Episode 337 - Ed Crasnick
Marc:Lock the gates!
Lock the gates!
Guest:Okay, let's do this.
Guest:How are you, what-the-fuckers?
Guest:What-the-fuck buddies?
Guest:What-the-fuckineers?
Guest:What-the-fuck nicks?
Guest:What-the-fuckstables?
Guest:What-the-fuckadelics?
Guest:And what-the-fuckaholics?
Marc:Uh, what-the-fuckalots?
Marc:I think I just made that one up.
Marc:Is that possible?
Marc:Probably not.
Marc:This is Marc Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:This is Thanksgiving Day, if you're listening to it.
Marc:On the day it has been dropped.
Marc:On the day it has been provided for you.
Marc:You're probably at home.
Marc:You're probably...
Marc:At home at your family's house, maybe tucked away in a corner looking for a bit of reprieve from whatever's going on out there.
Marc:Probably some cooking or maybe it's post-cooking.
Marc:Maybe there are people watching football and you want nothing to do with it.
Marc:Or perhaps you're just taking a break from the football game.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I have to assume.
Marc:I have some fans that enjoy the football.
Marc:Perhaps you're slowly digesting that tremendous meal you just ate and wondering whether it was worth it.
Marc:Perhaps you're standing or kneeling over a toilet wondering whether or not it's purge time just so you have room for more.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Maybe you're drunk and sad in a closet.
Marc:How about your childhood closet?
Marc:Perhaps you're curled up in your childhood closet, stuffed with turkey and wasted, crying.
Marc:Pull it together, man.
Marc:I'm talking to you.
Marc:It's a very specific person I'm talking to you, curled up in your closet, the closet you grew up in, or the closet of the room you grew up in, drunk, full of turkey, maybe looking at some pants that you once wore, or perhaps there's a hockey stick or a baseball glove in there, something you found on the floor that's not making it any better.
Marc:It's OK, man.
Marc:Step out of the closet.
Marc:Go back downstairs.
Marc:You're not that kid anymore.
Marc:You can do it.
Marc:Happy Thanksgiving.
Marc:Ed Krasnick's on the show today.
Marc:Ed Krasnick, highly Jewish, extraordinarily sensitive and neurotic man who I knew years ago in Boston.
Marc:It was a pleasure to talk to him.
Marc:Before I forget, if you live in the Boston area, I'm going to be doing a live WTF and a stand-up show at the Wilbur Theater in Boston.
Marc:That's a 7.30 p.m.
Marc:stand-up show on a 10 o'clock live WTF, Friday, February 8th.
Marc:The reason I'm telling you this is yesterday...
Marc:The pre-sales for a combo ticket went on sale over at the Wilbur.
Marc:You can go to the wilburtheater.com and link up to Ticketmaster through there.
Marc:And there's a combo pass, which means for 50 bucks, you can see both shows and not change seats.
Marc:And that's good through the pre-sales through tomorrow.
Marc:And then it goes on sale to the public.
Marc:So basically, I'm telling you today, if you're in the Boston area, you want to come see both shows for 50 bucks.
Marc:Get involved with that pre-sale.
Marc:Use the code WTF.
Marc:All right?
Marc:And tomorrow it goes on sale to the public.
Marc:That's the combo.
Marc:And then I'll tell you when the regular tickets for each show are on sale.
Marc:So that's that.
Marc:Also, I'll be at Helium in Philly December 6th through 8th.
Marc:So that's coming up too.
Marc:I don't know where we are with ticket sales on that, but I would get them.
Marc:What's going on with me?
Marc:I wish I could tell you that I'm actually doing this from my mother's house, but I'm not.
Marc:I'm about to leave for there.
Marc:So there's a little bit of a time thing going on here.
Marc:God forbid something bad happens to me.
Marc:This will be a very sad episode.
Marc:But let me speculate.
Marc:It's Thursday.
Marc:So I'm probably sweating in my mother's kitchen, getting together all my recipes while she stands there looking at me, baffled at what's happening, but excited at the possibility of things being cooked.
Marc:Not necessarily the possibility of eating those things.
Marc:The turkey's in the oven.
Marc:Smells good.
Marc:It's a new oven.
Marc:I'm a little nervous.
Marc:I made too much stock for extra gravy.
Marc:I'll have extra gravy.
Marc:I don't know what I'm going to do with that.
Marc:This is all speculation based on years past.
Marc:What's really going on is things are falling.
Marc:Things are dropping.
Marc:Things are hitting the ground today.
Marc:It's one of those days.
Marc:And yesterday.
Marc:Yesterday, I had a bit of a crisis.
Marc:I was drinking my JustCoffee.coop next to my MacBook.
Marc:And I learned this lesson once.
Marc:It's not a lesson you need to learn more than once.
Marc:I dumped an entire glass of liquid onto a MacBook years ago.
Marc:And it's one of the few sort of conditioned responses I have now.
Marc:I make sure that glass is far away from the computer as possible.
Marc:Sometimes I'll even walk across the room to sip my coffee.
Marc:This coffee was safely away from my computer, but not safely away enough for if I were to knock it two feet and coffee was to fly, you know, unencumbered by cup through the air and splash right onto the left side of my computer, shorting the whole fucking thing out.
Marc:The day before the day before I have to leave.
Marc:So that was a panic.
Marc:That thing just fried.
Marc:So I had to call my Mac guy, get some info, go get a new computer, which I needed anyways, the one I was using from 2006.
Marc:But it just stinks when a cup of coffee decides for you that it's time to buy a new computer.
Marc:So that happened.
Marc:Now I got a new one, and that one doesn't seem like its brain's on right, its head's on straight.
Marc:Some glitch in the new Mac got to wait for the update.
Marc:They're a good company, though.
Marc:They should be all right.
Marc:They should set me up.
Marc:So that happened.
Marc:So when I go to the MacBook and the Mac store on my way to the store, having fried my computer, it was sadly shorting out, stroking out at home, useless.
Marc:All I have is my phone and that decides to have a brain fart of some kind.
Marc:And that melts down.
Marc:My iPhone melts down.
Marc:So now I'm alone on a planet with no way to cry for help except for to yell at the top of my lungs.
Marc:Who's going to hear that?
Marc:If I can't tweet a cry for help or email you, then I'm in trouble.
Marc:Or at least text you that there might be an issue.
Marc:What do I do?
Marc:I felt lost.
Marc:And I was walking with my girlfriend.
Marc:I felt like a non-person.
Marc:When my phone went down, having kept my shit together up to that point about the spillage, I'm like, I'm fucked.
Marc:I'm fucked.
Marc:I'm nobody.
Marc:I'm nowhere.
Marc:There's no way to identify me on the big grid.
Marc:I should have felt freedom in that, but I felt panic.
Marc:I needed the love of the satellites to know where I was.
Marc:I needed to know that the iCloud was taking care of me.
Marc:That some part of me, even though I wasn't conscious of it, was connected to the big grid.
Marc:Then my phone came back on and she stubbed her toe.
Marc:So...
Marc:The problem shifted to her toe, which I think is not ironic, but telling that, you know, there I was lost in a modern world without any modern access.
Marc:And then boom, right when it comes back on, literally my phone came back on.
Marc:Ow, fuck.
Marc:And she's limping.
Marc:So that's what's important, folks.
Marc:It's not whether or not I can tweet or text or get my email.
Marc:It's whether or not I can be present for my loved one's pain.
Marc:And I wasn't that good at it.
Marc:I go, what happened?
Marc:She goes, I stubbed my tone.
Marc:I'm like, are we good?
Marc:We need to go to the hospital.
Marc:Can you walk?
Marc:And then I continue to look at my phone.
Marc:That's the kind of asshole I am.
Marc:But Thanksgiving, I think I'm going to clear my palate.
Marc:My soul palate.
Marc:Is this the day for that?
Marc:I didn't do it on Yom Kippur.
Marc:So maybe I'll go ahead and do it and repent on Thanksgiving.
Marc:Can I just mix it up like that?
Marc:I mean, a holiday is a holiday.
Marc:I can choose how I use them.
Marc:So I'll repent on Thanksgiving and eat.
Marc:I can use Thanksgiving like that.
Marc:That's the kind of relationship I have with a questionable God.
Marc:So I saw Lincoln, the movie, and Daniel Day-Lewis was amazing.
Marc:I think one of the things you don't really hear much about when you read history books or where you hear history talked about is just how much history was backlit and the effect that backlighting has on history.
Marc:I'm surprised I never noticed it, but there are some scenes in the House of Representatives that are beautifully backlit, and you don't really picture it that way.
Marc:But maybe, I don't know how historically accurate Spielberg was in this depiction, but the backlighting was tremendous in almost all of the scenes.
Marc:I did like the film.
Marc:I think the thing I liked about it, if it matters to you at all, not only was Daniel Day-Lewis amazing, but the movie is about politics.
Marc:It's not about
Marc:graphic war scenes of the Civil War.
Marc:It's not about Lincoln getting shot in the head.
Marc:It's about the political process.
Marc:It's about the passing of an amendment to the Constitution, number 13.
Marc:And it deals with the political process and how votes are garnered within the House.
Marc:And what amazed me was how...
Marc:Similar.
Marc:It works now, you know, without the horrendous corporate intrusion and complete self prostitution of most of the House of Representatives.
Marc:But the fact that the House of Representatives back then were just rabble, just freaks, car salesmen, landowners, barely.
Marc:And I tell you, it's no small thing to build up to a denouement, to a story point that is a House vote.
Marc:I mean, that is the resolution.
Marc:That is your Act 3.
Marc:It's impressive.
Marc:I think that what Daniel D. Lewis that was did was very interesting, was really sort of depict the detachment necessary for a president to have in order to just handle the job.
Marc:I was a little disappointed that they didn't get into the supposed or at least slightly documented mental illness of Abe Lincoln.
Marc:perhaps bipolar.
Marc:And they didn't really get into the depth of the relationship between he and his wife, who was also had her own mental problems.
Marc:They dealt with it a little bit, but but not much.
Marc:But, you know, Spielberg wasn't going to go too dark.
