The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: E262: JACKASS Star Steve-O: A SHOCKING Story Of Unaddressed Childhood Trauma, 3-Day Drug Binges, Mocking Death & Craving Attention! (HOW TO TURN YOUR LIFE AROUND).

I read that you were practically living on Diet Coke, booze, and nitrous.

Not Diet Coke, a diet of cocaine.

Steve-o!

The jackass superstar.

He survived his trademark wild stunts along with some personal struggles.

It is of paramount importance that I find separation between me and the persona of Steve-o.

Why?

We have to go back to the beginning of my journey.

I didn't get attention from my parents.

My dad was a businessman, and my mom suffered from alcoholism.

My father would praise you for stunts, diving head first for baseballs.

And he'd give one dollar.

I don't think you have to be Sigmund Freud to imagine that had something to do with coming and attention whore.

That was when I started doing dangerous stunts.

I'm Steve-o, and this is the fish hook.

Why stunts?

Growing up, I felt defective, and the thought was I wasn't going to live very long.

So I was lashing out at death, taunting it.

But I lost my mom in 2003, and that traumatized me more than anything.

I was out of control broadcasting my downward spiral to 200 influential people in real time.

You were manhandled into a psych ward.

Yeah.

This was going to be my legacy, having miserably failed at life.

And the toughest thing is that I wanted to make my mom proud.

Stephen Gilchrist Glover.

AKA Steve-o.

Honesty.

Honesty saved Steve-o's life.

But the man that sits in front of me today isn't Steve-o.

It is Stephen Gilchrist Glover, which is a man you've probably never met before.

But once you meet Stephen Gilchrist Glover, you'll undoubtedly understand Steve-o.

That guy that we grew up with on our screens doing those crazy jackass stunts that behind the scenes

struggled with a deep discomfort of being in his own skin, depression, drug addiction, existential panic,

an obsession with attention, crippling grief, and most surprisingly and paradoxically of all,

a deep, deep fear of death.

It absolutely doesn't appear to make sense, but once you listen to this conversation,

if you listen closely, you'll understand exactly why that's driving him.

This conversation will make you laugh.

It will inspire you.

It will motivate you.

It will challenge you.

It will make you feel understood.

And it will teach you what it takes and what it means to live a good life,

including the role that romantic love has played in Steve-o finally living a good life.

And for me, it reaffirms to me once again that in order to live that good life,

in order to find that good life, we need to surrender, stop fighting life,

and we need to be honest.

And once we are, we might just find all of the things that we're looking for.

You're going to love this one.

Steven.

All right.

You've lived a anomalous life.

The man that sits before me today is an anomaly in many respects.

The professional path you've walked is extraordinary to say the least.

In order to understand you, what do I need to understand about your earliest context

to understand who you are and why you walked the path you did in your life?

What's the first sort of domino that I need to understand?

I would point to my lineage.

My mom's side of the family is like the whole family tree,

every leaf on the tree, suffered from alcoholism, some form of addiction.

And then at the same time, very personable, charismatic individuals,

which is very alcoholic and a lot of deviance.

And then my dad's side of the family is a super academic.

There's a lot of theologians, clergymen.

Everybody's got at least like a master's degree or a PhD or, you know,

highly decorated academia.

And my dad broke the mold by becoming a businessman.

So I just kind of think that I am a little bit of a hybrid of both in that I definitely went

towards deviance and suffered from alcoholism, but I had this rocket engine on it

from my dad's side of the family.

And as I've grown older, I think I kind of manifest my dad's side more than my mom's side.

Before we start recording, I said that one of the things that really surprised me,

we're sat in London now, was to learn that you were born in London back in 1974.

Yeah, born in Wimbledon, which makes me British.

My mother was born in Canada, which makes me Canadian.

And my father was born in America, which makes me American.

I'm what you call triple national.

And I hold three valid passports.

I'm very jealous.

It's cool.

Like having the keys to the to the world in many respects.

How did that impact you though?

You told me that you were you born here.

Your first words was in Portuguese in Brazil.

Then you're in Venezuela, then Canada, then USA as a young child that's figuring out the world

and figuring out where he belongs and making friends.

How does that sort of destabilization impact impact you in hindsight?

I don't think you have to be Sigmund Freud to imagine that that had something to do with

me becoming an attention whore.

And I think that it's actually exacerbated by the fact that when I moved to Brazil at

the age of six months, I moved to Brazil because my father became the president of Pepsi Cola

in all of Brazil.

And it was just kind of living it up, you know, I think that's the best way to describe it.

And I didn't get much attention from my parents.

I was actually raised by live in maids, which is why I spoke my first words in Portuguese.

So I think I was lacking for some attention from my parents.

And I think that that has something to do plus the instability and always being the new kid in

school.

I never stayed one place for more than a couple years.

So yeah, I point to that for why I became such an attention whore.

The context that you raised and your mother's at home, your dad's very, very busy, very successful

businessman by all accounts.

Yeah, not just busy, but traveling.

My dad was consistently gone.

I would argue that he was gone more than he was home.

And mom was drunk a lot.

So I had not just lacking attention, but lacking supervision a lot of the time too.

In 2023, we've learned a lot about addiction and alcoholism and those kinds of things.

But I imagine, I mean, I wasn't alive then, but back in 1974.

People didn't understand that behavior as clearly as they do now.

Did you understand your mother's behavior when you were young?

Did you understand her relationship with alcohol was an unhealthy thing or an addiction?

I think so, yeah.

I think so because I remember she would have these binges drinking where

it wouldn't be the case that my mom would get drunk at night and then wake up and have a hangover

and then get drunk again the next night.

It was more of a case where she would stay drunk for days or weeks on end.

You hold, sorry.

It got really pretty crazy.

I would say when I was about eight, certainly when I was nine, it was terrible.

And whenever my mom would sober up from one of her binges,

she would swear that she was never going to drink again.

And invariably, she would.

And I say this because I think I really, really understood the concept of the disease of alcoholism very well

because when I would come home from school and find that my mom was drinking,

I would say to her, you know, mom, you said you were never going to do this again.

And she would explain to me that this time it was going to be different.

This time she was only going to have a couple.

And I remember knowing that that was not the case.

And that's kind of the reality of alcoholism is that the alcoholic, once they start drinking, they cannot stop.

They've lost control.

And it's a characteristic of alcoholics, the illusion that one day they're going to control and enjoy their drinking.

And they pursue this illusion into the gates of insanity or death.

That's how it's described.

And I understood that.

So I knew if mom had one drink, I knew that all bets were off for days or weeks.

You talked about lineage.

Yeah, the family line.

Yeah.

What is that then?

Is that a predisposition?

Is that a genetic predisposition in your view?

Is that a generational trauma?

Have you ever figured out what the cause is that?

I understand there to be a genetic component to the alcoholism.

I don't know that it really matters as much like why one becomes an alcoholic.

But certainly, as I said on my mom's side of the family, it never skipped a generation.

And then sanity of it.

I mean, one could really describe it as a mental illness.

I mean, they do say it's a disease that's centered in the mind.

