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Oct. 3, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:26
The Truth About Robin Williams
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
So I was driving yesterday, my wife was driving, I was sitting in the backseat chatting with my daughter, and my phone pinged, and I saw that Robin Williams hung himself, or died yesterday, apparently he hung himself for suicide.
He left no note that has been discovered as yet.
And I wanted to talk about his death.
I'm old enough that I remember when he first burst on TV in the 1970s.
He first played Mork on Happy Days.
He was cast by Jerry Marshall.
And then he got his own spin-off show with Pam Dorber called Mork and Mindy.
And... He was dazzling, electrifying.
He pushed the boundaries of human communication and has always been someone that I aspire to emulate in my own small way, the degree to which one can push the boundaries of what human language and human communication is capable of.
He really moved the goalpost for improv, for wit, for skewed, absurdist physical comedy, and I was deeply shocked and remain quite sad at his passing.
It really does feel like the fates have drawn a curtain across one of the brightest lights in those who expertly wield human language.
And I feel very sad about that.
There is, of course, the pathos of the man who brought so much happiness to millions of people around the world hanging himself alone.
And the talk is generally that this was some problems that he had.
He suffered from depression apparently and was suffering from major depression recently.
And there's talk, of course, that he had relapsed in his addictions.
He was, of course, in the 70s and 80s addicted to alcohol.
And cocaine.
But I'm going to make the case here.
And I feel quite angry about this, so I hope that you will forgive me if my temper flares a little.
But I really feel the degree to which some of the great lights in the world are put out by this addiction that nobody is talking about.
We will get to that a little bit later.
But let's first start with some of the facts about Robin's life.
His father, Robert Williams, Was a vice president of the Ford Motor Company and was very successful at his job.
And his father had been born to money, right?
So he comes, Robin Williams comes from a long line of money.
But Robin's father, Robert Williams, when he was a teenager, his family business went bankrupt.
And he actually ended up working in a coal mine in some Fountainhead-style tragedy.
And later, Robert Williams' father served in the Navy in World War II and was almost killed when a Japanese airplane crashed into his ship.
So that, of course, was probably kamikaze, a suicide bomber.
And he was described, Robert Williams' father, as a cold and rigid man.
In the early 1950s, Robert Williams met and married his second wife, Laura McLaurin.
She was about 29 years old.
They had a 16-year age difference.
She was a fashion model and part-time actress who had two children from a previous marriage and was deeply involved in the Christian Science Church and did a lot of charitable and volunteer work.
So we have, and we'll see this mirrored in Robert Williams' own life, we have this pattern of a successful man attracting what can only charitably be described as gold diggers in many ways, so younger and prettier and available and so on.
It's because he was an older man, Robin Williams' father, who married a young Southern beauty.
And if you've read your Tennessee Williams, you know that marrying a young Southern beauty or any age Southern beauty can be a tad challenging.
So Robin Williams' father was very successful at Ford.
He was 46 years old when Robin was born in 1951.
And if you've spent any time in business, you know that, of course, to become successful, you have to travel, you have to move a lot.
And so his father was on the road a great deal, and his mother was deeply involved in society functions, and as well, she continued to do occasional work as a model.
So when Robin Williams was very young, he was very lonely in the giant mansion that he grew up in.
And so to compensate for this loneliness, he developed his Imagination.
People who have the ability to go in and out of characters and so on often experience a lot of loneliness as a child because they create conversations in their head, they create characters in their head.
A man who is starving will dream of food, and a boy dying of loneliness will dream of friends.
He gave all his imaginary friends their own unique voices, and he also spent a lot of time playing hide-and-seek with the family dog whose name was Duke.
And unless the dog was super intelligent, Hide and Seek was probably not the most intellectually stimulating game to play.
As a young child, Robin Williams was not close to his parents either.
He told the Squire magazine in 1989, my father was away, my mother was working doing benefits.
I was basically raised by this maid and my mother would come in later, you know, when I knew her.
And she was wonderful and charming and witty.
He called his dad sir and his mother ma'am.
So, Robert Williams' father was stern, demanding, without a sense of humor, and emotionally closed off, emotionally unavailable.
He expected perfect performance from Robin at school, but no matter how hard...
Robin worked. He was never certain he had done quite enough to please his father.
He yearned for his father's praise, of course, as all children do, but he never really got it.
Once he did, at the age of eight, bring home a straight-A report card, but his father said, well done, son, now let's get ready for dinner.
And, you know, for the moms and dads out there, I mean, you don't want to...
Over-bake your children in the heat of your praises, but at the same time, you don't want to freeze their hearts by withholding praise as well.
Otherwise, they develop a hunger for approval that, if shifted to adult life, creates very dysfunctional patterns, in my opinion.
I guess he was still, Robin seems to have still been trying to please his father when he grew up as he made his mark as an international movie star as an adult.
He would insist in interview after interview that he knew nothing but love and devotion from his father, even though he was hardly a warm and loving man.
So as a child, Robin Williams quickly learned that his mother loved to laugh, and the way for him to have some kind of impact on her was to make her laugh.
So he told the squire, I think maybe comedy was part of my way of connecting with my mother.
I'll make mommy laugh, and that'll be okay.
