Sarah Silverman — How to Be Your Own Best Friend | The Tim Ferriss Show

Sarah Silverman opens up to Tim Ferriss about the sudden onset of her childhood depression at 13 and being prescribed up to 16 Xanax a day in the 1980s. She explains how, after losing herself in a codependent relationship, she deliberately learned to be her own best friend, becoming deeply comfortable being alone and talking out loud to herself. The conversation explores the craft of comedy as an ongoing process of bombing, starting from zero, and being brave enough to disappoint audiences, drawing on her SNL boot-camp experience and lessons from Chris Rock and Garry Shandling. They also discuss therapy breakthroughs, social media radicalization and cancel culture, self-flagellation as disguised self-obsession, and her late mother's advice to be her own best friend. She closes with her aunt's mantra to grab joy wherever you can get it.

• Silverman's depression came on at 13 as suddenly as catching the flu, and she describes it as feeling homesick while being home, with no home to go to.
  00:01:33
• In the 1980s she was put on Xanax and ultimately given 16 Xanax a day (four pills, four times a day) as a 13-year-old.
  00:02:04
• After losing herself completely in one codependent relationship, she made being alone and enjoying it a deliberate practice, eventually loving her own company.
  00:06:16
• After her first special Jesus Is Magic, audiences expected to be shocked, forcing an identity crisis where she had to disappoint fans and start over with new material.
  00:19:46
• Her core lesson: comedy dies in the second-guessing of what your audience wants; you have to be brave enough to bomb and start from zero, like Chris Rock does.
  00:20:47
• She was fired from SNL after her first year via a fax to her agents, learning of it on a surprise three-way call she'd assumed was good news.
  00:27:33
• Her view on self-criticism: constant self-flagellation is not modesty but self-obsession and 'masturbatory' unless it turns into real change.
  00:42:11
• Asked for a billboard message, she points to mourners at Westboro founder Fred Phelps's funeral holding 'Sorry for your loss' signs as the most beautiful act of protest.
  01:07:40

• Her mother, a photographer, took paparazzi-style photos of her getting off the eighth-grade camping-trip bus, capturing the literal moment depression took hold.
  00:04:42
• She invokes the concept of JOMO, the joy of missing out, as the opposite of FOMO, crediting friend Jason Fried.
  00:11:56
• Law & Order is her 'safe space' and travel totem because she can find it in any city while on the road.
  00:12:29
• On her first day at SNL in 1994 they still wrote on legal pads handed to typists, and three Harvard-hired male writers assumed she was a typist.
  00:24:58
• A therapist told her to 'look in the mirror less,' noting people cognitively distort what they see in mirrors.
  00:43:47
• Her best therapist asked if she'd ever predicted anything in her life and said 'we're looking through a pinhole,' reframing the unknown as exciting.
  00:46:54
• I Smile Back was adapted from Amy Koppelman's novel; Koppelman personally requested Silverman for the lead role.
  01:01:26
• Garry Shandling hosted Sunday basketball games at his house mixing big celebrities with writers' assistants and PAs as equal friends, and taught her the value of silence.
  01:04:33
• Her middle name Kate comes from a near-miss: she was nearly named Kate Sarah, but her Nana objected because she disliked someone named Kate.
  01:11:50
• Her memoir The Bedwetter (2010) is being adapted into a musical previewing in April at the Atlantic Theater in New York, covering the year she was 10.
  01:12:24