Name: Bill Burr's Advice To A Viewer That Lost Everything
Uploaded: 2024-02-09T15:00:42.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Bill Burr's Advice To A Viewer That Lost Everything' from Bill Burr Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-02-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Bill Burr's Advice To A Viewer That Lost Everything' from Bill Burr Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-02-09. Transcript available.

A hard one. Dear Bill, this is going to be a sad letter, so if you don't feel
like dealing with this
today, I understand. All right, yeah, fuck this letter. I'm not reading it, no.
Truthfully, I think
I'm writing you for the same reason Catholics go to confession. Don't worry, I
know you can absolve
me of my sins. Five years ago, I switched jobs, and when I did, I rolled my
company 401k into
what's known as a self-directed 401k. My family and I also moved that year, and
I took the
proceeds from the house sale and dumped those into an individual account with
the same broker.
Oh, God. It wasn't much by some people's standards, but, dude, if it's all you
have, it's a lot.
It wasn't much by some people's standards, but between the two accounts, it
amounted to our
life savings. I did what any sane person would do and bought a bunch of safe
stuff and tried not to
look at it very often. Then came the pandemic. I actually sold everything at
the perfect time. Yes!
Okay. Oh, please tell me you didn't get into Bitcoin. I think I was the second
or third,
it was the second or third week in February before everything really went to
hell, but
I took a long, long time getting back in, and when I did, I didn't play it safe
anymore.
Oh, boy, this has fucking too many twists and turns here. For a year, I did
very well and doubled our
life savings, and during that whole time, it never occurred to me the real risk
I was taking. Cue the,
oh, Jesus. Fast forward to yesterday, and it's been two solid years of bad
decision after bad decision
decision. First, I was long when everything was going to down hard. What? First,
I was long when
everything was going, I think, going down hard in 2022. Then I was short when
everything was just kept
going up, up, up in 2023. An absolute epic meltdown brought by tens, on by tens,
if not hundreds of
individual bad decisions. So here I am. It's early February, and there's
basically nothing left. I know
you're probably thinking I'm some degenerate gambling addict, but I swear it's
not true. I don't bet on
sports. Only been to casino twice in my life and probably lost $150 combined. I
drive a 20-year-old
SUV and live in a regular house. Don't drink, don't smoke. I just got
overwhelmed slowly at first,
then all at once. My question's simple. How do I forgive myself? How does a man
forgive himself when
his selfish and foolish actions cost the people he loves? Thanks for any advice
you can give,
and thanks for all the laughs over the years. God bless, and go diddle yourself.
Easy. You take responsibility for your actions. You apologize to everybody, and
you promise that
you're going to do everything in your efforts to make it right, and then you go
out and you do that,
and the worst thing you can do right now is act like the game's over. Your life
is over. This is a
moment in it, and you know what? You've built yourself a great preamble to the
story of your success,
of losing it all and coming back. Do you know how many successful people I know
that have lost it all and then came back? Success is not trying something,
going out,
being successful, and then that's it. It's not a linear thing, journey. Success
is just stepping out
into the abyss and free-falling into something, hitting the water and then
trying to swim,
and there's moments where it's fucking white water, and then it becomes calm,
and then there's a fucking
waterfall, and what it is is not allowing yourself to get too down or too high
and keeping between your
ears positive, which is what you need right now, because right now you're
beating yourself up. It's
time that the pity party is over. Just tell your wife that. Just be like,
listen, I want you to know that
the pity, you know, I still feel unbelievable shame for what I did, but the
pity party is over, and I'm
going to make you proud of me again, and then you just go out, and you've just
fucking, whatever the direction
is that you want to be going in. I don't know what you do for a living, um, and
you build it back up
again, and I'm going to tell you something. You will get, you know, if you do
that, if you don't just
look at this like, this is the end of your journey. It's the beginning of your
big comeback, okay? Um,
I feel that, you know, your family's always going to love you. They're going to
be, now they're going to
be, like, looking at you, like, you're going to teach them. You can actually
give them a life
lesson here. So, the life lesson here is, you know, you don't stick all your
eggs in one basket,
and I hate to tell you this, but Wall Street, you might as well go into a
casino. Casino,
it happens quicker, but Wall Street is 100% fucking rigged. I mean, the House
and Senate voted that they
can't get tried for insider trading. They make a couple hundred grand a year.
They're all,
their portfolios, generally speaking, are worth upwards of $20 million. Okay?
They're getting
all kinds of insider trading. There's a bunch of different ways to make money
still in this country.
Um, and I think the fact that you're conservative at heart is a good fucking
thing.