For me to see and experience what I did as a child, like just how awful it got.

And then for me to just pick up a drink is so insane.

I mean, if anybody should have known better, it should have been me.

And I remember at the time, like 16 years old, when I started drinking regularly,

I just convinced myself that what would make me different is that I was going to enjoy it.

I was going to party.

And it's just insanity.

That speaks to the nature of the addiction and the disease, though,

because people that are outside of that situation might see it as self-destructive.

But clearly, it can't be that.

It's clearly something else because you saw how destructive it was.

And yet it's still, through no choice you made, through no intention you made,

it managed to find you later in life.

Your father in this context, is he aware that your mother's has this disease of addiction with alcohol?

Mom would really do her best to get her act together by the time Dad got home from his business trips

and with very little success, I would say.

When Dad would get back, Mom would describe that she was ill

and Dad would believe it a lot of the time.

I think Dad, I mean, yeah, he knew, but the extent of it

and how naive he was to believe that Mom just wasn't feeling well or...

Did he...?

I don't know.

I mean, we would describe it as rose-colored glasses.

I don't know.

And perhaps Dad was just so focused on his stuff that I don't even know.

It would be crazy to not know, but somehow I believe that my Dad was particularly naive

or gullible, I'm not sure, but...

Sometimes I think men have a predisposition to avoid conflict

and to opt for an easy life.

Right.

I think that that's probably fair too.

But man, it's making me really sad that I lost my mom in 2003, November of 2003.

And I just think had we both been in recovery,

I don't think anybody from my mom's side of the family ever managed to achieve long-term sobriety.

I think I'm the first.

And I fantasize about what it would be like from my mom and I to have both gotten, you know, gotten it.

Like what our relationship would be like.

She would get such a kick out of it.

I think that she would have gotten such a kick out of me being successful.

And she didn't get to see it, you know.

She never...

Well...

Because Jack asked her just to start to move at that point, hadn't it?

Well, the thing was that her last five years, she was terribly disabled both physically and mentally,

because in 1998, she suffered an aneurysm, which it rendered her very disabled.

So the last five years, she didn't...

She had a really rough last five years.

And that traumatized me more than anything.

She developed bed sores.

She cried in pain for her last five years.

It was the most upsetting, the most...

By far the most traumatized I've ever been by anything was the situation that my mom was in for her last five years.

And it's all because of this thing, this alcoholism.

And had she been in recovery, had that not happened.

Again, I fantasize about what our relationship might be like today.

But yeah, that started us off on a bummer.

Yeah, it's really interesting context though.

Specifically, you said the thing about attention and seeking attention in a variety of different ways,

because you were destabilized in terms of your early schooling life, your father's not present.

I read that you'd said that you wanted your father's approval and as a child, your father would praise you for physical stunts,

such as diving head first for baseballs or doing push-ups for your father's and his friends.

I would do a hundred push-ups in a row for his buddies.

And he'd give me like one dollar.

And everybody got a kick out of that.

I love doing it.

And I don't think they were terribly impressive push-ups because hundreds a lot.

But yeah, I was a little bit of a performer at my dad's best.

I think there's this thing called love languages. Have you ever seen it before? Have you ever done the love languages testing?

No.

It's this thing you do online and I think it's pretty telling.

I'm not into like pseudo bullshit, whatever, but I think it's pretty telling.

You answer these like 30, 40 questions and it tells you the language of love that you have.

So some people are words of affirmation.

That's how they kind of show and receive love.

Some people are physical touch.

Some people are little acts of service.

Some people are gifts, for example.

And it was making me, when I was just reading that in your book, I was thinking about how like that can become a love language for us.

And it's funny because then I skipped to this moment later in your story where you had a heartbreak.

And the way that you responded to the heartbreak to try and get attention was by doing stunts.

Yep.

And I just saw this connection there and I thought, you know, it's interesting.

Some of our love languages can be like stunts or...

Sure.

Or other forms of like validation.

Uh-huh.

It's an interesting take on it.

I remember at the point when I had the heartbreak and that was when I really started doing dangerous stunts.

It was less for...

Well, yeah, it was for attention.

And I wanted this girl who had dumped me to be worried that I would die.

Like, I mean, it's crazy.

But yeah, I was like, I was jumping off rooftops into pools and, you know, climbing off of like just huge balconies and stuff.

And sending her the videos or just posting them where she's at?

At the time, there was no such thing as sending videos without going to the post office.

But yeah, I would send her in videos from the post office.

I would mail them to her like once a year.

And the videos genuinely did get ratter and ratter.

Yeah, each new installment.

It was...

Yeah, it was crazy.

If I'd asked you when you were a young man, your teenage years, what are you going to be when you grow up?

What did you respond to?

Ah, man.

The first actual thought I had for a career to pursue was one in advertising.

You know, my father had won a video camera in a golf tournament.

And I stole it from his closet and began videotaping my skateboarding with my buddies.

And I learned how to edit by plugging these video cassette recorders together.

And I would hit play on one and record on the other to just record the good bits.

And it was crude editing, not sophisticated.

But I fell in love with the process.

And clearly, I wasn't that great at skateboarding.

So I just thought there's something about this capturing video and then editing it to create presentations and ultimately to manipulate the video to create influence.

You know, there was just something really magical and powerful about that.

And I thought that that would be a great career for me.

And so I went off to the University of Miami to pursue that, but I just had trouble making it to class.

So I, graduating from university was not in the cards.

And I knew I still loved the video camera and, you know, manipulating images to sway people one way or the other.

And I decided that since I wasn't that great at skateboarding that I would do crazy stunts.

And so I literally dropped out of university in 1993 to pursue a career as a crazy famous stuntman.

And there was no precedent at the time.

Everybody who I explained that plan to legitimately felt sorry for me.

Like what a tragic loser I seemed to be.

And they weren't wrong for the first three years after I left the University of Miami.

I was genuinely homeless.

I was more of a couch surfer than, you know, a guy living on the streets.

But yeah, I had no home, man.

And I was not doing well.

Quick one before we get back to this episode, just give me 30 seconds of your time.

Two things I wanted to say.

The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week.

It means the world to all of us.

And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.

But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.

And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.

Here's a promise I'm going to make to you.

I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.

We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to.

And we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Back to the episode.

So there's so many things that I want to ask this question because I just really want to hear it in your own words, which is like,

and I've kind of maybe piece it together using some connected dots, but why stunts?

I have a theory that the human condition is one of a real catch 22.

We've got one instinct, which is to survive and one guarantee, which is we won't survive.

And I view the human experience largely as an exercise to come to terms with our mortality to wrap our heads around it to become to come to peace with it.

And I view the different ways that people do that.

You know, there's there's reproduction. We have children.

So then I think that eases people's mind about their mortality because they have a legacy living on with their children that they won't really be dead.

Then of course, people turn to religion because they think everything's going to be great when they go to heaven.

And then there's people who leave stuff behind to outlive them.

You know, like cavemen scrawling stick figures on the on the cave.

It seems that they were just like I described really upset about their mortality and leaving this art on the cave walls to outlive them because I had failed in university the way the way I did.

