Time that pointed to this. We wanted to build that got to the substance but talk to the people. Rose we conclude talking about robots with Rodney Brooks. I think were going to see a lot of mixing of Material Science Technology with robots. We havent had that up until now. More like material thats in animals and humans and flexibility and complexity. And then the way we can interact with 9 robots is critically important. They understand us and we understand them. Rose louis c. K. , David Leonhardt and Rodney Brooks when we continue. Theres a saying around here you stand behind what you say. Around here, we dont make excuses, we make commitments. And when you cant live up to them, you own up and make it right. Some people think the kind of accountability that thrives on so many streets in this country has gone missing in the places where its needed most. But i know youll still find it, when you know where to look. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose louis c. K. Is here. Gq magazine calls him undisputed king of comedy. New york times says hes the performer on of the moment getting bigger and bigger. Louie is around a father who struggles to balance his comedy career with being a single dad. He returned after a nine month hiatus. He was the teaser for the new season. The all new season of louie on fx. Rose not only do they talk about you being the undisputed king of comedy. People love this show. You have deeper and broader comparisons to lenny bruce. Compared to bob dylan and being a philosopher king. Do you want to not talk about that because. Where does it come from and how do you see what you are. I dont know, im just a comedian, you know. I think thats better of what i am. I do a lot of other things. I have a tv show and i have, i act a little bit. But im a dad and im a comic, thats really mostly what i am. Anything beyond that i get a little uncomfortable. Im good at writing and stuff, im good at that stuff. Rose youve been doing that. Ive been doing that for a while. I love doing those things. I feel like im trying those things. I always feel like im just trying that. Rose but it takes a while to make a comedian, doesnt it. Yes, it takes a long long time. To make a really thoroughly, to a ripe baked ready for, you know. Ready to actually look at it from all angles. Rose what does it take, writing. It takes an understanding life through living it and being on stage an awful lot and not giving up, thats all. Rose and being prepared to fail. Oh yeah. Thats really the road, failure to the road to being a great comic. If you always kind of back away from the tough things and find easiest routes youll do okay sniffle failure is whatnot being funny. Maybe not in the moment. Rose maybe being funny but not everybody got it. You did a bad show. Theres a comfort factor that feels real good and its nice to wear it once in a while but if you stray off the road. Its like if youre on a vacation and youre seeing everything thats sort of laid out for you where everybody else has been. But if you take a road off to the side and you feel a little uncomfortable all of a sudden do you know what i mean. Theres no obvious tourist things but youre seeing and learning an awful lot. Rose but failure has been a subject of yours too. Yeah. Rose not just failure shapes you but you talk about failure. Yeah. Its a fascinating thing because most people avoid it. So if you can get to a place where you kind of like it, you know. I mean you like when you get out of it. Then its new territory, you know. Rose what do you learn as a comedian. In that 25 years, it takes 25 years. What is it you learn. You learn presence, you learn a oneness with the audience. Yes. Rose you learn a sense of who you are, what your own strengths are. Those are obvious to me and im not a comedian. Those come pretty quickly i think. The stage presence comes pretty quickly, depending on who you are. How to write jokes and how to generate material and know its going to work. That sort of comes, you know. First ten years youre building the skills. Rose the skills are what, timing, delivery. Yes, timing and delivery and material. Rose material that works. Generating the jokes because most comedyians you write your own stuff, you come up with your own thing. Connecting with an audience and then theres all sorts of other things that happen. You know, your best show keeps getting higher and higher, thats the first thing. How good you can do keeps increasing. But then the really important thing is how bad your worse show starts coming up. I think thats for any performer. Your worst show needs to come up close to the best show so that even on your worst night you still. Rose and you seize it. Yes. Rose your best show, the worst show should be much closer. The margin should be like that, yes. Rose how does that happen . Well, experience. Just experience. Just you know, theres hardly any situation that i havent seen, so you know when i feel an audience, you get an instinct for things. Rose did you have the power of observation always . You just had to learn how to shape it and form it. To see life with a comedic eye. Yes. Thats just the way i look at things and im very curious so i like to look at a lot of things. So im always out there looking at life and thinking about it so i guess thats just observation. Its being able to have people understand an observation even if its from a strange place or very personal. The thing is once you get really good at the skills and your bottom comes up, youre able to go try stuff thats probably not going to work and thats where you find, thats where you get more, thats where you get better and more interesting. The good comics do that anyway. Rose to read but is to know nothing close is as important as your children. Yes. Easily being a dad thats the most important job. Rose what do they think of the comedy. Do they love it. Do they say its not me dad, its funny how you use us but its not me. Well, the stand up that i do, ive changed the way i talk about my kids just because i like sharing my kids, i like showing them what i do. The first time i ever showed, i showed my oldest daughter a bit i used to do about hide and seek. Rose tell me that story. With her. Its about getting really frustrated that she would hide it in plain site