You know him from the hilariously brilliant HBO show, “Crashing” and his beloved podcast, “You Made It Weird.” Pete Holmes rose to stardom as a stand-up comedian who successfully intertwined his eager imagination and sharp wit to keep his fans laughing for over 20 years. In this interview, he’s opening up about his new book “Comedy Sex God,” and revealing his soul-seeking journey and path to enlightenment (and all the speed bumps along the way). Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Spiritual people really love to say, everything happens for a reason.
It's very annoying to me, because that's not necessarily true.
People love to say it, though.
They're like, oh, you lost your job, but then you got the new job, and that's where you met Lisa, right?
Things don't always tie up in a nice, candy-coated Hollywood, fade to black, swell the music.
Not a long enough timeline, you know, your heart's gonna stop beating, you're gonna die, so what was that?
We're just gonna edit that out of the movie?
Like...
Things are going to fail or go wrong at some point.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
podcast.
You know him from the hilariously brilliant HBO show Crashing and his beloved podcast You Made It Weird.
Pete Holmes rose to stardom as a stand-up comedian and successfully intertwined his eager imagination and sharp wit to keep his fans laughing for over 20 years.
The New Yorker called him unchiseled.
Why do they call you unchiseled?
I'm chiseled because I'm low T probably.
No.
Can you check my T? We'll do that.
Before we were rolling, you did something very decisive and I was saying I'm going to drop all the medical facts that I know.
Decisiveness linked to testosterone, which men and women both have, we both know.
And you were very decisive, and your jawline is very square, which is also a sign of high T, which is why women find it attractive.
Isn't that interesting?
It's a sign that they can tolerate poison, because testosterone is poison.
But that decisiveness when it's for themselves is fine, when they start meddling in everyone else.
He wasn't just being decisive about his own microphone.
You're right.
He was taking over mine.
I know.
And that's just annoying.
I understand.
And annoying is not what attracts women.
Yeah.
Even in the jungle.
Let me mansplain this to you.
Let me ozplain it.
So YSB here, he's opening up about his soul-seeking journey and path to enlightenment.
Actually, it's a fantastic book.
It's called Comedy, Sex, God.
Thank you for pausing.
All the speed bumps, by the way, that come along with finding enlightenment.
Because as you know, if you see the Buddha walking along towards you, what do you do to the Buddha?
Kill him.
Kill him.
You know why?
Because if you see it anywhere other than inside, it's not it.
And that's the point of the book.
I don't mean to jump right in.
It's the moving from external religion to inner spirituality, obviously.
That is what I'm going for.
It's you, St. Francis.
I love the St. Francis quote.
He says, what you're looking for is what you're looking with.
And I think that's it.
Science would obviously call it consciousness.
The Christian world, Christian mystics would call it the soul.
Other people, the Hindus call it the Atman.
We're talking about the phenomenon of being, of awareness itself.
And when we dwell in that place of base, simple awareness, that's where joy is.
That's where anxiety disappears.
It doesn't disappear when we just calm ourselves down, think positive, or try and problem-solve.
That will only give you a temporary hit.
You know how the brain is.
The way happiness works, dopamine, adrenaline, endorphins, all the things that make us happy, are to train the animal.
You go for a run, it gives you a hit of endorphins.
Why?
It wants you to keep running.
So happiness is a fool's game.
It's stupid.
Real bliss, real contentment, comes from separating yourself from your thoughts, disidentifying with your ego, and dwelling in that gift that we all have.
This is why it's good news.
We all have it.
You have it.
You see the Buddha?
Kill it because it's looking out your eyes right now.
You are it.
And that is the message of the book.
So many could deliver, although you did that beautifully, an argument for what you just said.
But you were an evangelical Christian.
Yes.
Which I'm going to come back to.
Yeah.
Went a complete other way because there's probably not a lot of evangelical Christians in the comedy world.
Yeah, that's true.
And there's a great story that I'm going to come to later that has to do with M&Ms that you recount.
Sure, yeah.
Which I think is a great example of how ethics plays a role in modern society and how it's a little different from what you're saying.
Yeah.
But mostly it brought my biggest ally because Lisa went to theology school.
Did you really?
I've dropped out.
It wasn't deep enough for her.
That is the most theological thing ever.
To drop out of theological school?
Yeah, because to me, spirituality is about breaking away.
You know, one of the more confusing things that Jesus said...
You know, allegedly...
You know what I'm talking about.
I don't mean to quote him like a reporter.
It was in the New Testament.
He says, I didn't come to make peace, but I brought a sword.
I came to turn brother against brother.
And what he's saying is, in my opinion, he's saying like, it's not the easy path.
You're going to break.
You're going to leave school.
My wife might leave me.
I might even lose my faith.
We're talking about a rocky road.
We're talking about the path of resistance and suffering.
And I used to think like being with God meant like, of course you finish theology school.
It's his school, right?
No, the path is complicated.
That's where the juice is.
That's where the conflict is.
And that's where change is.
Like, we change when we suffer.
And I don't know if you suffered and you left, but I'm guessing you didn't leave because you were loving it.
You know, right?
I think it was called pregnancy.
Or pregnancy.
No, I was not pregnant.
Oh, okay.
I was pregnant.
What I love, and I think an aspect of the divine that we sometimes miss in Christianity, is what they had, at least in Norse mythology, which is the trickster, the irony of the universe.
The cosmic joke.
It is the cosmic joke.
And that's where I think the comedy and God come in together for you, maybe.
Why is God laughing?
Because he gets the joke.
Because he gets the joke.
And when we laugh, so enlightenment, we could talk about being lighter, being more spacious, and even laughing at our own suffering.
