The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - JACKASS Star Steve-O: A SHOCKING Story Of Unaddressed Childhood Trauma, 3-Day Drug Binges, Mocking Death & Craving Attention! (HOW TO TURN YOUR LIFE AROUND).

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

In this new episode Steven sits down with Stephen Glover, better known as the star of Jackass, Steve-O. After graduating from Clown College in 1997, and recording various death defying stunts on camera, Stephen became Steve-O, a member of the MTV series ‘Jackass’ in 1999. Since then, Jackass has become a cultural phenomenon with 3 TV series and 4 number one box office smash hit films. After battling addiction and becoming sober in 2008, Stephen has diversified his career, starting stand up comedy in 2013, creating the ‘Wild Ride! with Steve-O’ podcast in 2020, and writing 2 best selling memoirs. In this conversation Stephen and Steven discuss topics, such as: Stephen’s ‘insane’ childhood His mother’s alcoholism and later illness Why he thought he would be dead before the age of 25 His anger at the idea of death Feeling guilty for being successful Becoming sober and escaping addiction How heartbreak led Stephen to find stunts His constant need for attention and how it has driven his life Why Stephen feels as if he is defective You can purchase tickets to Stephen’s ‘Bucket List Tour’, which we be in the UK until 14th July 2023, here: https://bit.ly/3PCTIH8 Follow Stephen: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3CXQyWQ Twitter: https://bit.ly/44hbN1R YouTube: https://bit.ly/3pIyRHH Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I read that you were practically living on Diet Coke, booze, and nitrous. Not Diet Coke, a diet of cocaine. Steve-O! The jackass superstar. He survived his trademark wild stunts along with some personal struggles. It is of paramount importance that I find separation between me and the persona of Steve-O. Why? We have to go back to the beginning of my journey i didn't get attention

from my parents my dad was a businessman and my mom suffered from alcoholism your father would praise you for stunts diving headfirst for baseballs and he'd give one dollar i don't think you have to be sigmund freud to imagine that had something to do with becoming an attention whore that was when i started doing dangerous stunts. I'm Steve-O, and this is the fish hook. Why stunts? Growing up, I felt defective. And the thought was, I wasn't going to live very long.

So I was lashing out at death, taunting it. But I lost my mom in 2003, and that traumatized me more than anything. I was out of control, broadcasting my downward spiral to 200 influential people in real time. You were manhandled into a psych ward. Yeah. This was going to be my legacy, having miserably failed at life. And the toughest thing is that I wanted to make my mom proud. Stephen Gilchrist Glover, aka Steve-O. Honesty. Honesty saved Steve-O's life. But the man that sits in front of me today isn't Steve-O. It is Stephen Gilchrist Glover, which is a man you've probably never met before but once you meet steven gilchrist glover you'll undoubtedly understand steve-o that guy that we

grew up with on our screens doing those crazy jackass stunts that behind the scenes struggled with a deep discomfort of being in his own skin, depression, drug addiction, existential panic, an obsession with attention, crippling grief, and most surprisingly and paradoxically of all, a deep, deep fear of death. It absolutely doesn't appear to make sense, but once you listen to this conversation, if you listen closely, you'll understand exactly why that's driving him. This conversation will make you laugh. It will inspire you. It will motivate you. It will challenge you.

It will make you feel understood. And it will teach you what it takes and what it means to live a good life, including the role that romantic love has played in Steve-O finally living a good life. And for me, it reaffirms to me once again, that in order to live that good life, in order to find that good life, we need to surrender, stop fighting life. And we need to be honest. And once we are, we might just find all of the things that we're looking for. You're going to love this one. Stephen all right you've lived a anomalous life the man that sits before me today is an anomaly in many respects the professional path you've walked is extraordinary to say the least

in order to understand you what. In order to understand you, what do I need to understand about your earliest context to understand who you are and why you walked the path you did in your life? What's the first sort of domino that I need to understand? I would point to my lineage. My mom's side of the family is like the whole family tree, every leaf on the tree suffered from alcoholism,

some form of addiction. And at the same time, very personable, charismatic individuals, but just very alcoholic and a lot of deviance. And then my dad's side of the family is super academic. There's a lot of theologians clergymen everybody's got at least like a master's degree or a phd or they're you know highly decorated academia and my dad broke the mold by becoming a businessman Um, so I just kind of think that I am a little bit of a hybrid of both in that I definitely went towards deviance and suffered from alcoholism, but I had this

rocket engine on it from my dad's side of the family. And as I've grown older I think my I'm kind of manifest my dad's side more than my mom's side before we start recording I said that one of the things that really surprised me we're sat in London now was to learn that you were born in London back in 1974 yeah born in wimbledon um which makes me british my mother was born in canada which makes me canadian and my father was born in america which makes me american i'm what you call triple national and i hold three valid passports i'm very jealous it's cool like having the keys to the to the world in many respects how how did that impact you though because you told me that you were you born here your first

words were in Portuguese in Brazil then you're in Venezuela then Canada then USA as a young child that's figuring out the world and figuring out where he belongs and making friends how does that sort of destabilization impact you in hindsight? I don't think you have to be Sigmund Freud to imagine that that had something to do with me becoming an attention whore. And I think that it's actually exacerbated by the fact that when I moved to Brazil at the age of six months, I moved to Brazil because my father became the president of Pepsi-Cola in all of Brazil. And it was just kind of

living it up. I think that's the best way to describe it. And I didn't get much attention from my parents. I was actually raised by live-in maids, which is why I spoke my first words in Portuguese. So I think I was lacking for some attention from my parents. And I think that that has something to do, plus the instability. And always being the new kid in school, it was, I never stayed one place for more than a couple of years. So yeah, I, I, I point to that for why I became such an attention whore. The context that you were, you raised you raised and your mother's at home,

your dad's very, very busy, very successful businessman by all accounts. Yeah, not just busy, but traveling. My dad was consistently gone. I would argue that he was gone more than he was home. And mom was drunk a lot. So I had not not just uh lacking attention but lacking supervision a lot of the time too in 2023 we've learned a lot about addiction and alcoholism and those kinds of things

but I imagine I mean I wasn't alive then but back in 1974 people didn't understand that behavior as clearly as they do now did you understand your mother's behavior when you were young did you understand her relationship with alcohol was a uh an unhealthy thing or an addiction i think so yeah um i think so because i remember um she would would have these binges drinking where it wouldn't be the case that my mom would get drunk at night and then wake up and have a hangover and then get drunk again the next night. It was more of a case where she would stay drunk for for days or weeks on end um and you how old sorry oh um like it got really pretty crazy i would say when i was about eight certainly when i was nine it, it was terrible. And whenever my mom would sober up from one of her binges, she would swear that she was never going to drink again.

