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May 15, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:28:19

2975 The Truth About David Letterman

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	Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I'd like to talk about a complicated relationship that I think most of us have with comedians and with father figures.
	For those of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s and 80s, there was of course a massive peak of divorces and a lot of times for those of us who had no fathers or absent fathers, The game of spin the media roulette wheel and figure out who could be your father's substitute was a common occurrence.
	And so, much like I did when I talked about Robin Williams, I had a complicated relationship with David Letterman growing up.
	So envy and fear of the caustic nature of his comedy, admiration for his courage, Empathy with his insecurities and so on.
	And just as we'll see in this conversation, David Letterman modeled himself after and yearned to be Johnny Carson.
	Those of us who grew up in the matriarchal manners or the single mom hive of my neighborhoods growing up, often attached to older men.
	And sadly, the closest older men for most of us was through the media.
	And so I'm going to talk about That, but most importantly, we're going to talk about David Letterman, a man who's been involved in the entertainment industry for over 40 years.
	Kind of a divisive and polarizing figure.
	Some people love this sort of affable everyman who caustically poked holes in the vanity and facades of celebrity.
	Others found him to be sort of mean-spirited and caustic and aggressive.
	These are all debatable points, and we'll get into them during this conversation.
	It's really not up for debate what an impact and role he's played in American culture over the course of multiple decades.
	Whether you're a fan or not, everybody knows his name, and his sarcastic wit has left an imprint on generations of observers and wannabes.
	Not the easiest guy to get to know from the outside.
	I mean, all relationships to celebrity are illusory unless you're actually living in the house or somewhere nearby and know them.
	But he's a deeply private man.
	Letterman's relationship with his own celebrity and success is complicated and frankly quite fascinating.
	For a man who...
	Love to take the wind out of pompous and egotistical celebrities or those who dared to take themselves too seriously.
	Letterman, pretty much a workaholic it seems, really obsessed with achieving perfection in his performances, his own worst critic, and also he did leave a trail of broken relationships in his wake or climb to, I think, what can be safely called superstardom.
	So, a polarizing figure, somebody I have a quite complicated emotional relationship to, and you can come down on either side, but let's see if we can dig up the truth about David Letterman.
	David Michael Letterman was born April 12, 1947 in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Harry Joseph Letterman, who was a florist, and Dorothy, a perfectly named secretary for the Second Presbyterian Church.
	David was in the middle sandwiched between two sisters, Janice the youngest and Gretchen the oldest.
	Now, David Letterman's parents were both children of former coal miners, and they left mining, his grandparents, to become farmers in rural Indiana.
	David later described his sort of at-home atmosphere as a sort of cross between father knows best and Leverett Beaver, a kind of lower middle-class family.
	The Lettermans went to church, I think Lutheran church, every Sunday and played an active role in their community.
	Letterman said, my dad had a lot of energy, and he had a lot of ideas and a lot of drive, and he wanted to do things.
	My mother, by comparison, is the opposite.
	She couldn't be more taciturn, very, very quiet.
	You want to take her pulse every few minutes.
	It was a good combination.
	He was the circus.
	He was the show.
	He was the energy.
	He was the battery to which all the cables were hooked.
	Now, when David was five years old, his father barely survived a heart attack.
	His father was only thirty-six.
	And the fear of losing his father haunted Letterman as he grew up.
	As he said, when he got over it, in the back of my mind was this fear that it could happen again.
	Now, his father's florist, flower business, also had problems causing, as he said, a lot of financial tension around the house.
	Not talking about poverty or anything dramatic, Letterman later said, just the ordinary man's struggle to provide for his family, for a decent home, clothes that are in style, summer vacations, and college educations for the kids.
	Now, when Letterman, on the rare times that he did describe his childhood, Letterman said, I was a maniac.
	From the time I was six until I was 16, there wasn't a peaceful minute.
	I was always picking fights, starting trouble.
	I don't think there was a single meal where my mother didn't have to say, All right, David, if you can't behave, take your plate and eat outside.
	Now, Seeing his father almost die when he was five and then at six starting to pick fights and so on strikes me.
	I'm no psychologist, just a guy with curiosity.
	But it strikes me that if the mother is very taciturn and the father is disabled, in a lot of these kinds of households, there's, you know, when there's a near miss, well, he's okay now, so let's not talk about it anymore.
	And I think this lack of communication about little David's feelings with regards to the near death of his father Probably got acted out in some ways.
	He had no place to put his emotions, no one to connect to, no one to talk to about his fears about his father, which strike a boy differently than they would strike a girl.
	And I would imagine that had a lot to do with his acting out, my guess anyway.
	And there were some troubling characteristics or activities of Letterman's childhood.
	When he was eight, he and his friends brought mirrors up to their tree fort, which was located just off a street, and they used it to reflect sunlight directly into the eyes of drivers driving down the road and temporarily blinded the drivers, and they nearly caused...
	Several accidents.
	That is not the healthiest occupation for a boy, and these kinds of acting out, you know, there is that old cliche, it's like a cry for help.
	I think there is something in that.
	These kinds of behaviors are a cry for attention, that something is, some fundamental need is not being met in the child.
	As an adult, Letterman did admit that his mother, when she was young, was whipped with a razor strap for misbehaving, but he was only spanked.
	And I've got a lot of shows.
	One's called The Truth About Spanking.
	I've got interviews with Elizabeth Gershoff and other specialists within the field, Alison Gopnik and so on.
	And spanking is really, really hard on children.
	And, of course, it would have been hard on David as well.
	So, television caught Letterman's eye from a young age, and he greatly admired Johnny Carson, the eventual host of The Tonight Show.
	Now, for those who don't know, Johnny Carson was the cool—he was like, I guess, the George Clooney of his generation.
	He was the coolest guy around, self-possessed, funny, handsome, and seemingly, to a lot of people, had the best job in the world.
	Watching Carson on a network television quiz show called Who Do You Trust?
	ignited in young David an interest in a television career.
	He said, there was one guest who balanced a lawnmower on his chin and Carson just made fun of him.
	I thought, what a great way to make a living.
	And this to me is very interesting, the degree to which real career arcs, entire life directions can be crystallized And focused by one coincidental or drive-by viewing of something when you are young.
	And it can really shape your whole life, the degree to which these early instances can form you.
	He said, when I was a kid in adolescence, I didn't see much of my father because he was at work all day, working very hard.
	He owned a flower shop that was not as successful as it could have been, maybe.
	And it just beat him silly.
	So when I would get to see The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, I saw a guy there who looks great, who had a suit on, had a great looking tie, interviewing beautiful women, smoking a cigarette.
	I don't want to diminish my father's role in my formative years, but you saw in your father a hard-working guy who was just trying to stay ahead of things.
	You saw in Johnny Carson, oh my God, Jesus, look at this guy!
	And that sort of, he was like the James Bond of television in the 60s.
	And yeah, seeing your dad kind of get beat up by life is really tough.
	Now, if David's parents caught him lounging around watching television, they would make him go outside, as he said, and do something real.
	Letterman said, again with Letterman, you never know where the comedy is and where the deflection away from vulnerability is.
	Letterman said that his mother Dorothy regarded television as, and I quote, the work of Satan.
	So, she did have a pulse sometimes, a bit of a scary pulse, but...
	So Dave got very interested in broadcasting very early, but this was kind of at odds with what his mother found acceptable.
	And this trend kind of continued throughout his life, I guess, until he borked her into doing parts of his show later on.
	Letterman said, when I was a kid, I never really went to the movies.
	In my house, going to the movies was pretty much equated with as big a waste of time as you could come by as a human.
	Now, of course, one of the reasons that celebrities go on Letterman's show is he's got the audience that they want to reach to announce their projects, their movies, their books, their perfumes, their whatever.
	And so it's sort of interesting to me that...
	His mother says, and his father said, I imagine more his mother than his father would say, movies are the work of the devil, and television is the work of Satan, and it's a huge waste of time, and then he basically helps promote movies.
	Nothing like a 40-year reaction formation.
	And the one exception in the Letterman household to the evils of television was the Ed Sullivan Show.
	Letterman said, every Sunday night at my house we'd have dinner early and then we finished dinner and watched the Ed Sullivan Show.
	Ed used to have this habit of, come on now, let's really hear it for him.
	And my mother used to say, I don't like the way Ed begs the audience for applause.
	So she was completely standoffish by that.
	And, you know, there's an old joke about how do you give an actor CPR? Well, you know, those of us in the public sphere, we do like our accolades.
	That's how you know whether you're doing a good job.
	It's just how you measure.
	Y'all measure yourselves, perhaps, by the number of people you sleep with, or maybe you measure yourself by the amount of dollars that you have.
	But those of us out there trying to make a connection in the public sphere, we take our Applause our feedback as the validation of what we're doing, or at least that we're reaching some people.
	The Ed Sullivan Show was approved family viewing, and Johnny Carson pretty much the coolest guy around, so it's not too shocking that Dave Letterman would yearn for a career that would give him a similar kind of validation.
	Now, Letterman Not the most diligent student within the confines of the traditional school system.
	My parents and I had huge fights, he said, of my grades, which were mostly C's and D's.
	And this, you know, I have real sympathy for this kind of parenting.
	You know, people who come from, like, minors and farmers and so on don't often get a lot of the more sophisticated or mature parenting styles, wherein when you have conflicts with your children, you...
	Talk it out.
	You figure out what's wrong with the school.
	Or, you know, why are you fighting from the age of 6 to 16 with every sentient life form in the house?
	You sort of try and figure out, tease it out of the kid, find out what's going on.
	But that basically was just a hammer and a nail approach to parenting problems, at least when I was growing up.
	I'm certainly not as old or a billionth as famous as Dave Letterman.
	But we didn't grow up wildly far apart.
	I think he's about 19 years older than I am.
	And Letterman's sisters did really well in school, so that made it even more stressful when he would come home with his bad marks.
	Minor rant.
	Minor rant, if you don't mind.
	I mean, because government schools really work well for girls and not so much for boys, right?
	Because boys like to go out and be active and do things and engage and learn.
	But, you know, having everyone sit in a row like zombified sardines while some Woman squeaks up there with a chalkboard.
	I mean, it's just a sure way of provoking nose picking and ADHD in boys and smiling superior compliance in girls.
	Not for everyone, but the fact that his sisters did well in a school that was driving him completely insane is not too shocking.
	He said, my sisters were both good students and I was the disappointment in my high school.
	There was a top 10% on the honor roll, a bottom 10% stealing cars, and a middle 80% where I was just going through the motions.
	Certainly the case for me, too.
	I mean, I took my books home every night, never did a stitch of homework, and I was just going through them.
	I hated being in school.
	I'm sure that it was similar for Dave.
	You do just go through the motions.
	You do the bare minimum you can do to get to the next grade.
	I love to learn now, and once I got to graduate school, I was enthralled with learning at my own desk, in the library.
	I could take books out for as long as I wanted.
	I just buried myself in learning.
	But school is not particularly government Junior high and high school is not that way.
	He said, there was a period in high school, and maybe that's when it comes for everybody, when you sort of had to figure out who you were.
	You think, well, I'm not fitting in with this group, the really desirable blue chip group.
	And not fitting into that group, many start examining your own inventory and think, is there anything I can do that is going to make me desirable or make me different?
	Early on, I realized I had this one little tool.
	I can make people laugh.
	Now, I talked about this in the Robin Williams conversation.
	The Truth About Robin Williams.
	We'll put a link to it below.
	Me plus.
	This idea that in order to gain your attention or the attention of those around me, I have to be me plus something, you know, plus physical beauty, great singing voice, great athletics, great hair.
	Like, I have to be something that is other than just, you know, the simple essence, as the fool in King Lear says, you know, the bare forked animal called a human being, my essence, my personality, my individuation, who I am as a human being.
	That is not enough.
	Nobody's going to eat cake with no icing and I have to develop something that's going to get people to give me attention.
	I think if you have genuine connections at home, You don't need that.
	I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad for six years and my daughter does not need to impress people.
	She doesn't go out there and feel like she needs to be me plus.
	She's got great skills, great abilities, very smart, but she doesn't need to put on a show.
	Now, this idea that you've got to put on a show of some kind, some sort of mating display or social status display is really common.
	We talked about this with Robin Williams, and it seems to me that this is how Dave brought attention to himself.
	How was he going to get people's attention?
	Well, he wasn't great looking, he wasn't really tall, he wasn't a great athlete, he didn't have a fast car, he didn't have a rich family, so...
	He can make people laugh.
	He said, sophomore year in high school, I signed up for a public speaking course.
	The first day, you were supposed to get up and extemporaneously speak for five minutes.
	Everybody's twitchy and sweaty and worried about this, as was I. And then, when I got up there, the nervousness and the twitchiness and everything dissipated.
	I love it.
	And I thought, oh my god, maybe this is a way I can distinguish myself.
	This is how I'm going to get attention.
	That to me, I mean, I don't want to make this about me, but I gave a speech a little while back in Amsterdam that was going out to like 40,000 people.
	And I lost my speech before I went up.
	I completely lost my speech.
	And I hadn't memorized it.
	And so I just...
	But it's fine.
	It's fine.
	So he said, I was not good in math or chemistry, and I realized that athletics were not going to make me wealthy.
	The only thing that came to me easily was English, writing and public speaking.
	I started to think, is there any way that I can practically apply this to my life?
	I mean, outside of the shop, because that's pretty rare.
	I think it means a flower shop.
	You don't need to be doing something that involved heavy lifting.
	Don't look for that kind of work.
	Look for something you can do easily.
	In high school, even David's school work showed signs of his personality.
	So, in his class, there was an assignment which was, you know, write about someone else's significant life event, and Dave wrote a story describing a man who committed suicide by swallowing Paper towels.
	As a biographer noted, it was the kind of response that makes a teacher wonder whether to give an A-plus for his creativity or send him off for immediate professional help.
	I took a class on Marxism, caused the rise of capitalism and a socialist response.
	And for my exam, I wrote a play.
	I was in the play, I just wrote a play between a capitalist and somebody from the newly risen Atlantis.
	And I did all right.
	In high school, Letterman was of course struggling not only academically but also socially and emotionally.
