Bradley Cooper

Our birthdays are a month apart. Oh, our sobriety birthdays. