The Bill Simmons Podcast - Ep. 92: Louis C.K.

Episode Date: April 20, 2016

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons chats with comedian Louis C.K. about owning his own show ('Horace and Pete'), battling the stigma of "being broke" (18:00), internet headline culture (28:00), the creative decisions behind 'Horace and Pete' (35:00), the 'Golden Globes' with Jessica Lange (45:00), Garry Shandling's silent impact (52:00), the economy of outrage (1:02:00), and the future of his FX hit, 'Louie' (1:10:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Oh, yeah. We're doing it. HBO Now, Andy Greenwald, Chris Ryan. It premieres on HBO Now a couple hours after the show. That's exciting. So there you go. And they'll tell you what happened because I never know what the hell happens on that show. I love it.

Once it's over, you go, what happened? Yeah. never know what the hell happens in that show i love it once it's over you go what happened yeah i'm i watch it and i go uh the tall blind lady got mad at the guy with one hand and i'm just an idiot so they yeah yeah yeah so they go all right let's start that was the voice of Louis C.K. Do people call you Louis or Louis? How does that work? I've never been able to decide. So I just like I'll tell every other person Louis and every other person Louis.

I had a Bill. Most people call me Louis. Yeah, that's what I want to call you. But I don't know if like Louis sounds more formal. Yeah, it is more formal. I had a Bill versus Billy situation for a long time and finally went with Bill, but my whole family still calls me Billy.

Sure. But it is weird. You feel like you have two identities almost. That's okay. I like having a couple. Yeah, a couple. A couple of different things people call you is a good thing in life, I think.

Do people call you CK? Like do you have buddies who just say, hey, CK? Nobody. Not one person. Not one single person you get mad if they call you ck no there was one guy uh call me ck i didn't uh end up liking him but i used to like him so uh thanks for coming i i you know i've read all the reports about your

you're broke apparently now i feel really bad i i didn't know if we had to pay for your car or how's that what's bankruptcy like is it rough i'm so not broke i'm so not broke was that the most misreported story you've ever been a part of yeah it's kind of crazy to see how wrong it it it gets and to see how far that wrongness spreads yeah it's an interesting pipeline to have tested because an interesting thing about this show, this experience for me, is that I made a thing that's usually made by a corporate entity. Yeah. But I don't have any of the apparatus. So in other words, we didn't send out like big press releases.

We actually avoided the press when we were making the show and didn't. So they don't have any guidance or relationship with us. Yeah. the show and didn't so they don't have any guidance or relationship with us yeah you know like if uh fox or abc makes a show they have you know a staff of people that are all about pr and all about handling the press and they talk to those people every day so they go here's what here's the new show that's coming here's what we're trying to achieve here's what you know the selling points on it and they walk you through it they walk them through it and they always know what's going to be written.

You know, like, I know that because I've made shows for networks. So whenever I've had, like, on FX, I have very direct contact with the executives at FX, and they share with me, okay, something, there's a new story coming down the pipeline. Here's who's wrote it. We've already read it.

You know, that kind of thing. But I just made the show and see what happens. And well, you literally dropped it on a Saturday morning. What's that? It was just an all of a sudden it was online. Yeah. Wasn't it a Saturday morning? It was a Saturday morning, 10 a.m. in the morning.

And I remember when you did it, there was a lot going on that week. And I was like, wow, he's really. Yeah, i was really trying to sneak this one out i was trying to i wanted to see how a show grows with no with no uh help from any of that stuff i wanted to see if it would yeah um so i i actually picked the worst possible like the dark side of the moon of uh promotion time because it seemed like it was intentional though because you picked literally the worst possible day you picked the day when when news organizations try

to like they just fired somebody and they try to bury it at 5 30 on a friday or friday night is considered the worst time yeah but or the best time to bury something right but that's because people are working on friday night They don't even consider Saturday morning. Like, Saturday morning is, like, not time. But I wanted to see how it would spread through word of mouth without the... And some of the sites, some of the sort of, like, instant news sites did, you know, write about it. So what did you learn? So much.

I'm still learning because it's still very early in the process. But this thing with, you know, I went on Howard Stern and, and, uh, talked about where the show was at and I told him that I'm in debt. Um, I borrowed money to make the show.

Yeah. Which is every single TV show ever made. They're all in debt. Yes. And they don't, I know this from getting my financial reports for my show on FX cause I'm, I'm a partner on my FX show. I mean, I have participation in the profits.

Yeah. So they send me a thing that tells me, and I read those, you know, and it says this show is in deficit and it stays in deficit for a long time. Like after they get their first round of advertising dollars for running the show, they're in deficit. They owe money. They're not made whole yet. I always just assumed every show is in deficit except for CSI, all the NCISs.

Yeah, no, most TV, but they have a... Those are the only ones. In the aggregate, they make money. I always use that word wrong. But then also they make money when they sell it to other networks. So my show did very well on Netflix and places like that.

Apple TV, other outlets. And then I would start to see profits, but not from the broadcast run. So when I took debt on my show, I thought this is an acceptable, this is the risk I'm taking. You know, you can't make a show without losing some money first. But the thing that was funny was that when I said that on Howard Stern, you know, I said it a little dramatically because it's Howard and he's fun to talk to. And we were making fun of me for not working hard to be a rich person. Right. I told him that I've been offered very lucrative advertising deals.

I always say no to him. But anyway, so then there was these stories that say Horace and Pete lost money. And I thought, well, that's not, I didn't lose money. I invested money. You know, it's like if you. You owned every aspect of it. That's right. The thing that was left out is that I own a television show.

I own a complete series. You own a television show during an era where all of these streaming content places are in an anchorman fight to try to get good content. That's right. You have multiple places to sell this show. That's right. And I'm at the head of the stream. I'm in the mountains. I'm the snow that's melting to feed the water.

And it's an enormous asset. And it's mine forever. So that doesn't exist. You might own a small piece if you get points on your show, which is a hard position to get to even. But I own this thing. So and by and and I own it. I own a show that's that has Steve Buscemi, Edie Falco, Alan Alda, Jessica Lange, Alan Alda, who I hadn't thought of in like six years until I watched it. Allen is just one of these MVP guys. He's like, if he was like a baseball player that shows up, plays for the Giants one year,

hits like, you know, hits 60 home runs. He's an unbelievable actor. And then goes away, comes back three years later, hits, you know, 300 hits or whatever. Right. I don't know what those numbers are like, but he just doesn't diminish. It would be like if Julio Cesar Chavez just came back now and just won the title again. Yeah, or what's his name? Ricky Henderson.

You know, like, who did that? Like, he'd play for the Newark Bears. He'd play for, like, you know, the Newton North Tigers, my high school baseball team. Anybody. But Allen doesn't get, doesn't diminish because he's not an athlete. He just gets better. But anyway, the cast is enormous. And the show is, you know, I feel like it's a great show. But also it's the critical acclaim has been, you know, off the charts for it.

So that's what I own. And, yeah, I'm right now I'm in deficit until I get. But it's making money every like while we're sitting here, it's selling and selling and selling and selling. So, well, you didn't promote it at all. I didn't promote it at all. That's the other thing is that when I look, one of the reasons these shows are in deficit is because the advertising budgets are often they often eclipse the production budget on television shows. So like they'll spend millions of dollars on advertising. And so far to date, my advertising budget is zero.

It's literally zero. I've spent zero dollars on this show aside from the production budget. I would have put it out on a Tuesday. Well, but you see, I wouldn't have asked me and you say, just here's my plan. Yeah. I'm only telling you I trust you have good taste on stuff. I'm going to put this out on a Saturday at 10 o'clock. I would have been like, don't do that.

No, it didn't. But I think you did that intentionally because you were doing some sort of experiment. I was experimenting. And the thing is that, you know, we're still, how old are you? I'm 75 years old. 75, yeah. No, I'm 46. But I'm a young 46.

I'm 40. I'm an old 48. See, I'm like those boxers when like Bernard Hopkins gets out of jail and they're like, he's a young 38 and like, oh, he's been in jail. That's how I'm like. The internet was my jail. Right. Yeah.

I feel like I'm one of those boxers from Cuba that nobody actually knows how old they are. Like they literally don't know. Like remember Al Duque, the pitcher? You could be 60. You could be 40. He's like, I don't know. You know, I've been around. Yeah.

But yeah. the pitcher you could be 60 I don't know you know I've been around yeah um but uh yes okay the reason I say our age is because um why did I mention our age oh because the way tv feels to us is like it's a thing that happened yeah and then it's done happening the thing that we haven't wrapped our heads around is that this stuff you make it and you put it up and it's sitting there forever. Do you know what I mean? It's sitting there. So the show, I launched it on a Saturday morning, but that's meaningless. Like when I actually put it up doesn't mean anything. For most people in the world, it doesn't exist yet.