	He said, I had two or three friends.
	We made fun of anything we couldn't do.
	I was never with the really good-looking kids and I was never with the really great athletes, but there was always a small pocket of people I hung out with and all we did was make fun of the really good-looking people and make fun of the really smart kids and make fun of the really great athletes.
	Now, this being on the outside, this sort of beta frustration and beta rage, this being on the outside and looking at all the cool people, you know, like the beer commercial where everyone's in a bikini and having fun and a barbecue and so on, that's not a door you can open and go through.
	That's like a TV screen that you bump your head against.
	You can't open that portal and go into that fun world that you perceive everyone else is having.
	And there is, of course, this idea, which insecurity really feeds on, which is that, you know, the pretty people are just having a great life, and everything's perfect for them.
	And, of course, the pretty people are neurotic about being pretty, and there's someone else who's more pretty, and they're tempted to have their me plus be prettiness, which means that over time it's going to decay, and nobody likes me for me, and I can't give up this, you know, dangling anger fish light to draw the fish in to get attention.
	Like, that's really hard.
	Really hard.
	Oh, the models, they're having such a great life.
	What a wonderful existence.
	It's like, well, yeah, I get a pimple.
	Who cares, right?
	A model gets a pimple.
	She might lose $10,000 and not get a call back next time.
	Really stressful.
	And, you know, athletes are constantly worried about injury and competition and all that kind of stuff.
	So there is this fantasy that people have that on the other, you know, grass is green.
	And on the other side, in that clique, man, they're having a great time.
	And the reality is...
	I just think of the guy in...
	Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, the guy who was number one and the coolest guy in high school.
	Oh, that's the so delicious part about going back to your high school reunion, which I did quite by accident, just driving past.
	And, yeah, seeing all the people who were the super coolest and where they ended up, oh, it's quite a relief.
	So, what's interesting to me is that David Letterman often was in the position in his comedy...
	You didn't know, like with Larry Bud Melman, who was a strange guy who turned out to be an actor who would come on and say stuff and seem completely spaced out and crazy.
	People didn't know if that was a joke or not.
	In other words, now you're outside the Letterman comedy universe and you don't know if it's a joke or not.
	And so now he's putting you on the outside looking in to where they're having fun and you're not sure whether you're part of the joke or the butt of the joke or supposed to laugh at it.
	So it's funny how these things just kind of reverse in people's lives.
	So he goes on to say, you know, we weren't the honor society, so we made fun of the honor society.
	And yet we weren't stealing cars, so we made fun of the guys stealing cars.
	We couldn't do much.
	My grades weren't good, and the guys I hung out with, their grades weren't really good.
	And we couldn't go out with the really good-looking girls.
	We would egg their houses.
	We'd find the best-looking girl, and without ever asking her out, we'd just assume she wouldn't go out.
	We'd just go egg her house.
	On theory, you know, just, hell, screw you!
	I know you're not going to go out with me, so we'll egg your house.
	And sort of a semi-famous interview that he gave or a conversation he had with Paris Hilton on his show after she'd come out of jail.
	And she was there to promote her perfume.
	And he, I will link to this below as well, he was just like, what was jail like?
	What did you eat in jail?
	Did you make any friends in jail?
	Just hammer, hammer, hammer.
	And that's the verbal equivalent, I would say, of exactly what he's talking about here.
	Go egg the house of the really good-looking girls.
	This course wasn't the last time the beautiful or popular would become David's targets.
	Reflecting on his time in high school, he did say, not the best time of my life.
	I was very shy.
	He was on the freshman basketball and reserve track teams in the school band for two years and also joined Ripples, a school organization which put on a comedy show annually.
	But he found performing in public to be too nerve-wracking.
	He never even wrote a skit for the event.
	Oddly enough, I have no way to put this piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
	If you can tell me how it fits, I'd love to.
	I can't do it.
	I can't find a way to fit it.
	Letterman was a dedicated hall monitor.
	For all four years of his high school tenure, he preserved order in the corridors of his high school.
	Now, Letterman has admitted to having a serious drinking problem when he was younger.
	He says he started drinking at the age of 13, prompted by a desire to be accepted, to do the things everyone else was doing, and the need to dull the social anxiety and the pain he felt from being rejected by his peers.
	Now that's pretty early for drinking, and there does seem to be a theory, if you believe it or not, Put it out there.
	There's a theory which says that when you start self-medicating through alcohol or drugs or something like that, or promiscuity, if you start self-medicating for anxiety, your emotional development just comes to a halt.
	Because instead of, like, you know, if you've got a toothache and you take heroin, well, your tooth doesn't hurt anymore, but you're not going to a dentist.
	You're not dealing with the pain.
	You're not changing your behavior to fix whatever is going wrong or is painful within you.
	So when you self-medicate, because you're slipping past the need to grow through pain, your emotional development really gets arrested.
	And I think there is that sense of perpetual adolescent in David Letterman with some other comics as well.
	But I found this in particular with David Letterman.
	I think that there is an aspect of, you know, he drank for quite a while, 10 or more years, really solidly, at least later on, drinking in the morning and so on.
	And then he started to become famous.
	And so, you know, alcohol is a form of self-medication.
	Fame is a form of self-medication.
	It isolates you from necessary pain sometimes.
	And I think that's one of the reasons why it took him until later in life to go to therapy, to really figure out what he was all about, really after the sex scandal, which we'll get to a little later.
	So Letterman originally wanted to attend Indiana University, but grades didn't quite make it.
	He said, I'd have to maintain a C average my freshman year, and I figured there's no way I can do that.
	So in 65, he enrolled in Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.
	He said, in college, my friends and I pretty much structured our week around obtaining beer for the weekend.
	The big thing was to get as drunk as possible as early in the day as possible so you'd be conscious for the least amount of time.
	College enables young people to be stupider longer with minimal jeopardy.
	And, of course, this adolescence just goes on and on in modern Western culture.
	I had Gabor Maté, a brilliant writer and physician, on the show recently, and he said that one of the things that people are afraid of is their own minds.
	And this drinking to not be conscious, drinking to not be yourself, this form of self-erasure is really interesting and really tragic.
	You know, I mean, we don't know enough about his childhood to know exactly what might have happened to drive this discomfort but the self.
	But I think that there was a lot of unmentoring in Dave Letterman's childhood.
	I mean, his father, as he said, was away a lot, and his mother was basically an emotional corpse, as he sort of described, you have to check her pulse.
	And so I think he grew up extraordinarily untutored, unmentored by his parents.
	And this is why, of course, he turned to mentoring from pretty much...
	Celebrities are, in essence, fictional characters for most of us, right?
	And so I think he turned a lot to...
	Johnny Carson, because everybody needs a template.
	You know, Howard Rourke.
	Everybody needs a template of how they're going to be.
	I mean, the possibilities for human beings to do what they want with their lives, they're so infinite.
	In this kaleidistopic chaos of liberty known as the Western farm of opportunity, you can do anything.
	What are you going to do?
	What are you going to do with your life?
	Everybody needs some kind of template.
	And if you don't get it from your parents, then it sounds like he did not want to do what his father did, and he certainly didn't want to be like his mother.
	And so I think there was this fighting, and I think a lot of the aggression from 6 to 16, plus the drinking, was this incredible frustration of, who the hell am I going to be?
	And he defined himself early, and I think this really followed him, like a shark after some stowaways.
	I mean, it really followed him to define himself in the negative.
	In envy, in spite, in teardowns, which hides a deep yearning for everything that you are tearing down.
	Oscar Wilde said, a cynic is somebody who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
	And I think that is this fleeing from the self.
	And this grand untutoring that happened that started really in the 50s, late 50s, early 60s, into the 70s, this untutoring of the young.
	It's one of the reasons why there's been such wonderful creativity that has come out of this generation.
	Amazing stuff.
	Really hierarchy, tearing down stuff.
	Really electric, comedic stuff.
	You can see this coming out of people like George Carlin and this sort of beautiful, kaleidoscopic, firework-up-the-nose, anarchic comedy of Robin Williams.
	There's this great creativity.
	You take off mentoring and tutoring and everything becomes possible except identity.
	And I think that's perhaps, if I had to put out a guess, what he was trying to drink away.
	He also smoked marijuana but gave that up after six months.
	He had this terrifying experience.
	He said, I remember one night when I smoked down a big joint I went downstairs and ate two pints of Haagen-Dazs, an ice cream brand, and went back to bed.
	An hour later I woke up and thought my heart had stopped.
	The next day I went to a cardiologist and said, I think my heart stopped last night.
	He said everything was fine, but that was the end of my pot experience.
	Now, his father When he was five, almost died of a heart attack.
	So this would be, I think, a manifestation of his greatest fear of mortality.
	Now his mother, Dorothy, was worried that David wasn't applying himself and that his silly dream of becoming a broadcaster was standing in the way of him pursuing something more sensible like accounting or engineering.
	I like David Letterman a lot.
	He's pretty much the last guy I'd ever want doing any kind of accounting for me.
	Now, his mother was strongly opposed to David's path, but his father quietly supported his ambitions.
	Again, this disconnect between the parents shows up.
	And so he encouraged Dave's antics, and he didn't demand improved grades.
	But his mother scoffed at the idea that David would someday earn a living with his current behavior, because he was studying, you know, film, radio, television, and so on in school.
	And I think it was Jung who said, nothing has a greater effect on a young person than the unlived lives of his parents.
	Nothing has more effect on a young man than the unlived life of his parents.
	Of his father.
	Now, he said that his father was this electric, energetic, charismatic, stuck in a grinding, dull job in a flower shop.
	And it seems that, and you can see this with Steve Martin and his father as well, if you read Steve Martin's autobiography, which is well, well worth reading.
	It seems to me that his letterman's father may have been a thwarted performer and therefore he had, I think, the grace and maturity to encourage his son's ambitions in that area.
	Letterman began his broadcasting career as an announcer and newscaster at the college's student-run radio, WBST, a 10-watt, non-mega-powered campus station, which is now part of Indiana Public Radio.
	I actually started in radio at college as well.
	He was paid a buck and a quarter an hour as a DJ. If you asked the management present during his tenure, they would describe him as an administrative problem.
	DJ Letterman's time slot was the sign-on show that ran from noon till 3pm, but the host was frequently late.
	Letterman later admitted, I wasn't a very reliable employee, and if you're not, you must end up working for yourself.
	He was eventually fired for treating classical music with irreverence and adding his own commentary between the musical selections.
	I remember playing The Clap, which is a song by, yes, an incredibly fast guitar song by Steve Howe, halfway through.
	Ah, my fingers are melting!
	So he said about his radio gig, this was my first outlet, my first place to just go and talk, and I loved it.
	He met Michelle Cook, a very attractive yet quiet music major early in his college term.
	And his relationship with her became serious very quickly.
	A lot of pent-up sexual energy, I would imagine.
	So if she was almost six feet in height, immediately David hits her with an endless knee-shaking barrage of tall jokes.
	And apparently this won her over as a supporter and also turned her into his biggest fan, which was really, I think, why we've ever heard of him at all.
	And this, you know, she's tall, cut her down to size.
	This is very typical of this kind of humor.
	And they actually both got married while they were still in school.
	She became a waitress, and he started working at a, quote, real radio station, and then he got a summer job at an ABC TV affiliate in Indianapolis.
	Now, this of course was all while the Vietnam War started by Kennedy and eventually concluded by Nixon was boiling its horrifying way through the American political and media and emotional And he felt incredibly, Letterman felt incredibly isolated from this whole Vietnam thing.
	There were war protests that were raging through Ball State.
	He said, I was only vaguely aware of the political turmoil of the time.
	It was a lot different from being at Berkeley.
	We were pretty well protected, he said.
	Quite honestly, the only protest that I ever was involved with was we thought maybe we could get the cafeteria cooks to wear hairnets.
	I was hardly aware of the Vietnam War until a friend of mine flunked out and was drafted and was dead.
	Like that.
	One day he's a guy setting fire to the house mother's pantyhose and the next day he's gone.
	That got my attention.
	He graduated in 1969 from what was then the Department of Radio and Television.
	Radio and TV, he said, were perfect for me.
	A lot of people came to study to be a teacher, and then they had trouble finding a teaching job.
	Some study animal husbandry, and there are very few animals that need husbands.
	But for me, it was just practical experience, and I was able to turn it into a career.
	So I have no doubts about the benefits of being at Ball State.
	So though Letterman did register for the draft and passed his physical after graduating from college, he was not drafted for service in Vietnam because of receiving a draft lottery number of 352 out of 366.
	It meant he was very unlikely to be called.
	And just by the by, I mean, step into sort of a larger socio-political narrative for just a second with your indulgence.
	There was this great irony and tragedy, I think.
	So with the Second World War in Europe, a lot of leftist intellectuals, some more conservative, some Austrian economists and so on, but a lot of leftist intellectuals fled Europe and came to settle in America where they got jobs in Europe.
	American universities.
	And then with the GI Bill, a lot of that very left-wing infection from intellectuals that were fleeing the war in Europe and persecution, of course, in Europe, those leftist intellectuals infected a whole bunch, let me get too technical here, a whole bunch of the GIs through the GI Bill, which subsidized or made free college education for GIs.
	And then the G.I.s absorbed all of these leftist influences.
	They passed them down through to their children, which resulted in, you know, sex love, hippiness, and...
	Positive steps towards racial egalitarianism in the 1960s.
	And there was a second wave of infection of leftist ideologies.
	And please understand, leftism has some very positive aspects to it, particularly criticism of imperialism and so on, and its focus on civil rights.
	But it was kind of indoctrinated.
	I mean, I went through this in Canadian universities.
	It doesn't have the better arguments.
	They just have...
	They hold the marks in the professorship so they have more indoctrination capacity.
	But then, of course, a lot of the young people in America stayed in college and continued in college and went to college who might otherwise not have gone simply because it got them out of the draft.
	And that was another round of infections that hit in America.
	And I think that's why a lot of the media It's kind of on the left, right?
	Because a lot of these guys went through college and they're really influenced by the GI Bill and by fleeing draft in the 60s, which got huge pumpings of leftism into the psyche of a lot of people who ended up in the media.
