The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. So explain that again. Explain the show that you saw.
It was at the Singer Bowl in 1969. Jimi Hendrix was the headliner. The experience right off the air. Monterey. And Dennis Jafflin in the holding company.
Big brother in the holding company was the warmup act. Wow. What was that like? Well for starters we bribed a little security guard to get in. Me and my friends.
I think we gave him $2 a piece. And we walked right up to the stage. Wow. And watched. Like right there.
And then that was my first, my first, I guess I got to start drinking Southern Comfort. She's making it look pretty good. When I worked with Phil Hartman on news radio, one of his favorite stories was he was like a stage hand 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 was not 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. Early on he would destroy his equipment. Like the who would do as well. Like tear up the amps. He set the guitar on fire.
You know, I'm 15, 16 years old. Oh man, don't give me the guitar. Don't smash the guitar. He's really smashing guitar. Yeah.
It was an expensive way to end a show. But that was happening. It was just a wild rock and roll thing. It was amazing. It was an amazing time to be a kid watching that stuff.
It was such a crazy time in human history. I mean it was 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 ever. So radical and so big.
It happened so fast. It was a response to the 50s. It was that in the Vietnam War and drugs. All the above. All of them psychedelic drugs.
Everything all together. And the birth control bill. Yes. Changed everything. Yes.
Very good point. Very good point. Yeah. Gave women freedom. As well.
It did the same for men. Oh yeah. Yeah. Everybody could just do whatever the fuck they wanted. And they're doing drugs at the same time.
So everything just boom. Just all came together. One of the things that bumps me out the most about the internet and streaming. Is that we've lost the multi-camera sitcoms. It's a very weird thing.
The first thing that killed it, I think was reality shows. That sort of took a lot of our windows sales. But a few remained. During COVID. Me and my family watched Big Bang Theory.
I'd never watched it. I'd never watched it from episode 1. We binged it all the way to the end. I fucking loved it. I felt like when I was a comic in the clubs in L.A.
You never heard about Big Bang Theory. It was like there was other shows. It was like there was other shows that people wanted to, you were cool if you liked. And the big bank theory was like, you know, family sitcoms, 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. Thank you. We worked hard. I bet you did. We worked really hard.
It was a general attitude that every episode had a kick ass. Everyone. Well, it was also so unusual. You have this like super autistic genius guys, your head character. Well, the way I entered the show, because I'm clearly not a physicist or a lady means a genius, they were outliers.
They were guys that couldn't figure out how to bathe in the real world. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, physicists, quantum physicists, 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. Right. That I understood.
Yeah. Your story is awesome, too. It really is. It's very, it's such an American story, you know, because it's you trying to figure out how to make it and show business and trying to be a musician and all these different things that happen to you and the whole Scientology thing. And then eventually, you know, starting to write on big sitcoms and the Roseanne story.
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, there's some 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.
These people on TV that we become attached to watching every Thursday. For me, it was characters. Nobody remembers the plot of a sitcom. Right. And I remember the plot, especially on Seinfeld and stuff.
Larry David, nobody can plot a comedy story better than Mr. David. But the secret sauce was you wanted to hang out with these people. You wanted to sit at the bar with Norman Cliff and Woody and Sam. You wanted to have a cup of coffee with Jerry, you know, and the same thing.
Elsewhere with friends was a sort of surrogate family that you wanted to be part of. You don't remember the stories. The stories was secondary. It was the characters and perfect casting on these shows as well. Perfect casting.
Why do you think that, I mean, in 94 when I first came to LA. The 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 going to get a deal so that you could be the next Roseanne or Jerry Seinfeld or Phil in the Blank. Tom, Tim Allen, Brett Butler, there was all those people.
Can you see? You can go back to Cosby, stand up. Yeah. It was all you wanted to develop a show around you and all these people are scrambling for that. And that for the most part doesn't exist anymore.
Well, we try and with Leanne Morgan. Leanne's remarkably successful stand up right now and the show we're doing with her on Netflix is doing pretty well. Netflix, you can do it. Young Sheldon worked on Netflix. That was great.
It's amazing thing about young Sheldon on Netflix was a whole generation of kids watch that show and had never seen the Big Bang Theory. Right. And what's wonderful too is when you get to talk to them, they don't know what CBS is. That was weird. But the show stood on its own, which was that was our dream come true.
It wasn't standing on the shoulders of the Big Bang Theory. It was its own show. Right. No, definitely was. We binged that too after we binged Big Bang Theory.
We binged Young Sheldon, which is a great show too. But different, right? It's a fairly different vibe. And the thing about the multi cam thing is like you're kind of in on it. You know there's a crowd there watching this.
It's like you're watching a play as much as you're watching a comedy. It is play. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it.
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Pro-apply, product availability varies by region. See app for details. Yeah. It is a play with four cameras rolling around in front of it. Right.
And if somebody makes a mistake, you do it again. Yeah. Or something stinks. You rewrite it or you cut it. But you don't put it on TV where, as I've always said, if it stinks in front of the audience, if you put it on TV, it's going to stink forever.
Right. Right. So it is a little bit of theater. I think it started back in the 50s as theater. That's what that started as radio plays.
Right. And then television happened. What was the first sitcom on television? It wasn't the honeymooners, was it? It had to be something probably before that.
Well, it was always, you know, Lucy. But I think even before that, there was Phil Silvers and George Burns. Right. I don't know the deep history of it. But it all came out of Vaudeville and theater.
Yeah. One of the more interesting things about this taste for the laugh track. We've never used a laugh track. Never. And 40 years been accused of it, but never used it.
And I remember one time I had a reporter on the set of the Big Bang Theory who went and sat in the audience and watched this tape a show in front of a live studio audience. It takes 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 200 people laughing and he wrote about it annoying laugh track.
That's interesting. Do you think they just do that because controversy sells and negativity sells and they just have a narrative in their head? It diminishes the show. They wanted to mention it. Yeah.
I think I made that pretty clear in the book that the words had come. It made sense when you married a fucking witch, you know, or you came back from outer space with a genie 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 not a family. What's the situation? He's big it.
He's, you know, he's racially insensitive. That's not a situation that's life, you know. Well the whole sitcom thing, I just don't feel like you talked about this in the book as well. Like you wouldn't even say that you wrote for sitcoms. I'd say I wrote a TV comedy.
Yeah. It goes on. It's interesting. I was very insecure and the word hurt me. It physically hurt me.
That's crazy. Yeah. Because it's all I would have just didn't get the respect that a film did. No, of course not. Not even close.
Not even close. So much harder though, in so many ways, to make 200 people laugh every week for 22 weeks. It's almost impossible. It's very difficult. It's ridiculous.
And if you watch the writer 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 network executives and company executives and the managers of the actors and the actors and everybody's, you know, feeling like we live or die, depending on whether the audience laughs or not. There's no grace period. And if you're a writer, you also have to listen to the executives. And their ideas are really on. Early on.
Early on. Early on. Before the show gets successful. 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, it's saying, no, this is the way it's going to go. But that was predicated on having had success. That was all. This, uh, the sitcom on Netflix you were talking about, is this going to be multi-cam or single-cam? It's multi-cam.
It is multi-cam. Oh, that's awesome. Did you finish their second season? I didn't know. Yeah.
The only one that I know that's doing it right now is Miss Pat. She's got a very funny show. They were 40 or 50 a week. Now there's maybe three. Seriously.
Can you find out about what he mentioned? First of all, boy, did you get out the right time? You know, with network stuff, like all your gigantic hits, you know, they were all like perfect at the right time when everybody was watching sitcoms. Timing wise, I've been blessed. It's the greatest timing of all time.
You know, and I mean, I just don't understand why they can't come back. It's such a good art form. It's so fun to watch. When it's done really, really well. Yeah.
It's extraordinary. I've seen the eulogy for it many times over the last 40 summer years. And I'm hard to buy into the eulogy because one great show changes everything. Yeah, it's still fun to watch. That's what doesn't make sense.
And this is what I got when we're watching Big Bang Theory. Like it's fun to watch sitcoms. It's a very different experience of watching anything else. You're aware that it's half an hour. You know, you know, all the characters, you know, all this guy's going to say something stupid and this guy's going to do it.
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.
I don't understand it either. Taste change and culture changes. Do you think that's what it is though? I don't think that's what it is. I don't think they've changed that much.
I think comedy has certainly changed, I believe. I think laughing out loud is frowned upon. Really? I think there's a vulnerability to laughing when you let yourself laugh. And I mean, look at what 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. 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. It's extraordinarily well written and well produced and casting is great. But it doesn't cause out loud laughter. You think people don't want to laugh?
