Episode 454 - Phil Stutz
Guest:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck nicks what the fuck ups what the fucksters what the fuckadelics what the fuckleberry fins what the fuckstables
Marc:Oh, man.
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:But if you go get that app, the free WTF app and upgrade to the premium for a few bucks, you can stream the other 400.
Marc:400 hours talking.
Marc:Mostly one-on-one with people I kind of know or I think I know or I don't know at all.
Marc:That's got to be analogous to some sort of flight hours.
Marc:In-flight hours.
Marc:What are they called?
Marc:Logging.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I didn't read the Malcolm Gladwell thing.
Marc:I don't know about all that.
Marc:I don't know what it makes me good at, necessarily.
Marc:pow look out i just shit my pants just coffee.coop available at wtfpod.com that was a classic a classic just coffee plug he said about something he does himself that was established early on in his show so look yeah dr phil stutz is on the show and some of you might uh might remember he was uh he was talked about
Marc:on the Hank Azaria episode.
Marc:Hank Azaria was on this show and talked about his therapist here in Los Angeles.
Marc:Phil Stutz is a medical doctor, psychiatrist.
Marc:Wrote a book called The Tools.
Marc:Hank Azaria, as said on my show, is one of Phil Stutz's patients.
Marc:And I will play you a bit of Hank Azaria talking about Phil Stutz in just a moment.
Marc:But back to what's happening in my life, if that's okay.
Marc:So it's before I go to set.
Marc:I'm shooting Marin Season 2, and I'm having a good time.
Marc:It's a lot of work.
Marc:Obviously, it got me sick.
Marc:It ran me down.
Marc:But it's my show.
Marc:It's got my name on it, and I'm enjoying it, and the scripts are good.
Marc:And I think I'm grounded.
Marc:I have a clearness of mind and spirit.
Marc:I think I'm doing a better job acting.
Marc:But yesterday was sort of an amazing day.
Marc:In one of the episodes that I wrote, my family, as some of you know on the show, Judd Hirsch played my father.
Marc:And Sally Kellerman played my mother briefly in one sequence where we weren't even together in the room, really.
Marc:She was on the phone with me.
Marc:Well, now she's back for a couple episodes.
Marc:And we did a family-oriented episode with a guy playing my brother.
Marc:Troy Ruptash plays my brother.
Marc:So I got them all in the room.
Marc:I got Sally Kellerman and Judd Hirsch.
Marc:We're at a table in a dinner scene, and I'm watching Sally Kellerman and Judd Hirsch having an argument right in front of me.
Marc:Front row seats.
Marc:For these amazing actors, these amazing characters.
Marc:And I was, what do they say in Yiddish?
Marc:Kvelling.
Marc:I was ecstatic.
Marc:I love Sally Kelleran.
Marc:And the fact that she's playing my mother is just mind-blowing to me.
Marc:To see somebody with all that history and all that talent and still sort of focus.
Marc:It was fucking outrageous.
Marc:Outrageous.
Marc:And it was my life.
Marc:It is my life.
Marc:i guess i'm bragging i'm not bragging i'm just sharing experience with you then we did another episode i don't know if i can tip that one but there's an episode sort of loose it's all loosely based on things either in my head or actually in my life where i have a guest on the show and i and i want to know whether or not because i i wonder this in real life you know does how far does the relationship go here we have this wonderful conversation and do can we hang out are we going to hang out
Guest:Can we hang out?
Guest:There are people I've had in here where I'm like, all right, so we had a pretty intense talk for an hour.
Guest:Can I have your number?
Guest:Yeah, I might need to call you tomorrow, Iggy.
Marc:But it never happens.
Marc:To be honest with you, I don't hang out.
Marc:Outside of a couple of guys that I know well or I see at comedy clubs, I don't hang out with many people at all in general.
Marc:I don't spend that much time with people.
Marc:I spend time with myself.
Marc:And if there's a lady in my life, I'll spend time with her until I drain them of their life essence.
Marc:That's not true.
Marc:It goes both ways.
Marc:But I always wonder, like, could I just give him a call?
Marc:Could we just have lunch?
Marc:Could we go out?
Marc:Could I come over to their house?
Marc:Maybe.
Marc:You know, and also there's the issue that I'm not really a guy guy in that way, but whatever.
Marc:But there's a whole episode about that, about a celebrity that comes in here.
Marc:And I'm like, maybe we could be friends.
Marc:And I go out and I try to be their friend.
Marc:That's one of the episodes.
Marc:Can't tell you the celebrity.
Marc:I know, I'm going to tease.
Marc:But he was great.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So let's talk about therapy.
Marc:Okay, I know I'm rambling, but look, you know, it's a holiday season.
Marc:Some of you are into listening to me talk.
Marc:Others, you know, just move on.
Marc:Move on.
Marc:Just let us talk.
Marc:You can just fucking forge your way into whatever the hell you want.
Marc:Turn it off.
Marc:I don't care.
Marc:But some of us are talking.
Marc:So why don't you let the grown-ups talk?
Marc:Okay?
Marc:About midway through the show, Marin started yelling at people he assumed were not listening to his intro.
Marc:And that's where I checked out.
Marc:Look.
Marc:I've been in therapy in my life.
Marc:A lot of you think I'm neurotic or I'm self-obsessed and I'm like, you know, a classic Jewish nutbag who has spent his life in therapy.
Marc:Not true.
Marc:Went for years and years without therapy.
Marc:The reason I'm saying this, I got Phil Stutz on in a minute.
Marc:And I was trying to like make a list of the therapists I've had in my life.
Marc:There's only been like five or six at different periods of my life.
Marc:I remember the first therapist my parents brought me to.
Marc:I was probably in third or fourth grade.
Marc:Who the hell knows what the problem could have fucking been?
Marc:But I think they brought me to a guy named Hudson, who was a child psychiatrist.
Marc:And I don't remember anything about that other than the guy wore tinted glasses, had a crew cut, was overweight, and brought me into a room full of board games and sat me down and said, which one do you want to play?
Marc:As a metaphor for life, if we make that guy the sort of mythic god, it sort of makes sense.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:That's a good question.
Marc:That scene as a metaphor for that moment in life, I'm not sure which board game or game I decided to play, but I have no idea how to get out of it.
Marc:That's all I remember about that guy.
Marc:And then when I was in high school or junior high and there was motivation problems,
Marc:Mark doesn't seem to be interested.
Marc:He's got a bad attitude.
Marc:We don't know what to do with him because we have no parenting skills.
Marc:There was this other guy, Dr. Carey, I think his name was, who was good with teenagers.
Marc:You know, the guy who's good with teenagers.
Marc:He was good.
Marc:I went to group therapy.
Marc:That was interesting.
Marc:Fell madly in love with this girl, Lisa, who was two years older than me.
Marc:I remember talking group therapy, getting a few jokes out.
Marc:I remember I enjoyed going, you know, more than Hebrew school anyways.
Marc:I remember just being in love with this girl.
Marc:And then she tried to commit suicide.
Marc:I remember visiting her in the hospital, not really understanding any of it.
Marc:I was young, didn't understand any of it.
Marc:And I remember I brought some music.
Marc:She wanted to listen to music.
Marc:I brought Steve Miller because that's what she wanted to listen to.
Marc:And I just kind of remember her playing, you know, kind of like doing air guitar to like a Steve Miller song, Fly Like an Eagle with bandaged wrists.
Marc:Moving on, there was a guy in college I saw.
Marc:He was, I think, a gay gentleman.
Marc:What did I learn from that guy?
Marc:How to gaze deeply at somebody, like right through their fucking being, and seemingly not paying attention whatsoever.
Marc:It's a trick, people.
Marc:It's a trick.
Marc:That guy had skills.
Marc:Thought he was burning through me with his eyeballs, but I don't think he was paying attention at all.
Marc:Then there was D'Onofrio out on Long Island when I was in New York.
Marc:What did I learn from that guy?
Marc:That sometimes therapists just enjoy listening to you talk.
Marc:You can get some good laughs out of them.
Marc:They just seem to enjoy having you there more than you really need them.
Marc:He was good, though.
Marc:He was good.
Marc:Oh, there was Dr. Rosenfeld in San Francisco.
Marc:What did I learn from that guy?
Marc:I learned a couple of things.
Marc:That guy was intense.
Marc:I related to that guy.
Marc:He seemed troubled.
Marc:I hope he's all right.
Marc:Jonathan Rosenfeld, are you all right?
Marc:Are you doing well?
Marc:Because now I'm concerned about you.
Marc:What I learned from him, I liked him.
Marc:I was going through torment toil before I got sober.
Marc:What I learned from him was you can train your parents because eventually they want to have a relationship with you of any kind.
Marc:What else did I learn?
Marc:Oh, he's the one that told me there's no such thing as boredom, only fear.
Marc:That thing kind of kicks around my brain a lot.
Marc:There was one guy I remember getting a psyche val when I was in rehab in 1988 and
Marc:A psychiatrist comes in to do a psyche-eval with me, and at that time, I had to wear certain rings to protect myself from certain things.
