The Rich Roll Podcast - Steve-O (+ His Dad!) On Fame, Reinvention & The Journey To Finding Fulfillment From Within

Episode Date: May 16, 2016

He's set his head on fire, backflipped off buildings, snorted wasabi and leaped off a bridge from a moving car. He even stuck a fish hook through his cheek and put fireworks where they should never go. Don't get me started on what he's done with a stapler. Ever since he snatched a video camera from his father's closet at age 15, Steve-O has lived for attention. And the Jackass star learned early and often that public adulation escalated in lock step with the outrageousness of his behavior. The equation was simple: the further he pushed the envelope, the more America's favorite prankster felt loved and alive. Insanity ensues. Still, it wasn't enough. It would never be enough. An insatiable hunger for wholeness that could never be sated. A spiritual hole he almost died trying to fill — first through external validation, then through substances. As insanely dangerous as his stunts had become, it was drugs and alcohol that ultimately brought Steve to his knees. To the brink of death. To the psych ward. To sobriety. It was March of 2008. A moment that broke him. A moment that saved him. Let's back up. Steve-O knows how to play the idiot. But Stephen Glover is no moron. Growing up in five countries fluently speaking three languages, Steve has maintained household name status for almost two decades in an industry famous for it's flash in the pans and also rans. He's starred in a variety of television shows and movies, including (of course) three global blockbuster installments of Jackass. Sober since 2008, he wrote the New York Times bestselling memoir Professional Idiot*, then reinvented himself as a successful stand-up comedian. On the heels of his recently released Showtime special Guilty As Charged, Steve has taken his unique blend of comedy, stunts, stories and performance art on the road, selling out venues across across the globe. I've known Steve for over seven years. When the camera is off, he's far more grounded than you might imagine. Surprisingly self-aware, present, generous and contemplative are just a few descriptors that spring to mind. That's the Steve I'm interested in. So this week we go beyond Steve-O to meet Stephen Glover — the human being behind the clown, comedian, stunt man and provocateur. The best part? We're joined by Steve's dad. Not only was this Ted Glover's first podcast, I believe it's the first time Steve and Ted have ever been interviewed together (at least on audio). The result is glorious. This is a conversation about health, environmentalism and ethics. It's about the damage inflicted by addiction on loved ones. It's about recovery, forgiveness and spiritual evolution. It's about what used to drive Steve and what drives him now. But most of all it's about the love between a father and son. This one's special. Yeah Dude! Peace + Plants, Rich

You can't be emotionally sober so long as you derive your fulfillment, your happiness, your serenity from external validation. And by the virtue of being an entertainer whose career is in the entertainment industry, it's really difficult to juggle that because my livelihood is in the validation of external sources, yet the happiness needs to come from within. That's Steve-O, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast.

All right, Steve-O and his dad. Where do you even begin? I mean, I've known Steve-O for about seven years. I think we met around 2009, I think. And I wouldn't say that I know him super well, but I know him well enough to know what this guy's like when the cameras are off. And what I think you might be surprised about is that he's actually a very grounded person, much more self-aware than you might imagine, far more intelligent than you may suspect, and also a guy who's really interested in other people.

And I think today in this podcast, we get a pretty good sense of the real guy. This is much more a conversation with Steven Glover, the human being than it is with Steve-O the performer. And the fact that I was able to have his dad there, it was actually Steve's idea, it was a genius idea, to have Ted there as like this cipher, as like this lens through which we can better

understand Steve was really amazing. Not to mention a privilege to be able to get a better idea of what their relationship is like. I mean, can you imagine being the parent of Steve-O, like what that guy had to go through when Steve was, I just, I can't even begin to comprehend that. And, you know, they're so different on the surface. And yet the dynamic between them might surprise you. They're really close, far more alike than you might suspect. And it's really sweet, very, very sweet. It was super cool and a privilege to be able to sit down with both of them. And I think what comes out the other side is not only really unique and quite compelling, we find this different side of Steve-O. And I think it's fair to say that this conversation is Steve-O like you have never before seen him. We talk about his life,

his sober and vegan journey. It's about entrepreneurship, oddly. It's about self-reinvention and creating career longevity. But mostly and most interestingly, this is a conversation about the evolution of a father-son relationship. Finally, a quick language warning. This is Steve-O after all, and there's going to be some F-bombs, but I should say that he probably dropped the fewest number of F-bombs in a 90-minute period than perhaps he ever has in his entire life previously. So much so, in fact, that his dad, Ted, actually pointed it out when the podcast was over. He's like, wow, you barely swore. But there is some foul language in here. So if you're sensitive to that, either pass on this one or pop in the earbuds or just make sure the little kitties are

in the next room. Finally, I made a really fun behind the scenes video about this experience. You can find that on my YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash Rich Roll. I will also embed it on the episode page for this episode at richroll.com, but check it out. It's really pretty great. All right, enough. Let's go to Steve-O's house and talk to Steve and Ted. That's all right. Don't worry. That's a real baba booey when it comes to throat clearing. Yeah. No worries, man. Steve, let me just hear how you sound. Yeah, dude.

Perfect. I sound terrible. You sound great. Everybody's got a beverage. We're in good shape. It's so cool you came here, man. I really appreciate it. Oh, man.

It's more fun for me because then I get to see how other people are doing and everything like that. Right, yeah. So, you know, I don't mind it. I mean, I have a little studio, but I live so far away. Getting people to come out to where I am is tough. Sometimes I do it at the house. So does that mean we're underway? We're going.

All right, here we are. It's a podcast. We've got Steve. We've got Ted. Thank you for doing this. And Ted, by the way, is Papa Steve-o. That's right. Have you ever done a podcast before? Never done

a podcast. Dad's probably never listened to a podcast either. Walter! It's going to be good. I've got so many questions for you, Ted. For me? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, come on. What's it like to be Steve-O's dad?

I didn't know that you would even be aware that i was here and i thought i'd i advertised you i i made a big deal it was your yeah it was your idea but it was right and i think that there's so much stuff that dad would um really um bring value to and and that that i i kind of cursed myself for not having exploited you more. Capitalized on my greater wisdom. Right, right. Dad's really that.

Because with the jackass history of Bam beating up his dad and sort of being generally terrible to his parents, in my worst, at the depths of my alcoholism and drug addiction, there was never a point when I ever really shit on my family. You know, like it's just not been my shtick. It's never been my deal. And even at my worst, I've always, you know,

I always made it home, you know, like for Christmas, this and that, you know. And for the most part, except for having no regard for my, you know, my own well-being. And, of course, in turn, that's kind of shitting on your family. Well, I think that, you know, behind all the insanity, you know, lives a pretty sweet kid, you know, with a big heart. I think that's a big part of the jackass success.

And I don't know. I think people get that on some level about you. But I don't know if they really get it in the way that, like, you know, we don't know each other that well, but I know you a little bit. I know what you're like when the camera's off. And, you know, you're a lot more grounded, you know, shockingly more grounded than I think people would imagine. I think that's fair to say. And I should also say thank you for the kind words. It's appreciated.

Right. And we've known each other for going on. I mean, I just turned eight years sober right so uh that's amazing i mean i guess i was probably we probably met i was about in about a year yeah i think that's i think that's about right so we've known each other you know somewhat peripherally for a good seven years but yeah yeah yeah for sure i mean it's been what an insane journey man right you know i mean it's a freaking miracle you know and when i'm driving over here uh you know i listened to uh the marin uh interview the other day and and it was it was before you had gotten back to me and i'm like fuck man what am i going to talk to this guy about he just he just told the whole thing with mark and then you're

like i want to have my dad on the podcast and i was like that's genius so like that's perfect like this has never happened before so this is it's never happened before and um and and selfishly i you know because i consider you to be uh an authority on not just a vegan lifestyle but but health and nutrition in general selfishly i I kind of hope that we can get into a little bit of a discussion that might influence the old man to be a little bit more careful about what he does and doesn't eat. And I classify dad as being kind of like, he's sort of, I don't know, like defensive of certain lifestyle habits that until there's a burden of proof and it's conclusive

and you can not only prove why something's bad but boil it down into a manageable sound bite that can be uttered in just one sentence, he's going to hang on to bad habits. And the first case in point being diet soda. Well, first of all, I appreciate the desire to want to see the facts. That's an admirable quality. So I don't disparage you for that.

Right. The tone of voice says it all. But the way, Steve isn't quite right on what he said. I was trying to explain it with an advertising analogy. I started my career in the middle 1960s and was in marketing pretty well all the way, so a fair amount of experience dealing with advertising agencies and copy and all the rest of it. And I of experience dealing with advertising agencies and copy and

all the rest of it. And I said to Steve, if you've got a product that supposedly polishes furniture better, reduces cavities in your teeth, example I used was head and shoulder shampoo that controls dandruff. The first thing you've got to start out with is what is the claim? What are you saying that this product stands for and is capable of doing? The second level, once you've established the claim, is to define the support for the claim. Why does the product do what it's claimed to do? How do you substantiate the claim?

And in the case of my early marketing days when Head & Shoulders was literally first introduced as a new product, a key ingredient in the formula was a zinc compound referred to as ZPT. And that became the reason why. Head & Should shoulders controls dandruff because of this unique ingredient, ZBT, which does all the terrific stuff. So that's the support for the brain. Then the third level is the documentation, that the support isn't all bullshit, but the clinical study that absolutely proves it back to steve's analogy i gotta get to level two gotcha i gotta understand why something is good but i won't necessarily beat it to death to get all the scientific studies let's jump right in with with diet coke okay so dad tell me like why do you feel so strongly about continuing to uh drink diet coke okay so it's in our dad tell me like why do you feel so strongly about

continuing to uh drink diet coke there's got to be some cognitive dissonance because you know it's not a health food well all of my life i've been fighting i've been fighting a battle of weight gain i mean i'm not overweight but I very easily could be. And so my first conscious thought about healthy eating or drinking or whatever was focused on calories more than anything else. So I concluded pretty quickly that a soda that has zero calories has got to be more beneficial in terms of weight control right than a soda that's got several hundred calories so that kind of launched me on the on the diet soda kick and working in the industry didn't hurt that used to be a Pepsi Cola right so diet Pepsi ori or diet pepsi no it took 30 years to get out of that when steve was little he wasn't allowed to have coke and uh if we were in a restaurant that was a coke exclusive he'd drink seven of them i hear you

but but that that's you realize that's a myopic perspective because you're overlooking all the the chemicals and all the additives and all the other things. No, it's not myopic. We're off like we're way in the weeds now. No, we're not. Let me define it. This is a first step in an evolutionary journey and not to be disparaged. All right. Okay.

Hold on a second, Dad. What the hell are you talking about? What he said, what he said, what he said, when he said I know it's bad, I'm saying, hey, I know it's going to contribute less to obesity. And as I progress this evolution, I'm realizing that it's not great, and so I'm drinking more water and less soda.

But I have not eliminated completely but but can we um let me let me can you help me to get him to this second level or whatever he's talking about to understand like why it's terrible let me about diet soda or just let's or about the vegan lifestyle let's go let's let's try to knock out diet soda all right well first as far as diet soda is concerned your your equation presumes that if you're not drinking diet soda, that you're going to be drinking regular soda. So that's error number one, right? Like, neither of those are good. So maybe try to work on overcoming that presumption. I agree with that.