I mean, I failed every which way that you can.

And every attempt that I had ever had to be employed ended in disaster.

I was fired from literally every job that I ever had.

So not being able to make it through school or keep a job.

I felt absolutely just not qualified to navigate the world.

I believed that I was going to fail at life like badly and quickly.

And I think that this idea that that I would that I believed that I was just going to fail at life and die very young.

I think that it heightened my my mortality issues because even though, you know, I was I was young, but like, man, I think I was somehow angry at the idea of death.

And my theory is that I was I was lashing out at death by climbing off of balconies and just dangling from my hands off like 12 stories and then letting go and dropping onto the balcony below.

Like that was totally life threatening, especially how intoxicated I was while doing that.

And, you know, like I said, I wanted that girl who dumped me to think I was going to die like there was this this this idea of mortality was was very woven into all of the art.

So I think that I was I was I was upset about mortality and I'm lashing out at it.

I was mocking death, taunting it.

What why you because that that is I understand at a certain level we all probably have that relationship with our mortality.

But you seem to more than anyone I've ever spoken to have had a more close and adverse relationship with the concept of mortality, the concept of death.

Like you seem to the way the way that I'd word it plainly is like you seem to have the biggest problem with death than anyone I've met.

All right. Why?

I think about it.

And I've always thought about it.

Since you were young.

I'd say so.

Yeah, I would.

I would absolutely say that I'd seem to recall being quite young.

I wouldn't know an age but quite young.

And being in the bathtub just for some reason I was thinking about it's going to be the year 2000 and like we weren't really anywhere near the year 2000.

But just kind of doing math in my head trying to calculate how old I would be at the turn of the millennium.

And I came to 25.

I'll be 25 years old.

And the thought was I'll never live that long.

No, I'll never make it that long.

And again, I don't know how old I was, but I was definitely a child when I had that thought.

And the older I got the more convinced I was that I wasn't going to live very long.

And perhaps that's another manifestation of my alcoholism.

But I think that really to describe alcoholism, I felt defective.

I felt like there was just something wrong with me that things weren't going to work.

And I think that to some extent is a characteristic of alcoholism for a lot of alcoholics.

I feel like just uncomfortable in your own skin.

They describe it as restless, irritable and discontented.

Defective is a word that really resonates with me.

Does that ever subside?

It's a tough one because I don't think so.

I mean, to an extent, yeah, I'm definitely better with all that now.

But at the same time, it doesn't go away.

I think that it improves and fluctuates.

But what doesn't go away is this default setting I have that everything's not going to be okay.

I live in this perpetual state of terrible anxiety and stress that just things are not going to be okay.

And I've got to just hurry up and frantically work and hustle to try to make it so everything will be okay.

I'm not surprised to hear that because it is the story I've heard over and over and over and over and over again.

It surprises me because before I started doing this podcast and having these conversations,

I assumed that have a certain upbringing, childhood, you're programmed in a certain way, you go to therapy and it's fixed.

And it's actually been, I've asked the question purely because I've never heard anyone say anything other than what you've said.

Right.

And I think it's actually helpful because it helps people know that their efforts to heal in whatever context that they've tried to heal doesn't make them inadequate.

It makes them very much human.

The way that we're programmed and hardwired because of whatever reasons, it is not something that is easy or in many cases possible just a therapy away or prescription away.

And I think that makes people, a lot of people feel better.

And what's crazy too is that, I think, and I'm fascinated that you said this is something they've heard many times.

I've never not heard it.

Right.

And I would also guess that for all of the successful people that you've spoken with, that they would describe having been much more at peace, much more serenity, much more happiness before they were successful.

Yeah.

And it's so counterintuitive to imagine that that's the case, but there's one saying that I think really explains it to a degree, which is that this is the saying a man who has nothing only has to worry about his next meal,

but a man who has everything worries about his last meal.

Yes.

And that, that messes me up, man.

That messes me up big time because if you're just focused on the next meal, then you're in the moment.

Life's pretty simple.

It's not too much of a task to accomplish finding your next meal.

But once you've got your next meal covered and then it's like, all right, and then I've saved up some money.

I'm good.

My next meals are set for the next year.

But then you're thinking, how long am I set for?

And once you start thinking how long am I set for, then life gets really scary because you're not in the moment and you're future tripping and everything isn't going to be okay.

And what's even crazier is that I understand that there's been studies about financial security.

And it's people who have upwards of $10 million net worth, who find themselves feeling considerably more financially insecure than anybody else.

The more money you have, the more financially insecure you feel.

The study that I read about this, it says that they interviewed people all the way up the wealth income spectrum.

And they asked them the question, how happy are you out of 10?

And then they asked them the second question, which is how much money would you need to be 10 out of 10 happy?

And all the way up the wealth spectrum, people said three times currently what they have now.

So millionaires said they needed $3 million.

People with $10 million said they needed $30 to be a 10 out of 10 happiness.

And people with $100,000 said they needed $300,000, which speaks to this sort of like hedonic endless treadmill and increasing anxiety.

Right.

And also studies are pretty clear that happiness will increase up to...

Like a baseline, it's like $75,000, household.

Yeah, I think that that number is just going up with inflation.

I understood it to be like $60,000, $60,000 a year.

And then you've got all of your needs met.

And then after that, more money doesn't really equate to more happiness.

And also to your point about the panic of like losing it.

I think that's an issue for people that came from nothing predominantly.

So if you've always had this financial security growing up and you're, you know, you are, I don't know, extremely wealthy and you've been wealthy.

I think people tend to have less of a fear of going, of losing it all.

And they also never seem to have the guilt.

I sit here with people and they speak to this success guilt they have.

And I hear that a lot.

And it's typically people that have felt sleeping on a sofa that have the kind of, even when they become successful, they feel like they don't deserve it to some degree.

And I read that a little bit in your story, in your book.

Right.

And it's interesting because I grew up very privileged.

You know, my father didn't grow up with privilege.

As I said, he broke the mold becoming a businessman.

He became like my mom didn't marry a rich guy.

My mom married a motivated guy who became quite wealthy.

I had privilege guilt when I was a kid.

I was, I was like quite ashamed of, of how wealthy my parents were.

And I don't understand why that is, but.

In whose eyes.

Like I was self conscious about, about how my peers viewed me at school.

As I grew older, the, the homes that we lived in each move to each, you know, represented a bigger house.

You know, it became kind of a little bit obnoxious.

But by the end, when I was attending high school here in London, I went to the American school in St.

Johnswood and I lived directly across the street from Regents Park on Prince Albert Road.

Oh, wow.

In this, it was a just gaudy obnoxiously huge house.

And I never wanted kids from school to see it.

So I, you know, we would have like overnight when you're a kid.

I wouldn't have kids spend the night at my house.

I was always overnight at someone else's house.

And for me to ride my skateboard to school, you know, took a certain amount of time.

And if I, if I would oversleep, I would ride with my dad.

My dad was chauffeur driven to work and, and he would be reading his newspaper in the back seat.

