Episode 55 - Rob Delaney / Dr. Steve

Episode 55 • Released March 14, 2010 • Speakers detected

00:00:00Guest 3:Lock the gates!

00:00:07Guest 4:Are we doing this?

00:00:08Guest 4:Really?

00:00:08Guest 4:Wait for it.

00:00:09Guest 4:Are we doing this?

00:00:10Guest 4:Wait for it.

00:00:12Guest 4:Pow!

00:00:12Guest 4:What the fuck?

00:00:14Guest 4:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?

00:00:16Guest 4:What's wrong with me?

00:00:17Guest 4:It's time for WTF!

00:00:19Guest 4:What the fuck?

00:00:20Guest 4:With Mark Maron.

00:00:24Marc:okay let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears whatever the fuck you want to call yourselves it's it's time to talk about some sober business it's time to get a little real i know i do that anyways but i'm going to do it even more today because of the amount of emails i get around the issue of addiction and drinking and sobriety because i guess i put it into some of your heads

00:00:50Marc:That that I am I'm sober and I used to be pretty fucked up and it was no easy task to get sober.

00:00:58Marc:It took a long time to get sober, given the fact that I am a horrendously obsessive, compulsive, addictive type of guy.

00:01:07Marc:I mean, maybe not horrendously, but I definitely I definitely have it enough to where it has become an issue in a lot of different areas of my life.

00:01:12Marc:I mean, look at me now.

00:01:14Marc:I just I think I've had three nicotine lozenges.

00:01:16Marc:I've drank a double espresso espresso.

00:01:19Marc:Sorry, espresso for all of you correctors out there.

00:01:23Marc:And now I'm drinking regular coffee.

00:01:26Marc:And I've just had my oatmeal because, of course, that will erase all the other bad things.

00:01:29Marc:I've always had that type of thinking, even back when I did a lot of smoking of the cigarettes, a lot of smoking of the pot, a lot of doing of the drugs, the cocaine, the the booze.

00:01:39Marc:I would wake up the next day and think like, well, all I need probably is a nice glass of juice, maybe some wheatgrass, a few vitamins, and my body will just resurrect itself.

00:01:50Marc:I wish that they would come up with a pill where you can just take it and it would rebuild all of the organ damage you've done to yourself over your lifetime and make everything clean and perfect again.

00:02:00Marc:Though they don't have that, I'm not sure that I really want that because God knows if they had that, who knows what we would be doing with ourselves.

00:02:07Marc:Well, the issue here is I'm going to have Rob Delaney in here in a few minutes.

00:02:12Marc:He's a comic who has a fairly spectacular story.

00:02:16Marc:of hitting bottom, as they call it in the sobriety game, where something happens in your life that is just so devastating, ridiculous, and so damaging.

00:02:27Marc:Sometimes it's not that bad, but nonetheless, it gives you that moment of clarity where you realize, holy shit, I can't do this anymore.

00:02:35Marc:I have to do whatever is necessary to not do this anymore.

00:02:38Marc:Now, listen to me.

00:02:39Marc:I certainly am not judging anybody who does drugs and alcohol.

00:02:43Marc:I love them.

00:02:44Marc:I loved them from when I was a little kid.

00:02:47Marc:Even before I did them, all I wanted to be was a drug addict.

00:02:51Marc:I looked up to drug addicts.

00:02:52Marc:They were my heroes.

00:02:53Marc:If I really thought about the heroes that I had as a young man, I mean, beginning with Keith Richards, with William Burroughs, with Lenny Bruce, with Richard Pryor, you know, Bukowski, reading Bukowski, any of the beatniks, all of them, all of them had one thing in common.

00:03:12Marc:They were all out of their fucking minds on drugs.

00:03:14Marc:And for some reason, I thought that was great.

00:03:16Marc:I thought cigarettes were great.

00:03:17Marc:When I was like 10 years old, all I wanted to do was smoke cigarettes, which is honestly the stupidest addiction in the fucking world.

00:03:25Marc:If I wish I had... The one thing, I don't have many regrets because I've worked through a lot of them.

00:03:29Marc:I got a few, but there's really nothing you can do about it but accept them after a certain point.

00:03:33Marc:I mean, you're going to fuck your life up.

00:03:34Marc:I mean, that's what human beings do.

00:03:35Marc:We're here to make a mess and then reckon with that mess and see if we can stand on top of that pile of shit and say...

00:03:41Marc:Yeah, I'm okay with this.

00:03:43Marc:I did the best I could.

00:03:44Marc:I made some mistakes, but this is my pile of shit.

00:03:46Marc:If you don't mind, I'm going to build a house out of it.

00:03:48Marc:I'm going to build a house out of the rubble of my pile of shit, live in it, and proudly decorate it on the holidays.

00:03:55Marc:If you can do that, then you've succeeded.

00:03:56Marc:But there's no way around hurting yourself, hurting other people, causing a great deal of damage.

00:04:01Marc:Unless you live a protected, insulated life and you don't take any risks at all.

00:04:06Marc:It's just part of the game of being a person.

00:04:09Marc:The real trick to it is acknowledging your mistakes, taking some responsibility, apologizing where necessary.

00:04:14Marc:And when you're too proud to do that, you know, just live with the psychological cancer that that creates.

00:04:20Marc:And good luck with that, by the way.

00:04:21Marc:I mean, I have very little regret, but I mean, I wished I had listened to those grownups who had said to me, whatever you do, just don't fucking smoke cigarettes.

00:04:30Marc:Because here I thought when I was a kid, and this is part of the addictive personality, mine specifically, which just heard that as like, don't do this because I say you shouldn't.

00:04:39Marc:And in my brain, like, well, fuck you.

00:04:41Marc:I'm going to do it anyways.

00:04:43Marc:But if you live long enough to realize how stupid cigarettes are.

00:04:47Marc:You realize that those people were not probably telling you to do it because they were condescending or thought they knew better in a way that wasn't based in experience.

00:04:55Marc:It's just that cigarettes, unlike a lot of drugs, are so easily available, readily available to us when we were kids.

00:05:03Marc:I used to buy them on my way to high school because we could drive when we were 15 in New Mexico.

00:05:07Marc:And I remember getting them for 60 cents a pack at the Hess station and going to school.

00:05:11Marc:And I remember trying to figure out what brand I wanted to smoke.

00:05:15Marc:I'd read an interview with Keith Richards who said he liked Marlboro's and sometimes he smoked Marlboro menthols.

00:05:19Marc:And at that time they weren't that easy to find.

00:05:21Marc:So I would, I literally would buy a pack of Marlboro, a pack of Marlboro menthols, a pack of Winston's, you know, just trying to figure out Camel filters when they had the original package before there was even such a thing as light cigarettes.

00:05:32Marc:I was just figuring out which brand fit me.

00:05:34Marc:And I'll tell you, I've been paying for that addiction ever since.

00:05:37Marc:That one is a tough nut to crack.

00:05:39Marc:I'm still strung out on nicotine and it's useless.

00:05:41Marc:Most addictions after a certain point, certainly cigarettes, they're not even fun anymore.

00:05:46Marc:You just do it to feel better, to feel real or regular, not even real, just to feel normal, just to get well, as they say in the addiction game.

00:05:56Marc:As I've always said, again, I'm not judging, and I've said this on stage, I feel bad for people who have never been addicted to anything because they don't know what it's like to really want something and get it again and again and again and again until they're sick and have to stop.

00:06:11Marc:That's passion.

00:06:12Marc:I didn't quit drinking and doing drugs because I didn't enjoy them.

00:06:16Marc:I quit because I couldn't handle the commitment.

00:06:18Marc:Now, I'm not going to talk too much about details because I think I might get into that with Rob, share some war stories, get to the bottom of it.

00:06:25Marc:But a lot of you people are asking how I stopped and, you know, what is it like to be stopped?

00:06:30Marc:Well, you hear how nuts I am.

00:06:31Marc:I wouldn't say that I'm a pillar of sober thinking, but I do know that I am physically sober and I'm mentally more sober than I ever have been.

00:06:38Marc:And how did I do it?

00:06:40Marc:I've hit several bottoms in my life.

00:06:43Marc:uh when i was younger i was the kind of kid uh i'd hang out with a bunch of dudes that would drink beer i didn't like beer so i would shoot jack daniels get they'd get a six pack of beer each i'd get a half pound of jack daniels and i'd be the guy throwing up in the car i'd be the guy that they'd get to the party and they'd have to put on the lawn next door i'd be the guy where that they'd have to drive home because someone walked into a crowded party and said there's a guy dead on the lawn next door

00:07:08Marc:And, you know, kind of wake up half drunk, surrounded by strangers with concerned faces, some laughing.

00:07:14Marc:That was who I was.

00:07:15Marc:I was a puker.

00:07:17Marc:Yeah, not not a fun guy to hang out with.

00:07:19Marc:And then as I get older, I start to really assess, you know, what that what why was I that guy?

00:07:24Marc:And then there's part of it that makes me think that part of my addiction or part of my behavior was, you know, I like the attention.

00:07:30Marc:Clearly, I chose the profession I did because that's some element of it.

00:07:34Marc:But but nonetheless, it spiraled out of control after a certain point.

00:07:38Marc:You know, I was not that big of a blackout drinker, but I was a regular daily pot smoker.

00:07:43Marc:I used to walk around with a one hitter and I duck into phone booths, you know, and just all day long puff away at that.

00:07:48Marc:Just to stay level, I used to use a lot of cocaine because it made me feel really, really good for like two hours.

00:07:57Marc:And then it made me feel really, really bad for the rest of the night and probably two or three days after.

00:08:04Marc:Nothing like listening to your heartbeat and waiting for it to explode at the end of a coke bender.

00:08:08Marc:And then drinking, always with the drinking.

00:08:11Marc:Look, I've got 10 years and changed sober now.

00:08:15Marc:And the first time I got sober was 1988.

00:08:17Marc:So it took me about 22 years to get the 10 I have because I couldn't lock in.

00:08:22Marc:Look, to be quite honest with you, anybody can stop drinking.

00:08:25Marc:Anybody can stop using drugs for a little while.

00:08:29Marc:If you want to commit to a sober mindset, you're going to have to figure out what that is.

00:08:33Marc:You're going to have to figure out how to process it.

00:08:35Marc:And I'm not going to, I know that in the secret society that I am in,

00:08:40Marc:You're not allowed to really promote it.

00:08:42Marc:But I'll tell you quite honestly, I got a lot of help from AA and I got a lot of help from those meetings.

00:08:47Marc:And I know a lot of you who know that you have drug problems and know that you have alcohol problems are like, oh, fuck that.

00:08:52Marc:It's a cult.

00:08:53Marc:Is it?

00:08:54Marc:I don't know.

00:08:54Marc:You don't really have to pay any money.

00:08:56Marc:You don't have to stay.

00:08:57Marc:You don't have to do anything, really, but try not to drink.

00:09:00Marc:So the cult thing.

00:09:01Marc:All right.

00:09:02Marc:And then I've heard other people go, they brainwash you.

00:09:04Marc:Yeah, I've heard that.

00:09:05Marc:But, you know, maybe your brain needs washing.