I think when you laugh out loud, first of all, laughter is not something self-generated. It happens to you. Right? Right? It should come as a surprise when you laugh.
Sure. Right? It's not, oh, I'm going to laugh now. Laugh there happens because you've been surprised by what you're watching or listening to. Yeah.
And there's a certain, you have to be vulnerable enough to let yourself react. You've seen people watch comedy like this with their arms folded. They're rejecting you before you've opened your fucking mouth. You know where that happens the most is Los Angeles. Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe you need to move. You're saying all these things that I respect you deeply. And I'm hearing what you're saying. I don't agree at all.
I think people love laughing. I think they enjoy the shit out of it. It's one of their favorite things to do. Maybe I am experiencing it. Maybe I am a victim of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is an insanely self-important place where people are constantly judging each other's social status. Mm-hmm. And they would love to be able to dismiss you. And they love to look forward to the opportunity to dismiss you. Not everybody.
Not everybody. A lot of cool people there. Yeah. But 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. It's exhausting. So where would I go? I don't know. Somewhere else.
Somewhere else. I mean, even New York is way better in that regard. Because it's not tainted by show business. You know, New York is insanely congested and just too many people. It's just nuts.
But other than that, it's a great metropolitan city filled with everything. All the greatest restaurants and there's comedy clubs. It's not tainted. There's a thing about Los Angeles where the spirit of the city itself is tainted by people that want attention. And it always will be.
It's impossible to avoid. They go there because that's where the auditions are and that's where the plays. And some of them are fantastic people. Don't get me wrong. But there's a larger percentage that aren't fantastic and they are a mess and they're exhausting.
And those are the people that cross their arms. And that's why you think people don't want to laugh because they do everywhere else. Well, clearly the shows that I've been spent my whole life working on do really well all over the world. But you know, maybe, you know, I'm, but I'm in a bubble. You're in a bubble.
Yeah, that bubble's a little bit of a problem. It's crazy. I mean, sometimes you see the big bang theory, huge hit in Germany. In Germany, you know, I astonishing how it Mexico, Brazil, they're the Beatles down there. It's remarkable.
You know, maybe not so much in Brentwood. Right. It's like, that's the thing about it. It's dismissed and it was dismissed in Hollywood. I remember I was working on a sitcom and I was dating this girl who's 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. I don't know what to tell you. Like the secrets to people don't know unless they've been there.
It's really hard. It is hard, but it's really hard to put on a play every week. It's really hard. And it's anxiety ridden. It's nervousness.
It's stressful. It doesn't always go well. Right. When a joke fails at the Burbank, one of the brothers is a lot and the audience doesn't respond. You can hear the 134 freeway.
Right. I mean, it's crickets. Yeah, it's not good. And but it's it's an extraordinary teaching device because you learn, you learn some humility. Oh, I'm not as smart as I thought I was.
That joke died. I thought it was great. It died. Oh, we got to fix it. You know, and that's how I spent the last many decades rushing around trying to fix it.
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Watch the terminalist season two on October 21st, only on prime. 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 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. What's real? You put it together. It was huge. Every week maybe 40 million people were watching in real time.
No DVRs yet. Basically just to start the VCR stuff and you know, great writing staff. I was really blessed to be part of that staff. But we learned very quickly, John Goodman would walk into the kitchen and say, Rosie, I'm home. The audience would go berserk.
And we'd be going, yeah, I wrote that line. They were just glad to see him. Right, right. 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. But they were so thrilled to be in the same space as John Goodman, who they loved as Dan Conners. And 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. It's become visceral.
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. I was sitting next to Jim Parsons at an autograph line 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 them the picture to sign and she's crying out of joy to see Jim Parsons to be this far away from Jim Parsons.
Wow. And I remember thinking, I've been doing this a while. People were always happy to see John Cryer and Charlie. Nobody ever cried. Nobody ever cried when they saw Roseanne or anybody like that.
But she was crying out of sheer joy to see these guys. And that's when I went, some of what's happened in here that we didn't plan, that we couldn't have planned. These characters have hit a nerve. Well, I think it is the misfits thing. I think that's a giant part of it.
And they become a surrogate family. They support one another. They're losers in a life raft. You know what I mean? And they hold each other up.
And all odd in their own unique way. That's endearing. And I think for a lot of people, you look at friends, you're like, those fucking people never hang out with me. What's the point? They're all good looking, hanging out together.
They're too cool. Everybody's cool. Fuck. I don't fit there. But they'd watch Young Sheldon and they'd watch that show and they'd think, all right, well, these people are just weirdos just like me.
One of the things I loved about Young Sheldon we discovered as we were doing it was the show really became about his family. Right. Here's this cuckoo. Right. Cuckoo's nest.
You know, this odd child. Normal parents. Normal parents. His mom's deeply religious. He's got a twin sister who's just a kid.
Yeah. And an older brother's kind of a knucklehead. You know, it 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.
He was oblivious 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 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 he's coming out of a child's mouth, not so pleasant.
So it really shifted to becoming how his parents and his brother and sister and eventually his grandmother took care of him. They just they excused him for being the way he was and allowed him to be that way. That's a love story. It is and it's completely unique to the original show. The Big Bang Theory, you know, obviously Sheldon's older, but it's just a different thing.
There's the whole stories of different thing, the concentrations of different thing. It's really about the family and this extraordinary kid. Yeah. But it's great. Thank you.
When you talk about the Roseanne days, those are so my favorite days because you know, I'm friends with Roseanne and I know how crazy she is. And you know, and she talks about a lot of it, you know, better than I do. But she talks about how crazy she was during those days. That's nice to hear. Yeah.
That's a tyrant. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a nice story. I can think of well, you know her whole story of how she got hit by a car when she was young. Yeah.
That's what a lot of people don't know. 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.
She had a legitimate brain injury that changed her personality completely. And it's responsible for a lot of her erratic behavior and a lot of the chaos that you see. Also maybe some of the brilliance in her comedic timing. She was just so, so didn't give a fuck. She was so different than any woman comic before her.
Absolutely. No, she was groundbreaking. That initial act that she and her sister, I don't know if she talked about her sister much, but they wrote that act and it was like nothing that we'd ever seen before. It was entirely original. Yeah, entirely original.
And now I know why children, why parents eat their young, why animals eat their young, was the keystone of that act. Now I know why animals eat their young. She was a force. Just hearing the stories, like the Tom Arnold, they made you put his name as a writer. The scripts, you'd have to change the scripts and write his name in.
Easy for you to laugh. That kind of shit. The reason why I laughed is because I 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.
You don't even know show cakes. Yeah, it was almost like that. Like people got writer's credits when they weren't writing at all. And it was a lot of money. A lot of money.
A lot of money. Yeah, I know many stories. I remember complaining to an agent who, I might have included this in the book, I remember. He said, Chuck, you got to let him fuck you a few times so they know they love you. Yeah, that's in the book.
Yeah, it's a weird business, man. It's a weird business. And all your stories about just dealing with crazy actors and the civil shepherd thing, she made you change the joke and then it didn't work and then she got mad at you for that. And it worked for Bransky. Bransky could read the phone book.
I mean, that was one of the great gifts. But that whole weirdness where people get upset if someone else got a joke, even if it was like that person's character to say that line and not your character. It was all about who gets the lines, who gets the good ones. Given how successful those shows were and how much money was being generated by them, it's hard to defend how much cruelty and malice went into making of it. So unnecessary.
It should have been a constant celebration. It should have been an ongoing party. Look what we did. 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 has written about them.
It's all about them. It's like there's something about the intoxicating power of being the top person on the show. 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.
They just get crazy. It makes me think of it was my great good fortune to get to know Bob Newhart and to call him a friend and he did a bunch of big bang episodes. And he taught me something I've never forgotten. He goes, I'm not the funny guy on the show. I react to the funny guys.
Larry Darryl and Darryl and Tom Post and the crazy characters would come in and the show and he was a psychiatrist. Crazy people would come in and the comedy was Bob reacting. A raised eyebrow would get an enormous laugh because he becomes the audience reacting to the crazy people. I was begging him for years to come into any show I'd worked on. I was such a fan.
I remember he watched the Big Bang Theory and he said, all right, I'll do this one. But I have three demands. Go. 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 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. He'd never won an Emmy for his show. That's crazy. That's crazy.
And he did on the Big Bang Theory. He won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor, Best Guest Actor in a Comedy. And it was one of the genuine joys of my life. I got him the Emmy. He got the Emmy.
But we delivered on all three. That's amazing. I can't believe he never won an Emmy. That's crazy. That's crazy.
That's literally crazy. I went to the Emmy's once and it was after Phil Hartman had been murdered. And he was nominated for an Emmy. So we all win. And he didn't win.
