Ep. 16 - Joel Kim Booster Is In A Pit
Sometimes something rough can be beautiful. Like Tasmanian Devil in a prom dress. Or this week's episode.
So THAT conversation happened.
And I’m glad it did.
This week’s episode is a mostly unedited conversation between me and Joel Kim Booster. Here are some facts about it:
That was one of the most difficult and awkward interviews I’ve ever conducted. I’ve been in radio and podcasting for twenty years.
As an interview, it fell apart. I lost the thread. It became pretty disjointed as I jumped around the timeline of Joel’s life, follow-up questions didn’t always go right after the thing they were following up on.
I often didn’t know what to say, which is never a problem I have.
At some point, it shifts from me gathering information to me wanting to help a person in distress.
After all these years working on the topic of mental illness, I know - I KNOW - that you can’t talk someone out of depression. They can’t be cheered up because the operative condition isn’t one of sadness. It’s an all encompassing mental state.
You can read a thousand descriptions for depression, you can read entire books. Or you can listen to Joel talk. I think you get more of a feel for it from the latter.
Joel was obviously not doing well at all. I fumbled it in a lot of ways. I still think it turned out to be very valuable.
I haven’t heard from Joel Kim Booster on what he thought. I don’t know him. The conversation you hear in the interview is the only conversation we’ve ever had. I hope he feels good about it being out in the world.
What wasn’t in the interview
We made a decision along the way to not drop in clips that show the other side of Joel, the loud and fun and funny side. Part of that is gambling on rights but I also wanted Joel in the pit to stand on its own.
I can put them here, though.
I mentioned the show Sunnyside a couple of times. Here's Joel and Poppy Liu in action:
Here’s one of his most popular standup clips on YouTube:
Here he is at Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival:
An Example of How It Just Doesn’t Work
Here’s why you shouldn’t try to cheer someone up out of depression.
Here’s what was going on in Joel Kim Booster’s life at the time of this deep, deep depression he was going through:
He had just returned from a wonderful vacation in Mexico.
He was in love.
He was in the process of writing a movie that he will star in.
He was getting ready to record a one-hour Netflix special.
He was getting ready to buy a house, finally in position to do so.
And he was in a horrible depression. I think a lot of people would look at any single item on that list and say, “If I had that, there’s no way I would be depressed.” But it just doesn’t work like that.
It’s worth noting, too, that Joel had recently lost his father this past spring. His dad was a conservative Midwestern Christian man who didn’t always line up neatly with his gay, extroverted, Hollywood son, and hadn’t seen any of his work. The two were starting to patch things up when his dad died.
But I believe that if his dad never got sick, there’s still a strong likelihood that Joel would still be depressed. Depression is not a response to a single stimulus.
Starry Night explained
If you try to imagine the quality of care in a 19th century French mental asylum, you’d probably figure it would be pretty rough. When Vincent Van Gogh was there? It was kind of great. He was treated kindly, painted prolifically, and seemed to have a really great experience overall.
That’s according to this video, which shatters a lot of myths and assumptions:
Vincent had what we now know as bipolar disorder.
As the video says, Vincent produced his beautiful art not because of his mental illness, but despite it.
Sha'Carri Richardson's weed suspension says a lot about mental health in sports
Driving the news: U.S. favorite sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson has been suspended after testing positive for marijuana that she said she used to cope with her biological mother's death, which had put her in "a state of emotional panic."
"Don’t judge me because I am human," Richardson told Savannah Guthrie on the "Today" show. "I’m you — I just happen to run a little faster."