And invariably she would. And I say this because I think I really, really understood the concept of the disease of alcoholism very well. Because when I would come home from school and find that my mom was drinking, I would say to her, mom, you said you were never going to do this again. And she would explain to me that this time it was going to be different. This time she was only going to have a couple. And I remember knowing that that was not the case. And that's kind of the reality of alcoholism is that the alcoholic, once they start drinking, they cannot stop. They've lost control. And it's a characteristic of alcoholics, the idea that they, the illusion that one day they're going to

control and enjoy their drinking and and uh and they pursue this illusion into the gates of insanity or death that's that's uh how it's described and i understood that so i knew if mom had one drink i knew that all bets were off for days or weeks you know you talked about lineage like yeah the family line yeah what is what is that then is that is that a predisposition is that a genetic predisposition in your view or is that a a generational trauma you know did you have you ever figured out what causes that i understand there to be a genetic component to the alcoholism um i don't know that it really matters um as much like why one becomes an alcoholic but um certainly as i said on my mom's side of the the family it never skipped a generation i mean it got everybody and then

sanity of it i mean one could really describe it as as a mental illness i mean they they do say it's a disease that's centered in the mind um for me to see and experience what I did as a child, like just how awful it got. And then for me to just pick up a drink is so insane. I mean, if anybody should have known better, it should have been me. And I remember at the time, like 16 years old, when I started drinking regularly, I just convinced myself that what would make me different is that I was going to enjoy it. I was going to party.

And it's just insanity. That speaks to the nature of the addiction and the disease though because people people that are outside of that situation might see it as um self-destructive but clearly you know clearly it's it can't be that it's clearly something else because you saw how destructive it was right and yet it's still through no choice you made to no intention you made it managed to to find you later in life did what your father in this context is he aware that your mother's has this disease of addiction with alcohol um mom would really do her best to get her act together by the time dad got home from his business trips. Um, and with

very little success, I would say when dad would get back, mom would describe that, that she was ill and, and, and dad would believe it a lot of the time. I think dad, I mean, yeah, he knew. But the extent of it and how naive he was to believe that mom just wasn't feeling well. I don't know. I mean, we would describe it as rose-colored glasses. I don't know. And perhaps dad was just so focused on his stuff that, I mean, I don't even know. It would be crazy to not know, but somehow I believe that my dad was particularly naive or gullible. I'm not sure but sometimes i think men have a predisposition to avoid conflict

yeah and to opt for an easy life right um i think that that that's probably fair too but man it's um it just makes me really sad that I lost my mom. I lost my mom in 2003, November of 2003. And I just, like, I think had we both been in recovery, I don't think anybody from my mom's side of the family ever managed to achieve long-term sobriety. I think I'm the first. And I fantasize about what it would be like for my mom and I to have both gotten it. What our relationship would be like. She would get such a kick out of it i think that she would have gotten such a kick out of um me being successful

and she didn't get to see it you know she never she never well because jackass had just started to move at that point hadn't it well the thing was that her last five years she um was terribly disabled both physically and mentally because in 1998 1998, she suffered an aneurysm, which, yeah, it rendered her very disabled. So the last five years, she didn't, she had a really rough last five years. And that traumatized me more than anything she developed bed sores she uh she cried in pain for for her last five years it was the most upsetting the most by far the most traumatized I've ever been by anything was the situation that my mom was in for her last five years.

And it's all because of this thing, this alcoholism. And had, again, had she been in recovery, had that not happened, had, like, I just, again, I fantasize about what our relationship might be like today. But yeah, that started us off on a bummer. Yeah, yeah. It's a really interesting context, though. Specifically this, you know, you said the thing about attention and seeking attention from, um, in a variety of different ways because you were destabilized in

terms of your school, early schooling life, your father's not present. I read that you'd said that, um, you wanted your father's approval. And as a child, your father would praise you for physical stunts, such as diving headfirst, um, for baseballs or doing push-ups for your fathers and his friends. I would do a hundred push-ups in a row for his buddies. And he'd give me like $1. And that, everybody got a kick out of that. I love doing it. And I don't think they were terribly impressive push-ups because 100's a lot.

But yeah, I was a little bit of a performer at my dad's behest. I think there's this thing called love languages. Have you ever seen it before? Have you ever done the love languages test thing? No. It's this thing you do online, and I think it's pretty telling. I'm not into like pseudo bullshit, whatever, but I think it's pretty telling. You answer these like 30, 40, whatever, but I think it's pretty telling. And it basically, you answer these like 30, 40 questions and it tells

you the language of love that you have. So some people are words of affirmation. That's how they kind of show and receive love. Some people are physical touch. Some people are little acts of service. Some people are gifts, for example. And it was making me, when I was reading that in your, in your book, I was thinking about how like that can become a love language for us. And it was making me, when I was reading that in your book, I was thinking about how that can become a love language for us. And it's funny because then I skipped to this moment later in your story where you had a heartbreak. And the way that you responded to the heartbreak to try and get attention was by doing stunts. Yep. And I just saw this connection there.

I thought, you know, it's interesting. Some of our love languages can be like stunts or other forms of like validation. Uh-huh. which just can be like stunts or other forms of like validation. Uh-huh. It's an interesting take on it. I remember at the point when I had the heartbreak and that was when I really started doing dangerous stunts. It was less for, well, well yeah it was for attention and i wanted this this this girl who had dumped me to uh to be worried that i would die like uh i mean it's crazy but

yeah i was like i was jumping off rooftops into pools and, and, you know, climbing off of like just huge balconies and stuff. And, um, and sending her the videos or just posting them where she's at the time, there was no such thing as sending videos without going to the post office. But yeah, I would send her in mail videos from the post office. I would mail them to her like once a year. And the videos genuinely did get radder and radder. Yeah, each new installment. It was, yeah, it was crazy. If I'd asked you when you were a young man,

you're teenagers, what are you going to be when you grow up? What would you have responded? Ah, man. your teenage years what are you going to be when you grow up what would you have responded ah man the first actual thought i had for a career to pursue was um one in advertising you know um my father had won a video camera in a golf tournament and I stole it from his closet and began videotaping my skateboarding with my buddies. And I learned how to edit by plugging these video cassette recorders together and I would hit play on one and record on the other to just record the good bits. And it was crude editing, not sophisticated. But I fell in love with the process. And clearly I wasn't that great at skateboarding.