And when he didn't win, Dave Foley looked over and he goes, what the fuck does a guy have to do to win? It didn't that moment. It was so beautiful. We were all so broken. We were so sad.
It was so not that he didn't win the Emmy. He had just recently been murdered. It was still hard to believe and so painful that Dave just came in with a banger. Dave Foley was one of the producers of News Radio. The News Radio, Paul Stemms was so brilliant that when he created the show he allowed all these creative people to come up with alternative lines.
And Dave was from Kids in the Hall. So he was just a fantastic writer on top of being very funny. And so he would come up with better lines all the time. And Paul would always use them. It was just there was no ego there.
It was such a great place to be. And so when Phil got killed, it was like we were just broken. We were just like, what? And so for Dave to say that at the Emmys, I was like, okay, no one's topping this. I'll never come back to the Emmys again.
Get out of here. No, that's not how I know. You could come up with that. I can't believe Bob Newhart never won an Emmy. That's insane.
He did. On the big bangs. Yeah, I mean before that for the Bob Newhart show, that's bananas. That's bananas. It was such a good show.
He seemed like a lovely guy. I wish I got there. He really was. He truly was. Back when I was getting started, when that set was, I worked on the same lot as the show, the Bread and Beckford, 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. It's a tiny little set where he'd stand behind the counter and Larry Darryl and Darryl come in. Yeah. I just sit there in the dark and just take it in. Yeah, this is where they make this show.
Wow. And later on, we would, once you were 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 going to get to the Oval Office. And we were sitting there, you know, late at night. That's awesome.
Just bring up Two and a half men. Like you have gone through some of the fucking craziest actors. Like you worked with some of the craziest people of all time. Charlie, when he was here, he did the podcast. He was like, tell me about those days.
When you hear all those days, like, how did you function? Like, how are 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.
We did six, seven years in the clear before it all went to hell. We had like 150 some odd 60 episodes before it started to go down. And was he heavy using during those times? Not to my knowledge. Oh, so he was, he was managing it and kept 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 successful. We had something in common. We were all on the same kind of, I thought we were all on the same road, keeping it clean.
Right. And staying sober and stuff. The show was killing it. It was just, it actually, the success of that show is what granted me the freedom to go and go and do a couple of tries to get the big bang theory right. I mean, we failed at first.
We made a lot of mistakes. But two and a half men were so successful. Maybe it was granted me unbelievable leeway to make decisions, do shit over again, like the pilot. Nobody get to do over. We got to do over on the big bang pilot.
Wow. That happens. We got one and it worked out. Where some see heroes and other see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes.
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We followed the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Boy, did it work out. So I didn't know that Charlie was supposedly sober for most of that time. As far as I know what he was.
But you're talking, you talk to him now, right? You guys are friends now. Yeah, he has a blurb on the back of the book. So he says he was sober for the beginning and then eventually he just. I don't know at what point he went off the rails.
Did you notice like a change? 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 big lighter blew up and he has no eyebrows. Now, I'm somewhat naive to some of this stuff, but I know big lighters may not blow up. Wow.
Maybe they do when you're cooking Coke with them. Maybe that's what happened. But there was a lot of, the behavior became more and more erratic. A lot of, a lot of missed stuff. And, you know, and the saturings about, about my part of it was I was determined to stay in denial.
I just didn't want to know. I wanted to believe it was all okay. I was absolutely, you know, forcefully, you know, oblivious. I just wanted to believe it was all going to be okay. Just because the show was doing so well.
It was doing so well. And it was fun. I mean, we kick ass. We worked really hard. I partnered 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 like in a bad show on television.
So go into a restaurant and have a cockroach come across your table. You don't go back to that restaurant ever again, ever again. And that's how I talked about situation comedies. You make a bad show. People are going to maybe never come back.
You're going to lose a bunch. You're going to lose a bunch. You know, I just, my own experience, I loved Cheers. I was devoted to Cheers. It was a couple of years there where, you know, you had to get through Cliff going home to his mother.
I wanted to be in the bar with, you know, Woody and Sam. And you would tolerate, you know, some of the dips. But then they'd come roaring back with great writing and, you know, stuff. But more often than not, if a show fails on a few occasions, even a show you love, there's is a likelihood you may move on. And it's usually something happens behind the scenes, like a head writer leaves or someone new gets hired and they have new ideas about stuff.
That's generally how it goes, right? There's a weird delicate chemistry to write these things when they work, you know. And it's really obvious when you think you can spin something off. Do you remember Archie's place? No, I don't.
And he tried to spin off Archie Bunker. I remember the name now that you brought it up, but I don't remember it at all. I think he read a bar. Wow. And it was a new show with Archie Bunker, but without Meathead.
Yeah. And, you know, and Edith. I remember he went on to do a cop show and I was very upset. I was like, how was he playing a cop on TV? The miraculous chemistry of all in the family was gone.
Yeah. It was gone. The same thing happened with Joey, all of the friends. The miraculous chemistry of that cast. Right.
You just can't just, you know. I think I learned a lesson watching those things going, don't think this thing travels. Right. You know, the characters and the relationships with the other characters are the heart and soul of this thing. You know, you can't just pluck something out and go here.
Well, that's why young Sheldon is so impressive because you didn't, it is kind of a spin off, but it's not and everyone's new. The only inkling of the big bang theory is Jim Parsons narration. Right. You never see him. Right.
He's not telling the story of being a child in East Texas. That was the only link. Yeah. It was just amazing that you pulled off that chemistry in two completely different environments about the same character. Yeah.
That was the role of the dice, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. If we didn't find Ian, then we would not have made the show. Yeah. There's things about certain sitcoms like Seinfeld's great example where those people just worked together so well.
You couldn't imagine a new person being put in the mix or someone going away. Like, what? You would ruin the whole thing. Absolutely. And again, the characters and their relationships with each other, oh, why you watch?
Yeah. You know, I can't tell you one plot, but I never missed an episode. Right. I never missed a Thursday night was gold because of Seinfeld. Yeah.
I mean, the entire country was watching because of Seinfeld and because of Friends on Thursday night on NBC. That was the night. Yeah. And then Bauchko shows were impeccable. Right.
Right. I mean, one after the other, Hill Street, L.A. Law, you know, NYPD Blue. It was an incredible run of sophisticated cop shows. It really was.
It's amazing how many cop shows there for them. It's like, boy, do we like watching cop shows. Again, there were character shows. I mean, Bauchko understood that as well. That, you know, it wasn't the crime of the week, which is, you know, solving the crime is more the dick wolf approach to dramas.
Bauchko was about the characters, about the cops, about their heartaches and the torments of being a cop in Los Angeles. Also, you're going to write a show about drama, who experiences more drama than cops? It's the perfect genre. Yeah. Because you're always going to have chaos.
You could write in any kind of chaos, whereas if it's one person who's a plumber who's experiencing that much chaos and is like, what the fuck are you doing with your life, man? How are you involved in so many murders? How are there so many armed robberies when you're around? But if you're a cop, it makes sense to write it in like that. 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 the Bauchko lore. I can't remember his name. He wrote, gosh, damn it. I can't remember his name. I'll remember it tonight when we're done.
He wrote about cops as people, people in untenable work. Work was just incredibly destructive work environment. And starts with the dam. Cop genres, sitcoms. It's just to me, the cop genres are still around, whereas the sitcoms have been produced by 80 percent.
More. 90. Yeah. Again, 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 16 a night. And then the hour dramas were at 10 o'clock every night for years. Yeah, I don't believe that's because people don't like them. I really don't. I think it's just a mistaken broadcasting.
I think they fucked up. And I think if they came back with some good ones, the problem is it's a hard job. It's a hard job. And I was one of the blessings of my career was I got to have a journeyman period where I was learning, but I wasn't in charge. I wasn't the guy.
I didn't have to say that way. Right. And maybe seven, eight years before they said, here, your show, and I wasn't ready. I still was overwhelmed. Merle Miller?
No. Nope. All right. We give up. We can't figure out what it is.
But that first show, I was the case to the kingdom. I got a show on TV. Right. And so this is a show after you leave Roseanne and now you're working on your own show, but they put it on Saturday night. The owners of the Roseanne show had an idea for a show that was strangely like Roseanne.
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 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 rip off of Roseanne. I'm in. 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, I'm British actress named Miriam Margolis. Margolis Margolis.
And she was a terrific actress. And she tried so hard. She choked so hard to be an unhappy American Staten Island housewife. And the show, to credit how powerful, of course, in Tom Warner, the network couldn't bring themselves to say pass. It couldn't say pass.
And they ordered six episodes. And they put it on the coveted time slot of eight o'clock Saturday nights. For people who don't know, that's the worst time slot you could ever get on network television. It's like making the show and using it for landfill. Everybody's out.