But when you start on your journey, less bad is moving in the direction of good. Uh-huh. Right. Right. But when you're okay i don't even know where to begin with this i told you he's a logic machine and he uses his logic very irrationally i could talk about i could talk about the vegan stuff and the animal products in your diet if you want to talk about that well i i here i got kind

of a separate issue if the entire vegan proposition is based on cruelty to animals steve has made sure that i viewed the appropriate video that's amazing i like for for those who aren't familiar with the documentary called Earthlings, it's probably the most upsetting expose of animal cruelty. And it's a documentary that breaks down chapter by chapter the ways in which humans exploit animals. You know, first being not necessarily in this order, but for food, for clothing, for entertainment, for animal testing. And I feel like I'm leaving out one. But it's, oh, yeah, for pets. It's just the most, like, heart-wrenching, upsetting thing. And my stepmom, at the time when I brought this documentary home,

it was important to show this to Dad and my stepmom. The opening credits hadn't even rolled, and my stepmom went running out of the room. Like, I can't stand it. I can't see this. I'm crying or crying. And Dad, like, sat there and watched it through. Now, while this documentary was was you know playing

i remember thinking to myself i'm already vegan like i'm already vegan like why am i doing this to myself to watch this like it just made me feel super vegan and um and dad you know like uh just sort of bonding with me like they actually managed to not fall asleep which was which was pretty impressive and um and made it all the way through from beginning to end watch the whole thing now the next day we went out to lunch and both dad and stepmom uh order meat they're like whatever it was i think it was like a a caesar with chicken all over it or something and um i remember just thinking wow like my my take on it at the time was well you know um i i genuinely and and not not to be mean or anything i just i just can't respect the uninformed decision to run out of the room like i can't bear to see this and then not change the way you live

it's basically acknowledging that there's something really wrong there and just just running out and and i don't want to watch it and then and then not changing i have trouble respecting that but i had to say even at the time you know the fact that dad like just parked down on the sofa watched this whole documentary from beginning to end became fully informed like it with all of the the you know really really difficult to watch uh you know video component and and difficult to watch, uh, you know, video component and, and just completely informed. And then just sat down and ordered himself some chicken the next day. Like, I don't like it, but I, on, on a, on a level I had to just respect that. Like it was an informed decision. It's sort of like how Upton Sinclair,

you know, would say if you, you can eat meat if you want, but first like tour the slaughterhouse. So you know what you're getting into. So you're not going at it with blinders. And it's more and more difficult. We're more and more divorced as consumers from the process by which our food is made as a result of ag-gag laws and all sorts of, you know, regulatory actions that prevent the consumer from having that transparent relationship with food manufacturers. Right. Jumping completely to a tangent, but somewhat relevant,

America is one of only four or five countries with a death penalty, others including Saudi Arabia and China. And it's been opined that the fastest way to get rid of the death penalty would be to put the executions in television and force the masses to watch them. I don't think that that would be to put the executions in television and force the masses to watch them.

I don't think that that would be the case. I don't know. But it's kind of, to your point, if you look at all the bad stuff that's going on, you are more likely to be repelled by it than if you stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. Well, it's a common saying that if slaughterhouses

had windows, or glass walls that you could see through, and everybody was seeing what was going on, then a lot more people would be... Yeah, but I'm going to use my logic now, I guess, in an inappropriate way. Logic is usually good, but this one, a little bit inappropriate. I got a lot of respect for Steve's care about animals. And if I were looking at it only on a health benefit basis and not on a cruelty to animals basis, I could pretty

quickly conclude that three quarters vegan is better than no vegan and have a steak now and again, and you're still leading a healthier life. And it is not like alcohol or drugs, again and you're still leading a healthier life and it is not like alcohol or drugs which become addictive and one slip and you're down the slippery slope again yeah so that i buy i buy i disagree there because when like once you're when when you've established like a principle of it's wrong to harm animals like once every few months or wait, wait. I'm breaking the argument into two component parts. Okay. I'm dealing first with the health issue as it relates to the consumer. The animal issue is a separate issue.

Right, okay. As the consumer, three-quarters vegan has got to be healthier than zero vegan. Now going to your point about cruelty to animals, and this is where I get a little bit unglued, Steve doesn't wear leather, and I respect that. On the other hand, the industry has become so incredibly good at designing fake leather that's indistinguishable from the real product. If Steve goes to a function wearing a belt or shoes that is indistinguishable from the real product, if Steve goes to a function wearing a belt or shoes

that is indistinguishable from real leather, everybody thinks that he's okay. Yeah, I've thought about that too. When I go out in public, I try to wear stuff that doesn't look like leather at all so people won't get confused in that way. I mean, that's sort of, we're getting into the minutiae of a little bit. But backing up, I wanted to get back, that's sort of, you know, we're getting into like the minutiae.

But backing up, I want to get back to something you said earlier, which was your presumption of approaching this issue from a perspective of ethics and the mistreatment of animals. But there's also, like you began to allude to, the health considerations and also profoundly the environmental implications. So there's a, I'm sure you saw Cowspiracy. I watched it with Dad. You did, okay. Got Dad to watch Cowspiracy, and he showed up to lunch the next day. Yeah, so the way I look at it is like this. It checks every box because when you break down the system of factory farming and industrialized animal agriculture

and the massive deleterious impact of that industry on planetary health, everything from species extinction to ocean dead zones to water use to land use to rainforest deforestation, everything about that is so profoundly more harmful than all of transportation combined, etc. Then you look at health and you realize we're in the midst of this unspeakable health care crisis right now. One out of every three Americans dies of heart disease. By 2030, 50% of Americans are going to be diabetic or pre-diabetic. 70% of Americans are obese or overweight. And I would contend that we actually are addicted on some level, not maybe the way that you become addicted to cocaine, but there is an addictive element to some of the foods that we eat, particularly some of the more highly processed foods.

So by removing animal products from your diet, you're taking out an insurance policy on your health to not become one of those chronic lifestyle illness statistics. You're doing right by the environment and you're sparing the life of animals that are being mistreated so when i look at at it from like a 10 000 foot down perspective i see all these reasons why yeah one-stop shop yeah so check that's how i tend to think about it but i also um you know i'm somebody who i don't go around preaching and telling people what they should or they shouldn't do like Like I've lived my life. I'm happy to talk about it. If people want to hear about it, if they're interested, I'll answer questions, but I don't sit in judgment of anyone

else's lifestyle. But I do think that we're at like, you know, a chronic point in our, in our planet where we have to, you know, really figure some stuff out because we're headed in a not so good direction. Well, let me, I'm, well let me i'm interrupting on purpose and i apologize for that but uh i think it's i don't think it's fair to say that we don't sit in judgment of uh of people's lifestyles because i think that we that we do i think what we refrain from doing is attacking them and preaching to them it's a but but but we can't be removed from judgment i don't think and and really having this conversation. Fair enough. Let me try to put a pragmatic twist in this. The principal home is in Florida, and we've got the great big plastic recycling bins, and I recycle like a trooper.

I believe in it. I make sure that everything goes out. A soda can or a plastic bottle will never go into the trash. We have an apartment in London that we spend you could go to in the summer and it's a small apartment you know it's a space constraint. And to have a separate container for recycling wouldn't fit into the kitchen. And so it is a significantly greater pain in the ass to think about recycling soda cans in our place in London than it is in Florida. So I do the cost-benefit analysis.

our place in London than it is in Florida. So I do the cost-benefit analysis. I'd like to help save the world. Within reasonable costs of effort and time, I'll be absolutely committed, as I am in Florida. But if the difficulty of doing that reaches a certain level, the cost-benefit clicks in. I think, hey, if I throw 100 soda cans out in the course of the summer, I don't think the world is going to be damaged as much. 100 soda cans.

Well, the greater point that you're making is that if you really want to make change on a mainstream mass level, the healthy choice or the choice that's better for society and the planet at large has to be the convenient choice. I think that's right. And I think the real point... There's another point. That movie, that's the one we saw at Christmastime, right? With the map and all the cows. The Cowspiracy one, right. Yeah, and...

Dad has shit on every single one of these documents. No, I'm not shitting you. Well, no, I remember you said you came to lunch the next day, you ordered yourself some meat. Well, it'm not shitting you. Well, no. I remember you said you came to lunch the next day. You ordered yourself some meat. You said that the main thing that the cowspiracy thing was called was consumption of water, right, if I remember correctly. And they were talking about, you know, like imagine, you know, leaving the hose running. And if the neighbor left the hose running and it flooded everywhere, you everywhere, you'd say something and you'd tell him to stop.

Dad's point was, he said, I don't buy it because it's impossible to use this water for this agriculture without effectively recycling it one way or the other. So you don't lose the water, is what Dad was saying. If we could respond to that, that would be helpful. I'm not sure I totally understand. You're saying that that water has to get used one way or the other and it's not fun and it's bad for consumers? I'm not sure I said that.

I think the bigger issue is that using animals as a repository for food is inherently wasteful and unsustainable because you have to cycle all these crops through an animal, and you end up with less food than if you just fed the human beings the crops themselves. And so you have to pour all these resources into growing an animal to the size that it can be slaughtered for for food and because of that uh it's just it's inefficient and as a business person you know economies of scale and efficiencies i would think are something that is always on your mind well that's the same argument that undermines the case for electric or hybrid cars because everybody says hey they don't use any gasoline and they use little or no gasoline depending on which model you buy but nobody calculates the renewable or non-renewable

energy which is required to make the batteries and you know run the turbines that provide the electricity that kind of all gets lost in the shuffle all right right. So, Ted, how are we going to solve all these problems? Well, I've got a solution for the water. You do? And I want to use an analogy with the oil industry. Because if you go back six or seven years, everyone was talking about peak oil. The world was running out. Saudi Arabia was hitting its peak and about to decline. I forget the name of the field, but in the Gulf

of Mexico, off the coast of Mexico, was declining by 15 or 20 percent every year. This was a dire thing. And guess what happened? American ingenuity came up with the technology of hydraulic fracturing, and suddenly the world is awash with a surplus. And my view is, I'm not saying this would solve it, but an equally constructive avenue maybe to approach in tandem for the water problem is to concentrate on much larger scale desalination technology. If you could take salt water, and the technology exists, but not on a scale or cost structure that would make it viable to water the crops across America. But why couldn't water be taken from the ocean, desalinated, used to irrigate crops, and you get the dual benefit of not only solving the water shortage but at least partially addressing the you know the global warming the ice cap melting and the rising ocean that's going to

wipe out florida in a hundred years i talked about this with joe rogan on his podcast and my theory on this is that it seems like uh it seems like desalinating the ocean would be like elementary school chemistry like why can't we just get the salt out of the ocean it seems like desalinating the ocean would be like elementary school chemistry like why can't we just get the salt out of the ocean it seems like it would be simple but it's not it's very difficult it takes a lot of energy to do it it's so complicated i think that god rigged it because if it was easy those oceans would be dry by now because human beings are idiotic yeah look look i'm not saying i'm not saying it's easy i'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying it's viable. I'm just saying that if you are trying to take, forget just the American public, the world public, and get them off eating meat, I submit that that is an even bigger challenge than developing desalination plants on a vast commercially viable scale. He might have a point.

And if you were to pursue both avenues simultaneously, you would probably have a greater chance of success in pursuing one only. We still don't have enough land to raise the number of animals to anticipate the needs of a planet that's going to swell to 11 billion people by 2100. Yeah, I think that's right. Now, the other thing, if you look at two separate industries with related issues, when I was in my 20s, it was perfectly common to go out on a Friday night, get totally wasted, and drive home at two o'clock in the morning. At the time when Steve was little, we lived in Connecticut,

about an hour's drive from Manhattan. And Steve's mom and I would literally go down to central Manhattan after work, leaving the kids with a babysitter, drink ourselves shit-faced until 1 o'clock in the morning, and then drive home along the Hutchison River Merritt Parkway. If you know it, there's no lights and it's a winding road. I sometimes marvel that I'm still alive today to tell the story. Those are the good old days.

No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. They're not the good old days. But here's the difference. Over time, there was a societal change, and drinking and driving not only became penalized criminally, it became socially unacceptable. And once it becomes socially unacceptable and people are embarrassed to do it, that changes habits.

I spent four years in the cigarette industry as head of the Latin America operations. For R.J. Reynolds tobacco. Right. That's amazing. And I remember at the time, the industry was far more concerned about losing social acceptability than losing lawsuits. Yeah, because once that tide shifts, you're done. Yeah. And I think that if you really want to change behavior, there's got to be a hook that influences people to look down on the meat eater the way currently people look down on the smoker. I mean, if you're at a social function or a business function and somebody's got to go out for a cigarette break, at best they they're lower-level sociodemographics, and probably they're an asshole. If you could convey that kind of thinking. Well, I think we're headed in that direction as a result of some pretty interesting technological advances

and what's going on with the kind of meat alternative industry with Beyond Meat and Hampton Creek. These are really pioneering, interesting companies that are coming up with everything from burgers to mayonnaise to cookie dough and beyond. And this is only going to enhance. There's companies like Memphis Meats that are growing in petri dishes, like steaks and all kinds of – the technology that's going into this is amazing. yet certainly, but 5, 10, 15, maybe 20 years from now when we're able to produce foods that are indistinguishable in taste and amino acid profile and nutrients and all of that from animal products, then I think we will get to a tipping point where mainstream culture will shift their perspective because why participate in the killing of an innocent animal when you can get this alternative that actually is more nutritious,

tastes just as good, etc. I don't like vegan, call it rip-off burgers. Mock meat. Mock anything. I mean, anybody who has not yet converted and enjoys a good steak or a good hamburger or a good piece of chicken is not going to particularly enjoy. It's getting better, though. It's getting better, but it's gone from very bad to somewhat bad.

Here is the suggestion. We were at, i forget the name of that restaurant the other night and veggie girl and there was one dish in the menu which i would classify as real food the bombay bowl right and i loved it and i'm not going to go back to the same restaurant if they've only one dish in the menu that I like, but I don't understand why these restaurant proprietors don't recognize that there's a huge... Value in creating meals that aren't pretending to be something that they like.