So I just thought there's something about this capturing video and then editing it to, you know, I mean, create presentations and ultimately to manipulate the video to create influence. You know, there was just something really magical and powerful about that. And I thought that that would be a great career for me. And so I went off to the University of Miami to pursue that, but I just had trouble making it to class. So graduating from university was not in the cards. And I knew I still loved the video camera and manipulating images to sway people one way or the other. And I decided that since I wasn't that great at skateboarding that I would do crazy stunts. And so I literally dropped out of university in 1993 to pursue a career as a crazy famous stuntman. And there was no precedent at the time.

Everybody who I explained that plan to legitimately felt sorry for me. Like what a tragic loser I seemed to be. And they weren't wrong for the first three years after I left the University of Miami. I was genuinely homeless. I was more of a couch surfer than, you know, a guy living on the streets. But yeah, I had no home, man and um i was not doing well there's so many things i want to ask this question because i just really want to hear it in your own words which is like and i've tried to maybe piece it together using some connected dots but why stunts i have a theory that um that the the human condition is one of a real catch-22. We've got one instinct, which is to survive,

and one guarantee, which is we won't survive. And I view the human experience largely as an exercise to come to terms with our mortality, to wrap our heads around it, to come to peace with it. And I view the different ways that people do that. There's reproduction. We have children. So then I think that eases people's mind about their mortality

because they have a legacy living on with their children that they won't really be dead. Then of course, people turn to religion because they think everything's going to be great when they go to heaven. And then there's people who leave stuff behind to outlive them, like cavemen scrawling stick figures on the cave. It seems that they were just, like I described, really upset about their mortality and leaving this art on the cave walls to outlive them because I had failed in university the way I did. I mean, I failed every which way that you can. And every attempt that I had ever had to be employed ended in disaster. I was fired from literally every job that I ever had. So not being able to make it through school or keep a job, I felt absolutely just not qualified to navigate the world. I believed that I was going to fail at life, like badly and quickly. And I think that this idea that I believed that I was just going to fail at life and die very young, I think that it heightened heightened my my mortality issues because even though you know i was i was young but like man

i think i was somehow angry at the idea of of death and and my theory is that i was uh i was lashing out at death by by climbing off of balconies and and just dangling from my hands off like 12 stories and then letting go and dropping onto the balcony below. Like that was totally life-threatening, especially how intoxicated I was while doing that. And, you know, like I said, I wanted that girl who dumped me to think I was going to die. Like there was this idea of mortality was very woven into all of the art. and so I think that I was upset about mortality and lashing out at it. I was mocking death, taunting it.

Why you? Because that is, I understand at a certain level we all probably have that relationship with our mortality but you seem to, more than anyone I've ever spoken to, have had a more close and adverse relationship with the concept of mortality, the concept of death. Like you seem to, the way that I'd word it plainly is like, you seem to have the biggest problem with death

than anyone I've met. All right. Why? I think about it. I've always thought about it. Since you were young? I'd say so. Yeah, I would absolutely say that.

I seem to recall being quite young. I wouldn't know an age, but quite young. And being in the bathtub, just for some reason I was thinking about it's going to be the year 2000 and and like we weren't really anywhere near the year 2000 um but just kind of doing math in my head trying to calculate how old I would be at the turn of the millennium and I came to uh uh 25 I'll be 25 years old. And the thought was, I'll never live that long. No, I'll never make it that long.

And again, I don't know how old I was, but I was definitely a child when I had that thought. And the older I got, the more convinced I was that I wasn't going to live very long. And perhaps, you know, that's another manifestation of my alcoholism. But I think that really, to describe alcoholism, there's a, like, I felt defective. You know, I felt like there was just something wrong with me that things weren't going to work, you know. And I think that that that to some extent is a characteristic

of alcoholism for a lot of alcoholics i feel like just uncomfortable in your own skin they describe it as restless irritable and discontented um defective is a word that really resonates with me does that does that ever subside oh it's a tough one because um i don't think so i mean to an extent yeah i i'm definitely better with all that now like But at the same time, it doesn't go away. I think that everything's not going to be okay. You know, I live in this perpetual state of terrible anxiety and stress that just things are not going to be okay, and I've got to just hurry up and frantically work and hustle to try to make it so everything will be okay. I'm not surprised to hear that because it is the story i've heard

over and over and over and over and over again sat here okay yeah okay yeah and it surprises me because when before i started doing this podcast and having these conversations i assumed that you know something you know have a certain upbringing childhood you're programmed in a certain way you go to therapy and it's fixed yeah and it's actually been, I've asked the question purely because I've never heard anyone say anything other than what you've said. Right. So, you know, and I think it's actually helpful because it helps people know that they're not, that their efforts to heal in whatever context that they've tried to heal doesn't make them

inadequate. It makes them very much human that you know the way that we're we're programmed and hardwired because of whatever reasons you know it it is um it is it is not something that is easy or in many cases possible just a therapy away or to prescription away and i think that makes, a lot of people feel better. And what's crazy too is that I think, and I'm fascinated that you say this is something they've heard many times. I've never not heard it. Right.

And I would also guess that for all of the successful people that you've spoken with, that they would describe having been much more at peace, much more serenity, much more happiness before they were successful. Yeah. And it's so counterintuitive to imagine that that's the case. But there's one saying that I think really explains it to a degree, which is that, this is the saying, a man who has nothing only has to worry about his next meal. But a man who has everything worries about his last meal.

Yes. And that, that messes me up, man. That messes me up big time because if you're just focused on the next meal, then you're in the moment. Life's pretty, pretty simple. It's not too much of a task to, to accomplish finding your next meal. But once you've got your next meal covered and then it's like, all right, and then I've, I've, I've saved up some money. My I'm, I'm good. My next meals are set for the, for the next year. And,

but then now you're thinking, how long am I set for? And once you start thinking, how long am I set for? Then, then, then life gets really scary when, when scary because you're not in the moment and you're future tripping and everything isn't going to be okay. And what's even crazier is that I understand that there's been studies about financial security. And it's people who have upwards of $10 million net worth who find themselves feeling considerably more financially insecure than anybody else. The more money you have, the more financially insecure you feel.

The study that I read about this, it says that they interviewed people all the way up the wealth income spectrum. And they asked them the question, how much money, how happy are you out of 10? And then they asked them the second question, which is how much money would you need to be 10 out of 10 happy?

And all the way up the wealth spectrum, people said three times currently what they have now. So millionaires said they needed 3 million. People with 10 million said they needed 30 to be a 10 out of 10 happiness. And people with 100K said they needed 300K, which speaks to this sort of like hedonic, endless treadmill and increasing anxiety.