Everybody goes out. In the old days before the internet, people would just leave the house on Saturday night. If you go back far enough, Saturday night had some huge stuff. How far you gotta go back? Back into the 60s.
Really? Saturday night was a big night. Yeah. It was fairly new. It was a crazy thing.
Stay home and watch TV. That makes sense. But anyway, they ordered six episodes. They couldn't, they aired five, couldn't bring themselves to air the sixth one. You know, like it would have hurt.
And I thought, you know, okay, that's the end of my career. I'm done. I had my shot. I blew it. And Tom Warner gave me in my office a few days after they canceled the show and said, the noble failure.
Let's try again. I had never put noble and failure together in the same sense. Did you think the show was good or did you think it didn't have enough time to get good? Here's the problem with writing a TV and producing a TV company is you don't even have perspective. You lose perspective.
You're working so hard. You don't really have the big pictures to eat. You think it's working. You ask anybody on any staff on any sitcom back in the day, where do we do great work? I think it's just impossible to own the fact that it might be mediocre given how hard we're working.
So I don't know that I really had a clean perspective on whether it was quality television or deserved to go on or not. I just know I worked really hard and I was heartbroken that it failed. That's a very honest perspective. I appreciate that. And then he said, no failure.
Let's try again. And I was like, I get another, I get to do over. I get to try again. Great. Because when you're indoors, they bring you lunch.
They feed you. You know, you're a parking spot. It's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. And 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 is just said, I wanted her to leave her husband and try and be single and live with her daughter. And you said no, she has to be married because Cosby's married. Rosanne's married.
Another married show. But what 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? What sensibility can I bring to a single mom show?
And to their credit, they sent me to Elgin, Illinois to spend a few days. The Chamber of Commerce took me to a women's shelter, a YWCA. Hospitals where women were either on welfare, working two jobs, you know, killing themselves to support themselves while raising children. And I got this walk through what 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. Murphy Brown had endless nannies. She just went about her life and there was a kid. But a woman raising children by herself without a safety net 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. You wouldn't think it. It's a sitcom. It's four cameras in front of the 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 feed them. And then it went, will South when they said, okay, we found the perfect actress to play that part. And that's how I met Brett Butler. Sure, you laugh.
Well, that's a similar situation what we're talking about before where people just become tyrants when they have their own show. She was very unhappy. Out of the gate. Day one. Seems crazy.
I should have been celebrating because the show was an instant hit. 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 truly funny woman. She had a great stand up act.
Oh, she was hilarious. Yeah. No questioning. And she took to acting immediately. You know, I've watched people try and do this.
Not everybody can do it. Brett could do it. Brett could do it. But it didn't go well for me. It just seems so insane that someone would get an opportunity that if you're a comic, that's the opportunity.
That's it. It's your own sitcom. How could you be upset? I'm so scared. I think if you're damaged in this certain kind of way that actors and 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.
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 when I was a boy. You know, if you make something of yourself, you'll feel, you'll be good.
People will like you and admire you and you'll be a man of substance. The tradition was a mensch, right? And then you learn that horrible truth. Only can happen with success, which is, oh shit, I'm still a miserable fuck. Now what?
Now what? That's not going to solve that hole inside. And generally that's where the drugs come in. That's where the drugs come in. With rock stars.
Rock stars and gambling. Yeah. You can't fuck your drink your way, drug your way, gamble your way out of that. That shit works temporarily and then it doesn't work. And when it stops working, you're truly fucked.
You're truly fucked. You're trying to find a solution that the best I understand. Nothing on the outside is going to heal the inside. This episode is brought to you by Call of Duty. Modern Warfare 4 is coming and they're going all in on this one.
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Visit M for Mature. It has to be an inside job to get well from that stuff. It's also for people's perspective. If you're talking about what was prepped, Grace Under Fire was 93. In 1993, there was only four channels.
And then cable. Nobody's watching cable, not like that, not like sitcoms. And there was maybe 100 famous people on Earth. There was nobody was famous back then. There's way more famous people.
So if you're a damaged person and then all of a sudden you're one of the most recognizable people in the world, who prep out there was when that show was number two. I mean that was a huge show. She was on every magazine. You saw her everywhere. That's kind of pressure.
And that kind of for a person who's already struggling to keep it together, that can be devastating. Yeah. I often threaten to write a screenplay. The perfect murder, the perfect murder of an actress who is malicious and destructive is to make her famous. It'll ruin her.
No. I've got to write that story yet. But you want to do something harmful to somebody who's damaged in that way. Make them famous. It'll absolutely destroy them.
Isn't that nuts? Yeah. It's nuts. 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 was anymore. I heard those stories as well. I don't know. I don't know. It's such a sad turn of events, you know, because people wanted to love her, especially when she was on that show.
They were rooting for her. Yeah. She was a spokesman for a spokeswoman for, you know, millions of women and men loved her too because she had balls, you know? She suffered no fools. Yeah.
And she worked in an oil refinery. Yeah. And on the show. It just sucks that so many talented people have that, whatever the fuck it is, that self-sabotage scene that makes them not be able to ever change course and enjoy this fortune that they've been given. Making an audience left temporarily fills the hole.
Temporarily. Yeah. And you go home and you're still that guy. Yeah. Yeah.
That's the problem. Yeah. Okay. What are we going to do about this? Right.
I don't think there's anything you can do about it. I mean, it's just 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 dead on. I mean, they were all drugged out of their fucking mind.
They were 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 20 minutes before you tried to pull his dick out. I was the shortest concert I've ever been to. It was an outdoor, it was a singer bowl. It was an outdoor kind of arena. Cops came in on horses hitting people over the head with sticks.
Right? Because he pulled his dick out. And they just stopped the show. I think it was after he did it in Miami and he got arrested in Miami. I was in the move.
I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was 16 years old or something like that. And I'm standing there with my friends. I'm still going to join going, this is terrific. This is fantastic. We were watching these horses go by.
We were watching these horses go by. This is fantastic. We were having, we thought, well, yeah, okay, it would have been nice to maybe hear a second song. They opened with Light My Fire, never finished it. Really?
End of show. Oh my God. That's crazy. This is cool, man. This is a great show.
Let's get out of here before we get hit. Who'd you say he was performing with again? The warmup act was the who? Wow. You know, before Tommy, they were a warmup act.
Wow. Great song, my generation. I can see for miles and great stuff. Yeah. Before Tommy, once at the Tommy hit, they never wore a warmup act again.
But this was just prior to Tommy. Wow. Dude. That's it. But again, I mean, how many of them died at 27?
Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin. Although the Hendrix one's very weird. There's a lot of very interesting conspiracy theories about the Hendrix murder. The Hendrix death rather, that it was perhaps a murder. He was leaving his manager.
His manager was a shady mob character. His girlfriend after the murder, after his death rather, she gets thrown off of a roof. They said it was a suicide. It doesn't seem 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. If Hendrix was dead, then he would get royalties from all those songs forever. He probably contractually would have had them anyway. And most managers, back in those days, it was all that's so corrupt. Oh, they're very predatory.
It was really predatory and corrupt. He would have had a piece of his publishing no matter what. Liver dead. You know? Listen to me.
But he wouldn't have anything in the world for future. His fixating on his own vomit is heartbreaking into a generational superstar. I mean, he had a big impact on me. Oh, my God. He was unlike anyone before him.
His sound was so completely unique that, I mean, Eric Clapton famously said that he felt he wanted to quit playing guitar when he saw him. It was just like, and Eric Clapton was insanely good. For a guy like Eric Clapton, you know, listen, go listen to the Derek and the Domino's Layla. Layla. Jesus Wayne.
Christ, you ain't a woman. Oh, my God. Passing back. Oh, my God. That back and forth with him and Joane.
Yeah. Or have you ever loved a woman? Listen to Eric Clapton and cocaine. Just that. Oh, my God.
That, yeah, but that story is just the story of his death. It's 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 all. It's just a huge number of those guys died so young. And it's because of what you're talking about, that whatever fucked up thing that makes them so brilliant at performing.
And it's like almost an attempt at the more brilliant you get. It's the more you can fill that whole temporarily, the more love you get in these big bursts. And then the crowd goes away and then you buy yourself and it's just back to the darkness and then the drugs and then the alcohol and then the chaos and then the fault ripping your life apart. And then there's another show and there's another burst. You feeling good when you're on stage?
You're on stage? It's the same fucking thing. It never heals. It never heals from the outside. The outside stuff is glorious as it is in fame and adulation and fancy cars.
Yeah. It's great. It's wonderful. There's no reason to denigrate it. It's just it's not the real solution.