For most people in the world, they have never heard of it. Right. This is like a, it's almost like the Tour de France. It's like 30 stages. Yeah, something like that. But even though there's no finish to it, it's just sitting there. It's really like I made the movie. I just made it.

I let a lot of people watch me make it. Because I made it. I'd make it. I shot Wednesdays and Thursdays, edit Friday. For 10 straight weeks? 10 straight weeks. We made the show over Wednesday. We would table read Monday, rehearse Tuesday,

shoot Wednesday, Thursday, edit Friday, and the show was on the website Saturday morning. And then I'd email out Saturday morning. My biggest confusion until, you know,

fortunately, Louis K., who you know and I know, he was able to tell me. Yeah. Who's also my publicist. Oh, that works out. Yeah, that worked out.

So I was like, what's he doing? How many episodes are there going to be? He's like, I don't know. He won't talk about it. Yeah, I wouldn't tell him. Yeah, yeah worked out. So I was like, what's he doing? How many episodes are there going to be? He's like, I don't know. He won't talk about it. Yeah, I wouldn't tell him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, I don't know.

It could be 40. It could be two. I don't know. This is what excited me. I'm making a show with that heavyweight cast, and I put an enormous amount of thought and work into it. I really worked hard on it, and I thought it's going to show up.

No one's going to know that a show was even going to show up. It's just going to show up, and all I'm to know that a show was even going to show up. Right. It's just going to show up. And all I'm going to say is Horace and Pete is ready for download. Period. It was like first episode. First episode. So what does that mean?

Yes. Episode one of Horace and Pete. First episode of how many? That's right. To me, that's so exciting. Yeah. That people would. And again, they didn't.

I didn't want them to get this from BuzzFeed or Vulture or any of those sites. So that's why you didn't ask Saturday. I didn't want that to be how people learned about it. I made this for, I have about, well, I don't want to say how many, but I have hundreds of thousands of people on my email list. Yeah. And I wanted them to get this email. The people that have been buying my tickets and my comedy specials and that stuff, to me, they were the first target.

And I knew they would spread it. But I'd rather that either you got it from me or from somebody who has my email. Well, and you also have all the TV critics who love you. You knew that's going to go up and you're going to get five or six people. Right, but a lot of them were getting... I had five seasons of my show

and it was nominated for Best Comedy but nominated for best series ever you know best comedy series for three years in a row like we had such a there's a way that uh failure can hurt a tv show but there's a way that success can hurt a tv tv show too there's a way that that that road can be uh distorting and uh and there's an end to every road there's an end to every road of success do you know i felt that in your last season i i thought that was the underlying theme of that season is that you were like i've i've peaked with how people will feel about this show so now i'm gonna start fucking around and trying stuff yeah i'm gonna start you gotta land this this plane this plane is you gotta land it now yeah you gotta land it and then uh and then you gotta disappear

you know what i mean and then so the next thing way more chances in that last season i felt like than you did in the other not that you didn't take yeah i think that might be true that might be true but wasn't the russian apartment episode that was the season before what was the last season what was the biggest risk you took the russian apartment episode was when i was like oh he's really fucking around he's really experimenting yeah this is yeah this is going places yeah the last season was i'm trying to remember i don't remember i don't have it in my head i can't totally remember the sequence either yeah i empty it out of my head once well that the last one had the well there was the episode where

i uh i fuck a pregnant lady and she goes into labor. You had that? Yeah, that was the opening. That was fun. That was hilarious. And then there was the... You know what I've...

What? You don't have found out with content. Yeah. There's so much content now. I think I saw something about how 15, like in 1999, there was like 25 scripted shows in production. There's like 140. I think it's in the 300s now.

But I mean, that doesn't mean we're watching all of them. But I just remember when I was a kid and we were growing up with the three TV stations, basically. Yeah. And I remember like everything about everything that I watched, like The Good Times, JJ Gets Shot. It's a double episode. Like all those moments. And now there's so much good TV. It's like I watched all your shows and then the next one's on and I don't go backwards with it.

Almost. No, that's the thing. Most people don't go backwards anymore. It's like porn. It used to be, you knew what all the porn was, you know,

there was Debbie does Dallas and there was deep throat. Yeah. Taboo. Maryland chambers, the green behind the green door. That was kind of it. Yeah. But now it's,

I don't know why they, nobody will ever watch it all. Like it doesn't see, like it seems like they could stop making porn now and nobody would actually, it wouldn't run out as a resource for like a thousand years. This is a big, Adam Crow is, this is a big conversation with him where he feels like we've now made enough porn to last us now for like 700 years. You could sit down and try to watch.

You wouldn't, you don't have enough life. Yeah. I mean, if you took a baby and started watching him making him watch porn 24 7 for his whole life right he'd get to 90 years old and he wouldn't have seen all the porn he'd be up to there's a millennium of porn out there if you lay it end to end i think there's a millennium of porn like more than there has been i think you could go back to jesus with how much porn there's i think i bet it's true there's 2 000 years of porn if you lay it out linear you know uh linearly end to end probably

more with credits with credits i bet you get back to jesus so um so the show okay so so just going back to this shit with the so okay so people started saying uh the show's broke and then they started jumping ahead to saying well it all came from the stern interview right but if you listen to the stern interview i tell him i took debt to finish the show i was hoping that the sales would pay for it but that was that was insane that was never going to happen especially because i didn't advertise it and i launched it on purpose at the worst possible time. The money was to be made later. But the first, the laying out of the show, the event of the show for the people that were following along

was meant to be a small, intimate experience. And I knew it would only be a few people. But it also felt like 10 plays. That's what it is. It's like a 10 act play yeah and i started to realize as i was writing it this is a finite piece this is a this isn't this isn't a series in terms of like hey let's go five ten years with this this is a this is a 10 act play um and it has a beginning and a middle and an end to it and each piece has its own sort of life to it um but when i started to realize that i thought

um i could put everything i have into just these 10 you know what i mean so i put those out uh knowing all the time how many i was going to make and how far the thing was going to go although there's ways i can continue with it you know there's in my head but i haven't decided whether i'm doing that or not um i don't, we can't get in a spoiler alert. No, we don't want to spoil anything. But anyway, so what I told Howard was that I took on debt to finish the show, but that by the end of the summer, it's going to be gone. I'll be in the black, which is true.

I mean, watching the sales the way they are, you know, by August or something, I'll probably be clean. And then hopefully we'll get Emmy nominations, which I'm going to push for. And then the show is going to be, you know, and then we'll sell to Netflix or somebody else. Tate watched all of them in two days. Did you really? You took him to a dark place. It's hard, right?

It's hard to sit through it. He came in in the morning. He was like kind of shaken up a little bit. He's only like 23. Yeah, no, freaks people out. Yeah, you freak them out a little bit. And now that I've got all of them for sale at the same time, you can buy them all with one click.

Now it's crazy how it's selling. So I knew all this, but what people took out the part where I said we're going to make our money back and said he lost money, and then other people wrote the show is a failure. He lost money. It didn't work. Right. And I saw that, and I was like, how did they extrapolate that well first of all

it's a lack of education about what the entertainment climate is i don't think that's why so many different i think it's just more fun to say i think it's more fun to say you think it's just easy to just jump on it well it's just more more interesting nobody wants to click on a story that's like um uh the jury's out on how horace and pete is doing so far it's uh it's it's in deficit but do it but but you know but sales are strong that's not a clickable story louis ck lost all his money on horace and pete and it was a total failure is very clickable so that's what i think guides i think you should have played with it and done a couple planted things where you're just like at a bank like with your stuff well the howard show

boosted sales i mean the whole story did great yeah i mean they people have gone beyond and written that it's been uh canceled which is really bizarre but that's that's a whole other because you own every piece of it you'd basically be canceling yourself yeah i know it doesn't make any sense because what happened was i wrote basically every time I say anything, they write some weird whole other thing. So I wrote an email to my fans of the show saying so that was it because I didn't want to when I sent the last episode out, the email that came with it. I didn't want to say here's the last episode because you didn't know how many there was going to be. Yeah. So your friend here didn't know when he's watching it. How many are there going to be yeah so and your friend here didn't know when he's watching it how many are they going to be so when the 10th one came out i wanted people to watch the show without knowing they're watching the last episode i wanted them to have all the feelings of something ending um the way it feels