Marc:I had to wear skull rings.
Marc:I had to have pinky rings.
Marc:One was a snake, one was a skull.
Marc:I had to wear skulls on my shirt.
Marc:That was what I had in my mind.
Marc:Cocaine psychosis.
Marc:And this psychiatrist walks in.
Marc:He's a youngish guy, complete nerd, kind of like a doughy nerd, you know, like sort of like, you know, pants a little too high, belt, shirt tucked in, goofy nerd glasses.
Marc:And this was before nerds were cool.
Marc:But I judged him.
Marc:I'm like, what's up with this guy?
Marc:How was this guy, a psychiatrist?
Marc:And he sat down and started talking to me and I noticed he was wearing this large dragon ring, which I assume was part of some game.
Marc:I don't know what he was into.
Marc:It was definitely a dragon ring.
Marc:And he's looking at me seriously saying, you know, I'm explaining to him my system of protection with my pinky rings.
Marc:and what they meant.
Marc:And then I said, what does your dragon ring mean?
Marc:And he seemed very flustered and taken aback and took him a few seconds to get his composure.
Marc:I think I was talking to the dungeon master.
Marc:Either it was part of a board game community or he was into some deep shit.
Marc:And now I got my guy and now I'm seeing a guy, but I, you know, now, Oh, Kirk, Kirk, the guy who I went to in the, you know, when I was crushed from that second divorce in New York, Kirk primal union.
Marc:That's what I learned from that guy that I was in search of primal union.
Marc:that because my parents or my mother never fully detached from me or let me go and develop my own sense of self, you know, I'm constantly looking for that unconditional primal union, that connection with others.
Marc:And I got to put a cap on that shit, man.
Marc:Reel it in, Maren.
Marc:Reel it in.
Marc:It's not everyone's job to parent you.
Marc:All right, look.
Marc:Now, as promised, I have a bit of my Hank Azaria interview where he's talking about my guest today, Dr. Phil Stutz, who is his therapist.
Marc:The reason I wanted to put it right up against the intro is I wanted you to hear how close Hank's impression of Phil is.
Marc:And this is a very compelling interview with a guy who's got some practical advice of how to keep your shit together, which never hurts.
Marc:So this is Hank Azaria from my conversation with him talking about my guest today, Phil Stutz.
Guest:I have an amazing shrink.
Guest:I don't seem to much anymore, but he talks like this.
Guest:He kind of sees a New York guy.
Guest:He sounds like Mickey Rourke in the early days.
Guest:And he literally, he was this kind of guy.
Guest:I would be in there whining about this very stuff, and he would literally go, he'd listen to me about 20 minutes and go...
Guest:Yeah, all right, shut the fuck up.
Guest:Your problem is you're a fucking baby.
Guest:That's what he said.
Guest:I was like, what?
Guest:He's like, yeah, well, this didn't happen.
Guest:I didn't get this.
Guest:This is all shit that if I told you it would happen to somebody else, you wouldn't give a shit.
Guest:But because it's to you, it's like a fucking crime.
Guest:Everybody had this shit.
Guest:Grow the fuck up.
Guest:And it was like the best thing I ever got told.
Guest:What's this guy's number?
Guest:He's amazing.
Marc:That was Hank Azaria doing Phil Stutz.
Marc:Now let's talk to the real Phil Stutz.
Marc:Thank you for coming, doctor.
Guest:Okay, pleasure to be here.
Marc:Dr. Stutz, right?
Guest:Yeah, you can call me Phil.
Guest:Phil?
Guest:I can call you Phil?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know, I had Hank Azaria in here.
Guest:Who?
Marc:Yeah, I know, I know.
Marc:And good for you.
Marc:And, you know, he did an impression of you.
Marc:And it was beautiful.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And I'm very excited to see you.
Marc:And it sounds like he got it just right.
Guest:No, I'm really self-conscious.
Guest:Are you really?
Guest:Yeah, I don't think I'm going to say anything.
Guest:I don't know if I can live up to his impression.
Marc:No, he's one of the great voice guys.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, you know, I have the book, you know, after I talked to Hank, you know, we have the same publisher and she sent me the book and said, well, you got to talk to Phil if you want.
Marc:He's out there.
Marc:And I'm like, yeah, of course I'm going to talk to Phil.
Marc:I will take any opportunity I have to talk to a psychiatrist for nothing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What do you mean for nothing?
Marc:You're going to get something out of this this time.
Marc:I'll pay after.
Marc:It depends how the session goes.
Marc:I think I'm in that position.
Marc:You are.
Guest:I love treating comics.
Guest:You do?
Guest:Yeah, I'm a good audience.
Guest:Very good.
Guest:You can't help them, by the way.
Guest:You can just enjoy yourself.
Marc:Come on, no progress?
Marc:It's impenetrable?
Guest:Yeah, they don't particularly want to be healed anyway.
Guest:They don't?
Guest:No, I shouldn't kid around.
Guest:Once they're in therapy, they're like anybody else.
Guest:They always come with the initial fear, though, that if they get healthier, they're not going to be funny.
Marc:I used to have that, but I don't have that anymore.
Marc:Well, because it's twofold, is that I know I'm never going to be that healthy.
Marc:Me neither.
Marc:But there's some things, I think, in your wiring that you can get a handle on.
Marc:But fundamentally, they're not just going to go away unless you have a lobe removed.
Guest:isn't that right yes basically that's right uh our philosophy is um you're going to have to work on yourself for the rest of your life problems don't have to go away but what you do need is some kind of protocol to deal with the problems and that's where the book came out that's where the that's where that comes in that's where the book comes well what's your story because you seem uh you know you're a new york guy yeah where'd you grow up
Guest:I was in the Bronx till I was five, and then I grew up in the city in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Marc:So your family's from the city?
Guest:Yes, basically.
Marc:And you grew up, like, you know, what kind of world was it?
Marc:What did your old man do?
Guest:He was in the peace goods business, you know, these big rolls of material.
Marc:I love that.
Guest:So he's a schmata guy?
Guest:He's a schmata guy, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So he's down on Sixth Avenue every day?
Guest:Yeah, it was further down.
Guest:Now it's so fancy where his store was.
Guest:If he saw it now, he would faint.
Marc:Was it like meatpacking or where?
Guest:It was 372 Broadway, which was below Canal.
Guest:It was all textiles at that time.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He was an interesting character, though, my father, because he was a great businessman, but he was a communist.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So he was guilty about making money.
Guest:So he can make a lot of money, but he had to get rid of it as fast as he possibly could.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But when he got rid of it, does that mean he put it back to good use or he just needed to buy things?
Guest:It was probably a combination of both.
Marc:It's interesting that I don't think people, that that dialogue really exists, because I had a, anymore, as I had a great aunt, that there was this whole sort of, you know, Jewish communist, you know, workers' rights, unionizing bit of business that was, you know, common.
Marc:And you just don't hear people talk about it.
Guest:No, the younger kids don't even know about it, really.
Marc:Was he a union guy?
Marc:Was he, you know, how does this communism manifest itself?
Guest:Well, that's a funny thing.
Guest:You know, he had a union shop there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The unions used to really screw him, actually, and the guys would steal from him.
Guest:But I think ideologically he couldn't really accuse him or go right up against him.
Guest:He would complain to me about it.
Guest:He was the reason I became a psychiatrist.
Guest:I was his psychiatrist by the time I was probably 12 years old.
Marc:Isn't that interesting?
Marc:Because I had a similar experience.
Marc:My father is a very demanding, slightly bipolar fella.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Marc:And I needed to entertain him.
Marc:You did.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:How did you, what was, as a 12-year-old, what were some of your father's problems that needed to be dealt with?
Guest:I only had one problem, bankruptcy.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:Listen to this.
Guest:My father started his business in 1938, right in the midst of the Depression.
Guest:He never had a bad year ever, but every year he swore he was going to go bankrupt.
Guest:So he'd come home and he'd say, sit down, I want to talk to you.
Guest:He'd go,
Guest:how would you feel if we all had to live in one room, like all five of us?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, as a kid, I'd say, okay, Daddy, I can do it.
Guest:He'd say, how'd you feel if you only had one pair of pants and they were dungarees?
Guest:That would be it.
Guest:I was a kid, I didn't know.
Guest:I said, no, no, it'll be fine.
Guest:This went on night after night after night.
Marc:Every day he'd come in and...
Guest:Yeah, every day.
Guest:And then sometimes he would think he forgot to lock these.
Guest:It was called the place.
Guest:It wasn't called the store.
Guest:Forgot to lock up the place.
Guest:So he'd get in the cab and he'd go downtown.
Guest:The place was always locked.
Marc:So he had a little OCD too, huh?
Guest:Yeah, he had a little bit of that too.
Marc:Well, I think that's a, that's like, I mean, as a guy who talks to people for a living, I think that, you know, when things get chaotic and frightening, that OCD thing, it gives you a sense that maybe you have a little control over things, I would imagine.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A hundred percent.