The real solution, you know, I'm going to say it and then regret it, but the real solution is a spiritual solution. You have to find something beyond this world. Why would you regret that because you live in LA? Because you're in your bubble? Because it's part of my life.
Right, but why would you regret saying that? Because it might seem like. Please share. Like flaky and hairy fairy and woo woo new age bullshit. Yeah.
But I don't know any other way. I just don't. And I do know that in my own life seeking a spiritual solution, not finding it, but the act of seeking it, there's some salvation in that. No, I think there is as well. I don't think there's anything silly about it.
And I think the problem is the term has been co-opted. The term spirituality has been co-opted by people that you do consider to be flaky. That's the problem. Yeah. 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. And people who are preaching in front of sold out stadiums and giant arenas, how many of those are actually sincere? Well, it's a small percentage. It's not the same thing. It doesn't mean it's not possible.
No, it just has a bad name. That's a bad name. It's spirituality. 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 you just associate it with people who are unsuccessful in the act. And it's 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, they're like, I know this guy is a Christian and all he does is build houses like small homes for homeless people and help them get them jobs and teach them skills and help them get clean. I know people like that too. They're real. Yeah. And they're role models.
Yes. I want to be like that guy. Yeah. Yeah. They exist.
Yeah. I've been fortunate enough to know a few in my life and they've had a deep impact giving rather than taking. Yes. And yeah, yeah, no question about it. That was not my nature.
I didn't go out to Los Angeles a giver. No. I wanted to give me. It was also a culture back then, right? It was all I knew, you know, I said the first page of the book was if I could have been better, if I could have done better, I would have.
That was the best I could do, you know, which is real. Yeah. The self-centered, you know, Dick, I was the best I had early on. It took a while. Yeah.
Well, it's a work in progress, basically. We all are. That's part of being a human being. You're a work in progress. That's part of the thing that they said when they were young and stupid.
Oh, my God. That's who you are forever? Some shit you said when you were 20 years old, like, good lord. That's insane. It's insane.
It's insane. It's insane. It denies the fact that we change. We do change. Yeah.
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. Yeah.
What a selfish, self-centered, Jesus Christ, you just left her? You didn't say thank you. What is wrong with that man? And that man was me. You know?
It's wild. Yeah, there's a therapeutic cathartic quality to doing something like this to try and write about your life. I'm an absolute laugh horse, so I wanted to make it as funny as I could, because otherwise it's just boring. Who gives a shit about your life, Chuck? But if I can make you laugh, then maybe it's worth reading. But beginning with my childhood, when I was a kid working
for my dad, those things, that's me. But if I were to be held to what I said in 1969, it wouldn't go well for me. For anybody? Yeah. It's great that you're reading the audiobook too.
Was there a jokeingly said in a book that I'd asked Idris Elba, where Brian Cox to read it, they passed. Brian Cox would be great to have some sonorous kind of really baritone, beautiful. 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? 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. Absolutely. People need to understand that. 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, Jenna Elfman, was that around that time, Darmen Gregg? Yeah. You had, I mean, there was a ton of people, Kirstie Alley, a ton of people, super successful Scientologists who always seemed to have their shit together and they were really focused and they were career oriented. And there were so many of us in the outside, like, wow, maybe I should have fucking Scientologists. It seems like that would help. That was, listen, they built that
thing called the celebrity center on Franklin. Yeah. For the very purpose of, I'll be even wrote about it, people admire celebrities. They all want to do what celebrities do. Let's make an environment that attracts celebrities. It was a PR gesture. He understood positioning,
which is, I think, a marketing term where, you know, that's why famous people do TV commercials, you know? Yeah. You know, Peyton Manning says, by this, by Geico, I mean, Peyton must know, he's a quarterback. No, he doesn't know anything about it. But you're paying attention because he's famous and he's really good at what he does. And now he's telling me how I should ensure my car.
Makes perfect sense. Right. And Hubbard understood that early on that celebrities position Scientology in a way that will draw people in. And he was right. You know, I thought it would give me an edge. I thought that if I went down this road, it would give me an edge into the career
that I wanted. What was it about it that you felt was going to give you an edge? Was it the philosophy behind it? Like the way they structured their lives? Because I bought Dianetics on a late night television commercial. I didn't even know what it was. I didn't understand that that was Scientology.
Kind of a psychotherapy. Yeah. I thought it was just a self-help book. Yeah. Digging up past trauma and releasing the trauma, freeing up your life force because you're releasing the trauma of past experiences. Yeah. It wasn't that far off the charts. Well, that was what Elrond Hubbard did for the most
part. He was a science fiction writer. He was a science fiction writer. Not only that, he wrote more fiction than any human being that's ever lived. Absolutely. Right up there. He did. He wrote
the most. He wrote more than anybody. Yeah. Anybody because he never wrote a second draft. Everything was like a first draft. It was all horrible. It was pretty shitty. It was the worst. Yeah. But funny in that
regard, like that Battlefield earth movie is fucking fantastic. Just because it's so goofy. Have you seen it? Yeah. It's terrible. It's amazingly bad. Yeah. But it's good bad. It's bad to the point where it's
like, what the fuck am I watching? Like, oh my God. When you're 21, 22 year old me and you're scared to death, the world is big, the world is threatening. Yeah. I don't know what's going on. I want to be
in music. I want to have a career in music. It's a songwriter. These people promised me they knew away from me to do that. And I was so vulnerable to that promise. How did you get introduced to it?
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noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. I was playing in a band that was traveling around the country, cover band, and playing bars, nightclubs around the country. And the sex 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 told 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's your I'll go. And wouldn't you know, there were pretty girls there. So I mean, there's pretty girls here. Oh, they're very smart. They're very smart about that.
Yeah. And I bought, I think, all the communications course, which promised to improve my ability to communicate. What could go wrong with that? What could go wrong with that? Obviously, I'm a musician and I'm trying to become a songwriter. That's a communication issue. You know, anything
in the arts is communicating. I could get better at that. Why wouldn't I do that? 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 switching,
no laughing, no giggling, no getting creepy, no getting lost. I thought just sit there. What I didn't know, I got really good at it too. What I didn't know was it's just meditation. It was just meditation. It was just learning to be still, which is meditation, just learning to be still and
not being tossed around by every fucking thought that comes screaming through your head like, you know, a tree full of rabid monkeys. And that first time I did it, opposite a pretty girl. It was a woman who was running the classroom communications course. I said, I have this feeling like I'm up in the corner of the ceiling looking down at me. And she yelled out, Chuck has gone exterior.
I didn't know what that meant. But it was an extraordinary experience. I have a very vivid memory of being up near the ceiling, looking down on me, sitting in front of this woman doing training routine zero. So it worked. It worked. I 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 the word meant, but I didn't understand this as, but it felt good. The only other time that happened to me having that experience was when I flipped my car over at 70 miles an hour in Iowa. And I remember seeing the accident from up in the sky looking down at it. That was more like a near death experience.
I was in your death experience, but it was also very calm. Huh. Wow. The car is flipping over down in some bankmen. And, and so the experience, that's a powerful experience. And I wanted to
pursue it. I wanted more of that. Well, that makes sense. I mean, if what's interesting is if you get a kid, a young guy or a young woman in a very suggestible state and this heightened moment where they really believe there's some real significance to them sitting there and doing this exercise and that something big is going to happen, your brain can trigger endogenous states that that actually are real. So it's like what they're saying is kind of true, even though it's kooky, like a lot of it is very kooky, like some of these methods of just doing that kind of stuff, it can have powerful, transcendent results. Nobody told me this was going to happen. It just happened. Yeah. I was just
told to sit there and just be relaxed and just be there in front of another human being without, you know, getting uncomfortable or if you get uncomfortable, just deal with it, just sit there. That's all I was told. That was the entire instruction. Nobody said you're going to be up near the ceiling Did you try to recreate that experience and it never happened again? Okay. Did you ever try to recreate it with the same woman? No, maybe it's her.
Maybe that's it. Maybe it's like being there with a beautiful girl and her looking in your eyes, you're looking at hers. Maybe that triggers the thing. I don't think it had anything to do with her. No, it was just you were in that suggestible moment. I just, but who was suggesting what no one suggested
anything remains a mystery and I'm okay with it being a mystery, but it certainly, it certainly was not one that I've forgotten. There's a documentary called Holy Hell and it's about this cult leader that used to live in Austin for a while. And one of the weird things this guy did, he was a yoga teacher and also he was a hypnotist and a gay porn star. So the documentary is crazy. But in one of the things that he would do with this cult is he would do a thing called the knowing and they had to be ready for it. He had to decide they were ready for it. They had to decide they were ready for it. They had a ceremony.