literally. And i would have to pretend she wasnt, that she was hiding better. And on stage i would say what bs this was because i had to pretend shes good. And i would rail about it and get angry. And i showed to her when she was six. And she laughed a lot because her younger sister was like that now. Like she was having to patronize her younger sister. Rose she was doing the same thing you were doing to her. I know exactly how you feel. She was able to make that connection. And she although thought it was funny that i got so upset. She knew it was funny because in real life at home im not like that, you know. I mean i get upset like any parent does but not unreasonably so. So she thought rose did she say to her friends i have the funniest dad in the world. Geez, i dont know. What i hope is that her thoughts about me are as of a father. Im there for her when she gets off the bus from school, im there for her i take her home i cook her dinner we do her homework together and her sister same thing. So i take care of them. To me thats what i want them to remember. The work is something that hopefully when theyre like 18, 19, theyll google me and go wow this guy did a bunch of stuff while he was doing that, you know. Its not important to me that they, i like to model for them the good, a good life in my career as far as trying really hard and being responsible. I tell them when Something Big is at stake when it doesnt go well or when it does. I tell them that stuff as a role model you know but i could be doing the same thing if i was working in some Company Making widgets or something, you know. Rose whats interesting about you too is you seem to be fascinated by how show business works. Yes. Rose not only a student but understanding the Business Model, understanding, there was a story i read but once understanding how much you would charge for a night to a venue would affect how they did with ticket prices because they had to suffer if they had not enough people there, didnt fill it up. They had to charge tickets as a kind of safety valve. When you go work at a theatre as a comic or as a musician or whatever, you know, you try to get a big guarantee thats sort of the conventional thing. You get a bunch of money up front. What that means is that whether the show goes well or not you get to keep all that money. Thats asking a lot, you know. So in order to hedge against that and make that not such a big risk, the venue needs to spend a lot of money on advertising. Rose promotions. And they need to charge a lot of money for the ticket so that anybody that does buy tickets they get a quicker, you know. So in the end, you end up making less money. If the place is sold out, your guarantee will have caused so much money to be spent. Because once the place is sold out you divide the profits with the promoter. That you both dont make that much money and the audience pays a lot of money for tickets. But if youre willing to, i started to say lets not have a guarantee lets just both do our best. And then we could ask them to keep advertising budget lower. Rose and you have an investment in this. And also i didnt want it to be difficult to come see me. I guess really sick physically when i see that like a ticket of mine costs like 75. Thats just too much money. Rose also i mean you did an amazing thing to me. I certainly identified with it. When you put the thing on your website and you said you would charge 5. Right. Rose and i hope you wont parrot it. Please dont steal it. Rose pay 5 i hope you enjoy it but dont do it. David carr wrote a piece about this in the New York Times. I talked to him, i remember. Rose and it worked. Yes it did. Rose and it said something very very good. I kind of closed the gap. I also made the website very easy to use so i closed the gap between how easy it was to steel it and how easy it was to just buy it. And so you know it was just so much because you could go to my site and the 5 purchase was such a little bump in the road. It was almost like a viral video. Click on it and it was over. That was easier for more most people than to go to some pirate site and find a way to torrent. If something doesnt exist people will take it if its on the internet. They feel entitled to it if its on the internet. A lot of Companies Put stuff out on the stages and say you can only have it for one minute and well take it back. When i went to australia the first time they all were watching my show and it wasnt on tv there and it wasnt on itunes or netflix. Rose it was on the internet. Regular people not like crazy nerds, regular family. Rose they all what. They all stole it, downloaded it because were not letting them watch it. Were not giving them the opportunity. And they all told me if your show was available we would buy it. But its not. And the whole world knows about it but us doesnt seem fair so they just take it. Rose whats your relationship with comedians. Do you watch them, learn from them. Sure. Im always a student of comedy. I really love watching any comedian. Ill watch any comedian and just hear, you know its like studying the ocean and the waves. Rose its interesting to me because im fascinated by watching painters have told me they go to a museum and look at it more clinically. Youre studying it. Youre saying thats how he did that. Look at that i you do the same thing. Its hard to go out to, if i time to go like if i get a babysitter and run to a club and do a set i might watch the guy before me but then ive got to go home so i dont get to do it like i used to. When i started, i just devoured comedy. I went to clubs every night even if i was the, i would be on stage twice a week but i was at clubs seven nights a week. I watched every comedian i could, good or bad friend or foe, it didnt matter i just watched it and loaded it into my system. Rose im the same way about the internet. See how theyre doing it. If youre in london watch everybody you can see. Are they doing it differently, is there a style thats interesting because in the end you have to be yourself, you have find your own sense but theres always something to learn about the approach that somebody makes whether its baseball player watching another baseball player. Right. Because the baseball player is watching another player but hes watching baseball theyre