when something ends which is you don't know what's going to to me that that was a great live present to be playing with and to use dramatically on the show. The whole show benefited, I think, from that angle of it, that nobody was sure where they were going or how long they were going to be made to stay there. One of the things I've learned really dramatically over the last year is how the first story determines all the other stories. And if you get there first

with whatever the angle is yeah that's just going to shape what the rest of the angles are for good and bad so like when when i broke up with espn and i decided not to say anything the first couple days and they started planting stuff right and it was basically like this was a financial decision he was difficult and he he wanted too much money i was like, I never even talked money with them. That's right. It had nothing to do with money. And it was the day after I went after Roger Goodell again. And 18 hours later, all of a sudden we're breaking up and people are like, well, he

wanted too much money. It's like, are you following the timeline of what happened here? The first time I went after him, I got suspended for three weeks. And the next time in 18 hours, I'm out. Well, nobody does follow the timeline and nobody's paying as much attention as as you would hope right it doesn't all of this is casual interest for everybody yeah and they look it out of the corner of their eye and it's like one out of 50 things they click on that even that hour and then tweet about and then forget about so So that's how that kind of stuff spreads. But that's the same thing that happened with when I sent out my last email

saying, so that was the end of the show. That was it. I mean, the show has a narrative ending to it, to the 10 episodes. Yes. And so I said,

so, so obviously that was it. And I said, now that the show is finished and complete, I'm going to go and tell the world about it. Because now the next phase is that it's a complete 10-piece library that's available now to anybody who wants to see it. And they'll have a different experience because they know there's 10. They know that there's sort of a definitive ending to it. And they'll come to it with that knowledge and watch it all at once.

Now it'll get binge watched. So when I sent that out, some people wrote things saying, Lewis C.K. canceled Horace and Pete because it was a financial disaster. And they wrote, they used the quote, now it's finished, to seem like I was like, I'm finished, as if talk like a i'm in a frank capra movie you know or like i'm edward g robinson you're through you know so uh and then that got picked up because what i'm learning is that uh news sites don't do their own research and nobody called me or my publicist to say is it true that the show's canceled because i never said that i never said the show's canceled nobody ever does a follow-up email they just they just check one site and then

it grows into this enormous story because the idea of the show being canceled is a radically different idea than it's like saying that um raiders of the lost ark was canceled when they wrapped it they oh they gave up at the end you know what i mean or like saying that um the people versus oj simpson was canceled well the how what do you want them to keep hanging around talking about what happened like forever and ever there's an ending to this story but uh i in your case it was a company that got out ahead of you yeah because they had an agenda yeah but i don't know why it happened in this case because there's no i don't have any opposition in this

people want it's it's boring right now for culture it's like for just it's just something to talk about right it's like you've filled a couple days of uh headlines i think that's what it is which is okay with me it's okay because here's in your case and in my case the thing is you just live your life and you keep making your work and it doesn't to me it's a curiosity it's funny but also there is a timeline to your life and here you are now where you are now and the places that get out ahead and say really rash unsubstantiated you know crock of shit stuff um after a while i think they must lose some credibility like i think most people don't most people know when i read anything on internet news i go like yeah maybe maybe i don't think that happened i don't think most people do

that i guess maybe not i don't know i think people trust the news i do it like i'll read some beat like vanity fair behind the scenes on something that happened and you just you trust the writer and i guess so especially when it's just a fact when somebody just says this happened you go well here's something i see a lot this guy said this and i go fuck why'd he say that that's really harsh but then if i take the time and read it which is rare like one out of every 10, mostly I'll just see the headline. This guy said this thing. And I'll go, wow, that guy shouldn't have said that.

And I never look at the article. But I store in my mind that that guy said that. I keep it in my files of who that guy is, right? But when I do look at it sometimes, I'll go, well, that doesn't, he didn't exactly say that. Like when you really look at the facts or if you go back and watch the interview that they provide with it, it's like, nah, it's not that bad. It wasn't as bad as it sounded. And then when the person, you know, responds and says, that's not what I said. They go, he walked back his remarks that he never said.

There's a good story that's happening as we speak. That is a fun sample for this, for everybody to watch. So Michael Strahan announced yesterday that he was leaving the Michael and Kelly show. Right. Right. He's going to a good morning America.

Uh huh. And he told Kelly and the producer after the show, like Disney was basically like, we'll double your salary to do GMA. So all these reports come out that Kelly rip is furious and that the, after the show. Like, Disney was basically like, we'll double your salary to do GMA. So, all these reports come out that Kelly Rip is furious and that she was mad

and she was blindsided, all this stuff. Who knows what's true and what's not true? Yeah, never know. So today, I actually put on the show

because I was in here. I wanted to see if they'd talk about it. Yeah. She wasn't hosting. It was Michael Strahan and Anna Gasteyer. Now,

maybe she had a doctor's appointment. Maybe it was a pre-wrench thing. But the internet is just going to go nuts with this for the next. I even did a tweet. I had fun with it. But who knows what's true and what's not true. Maybe Kelly Ripa wasn't blindsided. Maybe she's mad at somebody else.

Or maybe they're fine. Or maybe she knew. But it's going to take the narrative that's starting now is Kelly Ripa is mad. She got blindsided. I don't know if that's starting now is Kelly Ripa is mad. She got blindsided. I don't know if that's true. No, you have no idea. The thing is, though, the difference recently, it feels like because I kind of stopped getting I sort of faded away from a lot of press attention between my last season of Louis and this thing. So I feel like things have changed because it used to feel like there were sites that were

willing to go out on a limb and speculate you know what i mean and they used tons of uh shellac of things like um sources say close to the source say you know what i mean or like uh or cute language perez hilton he kind of you know i seen you know i hear a whisper that you know that kind of shit that gossip people used to do. Or, you know, I'll word on the street is. But now they actually just say like and you can only go by your own experience because I got it. I got to assume that if everything that I read about myself is really inaccurate, that everything I'm reading is accurate and is inaccurate. It's not about me. Do you know what I mean? So when I read things that say like Louis C.K.

states or, you know, confirms that his show is canceled because of, you know, financial concerns, they that when they extrapolate something, they just say this is a fact because it's all moving too fast for anybody to check it or to give a shit. I have no interest in correcting any stories about why would you do that like why don't you go out i mean you just if you just when you have an opportunity which i have plenty to talk in public you just say the truth about your life and then someone else is saying some speculation about your life and people choose which one they want to you know it's probably more interesting to read the speculation so i don't know it's also you have twitter which is

140 characters and you have the way that everybody writes headlines now yeah so headlines now are like louis ck went broke doing horse and pete that's just the headline and then you read the story and it's like wait a second are we sharing it but it's same thing and in twitter it's they pass it along right and again it's okay in the end because time keeps going by so like the places that want to go on record saying that that's the reality of my show well then it's going to continue living it's going to grow because i'm promoting it now i would say you're in a pretty good pretty good shape with uh 10 hours of content in a climate where everyone's killing for content right and it's not a bad place for the story to start uh which is that i'm i'm an underdog i'm i'm hurting you know what i mean i have no there's no downside to people thinking that

uh to thinking that the show that i'm having trouble that's okay with me because well we can perpetuate it if you want yeah yeah oh no i'm really fucked yeah yeah i'll buy you lunch after thank you after we do this i know i know it's tough times for you but it must have been you must have at least thought about just going into netflix or hulu or someone and just being like just give me 25 million for this right now well give you 10 hours all of this is in the future i can i can and will do that i'll find somebody to buy the show i mean that's i own a tv show so obviously i'm going to sell it to another outlet i mean i'm the same i is in the future. I can and will do that. I'll find somebody to buy the show. I mean, I own a TV show, so obviously I'm going to sell it to another outlet. I mean, I'm in the same position that FX is with the show that they make. You just flipped it. Normally, people, it airs on TV.

Yeah. And then they pay $31 to binge watch it a year later because their friends don't watch it. So the binge watching is the first income stream. Right. That's right. So the binge watching is the first income stream. Right. That's the thing. And what has been interesting has been watching people kind of like figure out and debate what the price point should be and what this show is. No one's ever that I can think of done anything this way. I'm not the first person to make my own TV show. But because of the profile of the cast and because I came off of five years

of a winning TV show that was doing well, it's in a really unique position. But I charge money to watch it, which is an odd thing for people now because they're used to streaming and having a subscription. It's odd and it's not odd though because I never watched Mr. Robot

and then everyone was telling me to watch Mr. Robot and the only way to watch it was to basically either get the whole season or pay by the episode that's what that's what you did yeah that is just what it is and so you see people trying to figure it out and talking about it on the internet but then in the end people that like it go well whatever I'll pay and they pay for it and that's how the show um that's how i was able to afford the show and the fact that i'm going to be out of deficit in a couple months i mean i'm i'm

over halfway uh paid off the bills for the show at this point i couldn't be less concerned about you paying for this show yeah no it's not gonna it's the greatest era for you to do this that's ever existed yeah this is just when to do it and then after once it's kind of gone that route i'll put it on netflix and it'll be it'll just be there for who wants to or hulu or vimeo or uh wherever else or or a broadcast or you know a cable network or something like that there's a lot of buyers right now well for television so hold on one second if you're just getting started or you're building a growing business, MailChimp makes it easy. Is that right? To connect with your customers and sell more stuff.