00:09:07Marc:Maybe it does.

00:09:08Marc:You know, why let it be washed by everything else to make you buy shit or believe that defending drugs and alcohol is is a way of life?

00:09:14Marc:Whereas you try the other way.

00:09:16Marc:It just really depends on how much you want to try.

00:09:17Marc:Well, what about the God thing?

00:09:19Marc:Well, you know what?

00:09:20Marc:Don't believe in God.

00:09:21Marc:I don't.

00:09:22Marc:You don't have to.

00:09:23Marc:It's all there.

00:09:24Marc:There's help if you want it.

00:09:25Marc:I'm just putting that out there as one option because I know that option happens to work for me because I'm crazy.

00:09:32Marc:I have bugs in my head that lock on to things that I get obsessed with and hold on to them like little insect pit bulls until I satisfy what they want.

00:09:43Marc:And the bottom line with addiction, you're never going to get it.

00:09:46Marc:You're never going to scratch that itch for very long.

00:09:49Marc:And I'm telling you, addiction becomes a job.

00:09:52Marc:To wake up in the morning and wonder how you're going to feed that monkey on your back becomes a job.

00:09:57Marc:It doesn't matter what the monkey is.

00:09:59Marc:It really doesn't.

00:10:00Marc:Could be cigarettes.

00:10:00Marc:Could be coffee.

00:10:01Marc:Could be cocaine.

00:10:02Marc:Could be heroin.

00:10:03Marc:I hope not.

00:10:04Marc:Could be sex.

00:10:06Marc:Could be food.

00:10:07Marc:Could be a lot of things.

00:10:08Marc:But anything that the bugs are directing you to do.

00:10:12Marc:is probably something that you can't make a choice against.

00:10:15Marc:And that's really the big question for you folks out there.

00:10:18Marc:How fun is it?

00:10:20Marc:How much fun are you having?

00:10:22Marc:I fucking loved drugs.

00:10:24Marc:I remember years ago, I was working as a doorman at the comedy store.

00:10:27Marc:Out of my mind, psychotic from cocaine use.

00:10:30Marc:And I just remember a woman I knew from college came to visit me.

00:10:35Marc:from out of town.

00:10:36Marc:She came like she was a normal person.

00:10:38Marc:She come from Wisconsin, I believe.

00:10:42Marc:Gail was her name.

00:10:43Marc:And she was lovely.

00:10:44Marc:I still talk to her occasionally, but I've been out there and I was living the life and living in a house full of drug fiends.

00:10:49Marc:We were all, you know, doing blow all night long, thinking we knew the truth, having the big discussions, sweating, grinding our teeth, getting to the bottom of bullshit, talking about nothing for hours on end.

00:10:59Marc:But God, it was glorious.

00:11:02Marc:boy did we cover some ground hell yeah so i remember sitting there with gail the day she was gonna leave and i was like you know we're living life gail i mean like no one no one lives like we do like that was some fucking great you know like you know fuck the world man we're doing the big work here

00:11:24Marc:hunching over mirrors, chopping things with bank cards that represent empty bank accounts because of what we're about to put in our face.

00:11:35Marc:And she wrote me a letter a few weeks later.

00:11:38Marc:I don't remember the whole content of the letter.

00:11:42Marc:I probably have the thing somewhere.

00:11:45Marc:And she said, you know, Mark, you said that nobody lives like you guys.

00:11:49Marc:And I realized that

00:11:51Marc:No one really would want to.

00:11:53Marc:And it was one of those moments where I was like, huh?

00:11:57Marc:What?

00:11:58Marc:Wait a minute.

00:12:00Marc:But, yeah, I didn't fully get off for a long time.

00:12:03Marc:It just takes a certain amount of vigilance, folks.

00:12:05Marc:And certainly, you know, I can lead you in the right direction if you're really concerned about it.

00:12:09Marc:Because it is a mental disease in some respects.

00:12:12Marc:And it will take you down.

00:12:14Marc:So let's enjoy my conversation with Rob Delaney.

00:12:17Marc:Maybe this will be something helpful for you.

00:12:19Marc:Maybe it'll be exciting.

00:12:20Marc:You know, I've not really talked to the guy.

00:12:22Marc:He's a very quirky comic.

00:12:24Marc:And I know he has this story that I want to hear.

00:12:27Marc:So stay with it.

00:12:30Marc:God damn it.

00:12:31Marc:God damn it.

00:12:32Marc:I'm sorry, folks.

00:12:33Marc:I left my I left the fucking space heater on again.

00:12:37Marc:I'm cold.

00:12:38Marc:Is that I'm sorry.

00:12:39Marc:Won't happen again.

00:12:46Bye.

00:12:58Marc:So I've seen you around.

00:13:04Marc:I haven't seen you live in a long time.

00:13:07Marc:But you do post a lot of videos that are always, you're an odd man.

00:13:12Marc:I'm an odd guy.

00:13:13Marc:Yeah, you know, you're sort of, you look at you and you think like, hey, this is a pretty normal guy.

00:13:18Marc:And then all of a sudden you listen for a while and you're like, this isn't normal at all in any way.

00:13:24Guest 2:Yeah.

00:13:25Guest 2:Yeah.

00:13:25Guest 2:I guess that's kind of the thing, um, is that people look and they think, you know, somebody the other day was like, Oh, I expected, I came to your show and I thought it was going to be this, you know, athletic guy, you know, talking about, I don't know, uh, being sports.

00:13:40Guest 2:Yeah.

00:13:40Guest 2:Football team or whatever.

00:13:41Guest 2:And yeah, I'm kind of not, I mean, I, um, I think the main thing would be, I mean, I'm a generally happy person for the most part these days, but

00:13:50Marc:you know went through the cauldron of uh that car accident that you know you know about eight years ago where uh well i think we should you know i i don't think we should waste any time with that okay you know because it's the knowledge like in my mind if you have that thought like i i think i better stop then you probably better stop

00:14:11Guest 2:It's probably going to be a good idea.

00:14:13Guest 2:I would tend to agree.

00:14:14Marc:And, you know, we came into my kitchen.

00:14:16Marc:This is Rob Delaney, by the way.

00:14:18Marc:Hello.

00:14:19Marc:And I have this weird little religious pamphlet cover that I have hanging next to my refrigerator.

00:14:24Marc:It's just sort of a... It's a guy's face.

00:14:29Marc:He's got his hand on his chin.

00:14:30Marc:He looks despondent.

00:14:32Marc:And it just says on top, suicide.

00:14:34Marc:And on the bottom, no solution.

00:14:37Yeah.

00:14:37Marc:and and you know it just sits there by the refrigerator i think it's sort of campy it's sort of funny but nonetheless it is right where i will go in the morning and it is there not necessarily for a reason but uh but rob is one of the first people that walked into my kitchen and said wow that's that's really great yeah with it with a type of earnestness that uh that made me think uh holy shit somebody gets this yeah now you had a cathartic

00:15:01Marc:You had a baptism in a revelation.

00:15:06Guest 2:I did to a degree, yeah.

00:15:07Guest 2:This was eight years ago.

00:15:08Guest 2:It was eight years ago.

00:15:09Guest 2:Yeah, I was very lucky.

00:15:11Guest 2:It won't sound lucky at first, but yeah, I was in a blackout.

00:15:16Guest 2:How did the evening start?

00:15:18Guest 2:I was over at a friend of mine's house here in LA.

00:15:21Guest 2:Having a good time?

00:15:21Guest 2:Having a good time.

00:15:22Guest 2:A friend of mine that I went to NYU with and she was having a party and a keg party.

00:15:28Guest 2:Oh, a kegger.

00:15:29Guest 2:Yep.

00:15:31Guest 2:And it started out normal, you know, other normal people drinking normal amounts of alcohol.

00:15:35Guest 2:Just pumping on the keg and you had the first

00:15:37Marc:First, like, you know, someone get rid of the foam.

00:15:39Marc:The foamy one.

00:15:39Guest 2:Uh-huh.

00:15:40Guest 2:And then we tapped that, and then we tapped a second keg, or rather finished it.

00:15:44Guest 2:And so then we moved on to wine, and then we moved on to whatever else was around.

00:15:48Guest 2:And my final drink that I ever drank was I had a solo cup, you know, like a keg cup, and I had a bottle of vodka in one hand and a bottle of bourbon in the other, and I poured them both in up to the top, which if you drink, you know, that isn't a drink.

00:16:01Guest 2:It's just gross.

00:16:02Guest 2:Yeah.

00:16:02Guest 2:That's just, that is an indicator.

00:16:04Guest 2:Yeah, that's a red flag.

00:16:06Guest 2:And I drank that.

00:16:08Guest 2:And I drank that all the way down.

00:16:09Guest 2:And then I was like, hey, you know, that wasn't bad.

00:16:10Guest 2:So I made another one.

00:16:11Guest 2:And that's when I can remember my consciousness just stopping recording.

00:16:15Guest 2:I don't remember.

00:16:15Guest 2:It was you going, hey, this isn't so bad.

00:16:19Guest 2:And then the next thing I remember was being in the hospital surrounded by cops and doctors.

00:16:24Guest 2:But what I had done is I had been like, well, I'm going to sleep at my friend's house.

00:16:29Guest 2:And everybody had left.

00:16:30Guest 2:And I just went to sleep on her floor.

00:16:31Guest 2:and then apparently I got up in the middle of the night and was like... But before we go on, so you were that guy.

00:16:37Marc:See, now, even that decision in my mind, it's like, I can go ahead and sleep here.

00:16:42Marc:Yeah.

00:16:43Marc:Because when you don't get that fucked up and you're at the party and you see that guy...

00:16:47Guest 2:Everyone's sort of like, oh, yeah, okay.

00:16:50Guest 2:Yeah, I'm just going to catch him.

00:16:51Guest 2:Is here good?

00:16:52Guest 2:Yeah, yes.

00:16:53Guest 2:Where I'm already laying down.

00:16:55Guest 2:And so then I think people were like, well, we aren't going to move you because you're big.

00:17:00Guest 2:Yeah, so you went to sleep.

00:17:01Guest 2:Yeah, and then I got up.

00:17:03Guest 2:This was the first time that I know of that I had done this, but I got up, but still in a blackout.

00:17:07Guest 2:So I kind of like began my new day.

00:17:09Guest 2:And the first thing I decided to do was take a car, not my car,

00:17:13Marc:It was in the middle of the night?

00:17:14Guest 2:It was during the day?

00:17:14Guest 2:It was like four in the morning.

00:17:17Guest 2:Oh, the worst time to be that fucked up.

00:17:18Guest 2:Absolutely.

00:17:19Guest 2:So I got in a car and I drove it, not anywhere near that party or near where I lived at the time, and I drove it really fast into the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

00:17:31Guest 2:at the intersection of pico and genesee and uh it was yeah it was pretty cataclysmic car accident there was no one else involved except me thank goodness i didn't know that at the time i did have to ask the cops if i had killed anyone uh-huh and they told me that i had not and uh and yeah i i took out three parking meters two trees a light post and then the building and the car and you were in the building in in the building

00:17:56Marc:You drove into the building.

00:17:58Marc:Yeah, half in and half out.