all doing the same game you know so the game is, so the same stand up, whatever the comic is doing is not in a vacuum youre watching standup happen. Youre watching how audiences are reacting and the audience in such a mysterious animal to us, you know. So youre always kept guessing. There are some nights you go to a club and youre like i feel good im ready to have a good show but the audience has a change unanimous grumpy feeling to them or something and these people are all strangers to each other but theyre all sitting there we hate this show. How is it happening. Rose its all in the fun. Ill never see enough shows to go okay i get this. So its an unquenchable thirst. Rose you like chris rock. Hes a great guy and were both very similar. We grew up around the same time. Were both listening to van halen and led zepplin in two different worlds but in the same east coast feeling. And we always new each other coming up but then he gave me a great job working for him. You know i remember i was writing for his show and were all winning emmys, everybodys happy and i was next to him during a monologue rehearsal and he turned to me and said when are you going to direct and go out there and do your own thing. Im happy to have you here. I have a Minor League Team and im glad i have barry bonds. But you look at him and say hes benefiting from my work but he wanted me out on my own. Hes always been a big brother and little brother to me is he same time. Rose did it come to you at the moment and say that thought comes to you yourself, i got it. I know theres been a cumulative mass so that i can go out. I dont need to write for somebody else, i need to write for myself. I need to get out there and face an audience. I was doing stand up at the time and i was getting off that way performance wise but i was putting all this sort of like knowledge of how to make visual television known and stuff and i was doing that with chris and i had done it with conan and letterman and a few other people as a writer. But yes, around that time i started to think i should try to do this for me, you know. Rose it used to be said and david in an interview i did with David Letterman at the time at the kennedy honors, we talked about carson in a sense. Was anybody playing that. Not really. It used to be you did one set on carson and they called it a three ring sign and it was a thing. If he did this, that meant you know, youre going to fill every club in the country for at least a year. And then there was he would bru over to the couch. Thats how it was when i started out. Everybody was trying to get on carson and then trying to get on letterman. I was writing for dana car vey. And that changed your life. I did letterman i dont know, eight, ten times. And all these shows. Rose is it the same set going on for a while or do you constantly change it. You cant repeat it really. Rose between those shows, youre constantly at clubs. Like seinfeld and chris. Yes, i go there all the time. Rose would you stand up. Try and bunch of stuff out yes. Im always trying out new stuff at the clubs and chris comes in, jerry comes in. Theyre excited to see but the thing with standup the first joke you do and its not funny thats it right there. Chris and i weve done this you try to ground their expect. You try to do something that you know isnt going to please them. You get to work do you know what i mean. You go on stage because they see you on tv. Theres nothing useful going to come out of that. So you Say Something i dont know not insult the crowd but you Say Something to take them down or bore them for a minute and then you can get an honest read for the material. Rose what youve been doing for the last nine months youve been off. Ive been doing shows, theatres around the country, england, norway, a bunch of places and i diduiln hbo special that came out of that tour. Then i worked on the show. I work, i spent more time, i usually start working on the show like in january and it would go on the air in june. So i would do all the writing and everything and shoot it and cut it. Rose you write everything. Yes. But this year i started writing in april for a show that went on the air in may. So i spent a whole year on, i worked on the show for a whole year which is longer than i ever spent on it. So i did it more care employ this time. Rose is it like sculpturing. I was talking to a friend of mine recently about how well you know theres two kinds of sculptures, theres Edition Sculpture and its attraction. Edition is where you have, you keep adding clay until you get the right shape and subtraction is where theres a block and you cut away what isnt it thing so youre left with the thing. So with the show, its both. You start with addition shooting, your glomming pieces and youre compiling pieces. Editing is really the creation of the show youre carving away what doesnt belong. Its the negative space around it that defines it, you know. Rose its amazes me then you talk about, it takes a year to build a show. Yes. Rose thats a lot of sculpture, isnt it. Yes. And you just keep layering and making sure its good. Rose every moment is perfect . No, no. Its all wild. Its like, i mean now no more perfect than if youre growing like a garden, you know. Its not perfect. I mean maybe theres English Gardens where theres roses. Its more like a wild crazy womans garden and shes got too many dogs and stuff, you know. Rose how important is the beginning. When you first hit the stage. Pretty huge when you start, because if you dont have the right footing with the crowd, youre lost. But when you get to be a veteran it doesnt matter. I really doesnt matter. Rose you mean you walk out there and if you dont get them right there, youll get a pause because they know you and youre a big king of comedy. But you know that even for whatever reason you can get them. Yes, it doesnt matter. As a matter of fact, you can throw them back and get them back again. Thats where you get really great. Thats where you can get really good, you can just go you guys go away. You can piss them off and go yeah i know you seem like youre upset. Because when youre on stage you know the future. You control the future. They dont know what youre going to say but you do. Its a very unique thing that way. You cant, you can never fail if yo