And the idea, I call it me plus, I have to be me plus something in order to be loved, to have connection, to make contact, to be of value to people.
So I have to be me plus good looking.
I have to be me plus rich.
I have to be me plus funny.
I can't just be me and be loved for who I am.
I can't just be cake.
I have to have icing. Me plus is the root of a huge amount of dysfunction in the world.
It's why people rape the environment by gathering more resources than they really need.
It is why there's a cosmetics industry.
It's why there's plastic surgery.
It's why there's all this dysfunction.
Me plus. Well, avoiding me plus or dealing with the agony of me plus is essential to actually get a connection.
Because me plus is always me plus a show.
Me plus a show of money, of beauty, of sex appeal, of comedy, of you name it.
So, me plus, and I think that the me plus ends up in a significant me minus later on in life.
So, he studied, of course, he played games of make-believe, and he also watched television, of course, that came into American homes in the 50s.
Now, as we mentioned, Robin did have two half-brothers, Todd and Lauren, but they were both much older.
Then he was. He told Playboy in 1982, there were no other kids in the neighborhood.
There was nobody around to play with.
My half-brothers, Todd and Lauren, were a lot older than I, and I didn't see them until I was about 10.
Todd always extorted all my money.
He'd come into my room and say he needed some beer money, and I'd say, oh gosh, yes, take it all.
My mother would get furious because Todd would get into my piggy bank and walk out with $40 worth of pennies.
This tells you something about the character of his mother, that she raised these selfish, bullying, preying-upon-little-kids-stealing-their-money-children.
And this exploitation and having his money stolen from him, which is the addiction that I will talk about in a few minutes, was a constant theme of Robin's life, and I would argue was what killed him.
Now, as we mentioned, his father was a successful executive, so he needed to move a lot.
By his own estimate, by Robin's estimate, he attended six schools in just one eight-year period.
So he's always the new kid in class, and he was also bullied constantly.
When asked by Ladies Home Journal in 97 what the hardest part of his life was, Robin Williams said, I was small and overweight, and slow and pasty white.
I remember in sixth grade being called leprechaun and dwarf.
I would go home crying.
Mom and Dad had put me in a public school, and most of the kids there were bigger than me and wanted to prove that they were bigger by throwing me into walls.
There were a lot of burly farm kids and sons of water plant workers there, and I'd come to school looking for new entrances and thinking, if only I could come in through the roof.
They'd nail me as soon as I'd go through the door.
I've mentioned this before in these conversations, but bullying...
is an attack upon the runce of the litter, the weak of the species, and is basically predicated on a lack of bond with the parents.
If a child has a secure bond with the parents, that forms pretty much a force field around the child in terms of bullying.
If the child does not have a strong bond with parents, then it's like separated from the herd.
Those are the ones who get picked off by the human predators in childhood and adulthood.
So keep your contacts as close as you can.
They provide an amazing shield against bullies and users.
So, as Robin grew older, of course, he...
Developed two strategies to defend himself from the abuse that he was receiving in the government school.
So he took up wrestling and cross-country running to lose weight and build up his muscles, and he found out that he could make other people laugh.
And if he could make other people laugh, they wouldn't attack him.
So he said, I started telling jokes as a way to stop getting the shit kicked out of me.
Now, he'd had years and years of practice making other people laugh because the me plus for Robin and his mother was, Mommy will pay attention to me if it's me plus jokes.
And there's something incredibly and fundamentally humiliating about that.
Needing to be a performing monkey for your own mother for her to pay attention to you is a wretched and vicious experience to have in perpetuity as a child.
In 1969, Robin's father quit Ford and moved the family to a small town in North Carolina, which was part of the counterculture movement, hickey hippie culture, and drug use.
And the teenagers there smoked marijuana and took LSD because cocaine was too expensive, and Robin found himself fitting right in.
So in 1982, he recalled, it was wonderful and very, very weird.
I went to Redwood High School, which had courses in 16mm filmmaking and a lot of psychology-type classes.
It was the height of the encounter period, and in a lot of classes, teachers would get everybody together for an energy hug.
I remember one teacher would sometimes just stop what he was doing and then a few kids would start pounding out a beat and everyone would get up and dance around the room.
It was incredible to go from a private old boys high school to a place where there were gestalt history classes and where kids were always flying around on acid.
And in one of his greatest movies, Dead Poets Society, he based the character on one of his own history teachers.
He told Playboy, at first I still carried my briefcase, and guys would either ask, who's the geek?
Or stare at me and say, wow, a briefcase, how un-mellow.
You're really creating negative energy.
In the Midwest, if your classmates thought you were creating negative energy, you'd hear, yo, followed by a right cross to the jaw.
Right after I started wearing jeans, somebody gave me my first Hawaiian shirt, and after that I was gone.
I got into the whole wild face, and I learned to totally let go.
And soon after that, he made his first experiments with drugs.
Now, I've got a whole presentation on this called The Bomb and the Brain.
You can go to fdurl.com slash bib to look it into more.
But drug use is basically an attempt to self-medicate a brain that has developed dysfunctionally Through the absence of parental attachment.
So when you don't get parental attachment, when you don't have love, when you have to be me plus, your brain develops with shortages of dopamine or endorphins and therefore you end up having to substitute these substances which should be naturally occurring in your brain with external supports for those missing substances.