Totally free to get started. No expiring trial. No credit card required. We are using the MailChimp for the ringer. What is MailChimp? My new website. It's a newsletter service. Sends out newsletters.

Our website's going to launch this summer. And we've been writing content in the newsletter. Mailing it out through MailChimp. It's been awesome. We're closing it on 200,000 subscribers. That's great. Thanks to MailChimp for helping me and everyone at The Ringer build our audience. Incredibly easy to use and totally free to get started.

No expiring trial. No credit card required. How long have you had your newsletter? Since I launched my first thing on my site, I did Live at the Beacon in 2011, I think. How long did it take you to get to a decent level where you were like, oh, I'm at 100,000 people have subscribed? It happened pretty fast. Did it? That show sold very fast.

Good. So I think it was a few months, like two or three months. Were you obsessively checking the numbers every day? Are you one of those people? No, I mean mean i get an email in my pocket yeah uh every hour depending sometimes depending on how i feel psychologically i'll call my i'll write my web guy and say let's go to one every four hours for a while right or let's go to one every hour um right now i'm at one every hour because i have something current on sale it's a fun email to get it is and it tells me, how much I've sold of everything I've sold on the site and where my subscribers are at. And so, yeah, it's a fun thing to check once in a while.

Can I ask you about some of the decisions creatively with Horace and Pete? Yeah, please. Yeah. First of all, you got really genuine and awesome performances from a couple of people I hadn't thought about in a while, like Edie Falco. He's amazing. Steve Buscemi. Yeah. Like all these people were locked in.

But then you said before, like you basically did a read through on Monday and you taped it in two days. Like what part of the process gets people to that point where they just bring in their A game when you're just kind of rushing this out every week well we didn't know how we were going to do it it was a very new way to make a show yeah i don't think that there's a show that exists it's like this or has for a long time i mean they used to have playhouse 90 and stuff like that but those were plays and i think that and those were like known plays yeah and i think they would probably do like a rehearsal for months the way you do with the life you know with a play so you need the actors to buy into this because it's a big risk for them they're not rehearsing that's right they're putting themselves on the line and the show is very raw and very naked there's not much protecting you

there's no soundtrack i mean there's no there's there's some music, but there's no score and there's no editing. We don't edit the moments. We edit chunks together. And so, yeah, it is asking a lot of them. And we did a lot of preparation. I mean, I wrote all these episodes back in, you know, like August, September. And after I wrote them, we had a lot of table reads. We would just, I would bring everybody over my house and we would just sit down and read. So you wrote, you wrote the entire show? I wrote the whole season. In August, September, most of it? Over August and September.

The only, I let, I left two, um, the ninth and 10th episode. I knew what they were going to be. I had them outlined. Like I had the whole story fleshed out, but I didn't want to write them until we started shooting because they, I didn't want it, the show to, to go where it was going. Like I didn't like, but you knew where it was going. I knew it was going. And I thought, let's just start shooting. And maybe another ending will occur to me because I didn't want it to end the way that it did the season, the season anyway. And, uh, but I just couldn't escape it. It just was, it just else felt right. But anyway, but I knew what they were.

It took me a day to write each one because I had them line by line fleshed out in my head already. But anyway, the first eight episodes were completely written. And I would have... Did you have somebody you trusted in your life that you were showing them to? Or were you just totally soloing this? Sure, I mean, those people are credited to.

Vernon Chapman is an executive producer on the show. And Vernon. He does stuff with the South Park guys. Yeah, he does. He works with Matt Trey a lot. Yeah. He has a lot of fascinating shows that he's done. If you just IMDB him.

Everybody loves that guy. He's a really brilliant guy and a very giving and generous guy. He just listens well and he adds well and he's extremely bright. I feel sad that he's not in my life. It just seems like he adds stuff to everybody else's life. Yeah, Vernon helps everybody. Maybe I'll just try to make friends with him. You should.

But Vernon is also very busy, so I can never get him to sit down or write anything with me. But what he was, so he's out and working with Matt and Trey. He's also got two little kids. So I would just send Vernon stuff and then get him on the phone for a couple hours and he would talk to me once in a while while i was writing i got vernon to come and sit on my couch that's

the biggest help that anybody ever does me is like sit on my couch while i'm writing um because then i just look up once in a while and go does this i just i'm writing and i look up once in a while and i go does this make sense or i read it out loud to them and we discuss it a little and then i keep keep so what are they doing when you're typing they're just like reading they're reading a magazine yeah well magazine people have their own phone and their own yeah yeah sure yeah it's not you know there's not like a fan in the corner magazine like an old brass fan yeah um a good newspaper yeah so uh uh he did that for me dino stamatopoulos did it did some of that work for

me and also annie baker who's a playwright uh um who lives in new york i met her she did a great play called the flick that i really loved and um she won a pulitzer for the flick wow and she's just like an independent brooklyn playwright and i met her and i and uh i got less time with her because she was had her own life and was busy but But I had like two days that she came and sat and helped me think some of the things out. Because you'd never written a play, right? She particularly helped me with the third episode, which I gave her credit for. And you'd never written a play before this? Yeah, and I didn't know this was a play until I kind of got halfway through it and started to feel like what it was.

Oh, really? Yeah, I sort of thought it was like, I knew who the people were and I knew what the show was about to me. And then the more they started talking to each other on the page for me, I was like, this feels like a stage play or something. I thought maybe this is like a, I don't know,

it's like a multi-camera drama or a sit-drama situation. know, situation, drama, you know? It felt like something out of the 1970s to me. Like how like Maud or On the Family was filmed almost. That's the way those shows were filmed was very respectful to the idea of live performance. Yeah. And that's the way I did when I did Lucky Louie. That was the idea behind that.

The series I had on HBO was really let it feel like a live performance yeah um and that's the way i did when i did lucky louis that was the idea behind that the series i had on hbo yeah was really let it feel like a live performance but the and i had a live audience that really enjoyed the show so i had a lot of laughing on the show but there's a thing about laugh laughing on a sitcom has been so discredited by its abuse that you just can't hear it anymore so i saw this thing on um youtube called abigail's party it's a mike leaf uh play michael lee the filmmaker wrote a play in the 70s and they made a sitcom looking version of it they just filmed it with multi cameras on a set that looked like all in the family like that style set um and i was blown away by it and it's really funny and there's no audience there's no laugh track that's kind of what was the jumping off point i thought i want to tell that kind of a

story and also it was two hours of one scene two hours of a constant conversation that does two hours long no break and i thought originally i thought that's i'll never cut in this show it's going to go from that's hard a to b without a cut yeah it's just going to be a live performance and i made the first thing that started to form the idea of horace and pete as a bar owned by a family was that uh i wanted it to be a business and i wanted two sets a workplace and a living room and i thought I don't want to cut though. Like can I have a little piano music? Here's the house.

So I thought, what if the business and what if they're in the same building? What if the apartment's upstairs? So that you can, people can go up and down the stairs without cutting. That was the first idea I had. And I thought, well, then it's a family-owned business that's how i got to a family-owned business that they have the place upstairs and they live downstairs and then once i got there i let go of the thing of like you can't ever cut or have separate scenes i just let go of it because i with what i wrote before you write stuff you get

all these crazy ideas you know i don't remember what your original question was but no that was one of them then i the follow-up question was about how you picked the customers because some of them seem to be people in your life. Yeah, so wait. You asked me about getting the performances up. Yeah, so once I wrote it, once I wrote the eight, then people came over and they sat with me and read it. And then we'd talk and then they'd go home. But yeah, we just decided we're going to do this in this workflow. We're going to just, and we didn't know how we were going to do it, really.