Right. And also studies are pretty clear that um happiness will increase up to like a baseline it's like 75k yeah household yeah i think that that number is just going up with inflation i understood it to be like 60 000 60 000 a year and then you've got all of your needs met. And then after that, more money doesn't really equate to more happiness. And also to your point about the, the, the panic of like losing it. I think that's a, an issue for people that came from nothing predominantly. So if you've always had this financial security growing up and you're, you're, you're, you know,

you were, I don't know, extremely wealthy or, or and you've been wealthy i think people tend to have less of a fear of going of losing it all and they also never seem to have the guilt i sit here with people and they speak to this success guilt they have and i hear that a lot and it's typically people that have felt sleeping on a sofa that have the kind of even when they become successful they feel like they don't deserve it to some degree and i read that a little bit in your story in your book right it's interesting because i i grew up very privileged you know my my uh my my father didn't grow up with privilege as i said he broke the mold becoming a businessman. He became like, my mom didn't marry a rich guy. My mom married a motivated guy who became quite wealthy. I had privilege guilt when I was a kid. I was like quite ashamed of how wealthy my parents were.

And I don't understand why that is, but. In whose eyes? Like I was self-conscious about, about how my peers viewed me at school. As I grew older, the homes that we lived in, each move to each, you know, represented a bigger house.

You know, it became kind of a little bit obnoxious, but by the end, when I was attending high school um here in london i went to the american school in st johnswood and i lived directly across the street from regents park on prince albert road oh wow in this i mean it was a just gaudy obnoxiously huge house. And I never wanted kids from school to see it. So we would have like overnight. When you're a kid, I wouldn't have kids spend the night at my house. I was always overnight at someone else's house. And for me to ride my skateboard to school, you know, took a

certain amount of time. And if I would oversleep, I would ride with my dad. My dad was chauffeur driven to work and he would be reading his newspaper in the back seat. And whenever I overslept and I had to ride with my dad, chauffeur would pull up to the school and as i got out of the car i would hug the chauffeur yeah like to try to create the impression that i was just embarrassed my dad was in the back seat like uh being chauffeured around uh i don't know what that is um wanting to fit in it's every i was the opposite okay in every respect no one came to my house because it was like it was the windows were smashed and the grass was six foot high um so everything you described was me but the opposite for opposite reasons like i would i would pray that the traffic lights near our school would

stop go turn red which meant that i could get out of the like this beat-up van we drove in as far from school as possible yeah whereas you're hugging this chauffeur right it's really interesting too like i went to a super privileged school too i mean like uh i attended school with the son of the american ambassador to, to the UK. Like, I was like, my best friend was this kid, Abdullah. His father was like a crazy, like oil tycoon. And, uh, when I, when I, when I was in, for me, fifth and sixth grade, I was in London, England at that time too. Same school. And my father was, I'm not even quite sure what his job position was, but worked for Del Monte, the canned fruits. And he had to, you know, like the, all the pie, there was a pineapple factory in Kenya. Dad had to go visit this pineapple factory, I want to say maybe once a year. And so he planned his trip to the pineapple factory in Kenya to coincide with

our spring break, the one week off from school so that he could take the family on safari. And I have this crazy memory of coming out of the airport in Nairobi, being ushered into some chauffeur driven car. I always remembered it as a stretch limo. My dad says, no, we didn't have it but whatever ushered into a chauffeur driven car out of the airport and um and sitting in the back of this car and these these just it was my first time seeing poverty like real poverty and these people were were clawing at the windows begging and i'm just sitting in this car and just thinking, what did I ever do to deserve to be, like, I'm not a good kid.

You know, like, I'm just always in trouble. Like, I don't do, just like, again, feeling defective, you know? And I really wasn't a good kid. I mean, I was always in trouble. Everything was just a disaster with me. And here I am inside the car that's being clawed at by these people who are barely clothed, you know, and just clearly desperate. And, like, that was a moment where I felt genuinely guilty. You know, I had a privilege guilt, you know, and that's, that's worse than success guilt

because, you know, and again, I did everything wrong. I was always in trouble, got terrible grades. And my sister who was, who is three and a half years older than me. She did everything right. Got straight A's, just did everything perfect. Somehow along the way, like my sister went into a low earning career. She was a school teacher, which is notoriously underpaid, especially for how important of a job that is. She became a single mom with a special needs kid and low earning. And it kind of struggles. Life is hard for my sister and and like somehow me that the guy who just did everything wrong and then goes on to have this stupid career

and everything just works out great for me so when you said success guilt i feel that i feel like like what why you know why did everything work out great for me and my sisters having a tough time and i struggle with that too i actually um i uh i i i have it i've always called it kind of survivor's guilt but but yeah success guilt same thing you your mother um had a brain aneurysm in 98 you said um jackass the pilot was in 99 yep a year later yep you describe how your mother was ill for roughly five years before she passed away and she was um just disabled you're very busy with jackass at that time. How do you, do you deal, did you cope with it? Because it doesn't seem to me that there's anyone in your life really at that point or any experience that's going to help you deal with the concept of grief and loss.

Right. How did you cope with it? If you did at all. My parents divorced in 1991. I graduated from the American school here in London, the American school in London in St. John's Wood in 1992. Then on that fateful day of October 10th, 1998, we received word that mom had this brain aneurysm. My sister and I flew to Florida from New Mexico. My dad flew to Florida from England. We all congregated around this crisis with my mom. At one point, we went to a nearby restaurant just to get a meal. I went outside to smoke a cigarette.

And my dad came outside and initiated this conversation. He says, I want to tell you that I feel I've done a disservice to you by not supporting you in this path that you've chosen, my path to be a crazy famous stuntman. He said, I chose a path that my father, you know, dad broke the mold becoming a businessman. The idea of that was pretty repugnant to his father. And he said that his father had the same conversation. You chose something that I would not have chosen for you, but you're clearly committed to it. And so I just want you to be the best and, you be the happiest and i pledge to support you and i'm thinking man like it's tough because i'm a loser you know like the whole thing going on with my mom was it was kind of prevalent but this the side

conversation like i just felt like wow you know like now dad supports me and i i just said i didn't feel very very hopeful i don't think at that time but it put a lot of wind in my sails so the next year i saw this advert on television for a show called Real TV, where they're saying, if you have home video footage that's crazy and you think that we should have it on our show, then call this number. And I called the number and sent them my videotape and they wanted it. And dad helped me negotiate the license deal with them. And it was meaningful. You know, this pursuit of becoming a crazy famous stuntman had made my father and I as far apart as, you know, it really, really made us not, our relationship suffer.