And when they had a ceremony, he would touch their head, he would put his hands on their head and they would experience this unbelievable psychedelic moment where they contacted God and they all talked about it because the anticipation of this moment was so heightened and they were so suggestible. He was an actual professional hypnotist and when he would put his hands on them, whatever it was inside their brain, it was just a release. And even after they talked about him being a fraud, if they all left the cult and they said all these terrible things that he did, they still said that moment was the most powerful moment of their life. Hyptitism is a powerful mechanism. It really is. I think that I've not heard this, but that's a
story of a hypnotist. Yes, yes. A hypnotist that really can give you the greatest moment of your life, even though everything else is done is terrible. Even though he's taking everybody's money and fucking everybody and it's always the same story, he did make them see God. That's what's weird about it. And so many people are looking for something to take them out of their
state, the state they're in now. And if it's Scientology, if it's being a Mormon, if it's Cap, Catholicism, whatever it is, like people are trying to find something against them, Jack Daniels, cocaine, ecstasy. But for you, so I never actually went to a Scientology meeting or anything like that. I just got the book, but they never stopped emailing me or mailing me rather every day. I had one of those UPS boxes and every day it would be some new invitation to some Scientology event.
You got on mailing list. I didn't realize it was even Scientology when I bought the book. I thought it was just Elmeron Hubbard's going to teach me how to kick ass. Yes, absolutely. I always call it, you know, this is going to give me an edge on the universe.
So when you first started doing it, when did you start thinking maybe this is a little wacky? My entire community of friends, everybody was in, it was in, everybody. And I couldn't help notice. My life was shit. And these other people who I admired and I looked up to, they were getting in car accidents, getting divorced, catching colds, basically being just human beings, dealing with whatever shit was coming down the road, not the evolved spiritual titans that were, that Scientology was promising, the exalted spiritual enlightened beings. People, you know,
you weren't supposed to get a cold. You were supposed to be, you know, the promise was you were going to rise up above all these human menusia dilemmas and problems and whatnot. And you were going to have this remarkable insight into the world and you have power, power, being very powerful, power being powerful, being a real hook. Because if you're a young scared guy like I was, power was missing. 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 promising you the one thing you don't have as a young stupid man is power. And it was an easy sell. And I, you know, and I, it took, it took me 10 years to realize, wait, this isn't working. It took 10 years. Yeah, this isn't working to my wife at
the time. She was in, in the pro, in Scientology as well. We both kind of went, had a moment alone, one night going, bullshit. You know, 10 years, 10 years it took to wake the fuck up. And we bailed out and we lost all our friends. We were excommunicated. Do they fuck with you at all? No,
because I had no money. Nobody chases you if you have money. Right. You weren't successful enough for them to miss you when you left. Yeah. See you. And, and it really began, you know, 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 want to go. I'm just going to work my ass off. And for the next 10 years, I worked like a dog till I scrambled in and eventually, you know, not on a show where I'm, you know, getting yelled at by Roseanne Barr, but I, but I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. So it didn't hurt you to leave. It hurt you. 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 in a lot of that perception and belief was bullshit.
I was still, you know, a frightened young guy trying to find his way in the world, but it was on me. I wasn't going to, I wasn't looking for some outside wisdom to give me leverage. I was just going, I was going to work until I dropped to get where I needed to go. And, you know, the funny ending of that story was I succeeded. I succeeded. I had the career I couldn't have dreamed of. And I still
couldn't top, and still didn't solve the whole, the dark whole in the soul that we were talking about, right, you know, which, which, you know, let's do the other change in my life, which is, what's it, 27 and a half years ago, I stopped breaking. So, and that's been a massive change, you know, so because again, you know what, I keep saying over and over again, I'm not sure I'm saying it clearly. The one thing that is clear is the outside, the outside stuff, whether they be experiences or stuff or relationships or Mikey's marriages, it doesn't, it's a band-aid. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't heal the wound. The wound has to be dealt with in some other way that's personal, the spiritual path of your own, you know, your choice, you call it, it doesn't matter. If it's Christ, if it's Yahweh,
if it's the Koran, 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, out of that darkness, as far as I can tell. I think you're probably very accurate. I think you could probably do it on your own, but I don't know very many people who have. It's really hard. It's hard. We're community animals.
You know, I think we thrive, you know, in groups. I think that's how we're wired. I think the worst thing that could have happened a million years ago in a tribe was to be thrown out of the tribe. You're going to die. You get kicked out of the tribe because of misbehavior. I don't know what
misbehavior is. It's a place to see an error in the end with all this, but if you got kicked out, you're dead. When you come to something, that's why people have stage fright. That's why they have a fear of public speaking. She said, because when we were in tribes, if you had to speak in front of the public, you were defending yourself. That's probably very true. And you probably were going to get kicked
out of the tribe. And kicking out was a sentence of death. And so we desperately need one another, and that's not good, better, and different. It's just the way we are, right? Which is what makes people so prone to ideologies, to religious cults, to all sorts of different things. We want to be part of a group.
Even if the group is wrong, it's a group. It doesn't matter. Right or wrong, it's irrelevant. I'm in this group. Look at it. I got friends. And people will do wrong things to defend the group.
They fight to the death. We go to war over these groups. It's a weird thing. It's just for a lot of people, it's finding a good one. It's just fine. Find one that works. Find some sort of a spiritual
path that gives you some sort of peace of mind. It doesn't hurt others. It doesn't hurt others. That's it. It's not really complicated. But we don't live in a culture that pursues that.
We live in a culture of consumption. I think there's more people aware of that now today. But there's no guidebook. There's no operator manual on how to be a person. That's very effective. And even religions. You're kind of figuring it out on your own. It's not as laid out as I'd
like it to be. 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 greater spiritual path exists. I was raised in a Jewish household.
No one ever talked. Ever. No rabbis. My parents. Ever discussed having a connection with God.
Pursuing God. Seeking God. What's my reason for being here? Why am I alive? How did this happen?
It was never discussed. It was just do this and shut up. Right? Hear the rules. Do the rules. And
moving on. Right? And that was how they were raised too. So it's not like there was 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. It honored some wonderful things like education. And there was a great deal of goodness to it.
Societal goodness. I think I mentioned in my book that my father was one of 11 Republicans in the country. 11 Jewish Republicans. 11 Jewish Republicans in the country. I left out the key word because he believed in his heart each man for himself. Pulled himself up by the bootstraps
and stuff. And he believed that dearly. But I lost my child's thought. Well, we were just talking about having some sort of a connection with God and a spiritual connection and that this is what helped you become sober and get out of the darkness. This is the roundabout way of it. So did you do alcoholics and on this? Like is that what? I just wanted to know like what?
Let's focus on the word anonymous. Okay. I got sober. You got sober. But through that you started exploring spirituality. It was inevitable. It was part of it.
It was inevitable. You know, the most extraordinary thing. It's hard to do this and retain anything like anonymity. But there is the encouragement to pursue a God of your understanding. Not someone else's. Yours. That was remarkable. That's a remarkable insight for me. Really, I get to choose.
Wow. 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. It's not that hard to do given of your understanding that could be the ocean. It could be whatever you choose it to be. It'd be a fucking doorknob. But it's it's critical. It's critical.
What was the path? Like, so you go from becoming sober and this idea of worshiping something or looking at some word? No, no word worship. Okay. What's the word?
Word is where something is a higher power. Word worship is I don't understand that word. No, it's just recognizing. It's just recognizing. Okay. There's something else going on here and it
ain't me. That's it. There's no worship involved. There's no genuflecting or you know, there's service. How can I be better in this world? There is that. There is that, you know.
And for somebody like me who was gimme all the time is always gimme. Gimme I need. I need more. More is not enough. Yeah. Right. I need more. And when that ceases to work, when you finally
wake up and go, there is no more. More is never enough. When you finally give into the reality is that that will never do the job. I will always be empty. If that's the way I'm trying to go about it.
Then there's a possibility that's the bottom. And the bottom is where you decide to stop digging. And the bottom is where you go. Okay. Let's try something else. Do you have a negative connotation
with the word worship? We make Chevrolet vehicles. But what you do with them makes them so much more. You make the mobile offices, your kids personal taxi, a concert shuttle, your hockey equipment locker, your recording studio. We make a Chevrolet, but you make it a Chevy. Discover yours at Chevrolet.ca.
It's not what I recognize. What you think worship is? Like in your mind, what do you think is that? It's a servient. Servient. Servient. You know, the punishing, you know, all powerful,
you know, thing that's going to, you know, punish and whatever. Right. The whole testament stuff. Right. Okay. I don't know if they have to be connected though. I don't think a worship in that
way. I think a lot of people do though, especially when you get into the Old Testament stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I just, for me, what I've been doing for the last many years, it worked. What can I tell
you? I don't really understand it. I really don't. It's so much of it. It's counterintuitive.