	And Letterman's politics, I mean, he says he's kind of apolitical, doesn't really know much about this stuff.
	He seems more on the liberal side to me, just watching his debates with Bill O'Reilly and so on.
	He did give money to Al Franken, who is a crazy liberal.
	But, of course, Al Franken was another comic, and they were probably friends, so that probably had more to do with that.
	Just kind of ironic that the America was off fighting left-wing-driven communism in Vietnam, and what was happening was, to flee, fighting over in Vietnam, a lot of young Americans hid out in college where they were infected with the kind of same virus that was playing out in, anyway, Vietnam.
	So...
	He said about his high draft number, he said, at the time, I didn't know how lucky I was.
	I felt guilty because I had friends who had gone, and I had friends who had been in the Marine Corps, and I just felt like, why me?
	These guys went, why shouldn't I go?
	Then it dawned on me pretty quickly that I had been among the really, really lucky.
	Now, Letterman has said that he's basically driven by huge steaming piles of Lutheran guilt, that his fundamental fuel is guilt, and...
	For those, and I don't count myself among this number, but for those who don't know or didn't experience the degree to which the draft and Vietnam raced through and erased swaths of U.S. society, 70,000 to 80,000 people killed, Americans killed in Vietnam, untold numbers, I don't know the exact number, but significantly higher, who were wounded in Vietnam.
	There's a lot of survivor guilt for people who didn't get called up because most people knew someone or knew someone who knew someone who was drafted and facing death or did in fact die.
	A lot of survivor guilt in this situation.
	That's hard.
	In the Second World War, a lot of guys went.
	Most guys went.
	Korea was smaller.
	Vietnam was much more significant.
	And, of course, it was the first televised war where you could actually see the carnage up front.
	It wasn't just medals and taps and flags being folded nicely.
	nicely you could see the blood and guts which is why the american military has had such tight control over the um media in war ever since and of course uh because in in the second world war like a tiny percentage of soldiers actually ever ended up firing their weapons mostly just threw them away and hid
	and so vietnam was where they really broke the soldiers and turned them into as you know as as george chomping and foliage eating a set of sociopaths as they could possibly manufacture to make sure And they got the participation rate way up in terms of shooting and killing people from World War II. But at the expense of, like, people say, well, why did Vietnam vets have a tough time reassembling into society or returning to society?
	Because in the Second World War, they didn't break human beings and reassemble them as, like, evil robots of domination.
	But in Vietnam, it was a huge cost...
	Emotionally and intellectually because they really had to make you willing to pull that trigger and very few people really want to pull that trigger and explode someone else into a column of red mist.
	So this guilt, it's hard to sort of understand if you don't have any of that kind of survivor guilt of having a lucky high number in the draft.
	After college, he returned to Indianapolis with his wife, hoping to get a full-time job At the TV station he worked at over the summer.
	This is kind of funny.
	The station kept him on a temporary basis.
	They said, okay, Danny, if you can hang around here, just until we replace you, find somebody that we like.
	So for six months, he had to basically watch people audition for the position that he had.
	But in the end, the program director never found anyone quite to his liking.
	Possibly Letterman got better.
	And so he got the job permanently.
	As he commented, he said, I just sort of got it through attrition.
	Now, his drinking problem during this time, from sort of 13 onwards, he said, four years of drinking in the morning is enough for anybody, unless you're looking at it as a career.
	That said, I got a job as a TV announcer in Indianapolis.
	I had to get there early to sign on, so that was the end of my all-day consumption.
	One of his assignments was a Saturday special, Clover Power, dedicated to letting central Indiana know all about the achievements of children and the 4-H youth organization.
	And he did admit that what he did as the host was basically make fun of the little kids.
	He said, I mean, there's not much else you can do.
	You'd have a kid with a bad complexion plugging a cord into a socket, watching a light bulb light up.
	And then you had to talk to him for 10 minutes about it.
	It was so unnatural.
	So you had to say, I'll be damned.
	You're kidding.
	It really lights up like that.
	So he did participate in a bunch of other programs.
	He's probably best remembered during this time for his gig as a replacement weatherman.
	He said, I used to like to make up cities and circumstances that didn't exist and describe devastation that didn't occur.
	I thought that was a high form of entertainment.
	Looking back on it, it probably wasn't funny, but I enjoyed using television for the purpose of disseminating false data.
	He said, and you can sort of see the ambition.
	Ambition tortures the able until...
	They exercise it to its full extent.
	He said, I could have become one of any number of guys who have stayed on in any market in the country.
	There are guys who've been on for 25 years.
	They become Fred Heckman, who's a prominent broadcaster in Indiana.
	They become dean of this and the dean of that, and they speak at the Rotary Club, and the next thing you know, they're dead.
	And that is, you know, kind of torture.
	When you have great capacities, an ordinary life is very tempting to be the target of your condescension.
	It's very tempting to be scornful towards those who don't have greater.
	But, you know, I mean, if you have a great singing voice, Is it really fair to be scornful of people who are battling their way through something in karaoke?
	I don't think so.
	I mean, you happen to be blessed with a great voice.
	Some people, most people aren't.
	But this idea that, oh, you know, you become dean of this and dean of that, speak at the Rotary Club, and then you're dead.
	It's easy to feel scorn and contempt for that if you have the kind of capacities that...
	David Letterman have.
	And that's not just comedy.
	I mean, lots of funny people in the world.
	The capacity that David Letterman had, he's got to be a leader.
	He's got to run a team.
	He's got to negotiate network stuff.
	He's got to understand how to work the audience.
	He's got to understand the demographics of the audience.
	You've got to be more than just a funny guy.
	Lots of funny guys, you know.
	But to actually run a show like that is a significant amount of leadership and teamwork and so on.
	So he was repulsed by this idea of ending up like Fred Heckman.
	So he sent videotapes to bigger stations all around the country, but he got nothing.
	So he said, okay, well, maybe I'll try radio.
	It's a better fit.
	So he said, with regards to radio, he said, this was my fantasy, being able to communicate with folks without the unspeakable trauma of having them right there in the same room scrutinizing me.
	Yeah, I've done some radio too.
	I like the live speeches myself, but radio is interesting because you can only really guess what the response is to what you're saying.
	So he left Channel 13, took a job in Indianapolis at a radio station, and it all fell apart.
	He just realized he was not at all suited for the job.
	He said, I hated it.
	I was miscast because you have to be somebody who is fairly knowledgeable, fairly glib, possessing a natural interest in a number of topics.
	That certainly is not me.
	I don't care about politics.
	I don't care about the world economy.
	I don't care about Martians cleaning our teeth.
	The Nixon Watergate nonsense was the perfect example of something about which I knew nothing and couldn't care less.
	All I wanted to do was get home at the end of the day and drink beer.
	So, as Les Letterman typically did when faced with work he found unrewarding, he started to provoke people and inflame emotions.
	He once infamously told listeners that the local 230-foot-tall Soldiers Monument, which was the focal point at the center of the city, had been sold to Guam, whose government intended to paint it green, in honor of their national vegetable, asparagus.
	A segment of his audience began fiercely protesting this false news story.
	Letterman found this, of course, enormously entertaining.
	And again, this is like you're on the outside, you don't even get the joke.
	You're on the outside looking in, and I'm going to mock you for not getting the joke, which is a very funny joke, to be honest.
	Now, he also had a habit.
	He said many years later in an interview with Oprah that he has a very low threshold for embarrassment.
	And then she said, well, but you really enjoy putting other people into embarrassing spots.
	Why is that?
	He's like, haha, you and my psychoanalyst or my psychiatrist, you and me as psychiatrists should get together and talk about that someday.
	Deflection, deflection.
	But he would grab unsuspecting production assistants and yank them and put them on air.
	You know, here's the mic.
	Don't let me have dead air.
	That's fatal.
	And he would create imaginary personas for them, which were embarrassing for them.
	One young woman would be...
	Supposedly engaged in multiple love affairs where he'd take some really shy and aloof young guy and introduce him to say, okay, give the audience cool guy tips.
	And then the guy would be like, right?
	And this he would find very amusing.
	So this sort of infliction of your own worst nightmares on other people has a sort of mildly gapped-toothed tiny bit of sadism to it.
	And...
	Letterman has spent a good deal of time apologizing to people who've been on his show for their discomfort, but he does seem to be kind of drawn back to it.
	He'd also announce that celebrities had gotten married and then they'd get deluged with well wishes and gifts and so on.
	And so he would change, like people would call up and mention some local official and he would say that they were pronouncing the name wrong and attack them for their carelessness even though they were pronouncing it right.
	So he had lots of gags at the expense of other people.
	So he was allowed to be more creative than he was in television, but he really began to like the job less and less.
	He said it was a very difficult period in his life.
	Listen to the guy, except for maybe the last little tiny bit.
	There's hardly a period in his life that he's ever described as joyous.
	1974.
	Harry Joseph Letterman, his father, died of a second heart attack at the age of 57.
	David was devastated.
	His death was horrible to me.
	Just horrible.
	It was awful.
	And early on in his television career, when he was asked about his background, Letterman would say, My mother's still working, but my dad is dead, so he does precious little anymore.
	And, you know, if you've got a lot of pain, making jokes about it is quite typical.
	I do a call-in show and people often laugh about things that are really quite tragic.
	And if you've not had a great connection with your father, then your father's death means the end of any possibility for that to occur.
	It's, you know, an old cliché and so on, but I think it's very true.
	That if you still have hope that at some point, and then you get mad at yourself, because how much time did I waste making fun of people, making silly jokes, pretending it was raining in Mordor or whatever he was doing, rather than calling up my dad and having a meaningful conversation with him.
	Now he's dead, and I never got to, you know.
	Next thing you know, you're in some song called The Living Years or whatever, right?
	So...
	He said, I have pictures of my father in my house.
	I look at him and see myself.
	Now that's interesting because he does not ever claim to have been close to his father.
	His father was working a lot.
	And his father was not close enough to him to intervene when he started drinking.
	When David started drinking at the age of 13, do you not notice that your child is drinking or your child is abusing alcohol?
	If you're an engaged parent, you would know.
	So, he was not close to his father.
	He sees pictures and sees himself, which I assume would mean that he also does not feel that he's either close to himself or other people have the capacity to be close to him.
	So, because he hated radio, Letterman decided to try his hand doing comedy writing for network television.
	He wrote mountains and mountains of comedy scripts and mailed them off to a bunch of people.
	Nothing.
	I mean, who the hell in California wants scripts from some unknown guy in Indiana?
	Plus, of course, you know, if you are involved in a television show and some guy mails you a script, You don't open it.
	You don't open it.
	I mean, they talk about this at The Simpsons, right?
	People mail them scripts all the time for the show The Simpsons.
	They don't open them.
	Because if you open it, then if it's bad but it's got a good idea, you can't use that idea.
	Or let's say you've been working on an idea and you open it and that guy's got the same idea.
	Well, you put your idea out and he's gonna sue you for stealing his idea or whatever, right?
	So they just don't open that stuff at all.
	They send it back.
	Michelle, his wife, she hated seeing how miserable he was.
	And she said, I know, let's go to Los Angeles, California, because that's where all the young comics are going.
	So she was a huge fan of him, big supporter, and she just was going to make this happen.
	He was resistant, he was hesitant, and she just insisted.
	And he's still putting it off, and finally she's like, forget it, I'm packing up, we're moving, we are going.
	And what's interesting to me is his father, I think Letterman's father, was an underachiever relative to the way that Letterman describes him as being plugged in and electric energy and so on.
	But his father was married to an emotionally inert woman and therefore never got out of his flower shop.
	It sort of seems to me like if...
	Letterman's father had been married to Michelle, Letterman's wife, Letterman's father would have become Johnny Carson.
	Because that kind of driving energy, you can't ever get further in life than the people closest to you believe you can get.
	This is just the weird interdependence that we have as a social tribal species.
	I'm telling you, you can't ever get further in life.
	than the people who are close to you believe you can get.
	And this is why surrounding yourself with people who believe in you and believing in the people you surround yourself with is so essential.
	Success is social.
	Success is interpersonal.
	personal success is a rising tide that lifts the boats.
	So he did finally accept, I guess, when he was being dragged into the car that he was And so he really wanted to get his financial arrangements and strategy together and...
	He really has this habit in life, as far as I understand it, of kind of being a perfectionist and really making sure that everything is just so.
	Like, he watches tapes of himself after every show, and if he stumbled over a word or something, he just gets really upset, because I guess if when you spend a lot of time criticizing other people or putting them down, there's this fear that all those bladed boomerangs you've thrown out there that have lit on fire with other people's indignation can easily come back and rain and carve you up like sushi.
	And he said, he said, I was too unhappy with myself to stay in Indianapolis.
	If you're secure with yourself, regardless of where you are, you're happy and you lead a productive life and you have kids and go to rotary meetings and you have, you know, a great life.
	But if you're insecure like me and millions of other young airheads, you move to Los Angeles and entertain drunks in bars or try to.
	And this, you know, he's got this weird thing, and I see it coming up a lot.
	You know, so people who get vicious about the 50s, you know, like the Lever to Beaver, they're caustic about the Lever to Beaver.
	Well, that's because the Lever to Beaver is a pretty nice family.
	I watched that show when I was a kid.
	I'm like, yeah, I'd be willing to trade in all my car a little bit from that grainy black and white 12-inch universe.
	It looks pretty appealing to me.
	And there's this thing about the Rotary Club and the Shriners and the guys in the hats and the fezzers and the little cars and so on.
	People just hate that stuff.
	But there is...
	It's kind of a community to that.
	To go out on a limb that is not supported by any data that I have in this presentation, that there's a giant conflict between the government, which provides and takes care of people, and private institutions, which provide and take care of people.
	And there's a lot of...
	Hostility on the left to groups like the Shriners and the Rotary Club and the Legion and so on, because what used to be called the friendly societies, which is how people took care of each other much better and much more ably and much more cheaply before the welfare state, when there are these private institutions of charity and the Rotary Club and the Shriners are incredibly charitable and helpful guys, when you have these private institutions of charity, there's much less need for this giant welfare state.
	In fact, they're kind of opposites.