Marc:And and it was about it was about this monumental vote.
Marc:And a lot of the Tommy Lee Jones was great.
Marc:And a lot of the the the cast was awesome.
Marc:So I'm no Spielberg fanatic, but he certainly makes things look good.
Marc:The lighting in that time in the Lincoln White House was spectacular.
Marc:So I would say that's a fairly raving endorsement.
Marc:I enjoyed it because I've been out of the political racket and was nice to sort of get a refresher course on how democracy works.
Marc:Happy Thanksgiving.
Marc:I hope you are grateful and humbled and appreciate everything you have.
Marc:I'll be repenting.
Marc:Let's talk to Ed Krasnick.
Marc:So you're comfortable.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:I make a living.
Marc:Yeah, I know it's a tall order for you to be comfortable.
Guest:I can't be comfortable as long as I know that there are Jews living this high up.
Guest:Is that true, Ed?
Guest:It is true.
Guest:You know, we know each other.
Guest:We go back away.
Guest:Who's in charge here?
Guest:Go ahead.
Guest:I think we both know who's in charge here.
Guest:A greater spirit than you and I combined.
Guest:How do you call it?
Guest:Hashem?
Guest:Hashem.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Are you doing the Hashem thing?
Guest:No.
Guest:You're not.
Guest:No, I'm doing the Hashem thing.
Guest:Does that help anybody listening?
Guest:For you at home, no.
Guest:See, I'm old school.
Guest:I'm way too old for you.
Guest:Anyone ever call you Little Eddie?
Guest:No, but I've had many different names.
Guest:One was Sneaky Krasnicki.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, my uncle, who I loved a lot.
Marc:So that wasn't a negative thing?
Guest:No, no, he was great.
Guest:Sneaky Krasnicki.
Guest:Sneaky Krasnicki, and then Crazy Eddie in college at Syracuse University.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Crazy Eddie, but not like, what's he going to do?
Marc:Legitimately crazy.
Guest:Well, no, no.
Guest:Well, always legitimately crazy, but I would do weird things, like the parents would come for Parents Weekend, and I would jump off a roof.
Guest:I was held on by my friends, and I'd say, I can't take the pressure, and I'd jump.
Guest:Were your parents coming?
Guest:No, my parents never made it to Syracuse University because-
Guest:Oh, actually they did, now that you mention it.
Guest:We had, this is really true, we had a marathon family therapy session where they would unite people that didn't live in the same geographic region, bring them together for four and five hour sessions on camera.
Guest:This was cutting edge therapy.
Guest:And then they would look at the film of how you behaved in the session.
Marc:Was this an experiment or was this a practical thing?
Marc:Who instigated this?
Guest:I was seeing a therapist.
Guest:What, you were 20?
Guest:I was like 18, 19, yeah.
Guest:Where do you come from?
Guest:I come from Boston.
Marc:Right, that's where I met you.
Marc:Let's put this into context.
Marc:I met Ed Krasnick in Boston, Massachusetts, I would say in the late 80s.
Marc:you would uh you were you were coming around you look you look the same you don't look like you've aged a bit uh even your hairline similar though you wore it long in the back overcompensating a bit well i would say overcompensating a lot okay i have sort of a my hair is done in a beehive for those of you yeah it looks wonderful i mean because it sort of the beehive is only taking up the back of his head and sort of comes up in the back
Guest:Well, I try to get as high as I can without living so high.
Guest:So you grew up in Boston.
Guest:I grew up in Boston.
Marc:I don't live that high up.
Marc:I mean, I'm on a hill.
Marc:Dangerously high.
Marc:You took a way to my house that is suggested by Google as the quickest way, but it happens to be a very harrowing journey through an area that I don't live in, and you actually came down a few feet to arrive at my house.
Guest:I don't know if anybody's ever seen like Alfred Hitchcock, like if you've seen Bullet or French Connection.
Guest:It was like the French Connection, but with a little bit of Deliverance.
Guest:The French Connection is in Brooklyn.
Guest:And then you go to Deliverance.
Guest:So you have the same panic of French Connection, but with the countryside.
Marc:But Bullet is a different thing.
Marc:That's San Francisco where you could drive.
Guest:I'm telling you, it was all those three movies in one trip.
Guest:You had a hell of a drive over here.
Guest:I really did.
Guest:That's what your brain did to you.
Guest:I really did.
Guest:No, I had a hell of a time, but then I thought to myself, I have to keep going.
Guest:Just like in show business, I said, no matter how bad it is, and it's really bad, keep going.
Guest:Just keep going.
Guest:Now, dead relatives are waving at me now.
Guest:They're waving me toward the light.
Guest:On the way here.
Guest:And I just keep going.
Guest:You saw dead relatives on the way to my house?
Guest:I did.
Guest:and they said you know what you might why didn't you stick with stand-up why didn't you just stick with that and why did you veer why are you veering yeah where are you now i right your way off road or where are you i'm kind of a i'm kind of a light terrain vehicle i'm kind of a utility vehicle all right let's go back because i have a feeling that we could get on tangents yeah that would be just a an exercise in denial
Guest:Well, everything is in this country.
Guest:Oh, now it's a country thing.
Guest:I'm not going to get into it.
Marc:You think people are better in France?
Marc:I think that- Would you feel better in France, Ed Krasnick?
Marc:Would you feel better in Germany?
Marc:How about Spain?
Guest:Do you think that anywhere you go, it would be different for you?
Guest:No.
Guest:You know why?
Guest:And you're right about that.
Guest:Now, I heard you say something about the denial of death.
Guest:I love that book.
Guest:And you had a phrase, which was really good, that whatever you need to go through, you create.
Guest:I can't.
Guest:I'm paraphrasing.
Marc:Oh, we create our own reality to discover ourselves.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So that's really what it is.
Guest:And that's what I've learned over the years, is that it's coming from inside me, the fact that I feel like I'm on bullet and French Connection, and I'm too high.
Guest:That's what it is.
Marc:Too high in an altitude way, not in a...
Guest:No, I've never been high in my life, by the way.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Well, thank you for coming.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You see what I'm saying?
Guest:Isn't this weird?
Guest:People in college would try to get me high.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That was their preoccupation.
Marc:Like a cat?
Marc:They try to hold you down and put a smoke in your face?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it just didn't work because you don't want to see me high.
Marc:No.
Marc:No.
Marc:Well, okay.
Marc:So you grew up in Boston.
Marc:In what part?
Guest:I grew up in Dorchester, Mass.
Guest:Basically, we're goodwill hunting territory.
Marc:Right, but Dorchester now is primarily Irish, am I mistaken?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I mean, I think it's a very tough area, and it was when I was growing up there in the 60s.
Guest:We had the Students for Democratic Society.
Guest:We had Jewish Defense League.
Guest:In Dorchester.
Guest:In Dorchester, and the Black Panthers, and they all converged at the same time.
Guest:This was a time of court-ordered busing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was a very politically charged- And how old were you?
Guest:Nine, 10 years old.
Marc:So you were marching.
Marc:You were in the streets with the people.
Guest:I'm always with the people.
Guest:I was marching because I really enjoyed the exercise and I thought that I would get new sneakers.
Guest:It was fun.
Guest:It was fun for a 10-year-old.
Guest:It was fun to march.
Guest:No, it was a really tough, very tough area, tough time.
Guest:Busing, of course, in Boston.
Guest:Boston, a very racist kind of town.
Guest:Still kind of, I think.
Guest:Very much so.
Guest:And your parents were what?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:my parents were human beings uh they were mammals yeah yeah they were jewish mammals they were jewish mammals my mother was the funniest person came to see me do stand-up yes at catch rising star in cambridge that's where i picked up with you right yeah and you know people don't and came and my mother was funny and could be funny yeah on demand what'd your dad do that made you like this
Marc:Did that come out?
Marc:I was supposed to just be thinking that.
Guest:No, you should have thought that.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:I'm fine with it because I passed away last week.
Guest:What?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Here's the thing.
Guest:This is a new philosophy of life.
Guest:If you believe that you've already passed away, you don't care about anything anymore because you're dead.
Guest:You look great for a dead guy.
Guest:I have passed away last week.
Guest:I had a nice party.
Guest:Should I say I'm sorry?
Guest:Don't be I'm sorry.
Guest:Don't be I'm sorry.
Guest:I'm now the spirit that I'm intended to be.
Marc:That's a wonderful way to look at it.
Marc:Do you say this to everybody or is this special to me?
Guest:That's you.
Guest:And I should say this.
Guest:I'm learning how to take care of myself better psychologically now that I'm dead.
Guest:And I say to you, I'm prepared to walk.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That's my new, because I'm not good at boundaries.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So I say, I'm prepared to walk.
Guest:There's a new sheriff in town.
Guest:I'll come in.
Marc:Would you say this at a Starbucks?
Marc:Like, hello, I passed away last week.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I'd like this type of coffee, and I'm prepared to walk.
Guest:I would say it.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And because with people that don't have strong boundaries and that can't set limits that well.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:You should think of yourself that you've passed away and you should set limits by saying things like, there's a new sheriff in town.
Guest:So if you go home tonight and you say you're having an argument with your girlfriend or wife, you just start with, you know what?
Guest:There's a new sheriff in town.
Guest:Now, I don't really know what to follow that up with.
Marc:I would have to think that would depend on their reaction.
Yeah.
Guest:I would think you would get some interesting reactions.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But really, this is what I figured out.
Guest:What I figured out is that you have to get phrases.
Guest:First, you have to believe that you're not alive anymore.
Guest:And then you have to get phrases that you can use that empower you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm prepared to walk.
Guest:I am prepared to walk.
Guest:But you have to say it in a certain inflection.
Guest:I am prepared to walk.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:There's a new sheriff in town.
Guest:Right.
Marc:uh i don't need it yeah and you do air quotes when you say i don't need it i don't need it so much why'd i eat that very good but that's not proactive that's and that's not something a dead person would say a dead person would eat whatever they wanted yeah that's true a dead person would say whatever they wanted to anybody what do they care they're dead but see that kind of mentality no this is the this is the chink in the idea
Guest:Don't you believe that if you believe that you're an eternal spirit?