Marc:And then you feel like you can just go down, you know, it's like that, like I used to say in my act sometimes that no one understood it is that if you're OCD, you know, it may be problematic, but every time you go to see if the, if the place is locked and it is, you get that same feeling of satisfaction.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:It's not bad.
Guest:Yeah, you lose a lot of money in taxes.
Marc:But you feel good every time.
Guest:Yeah, for a while, yeah.
Marc:So when you, and you have brothers and sisters and the whole big Jewish family or what?
Guest:I have one brother and one sister.
Guest:There was also a brother that died when I was nine.
Marc:Oh, gee.
Guest:And that sealed my fate as a doctor right there.
Marc:How so?
Guest:The family kind of cracked up after that.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And my job was to fight death.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:What did he die of?
Guest:He had a rare kind of kidney cancer.
Guest:Oh, geez.
Guest:And he was gone in about four or five months.
Marc:How old was he?
Guest:Three.
Marc:Oh, that's brutal when you're like nine, so you're cognizant of everything and the horror and the house and the, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, a lot fell on my shoulders after that.
Guest:But then just to make sure I became a doctor, a friend of mine fell down an elevator shaft.
Guest:Actually, he was pushed.
Guest:The story was he fell, and he was in Metropolitan Hospital.
Guest:We went to visit him.
Guest:He was in the intensive care unit there.
Guest:As we're walking out of the hospital, my father says, that's the only profession, being a doctor.
Guest:I was about 15.
Guest:He just wanted to make sure.
Guest:The funny thing is, that's where I trained in that hospital, just by coincidence.
Marc:Yeah, that's a hell of a hospital.
Marc:I think my father did a couple of years in that hospital as a, I don't know if it would be, I think an intern.
Guest:Oh, he was a doctor.
Marc:Yeah, he still is, kind of.
Marc:He can't work anymore, but yeah, he was a doctor.
Marc:He was a surgeon.
Marc:And he went to... What kind of general surgeon?
Marc:No, orthopedic.
Marc:And he did time at Metropolitan.
Marc:I remember when we saw the movie Hospital with George C. Scott.
Marc:Yeah, that was filmed there.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:My father says, it's just like that.
Marc:And I'm like, holy shit, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Was that crazy?
Guest:It was pretty wild.
Guest:There were junkies were running up and down the staircases stealing drugs.
Guest:There wasn't real... No security.
Marc:No security.
Guest:Listen to this.
Guest:In 1972, I'm walking out of the hospital.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My shift was over, and they have these detail men from the drugstores, you know, flax trying to sell their product.
Guest:Oh, yeah, sure.
Guest:This guy runs up on me, and he puts this big jar in my hand.
Guest:He says, this is a great new product.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:Get the fuck away.
Guest:Leave me alone.
Guest:I take the thing home.
Guest:You know what it was?
Guest:What?
Guest:It was 1,000 Quaaludes.
Guest:Nobody knew what quaaludes were at the time.
Marc:So did that get you through the 70s?
Guest:Yeah, pretty much, yeah.
Guest:At least about half of it.
Marc:That's hilarious.
Marc:So when you go, okay, so you decide to be a psychiatrist.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And you feel that you were compelled just by your father's pain?
Marc:Because you could have done anything.
Marc:You could have been any kind of doctor.
Guest:Yeah, I was interested in surgery, but I'll be honest, I couldn't get up early in the morning.
Guest:They're up at 5 o'clock in the morning every Sunday.
Guest:Prepping?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, they got to make rounds before they operate.
Guest:The rounds are at 7, whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was good at it.
Guest:I was dexterous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But given the fact that I got Parkinson's, it would have been a disaster.
Marc:But you would have had a few good years.
Guest:Yeah, I would have had 10, 20 good years, yeah.
Marc:All right, so you decided to do psychiatry.
Marc:So in New York, in Metropolitan Hospital, I mean, just at that time, what are we talking about, the 70s?
Guest:Yeah, 71 to 75.
Marc:What were you doing?
Marc:What does a psychiatrist do at Metropolitan Hospital in the mid-70s?
Guest:Well, the first thing I should tell you is I was an intern there first, so I did medicine, so I was a medical intern, so you're there.
Guest:The classic is Friday night, which is like war.
Guest:You even had combat-style wounds and stuff like that.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, oh, yeah.
Guest:And then the amount of drugs that were... The favorite drug was speedball.
Guest:You know what that is?
Guest:Heroin and Coke.
Guest:Yeah, shot.
Guest:So sometimes they'd put in too much Coke.
Guest:And there were some maniacs who would just shoot the Coke, straight Coke.
Guest:There was one guy who started to walk up and down, up and down.
Guest:We couldn't restrain the guy.
Guest:We had two or three big officers there.
Guest:We had to wait until he ran out of gas.
Guest:It took about four hours.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I've been to that party.
Guest:But what it did was, you know, that hospital in the middle of the night was basically run by 26, 27-year-olds.
Guest:I mean, you don't want the public to know that.
Guest:But you become very confident because you have to make the decisions.
Guest:There's nobody else here.
Marc:Whether to call a doctor in, whether to not call a doctor in, what to do.
Guest:Well, you are the doctor, whether to admit or not, how to treat, who needs to go directly to an operating room, etc., how to stabilize somebody who's bleeding out, all that stuff.
Guest:So it made you confident and aggressive.
Guest:Then, so you do a year of that.
Guest:Then you do three years of psychiatric residency, and you start on the psychiatric wards.
Guest:Psychiatry is a strange field where the least experienced people get the hardest cases.
Guest:It's the opposite of the rest.
Marc:Because they know that's a good, it's like hitting a ball against a wall.
Guest:Yeah, you can say that.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Or hitting your head against the wall.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:Give him that guy.
Marc:There's no helping that guy.
Guest:It'll make him tough.
Guest:Yeah, let him practice on him.
Marc:So you're on the hopeless psych ward doing that stuff?
Guest:Yeah, I wouldn't say hopeless, but I was semi-hopeless.
Guest:I had an interesting experience the first or second week I was there.
Guest:They bring this kid in about my age, and he's psychotic.
Guest:And, you know, part of schizophrenia is there's a grandiose, ill-advised self-importance, like the President of the United States is talking to me through the events and stuff like that.
Guest:So I'm admitting this kid, so you have to write down all his belief systems, his delusions.
Guest:So I'm writing it all down, and then when I'm finished, I'm saying, you know,
Guest:This is ridiculous what you're telling me.
Guest:This can't possibly be true.
Guest:Let me tell you what reality is.
Guest:And you know what the kid did?
Guest:Punched me right in the face.
Guest:And when I was falling to the floor, I realized, I said, the kid is right.
Guest:I was disrespectful.
Marc:Of his reality.
Guest:Yeah, you know, you have to start out that way.
Guest:I didn't make that mistake again.
Marc:Yeah, the tough love thing didn't work that time.
Marc:No.
Marc:Get it together, kid.
Marc:Yeah, pow.
Marc:That was it.
Marc:That's a hell of a lesson to learn as a psychiatrist.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Then there was the guy that escaped from the ward naked.
Guest:He took all his clothes off and he started to run up and down the ward and he was big.
Guest:This kid was big.
Guest:He was built like an NFL linebacker.
Guest:He must have weighed about 220.
Guest:And first he says, he takes his clothes off, first he says, I want to take a shower.
Guest:The guards hadn't arrived yet, so we said, fine, go take a shower.
Guest:So he's all lathered up, soaked up, gets out of the shower, and then he makes a beeline for the door of the ward, and the guards still hadn't gotten there.
Guest:So he says to my supervisor, it was a little guy, like an Omar Fudd looking guy.
Guest:And the kid says, I want to leave.
Guest:And the guy opens the door and he ran out naked.
Guest:Into the street.
Guest:Yeah, he made it, I think.
Guest:He made it through the lobby.
Guest:In Metropolitan Hospital at that time, nobody would really give that a second look.
Guest:They'd say, oh, yeah.
Marc:That's happening.
Guest:I want to say one thing, though.
Guest:The teachers I had, the attendings in that hospital were excellent.
Guest:They were very serious about teaching us and making sure we were competent.
Marc:Well, that's great.
Marc:And one of the things that you sort of talk about in the book, the tools, is that over years of being a practitioner,
Marc:that you hit a certain wall with what was thought to be the way to treat somebody.
Marc:And what you, out of experience, grew to realize was not really practical.
Marc:Let's start with the first set of jobs you had.
Marc:Where'd you go after Metropolitan?
Guest:I went to prison.
Marc:So you went to where?
Marc:Rikers Island.
Marc:So like a real, the prison, the New York prison.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Rikers was, that was like a city prison.
Guest:Yeah, it was a jail technically.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:It wasn't like they sent you away for years.
Marc:It was more of a holding situation, correct?
Guest:Yeah, most of the guys there were waiting trial, which made it a very jumpy place.
Guest:They weren't happy.
Guest:It's actually calmer upstate.
Guest:You know, you have a few guys doing a one or two year bids who do it in Rikers, but mostly it's people waiting their trial.
Marc:And what is your function there?