00:17:59Marc:Now, you don't remember having any sort of anger or water problems at home.

00:18:05Marc:No, it had nothing to do with my electric bill.

00:18:08Guest 2:There was no momentary like, those fuckers.

00:18:11Guest 2:Water and power.

00:18:11Guest 2:Fuck them.

00:18:13Guest 2:I saw Chinatown.

00:18:14Guest 2:Yeah, exactly.

00:18:16Guest 2:So, no, I don't remember.

00:18:18Guest 2:And it could have been the kind of a thing where I just fell back asleep within my blackout and then drove into it.

00:18:23Guest 2:It could have been an aggravated...

00:18:24Guest 2:Fuck that building.

00:18:26Guest 2:I don't know.

00:18:27Guest 2:So how badly were you hurt?

00:18:29Guest 2:I broke both my arms.

00:18:32Guest 2:You can see there's a pretty big scar on this wrist where I kind of rebuilt it.

00:18:36Guest 2:This longer scar on my arm here, that's all titanium in there.

00:18:40Guest 2:This was very badly broken.

00:18:42Guest 2:Bionic.

00:18:42Guest 2:You're bionic.

00:18:43Guest 2:I'm slightly bionic.

00:18:45Guest 2:And my legs were not broken, but they were kind of torn open, my knees.

00:18:50Guest 2:So they had to sew them up like with hundreds of stitches and put me in leg stabilizer so I couldn't bend my knees.

00:18:56Guest 2:So although my legs were not broken and they recovered fairly quickly for the first few days afterwards, I was in things that did not allow me to bend my knees.

00:19:04Guest 2:which I should tell you is kind of the aha moment was me being wheeled around in a wheelchair in jail by the cops, and I couldn't use my arms.

00:19:14Marc:So you went to jail?

00:19:15Guest 2:Yeah, after the hospital, because they took me to the hospital in an ambulance and did what they needed to do to stabilize me.

00:19:21Guest 2:And then the cops said, can you mind if we take them now?

00:19:23Guest 2:And so they took me to jail.

00:19:24Marc:Were you like, wait, what happened?

00:19:26Marc:What happened?

00:19:26Guest 2:Oh, they told me, they said, you're extremely unbelievably drunk.

00:19:29Guest 2:They drew my blood and I, it was a 0.271, which if you know, 0.08 is illegal.

00:19:35Guest 2:So that's effectively three and a half times the legal limit.

00:19:38Guest 2:So yeah, they brought me to jail and to book me and all that.

00:19:42Guest 2:And when I was in jail, I was in the wheelchair and I couldn't use my arms on the wheels and I couldn't use my feet on the ground.

00:19:46Guest 2:So occasionally I would slide out of the wheelchair

00:19:49Guest 2:And my bloody hospital gown, which was covered in face blood, would come up over my dick and balls and asshole and show that to everybody in jail, which, you know, if you've been to jail, you know, you're not supposed to do that.

00:20:00Marc:That's sort of like a strip show.

00:20:01Guest 2:Yeah.

00:20:01Guest 2:They're like, yay, entertainment.

00:20:03Marc:Here we go.

00:20:04Marc:Shake it.

00:20:05Marc:Yep.

00:20:05Guest 2:and uh did that go anywhere for you uh that well that nothing happened you know nobody fucked my ass or anything but uh they did uh i guess they draw a line they're like you know i i want them to be able to fight a little well you know as a as a gentleman you know we're into the hunt and when it's that easy you don't want no one wanted to fuck you in jail believe it or not holy shit i know then that's when i knew i was like this is the problem and uh that's when you knew nobody will rape me

00:20:33Guest 2:But it's funny because it was right then that I was like, you know what?

00:20:38Guest 2:Like as they say, you know, with drinking and stuff, if you need to go there to stop, that's where you need to go.

00:20:43Guest 2:And for me, I'd been trying to quit for years before that.

00:20:46Guest 2:So you knew?

00:20:47Guest 2:Oh, yeah.

00:20:48Guest 2:Oh, yeah.

00:20:48Guest 2:I'd had lots of problems.

00:20:49Guest 2:Is it a family situation?

00:20:52Guest 2:It is, yes.

00:20:52Guest 2:Alcoholism, drug addiction, depression are pretty rampant.

00:20:58Guest 2:Good American family.

00:20:59Guest 2:Big time.

00:21:00Marc:I had a couple of experiences with that myself.

00:21:02Marc:Blackouts are very frightening, and I'd only had a couple, but there are some people that are regular blackout drinkers.

00:21:09Marc:The worst blackout that I had

00:21:11Marc:which I can't quite get out of my mind because the scariest thing about a blackout is that for however long it takes, maybe years, there are big chunks of time and actions that are really not within your memory.

00:21:24Marc:Oh, yeah.

00:21:25Marc:So you really have to rely on people to come up to you.

00:21:28Marc:The worst.

00:21:29Marc:Yeah, where they say, holy shit, man, are you okay?

00:21:33Marc:And you're like, what?

00:21:34Marc:And you don't want to ask because you might find something out terrible.

00:21:38Marc:Exactly.

00:21:39Marc:Well, what happened to me, I had cocained myself into a psychotic state.

00:21:46Marc:And by the time I left LA, I was pretty sure that there was a

00:21:50Marc:a universal conspiracy against me that that i was a chosen one i was hearing voices in my head uh and it was and and that would be an indicator of a problem to some people but for me i'm like they're trying to tell me something and i don't know if you've ever heard voices in your head but when you do it's it's never one it's always many and i spent a lot of time trying to get them to pick a fucking leader you know if somebody's got something to say

00:22:14Marc:Step to the front of the head.

00:22:16Marc:I'm awaiting direction.

00:22:17Guest 2:Get a union representative.

00:22:18Marc:That's right.

00:22:18Marc:So I get back home.

00:22:19Marc:I renew my passport because I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to go.

00:22:23Marc:Sure.

00:22:24Marc:And at that time, it was very important that I wore two pinky rings, one on each finger, each with a skull on them.

00:22:30Guest 2:Oh, God help you.

00:22:31Marc:Yeah, and if I didn't have a shirt that had a skull on it somewhere, I would be in horrendous mystical trouble.

00:22:38Marc:Oh, those are tough times.

00:22:39Marc:Yeah, and hats were important, too.

00:22:41Marc:I had several hats that were protecting me.

00:22:44Marc:That does make sense.

00:22:45Marc:Yeah, and a couple of things helped me at that time.

00:22:47Marc:I got cleaned up.

00:22:49Marc:I stayed clean for about a year, and actually Stevie Wonder helped me.

00:22:54Marc:And I believe the line in superstition is when you believe in things that you don't understand, you will suffer.

00:23:00Marc:And I really was like, there might be something to this.

00:23:03Marc:That and Tom McGuane, who is a writer, once said, if the mind is not a boomerang, if you throw it too far, it will not come back.

00:23:11Guest 7:I believe that.

00:23:12Marc:Yeah.

00:23:12Marc:So I didn't really get sober in the traditional sense, but I was hanging on to a couple of ideas that enabled me to get rid of the rings.

00:23:18Guest 2:It's, yeah, it's funny you say Stevie Wonder because I truly believe that he's like the finest expression of what a human being can be.

00:23:24Guest 2:And I've often thought that if we do make contact with aliens that Stevie Wonder is who we should have be our kind of emissary to just say like, this is what we're about, you know?

00:23:32Guest 2:They'll find out later we're not.

00:23:33Guest 2:But at first they'd be like, hey, we like you guys.

00:23:35Guest 2:Go tell them.

00:23:36Guest 2:They'll trust you.

00:23:37Guest 2:Yep.

00:23:37Marc:I'm not clear that he's not one of them.

00:23:40Marc:True.

00:23:40Marc:It could go either way.

00:23:42Marc:But the blackout experience I had, that was just horrible.

00:23:45Marc:I was at a show.

00:23:46Marc:I ran into this couple.

00:23:47Marc:There was a man and a woman.

00:23:50Marc:The only thing I could think of in my memory is that it was like Boris and Natasha, the cartoon.

00:23:56Marc:He seemed very runty and weird.

00:23:58Marc:And she, I think, had a scar on her face.

00:23:59Marc:They had cocaine.

00:24:01Marc:And we were doing cocaine in the bathroom, drinking.

00:24:04Marc:Sure.

00:24:04Marc:And then the last thing I remember is they took me to an apartment.

00:24:09Marc:And I don't really know what happened after that.

00:24:13Marc:I do know that the next day I was dispatched in a cab and I was coming to and my shirt was on backwards.

00:24:20Marc:Mm-hmm.

00:24:21Marc:And I was panicky.

00:24:22Marc:I'm like, does my ass hurt?

00:24:24Marc:Did something weird happen?

00:24:25Marc:What did they do to me?

00:24:26Marc:Was I okay?

00:24:28Marc:And then I get home and I was married to my first wife at the time.

00:24:31Marc:And they were freaked out because they didn't know where I was all night.

00:24:34Marc:And I got home and I was wasted and hungover.

00:24:37Marc:And she says, listen to this message.

00:24:40Marc:And I had called and left her a message that said, I'll be home as soon as I can get out of this dream.

00:24:47Marc:Oh, Jesus Christ.

00:24:51Guest 2:Wow.

00:24:52Guest 2:That is the membrane between dream and reality had been perforated.

00:24:56Guest 2:Exactly.

00:24:57Marc:And then the other thing, the other horrible thing I did that time, which isn't horrible in relation to some stories, is that I remember one time I got out of bed wasted to pee.

00:25:07Marc:And you know, when you're wasted, you're not going to stand to pee.

00:25:09Marc:Why would you?

00:25:09Marc:Yeah.

00:25:09Marc:So like the bathroom was off the bedroom and there was a chair with the footstool in the bedroom.

00:25:15Marc:And apparently I just sat down on the footstool and

00:25:17Marc:and just started pissing on the floor.

00:25:20Marc:Oh, that's superb.

00:25:20Marc:And my wife woke up and goes, what are you doing?

00:25:23Marc:And for about three seconds, I thought I was completely justified.

00:25:27Guest 2:What are you doing?

00:25:28Guest 2:Why are you asking a man taking an honest piss?

00:25:32Guest 2:That's funny because one of the most terrifying things was after the accident, and the cops, I would have stayed in jail for days, but they were like, we can't take care of you here, so we're going to take you home, but here, come back on this date to court, and then you can come back to jail for a long time.

00:25:46Guest 2:So so the next day I kind of went back to my apartment.

00:25:49Guest 2:They took me back.

00:25:50Guest 2:They folded me in half and put me in a cruiser and drove me home.

00:25:53Guest 2:And I remember lying on my bed for a few hours and then I got up to piss and my urine was neon blue.

00:26:00Guest 2:And that was terrifying to me because my urine is never neon blue.

00:26:05Guest 2:And so I started to cry and I went to blow my nose.

00:26:08Guest 2:And a bunch of bits of glass came out, which I later found out were windshield chunks.

00:26:14Guest 2:So then I started to sweat and I took off my hospital gown and there were stickers all over my body.

00:26:19Guest 2:But they were like heart monitor anchor things that I had no idea.