And then ultimately it would bring us together. And today my dad is 80 years old, been retired forever, but he's come out of retirement and he's on my payroll. He manages all kinds of

business stuff for me, all my insurance stuff. And it's crazy. It's insanity that just, again, what drove us so far apart brought us so close together. And that catalyst moment was your mother's brain aneurysm really it was that conversation might not have happened and then it it was and now now you pointed to when jackass short i wouldn't just well okay um my sister and i both moved from New Mexico to Florida. To be with your mom. To be with my mom.

Yeah. And my sister naturally assumed the role of caregiver for my mom. And I got this opportunity to go be a circus clown on cruise ships. And it just made sense for me to do that. You know, like, I think that my overall attitude in particular, like even going off to work on cruise ships and then with, you know, with, with Jackass, I don't think that I had any level of like guilt about it. I think that my,

my attitude about pursuing my own career and to be, you know, with jackass and everything else. My attitude was that rather than let this aneurysm destroy everything that I've, I've really strongly wanted to get out there and really make something of myself and that that would be the way to honor my mom more and make my mom proud that way people don't and often appreciate how difficult it is for everybody around the individual that's that's sick and i've again i've learned that from doing this having this conversation about just how sort of debilitating and difficult it is for everyone around the individual especially when they're in a situation where they become disabled and your mother's situation was i mean she she couldn't move from what i understood she wasn't necessarily speaking she was wheelchair bound she had to

be lifted out of bed and into a wheelchair and and back and could she she could speak she could speak it fluctuated how present she was, how aware she was. One of the more aware moments, I said, Mom, I'm going to have a book written about my life. And she said, and who's going to write this masterpiece? She was making fun of me and it was funny like uh the last time that um that my mom ever laughed was i came home um with the words shit and fuck tattooed on my knuckles and um mom was in the hospital at that point with the do not resuscitate order on her bed. Like this was, this was the end.

Like it was about a month before she passed. And I walked into her hospital room and I just didn't, you know, it was just a tough situation. I didn't, I just said, hey, ma, like check it out. And I held up my knuckles to her. And she looked at it, and she said, shit, fuck. Shit, fuck. And then she said, my son is a shit, fuck. And she, like, she laughed.

And it's just the most beautiful. I thought it was just the most beautiful thing. Like she's able to laugh and, you know, and yeah, it's tough, man. That whole thing's tough. And the toughest thing is just imagining when I was struggling in the beginning, like prior to her aneurysm, like there were times when I'd show her one of my videos, I'd say, Ma, check it out.

She says, oh yeah, that's great. But like, how is this ever going to like earn you anything? You know, like she didn't ever seem to be like terribly concerned for my safety i was showing her videos like jumping off bridges and you know doing stuff that was like really pretty dangerous and and uh appeared to be life-threatening and and that never seemed to upset her what she was upset upset about was that I didn't have a pot to piss in. She would say, you don't have a pot to piss in. Like, how am I supposed to be impressed by this? Where is this ever going to get, you know?

How is this ever going to? She would say, show me the money. Show me the money. Like, how is this going to get me the money like how is this gonna get you the money and um man like given that that that was her position on it and i think that that she was um largely concerned with the appearance of things and and um like less she wasn't ever i never got the sense that she was worried for my safety on any level. I think that what she was concerned with was how I reflected on her. Interesting.

You know, like my son's a loser. This is a bummer. You know, she was bummed that I was a loser because that reflected badly on her. And that's just, that's what was important to her. You know, there's nothing wrong with that and um is that why you want her you'd like her to be able to god yeah man that's the toughest thing to imagine if uh if we if she she had been to rehab many times she was in the program recovery but she just couldn't hang on to that you You know, she would always, she would just always end up drinking again.

And I think that what would cause her to relapse was the, you know, trauma from the breakup with my dad, which is just a vicious cycle because what broke her up with my dad was her drinking. And then the trauma from the divorce would make, you know, it's a vicious cycle. But had she gotten it, had she really, really grabbed onto it and not let go and been in recovery and both of us like she would have just gotten such a kick out of like being on being on the red carpet at a big movie premiere and she would just be letting me have it making fun of me for the dumb shit i was doing in the movies like we'd be laughing. So that was one thing. My mom had like a sense of humor. She was cool, man.

She was cool. And we related to each other a lot. You're 29, November the 7th, she passes away. Correct. A mixture of emotions. I read in your book, in professional idiot page 194 the overwhelming emotion i felt afterward was relief sure yeah she like it this the suffering was over you know it was it was merciful like there's nothing upsetting about my mom dying. What was upsetting was the pain and the suffering

that she had endured for the five years leading up to her death. Do you ever process that? We talk a lot these days about grief and we understand that grief is a thing and I don't think we ever did before. Did you ever process that if i did it was years later in recovery and and digesting the concepts in that book conversations with god that was when I just developed the idea that mom wasn't alone.

You know, that mom was, she wasn't alone. She, like, that was an experience that she had as god and somehow that just that it doesn't change anything but it changes everything alone why why the word alone why was that the concern man just because the i mean it's uh like on on a bigger level like mom mom's this one thing you know so there's no such thing as alone at the same time jackass starts taking off right so that's roughly around that time your fame goes through the roof yeah well mom's aneurysm was 1998 i worked on cruise ships for six months of 1999 i worked in a circus at a flea market for six months in year 2000 and jackass came out in October of your 2000.

And then, yeah, everything. The movie comes out in 2002. Yeah. You're 28 years old at that time. Your mother passes when you're 29 the next year. These two things have almost happened at similar times. Your trajectory has started to skyrocket. Your mother has passed away.

Lots to deal with. Lots going on. Fame is this new thing in your life now and attention and yeah as you said earlier like worrying about the next meal is maybe sometimes a better problem than worrying about the last um this strikes me as as a real difficult moment in your life um i i the from professional idiot which i read it said by by mid 2007 i was practically living on diet coke booze and nitrous a not diet coke a diet of cocaine oh it was a diet of coke big difference um you were hallucinating and hearing voices yeah big time it's called psychosis and it's a fascinating um it's a fascinating thing that um there are so many different

substances one can ingest that might bring about this phenomena of psychosis. Yet, there's so much similarity between the experiences people have with it, even though they take so many different avenues to get there. And that's partially why I believe that psychosis, that there's sort of different compartments, maybe dimensions, and that in our human experience, we're in a distinct compartment. And that psychosis happens when you erode the barriers to the other compartments other dimensions and by doing that with with chemical substances um we erode the barriers kind of open ourselves up to energies from other dimensions um you open yourself up to like all levels of it so you can really let in demons you know like like demons being low level frequency energy and angels like being a higher level and by uh just consuming enough substances i i really believe that you erode the barriers you open yourself up to all

these energies and um in comes flooding demons and and angels and that that's how i characterize my experiences with hallucinations um all that stuff is uh demon activity with some angels mixed in. I was reading about this thing called the rad email list. Oh, yeah. Where you sent an email to a lot of people, which I think ultimately sounds like one of the things that brought about an intervention. Right.