Guest:My function is to get played by the inmates to give them Valium and to refuse to give it to them.
Guest:That was basically my function.
Marc:So there you learned the incredible charm and intelligence of the dope fiend.
Guest:You could say that, yes.
Guest:It was a crash course.
Guest:Yeah, I don't know, Doc.
Guest:I'm just, you know, I'm in a lot of pain.
Guest:I'll tell you, though, you know, there's a psychology to everything, even the criminality.
Guest:Like every guy that I interviewed, which was a lot of guys, I was there for five years.
Guest:Five years?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Every one of them said, I am innocent of the crime of which I'm accused.
Guest:Then they said, but by the way, I committed all these other crimes.
Guest:I'm the best criminal you've ever seen.
Guest:But this particular one I happen to be innocent of.
Marc:So there was a pride to it.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah, there was a criminal pride.
Guest:You know, there's a pecking order based on your crimes.
Marc:So outside of that, what were the primary lessons of being a prison shrink for five years?
Guest:Um, the primary lesson I would say is it makes you, it brings out your instincts.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, you could say your animal instincts, but not in a bad way because in a prison setting, you have to be able to size somebody up really quickly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You have about two seconds and the way you carry yourself matters more than what you say.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Like the cell blocks, I'm not sure of the numbers, but I think there were like 150 guys in his cell block.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You only had two correction officers.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Now, some of the correction officers couldn't handle their business, and the cell block would be chaotic, out of control.
Guest:Other guys would dominate the 150, and you'd have decorum and probably some degree of fear of the... But they radiated authority.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I became interested in the difference between who can radiate authority and who can't, almost on an animal level.
Marc:And what did you come up with as being the differences?
Guest:The difference is, I would say, twofold.
Guest:Number one, how you express yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The person who can express himself in a flow with confidence gets a lot of authority that way.
Guest:And the other thing is this correction officer's, how can you say it, awareness or sensitivity to the vibe of the situation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, there's some guys, oh, my God.
Yeah.
Guest:I'm just thinking of one.
Guest:This was the scariest thing that ever happened to me.
Guest:I was admitting a new patient to the psychiatric.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It wasn't called a ward, whatever, that quad they called it.
Guest:And I'm there writing, and in the prison they call it yoking.
Guest:The guy, out of nowhere, he jumps up, yokes me around the neck, pulls me down.
Guest:And that was okay, but then he went for my pen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was going to stick the pen in my eye.
Guest:Thank God they interceded right at that moment.
Marc:So he didn't give a fuck.
Marc:He was just going to kill you.
Guest:No, he didn't care.
Guest:He was either paranoid schizophrenic or doing a good imitation.
Marc:This idea of confidence and authority.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What I've heard and what I know in my life is that on the other side of that, certainly with criminal minds, their instincts are to find a guy.
Marc:They're going to size you up just as quickly as you are.
Guest:Yes, or quicker.
Marc:Yeah, so the game is that.
Marc:So this exuding of authority or this taking of authority, I mean, it's got to come from a pretty real place that they're going to see right through it.
Guest:Yes, it's got to come from a real place.
Guest:One of the things we tried to develop and I think succeeded with the tools is...
Guest:The tools are not just cognitive.
Guest:They're not just concepts or ideas.
Guest:They try to drive emotion and energy right through your body.
Guest:So they change your entire state.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the conceit is that they can do it quickly.
Guest:And if you practice them, they can.
Marc:As a guy that's been doing this for, what, 40 years, 50 years, so what things can you tell?
Marc:I'm always curious with psychiatrists, what illnesses of the mind can you see almost immediately, within five minutes?
Guest:Probably a lot of them.
Guest:Certainly, you know, the classic thing for a psychiatrist is treating what's called a borderline.
Guest:Have you ever heard of that?
Marc:Yeah, that's the trickiest one.
Guest:That's the trickiest one.
Guest:A borderline will idealize you at the beginning and tell you you're the greatest thing since doo-doo.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then you will disillusion them.
Guest:It's just a matter of time.
Guest:It could take two days or two weeks.
Guest:And then you're the worst therapist that ever lived and you fail to understand them, fail to heal them, etc.
Guest:You know, they're very, very unstable.
Guest:And what they, you know, the folk wisdom about it is an experienced clinician can diagnose them before their ass actually hits the seat.
Marc:Really?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, because what they do is they want to idealize you and make you seem superhuman, and they get this look in their eye.
Guest:It's hard to describe exactly what the look is, but there's something unreal about it.
Guest:And the younger therapists tend to get sucked in by it because, oh, here's this person really looking up to me.
Guest:And they always compare you to the prior therapist.
Guest:who's a complete shit.
Guest:These are worthless.
Guest:And you're the one who's going to save them.
Guest:When you get older and more experienced, when you see that look, you want to run for the hills.
Marc:Why, because they're untreatable?
Guest:They're not untreatable.
Guest:It's just the old methods of treating them basically worthless.
Guest:Here's what happened to me, maybe it'll help answer the question.
Guest:When I was probably 26, 27, I was first given my own patient.
Guest:They weren't private patients because I was still a resident, but I was given my own patients to treat.
Guest:And right away, I felt something was wrong.
Guest:And the reason I say that is that patients...
Guest:were in urgent need of relief, whether it's someone who's depressed, high anxiety, insomnia, you can have your OCD.
Guest:I mean, there's a million endless crushing depression.
Guest:They needed something right at the moment that they presented, not that it was going to cure them, but
Guest:that gave them the sense you understood what they were feeling you were on their team and you wanted them to get some relief quick yeah why because if they get some relief quick there's a sense of hope if you just sit there and talk to them about their background and their parents and whatever you know it's like a boat lying dead in the water you know there's no particular hope of of uh progress it could go the other way it could go the other way a lot of times it does yeah
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:So now before we get into the tools specifically, because, you know, I want to apply them to my life as we sit here.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:We'll do it.
Guest:I promise.
Marc:All right.
Marc:You know, I'm in therapy now when I haven't been in a long time.
Mm-hmm.
Marc:And I've been through enough therapy and somehow or another, I do believe, and maybe you disagree with me, that age is a great leveler of problems.
Marc:All the things that you thought were life or death, sometimes you look back at them and you're like, oh my God, that was fucking ridiculous.
Marc:And back then, I was the end of my rope.
Marc:But I guess if you live through it and you don't hurt yourself or get worse, you have that hindsight.
Marc:How do you know?
Marc:Because with something like this, where you write a book and you say, this is the get well system psychologically.
Marc:I mean, there's not an unusual book for people to write, but few of them really have the teeth to really make a difference, right?
Marc:Like the self-help thing is a little iffy.
Guest:Yeah, that's putting it mildly, but yeah.
Marc:So like in terms of your psychiatric practice, I mean, I have to assume that you still prescribe medicine.
Guest:I do.
Marc:And that some things are not necessarily easily resolved with the tools.
Guest:No, in fact, we made it a point to tell the truth in the book.
Guest:Maybe it hurt the sales.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:What we said is the tools work, but it's really hard.
Guest:It's going to take a while.
Guest:You'll see results right away, but you won't see a cure right away.
Guest:You may never...
Guest:see a cure.
Guest:It's a fight.
Guest:It's a lifestyle or it's a set of habits.
Guest:You know, we call it mental hygiene.
Guest:And you will have to do it for the rest of your life.
Guest:We use the term ceaseless immersion.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:I'll tell you what it is.
Guest:When I first moved out here, it was 82, and it was really smoggy out here in 82, and I'd see all the Californians in the morning going to work, and the smog didn't bother them, and I would curse them out, they're fucking Californians, were they crazy?
Guest:Within six months, I never noticed the smog myself.
Guest:I was ceaselessly immersed in smog.
Guest:I just accepted it.
Marc:It's adapting.
Marc:It's adapting, yeah.
Marc:You don't have the energy to rant against the smog every day.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:Traffic's another thing.
Guest:Yeah, don't let me start on that.
Marc:You can't surrender to ceaseless immersion in traffic.
Marc:That is aggravating always.
Guest:Yeah, that's outside the bounds of psychiatry.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But it's also an amazing test of, you know, I'm in recovery, so I'm a recovery guy.
Marc:So, like, you know, I've got those tools, you know, sometimes.
Marc:So, like, when I go through your book, I mean, I understand certain things, you know, in different languages.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:A lot of this stuff, sort of like how to live a responsible and mentally healthy life, there's a standard to it.
Guest:Yes, 100%.
Marc:But with traffic, I try to do that.
Marc:On a good day, you can sit there and you can say, I got no control over this.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And just realize that any aggravation that you're going to put yourself through in relation to that is fucking wasted energy.
Guest:There you go.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But but still, some days, you know, it also is useful in that you could have other things bothering you.
Marc:There could be other things sitting in your soul.
Marc:And if you're going to blow up at the guy in front of you or the traffic or whatever, maybe it's not a bad way to blow off a little steam.
Guest:I don't know if I fully agree with that.
Guest:I'm very euphemistic.