And, and whenever I overslept and I had to ride with my dad, the chauffeur would pull up to the school.

And as I got out of the car, I would hug the chauffeur.

Yeah, like to try to create the impression that I was just embarrassed.

My dad was in the back seat, like being chauffeured around.

I don't know what that is.

It's wanting to fit in. It's every, I was the opposite in every respect.

No one came to my house because it was like, it was the windows were smashed and the grass was six foot high.

So everything you described was me, but the opposite for opposite reasons.

Like I would, I would pray that the traffic lights near our school would stop.

Go turn red, which meant that I could get out of the, like this beat up van we drove in as far from school as possible.

Yeah.

Right. It's really interesting too.

Like I went to a super privileged school too.

I mean, like I attended school with the son of the American ambassador to, to the UK.

Like, I was like, my best friend was this kid Abdullah's father was like a crazy, like oil tycoon.

And when I, when I, when I was in, for me, fifth and sixth grade, I was in London, England at that time too.

Same school.

And my father was, I'm not even quite sure what his job position was, but worked for Del Monte, the canned fruits.

And he had to, you know, like the, all the pine, there was a pineapple factory in Kenya.

Dad had, had to go visit this pineapple factory.

I want to see maybe once a year.

And so he planned the trip, his trip to the pineapple factory in Kenya to coincide with our spring break.

The one week off from school so that he could take the family on safari.

And I have this crazy memory of coming out of the airport in Nairobi, being ushered into some chauffeur driven car.

I always remembered it as a stretch limo.

And my dad says, no, we didn't have, but whatever ushered into a chauffeur driven car out of the airport.

And, and sitting in the back of this car and these, these just, it was my first time seeing poverty, like real poverty.

And these people were, were clawing at the windows begging.

And I'm just sitting in this car and, and just thinking, what did I ever do to deserve to be like, I'm not a good kid.

You know, like, I'm just always in trouble.

Like, I don't do just like, again, feeling defective, you know, like, and it was, I really wasn't a good kid.

I mean, I was always in trouble. Everything was just a disaster with me.

And here I am inside the car that's being clawed at by these people who are barely clothed, you know, and just clearly desperate.

And that, like that was a moment where I felt genuinely guilty.

You know, I had a privilege, privilege guilt, you know, and that's, that's worse than success guilt because, you know, and again, I did everything wrong.

I was always in trouble, got terrible grades.

And my sister, who was, who is three and a half years older than me, she did everything right.

She got straight A's that just did everything perfect.

Somehow along the way, like, like my sister went into a low earning career.

She was a school teacher, which is notoriously underpaid, especially for how important of a job that is.

It became a single mom with special needs kid and low earning.

And then like, it's kind of struggles, you know, like, like life is hard for my sister.

And, and like, somehow me, the guy just did everything wrong and then goes on to have this stupid career.

And everything's worked out great for me.

So when you said success guilt, I feel that I feel like like what, why?

You know, why did everything work out great for me and my sister's having a tough time.

And I struggle with that too.

I actually, I have it.

I've always called it kind of survivor's guilt, but but yeah, success guilt, same thing.

You, your mother had a brain aneurysm in 98, you said.

Jackass, the pilot was in 99 a year later.

You describe how your mother was ill for, for roughly five years before she passed away and she was disabled.

You're very busy with Jackass at that time.

How do you, do you deal, did you, did you cope with it?

Because it doesn't seem to me that there's any, anyone in your life really at that point,

or any experience that's going to help you deal with the concept of grief and loss.

How did you cope with it?

My parents divorced in 1991.

I graduated from the American school here in London, the American school in London in St.

John'swood in 1992.

I went off to the University of Miami.

Right around the time when I went to the University of Miami,

my mom moved to Florida as well.

Then on that fateful day of October 10th, 1998,

we received word that mom had this brain aneurysm.

My sister and I flew to Florida from New Mexico.

My dad flew to Florida from England.

We all congregated around this, this crisis with my mom.

At one point, we went to a nearby restaurant to get a meal.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette and my dad came outside and initiated this conversation.

He says, I've been, I want to tell you that I feel I've done a disservice to you by not supporting you in this path that you've chosen.

My path to be a crazy famous stuntman.

He said, I chose a path that my father, you know, and dad broke the mold becoming a businessman.

The idea of that was pretty repugnant to his father.

And he said that his father had the same conversation.

You chose something that I would not have chosen for you, but you're clearly committed to it.

And so I just want you to be the best and, you know, be the happiest and I pledge to support you.

And I'm thinking, man, like that's tough because I'm a loser, you know, like the whole thing going on with my mom was kind of prevalent.

But this side conversation, like I just felt like, wow, you know, like now dad supports me.

I didn't feel very, very hopeful, I don't think at that time.

But it put a lot of wind in myself.

So the next year, I saw this advert on television for a show called Real TV where they're saying,

if you got, if you have video, home video footage that's crazy and you think that we should have it on our show,

then call this number and I called the number and sent them my videotape and they wanted it.

And dad helped me negotiate the license deal with them.

And it was meaningful.

You know, this pursuit of becoming a crazy famous stuntman had made my father and I as far apart as, you know,

it really, really made us not our relationships suffer.

And then ultimately it would bring us together.

And today, my dad is 80 years old, been retired forever, but he's come out of retirement and he's on my payroll.

He manages like all kinds of business stuff for me, all my insurance stuff, like, and it's crazy.

It's insanity that, just again, what drove us so far apart brought us so close together.

And that catalyst moment was your mother's brain aneurysm, really?

It was.

That conversation might not have happened and then...

It was.

And now you pointed to when Jack asked, I wouldn't just, well, okay.

My sister and I both moved from New Mexico to Florida.

To be with your mom.

To be with my mom.

Yeah.

And my sister naturally assumed the role of caregiver for my mom.

And I got this opportunity to go be a circus clown on cruise ships.

And it just made sense for me to do that.

You know, like, I think that my overall attitude, in particular, like even going off to work on cruise ships and then with, you know, with Jackass.

I don't think that I had any level of, like, guilt about it.

I think that my attitude about pursuing my own career and to be, you know, with Jackass and everything else.

My attitude was that rather than let this aneurysm destroy everything that I've really strongly wanted to get out there and really make something of myself.

And that that would be the way to honor my mom more.

And make my mom proud that way.

People don't often appreciate how difficult it is for everybody around the individual.

That's that's sick.

And I've had, again, I've learned that from doing this, having this conversation about just how sort of debilitating and difficult it is for everyone around the individual, especially when they're in a situation where they become disabled.

And your mother's situation was, I mean, she, she couldn't move from what I understood.

She wasn't necessarily speaking.

She was wheelchair bound.

She had to be lifted out of bed and into a wheelchair and back.

And could she, she could speak?

She could speak, but it fluctuated how present she was, how aware she was.

One of the more aware moments, I said, Mom, I'm going to have a book written about my life.

And she, she said, And who's going to write this masterpiece?

You know, she was making fun of me and it was funny.

Like, the last time that, that my mom ever laughed was I came home with the words shit and fuck tattooed on my knuckles.