	And again, I'm not trying to guess Dave Letterman's politics, but I do know that a lot of this hatred of the 50s is hatred of the family.
	And the left has had for many decades, really since the progressive movement with Shaw and H.G. Wells and all that, the turn of the last century, have had this hostility towards the nuclear family, because if you can break the family, you empower the state.
	The state and the family are opposites.
	And also, these charitable social institutions, there's a lot of hatred.
	Now, you know, he went through his university.
	Were there leftists there?
	I have no idea.
	But there was something in the zeitgeist of the time, and has continued to this day, where the private institutions that would elbow aside and bypass and supplant government institutions, those who were invested in those government institutions, throw a lot of hatred at those private institutions.
	So there just seems to be this continual...
	You know, you go to rotary meetings.
	It's like, well, what's wrong with that?
	Nice guys.
	David later recalled his wife's enthusiasm.
	He said, she started running around and packing the dishes and telling me this time we were really going to do it.
	She was very supportive.
	I knew I was going to fail.
	Letterman later described the experience.
	Ultimately, it wasn't so much a matter of bravery.
	You keep conditioning yourself in risk situations.
	Well, if it all explodes in my face, I can always come back to Indianapolis and get work.
	So I convinced myself by looking at the other side of the argument, That I really had nothing to lose.
	You sort of trick yourself into thinking that it's an extended vacation or a high adventure, but the truth of the matter was, I felt pretty foolish giving up a job that was making good money for me.
	Driving across the country that May, I felt pretty stupid.
	I had a little bit of that anxiety.
	I used to be a pretty high-flying software executive and gave it up to do podcasts and took a massive pay cut and it's like, what am I doing?
	But, you know, glad I did it.
	And he said, we loaded everything we owned into a pickup truck and drove cross-country, just quit our jobs and moved.
	And my parents, my father was dead by that time, but my mother, God bless her, never said a thing.
	I said, Mom, I'm moving to California.
	She never said, Why?
	What are you, nuts?
	What the hell are you going to do?
	Never.
	And I can remember her with my two sisters standing on the lawn of my house.
	He just drove by to say goodbye to them.
	And she never questioned it.
	Just said, Okay.
	Bye.
	That's kind of tragic.
	You know, I don't want to be like the stay-at-home dad with a single kid helicopter to get a parent, right?
	But I would like to think that if my daughter is making a massive decision like quitting her career to go and do heaven knows what on the other side of the country, that, or at least on the left-wing side of the country, I'm not going to be focused on left-wing stuff the whole time.
	Forgive me.
	I'd like to, I wouldn't just say, okay, bye, but get involved.
	I mean, there's no maternal engagement in a crucial life decision, and that is really, this is what I mean when I say unmentored rudderless.
	Oh, there's a lot of creativity, but there's a lot of lack of structure.
	I'd like to see a world where you get mentored and still be creative.
	And also, you know, it's hard to escape the The belief, the reality that Letterman decides to move to Los Angeles about a year after his father's death.
	So, Letterman's father supported him, encouraged his dreams, his mom, you know, 50,000 volts makes her lift her teacup, and so his support wasn't balancing out his mother's disengagement, dissociation, and indifference, so...
	What is there really to stick around for?
	He said, it wasn't until my dad died that I realized my mother is the least demonstrative person in the world.
	And this goes back to when he was five.
	His father has this terrifying heart attack and there's no one there to help him with his feelings, to help him help hold his feelings, to help him work through his feelings.
	According to the Oxford Dictionary, the definition of demonstrative is unrestrained in showing feelings, especially those of affection.
	So when he says she's the least demonstrative person in the world, if we take aside the euphemisms, I think Letterman thought that his mother was stone cold.
	So naturally, you know, we have our dreams.
	The world doesn't care.
	This is the natural path of anybody trying to carve their own way.
	I want to go north.
	The wilderness is not parting before me.
	No Red Sea parting in my way.
	I must push and carve it out.
	The world of television comedy was not eagerly awaiting the talents of David Letterman, and after months of getting nowhere, he freaked out.
	He said, it was the first time in my adult life that I didn't have a real job.
	So, he eventually confronted and pushed through his in-person public performance anxiety.
	He headed to a place called The Comedy Store, which was one of the most famous of the West Coast comedy clubs, known to be a place which helped launch the careers of young performers.
	Richard Pryor was there, Jay Leno was there, Robin Williams was there, and Jimmy Walker was there, and Yellow.
	So, lots of great people in that.
	So he said, the first time I found it very painful to get up in front of those people, and it wasn't exactly a big hit either.
	I remember thinking, geez, I've come 2,500 miles and gotten on stage in this dimly lit bar in front of these mutants, and I'm telling jokes.
	Now, got anxiety?
	Go for alcohol!
	I mean, David's drinking greatly intensified during this time and of course before he drank out of, you know, boredom and alienation, peer pressure perhaps.
	Now he's hitting the bottle out of massive terror, social anxiety and the insecurity Of performing in front of people who can offer immediate criticism, right?
	I studied at the National Theatre School for almost two years and you do comedy and you do drama, man, they're different species completely.
	If you're doing drama, the audience can have fallen asleep and you think they're wrapped with emotional attention because of the intensity of what you're doing.
	Hey, you do comedy, you know whether you're funny or not, right there.
	And, you know, having to push through when you're not and trying to win the audience back, man, it's like running a marathon and a sprint at the same time in different directions.
	It's really tough.
	So, yeah.
	I did an evening of theater, Harold Pinter's A Slight Ach and then Anton Chekhov's The Bear and in A Slight Ach I played an alcoholic depressed person and then in A Slight Ach I played an ancient comedic butler.
	Yeah, it's a challenge going from one to the other, and yeah, comedy is really a challenge.
	When it works, I mean, you are surfing a tsunami, but when it doesn't work, man, you're drowning in a puddle.
	He said, when you go out there and you think you have something that you think is funny, it's such a personal little presentation.
	It's you trying to make a room full of people laugh or a whole country of people laugh.
	If they don't laugh, It's like you've just been embarrassed in your third grade class and your teacher has reprimanded you.
	It's the worst sinking feeling in the world.
	It's the deepest embarrassment you can endure.
	Here you are showing off and nobody thinks you're funny.
	He told TV Guide once, he said, I always was very insecure and still am.
	I envy comedians who can go out and enjoy being in front of people.
	It's still something of a traumatic thing for me.
	I'm generally uncomfortable around people.
	I'm also a confirmed pessimist.
	If anything can go wrong, it sure as hell will.
	I think I had a drinking problem because I was so uncomfortable unless I was dead drunk.
	While Letterman remembers his first appearance as an embarrassment, one guy in the audience had a bit of a different perspective.
	Future late-night TV host rival Jay Leno praised his performance and Leno's own act significantly influenced Letterman's approach to his performance.
	Letterman said, Oh, I see.
	That's how it's supposed to be done.
	Leno's attitude was so clearly defined, and he was bright and so contemporary, and he did it so effortlessly.
	It just seemed like an extension of his personality.
	And that really crystallized for me what I wanted to do.
	And again, there's that don't have a mentor, get a mentor.
	There's this hunger for definition, which if you don't get it early in life, you spend a lot of your life sprinting around like a man made of water in search of a wetsuit.
	His appearance has caught the attention of comedian Jimmy Walker, who hired Letterman to write jokes for him.
	$150 a week for 15 jokes.
	It was his first paying gig as a comedy writer and helped keep him and his wife Michelle afloat financially.
	Now, back in the day, pre-YouTube, the goal of every comic in the world, and certainly in the Comedy Store, was to get onto The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
	It's one of the things that launched Seinfeld's career as well.
	The shows just could make your career, and given Letterman's deep admiration and fetishization of Carson...
	He yearned for that opportunity.
	Now, the people at The Tonight Show, he said, are very good at dealing with young comedians.
	In 1977, the Carson people came to me and said, you're not ready.
	I said, okay, that's fine.
	I was just thrilled that they'd been watching me.
	And the last thing you want to do is go on and not be ready.
	So I kept working on building my act, and the next year they called for me.
	Now, that's interesting because Letterman was continually putting people in awkward situations that they weren't ready for.
	And then he deeply appreciates the fact that the production team at The Tonight Show wait until he's ready.
	And he never needs to make these connections to ships that pass by the night as this man's capacity for self-knowledge at certain times in his life.
	Like, wouldn't you say, oh, they know that I'm not ready for this, so they're going to wait until they am ready, and here I have been pushing people in my radio show and so on into the spotlight when they weren't ready and embarrassing them.
	I should not do that.
	Again, this bounce back of what you prefer and what you've been doing to others just doesn't seem to wrap around and create that empathy loop that I think is so positive in life.
	So, he did get some minor television appearances, and he did get notices and up-and-coming talent, but he was on the verge of his biggest career breaks, but his marriage to his biggest supporter was falling apart.
	And sometimes, I mean, you see this with people who've really risen in the world.
	You see this...
	That they have relationships that are like the stages of a rocket, you know, the rocket goes up and then fuel the spin, toss that bit away, toss that bit away, toss that little module at the top.
	So, he was spending his nights working in bars, he was working on his deep insecurities about performing in front of strangers.
	And his future's on the line, he's drinking heavily, and he's coming home later and later, and sometimes not at all, right?
	Because he's a rock star of the comedy world, at least, as far as the comedy world accepts and has rock stars.
	And his wife, of course, was, I guess, somewhat understandably beginning to wonder, what's in this for me again?
	She's working all day.
	She was a department store buyer.
	She's working all day to support her husband she never sees.
	And who is clearly enjoying his new popularity, particularly with the ladies.
	So she took her vows very seriously, though.
	She planned to hang in there.
	She wanted to make the marriage work.
	She pleaded with Dave to come home more often.
	But his response when she pushed him was devastating and shocking to her.
	He said, I want a divorce.
	Without Michelle, it's hard to imagine that Letterman would ever have ended up leaving Indiana, let alone stayed through the early frustrations and disappointments of Los Angeles.
	They'd been together for 11 years, married for 9, right on the cusp of a success.
	Done.
	Now, Letterman had lots of reasons as to why the marriage went south.
	He said, well, it wasn't due to my career.
	My career had nothing to do with it.
	He said, it could have happened in Indianapolis or Tucson.
	The marriage just ran out of steam.
	It was not a case of my getting a taste of the fast life in show business and saying, to hell with this, all broad.
	He had lots of excuses.
	Why did the marriage fall apart?
	He said, our basic problem was that we'd just gotten married too young.
	He once described the marriage as a common mistake made by a young man who was, quote, looking to take a step into something to get away from being a kid.
	And later, the guilt, which he says is the bedrock to his personality, began to show up.
	And later he said, yeah, she was immensely valuable in getting me going.
	And he did say he felt really guilty for divorcing her.
	More than just drifting apart or getting married too young, he later admitted, I behaved badly.
	And he thinks back, when he thinks back or talks about those early years in LA, he says his behavior was embarrassing and superficial.
	He said, I ruined the marriage.
	It was just me being a dork.
	Hey, young girls.
	It took a long time for me to reconcile the guilt for what I put her through.
	I felt like I should burn in hell for the rest of my life.
	Well, I guess sitting across from Paris Hilton for a while could count.
	Michelle was heartbroken.
	She really wanted to make it work.
	She really believed in him, but she accepted the divorce and did not even ask for alimony in California, no less.
	And Letterman has never seen her again, even though she has remained living in California.
	He said, Seems odd to me now.
	I was married for a long time, like nine years.
	My life is so different now from what it was then that it does seem strange that there was this other person with whom I was very close for all that time who now plays no part in my life.
	He was later relieved to hear that Michelle had remarried and he hoped that the new husband would, quote, flush the horrible memory for her.
	A very compact way of referring to yourself as excrement that needs to be flushed into the sewer.
	Now, Michelle, to her credit, I'm telling you, she sounds like a class act.
	She's never uttered a negative or hostile or critical word about Letterman publicly.
	Her father, Bill, his father-in-law, was not quite as kind.
	He said, Dave broke Michelle's heart.
	He came home one day, packed his bags, left her, and never looked back.
	Michelle was devastated.
	She's never got a dime from him.
	After the divorce, he quickly got involved with another woman, and it was somebody who also fiercely believed in his talents and could help with his deep insecurities.
	In 1978, Letterman met Meryl Marko, who was also performing at the Comedy Store.
	She first laid eyes on him.
	I tell you, I mean, he's a good-looking guy when he was younger, you know, with that, you know, widow's peak tumbleweed hairdo and that gap tooth smile and twinkly eyes.
	Eh, good-looking guy, I thought.
	She thought that he was one of the best comedians.
	Lena was actually her favorite, but she found him really attractive, and she found out quickly that they shared the same agent.
	So she used that as her opening line, approached him, and they began dating.
	Now, they both shared this insecurity, this low self-esteem, always paranoid about looking foolish.
	Meryl explained their relationship.
	She said, Letterman said she's verbal and uncompromising about what's worth pursuing.
	She's intelligent, nothing like I am.
	And Letterman, obviously a very, very intelligent guy.
	I don't find his humor to be highly intelligent, but he's a very intelligent guy.
	So they realized that they made a good team professionally.
	He was the better performer, but she was a very, very talented writer.
	He later recalled, she's the funniest person I've ever met and she's so smart, it's scary.
	I mean, she walked into a room and you could feel hum coming out of her ears.
	She's had some of the best pure ideas for TV that I've ever seen.
	This is the insular world of show business, right?
	I mean, she's so smart, she's so brilliant, she's such a creative genius, she's the smartest person I've ever known.
	How do I know?
	She's got great TV ideas.
	No!
	Socrates!
	Aristotle!
	Kierkegaard!
	Nietzsche!
	Smart!
	Not because they could pitch a sitcom!
	Anyway, sorry.
	But his anti-intellectualism and anti-intellectualism as a whole is quite common throughout a lot of comedy.
	Again, some exceptions like George Carlin and other intelligent social critic comics.
	But he's got this relentless anti-intellectualism because intellectualism probably provokes insecurity, which means he's got to tear it down and all that, right?
	Letterman said, she was an excellent source of material for me.
	I never wrote anything for her, though.