00:26:23Guest 2:And I'm like peeling them off.

00:26:24Guest 2:It took me, I would find them like a week later.

00:26:26Guest 2:I still found a couple.

00:26:27Guest 2:But I found out later from reading the hospital intake thing that the blue stuff, they had infused my bloodstream with something called methylene blue, which is what they flood you with to see if you're hemorrhaging internally.

00:26:39Guest 2:And I hadn't been, but they didn't tell me that.

00:26:41Guest 2:They weren't like, just FYI, your urine will be the color of Gatorade for the next five peas.

00:26:47Guest 2:And so that was the worst hangover of my life was that day.

00:26:52Marc:Peeing blue, covered with stickers, blowing glass out of your nose.

00:26:56Yeah.

00:26:56Marc:So, okay, so there you are.

00:26:57Marc:Yeah.

00:26:59Marc:And you decide you're going to put, you don't have a girlfriend at the time.

00:27:02Guest 2:Oh, no.

00:27:02Guest 2:I sort of did.

00:27:03Guest 2:I had like a newish girlfriend, but I evaporated from her life and months later got in touch with her and was like, just so you know, I'm alive.

00:27:11Guest 2:And she was like, well, not to me, you're not anymore.

00:27:13Guest 2:Oh, right.

00:27:14Guest 2:And she was a cute little German architect.

00:27:17Guest 2:Oh, you got yourself a normal one.

00:27:19Guest 2:Yeah.

00:27:19Marc:Like a person with a job and stuff.

00:27:21Guest 2:Mm-hmm.

00:27:21Guest 2:Oh, shit.

00:27:22Guest 2:But that was that.

00:27:23Guest 2:And so, yeah, then basically I was sentenced.

00:27:27Guest 2:They said they said I could go to jail for X amount of time or I could go to rehab and a sober living halfway house for four and a half months.

00:27:36Guest 2:I picked that because I didn't want to go to jail.

00:27:38Guest 2:And I genuinely at the time was like, I've had enough and I really, really want to get better and not do this anymore.

00:27:44Guest 2:And I don't know quite how to do that.

00:27:47Guest 2:So I said, I definitely threw myself at their mercy and said, you know.

00:27:50Guest 2:You were what they call willing.

00:27:52Guest 2:I was willing.

00:27:53Guest 2:And I'm not like a wholesale different person from before.

00:27:57Marc:Well, yeah, that's all the big fear is that what you end up doing once you get through the tunnel of insanity that is being newly sober is you figure out whatever way you're getting sober is that you have to change your way of thinking.

00:28:12Marc:Because I don't know if people...

00:28:14Marc:People who don't have the bug, who don't have the hungry animal inside of them that is never sated, never fed, that demands that you feed it with the idea that you're going to feel whole and better.

00:28:30Marc:I mean, there's just no end to that.

00:28:32Marc:And if you've never had the feeling where your brain locks in on something so hard, whether it's drugs or food or gambling, there is a trigger or sex.

00:28:42Marc:There's a trigger within people that have

00:28:44Marc:Addiction where it's like, you know, before you get it, all you can think about is getting it.

00:28:50Marc:And your brain then locks in on the obsession.

00:28:53Marc:All right.

00:28:53Marc:And then once you get a taste of whatever it is, that fucking animal will not stop eating.

00:28:59Marc:It is true.

00:29:00Marc:It's baffling.

00:29:02Marc:And you can't explain it to somebody that doesn't have it.

00:29:05Marc:Yeah.

00:29:06Guest 2:But a lot of people have it.

00:29:08Guest 2:I can think of a few works of art that do effectively communicate it kind of well.

00:29:13Guest 2:I think, honest to God, and it's going to sound cheesy, but the film Trainspotting, I think, has elements of it that show the horror of it.

00:29:21Guest 2:That movie, Requiem for a Dream, I think has, just when it gets really dark, addresses it.

00:29:26Guest 2:One of the best ones, and I feel like such a dork for saying this, but in the Lord of the Rings movie, when the Gollum thing splits into two pieces and argues with itself, and one of them is trying to rip it apart...

00:29:37Guest 2:that have struck home for me because you really do feel like i felt like i had a physical alive monster with a voice and feelings and all that shit that lived like my rib cage was like a jail cell and it was like shaking rattling at the bars just saying give me give me give me and it's maddening you know and and that is what it feels like but i tell you when you get that first hit or whatever

00:29:58Guest 2:Well, it's like, honestly, that would have felt like, and I try to, and I don't feel guilty now if I feel like, oh, I'd like to be really high right now or whatever.

00:30:05Guest 2:I don't feel bad about that.

00:30:06Guest 2:I just kind of let that thought go.

00:30:07Guest 2:But it feels like a chemical equation is like being completed.

00:30:10Guest 2:Like I'm, you know, I'm a percentage of what I could be, but add drugs or alcohol.

00:30:14Guest 2:Now I'm 100% and let's fucking roll.

00:30:17Guest 2:Yeah.

00:30:17Guest 2:Like introduce it.

00:30:18Guest 2:And then I'm like, here I am.

00:30:19Guest 2:I'm not me until you put drugs or alcohol into me.

00:30:22Guest 2:Right.

00:30:22Marc:Well, I think a lot of what I felt when I used was that it made me excited.

00:30:28Marc:It turned off the I'm an idiot or I'm a fuck or I don't want to go out or I want to do this.

00:30:34Marc:It was actually relaxing.

00:30:36Marc:I did a lot of coke and it would actually have a calming effect on me to some degree.

00:30:40Marc:I'm already intense.

00:30:41Marc:So what I started to realize, and this is with depression as well,

00:30:46Marc:Is that at some point you're going to have to figure out, look, alcoholism, addiction is a disease that has a lot of effects.

00:30:53Marc:And if you feel like you have that, I found that it's best to just look at that as its own sickness.

00:30:58Marc:And some of the side effects of that are some of the symptoms are depression, self-centeredness, complete lack of empathy or too much empathy.

00:31:09Marc:Basically, anything in your personality that drives you to say, I got to get high.

00:31:13Marc:I got to eat.

00:31:15Marc:I got to go lose all my money.

00:31:16Marc:I got to go fuck everything.

00:31:18Marc:Anything where the voice inside of you that says the only way I can feel better is by doing that.

00:31:26Marc:Introduce yourself to your sickness because that's your guy.

00:31:28Guest 2:You were talking about depression.

00:31:30Guest 2:I've dealt with depression and it became very serious after I stopped drinking and doing drugs.

00:31:36Guest 2:About a year into sobriety, I had my first experience with super unipolar suicidal depression.

00:31:42Guest 2:Unipolar?

00:31:43Guest 2:What the fuck

00:31:43Guest 2:Well, bipolar would be like manic depression.

00:31:46Guest 2:Oh, there's another side to it.

00:31:48Guest 2:There was no side.

00:31:49Guest 2:There was just one, yeah.

00:31:50Marc:So do you even call it a polar if it's only one side?

00:31:53Guest 2:Can't you say it's like monolithic?

00:31:55Guest 2:Yeah, why not?

00:31:56Guest 2:Yeah, it is.

00:31:57Guest 2:It's quite monolithic.

00:31:58Guest 2:Is unipolar something you made up?

00:32:00Guest 2:It isn't.

00:32:00Guest 2:No, actually.

00:32:01Guest 2:I would never try to foist a name on a thing that I don't understand.

00:32:05Guest 2:So that's interesting.

00:32:06Marc:So unipolar is the... It's a real word, yeah.

00:32:08Marc:Right, but it's not bipolar.

00:32:09Marc:Not bipolar.

00:32:10Marc:But if it's unipolar, I guess the idea that there's another pole is to provide some hope.

00:32:15Guest 2:Supposedly, right?

00:32:17Guest 2:Oh, my God.

00:32:17Guest 2:Yeah, when you're unipolar, you're like, please let me be bipolar.

00:32:20Guest 2:Yeah, yeah.

00:32:21Guest 2:And you kill for another pole.

00:32:22Guest 5:Another pole except for the one that I want to hang myself from.

00:32:25Guest 2:Exactly.

00:32:26Guest 5:Where's the one I want to swing from?

00:32:28Guest 2:So that was my experience, you know, and those things can go hand in hand.

00:32:32Guest 2:But, yeah, I found that even though I was going to therapy, you know, talk therapy, I was exercising.

00:32:37Guest 2:I had started to get a job.

00:32:39Guest 2:I was just really trying to truly be responsible.

00:32:42Guest 2:But it just, like, the bottom fell out, and I very much wanted to die and, you know, fantasized exclusively about suicide.

00:32:50Guest 2:And so...

00:32:51Guest 2:people who cared about me said hey you should you know maybe try medication and I thought no I would never do that only you know a weakling would do that and you know you fix it you can get out of it yourself you know I still have a little of that pride yeah and I understand it you know and but the thing is is that I thought to myself what I tried to do is like take myself out of myself and I'd be like like if you for example Mark if you were like hey Rob I'm feeling xyz and I'd like to blow my brains out I would do anything within my power to help you you know what I mean whereas I wouldn't do that for myself which is crazy

00:33:19Guest 2:So I really tried to think of myself like, all right, well, don't be you.

00:33:23Guest 2:So I tried to be as objective as possible.

00:33:25Guest 2:And I tried to understand that the things that my brain were telling me were crazy.

00:33:28Guest 2:And so I did get on medication.

00:33:32Guest 2:And the fact of the matter is, is it made me able to feel every emotion rather than just one nightmare, blow your brains out one.

00:33:39Guest 2:Now I can still feel sad or upset, but I can also get happy, proud.

00:33:42Guest 2:horny hungry oh yeah that's one thing that I should those are the other poles yeah those are the other poles the horny pole and but the thing is is I think people might not understand is that you know real super clinical depression isn't just like a mood it's like a feeling like your penis shuts off I mean I didn't use it for a month and before I was like what's the problem whereas I like to jerk off a lot or fuck anything that I could at that time

00:34:04Guest 2:Oh, really?

00:34:05Guest 2:Just said, nope?

00:34:06Guest 2:Yeah.

00:34:08Guest 2:Like a beautiful woman could be like, what do you think of these?

00:34:11Guest 2:And these are her naked breasts.

00:34:12Guest 2:She's jamming her face.

00:34:13Guest 2:I'd be like, get them on my face.

00:34:14Guest 2:Your dick just goes, nah.

00:34:16Guest 2:What's the point?

00:34:17Guest 2:Didn't eat at all.

00:34:19Guest 2:Had diarrhea all the time and couldn't sleep at all.

00:34:22Guest 2:And so the physical symptoms were bananas.

00:34:25Guest 2:Holy shit.

00:34:26Guest 2:uh so but yeah but yeah taking the medication made me like if you for example i mean since then i've had jobs you know like a great big corporate jobs you know relationships been physically healthy and like you'd be like hey rob i could hire him to do this thing or accomplish this task or talk to him in a cogent fashion about an issue right so the thing is opposed to say we could hire him to not fuck anything and stay up all night we could not eat yeah put in he could fill that corner with diarrhea and tears you know

00:34:56Guest 2:and so just a puddle of rob yep and so but anyway so i did that and then it made everything it literally swear to god made life livable like i said not magic but just like a regular dude putting one foot in front of the other and being like of use to the world well it's good that you got help you know because i i talk about suicidal ruminations in my act because i come from depression and i and i and i have not had them lately yeah but again a lot of mine tends to be

00:35:20Marc:Like, anxiety-related.