Not later.
To me, the game is about learning to have hindsight in real time.
So something that I was just talking about, and there's a chapter in the book about, like, when something goes bad.
And I recently had something professionally not go my way.
And you get that, the jacuzzi jets of anger sort of kick on.
You know, you feel it.
But all been there.
Dr. Oz could tell us what chemically is happening.
There's a constriction in your stomach and your brow and you feel you're sweating and you're angry.
And one of the things I talk about in the book is to say yes to the world and to say yes even to the things that you wouldn't want.
Not later, but in real time.
I know it's kind of woo-woo spiritual stuff.
This is very practical.
You can be an atheist.
You can be an agnostic.
I think those are valid choices, by the way.
I'm saying if you're suffering and you greet it with yes, thank you, The Franciscan friar Richard Rohr says the first forgiveness in Christianity is to the world.
It's us forgiving the world, reality, for being how it is.
So it starts with you forgiving the world, and that's also Buddhist.
The Buddhist idea is that resistance is what causes suffering.
So you tell a story in your head, your alarm goes off in the morning.
I know you get up early.
And you were in late last night.
Some mornings that alarm goes off.
And you're like, you tell yourself a story.
I should be able to sleep longer.
What is all this success for if I can't even get some sleep?
And I know the numbers.
I need this.
I need seven and a half for my cycles or whatever it might be.
So you're suffering because you're resisting what is.
And there's something beautiful.
This morning my alarm went off.
I didn't want to get up.
The first thing I said out of my mouth, literally, this is not a metaphor, I said in the dark, I went, yes.
And that is what I try to do to suffering.
Because as I write about in the book, my wife left me, I lost my faith.
The two things that I thought, absolutely, full stop, these things should never happen, divorce and then becoming an atheist, absolutely not.
And those two things were absolutely essential to my spiritual growth and my development as a person.
Why, when your wife left you, did you lose your faith?
What did your wife have to do with God?
Yeah, I mean, well, the reason it's called Comedy Sex God is because God and sex were so linked to me.
Do you practice Tantra?
No, I'm not Sting.
I wish I was cool like that.
The book is not about my sexual prowess in any way.
It's more about how, for so many people who have an earnest desire to understand the universe...
I remember when you were on Crashing, Dr. Oz, you talked about the singularity.
And we talked off-camera about how you agreed with that idea of a single speck of mass erupting into the Bing Bang.
And we can call that God, or we can call it the singularity.
What's the difference?
So this is sort of the God we're talking about.
So people have an earnest desire to understand that.
That's really beautiful.
And let's call that a bucket.
Unfortunately, into that bucket gets poured some pretty inconvenient dogmas that can be very at odds with who we are just as human beings.
And the only one, like, I wasn't tempted to lie or cheat or steal or be cruel.
But, of course, I was sexual.
I was going through puberty.
I don't think you or I, just as men, can even remember what it was like to be 15.
Everywhere you look is sex.
It's just like what you see is sex.
And then you have church telling you there's a transactional model for love and a transactional model for salvation, meaning like heaven and hell, afterlife realities, torture, pleasure, are hinged on not sinning and God loving you.
And your biological drive makes God actually not, it makes him hate you.
He hates his creation.
He made you, and he hates you.
I understand, you know, obviously this is more difficult for gay people, and I have compassion for that.
And even as a straight person, you felt like shame.
You felt that level of shame that you almost had to come out of the closet in my late 20s.
I had to be like, I want the world to know I'm attracted to you.
By butts!
You know what I mean?
Or whatever it was.
You had to come to terms with your sexuality.
So that was a big part of my journey.
And that's why those two words are in the title.
I don't know how I got there.
You said something about the mischief.
Why does it make a joke?
Yeah, I was just asking.
People seem to...
It's not an uncommon scenario where people's faith completely crumbles when they have a personal tragedy.
You can see it happening all around you, but somehow we all think we're immune.
And then the laws of the universe don't apply anymore.
And oh, everything's terrible.
Even though it happened a mile away from us, when it happens to us, then the universe is shot and God doesn't exist.
So much of religion is narcissistic, isn't it?
I mean, my faith certainly was.
And so much of religion has been turned into an ego-driven membership.
It's identity building.
It's culture building.
But it's always us versus them.
In versus out.
And as I've been joking all day today, it's like, have you ever noticed that it's always your group that's in?
It's funny that it works out.
Everyone else is wrong.
And if they were just listening to their inner voice, they would know that I'm right.
Well, are you listening to your inner voice?
Are you wondering if you could be wrong?
Probably not.
But anyway...
When my wife left, to your point, Lisa, is that I could have gone one of two ways to follow the stereotype.
One is I could lose my faith.
That's obvious.
Or I could go double down and become super religious, which I've also seen happen.
But we don't have a model of God that allows for suffering.
It's just not part of the story.
I write in the book that I kind of felt like...
I was in his protection plan.
I didn't smoke.
I didn't drink.
I didn't swear.
You know, you say, freck.
You say, gosh darn it.
You have all these ways around it.
You certainly don't have sex.
Not that anyone was offering, but you don't.
I had this convenient.
It was like, oh, it's not that no one wants to.
It's that I'm very holy.
So you do everything right.
So why the suffering?
In my model, it was like God was the mafia and I was paying him protection money, so he should watch my bakery, right?
But then somebody throws a brick through the bakery window and I go, well, this guy's not paying out.
It turns out that that is a very Western limited scope of suffering.
When my wife left me, somebody at my church goes, this was a pastor.
He goes, we're not good with suffering.
He was basically apologizing.
He was like, I'm sorry, we're not really good with suffering.