And so when you first take these drugs You realize that you've had something missing your whole life.
Most people, if they've got a happiness level of like 100, they take a drug that goes to 110, 120, then they go back to 100.
But if you started with a happiness level of 20 or 30, you take a drug, it takes you to 80 or 90, you feel normal for the first time in your life, and then you crash back down.
That's where the addiction comes from.
This is why some people can take the drugs and just whatever, and then some people, you know, it completes them.
They realize what it means to not be in pain.
And this is where the addiction comes from.
And there are ways of dealing with it, of course, without drugs.
But he was not exposed to that information as far as I've been able to find out.
So, Robin expected to become a diplomat.
So he moved to Claremont Men's College near LA after high school.
But he got involved in those dirty hippie theater people.
Oh, yes, that was my experience too.
And He realized that on the stage he could really make people laugh.
This was the trigger event because it was so easy for me.
It was instantaneous. He told Reader's Digest in 88.
I kind of exploded, right?
So he's been trained to make his mother laugh.
He's been trained to keep the bullies at bay by making them laugh.
So this is not out of nowhere.
It's not instantaneous at all.
It's like me being raised in a Japanese household and then saying, it's weird.
I could just speak Japanese.
It was instantaneous. Well, it's not.
But it shows that he did not really grasp the degree to which his childhood was developing the me plus problem that I think plagued him his whole life.
So he started spending more and more time in the theatre and less and less time in classrooms.
I remember when I was...
I have a minor theatre background.
I went to the National Theatre School in Canada for a couple of years studying acting and playwriting.
And then I did a whole bunch of plays.
I was Macbeth on stage in college and a couple of other plays.
I ended up just completely neglecting my schoolwork and doing plays and all that.
So... So he returned back home after failing most of his courses and then transferred to the College of Marin to continue working in the theater.
And his comedic ability started to develop when he was hanging around San Francisco's comedy clubs.
So in 1973, recruiters from New York's prestigious Juilliard School stopped in San Francisco for auditions for the school's acting program.
And Robin auditioned and obviously blew them away, was offered a full scholarship.
He also was one of the only two students to be accepted into the advanced program at the school that year.
The other was Christopher Reeve, noted for playing, I think magnificently, Superman, who then had a tragic accident.
He fell off a horse and was paralyzed and then died as a result of this paralysis.
And they basically were very close friends, and they took the classes, basically two of them in the class at some points.
And it is prestigious.
I mean, I remember when I auditioned for the National Theatre School, they only take 1% of applicants, and I got in.
I had an audition.
I did something from The Zoo Story by Edward Albee.
Actually, my original audition, which I didn't have the courage to do, which I will reproduce for you here, Was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern has only one in the stage directions as Samuel Beckett play.
There's a tree which has a leaf in the first act and no leaf in the second act and I was allowed a three minute adapted audition.
I was going to stand there for a minute and a half like this and then do this.
But I thought that might be a bit obscure for them so I decided not to do it but lo these many years later I have reproduced it for you here.
That's some gripping stuff. So, after he graduated, he was on the short-lived Richard Pryor show on NBC, and then, as I mentioned, he was cast at the Alien Mork in Happy Days, and then from 78 to 82, it was a spin-off show.
And in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, he began doing stand-up comedy, three HBO comedy specials, and in 78, June 4, 78, he married his first wife, Valerie Velarde.
And during this period, he was addicted to cocaine.
He was among one of the last people to see John Belushi before John Belushi died of a drug overdose, March 5, 1982.
And it was that tragedy that...
I guess woke him up was the wake-up call for Robin Williams, and he quit cold turkey.
And he also, of course, he had a son who was about to be born, and he said, you know, you've got a responsibility.
It's more than you. But the important thing to note here is that his wife married him and decided to have a child with him while he was taking drugs and alcohol while he was a cocaine addict.
So not particularly great.
I looked up the woman. I'm always curious what happens to the wives of celebrities.
After they divorce. And I looked up this Valerie woman.
She had a credit on one of his terrible films, Popeye.
One of Robert Williams' films, Popeye.
And then she also had a screen credit of herself as an audience member at some awards show in 1979.
So it doesn't look like much afterwards.
So, his son was born April 11th, 1983, and he actually says, and I'm sure it's true, he stayed clean for another 20 years.
But in 2006, which we'll get into in a minute or two, Robert Williams relapsed.
Now, during his first marriage, he got involved in an affair with Michelle Tish Carter, a cocktail waitress that he met.
In 1984, she sued him in 1986 for $6.2 million.
Now, kids...
This is back when $6.2 million really meant something.
Now, she said that he didn't tell her he was infected with the herpes simplex virus and then basically had sex with her in the mid-80s and then she says he transmitted the virus to her.
And she sued him for $6.2 million.
The case was settled a week before they went to court.
He says that he neither denied nor admitted having herpes, but he did not dispute that he had got involved with her.
And so, of course, this was a tragedy for his marriage, and he said during this time period he was high on vodka and cocaine.
He said, right now I'm moving through my personal life like a hemophiliac in a razor factory, which, of course, would be a death sentence.
There's a movie Patch Adams.
He said he identified very strongly with a doctor, an American physician, a social activist who also became a clown.