And mom was in the hospital at that point with the do not resuscitate order on her bed.

Like this was, this was the end.

Like it was about a month before she passed.

And I walked into her hospital room and I just didn't, you know, it was just a tough situation.

I didn't, I just said, Hey, mom, like, check it out.

And I held up my, my knuckles to her and she, she, she looked at it.

And she said, shit, fuck, shit, fuck.

And then she said, my son is a shit fuck.

And she like, she laughed and it's just the most beautiful.

I thought it was just the most beautiful thing.

Like, she's able to laugh and, you know, and, um, yeah, it's tough, man.

That whole thing is tough.

And, and, and the toughest thing is just imagining when, uh, when I was struggling in the beginning,

like, like prior to her aneurysm, like there were times when I'd show her one of my videos.

It's, mom, check it out.

She says, oh, yeah, that's great.

But like, how, how, how is this ever going to like earn you anything?

You know, like, she didn't ever seem to be like terribly concerned for my safety.

I was showing her videos of like jumping off bridges and, you know, doing stuff that was like

really pretty dangerous and, uh, appeared to be life-threatening.

And, and that never seemed upset her.

What she was upset about was that, uh, that I, I was, I didn't have a pot to piss in.

That she would say, you don't have a pot to piss in.

Like, how am I supposed to be impressed by this?

Where's this ever going to get?

You know, how is this ever going to, she would say, show me the money.

You know, show me the money.

Like, how is this going to get you the money?

And, um, man, like, given that, that that was her position on it.

And I think that, that she was, um, largely concerned with the appearance of things.

And, and, um, like less, she wasn't ever, I never got the sense that she was worried

for my safety on any level.

I think that what she was concerned with was how I reflected on her.

Interesting.

You know, like my son's a loser.

This is a bummer.

You know, she was bummed that I was a loser because that reflected badly on her.

And, um, that's just, that's what was important to her.

You know, there's nothing wrong with that.

And, um,

Is that why you want her, you'd like her to be able to see?

God, yeah.

Man, that's the toughest thing.

To imagine if, uh, if we, if, if she, she had been to rehab many times,

she was in the program recovery, but she just couldn't hang on to that.

You know, she would always, she would just always end up drinking again.

And, um, I think that what would, what would cause her to relapse was,

was the, you know, trauma from the breakup with my dad,

which is just a vicious cycle because what broke her up with my dad was her drinking.

And then the trauma from the divorce would make, you know, it's a vicious cycle.

But, um, had she gotten it, had she really, really grabbed onto it and not let go and

been in recovery and, and both of us, like she would have just gotten such a kick out of,

like being on, being on the red carpet at a big movie premiere.

And she would just be letting me have it, making fun of me for the dumb shit I was doing in the movies.

Like we'd be laughing.

So that was one thing.

My mom had like a sense of humor.

She had, she was cool, man.

She was cool.

And we would, we were, we were related to each other a lot.

You're, you're 29 November the 7th.

She passes away.

Correct.

A mixture of emotions.

I read in your book, um, in professional idiot page 194, the overwhelming emotion I felt afterward was relief.

Sure.

Yeah.

She like, this, this suffering was over.

You know, it was, it was merciful.

Like there was nothing upsetting about my mom dying.

It was what was upsetting was the, the pain and the suffering that she had endured for the five years leading up to her death.

Do you ever process that?

We talk a lot about these days about grief and we understand that grief is a thing.

And I don't think we ever did before.

Do you, did you ever process that?

If I did, it was years later in recovery and, and digesting the concepts in that book conversations with God.

That was when I finally, uh,

that was when I just developed the idea that mom wasn't alone.

You know, the mom was, uh, she wasn't alone.

She like that, uh, that was an experience that she had as God.

And somehow that just, it doesn't change anything, but it changes everything.

Alone?

Why, why the word alone?

Why was that the concern?

Yeah, just because the, I mean, it's, uh, like on, on a bigger level, like mom, mom's this one thing, you know, so there's no such thing as alone.

At the same time, jackass starts taking off, right?

So that's roughly around that time.

Your fame goes through the roof.

Yeah. Well, mom's aneurysm was 1998.

I worked on cruise ships for six months of 1999.

I worked in a circus at a flea market for six months in your 2000 and jackass came out in October of your 2000.

And then yeah, everything.

The movie comes out 2002.

Yeah.

When you're 28 years old at that time, your mother passes when you're 29 the next year.

These two things have co, have almost happened at similar times.

Your trajectory started to skyrocket.

Your mother has passed away.

Lots to deal with.

Lots going on.

Fame is this new thing in your life now and attention.

And as you said earlier, like, worrying about the next meal is maybe sometimes a better problem than worrying about the last.

This strikes me as, as a real difficult moment in your life.

From professional Lydia, which I read, it said by mid 2007, I was practically living on Diet Coke, booze and nitrous.

Not Diet Coke, a diet of cocaine.

Oh, cocaine.

Fuck.

It's a big difference.

It was a diet of Coke.

Big difference.

Yeah.

You were hallucinating and hearing voices.

Yeah, big time.

It's called psychosis.

And it's a fascinating.

It's a fascinating thing that there are so many different substances.

One can ingest that might bring about this phenomena of psychosis.

Yet there's so much similarity between the experiences people have with it.

Even though they take so many different avenues to get there.

And that's partially why I believe that psychosis.

That there's a sort of different compartments, maybe dimensions.

And that we're in our, in our human experience, we're in a distinct compartment.

And that psychosis happens when you erode the barriers to the other compartments, other dimensions.

And by doing that with, with chemical substances, we've erode the barriers, kind of open ourselves up to energies from other dimensions.

You open yourself up to like all levels of it.

So you can really let in demons, you know, like, like demons being low level frequency energy.

And angels like being a higher level.

And by just consuming enough substances, I really believe that you erode the barriers, you open yourself up to all these energies.

And in comes flooding demons and angels.

And that's how I characterize my experiences with hallucinations.

All that stuff is demon activity with some angels mixed in.

I was reading about this thing called the rad email list.

Where you sent an email to a lot of people, which I think ultimately sounds like one of the things that brought about an intervention.

Right. It wasn't one email.

It was more of a stream, a barrage.

I was inundating a list of 200, roughly 200 people.

Many of them very influential people in the entertainment industry.

Celebrities and agents and just powerful people, you know, media personalities.

And I was just inundating these 200 people with emails at all hours around the clock and effectively broadcasting my downward spiral in real time.

And I would send at times really funny stuff, you know, at times, just deeply alarming stuff.

I was, you know, I was, I knew how to control.

I wasn't, but I was just, I was rad.

I mean, I was out of my mind.

I was out of my mind and I was making that abundantly clear by sending video.

YouTube hadn't become a thing.

YouTube started in 2005.

In 2007, YouTube allowed me to make really disturbing videos and then email the links to 200 people.

If I was a fly on the wall in 2007 in your life, what would I have seen on an average day?

In 2007, I was renting four apartments in one building.

One of them, I just demolished the walls and built escape park throughout the whole apartment.

With permission from a landlord?