The first week, we really discovered it. Every Tuesday, we'd come in and we would read it. Like, we'd go all the way through the episode on the two sets. We'd just walk from one set to the other, and we'd just go all the way through. And the thing is, the show is very exhausting emotionally so we do it once yeah we do it once and then we'll be like all right and i let's do it again we do it twice and then i go okay let's just do the second half one more time do the second half one more time and then be like and i'd look at everybody and i'd go like let's stop i mean we on tuesdays we would be done by like two in the afternoon because we just couldn't

keep doing it we couldn't keep reliving these moments yeah and then wednesdays we'd kind of have this feeling like it's it's tape day and we'd get miked and put on our costumes and makeup and stuff and then now the cameras are there and there's just a different life there's no audience but everybody kind of get this game face on um and i had certain coach things i would say like off book tomorrow morning or you're you're fucked you know or and then once we're taping we do like a big chunk of the thing versions of a big chunk and sometimes i'd say things like um well if you want it to be on tv you better do it now because this is the take i'm using i'm not using anything you've done yet right and you see people go oh fuck pressure's really good for good actors you know

but anyway sorry go on what were you uh customers customers so was there anybody that you really wanted that you didn't get that couldn't do it because of a schedule because it seemed like a lot of the people that you had in there are people that um have crossed paths with you at some point yeah i mean i steven i knew right away i I wanted Steven Wright sitting at that bar every day. I was going to imagine he was your first lottery pick. Yes. He was an immediate

first draft choice. Yeah. I mean, I knew I could get him, but he's the DNA on that. Yeah. It's like, I remember reading about

Tuna. What was the coach, Tuna? What was the coach? Bill Parcells. Bill Parcells. Yeah. He would get his guys.

He'd go get his guys. Yeah. Like he'd go start with a new team and he'd go around to their houses and knock on these old guys' doors. They'd make it. Yeah. Yeah. And he'd be like, come on, we're going to...

And they'd be like, what, man? I don't play football anymore. And he's like, come on, Patriots. We're going to go be the Patriots now. And the guy'd go, fuck, Bill, man, I'm tired. But he preferred guys like that to whatever new young college kid. Yeah. Because that veteran ability... I'm not trying to age Stephen Wright too much.

I get you. I just know what Stephen can do. And I know that he has this deep, terrific soul. And he's such a lovable man. It just wasn't realistic to see him sitting at a bar, sadly. Oh, no, wait. It was totally realistic. He's perfect.

Yeah. So he's the first customer that walks in you know um so how do you end up with like jessica lang okay so jessica lang and i because that one threw me for a loop yeah well jessica lang and i sat together a lot at awards shows because she was on american horror story winning and the fx table and i'm yeah so we i'm always at the fx table and uh she likes sitting next to me because i'll make i would make her laugh you know uh those things are fucking boring the golden globes is the most boring thing you'll ever attend but and that's the most exciting of all the award shows that's right and it's boring and there's always a kind of a kind of

even exchange between um uh glamorous actresses and comedians which is that we're happy to sit next to you if you're a glamorous actress and she's she gets entertained so i enjoy i enjoy charming somebody like jessica she enjoys being entertained and she's a really cool person with an amazing history she was in king kong's hand she was the most beautiful woman in the world than the 1970s yes it was like her and jackal smith so i used to sit and chat with her and make her laugh at the golden globes and say inappropriate things about whoever was on stage and stuff and crack her up i just liked her i liked her yeah and um so when i started putting this together i thought um is there a way to use

her there's got to be a way to use Jessica. And I talked to Buscemi about it because he was the first person to come on and I used to talk to him a lot about the show. Yeah. And he said, she's got a great voice and she's very, she's different than a lot of people that do what she does, you know? Yeah.

So I, you know, you sit down, you go, it either writes or it doesn't. I had her in my head. I thought of a character for her and a place for her in the family as this kind of hanger-on boozer. And it worked. It worked for me. Was there anyone you didn't get that you would have been perfect? That I wanted?

Yeah, as a customer. I wanted Uncle Pete to be played by Joe Pesci originally. I wrote it for Joe Pesci. Really? Yes. Joe Pesci? Yes. And I contacted him and I courted him.

I tried to get him to do it. And he was very nice to me and I got to know him a little bit. And he finally passed. But to me, it's like saying you wanted somebody else to play your real uncle in your life. I mean, Alan Alda is Uncle Pete to me. I was going to say say you ended up with like the most decorated most comedic just nobody could have done that part the way he did it nobody could have made that guy live that way so um so everything works out you know but i there was not

no there was a few people i wanted that i didn't get did you think of having like uh because it's a it's a pretty dark show did you think of having like the because it's a pretty dark show. Did you think of having like the Norman Cliff type character that would be a little levity? You know, I just wanted to make sure it felt like they were really people that might be at a bar. To me, I wasn't thinking in terms of entertainment value or comedic value so much, you know. Except for there are people like that are on the show because I saw them at the Comedy value so much you know uh except for there are people like that are on the show because i saw him at the comedy cellar you know kurt kurt metzger who plays the guy who sits with a stack of newspapers and drinks coffee he was a big that was a big bet

that was a big like who knows how this is going to work thing because he's just this really wily comedian he's a really unhinged hilarious comedian he's to me a really exciting new stand-up i mean new to me he's probably been doing it for you know 15 years or something but uh um i i got his voice in my head and i thought i handed him a huge thing which is he's he like leads the conversation in every episode at the bar and i had an instinct that he might be able to do that um so i wrote that stuff for him and and uh he turned out to be great you know but he was never meant to be like he's gonna be really funny he was meant to be this

is the kind of guy who's like he can't stop talking the kind of guy who like will will attack people at the bar and say obnoxious shit, and nobody quite likes him. Do you know what I mean? He's just a constant. Well, that's what Cheers, because Cheers was such kind of an uplifting, funny show for the most part. Right, right. And bars are just not like that.

No, they're not. They're the opposite. They're not. A bar is an interesting place because people are very open. They'll say anything at a bar. They're argumentative. They're candid. Yeah.

First of all, people are able to go like somebody will go like I like Donald Trump. Somebody will go like, well, that's because you're a rich asshole. Like you'll say to the other guy, I'll just shrug. Like nobody quite gets in a fight. Yeah. Or somebody will just suddenly say, yeah, I kind of killed my mom over the years. She died because I abused her. Something like that.

I held her meds off. Yeah. And people will kind of shrug. Yeah, I've heard worse. You know, there's a moment where Tom Noonan says, Stephen Wright says, imagine if everybody in the world killed themselves at the same moment. Even babies. Imagine a baby killing himself. And then Tom Noonan says, babies imagine a baby killing himself and then tom noonan says i saw a baby kill himself once and those are the kind of things you hear at a bar

once in a while i saw a baby kill himself once i remember what the fuck was that you know when i lived in charlestown there was a bar called sully's on main street and it opened at eight and at about 7 40 guys would be lining up to go in right and it was like i and you know i'd be going most of the time i'd be coming home because i would never get up that early when i lived there but uh you'd see these people and you'd go what's more depressing being in a bar at eight in the morning or waiting online at 750 in the morning to get to the bar at 8. It's much more depressing to be in the line. Well, the thing about a bar is that you're not alone, but you're not with anybody.

It's like the Billy Joel line. They're drinking a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone. So it's a bunch of people being alone together. You just perfectly quoted Billy Joel. That's a hard lyric. I alone together you just and to me perfectly quoted billy joe that that's a hard lyric i thought you're gonna screw that up no that's uh yeah um yeah the the the thing to me is the what the show is a little bit about if it's about one thing it's the tension people feel between wanting to be alone because that's safe and it's that there's solace in being alone and that but

it's a desperate fear in being alone right but then if you're with people there's comfort in being with people but there's danger in being with people because you can get hurt by people and it'll take you to a scary place in yourself sometimes so people live in this constant tension of wanting to be like safe but not alone safe, safe, but not alone. So a bar is a place where you can sit there and you know, everyone's leaving you alone, but you're not alone. It's, it's, it's the one step away. Day drinking is one step away from drinking in your, cause you kind of know if you drink in your apartment by yourself, you maybe last a month and they're going to find you half eaten by the cat. You can keep it going

at a bar a little longer. You know what I mean? It's a survival thing. There's witnesses to your self-destruction. Yeah, and they keep you a little closer to, you know. And there's somebody

to turn and talk to, but there's not anybody to be responsible to or anybody to let down. I think that's one reason people live that way too. Quick break to talk about our good friends at FrameBridge.com. Mother's Day is coming up, so send the mom in your life something special,

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as soon as it converts from being a Game of Thrones studio. So we love Framebridge. Check it out. Their work is spectacular. Again, offer code BS. Check out 15% off and do it by May 2nd for Mother's Day. Back to Louis C.K. I didn't, I mean, I might be wrong on this, but you used the Shanley quote in the one episode,

which I'm sure had partly to do with the fact that he just passed away and you wanted a picture between them. Everything to do. Yeah. But it also kind of, I thought that seemed to be what the show was about. It had something to do with the show. That the show's kind of about like silences, right? Yes.