It wasn't one email. It was more of a stream, a barrage. I was inundating a list of roughly 200 people, many of them very influential people in the entertainment industry, celebrities and agents and just powerful people, you know, media personalities. And I was just inundating these 200 people with emails at all hours around the clock and effectively broadcasting my downward spiral in real time. And I would send at times really funny stuff, you know,

at times just deeply alarming stuff. I was, you know, I was, I knew that how out of control I was, but I was just, I was rad. I mean, I was out of my mind. I was out of my mind and I was making that abundantly clear by sending video. YouTube had become a thing. YouTube started in 2005.

So 2007, YouTube allowed me to make really disturbing videos and then email the links to 200 people. If I was a fly on the wall in 2007 in your life, what would I have seen on an average day? In 2007, I was renting four apartments in one building one of them i just demolished the walls and built a skate park throughout the whole apartment um with permission from the landlord no not at all no no permission whatsoever and it was just with the – I remember there was like a Russian prostitute operation in the adjacent apartment, so they weren't trying to complain about the noise. There was a stairwell on the other side, and beneath was the parking garage. So there were never any complaints for that. And then a little bit down the hall was I had a couple of my buddies living there. One of them was, you know, edited stuff for me, but we very rarely, very rarely.

Well, I mean, he would. He thinks he works hard. Yeah. I mean, I had people like on salary and they didn't do too much but when i was really out of my mind and these disturbing videos that i wanted to email the links to the rat email this my editor guy was in charge of that um so yeah i had the the office the skate park apartment the office apartment and then i had an apartment for the assistant the assistant really didn't do anything um except uh explain to people that

she couldn't get a hold of me and change my flights uh well because i would always miss my flights um and then i had my apartment which this is sort of a where all the really crazy stuff happened that was just my little drug den and I would inhale this nitrous oxide

stuff and it would come in these little cartridges that people used to make whipped cream. And a box of these nitrous oxide cartridges would have, there would be 24 cartridges per box. But if you bought a case, there would be 25 boxes in the case. And I believe that 25 times 24 comes to 600 um and so i would sit down with 600 cartridges of nitrous oxide and just inhale like the the thing that the cartridge goes into this canister correct yeah but i'd have two of them oh so i would you know crack one i would

crack one up and fill that and inhale it with my lungs filled with nitrous oxide i would be busy filling up the next one so that when i exhaled the nitrous from the first i I would then inhale. So I wasn't breathing air. I was inhaling nitrous oxide to the exclusion of breathing air as much as possible. And my goal at all times would be to lose consciousness because if you do that and you hold your breath, you, you will become unconscious and you're kind of twitching and flopping around and, and, uh, your lips are all blue and then, and then you come back to, and, and it would, uh,

it's not, not healthy. And I would be doing that. And I would be doing that for days on end while snorting cocaine. So it was on, on like the second and particularly on the third day of being awake on a cocaine binge while inhaling nothing but nitrous oxide um that's when the the most profound psychosis with all of the hallucinating would be going on you sent out Suicidal ideation. Yeah. I was going so crazy in this apartment. And it's very loud and destructive in there. And the next department over was a lawyer in his first year of being a lawyer. So, you know, like a guy who cared about work. And I was just making all kinds of noise at all hours. And so he would call the police.

My neighbor, it's insane you know and um the more that the police would show up in my apartment the angrier i would get at the lawyer who was calling the police which is a little bit backwards and that was kind of my mo like i would i would wrong people and then i would resent them for their perfectly natural response to being wronged by me. Mr. Honest. So I would bang on the guys. I would really antagonize this poor lawyer guy and um at one point it got to uh to the level where pounding on the wall i actually pounded a hole in the wall and um i pounded a hole you know on my side there's the

there's the the drywall and then in between there's like the fiberglass stuff and then then there's his side of the throat. I actually, this one night pounded all the way through his side of the wall too. So I was actually looking into his apartment, which of course constitutes vandalism. So when he called the cops this time and the cops showed up, they had no choice but to actually arrest me for vandalism. He said, look, they put a hole in my wall.

So they were here to arrest me for vandalism. He said, look, they put a hole in my wall. So they were here to arrest me. And I was really, really out of it, like having been snorting both cocaine and ketamine. So I was super out of it and didn't put it together that i was being arrested and going to jail with a bag of cocaine in my pocket i mean i probably could have it would make sense that and i remember it was funny too because they said that i was barefoot and i had no shirt they said well we have to take you to jail we have no choice but we will let you go put on a shirt and some shoes which which was the perfect opportunity for me to go into my apartment and remove the bag of

cocaine from my pocket but i didn't do that and i said you know fuck a shirt fuck shoes so i went to jail completely barefoot and shirtless with a bag of cocaine in my pocket and um and then when they you know when they process you into jail they search you know your pockets they found the cocaine and they arrested me again so i was now i had a felony cocaine possession charge as well as the vandalism charge. And this was like, pretty well publicized, you know, the fact of the cocaine, you know, the arrest. And when I was released from the jail, I was in there for like, I want to say like, three days, because the consensus among anybody who loved me was, he's better off in jail. So there was no concerted effort to bail me out,

which is why I managed to stay in there for, I believe, about three days. And then when I finally did get released from the jail after the three days and I returned to my apartment, there was an eviction notice on the door. So my response to that was, oh, okay, well, I'm being evicted. And I went into the apartment. I found more vials of ketamine that I had stashed in there, and I cooked that all up. And within a couple hours, I was, like, screaming about God, like, while jumping up and down on a parked car

and like dealing with more cops. You were manhandled into a psych ward, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, so I went on this prodigious final bender and I was running out of time before I had to get my stuff out of the apartment. I was evicted. So the email to the

rat email list was, hey, I have to have my stuff out of this apartment because I've been evicted. But before I have to be gone, I want to jump a motorcycle. I want to ride a motorcycle through the living room and off a ramp and jump it over onto the building next door, which was very, very small gap. It was hardly even a big stunt. And it was like two and a half stories up. I think I was on the third floor, but it was really like kind of two and a half, so maybe like 20, 25 feet. And I said on the rad email list, and I want to jump the motorcycle onto the roof next door, and I want to jump out of the bedroom window into a hot tub. And I just said, so Knoxville, bring a camera crew and a hot tub and if you can't do the hot tub at least bring some cardboard boxes but i'm jumping out of the window and i'm jumping you

know and if you don't come i'm jumping out of the window anyway i'm gonna jump and i'm gonna find out how many bones break when i land on the sidewalk 25 feet below I'm ready to die like I was like promising that I was going to jump out of the window and and break bones on the concrete below and that qualified me for the psychiatric evaluation and they they staged an intervention they staged an intervention yeah I said not so Knoxville responded I forget if he responded with all 200 people on copy but uh but i said this i did this on the the rad email list with the 200 people and and um i said uh um if knoxville responded says okay i'll be there you know i said be here at 10 a said, be here at 10 a.m. Be here at 10 a.m. I'm going to jump.