He said Patch was so deeply depressed that he tried to kill himself, said Robin Williams.
But then he found a way out of it by being absurdist.
His whole thing about being absurdist is that by helping others, you get back.
So then again, this is how am I providing value to others?
Me plus. Me plus clown makeup.
Me plus jokes. And this is a very, very important thing to avoid.
There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.
It must be tackled within.
It must be grappled with and tackled within.
And because he grew up so lonely and then turned to jokes as a way of providing value to others, he did not develop his social skills.
Now, if you're a celebrity, Then you meet crazy amounts of people.
I remember seeing an interview with Jack Nicholson in one of the outtakes for The Shining, where he said like a person meets a thousand or two people in his life.
As a celebrity, you meet like 10,000 people a year.
And so if you don't have social skills as a celebrity, it's really anxiety provoking being in crowds of other people.
Again, I'm not exactly a celebrity, but when I go to conferences, there's lots of people there who want to meet me, who want to chat with me, which I really enjoy.
But if I had social anxiety or anxiety around that, it would be pretty horrendous to do it.
So, his friend, for 35 years, a fellow named Bob Zmuda, he said there had to be two people in the room.
With Robin Williams. Then you were an audience and then he came alive.
He goes on to say that one-on-one, Williams had no social skills.
He couldn't handle it. I knew this man for 35 years and yet it was like I was in an elevator with a stranger.
And so he comes to life with an audience.
Now, if you deprive someone like that of an audience, then the underlying depression, the underlying emptiness, the underlying anger...
is going to erupt.
Again, sort of my amateur psychologizing, so don't take it very seriously.
It's just sort of what I think. What Ayn Rand used to call a social metaphysician, someone who tragically defines his life by the value that other people see in him, the me plus.
Now, we'll get into sort of what may have precipitated this in a moment, but his last show was canceled and he was basically left with no one to entertain.
So, April 30th, 1989, Robert Williams marries Marcia Garces, his son's nanny, who was several months pregnant with his child.
So, he was raised by a maid and married his son's nanny.
Is that a coincidence? Probably not.
I mean, it's the Schwarzenegger thing, right?
If you're a maid or a nanny in a rich man's house, you seduce him, you get pregnant, and you're set for life.
And also, you can sort of see there's a pattern that Robin Williams just dates people who are around.
This probably has to do with his social anxiety.
So, he dates women he meets at nightclubs.
He dates women he meets in comedy clubs.
He dates the woman who's in his house.
Just people who are around.
This is not a very discriminating or discerning placing of the penis.
So they had two children, and they were together for a long time.
But during this time, I mean, and for most of his career, Williams was a complete workaholic.
He said, in one two-year period, I made eight movies.
At one point, the joke was that there's a movie out without you in it.
You have this idea that you'd better keep working, otherwise people will forget.
So the audience remains his mother.
My mother will not pay attention to me if I'm not entertaining her.
The audience will forget me if I'm not entertaining the audience.
Now, what's so bad if the audience forgets you?
You still exist. You still have your friends, your close relationships, your loves, your hobbies, your thoughts, your emotions.
Well, if you don't have those things because you're other-focused, because you have to be me plus, and because your identity and existence and value is predicated upon pleasing others, well, when those others go away, your identity, that false self, goes away as well.
2003, he described the beginning of his alcohol relapse after 20 years.
He said, one day I walked into a store and saw a little bottle of Jack Daniels.
And then that voice, I call it the lower power, goes, hey, just a taste, just one, he says candidly.
I drank it and there was that brief moment of, oh, I'm okay.
But it escalated so quickly.
He was in Alaska, I think.
He says, I was in a small town where it's not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there.
And then I thought, drinking.
I just thought, hey, maybe drinking will help, because I felt alone and afraid.
It was that thing of working so much and going, fuck, maybe that will help.
And it was the worst thing in the world.
You feel warm and kind of wonderful, and then the next thing you know, it's a problem and you're isolated.
So within a week of taking that drink from Jack Daniels, He was fully hooked again.
You feel warm and kind of wonderful.
Well, that's actually the experience of love.
And Gabor Maté, a Vancouver physician who's written extensively on addiction, and I would highly recommend his works, particularly in the realm of hungry ghosts, says that one of his patients, heroin patients, or one of the patients he had who was addicted to heroin, said heroin felt like a warm hug.
And we know that children who are cuddled and nurtured and breastfed feel warm and secure and It releases happy chemicals in their brain.
Children who don't experience that, when they get those external chemicals from drugs or alcohol, they then feel like they're being hugged for the first time by the mother who never did or rarely did.
And it's an irresistible feeling.
Without strong and strict self-knowledge approaches and really great therapy, it's an irresistible feeling.
It wasn't fun while it lasted.
Of course, three years sounds like a whole lot of time to not be having fun.
He says, that's right, most of the time you just realize you started to do embarrassing things.
And so Robin Williams recalled drinking at a charity auction hosted by Sharon Stone at Cannes.
And I realized I was pretty baked and I look out and I see all of a sudden a wall of paparazzi and I go, oh well, I guess it's out now.
Some, of course, suggested that around this time, his friend Christopher Reeve died.
And, I mean, what a horrifying existence.