But it worked, you know. Now I find all means, if you read the book, this is a guy who's got some serious issues. I haven't cleared that hurdle by any means, but it's better. It's a better life than the one I had. And is this an arc for you or was this a quick realization upon getting sober?
Oh, slow. It was a slow, slow writing process to get to where you are now. Yeah. Slow. And do you define it like what you're serving or what you're, what you worship, not bad words are what you appreciate about the higher power? Oh, you don't have to define it.
I don't think language is really equipped for it. Right. I think language, they're very active putting a word on it limits it. They're very active saying this is a thing a noun. I don't know if this is going to sound strange, but I think it's a verb. I think it's a process.
It's not a it's not a brick. Right. It's moving. Whatever it is. Whatever greater power it is. It's not a static thing. I think that's a better way to describe it.
Yeah. And again, language wants to solidify it. Language wants to name it. This is this. And language is a beautiful thing. I love languages. One of my favorite things words have been good to me,
making up words and putting them together in sentences has been terrific for me. I'm really grateful for words and language, but there's a limitation to what words can show you about what's going on. Yeah, most certainly. And that's a I think that's an important point, like what you're saying is that it's 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 ridiculously instantaneous. We see a man in the fucking moon. I mean, we anthropomorphize everything. We see our images everywhere we look, right? And it's kind of a it's amusing when it's not doesn't cause war. Right. Good point. It's also connected to
a lot of the ancient depictions of it. Unfortunately, you have to think about like ancient depictions of God and Moses and all these biblical pictures who are figures who are painted in the garb of the day and which that painting was made. These people were looking up at the night sky going, what the fuck? Yeah, what the fuck? Who's making the lighting? What's happening here fighting? Yeah, no,
I had to come up with a story. We are, you know, I mean, have you ever read any of the Yovell Harari books? Yes. It makes it really clear that's our superpower. We tell ourselves stories and we believe them, right? And we congregate around them and we were able to mobilize millions
of millions of people around a fiction. Yeah, it doesn't even have to be true. We just need to believe it. And we're all moving and we're all marching in the same direction. It's monkeys don't do that.
Monkeys don't have a monkey God. Right. They 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. You want to call it true or not. It's an organizing element that no other animal does. You know, so we get to rule and or ruin the world. And we want to define the structure of whatever that thing is that we want to we want to even if we're pretending we want to give order to it.
Absolutely. This order is too scary. Too scary. Too crazy. Look at this.
Also, you can't have people running around making up their own order. That'll fuck everything up. You can't have a bunch of people. Well, God's been talking to me. You know what he tells me?
Yeah. Work is awesome. Well, you can have that guy. Yeah. And listen, you know, and you can see where civilizations or cultures that took God out of the picture, they replaced it with a Communist Party. Yeah, right. With a fascist dictator. Yeah. You know, it's same idea. Organize around me.
Sure. Right. Doesn't matter if I'm right or not. Organize around me and people will. And if you take that away from them, they get angry. Yeah, it freaks them out because it's like a tent pole. A 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 is in fair play. Everything. Right. Right. The tent collapses. So people will fight to the death. They keep the tent pole up. It
doesn't matter if it's true or not. It's the tent pole. I have a friend of mine who grew up Mormon and she left the Mormon church. And when she left the Mormon church, she said, I'm so susceptible to believing anything because I believed everything they told me for so long. 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. Yeah. I think I think growing up the way I grew up, I was a vacuum. I was wide open. You've got you know how to get out of this madness,
this world that's so frightening. Right. Show me. Yeah. I got nothing. I got nothing. I'll go, you
know, I was I was absolutely fragile, stupid, fragile. Like most people. Yeah. And you know, that's I got to write down. I got to write it down. Yeah. Well, that's the beauty of it. That
fragility and that emotion and all that chaos that 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. Back in the day. Oh my God. That was the big one. 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 Reichsberg book. Great book. Great book. Great book.
I was like, holy shit. Yeah. When it wasn't until that until I really kind of got the grip of what it's all about and how big part of it was secrets. Yeah. You know, institutionally held secrets.
They glue you. Oh, I want to know the secret. Yeah. Stick around. I'll find out the secret.
Is we're all looking for, you know, we're all looking for a secret. Like the knowing. The knowing. Yeah. 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. I'm not kidding either. It was those words were used. If you're not ready for these higher level spiritual things, it will destroy you. Drag you mad. When I bought my first house in 96, my next door neighbor was a
Scientologist and there's 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, oh, how are they going to do that? And he explained to me, I go, why do you have to put off the sale? He goes, because it cost
$50,000. They sent her to Flag in Florida. Is that what it is? Yeah. There's this own thing and I guess it's clear. It's incredibly expensive. Go clear and clear water? Incredibly expensive. 50 grand.
This guy was a construction guy. He had a construction business. It's probably a million dollars now. Yeah, it's 96. I don't know. But and there was a very purposeful thing. Putting a high
price tag on it made it important. Smart. Smart. It's marketing 101. If you give it away, it doesn't have as much value as if you say it's worth $50,000. I think Paul Haggis was the one in the documentary
who was discussing when he first got ahold of like one of the ancient stories that is like super secret and he read it. It was like, what the fuck am I reading? Because it was just cookie, Elrond Hopper. It was science fiction stuff. Oh, yeah. But you know, I mean, hey, whatever floats about.
One of the gifts of this writing a memoir was I found my way to be able to forgive myself. 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. 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. 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. I mean, we're all foolish. I agree. And that's, you know, I was watching an interview you did
the other day because I wanted to learn about what I was sitting down with, Tim Robbins. And he said something that struck me as worth repeating, which is a remarkable insight, I thought. And it was a remarkable insight for me. It came very late in life. But it was simply the power of saying, I don't know what a relief did not pretend I know, right? What a relief to not, you know, to not act as if I
have a handle on this. Right. I don't. And what's great is when you're sitting in a room full of people 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 open for 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 have gone on some long diatribe trying to convince everybody I knew what I was doing. It's exhausting. I don't, you know, I don't. I'm doing the best I can.
And when I don't know, it's freedom to say I don't know. It's freedom. Oh, shoulders go down, you exhale, and you seek to collaborate. So many people need to learn that lesson. Because it's a burden that you don't have to carry. You're carrying around unnecessary burden. It's propped
up by your own ego. And it's all sorts of your consciousness. I think it's how we're raised, too. You know, I don't think, you know, we're not taught as children to admit to ignorance. Right.
You know, it's just it's not how we're raised. It's, you know, man, right, that's the right thing. He knows what to do. He's leader. He's John Wayne in my generation, you know, more Steve McQueen, but okay, a little later. Yeah. But you're certainly not taught to say humility and say,
I don't know. And humility has a bad taint to it because it smells of weakness, but it's not. It's the opposite of weakness. Right. Oh my God, you know, to be able to say, I don't know, help me is actually an incredible strength. And it's much more admirable. It's for people on the outside watching.
They recognize it as being true. So this is a authentic moment rather than someone bullshitting you. Well, you know they're bullshitting you and they know that you know and everybody just goes through this stupid fucking dance. One of the questions I get asked all the time now that I'm in the twilight of my career is what's the secret sauce? You know, what's, what's, you know, if anything carries through all the different TV shows and what. And in order to come to mind this collaboration,
I didn't do anything alone. You know, you know, you come out of the comedy world, you know that writing comedy with others is really a gas and it's far more effective. 100%. I learned so much by being in a room for 25 years with great writers. And one of the things I talk about in the book, which is really meaningful to me was when I got a chance to do the Comminsky method with Michael Douglas, I decided I want him 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 we get volatile, you know, comedy writers. You fucking nuts. What are you stupid? It got mean, right? But when I sat down and write, wrote those scripts by myself, I realized all those guys were in the room with me. They're in my head. You know, really? You think that's funny? It's,
you know, it's a fucking pun you moron. You know, that guy's, guys in my head, he was part of me now. And I wasn't, I was writing alone, but I wasn't alone. All those guys. And you know, when you watch a great standup, it gets in your head. You don't copy that guy. But his insight can change the way
you perceive things. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. Standup always says that he writes in he thinks about himself as a defense attorney defending the bit as he's writing it. Who is this? Doug Stanhope.
Larry's great standup. Hilarious guy. But he looks at it like he's like that bit is being tried. How does he defend this bit? And he makes sure that he lays it out in that way. That's great. Yeah.