I was like, it's crazy.
It's one of the cornerstones of spirituality.
So that's what led me on my journey.
I wanted...
Because people have this earnest desire to understand and participate and experience the fundamental feeling of the universe, where we can call that God or the mystery.
And unfortunately, that sort of gets mixed up into religion.
So it's sort of embarrassing to be religious sometimes.
And I understand that.
The book is a lot about trying to save the baby from the bath.
And to try and take some of these Eastern ideas that actually help me recognize...
Those ideas in the Bible as well that allow for suffering.
Of course, any religion worth its salt is going to have some understanding of suffering better than the devil.
Like, oh, the devil grabbed the controls.
That's not biblical.
That is not the idea.
All right, we're just scratching the surface here, but we've got a lot more to discuss, so stay with us right after the break.
So when I started reading the scripts for "Crashing," and just in full disclosure, Pete allowed me to stain his wonderful HBO show It was awesome.
You had that sense of humor and wore the suit.
We were writing it.
We were like, will he wear a skin-tight suit with the organs on it?
And he was like, yeah.
Of course.
Yeah, no problem.
Different than the one I have?
Yeah.
So in the show, Pete is a comedian trying to get work, and one of the jobs he gets is to be my stand-up.
He does stand-up before the show is to get the audience psyched up.
So you come in, you do your job, and my part is a ridiculously macho version of me.
Right.
Sort of.
It's always funnier to have the celebrity play like a jerk version.
And that's what you did so well.
Not really.
You weren't that much.
Not really.
People didn't laugh.
No, no, they didn't.
Other than that.
You were in the promo.
I mean, it was the best part.
But I started...
I had seen the show, but I didn't really realize it was autobiographical to some extent.
And most people...
If they lost their wife, it would be so painful, they would run from it.
And to your point, they'd either run towards church or away from church.
Right.
But they certainly wouldn't talk about it too much publicly.
And you write a book about it, you make it through.
And do three seasons of a show.
Three seasons of a show, a very successful show on it.
And part of the reason the show worked was because you are speaking to how you're coping with your suffering.
Right.
So give us the ABCs.
Give me the Pete Holmes game plan for coping.
For suffering?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's a big question, obviously.
And I want to say in humility, it's a little out of my pay grade, but I'll take a shot at it.
It's the idea, my understanding, is that we don't change if things are working.
Richard Rohr says, when things are working, we don't change.
We need to change.
We need to grow.
And this is not just from the ego level, and this is the big distinction, is let's say that there's the ego level and there's the soul level.
That's a pretty big buy.
I understand that some people are going to go like, well, I'm out.
You lost me.
But Basically, when I say your soul, I just mean your basic awareness.
Like when you're with a little baby.
I have a little baby.
When you're with a three-month baby, they're not selling you a story.
They don't know they're American.
They don't know they're a woman or a girl.
They don't know they're white.
They don't know anything.
They don't know they're separate.
They just are.
Capital A, A-R-E, they are.
When Moses asked God in the Old Testament what his name is, he says, I am.
So God is the quality of being.
and your soul is that pure, unencumbered, unidentified being.
Okay?
So that's what soul is.
We could also just say awareness.
So there's your awareness and then there's what Jung and Freud called your false self, which is the story you tell.
I'm Dr. Oz.
I have a TV show.
I'm American.
I'm this age.
I'm this.
I'm married.
Just this thing that we kind of perpetuate and gives life meaning and it's a fun game to play.
But the real you is the part of your brain that's watching the thoughts, that's hearing the thoughts.
This is what we call your soul.
So in the book, I say, sing happy birthday in your head.
And I go, go on, I'll wait.
And I go, right, that was funny.
Ask yourself, who's hearing that?
That's your awareness.
So again, if I'm losing people with soul, let's just say awareness.
So there's two levels.
There's your ego level and there's your awareness.
When people in this world say, in this world, in this country say, Things happen for a reason.
And spiritual people really love to say everything happens for a reason.
It's very annoying to me because that's not necessarily true.
From the ego level, from the story level, that's not true.
People love to say it, though.
They're like, oh, you lost your job.
But then you got the new job, and that's where you met Lisa, right?
Oh, good ending, right?
Bullshit.
I don't know if you can swear on this show.
But that's not true all of the time.
Like, things don't always tie up in a nice, candy-coated Hollywood, fade to black, swell to music.
On a long enough timeline, you know, your heart's going to stop beating.
You're going to die.
So what was that?
We're just going to edit that out of the movie?
Like...
Things are going to fail or go wrong at some point.
So what are we saying?
I do believe things are happening for a reason, but I don't believe it's the reason of the ego.
I think that is pretty irrelevant.
That's the show.
That's the dance.
That's the play.
But what we're really doing is we're trying to refine and uncover and awaken, the Christian word for this would be to save, salvation, or conversion, our souls, our spirits.
We're trying to remember who we are.
So the summation, as far as I'm concerned, of every mystical tradition, all of them, is very simple.
You are not who you think you are.
You think you're your story.
You are, as St. Francis says, as I already said that, what you're looking for is what you're looking with.
Yeah.
But I want to hear it again.
I say it so much.
It's true.
It's one of my favorite quotes.
What you're looking for is what you're looking with.
So that's who you really are.
That's what you're looking for.
That's God.
That's awareness.
That's being.
That's your place.
That's your dignity.
And the love that we're talking about, it's already looking out your eyes right now.
So, the things that happen in our lives, it's sort of like God or whatever or this, the lawfulness of the universe, rattling your cage a little bit, rocking the boat, saying, Stop clinging.
Stop being so attached.
That thing went wrong in my professional thing, like the thing that made me angry.