But his response was, he says, can we do noon? What's with the early call times? Sheesh. So we agreed on noon. I forget. I don't think he was concerned with the early call times. I think what he was concerned with was having more time to rally a group to really do the intervention. But in that email exchange, I was not scheduling a shoot for jackass

as I thought I was actually scheduling my intervention and that's really where your life seems to start to take a new direction although not linear in any respect well i mean that that intervention marked uh the beginning of my journey i've been clean and sober since that day which is I mean the intervention was March 9th the intervention was March 9th of 2009 oh sorry 8th yeah March 9th of 2008

and we don't count that as our sobriety date because it's the first day you didn't get loaded is your sobriety date so my my sobriety date is March 10th of 2008 over 14 years sober over 15 now over 15 years sober yeah congratulations dude that's amazing honestly that's incredible it's so incredible and i don't

say that to you know to be uh self-important, you know, like douchey. It's just the most profound gift, like ever. And I believe strongly that, you know, this conversation began with this dark discussion of alcoholism and how just how terrible and sad alcoholism is. However, as upsetting as alcoholism and drug addiction is, it's the only disease where once you treat it, you become a better version of yourself than you were before. And that's really incredible to me because any other disease, the best you can hope for is to get back to as healthy as you were before you got sick. But for us sober alcoholics and

addicts, we genuinely become improved versions of ourselves. And the work you've done since has been incredible. I mean, you've taken on many professional pursuits. Your standup comedy became a facet of your life in 2013. 2010. 2010. Okay.

I had the first time I had gotten on stage in a comedy club and performed what I intended to be stand-up comedy was 2006. How did that go? I thought it went a lot better than it actually did, but the first time I ever got on that stage, it wasn't a disaster. It became a disaster later um but but in 2010 once I'd been clean and sober for just over two years I I pursued stand-up comedy in earnest why stand-up comedy I know you've got a big tour coming up in the UK but why stand-up comedy I'm

trying to understand the through line between the stunts it's the through line is just attention seeking you know um the first time i ever got movie was to be released a couple months later. Showed up at this comedy club. I walked in, had no plan for what I was going to do. And just observing what was happening on the stage with somebody standing there holding a microphone, just speaking to the audience. I thought, there's no stunt that could possibly be crazier than that.

You know, like, I'm going to do my, the craziest stunt that I could possibly do is no stunt at all. I'm going to stand there and speak into a microphone and try to make the people laugh. This was genuinely the most terrifying concept. And I was just wasted enough to decide I'm going to do that. When it became my turn to get on the stage, I had come up with one joke. As I got on the stage, there were people people they were aware of me they were excited to see me I felt like an excitement uh they were there to have a good time they were they were rooting for me

I mean of course like get on stage I'm Steve-O-Rad they were that I felt loved I felt uh they were rooting for me they wanted to have a good time i got i got on i was terrified but but uh but it was it was just it was man it was uh it was electric dude and um you know i said i said you know what's up everybody i'm in the mood for a blow job does anybody want one? And, uh, and, and, and I got a laugh, you know, like they'd laughed and I just was so happy about that. And, um, I couldn't have been on that stage for more than three minutes. Like, um, I got on and I got off, just got out of there and it was a favorable experience. And I decided that this was something I wanted to pursue. And you've been pursuing it ever since there's a, an awesome tour coming up in the UK

from June 30th to July 14th, I believe, called Bucket List. That's right. Which I'm coming to see. Oh, dude, I love that, man. I'm going to make sure that happens. When I started doing stand-up in earnest in 2010, I imagined that I was trying to establish myself as a stand-up comedian and that I was going to forge a career with speaking into a microphone. And I felt that I was well-equipped to succeed in that endeavor because my life has been so just colorful. Like the experience that I've had in my life, like to mine my life experience for material stand-up comedy, it seemed very doable you know like i've got i've

got stuff to talk about so i felt that i came into stand-up comedy not with just an advantage in that i had um an audience a profile but i just had interesting material to you know to mine and um clearly the world was not eager for the stand-up comedy of steve-o you know i think that they're the bar for the stuff that i was known for like to to go from like the the the shocking like unbelievable like crazy visual stuff that i'd become known for and then appear speaking into a microphone it seems like uh mismatch an expectation yeah like that's always disappointment isn't it right like and maybe this is from my own perception i'm not sure but with all of the self-doubt with all of the um you know negative self-talk i just still persisted and um i wasn't super successful in the beginning. And like, of course not, but I was successful enough

to get booked by comedy clubs and then be welcome back. And I would go around this comedy club circuit around the United States. And I did just well enough to go back around the loop. And that loop lasted for 11 years in comedy clubs. And I tirelessly persisted. I genuinely didn't. I put in work and I developed this craft of storytelling and stand up, telling jokes. Along the way, I taped two comedy specials. The first one was me in a microphone and some intermittent stunts I performed on stage throughout the act. And as I put together what would become the next comedy special, I put together this new act to tour with. It occurred to me that the stories I was telling in this new act had, for the most part, all happened on camera. And I had the idea, wow, what if for my next comedy special i i perform the act but in post-production

i edit into the special interstitial footage of these stories unfolding so it's depth to the storytelling oh dude my head exploded i got so excited i i couldn't even i couldn't even stand it wow like i'm gonna have a my next comedy special is going to be multimedia uh that that one i put out myself um and uh and then it was time to put together the third show so now i knew that for this third show, which is Bucket List, the Bucket List, correct, that I needed to film all new stuff, which would lend itself to all new stand up material. And it had to be crazier than shit. It had to be crazier than ever. And that's what people will see if they go.

