What up, Leslie?
Man, we have never got to actually meet.
We didn't like been in the same places, we didn't cross paths.
Have we ever met?
We said hi to each other backstage.
We just like back--
Yeah, at SNL, yeah,
Yes, baby, I'm so glad to finally get to talk to you.
You look very at home here.
Well, thank you very much.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I'm trying, I'm trying, baby.
And I must say, having a depressed dick
playlist is nuts.
Jesus Christ!
Would you can play it on your show, is the question.
Well, it'd be soft, and subtle.
[laughs]
Well, OK, let's just get into it.
Now, I want you to explain to me,
why do you think men are so scared of therapy.
Oh, man, I think it's societal.
For me, it came from like my father,
because my father, he went to therapy two and three
times a week, and my father, he was
on like 10 to 12 different medications
for his mental health issues.
But he never told me that.
I didn't find that out until November of 2018
after I wrote a book about it and after I started
discussing my own issues.
And I remember asking my mom, like, Mom, you know Dad
was going through all of that?
And she said, I thought he was playing crazy to get a check.
Because that's what they did in the state of South Carolina.
They just would give him a check
because they couldn't figure out anything else
that he was going through.
And I think about it.
I'm like, damn, I was dealing with anxiety my whole life,
I was dealing with bouts of depression.
If he would have if he would have told me that back then,
then I would have had the tools much, much earlier.
But what I do is, and I learned this from my therapist,
you've got to give your parents grace.
Yes.
And you got to give your parents grace.
You got to give them grace, because they
were doing the best they could with what they had.
Like, we take for granted that we're
the first generation that has the luxury of healing.
Absolutely.
You know, that generation, they
was really scratching and surviving
on some Good Times stuff. You know what I mean?
Absolutely.
I think about it all the time that my parents
were in their 20s and 30s raising two kids.
And I think about my 20s and 30s,
thank God there was no children involved!
[laughs]
What was the reaction when you started talking
about this type of stuff?
Did you get a bad reaction?
Did you get a positive reaction?
Well, like a lot of things that come out of my mouth,
I wasn't really caring about what people thought.
So I was really just having these conversations
because it was almost like it was a cry for help, you know.
Because I can't get on the radio
and discuss what everybody else is going through
and not discuss what I'm going through.
And I've always been transparent about my life.
But I think going to therapy made me more vulnerable.
So I was flirting with the idea for a while.
So I'd be having conversations with a lot
of people around me, you know.
Like, you know, I got to give credit
to people like Amanda Seales and Neil
Brennan, Pete Davidson.
Even though Pete's younger than me,
he was somebody that's been going
to therapy for a long time.
And just like having conversations
with those, why is that funny?
Jesus Christ!
We should be applauding, yeah, Pete, you know.
[applause]
But, it's just like, you know.
[applause]
Having conversations with those individuals about things
that I thought were normal, because it
took a long time for me to realize that your anxiety is
not normal.
These bouts of depression aren't normal.
A lot of times we think we can just
write anxiety off to being in a better position in life.
That was my case, because I was dealing with panic
attacks my whole life.
And then the fourth time I got fired from radio,
when I was back at home living with my mom at like 31,
32 years old with like a two-year-old daughter
and my now wife, who's back at home living with her parents
in Moncks Corner, South Carolina,
I remember having like one of those panic
attacks where you couldn't tell me I was not about to die.
Like, it was the--
Wow.
--Fred Sanford, oh, I'm coming to join you, Elizabeth.
Right.
Like I thought, I thought it was over.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I went to the doctor, like I usually do,
and the doctor told me I got an athlete's heart.
He said, your heart is fine.
He was the first person to ever say to me, yo,
do you do you deal with anxiety?
It sounds like what you're describing
was an anxiety attack. - Anxiety attack, yeah.
And so he was like, are you stressed out about anything?
And I'm like, hell, yeah!
Yeah.
So in my mind, as long as I get me another gig
and get back in position to get out of my mama house,
I'll be all right.
Next gig I got was The Breakfast Club.
So three or four years later, I got more success, more money
than I've ever experienced.
But nothing has changed.
- Yeah. - Nothing has changed.
You have to live with it.
The anxiety might even be worse.
The depression might even be worse.
And I really just was looking in the mirror
not liking who I was becoming.
And listen, I love, I love my father,
I mean, I love him to death.
But I saw myself turning into him.
Right.
And I saw myself really indulging in the drugs
and really indulging in the alcohol
and really indulging in other women
and not treating my woman the way I needed to.
And I was like, yo, for somebody that I thought
I resented because of how I saw him treat my mom,
I'm just I'm becoming just like him.
Do you think that that's why Black men
don't talk about therapy too?
Because they feel like they snitching on themselves?
[laughs]
You know what I'm saying, you know?