00:35:22Marc:Like, literally, I'd get so overwhelmed.

00:35:25Marc:Like, I used to say, you know, I think about suicide a lot, but it's not because I want to kill myself.

00:35:28Marc:I just find it relaxing to know that I can if I have to.

00:35:31Guest 2:Yeah, I know.

00:35:32Guest 2:And that doesn't sound crazy to me.

00:35:33Guest 2:I mean, I remember when I was in the halfway house, a kid slit his wrists.

00:35:36Guest 2:He didn't die, but we had to take him to the hospital.

00:35:38Guest 2:They had me go with him because I was like, I'd been there for a little while, and I was kind of his big brother.

00:35:41Guest 2:And I remember being in the emergency room with people in the middle of the night in L.A., so people coming in with crazy gunshots and everything, and just being like, ugh...

00:35:49Guest 2:This is what I feel like inside, so it was like equilibrium.

00:35:53Guest 2:It was like a normal person slipping into the Dead Sea for a floaty bath.

00:35:57Marc:Well, I think if anything, I think that that pride and that being stuck in your own head about it or being ashamed,

00:36:04Marc:about any of this stuff, not so much about the drinking, because usually by the time you have a drinking problem, if you're not a shut-in, most of the people around you have had enough of you and trying to help you.

00:36:16Marc:But with depression, it's a little different because someone once told me that you can't solve your own problems if your head is fucked up.

00:36:24Marc:You have to, at some point, have to listen to somebody assess your situation, because how are you going to fix a machine with a broken machine?

00:36:32Guest 2:Yeah, it's kind of like how they say when the masks come down in an airplane, put your mask on first before you put it on your kid.

00:36:38Guest 2:If you don't get your shit together, you're not going to be able to do anything for yourself or anyone.

00:36:43Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:36:44Marc:I think I've got some of my shit together.

00:36:46Marc:But I tried, like, when I was on medication, I did it...

00:36:49Marc:I think I have a little OCD too.

00:36:51Marc:A little obsessive compulsive disorder.

00:36:52Marc:But I really can honestly say that after 10 years of sobriety and after going through a miserable divorce, that mentally I've never felt better.

00:37:00Guest 2:Great.

00:37:01Marc:And I don't know what to attribute it to.

00:37:02Marc:My dad cajoled me into doing vitamins.

00:37:05Marc:And there's part of me that does not want to give my recovery or sobriety any credit.

00:37:09Marc:It must be these fucking fish oil pills.

00:37:11Marc:Why didn't anyone tell me about that?

00:37:13Marc:Not the fact that I made it through all this shit.

00:37:15Marc:Yeah.

00:37:15Marc:through all these fears and all this pain, without taking a drink, without hurting myself too badly, and without killing myself.

00:37:24Guest 2:I saw you did some stand-up I watched recently, and I don't remember what show it was on, but you said when somebody comes to me and complains about being really depressed, I tell them, congratulations, that means you're sane.

00:37:36Guest 2:Yeah, yeah.

00:37:36Guest 2:And I truly agree with that, you know, and I think part of, you know, with your maturation process or whatever the human like life is going to kick your fucking face in and you're going to get depressed.

00:37:47Guest 2:You're going to get upset.

00:37:48Guest 2:You're going to get sad and see like that's OK.

00:37:50Guest 2:When you get to that, then you can kind of transcend it and be like, oh, I don't have to be miserable.

00:37:54Guest 2:You know, horrible things are happening everywhere all the time.

00:37:59Guest 2:Right.

00:37:59Guest 2:Yeah.

00:37:59Guest 2:And there's a statistical likelihood that I will die of stomach cancer or in a car accident.

00:38:03Guest 2:Let's enjoy ourselves, you know, while we've got it.

00:38:07Guest 2:Ah, that's so uplifting.

00:38:09Guest 2:You know, honest to God, though, I realized, as I said, I was like, this might not sound uplifting, but I believe that life is super hard.

00:38:15Guest 2:Once we achieve peace with that knowledge, then happiness can then be possible.

00:38:19Marc:i think i think that's true and there's a difference between saying life is super hard between between that and saying like what's the point oh yeah i mean that's a very fine line yeah being happy or having peace of mind is different than like i want to feel good now yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean yeah try to keep the dial on five so to speak rather than zero or ten you know well i sort of wanted to bring it around to this email because i didn't really know what to do with this email and uh

00:38:46Marc:i was gonna put it in an email show but i uh i didn't even know how to do it there and and i it may be too heavy for us to handle uh because i get a lot of emails from from people sharing their what the fuck moments i think what

00:39:01Marc:you're saying and what i've been trying to say on this on this show is that the kind of things that go on in our minds uh most of us most people in general are trying to fit in somewhere yeah they're trying to fit into their relationship they're trying to get a job they're trying to fit into their job they're trying to fit into their friendship circles and their schools and everything else

00:39:19Marc:So a lot of effort goes into doing what you think is necessary to fit in, to pass, to appear like you have your shit together in order to get what you want out of life, which means everything else that is spinning around your head is just up there like a bunch of fucking bugs gnawing at you around the clock.

00:39:39Marc:And sometimes when I talk about things, I get responses where people are like, oh, thank God you're out there because I thought I was going crazy.

00:39:46Marc:Yep.

00:39:46Marc:That's what life is, but this dialogue doesn't exist in life, which is why there's such an insensitivity outside of a cultural acknowledgement of depression or alcoholism or addiction is that most people, when you say something like that, I'm fucking depressed.

00:40:00Marc:I'm losing my mind.

00:40:01Marc:They're like, oh shit, really?

00:40:02Marc:I got to meet someone for lunch.

00:40:04Marc:I hope you, good luck.

00:40:07Marc:Good luck with that.

00:40:08Marc:But I mean, it's important to know that there's help for all this shit once you get past your pride and ask for it.

00:40:14Marc:So I get this email, and I don't want to bring the whole tone down, but it was sort of disturbing because it is one of these questions about Will.

00:40:21Marc:Hi there.

00:40:21Marc:I like your show and never thought about WTF moments before.

00:40:25Marc:Now I do.

00:40:26Marc:I had the most profound one I think a person can have recently.

00:40:30Marc:About a month ago, I decided to end my life.

00:40:32Marc:I am the owner of my body and brain, and the brain I have happens to be defective.

00:40:37Marc:I've struggled with depression, anxiety, addiction, and just straight-up self-loathing for many years now.

00:40:43Marc:The body I was given is fine.

00:40:45Marc:I am a 30-year-old woman with an attractive, healthy body.

00:40:48Marc:It's my brain that is broken.

00:40:50Marc:My ultimate WTF moment was waking up from an induced coma in the ICU still attached to a ventilator.

00:40:58Marc:what the fuck someone decided to step in and take my free will away what right did they have to revive me the last feeling i remember having after taking about 120 muscle relaxers and climbing into bed was peace for the first time in my life i felt peaceful someone decided to step in and take away my peace why does anyone have the right to take that away from me what the fuck

00:41:24Marc:When I read this, I was like, it's so sad because this is, in a way, and if this person is listening, it's hard for me to react only from my own experience, but this is someone who has justified that depression as being reasonable and then putting her will behind it, saying that it's up to me.

00:41:51Marc:Right.

00:41:52Marc:if I'm done with this.

00:41:54Marc:Whereas what we're saying is that in this particular solution, there has to be a solution worth, in this particular situation, there has to be a solution that is still worth looking for.

00:42:06Guest 2:Yeah, well, first of all, I would say I'm glad that that person did have their process interrupted, and I'm glad that they're still with us, presumably.

00:42:17Guest 2:And I think, well, just to address kind of the mechanics of it, I think the person might not have been thinking like, I'm not going to let them do this.

00:42:24Guest 2:They might not have known what have happened.

00:42:25Guest 2:I mean, any number of things could have happened.

00:42:27Guest 2:Sure.

00:42:28Guest 2:But I would say why I feel like and when I walked by that sign in your kitchen that said suicide is not a solution.

00:42:35Guest 2:You know, not to get too much into, you know, the ethereal or God or whatever, but like it in all likelihood, it probably doesn't wrap up with suicide because even from like a physics perspective with all the stuff going on, if you stop here, I'm of the belief you're going.

00:42:54Guest 2:You get you don't get to flush your problems away.

00:42:57Guest 2:You don't get to not deal with them.

00:42:58Guest 2:Really?

00:42:58Marc:That is my belief that you don't have any more definition than that.

00:43:02Guest 2:yeah i mean i think that when you if you have a backpack full of crap that you built up in your life things that you did and things that were done to you yeah uh the end of this life does not mean that that is over and i think that you're gonna get to deal with it on one plane or another i'm not saying heaven with dr god or anything like that you don't say that for yourself you're not just being cagey because no i'm not and i don't because fuck if i know what the fuck do you just think that probably

00:43:29Guest 2:Perhaps you're going to have to deal with it.

00:43:31Guest 2:That is my my thinking, you know, whether you're reincarnated or whatnot.

00:43:35Guest 2:I mean, you're going to have to it.

00:43:37Guest 2:I just can't.

00:43:38Guest 2:Why have you thought about this?

00:43:40Guest 2:Why have I thought about this?

00:43:41Marc:Because like this is something like I don't I wasn't brought up with God.

00:43:45Marc:OK.

00:43:45Marc:With any tangible sense of it.

00:43:47Marc:Yeah.

00:43:48Marc:It wasn't brought up with the fear of it or the need to believe in it.

00:43:54Marc:When I think about hell, you know, I think about it's completely a fictional construct to me.

00:43:58Marc:I totally agree.

00:43:58Marc:And I enjoy, you know, some of the pictorial representations of it.

00:44:03Marc:And the idea of it certainly is interesting poetically.

00:44:06Guest 7:Yeah.

00:44:06Marc:When I think about heaven, it seems, you know, that eventually that would have to get boring.

00:44:11Guest 7:Yeah.

00:44:11Marc:eternal life to me, I can't even wrap my brain around it.

00:44:15Marc:Neither can I. But if I get anywhere near what you're thinking, I think there's some sort of dissipation, some sort of frequency shift.

00:44:27Marc:Yeah.

00:44:27Marc:But I can't even wrap my brain around it, but you seem to think that there's karma somehow.

00:44:31Guest 2:I do.

00:44:31Guest 2:Yeah, karma, that's a good word for it.

00:44:33Guest 2:I think that you can deal with it.

00:44:37Guest 2:Here's my feeling, you can deal with it now or you can deal with it later with problems that you have.

00:44:41Marc:Yeah, but if you're going to deal with it later, you may not be in the same spiritual or physical manifestation of you.

00:44:47Marc:So, you know, that is possible.

00:44:52Guest 2:I certainly allow for that possibility.

00:44:53Guest 2:And I can't I wish I could sort of verbalize exactly how I feel or why I feel the way that I do.

