Transcript
Speaker: It's beginning to look a lot like December, unless you're in L.A., where it looks like every other month of the whole year.
Speaker: I mean, it's still 70 degrees out there.
Speaker: That's not Christmas-like at all.
Speaker: But I'm here to tell you.
Speaker: about how I spend my Christmas, or at least how I have for the past 10 years.
Speaker: And before I do this, I'm going to let you know that in no way am I endorsing the use of psychedelic drugs unless you're super cool and aren't a narc, at which point I am definitely endorsing the use of psychedelic drugs under safe conditions for the user.
Speaker: I call it Alex's Introspective Christmas.
Speaker: And it started about 10 years ago when my wife decided that she was going to go home for Christmas back to Cleveland where her family is.
Speaker: I was at, in LA by myself.
Speaker: I don't like traveling around the holidays.
Speaker: There's just a lot to do, but also we had just gotten our first pug.
Speaker: So I had to, it was my first Christmas alone with him and I wanted to watch him just so we wouldn't have to give him to a sitter.
Speaker: And I decided that,
Speaker: It would be advantageous, since I had the entire apartment to myself, to take a large dose of psychedelics.
Speaker: The reason I did that is because when I'm on psychedelics, I cannot hide from myself.
Speaker: There is no lying to me about my current state.
Speaker: It's basically like hiring an excavation team to go inside of me and figure out what am I not paying attention to?
Speaker: What is happening within the annals of my brain?
Speaker: deep down in the ruts, in the crevasses, the Marianas trench level depths of my noggin.
Speaker: And mushrooms, psychedelics, will do that for you.
Speaker: They will bring up feelings and emotions that maybe you didn't know were there or maybe you did and you were a little too afraid to tap into.
Speaker: But I will tell you this, as I was tripping with my pug,
Speaker: I had this beautiful revelation that all of the work I'm doing out here in LA is worthwhile.
Speaker: The life I've chosen is worthwhile.
Speaker: And sometimes it's easy to lose track of that.
Speaker: And my pug and I sat there.
Speaker: I cried a lot.
Speaker: He stared at me like, dad, are you okay?
Speaker: As I went through all of it.
Speaker: But of course the beauty of psychedelics is even when you go through it, you're always going to come out on the other side with a new form of appreciation, a little bit of enlightenment and afterglow.
Speaker: I like to call it where everything has a little bit more clarity.
Speaker: And I'm more grateful.
Speaker: So that began a tradition where every year I would do a heroic amount of psychedelics.
Speaker: Maybe it was two tabs of acid with a little bit of ketamine on top.
Speaker: Maybe it was a couple trips into the world of DMT.
Speaker: You know, whatever my chosen substance was, there was only one rule.
Speaker: Do it by yourself and do a little bit more than you're used to.
Speaker: So I would set up my apartment in a way that felt very safe, where I would just put on music and some warm lighting, no TV, anything like that.
Speaker: That's not what it's about.
Speaker: It's about going into your brain and letting it show you what it wants to see.
Speaker: And some people say you need an intention on psychedelics.
Speaker: That helps.
Speaker: For some people, sure.
Speaker: It does.
Speaker: For me, I didn't want to set an intention.
Speaker: All I wanted to do was think about my past year, how I've grown, what I've learned, what I've accomplished, and why I should be excited going into the next trip around the orbital sun.
Speaker: Over the years, my friends, very close friends, found out that this is how I was spending my Christmas.
Speaker: And a couple of them were like, Alex, that's sad.
Speaker: You're doing drugs on Christmas?
Speaker: You're supposed to spend that day with your family.
Speaker: That's one way to interpret it.
Speaker: And then a couple of other, my friends were like, uh, no, I get this.
Speaker: I completely understand.
Speaker: I think that's a brilliant way to spend Christmas because you are celebrating yourself.
Speaker: You are celebrating the life that you have chosen to live.
Speaker: You are reinforcing your decisions and figuring out how to make everything have more value.
Speaker: And something about that is absolutely beautiful.