No, not at all.

No, no permission whatsoever.

And it was just with the, I remember there was like a Russian prostitute operation in the adjacent apartment.

So they weren't trying to complain about the noise.

There was a stairwell on the other side and beneath was the parking garage.

So there were never any complaints for that.

And then a little bit down the hall was, I had a couple of my buddies living there.

One of them was, you know, edited stuff for me, but we very, very rarely, well, I mean, he wouldn't.

He thinks he works hard.

Yeah, I mean, I had people like on salary and they didn't do too much.

But when I was really out of my mind and these disturbing videos that I wanted to email the links to the rat email is my editor guy was in charge of that.

So yeah, I had the office, the escape park apartment, the office apartment, and then I had an apartment for the assistant.

The assistant really didn't do anything except explain to people that she couldn't get a hold of me and change my flights.

I would always miss my flights.

And then I had my apartment, which was this is sort of a, this is where all the really crazy stuff happened.

That was just my little drug den.

And I would, I would inhale this nitrous oxide stuff and it would come in these little cartridges that people used to make whipped cream and a box of these nitrous oxide cartridges would have there would be 24 cartridges per box.

But if you bought a case, there would be 25 boxes in the case. And I believe that 25 times 24 comes to 600.

And so I would sit down with 600 cartridges of nitrous oxide and just inhale.

The thing that the cartridge goes into this canister.

Correct. Yeah, but I'd have two of them.

Oh, so I would, you know, crack one up and fill that and inhale it with my lungs filled with nitrous oxide. I would be busy filling up the next one.

So that when I exhaled the nitrous from the first, I would then inhale just so I would not breathe.

I was, I wasn't breathing air as like I was breathing.

I was inhaling nitrous oxide to the exclusion of breathing air as much as possible.

And my, my goal at all times would be to lose consciousness because if you, you know, if you do that and you hold your breath, you will become unconscious and you're kind of twitching and flopping around and and your lips are all blue.

And then and then you come back to and and it would, it's not, not healthy.

And I would be doing that. And I would be doing that for days on end while snorting cocaine.

So it was on on like the second and particularly on the third day of being awake on a cocaine binge while inhaling nothing but nitrous oxide.

And that's when the most profound psychosis with all the hallucinating would be going on.

You sent out on that rad email one time, suicidal ideation.

Yeah, I, I, I, I, I, I was going so crazy in this apartment and I was very loud and destructive in there and and the the next department over was a lawyer in his first year of being a lawyer.

So, you know, like a guy who cared about work and I was just making all kinds of noise at all hours and see he was, he would call the police.

He's getting this in my neighbor. It's insane, you know, and the more that the police would show up in my apartment, the angrier I would get at the lawyer who was calling the police, which is a little bit backwards.

And that was kind of my ammo. Like I would, I would wrong people and then I would resent them for their perfectly natural response to being wronged by me.

Mr. Honest.

So I would, you know, I would bang on the guys. Well, I would really antagonize this, this poor lawyer guy. And at one point it got to, to the level where pounding on the wall, I actually pounded a hole in the wall.

And I pounded a hole on my side. There's the drywall and then in between there's like the fiberglass stuff and then then there's his side throughout.

I actually this one night pounded all the way through his side of the wall too. So I was actually looking into the apartment, which of course constitutes vandalism.

So when he called the cops this time and the cops showed up, they had no choice but to actually arrest me for vandalism. Look, they put a hole in my wall.

So they were here to arrest me. And I was really, really out of it.

Like having been snorting both cocaine and ketamine. So I was super out of it and didn't put it together that I was being arrested and going to jail with a bag of cocaine in my pocket.

And I probably could have it would make sense that, and I remember it was funny too, because they said that I was barefoot and I had no shirt and they said, well, we have to take you to jail.

We have no choice, but we will let you go put on a shirt and some shoes, which, which was the perfect opportunity for me to go into my apartment and remove the bag of cocaine from my pocket.

And I didn't do that. And I said, you know, fuck a shirt, fuck shoes.

So I went to jail completely barefoot and shirtless with the bag of cocaine in my pocket. And, and then when they, you know, when they process you into jail, they search, you know, your pockets, they found the cocaine and they arrested me again.

Because now I had a felony cocaine possession charge as well as the vandalism charge. And this was like, pretty well publicized the, you know, the fact of the cocaine and the, you know, the arrest.

And when I was released from the jail, I was in there for like, I want to say like three days because the consensus among anybody who loved me was he's better off in jail.

So there was no concerted effort to bail me out, which was why I managed to stay in there for I believe about three days.

And then when I finally did get released from the jail after the three days and I returned to my apartment, there was an eviction notice on the door.

So my response to that was, oh, okay, well, I'm being evicted. And I went into the apartment, I found more vials of ketamine that I had stashed in there and I cooked that all up.

And within a couple hours, I was like screaming about God, like jumping up and down on a parked car and like dealing with more cops.

You were manhandled into a psych ward, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I went on this, this, this prodigious final bender. And, and I was running out of time before I had to get my stuff out of the apartment.

I was evicted. So the email to the rat email list was, Hey, I have to have my stuff out of this apartment because I've been evicted.

And before I have to be gone, I want to jump a motor. So I want to ride a motorcycle through the living room and off a ramp and jump it over onto the building next door, which was very, very small gap.

No, there was hardly even a big stunt. And, and it was like two and a half stories up. I think I was on the third floor, but it was really like kind of two and a half.

So maybe like 20, 25 feet. And I said on the rat email list and I also want to jump the motorcycle onto the roof next door and I want to jump out of the bedroom window into a hot tub.

You know, as I said, so Knoxville, bring a camera crew and a hot tub. And if you can't do the hot tub, at least bring some cardboard boxes, but I'm jumping out of the window.

And I'm jumping, you know, and if you don't come, I'm jumping out of the window anyway, I'm going to jump and I'm going to find out how many bones break when I land on the sidewalk, 25 feet below, I'm ready to die.

And like I was like promising that I was going to jump out of the window and break bones on the concrete below and that qualified me for the psychiatric evaluation.

And they, they staged an intervention.

They staged an intervention. Yeah. And I said not so Knoxville responded. I forget if he responded with all 200 people on copy.

But, but I said this, I did this on the rat email list with the 200 people and I said, if Knoxville responded, he says, okay, I'll be there. You know, I said be here at 10am.

I'm going to jump.

But his response was, he says, can we do noon? What's with the early call times? Sheesh.

So we agreed on noon.

I forget. I don't think he was concerned with the early call times. I think what he was concerned with was having more time to to rally, you know, a group to really do the intervention.

But, but by in that email exchange, I was not scheduling a shoot for, you know, for jackass as I thought I was actually scheduling my intervention.

And that's really where your life seems to start to take a new direction, although not linear in any respect.

Well, I mean, that that intervention marked the beginning of my journey. I've been cleaning sober since that day, which is, I mean, the intervention was March 9.

The intervention was March 9 of 2009.

March 9 of 2008. And we don't count that as our sobriety date because it's the first day you didn't get loaded is your sobriety date.