Guest:Oh, boy.
Guest:Right?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:But don't you?
Marc:I think I'm an appendage of an eternal spirit.
Guest:There's a bigger thing.
Marc:There's a bigger thing that I might be a skin tag on.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I'm a skin tag on God.
Marc:Well, is that a bad thing?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:How do you feel about skin tags?
Marc:They're not going to hurt you.
Marc:They're a little unattractive.
Marc:You might want to get it removed.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, it depends what kind of god you are, doesn't it?
Marc:I'm not going to have this.
Marc:You don't want to get into that?
Marc:No, of course I do.
Guest:On this show?
Marc:No, no, no, if that's where you want to go.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:I'll get into it.
Marc:If you are going to take me to a higher level, higher than the hill that I live on, if you're going to take me to the mountain, Ed Krasnick, I am willing to go to the mountain with you.
Marc:I will stand on the mountain with you, Ed Krasnick, and say, why is Ed so uncomfortable?
Guest:You know, the funny thing is, you know why it doesn't agree with me?
Guest:What?
Guest:The discomfort.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Because I'm very happy.
Guest:You seem fine.
Guest:It doesn't fit.
Guest:So I'm living a role that really is not me.
Guest:Now that's interesting.
Marc:Why can't you let go of the, oh, look at it.
Marc:I'll tell you why.
Marc:Let's go back to the source of it.
Marc:What did your father do?
Marc:My father worked two jobs for 52 years.
Marc:Working class Jewish man.
Marc:Do you hear that, Jews?
Marc:Working class Jewish man.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Deal with it.
Marc:Do you hear that, non-Jews?
Marc:We're not all what you think we are.
Guest:Right.
Guest:My father was very hard working.
Guest:What jobs was he?
Guest:He worked as a social worker during the day, helping families, and he worked at night in the post office.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Civil servant all around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was a great guy and he was very honest and had a lot of integrity.
Guest:And my father went over to World War II and he believed in exercise.
Guest:So he took in his duffel bag two 40 pound dumbbells.
Marc:To the war.
Guest:To the war.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, why are you carrying extra weight?
Guest:You're coming over in a destroyer.
Guest:You're going under the water.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, because how am I going to work out?
Marc:Right.
Guest:So he believed in exercise because he was chronically depressed.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And his antidote was to be active.
Marc:That's information I can use and I think anyone can use because I am struggling right now to get back into a routine.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Like I ran on Saturday.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:On Sunday, I ate a pint of ice cream.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And I also took liberties with some other foods.
Marc:And then today is Monday and I'm ready to go again, but I have not gone.
Marc:It sounds like a book.
Marc:That is, that's the whole book.
Guest:Yeah, it sounds like a book.
Guest:No, it's, you know, look, I mean, that's part of it.
Marc:So you have family depression is what you're telling me.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
Guest:And that's part of the whole thing is I believe, you know, I believe that, you know, so many factors.
Guest:First of all, depression that we now know is a curable thing.
Guest:It's something that there's, it's the way that the brain is wired and you can actually rewire your brain through certain types of exercises.
Guest:And through certain types of thinking.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Like what a counterintuitive thinking.
Guest:Well, that's what I hear.
Guest:I mean, they're doing something now.
Guest:They discovered they're studying the brain now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:After 5,000 years, they think something might be in the brain.
Guest:So they're discovering the brain now.
Marc:Isn't it amazing to you that with all the technology, the fact that I can text you from my pocket right now, goes to space, comes back down, lands in your pocket.
Marc:I can take money out in Africa of a machine that knows where I am.
Marc:My phone can tell me where I'm going, yet there's still cancer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I can't communicate and I don't know what I feel.
Guest:And that you can learn by doing none of those things.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But I remember you early on.
Marc:You were championed by the lovely Janine Garofalo.
Marc:You were ushered in.
Marc:This is a man.
Marc:who is to be reckoned with comedically.
Marc:He's from the area.
Marc:He's one of us.
Marc:Welcome him.
Marc:And everyone sang Dayenu, and you came in.
Guest:I came in.
Guest:And I had a great time, and I really still, my favorite thing to do is to be in the company of a fine comedian.
Marc:And you had a very stylized delivery of very, you know, Semitic themes.
Guest:Yeah, that's true.
Guest:Storytelling, you know, stuff like that.
Guest:And, you know, was really veered off the path.
Guest:I really did like stand-up, but I was scared.
Guest:Who isn't?
Guest:I know.
Guest:How is that not part of it?
Guest:I know, but you didn't give, you know, I would measure myself, you know, I'd change things or I wouldn't develop stuff because I was afraid.
Guest:So, you know, sometimes you, I've learned about that, but you guys, you know, some people press through it.
Guest:I took different routes with it.
Marc:But you were always sort of around you like sort of what's going on?
Marc:Hey, look, I'm in California.
Marc:That's Ed Krasnick.
Guest:I know.
Marc:And then like, oh, I'm back in New York.
Guest:What's Ed Krasnick doing here?
Guest:I know.
Guest:Well, I've done a lot of really interesting things.
Guest:It's taken me to a lot of interesting places.
Marc:But let's go to Dorchester.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:This fascinates me because in my mind, living in Boston, Dorchester was a rough town.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And Boston was a rough town.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:How many siblings do you have?
Marc:I have an older sister, seven years old.
Marc:I remember that.
Marc:And she used to come out occasionally.
Marc:I feel like I've met her before.
Marc:I know.
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:Is that possible?
Marc:You might have, you might have.
Marc:All right, so there's the Tuias in the Jewish community, Dorchester, Massachusetts.
Marc:Temple, no temple?
Guest:No temple.
Guest:You would walk to temple.
Guest:There was a Woodrow Avenue temple, and it was an old one, old school.
Guest:So it was really like The Chosen.
Guest:If The Chosen was a musical, and it was a musical.
Guest:So it would be like you'd go to The Chosen, and I'd go with my father.
Guest:He'd take my hand, and I'd go.
Guest:And everybody looked like they were selling cough drops because they all had long beards.
Guest:It was like a Smith Brothers convention.
Marc:You thought Amish, mid-1800s, now Brooklyn.
Guest:This is old school.
Guest:A school wasn't built yet.
Guest:It was so old school.
Guest:And dark, like the Woody Allen movies.
Guest:Really dark, like you couldn't see.
Guest:You had to light a match to button your coat.
Guest:So here, and my father was a big Red Sox fan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So now you have the transistor radio.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:In the pocket.
Guest:And you can see the little.
Guest:In temple.
Guest:And the little outside the lining, you could see the outline of the radio.
Guest:And the ear, the wire would go up.
Guest:The piece.
Guest:The one white earphone plug.
Guest:The white earphone plug would go in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then the rabbi would say, I swear to God I remember this, he'd say, now we should all greet each other, turn to your right, say hello, and say Happy New Year, Lashana Tova.
Guest:My father, not kidding, this is what he did, he said, oh my God, why is he pitching like a crazy person?
Guest:Take him out!
Guest:Take him out!
Guest:So that's how I grew up.
Guest:Happy New Year.
Guest:Happy New Year.
Guest:Diana.
Guest:No, I have these, it's all mixed.
Guest:You know, everything is mixed.
Guest:And that's why, you know, I mean, I can take you through the journey of Dorchester and stuff like that because it was an amazing area.
Guest:There was a book written called The Death of an American Jewish Community.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was about my neighborhood in the 60s.
Marc:I thought you were about to say it was about my family.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It was about my family, turned into a musical, then it became Assassins, and then it was Starlight Express.
Guest:Things change over the years.
Marc:But you're one of these guys, like, you know, I worry about you, I wondered about you, I know you struggled, but you're always sort of chipper about it, and you had a style that was well-rooted in Woody Allen, in the Borscht Belt, in Psychoanalysis, which doesn't exist anymore.
Guest:Psychoanalysis, you know, like I would say something, like I would say now we have Lance Armstrong performance enhancing drugs.
Guest:I've been on them.
Guest:I'm admitting to them now because I've been running from my problems for many years.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it takes a lot of energy.
Marc:So there you have- That's a style.
Marc:That way you're saying that comes from Woody Allen through Richard Lewis.
Marc:Richard Lewis is exactly right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And with me, even with Richard, who I've become a little friendly with, there is a certain point, and I think you're at this point, if I'm sensing what you said earlier, is that 20 years in, 30 years in, 40 years in, if you're Richard Lewis,
Marc:There's party that thinks, nothing's better?
Marc:Nothing.
Marc:Nothing's better.
Marc:No, actually everything is better.
Marc:For you.
Marc:For me.
Marc:And perhaps maybe for Richard.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I think that your type of comedy, I said this to Richard, maybe I didn't, maybe I said it about Richard, that something happened in the 80s
Marc:Like the 70s were defined by neurotic Jews.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then in the 80s, the neurotic Jews were writing things and they always wrote things.
Marc:But the comedy was changing.
Marc:And I think that once psychopharmacology took over the culture, I believe that somewhere in this cultural subconscious, when a neurotic Jew would get on stage, they say, you know, they're medicine for this.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Haven't we had enough of this?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Why isn't he on medicine?
Marc:Why isn't he on medicine?
Marc:Or maybe you get through your problems, but it seems to me that you are struggling with your comedic identity.
Guest:I never went into comedy.
Guest:Now, I don't know why you went into comedy.
Guest:I went into comedy to express myself.
Guest:I never went in to make people laugh.
Marc:I'm exactly the same way.
Marc:I thought I need to be heard.
Marc:This seems like a good context for me.
Marc:And people will listen.
Marc:I will be seen.
Marc:I have some things I need to share.
Marc:I believe they're funny.
Marc:That's exactly me.
Guest:I didn't know funny, not funny, but I needed to express myself.
Marc:You knew you were funny.
Marc:I mean, obviously you chose stand-up.
Marc:It wasn't just some vague thing.
Marc:You could have been talking on the street.
Marc:You could have painted a fucking picture.
Marc:You could have been a poet.
Marc:You knew that maybe if I stand on that stage, the funny will come out of me.
Marc:You must have known you were funny.