Speaker: Eventually I had two pugs, Carlton and kimchi.
Speaker: One year I did it while also hosting their cousin Lala, a little black pug.
Speaker: I had three pugs and I was tripping balls.
Speaker: What a Christmas.
Speaker: I wasn't around my family eating a glazed ham and opening random presents.
Speaker: I wasn't having those connections, but I was connecting with myself.
Speaker: And understanding what I needed to move forward to continue to find joy in every facet of my existence.
Speaker: That's so important.
Speaker: One year, a couple of my friends were like, we're not going home this year.
Speaker: We want to join Introspective Christmas.
Speaker: So there were five of us that year doing Introspective Christmas.
Speaker: And we all had a great time.
Speaker: We went out to dinner afterwards at an Italian restaurant.
Speaker: It was really lovely.
Speaker: The next year got a little too intense because the next year, almost none of my close friends went home.
Speaker: So I had 15 people in my one bedroom apartment, all tripping on different substances.
Speaker: And that's...
Speaker: But it's not what introspective Christmas is all about.
Speaker: Because there's a difference between tripping with a group or other people and tripping on your own.
Speaker: Because on your own, you can really let the feelings come up.
Speaker: You can really get in there.
Speaker: You can mine what is supposed to be in there.
Speaker: You can release everything.
Speaker: A couple hours of introspective Christmas, I'm usually crying my eyes out, bawling.
Speaker: I don't know when it's going to come.
Speaker: I don't know how it's going to happen.
Speaker: I'm usually a little confused, wondering what have I done to myself?
Speaker: Was this a good idea?
Speaker: Should I be terrified right now?
Speaker: And next thing you know, I'm in this beautiful, beautiful sob fest.
Speaker: And just letting out all of this negative emotion, just purging sadness, fear, resentment, anger, bitterness, jealousy, all of it flutters out of me.
Speaker: And I'm left soaked in a puddle of myself.
Speaker: Not in some gross way either.
Speaker: in a magical sense, in a healing sense.
Speaker: And I've had so many perspective shifts because of introspective Christmas.
Speaker: I used to be terrified of being a father and having children.
Speaker: And one introspective Christmas, as I was really going through the motions, I remember thinking, if I spend all this energy putting out
Speaker: like love into the world toward other people, attempting to shine my light as brightly as possible upon others.
Speaker: I do that for strangers.
Speaker: What would I do with my own child?
Speaker: What if I poured all of this energy of love into a single being or two little beings, maybe what would they become?
Speaker: What kind of love would they grow up with?
Speaker: What could they do?
Speaker: How would it manifest within them?
Speaker: And suddenly I was like, wow.
Speaker: I not only want children, I'm ready for children.
Speaker: That came from introspective Christmas.
Speaker: A lot of things come from introspective Christmas.
Speaker: My love of comedy is always apparent when I do it because this can be a frustrating business.
Speaker: The world is always trying to collapse in on us and there is so much negative energy floating around the particles and the microbes in the air and it will infect you.
Speaker: It will get inside of you.
Speaker: But you can release it.
Speaker: You can release it.
Speaker: And so once a year, usually it's Alex's introspective Christmas.
Speaker: I do psychedelics completely by myself.
Speaker: And I'm not encouraging you.
Speaker: to do drugs, but I am encouraging you to reflect because as the end of the year is coming up, a lot of different things are happening inside of you.
Speaker: You're looking forward to like, what did I accomplish?
Speaker: Did I do anything this year?
Speaker: How did I grow as a person?
Speaker: And look, no matter what you did, you did a lot because you are still here and
Speaker: Maybe if it doesn't feel like it, take a little inventory.
Speaker: Where did you travel?
Speaker: What books did you read?
Speaker: Where, what sporting events did you go to?
Speaker: What concerts did you see that blew your mind?
Speaker: How did you grow deeper into a friendship with somebody?
Speaker: How did you experience or release love?
Speaker: What was your favorite thing that you ate this year?
Speaker: What was something that you never thought you would do and suddenly you did?