I think we just don't be having the tools,
we don't be having the resources.
I think we have it now, because we're
having more conversations about it, you know.
Like I said, I would have never known anything about it.
I wouldn't have known anything.
I would have known about it, if my dad would have told me way,
way, way, way, way back when.
But I think, man, come on, I'm 44 years old.
I grew up in the era where you had to be hardcore.
- Yeah. - Like literally!
It was a term. - Absolutely.
Like, hardcore!
Like, we didn't show no emotion, we couldn't cry,
we couldn't tell anybody we were sad.
Sad?
You better go get a job.
Sad?
You better you better go play outside.
- Why you sad? - Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you livin', you breathin'.
- That's right. - Yeah.
That's right.
So let me tell you, let me ask you.
How do you deal with the panic attacks?
You wrote a whole book about it, so I mean,
like because that can help women just as much as men.
How do you deal with panic attacks?
How do you, is there breathing exercises, is this something
that you do?
Well, I got a new therapist now,
and my new therapist told me something
that was really interesting.
He said, he said faith and anxiety can't coexist.
Hmm.
So whenever you have those panic attacks, whenever you
have those anxiety attacks, you got to tell
yourself your own hero story.
Hmm.
And I know it may sound arrogant,
but no, you really got to tell yourself how far you've came.
You have to tell yourself what you've overcome.
You have to talk about the good things
that you do for yourself, the good things you do for people.
And I think that's something that we don't do enough.
We don't tell ourselves our own hero story.
So much of us are getting on social media waiting
for a bunch of strangers that we don't even to validate
us through likes and retweets and everything else, you know.
So it's like, how often do you how often do you wake up
and look in the mirror and really just tell
yourself your own hero story?
Mm-hmm.
Sometimes we laugh at Caitlin,
but Caitlin's right when he say,
yo, sometimes you got to look in the mirror like,
yo, you smart. - Yeah.
- You know? - Yeah.
You're beautiful.
Caitlin might do it too much, but I get what you're saying.
I agree with you, I agree with you on that.
He might do it too much.
But, maybe we have to have a DJ Caitlin level of annoyance--
Absolutely.
--in order to encourage each other.
Mary J. Blige had a song called "Good Morning Gorgeous."
- "Good Morning Gorgeous!" - Yes.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Sometimes you got to wake up in the morning
and do that for yourself.
I agree.
I agree 100%. - Yeah.
Sometimes you really got to look at yourself
and say, hey, I live with myself.
You got to like yourself. - That's right.
Because you're going to be with yourself all day.
All day when you go to sleep, before you wake up,
when you're shitting, when you brush your teeth.
That's right, that's right.
You are by, you are with yourself.
That's right.
So you better start liking yourself.
Tell yourself your own hero story.
For all you brothers out there with depressed dick,
look in the mirror, look in the mirror and talk to your penis
about the good times.
See, that's what I was going to get to!
- That's you all used to have. - See!
That's what I was going to ask you.
Yes.
Do you think, do you think therapy like improves
you as a sexual partner?
I mean, please say yes, so they can go to therapy, please.
Yes, it does.
It does, but it really does, because it
makes you more vulnerable.
You know what I'm saying?
And I think that it makes you more,
it makes you more intimate, you know.
And I think that you start approaching sex
not just from a physical aspect,
from a mental and a spiritual aspect, you know what I mean?
Absolutely.
There's a great song by Dead Prez, it's an old,
it's an old school song.
Damn, I can't believe I said it's old school.
That's OK.
But it's called "Mind Sex." And it's true!
You know what I mean?
Like, everything is mental.
It all starts here.
Absolutely.
So it is going to make what happens in the bedroom better.
So--
I just told my penis my own hero story.
I might be dealing, I might be dealing
with erectile dysfunction, and I just told
my penis my own hero story.
You just told your penis it was all right.
That's right.
So what would you say right now,
what would be the thing that you say right now
to tell men to go to therapy?
What would be your inspirational,
like what would you say to all the men right now?
I would say the life you save may be your own.
Because I saw what you were saying about men
and being violent, like yeah, I think
that we do a lot of projecting, you know what I mean.
I think that we haven't dealt with our pain.
We haven't dealt with our hurt.
And so we end up projecting that pain and that
hurt on the other people.
And therapy is really just one part of it.
I got a good friend, I got to salute her,
man, her name is Debbie Brown.
And Debbie always told me that therapy will give you
the language and it'll give you an understanding of what
you're going through, but you actually have to go out and do
things that help you heal.
Because it's one thing to be able to talk about it,
but what are you doing to actually heal what
you're dealing with?
So if we don't actually deal with our issues
and actually seek some healing, we're
just going to keep projecting that pain
and hurt on other people.
Amen.
I'm so proud of you right now.