Guest:Well, I knew I was funny as a little kid because I would do impressions.
Guest:I was a very good impressionist.
Guest:I'd do impressions for the family, but I was too shy to have them look at me.
Guest:So I would go into the hall closet and the family would pull their chairs around the outside.
Guest:Honest to God.
Guest:And I do the Kennedy family.
Guest:You did the entire Kennedy.
Guest:The whole family.
Guest:You did a Vaughn meter record.
Guest:Whole family.
Guest:Did the mother.
Guest:Did Rose Kennedy.
Guest:You did.
Guest:We never loved the boys comic books, Bobby and Jack and Teddy.
Guest:We never loved them.
Guest:The creature comforts.
Guest:I did all those voices.
Marc:Can I hear the nuances between Jack and Bobby?
Guest:Boy, I don't do it that much anymore.
Marc:It's not- When I was a kid.
Marc:Not exactly relevant.
Guest:But what if I did- Now I do two impressions, and the funny thing is I get a part on Hot in Cleveland doing something I did years ago, which was a guy who thought he was Woody Allen.
Guest:And I now have that part again.
Guest:That's a new show.
Guest:It's a new show.
Guest:Hot in Cleveland is the name of the show.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I'm doing a part.
Guest:I'm doing a role.
Guest:What is that show about?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I've never been on it.
Guest:But it's supposed to be a good show.
Guest:Betty White, Jane Leaves, Wendy Malick, Valerie Burton.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:That sounds good.
Guest:It's a good cast and a great show.
Guest:I think I saw the ads for it.
Guest:That's a great show.
Guest:Anyway, so I don't even know where I am.
Guest:But that basically, so I do Woody Allen and I do Maya Angelou.
Guest:So why would you do that?
Guest:I don't do that.
Guest:My great-grandmother was a person of beauty and intrigue.
Guest:I do.
Guest:And her office was cranberry.
Guest:I do stuff like that, like the cranberry.
Guest:I did on a rival Feldman's podcast, I did.
Guest:Okay, so when did you start doing the stand-up?
Guest:Well, I started doing stand-up at the other cafe in San Francisco.
Guest:Wait, so when I met you in Boston in 89, you'd already been to San Francisco?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, I was living in San Francisco.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now that's interesting.
Marc:I don't know why, but yeah, I was living in San Francisco.
Marc:So you graduated college from Syracuse.
Marc:Crazy Eddie.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Didn't do drugs.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Hang off a building when the parents are coming.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Four-hour therapy sessions with the family.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you sound like you had a fine childhood, so why are you dragging your family into that?
Marc:What the hell happened there?
Guest:When did you start having problems where your father, who worked hard and liked the Red Sox- You know, I had him early on, and I don't want to depress anybody.
Guest:Do it.
Guest:But I had them early on.
Guest:And this was really it.
Guest:I thought that I really did think that when I was a kid, if I had needs or feelings, that there was something wrong with me.
Marc:Like what?
Guest:Like I want ice cream or- Yeah, I want ice cream and it seems like people are overburdened.
Guest:Maybe I'm asking too much.
Guest:There's something wrong and I don't know how to ask for things and I'll stop asking.
Guest:I'm one of those people who is very polite.
Guest:Like if I was in surgery, I would say to the surgeon, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, could you put me out before you cut my liver out?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Could you put me under?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And they'd say- Please.
Guest:And I know you're busy.
Guest:We do that anyways, they would say.
Guest:And I would say, I know you're busy and I will not bother you again with this request.
Guest:But how did this manifest itself as a kid?
Guest:I mean, were your parents sort of like, this kid's got problems, he doesn't ask for anything?
Guest:No, I was a good kid.
Guest:You see, in my family, when you grew up and you didn't need anything, you didn't ask for anything, it was good.
Guest:And what were you lacking?
Guest:What weren't you getting?
Guest:What did they pay?
Guest:My family was very loving, but they were very, emotionally they had their own issues and they grew up in kind of unhealthy families themselves.
Guest:Was there fighting?
Guest:There was yelling and funny.
Guest:There just wasn't a lot of communicating and people were depressed.
Guest:When they were at home, they were sort of shut down.
Guest:When they were outside, they were different people.
Marc:Right, but at home, quiet.
Guest:At home, kind of quiet and kind of windows closed and shades drawn and that kind of stuff.
Guest:So when I was a kid growing up, I had two lives and they were incongruent, but one of the lives was show business, watching television and being very moved by entertainers.
Guest:Like who?
Guest:At a very early age.
Guest:You know, The Tonight Show and Rickles and movies.
Guest:Me too.
Guest:As a kid.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But very moved.
Guest:You know, my family would go to bed.
Guest:I'd be up at 1130 midnight.
Guest:I was a little kid crying.
Guest:And I felt like that was my family.
Guest:Yeah, I get that.
Guest:You get it.
Guest:So that was really, so that was tremendous life.
Marc:It enabled you to have feelings.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:And you were alone and it felt safe because there was a context.
Right.
Marc:There was the movie.
Marc:There was the guy who was making the funny.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And here's the thing that most people, Ed Sullivan was really the only reason why I wanted to go into show business because he had the greatest show.
Guest:My family, it would bring us together.
Guest:Otherwise, we were off playing hide and go eat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it would bring us together.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what I saw in my family is they came to life.
Guest:But the thing that most when they were watching, they became these lively people because the entertainers move them.
Guest:And so they love their favorite entertainers.
Guest:So they come to life.
Guest:But if you turn the TV screen around and you looked into the faces of the people, you would see that that stuff is already inside them.
Guest:They just don't know it.
Marc:Well, I think that it's interesting that you bring it up because I never really thought about it that way is that you're being guided through something by a professional guide through emotions.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That, you know, when a story has an arc and someone's telling the story, you're like, oh, listen to this story.
Marc:And even if you're sitting with other people, your family, you're all on this journey together.
Marc:It happens unconsciously.
Marc:You're all enjoying something.
Marc:There's no responsibility on anybody in the room to guide you through anything.
Marc:You have a professional, a professional storyteller, a professional joke guy, a film, a television show, and you all sit there.
Marc:It's like sitting in front of the radio.
Marc:I get that.
Marc:But the emotions are in you.
Marc:No, of course, but they were brought out safely by a reaction to a story.
Marc:Now, I'd imagine if somebody overreacted to a story.
Marc:You break down, like Old Yeller.
Marc:I'm sure you watched Old Yeller.
Marc:You cried for three days.
Guest:I watched it.
Guest:I couldn't get out of bed.
Guest:I missed a lot of school.
Guest:Bambi, you had to call in sick?
Guest:I missed a tremendous amount of school.
Guest:I could not go.
Guest:Well, that's a problem is I couldn't function, but that's another story.
Marc:Like you couldn't stop it.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Because once it started to come, you can't stop the emotion.
Guest:But the thing about it is that there was nothing better, really, when I think about it, than comedy and emotion.
Guest:I mean both of them together.
Guest:I don't mean just laughing.
Guest:I don't mean just emotion.
Guest:But I'm talking about being moved.
Guest:And that's when a person is truly alive, I think, I feel.
Guest:And that's something that came through entertainment in my house.
Guest:That's how it came about.
Guest:But what I'm saying to you is if people could see their own faces and the way they respond to their favorite entertainers and have a mirror up, they would see that they too are great and they would get it because they could see it.
Guest:But they can't see it and they project it on.
Guest:It comes out, but they also project the love onto the people who brought those things out.
Marc:Yeah, I get that.
Marc:I mean, it's sort of convoluted and heartbreaking that.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:I mean, in the sense I'm not accusing you of anything.
Marc:You know, what you're saying is that, you know, there's untapped emotions in everybody and they don't know how to communicate those emotions.
Marc:But when they're reacting in sort of almost trance state to somebody who's guiding them through emotions with their talent or with their story, that their emotions engage.
Marc:And you perhaps wish now or wish then that they would have been able to tap into those emotional resources and communicate as a family.
Guest:Well, yeah, and really feel fully alive.
Guest:You feel... I've always feel... When you feel fully alive when there are mixed emotions, when there's a mixture.
Marc:Yeah, I know, but I also think that that's a little... The self-awareness necessary...
Marc:to acknowledge that moment, to say, a lot of times with me, it's sort of like when I'm completely engaged, the time just blows by.
Marc:And then you say something like, that went by so quickly.
Marc:And then there's part of me that thinks like, why would anybody want that?
Marc:I don't want to rush this thing.
Marc:But I understand what you're saying.
Marc:But I also think that there is something alive about misery.
Marc:I think there's something alive about, I think what you said before, that you go with what you know, that the sort of wiring of pain is very real to some people.
Marc:I mean, I think what we're talking about is like, why can't we get out of ourselves and
Marc:and be there for others emotionally and capable in the same way that we show up for this television show.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, I understand.
Guest:And it's all in there.
Guest:And one of the things that I started to do was I started to do this show that I called Acting Out.
Guest:And people would come on, they'd talk about real life issues.
Guest:When was it?
Guest:Last couple years.
Marc:Where did you go from the Ed Sullivan Show to your family?
Marc:I imagine that if you had this, what Richard Lewis told me Rodney Dangerfield used to call the heaviness.
Marc:If you had the heaviness.
Marc:And I know that.
Marc:It's a heavy heart that is an indicator of depression or feeling isolated in your own body.
Marc:So you were obviously able to go to college.
Marc:You weren't paralyzed with it.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I had periods of, for me, the substance abuse was food.
Guest:I would numb my emotions with food.
Guest:I'd eat a lot of food.
Guest:I just did it.
Guest:Yeah, well, everybody does it to some extent.
Guest:But I mean, were you fat?
Guest:No, but I'd gain weight, but my thing was I'd eat the food and then I couldn't get out of bed.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:So, you know, when I was a little kid, I was sitting there in bed and outside I could hear the voices of kids on their way to school.
Guest:I can't move.
Guest:Because you're full?
Guest:Yeah, because I've eaten so much that I can't.
Marc:What were your things?
Guest:You know, it was bread.
Guest:It was a lot of breads.
Guest:I was a big bread man.