Speaker: When you look back, you did so much this year.
Speaker: And I know that because there are 365 days in a year and you didn't spend it doing fucking nothing.
Speaker: I know you didn't.
Speaker: You grew.
Speaker: You are a different person now than you were at the beginning of last year.
Speaker: And that takes a level of appreciation for you.
Speaker: And you need to focus on that for at least a little while at the end of this year.
Speaker: Because this can drum up a lot of weird feelings.
Speaker: We're seeing our families or we're not seeing our families.
Speaker: It's the holidays.
Speaker: People are gathering.
Speaker: People are taking inventory of what they did wondering, was this year okay?
Speaker: My year was spent, I called it bouncing back.
Speaker: That was my journal this year.
Speaker: Every single morning I journaled, well, six days a week anyway.
Speaker: I gave most Sundays off.
Speaker: But bouncing back because that's what I was doing.
Speaker: I was recovering from being in the hospital.
Speaker: I still had cancer.
Speaker: I still was attached to antibiotics because of sepsis.
Speaker: At the beginning of this year, I was a completely different person than who I am now.
Speaker: I was a cripple.
Speaker: And now I'm playing tennis, walking on slack lines, doing comedy sets about to film a new special.
Speaker: I am a different fucking person.
Speaker: And I need to take gratitude in that even on days when I'm not really sure what to do with myself or if I have really moved past that area.
Speaker: I'm still processing.
Speaker: And I'm thinking about all this because I'm about to go back to Baltimore for a week.
Speaker: My brother and his wife are coming in from Alaska.
Speaker: I'll see my sister and my niece and my mom and my stepdad and some other family members.
Speaker: And it is a time to reflect on what I've done this year, but also how good I feel and what I want to do in 2024.
Speaker: What am I going to call my journal?
Speaker: Is it leaping forward?
Speaker: Is it capturing the moment?
Speaker: How am I going to stay present yet continue to build on every single thing that I've done?
Speaker: Because I walked through fire this past year.
Speaker: And even though it looks like I got burned, that's just the eczema.
Speaker: I didn't.
Speaker: I'm stronger than I was before.
Speaker: And I don't know when my next introspective trip is going to come.
Speaker: I did one in October when my wife went to Mexico and it was beautiful.
Speaker: Two tabs of gel acid straight to the dome went fucking deep.
Speaker: And I'm ready to do it again.
Speaker: Because that is my own version of...
Speaker: a masogi of a challenging experience that will make me a different person.
Speaker: It's a Japanese term that I just learned from a book called The Comfort Crisis.
Speaker: What are you going to do next year?
Speaker: But more importantly, why are you proud of yourself from this year?
Speaker: Look back and even the tiniest accomplishments probably have a lot more gravitas than you're giving them credit for.
Speaker: So take a moment and be very proud of yourself.
Speaker: Because you're still here.
Speaker: And there's a lot of people who can't say the same.
Speaker: You are growing.
Speaker: You're developing.
Speaker: You are blooming.
Speaker: Like an onion at Outback Steakhouse.
Speaker: $8.99.
Speaker: Go get yourself one.
Speaker: I'm sure they're still delicious as ever.
Speaker: Hear more.
Speaker: HooperComedy.com.
Speaker: Got dates coming up.
Speaker: Filming the special, everybody.
Speaker: And January 7th at the Hollywood Improv.
Speaker: Very excited because I'm running my hour before I go tape it.
Speaker: January 10th at McGuby's in Baltimore.
Speaker: I'll be there running the hour.
Speaker: That's only two days before the special taping on January 12th where I'm doing two shows in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: December 14th this week.
Speaker: If you're listening, Comedy Store producing another episode of Perfect Dose with my main homie, efficient of my wedding, Jerry Brandt.
Speaker: We have an incredible lineup coming at you.
Speaker: It's only our second show and we're really excited about it.
Speaker: I'm not telling you to do drugs, but I'm also telling you to put only the fun ones.
Speaker: They're good for you.
Speaker: I'll see you next week.