Wake up, wake up, wake up.
Get over here.
Get over here.
Stop clinging to the illusion, or what they call maya.
As the Buddhists say, it's on fire.
Everything.
Jesus says, store not your treasure where rust and moth doth corrupt.
Your money, your cars...
Your good memories, it's all on fire.
It's all going away.
What lasts in this world?
Awareness lasts.
There's nowhere you can go that is-ness is not.
And your identification with that...
Is the solution, or at least in my experience, it's helped me lower my anxiety for death?
Because you start to ask yourself, what dies?
What is dying?
I'm not talking about my ego.
I don't think I'm going to die and be like, Pete's in heaven.
Pete's in heaven.
Pete's a good boy.
He made it to the good...
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about an undulating, recycling fountain.
That's how I see the world.
That's how I see the solar system.
That's how I see everything.
It is a fountain, or it's like the ocean.
And our stories are like the waves.
But don't forget, you're the ocean.
You're the ocean.
You crash.
You suck back in.
It's a beautiful, recycling, repurposing, infinite, blah, that we are, we belong.
We don't come into this world, as Alan Watts says, when you have a baby, your producer is pregnant.
When you have a baby, that baby isn't coming into the world, it's coming out of the world.
It is an inherent part, like Taoism, of the lawful nature of reality.
That's the good news.
You are loved.
Love is what's holding you together.
Right now.
It's what's making this, you know, from the scientific perspective, this table and me are made of the same thing.
Molecules.
And Bill Nye did my podcast and I was like, so what is matter?
And he said matter is molecules repelling each other.
And I said, why do molecules repel each other?
And he says, the scientific perspective is we don't know.
Okay?
And I'm not here to say, oh, well, then science is stupid.
I'm saying science is beautiful.
That's great.
We don't know.
That's a mystery.
What I'm saying is the mystics, these traditions, are saying Dante, his definition of God is the love that hung the stars.
I would add to that, it's the love that's making you you and me me because this is just a room of one thing.
If we could see on the molecular level, it's just a swarm of hornets that we call molecules.
And yet here I am.
I'm in this one.
You're in that one.
You're in that one.
It's a game.
It's a dance.
It's a trip.
It's fun.
Play it, but don't get lost in it.
Don't forget that it's one and that you're part of it and that you belong.
God isn't wagging his finger at you and mad that you...
Masturbate or swear or whatever it might be.
It's a story that you're lost in.
And the good news is that you are born in it and a part of it and loved.
This is love.
This is love.
Gravity.
This is love.
This is love.
You just touched me inappropriately.
LAUGHTER There's a video.
You can see.
Watch the video on Facebook.
You've got to get extra credit for theology school for this.
Oh, yeah.
25 years ago.
You'll get two credits.
There's so many places to go.
You want to go first?
No, go ahead.
You mentioned Richard Rohr a few times, who we've become very close to.
Get out!
We've been to his retreats.
No way!
Lisa's parents, Lisa's mom especially, is a source of much wisdom in our lives.
I did Colbert last night.
I brought him the Universal Christ.
Oh my goodness.
And he goes, I've already read it.
I'm like, this is what I'm talking about.
Steve's been through some stuff, right?
Some of this is public, but he didn't talk about it much.
But he had a very difficult childhood.
Yeah, his mother.
And his dad and his brothers in a plane crash.
So how do you come back from that?
It changes how you see the world.
But Richard Rohr, I think, has done a wonderful job awakening us.
I agree.
And again, he's a...
He's a theologian, right?
He's brilliant.
He gets the doctrine, but he can describe in beautiful ways.
And he's inside of it.
You know, I like to be, I'm a comedian, so I'm kind of coming from the outside.
So someone might buy this book because, oh, it's the guy from that show.
And then I'll be like, hey, wow, you're here.
Richard, though, it's even more impactful to somebody like me who left the church because he's got the robe and the rope belt and he does the talks.
He's in it still.
And that makes it even more powerful, I think.
But keep going, I'm so sorry.
And then this broader theme of the meaning behind this, because you mentioned Bill Nye's very wise comment, which is that they're fundamental forces that define a table, our skin, our head, probably much of our brain function, but not necessarily our consciousness.
And the nice thing about religion is that it's trying to answer a different question than science is trying to answer.
Science is asking, what is this?
And religion is asking, why is this?
Right.
That's something I say in the book.
I say, with all respect, I am a benefiter of science.
Science brought me here with directions.
You know what I mean?
Vaccines, all these things, wonderful things.
So it's good to acknowledge that they're dance partners.
They should be dance partners, as my friend Rob Bell writes.
But I wrote in my book, I was like, science is trying to photograph it.
And that's wonderful.
And the mystic is trying to have it sort of pass through you.
We're trying to experience it.
I want to be like a spoonful of sugar stirred up into the universe of the iced tea.
I want to dissipate into it.
And that is an emotional and visceral and spiritual and psychedelic wonderful experience.
I also need the people in white coats going, yeah, but it's also expanding at this rate.
I need that.
So moving beyond science versus religion, then there's religion versus ethics.
Which you do talk about a little bit.
And Richard talks about beautifully.
And my mother-in-law is a minister, actually.
Oh, wow.
And we have these debates.
The classic debate is you're at a four-way stop light, and there's no...
This is not the classic debate.
This is just your obsession.
This is not ethics.
This is nothing.
All right, move away.
Move away.
Justifying his bad traffic habits.
That's all it is.
All right.
Move away from that example.
I'm going to move to an example that Pete used.
No, I'm here.
You're at a four-way stop.
I have to.
And no one's there?
You're at a stoplight.