Guest:I was going to change my name to Bread Krasnik.
Guest:It was a lot of bread.
Marc:Ed Bread Krasnick?
Guest:Yeah, or just Bread Krasnick.
Guest:And then I'd listen to Best of Bread and that would get me into Bread.
Marc:So you go to college?
Marc:Yeah, so I go to college.
Guest:What do you study?
Guest:Child Development and Visual and Performing Arts, double major.
Marc:So you wanted to perhaps help...
Marc:in a psychological way.
Marc:You wanted to get into the family business of your father, helping people.
Marc:Yeah, expressive therapies.
Marc:Civic-minded, altruistic Jewish man.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Once he uses his mind and his creativity for the bettering of the world.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, and so that's what, and in a strange way, I sort of came back around to that.
Guest:I thought, I started doing, I don't know how it happened, but I started doing this show and- Acting out.
Guest:Acting out, and it was funny people-
Guest:Telling real life issues like painful, whatever their issues were.
Guest:And they talked about it.
Guest:And then I had a therapist, a psychodramatist on stage with me and a panel of comedic actors.
Guest:And what these people would do is they'd act out their issues.
Guest:And solve them in front of an audience.
Marc:Or become aware in a deeper way.
Guest:Yeah, they'd move through it.
Guest:They'd be guided by this therapist who'd been doing, he did stuff with John Lennon years ago.
Guest:This guy is amazing.
Guest:And I started working with him.
Guest:And what I saw was that people could move through things really quickly.
Guest:um and but you're saying move through how release the grief in that moment really mixed emotions i'll give you an example yeah explain this mixed emotions a woman a woman comes on and she said i said what's going on with you what's happening and she said well i hate my mother and i said really how's that going to resolve itself do you think and she said well it'll resolve in a funeral home now the therapist is sitting there he's listening and a lot of pain right
Guest:You'd think.
Guest:And he sat there and he said, well, you're in luck.
Guest:This is your lucky day because this is a funeral home.
Guest:And I'm going to ask Moon Zappa on the panel to come over and lay down in this grave and be your mom.
Guest:And she's finally gone.
Guest:And now you get to do the eulogy.
Guest:Now, these are funny people pouring down tears.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:The audience is stunned.
Guest:They don't know what to do.
Guest:A mutual friend of ours, Jimmy Pardo, is on the panel.
Marc:And he looks over at the way- Not a comfortable emotional person.
Guest:Well, interestingly enough, he looks over at the way Moon's sitting down and he says, why is Moon Zappa laying down in a grave like she's on CSI Miami?
Guest:Why is that?
Guest:I've never seen anybody laid down in a grave like that.
Guest:Now the audience is roaring with laughter.
Marc:So his instinct was to break the attention.
Guest:And it was fine.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So now we've got the tears.
Guest:We've got the laughter.
Guest:Within the next 10 minutes, this woman is going to play her mother.
Guest:She's going to play herself as a little kid.
Guest:The panel is going to be led by the therapist.
Guest:And at the end of 10 minutes, she's laughed.
Guest:She's cried.
Guest:She's gone through this journey.
Guest:She has a different relationship with her mom.
Guest:Her mom's not there.
Guest:So this is something- You've done follow-up?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So she, after that moment, has a relationship with her mother?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Different, different.
Guest:And what the audience experience, you know, you go to shows, everybody wants to get out of there.
Marc:But what you described to me was just good comedy.
Marc:On some level that that, you know, that your ability to work through the feelings of grief or emotion and discomfort.
Marc:And, you know, look, I've done that on stage working them through.
Marc:But once you get them work through is when you become a giver of gifts.
Guest:Well, yeah, but guided by therapeutic role play.
Guest:Like really, when you pretend, you think, she's not my mother.
Guest:How am I going to pretend that she's my mother?
Guest:You speak the words and you're guided with these techniques and all of a sudden, the emotions come and you're feeling them.
Guest:And this is something anybody can do.
Guest:It's free and it can change your life in that moment.
Guest:The audience has changed because they've had mixed emotions.
Guest:People aren't allowed to feel more than one thing at a time.
Guest:They're not allowed to feel it.
Guest:In life or in this exercise?
Guest:Mostly in media, in media, in the culture, in the world.
Guest:It's like I'm either happy or I'm sad.
Guest:I'm either angry or I'm unhappy.
Marc:People are sort of, they pigeonhole themselves into almost becoming cartoon characters.
Guest:Well, yeah, there's no dimension.
Guest:All the real people in media are the cartoon characters.
Marc:Right, but there's also a requirement, it seems, that some people feel that they should be limited in order to get by, in order to function.
Guest:And it's, of course, the exact opposite.
Marc:Well, initially, you can't go to work crying every day.
Marc:I mean, I think one day and then maybe you sit down with the boss and say, I was upset because of this and this.
Marc:I've been better now.
Guest:But you're talking about letting things come through.
Guest:There's all this stuff in there and letting it.
Guest:It wants to go out.
Guest:So why not let it out?
Marc:The pain comes from holding stuff back.
Marc:What has come through for you, though?
Marc:Because in my recollection, I had concern for you at some point in time.
Marc:only because seeing you as a younger stand-up and knowing you had an original voice and then not seeing you for a while and then running into you occasionally, I felt that you were fighting, you were being beaten down by yourself.
Marc:Well, you're probably right about that.
Marc:And that your dream was getting away from you.
Guest:You're probably, you're right about that to a certain extent, but what I found is that all the little detours that I took, which for me, I've always worked in the business.
Marc:I know, yeah, writing and producing.
Marc:You encourage your enthusiasm, you do a lot of roles.
Guest:Sure, I'm always acting and writing and producing all at the same time, hosting, everything.
Guest:um and i always you know made a go of it but i learned all these different skills and so now trying to start this company um this media company that unites self-help and comedy and acting out is one of the shows and there are other shows and i realize it comes very easily to me and it's really what i want to do you know it's really what i've learned how to do it's really me so this is uh when did you start putting this together
Guest:About three years ago.
Guest:It just sort of came to me.
Guest:And little by little, I developed these shows and have books and have projects and ideas.
Marc:But for that 20 years where I didn't see you.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:What was I doing?
Guest:I was working on the road and I was taking jobs.
Guest:When I moved here to town, I took writing jobs.
Guest:I wrote on every kind of show imaginable, sitcoms, game shows, sketch shows, talk shows, variety shows, everything.
Guest:So you're always working.
Guest:Yeah, always working, you know.
Guest:Never had a problem with the money.
Guest:Always had a problem with the money, yeah.
Guest:Struggled for certain times, always come back.
Guest:But really learned a lot of the flexibility and had a lot of resources within myself to do different things at the same time.
Marc:What was the catharsis moment for you?
Marc:Because I know, look,
Marc:I was creating all these shows for other people.
Marc:No, but I mean, there's a moment as a stand-up.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:You got a unique voice.
Marc:It's your fucking dream, despite whatever you say.
Marc:You were a great stand-up.
Marc:And there's that moment where I've hit it several times in my career, where you're like, yeah, it's not panning out.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I'm not going to be the big guy.
Marc:What were your thoughts at that moment?
Marc:Were you like, I don't fit in here, what am I gonna do?
Marc:And was there a moment where you had to actually sort of realize your limitations or accept some heartbreak around that shit?
Guest:Well, I accept a lot of heartbreak, but all the heartbreak was coming from me.
Guest:I was telling myself things that held me back.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:Everything that you can imagine, like you're not good enough, you'll never make it, this is not what you're doing, it'll be this way the rest of your life.
Guest:You're wasting your life?
Guest:You're wasting your life, but it'll be this way forever.
Guest:This will not change.
Guest:This does not move.
Guest:Now, you were in therapy during this time?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's what all of these projects are about, the fact that I was working in television, working in show business, and seeing a lot of self-help people.
Guest:For yourself?
Guest:For myself.
Guest:Like what kinds?
Guest:I'm talking about shaman.
Guest:Okay, so tell me about that experience.
Marc:I go to a shaman.
Marc:Because you have to suspend a certain amount of rationale and disbelief in order to find yourself in that situation.
Marc:Because I'm a searcher to a certain degree.
Marc:I'm not looking for God.
Marc:I'm looking for relief, but I'm not going to find myself at that place.
Guest:Well, here's the thing.
Guest:I was pretty much open to any kind of sudden and I found it fascinating.
Guest:And here's what I did.
Marc:What was the pain that was driving you?
Marc:Were you just sort of like, I'm sad all the time?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I was, you know, I just wasn't myself.
Right.
Guest:I wasn't myself.
Guest:I knew that there was more inside of me and I was hurting myself.
Guest:I was stopping the things that were me.
Guest:You know, pain comes from resistance for me.
Guest:It comes from resisting who I really am.
Guest:Okay, right.
Marc:So you want to be true to yourself, but you can't get at it.
Guest:Yeah, don't know how, don't have the tools.
Guest:But you can feel it in there.
Guest:Yeah, always.
Guest:This guy wants out.
Guest:Always.
Guest:So tell me about this shaman.
Guest:So I go to a shaman.
Guest:Where do you get a shaman's name?
Guest:I was in all these different groups, like communication groups, support groups.
Guest:For what?
Guest:Just general?
Guest:Yeah, general communication stuff.
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:I don't know what that means.
Guest:I went through this amazing group called Life Intensive Training.
Guest:We're here in LA, so there's all these kinds of self-help, new-agey sort of things.
Marc:What does Life Intensive Training entail?
Guest:It was a six-month session where you learned about how to communicate differently, how to let things go through you.
Guest:You learned how to observe your behavior without judging it.
Marc:What's an exercise in that?
Marc:Can you help me?
Marc:Did it have an effect on you, a lasting effect?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:What did you learn?
Guest:It was like a touchstone.
Guest:Well, what I learned is that you can have behavior without judgment.
Guest:You don't need to judge every single thing that you do or that other people do.
Marc:So that combated a little of the insecurity and the negative self-talk.
Guest:You can literally turn on an observer like an anchorman, like a news anchor watching the behavior.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And you can just say, oh, isn't that interesting?
Guest:I just did that.