	I have a kind of philosophy that has helped me skyrocket to the top.
	Keep the good stuff for yourself.
	A little bit of a...
	Ooh, comedy jugular.
	Keep it covered when Letterman's a rat.
	So, Merrill, his girlfriend, was hired as a writer for the Mary Tyler Moore variety show.
	Yes, it happened.
	I'd never heard of it either.
	You'll know why in a moment.
	And, um...
	This inside position gave Dave some additional influence in attempting to avoid things outside of his comfort zone.
	So he dressed up like a carrot, he sang, he danced and did everything that was uncomfortable for a comic because his forte was sarcastic wit in a controlled environment.
	The Mary Tyler Moore show cancelled after three weeks!
	God, it must have been terrible.
	But then that led to his biggest career break today.
	The one he wanted, the sought-after appearance on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show.
	Of course, even his girlfriend said, the whole time I knew him, he dreamed of going on The Tonight Show.
	Now, and it's the same thing that I think that Jerry Seinfeld did, which was he went running and prepared and prepared.
	He practiced his monologue endlessly and he just had it down cold.
	He said, I knew I had that one cold.
	Unless there was an earthquake or a power outage or an assassination, I knew I had that one slick.
	I did it and it worked beyond my wildest dreams.
	After his very first stand-up appearance, Carson asked Letterman to come over and sit with him.
	That's a huge honor in the world of Carson.
	He said, to suddenly find yourself seated next to him is stunning.
	You're from Indiana, and you sit there year after year watching Johnny Carson when you're 16, 17 years old, and then the next thing you know, 1978, he's right there!
	I sat down and Johnny Carson is sitting right there and you're just talking and talking and praying to God that it's over soon and you're looking around and you're seeing stuff that you've seen on TV for years and you can't let yourself think for a second or, you know, your head would explode.
	Here, talking and talking and just praying, oh, please go to a commercial, please go to a commercial!
	And the next thing you know, you're out of there and it's like, holy Christ, I was on The Tonight Show!
	Being on Carson was the most fun I ever had, he said.
	There I was holding my own with Johnny Carson.
	I knew then I could hit big league pitching.
	And that is an amazing thing.
	Tragically, I will never sing a duet with Freddie Mercury, but I'm very glad, very glad that Letterman got under Carson.
	So he got massive approval from his childhood hero.
	What an amazing experience.
	And a father figure from his early life.
	He said, it justified, certified, legitimized everything I had done that everyone thought was insane.
	And nothing that has happened since has come close to that.
	It was like looking at a picture of George Washington on a dollar bill all your life and suddenly being in a bar next to him.
	He was great.
	Very hospitable and friendly.
	Still knowing you're under his scrutiny.
	Everybody looks to him for his reactions.
	Comics are sensitive about how he treats them.
	One I know was upset because Johnny failed to mention his name when he finished a routine.
	Do you think that means anything?
	He asked me.
	He said, I was in a different dimension.
	I love this joy that he speaks of this.
	He said, I was in a different dimension.
	It's like West Point graduation and your hat's in the air.
	All those years hanging around the Comedy Store and driving around in your truck and heating up burritos at the 7-Eleven and drinking warm quarts of beer.
	All of a sudden it's changed.
	You're on The Tonight Show.
	It was like a miracle.
	It turned me upside down.
	I go to the Comedy Store now.
	And I was an important guy because I had been on The Tonight Show.
	I was one of the chosen few.
	After his third appearance performing on the show, Letterman was approached about guest hosting.
	He said, it happened real quickly during the middle of the third show.
	Producer Fred de Cordova came over and said, have your people call me about hosting.
	That was a real numbing experience.
	Having that go through my mind while I was still sitting there pretending to be part of the show.
	In California, I was literally living in a one-room apartment on stilts in Laurel Canyon, and I'd hosted The Tonight Show a couple of times, and then I went away.
	When I got back to my house in Laurel Canyon, I had mail from people all over the country, and they had all sent clippings carrying the same wire release saying I would be the next Johnny Carson.
	I thought, good lord!
	The week before, I was having trouble getting enough money to have the clutch in my truck replaced, and the next week I'm getting clippings saying I'm the next Johnny Carson.
	Over the next several years, Letterman Guest hosted the show more than 20 times at a fee of about $1,000 for each episode.
	He said,"...the association for me with the show has been good.
	For comedians, it's a real stamp of approval.
	It's reflected in the money you make on the outside.
	I like doing the show and the people are supportive, but I can never fully relax because it's not my own show." You're driving somebody else's car and wearing somebody else's underwear.
	Carson has made it.
	Everything there is.
	So the best you could hope for is to be compared favorably to him.
	Now, this was a huge deal back in the day.
	15.5 million people watched Carson every night, and that's when 15.5 million people was a lot, not just how many people fit in a Tokyo subway.
	The show was 17% of NBC's network profits, but they were always encouraging speculation about the next host of The Tonight Show.
	It made people want to watch the guest host to see who would be the best candidate, and it also told Carson, who had a lot of power, oh, you're kind of replaceable, and helped, I guess, with negotiations.
	So Letterman continued to do his stand-up and television guest hosting appearances for lots of shows.
	And the problem is, you know, he was using up a lot of his material that took a long time to develop.
	He said, working as a stand-up has been occupying my mind for four years, and it took me that long to accumulate 25 or 30 minutes of material I felt comfortable with that I knew would work.
	In two or three months, I had used all that on TV. The luxury of time is gone.
	Now Meryl, his girlfriend, was still in his life and gave him an extra source of material.
	She later noted, When I first fell in love with Dave, I was busy writing him jokes.
	It was like the things girls do for boyfriends.
	You know, well, here, take all these.
	Here are my best jokes.
	In 1979, Johnny Carson and NBC had a contractual disagreement which threatened the future of The Tonight Show.
	In this context, Letterman was offered an incredibly lucrative two-year contract with NBC, but without a specific project attached.
	Not too surprisingly, Letterman signed it.
	He said, I kept waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, OK, buddy, give us the money back.
	NBC wants your new house and you have to go home to Indianapolis.
	Now, Carson did continue to work through the contractual dispute and eventually signed a new and more lucrative contract with NBC to continue the Tonight Show.
	Letterman was given his own show, but at 10 o'clock in the morning, which was a considerable limitation on the kind of material that he could use during the day, right?
	Family-friendly time slot.
	And his girlfriend, Meryl, was also brought on as a writer.
	The show was...
	To be broadcast live from New York City, which required a cross-country trek from the couple.
	So it was called David Letterman Live, and at first it really didn't work, especially as a morning show.
	There were disagreements with the production staff, high-profile resignations, pretty soft negative reviews, terrible ratings, and frequent cancellations by NBC affiliates across the country.
	And it did not look good for the show.
	He said, the first few weeks were very difficult.
	It was the real low point of my life, an awful period.
	And this is, of course, you know, be careful what you wish for.
	Oh, I've got my dream, right?
	It was non-stop stress, lots of cancellations, and circling the drain death spiral is not a great place to be creative from, or is it?
	But he stuck with it and pushed through it, you know, to his credit, you know, later in life when he was hit with six months of severe depression, pushed through that too.
	I mean, the man has the willpower to walk through walls, often while pushed by the women in his life, but nonetheless...
	So the show got better.
	Ratings increased.
	But so many affiliate cancellations left them crippled in terms of national ratings.
	But the show was starting to find an audience.
	And tragically, NBC announced the show was going to end.
	That was September 29th, 1980.
	The last show was going to air on October 24th.
	He said, this is the hardest I've worked on anything in my life for any length of time.
	At least...
	I now know in my heart that I did the best I could and tried the hardest.
	I think you ought to get points for trying.
	And he did get more points.
	After the cancellation, he won an Emmy for Best Daytime Talk Show.
	And Meryl won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Writing at the 1980 Emmy Awards.
	The New York Times' Tony Schwartz wrote, So he got the Emmy, but he remained pretty pessimistic about his future.
	He said, I was on a plane back to California and I was thinking, what do I do?
	Yeah, we won, but now what?
	I just figured my one shot on TV had come and gone and that's it.
	I was destined to be doing guest shots on the love boat for the rest of my life.
	Meryl, his girlfriend, later said that he was pretty sure he would never work again.
	He's a pessimist and this gave him the chance to be really pessimistic.
	Letterman once described himself as, quote, having more apprehensions than the average person or the average medium-sized American community.
	In a People's Magazine profile from this time period, Letterman said that his Midwestern mother remained duly unimpressed.
	Mom thinks I'm a notch or two above a carnival worker.
	After some time sitting on the sidelines, NBC offered him the same kind of contract he'd received prior to his morning show, one where he'd remained available until they could offer him another show.
	In 18 months, he received the opportunity which helped solidify his career.
	Late Night with David Letterman.
	So, NBC announced starting February 1st, 82, a new version of The David Letterman Show would go on air immediately following The Tonight Show.
	From 12.30 to 1.30 a.m.
	And now this was the break and the...
	...wide Savannah, do-what-you-want time slot...
	...which Letterman had been waiting for.
	Johnny Carson's contract allowed him right of approval...
	...over what followed The Tonight Show...
	...and he not only endorsed Letterman...
	...but offered his production company...
	...to co-produce the new show.
	Very classy.
	And he got a lot of his staff...
	...in the morning show for work on his new project...
	...including Merrill...
	And in typical day fashion, remained optimistic about success.
	Well, let's just try not to embarrass ourselves unnecessarily.
	Andrew Kopkand, an influential commentator among the younger audience, wrote, Letterman is now the official host for the baby boom culture.
	The audience of videonauts that lasted sick jokes, made sense of idiotic images, and feels comfortable suspended off the wall.
	Velcro wall.
	It's an audience that was weaned on Mad Magazine, warmed up with recreational drugs, and trained to respond to the merest remark of Steve Martin.
	To these aging freaks, domesticated hippies, and nostalgic iconoclasts, Sorry, and nostalgic iconoclasts, people like Johnny Carson are not just conventional, they're incomprehensible.
	Word of mouth during Letterman's first week was hot.
	Not since the early Saturday Night Live days has a new program found so much resonance in the media active demographics.
	So, you probably know some of these features, the Top 10 list, Stupid Pet Tricks, along with the companion Stupid Human Tricks, Viewer Mail, and more.
	He's also known for his parody sketches that target the obviously weak acting abilities of his bandleader Paul Schaeffer, Larry Bud Melman, stagehands, and anybody in the general vicinity.
	Letterman said, we're not mining diamonds here.
	It's Rip and Read, pure TV. What we have is sort of found comedy.
	We take cameras into the street and do silly stuff.
	I tend to be cynical, which leeches into the finished show, if it can be called finished.
	Once the television ratings were out, they confirmed the expected success of the show.
	Late Night with David Letterman achieved a 2.7 rating in a 14 share, twice the number compared to the previous show in that time slot.
	Not wildly unpredictably, Letterman seemed somewhat uncomfortable with his success.
	He said, privately, I think that I'm not really somebody who has a network television show.
	Celebrities are other people, Johnny Carson and Sylvester Stallone.
	I'm just a kid trying to make a living, is the way I feel.
	I don't like to think about it.
	It's a little more responsibility than a guy would want.
	I don't know that mass popularity and acceptance on American television really means that much, aside from untold wealth.
	My aim is to try and do something different and do it well.
	The basic premise of television is, let's sell Pintos.
	Now, let's get everybody in this country to buy a damn Pinto.
	Now, how are we going to do it?
	Well, we're going to go and get Suzanne Somers and eight other girls with big chests and we're going to sell Pintos.
	That's what American television is.
	I'm not sure if you succeed in that.
	It is such a pat on the back.
	What I'd like, he said, is for this show to span long enough to become just a pattern of American television.
	If we were still on the air in five years, then I'll think of it as a success.
	Carson has been on the air for 20 years.
	It's not because he does a great show every night.
	He has great shows, and he has awful shows, like everybody else.
	But the reason The Tonight Show succeeds is because people like him.
	They don't really turn the show on to see whomever Johnny has as a guest.
	They turn on the show to see Johnny.
	I just wonder if this particular show and I don't have a built-in obsolescence.
	It's alright now, but maybe in six months people will be saying, we've seen that already.
	So, is Letterman mean?
	I know we've dealt with big questions in this show.
	This is a question that has significant cultural impact.
	Robert McKenzie from TV Guide recognized Letterman's talent but said, And I
	don't know.
	I mean, I've been around some awkward family dinners in my time.
	And it's always sort of struck me when watching Letterman that there's this awkward family dinner you know when the normally quiet uncle has had a few too many drinks and starts to become outspoken and pull up some family history and pulling some skeletons out of the closet it's also sort of struck me that there's this awkwardness and unpredictability that may mirror some people's experience within their own families and maybe that's why they're sort of fascinated by or drawn back to it There
	is a question that floated around when I was younger.
	Is Dave Letterman mean or is he funny?
	And that, again, walking that line is a real challenge.
	So, similar to his early radio and television days, during segments where Letterman would interact with people on the street or in the audience, he would regularly ridicule their comments, describe flaws in their appearance, and embarrass them for the sake of entertainment.
	He once told TV Guide that he felt justified in his interactions with ordinary people during the show.
	His girlfriend Meryl noted, We're not talking to these people about their worth as human beings or their hopes for their children.
	We only ask about inane things.
	The burden of being a jerk is on us because we're stupid enough to ask about the subject of the remote feature.
	Trying to delineate what is fair game, Letterman said, quote, If a guy has been repairing audio bodies for 30 years and has a wall covered with photos of celebrities whose cars he's fixed, he's fair game.
	You don't make fun of him, you ask about it.
	You give him the opportunity to show he thinks the most important thing in life is celebrities and their automobiles.
	We don't put words in anyone's mouth.
	Well, that's true, of course, but like, you know, the guy, the horrible guy who blackmailed him for the sex scandal, which we'll mention in a bit.
	The guy's got a lot of charisma.
	He's got this kind of placid serenity and certainty to him.
	And you, again, watch the debate between Letterman, on Iraq, Letterman and Bill O'Reilly.
	Letterman made some fantastic points.
	Now, Bill O'Reilly is like, do you want America to win?