Silence versus conversation. Yeah. Is that a misread? That was Tate's big suggestion. No, that was right. I think that, I mean. After you broke Tate. Well, Gary and I were friends was right. I think that, I mean. After you broke Tate. Well, Gary and I were friends.

Yeah. And he wrote that to me in an email. It wasn't like a quote I pulled from his. Oh, that wasn't like from his stand-up? No, it's something he said to me in an email. About two weeks before he died, he wrote that to me. Was there a reason behind it yeah i he wrote to me about and i don't really want to i don't want to go into this fucking thing because it's

such a stupid episode but when i wrote an email about donald trump to my fans and it kind of exploded a little more than i expected it to and gary wrote to me and sort of made fun of me about the email and i wrote back and forth and he was, I was a little distressed at that. I got too much more attention from it than I wanted to. Yeah. And, uh, and,

and we started right back and forth just about life and stuff. And then he wrote that to me amongst other things. And, uh, I went through this email that he had written to me and it was so full of very moving. And he, he is a very,

he was a very deep person all the time i ever spent with gary um we would just talk and talk for hours and then i always felt like we didn't get anything we didn't have enough time you know what i mean um but so he wrote me that email and i found about 10 things that applied to the show applied to life applied to him passing and how i felt about it and so i threw it on the on the end there um it's he's such a curious guy i only spent one extended stretch on them but he's one of those guys you just could have talked to for 12 hours like he would have been a great guy to drive cross country with that's right yeah just like no that's what i love this what I love. He owned a boxing gym.

Yeah. On the west side with Peter Berg. Wild Card West, they called it. Yeah. And I worked out there with him a bunch of times. I would come to town and I'd write him and say, can we work out today? So we would go and he would get a young trainer. And we would, you know, work in tandem with the trainer. You know, one of us would hit the pads and then the other and we would you know work in tandem with the trainer you know one of us would

hit the pads and then the other one would you know and then vomit while the other one hit the pads you know like we just we're both around the same age and shape and then after training we would go have lunch and sometimes we would just walk in one direction for hours and just talk and then walk back to the car and just, and just leave. Um, and my friendship to him came a little late, late. I didn't really know Gary until like, I don't know,

two, two years ago or something, three years ago. Um, but it became a real constant for me. It was a really, he was very generous with talking about the road from nothing to success, which he had an amazing run.

Um, and he shared a lot about what goes on inside, the inner workings of a person during those kind of big changes. So he was a great friend, you know. He wrote me a month before he died. He was in Hawaii, and I don't know what was going on with him health-wise, but he was convalescing from something or whatever. But he wrote me something about wasting. Oh, he wrote me this

thing saying that, uh, wasting time is part of being creative. That's what he said. Uh, he said that, and he sent me some chapter of a book. I forget what it is, but about that being true. It was something about how Einstein used to like sit around and just do dumb things before he then figured everything out. But he said wasting time is part of being creative. That was the message to his email. And at the end he said, I don't know how much time I can keep wasting because I'm certainly not a teenager anymore. Like how much time I have left to waste, maybe three, four weeks or something like that, which ended up being exactly how long he made it. But anyway, so yeah, that quote,

he had died only a couple of days before and I was posting the show. And so I called my editor and asked her to throw it on the end there. Did he ever give you feedback on the Louis show? No, no, I never asked him about it. Although he read the first two episodes of Horace and Pete before I started making it and asked him about it. Although he read the first two episodes of Horace and Pete before I started making it, and he really loved it.

Actually, the way that he loved it gave me a lot of juice to keep writing. Because at that point, I was just writing scripts, and I didn't know if they were any good. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. So it sounds like August, September, you just hold up. You just crank this out. Yeah, I was sort of possessed. possessed when was the last time you'd done that uh you know when i wrote louis but which is like at least a year earlier it was a couple

years earlier i guess or something and uh and that was a different feeling because i was sort of delivering episodes and also louis i wasn't just making something i was you know giving back to the network that gave me the show and keeping people employed I have you know yeah like a couple hundred people that depend on my show for or did depend on it yeah uh and so that became a lot of what was driving me was I didn't want to let anybody down uh with Louie you know um if it was just me making some for a few people I might have stopped earlier you know um although and I still might make more you know i can't if i want to so i think it was the last season or the second last season when louis did a couple of morally questionable things and people wrote about it

like it was a real person yeah and we saw this happen with game of thrones last year when right something that there was a rape scene on game of thrones and people like this is terrible and it's like this is the same show that started with a brother and sister having sex and then a little kid getting pushed off a tower. That's right. I'm pretty sure I'm ready for anything on this show after that. But it seems like this recurring theme in art,

even saw it a couple weeks ago, people are like, oh, these female characters keep getting killed off. What message? And it's like, well, maybe because it's fiction? Do you think people get too carried away with that stuff i don't know i mean i think it's okay if people write those things because they're just some of the population there's a weird disproportionate thing going on with the internet where it's like it feels like that's what everybody's talking about but i don't think it is i think it's a minority and i think that most people take culture into their lives,

and then they think about it, and they talk to their friends about it, and then they go do their jobs and raise their families. I think that's most people. So you think it's a bubble? I do think so. And I think that it's okay for it to go where it wants to go. I mean, it's a reaction. When you make stuff, the reaction is different.

I think sometimes when we make things we wanted them to be guided missiles like we can decide how people think about them and make sure they heard me just right i don't worry about that kind of thing you know what i mean like but you're you like it's really it's been interesting to see the distortion of the story of horace and pete because i'm studying this thing right but it doesn't bother me or concern me. But you also have a thick skin because you were in comedy clubs for, you know, I would say stuff bounces off you more than a typical show. That's right.

And also what I've always trafficked in is material that it's subjects that people don't want to usually talk about. They aren't easy to talk about. So what I'm really used to doing, because I do it several hundred times per night, most nights of my life,

is starting to say something and watching people tighten and get upset. And knowing that after they're upset, they're going to laugh and they're going to be glad that we went down that road. Yeah, I mean, the SNL hosting was the best example of that. Yeah, you mean which one? The last one you did.

Yeah, yes, that monologue about the child molester. was the best example of that yeah yeah you mean the which one the the last one you did yeah yes the the uh the that monologue about uh the child molester yeah uh was you could literally hear the audience yeah you could hear the sphincters tightening as you were like oh no totally and i'm used to that oh no don't don't no louis no no no back off no no please no see that's how i felt watching it which is what you wanted. That's right. Well, to me, that's a worthwhile trip. Yeah.

And everything that happens afterwards is okay. People have their reaction. And everybody doesn't have to agree on what something is. It's like when you read pieces on the internet that are like how he got it wrong, like the ones that always start with why this, this yeah well according to you and i don't know you i think you're in your 20s and also you're selling this you're selling this click for money there's so many reasons not to take it seriously do you know what i mean and every time that i've met people who write for sites like that they kind of roll their eyes and go well they make me write this stuff you know like nobody really means it and i try to tell that to my friends.

I think it's like professional wrestling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like if two wrestlers got mad at each other, like, hey, man, you body slammed me. Well, first of all, no, I didn't. Remember, we rehearsed it. I mean, it's a joke.

So like when I have friends that get attacked and by the blogosphere and they get scared and they're like, I don't know what I'm like. It does. The person that wrote this about you didn't mean it. They actually didn't mean it. When somebody writes, this was racist or this was inappropriate, they don't, I don't believe that most of them actually mean it. They're just crafting something to feed a, um, a dopamine rush that certain people have

to, to sell clicks. It's all, it's, it's, it's a click economy. It's sell clicks. It's a click economy. It's an outrage economy. It's an economy of outrage. Every time you read a story that's supposed to make you mad, it's supposed to make you click. You're a sucker. Whenever you add your comments to,

yeah, that woman shouldn't pretend to be black in Spokane, Washington, who I never heard. You know what I mean? This thing that affects three people that is now a global concern, Yeah, that woman shouldn't pretend to be black and Spokane, Washington, who I never heard. You know what I mean? Yeah. This thing that affects three people that is now a global concern. It's money. There's an economy that sold that story. And made sure everybody in the world would click on it for money, money, money.