Marc:So you had to shift the perception of your self-awareness.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Very much so.
Marc:That's what you learned there.
Marc:Like my experience was in going to, I went in a very kind of like troubleshooting way, way too late to some anger sessions.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:And my problem is in experiencing the same thing that you're experiencing that like, you know, why can't I not do this so I can be me?
Marc:Why can I not?
Marc:Why can I not stop raging or express my feelings in a different way that don't hurt myself and hurt others so I can be me?
Marc:Why can't I just be okay with the sadness or the or the joy or why am I so selfish?
Marc:Because I think what you're talking about, too, because the weird thing about it is, even though you describe yourself as somebody who's like, I don't want to trouble you, that there's a selfishness to that.
Marc:Oh, sure.
Marc:It's a different thing.
Marc:It's a martyring selfishness.
Marc:It's all about control.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I actually got frightened when empathy was called for.
Marc:This person who I supposedly love is having problems.
Marc:I don't know how to handle that, so I'm going to transcend that.
Guest:their problems with my problems you're upset i'm more upset right right that's a common jewish family issue that really is comparing the pain you do you compete right but it doesn't attention thing okay so okay so you learned how to shift the perception of your self-awareness in this particular group yeah the different tools that's one thing the the thing that i learned now i'm jumping around now but this thing that i just want to go through this process i'm jumping around but the thing that i learned i'll take you back to the shaman we'll get to the shaman i'm okay with that but the thing that aren't we all going to get to a shaman
Guest:I think I'm with one right now.
Marc:Are you shaman now?
Guest:I'm very shamanistic.
Guest:Some people go to shaman because it's more shame.
Guest:But then you go to shaman.
Guest:So I found, I can't remember exactly how this was.
Guest:Oh, I listened to something online and it was this thing called the Sedona Method.
Marc:That's Arizona.
Guest:Yeah, and it was a releasing technique.
Guest:Now, what do I mean by that?
Guest:Basically, what happened is they said that instead of resisting the feelings that you have, try welcoming them.
Guest:And I was having a panic attack one day, a long time ago, and I basically said, okay...
Guest:Could I welcome?
Guest:Could I welcome it?
Guest:Could I make room for it?
Guest:How much panic could I have?
Guest:And I invited it to do more.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, as soon as I did that, it went away.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you say it out loud or just mentally?
Guest:Mentally.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:Boy, I'm really scared right now.
Guest:I wonder how scared I could be.
Guest:I want to be as scared as I can possibly be.
Guest:At what?
Guest:Let's open it up.
Marc:Right, but in that moment, don't you realize that your head's generating all this shit anyways?
Guest:Yeah, but the idea of expansion as opposed to like, I should not feel this in this moment.
Guest:This is a bad thing.
Guest:Stop it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which we do every second of the day.
Guest:was such a relief that all of a sudden it was gone.
Marc:See, like my problem with those groups, and I didn't get to that because I got distracted.
Marc:I'm just saying tools.
Guest:I'm not saying belong.
Marc:Don't second guess me.
Marc:What my experience was, was that I was there with all these other people who were in pain and trying to help themselves.
Marc:And my first thought was, oh, look at these fucking losers.
Marc:Is this where I'm at?
Marc:This is who I am?
Marc:Right.
Marc:I can't be this guy.
Marc:And that stifled my engagement in that process.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Even with AA, I go all the time like, oh, I'm not this fucked up.
Marc:But then eventually you're like, this is a human undertaking.
Marc:These are human beings in trouble trying to sit with other human beings with similar troubles trying to find a common thread and some comfort.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:So this is it.
Guest:This is it.
Guest:And really, this is the thing that I feel like there's something coming.
Guest:And what's coming, I really believe this.
Guest:In a big way?
Guest:Or are you talking about you?
Guest:No, I'm talking about just what I see that's coming.
Guest:The zeitgeist.
Guest:Yeah, the zeitgeist is going to be problem solving.
Guest:With comedy.
Marc:Let's go back to the shaman.
Marc:We'll get to that.
Guest:All right.
Guest:I'm going back to the shaman.
Guest:I go to the shaman, and the shaman is a woman in Topanga Canyon.
Guest:Who referred you?
Guest:Probably from one of the friends that I met at this group.
Marc:What was his selling point?
Marc:This woman can what?
Guest:I just always... You know, I went to see her.
Guest:She has tremendous... I mean, I felt so much better.
Guest:She has this healing presence.
Guest:You should go see her.
Guest:It'll be great.
Guest:A healing presence.
Guest:Healing presence.
Guest:You know, this is all like... I know, I know.
Guest:You hear things.
Guest:So you go in.
Guest:I went in, and the woman...
Guest:It was like Native American rituals, and she had these branches from trees.
Guest:And she said, I want you to close your eyes, and now we're going to talk about, I'm going to read your energy afield, and we're going to go back to ancestors.
Guest:She said, your ancestors absolutely love you, and they are killing you.
Guest:I'm not kidding.
Guest:They love you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they love you so much, they want to be with you so much that they're killing you.
Guest:They're actually suffocating you.
Guest:So we have to free them now.
Guest:We need a ceremony.
Guest:Get them off your back.
Guest:Get them off your back.
Guest:This is what we need.
Guest:So anyway, this is the kind of experience.
Guest:And then there was like an eye closing and there was branch laying.
Guest:I'm not kidding.
Guest:I know you're not kidding.
Guest:Now, how many comedians, how many stand-ups at that time do you know who would go to a shaman?
Guest:Who's going to a shaman?
Marc:The reason why we're comedians, we're stubborn.
Marc:We're going to crunch the emotional numbers ourselves.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Who's going to go to a shaman?
Marc:There's people that have gone to shamans.
Marc:Come on.
Marc:But this is what led me to this place, all these experiences.
Marc:But was there a part of you that said, okay.
Marc:Now, poetically, that's a beautiful bit of business.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Your ancestors love you, but they're killing you.
Marc:Nice piece of business.
Marc:It's a nice piece of business because ancestors, I mean, that goes back to the first ones.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:That taps right into the Jewish legacy.
Guest:Right.
Marc:We love you.
Marc:Why are you disappointing us?
Marc:Right.
Marc:All of them.
Marc:All of them.
Marc:Since Adam.
Marc:Beginning of time.
Marc:All right, so I like that piece of business.
Marc:But then, you know, but part of you as a guy who is intelligent and isolated in his thoughts and terminally unique, Ed Krasnick, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Close the eyes.
Marc:Here come the branches.
Marc:This is bullshit.
Guest:Well, yeah, there is a part that says right now there's somebody putting branches on me.
Yeah.
Guest:Of course you do say that in your mind.
Guest:However, the goal, what is the goal?
Guest:What is the goal?
Guest:The goal is to be expansive and the goal is to have different tools, things that you can do to take care of yourself.
Guest:Did you ever get involved with the forum?
Guest:No.
Marc:The Est?
Marc:No.
Marc:Any dangerous, any situation where you're like, I'm going to go to this group, and you realize, oh, this is one of those groups.
Guest:Well, not dangerous, but very funny.
Guest:And this was the group.
Guest:This was many years ago in Santa Monica, and they had something called the Men's Movement.
Guest:This was on the heels of the, this is Robert Bly.
Guest:Robert Bly, sure, I have that, Iron John.
Guest:Okay, Iron John.
Guest:So here's now a support group for men that's like the Women's Movement, but without any of the soul.
Marc:Predecessor to the Promise Keepers, which sort of did, that's not a great thing.
Guest:Something else.
Guest:So I go to a house in Santa Monica.
Guest:There's like five guys there.
Guest:And I open the door and the guy says to me, and I'm not making this up, hi, I'm Larry, let's go.
Guest:And what he meant by let's go was let's hug.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:Hi, I'm Larry, let's go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Now, I will never forget that as long as I live.
Guest:And that's what the problem is with the men's move.
Guest:They didn't know how to be it, but they thought that if they went through the exercises, the same as women, that it would be great.
Marc:Isn't there some truth to doing behaviors?
Marc:Oh, sure.
Marc:What do you call that?
Marc:Acting as if, perhaps?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:That's what we do in acting.
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:But it was just a weird thing.
Guest:It was like a guy who wasn't comfortable with it, but let's do it anyway.
Guest:And then the people in the group had rejected the male role.
Guest:My father used to tease me and I hated sports.
Guest:It was all that.
Guest:It wasn't you could be multidimensional and you could still be a guy.
Marc:But were you one of those guys?
Marc:Oh, I mean, I was.
Marc:Were you judge yourself against this idea of masculinity?
Yeah.
Guest:Boy, I don't even know what, you know, I tell you, I don't even know what to say about that.
Guest:I really don't.
Guest:Because I feel like masculinity, you know, I was so influenced by my mom.
Marc:But I mean, were you a guy that sort of like, I'm not that kind of guy.
Marc:Those guys, they're all better.
Marc:They're better than me.
Marc:They do things that I can't.
Marc:They're going to hurt me.
Marc:They're men.
Guest:No, no, I never really had that kind of stuff.
Guest:You know, I just had other stuff about just doubting myself, period.
Guest:Because I think with the, I didn't know whether it was depression or whether it was like chemical stuff, but I always felt like out of it somehow.
Guest:Different.
Guest:I always felt like I was in the party scene for Midnight Cowboy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everybody is, it's sort of underwater.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's kind of murky.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And it's not that it's unhappy, but I'm operating at a different speed.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:There's some speed thing that's not right.
Guest:Because you're so aware of it.
Guest:Maybe aware.
Guest:I don't know if it's aware.
Guest:How can you not know this is your life?
Guest:Well, it is.
Guest:It is.
Guest:But I'm saying what that comes from is I should be you.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In other words, why aren't I like Marc Maron?
Guest:He's good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm not good.
Guest:I should be like, you know what I mean?
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's like you think you should be- No confidence in your sense of self.
Guest:Well, you think you should be the other person.
Guest:Yeah, I know, I know.
Marc:And there's something wrong with this, but everything's great with that.