00:45:00Guest 2:But I will just say that my feeling when I was in the throes of suicidal depression was like I didn't pray for myself, but I did sort of ask for I was like, this is so fucking horrible that if I get better from this, I really hope I get the opportunity to help other people through this.

00:45:18Guest 2:You know what I mean?

00:45:19Guest 2:Because I think there's a selfishness.

00:45:20Guest 2:Not like a disgusting, evil-based selfishness that comes with suicidal thoughts and stuff, but there's a selfishness that is egotism, and you think, my problems are so much worse and so much, it's like egotism in reverse, so to speak.

00:45:32Guest 2:And you think that you're so special and important and your problems are so unique that you're among the 1,000% of people who should do this.

00:45:40Guest 2:and that i don't buy that i don't think anybody's special good or special bad and i think we're sort of all in it together and i think that if i believe that if you were to off yourself you would have to deal with all the same things that made you want to off yourself before yeah i don't you know i i i can certainly hear that and that may or may not be true but i think what breaks my heart about about this email is

00:46:05Marc:It's just that coming from someone, a father who constantly expressed the desire to kill himself when he was in depressive states.

00:46:14Marc:He's been much better lately.

00:46:16Marc:It becomes very draining on your loved ones when you're like that.

00:46:20Marc:Depression is paralyzing to you, but also it creates a tremendous amount of frustration and sadness and hopelessness with the people that do love you.

00:46:30Marc:And I guess for me, when I've been...

00:46:34Marc:at my most depressed, and when this seems the most reasonable, the saddest thing about it is that realization that even in her letter here, she can see that she's an attractive person, that she's a young person, and that the thing that you can't see is that somehow or another, this bullshit piece, this organ in our heads, this brain, is generating this thing that is justifying ending the existence of your body.

00:47:01Marc:And when you're in that depression, you cannot escape that.

00:47:06Marc:Even when she's completely capable of doing things, but when you're in a depressed head, a movie's not going to work.

00:47:15Marc:The idea that art and life is worth living for, the bird that flew up, any of those things.

00:47:21Marc:It's not going to be a negative thing, but it's not going to get through.

00:47:25Marc:Right.

00:47:26Marc:And, you know, the only hope that that people like this have is to keep trying to find treatment that will work for them.

00:47:32Guest 2:And the thing is, is I can relate to what that person is saying.

00:47:35Guest 2:And that's why you kind of have to realize, like, that's why it's useful to try and step out of yourself.

00:47:39Guest 2:And that's why it's important to talk to other people, even people as flawed and dangerous as you and I, to try to get ideas because.

00:47:45Marc:your thought process is the thing that's killing you you know what i mean so you've really that's the problem you know the words coming out of your mouth the problem the thoughts dancing around your head it's just fucking brain and she's clear on that you know i think that that's one of the reasons i got into comedy was that when i was a kid i've always been a heavy-hearted person until i got callous yeah and that helped me a great deal um

00:48:09Guest 2:but comedy comedians always helped me yeah they always helped me yeah like you know if i was sad you know if i could sit down watch some guy with some jokes oh yeah it was like thank god there's an alchemy in comedy where you're taking because obviously you know the recipe of comedy of tragedy plus time but the fact of the matter is is comedians good comedians who are doing good stuff take stuff that's painful and turn it into good stuff and that's got that that's the process we all go through individually a million times a day

00:48:34Guest 2:to deal with stuff and understand stuff so i'm fucking major proselytizer for the church of comedy comedy helps people i didn't start doing it seriously until after i got sober and now it's all i do and it's the fucking best and it's it's treatment you know i mean it helps people yep yep were you what kind of comedy like you're you're an oddball

00:48:54Guest 2:yeah i'm a weird guy yeah yeah um like you like i i like sometimes i watch some of your videos i'm like i don't i don't even know what to do with this guy yeah well i mean i can i mean like i love i did the improv the other night and i love doing the big classic clubs and all that stuff i mean i i you know know what to deliver there to make people happy and make myself happy but uh

00:49:17Guest 2:yeah i mean my comedy now is getting to where i am able to get more honest and tell the truth more about myself and about my feelings i mean a lot of my stuff now is like virulent uh anti-homophobia anti-misogyny and uh i hope i didn't just make that noise and uh

00:49:35Guest 2:you know getting getting realer you know i mean i love like you're somebody for example who uh you know your kind of comedic journey or whatever is uh where you are you know artillery-esque with your feelings and ideas and stuff but the fact of the matter is is whether you like it or not is they come through a mind that has been working out in like the joke gym for decades so so it's funny all the time you know what i mean so

00:50:01Marc:Yeah.

00:50:01Marc:So, I mean, I, you know, I appreciate that.

00:50:03Marc:And I hope that to be true.

00:50:04Marc:What I've started to realize lately is that I can't be artifice sometimes of comedy.

00:50:10Marc:Like it's, it's an addictive mind that I have.

00:50:13Marc:So it doesn't satisfy me as much as truly connecting.

00:50:18Marc:Right.

00:50:19Marc:Which I don't know if it's really part of it sometimes.

00:50:22Marc:That it takes me a while to get to the funny and the only way I can do it is by risking on stage the horror of a room full of people going, why is he telling us this?

00:50:33Guest 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:50:34Guest 2:Well, that's great, you know, when you do that and then you hone it because you don't, I mean, I don't, I'll say, want to go on stage and just wing it every time, you know what I mean?

00:50:42Guest 2:But you do, you have to have those critical performances where you're like, fuck it, I'm just going to say what I feel.

00:50:47Guest 2:And then you hammer that into the thing.

00:50:49Guest 3:Have you had any of those experiences lately where you put something out there and you're like, wow, that's just sitting out there.

00:50:54Guest 2:I mean, like in my show at the UCB, I did the next time I do it, which I will be doing it again in April.

00:51:00Guest 2:I have to I have to there were people who died in the few months that I was in the rehab and the sober living.

00:51:06Guest 2:And I talked about that and I'm not satisfied with the way that I talked about that, you know.

00:51:10Guest 2:Sure.

00:51:11Guest 2:Then there was stuff that I talked about, like childhood bedwetting as that kind of like wetting the bed, stopping that kind of organically, but also starting to drink myself into the point where I would pass out and piss myself anyway.

00:51:24Guest 2:They almost overlapped in childhood.

00:51:26Guest 2:Oh, that's funny.

00:51:27Guest 2:People enjoyed that very much.

00:51:29Guest 2:And then, you know, talking about like there was a girl when I was in the in the in rehab.

00:51:35Guest 2:this girl was like how do you masturbate with both broken arms and i was like carefully slowly you know and she said this is this big uh meth head girl and she had a friend who was visiting with her and she said well you know my friend uh lisa she'll suck your dick and she pointed at her friend lisa and this lisa looked at me and nodded meekly and i was like oh god you know so now that's patently horrible there's no other way to look at that but it's fucking funny

00:52:03Guest 2:that that happened, you know what I mean?

00:52:05Marc:And also, thank God for Lisa, I hope she's okay.

00:52:07Guest 2:Yeah, I didn't let her, because I'm going to put my dick in some crazy, I mean, I would have gotten five diseases.

00:52:11Guest 2:From a mouth?

00:52:12Guest 2:I don't know.

00:52:15Guest 2:I think that's a little paranoid.

00:52:18Marc:I think you made a character judgment.

00:52:22Guest 2:Or you could point to that moment and say, that's when he really decided to heal.

00:52:27Guest 2:Putting his dick in a crazy face.

00:52:30Marc:Mouths are designed to kill a lot of germs.

00:52:32Marc:That's true.

00:52:33Guest 2:Well, hey, we all have regrets.

00:52:35Marc:But you did the right thing just because Lisa probably wasn't coming from the right place.

00:52:39Marc:Exactly.

00:52:39Marc:With the willingness to suck every dick.

00:52:41Marc:Exactly.

00:52:41Marc:Well, along these lines, I feel like I should buffer the other letter.

00:52:45Marc:But here's a good example.

00:52:46Marc:The other night, I'm performing for a primarily older audience.

00:52:49Marc:I have a woman that books these rooms, and she has this small mailing list of people that come, and they're all over 60.

00:52:54Marc:Okay.

00:52:55Marc:They're all progressive, kind of liberally people.

00:52:57Guest 2:Was this in the basement of the...

00:52:58Guest 2:Piano place?

00:52:59Guest 2:Yes.

00:52:59Guest 2:Okay, cool.

00:53:00Marc:It's at Fields.

00:53:01Marc:And I knew what I was getting into.

00:53:03Marc:But I'm in a process where I'm trying to integrate new material.

00:53:06Marc:And a lot of it has to do, some of it has to do with getting through the divorce, other has to do with dating and sexually acting out and who I'm finding myself with.

00:53:15Marc:And then I wanted to try these two things about my father that were true things that I just think are hilarious, heartbreaking, and so defining about where I come from.

00:53:27Marc:Outside of the manic depression thing.

00:53:31Marc:People who listen to my show know him from the phone calls.

00:53:34Marc:Here's how I explain my father.

00:53:36Marc:If someone asks me what my father's like, there are these two moments that I explain.

00:53:41Marc:One is that he's remarried to a woman named Rosie, and he calls me once.

00:53:46Marc:I didn't know if he was depressed, so I said, how you doing, Dad?

00:53:48Marc:He goes, I don't know, I'm not that good.

00:53:50Marc:And I go, what's the matter?

00:53:51Marc:He goes, well, Rosie's got cancer.

00:53:53Marc:And I said, well, that's horrible.

00:53:54Marc:I'm really sorry to hear that.

00:53:56Marc:Are you okay?

00:53:57Marc:He goes, yeah, I got bad luck.

00:54:01Oh!

00:54:01Marc:Oh, wow.

00:54:02Marc:See, but it hits you in the gut like it was supposed to.

00:54:07Marc:It's horrible.

00:54:08Marc:It's horrible but brilliant, and it's such a perfect encapsulation of self-centeredness.

00:54:15Marc:And the other one was...

00:54:18Marc:I was with my dad.

00:54:20Marc:I went to visit him in Albuquerque, and we went out to some coffee shop together.

00:54:23Marc:And some guy comes up to him and goes, oh, my God, Dr. Marin, it's me, Bob.

00:54:27Marc:I don't think, what's it been like 20 years since I've seen you?

00:54:31Marc:How are you doing?

00:54:31Marc:And my dad looks at this guy, and the only thing he says, well, the money's running out, and I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with myself.

00:54:37Marc:Yeah.

00:54:38Marc:and i thought and i thought those were so funny yeah and i did those at this place and these old people were just like really well not judging it it was sad oh and it is sad yeah it is sad yeah but it's okay to laugh at sad stuff no i know but but like sometimes i think it is like if you do not have enough buffer in the form of a joke or a setup yeah and you present the sadness yeah then it's just gonna come out just because i'm so jaded that like just give me the straight shit

00:55:08Marc:Just hit me with the straight sadness so I can laugh at it if you say it right.

00:55:11Marc:They're not willing to necessarily do that.

00:55:14Marc:But I think that sharing about this stuff is where it's taking that risk and it really just comes down to a question of, is this the right environment for this?