Yeah, for sure. There were just ideas that came up over the years that were genuinely never supposed to happen on any level, but they were just ideas that I was so fond of just because they were crazy things to say. I can't wait. The idea was to push things further than Jackass ever could. And there's no way that you do that. And there's not a story to tell, you know,

like the, the, the, the challenges of, of making these things happen. And it's just, there's a, it's inherently juicy material for stand-up. There's just no way around it. And one step further is that I've worked so hard on developing the ability to be in a healthy relationship with a life partner. So I was just about to ask you, this was my last question, which was about Lux. Right. My fiance Lux. And the bucket list show is every bit as much about these

ultra high level jackass stunts and how they're conceived and executed it's every bit as much about that as the implications of carrying out these bucket list items on my relationship with my fiance what i was actually going to ask you about was specifically kind of the juxtaposition of what's making you successful here seems to me as a guy that's gotten into relationship struggle to find a relationship for my own reasons with my childhood seems to be the antithesis, the very opposite of what it takes to be successful in a relationship, which is like the stability, the, the, I don't know, the, the, the calm, the right. And over here, we're seeking instability.

And here in a relationship, then I don't know, there needs to be a certain stability that i think how well to derive one's self-worth and self-esteem on how successful i am as steve-o it just plainly presents a dark and upsetting future as the spotlight wanes. And this is something that became very clear to me 15 years ago when I got sober, was that for me to be happy and healthy on any level, it is of paramount importance that I find some separation between me and the persona of Steve-O. And with that kind of ruminating in my mind, and when I got into the stand-up,

I was acting out sexually as much as possible on the road while doing stand-up and and at that time i was um in my late 30s approaching 40 and and it just occurred to me man this is not the not the road to being happy. I got to learn. If I want to be happy later in life, I need to learn how to have a healthy relationship. That was a belief that I subscribed to, and I got to work on learning how to be in a healthy relationship. And thank God I did because I'm terrified of being a washed up

old attention whore that nobody wants to pay attention to anymore and being alone and being alone that sounds like the most terrifying like awful thing and so what does it what does she mean to you lux i mean she you said something earlier that the design for living in the 12 steps, and this is my kind of extrapolating on what you said. You said that the principles of honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness are helpful to all people. And I'll take that a step further, that the design for living outlined in the 12 steps is something that you don't have to be an alcoholic or an addict to benefit from. But what Lux is as a person is somebody who automatically does that stuff.

She's automatically honest. She's automatically open, willing. She automatically does the right thing. Where I had to really, really work and train myself to be honest and to do the right thing. And she's just automatic to her. And Lux's capacity for love is so staggering. Like her, it's just so natural to her to be loving. And it blows me away.

We both, like with animals, we're out out of our minds we love animals so much. And the way that Lux loves me and the way that she wants me to love her, like, just, no, no, no, like, the way that we hold each other, the way that, like, each other, the way that like, she's, she's, she's taught me to love. She's, she's increased my capacity to love. And, and that's, that's the biggest deal, man. It's, it's massive. Such a beautiful thing. Steve-O, thank you so much. Steve-O? Stephen.-o thank you so steve-o steven yeah thank you so much um we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest

okay um and the question that's been left for you is one of the most interesting questions that's ever been left in fact they don't know who they're leaving it for good so it's a totally they said what can steven so you've filled in the blank? No, no, no, no. They literally wrote, what can Stephen? And they're talking about me. Ah, okay. They spelled it with your name, with a PH. They said, what can Stephen, this beautiful man, improve about himself? So that's my quote?

What can I improve about myself? No, they're asking you to tell me what I can improve about myself. Ah, okay. Because they didn't know you were called Stephen. So they said, what can Stephen, this beautiful man can improve about myself because they didn't know you were called steven so they said what can steven this beautiful man improve about himself honesty you didn't speak about yourself very much with your girlfriend being that you're so consumed with work and uh that you said something about she wants quality time you can't compensate for your uh you know all of your energy and time going into your career and that you want to compensate by

with material things and, and that, but that she's no, no interest in material things. She wants quality time. And I think that, that you and I both have this, this drive, this hustle, this urge to succeed. And I think that both of us would do well to find our success in our relationships. Every study about longevity and health and happiness 100% points to relationships as the source of true happiness and true health comes from the quality of our relationships. Not the numbers in our bank account, but the quality in our relationships. So I think that my answer for you is this, and for me is just that, you know,

that we should put the emphasis on our quality time in our relationships that we do on our hustle and it's it's the the reason why i i don't is because i think of some of the stuff that i said earlier about like where i came from and being a poor family and all so like my survival innately in me or my validation comes from my work so i'm like being pulled by this like insecurity and the shame from my childhood over here like become fucking become everything that you weren't and you know and then on the other hand my sense goes well steve the happiest times in your life the the all the studies i've sat here with the guy that did that 95 year old

study on um men and found that they live i think it's like 14 years longer if they have a meaningful relationship i know logically but then emotionally and the scar the scar tissue in me goes no you need to validate yourself right i'm being dragged by that still to you know right and hustle but but not in a way that that undermines or or detracts from the quality of the relationships is that that's what you're doing i mean like uh i mean yeah shit let lux and i have a rule that we were not to be apart for more than two weeks i love that and we spent two days together over the course of six weeks we broke our rule badly and that's not cool man sucks yeah so um if i wasn't so you know so so operating from fear that's the that's the difference. Yeah, exactly.

Hustle because you love it. Not because you're afraid of the post-apocalyptic, you know? And there's this concept I've been toying with a lot in this podcast between the distinction between being driven and being dragged, and sometimes I'm being dragged. Yeah. Driven is the, like, intentional. It sounds like, you know, kind of the intentional hustle

with control over the hustle. Dragged is, like, fucking fear. Like, if I don't, then I'm not enough. Right. I've taken so much of your time. kind of the intentional hustle with control over the hustle dragged as like fucking fear like if i don't yeah then i'm not enough and right i've taken so much of your time i did thank you so much really really appreciate it a pleasure to meet you and i've learned so much incredibly surprising wisdom-filled conversation that graced so many different aspects um i'm so excited to see bucket list i'm sure all of my audience are as well the 13th is the date to be there right hacking empire that's where I'll be.

I'm looking forward to it. I think that we might be able to open up some tickets on the 14th. Okay. But I don't know, and I don't know how many. I just know that as I sit here now, the show on the 13th just went live. So that's a whole show that I got to fill. So link is in the description below to get tickets in the youtube description and on the audio apps it's in the description below

and i hope to see you guys there thank you so much thank you bro Thank you.