Marc:Hey, I wore a lot of different rings and hats just to be like other people.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And so, anyway, so you go through those kind of things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Now, coming around to this thing, this self-help and comedy,
Guest:I feel like the deliverers of, you know, how to take care of yourself, how to take better care of yourself, how to problem solve.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The deliverers are comedians.
Guest:The deliverers are humor.
Guest:It's combining humor with therapy.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:That's what it is.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:But no one has really done it.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:To an extent where it's actual therapy and it's actual humor.
Guest:There's a lot of therapists that think they're funny.
Guest:No, no, but I'm saying your level of humor, Zach Galifianakis' level of humor with actual tools for change, for therapy...
Guest:Okay.
Guest:That's what I'm talking about.
Marc:Who are your therapists?
Guest:Who are your guys?
Guest:This guy, his name is Dr. Michael Solomon.
Guest:Where's he come from?
Guest:He comes from a background where he was taught therapeutic role play by the father of it.
Guest:His name was J.L.
Guest:Moreno, who wanted to put it on TV years ago, and they could never quite figure out how to do it because it's very kinetic.
Guest:It's very unpredictable.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This guy did stuff with people in institutions and he gets to it very quickly because if they have like a cogent moment, that's a session for them.
Guest:So he learned how to do it fast.
Marc:So you set the scene and you go, go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, he says, what's going on for you?
Guest:What's up for you?
Guest:Well, I want you to come over here and be your mom and I want you to talk to five-year-old Mark who's sitting in that chair.
Guest:Tell him what you think of him.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:Come on over here.
Guest:And I'm going to get, I'll get Moon.
Guest:I'll get Mo Collins.
Guest:I'll get these people.
Guest:You go over here and you be the mom.
Guest:Not Bobby Collins.
Guest:Switch chair.
Guest:Never get Bobby Collins unless you're doing a Tic Tac commercial.
Guest:Or you're wearing a suit, a nice suit.
Guest:Unless there's a show on a boat.
Guest:If there's a show on a boat.
Guest:Now, you never see him in Show Boat, but if there's a show on a boat.
Guest:You don't remember?
Guest:Sure, of course I do.
Guest:How are you, Ed?
Guest:You look great.
Guest:You look great.
Guest:What are you doing?
Guest:I'm wonderful.
Guest:Are you kidding me?
Guest:Tremendous energy.
Guest:I just got off a boat.
Guest:I'm not aging.
Guest:My teeth are clean.
Guest:He's bathing on the river denial.
Guest:He is.
Guest:There's so much denial going on.
Guest:He's all right.
Guest:No, everybody, look, everybody's talented.
Guest:I like this idea.
Guest:I'm telling you.
Guest:All right.
Guest:It's so powerful.
Guest:And really, it's funny people.
Marc:Because the funny people will open up.
Marc:I'm working on a piece myself.
Marc:But I get it.
Marc:But what do you want?
Marc:Put this on television?
Marc:No, no.
Marc:It's TV shows.
Marc:It's movies.
Marc:It's books.
Guest:It's media.
Marc:It's media.
Marc:I'm talking about a genre.
Marc:You're talking about an empire.
Marc:This is a genre.
Marc:A genre.
Guest:Self-help.
Guest:It will be the next genre.
Guest:Get rid of self-help though.
Guest:It will be the next genre.
Guest:Do not call it that.
Guest:Call it something else.
Guest:No.
Guest:it'll be the next genre it'll be self-help comedy no i don't know what it's called i don't know what it's called but it'll be you'll see this this will take the play you know nobody knew what reality tv is nobody knew what it was okay there's going to come a thing it's going to be around problem solving it's going to be around helping people but it's going to be entertainment at the same time if you little miss sunshine
Guest:These kinds of things are going to be more in the culture and they're going to be on TV.
Guest:We need to learn how to problem solve.
Guest:We need to learn how to take care of ourselves.
Marc:You're talking about emotional honesty, which is looked at now as freakish.
Guest:Yeah, people are scared of it, but not if it's presented with humor.
Marc:No, I get what you're saying, but my understanding of what you're telling me in the evolution of reality television is now you have a lot of reality television of people with problems, and you have problem solvers in there, but generally the problems are exacerbated or freakish.
Marc:Produced, yeah.
Marc:No, no, I mean, hoarders are real.
Marc:People, I just watch intervention.
Marc:For me, intervention is like going to a meeting.
Marc:I understand that disease.
Marc:I have it.
Marc:I'm very moved by it.
Marc:I'm very moved by any arc of recovery, even if they don't stick with it.
Marc:I understand it.
Marc:I see it.
Marc:And it's helpful.
Marc:Hoarders don't know how helpful that is to people.
Marc:I think people say like, oh, they're watching it from morbid fascination.
Marc:So you're talking about the evolution from morbid fascination to actual relatability.
Guest:Yes, I'm talking about we do it instead of shock and drama using humor and emotion.
Marc:That's what I'm talking about.
Marc:I like this idea because I am working on a piece on stage now where I'm trying to walk an injured 10-year-old Mark off the baseball field after he was hitting the face by a ball because I think that that was a pivotal moment for me.
Guest:Why is that a pivotal moment?
Guest:I mean, obviously, it's painful, but what about it is a pivotal moment for you?
Marc:Because there's some part, and I've talked about this on the show a couple of times, I'm hung up on that moment.
Marc:My fear of competition, my fear of failure, my fear of succeeding...
Marc:Or taking any sort of preparation or to do well, like I've decided that I found a great deal of comfort in in disappointing people because, you know, you're going to get attention.
Marc:There's only a couple ways to get attention, right?
Marc:You get attention when you go, help, help, help.
Marc:I'm bad.
Marc:I'm in trouble.
Marc:Help, I'm in trouble.
Marc:That is very, very hands-on attention is needed.
Marc:He's in trouble.
Marc:Right.
Marc:to get attention the other way by achievement uh takes uh discipline and and working towards something and i was not given those disciplines i was not taught how to be you know to to stick to it and prepare something all right so if it didn't happen intuitively and freakishly like i just did this it's amazing look what i i remember one time i spent days and days and days drawing john lennon and i have artistic attitude my mother's an artist but i really wanted to just and i did it and i don't think i could ever do it again
Marc:And it was like, look at that.
Marc:It was beautiful, won awards.
Marc:Could never do it again.
Marc:There's some part of me that's like, fuck you, I can do this once.
Marc:Outside of that, it was like, I can't, I'm in trouble.
Marc:So I think that that was a pivotal moment for me, a pivotal moment for me, because I could have caught that ball.
Marc:And I'm not sure that I, at the last minute, just gave up while the ball was in the air.
Mm-hmm.
Marc:That some part of my subconscious knew that if I just fucked this up, I would not be forced to do this stupid game.
Marc:The game would be about me for a few minutes, and I would be a victim as opposed to a hero.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And so you learned something.
Guest:You learned that you could achieve something through that.
Marc:I'm sad, and I've talked about before, that the one regret that I have in my life, really, and it's not even my regret, was that somebody didn't kick me in the ass and tell me to fucking do my homework.
Marc:to understand that not all competition is life-threatening, not all competition is some attack on your sense of self.
Marc:And I think it would have saved me a lot of, I don't beat myself up about it, but I think I would have been a different person.
Marc:And maybe I would have moved through the world in a different way if I didn't think everything was a threat.
Guest:But now, and I said this to you the last time I saw you, I said, you're doing really well.
Guest:Yeah, I'm doing good.
Guest:I feel all right.
Guest:And I said, are you okay with all of it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you looked at me like I was crazy.
Guest:You looked at me like, why wouldn't I be okay with it?
Guest:which was insane to me for you to be saying that.
Guest:It was absolutely insane.
Guest:And I was like, look at you, you looked at me like, why wouldn't I be okay with that?
Guest:I'm okay with everything's good.
Guest:And I was like, really?
Guest:Like there was never a time in your life when you were, it was very interesting.
Marc:No, no, that's a new thing.
Marc:I mean, you know, I don't think I've changed as a person.
Marc:I'm just, maybe I should have framed it differently.
Marc:Like I'm grateful that I can handle what's happening.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that's what I, yeah.
Marc:So that's different.
Marc:Like, I wasn't condescending.
Marc:Like, of course, I've been waiting my way for this.
Guest:No, no, but it was very, it was very.
Marc:Out of character.
Marc:It was very out of character for you.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I think that's, you know, that, like, I've got to be careful of that because that is the difference between humility and pride.
Marc:like you know if the if the face i'm gonna put out in the world is like yeah fuck yeah i mean what do you take me forever to get here which i i don't feel right i all i all i feel really is like i'm showing up for this shit and i'm available for it and i'm not freaking myself out and that's pretty good so like that that's the back story there if you ask me again yeah do that do it again
Guest:Well, you know, there's a lot of success.
Guest:Things are going good.
Guest:How are you?
Guest:Are you handling it okay?
Marc:Yeah, I'm amazed that I'm handling it okay because generally in my past, I would be freaking out constantly and panicking and afraid that I'm not doing it well.
Marc:But for some reason, I can't quite explain it.
Marc:I'm not freaking out and I'm engaged in what I'm doing and I'm excited about it.
Guest:Okay, now I'd like to speak to Mark.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:We'll be right back.
Guest:I'll put Mark on the line.
Guest:Put Mr. Allen on the phone.
Guest:Really?
Guest:That's great.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:That's great.
Marc:Now, how about you?
Marc:I mean, you're a father of a seven-year-old child.
Marc:You're married to the woman that had the child.
Guest:Yes, I am.
Marc:And that's hung together?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:It has.
Marc:You showed up as a parent, which is something I have not done that frightens me immensely.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, I can understand that.
Guest:I'll tell you, she is amazing.
Guest:She's a terrific person.
Guest:I don't think a lot of parents would say of a seven-year-old, she's a terrific person, but she really is.
Guest:She's a real seven-year-old.
Guest:She's not like being an adult child, but she has a sensitivity to the world that has taught me a lot about how to move through the world, I swear.
Guest:She's very interesting.
Marc:Well, that's around the time we all got lost.
Marc:At 7.
Marc:Yeah, between 5 and 10, probably.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:No, she knows what she feels.
Guest:She knows what's going on with her.