Christopher Reeve had his own terrible anxieties and had dropped out of sight after being offered some great roles, including American Gigolo, before he did Remains of the Day, which sort of put him back on the map.
I mean, it's a shallow part of me.
It's hard to imagine people that good-looking, rich, and talented have problems.
Of course they do. Again, if being rich and famous and good-looking and talented were enough, Marilyn Monroe would have lived a whole lot longer than she did.
But Christopher Reeve, a fellow for horse, had a terrible spinal injury, basically could barely move any part of his body below his eyes, and just didn't last, got an infection from bedsores, I think, and died from just horrendous, horrendous death.
And so some say, well, maybe it was Christopher Reeve's death that turned him back to drink.
No, he says quietly. It's more selfish than that.
It's just literally being afraid.
And you think, oh, this will ease the fear, and it doesn't.
And the interviewer asked, what are you afraid of?
And he said, everything. It's just a general all-round arg.
It's fearfulness and anxiety.
Now, the use of alcohol to self-medicate deep-seated anxiety is very common and very tragic, and of course it doesn't work.
But it's very, very tempting, because the alternative is to question your primary relationships, your family of origin relationships, and that's really hard for people.
So, in a sort of strange cycle, it was the imminent birth of his son, Zach, that got him off, along with John Belushi's death, that got him off booze and drugs in the first place.
And then, 20 years later, his son, Zach, also staged an intervention, and he told the Times, the son, there was an ultimatum attached to it.
I'm pretty confident that if he continued drinking, he would not be alive today.
And so the ultimatum is probably you have to quit drinking or we're not going to have a relationship.
So he goes back to AA. William says, I felt so good about the first AA meeting I attended that I went out and drank the next day.
He was persuaded to come back.
A friend said, hey, we don't shoot a wounded.
Come back. Now, I'm going to say this.
I don't know exactly what he's meaning, but I know it's important.
So why did he say he fell off the wagon?
He said, I think I did it because it would actually allow me not to talk.
It was like reverse medication.
It's that idea of, okay, you don't have to talk to people.
It kind of shuts you down.
So I would guess, right, and again, this is all just speculation, and it comes really out of a place of love and respect for the man, but...
I would guess that he didn't know how to interact with people without being on.
Being on is exhausting for a long period of time.
I really strive when I'm in sort of social situations with people who know me and know my work to not be on, but to be connected, to listen, but not to be a performer.
I mean, I do kind of philosophy as performance art as it is.
But I really think it's important to not be on to give people the connection and solidity that they crave, but without being a me plus.
Because if I'm not a me plus, then they don't feel they have to be a me plus as well.
Because a comedian who's telling jokes is saying the value here is me plus jokes, and the audience in listening to the jokes say the value is me plus money plus laughter.
And so nobody is there for each other.
They're there for... Financial and emotional reasons that don't have anything to do with genuine human connection.
So I think that for him not to talk was very stressful, was very anxiety-provoking, because it would be like he's desperate to make a connection with his mother as a child.
The only way he can do it is through making jokes.
And then being not talking is very stressful for him, because it means that his mother's going to drift away, that he's going to have no connections, that he's going to go back to his horrible life of Imaginary friends hand puppets and playing hide-and-seek with the family dog in an empty floor of an empty-hearted house.
So my guess is the drinking had something to do with that.
Now, he talked about his addiction.
He said, it, or addiction, is not caused by anything.
It's just there.
It waits. It lays in wait for the time when you think, it's fine now, I'm okay.
Then the next thing you know, it's not okay.
Then you realize, where am I? I didn't realize I was in Cleveland.
Now, this is not true, and addiction is caused by early childhood trauma, and this, again, you can look at the science behind it in my presentation, fdrurl.com slash bib.
So, in March 2008, his second wife filed for divorce after 19 years, citing irreconcilable differences.
So, after 20 years of sobriety, the relationship basically cracked and faltered after he was three years back on alcohol.
So he entered rehab and, by all accounts, has remained sober since then, but the trust was broken, says a friend of the family.
She's hurt. Williams later said, you know, I was shameful, and you do stuff that causes disgust and that's hard to recover from.
You can say, I forgive you, and all that stuff, but it's not the same as recovering from it.
It's not coming back. Now, if you are an alpha male, right?
And he was an alpha, of course.
Rich, famous, and quite a good-looking guy.
And you are targeted by hypergamous women, right?
by women who want to trade up, by women who want to get the security of a rich man's sexual attention or child.
And whether, when we say, I'm doing disgusting stuff, It may have been affairs.
I don't know, because it was never particularly detailed.
But until you're in the laser sights of hypergamy-driven women, it's really hard to understand how tempting it can be for men in that situation where women are throwing themselves at you, even if you look like Tom Likas.
So he says, comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.
He's been in and out of therapy for much of his life.
He says, everyone is slightly dysfunctional.
There's a darker side to all of us.
Yeah, there are times when I've been depressed, other times not.
That's why I have friends and family and even a therapist I talk to.
There's nothing romantic, he says, about addiction.
The idea that as an artist you have to push yourself and explore the dark side.
I went there. You can do a lot more interesting stuff when you're not messed up.
During an interview, he didn't really talk much about the therapy, but at one point he said, I think the more you understand yourself, what you do, why you do it, this frees you up to do other things and to be other people.