Right. I think there was an idea that Veggie Grill had to have those sort of chicken sandwiches and burgers and the like to kind of get a mainstream audience in, but they're actually pivoting right now and doing exactly what you're saying. They're going to be putting more, you know,

sort of whole food, you know, real food items on the menu. And they've been incredibly successful, too. I mean, this chain, it's a Southern California operation that has just exploded, and they've got new locations opening up. That was just up in Portland, Oregon. They have a veggie grill. Oh, they do up there? Uh-huh.

You know what's opening in Portland pretty soon? What's that? This all-vegan grocery store called Vegan. Like, it's a full grocery store, but everything in there is vegan. It's this guy who used to be a Mercedes-Benz executive and started this chain in Berlin. There's a couple in Germany. And they're introducing their first one in the U.S. I don't know exactly. Can you buy Tide detergent and Heineken beer there? Chain in Berlin. There's a couple in Germany. And they're introducing their first one in the U.S.

I don't know when exactly. Can you buy Tide detergent and Heineken beer there? That's a good question. I'll tell you, I've got a real bitch against Whole Foods. I hate that place. Because Whole Foods. You can afford it. But the cost is not the issue. You walk in, and in the front end, they've got fresh vegetables that are pretty good.

They've got a lot of meat down the back, but the steaks are too big. I'm eating less meat, which I guess is a step in the right direction. So Steve's doing something. Instead of having a 20-ounce steak, I'm happy with a 12-ounce steak. But in the middle, they've got all these foo-foo products, and if you want to do a total shop there you can't so you got to go to whole foods for this but you still got to go to public's or ralph's or wherever you live in order in order to fill out your your shopping list like what yeah what are

you trying to get i want to get beer i want to get detergent i want to get toothpaste i'm sure they do but they they don't have the same brands they They try to get these niche craft brands. If you've got... All right. All right. Hold on. Let's like... And paper towels.

Can you get paper towels in Whole Foods? I want to talk about how your dad clearly has a methodical, logically-based plotting mind. I don't like the word plotting. Where are you coming from? I don't like the word plotting. Leaping, leaping, leaping. Real quick, I remember this was, I've been on kind of a crusade to try it, because I love my dad so much.

Dad just turned 73. In the family history, there's dementia, there's cancer, there's this and that. And the idea of losing my dad or, heaven forbid, any downgrade of dad downgraded in any way is terrifying to me. And I clutch to him. Like last night, we went to a Dodger game. And I didn't say this, and I don't know why I'm saying it now, but they run everybody through a metal detector. And as Dad said to the individual,

almost like sheepishly, for my dad, the way I know him, he said, I have a pacemaker, and I can't go through the metal detector. And that dad, when he said that, that hit me so hard. I didn't mean to do that, but I'll tell you. It just hit me really, really hard. It was like I was confronted with my dad's mortality, which I'm just not open to

being confronted with. And so for all these years, I've been, since I started taking care of myself, I've been really campaigning dad to take care of himself, you know, because, because I just, I want to keep him around and I want him in the best shape I can have him. So part of the campaign was I came home and I come home with documentaries all the time. And dad, you know, I was sort of a bonding thing, you know, father and son, he'll, he'll watch just about whatever I bring home with him, you know, to,

to spend time with me. And it's always geared towards trying to get dad to live more healthy. And one of the trips home was we sat down and watched the documentary Food Matters. Dad always comes away with a take on it, some kind of a dad spin that just undermines everything he's just seen. Did we just watch the same movie? Right. But the thing about Food Matters, and this is for people. undermines everything he's just seen just like did we just watch the same movie right but uh but the thing about food matters and and then this is you know for people who don't know it's a documentary that basically like uh extols the virtue of a raw food diet and says that you know if you go to whole foods or something you know and to buy your uh your uh your raw produce

your raw produce, that raw produce has lived on a truck, which brought it from wherever it was farmed. By the time it gets to the grocery store, it's basically lost all of its nutritional value, and it's no longer, you know, it's so important that, you've got to go to get it from your local, you know, local organic, you know, it's got to be locally your local, you know, local or grant organic, you know, it's gotta be locally sourced, you know, farmer's market.

Like, and so dad, and I kind of understand it. And I even a little bit with them on that. Dad's like, okay, so this documentary, I might take away is that no matter what you do, it's just not good enough. You know, even if I go to a whole foods and buy all the organic veggies and this and that, they've lost all their nutrients. So no matter what you do, you're screwed. Right, so just fuck it. And I think that's a problem. Yeah, but let me say, I don't think vegetables hurt you.

I suppose if they got too much pesticides in them. But to me, vegetables, in the scenario you describe, go from a plus to a zero. But what is scarier is that I grew up being told that white meat and fish were healthy alternatives to red meat. And when you see all these documentaries about the poultry. I mean, that doesn't look any safer than red meat. And then you read about the mercury in the water, and you eat fish, and you get mercury. And there's one astonishing thing in the local paper in West Palm Beach. A lot of sport fishermen up there, and they somehow did a study with families that fished sufficiently regularly that their meal was based on fresh-caught fish, I think three times a week or more, four times a week or more.

Very, very high incidence of catching their own fish in the waters off the east coast of Florida. So they did some kind of a study, and I don't remember the specifics, but the conclusion was that these people had a particularly high incidence of something that was bad. Even the fish that you caught off the local pier had a bunch of crap in it. So Steve's right. I mean, you do get to a point where if everything is bad, and then you've got all the studies about how coffee used to be dreadfully bad,

and now coffee's okay. Wine was bad, but if you drink a couple of glasses of wine every day, you got... There was almost a Freudian slip in there. The word bottle almost came out. Well, once upon a time... A couple of bottles, I mean. Once upon a time, there was, and as Steve will acknowledge, I don't think I was ever an alcoholic. I certainly was an alcohol abuser.

I could drink a bottle of scotch in a night if it was a long enough night. Steve's stepmom, my wife, got me off of that. I'll have a couple of scotches a month. I'll have a single beer with most meals. But it doesn't go beyond that. Yeah, Dad's, you know, in the book, he's the problem drinker who's able to moderate, you know, when given a sufficient reason.

Well, that's what your book said, not my book. That's what the big book said. Not my book. What if your book says? No, I mean, so I say, when Steve first went into his recovery process, I read the AA book. I went to Al-Anon. I made a point of trying to understand

more clearly what it was all about. It was so funny. Dad says so, you know, because I told him right when I went in, Dad, you have to, you know, go to Al-Anon because otherwise you have to understand what I'm going through and you got to kind of figure out how to not screw it up, you know? And so I need to go to Al-Anon.

Now it's about six months in, dad says, so I've been going to Al-Anon and I just don't quite understand it because it seems like the people in these Al-Anon meetings are there discussing their own problems. And I don't have any problems. He says, I don't have any problems he says i'm just here to to be supportive uh you know to to understand and support you and what you're doing he went though he went yeah and i remember thinking it was hilarious and i said dad next time just hand me a joint and a beer and call it a day right no that's not fair right no let me ask you this. When Steve started getting super crazy, I mean, what was that like for you? Awful. I mean, it had to be torture.

Usually, almost invariably, I didn't see any footage until obviously long after it was taken. So the immediate life or death threat wasn't an issue because I talked to him on the phone the week or the day before. What I was looking at on the footage had obviously been filmed much longer ago than that. And both of my kids, especially my daughter, legitimately criticized me for what they call rose-colored glasses. I mean, I'll usually find a positive spin to put on just about anything. And I did delude myself that, yeah, there was a problem, but it was not as big a problem as everybody said it was. One way or another, things would sort themselves out.

And obviously they did, but not in the way I expected and not in any sort of evolutionary change. It was a crisis that, you know. Right, and I had, like, I essentially had, you know, a blackmail operation going where, you know, I was self-sufficient you know with my own you know financial right uh so he couldn't tell you what to do yeah i wasn't i wasn't dependent on anybody financially or otherwise and so it was just sort of like a hey you know like i'm gonna need you to

shut up and if you don't like that then you're just sort of i'm gonna you know you're not going to be able to have a relationship with me and so it was very much like on my terms and uh and and and I was you know like typical for an alcoholic addict like you know if anybody brought up my lifestyle my health like my my you know my heaven forbid my addiction um I just barked I turned really really harsh really cold, really fast, and just shut down. And that was the end of that conversation. And so nobody was invited to bring it up. And if anybody did bring it up, I made them regret it in short order. And if they persisted with it, then they jeopardized their ability to have a relationship with me at all. So with Ted, it's a little bit of denial or just sort of believing that somehow it's going to work out.

And also being trained very well to know not to bring it up, not to kind of dance around it. But believe it or not, there was a silver lining in all that. Because when Steve had his ultimate collapse and was talking about riding his motorcycle through the glass window to land in the building across the street. I got calls from Knoxville. Right, when Knoxville was arranging the intervention, the idea was to have Dad be physically present there. So let's just paint that picture quickly, because it's pretty interesting. I mean, I know you've told this story before, but, I mean, you were headed towards the end there and going insane. I was in dire straits.

I mean, my disease of addiction had progressed for many years. And, I mean, my first time in rehab was 1995. And I kind of blazed out of there. And, you know, I had serious issues. And by the end of it, I was just so in such a bad way that i had effectively burned all the bridges in my career um you know like uh any good kind of business opportunity i i made go away um i uh just was i became like like quite truly uh just a nasty person i think that the way that we treat others um is is a pretty pure reflection of how we feel about ourselves and my my self-image my self-esteem i hadn't had

just been driven so low that i didn't have very many nice things to say or do towards others and and i was i was pretty nasty i would i would try to harm people's reputations, you know, make them feel bad. Not all the time, but that was a big chunk of what I was up to. And for the most part, just becoming, you know, inebriated and intoxicated, you know, to really kind of dangerous levels. And I would sleep but once every you know three days right so it's like coke pcp ketamine alcohol right everything except for crack and heroin like was part of my deal i never why not i had boundaries for that and the reason why is because i had been in uh when i was in in rehab in 1995 when i was 20 years old, I mean, I wasn't even of legal drinking age at that point.

So when I got to the rehab, you know, it was just like, I was just kind of getting my feet wet a little bit. I mean, I wasn't, I was a proper alcoholic, but once I was in the mix of the rehab center that I was in, it was like, oh, okay, well, these people have real problems, made me feel a little bit better about myself by comparison. I didn't have that much of an issue. And the way that it was set up, everybody was, you know, we'd be in our circle, sort of talking about our feelings, this and that.

And every day, one person would, for the most part, one person would leave and another person would show up. This was the turnover. And so whenever a new person showed up, what you did, you know, that person would show up. This was the turnover. And so whenever a new person showed up, what you did, that person would walk up to the circle and introduce yourself to the group and say what your drug of choice was.

And I learned really quickly how people reacted to the new guys showing up. If they were to say, my drug of choice is powder cocaine, like snorting cocaine, they would be smirking, they'd be laughing, like, what a pussy. They'd be basically saying under their breath. But if the person was to say my drug of choice is crack cocaine,

it would just be like all of a sudden, avert eye contact, I don't want to know this guy, he's not my roommate. It was the sort of feeling I got from it. And it was like, wow, I don't know what the difference is between powder cocaine and crack cocaine, but whatever that difference is it is very significant because people would talk about about having careers with drugs and alcohol that went forever and ever even heroin you know whatever like just they were maintained for years and years and years and then like from the moment they took their first hit of crack cocaine, in just such a short time, they lost everything.

And I learned that really, really effectively when I was in that rehab. Like, whatever you do, just do not smoke crack. But PCP, no problem. PCP, no problem. I mean, I remember seeing, and then the nitrous, too. And heroin, too. Yeah, nitrous was terrible. I mean, what was it?

There was some show, ATV, where you're at the end, and you're lying around, and there's just nitrous cartridges just surrounding you. Right. And I never even really, I was kind of ashamed of it at the time. I never really documented the, you know, like if I hadn't been, I was always trying to sort of manage it and kind of like not, you know. There's just no video footage that lives that could do justice to the extent of the nitrous consumption I was up to.