	Yes or no?
	And Letterman is like, yes or no, it's a simple answer.
	And he said, it's not a simple answer.
	Letterman said, it's not a simple answer because I'm thoughtful.
	And he actually did have very intelligent things to say about Iraq.
	And for a guy who claims not to understand geopolitics, he did a pretty damn good job of predicting all of this stuff.
	So, it is true, of course, that Lederman and his crew don't put words in anyone's mouth.
	They just ask questions.
	The difference is they're vastly more experienced than, right?
	Most people, it's their first time on camera.
	It's like, what was it?
	Sean Hannity said in his autobiography, it took me forever to feel comfortable on the camera.
	And yeah, I mean, it's a robot I am talking to, but it has to be kind of like a person.
	And so they're vastly more experienced.
	They've done it many more times.
	So yeah, I mean, and that people are like, oh, a camera.
	Oh, I'm going to be on TV. They're all excited.
	And so that's very much a disadvantage.
	It's very much a win-lose for the most part when you wander into somebody else's field of expertise.
	And so, you know, saying, well, it's, you know, fair game.
	It's not fair game if you put a girl guide in with, you know, Muhammad Ali in his prime.
	It's like, well, she's there by choice.
	Anyway.
	Now, Letterman can be sort of unkind to ordinary people, but he can be pretty harsh on celebrities.
	Robert McKenzie from TV Guide commented, quote, If celebrities start to drown on this show, they get little help from the host.
	He not only sit there and watch them go down, but is apt to toss them an iron life jacket.
	And staff member Sandra Furton admitted to Rolling Stone.
	She spent a lot of time trying to soothe the fears of potential guests about being ridiculed by Letterman.
	She said, There's a fine line between playing with and making fun of, and people don't always see the distinction.
	Steve Allen, who back in the day was a very popular TV personality, spoke in his defense using a blame-the-victim approach.
	Quote, occasionally he just sort of open up.
	Sorry, occasionally he's just sort of operating up on another little level.
	He's not always communicating on the same level as the guest.
	He says, I don't want to be perceived, Letterman says, I don't want to be perceived as an asshole who just says, line them up, bring them in, and let me make fun of them.
	They spend weeks booking people on the show, and then they leave in tears, and they think, what was that all about?
	We spent two weeks getting somebody, and in eight minutes, they're out of here sobbing.
	I think, yeah, another job well done.
	Here's how Letterman responded to the comment that some viewers find you condescending, smug, even mean, in an 89 Time magazine interview.
	Quote, I suppose I am all of those things, but...
	We never invite somebody on to demonstrate condescension.
	Or condensation.
	If somebody comes on and is a bonehead and is loafing through an interview, I resent that.
	And maybe I will then go after them.
	But if you come on and are polite and well-groomed and behave yourself, then you've got nothing to worry about.
	I'm stunned at the number of people in show business who come on and don't seem to get that what we want from them is a performance.
	You know, tell us three stories out of your life.
	Anybody who's been on this planet 20 years and doesn't have three stories, well, they should re-examine what they're doing.
	It used to trouble me that people thought our sole purpose for being in business was to make fun of people.
	Unfortunately, there is no joke that does not make fun of somebody.
	I try to make it as often as not me or the show or somebody in our little group.
	So if we do say something that looks like we're making fun of somebody else, it's in the spirit of everything.
	But some people don't buy that.
	I know that some people can't stand me and it troubles me because I think we're just trying to do the funniest show we know how.
	In May 1986, Letterman finally had Cher on the show after over four years of courting her to be a guest.
	On air, he asked her why she changed her mind about appearing.
	I thought I would never want to do this show with you, she replied.
	Why?
	questioned Letterman.
	Because you thought I was an asshole, Cher declared.
	After a long silence, Letterman responded, I think a lot of people feel that way about me.
	In a Playboy interview, he claimed, quote, when a guest stalls, I get nervous, probably because I'm so shy by nature.
	When a person I am with as low, I get low.
	If a guest doesn't want to put out, it's very difficult for me to whip him into shape.
	It's often said that an essential ability for a talk show host is to get things going at all costs, but I can't just do that.
	I can't do it.
	My big problem, he said in another interview, has been, and maybe always will be, that if someone says something that I feel can get a laugh by adding a remark to it, I'll do it 90% of the time.
	And I know that gets in the way of an actual interview, and I know that can be annoying, and I try to keep myself from doing it, but something in the back of my mind always says, if you don't do something that gets a laugh here, this is going to be dull.
	What I forget is that just because something's gotten a big laugh doesn't mean everyone enjoys the humor.
	He constantly stresses he doesn't mean to wound people.
	He interviews, quote, We never mean to be cruel.
	It always saddens me to hear that someone might take it that way.
	But I've had this problem since third grade.
	Look, I'm a smartass and have been for some time.
	I wasn't born that way.
	It evolves as a way of compensating.
	You'd get bad grades as a kid.
	So you'd trip the guys who got good grades.
	Good-looking girls don't go out with you, so you throw eggs at their houses.
	Later you learn to do roughly the same thing with your mouth.
	In a sense, this tendency to use some of his celebrity guests as the butt of his jokes is kind of an extension of this high school behavior of throwing eggs at the houses of popular girls who he assumed would never go out with him.
	And I think a lot of people feel that frustration towards celebrities.
	Celebrities are like the modern Greco-Roman gods who bestride the world like a colossus, right?
	I mean, they're like these giant golden statues of perfection come to life, and we never see them in the morning un-airbrushed, or I don't.
	And I think that there is a lot of resentment to these people who we feel are living this perfect life.
	You know, like stars, they're just like us.
	They get lattes, they fill their gas.
	It's like, of course they're just like us!
	Colbert gets a colonoscopy.
	But they inhabit a very rarefied world.
	And there is, for a lot of people, I think there is a resentment about that.
	And I think that he's really hooked into that.
	We want to see them, but we resent them.
	We're deeply ambivalent towards celebrity.
	They entertain us, but they make us feel small.
	We love their beauty, but they make us feel ugly.
	We love their success and their wealth because that's the result of our choices.
	I mean, celebrities are wealthy because people want to pay to see them or see what they do.
	But at the same time, although we pay them and make them wealthy, we resent the wealth.
	That is a reflection of our preferences.
	It's a very ambivalent relationship.
	And I think that Carson was on the plus side of that, and I think that Letterman represents the darker side of that.
	Both are equally valid, you know?
	I mean, it's like that old construction from Jung, which says that sentimentality is a superstructure built upon brutality.
	The flip side, right?
	The flip side of worship.
	is contempt, and I think that he really hooks into that.
	Oprah, of course, the other way.
	Letterman, this way.
	Now, if you identify with Letterman, his comedy, of course it makes you laugh, but it also makes you feel superior.
	to the average person and we have always loved as a species you know there's this weird egalitarianism and people get too high boom bring them down bring them down an arch make a mortal I'm feeling too small in the presence of these demigods we need to make them mortal and the way you make a god mortal is by wounding them in their vulnerable places and we often will do that and again that hit David as well later on and Some
	would argue, oh, and he says, every joke is at the expense of someone.
	That's not true.
	That's not true.
	There's plenty of jokes not at the expense of anyone.
	But that's his win-lose, right?
	For comedy to win, someone has to lose.
	It is a gladiatorial combat.
	It's sort of like the Christians and the lions and the thumbs up and the thumbs down and the Roman amphitheater.
	Someone's got to lose blood for there to be comedy.
	And I don't think that's actually correct at all.
	So he also said, When I think about television and show business, it grinds my stomach.
	I want to say to people, Don't you understand that this is just bullshit driven by egos, and that's all it is?
	I mean, nothing makes me madder than to be sitting there watching somebody who's just the winner of the genetic crapshoot, and there they are, big stuff on the air, a star.
	It just drives me crazy.
	Martin Mull has the best line, Ever heard about show business?
	He says, show business is like high school with money.
	And it is.
	Even though I have rather a large ego, anyone who goes into comedy has a bottomless ego.
	I still feel more comfortable in a not fully accepted circumstance than I do if I'm surrounded and engulfed and embraced.
	I always felt better to be a little on the outside in high school, kind of lobbing in annoying things from outside The periphery.
	It's just easier to be on the outside making fun of it.
	This show is a little fortress, a little bastion from which I can whine about practically anything.
	We're just an irritant.
	Letterman told Playboy, The thing about success you really have to avoid, aside from going to prison or fogging up your taxes, is letting the money and the recognition a performer naturally receives make you feel like an especially worthwhile person.
	I have no evidence that I should feel anything but lucky for what has happened to me, and I certainly have no evidence that I'm a better person than anyone else.
	The most successful performers seem eventually to come to the conclusion that they are better people.
	It's amazing, and it's very silly.
	When he was 37 years old, Letterman said, I guess what I'm saying is, I don't want to be a showbiz asshole.
	There are enough of them already.
	I don't mind being accused of being a bad comedian, and I don't even mind being accused of being a bad talk show host.
	But I never want to be accused of being an arrogant, pompous, showbiz asshole.
	Late night success and failure.
	So, again, not too shockingly, Letterman did not seem to enjoy his massive success and popularity.
	After the show's taping, as I mentioned earlier, he goes into the office with the tape and...
	Tape?
	I'm dating myself.
	With the digital copy?
	And he looks for mistakes, a brief stammer, a mistimed punchline.
	His girlfriend, Meryl, says he's very self-critical.
	He goes nuts after a show if he sees himself stammer for a second on the tape.
	I do that like I'm doing a presentation.
	I'm like, I stammer.
	Potomac.
	Potomac!
	Oh, do I stop?
	Do I start?
	He said, I have my own little ritual.
	Yeah, but I should.
	If you've got men on base and you can't drive them in, how come you're getting Major League money?
	At the time, Meryl described her boyfriend's personality.
	David is more of a warrior when he's at home than when he's at work.
	He's a lot more worried than he looks and a lot less easygoing than you think.
	During the third year of Late Night, NBC executives congratulated Letterman on an impressive 45% increase in television ratings.
	In classic Letterman fashion, he responded, quote, I don't know what the hell happened.
	We're not doing anything different on the show.
	Maybe we've just worn people down.
	They say, oh, all right, oh, God, we'll watch your damn show.
	The ratings will probably just go back down again.
	Merrill noted, he's incredibly insecure and very self-torturing.
	He doesn't ever reward himself for a job well done.
	He always feels that he's screwed up.
	In fact, in all the years I knew him, I've never once heard him say that he thought something went pretty well.
	The most he ever gives himself are remarks like, well, I guess that stuck to the tape, or no one got killed today.
	I can sit home and watch myself post-show and turn to the person who is watching with me and say, This is where the SOB collapsed and we were lucky to get out of it with our lives.
	And they'll say, you're killing me.
	What are you talking about?
	And I'll think, oh yeah, you can't tell.
	It's true.
	I mean, seeing yourself from the outside is...
	Boy, it's really surprising.
	And what you think works doesn't work for other people.
	You learn as you go forward.
	He said, reality dictates that you're probably better off being insecure.
	That way, you won't be surprised when it cancellation happens.
	Although the other school is that you know it's going to happen, so relax and enjoy it along the way.
	I've not been able to do that.
	Actually, I remember that when I was in business with my brother.
	And we were worried about some new competitor coming into our field.
	And he's like, yeah, whether we succeed or whether we fail, let's at least have fun along the way.
	And it's true, of course.
	I mean, a little hard to remember sometimes.
	It's true.
	I mean, this show relies entirely on donations.
	And if donations are scant, they're like, we're doomed!
	Mandy Lifeboats, we're sinking!
	But it usually works out.
	So, Merrill both lived with and worked with Letterman, so there was not a lot of relief from the pressure of the show.
	In later years, Letterman concurred, noting, quote, We were working on the show and then went home.
	Instead of having a life, we were still working on the show.
	It was a totally unmanageable situation.
	To address this unmanageable situation, Merrill stepped down as head writer to become an associate producer, trying to save both their sanity and their relationship.
	He said, It was great that I trust her comedy instincts.
	On the other hand, it felt like it was a 24-hour day professional relationship.
	We both grew weary of that.
	Things are actually better now for everyone because they've no sexual interest in our present head writer, Steve O'Donnell, whatsoever.
	It was better to let somebody else fight the minute-to-minute battles, Meryl concurred.
	She also was getting kind of resentful of using her talents on a show, which Letterman did nothing but complain about.
	And of course, her own career aspirations had been put on hold.
	She also wanted a commitment from him, pressuring him to get married.
	And as Letterman had often done with his previous relationships, he just withdrew, became emotionally inert.
	His mom, the Crypt Keeper mom, always bouncing up in her heart of hearts.
	In 1987, approximately 10 years after they had met, she left the show completely and moved back to Los Angeles to pursue her own projects.
	She didn't want to end the relationship, but felt that if something didn't change, the relationship was doomed.
	It was very hard for me to leave, said Meryl the following year.
	The show felt like a child Dave and I had given birth to, but there was a point where I wanted to do a lot more, and I couldn't without being in complete conflict with Dave.
	You get tired of one person always getting the final yes or no, which I'd always let him do.
	Meryl hoped the drastic move would change Dave's perspective, but not so much.
	The relationship continued, living on opposite coasts, until late 1988.
	They stopped seeing each other altogether.
	Meryl claimed it was, quote, a very bitter, sad, horrible breakup, and for many years they did not even speak to one another entirely.
	Letterman takes, quote, full responsibility for the unhappiness and the unpleasant feelings that lingered.
	But he never stopped crediting Meryl for her contributions to the show and his career.
	He said she is largely responsible for the success of the show.
	Many of her ideas are mainstays, and she is one of the most important people in my life ever.
	Without Meryl, none of this probably would have happened.
	She was an integral part of the evolution of the show.
	And, well...
	Then it just became impossible, and from that, things came apart.
	Five years after the breakup, Meryl, who had stopped watching Dave's show after they parted ways, commented on her future.
	I have no interest in helping any other white man in a suit do an inventive show.
	Let them all find their own damn inventive shows.
	She's white, I think.
	I don't know why she's calling her a white man.
	She went on to co-write a novel called The Psycho X Game, which was motivated by interactions with the other co-author.