There's no one there.
Do you illegally pass the light?
That's the question.
It's like an intersection.
Intersection.
And we're in the desert.
Can we be in the desert?
We're always in the desert.
No one's around.
100 miles flatland.
100% you go through.
You go through the light.
She won't.
That's not true.
Would I not?
Lisa won't because it's not the right thing to do.
Because I've never run.
I've done that in New York, driving back for gigs.
Are you so ridiculous?
Some bad neighborhood.
Keep it moving.
Keep it moving.
Like once a week we talk about this.
I love it.
I hate that for you, but I love it for me.
It's fun to watch.
Here's Pete's scenario.
Pete is with many of his stand-up comedians who are atheists.
And one of them in particular you mentioned.
You're at a facility that has an honor bar.
And there are M&Ms there.
Yeah, it was an unmanned market.
So, the question is, if you are not a person of faith, and therefore no one's watching, why not just take the M&Ms and walk away?
Right.
And that was really beautiful for me.
There's a chapter called The Horatheist in my book, which is where I'm briefly an atheist.
I like to say I was a Horatheist because I really enjoyed it.
Because, you know, if you're given the choice between, like, believe that everybody that died in the Holocaust went to hell because they didn't believe what you believed, which is a very heavy thing to say.
Forgive me while you're still laughing at the Horatheist to say such a dark thing.
But if you're given that choice of that belief or the belief in nothing, it's actually way more compassionate and rational and beautiful to be like, well, then I'm out.
I just don't believe in any of this.
So I was very curious, though, why are my atheist friends, I was with two of them, why aren't we stealing these M&Ms?
Why aren't we just taking it?
Who cares?
And we were drinking.
In the mini mart?
Well, it's a hotel that had a minimum.
The alcohol was free, right?
It's an honor bar.
So they didn't take the M&Ms, but they took the beer.
No, no, no.
We were drinking elsewhere.
We came back to the hotel.
The M&Ms were there.
And I said, I was newly atheist, so I was confused.
I was really confused.
I was like, I don't understand.
I had spent so much of my life with this transactional view of love from God, which is like, if then, if I don't steal, then he loves me.
But now I don't believe in God, so I'm like, why not just take these M&Ms?
You just wanted a free pass to be bad.
Yeah, exactly.
And I know a lot of Christians that are like, if I wasn't a Christian, I would see prostitutes or I would do this.
I'd steal.
I'd cheat.
Who cares?
And I'm like, I don't know about that.
I think you're selling yourself short.
I think you're selling your conscious short.
And you're literally just like a lizard thing that's going on.
Empathy that's like built into you.
I don't think you're just going to...
Start doing whatever you want.
Just to have the debate, and again, we're all offering personal opinions.
Much of what serves as ethics in the West came directly out of the monotheistic religions, Christianity in particular in this country.
The Ten Commands.
Sorry?
Ten Commands.
Ten Commands.
Ten Commands, so to tell you what's right and wrong, and you get it, whether you actually read it, as Moses got it.
Our society is built on the Ten Commandments.
So you instinctively have those.
There are other countries, and my show's in 100 countries, so Lisa and I get to travel, and we love going to different places, and it's fantastic, but I'm always stunned by how uniformly we struggle with these same issues, but how different the answers are.
Interesting.
And not all the answers are surprisingly good or bad.
Sometimes the ones that seem bad work better.
It starts to jar you a little bit.
Because how do they figure this out?
A little wacky response, and yet it seems to work for them.
Right.
So the big argument becomes, okay, in every society there are these archetypal vessels, these things that are our ethics, and we've got to pour some fluid in them.
And that fluid is your faith.
Hmm.
It could be Christianity.
It could be capitalism.
Sure.
Right?
It could be many things.
But there's something that you've got to organize life into, belief systems, otherwise you can't get through stuff.
These are meaning-making symbols, and we need meaning.
Absolutely.
And so, in our society, we wouldn't take those M&Ms.
There are probably many societies that they would because they're foolish enough to leave them out, and then they won't leave them out anymore.
Isn't that a Chinese thing?
Isn't that something in China where it's like, if somebody's stupid enough to let you trick them, it's almost like a virtue to trick them?
Yeah.
I don't want to...
That's a billion people I just threw under the bus.
I'm just saying I've heard maybe someone misinformed me.
Is that what's going on with this trade war right now?
Give it a Google.
I don't want to be thrown into this.
Actually, my friends who are Chinese say that in China there's an expectation that you'll be called On cheating.
And it's okay.
It's not an insult.
You just got caught.
You just fix it and you go back and keep doing business.
Oh, interesting.
So don't take it personally.
As opposed to in Japan, shame.
Oh, jeez.
Yeah, no one.
You can leave your camera on the street and go into a museum and then come out and it'll still be there.
And still most societies have an element of, one of the most powerful weapons we have is ostracizing people.
Right.
Shame.
Shame.
And that's why mob rule, which is, you know, sometimes you see here, even in this country, becomes so dangerous.
Right.
Because people are condemned in absentia, which is in upstate New York, a small town.
That is funny!
You heard it a million times.
The walnuts are working.
The walnuts are working.
His brain is working.
Sorry, you've heard it too many times.
Just, you know, there's...
That's crazy.
I want Absentia New York t-shirts on your website.
There's no such place, by the way.
I know, I know.
That's the whole point.
That's what's fun about it.
It was a Mad Magazine joke when I was a little boy.
I know, and you've been telling it since you read it when you were eight.
There's lots more when we come back.
I still don't understand why you're so darn funny, but you are.
No, no, I mean, you are.
I remember meeting you when we were filming Crashing.
Just looking at you is funny.