Guest:Well, first of all, I'll tell you the tool, the grateful flow in the book, the fourth tool in the book, you should try it when you're sitting in traffic.
Guest:It's very soothing.
Guest:So basically all you do for 30 seconds is...
Guest:name things you are grateful for and you want to stick with small ones better than big ones.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Like, you know, I'm grateful it was a sunny day today.
Guest:I'm grateful my car has gas in it.
Guest:The gratitude list.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You say them nice and slow and you try to feel your chest relaxing, almost melting as you say them.
Guest:And then for a second you stop saying them.
Guest:You just feel the flow of gratefulness.
Guest:without the words.
Guest:And if you're lucky, if you're attentive, you'll feel yourself approached by an energy, and it doesn't matter what you call it, that's very soothing and calming.
Guest:It's the energy that says, it's a good universe, things are okay.
Marc:You're okay.
Marc:You kind of open your heart.
Marc:If you're an angry guy like me, or an anxious, sort of worrying guy, the feeling of actually opening your heart is a little daunting.
Guest:Yeah, it's a little bit scary.
Guest:It is.
Marc:You literally feel like the vulnerability is a lot to deal with.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Now, what we try to do with our patients is prepare them in advance.
Marc:You might cry?
Guest:What do you say?
Guest:Well, just to stick with this particular scenario.
Guest:You know, we've had a lot of guys that scream in traffic, go crazy.
Guest:They flip other people off.
Guest:I've even had a couple guys who follow people off the freeway.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then one guy followed somebody off the freeway.
Guest:He got out of his car.
Guest:He said, let's go.
Guest:And the guy took a bat out, you know.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:That was it.
Guest:He lost that war.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But here's the thing.
Guest:There's a principle called unification.
Guest:Unification says everything is connected.
Guest:So if you work on your impulses to scream, threaten, go nuts, whatever you want.
Guest:If you work on those impulses, we can talk a little more how to do it.
Guest:That will carry over into other areas where your impulses are out of control.
Guest:It may be anger, but it may be a different impulse.
Guest:It may be the impulse to overeat, just as a for instance.
Guest:It may be the impulse, obviously, to drink.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But in tracking those impulses in the old school way, like dealing with, I'm a comedian, whatever, but I got a lot of anger issues, and I had substance abuse issues, and I have food issues.
Marc:So from your experience, what is the source, 90% of the time, of anger or compulsive behavior or not being able to stop that stuff?
Guest:The addict, the addict personality and the truth is in our society, which is it's almost everybody.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:It's designed that way.
Marc:Capitalism needs it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I think in the first book we had the thing about consumerism.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You can never feel whole.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's always something else.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Every force of business, you know, through advertising and manipulation and salesmanship is designed to make you feel incomplete.
Guest:Yes, that's 100% right.
Guest:And we try to tell the truth about that in the book, which means the whole world's against you in this sense.
Guest:The whole world is a challenge.
Guest:The whole world pulls you away from yourself.
Guest:And you can know that intellectually, but what the tools do is they give you an active way to say no to that.
Marc:Transcend it.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Transcend.
Marc:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Did you ever read Ernest Becker?
Marc:the denial of death yes that book changed my life yeah in that you know like because what you're talking about when you talk about the god-sized hole or the void or the black sun you know in in a selfish culture or just as us being selfish animals with the ability to think that there i think what he sort of posits is that there is an almost primal need to feel connected to something bigger than you yes right and in that you know you know where you're not going to get around that
Marc:that the existential loneliness of not being able to engage that is too horrifying and terrifying and depressing and could cause you a lot of problems.
Marc:So once you accept that, and even if you do it involuntarily with football or a rock band or drugs or whatever the fuck you're trying to do, that you're gonna have to reckon with that need.
Guest:I just want to stop this interview right now and say something, which is I am so fucking impressed that you not only read that book, but that you understood it.
Guest:Because that's one of the books I assign my patients.
Guest:And basically what he's saying in the book is that you could reduce all human problems to the same issue, which is the denial of death.
Guest:And I find that very helpful.
Guest:It's funny, you know, we're dealing with that in the new book also because...
Guest:One of the things the therapy attempts to do in terms of dealing with fear or transcending fear is to give you the sense that death is not permanent.
Guest:And most of us, like for me being in public or doing this kind of thing,
Guest:It scares the shit out of me.
Guest:It's like a certain kind of a death.
Guest:But the only thing that's going to die is my ego.
Guest:So if you can accept and rush into death and process it properly, you've lost nothing except your ego.
Guest:And you get, in return, a better connection, I guess, with something much bigger.
Marc:Okay, so that's a pretty big thing to wrap your brain around.
Marc:Because recently...
Marc:I had some sort of weird terror in the morning where I decided that I had cancer.
Marc:It happened some days.
Marc:And it could happen to anybody.
Marc:It happens to most people.
Marc:And I was not experiencing anything really.
Marc:But for some reason, this particular morning, I was able to really experience the terror of it for about 10 minutes.
Marc:My brain was manufacturing that.
Marc:It sort of rode out its own whatever.
Marc:But that fear...
Marc:You know, I would imagine it's more damaging and problematic than actually being told you have cancer because, you know, that's conclusive.
Marc:And then you act practically.
Marc:But when your brain just goes and it says, like, you know, I'm dying in any given moment because that's the way your brain works.
Marc:I imagine that that fear is the fear exactly what you're talking about, that that level of terror.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Marc:That became manifest that morning for 10 minutes.
Marc:It's probably in us all the time.
Guest:It's in us all the time.
Marc:Yeah, and it's it's it's profound and and and horrifying Yes, and everything that our ego does is to sort of like keep that fucker down.
Guest:Yeah
Marc:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He may come up in a dream as some guy chasing you.
Marc:But when you say that death is not an end other than the ego, I mean, you're suggesting not necessarily God, because I know you're careful in the book not to do that, but to some universal order.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And that even when we're gone or when we decompose, because you have atheists or non-believers or myself that you want to believe on some level.
Marc:Some people find comfort in just sort of like, yeah, you're done, you're done.
Marc:But I think there's a denial to that.
Marc:I don't know that anybody can glibly accept that.
Marc:I think that in itself is a defense mechanism.
Marc:Is it part of the denial of death?
Guest:Yes.
Marc:So how do you explain then what happens after death?
Guest:Couldn't you ask me an easier question?
Guest:Yeah, I could.
Marc:Well, I mean, it's just that when you say that it doesn't end there, I know it's an intellectual tool, but what are you thinking?
Guest:Well, I think there's two parts to that answer.
Guest:Let me give you the easy one first, and then I'll talk about myself.
Guest:No, it's all right.
Guest:I'll talk about myself first.
Marc:Yeah, go ahead.
Guest:I've been sick for a long time.
Guest:Before the Parkinson's, I had some kind of chronic fatigue thing.
Guest:And part of being sick was getting all the information.
Guest:Mostly it would come at night.
Guest:That, I mean, what we wrote in this book is only like 10, 5, 10 percent of the information that we have.
Guest:So it was almost as, it felt almost as if the illness was like a kind of walking death.
Guest:I remember, because I was a city kid and I used to go out all the time.
Guest:I would go out four or five nights a week.
Guest:And I remember when I first got sick, and I was on 2nd Avenue and 87th Street, just like hanging on this parking meter.
Guest:I was too tired to do anything.
Guest:It was a Friday night, and I said, shit, my life has changed.
Guest:And in effect, what happened was the old part of me that was wild and a play and all that stuff was actually killed.
Guest:And it was right at that point that all this information began to come to me.
Guest:Now, more stuff happened after about, I've never spoken about this in public before, but after about five or six years, I started to see these, how to describe, you know like when you go to the movies and there's something glinting off the screen?
Guest:You see this just for a moment, you see like a flash of light.
Guest:I started to see these flashes of light, but I would only see them when I was doing sessions.
Guest:And I would see them around my patients' heads.
Guest:And a lot of times when they would say something that had strong emotion, I would see the little flash there.
Guest:Now, it was...
Guest:It wasn't just on a good day or once in a while with certain patients.
Guest:It was happening all the time, all the time, all the time.
Guest:Now, I'm not saying that proves the existence of God, but there are definitely things going on that we don't know about.
Guest:And I studied this guy, Rudolf Steiner, who died in 1925.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:And he's made a lot of predictions, and not predictions like the world's going to be destroyed tomorrow or something that'll make a tentpole movie.
Guest:They're modest predictions, and most of which have come true.
Guest:One of the things he said was that he said at the end of the 20th century, it's going to be impossible to educate anybody, and it's going to be impossible.
Guest:The leaders are going to be weak.
Guest:And he said the reason for that is there's going to be a drive of individuality that's going to get out of control, which clearly has happened.
Guest:And he said there's no going back on that.
Guest:You have to take that drive for individuality and make it a good thing because obviously it could easily just get caught up in consumerism, greed, you know, tribal warfare.