	Quote, We started playing the game of who'd had the more horrible previous love life.
	I don't want to tip any details, but we'd both been with a lot of people who were extremely narcissistic.
	Which is a thing I know a lot about.
	I had a very narcissistic mother and therefore went on to meet a lot of very narcissistic people and think of them as family.
	After his relationship with Merrill fell apart, it became public that Letterman had started dating Regina Lasco, who he originally met when she was working on Late Night, but who was now a production manager on Saturday Night Live.
	Letterman and Lascaux did keep their relationship secret for as long as they could.
	They were dating for over two years before it became publicly known.
	The only reason for their secret was because of a car accident while they were attending the christening of David's niece.
	It was reported to the newspapers and they said, Ah!
	The passenger is a woman named Regina Lascaux.
	And The Tonight Show.
	Despite his insecurities, Letterman genuinely believed that he would be the choice to inherit The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson retired and overtures had been made by NBC to this effect with him.
	Of course, this would be a childhood dream come true.
	I'm fronting Queen!
	And it was up to Carson himself.
	If it was up to Carson himself, Letterman would have gotten the job.
	But, of course, it wasn't up to Johnny Carson.
	Now, there's a lot of stuff that's been written.
	There's been a book out.
	You can check The Late Shift, Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battles for the Night by Bill Carter.
	There's a movie based on the book, and so you can check that out.
	And so, you know, we're not going to do a lot here.
	In short, Johnny Carson felt he was being pushed out just shy of his 30-year anniversary as host of the show.
	Letterman was devastated.
	Feeling like his dream job had been stolen from him in his career.
	All up to that point had been for nothing.
	Jay Leno was portrayed in the media as somebody who had backstabbed a friend to get ahead, and NBC looked utterly incompetent and disrespectful.
	He did some sulking, I guess you could say, but he was prided by friends and co-workers to entrust his career to super agent Mike Ovitz of the Creative Artists Agency.
	He had every major syndication company and the network throwing money and opportunities at Letterman.
	Letterman said, I'm too old to be on at 12.30.
	No one's watching.
	I'm too tired to watch.
	Not tired of being on at 12.30 because I'm lucky to have had a job for this long in television.
	It's all I ever really wanted to do.
	I just feel in order to extend my career, my public life, I've got to make this change.
	In an interview with Larry King, Letterman explained, At the time, it seems like it was The Tonight Show or I was out of business.
	I couldn't stay at 12.30.
	I had been there.
	When all was said and done, Letterman worked out the end of his contract with NBC, but signed an incredibly lucrative three-year, $14 million a year contract with CBS to produce a late-night show that would compete with Jay Leno's Tonight Show.
	When Letterman broke the good news to his mother, she replied, I just hope you know what you're doing.
	Hard to imagine why he would have these massive insecurities.
	Appeal to insecurity, the fundamental acid that eats at the base of the soul.
	And there was a lot of publicity generated by the controversy about who inherited The Tonight Show, which went to Leno, of course.
	And it set the table for Letterman's biggest career success to date.
	The Late Show with David Letterman on CBS. So Letterman's career wasn't just like a central driving force in his life as a complete workaholic.
	It was his life, and he was about to take on his biggest challenge to date.
	He said, to the exclusion of every other thing in my life, it was the success of this show.
	As a result, I waited to have a child 20 years too long.
	I just didn't do anything else.
	It was the show.
	It had to be the show.
	And if it wasn't the show, then find out a way to make it the show.
	I used to be involved in everything, big and large.
	I don't think that was necessarily good, but at the time, I thought it was what was required.
	When you had your own show, you had to have everything in your view and certainly influence each little choice.
	For me, it was like, oh my god, you know, if I fail at this, it's all going away.
	If you fail at this, you've got to get at the end of the line, and the line keeps getting longer.
	So to the exclusion of other important things, other aspects of life, I pursued the show.
	The Late Show launched on August 30, 1993, and from the start, Letterman was a hit.
	Even though only 70% of the CBS affiliates were carrying the show at 11.35 p.m., Compared with 99% of the NBC affiliates who were taking Leno, Letterman delivered a 6.0 rating to Leno's 4.0.
	Early in the run, CBS stock took a big jump, a rise that many people attribute to Letterman's show's success.
	It's a better show than I ever thought it would be, proclaimed CBC executive Howard Stringer, who has hailed Letterman as a genius.
	See, you get paid $40 million a year because you can make people a lot more than $40 million a year.
	Letterman said, the first night I felt okay.
	I thought we could get through the first night.
	And I fully expected the bottom to drop out in the second night.
	I really did.
	I was driven more by a sense of obligation than a desire to get in there and do the best we could.
	I just thought, okay, there's a lot of money, and I have to have a job, and here it is.
	We'll do the best we can.
	Then, when the ratings didn't go down, it became like a whole new universe.
	It was like, oh my god, you mean we actually have a chance of success here?
	In an interview with Playboy magazine, Letterman was asked about his success on CBS. Do you worry when things are going too well, or do you think a safe is going to fall on your head?
	Letterman.
	Absolutely.
	I think any reasonable person would, don't you?
	But doesn't that keep you from enjoying your success?
	Yes.
	Then what's the point of having it?
	Letterman says, I suffer from anhedonia.
	Now, anhedonia is defined as, quote, loss of the capacity to experience pleasure, the inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences.
	Anhedonia is a core clinical feature of depression, schizophrenia, and some other mental illnesses.
	When later asked if his claim of anhedonia was just false modesty, Letterman replied, Well, I think it has always been a defense.
	If you mention often enough how disappointed you are in your own behavior and your own performance, then you've pretty much just pulled the rug out from under people who were just about to say, geez, that was really disappointing.
	We're not pleased with his performance.
	I don't think it's a false modesty.
	It's just everybody has their own mechanism for getting through the day, and I guess it's easier for me to pretend to be a perfectionist or...
	Or maybe I really was a perfectionist and there's no difference there.
	When some of Letterman's former writers went on to work over at Gary Shandling's HBO late-night show spoof, Letterman began to notice storylines that seemed a little too close to home.
	Every time I watch that show, I think, hey, wait a minute, that's me!
	But I don't know if it really is me or if they have the talk show machine so well assessed that it looks like me.
	During almost every episode, I think, but didn't that happen once?
	They've all had an eerie effect on me.
	On March 27, 1995, in one of the giant interstellar bombs in media history, Letterman acted as the host for the 67th annual Academy Awards ceremony, and his performance was pretty universally criticized.
	Oprah, Uma, Oprah.
	After the award's late-night ratings dipped, and from that point onwards, Leno constantly beat Letterman in the ratings.
	Leno typically attracted 5 million people nightly between 1999 and 2009.
	The Late Show lost nearly half its audience during its competition with Leno, attracting 7.1 million viewers nightly in its 1993-94 season and then about 3.8 million per night as of Leno's first departure in 2009.
	Following Leno's return to The Tonight Show, he continued to beat Letterman in the ratings.
	A few months into the ratings plunge, Letterman said, That's just too bad.
	We had such a large dose of success in the beginning because, you know, that's addictive.
	Now all of a sudden we're shopping at Price Club, pal.
	It was unpleasant to watch, says a late show insider.
	He looked angry and miserable, which of course he was.
	Even Johnny Carson was mystified at Letterman's temperament, often mentioning to his friends the term self-destruct to describe David's behavior.
	In mid-1997, NBC had purchased a massive billboard in Times Square with a photo of Leno smirking, declaring, The Tonight Show, number one in late night.
	The intention was not subtle.
	NBC was touting their success and Letterman's failure in Dave's backyard.
	After seeing the billboard, Letterman said, you know what we have to do?
	We have to put up our own billboard.
	Shortly thereafter, an even larger billboard appeared in Times Square and featured Letterman proclaiming, number three in late night!
	Because ABC's Nightline was now number two and all that.
	Michael Keaton, the actor who's known Letterman since their days at the Comedy Store, said, He'll probably hate this, but I always thought it was kind of cool that he was never, except for a few times, number one.
	To me, it was perfect.
	It made his cachet and his legacy that much greater.
	Maybe he wasn't quite as popular, but everyone knew, qualitatively, that he was the best.
	He says about Jay Leno, Jay and I were friends.
	We were always friends before all of this happened.
	Letterman recently noted that the retirement of Leno was a significant motivator behind his decision to end his career.
	Letterman says, It caught me off guard.
	I thought Jay would have that job as long as he wanted.
	His ratings were strong.
	He showed no sign of slowing down.
	I knew he loved it.
	I knew it must have been hard for him.
	When Leno announced he was leaving, Letterman called him up.
	I was sort of touched by it, he says.
	I said, Jay, are you actually retiring?
	And he said, yeah, you know, so and so.
	And I said, well, I hope this is good for you, and I'm sorry you're leaving.
	He was very nice and earnest about it.
	While their friendship, or lack thereof, is the subject of frequent speculation and debate, there doesn't appear to be any lingering negative feelings.
	Letterman said, Our way of life at the Comedy Store was exactly the way you'd think it would be for a group of comics.
	It was tinged with sarcasm and ugliness and insult, but everybody loved it.
	We thrived on it.
	We would call each other names.
	We would steal each other's jokes.
	We would make fun of each other's girlfriends and this and that and this and that.
	You take that out of the Comedy Store and all of a sudden observers say, Oh my God, it's Civil War.
	We can't believe it.
	But the truth of it It's the way Jay and I have behaved toward each other is the way comics tend to behave toward one another.
	He has a way.
	He's an unusual fellow.
	I've never met anyone quite like Jay.
	And I will say, I'm happy to say, that I think he is the funniest guy I've ever known.
	Just flat out, if you go to see him do his nightclub act, just the funniest, the smartest, a wonderful observationist and very appealing as a comic.
	Therefore, the fact that he is also maybe the most insecure person I have ever known, I can never reconcile that.
	You're the best!
	Why are you doing things to support this insecurity?
	Ah, pot, meat, kettle, I know.
	Letterman's...
	I could call it aloofness and discomfort with people and his tendency to keep everyone but a select few at arm's length You could say probably has its roots in his childhood.
	In his high school, he was an outcast.
	He didn't fit in with the smart kids, the jocks, or the beautiful people, so he adopted an attitude of indifference and scorn and skepticism and condescension.
	Young David was rejected as a child now and forevermore.
	It's payback time.
	The revenge that feeds itself.
	These days, now Dave is going to dole out the rejection.
	He keeps his distance from the adult version of the cool kids in high school, the celebrities.
	He can't embrace his own star status.
	He has to keep that distance, and that's the template that he's working from.
	Now, he's never really shared this armor of apathy, at least until the most recent interviews that I've seen.
	He's distant from all but a very few close friends.
	Most of those, of course, have co-workers.
	And they can further aid his emotional distance and dissociation through workaholism.
	The stance that he took to maintain his dignity in high school became this like invisible cage that he inhabited and rewarded him, but I would argue trapped him a little throughout his adulthood.
	He said, I like staying at home.
	I have things in the house I like to do.
	People say, you're not a real celebrity.
	You don't go to parties.
	So what?
	Who would want to go to a party?
	I've been invited to the White House and haven't gone.
	When Letterman was asked if band leader Paul Schaefer was as good a friend as he appeared to be from watching the show, he replied, we're close.
	We chat every day before the show and after the show.
	We've been to dinner many times.
	He's been to my house many times.
	I like him.
	And I think he's the best of what he does.
	But...
	We're not best friends.
	I think it would be odd for me and Paul to be best friends away from the show and then have any kind of acceptable relationship on the show.
	Interesting that Letterman noted that working with a best friend would be untenable, especially because he worked with his living girlfriend Meryl for nearly a decade.
	On January 14, 2000, A routine checkup revealed that an artery in Letterman's heart was severely obstructed.
	He was rushed to emergency surgery for a quintuple bypass.
	That's like nine pigs, I think.
	He said, from the minute they pulled the tube out, I thought, geez, I wonder if I can still work again.
	That's your first thought, not who'll miss me, who do I love, who loves me.
	Prior to the surgery, he hadn't missed a day of work due to illness for 18 years.
	He returned to the show six weeks later on February 21, 2000.
	So even a quintuple bypass couldn't keep him away from work for long.
	Now, in a rare show of emotion, he was nearly in tears as he thanked the healthcare team.
	These are the people, he said, who saved my life.
	On November 3rd, 2003, his longtime girlfriend Regina Lasca gave birth to his only child, Harry Joseph Letterman, who was named after David's father.
	He was 56 years old.
	I thought I was an old dad.
	Letterman, Billy Joel, Anthony Quinn, anyway.
	He has blamed his single-minded focus on his career for the reason why he waited so long to become a father.
	Also noting, I have a little boy now.
	I wish I had a little girl too.
	Just by the by, I didn't delay fatherhood.
	Fatherhood is not a choice that you make like an individual.
	When you meet the right person you want to co-parent with, it's there.
	It happens.
	It's perfect.
	It's wonderful.
	It's beautiful.
	It's the best thing ever.
	And, um, but it is important also, it's not just women's eggs who age.
	You know, some arguments say the rise in autism is partly due to a wider sense of diagnosis, but also because men are getting older before they have kids, and, you know, our boys get a tad dusty on the shelf for that long.
	Sperm quality obviously doesn't decline as quickly as egg quality, but it does decline.
	It's just a little note to mention.
	Um...
	You cannot overstate how important Harry is in his life, says Tom Brokaw.
	Letterman jokes that he doesn't worry about screwing up Harry too much, since by the time the kid's out stealing cars, Dad will be dead.
	March 19, 2009, David Letterman, who's 61 then, married Regina, who was 48, before Justice of the Peace.
	The five-year-old son, Harry Letterman, was also present at the ceremony.
	He said, I had avoided getting married pretty good for like 23 years and I secretly felt the men who were married admired me like I was the last of the real gunslingers.
	Letterman had previously said, Oh, I'll get married again.
	You see, the thing is, I was married for 10 years, so I know the good parts of it and I know the bad parts.
	If it were up to me, I'd have children out of wedlock, but I know that's not the best way to approach it.
	The sex scandal.
	Thanks for hanging in.