That MTV special did a pretty good job, though. Yeah. That was dark. Yeah. It was dark. I frankly, I wouldn't actually wound up, I wouldn't watch it for the longest time. This was, for those who don't know, they made a documentary. I handed over like a box of video, the one I was fairly new in rehab,

and just handed it over with my blessing to make a documentary about my stuff, which is sort of a, you i don't know thank god i didn't go on that celebrity rehab because they were courting me like so persistently and uh they were they were casting the second season of dr drew's celebrity rehab when i was you know like a couple months like two or three months in and um they would and i couldn't say no i don't want to do it and then they kept like upping the money upping the money and to the point where i was like considering it it would have been the worst thing ever for me to do that and i look at what i did do with this it was called uh steve-o demise and rise and it was basically basically a

documentary about my downward spiral and my subsequent early recovery. And, you know, it came and went. And I think for a lot of people who put their recovery out there in the way of some kind of a media, you know, if it's a documentary, if it's a TV show or this and that, I think that people who sort of tout their recovery don't typically do as well in recovery, you know, if you're sort of busy drawing attention to it and touting it and sort of congratulating yourself for it. Yeah, that can become a problem quick. That becomes really tricky

because your whole motivation becomes sketchy. And I remember being kind of aware and thinking of it as sort of that kind of a curse. And really second-guessing myself, questioning, like, why am I doing this and like and is am I do am I doing myself to fail a lot of it's about intention though you know it's like it's being driven by ego and finances or or is it a vehicle to you know be of service to other people I you know I I think it was a little bit of everything

on the honest truth I think is a little bit of everything. The honest truth, I think it was a little bit of everything. It wasn't purely positive motivation, and it wasn't entirely negative at all. But looking at it, and I remember, you know, kind of really agonizing over, like, am I putting my recovery in jeopardy by putting this documentary out there? And one guy who really gave me,

maybe I said this recently, but it's James Hetfield from Metallica. Because that documentary that Metallica did, which was called Some Kind of Monster, which chronicled them replacing a band member, recording a new album. They were going to therapy, right, together. And all the therapy.

And basically, at the end of the day, what it really was was a documentary about the lead singer of Metallica, James Hetfield, and his early recovery. Because he just is fresh out of rehab. And he's got a limit on how much time he can spend rehearsing with the band. And he's just like, he's so raw. And it was basically a documentary about his recovery. And I look at that.

And I looked at it at the time when I was doing my documentary. And for Metallica, you know, that came, that went, and it was sort of back to the business of being Metallica. And James Hetfield didn't go on to write songs about making amends, or they were working the 12 steps of recovery. It was just sort of like he put that out there, and it didn't kind of define him.

It just sort of like he put it it out there and he moved on. That guy, I really held on tightly to the idea of that and letting that be my model for how to view that documentary and how to approach it. I remember meeting James Hetfield at a Metallica concert right when I got my nine-month sobriety chip. Of course, the chips that my nine month sobriety chip. And of course, like the chips that we get in sobriety, up until a year, they're made out of plastic. And then when you get your first

year, it's a coin. And so I met James Hetfield backstage at the Metallica concert. And I asked him, I said, Hey, man, how long have you been sober? And he said, seven years. It was at that time. And I mean, it was just it was evident evident it was written all over his face he could just see like the health the the the happiness like it was just like to me he was just the most cool like shining example of like meaningful recovery he said seven years and i said oh man cool and i pulled out my my nine month chip and i said i just got my nine month chip and i held it up to him and i said no more plastic for me man straight heavy metal from here on out you know meaning that it was my intention to really like protect my sobriety and and uh and stay and serve the business of getting your coins and not going

back to picking up plastic chips and uh you know boy that guy was just such a such a uh you know i just have so much respect for him and uh and just how like he's done it you know and um i just like i mean i don't know him personally and i haven't heard anything about but just for the way that he that uh what i do know about how he approached it you know i just think he's really stayed with it and stayed true to it and he remains someone who uh here to try to respect and look up to. Yeah, that's an amazing story. It's an amazing story.

But back to final days for you. Right. When all this insanity is going on, and you're firing off emails every 20 minutes to everybody in Hollywood telling them what you're going to do, and you're going to ride your motorcycle through your apartment and out the window. Right.

The living room had a sliding glass door. i was going to open the sliding glass door and put a ramp in the living room i wanted to ride a motorcycle i'd jump it off the ramp and uh out the sliding glass door which would which would launch me out and i wanted to land on the roof of the building next door which was very doable knoxville looked at it and he said knoxville looked at it and said there's not much of a gap right there. Like, he actually made fun of me for that being like, super easy. But then in my bedroom, there was a window and out that window is, you know, some 25 feet down to the sidewalk below. And I was emailing everybody in Hollywood, like with the jackass guys copied, you know, I want you guys to bring sidewalk below. And I was emailing everybody in Hollywood,

like with the jackass guys, copied, you know, I want you guys to bring me something to land on. I'm going to jump out the window. I've been evicted, and I've got to be out of here by tomorrow. So let's start filming a third jackass movie and bring me something to land on, preferably a hot tub for me. And I wanted to jump into a hot tub

because it wasn't a very high jump. You know, a cannonball into a hot tub would have been doable. But if you to jump into a hot tub because it wasn't a very high jump you know a cannonball into a hot tub would have been doable um but but if you can't bring a hot tub like made at least some cardboard boxes but no matter what come bring cameras and if you don't bring anything if you don't come if you don't uh you know like you know uh fulfill my my request uh you know if you if you don't like you know do what i say then i promise you i'm gonna jump anyway and i'm gonna find out how many bones get broken when i splat on the concrete you know on the sidewalk because i'm ready to die and i'm gonna jump it's that qualified me for uh right

you're architecting your own uh intervention i scheduled my own intervention yeah and created the proof to uh have you locked up i provided the documentation to qualify me for California's 5150 law, which states that if somebody is harmful to themselves or others, that they can be locked up in a psychiatric ward against their will. Right, so you set up a call time, and you think these guys are going to all come over and film you, and that's where they showed up. Yeah, they showed up to lock me up in a psychiatric ward, yeah. And they noxville tremaine noxville jeff tremaine the director um trip taylor the

executive producer of jackass um uh who i'd say cordell sound cordell mansfield the sound guy big reg was there but he was just he was just wait he was he was just uh but he was there to take care of it you're in the information loop but you're not you weren't able well no he was he was at they asked him explicitly to be there and dad and dad uh in a controversial mood said no i refuse to be at my son's intervention tremaine called uh knoxville sent a couple of emails and called uh dr drew Drew was very concerned. He said, if you don't get Steve off the street within 24 hours, he's probably going to die. And then Knoxville really kind of played the responsibility card, if you want to call it that,

and said, shit, if my son was in that situation, I'd be out in a heartbeat. I don't understand what's holding you back and uh that was maybe the toughest decision i've ever made but and your thinking was what my thinking was that steve described how despite the strength of our relationship uh i could never talk to him about lifestyle he would just shut down. And so my rationale was, these guys are his friends, his workmates. He looks up to them. They have influence with him. They talk that same street cred language, if you want to call it that. If I'm in the room, if I'm in that room, all these guys are going to shrink back against the wall,

and it's going to be a pissing match between Steve and me in the center of the room, and I'm going to lose. Yeah, it's going to work at cross purposes. If I don't go, then these guys are going to have to take responsibility, and Steve will listen to them more than he'd listen to me. That's pretty insightful, actually. They will get the job done, and four days later when he was in the lockup at that was cedars-sinai i flew out and spent a week there gotcha wow and and then uh and and and um i was in the psych ward for seven days they extended my stay uh by

changing my status from 51 50 which was three days to 52 50 which is two weeks and after seven days i determined that uh that i really did need help and that i was willing to go uh seek help and go into a treatment center um so dad what is that but let's let's park it there for a second i mean first of all i would imagine you're doing the thorazine shuffle for like a couple days in there right like trying to detox all this stuff well when i first got showed up um they had uh they got me into into a car you know i mean the idea of the intervention wasn't it uh you know like the kind on tv they say are you willing to accept help you know it wasn't that variation or the you know it was um it was you know they were there to inform me that i was going to get help and i was going to a psych ward and and that if I didn't like that,

that they were quite plainly going to beat me up and take me against my will, and so I didn't feel like getting beaten up, and I went willingly. So we got into a car. It was an SUV, and I was in, you know, Knoxville and Tremaine were driving me to the hospital, and we got to the hospital. There was a guy waiting at the curb with a wheelchair, thinking he was going to wheel me in. And I got out of the car,

and I looked at the guy and said, I don't need no fucking wheelchair or whatever. And I spit on the guy. That was kind of like not unusual for me to spit on people at that time in my life. And so I walked into the hospital, and I was just sure that I was going to explain, it was, you know, calmly explained it was a misunderstanding. I was just, I was very lucid.

I was, you know, I was kind of, I had an ability to kind of turn on like, you know, like, uh, lucid and sensible seemings. Of course, man, every addict alcoholic knows how to do that when, you know, when the time comes and you got to like show up and like convince people that you're okay right and and uh and i probably would have been able to do that if it weren't for those emails that i provided which they had printed out to document why i was uh why i qualified for california's 5150 law but um when i determined that i couldn't um when i wasn't able to uh talk my way out of it and that I wasn't going to be locked up, I became belligerent and threw a temper tantrum and grabbed a chair and went to throw it. And as I tried to throw this chair, I got tackled by hospital orderlies who slammed me down onto a stretcher

and they jammed the needle in my butt cheek which i understand to be thorazine yeah and then you're out like yeah yeah they put a needle in my butt cheek and i took a nap that was as simple as that and um now when i woke up um you know then there i am now i'm introduced to the to the psych ward you know where the doors don't open um i was like really clear about um about uh i know what they want to hear you know i know what they want me to say they want me to say i'm gonna i'm gonna like you know stop doing drugs and you know get sober like uh i was kind of negotiating like uh in my head for the first few days in there thinking yeah it probably really is a pretty good idea for me to quit doing ketamine you know like like uh this special k is really just not

good for me and i don't uh do myself any favors when i'm on it and you know like i don't know if i can but i probably should think about stopping doing coke you know but but then like there but then like just no i can't but but when when i got down like i i gotta be able to maybe drinking i could think about it oh i don't know man i'm gonna quit drinking you know but when it got to weed i was like no i will not you know so it's kind of like i was figuring out in my own mind but maybe i'll tell them what they want to hear but what i'll really do is this and that and just over the course of those seven days that i was in there um you know a number of things happened with people coming in to talk about sobriety and and somebody gave me a book about

sobriety and um ultimately it was like wow okay you know like once uh i'd heard the people tell their stories and and uh and kind of read in this book. And then taking the 20 questions of Alcoholics Anonymous, which they gave me. Well, I'm sure you're a perfect score on that. Dude, I aced it. Yeah, of course. I totally aced it. Except for, like, I could probably, I think that in hindsight, I could have argued that some questions were not applicable to me. some questions were not applicable to me.

But it's not like the clouds parted and the angels were singing and you were blessed with this moment of willingness. It wasn't like that, but it also kind of was something clicked. There was a distinct something clicked because I gave up on the whole, I'm going to continue to smoke weed thing. When I made the decision, when I made the decision seven days into the psychiatric ward i said i'm going to go to rehab and i'm going to learn how to live clean and sober i'm in 100 clean and sober i gave up any idea that i was going to continue to smoke weed that i was going to continue to drink and that that that that arriving at that decision what do you think that's a function of like what

was going on that got you to that point it means like you've been in rehab before you know when you went in you weren't exactly it's not like right you didn't know you were an alcoholic it was 13 years prior my my one experience in rehab and uh you know what what it was what what helped me to get to that was i would say primarily humiliation you know like i like I, I, uh, my reality was that I could not get through any given day without performing some, uh, dreadful thing that just brought about like, frankly, humiliation, you know, um, or, or just guilt and shame and remorse. Like when, uh, you know, I would like in the moment of, uh, of, of my bender, you know, or just guilt and shame and remorse. Like when, you know, I would, like in the moment of my bender, you know, on whatever drug I was on and sitting at the computer

firing off emails, like in the moment of sending every email, I thought it was just pure genius. I thought I was like, oh, this is great, I'm amazing. Like, or this isn't wrong, this is justified, you know, whatever. And then it's like to wake up the next day and realize what I had done God it was just humiliating you know and and there was so much of that going on and it was like a daily on a daily basis I was just humiliating myself well the more humiliated you are the more you got to use right it's a cycle absolutely for

sure it's a cycle and like and it sure. It's a cycle. And like, and it was just, uh, that's what I think like really for that and just how sick I was, you know, like, um, I, I,

I just, the seven days in the psych ward and, and the experience that I had in there with the various people that came in to talk to me, um, like, and the humiliation and in all of the shame and remorse. It was sort of a perfect storm of, you know,

it came with the clarity that I needed help. The trajectory of the arc has been pretty amazing. I mean, it would have been one thing for you to, okay, Steve-O's sober, and then just live your life. But I've seen, you know, just from my outside perspective, looking in on your life, and I don't know what that intimately, but, you know, you really grabbed onto this thing. I mean, you did the rehab super hard. Where'd you go to impact or someplace like that? No, it wasn't that. I went, I bounced around, I went to the Gooden Center in Pasadena.'s not like i started out at las encinas is that true las encinas was true he's long since washed his hand to that place but um but yeah and i showed

up like when i when i got there i was so serious about it and uh dr drew was the chemical dependency or the director of the chemical dependency unit of the hospital. And I remember, and I was with Dad, I said to Dr. Drew, I said, however long you recommend that I stay here in this rehab, I want to go ahead and stay significantly longer. Because I was clear on having heard all the statistics about like 95% of alcoholics dying drunk of causes related to alcoholism. The staggering statistics of how it's not, the odds are stacked against us.