So my sobriety date is March 10 of 2008.

I've had this little device, this blood sugar glucose sensor on my arm, which came in the home testing kit to understand how all of the different foods that I eat day to day have an impact on my body.

And it's been pretty unbelievable.

A big thing for me is feeling tired after I've eaten something and not understanding why. Historically, I didn't understand.

Now I do understand. I had been eating, I think it was like a rice stir fry with a bit of chicken and some chili sauce in there.

And I saw in my blood glucose chart on my phone, which is connected to the device that Zoe sent me, this huge spike.

And then later in the day, I saw a huge dip when I started feeling that sort of post lunch slump.

And what will happen next is Tim tells me they'll take all of that data and give me my own personalized Zoe scores for any food so I can figure out what I should be eating and what I should avoid

if I want to avoid those afternoon slumps.

And if you want to get started on your Zoe journey with me, use the code, we've got an exclusive code here, CEO 10 for 10% off.

And let me know how you get on when it arrives back to the episode.

Over 14 years sober.

Over 15 now.

Over 15 years sober.

Yeah.

Congratulations.

That's amazing.

Honestly, that's incredible.

It's so incredible.

And I don't say that to, you know, to be self important or, you know, like, like, it's just the most profound gift.

Like, ever.

And I believe strongly that, you know, this conversation began with this dark discussion of alcoholism and how just how terrible and and sad alcoholism is.

However, as upsetting as alcoholism and drug addiction is, it's the only disease where once you treat it, you become a better version of yourself than you were before.

And that's really incredible to me because any other disease, the best you can hope for is to get back to as healthy as you were before you got sick.

But for us sober, alcoholics and addicts, like, we genuinely become improved versions of ourselves.

And the work you've done since has been incredible.

I mean, you've taken on many professional pursuits.

Your stand up comedy became a facet of your life in 2013.

2010.

2010.

Okay.

I had the first time I had gotten on stage in a comedy club and performed what I intended to be stand up comedy was 2006.

How did that go?

I thought it went a lot better than it actually did.

But the first time I ever got on that stage, it wasn't it wasn't a disaster.

It became a disaster later.

But but in 2010, once I'd been clean and sober for just over two years, I pursued stand up comedy in earnest.

Why stand up comedy?

I know you've got a big tour coming up in the UK, but why stand up comedy?

I'm trying to understand the through line between the stunts.

It's the through line is just attention seeking.

You know, the first time I ever got on stage to perform in a comedy club, there was it was 2006.

I believe it was August of 2006.

And our second Jackass movie was to be released a couple months later.

I showed up at this comedy club.

I walked in had no plan for what I was going to do.

And just observing what was happening on the stage with somebody standing there holding a microphone, just speaking to the audience.

I thought, there's no stunt that could possibly be crazier than that.

You know, like, I'm going to do my mind.

The craziest stunt that I could possibly do is no stunt at all.

I'm going to stand there and speak into a microphone and try to make the people laugh.

This was genuinely the most terrifying concept.

And I was just wasted enough to decide I'm going to do that.

When it became my turn to get on the stage.

I had come up with one joke.

As I got on the stage, there were people, they were aware of me.

They were excited to see me.

I felt like an excitement.

They were there to have a good time.

They were they were rooting for me.

I mean, of course, like get on stage.

I'm Steve O'Ran.

They were there.

I felt loved.

I felt they were rooting for me.

They wanted to have a good time.

I got I got on.

Yeah, I was terrified, but, but, but it was, it was just, it was, man, it was,

it was electric dude.

And, you know, I said, you know, what's up everybody?

I'm in the mood for a blow job.

Does anybody want one?

And, and, and, and I got a laugh, you know, like they'd laughed.

And I just was so happy about that.

And I couldn't have been on that stage for more than three minutes.

Like, um, I got on and I got off.

It's got out of there and it was a favorable experience.

And I decided that this was something I wanted to pursue.

And you've been pursuing ever since there's a, an awesome tour coming up in the UK from

June 30th to July 14th, I believe called bucket list.

That's right.

And, and, which I'm coming to see.

Oh, dude, I love that.

Make sure that happens soon.

When I started doing stand up in earnest in 2010.

Um, I imagined that I was.

That I was trying to establish myself as a stand up comedian and that I was going to forge a career with

speaking into a microphone.

And, and, and I felt that I felt that I was.

Well equipped to succeed in that endeavor because my life has been so.

Just colorful, like the experience that I've had in my life, like to, to, to, to mine my life

experience for material stand up comedy.

It seemed very doable, you know, like I've got, I've got stuff to talk about.

So I felt that I came into stand up comedy, not with just an advantage in that I had.

An audience, a profile, but I just had an interesting material to, you know, to, to mine.

And, um, clearly the world was not eager for.

The stand up comedy of Steve.

Oh, you know, I think that they're the bar for the stuff that I was known for.

Like to, to go from like the, the, the, the shocking, like unbelievable, like crazy visual stuff that I'd become known

for and then appear speaking into a microphone.

It seems like a mismatch in expectation.

Yeah.

Like always disappointment, isn't it?

Right.

Like, and maybe this is from my own perception.

I'm not sure.

But with all of the self doubt with all of the, um, you know, negative, negative self talk, I just still persisted.

And, um, I wasn't super successful in the beginning and like, of course not, but I was successful enough to get booked by comedy clubs

and then be welcome back.

And I would go around this comedy club circuit around the, the United States.

And I did just well enough to go back around the loop.

And that loop lasted for 11 years in comedy clubs.

And, and, um, I tirelessly persisted.

I genuinely didn't, I put in work and I developed this craft of storytelling and stand up telling jokes.

And along the way, I taped two comedy specials.

The first one was me and a microphone and, uh, some intermittent stunts I performed on stage throughout the act.

And as I put together what would become the next comedy special, I put together this, this new act to tour with.

It occurred to me that the stories I was telling in this new act had for the most part all happened on camera.

And I had the idea, wow, what if for my next comedy special, I performed the act, but in post production, I edit into the special interstitial footage of these stories unfolding.

Oh, dude, my head exploded. I got so excited. I couldn't even, I couldn't even stand it.

Wow, like I'm going to have my next comedy special is going to be multimedia.

That, that when I put out myself, um, and, uh, and then it was time to put together the third show.

So now I knew that for this third show, which is bucket list bucket list, correct, that I needed to film all new stuff, which would lend itself to all new stand up material.

And it had to be crazier than shit. It had to be crazier than ever.

And that's what people will see if they go.

Yeah, for sure. This, uh, they, there were just ideas that came up over the years that were, that were genuinely never supposed to happen on any level, but they were, they were just ideas that I was so fond of because they were crazy things to say.

I can't wait.

The idea was to push things further than jackass ever could. And there's no way that you do that. And there's not a story to tell, you know, the challenges of, of making these things happen.

It's just, there's a, it's inherently juicy material for stand up. There's no way around it. And one step further is that, um, I've worked so hard on, um, developing the ability to be in a healthy relationship with a life partner.

So I was just about to ask you, this was my question, which was about Lux.