That's the same thing. Like having someone in your head that's like critic, that's gonna look at it and go, Hey, what the fuck is this part? You know, he's a motherfucker. This scene is in the scene. All right. Let's fucking work together here. Yeah. You know, and what gift, you know, and so,
you know, again, going back to that word, humility is a strength. I succeeded because I counted on other people. 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, every, you need to have a lot of brilliant people working together for it to work out well. Have you interviewed this guy Taylor Sheridan? Yeah, he's
good friend one. Yeah. Okay. That's, that might be the, the anomaly. Because, you know, I love that stuff.
I love all that stuff. I watch everything. You know, I'm just, he's a freak. He just turns them out. I feel so fucking lazy. I'm such a just a just I'm just driftwood. He wrote it and directed it.
And then he had time to write that great feature and holy shit. Yeah. He turns them out. I just, and it's good. Yeah. One thing to turn it out and it's one thing to turn out quality.
You seen Helen High Country? Yeah. Helen High Water Runner? Is that water? Yeah. That's a fucking
great movie. And I just, this is the Carrillo stuff. Yes. And then 1883 in 1923, in Helen Mirren, and Harrison Ford. Oh, he creates a banger after banger. I don't know. I don't know. I watch
Linus, everybody tells me that's incredible. It's fantastic. Landman. Landman's incredible. You know, Billy Joe Thornton. Billy Bob. Billy Bob. Yeah. Unbelievable. Great stuff. Yeah. Really great stuff.
It was funny. The pitch for that show was he was going to do Bad Santa, but on an oil rig. And he's like, fuck yeah, I'm in. Bad Santa, an oil man. I got to work with him once. Billy Bob.
His people, his representatives called me and said, Billy Bob wants to be on the big bank theory. I'm sorry, what? Oscar winning, you know, sling blade guy wants to be on the big bank theory. I said, I'm sorry, you're gonna have to give me more. His mother loves the show. And as a gift to his
mother, he wants to be on the show. Oh, wow. And we did it. That's awesome. And we loved it. We had a
great time. That's so cool. He played a 50 year old version of them who lived in his mother's basement. After all these years and all these shows, what keeps you doing it now? Like what do you enjoy about the process now? I'm a laugh whore. Making people laugh is fun. You know, and sitting in the
writer's room is fun. Sometimes it's you want to tear your hair out because it's hard. But every once in a while, you know, it hits something and you go, oh, this is good. This is really good. And what the fuck else would I do? Well, you could kind of do whatever you want. That's what I asked.
Okay, so I'm asking you, I can do whatever I want. What am I doing? I can travel. That's a couple of weeks. Now what? Right. Okay. I'm gonna garden. No, I don't see me in the, I don't see me in the
tulips. Keep going. What am I doing? I get a chance to make people laugh. That's not a bad way to spend the day.
No, it's an awesome way to spend the day. But some people, the stress of continuing to create and continuing to produce things, like it eventually gets to them where they just like, I want off the ride. What I've done, and you really hit on something there, is the stress of it at a certain point is intolerable. It's just intolerable. I just, I find myself becoming the crush, the short-tempered curmudgeon, 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, if I'm on the stage at a rehearsal, and the actors play out a scene, and the scene ends, everybody looks and says, looks at me and goes, is it okay? So my very presence suffocates the process. I am the plastic bag from the dry cleaners. I kill small children. So I have this extraordinary writing staff, wonderful cast and crew, and sometimes my presence can be, I don't want to say destructive, but it doesn't encourage people to step up and go, what about? How about if? I think this joke doesn't work. Can we beat it? It doesn't
invite collaboration. And the sad truth is, they think I know, I don't know. I'm guessing. We're all, you know, in the comedy business, it's a game of guessing. I think this is funny. I guess wrong,
right? When it dies. Let's fix it. No harm, no foul. I'm not a horrible person, because it died.
They just feel less likely to take chances when you're around. I think I suck up a lot of oxygen. Yeah, it makes sense. You know, I remember one time Norman Lear came to the set because he was going to go back into a version of One Day at a Time, and he was executive producing a remake of one of his shows from the 70s. And he asked, can I come and watch you guys work to see how it's being done now? This is 35, 40 years after his day. Of course, you know, geez, Norman Lear is going to come
watch his work, which I was a nervous wreck after every joke I'm looking at. It's Norman laughing. It's Norman laughing. But I asked him, I remember this really vivid moment when I said, are you going to write the pilot for this new sitcom? You're going to make it anyway? Are you crazy? No, if I
write the pilot, nobody's going to give me notes. Nobody's going to give me any constructive feedback. I'm all by myself. I'm not going to write it. If it says written by Norman Lear, who's going to do the punch? Right. Now I'm not saying I'm not in there. He reinvented television. I carried on.
You know, I've been keeping it going, but he really changed the game. So I don't want to say it's the same effect at a certain point in my career. I've noticed I have a the word stelte-fying comes to mind effect on the process. And the people I love working with could give a shit about my opinion. And I love that because then there's back and forth. Then
there's arguments. There's, you know, there's collaboration. Yeah, and it has to happen that way to do it right. That's fun. It's also great that you recognize that your presence can make them nervous and fuck it up. Yeah, and you want to go and understand. I actually don't know what I'm doing.
I'm just guessing. I'm guessing based on a lot of experience, but I'm still guessing. And, uh, and, uh, that's just your reputation proceeds. You've had too many hits. You know, it's a beautiful problem. Yeah. It's the best problem. It's certainly better than the opposite
problem. When I started the Big Bang Theory, I could barely do one show, two and a half minute. 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, I got a show on CBS. I'm about to have a second show. At one point,
he had seven shows on television simultaneously. I said, would he be available to talk to me? Maybe give me some tips and I'm very graciously invited me over to his office. And I sat down and I said, I'm about to start production on a second show. I can barely do the one. And now I'm going to do
two. What can you tell me? And he said, you're not going to like the answer. And it boiled down to, he said, you go where the fire is burning the brightest and you try and put it out. That was his management technique. That was ill. The fire of chaos or the fire of creativity?
He had seven shows in production. He had the script didn't work. They miscast the role. The bad fire. The director wasn't working. The second act didn't work. Some of them are small. Some
other huge problems. So and so is ill. Should we shut down? 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 bigger small. But his solution was gauging his response basically, nothing, nothing, nothing. Oh, that's a crisis. I'll go there. How did that guy have time for anything in life? I don't know. He was a good
man though. He was a really, he was a generous and good man. I was very, it was a real privilege to spend a little bit of time. That's amazing. Was there any time, every time when you were doing bull show simultaneously, we went, I don't think I should have done this. This is too much. Always.
It's our time. Always. But there was a moment around the third season of Two and a Half Men. And I know I wrote about this. We're heading weird epiphany. I was sitting in room for the comedy writers, great
writers, super star comedy writers. We were arguing about something. I don't remember what it was, some scene in an episode that we were working on. And it dawned on me that I could trust myself. And it was a really striking experience. Everybody was yelling and complaining and know about this,
do that. And I just thought, I think I know how to do this scene. And everybody's going, no, I think I know how to do this scene. And we're going to do it. Not angrily defending it.
Just, I felt calm. I felt this calmness going. I think this can work. Let's do this. And I also, there was a moment in that calmness where I went, if I'm wrong, we'll fix it. Nobody's going to die.
We're not going to get drummed out of show business. It's a joke and a scene. And I realized that I could be wrong and survive being wrong. Well, that's the benefit of being very successful. 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.
It was a turning point for me, 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 comedy. You just have this feeling. It's in it's in code. It's not something you could
express in words. You just know, I think this is going to work. And that feeling grows. It feels like episodes you've done. Yes. And you also know when you're bullshitting yourself, this is lazy.
We can do better. I know, yeah, this will work, but it's not great. It's okay. And okay, why are we doing this if it's just okay? Let's at least try for great. If we fail, we try for great. But if you're
fail for if you fail trying to do okay, you know, go home, go home. It's you're you're done. So, you know, that's about shoot for the moon settle for a low orbit. That's a great message. I think it's a good way to wrap this up. Thank you. I really appreciate it. I stunned. I thought for sure I
maybe I could talk to you for 20 minutes and I'm going to be screaming out of the room going this. I know you're saying that at the beginning. I'm you're going to be fine. Well, you're delighted to talk to you. And you are too. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. I get it. I get it. You have,
you have, as you I'm sure you well know, you know, you have a an aura about you. A myth, a mythos. What's the myth? You're powerful. Powerful man. And and what you've achieved is it's
remarkable. Oh, thank you. You know, as we say in the comic book, we'll use your powers for good. It's all illusion. It's just me talking for years. But I appreciate it. The 10,000 hours are
clear. Thank you very much. You're awesome. You look great. And this was a lot of fun. Thank you very
much. Bye everybody.