They'll say like, look around you in the rehab, 12 of you and only one of you is going to make it or this and that. I knew that the odds were not in my favor. So how long did around you in the rehab, 12 of you. And the one, only one of you is going to make it or this and that. I knew the thoughts were not in my favor. How long did you stay in that rehab? He said that what Dr. Drew said was, I recommend, I don't recommend you stay more than 30 days here in, in Las Encinas, which is to thank God, because I think that 30 days was pushed a hundred grand or something like

whatever, whatever it was, it was, it was obscene. And, obscene and um and uh and he said but if but if you really are this serious about your sobriety then what i'm going to recommend is that you go from 30 days in here and you move into a into a sober living like a halfway house and uh he was there for two years right i stayed in sober living until i had two years where where was that sober living house that why, I bounced around. What happened was, you know, I was in rehab for the 30 days, and I wasn't committed to what the next move was, you know, but I was just very willing to do whatever I could to give myself better odds, you know, to give myself an advantage.

And, you know, invariably on any given day in the rehab at Las Encinas there, Invariably on any given day in the rehab at Las Encinas there, one of the other patients was always just antsy, like, I've got to get out of here, I've got to get out of here, I've got to get my kids, I've got to get back to my kids, I've got to get back to my job, I've got to go do this, I've got to do that. And the counselors would look at them and just sort of very matter-of-factly say, hey, I get it, but what you're talking about is getting loaded.

They said, if you make anything your priority other than your sobriety, then you're going to lose it, and you're going to lose your sobriety, unless you make your sobriety your only priority. And faith for me at that time was pretty simple. And faith for me at that time was pretty simple. It was just like I had my faith in those counselors having devoted their lives to a constant stream of new people coming in and going out, and just the turnover every day. It's this stream of addicts coming through that they would have figured out after years of that what does and doesn't work. And when they so plainly

matter of factly say you're going to get loaded if you do that i believed them and so i just sort of you know did what they said uh you know i got the sponsor i did all those things that are uh that are recommended um and uh and in the process of working with the sponsor and looking at you know like all the stuff we look at the inventory and looking at, you know, like all the stuff, we look at the inventory and all that. Like I just, you know, I had to get the fourth step blues and wound up, you know, in psych ward number two, never got loaded. But, uh, but I, I, yeah, that self-loathing that it talks about in that fourth chapter.

You can't linger on the four on four too long. You know, you gotta get through five get rid of that stuff i'm more i'm morbidly morbidly put myself on trial with that uh with that so you like clinically diagnosed depressed they i mean they diagnose me as bipolar they you know they prescribed me like they'd make fun of me in rehab. They'd call me medicine boy. The way you told it at the time, you realized that your computer was becoming part of the problem because it lets you communicate to the outside world, and you're trying to prove to everybody the right way to go through all this.

Oh, I was the worst. Oh, I was the worst. Yeah, I was the worst. And so you gave it up voluntarily, and I always understood that it was driven by your obsession with the computer, that there were ramifications beyond that. But when your sponsor took away the computer for a week. Well, I asked him to take away my computer. And not for a week, for months on end.

But, you know, one thing about Steve, I've said before, the world is full of stupid people that try to make like they're intelligent and they fall on their ass. Steve is a very, very smart guy that's making a good living out of pretending that he's stupid.

There it is in a good living out of pretending that he's stupid. There it is in a nutshell. And one of the things, we had this discussion just the other night. Steve has a very sharply defined comfort zone. Most people kind of go from white, and between white and black, there's progressively more gray as they become less motivated and less proficient, but they're still functioning. Steve, within his comfort zone, within that white area, is second to none. I mean, he's committed. He works his ass off.

He's very smart. He gets 11 out of 10. But step three inches over that comfort line, and he's as useless as tits in a bowl. I mean, when did you come into that awareness? I mean, you're a traditional guy. He's as useless as tips on a bowl. When Steve's a little kid, when do you start thinking, what am I going to do with this guy?

Like, where am I going to put him? Like, you know, you're sending him to good schools, and you're probably thinking, I'm going to raise him to be my shadow, or I don't know what you were thinking. But at some point, you had to realize, I've got a square peg I'm trying to jam into a round hole here. Well, there was a moment, and I guess you were, it was pre-jackass, but not by much. I grew up in a family that was principally academics. My dad was a Ph.D. in history. My mother was an M.A. in academics. My dad was a Ph.D. in history. My mother was an M.A. in English.

My brother's a Ph.D. My sister's an M.A. I've got a niece who's a director at the Courtauld Art Industry and Art Facility in central London with a Ph.D. in art history. And I'm the only one in the family that went into business. with a PhD in art history, and I'm the only one of the family that went into business. And I wasn't ashamed of it, but I kind of thought of myself a little bit as a black sheep growing up in this family of academics. And at a point in time, I guess I was either about to finish or just finished my undergraduate college.

I never went beyond that. I just got the bachelor degree. My dad pulled me aside and said, you know, I really don't care what you do. I mean, don't have any hang-ups. Do whatever you want to do. Just make sure you do it as well as you possibly can. And you do something that you're enjoying while you're doing it as well as you possibly can. And that kind of resonated.

It took a while for me to bring Steve into that tent, but we had a moment of reckoning where we had that conversation. It was October of 1998, and Dad pulled me aside and he said, Son, I have to acknowledge I have done a disservice to you by not supporting you in this career path that you've clearly committed yourself to. What career path is that, though? It's like, how do you take a kid? I'm like, I'm interested in what Steve was like at 12, 15, and you're trying to parent this guy who's like, you know, a wild stallion that you're probably trying to break him in, right?

Like, how does that work? Well, I'm not sure, but I'll i'll give you you know sort of an example he said this before and it's been it's in his book but i guess he was uh 12 or 13 uh we were living in toronto and the motley crew were coming to town at the time the motley crew at the time at the time i was head of the Nabisco Canada operations. And we had several skyboxes in the Maple Leaf Gardens, which was the arena at the time. And there was certainly nobody in the executive ranks of Nabisco Canada that were going to go to the Motley Crue. So I thought I was going to be a pretty good dad.

And I came home and I said, Steve, guess what? I've got us the Skybox. Because I was a Motley Crue fanatic. I loved them so much. I said, I got us the Skybox for the Motley Crue, and even better, I set it up so that our company chauffeur is going to bring your recording equipment into the box so that you can record the show while we're there. And I thought, son of a bitch, I really got an 11 out of 10. Steve looked at me and he said, dad, that's lame.

Watching Motley Crue through a plate glass window sucks. So then I had to improvise, and I said, I'll tell you what. You know, you get better tickets, and I'll go with you to the gardens, and we'll sit in your seats. And he took the challenge, and this was unbelievable. One Sunday afternoon, let me finish.

One Sunday afternoon, he spent four hours going through the then paper yellow pages of the Toronto phone book, calling every hotel in the city, asking by name for the manager of the Motley crew. And after about three and a half hours, he caught up not with a manager, but with a manager's brother, who was so impressed with Steve's initiative, he said, I'll tell you what, you got six row front seats and backstage passes.

So he met the challenge. He got better tickets than I did, and we went with his tickets, and he went and met the crew afterwards. And then the thing was really astonishing. I was just blown away by that. And from then on, almost. It was a real curse because when every shitty report card came in, my dad said, son, if you could just apply the motivation, the tenacity, the

initiative that you applied to meeting Motley Crue, he said, if you'd get straight A's, your life would be great. And you wonder, but what he said, and it took a while for him to say it, like years, not weeks or months, and it really resonated with me. He said, you know, I really, every time you said that, I really took it as a put-down, He said, you know, I really, every time you said that, I really took it as a put down. Because the way I interpreted it, Steve talking, is that you're saying, Dad, that I peaked out at age 14. And everything after that is going to be a failure.

And that really got me thinking. Right. So clearly industrious. When you get your mind set on something, like you can channel that energy. But it's like, what are you going to, like there is no career path for what, I mean, you could have never foreseen. There was no path. Where do I take this? I'll tell you where it went, and this progresses the story.

He decided he wanted to be a stuntman, and this was the job title. This is so great, because this was, like, when I was dropping out of the University of Miami, it was 1993, I was still on this the University of Miami. It was 1993. I was still on this. I'm going to be a stuntman. I'm going to be a stuntman. So 1994, 1995, I'm accumulating home video footage of

genuinely pretty reckless, crazy stunts for which I would ultimately get some traction. Dad was busy going to the local library. Let me figure it out. There's a, I'm not sure if it was a library or an archive of cinematography just off Russell Square in central London

on the edge of Soho. I thought, you know, I've heard and read that stuntmen are going to be made obsolete by digital technology. I'm going to go there. And my wife and I spent probably three hours in this place, going through all the records about digital technology and the evolution of stunts.

Compiling an argument to shut me down. And in those days, obviously, there was no internet. And if we paid the equivalent of 25 cents a page or something, we got paper copies. And so I got copies of all these articles and stuck them in the mail, the snail mail, to get them to Steve. And eventually they got there, and about a week later I said, have they arrived? Have they arrived? Yes, they've arrived.

And I said, wow, that's terrific, isn't it? So now you can give up this stunt man bullshit. It's the logic, right? Your logical argument. And so his answer is even more logical. He says, fine.

If there aren't going to be any stuntmen in the movie, so be it. I'm going to get a bunch of crazy guys like me and we're going to put together a stunt circus and tour the country.

And that's what Jackass was all about. That's basically what happened. Yeah. I mean, how do you first meet uh you know the crew like how do you meet knoxville and it was uh there was a skateboarding magazine that brought us all together um it was uh a skateboard magazine that was kind of thinly veiled it was mostly just sort of uh for the purpose of being kind of naughty and crazy and offensive.

And they made these videos. And, you know, I was a fan of the magazine. I kind of worked my way into their good graces and, you know, did stunts and crazy stuff in their magazines and videos. And ultimately, the guy in charge reached out to Spike Jones. He was friends. Also from the skate from the right uh-huh he said hey uh spike you know um our big brother that's what it was called big brother magazine and the big brother videos he said were so popular they've really like you know gone crazy

with popularity but i get the sense that that they're not at all popular because of the skateboarding. And he says, nobody really cares about the skateboarding. It's all this other nonsense going on in the videos that's really catching fire. And he said, I think that if we were to subtract the skateboarding from the videos, then what's left over could be a great TV show. And I don't think anybody else could have really done that um uh with any kind of hope for success um because it was just such such lunacy it was just such like really crazy nonsense i think anybody else would have uh you know come to mtv or wherever they went and and they just would have said, we can't put this fucking shit on TV.

We can't put this on TV. But the thing was that it was Spike Jonze presenting the thing. So it's like, wow, Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie director Spike Jonze has this crazy thing. Like, okay, now it can work. And I think that Spike really, you know, I don't want to give him all the credit, but I think that he really um

by believing in you and and putting his like stamp of right by putting a stamp i think that he got uh he got corporate america to take seriously what they you know arguably shouldn't have yeah but you you're oversimplifying you're taking a very linear look at how you hooked up with Tremaine. And the reality was, in those days, you were going shotgun. You were sending VCRs. In fact, if you kid Steve, there were months when his Federal Express bill was larger than his income. For sure. And he was shotgunning these things out.

So that Motley Crue energy, the ticket, it's the same thing. I had the two VCRs connected in my sister's living room. Taping the tapes. Just tape to tape, tape to tape. It was like a fucking assembly line. And then I wrote on the little sticker that came in the blank, the cassette tape,

the sticker for the spine of the VHS tape. And then I would write, Steve-O, stunts and party tricks. Like, who wouldn't want to watch stunts and party tricks? And then I would, like, you know. Like, what kind of people are you mailing this off to? Largely people in the skateboarding industry, and then I would like like what kind of people are you mailing this off to Tim like largely people in the skateboarding industry but generally like

anybody who I thought might watch it like even like like talent agents that I would dig up online like I would

I'd send I'd send that shit everywhere and so is that how you connected with Knoxville or how did that come together the

I don't think i i had sent tapes to to big brother i was just a fan of big brother and when big brother came through uh my town which at the time was albuquerque new mexico um i just made it my mission to track them down and and uh inform them that they were going to publish an article about me because i was just so gnarly again the motley crew story whenue story, when he's committed, there's no stopping. And I made it happen. I got my damn article. But the interesting thing we've debated since then is, was it easier when Steve broke in or more difficult than today?