Right. My fiance Lux and, and the bucket list show is every bit as much about these ultra high level jackass stunts and how they're conceived and executed.

It's every bit as much about that as the implications of carrying out these bucket list items on my relationship with my fiance.

What I was actually going to ask you about was specifically kind of the juxtaposition of what's making you successful here seems to me as a guy that's gotten to relationship struggle to find a relationship for my own reasons with my childhood.

Seems to be the antithesis, the very opposite of what it takes to be successful in a relationship, which is like the stability, the, the, I don't know, the calm, the.

Right.

And over here we're seeking instability and here in a relationship, then I don't know, there needs to be a certain stability that I think how.

Well, to derive one self worth and self esteem from external validation, the way that that we do and show business.

Like for, for, for me to base my self worth and self esteem on how successful I am as Steve Oh, it just plainly presents a dark and upsetting future as the spotlight wanes.

You know, like the, the, and I can't and this is something that that became very clear to me 15 years ago when I got sober was that for me to be happy and healthy on any level.

It is of paramount importance that I find some separation between me and the persona of Steve Oh.

And with that kind of ruminating in my mind.

And as I was when I got into the stand up like I was acting out sexually as much as possible on the road while doing stand up and, and at that time, I was in my late 30s approaching 40.

It just occurred to me, man, this is not the, the, the road to being happy and, you know, I got to learn if I want to be happy later in life, I need to learn how to have a healthy relationship.

I had a, a belief that I subscribed to, and I got to work on learning how to be in a healthy relationship and thank God I did because I'm terrified of being a washed up old attention whore that nobody wants to pay attention to anymore.

And being alone.

And being alone.

That sounds like the most terrifying, like awful thing.

And so,

What does it, what does she mean to you?

I mean, she, you said something earlier that that the design for living in the 12 steps and this isn't my, you know, kind of extrapolating on what you said you said that the principles of honesty, open mindedness and willingness are helpful to all people.

And I'll take that a step further that the design for living outlined in the 12 steps is something that you don't have to be an alcoholic or an addict to benefit from.

But what Lux is as a person is somebody who automatically does that stuff.

You know, she's automatically honest, you know, she's automatically like open, willing, like she's automatically does the right thing.

You know, where I had to really, really work and train myself to be honest and to do the right thing.

You know, and, you know, she's just automatically just automatic to her and and Lux's capacity for love is so staggering, like her, it's just so natural to her to be loving.

And, and it blows me away, we both, like, with the animals were out of our minds, we love animals so much.

And the way that Lux loves me and the way that she wants me to love her, like, just, no, no, no, hold like the way that we hold each other the way that like, she's, she's, she's taught me to love.

She's increased my capacity to love.

And, and that's, that's the biggest deal, man.

It's, it's massive.

Such a beautiful thing.

Steve, oh, thank you so Steven.

Thank you so much.

We have a closing traditional in this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest.

Okay.

And the question that's been there for you is one of the most interesting questions that's ever been left in fact, they don't know who they're leaving it for.

Good.

So totally.

They said, what can Steven.

So you've filled in the blank.

No, no, no, no, they literally wrote what can Steven when they're talking about me.

Oh, okay.

They spelled it with your name, with a pH.

They said, what can Steven this beautiful man improve about himself.

So that's Michael.

What can I improve about myself?

They're asking you to tell me what I can improve about myself because they didn't know you were called Steven.

What can Steven this beautiful man improve about himself?

Honesty.

You didn't speak about yourself very much, but one thing that you did say you seemed to point to the deficiency in your relationship with your girlfriend being that you're so consumed with work.

And that you said something about she wants quality time.

You can't compensate for your, you know, all of your energy and time going into your career and that you want to compensate by with material things and that but that she's no no interest in material things.

She wants quality time.

And I think that that you and I both have this, this drive this, this, this hustle this, this urge to succeed.

And I think that the both of us would do well to find our success in our relationships.

Every study about the about longevity and health and happiness.

100% points to relationships as the source of happy and true happiness and true health comes from the quality of our relationships, not the numbers in our bank account but the quality in our relationships so

I think that the my answer for you is this is for me is just that, you know, that we should put the emphasis on our quality time in our relationships that we do on our hustle.

The reason why I don't is because I think of some of the stuff that I said earlier about like where I came from and being a poor family and so like my survival innately in me or my validation comes from my work.

So I'm like being pulled by this like insecurity and the shame from my childhood over here like become back and become everything that you weren't and you know, and then on the other hand my sense goes well Steve the happiest times in your life the the

happiest times I've sat here with the guy that did that 95 year old study on men and found that they live things like 14 years longer if they have a meaningful relationship.

I know logically, but then emotionally and the scar the scar tissue in me goes no you need to validate yourself right. I'm being dragged by that still to you know.

And hustle, but but not in a way that that undermines or or detracts from the quality of the relationships.

That's what you're doing.

I mean, yeah shit that Lux and I have a rule that we were not to be apart for more than two weeks.

I love that.

And we spent two days together over the course of six weeks.

We broke our rule badly.

And that's not cool man.

Yeah.

So if I wasn't so, you know, so so operating from fear, that's the that's the difference.

Yeah, because you love it.

Not because you're afraid of the post apocalyptic.

You know, and this is concept I've been doing with a lot in this podcast between the distinction between being driven and being dragged and sometimes I'm being dragged.

Yeah, driven is the like intentional sounds like, you know, kind of the intentional hustle with control over the hustle dragged is like fucking fear.

Like if I don't, then I'm not enough and right.

I've taken so much of your time.

I did.

Thank you so much.

Really, really appreciate it.

A pleasure to meet you.

And I've learned so much incredibly surprising wisdom fill conversation that grace so many different aspects.

I'm so excited to see bucket list.

I'm sure all of my audience are as well.

The 13th is the date to be there.

Right.

That's where I'll be.

I think that we might be able to open up some tickets on the 14th.

Okay.

But I don't know and I don't know how many I just know that as I sit here now, the show on the 13th just went like that.

That's that's a whole show that I got to fill.

So link is in the description below to get tickets in the YouTube description and on the audio apps.

It's in the description below and I hope to see you guys there.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, bro.

A quick word on Huell.

As you know, they're a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company.

One of the things I've never really explained is how I came to have a relationship with Huell.

One day in the office, many years ago, a guy walked past called Michael and he was wearing a Huell t-shirt and I was really compelled by the logo.

I just thought for a minute, a design aesthetic point of view.

It was really interesting.

And I asked him what that word meant and why he was wearing that t-shirt and he said, it's this brand called Huell and they make food that is nutritionally complete and very, very convenient and has the planet in mind.

And he, the next day, dropped off a little bottle of Huell on my desk and from that day onwards, I completely got it because I'm someone that cares tremendously about having a nutritionally complete diet.

But sometimes, because of the way my life is, that falls by the wayside.

So if there was a really convenient, reliable, trustworthy way for me to be nutritionally complete in an affordable way, I was all ears, especially if it's a way that is conscious of the planet.

Give it a chance.

Give it a shot.

Let me know what you think.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.