So I don't buy into that. I don't buy into that feeling. But as a comedian, if you're going to do a joke about child molesting, you have to know that there's going to be tons of people that are just going to go, I don't want to hear that. And I did it on Saturday Night Live, which is not a late night comedy club. That was a high wire act. That was a very mainstream place to do that joke. I was going to say, I love the fast and furious movies yeah there's only a couple trained race car drivers in the world yeah who could go on snl and do that bit yeah i mean i was very i i ran the set many times in clubs before i did it because i wanted to know that it

was uh airtight logic wise and to me i I stand behind it because it's all true. I mean, it's just a truth. It's maybe a truth that you don't like to hear. And that's okay. It's okay for you to be upset that I said it. And it's okay for you to dislike me for it. It's okay for you to say, that's it. I'm done with that guy because he said this thing.

That's your choice. You can limit your culture any way that you want to. Or you can comment on it any way that you want to, or you can comment on it any way that you want. In the end, human beings continue to choose comedy as an important part of their cultural diet. And part of making that choice is to get upset once in a while. It helps us, I think. What helps you as a performer when people know that you're going to push the envelope every once in a while. Yeah, and that's the other thing is that I'm starting to reach more and more people.

Which is a good thing and a bad thing. Well, it's a good thing, and then it's also something you've got to be careful about. Yeah. So to me, the thing isn't to say, now that I've got a bigger audience, I've got to cool it. That's a huge mistake, and it's also not honest. And you won't continue to be inspired, which means you won't be able to make anything anymore. So when I did SNL, I thought I'd done it twice. The first time I did it, I just sort of, the monologue to me is what I do there.

You know what I mean? And then I hang around for the sketches. The Lincoln thing was great, though. That was super cool. That was a big win for you. Seth Meyers completely invented that. Yeah. But the first time I did it, I told a story about an old lady in an airport.

I did a very basic monologue. Then the second time I did it, I kind of dug a little deeper and talked about religion and life a little more. And then the third time I did it, I thought, okay, people are getting used to seeing me do this. They don't really know who I am. And they don't really know what I'm capable of in terms of what I'm willing to talk about. So I should tell, I should be, I mean, I know this sounds weird, but I thought it's only fair to do the Chum Lester joke. I'm going to continue doing this show. I can't go down a road where I change who I am for them because then they'll, it's like they're getting fooled.

It's not, I'm not this filtered guy. You know, I'm not a polite comedian. So and also if they come and watch if they if they like me on SNL and they go watch one of my specials, they're going to have a heart attack. Some of these people, you know what I mean? So so I thought I should make a real account for myself. This bit is in my mind. This bit is frontwards. I had been doing it like this is the bit that is itching inside of me right now that that whole bit that there was this thing from the Middle East to the child molesting. And it also came out of a personal story. There was a whole shape to it, and I thought,

this is the things I'm doing right now. So it's only fair to lay it out and just let the chips fall. If it turns into that the outrage from the monologue would have taken me down a few pegs, I thought that's appropriate. I want to be in the right place in the culture i don't want to be bigger than um i ought to be do you know what i'm saying i i mean you've laid out the a lot of people i think creatively have been in that situation not just comedians

but like i think pearl jam was in that place to some degree tell me what you mean by that well i think pearl jam got bigger than maybe eddieder wanted to be. And that's what the documentary is about. Right. He felt like there were all these bandwagon fans. And he was playing because he genuinely loved the music. He never wanted to be on the cover of Time magazine. Yeah. And he was like, oh, Jesus.

So the next album they put out, the first single was Spin the Black Circle. Right. Which is just a, I hate that song, but some people like it. But it's just loud and it's not a song that would ever be a hit. hate that song, but some people like it, but it's just loud and it's not a song that would ever be a hit. And that was his reaction to that. He's like, oh, you want us to be this? You just need to know what I really am.

And what that does is it keeps your flow going. In other words, when you start, when you thwart what's real about you in order to keep creating content for a financial need, you're just not going to make it. You're not going to keep going. Some people are destined to be liked by a certain number of people. And once you go up here, you're going to lose that. It's very dangerous to be liked by more people than should like you.

It's very dangerous. It's bad for them and it's bad for you. There's going to be a shock down the road for them. Or you're going to dilute yourself and take yourself to a place where you can't live with who you are. So I think if you make an honest account of who you are and then you live with the results and the results will be appropriate to who you are. If you try, if you, if you have, I don't have a, I don't have a thirst to be big. I've had many opportunities to do things

that would have made me much bigger. You know, comedy movie type things that would have, I would have been more like a guy that would be recognized at a mall by children. That's not right for me,

I don't think, you know, so, and it's okay. It doesn't feel bad for people to reject you if they just, if they're rejecting you based on who you are. Do you understand what I mean? Uh,

I think the reverse of that, like Steve Martin wrote the best thing I've ever read about this in his book. I think it was called born standing up. He's basically like, he reached such a crazy level of popularity that when he went to do his standupup shows the people like he could have said anything and people would have been dying laughing yeah that's bad they're reciting the lines and he's just like wow i've i've i've nowhere else to go yeah that's that's this has gone to a place that i don't want that's right that's there's all kinds of bad ways this can go if you really care about the directions if you're saying things just to piss people off i don't know why do it if you're saying things just to piss people off, I don't know why do it. If you're saying things just to please people, that's also a short-lived victory. But if you just say the things you believe and the things that you like to say and that mean something to you,

if you stay close to the gut, then everything will work itself out. Do you know what I mean? The rest will be whatever it is. Well, Louis became a much more serious show I felt like as it went along would you agree with that? yeah and I remember

when I first started doing the show there was episodes that were funny and episodes that really weren't and so then I would see some of the reactions

some people would go that wasn't funny I'm not watching this anymore make me laugh yeah and then other people would go I really like this so I go okay

I'm going to keep making the show the way I want to and I'll catch the audience that likes it, and I'll lose the audience that doesn't. And if the audience I'm losing is bigger than the audience I'm getting, they'll take me off the air. I mean, it's that simple. I'm okay with the level I'm at.

I'm okay with being five times smaller than i am right now so like i'm okay financially and and i'm i'm happier when i'm more obscure whenever things calm down and i can walk the streets of new york and you know mostly people don't give a shit who i am i'm just more comfortable you know i would say you're more famous than that yeah it depends on what's going on a lot more than that it goes in waves you know and i also i don't mind it it on what's going on. You must get recognized a lot more than that. It goes in waves, you know? Yeah. And I also, I don't mind it. It's a goodwill, you know?

I mean, if I'm walking down the street and like a fire truck blares their horn and a couple guys wave at me, that's like makes me really, really happy, you know? I do like that, you know, there's way too many shows now, obviously, and it's tough to figure out which ones to watch. But there was this really bad trend

with comedy shows on TV, especially with networks, for about 20 years, where it just became set-up, set-up, joke, set-up, set-up, joke, set-up, set-up, joke. That's right. And my favorite network show ever was Cheers. Cheers was a show that happened to be funny, but it had real poignant moments in it.

And they'd have four or five minute scenes where people were just yelling at each other, fighting. Like when Coach died, it was as sad as any moment that had been on TV. It does feel like we're starting to drift back with that with some of these half hour shows. Like even my kids love Black-ish. Yeah.

Black-ish has some serious shows. That's what I've heard of Carmichael also. Carmichael does it too. They're not just churning out the jokes. Right. It's something I worked on a show called Cedric the Entertainer Presents, Cedric's show. And one of the head writers was John Bowman, who was a real veteran writer. And he used to call it the tyranny of the joke.

That you just must get to the joke. But jokes are conversation stoppers. They're not. Jokes have a corrosive, you know, nature to them. So if you're talking with your friends and being funny, like you're talking about something

that's making you all laugh and then somebody cracks a joke, everybody goes like, what are you doing? What are you trying to be cute? Like it's, you know what I mean? And that's what sitcom dialogue sounds like a lot of the time.

But yeah, it's starting to drift back into some interesting places. I heard that show, The Ranch. I've never seen. I've never seen any of these shows, but I've heard that's also. Oh, The Cutcher Show. People like that show. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's a little more serious. There's so much TV right now that there's, I mean, for me, the funniest shows, the shows that really make me laugh are like Portlandia Kills Me. Yeah. Because it's about just energy and moments. And there's creative ideas about the stories too but portlandia is just about watching fred and carrie take opportunities to be just super fucking funny you know um and it's very inventive and strange so there's a million kinds of great great comedy right now there are there always are but yeah

it has a rhythm to it. We're running out of time. Yeah, sure. So, not just, I could talk to you for five hours, but just like the average podcast, you want to go about 80 minutes and then people can't download them? No. Is Louis coming back?