Because he was recording all this stuff on his home video camera and going reel-to-reel to make the VCRs and sending VCRs by FedEx. VHS tapes. Or VHS. There was no internet as we know it today, no uploading, downloading capability. There was snail mail. So he had to really work his ass off to get this stuff out.

But he was doing it without very much competition. Very few people would have his energy and commitment to make that happen. In today's world, anybody can distribute anything instantly. And so it is easier to gain access, but it's got to be so much more competitive. There's more people doing it. More people doing it. And I think the argument could be made that Steve got a big boost by the low technology as compared with today's higher technology. Yeah, that's interesting. I think I did better when doing it at the time when I did because I was sort of, like, my medium was such, like, I wouldn't really film a lot of heads and tails.

It was just I wanted the shot of me flying off the roof of the building. The difference is that if you were doing it now, you'd just have a YouTube channel, and you'd be blowing up your YouTube channel, and that's all you'd need. You're like, I'm going to get a million subscribers, and then go from there. But the point is anybody can do that now. When he did it, it required a lot of initiative, a lot of effort, a lot of stress, if you will. I mean, putting out the small amounts that he earned, whatever odd jobs he had, buying all these. Whatever drugs he sold.

That's an odd job. Actually, that's a career. But as long as Steve is within his clearly defined circle, there is absolutely no stopping him. Well, that's what Dad put it another way one time, which I thought was even more eloquent. He said, how did he say it? He said, when Steve sets his mind to it, he can accomplish just about anything. he can accomplish just about anything. The problem is that's a fairly

narrow slice of the pie of what I set my mind to. Well, I would have presumed that you would have been a dad who would be thinking, like, my son's out of control. I just hope one day he's going to wake up and grow up and then

come and join the fold and get a real job and, like, be an adult. But what I'm hearing and what I'm getting is that you really were supportive of him trying to figure out what he wanted to do and pursue his dream. Well, to a degree, yeah. Like, I was flailing around. I wasn't, you know, getting any traction whatsoever in my pursuit of a career as a stuntman. But at a certain point, you know, when I moved to Albuquerque,

and I moved in with my sister there, and I had on my sister's floor the VCRs, and I was this and that. And I was back in school. My sister found out about Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, and she came home with that information, that it was free to get into if If you could get in, super exclusive. But if you could get into it, it's free. And she, I think, probably thought, like, you know, this would be great for my brother.

Like, I also could get him the fuck out of my house. But, yeah, when I heard about that, I thought, well, you know, if I had that circus, the affiliation with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Billy Circus, and I was a trained professional, then people would take me more seriously with all my idiotic, sort of light myself on fire at the keg party stunts. And so I made it my mission to get into clown college, and I did. I pulled that off. And when I went to clown college, it was like a big deal.

And that was where shit started kind of, I guess my antics were really showing some signs of professionalism leading up to that point, and particularly from that point on. And my mom came to my uh my clown college graduation the gala ceremony you know like there was a really major big deal and dad was conspicuously absent this was uh in september of 1997 when uh when that happened and um again the talk that dad and I had was in October of 1998 so dad hadn't fully come around yet and dad was

like pretty like dead set against like you know the idea of supporting clown college dad couldn't wrap his head around that and but like no that's not true.

Okay. Remember, you know. I mean, perhaps Dad was in England at the time. No. Well, maybe I can't remember. Mom and I were divorced. It hadn't been totally amicable. And I remember thinking at the time that this could kind of be her deal

and that it might not be quite as sympathetic of course my mom showed up drunker than shit but it was more in in my mind it was more uh you know kind of a voluntary sharing all right because before we had our conversation about the uh support you know all the rest of it i was certainly in your camp when you were interviewing for the job on the uh i'll support you and all the rest of it i was certainly in your camp when you were interviewing for the job on the uh cruise lines well right but that um that way i wasn't on the cruise lines until 1999 yeah but that but it was wasn't that before it was after our conversation was 1998 and when... I remember specifically because mom, my mom was, you know, a chronic alcoholic

and she suffered an aneurysm, which brought, like, you know, us sort of family members from wherever we were, my sister and I, in Albuquerque, dad flew over from England, and we all sort of convened, like, you know, over this crisis with my mom, and she survived the aneurysm,

but, you know, with terrible, you know, over this crisis with my mom and she survived the aneurysm, but in, you know, with terrible, uh, you know, terrible, uh, handicap, handicap, physical and mental. And she was just in terrible shape for the last five years, but it was, it was in midst of this crisis and it was actually at the hospital where they had mom, um, in the ICU and, um, and dad, you know, you're right. Yeah. I remember that now. It was actually not outside the hospital. We took a... We were in the hospital for mom and we went to some pub slash restaurant,

like a kind of English pub type place. And it was... I want to say even we went outside. I think I went outside to smoke a cigarette or something. And dad followed me out and sort of sprung on me this uh really thoughtful conversation which is why i know it was october of 1998 and when i remember chasing around coral gables uh trying to buy you the uh long material like for your your your stilts oh yeah yeah that was way

later that was way later okay way later that was once i had the the plan to do the film for the pilot for mtv oh okay um but uh the thing was so great is that when dad um pledged his support for me in in this and you're right it's so funny to call it a path because there was no path yeah how do you even there's no like where are you going to take this right there was no there was no path but but dad was you know okay so you're going to do this. You're committed, and I support you. And I remember, like, very shortly after that, you know, like, seeing a commercial on TV for this show that they had at the time, which was called Real TV. Now, at that time, there was enough, there were enough home video cameras to sustain America's funniest home videos.

Like, and, you know, but now, like, the video camera is becoming kind of a more commonplace household item. You know, reality TV was slowly beginning. The real world had been going on for a while, but there was other stuff that was happening. But what this commercial said was, do you have any home video that you think that we should see? If you have any home video that you think we might want to see, send it in to Reel TV. And it was just this hodgepodge of crazy, caught-on-camera home video stuff. And I was just feeling kind of gung-ho and i think dad like put some wind in my sails in that regard and i called up their number and i said i don't have video that you might want to see i have footage that you need desperately you

bad you need badly you're hurting for what i have you know and uh And I sent in the video that I had, you know, like a compilation of all my stuff, and they came back with, oh, we like the video of you lighting yourself on fire on the roof of this building and doing this simultaneous fire-breathing front flip off of the roof

into the pool below. And I remember thinking, is that all they want? Is that all? Out of the wealth of footage that below. And I remember thinking, is that all they want? Is that all out of the wealth of footage? That's all they're interested in? And there was some ancillary footage that went with it, like me jumping off the building during the daytime.

But they were offering me, if I recall correctly, five, and I do, I know it was, they offered me $500 for exclusive rights to that video. And I remember saying, and I said to the guy on the phone, because I wasn't familiar with the term exclusive. I said, what's that? He said, oh, well, that means that you don't own that. We own it outright entirely and that you don't own it anymore. And I'm like, wait a second. So like, I don't, I don't own it anymore. It's like, well, yeah, you can't do anything more with it. Like it's all ours. And I freaked out. And I remember like,

I hung up the phone with that guy and I called dad and I said, dad, ah, they want, you know, I called this, they want, you know, they're like, exclusive, they want to take all my rights. And dad just said, son, calm down. He says, calm down. Take a deep breath. This isn't complicated. He said, figure out for yourself, figure out at which point is it a deal breaker. And then draw a line in the

sand and stick to it he said from what you're telling me it sounds like exclusivity is a deal breaker and uh he says if i were you i would say i'd call them back and say hey you know exclusive does not work for me you can have the non-exclusive and And you had to give me $1,000, not $500. And that's what I did, and that's what I got. Oh, in the beginning. Yeah. Nice. They took a non-exclusive.

They paid me $1,000. And that was the first thing Dad and I collaborated on in a meaningful way. And then from that point, truly, and really, and, and really, really like, you know, this means a lot to me to say this, that, um, it means a lot to me to say that, that dad didn't by any means jump on a bandwagon where he wasn't supportive. And then all of a sudden I had some success and then he came around afterwards. No, like very much the opposite way around. I could say that I became successful because I had dad's support. You know, I think that that was like, I mean, I probably would have figured some stuff out

on my own anyway, but dad really put wind in my sails. That's great. Really put wind in my sails. And then when the first business conversations came up, like the Real TV one, dad was in the conversation with me. And that's just, it's such a big such a big deal um like like

like and it it came to be that my that my career in in uh in in i guess capturing and and uh you know i guess uh you know selling like the video which is what it was, it became for us like an activity that we bonded over, like very much like throwing the football when I was a kid. You got this businessman here. He knows a lot about business. You need some advice about that.

Yeah, we used to bond over throwing. When I was a kid, my grades were shitty. I was in trouble for this. I was in trouble for that. And we just wouldn't talk about it. We wouldn't talk about my report cards. We'd just go outside. We'd throw the fucking football.

I'd run the pattern. Dad would call. And he'd throw it to me. And we'd have a great time. And we bonded like that. We bonded over. I think you're missing a link. No, it's great how your memories are different.

You know what I mean? You're remembering my dad didn't show up at the clown college thing. And you probably have some resentment about that. And he's had a totally different recollection. I don't think I resent him because I just get it. It just wasn't his thing. Like at the, before the,

before the point where we had that conversation in 1998, where he pledged to support me, like I'm not resentful or, or I just understand. Like I was, he just, it just wasn't as, he couldn't wrap his head around my job. Where I got, you know, more actively involved and committed, I forgot real TV, but yeah, that was it. I have no legal training, but much of my

career was with companies where I spent a lot of time with company lawyers. And I became very, very comfortable with contract law and could read a contract. And I always believed that law is 85% common sense, and you don't need the lawyers involved until you get past that 80% threshold. And so I would read the contracts that he got, and they were brutal. I mean, his first contract, I'm jumping ahead chronologically, but the first contract he got for Jackass, the MTV contract...

Well, MTV's notorious for horribly... But the point is, they were going to prevent him from doing anything other than film Jackass shows and i saw that in a heartbeat i said steve you're not going to sign that and for him they took it out i forget what the issues were with real tv the exclusivity thing always kept coming up but i could go through and he would and representation deals are even worse because because then they're

then they're once you sign up then they're going to take uh a percentage of everything that you ever make and then uh it's going to renew automatically and and if they just do that with like a 100 people and then they get one person that takes off then so in in in those days obviously he didn't have the means or the stature to have a lot of outside help. And so I fulfilled that role. And by working through the deals and making suggestions in the contracts, I became much more involved in the content of what he was working on. And then we could start kicking around ideas. And I had one idea. It still hasn't been filmed. He liked it at the time.

The executive dumb? The executive dumb. Dad says he wants me to dress up as a businessman. Let me tell the story. All right. Picture this tree-lined suburban street in upper middle America. And Mr. Junior Executive is walking down to the bus, underground, carpool, whatever you have it,

carrying his attache case. And at a point in time, he stops, puts the attache case down, pulls out a copy of the Wall Street Journal, drops his pants, squats down. While he's taking, reading the Wall Street Journal, takes a shit, calmly wipes his ass with toilet paper out of the attache case, puts the Wall Street Journal back in the bag, pulls up his pants, and walks off to do his daily job. I thought that might be good. neat. I think it would be good, but I don't know if Steve was the right guy to do it, because no one's going to buy him in a suit with a natural shade case. First of all, at that stage, he wasn't well enough known for that to be an issue.

But secondly, the mere fact of Steve in a business suit, even before he was recognized, has humor in its own right. Because it's so clearly inconsistent. You've got a production company here. You've got business affairs and you're a development exec. Right. I remember it as you telling me to take a dump into the suitcase, or into the attaché case.