Be other people.
I don't think that the point of self-knowledge is to be other people, but to be authentically who you are, your original self, which is angry and hurt at neglect and trauma as a child.
If he was asked whether he has any regrets, he said, no, regrets don't help.
That's an interesting, very compressed, there's only four words there, but it's very interesting.
So he says, no, I don't have any regrets.
And then he says, regrets don't help.
So what that means is, he has regrets, but he's repressing them as being unhelpful.
Well, I think it's important to have regrets, because to not have regrets is to not have empathy.
We've all made mistakes and have hurt other people, which we regret.
I regret. And to have regrets is important.
Now, let's get to the real addiction that I'll argue caused the end of this tragically gifted man.
So, his two divorces and the herpes settlement...
It cost Robin Williams an estimated $35 million.
His two divorces and the herpes settlement cost Williams an estimated $35 million.
Let's just reduce this to base penis and pussy.
If he had decided to pay a prostitute $1,000 every night, he could have had daily sex for about 96 years.
I was always curious who originated this phrase here.
He originated this phrase. He said, instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her my house.
And one of the reasons he was such a workaholic is he had to pay for his ex-wives.
This is absolutely staggering stuff.
I've seen my parents divorced when I was a baby.
And more than a decade later, when I was 12 or 13 years old, I'd sit with my mom in a restaurant and she'd drop all these lists of everything that she wanted my dad to pay for and so on.
And because of that, because she was waiting and hoping for this money bomb to fall out of my dad's nutsack, she didn't get her own life going.
Because she's holding a winning lottery ticket, you ain't applying for jobs.
And this alimony stuff...
Child support is different, right?
But in child support, I mean, children aren't really that expensive.
Children will cost, you know, maximum 500 bucks more a month.
But this alimony stuff is wretched, and I think it's so destructive to women and to men.
The man had to work because he had these vampiric estrogen-based parasites hanging off his wallet.
Who considered themselves entitled to all the money from his work, his pain, his workaholism, his genius, his gifts.
Why? Because they had sex with him.
That's the only difference.
If they'd been female friends living with him, if they hadn't had sex, just been female friends with him, they would be entitled to nothing.
Women who are pursuing alimony turn a marriage into a whorehouse.
Because they're basically saying, I want to be paid now for having had sex with you in the past.
I mean, how alimony is not welfare for rich whores is absolutely beyond me.
It is horrendous. If you're a wife, let's just say, again, I know this goes both ways, but we're just talking about the vast majority.
This is women. If you're a wife, you have a job called being a wife.
I had jobs before I did this.
I had jobs running and working for software companies.
You have a job called being a wife.
Now, if you get fired, if the man divorces you, guess what?
You lost your job. You don't get paid.
And if you quit, you don't get paid either.
If I go into my boss, when I had a boss, I go to my boss and I say, hey man...
I don't like working here anymore.
I think you suck. I'm quitting.
But, by the way, you've still got to pay me, right?
What sense would that make?
And how much more likely would I be to quit if I knew I was going to get money, the same amount of money as if I'd still been working, maybe more?
Madness! If you quit your job, you don't get paid.
If you get fired, you don't get paid.
Marriage is a job.
You are getting paid for being a wife.
No longer wifey, no longer payee.
But this is just vote-buying bullshit that politicians do to women.
It also allows women with kids to break up a marriage and not have the kids get upset with them because of a drop in living standards.
Right? The style to which they...
Keep them in the manner to which they've been accustomed.
Bullshit! The man's accustomed to having a clean house of cooked food and sex.
He's not getting any of that anymore.
So why is the woman getting all the money?
Did she do the work? No. Putting up with difficult people is not a job that gets you paid.
Otherwise, my mother would owe me a fortune.
When asked why he made less than stellar movies like Old Dogs, 2009, Robert Williams said, it paid the bills.
Sometimes you have to make a movie to make money.
He didn't mistake them, he has for intelligence scripts.
You know what you're getting into, totally.
So... When he was 57, he had an operation to replace an aortic valve on March 13, 2009.
He was forced to cancel, so he was getting shortness of breath doing his one-man comedy show, Weapons of Self-Destruction.
And he planned to return to going on the road only seven months after having heart surgery.
And he said, I realized I was running out of merchandising money from Bicentennial Man.
Ah, great joke.
He married his third wife, graphic designer Susan Schneider, on October 23, 2011, in St.
Helena, California. He met her shortly before his heart operation, and she nursed him through convalescence at his California home.
So, two marriages, two divorces, now married again, and he was on the verge of bankruptcy after these two costly divorces.
And when he was 62 years old, after more than 30 years away from the small screen, he returned back to TV to star in The Crazy Ones with Sarah Michael Gellar.
And he said, The idea of having a steady job is appealing.
I have two other choices.
Go on the road doing stand-up or do small independent movies working almost for scale.
The movies are good, but a lot of times they don't even have distribution.
There are bills to pay. My life is downsized in a good way.
I'm selling the ranch up in Napa.
I just can't afford it anymore.
What brought this Oscar-winning workaholic actor to this point?
Well, the two divorces, he said, didn't quite take all his money.
Not all, he told Parade magazine.
Last enough. Divorce is expensive.
I used to joke, they were going to call it all the money, but they changed it to alimony.