00:55:25Marc:Correct, yeah.

00:55:26Marc:And I think that ultimately whatever the environment, if you're being honest and people aren't going to hurt you for sharing your truth, that it is a rich experience for everyone involved.

00:55:37Guest 7:Yeah.

00:55:37Marc:One way or the other.

00:55:38Marc:Yeah.

00:55:38Marc:Whether or not you get the response you want or not.

00:55:40Guest 7:Yeah.

00:55:41Marc:So I get this email.

00:55:43Yeah.

00:55:43Marc:Dear Mark, I wanted to write you a thank you letter and hope you are not too creeped out by it.

00:55:49Marc:You probably get hundreds of letters.

00:55:50Marc:And this one is a beast.

00:55:52Marc:I'm a teenage girl living in Scotland.

00:55:55Marc:And although it is likely that we will never meet and this could all seem irrelevant to you, I wanted to let you know that listening to your podcast really helped me.

00:56:02Marc:I recently had to do a talk in front of my English class, and being a shy person, I usually dread talking in public.

00:56:08Marc:Also, teenagers are really scary, even when you are one.

00:56:12Guest 2:True.

00:56:13Marc:To make it worse, we had to talk about a personal experience and reflect on it, share our emotions like we were in group therapy.

00:56:19Marc:I hated the idea of sharing emotions with my class and I intended to wimp out and talk about doing my work experience in some crappy office, which I knew I could talk about without revealing much about myself.

00:56:29Marc:Then while listening to your podcast, I thought about you and the way you are very honest about your insecurities and how you reflect about yourself while at the same time being hilarious.

00:56:38Marc:I realized that this was the kind of thing I am most interested in listening to.

00:56:42Marc:So it would make sense that I should try it out.

00:56:45Marc:I consider myself to be extremely awkward, so I decided to do my talk about that.

00:56:50Marc:I planned on talking about how I became more awkward as I grew up, about how it prevented me from enjoying things, how it is still a problem for me, and how it changes the way people see me.

00:56:59Marc:I also tried to make it as funny as possible because I was paranoid that I would just be whining at people.

00:57:04Marc:Up until the moment I was actually talking, I kept thinking, oh my God, I shouldn't do this.

00:57:09Marc:Who the fuck cares about my stupid little life?

00:57:12Marc:They are going to hate me.

00:57:14Marc:This sounds like me before I go on stage.

00:57:16Marc:Then it was my turn.

00:57:17Marc:And when I started, everyone was looking at me like they were thinking, who the hell is this bitch?

00:57:22Marc:I'm generally quite nerdy and nerds are generally boring because they talk about the world of Warcraft and obscure musical theater.

00:57:28Marc:But even though they assumed I would suck by the end of my talk, everyone was laughing and they were laughing with me, which was a nice change.

00:57:38Marc:Afterwards, people were so nice and some of them some of them said that they had similar experiences.

00:57:43Marc:And I think many of my classmates opinion to me changed a bit.

00:57:46Marc:And I guess they were all much nicer people than I thought they were.

00:57:49Marc:And I also got the best possible grade for it, which was a great surprise.

00:57:54Marc:I doubt it would have been the same if I had done the lame thing about working in an office.

00:57:58Marc:Basically, I wanted to thank you for showing the world that honesty plus comedy equals awesome.

00:58:05Marc:Yours sincerely, Rhiannon.

00:58:07Marc:P.S.

00:58:08Marc:Sorry this email is so long.

00:58:09Marc:I'm just really happy right now.

00:58:11Guest 2:Oh, God, that's wonderful.

00:58:14Guest 2:I mean, that's it right there.

00:58:16Guest 2:Right?

00:58:16Guest 2:Oh, so great.

00:58:18Guest 2:I'm tearing up again.

00:58:19Guest 2:Yeah, Rhiannon.

00:58:20Guest 2:Wow, that's really special.

00:58:24Marc:You know, in these moments where...

00:58:28Marc:Because we're in a scary business and you don't know.

00:58:31Marc:And so much of it is selfish.

00:58:32Marc:God, I hope this joke works.

00:58:34Marc:I hope I get that club work.

00:58:35Marc:I hope I do this.

00:58:36Marc:I hope I do that.

00:58:37Marc:But the fact that you can touch somebody like that and then they're like, they find strength.

00:58:43Marc:Holy shit.

00:58:44Marc:So great.

00:58:46Marc:That's worth the whole experience.

00:58:50Marc:Yeah.

00:58:51Marc:I could use some money though.

00:58:52Guest 2:Right.

00:58:54Guest 2:True, true.

00:58:55Marc:Thanks, Rob Delaney.

00:58:56Marc:Thank you very much, Mark.

00:59:06Marc:In the studio here at the Cat Ranch, the garage, is almost Dr. Steve, which is going to be over soon, correct?

00:59:15Marc:Soon enough.

00:59:15Marc:Just not yet.

00:59:16Marc:All right.

00:59:16Marc:Well, I'm not going to change it until it's done.

00:59:19Guest 1:Right.

00:59:19Guest 1:I might not change it ever because it's kind of... It's a hook.

00:59:22Marc:It's a hook.

00:59:22Marc:But you're going to want the credibility eventually.

00:59:24Marc:Right.

00:59:24Marc:But you have gotten a couple clients from listening to my show.

00:59:28Marc:That's true.

00:59:30Marc:That was not an obstacle to them.

00:59:32Guest 1:Right, and the fact is I'm almost doctor, but I've been a therapist in practice for years now.

00:59:37Guest 1:See, okay.

00:59:38Marc:That's just the doctor part.

00:59:39Marc:Now we've cleared that up, and the theme of today's show is something you and I both know, and I don't think we're too ashamed to admit it.

00:59:45Marc:No.

00:59:45Marc:We are both alcoholics.

00:59:48Marc:Yes, that's me.

00:59:49Marc:Drug addicts.

00:59:50Marc:Yeah?

00:59:51Guest 1:Yeah, that's the truth.

00:59:52Guest 1:It's all the same?

00:59:53Guest 1:Well, I don't know about it being all the same, but I'm sure we're going to clarify that as we go along.

00:59:57Marc:I think we will, because I just spent an hour talking to Rob Delaney and his spectacular story about hitting bottom.

01:00:03Marc:I've gotten a lot of emails from listeners who...

01:00:07Marc:who resonate with some of the talks you and I have had and also resonate with the honesty I have around my past substance issues.

01:00:15Marc:And they all kind of ask the same question, a lot of them anyways.

01:00:19Marc:It's like, I think I have a drinking problem.

01:00:21Marc:I don't know if I have a drinking problem.

01:00:23Marc:I do a lot of drugs.

01:00:24Marc:I kind of want to stop.

01:00:25Marc:How did you stop?

01:00:26Marc:How do you know when you're doing too much?

01:00:29Marc:And these are questions that I asked myself for 20 years before I got sober.

01:00:34Marc:Mm-hmm.

01:00:34Marc:And I I know the feeling, but I think that what maybe I'm wrong here and I've only gotten a sense of this as I've gotten more sober now that I have over 10 years and I just feel it is that a lot of times when you know in your heart that you're doing it too much, you have this other part of you that speaks that says like, well, I don't you know, I don't want to quit everything.

01:00:56Marc:Or like, oh, I'm not going to do AA or any bullshit.

01:00:58Marc:I mean, I'm just going to stop.

01:01:00Marc:And I've grown to believe that that, in essence, is the voice of the disease of addiction.

01:01:06Guest 1:Do you agree?

01:01:07Guest 1:I agree.

01:01:07Guest 1:It's a combination of two things that are at the core of addiction, which is one is denial.

01:01:13Guest 3:Yeah.

01:01:13Guest 1:And the other is obsession.

01:01:15Guest 1:And the two of them work together to really, you know, hammer someone into the ground as many times as it takes for that person to kind of get the message.

01:01:23Marc:But the weird thing is that it's within you.

01:01:26Marc:You think that you're making decisions that make sense to you for your life.

01:01:31Marc:And you get into that zone, and I know this is the real indicator, is that if you sit there saying, all right, I'm going to stop next week.

01:01:40Marc:Tomorrow's it.

01:01:42Guest 1:and that keeps happening no matter what it is that can only mean one thing you're in denial and you're obsessed and you have a problem with whatever it is that you you think you have a problem with absolutely because we're talking about again going back to something that we mentioned a couple of shows ago um the compulsive repetitive use of a substance despite negative consequences

01:02:06Guest 1:So if you are still compulsively and repetitively using the substance after you crashed the car or you lost the relationship or you just dropped an atom bomb on your life, that's a problem.

01:02:21Marc:Is it the cause of all those other problems?

01:02:23Guest 1:It's like a circle.

01:02:26Guest 1:It keeps feeding each other.

01:02:26Guest 1:No way to tell.

01:02:27Guest 1:There's no way to tell, is there?

01:02:29Guest 1:Well, at a certain point, there's absolutely no way to tell because it's totally a cycle, and one is causing the other, is causing the other, is causing the other.

01:02:36Guest 1:But what if it feels so damn good, Steve?

01:02:38Guest 1:It just feels so damn good.

01:02:40Guest 1:If you're one of those people who believes in God, it's one of God's very cruel jokes.

01:02:45Guest 1:Really?

01:02:45Guest 1:Because the substance feels really good, and that's the reason why we took it in the first place.

01:02:49Guest 1:Yeah.

01:02:50Guest 1:We're outing me, because you already outed on this program.

01:02:53Guest 1:Yeah.

01:02:53Guest 1:A couple of days from now, actually, I'll have 21 years myself of...

01:02:58Guest 1:of not using anything.

01:02:59Guest 1:And when I was 12 years old and I first was introduced on that first time to marijuana, Genesee Cream Ale, because I'm from the East Coast, and Southern Comfort.

01:03:09Guest 1:And I threw up and I did all the things.

01:03:10Guest 1:I blacked out, I passed out.

01:03:12Guest 1:But before that, I felt like I was about six foot five.

01:03:15Guest 1:And you know, I know that I'm not.

01:03:17Guest 1:I felt like the smartest guy in the room, the funniest guy in the room.

01:03:20Guest 1:I felt like the sexiest guy in the room, whatever that means to a 12 year old.

01:03:23Guest 1:And the next day I felt like worse than any migraine I'd ever had.

01:03:26Guest 1:I was a migraine sufferer as a kid.

01:03:28Guest 1:And my response to that was, do you have any more of that stuff?

01:03:32Guest 1:And what time are we starting tonight?

01:03:33Guest 3:Yeah, yeah.

01:03:34Guest 1:And I chased, I forgot the, ouch, mommy, the flu symptoms.

01:03:39Guest 1:Yeah.

01:03:39Guest 1:And I was like, let's chase this feeling for the next 14 years.

01:03:43Guest 1:I'll get the hang of it.

01:03:44Guest 1:I will.

01:03:44Guest 1:I will muscle my way through this.

01:03:46Guest 1:Oh, yeah.

01:03:47Marc:I so badly wanted to be a professional drinker or professional drug user.

01:03:51Marc:And you know what the sad thing was?

01:03:52Marc:Out of all the things that I used to use, pot never disappointed me.