And then close it up. I couldn't remember. Maybe that was like dump after dogs. Take a dump into it Taking them into it. Whether that's my idea or yours, it would make a better storyline. No question. So, Ted, where does Steve's insatiable need for attention come from? I believe it's because he changed schools every two, two and a half years. And in five cases, it was changing countries along with the school. And he always

was kind of hyperactive and not highly motivated to schoolwork. But with all this constant moving, he was always a new kid. And he decided that his way to get recognized and accepted was to be the cut up. And that kind of developed the persona. I mean, you told the story about how you banged your nose or something and wanted to get out of class. That's when I ripped the tooth out. Oh, that's the story you told on Merritt, right? Yeah, getting out of class. I mean, would you agree with that, Steve? I think that that, I mean, think that I believe in my heart

that if I stayed in one place, I'd probably be, without all the moving, I think I'd be an intentional whore as well. I think you'd be much less so. In fact, you probably wouldn't have been successful, because you would have had sufficiently

less motivation that you wouldn't have put your heart and soul into it the way you did. Perhaps, you know. And I think a case study will be my niece. I've got a niece who I think manifests a lot of whatever's going on with me, I think, is going on with her. Except she's lived in the same place for her whole life. Yeah, it's like an experiment. Do you think that

Cassie and I are similar? No. She loves reading. She prides herself in getting A's. She's a little bit uncomfortable with the odd B. I mean, I would agree that because of the family genes, there is

a propensity for addiction i agree with what you call the more monster i think that i think that she's like she's got that look at me look at me thing yeah but not as much now and and and uh there's certainly an overlap but i wouldn't call it more than an overlap right has sobriety changed that that predisposition at all like did you go through that thing of like i'm getting sober i don't know if i can do these stunts anymore or as a change of relationship with that desire for attention uh i think that before sobriety i think i just genuinely didn't uh believe that i was gonna live for very long you know like uh one way or another i just thought that i just wasn't gonna like uh that I was going to live for very long. You know, like one way or another,

I just thought that I just wasn't going to, like that I was going to die fairly young. So I was never really driven to try to like hoard money. And I just wasn't like particularly motivated by money. I've wanted like to have a legacy like forever. And so the video camera for me, it was like all the video, every project, like, man, it's like my the video every project like man it's

like my message in a bottle and when i'm dead this is gonna i'm gonna live forever and so i was really hyper focused on that and it was such bullshit and i remember sending you my famous george harrison uh email you know harrison had died not too long before that after a life of drugs and if anybody was ever going to be leaving a legacy it would be one of the principles of the beatles and i said to steve you know you can say all this crap but at the end of the day if they don't care all that much about george harrison's legacy you know who's going to really give a shit about yours i think george harrison's got a pretty dope legacy yeah i think people do care about a little bit sorry i mean people care about george but he's kind of lost i mean lennon had

more uh charisma uh uh yeah my point is he died at age 58 uh for all the kind of preventable reasons that you were talking about on a lesser scale when you were beating up on me for my diet I wasn't beating up on you I thought I was going easy on him yeah I think you were too I do the beating up the point is

you live for yourself first and foremost family and friends, important seconds. And who really cares about all the fans out there who are notoriously fickle and will jump from one celebrity to another celebrity and evolve in their tastes? And I remember sending, I think I still have that email, and I don't think it carried all that much weight with you,

but I thought it was epic. I'd be interested to see because i remember it and i remember the idea of it and it's like oh dad doesn't get it like i'm gnarly but is your relationship to like what you do shifted as you've as you've gotten more sober i think that uh you know as a function of being an artist, I guess, I don't know. I kind of say it a lot. I think that there's the artist, and then there's this whole new kind of arena of the person, which I never made room for before. It was just constant, 100%, never made room for before. You know, it was just constant 100%, never turn off, you know, it was just always on and always like the persona of Steve-O.

And now I think that, you know, there's like a really, like there's been like, you know, like a concerted effort to find separation between the persona and, and like the person. And, and it's a struggle, man, you know, it's a struggle because like, I'm still the attention whore.

Like, I'm still like, like, ah, I gotta do this. I gotta do that. Like, it's still like,

just, you know, I, I just have aching desire to matter, you know, like to, to matter and to be known and to be revered. And, and, um, it's really hard for me to back off of that, but so, but, but progress is being made, you know, is that where

the meditation comes in? Yeah. Like, uh, I feel like a TM, right? I do. Yeah. Uh-huh. And, uh, and I struggle with that, you know, I mean, I do it, I stick with it and I, you know, like, um, that you know i mean i do it i stick with it and you know like um like i'm i'm fairly diligent about it but but it doesn't come easily to me you know i don't i don't know i think alcoholic and meditation is a tough mix i think it's i think it's hard for everyone yeah i think it's particularly hard for somebody who's got who's prone to like you know the obsessive mind but but you're like hardly somebody you know eight years ago that somebody would have said steve-o's gonna be doing t you know tm right i get it man i get it and and i'm so glad that that i do and stay like even even when meditating is is terribly

difficult and and when i'm like oh my god i'm like i'm just so glad i'm doing it let me get back to this thing about the persona. I mean, Steve Glover is a totally different person from Steve-O. And those boundaries are pretty clear. What I think you're wrestling with now is that in between those two boundaries, there's kind of a gray zone. And Steve Glover never invades the turf of Steve O, but Steve O can slip across the lines of the Steve Glover. And to me, that's more a fine-tuning

thing than a fundamental change. I think the fundamental change has taken place. I think it's trying to maintain the boundaries that is what you're talking about't i see it as such a such a gnarly uphill battle and and uh i really do because um you know like it's it's the and and i would compare like like you like you've always emphasized how important it is to have hobbies and uh and interests. Yep. Because you refer to countless people that you've known in the business world who had job titles, who were very prestigious in their careers, and then from the moment that they retired

or lost their job, whatever the case may be, as soon as they didn't have that prestigious job title anymore, out the window went their whole identity, all of their self-esteem, and without hobbies and interests, they were just depressing, like depressed lumps who just had lost everything.

Putting it into a one-liner, soundbites are good, there's two kinds of retirees, those who are enjoying life and those who are waiting to die well right sure but but now like that's what what i relate to is um is is is really that what you're talking about is that the guy who had the prestigious job title who no longer has it and now is depressed and his life is miserable. I think of that because when your identity, when your happiness, when your fulfillment in life comes from the validation of external sources, be it people for the prestige you carry, that's an issue.

And we call it, in our terminology, we call it emotional sobriety. You can't be emotionally sober so long as you derive your fulfillment, your happiness, your serenity from external validation. Okay. And by the virtue of being an entertainer whose career is in the entertainment industry,

it's really difficult to juggle that because my livelihood is in the validation of external sources, yet that's not where... So that the happiness needs to come from within. We're very clear on that. And for me, the happiness... The flow of happiness and fulfillment needs to cease to come from the value of Steve-O, the commodity in the entertainment industry,

and really needs to begin to come from from inside steven glover and without external validation and that is sort and you would describe it as having hobbies and interests and and make yourself happy in the words of jfk let me tell you this about that i can't wait to hear this. You've got interests and depths that you don't even know about. Well, help me. Tell me what it is. I will never forget the time he came back.

He'd been shooting wild boys in Africa. In Rwanda. And he came back from Rwanda. And he got to the house about 11 o'clock. It was a late flight coming in. We must have stayed up till 2.30 or 3 just talking. And he started out telling me about Rwanda and got deeply into the atrocities of the Rwandan genocide. The genocide of 1994. And he knew stuff about Rwanda having just been there. I think it was after I had, like after being in Rwanda and I read that book. Okay, well, but you came back from a trip, I think you maybe read the book in the airplane,

because the two seem to be pretty married together. But you got into that with a knowledge and a depth that blew me away. And I don't know how it came up, but in the same conversation... Talked about Leonardo da Vinci. We shifted over to Leonardo da Vinci. And I knew very, very little about Leonardo da Vinci. And Steve, who had read about the man, blew me away with his knowledge. And the thing that he knew, and it was so thought-provoking, and it had never crossed my mind before, is that a testimony to da Vinci's greatness is that he was openly gay, living in the era of the Spanish Inquisition, and was tolerated because he was so talented.

I don't know how openly gay he was. I think he was known to be gay. Well, in those days, what's the difference? I mean, the Spanish Inquisition was after you. I mean, you get into that. the difference. I mean, the Spanish Inquisition was after you. I mean, you get into that. I can send you an article about the, you know, ISIS, about, you know, I don't know if I've kept you up to date on Turkish politics. I certainly send you stuff about the European Union. I mean, I can send you just about anything, and you'll read it and discuss it with interest.

And you're not a whole lot different from a corporate guy. So basically the point you're making is that the interior life of Stephen Glover exceeds the sort of public perception of Steve-O's character. Well, I'm saying two things. That piece is a no-brainer, but I'm also saying that I think it exceeds what he recognizes in himself. But I'm also saying that I think it exceeds what he recognizes in himself. Because when you're at the top of the corporate ladder and you're flying around in company airplanes and, you know, everybody bows and scrapes because of your title. You know, you want Super Bowl tickets, you flip your fingers and your secretary comes up with them somewhere. I mean, that's a lifestyle that is very, very ego-fueling. And you're right.

When people walk out the door for the last time, a lot of them have left themselves behind, and they've got nothing to replace it with. And yet, I've developed interest now in stuff that I wasn't aware that I was interested in when I was working and didn't have very much time. I certainly don't worry about your interest. And you've got that reservoir that you haven't had the time to fully recognize, but it's there. And I think that's kind of a middle ground that you will draw from at the appropriate time.

Male Presenter 2 It's an interesting conundrum, though, because you do need that sort of approval and validation and acceptance to be able to continue to pursue what you do and be financially remunerated for it. But it's about's about your relationship to that like it's about your attachment to that like are you neutral in your reaction and you're in the way that you receive that or is there you know what is the ego component that connects you to that well i i used to describe uh financial success as a three-tier process the first tier is earning enough money that you can engage in your preferred lifestyle. And for some people, that can be very minimal. For some people, it can be very extravagant. But whatever it is, and it's shaped by what you have at any point in time. But achieving your desired lifestyle is step one. Step two is accumulating enough assets

that you secure that lifestyle almost regardless of what happens. So you lose your job, you know, God forbid that he have an accident and never be able to do a stunt again or stand up. Yeah, enough money in the bank that the lifestyle isn't going to suffer. Sure, there'll be adjustments, but the monetary side is taken care of. And that's step two. Step number three is what i'd describe as ego and raw power and that's when people have far more than they need and some people uh give it to charities and other people play a real life monopoly game and buy and sell companies and strip out people's jobs and do all kinds of things just for the ego and the prestige. I think that's where it

becomes a sickness. And, you know, if you can get off the bus at a point when you've achieved what you want to achieve, you've secured what you want to secure, and you're no longer driven by the ego, it's a feasible scenario. That's the rock that you're pushing up the hill, right? And it has evolved because like you're not, I mean, with what you're doing now, yeah, there's stunts and there's Steve-O being Steve-O, but it's more performance art and comedy. It has changed. There's another theme that I've been on.

If I'm talking too much, shut me up. No, I love it. I have been beating up on Steve for probably 10 years now to assume the role as CEO of his own company. And at the very beginning, one of Steve's infamous quotes was, he was in charge of creative and he let the other guys take over the numbers. And guess what? He got ripped off and taken to the cleaners. And I said, you've got to be responsible. You've got to learn to manage people. You've got to learn to delegate.

And you've got to be willing to kick ass and enforce high performance standards. And every time he complains on the phone or when we're together and says, so-and-so let me down, or I think I ought to get rid of such-and-such, he's not performing anymore. My stock answer is, hey, it's not his fault. It's your fault. Whoever, I mean, some people are grossly incompetent. You find them out in six months and they're gone. But a person who has been performing at a satisfactory or better level for a number of years,

who suddenly stops performing. It's because they haven't had their ass kicked. They haven't had their performance standards clearly defined. And enormous progress is being made in that front. And I believe at some point Steve, if he chose to, would be capable of buying into a viable business and running it as a businessman. Yeah, well, I mean, beyond the talent and the sheer insanity of what he does,

clearly a lot of your insight has rubbed off on him because you've had tremendous longevity in this business. I mean, it could have been like a flash-in-the-pan thing, you know, see you later. Like, oh, this guy does crazy stunts, but you've actually cultivated a life and a lot of staying power in this town which is not easy and that only happens when you know you're making

smart decisions and you you do have an entrepreneurial you know relationship with what you do you know there's definitely this uh you know there's this insane drive that that i've had and, you know, the persistence and the just drive. And I'm sure that comes from Dad and everything else that's rubbed off on me from Dad. I've been very fortunate, you know, and I've worked hard, you know. And that's key. You have worked hard. And you've earned everything you've got. And you can look around and the field is littered with people that had similar opportunities and failed to capitalize on them.

Yeah, that probably gets missed by most people who just think, oh, it's just easy for Steve-O. Just do crazy stuff and everyone pays attention. It's a lot more complicated than that. So're so you're proud very much so right very much so and steve you got the you got the showtime special now you're traveling like a crazy man it is well again it's uh the showtime special is now if you go on my instagram in the bio of my instagram there's a link to uh to what i consider to be the craziest one-man show that's ever been recorded. This whole thing came together so quickly.