It's ripping your heart out through your wallet.
If a woman divorces you and takes you for $10 million or more, she basically is saying, I hated being married to you to the tune of $10 million.
Women's inability to resist free stuff offered to them is equivalent to men's challenges in resisting the sexual advances of fertile and beautiful women.
Men are primed to Have sex with fertile women, and women are primed to get stuff from men as resources to raise their children.
But I still, you know, when a man strays on a woman, when a man is married and then has an affair with a younger, beautiful woman, he's a jerk, right?
He's a jerk. He's breaking his vows.
He's a bad guy. Ladies, if you go after your husband after you've been fired from your job as wife or you've quit your job as wife, you're equally horrendous.
You're equally horrendous. You are destroying his heart.
You are taking his money. You are stealing from his labor.
Quit your job by all means.
Don't expect to get paid when you quit your job.
Get fired from your job if you're doing a bad job by all means, but don't expect to get paid if you get fired from your job of being a wife.
Stop taking free shit.
It's destroying marriage.
And anybody who does this is a gold digger for money and a grave digger of her husband's heart.
May 10th, 2014, CBS announced that it had canceled The Crazy Ones.
I never saw it, but the reviewer said that he looked tired and all that throughout it, and that doesn't work on TV. So, in July, he checked into Hazleton Addiction Treatment Center in Minnesota at a program aimed at maintaining long-term sobriety.
His rep said, after working back-to-back projects, Robin is simply taking the opportunity to fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment, of which he remains extremely proud.
August 10th, 12.02pm.
Williams was pronounced dead of an apparent suicide due to asphyxia.
He hung himself. He has been battling severe depression of late, said his media representative.
His wife said, This morning I lost my husband and my best friend, while the world lost one of its most beloved artists and beautiful human beings.
I'm utterly heartbroken. A recent CNN article concluded Williams' fans can look forward to four more movie appearances coming to theaters, including another installment in the Night of the Museum franchise.
Even in death, he's working to pay the bills of his vampiric and predacious ex-wives.
So, yes, Robin Williams died of an addiction.
I would argue that he died of an addiction.
Women's addiction to free stuff.
Single moms is basically the foundation of the welfare state.
Free stuff. And...
It is horrendous the degree to which women's desire for free stuff is natural, but it's not recognized as a problem.
Nobody's talking about the fact that the 62-year-old exhausted man who'd had heart surgery a few years prior was working himself to death to pay the bills, to pay the outrageous bills.
Alimony settlements that the American justice system, justice in quotes, heaps upon undeserving women.
Marry a rich guy? Great.
Fantastic. Good for you, sister.
Don't take his goddamn money when you leave.
You didn't work for it.
You didn't earn it. Sex is not work.
Unless it's something agreed to short-term ahead of time.
The addiction of women to stripping the flesh from the bones of their husband's finances, of their ex-husband's finances, that is the addiction that kills so many men.
Post-divorce, suicides among men are very high.
Now, again, he's not recently divorced, but his show had just been cancelled.
So this exhausted man, this broke man, this broken man, Robin Williams...
Was facing a future where he could not probably pay his alimony payments.
He could not continue to pump money at his vampiric ex-wives.
And so, like John Cleese, like Scott Foley, like so many other men, he then has to go.
He's going to have to go on the road.
He's going to have to go on the road at 62 years old.
When he should be on the verge of retirement, if that's what he wants, he should be relaxing and enjoying his time, getting ready for grandkids.
No. No, no, no, no.
He has to go on the road.
Exhausting, lonely, debilitating.
And somewhere, an environment which is very addict-provoking prone.
He's much more likely to drink when he's out on the road.
The last time he was on the road, he had shortness of breath and ended up in hospital Having part of his heart replaced with pig valves.
His TV show got cancelled.
He's facing massive bills.
He sells his house because he can't afford to pay his bills.
And then he's got to go back out on the road.
John Cleese did this. He had to pay his wife ungodly sums of money and he had to go.
He called it the alimony tour.
He had to go out on the road in his 70s and go and pay.
Because, goddammit, men are just disposable goddam workhorses, right?
Go work! Get the bitch some money!
Give me the money! That's all they have.
And this poor man had to go back out on the road or he would face prison.
There's no debtors' prison.
You don't go to prison for your debts unless you owe the IRS or you owe an ex-wife.
Then you go to prison.
He may have been facing prison time for his inability to pay his debts.
Dave Foley, a Canadian comedian who was on a sitcom with Phil Hartman.
Newsradio, I think it was called.
And he got divorced during that time.
He owed insane amounts, $17,000 a month or something like that, because he was making a lot of money at the time.
He was also in A Bug's Life.
And after that, you know, sitcom died for quite a while, right, on TV.
And he just couldn't get the work to make that kind of money.
So he goes to the court and he says, hey, Mistress Judge, can we kind of adjust this?
Because I'm not making that kind of money anymore.
She's like, no, fuck you.
You can't see your kids.
You can't re-enter Canada.
We're going to arrest you and throw your ass in jail if you don't cough up half a million dollars.
So he can't see his kids.
He's got to write them a horrible letter.
Why?
Thank you.
Because the family court system, the ex-wife, the lawyers, the whole screwed up.