Marc:And tribal warfare, but also on a more intimate level, pathological self-centeredness.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:That people's inability to connect with others and because of their own maybe even nebulous personal needs, that it just seems that even the act of therapy, what I've learned from talking to people is that it seems to have become an inconvenience to shoulder even mild emotional expectations of other people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Listen to what Rudolf Steiner says about this.
Guest:It's so amazing.
Guest:He says, when a mother has a young infant, it's actually a narcissistic act.
Guest:The infant is part of her.
Guest:So loving the infant and loving herself are all of a piece.
Guest:And he says that's necessary to get the extraordinary degree of sensitivity and identification.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Here's what he says.
Guest:He says, you can't get rid of that.
Guest:You actually have to make that force bigger.
Guest:And you say, what the fuck?
Guest:Make that kind of narcissism bigger?
Guest:Yeah, he says, because what you have to do is make the field bigger so that it encompasses not just a child, but every single person in the world.
Guest:Now, you know, that's a big task, obviously.
Guest:We have to be narcissistically involved in the whole world.
Marc:But also, I was told this was another profound moment that I had with a psychotherapist, another tidbit about my personal sense.
Marc:And it speaks to what you're speaking about, which is that what you're talking about, I think, is called also primal union.
Marc:That the connectivity between the mother and child is symbiotic and necessary for a certain amount of time.
Marc:But in order for an individual to grow, at some point the mother has to distance themselves from that and let that kid struggle on his own.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:So I'm not saying it's contradictory, but I mean, it seems that, you know, what you're talking about is a human principle of us being able to open our hearts and not be selfish to the point where we, you know, negate others and negate, you know, the world.
Marc:But also to develop as a person, your mother's got to cut you loose.
Guest:Yeah, think about this.
Marc:Hmm.
Guest:Her cutting you loose has to be a narcissistic act for her.
Guest:In other words, I'm bound or tied to this person for life or for longer.
Guest:The person needs to be free of me.
Guest:I sacrifice myself because it's part of my project.
Guest:There's an interesting tool with that, just as far as expressing yourself towards other people.
Guest:where um you you either um are angry polemic overbearing or which is one possibility we'll say that's category one yeah or category two where you're passive uh withdrawn uninvolved right but you're very you're accepting and loving of the other person
Guest:Now, there's something good in each of those, but by themselves, just a tirade or rage or whatever is not so good.
Guest:And the opposite, just being blindly loving and accepting and passive is not so good.
Guest:So what we tried to do was combine the two.
Guest:Now, the way that you... You want to try this?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay, just close your eyes for a second.
Guest:Just go to the rage part of you.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That was quick.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I have a river of that running at all times.
Guest:Yeah, this foam coming down his mouth, for those of you who can't see it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All right, now just kill that.
Guest:Now go to the other extreme, complete passive acceptance and lovingness.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Good.
Guest:Now go back to the first one.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Now go back to the second one.
Guest:right now don't think you hit them both at the same time not bad right but what did i just achieve what did you just achieve yeah you achieved the impossible in other words flow flow is the combination of two opposites that don't naturally fit in the same space um and logically you can't
Guest:That was the excluded middle in Aristotle.
Guest:You can't squeeze them both together.
Guest:But if you alter your consciousness and you go into a flow state, then you can have the good parts of both of them simultaneously.
Guest:Anything artistic, particularly anything that's original, has qualities of this.
Marc:It seems to me that what you're saying is that if you do the work, that you'll realize that both of those things are simultaneously happening all the time.
Marc:Yes, there you go.
Marc:And that you're going to make either deliberate choices or instinctual choices in a moment of what you're going to honor.
Guest:Yes, that's correct.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I get that.
Marc:So this is basically, I want to go to the book a bit and go through these things so people can, you know, the people that are searching and need help, like most people, if they'll admit it, can sort of get a rapid handle on each tool.
Marc:But this is considered, you would consider it cognitive therapy.
Guest:I would consider it cognitive plus.
Marc:Cognitive 2.0?
Marc:All right, so we enter this book with the first tool.
Marc:Well, it is the reversal of desire.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Okay, so now...
Marc:So the practical way to approach that would be like, you know, I come into your office and I say, you know, everyone's a fucking asshole.
Marc:You know, I'm tired of it.
Marc:I'm tired of this bullshit.
Marc:They can all go fuck themselves.
Marc:I can't get anything done because I'm being stopped at every turn by these assholes.
Marc:How do I play that tool?
Guest:you'd have to buy the second book well let's say just for argument's sake that that person who's complaining and feeling like a victim really has something that he would like to do and he's afraid to do it okay let's say he's a screenwriter who wants to write a novel yeah simple common thing right and he's he's
Guest:He feels like a victim because he's blaming his stasis, his inability to move forward on the outside world, okay?
Guest:So what I politely tell him is, you know, just say clinically, why don't you shut the fuck up?
Guest:You baby.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we say, be honest with yourself.
Guest:There's something you want to do that's meaningful to you.
Guest:You're avoiding it.
Guest:Why are you avoiding it?
Guest:Because there's some kind of pain.
Guest:And it doesn't particularly matter.
Guest:Fear itself is a kind of pain.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But there's vulnerability is a kind of pain.
Guest:Hurt feelings is a kind of...
Guest:it doesn't matter the point is the reversal of desire says well let me let me back up here's the secret of pain if you go towards it pain shrinks if you avoid it and move away from it it follows you like a monster okay so pain is is itself in motion it's mutable it's plastic okay so the reversal of desire says
Guest:Instead of desiring to avoid pain, I desire the pain.
Guest:That's why it's called the reversal of desire.
Guest:Why do I desire the pain?
Guest:Because only by desiring it can I go into it and shrink it.
Guest:I get it.
Marc:The only issue that I find intellectually with that is that many people who go towards pain...
Marc:The hinge to what you're saying is that that person needs to identify that fear or that sadness.
Marc:And then move against it.
Marc:But I think moving towards pain, I think a lot of people, and I think you talk about it a little bit in the book, with the maze thing and with the cyclical thing, is that whatever cyclical kind of behavior that's keeping somebody stuck, there's comfort in that.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:So the reversal of desire and the drive for Ford motion is not the same as masochism.
Guest:Right.
Marc:It's not the same as like, you know, I'm fucked.
Marc:And that's my that's my point of view.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Marc:There's something pathologically wrong with thinking that I'm fucked is your point of view.
Marc:So why are you fucked?
Marc:What are you afraid of?
Marc:Now let's move towards that.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:It's cheating to say I'm fucked, I'm a victim.
Guest:What you're really saying is I'm still special, but I'm special because I'm getting fucked so badly.
Guest:Exactly, right.
Guest:Whereas the program says you're the piece of shit that the world revolves around.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:So you still want your specialness.
Guest:Moving forward, you have to give up your specialness, subject yourself to whatever is going to happen and move through it.
Marc:At the risk of not being special.
Guest:At the risk of not being special.
Marc:I call it, and I don't know if I invented this, but I actually, you know, I have an amateur psychology practice here.
Marc:No shit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I call it inverted narcissism.
Guest:I like that.
Marc:That narcissism, you know, blind narcissism is, you know, I'm special, you know, and I'm amazing.
Marc:But inverted narcissism is I'm a fucking asshole.
Marc:That's what makes me special.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Barry, inverted narcissism.
Guest:Write that down when you listen to this.
Marc:All right, let's go on to, okay, active love.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Now, all right, so you move into the pain.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And now the premise of this is something difficult, especially for selfish people, to actually choose to open your heart.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Somebody does something fucked up to you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They take your parking space.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They take your girlfriend.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They take your job in a TV show.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's not fair.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You go into the maze.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I want revenge.
Guest:I'm going to speak out to them.
Guest:I'm going to tell them this and that.
Guest:How could they have done it?
Guest:It's the most fucked up thing ever.
Guest:It doesn't matter what your thoughts are.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They're amazed because once they get started, you're caught in the maze of those thoughts and you can't get out of them.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Yeah.
Guest:You are waiting for the universe to become fair.
Guest:Now, in Hamlet, the ghost says to Hamlet, you must set the balance straight.
Guest:And it didn't turn out too good.
Guest:Everybody died.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And meanwhile, while you're caught in the maze, the person you hate the most is actually taking up shop inside your brain to actually live in there.
Guest:So you have to live with them.
Guest:It's bad enough they did something to you last week.
Guest:It's as if they're doing it to you every five minutes now.
Guest:So you want to remove them.
Guest:It's like a form of psychic surgery.
Guest:now and so that you can go ahead with your life instead of getting caught now the only way to do that is to accept them and accept what happens happened and the force that accepts what is is love it's not a romantic view of love it's a source that accepts what is is love when you can generate it in the face of all this hatred you become unstoppable
Guest:in other words it's it's kind of like completing a circuit and once you can love again um or let me put it this way if you can love the person that you hate the most in the world at that moment you can love anything in anyone at that point your heart's open you're free and it's not i always tell people this is not a moral thing it's not even about forgiveness like if adolf hitler had a car and he drove past my house and he said uh you know uh
Guest:You're a Jew, you know, wash my car.
Guest:I could do it.
Guest:All I need is a hose.