I appreciate that.
So laughing as I'm looking at your unchiseled features.
That's what you want.
That's what you want.
I think I said that to somebody.
I was like, I'd rather look funny.
We were talking about chiseled features.
I was like, I'd rather look funny.
Zach Galifianakis is the same one.
Zach also.
He'll come up to you and just be like, the bus is late.
And you'll just laugh in his face.
Even though he's lost all that weight, it's not about being doughy.
It's just like some people are just funny, and I always envied that.
So now that people like you see me like that, I'm like, I've done it.
But some people do it.
Zach has that crazy look.
I've got my golden retriever infused on its hind legs.
Have you ever thought of making short...
It's tricky because, you know, comedy is really funny when it's like making fun of something.
It's a little bit difficult.
That's why it was sort of hard for me to cross the hump and start to admit publicly that I am a spiritual person and that I'm interested in the mystical traditions.
Because comedy, we're funnier when we're outside of something.
You know what I mean?
It's funny to make fun of marriage.
It's not as funny to, like, be married.
I am married.
It's funny to make fun of crazy people with kids.
Than to be the person with the kids.
But, like, I'm trying to get...
in.
I like being in.
And when it comes to like sharing deep things, that's why I wanted to write the book.
Cause I can do it with crashing.
Like what you, one of the things I loved was that your line didn't get cut.
Cause that you really, that, that thing.
Cause I would always write these things for the people, especially the guests to say something to blow my character's mind where it's like, you can call it the singularity.
You can call it God.
Are we really going to argue about vocabulary?
So there's just like, what is that?
It's just a little morsel of protein in your chocolate bars.
It's just a comedy show.
It's just chocolate.
But what was that?
Oh, there's some peanuts in there.
Or whatever it was.
Maybe a healthier nut.
Maybe a raw almond.
Well, peanuts aren't really nuts, as you know.
I know, and they're not great.
And you can't eat them raw because they're poisonous.
But we digress.
We digress.
All right, so I'm going to digress.
But I think fiction has a better shot at—I think this is why Jesus spoke in parables.
Like, stories are sometimes better.
I would argue that things like—even, like, pop movies can have that message.
Leave the village.
Challenge authority.
Get broken.
Come back.
Watch any movie.
That's all stories.
That's, like, pretty much, like, the hero's journey.
So you can watch The Avengers, and there's something going on in there where you're like— Yeah.
Iron Man.
The first Iron Man.
So good.
He breaks his heart and he has to build a suit.
That's his new belief system to escape the old way.
It's a resurrection.
It's the Christ story again and again and again and again.
That's actually my next book is about how pop culture is like...
Trying to not just wake up.
Such a good idea.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah.
Well, I'd like to pre-promote that one.
Pre-promote that right now.
You can buy it right now on Amazon.
But before we wrap up, we've done a lot of the God talking.
Did you just put sex in the title to make us buy the book?
No, man.
Can we talk a little bit about sex?
Well, as I mentioned, my marriage ended because of an affair.
That's no sex.
That's not sex.
That's sex with somebody else.
Exactly.
That's hearing about sex.
It should have been comedy, sex, hearsay.
Yeah.
Well, because, as I mentioned, it's like that was the hot sin.
So Richard Rohr, I can't...
If you buy one book, buy The Universal Christ, or buy Falling Upward.
If you buy two books, buy Dr. Oz's newest book.
If you buy three, buy mine.
But the idea is that he says, you know, Christians are obsessed with the sins of the body because you were talking about shame in Abstention New York earlier.
So shame is obviously a huge motivator for our behavior and it's a good way to control people.
And one of the most naturally inherent places, a source, a soft spot to inflict shame is people's bodies.
This is why we wrote the book Everybody Poops.
I mean, like, people are shamed, like, almost immediately.
Like, is this normal?
Then when you bring sexual function into that, it's easy.
It's a low-hanging fruit to make people feel shame about their sexuality.
So Richard Rohr is like, he's so great.
He goes, can't we get off these sins of the body when he's talking about homosexuality or just any sexuality?
That's what he sounds like, too.
Can we just get off it?
I was trying to do it.
I was like, can we get off it, huh?
Huh?
That's right.
These sins, these sins of the body.
But he talked about Paul.
There's this quote that the church loves where he says the sins of the flesh being like the big ones, basically.
And the church took that and ran with it.
And they were like, see, you are bad for looking at that Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue or whatever it is for people.
It could be.
It doesn't matter.
But Richard, I think so wisely, and you know wisdom when you feel it, when it lands on you.
He's like, Paul isn't writing about the sins of the flesh.
He means the false self.
He means the body.
He means the ego.
He means the lie.
And we're back to what we were saying at the beginning.
That's not who you are.
It's the story and the...
I like to think of sin as the static on the radio.
I write in the book that there's nothing you can do that can bring you closer to or further from the infinite love of the divine.
But there are things you can do that increase or decrease your awareness or your experience of that love.
So sin...
It's unconsciousness.
It's just something that you're not woke to yet.
So it's the static on the radio.
And you want that song coming in clean, not so you can be a good boy and get the gold star and be rewarded and be like, I'm Pete and I'm in heaven.
I'm still me and I'm still here.
It's because the song is where the life is.
It's where the juice is.
And I'm not talking about later or on Sunday.
I'm talking about right now as I'm talking to you.
This is it.
We're a part of it.
It's crazy.
It's incredible.
And we get lost and we forget anything.
Your thoughts, just like regular, ordinary, mundane thoughts, could be a sin in the sense that it's yanking you out of the moment.
So that's why we meditate and that's why we, some of the things I talk about in the book, the ways that we practice to stay here because that's where the electricity is.