It seems like you just got a little crazy. So, just learn from this lesson
and, uh, tell yourself you're going to figure it out and go fucking figure it
out. Um,
my stand-up career, I mean, I, I, I've had so many fucking ups and downs
in this thing where, you know, sometimes things that were supposed to be good,
this happens. It actually leads to like a down period or whatever. And I, like,
I had periods
starting off, nobody knowing who I was. And then all of a sudden people knowing
who I am,
you know, getting big gigs, having a fucking manager and big agency. Then all
of a sudden
shit cools off my agency. I've been dropped by, I don't know how many agencies
have dropped me.
Um, I've been fired by managers. I've gone all the way from being out here in
LA and having a one
bedroom apartment and driving a car to losing all of that, going back to my
walkthrough bedroom
apartment, living with Bobby Kelly now. And we shared the walkthrough bedroom
part. Like he slept
in the living room on a pullout couch, you know, becoming unincorporated and
just went through a six,
seven year period of just like trying to put it all back together again, just
not being able to get
arrested before I started to get it going again. And, um, and even then, like I,
I still have like,
like setbacks, you know, I got a really good role in this movie and I was
thinking like, Oh man,
this is going to be a great thing. I'll get to do the talk show circuit. You
know, maybe I'll get
some good press. I can start getting some better acting roles. And then the
pandemic comes and the
movie comes out during the pandemic does really well, but you know, didn't get
to do the hype.
I do old dads. I'm all excited about it. I'm really blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah. And it fucking
comes out during the strike. And it was this massive fucking hit that no one
really talked about. Cause
it did that. And it's just, you know, those are like little gut punches. I mean,
the amount of time
that me and Ben Tisho put in that fucking movie, it was like a, it was like
four years of our lives
and, and it just kind of, you know, came out and very quietly crushed. I mean,
it did amazing and
it's definitely opened some doors, but you know, I didn't get to do like what
everyone was telling me.
Oh my God, when this thing comes out, we're going to get you on this show. You're
going to be on the
cover this magazine. You know, nothing, none of that happened. So even when you're
like being
successful, like shit like this still fucking happens, you know what you say?
You just go,
what am I fucking special? Is no bad shit supposed to happen to me? Every
fucking person in the
business that I am in can sit down and talk way longer about getting kicked in
the nuts than they
can about going over the moon because, um, that's kind of what life is. Do you
know, it's like this
fucking, you know, you win and then the next day there's another game and you
might lose at that
fucking game. So that's where you're at, man. You, you, you know, you had a bad
season. You lost some
games, you're on a losing streak. You just got to fucking turn it around. And
success is really,
so much of it is how you handle when you get your dick knocked in the dirt. And
if you could just
fuck it, go, all right, nice shot. Dust yourself up. You know, Hulk Hogan, that
fucking, they go to
drop your hand that last time and you stop it. You fucking put it up in the air
and you start fucking
nodding your head. You get up to one knee. That's just what you got to do. It
just really is. And I'm
telling you, man, don't believe all of this shit that people say about
Hollywood where they, uh, you
know, because these fucking idiot actors got to ram their politics down
everybody's throat. So now
everybody's like saying fuck Hollywood. This whole idea that everybody is out
here just fucking sitting
around a pool, not doing anything like, um, when I get into business to do a
project, I am always
astounded at how hard people work. They are like, they're psychotic, the level
that they work. They're
fucking like workaholics. I mean, I'm talking 13, 14 hours a day and they don't
get paid overtime. It's
just, it's just what it is day in and day out Monday through Friday. And then
on the weekends,
your phone is blowing up with fucking a zillion goddamn questions when, you
know, you're trying
to shoot a TV series or a movie. It's like they're out there. Everybody is busting
their ass, but what
is the paparazzi show? They show people fucking vacationing in, in whatever the
fuck they go,
some Island. Um, and even then that's worked because they call the paparazzi.
They're not
the fucking feds. They don't know where you're at. They call the paparazzi, you
know, they don't eat
for fucking a bunch of days and then they put on a bathing suit and then they
got to have that. Oh,
you caught me. Fucking look, it's all bullshit. That's even their vacation is
fucking work. So anyway,
I'm sorry this shit happened to you, but you're going to fucking turn it around.
Okay. And, and that
what's great about life is when you get the mindset that, um, your success and
your failure is nothing
more than your decision. So whatever you decide to do, you can make the
decision that this fucking
event in the stock market is what destroyed you. And then you can go down to
some stupid bar and tell
your sad sack story to some other fucking sad sack. Who's also decided that
they're a loser in life,
or you can just decide that, Hey man, I fucking took a nice shot, got knocked
on my ass and I'm
fucking getting up and I'm going to come back even stronger this time. All
right. That's what I hope
for you. Okay. There you go. There's your fucking halftime speech. All right.
And that is the podcast,
everybody.