I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. Oh, no worries, man. It's all good. But I know it's like it's comedy, it's stunts, it's craziness. It's like you're interacting with the audience. It's something I worked on for five years of touring, you know, for all the material. And it's just, and I peppered stunts throughout it

that are just real heavy and entertaining, man. Like, at the end of the day, it's a cohesive one-man show where I tell my story and punctuate it with intense stunts throughout. And the end result is, it's the craziest, most entertaining one-man show comedy special I think that's ever been recorded. And I say that kind of brashly, but at the risk of sounding douchey, I couldn't be more thrilled with how it came out. And I continue to, now I'm onto the next one.

So doing, you're going to do another special and you're just touring. Well, ultimately like, uh, I'm touring, you know, like, like regardless of how that special performed on short time, even though it performed very well, but now in this, in this, you know, in this landscape of media that's so fragmented and, and, uh, it's so impossible to really like reach that many people, like, you know,

whether or not, uh, that many people, uh, see my comedy special. Um, I, you know,

the fact is that I've been touring as a standup comedian and, you know, one man variety performer, um, for almost six years now. And, um, and being a part of this comedy circuit, I've gone back to the same places, the same, you know, the same venues in the same cities time and time again, to the point where some, some comedy clubs I've been to five times, like every year for each of the five years like you

keep going back to ohio right yeah i go back to ohio a lot uh-huh um utah i've been to a lot so anytime i go back to a place that i've been to before um and if i repeat material that i performed when i was there the the one time before, as I do it from the stage, I feel like all I can think about is I know there are people in this audience who saw me here the last time I was here. And if they're here and I'm doing the same show I did the last time, I just am going to feel like such a fraud. I'm going to feel like I'm gypping them.

It just eats me alive from the inside out and so so yeah I'm just thrilled to have taken like that you know what I put on that comedy special put it out there retire it and be doing all new material but that's an interesting point

because when you go on TV you're not going club by club. I mean, now you're out there, it's in the archives, people can refer back to it, and it puts far more pressure to change the material and evolve the material. And one of the discussions we've been having is what next? I mean, if stand-up is going to continue, then at some point it needs to evolve from Steve-O's life history and a few crazy stunts into somewhat more mainstream that provides a vehicle for changing the material.

Right, sure. And that's going to be a challenge. You will meet it. You will meet it. But I mean, this is kind of an example of a later stage evolution. Sure. Like a Louis C.K. sort of evolution into... Sure.

I mean, there's a bunch of material that qualifies as stand-up. It's not autobiographical in nature that I chose to leave out of the comedy special because I felt that for my comedy special, it is a transitional piece. People aren't necessarily ready to swallow Steve-O, the stand-up comedian. By having emphasis on

stunts being part of that show and... You've got to break them in. Right. I've got to lure them in with the stunts and then convert them with the comedy. In order to make the comedy more palatable, have it be like totally autobiographical and like, wow, we're going to hear these crazy true stories about like what went on, like, you know, during Jackass behind the scenes, like what the kind of impact the end of it, wow, you know, this guy's a performer and he can actually get on stage and entertain people with spoken word. And he's making my point because he's thinking strategically and planning ahead and foreseeing the evolution

and working very, very hard to do it. And there are a lot of people that just go out and figure we give them the same old shit and I'll be funnier if I've had a few drinks under my belt and uh we go on to the next town tomorrow so you know it doesn't have to be new i mean there's two different standards and he consistently goes after the higher standard yeah it's great man and uh so just keep keep doing it like our i know you got like a like a movie project you're working on working on a movie project yeah stuff coming up is there ever going to be another Jackass?

It's not happening? I doubt it, man. Like, we got to get all the guys healthy, you know? Right. Like, I should say the remaining guys, which is a sad thing to say. But, yeah, you know, the guys that are healthy, some of the guys are, you know, can free up their time.

Well, it's like a band that's been around for a long time, and everyone just has a life now, right? They missed an opportunity. I remember at the premiere for Jackass 2, after far too many scotches, sitting in a hotel room with Jeff Tremaine and saying pretty much the same thing. I said, Jeff, you can't keep making this stuff more and more dangerous.

It's going to implode. That's what they were saying about reality TV. But I broke it down into three components. I said there's pain and danger, which is one, and that's the piece that's being outgrown and you have to evolve away from. There's rank gross filth, and that'll probably always be part of the proposition, but it may have a more narrow appeal than you'd like.

And then the third piece is genuine humor. And if you can move it up that scale and get to a point where genuine humor takes on a larger piece, then there's got to be scope for a lot more of these. I think that the bad grandpa accomplished that. Yeah, but that wasn't jackass. It was sort of jackass, but it was basically Knoxville's scripted movie getting away from the tradition in his way of getting away from it.

Just like you're planning on your upcoming project. But the point is, if there had been an early adoption of the view that we can make people laugh without having to hurt ourselves or put ourselves at risk, it would have been more feasible to extend it. I got that. But I think you're overlooking the most important aspect in the kind of success equation

of Jackass, which is the camaraderie amongst all you guys and the level of endearment. You know, like, there's a lot of love between all you guys. And that,

whether it's, it doesn't have to be stated overtly, but, like, that is so, like, clear and present when you watch those movies. And I think that's what allows

the audience member to, like, really tap in and go on that journey because you guys like, you know, you guys care about each other and, and it's not just like, it's not just in isolation, like doing crazy stuff.

Like you guys were all in it for the, for the win together. Tell them the story of sad ass. Oh, well, I mean, it's, it's just that every,

every so often, um, there will be, well, I mean, it's just that every so often there will be one of the, typically one of the, this one guy from Jackass will initiate an email to the whole cast and Spike Jonze and Knoxville Tremaine, you know, saying like, come on, guys, come on. Like trying to rally to get like a fourth jackass movie, um, underway. And, um, it generally like, uh, doesn't catch fire, you know, like there's not really a response. Um, I, I responded to the last one by saying, Hey, you know, I was, I was in Tampa promoting shows on the radio, and this radio DJ guy named Mike Calta said something that really was impactful to me. He said that when he went to the theater to watch Jackass 3D, that he went with fear, the nervousness, that it would have reached a point already that it had become sad to watch us advance in age and continue to do these things.

Right, right, right. He said, I was worried for you that it would have become sad to watch you guys do that. He said, however, that he was relieved that in fact it would prove to him that we were still getting away with it. It was still funny. The magic was still there, and it was great. Yeah, but you don't want to cross over.

Right. And as he told me that, I remember thinking, like, man, he's got a point. And whenever anybody asks me about, like, are you going to make a Jackass 4, i think of that conversation with mike calton tampa and i and i and i relate i related this to the to the guys in the email thread and i said hey you know um now like what the point that that guy was talking about now we're now we're six years later now like if we get together and we try to make a jackass for like the elephant in the room is wow these guys are fucking old you know like the like the it's the elephant in the room is wow these guys are fucking old you know like the like the it's the elephant in the room there's no way around it you know and i said

i'm with all of you like uh you know like um i i love all of you guys you know i miss you guys and and like all the enthusiasm is there you know like uh for us to get together and do something i just said i feel that it's important, whatever we do do, that we get out in front of that and we acknowledge, okay, now it's fucking getting to a point. Now it's fucking ridiculous. Now we're old. And if there's a way to kind of modify what we're doing,

if it's something like what my dad's talking about over here, if there's a way to um just acknowledge it to tweak it i think that there's a project for us to to do like under the name of jackass with all of us involved i just don't think that we could get away with sort of you know like the same format and without acknowledging it without getting in front of it no you'd have to i mean maybe you recruit the next wave you know and train and train them up. Yeah, who knows? But the funniest thing, and I laughed out loud. One of the guys responded with a graphic, a mock-up of a Jackass 4 movie poster. It had, like, for the A, it was the number 4, you know, but it said sad ass.

That's so good well i think it was for the third trapper was it the third one that they came so you got i don't know if you were there because i wasn't home this day but i know tremaine and a bunch of crew guys came to our house to scout for jackass three for some crazy stunt what do they want to do like ride a jet ski down the jay had the wave runner thing yeah and like go because our pool goes off like this edge and there's that where we did that you didn't end up using the house but like everybody came to check it out and i was like super long narrow pool exactly that's your house yeah that's my house yeah i mean you would know if uh if it happened like it's yeah it's long well you know didn't film there, but you guys all came out and scouted, and then maybe you found somewhere else or whatever.

Yeah, okay, I wasn't there for that. But I was like, please let that happen. Like, we've got to have jackass happen at the house. Right. It didn't work out. Yeah, but it's great because, you know, I don't think there's going to be another jackass four. I kind of feel like that that ship has sailed.

I personally got sick and tired of waiting for it to happen, and so I wrote this movie idea that I'm pursuing. I'm trying to make it happen, and I'm hopeful that I'm going to make it happen. And it's a scripted thing that involves all kinds of sight gags and crazy stunts and a story. And by the virtue of it having a story i'm able to easily get out in front of it and be like yeah you know acknowledging the very first scene like

you know like uh yeah i'm too old to be doing this yeah do it anyway that's great man i hope i hope that happens i do too man and uh you know. And this is where what Dad describes as my comfort zone, which I've more affectionately referred to as the narrow slice of the pie within which I apply myself fully. The comfort zone is widening. It's taking long, slow, painful. Yeah, but I don't even think it's necessarily widening. I just think this movie project falls into the category of shit that I will fucking pursue until it happens.

Right, right, right, right. Yeah, but you're into the contract. You're into the numbers. You're dealing with it at a much broader and higher level than you would have 10 years ago. Yeah, you got good people on your team and all that. and higher level than you would have 10 years ago. Yeah, you got good people on your team and all that. Yeah, I got a deal with an incredibly reputable movie producer who's made all kinds of, he's made like 175 movies

and knows exactly what he's doing. And we've got a deal between us. We've got the deal with the script guy. And the script guy is like, you know, I wrote it, but he's making it like official. So we'll see what happens, man. Nice, man. Well, congrats on the special.

Thank you so much, man. And it was great talking to you guys, man. This is really, no, I mean, honestly, I felt like I'm just eavesdropping on, you know, this conversation between father and son. Yeah, how about these organic moments where, like, nope, you got that wrong. Yeah, I know. I know. Like, whoa. I know. I mean? Yeah, I know. Like, whoa.

I know. I mean, Ted, it's like— I never said that. I said this. You've never done a podcast. You did amazing. And I appreciate you being honest and open. I still don't even know what I did.

I just— We'll find out soon, yeah. Well, cool. I mean, I think the last thing I want to say is just I think that you're an inspiration with your sobriety, cool. I mean, I think the last thing I want to say is just, you know, I think that you're an inspiration with your sobriety, man. And I've seen you, you know, I've seen you over the years. And you really, you don't just talk the talk, man. You walk the walk.

And I've seen the growth. And it's cool. So keep talking. I appreciate that a lot, Rich. And, you know, I feel the same way about you, brother. It's been great trudging the road together. That's right, man. And I'm going to make vegan smoothies.

Do you ready? Awesome. Do it. Thanks you guys. Peace. Oh my God. that was so amazing. I'm pretty sure Steve has never given an interview quite like that before.

What a gift, what a privilege. Thank you so much, Steve and Ted for taking the time. That was just remarkable. Don't forget to check out Steve's new comedy special, Guilty as Charged on Showtime. And don't forget to check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com for this episode. Lots of links following up on all the kinds of stuff

that we talked about today. So you can take your infotainment, your education beyond the earbuds. If you haven't already subscribed to my YouTube channel, make a point of doing that. Again, I've got a really cool behind the scenes video of this experience. It's vlog number 004. It's called Yeah Dude, appropriately titled. And you can find my

channel at youtube.com forward slash richroll. I've got four vlogs up as of the recording of this. I'm trying to get to more regular consistent frequency. It's very tough with all the things that I'm doing, but I'm aspiring to do better. Basically, these videos are just a look into my daily life, my musings. They're very creatively gratifying to create. They take a lot of time, however. It's challenging for me, but it's really fun. And it's super cool that people have been enjoying them. So thank you for all the great feedback and the comments. I also want to thank everybody who helped put this show together today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production, Sean Patterson for graphics,

Chris Swan for production assistance. He also puts together all the show notes, which is a big job. Thank you, Chris. And theme music, of course, by Analema. Thanks for all the support, you guys. I've been on a tear with these podcasts. I'm so privileged to be able to bring you such amazing guests week in and week out. I can't tell you how much it means to me. And I'm so glad that you guys are enjoying it. Tell a friend, let's help spread the word. Let's raise consciousness. And I'll see you guys next week.

Peace. Plants. Thank you.