01:03:56Marc:Like it was the one thing like, you know, booze and Coke and that kind of stuff.

01:04:00Marc:You can get bad Coke or you can drink yourself sober or, you know, it doesn't have the same effect.

01:04:04Marc:But pot, bang, every goddamn time.

01:04:07Marc:And you know what really creeped me out about pot?

01:04:09Marc:The only thing I knew about pot, and this is the most insidious of these drugs, by the way, because I think it's a will killer.

01:04:15Marc:I think that, you know, pot, man, you got some good ideas, but the, the odds of them getting out of your head and out into the real world are very small.

01:04:24Marc:I know people who can function on pop, but even high functioning pot heads.

01:04:27Marc:I know a lot of them, they, they don't, they get stopped because you're living up in your head.

01:04:32Marc:And one time I remember I was smoking, I was a daily pot smoker and we had gone and my first wife and I had gone to visit my aging aunt who was, you know, in dementia and

01:04:42Marc:My Aunt Evie, my father's aunt.

01:04:45Marc:And, you know, she's sitting there talking to me and Kim and she's like kind of like, you know, doesn't quite know where she is.

01:04:51Marc:But she looks at my wife, Kim, at the time and says, what's wrong with Mark?

01:04:55Marc:He looks like he's haunted.

01:04:58Marc:And I was.

01:04:58Marc:I was literally haunted because I'd fallen so far into my head on pot that it must have looked like that.

01:05:05Marc:It just resonated with me.

01:05:07Marc:And I realized that pot, too, can become a problem.

01:05:10Marc:And that seems to be the one that people are like, can I still smoke pot?

01:05:13Marc:And I think that what I guess I'm trying to get at, and just to help out and to have some empathy for people who are fighting with this thing, because this is a real thing, that in order for me to really...

01:05:24Marc:except sobriety, I had to just look at addiction as a disease.

01:05:32Marc:Because a lot of people are like, well, I think I'm just depressed.

01:05:35Marc:That's a symptom of addiction as well.

01:05:37Marc:I think I just have a hard time focusing or I'm hyper.

01:05:41Marc:They're all symptoms.

01:05:42Marc:Those are excuses that your disease will make to keep you drinking.

01:05:46Marc:And I know that's just one twist on things, but I know that that helped me get it through my head.

01:05:52Guest 1:Well, the other way of looking at it therapeutically is that these are all comorbid disorders.

01:05:56Guest 1:And what that means is they're all connected.

01:05:58Guest 1:I mean, you can separate them out and substance abuse has a lot of things in common with depression, anxiety, all these other things, but it's its own set of symptoms as well.

01:06:08Guest 1:And anytime you have somebody who's abusing substances and possibly has, or obviously has like depression or anxiety disorders,

01:06:16Guest 1:You got to treat the substance abuse first because the alcohol and the drugs are either continuing to cause these problems or they're being used as a tool either successfully or unsuccessfully at this point to try and calm these symptoms.

01:06:28Guest 1:To treat the problems.

01:06:29Guest 1:Right, exactly.

01:06:30Guest 1:So you got to get out of it.

01:06:31Guest 1:Home remedy.

01:06:32Guest 1:It's an old folk remedy.

01:06:33Guest 1:Yeah.

01:06:35Guest 1:And it's not quite doing the job anymore.

01:06:37Guest 1:So, I mean, if the person is getting into situations that obviously mean I have a problem.

01:06:43Marc:Yeah, I do recommend some sort of support system just so you can be with like-minded people and find that you're not alone in this and that you may very well have, you might not know you have the bug.

01:06:53Guest 1:Well, I found for myself, I found for myself that some combination of a number of different things that speak to me have helped me along the way, first to stop and then to stay stopped.

01:07:07Guest 1:And those look like I too have availed myself of 12-step recovery.

01:07:11Guest 1:I avail myself of therapy, and I found myself some good therapy.

01:07:15Guest 1:I availed myself of spiritual tools.

01:07:18Guest 1:And when I say that, I am not a member of any religion.

01:07:22Guest 1:I'm not running around asking people to join me in anything that I do.

01:07:27Guest 1:But I found some way to connect with the world in a way that's maybe a little deeper than I used to connect with it.

01:07:34Guest 1:I was trying to connect that way with the alcohol and the drugs.

01:07:37Guest 1:Sure.

01:07:38Guest 1:And as a matter of fact, Carl Jung, who was a big supporter of 12-step programs- I'm hip to the young.

01:07:43Guest 1:Always stay that way.

01:07:45Guest 1:Yeah.

01:07:49Guest 1:What alcoholics and drug addicts do is they are on this low-grade spiritual search, and they're using alcohol and drugs as the attempt to connect, and it's just not as good a system as some of the other systems that are out there.

01:08:04Guest 1:Can't snort God.

01:08:06Guest 1:You can't, but people do try.

01:08:08Marc:Yeah, well, I mean, I hope that helps people, and I think it'll help you to know that you're not alone.

01:08:13Marc:And also, it might help you to know that some people never stop.

01:08:18Marc:Mm-hmm.

01:08:18Marc:And that, you know, what you risk if you commit your life to partying or like I ain't got a problem is you will never be in touch with your authentic self.

01:08:28Marc:And you're talking to a guy right now who like I chew 900 pieces of nicotine gum a day and I drink a pot and a half a coffee.

01:08:34Marc:Does that make my life unmanageable?

01:08:36Marc:No.

01:08:36Marc:Does it make me a little irritable and cause me some stomach problems?

01:08:39Marc:Yes.

01:08:40Marc:Should I not do both of those as much?

01:08:41Marc:Am I still trying to escape something?

01:08:43Marc:Uh-huh.

01:08:44Marc:Is it as bad as doing an eight ball and drinking a half a pint of Jack Daniels to get the day started?

01:08:49Marc:No.

01:08:50Marc:Am I distancing myself from my authentic self?

01:08:54No.

01:08:54Marc:A little, but not enough for it not to come through.

01:08:57Guest 1:And there you have some of the hierarchy of negative consequences, right?

01:09:00Guest 1:Yeah.

01:09:01Guest 1:At the top are the kind of consequences that bring many of us into recovery, which is things like car crashes and people leaving and careers lost and- Health problems.

01:09:11Guest 1:Health problems.

01:09:12Guest 1:Jail.

01:09:12Guest 1:Hello?

01:09:13Guest 1:I had health problems when I was 23 years old, and it still took me another three years to find myself-

01:09:18Guest 1:So you never know what the negative consequences that are going to speak to that particular person.

01:09:25Guest 1:And then what happens is you come into recovery and you deal with some of the problems and then maybe they will, it'll become a game of whack-a-mole and there'll be a little bit of a transfer of, as they say, changing seats on the Titanic.

01:09:37Guest 1:And one will start to use other substances that they didn't used to use or they'll start to use shopping or gambling or any of these other things.

01:09:45Guest 1:And are the negative consequences of your nicotine gum as bad as some of the things you went through in the past?

01:09:52Guest 1:No.

01:09:53Guest 1:Are they things that you possibly want to deal with because the negative consequence now is you're not in touch with your true self?

01:09:59Guest 1:Yeah.

01:09:59Guest 1:Wow.

01:09:59Guest 1:Life's getting better because that's your big problem now.

01:10:03Guest 1:Is it ever going to be fixed?

01:10:06Guest 1:We've been through this before.

01:10:07Guest 1:Actually, you know what?

01:10:09Guest 1:It can be fixed as long as you change the definition of the word fixed.

01:10:14Guest 4:Oh, my God.

01:10:15Marc:All right.

01:10:16Marc:Okay, well, here's what I want to say in closing, is that whatever you're doing, if you think you've got a problem, believe me, whatever you've committed your life to that's causing that problem is not worth dying for, and it's certainly not worth missing out on your life for.

01:10:29Marc:So there's plenty of ways to get help.

01:10:33Marc:And if that made you want to get high, you definitely have a problem.

01:10:36Marc:Is that a reasonable thing to say?

01:10:38Marc:It's fairly reasonable, yeah.

01:10:40Marc:Thank you, Dr. Steve.

01:10:41Marc:Almost.

01:10:42Marc:You're welcome, Mark.

01:10:43Marc:Okay, that's our show.

01:10:49Marc:Thank you, Rob Delaney.

01:10:50Marc:Thank you, Dr. Steve.

01:10:51Marc:I hope that was informative and helped.

01:10:53Marc:If you got something out of it, that's really what this show was about.

01:10:57Marc:I certainly appreciate you listening.

01:10:59Marc:I hope you heard something you needed to hear.

01:11:02Marc:If you're doing a big bong hit right now, God damn you.

01:11:05Marc:Fucking enjoy your day.

01:11:07Marc:And if you're not, if you're wrestling with a bong, I don't know.

01:11:10Marc:It's on you.

01:11:12Marc:Make a call.

01:11:13Marc:I want to thank everyone for listening.

01:11:16Marc:As always, you can go to WTFpod.com for all your WTF needs.

01:11:20Marc:You can donate some bread.

01:11:21Marc:I appreciate all the donations and subscriptions that are coming in.

01:11:24Marc:I want to keep this a free show as much as possible and just let you guys own it.

01:11:29Marc:I love doing it, and I want to keep doing it that way.

01:11:32Marc:Also, I want to reach out to my buddy Kyle.

01:11:36Marc:he has a a sand carving glass operation and and he sent me the most gorgeous wtf pint glass it's got wtf on it it's got my name mark on it and it's got these beveled flames at the bottom now you know kyle i don't drink anymore and clearly we're we're all clear on that now but i because i lived in san francisco for a while i do enjoy putting my coffee in a pint glass speaking of that i'm going to take a sip of coffee out of my wtf pint glass with flames on the bottom and

01:12:05Marc:and mention our other sponsor.

01:12:10Marc:Pow!

01:12:11Marc:Oh my God, I just shit my pants.

01:12:14Marc:JustCoffee.coop, available at WTFPod.com.

01:12:18Marc:And you can check out all of these beautiful glasses that my buddy Kyle makes over at www.HunterGlass.com.

01:12:27Marc:Also, want to thank the folks at Dynamite Entertainment for sending me another mountain of comic books.

01:12:32Marc:You guys are going to get me back into it.

01:12:34Marc:Between Fantagraphics and Dark Horse and now Dynamite Entertainment.

01:12:40Marc:They've got all these beautiful books.

01:12:43Marc:Look, I love getting presents.

01:12:45Marc:I love getting presents.

01:12:46Marc:That's all I'm saying.

01:12:47Marc:Also, go to punchlinemagazine.com for all your comedy, industry, and entertainment needs if you want to keep on the pulse of what's happening in the world of comedy.

01:12:55Marc:I'll be at the Grog Shop in Cleveland, Ohio on March 21st.

01:12:59Marc:And I will be at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C.

01:13:02Marc:on March 22nd.

01:13:04Marc:And you people in the Bloomington, Indiana area, I will be at the Funny Bone in Bloomington March 25th through 27th.

01:13:12Marc:I'll be up there.

01:13:12Marc:I'll bring some shirts.

01:13:14Marc:Thanks for listening.

01:13:23you