And there's a bit of a challenge in much of this.
And I get, you know, there's so many points you make that just take them in order.
So the word sin, according to Jordan Peterson anyway, is, and actually this part I know is true, a sin is if you don't hit the target on a bullseye.
That was Richard too.
Richard also said that, yeah.
Richard talking.
So it's actually that you know what to hit, because you've got to figure that out, and then you have to actually hit it.
So there's a competency issue.
You actually have to learn what you're sharing, which I think is incredibly wise, and then you have to work at it, and it's not easy.
And that's the struggle.
And that's the game.
That's the game.
And it's in the game.
It's not a flaw.
We could have been born perfect.
We could have been born in heaven.
You know what I mean?
When I was a kid, I used to be like, why didn't God just make us born in heaven?
We just party?
If this God really wants us to just praise Him, like we go to heaven and we praise Him, why not just make infinite armies of angels to praise you?
It's a bad narrative.
It's a bad story.
We lost the thread.
This is it.
The meaning of life is life.
This is it.
This is the game.
We're learning about ourselves.
We're learning about itself.
Ourself.
And so this is what we're doing.
And the mistakes are part of it.
The suffering is part of it.
I don't tell that to people who are suffering.
Yeah.
And I don't recommend anybody do that.
And if you're suffering, I apologize and I empathize.
I don't apologize, but I empathize with that.
And this message might not be right timed for you.
But, you know, from the global, zoomed out, universal perspective...
It's one thing thinging itself.
It's one thing undulating, just like the ocean, just like anything.
So there's a lot of beauty to be, and a lot of peace to be had in becoming one with that idea.
Just flipping it, and Richard gets into these issues of quite frequent, huh?
Can't we just?
The first half of life is about understanding the rules of engagement.
Building a container.
Building a container.
And the second half is not to keep building the container.
It's to break it.
Exactly.
And to actually play the game.
So I tell our kids, you know, learn your game you're going to play in life.
Cricket, football, basketball.
It doesn't matter.
Find the game.
But then focus on actually the game itself.
Enjoy the...
Then you're going to lose.
And the bigger question we should be asking ourselves is, why would you expect not to have suffering?
I mean, that's...
That's insane.
Yeah.
That's lunacy.
And can you use the game of being Dr. Oz to wake up?
That's why...
Maybe it's weird that I'm a comedian and I'm doing this, but like, it's all.
All of it.
Can you use being a comedian to wake up?
And really, when we say wake up, it sounds like it's over there.
It sounds like it's on the other side of a wall.
It's so much closer than that.
It's as close as the air on your skin.
It's as simple as just going like, all right, it's what's looking out my eyes right now.
It's this.
It's just my story that's in the way.
You've got a very popular podcast.
Yes.
You make it weird.
You made it weird.
Past tense.
Past tense.
I make it weird.
Yes.
And you make it weird.
You made it weird.
Yeah.
So what have you learned today?
Through the conversations you've had that's most memorable?
I mean, endless, endless, endless stuff.
You know, I've had maybe 400, almost 400 guests now.
And if you listen to it, it's really this book slowed down.
It's over five, six, seven years or something.
So you can listen to me basically starting the podcast at a time when I was...
Maybe not really thinking about God.
I was still embarrassed about it, so I wasn't really thinking about it.
And then you can slowly listen to me, like meet a guest who tells me about Joseph Campbell.
And, you know, somebody reached out to me.
I write about it in the book that he emailed me because he was listening to the podcast and he was like, I think you'd like Joseph Campbell.
Joseph Campbell, for those who don't know, is the guy who helped us read mythic literature from the perspective of the people that were writing it.
And myth doesn't mean not true.
It means truer than true or not true.
I always explain, Joseph Campbell, that's where George Lucas got Star Wars from.
That's right.
Hero from a Thousand Faces.
Yeah.
And George Lucas says he got it from Joseph Campbell.
That's right.
I mean, it's it.
You said Hero's Journey earlier.
I mean, it's just part of our vocabulary now.
But that helped me realize that the Bible isn't a textbook.
It's not a scientific text.
The story of Genesis, as Rob Bell says, it's a poem.
It's not an explanation.
It's a story.
A rabbi told me this in Israel.
He was like, it's not to tell us how God created the world.
To tell us that God created the world, which is such a beautiful distinction.
But we go like, well, it was seven days, and this and that, and this came first, and that, and it gave us dominion over the animal.
It's like a story.
It's a story.
You're supposed to feel it.
It's like looking at one of those magic eye pictures.
You're supposed to look past it, and then you see the sailboat.
You know what I'm talking about?
You're supposed to let these stories kind of go through you.
But we spend so much time going like, well, did Jesus really say this?
Or was this?
Why does this gospel?
In the gospel of Mark, Jesus dies and isn't resurrected.
It's just, it doesn't, he dies.
It ends when he's dead.
Why would they include that?
If they were trying to make an airtight, perfect, factual religion, why would they include a gospel where Jesus dies and doesn't come back?
Because that's not the point.
Which story do you need?
Because we're trying to get you here.
God is trying to seduce you.
Which story do you need to the people that are suffering that I was mentioning earlier?
Sometimes you just need a story where the guy dies.
Would you like some solidarity?
He's dead.
Would you like some hope?
Read the next one.
You often mention that you don't run on caffeine and coffee, you run on anxiety.
So what makes you anxious?
I read about it in the book.
There's just like a fundamental...
And I cope with it.
Obviously, we're talking about a lot of the ways that I cope with it.
But if I'm being honest, when I wake up in the morning, especially on days when like...
I love days like this.
I love seeing you guys.