Guest:It wouldn't matter what my opinion was of Adolf Hitler.
Guest:It wouldn't matter that he killed half my family.
Guest:It wouldn't matter.
Guest:If I put the hose on his car, the car will be clean.
Guest:So if you think of love as a substance, just like the water in that hose, you can project it anywhere you want to.
Guest:It's your freedom to be able to do that.
Marc:Right, but what you have to transcend there is the feeling of being a heel, or I would assume that applying this tool sometimes has to, it's just an exercise until time softens the injury.
Guest:It might be.
Guest:However, if it frees you to move forward with your own life, you're going to get over the injury a lot faster.
Marc:Did you really have family in the Holocaust?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You?
Marc:I don't think so.
Marc:They got out before and they came here before it all went down.
Marc:uh yeah my father had i think four or five sisters that didn't get out oh god and you grew up with that too yeah oh forget about it the realization that that type of evil you know i mean you know as a as a third you know like i'm three generations down and my family was not affected but you know we certainly learned about it but
Marc:I have to imagine, not unlike, I believe Viktor Frankl, that being that intimate, like you had ants, and just knowing that that kind of horrible monstrosity could happen, that must have had some impact.
Guest:It had a lot of impact.
Guest:You know, it made me very interested in evil.
Guest:You know, when I was really young, I rejected a psychological explanation of it because, you know, in the PC far left wing, because there was a suggestion that if you understood the person, treated them well, explained to them what was going on, that somehow that would mitigate the evil.
Guest:That can mitigate a psychological problem, but not evil.
Guest:Evil is dynamic and expansive.
Guest:So it's going to move against you no matter what.
Guest:It doesn't care.
Guest:As a matter of fact, it likes two things.
Guest:One, you're not admitting that it exists.
Guest:And number two, your belief that you could...
Guest:talk evil out of being evil.
Marc:Being that that's a component of the human experience and you're saying it's a given, do you find that a tool like active love, are you of the belief that love can transcend that?
Guest:I'm of the belief it could transcend it for the individual.
Marc:Right.
Guest:I'm not of the belief it's going to make evil go away.
Marc:So the battle continues.
Guest:The battle continues.
Guest:That's why we have ceaseless immersion.
Guest:You are ceaselessly immersed in evil.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Look at you.
Marc:You're in show business.
Marc:Barely.
Marc:I'm in my garage.
Marc:I haven't reached the upper echelons to where I'm meeting with evil on a daily basis.
Guest:You will soon because all the comics are talking about you.
Marc:We'll see.
Marc:They come talk to me.
Marc:So, okay, inner authority.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's the next tool.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Now we've got active love, which is basically choose love in the face of contempt as opposed to be stuck in the maze of hate and resentment and vengeance and the other seven deadly sins.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well said, okay.
Marc:So once you sort of get a handle on trying to get out of the maze, what is inner authority?
Marc:How does that work in sequence?
Guest:Well, there's two kinds of authority.
Guest:There's the typical kind of authority, which has to do with hierarchy, like maybe you're the president of a corporation or something, or you're the leader of your particular division.
Guest:And it also is based on intimidation, raw power.
Guest:There's not much communication.
Guest:So that's one kind of power.
Guest:And there's a place for it, but I think less and less and less.
Guest:The other kind of power is called authority by flow.
Guest:So that has to do with how well you express yourself.
Guest:It has to do with the amount of courage you carry yourself with.
Guest:It has to do with the amount of creative problem solving you can do, etc.
Guest:But it comes out in a flow.
Guest:People can feel it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They feel its absence.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The second kind of leadership is inspiring.
Guest:So the first kind gets people to do their jobs because they're scared, but they're not really going to go very far beyond.
Guest:Management.
Guest:It's management, right?
Guest:This is inspiration.
Guest:Now, so the question is, how do you get in a flow state?
Guest:And that has to do with your shadow.
Right.
Marc:the human shadow thing.
Marc:I mean, when I read the description in the book, I thought it was as good a description as I had heard about the manifestation of your worst self, of your insecurities that lives within us all the time.
Guest:Yes, that's correct.
Guest:Jung, who's a great psychiatrist working as Eric, defined the shadow as that which you wish you were not, but you are.
Marc:Which is a great... You better make friends with that guy.
Guest:Yeah, and most people don't.
Guest:Now, here's what happens.
Guest:When you're in front of any kind of an audience, and it doesn't have to be an audience where you're performing, it could be job presentation, it could be your spouse trying to convince her or something, whatever, you're afraid that the other person is gonna see your shadow, see their reaction to you has become too important, usually because you need their approval.
Guest:Now, and here's how I learned this.
Guest:I used to treat a lot of actors years ago, and every actor has the same basic problem with auditions.
Guest:Now, let's say an actor goes in, let's say it's for TV, his first reading is good, he gets a callback, right?
Guest:Now, what he's thinking is, on the callback, I have to replicate auditions.
Guest:my original reading.
Guest:Obviously it was good or I wouldn't have gotten the call back.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So there's a certain kind of perfectionism and control in that.
Guest:So what does the guy do?
Guest:He takes his shadow, let's say his shadow was you never graduated from high school.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Whatever.
Guest:Should have been a doctor.
Guest:Yeah, okay.
Guest:You're this depraved actor, right?
Guest:He says to the shadow, listen, I'm going to go in and do this audition.
Guest:It's just going to take about five minutes.
Guest:I don't want them to see you.
Guest:No offense.
Guest:Just wait out here.
Guest:I'll be back in five minutes.
Guest:And the shadow says, oh, yeah?
Guest:You think you can do this without me?
Guest:Fuck you.
Guest:Go ahead.
Guest:Let's see how you do.
Marc:And what happens is... He becomes a shadow puppet.
Guest:That's good, a shadow puppet.
Guest:That could be a book title.
Guest:Anyway, so the actor comes in without his shadow.
Guest:The shadow is juicy.
Guest:It's in flow.
Guest:It's instinctual.
Guest:It's interesting.
Guest:It has depth.
Guest:so without all of that what you usually get is a flat reading you know the actor's a little bit removed and maybe the guy in the back was up all night blowing or something so he feels injured by that and the guy doesn't get the job anyway so that happened so many times so i said listen we're going to reverse this yeah we're going to take the shadow yeah by the scruff of the neck and bring him with us into the room as a matter of fact
Guest:we're going to let him do the audition.
Guest:And as a matter of fact, we don't even give a fuck if we get the job.
Guest:All we want to do is remember to bring him into the room.
Guest:And, you know, I can't name names.
Marc:Well, Hank told this story.
Guest:He did?
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:Fuck.
Marc:No, it's good.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:No, it's good.
Marc:It was something that helped him.
Marc:He cited this particular tool.
Guest:He's a fantastic student.
Guest:Some people come along, they really do the work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, obviously, he's talented.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I attribute all of that to myself as well.
Marc:I would take full credit.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But I think what's interesting about what we're doing and about the mind in general is that there's a movement against psychology that calls it a racket, a bunch of whiners, that a lot of psychology just creates a relationship that never heals anybody.
Marc:And then there's the medical lobby, the pharmaceutical lobby that puts way too much emphasis on that.
Marc:But I think what you understand and what is something that non-believers
Marc:or skeptics or people that only believe in tough love is that there's a poetry that needs to be applied to these things that aren't explainable yet live in the human heart and soul and are unavoidable.
Marc:That, you know, if you get into a sort of tough love thing and you just find yourself in a practical denial that leads to discontent.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But in order to... Practical denial leads to discontent.
Guest:Get that, Barry.
Guest:Go ahead.
Marc:But I think what you're embracing, and I think what is true for any system, because I mean, the issues you're talking about are human issues that have been around for a long time, for as long as people have tried to function in civilization.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And some of the other issues around belief in higher forces, that predates civilization.
Marc:But what I'm saying is these are fundamental parts of the human mind and heart.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So what I like about what you're doing here is that you're trying to make them understandable in a non-dogmatic way.
Marc:And you're trying to make these things practical, yet you're also engaging the bigger picture.
Marc:And it's a hell of a task.
Guest:Thank you, though.
Guest:At least you understand what we were failing at.
Marc:Well, I think that people forget the importance of poetry.
Marc:And I say that in a broad sense, that even whether or not you believe the Bible is true or not, or whether or not you're going to sort of partake in any sort of spiritual...
Marc:quest that all any of these kind of books, you know, not so much philosophy, but some of it is trying to do is giving you a personal poetic that will enable you to at least engage in these fundamental human struggles.
Guest:Yes, that's excellent.
Guest:You know, my partner, Barry Michaels, who's a fantastic partner, by the way, he's focused on, almost obsessed with the powers of the human heart.
Guest:And he's won me over, no question.
Guest:The heart ultimately has more power than the head.
Guest:I don't mean that in a trite, cheap way.
Guest:There are actual facilities, abilities, powers, forces that can come from the heart.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:The poetry is how you, and including a lot of the symbolism, that's how you reach the heart.
Guest:You can't really reach it with just abstract concepts.
Guest:So a lot of the tools are designed to do that.