	On October 1, 2009, Letterman made a public confession that he'd had sex with several female employees during his relationship with Regina Lasco, the mother of his child and wife of six months.
	This wasn't a sudden moment of conscience, but it was really a method of damage control and self-preservation.
	He was the victim of a blackmail or extortion plot concocted by a then-CBS producer, Robert Halderman, who demanded $2 million in exchange for his silence on Letterman's improprieties.
	Letterman cooperated with the police, and Halderman ultimately served four months behind bars for the extortion attempt.
	He said, It was easily the lowest point in my life.
	I don't know how else to describe it.
	I felt like I dug a bottomless pit and I was falling into it.
	Many praised the way he addressed the situation head-on by discussing it on the show, but Letterman is quick to brush off any praise related to this incident.
	It was tough, but I'll tell you something.
	In the back of my mind, this will give you a sense of the extent, of the width of what a weasel I could be.
	I was thinking, eh, maybe I can make this, maybe I can get a little sympathy out of this deal here.
	I think I was probably hoping that.
	Rather than being the actual one who was guilty, I thought, maybe I could generate some sympathy.
	It's just awful, isn't it?
	Uh...
	The biggest panic was on a Friday night when we heard Regina was on her way to file for divorce, Letterman says.
	It turned out not to be true, but that just turned me inside out.
	The only thing that's important to me I just ruined.
	I remember when they first handed me my son thinking, oh look, something perfect.
	And now I've jeopardized him as a part of my life and me as a part of his life.
	I still think you're going to have a flowchart of the responsibility for this circumstance, this sex scandal.
	My name's at the top.
	I'm not sure what that means, but I'm taking responsibility for it, and I'm trying to atone for it.
	And in atoning for it, you eliminate that behavior and apologize to the people you hurt.
	Going forward, there's not much more that you can do.
	When asked how he's regaining her trust, or how he regained her trust, Letterman said...
	That's what I'm still doing.
	I'm still doing it each and every day, in big ways and small ways, and get the reward of the nature of a relationship I never experienced before in my life, nor did I ever think was possible.
	Letterman's son, Harry, who was five years at the time of the scandal, now 11 years old, doesn't yet know about what happened.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no, says Letterman.
	I mean, he will one day.
	We'll have to have a conversation about it, but not yet.
	So, when Letterman's marriage to Michelle Cook, way back, was falling apart and she pleaded with him to work things out, he asked for a divorce and went back to work.
	When things started getting difficult with Meryl, Letterman chose work over their relationship and they broke up.
	He ended up marrying Regina Lasco, but was later discovered to be cheating throughout the relationship with women at work.
	Letterman says...
	I have a crude theory.
	I'm not sure that it's true, but I base it on the people I was hanging around with night after night.
	I think it's either people who did not get enough attention as kids or kids who got way too much attention who go into comedy.
	I got too little.
	I clearly got too little.
	But comedians, by and large, are not fun people to hang around with.
	They're dejected and depressed and sullen and nasty and backbiting and jealous.
	And I'm right in there.
	I'm included.
	You don't want to spend any time with me either.
	But they all have that one desire in common.
	To draw laughter out of people.
	You want to show that girl in high school who wouldn't give you the time of day, look what I can do in front of 200 people!
	I can get them to laugh!
	You wouldn't go out with me back then, and I was getting D's in shop, but...
	And I think that's probably the motivation.
	There were two periods of my life when I went to see a therapist, and it came down to that I would have to consider making massive changes in my personality.
	And I was reluctant to make those changes, so I said, now, I'm done here, I'm fine now.
	So I'm just as screwed up now as I was then.
	I concur.
	I mean, not about him, but about therapy.
	I spent years in therapy, three hours a week, ten hours of journaling, And my God, the changes that can be demanded or required or organically wrenched upon you like the tide coming in and you're a leaf on the wave, the changes that are demanded from real self-knowledge are enormous.
	And so when he says, it came down, I have to make, consider making massive changes in my personality.
	I don't want to make those changes.
	I'm done.
	I'm out of here.
	How much growth can people stand?
	Well, you know, when you're being paid $40 million a year for being who you are, it's a little tough to change the tires when you can't drive the car with different tires.
	So I can kind of understand how it's ridiculously possible to mix too many metaphors in one speech that hopefully remains somewhat comprehensible.
	After it was discovered that he'd been cheating on Regina, Lasko, he did return to therapy.
	And he said, for a long time I thought I was a decent guy.
	But yet, thinking that I was a decent guy, I was still capable of behavior that wasn't coincidental to living a decent life.
	That's what I'm working on.
	I want to be the person who I believed that I was.
	I want to be a good person.
	I believed I was a good person, yet I was capable of behavior inconsistent with somebody who was a good person.
	And you can't eradicate the record.
	But going forward, you can not be that way again.
	I have no one to blame but myself.
	And now I feel better about myself.
	My relationship with my wife is never better.
	And it's just because I want to be the person I always thought I was.
	And probably was pretending I was.
	And so far, it's been great.
	Things have been great.
	I hurt a lot of people.
	I have nobody to blame but myself.
	And I'm not looking to blame anybody.
	I'm looking to find out why I behaved the way I behaved.
	For years and years and years, 30, 40 years, I was anxious and hypochondriacal and an alcoholic and many, many other things that made me different from other people.
	The hypochondriacal behavior, it sounds stupid, but it was killing me.
	Doctors kept telling me not to come back.
	Really, Dave, there's nothing.
	Finally, I found out it's all a manifestation of anxiety.
	Once you realize that, you can self-monitor, which I found very useful.
	My life is fun and full of joy now.
	I only pretended that before.
	So, what has he accomplished?
	In his capacities as a writer and producer, performer, or as part of a writing team, Letterman is among the most nominated people in Emmy Award history with 52 nominations, winning two daytime Emmys and three, sorry, ten primetime Emmys since 1981.
	He won four American Comedy Awards and in 2011 became the first recipient of the Johnny Carson Award for Comedic Excellence at the Comedy Awards.
	He was a recipient of the 2012 Kennedy Center Honors, where he was called one of the most influential personalities in the history of television, entertaining an entire generation of late-night viewers with his unconventional wit and charm.
	He actually did surpass his friend and mentor, Johnny Carson, as the longest-serving late-night talk show host in TV history.
	33 years, February 1st, 1982, to May 20th, coming out 2015.
	So.
	Thank you for your patience.
	I think that, obviously, a very talented, very intelligent man, very heart-driven and ambitious man, a man who's achieved extraordinary and enormous success.
	You know, one thing, and we'll put the links to important, what I consider important, Letterman monologues and Letterman interviews and Letterman conversations below.
	Check this out below on YouTube.
	A lot to be learned.
	I've said on this show for many years, there is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.
	You have to get right with yourself.
	I run a philosophy show, had over 100 million downloads, and it is our relationship to virtue that is essential for our continued happiness.
	It is also having the courage to confront your demons.
	And shine a light in the darkest places of your history that gives you the freedom to be positive no matter where you came from.
	No matter what hellhole you may have crawled out of as a human being, there is a propulsion to the light that occurs when you follow Socrates' ancient commandment, know thyself.
	Know thyself and judge your history according to ethics, according to virtue.
	And he is a decent guy.
	He's generous.
	He's set up scholarships.
	Okay, it's only for C students, but he's set up scholarships.
	He's given a lot of money to charity.
	He's a decent guy.
	But the great lesson, I think, from Letterman is if you wait for success to bring you happiness, all you'll end up with is an open casket.
	That's all you're gonna get.
	You know, we all...
	We're shot like cannons into the sky, cannonballs into the sky, and we fall into a wet hole and we're eaten by worms.
	And to embrace all of the positives and negatives in life.
	I mean, life is just an endless series of problems to be solved.
	And to take relish and enjoyment in the virtue and kindness and courage and strength that we can bring to helping to advance life.
	The glorious narrative of the progress of human virtue is a noble calling and I think brings us the greatest happiness we can.
	If you're so afraid of failure, if failure is the worst thing in the world for you, then it's really impossible to live a happy life.
	If in the same way you think that overcoming failure, success is going to bring you happiness, You are also not going to be happy in life.
	There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.
	The only thing that you can do is learn about philosophy, define virtue, pursue virtue relentlessly, regardless of cost.
	That will bring you real and genuine happiness and sustaining happiness.
	What Aristotle says, the one thing we pursue, not for the sake of something else, but for its own sake, is happiness.
	And there's no route to happiness.
	But as Nietzsche described, the Socratic argument, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	If you are rational, you can be virtuous.
	If you are virtuous consistently, which rationality is required for, you can be happy.
	I don't think there's any other way to do it.
	That's my argument.
	At least I put the argument forward, all of that.
	I think that he had a lack of emotional connection to his parents.
	I couldn't find anything out about his sister, so I'm afraid they remain vexatious ghosts who've left no footprint on the internet.
	But I think without this connection, which is not the end of the world, to not have an emotional connection with your parents is not the end of the world, to not recognize the effects of not having an emotional connection with your parents and to deal with the vacuum and the void and the distance, right?
	So he was on the outside looking in, in his life, and then he replicated comedy where he was on the outside looking in.
	But I think, not to sound too maudlin, but I think that the reality was that the glass biodome, the impenetrable Stephen King-style sphere that he could not get through, was the coldness around his mother's heart.
	And when you don't connect with your own mother...
	When you don't have that essential emotional tie of umbilical cord to another human being, to your first human being, to the harbor that grew you and gave you life, it's hard to connect to other people unless you recognize and mourn that loss.
	There's an argument which is made which is that All dysfunction within the mind results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
	And I think that he did not mourn his lack of connection, and that lack of connection pursued him through his life, and he in a sense became, and this sounds negative, I don't mean it in a negative way, I think he became a sort of virus that spread this lack of connection to other people.
	When you're not connected to people, it's win-lose.
	Lack of empathy to other people keeps you out of the world of win-win, and therefore it's win-lose.
	And therefore his comedy had to be aggressive, and therefore his interviews had to be condescending in many ways.
	Because when you don't have empathy, it's win-lose everywhere you go.
	And that's why he defined comedy as that which draws blood and hurts someone.
	He didn't get the love and encouragement and acceptance from his mother.
	He did not get help in processing his father's near-death heart attack as a child.
	He did not...
	I mean, God, if your son is drinking, if he's alienated, if he's egging houses, if he's shining mirrored lights and causing, almost causing traffic accidents, this is a child...
	You know, like Sandra Bullock in a spacesuit spinning into infinity.
	Untutored, unmentored, unheld.
	And that he had to reach through a television for his inspiration was a great tragedy.
	You do not have to be as great as your children to enable their greatness.
	But the fact that his heroes were digital and distant meant that he had no choice but to become somebody on television.
	Because his real father was somebody on television.
	And that is really tragic.
	And yet not.
	I mean, hey, look, I'm ambivalent.
	But...
	He could not get the mentoring that he needed from his parents, and they were raised, you know, in diminished environments, did not seem to be particularly focused on self-knowledge or whatever, and his mother seems to be quite religious, which has its pluses and minuses.
	So he didn't have the kind of mentoring that he wanted and desperately needed, and he was adrift.
	And he didn't say, I had trouble fitting in, so I went and talked to my dad.
	Or I had trouble fitting in, I went and talked to my mom.
	It was just, I had trouble fitting in, so I shone lights into people's faces while they were driving in almost caused fatal accidents.
	That is what's missing.
	It's what's missing.
	And processing what's missing is the hardest thing in the world.
	Processing what's missing is the hardest thing in the world because you can notice the things you've done, but out of all of the 360 degrees of infinite opportunity that we have, knowing all the roads we didn't take is very hard.
	Oh, I was alienated at school.
	But the idea that in a healthy family, hopefully you would not be alienated at school.
	Secondly, your parents would notice even before you did.
	And thirdly, they would be neck deep in your environment with you, attempting to figure it out, to help you solve it, to help you deal with it, doing whatever it takes to solve this problem, to heal this distance, this alienation.
	The fact that that's not there!
	It's really hard to process and I think that's what he was probably getting close to when he was in therapy and the therapist was pointing out probably I would imagine the things that were missing in his life and what he needed to do to change and it was too much and then He fucked things up royally and literally by having sex with the people at his work,
	which then put him in a situation of vulnerability, which caused him to begin to take some tentative steps towards empathy, which I think is why he's feeling more joy now and why his relationship is closer.
	There is a reproduction of making other people small.
	When you have authority figures who aren't connected with you, who aren't really interested in who you are as a human being, you feel small.
	And you associate being in authority, having power, with making other people feel small.
	Because when your parents who had power over you, well, they made you feel small.
	Maybe your teachers did.
	Maybe your preachers did.
	And then when we grow into our full adulthood, we are like, oh, well, when I was...
	The people who had power over me made me feel small.
	Now that I have power, I'm going to make other people feel small because that's what power does.
	And the idea of using power to encourage people, to ennoble people, to...
	To fire up their passions and their potentials is very hard for us because there's so much in the world that is so invested in keeping us tiny.
	In keeping us small, in keeping us as political pets, not to look up at the grand statues and ironclad armors of our betters and our masters.
	There's so much investment in keeping us small.
	And my concern with Letimus is the degree to which he enabled that in people.
	That life is small, that people are foolish, that everyone is silly, and so on.
	He did not, to my knowledge, have heroes on his show.
	And what a powerful thing that would have been for him to do.
	Whether he would have had a successful show, well, probably not.
	Would he have had a happier life?
	I think so.
	And when the sirens of fame and money and sex come along, as they do, as Jesus himself was tempted in the wilderness when the devil said, I will give you all the world and a $14 million contract.
	I hope that maybe with a slight nudge from shows like this and from voices like mine, when the devil comes and tempts you with all that is material, You will instead turn to that which has the greatest meaning.
	Wisdom, virtue, love, empathy, connection, courage, all the virtues that bring the only lasting happiness and spread into the world until we can fully accept and understand that that which is funny is actually that which is joyful.
	And that which is joyful is never at the expense of another human being.
	Except perhaps really evil people.
	Thank you so much for watching this presentation.
	Dave, congratulations on your retirement and thank you so much for providing such fascinating stuff for the world to look at for so long.

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