It might. You know, I think about it sometimes. It's an autobiographical show. That's what makes it different. Yeah. If Louis was a character that didn't look so much like me and act like me and stuff um it would be a different thing if you named him bob i feel like it would be a lot easier right well louis was uh the the character on the show um was a version of me but uh with different who makes different choices and acts

differently yeah i'm a much more outgoing energetic person than the guy on the show. I'm a much more, I seize life and I'm very optimistic. But that's not funny to me. To me, what's funny is this guy that just can't do anything. He was, based on who I was in 2010 when I created the show, which was a newly divorced dad who was trying to do his best as a father without knowing quite how to pull it off, and being single late in life, and being a struggling comedian. That was the, and a New Yorker, you know, a member of just the random streets of New York City

with all the grit and shit of New York City. That to me was who that guy was. And I talked about him and told stories about him for five years, you know. And I mean, well, five seasons over six years. But your life completely changed as you're doing that. Yeah, exactly. And some of the stories weren't about his life.

And those are the ones that I feel like, you know, like the one where he meets the cop. Oh, yeah, no. I'm saying your life changed. I mean, the things that you were probably interested in telling stories about because of how your life changed, you can't do that. I'm a different kind of father than I was then. I know what I'm doing now. And obviously my life is different. I'm financially more better off than I was when I started doing the show. And it doesn't mean I can't write about that.

I was poor for 40 years. Yeah. And I've been better off for five or so, really. So I have more memories of tough times than I do good times. So I'll always be able to write about anything I want. And obviously life stays difficult. But the mechanics of that guy's life, and also it's hard to put something that looks like you out there to this degree.

When I started doing it, I was nobody. I'm well known now. So it's tougher. And also, I really wanted to be able to take that character and have him make big mistakes and and be kind of an idiot in a lot of ways and so it's harder to watch yourself do those things and to represent that you know so and then people you become so famous that people confuse the character's mistakes with yeah i think they do that too i mean here's for me when i watch things

like you said it's's fiction. Yeah. I don't need people to show me a good example of a human being when I'm watching a story. I agree. I don't understand that idea that culture and television is supposed to show how things should be. Or that it's supposed to avoid things that are bad. I don't understand that i don't i i don't think that way i don't argue with people that do but i don't get the idea that um you know we have to uh show women in a good light or men in a good light or you know don't show a family

structure yeah or the idea don't be racist. I think it's actually... This is just me, but I feel like it doesn't do any group any service to defend them or protect them in that way. I think it does the opposite. I think the idea with when we tell stories in comedy or drama, we're all throwing all of us into a mishmash

and fucking around and telling outrageous stories and we're competing and fighting and doing things to each other on television that we can't do or shouldn't do in real life. So if you'd say to a television, don't let this happen to this group, you're saying that group isn't worthy of that, that they're not equal, that they can't be an equal partner, that they can't put a chip in the game. You know what I mean? In fiction?

Like you can't watch it in fiction? It doesn't make any sense to me. I don't need that from fiction. The problem for you, though, is that you're too good at capturing real life. So when you have the bar customers talking about Trump, and it's hitting certain places where I'm like, that sounds like my uncle. Yeah, no shit. That's your tabina stuff that's actually there.

Yeah, and I know that that's true. So when I see that reaction, it's curious to me. I don't share it, but I welcome it. Also, I welcome when people watch my show and they get upset. That's a positive thing. And the people that talk about what I make and they're angry about it um that's positive but i don't i do like the idea of i like playing horace because he's so to me anyway he wasn't me yeah um so i don't know i don't know if there'll be stories i can tell about myself as louis in the future that have less to do with my daily life and more like adventures

there were certain episodes of louis that were like adventures that were outside of my real life do you know what i mean like the going to afghanistan and well you also when i had larry david we did we did a long podcast like a year and a half ago and he's you know he's coy about whether curb would ever come back right and i just got the feeling like he was good like he had a a great run. Why fuck with it? Yeah, I think at some point some... Don't you have to think about that too, right? You're like, this is great. Maybe it's better to leave two years too early than a year too late.

Yeah, definitely. I think I had that in mind when I put it on a big pause, when I basically said, I don't want to owe this anymore. Like that's where it's at now. I don't owe it to anybody to do it, but I'm welcome to do it. As long as the same... I mean, I might go back in a year and they don't want it anymore you know who knows but uh but it is autobiography so who knows once in a while you're grabbed by you know like char what's his name um uh john uh steinbeck a great fiction writer and then he wrote travels with charlie it's his best book and it's just about him driving around the country with his dog.

It's one of the greatest things I ever read. And it's just one day he decided, George Orwell wrote these bizarre, crazy fantasies. And then he wrote something called Fear and Loathing in Paris and London. And it's just about him living. He decided to live with nothing, with no money, on the streets of London and on the streets of Paris. And he wrote just like a first-person memoir of what it was like. So I do think it's possible that I'll have some experiences and stories that I want to tell at some point in my life.

And that'll be where I'll do it because there's no better place to me to make TV than FX. I love working there. How old are your daughters now? 10 and 14. How's it going with the 14-year-old? She's good. She's a really and 14. How's it going with the 14-year-old? She's good. She's a really bright kid.

Still nice to you? It's her life. Still nice to you? Yeah, we have a good relationship. Okay, good. Mine's turning 11 next month, so I'm sorry. I'm really getting focused on it. Yeah, no, it's...

The moodiness is... Everybody gets... We talked about this last time. When you get older, you get confronted by difficult truths about life. Yeah. And about how you feel. Stuff starts coming in really clear around 11, 12, 13, 14. And you can't blame a kid.

You go from Santa Claus to, you know, there is no God. That's a rough trip. That's a rough trip that's a rough trip yeah my my kid's almost 11 and and hid her tooth that she lost under the pillow hoping the tooth fairy would come out like i just want to freeze this just please keep believing this for as long as possible yeah for as long as you know and kids will always do it longer than they believe it to right well now it's a financial mover yeah definitely she's like yeah i still believe in the tooth fairy so uh if she's doing when she's 17 i'm gonna be i'm gonna be concerned yeah yeah so louis ck louis ck.net

yeah that's where you can get horace and pete it's 31 for the whole season five dollars for the first episode what a lot of people do i'm watch i'm seeing is they watch the first one and then they complete the season after they've watched the first one. That's the most common trend. That's what your advanced metrics are telling you? Yeah, because a lot of the, well, because a lot of the, by the $31 is a 26, because I get told how many,

how much, you know, when I average out how much we make on that price, it's $26 on the nose almost every day. So that means that that's 20, that's 31 minus 5. So people are watching the first episode, which is great. If people watch the first episode and they buy all 10,

or the remaining nine, that's a good thing. Well, also, it's slightly hard to buy each one, so it's just easier to just buy the next. Yeah, fuck it. I'll just buy all of them. I couldn't let you buy them all ahead of time yeah because they didn't exist yet so it would have been irresponsible for me to sell something that doesn't now when you're doing it you might as well it's just easier to just now it's there and you can just go buy it

i think people it's smart to take a little time with it because it is heavy it's intense i mean look at tape yeah people get hurt screwdriver that's not coffee people get hurt on this show this show is about a family that's been together for too long and uh parallel maybe about a country that's been together for too long yeah and it's and it doesn't mean that they don't need each other but it's a hard time in this family's life and uh and every episode reveals more and more about what they're going through together. And the performances are so good by these actors that the show is really fucked up. The show is seriously sad. You're not just a bystander of some drama. You're really seeing some shit that's not really okay.

And you have a stand-up. Your next one's coming. I'm on tour. I'm starting a tour now. Usually, yeah. Um, and you have a standup, your next one's coming. I'm on tour. Start. I'm starting a tour now. Usually. Yeah. I'll be all over the country through the whole summer.

I'm going to Europe to do some shows. I'm going to be on tour heavily from now until probably January of next year. Great. And, uh, I'm not going to put out a special for a little while. I might wait until next year cause I really love the material I'm doing right now. And so I think if I give it a good year of touring, it'll be even better. I really want the next special that I do to be better than all the ones I've done before. Okay.

Yeah. Excellent. Thank you. Thanks, Bill. This is fun as always. Good luck with Horace and Pete. Good luck with the bankruptcy. Good luck at HBO. Thank you. I, Bill. This was fun as always. Good luck with Horace and Pete. Good luck with the bankruptcy. Good luck at HBO.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Sure, man. All right. Thanks so much to Louis CK. Thanks to MailChimp.com. They've helped us make a very successful ringer newsletter. If you're just getting started or if you're building a growing business, MailChimp makes

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