Guest:And again, for us, it doesn't really matter whether you say these forces are as real as electromagnetic forces.
Guest:or they're just a construct.
Guest:That doesn't matter.
Guest:What matters is what kind of connection do you make with the concepts.
Marc:Right.
Marc:How do you make it your own?
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So let's just deal a little bit with the last tool in terms of higher forces.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Because there's a lot of talk in here about something bigger, higher forces.
Marc:You're going to tap into these higher forces.
Marc:I think you have some explanation that in our conversation about the flow and about the existence of the universal order and that faith is not necessarily God-specific, but it's okay to have it.
Marc:I'm a big believer in faith without God.
Guest:Yes.
Okay.
Marc:uh and and not labeling god yeah but but it's a hard jump for some people to make yeah uh but but it's undeniable so so how do you approach that in the book into getting people to a place in acknowledging higher forces which is a sticky point for for overly uh controlling logical people yeah how do you do that
Guest:We encourage them almost to take a scientific view, and that means don't believe a word we're saying.
Guest:Study what we say because it's directive.
Guest:It will tell you how to use the tool, when to use it, what the rationale is for using it.
Guest:But don't believe us that it's going to work, and certainly don't believe us that it's going to create higher forces.
Guest:See what happens.
Guest:The single standard that's most helpful in that regard is when you're working with somebody and they do something that they were not able to do before.
Guest:It doesn't matter whether they know why or how they can do it or not.
Guest:That's not what the key.
Guest:The key is it's a possibility now that's become real.
Guest:And all they need is uncertainty.
Guest:It's like...
Guest:I don't know where it comes from, and that's fine.
Guest:I can live in the uncertainty of it.
Guest:And that's for one issue or one problem.
Guest:Then if we can get them to live like that, and ceaseless immersion says you're going to have plenty of problems, don't worry.
Guest:You're going to get a chance to test this over and over and over again.
Guest:Again, the judge is no longer the head.
Guest:It becomes the heart.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's amazing how people change.
Guest:And unless they're interested in it, I stay away from the doctrinaire spiritual concepts altogether.
Guest:But if you drew a triangle and you put a circle inside the triangle, I mean outside the triangle, a triangle inside a circle means flow because the triangle is a sign for fire or change.
Guest:It means there's flow, a potential flow inside you.
Guest:So the top of the triangle is called possibility, which means it's possible to function on a much higher level than you're functioning now.
Guest:Now, the lower left corner is called determination.
Guest:It means if it's possible to function on this higher level, we're determined to get there.
Guest:But the key is the lower right corner, which is called the positive view of evil.
Guest:What that says is when you hit evil with a small e, let's say somebody else treats you, acts like an asshole or whatever, that makes you more determined.
Guest:You go back to the other angle to reach this possibility state.
Guest:So ceaseless immersion says you're going to keep meeting evil.
Guest:And you're going to, by using the tools, turn the evil into what you're capable of or maximize what you're capable of.
Guest:And I believe that's what most people want out of therapy anyway.
Guest:You know, I'm dealing with a lot of people that are performers in the arts that are writers.
Guest:They all want it, obviously.
Guest:And whether they're atheists or devout believers, they all sense in themselves there's something more and they want to get to it.
Marc:Now, with this book, I mean, I guess I should ask the question just because, you know, you clearly are a practitioner and, you know, your Hippocratic oath seems to be in the right place.
Marc:You want to help people.
Marc:You know, you're a healer.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You're a guy that wants to, you know, help people live better lives.
Marc:But I think when people see a book like this, they think like, well, this is a this.
Marc:These guys want to start a movement.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And and, you know, what is how do you counter that?
Guest:Um, I'm so bad at starting a movement that once you get to know me, you'll see how ridiculous that is.
Marc:Have you had that before?
Marc:Have people asked you that?
Guest:Um, yeah, we have, um, what I consider the greatest editor, um, in the publishing industry.
Guest:Julie?
Guest:Yeah, Julie Brown.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We have the same.
Marc:Well, she didn't do my book, but I, my book was on her, her imprint.
Um,
Guest:And the reason I say she's the greatest is not just because of her technical skills, beauty, connections, all that.
Guest:It's that she actually believes in this stuff, and she's willing to put herself on the line for it.
Guest:So what she basically said is, especially this kind of a book, not a movement, but we're going to have to start a community, and we're going to have to use all the viral means at our disposal.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:to get it out because unless we were to get very, very lucky and, you know, like we were on Dr. Oz and the book shot up.
Guest:He was really nice to us.
Guest:But that stuff tends not to last and it's not indigenous to either of our personalities.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:So my personality is to just try to do something meaningful, start on a small scale and just let it grow and grow and grow.
Guest:One thing I do believe about this book, which is in three years or in six years, somebody's going to have a problem and they're going to pick up the book for a solution to the problem right there.
Guest:And it will be able to help them at least to a degree.
Marc:No, that's great.
Marc:Even the fact that we had a conversation about Ernest Becker or Viktor Frankl, these struggles in your field and just in the world of people, they're just ongoing.
Marc:And the ideas are as each person takes a stab at it, for better or for worse, some will fall away and others will stick and help people wrap their brain around these issues in each generation or each era.
Marc:yes yeah so let me before we close here when you were diagnosed with parkinson's um you know how did that change you i mean i know what with the chronic fatigue syndrome you started to sort of have a sense of of of halos and and and and and a read uh you know in a visceral visual sense of people's emotion
Marc:But when you personally were given this diagnosis, I mean, as a therapist, what did you learn from that?
Guest:Well, I'll tell you this much.
Guest:When my patients saw me start to shake, they became much nicer to me.
Guest:That was all I got out of it.
Marc:So it saved you a little time breaking through their defenses.
Guest:Yeah, this guy, he may only have a couple more months left.
Marc:But how do you feel about the struggle with the chronic situation?
Guest:I think, well, here's one major thing that it's done for me, which is it's made me acutely aware of time because it's a progressive disease, knock on wood.
Guest:I don't have a debilitating case of it, but it gets a little worse, a little worse.
Guest:So you have to think about what's important, I guess, is a good way to say it because there is this progressive disease.
Guest:The other thing it does is because when you have Parkinson's, you don't want to get too exhausted.
Guest:So it's taught me a little bit to modulate my expenditure of energy and to hold back a little, which is hard for me.
Marc:Yeah, but that's good for anybody, really.
Marc:You're only given a certain amount, I think.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Guest:The biggest thing, though, has to do with the shadow.
Guest:See, my shadow now is the fact that I shake.
Guest:So if I'm in front of an audience, I'm going to be thinking they see my shadow, they see me shaking.
Guest:There are various jokes to disarm them.
Guest:You know, like you can hold your hand out and it's shaking.
Guest:You can say, what do they call this in the Parkinson's world?
Guest:What?
Guest:Disco hand.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, right, sure.
Marc:Jokes, you know, they make people comfortable and they're not going to be like, oh, you know, but if you show that you have a handle on it, it's good.
Guest:Yeah, the test for me is to reveal the Parkinson's.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:That I've gotten a lot out of.
Marc:I think it's also beneficial to people who struggle with that shadow.
Guest:Yes, other people watching.
Marc:That's the amazing thing about being honest and not trying to hide that type of thing is that it's empowering to people who are either stigmatized or vulnerable because they have the same situation.
Marc:It gives them hope.
Marc:That's the inspirational authority we're talking about.
Marc:It happens involuntarily.
Guest:Yes, that's correct.
Guest:You know, there's a law about it, which is if you have people in a room and they each reveal their shadow, which is what they do in 12-step, higher forces come right into the room and you can feel it.
Marc:I have to agree with you.
Marc:It was great talking to you, Phil.
Guest:This was fantastic.
Guest:Can I come back tomorrow?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Maybe we should wait a week.
Marc:No, no, I want to see you tomorrow.
Marc:Think about what we talked about.
Guest:Alright.
Marc:Thanks, man.
Guest:Thanks.
Guest:All right, that's our show, folks.
Guest:Again, if you don't check back in with me before the holidays, be careful.
Marc:Have a good one.
Marc:Marry happy.
Marc:Don't hurt yourself or others, if possible.
Marc:Keep the emotional abuse to a minimum, if you could.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for any WTFPod needs you may have.
Marc:Get some merch, kick in a few shekels, get on the mailing list.
Marc:I do do an email blast every Sunday.
Marc:What else?
Marc:Get the app, upgrade to the premium app, and...
Marc:Stream all the episodes of WTF.
Marc:Enjoy.
Marc:Try to enjoy your life.
Marc:I'm pretty sure it's the only one we have.
Marc:Wow, we're getting heavy.
Marc:I think Def Blackcat is around, but he sort of abandoned me because the feeding schedule has been disrupted.
Marc:I need to go work today.
Marc:Today, who am I working with today?
Marc:I'll toss out a name.
Marc:Who am I working with today on Marin?
Marc:Not only Judd Hirsch and Sally Coleman, but David Cross.
Marc:Just keep that between us, all right?
Guest:Boomer lives!