Marc:I just said that like I was a therapist.
Guest:You could be a therapist.
Guest:You know what would be great is you playing a therapist.
Marc:Yeah, but I just speculated there, 5 and 10, as if I had read books.
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:We say things.
Guest:I said it confidently.
Guest:You did.
Guest:And that's another good sign for you is that you say it confidently.
Marc:I always did that.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Well, maybe it's not so good.
Marc:Maybe it's bad.
Marc:With a little anger.
Guest:Maybe it's awful.
Marc:And then I would argue it.
Marc:If somebody was to actually say, no, I've seen the studies.
Marc:It's actually between 10 and 16.
Marc:I would say like, well, I mean, it's just my experience.
Marc:With the three children I've seen, that's where it went bad for me.
Guest:And the other people would say, wow, okay, you must know something.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:You know what would be great is you and I doing who's on first, and we couldn't get to it because we were too busy beating ourselves up along the way.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I'm doing that less.
Guest:You're not beating.
Marc:I don't see you as somebody who's doing that.
Marc:But I used to.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And I don't know where that went.
Marc:I'm not grieving its loss.
Marc:Why question?
Marc:But there are these things that, and I think this is something I wanted to come back to with you, is that a good deal of the insecurity and the behaviors that came out of that are sort of phantom limbs now.
Marc:There's part of me where it's sort of like I started, like I'm shitty and fat and I'm a fucking ass.
Marc:And I'm like, why?
Marc:You don't feel this.
Marc:Maybe why pay it?
Marc:What are you trying to get back to that?
Marc:Right.
Marc:So when you said that even some of your shtick, I think you suggested, is not representative of you.
Guest:Well, right, right.
Guest:It's an old part.
Guest:It's not the new part.
Marc:Do you know how to be funny in the new part?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I do.
Guest:I do.
Guest:I slip back.
Guest:I certainly slip back.
Guest:And I think that one part for me is that I need to perform more.
Guest:I don't think I perform enough because I've been busy working on other stuff.
Marc:What are you working on now outside of the empire and the genre change?
Guest:The most amazing- The paradigm shift.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I'm doing that.
Marc:I'm trying to set up a company.
Marc:The compassionate paradigm shift.
Guest:I'm the Leo Buscaglia of laughter, as Dana Gould called me years ago.
Guest:Outdated reference.
Guest:no um that's really that's really what i want to do i mean that's what i work on is i write i have this kids books for adults and one of the books is called honey i have no time to breathe and it's basically a book about a balloon who takes no time for himself and when he stops breathing people can't see him and then when he starts breathing again he gets really big and he's having a good life and then he gets scared and then he stops breathing again
Guest:So these are the kinds of books.
Guest:Where is that available?
Guest:It's not available yet.
Guest:These are all things that I'm writing.
Marc:Do you have an online presence with this project?
Guest:Yeah, I do.
Guest:I do.
Guest:I do.
Guest:It's selfhelpcomedy.com.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I do that.
Guest:And the company is called Commotion.
Guest:It stands for Comedy and Emotion.
Guest:We're the company that's beyond help.
Guest:I like that.
Guest:Yeah, it's pretty good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that's what I'm doing.
Guest:But the jobs that I've had are crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm working on a show right now that's called Oh Sit.
Guest:It's a show about extreme musical chairs.
Guest:That's what the show is.
Guest:No, it's extreme.
Guest:I'm not kidding.
Guest:It's a show on the air.
Guest:The great thing is that people, the people that work on the show are amazing.
Guest:And the people that have worked on all these unusual shows...
Guest:i mean i've been on sitcoms i've been on talk shows i've been on all these kind of shows but along the way too i've been on like a show with guinness world records i did something with ryan seacrest i did something with chelsea handler and now uh extreme musical chairs crazy is that a how do you feel about it
Marc:Is it ridiculous?
Guest:It's not ridiculous.
Guest:It's crazy.
Guest:It's crazy.
Guest:But you know what I find interesting is the people that work on the show are so talented and so cool.
Guest:And it's like we're all in this boat together.
Guest:And this is what I find.
Marc:But that's not unusual.
Marc:I mean, that's not unusual for people who are talented.
Marc:No, we're all working.
Marc:Right, to work.
Marc:We need to work.
Marc:But I don't want you to say anything that would jeopardize your job.
Marc:It seems to me that extreme musical chairs would be at the end of the spectrum before the big change that you're speaking of.
Guest:Yeah, you would think so.
Guest:But in a way, it's all the same stuff.
Guest:The adult child play is good, right?
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:No, it's actually kind of cool.
Guest:What they try to do is they try to break new bands because it's music.
Guest:They're playing live music.
Marc:Oh, I see.
Guest:So it's kind of coolly kitschy.
Guest:I would call it kitschy.
Guest:So they have live bands doing a live musical chair thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then it's extreme.
Guest:It's extreme.
Guest:How is it extreme?
Guest:There's water.
Guest:There's moats.
Guest:There's obstacles.
Guest:It's crazy.
Guest:It's crazy.
Guest:You know there's a show called Wipeout.
Guest:You know there's a movie called Network.
Guest:A prophecy.
Guest:My favorite movie.
Guest:I saw it when it first came out in Boston.
Guest:And do you know that when people saw that movie at that time, they were roaring with laughter because they couldn't believe how crazy it is?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was no happy talk on television news.
Guest:They didn't know what it was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was so broad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then look at us now.
Guest:Yeah, look at us.
Guest:Patty Chiefsky, if he were alive, he'd be rolling over in his grave and he'd say, oh my God, I told these people they didn't get it and now they're doing it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I should be getting residuals.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I watch that movie.
Marc:I watch it once a year or so.
Guest:It's the greatest movie.
Guest:It has the greatest scenes.
Guest:And then you watch A Face in the Crowd.
Guest:Those two.
Guest:Those are the ones.
Guest:And then those are the movies.
Guest:Those two.
Guest:If you want to really see movies.
Guest:Is that Chayefsky too?
Guest:No, that's Bud Schulberg.
Guest:Bud Schulberg, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But those are the two movies.
Marc:Ace in the Hole too.
Guest:Ace in the Hole.
Guest:Is that Jimmy Cagney?
Marc:No, it's Kurt Douglas.
Guest:No, I don't know Ace in the Hole.
Marc:Kurt Douglas is in the middle of New Mexico.
Marc:Guy's stuck in a hole, in a well.
Marc:And he's a journalist at the end of his rope, and he's got a story.
Marc:So he tries to figure out a way to keep the story going, even though it's going to take longer for him to get the guy out of the hole.
Marc:So he works his, you know, he works his paper.
Marc:He works the diner.
Marc:He's bringing people in.
Marc:It's a big story.
Marc:People are gathering.
Marc:He works the sheriff and the local mayor to do it, to rescue the guy by drilling into the mountain as opposed to just going down the hole, you know, just to make the story huge.
Marc:And the guy dies.
Marc:There's no spoiler because it's a fucking movie from the 40s.
Marc:I am so tired.
Marc:As I say, don't be a spoiler.
Marc:Watch things when they happen then.
Marc:I'm not going to repress my feelings about an event because you people haven't gotten to it on your DVR or your Netflix list.
Guest:Well, now that you've buried the lead in that vein, I just want to tell everybody that The Wizard of Oz is about Dorothy having a dream.
Guest:God damn it.
Guest:She's dreaming.
Guest:It's on my cue.
Guest:She's dreaming.
Marc:It's on my cue.
Guest:I haven't watched it.
Guest:So I'm going to bury all the great plots now because look, if you haven't seen it, it's your problem.
Guest:Spoiler alert, everyone dies.
Guest:Everyone dies in life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That would be it.
Guest:That would be the movie to end the world.
Guest:We all pass away.
Guest:We all die.
Guest:Everyone dies.
Guest:I died last Tuesday.
Guest:I know.
Guest:We discussed that.
Guest:We discussed that full circle.
Guest:Wonderful.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that's basically it.
Guest:That's really what I have to say.
Guest:I mean, those kind of things.
Guest:I also do believe, though, that people, performers, should not have to starve to do what they do.
Guest:I think that's true.
Guest:I don't think they should.
Guest:I think that's why John Lennon, why he said they created Apple Corporation so people wouldn't have to go down on their knees in someone's office to do what they love to do.
Guest:Yeah, I think you do what you love to do now and do as much, be as much, I'm saying this to myself, be as much of me as I can be in the work that I do.
Marc:Whatever it is.
Marc:You seem good.
Marc:Yeah, I'm good.
Marc:It's good to see you.
Marc:Thank you for hanging out.
Guest:It's a pleasure to see you and I gotta tell you something.
Guest:What?
Guest:You are a great host and I commend you for being a great host because I know that you've worked really hard at it.
Marc:Did you feel well hosted just now?
Guest:I did, I felt very at home and I'm probably gonna sleep here tonight.
Marc:Okay, well I don't think you're gonna figure out how to get home so you might as well just surrender to that.
Marc:You can sleep on the couch if you can get my girlfriend off it.
Guest:That's between you and her, and I don't want to get caught in the middle of it, but I will do a session with you.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:Hello, I'm Larry.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:Hello, I'm Larry.
Guest:Hello, I'm Mark.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:All right.
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed Ed Krasnick.
Marc:It was good to catch up with him.
Marc:He's a funny man.
Marc:His heart's in the right place, and he's going to help people with humor in a very specific way.
Marc:That's good.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:The Boomy Lives t-shirts are selling fast.
Marc:Get them if you may, if you must, if you will.
Marc:Do it now.
Marc:I don't know if I'm going to make more.
Marc:Should I make more Boomy Lives?
Marc:Check out the other merch.
Marc:Kick in a few shekels.
Marc:Get some JustCoffee.coop.
Marc:Leave a comment if you haven't been frightened off by the lone troll who seems to have dedicated part of his life on Monday and Thursday to inventing screen names and being a racist.
Marc:Yeah, that's it for me.
Marc:Let's pretend like I'm at my mother's house.
Marc:I'm going to go sit on the couch and feel fat and repent.
Marc:Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
Marc:Thank you for listening to my show.
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