And this is really fun for me.
And I did Colbert last night.
So my false self is shining.
Right.
I'm Pete.
I'm fancy.
My publicist got me a smoothie.
You know what I mean?
Thank you, Kate.
Thank you, Catherine.
Happy birthday.
You made her work at her birthday?
God, that is harsh.
She said this is what she wanted to do for her birthday.
This is your present to her.
She's 26 today.
She'll learn.
Listen, what was I saying?
Anxiety.
But on normal days where I'm not full of myself, the one or two that happen a year, I'll wake up and I gave it a voice.
The voice of my anxiety is saying, what if they get me?
It's just a misfiring of synapses.
Who gets you?
It doesn't matter.
It's just wrong.
My brain is just...
It's just firing something that was designed to keep me alive.
But it's just, what if they get me?
Something's going to get me.
What if it gets me?
Something physical or existential?
It's just...
It doesn't matter.
All of it.
It's just the feeling of...
It's paranoia, basically.
It's anxiety to the level of like...
Just something's wrong.
Although you know what Kissinger told Nixon during Watergate?
What?
Even paranoid people have enemies.
Yeah.
You know what my therapist says?
Paranoid people are correct.
This is powerful.
If you live in LA and you're paranoid about earthquakes, yeah, you're correct.
If you live anywhere...
I think it's funny that people say they're afraid of plane crashes.
I'm like, you're never not on a plane.
This is a plane.
You're in an airplane.
It's called your body.
And as you know, there's about a billion things that could go wrong for no reason at any moment.
So you get off the plane and you're like...
I'm on the ground.
I'm safe now.
Welcome to a stroke.
Welcome to an aneurysm.
Welcome to any millions of things that could happen, small and big.
So, like, you need something better than I'm safe when, because we're all in something that is atrophying.
And this is where...
This is why I wish spirituality and religion wasn't so stupid.
I understand that it is, because it's been co-opted and ruined.
Somebody pooped in the punch bowl.
And I get it.
And I'm trying, like Richard Rohr and Rob and like yourselves, and certainly like Oprah and Deepak and Eckhart, we're trying...
I'm happy to throw my name.
I'd love to be on their side.
Put it in there.
I'm certainly not as great as they are by any means, but these are people that have helped me find fresh water.
You know what I mean?
That one's been ruined, but can we save some of it?
Ram Dass, can we save some of it?
And the answer is yes.
And then when I go, what if they get me?
I can have that extra personal perspective, the soul perspective, where you go, wow.
Pete's really nervous this morning.
Pete's anxious about...
He doesn't even know what he's anxious about.
Who is noticing Pete's anxiety?
Who is the observer?
And that's your real self.
And your observer is fine with all of it.
It's fine with all of it.
Your animal?
Dread.
Panic.
So much going on.
The observer is just going, it's neutral.
It's love.
It's is-ness.
And it's beautiful.
You listed a bunch of people who I respect tremendously.
And most folks who are listening have at least got bits and pieces of their wisdom.
You bring a different approach.
Yeah, I swear more.
You swear more.
You're taller.
You're unchiseled.
The Scooby-Doo of philosophers.
Yes, that's right.
I'm Shaggy.
So what's the future for you?
I mean, your comedic career is thrilling to watch.
And I do believe you'll have and continue to have great success.
But you're probably called to do even greater things than that.
So what does the old Pete Holmes do?
Well, I'm very interested.
Here's what Alan Watts, right?
He has this great thing.
He says that he doesn't like to think of himself as a teacher.
He likes to think of himself as a stream down a mountain.
And you guys can have this.
This is beautiful.
It's not mine.
I took it from him.
Please take it.
I'll steal it.
It's helpful.
He's like, I get up and I talk about these things.
And you know what I'd be talking about if I wasn't doing this podcast with you?
This is 100% real.
I don't, in my life, do comedy.
I don't do routines for people.
But I do have conversations like this constantly with the driver.
Like, if they want to, like, I'm not trying to push myself on them, but I'm curious what they think.
This is what I do.
So Alan Watts is like, I'm just like a stream trickling down a mountain.
If you want to come and drink some, if you're a deer and you want to come and wet your nose, great.
But that's not why I'm doing it.
So I'm doing this because it's what I do.
It's my psychology.
It's my physiology.
It's probably in me physically somewhere.
I just like talking about the mystery.
And I like sharing good news.
It helps me remember it because I forget.
I forget every day.
It's like this, the doubt, and then the whatever.
Then you remember and you're back in the place.
Then you forget because you're grumpy, you didn't eat, you're hangry, whatever.
So I like talking about it because it helps me share some here and now with you guys.
So I'm going to keep doing that.
If people are open to me in this space, that's super exciting.
I'd like to do some live events, maybe add it to my comedy show, do like a second show or an early show where we do the Comedy Sex God Q&A or a conversation because it's just what I like to do.
So I'm going to keep doing what's sort of written on my bones to do.
And it is this stuff.
And this book, you guys know what it's like to kind of branch out into other areas.
I'm kind of like sticking my toe in the door going like, Well, you guys, is this okay?
Because what I'm realizing is nobody's going to tell you, like, you should get in the spiritual circle.
You just do what you do.
And with the book, we'll see if people accept me.
I'm not saying I'm perfect.
I'm not saying I'm righteous.
I'm not saying I'm holy.
Listen to my stand-up or my podcast if you want examples of how Pete is not enlightened.
But the I am that's inside of him is doing just fine.
Anybody, Lisa?
No, I mean, I'm so in awe of really the light that you are bringing to the world.
It's my joy.
Thank you for giving me this conversation and this podcast to do it.