And just watch Divorce Corps. There's a documentary.
Just watch it. I mean, it's really important to understand.
In Europe, you don't get alimony in some places in Europe.
I mean, you can get a couple of hundred bucks a month for child support.
It's fine, right? Reasonable.
But none of this keep the woman or the children in the style to which they've become accustomed.
It's complete bullshit. He died.
He died. From addiction, but not his own addiction.
He died from women's addictions to free stuff.
Which is not free, but paid for with the life of the workhorse.
Mel Gibson's divorce cost him $425 million.
Paul McCartney, Heather Mills, I mean, what was that?
80, 90 million dollars? I mean, are we insane as a society and as a culture?
Where's this patriarchy everyone keeps talking about?
Are we so insane that we think that this is somehow some kind of viable legal system?
People are being worked to death.
Men are going to prison because they're unable to feed the insatiable more of their ex-wise, grasping, vacuum-pussied hypergamy.
There is tragedy in comedy.
It is important if you know people who are focused on being funny to really connect to them on a human level and ask them to put that aside.
We don't expect Oscars to diagnose us at the dinner table.
We don't expect Paparotti to sing for his supper and we should reject constant joke telling from those around us because we need to get to the underlying insecurity and the connection.
Celebrities Are in many ways closer to us than our friends, than our family.
We see celebrities cry.
We see them vulnerable. We see them laugh.
We hear them talk about very important things, particularly comedians.
He talked about drug addiction, loneliness as a child.
He talked about divorce and the pain, Robin Williams.
And other comedians like Joe Rogan talk about very personal and powerful and difficult things.
And most people get more connection with another human mind sitting in the audience of a comedy club than they do from 100 dinners with their supposedly close friends.
We see and we connect with celebrities, even if it's just on screen.
Watch the park scene from Good Will Hunting.
How many times do you hear somebody clearly and powerfully express themselves in that kind of way?
How many times have you had that in your life?
So we do have an emotional attachment to celebrities.
They show us an intimacy and a connection that so often we don't get from our personal lives, which is why when they die, it's so painful for us because it awakens for us the lack of connection that we've had so often in our lives.
So it does matter that he was alive.
It does matter that he died.
I'm incredibly sorry about the mother that Robin Williams had and the father, right?
The father marries a young beauty and he married these young beauties who took him for everything that he had.
Fuck you, ladies.
Fuck you for killing a great soul.
Fuck you for fastening on his jugular and sucking the life, blood, and money out of the man to the point where he worked himself most likely to death and was facing A disaster.
He'd already sold a lot of his stuff.
He'd already sold his house, his memorabilia, and he just could not keep shoveling money fast enough at this evil system and these evil women.
So like Aaron Swartz, maybe he was facing jail time.
Maybe that's what he was afraid of.
Couldn't pay the women.
What was he going to do?
There is a tragedy in comedy.
Chris Farley... An incredibly funny but brutally self-mocking overweight comedian.
He was in Beverly Hills Ninja and Black Sheep, I think.
A funny guy.
And how did he die?
Well, he died of a drug overdose.
And it's unbelievably tragic.
Chris Farley... The four days before he died, partied straight for four days.
He smoked crack, snorted heroin, with a call girl, with a prostitute, then took her back to his apartment.
When they argued about money, she got up to leave.
Chris Farley tried to follow, but collapsed on his living room floor, struggling to breathe.
His final words were, don't leave me.
While the whore took pictures of him, stole his watch, Wrote a note saying she'd had a lot of fun and then left.
And Chris Farley died face down in a carpet, alone.
Unable to even pay a bitch-hearted woman to hold his hand while he died.
She stole his watch, she took her picture, she wrote a note, she left.
I'm sorry. I'm incredibly sorry that Robin Williams is dead.
He was the only good thing in the movie Aladdin, in my opinion.
I'm sorry that he was dead.
I hope that we can learn something about this most dangerous addiction that American society has in particular, which is the addiction to feed the wounded vanity of hypergamous women, the soul, flesh, life, blood, and money of men whose accomplishments they could not hope to approach.
Let's keep our geniuses alive.
Let us restrain the greed of their ex-wives.
I'm sorry you're gone, Robin.
I will certainly miss you.
And I hope that I can take some small amount of inspiration from your verbal certainty and verbal courage and stretching the boundaries of human communication.
You had a very big impact on my life.
I wish I could promise you a better place to land, but the only thing that I can promise you is that you were loved, in a way.
I saw your junk and ass in The Fisher King.
I've really not seen any of my other friends junk and ass at all.
And I will really miss that openness.
I will really miss that courage.
And I will really miss the beauty of the honesty that you brought in your comedy to allow people to approach truths that are hard to stomach without laughter.
And I really hope that you had enough joy in your life knowing how much joy you brought to others to make up for how it ended, which is a shitty way.
This shitty way for anyone to go.
I wish this woman who says that you were her best friend had known enough about you to help avert this.
I wish her therapist had told you to get angry at your mother and your father.
Because striving to please them by creating an audience in their image did not work.
And I'm incredibly sorry that you were preyed upon by this god-awful, sick and sadistic, Stalin-esque family court system in the United States.
Which outlaws prostitution among voluntary parties and legalizes and enforces it among ex-marital partners.
The state takes another life.
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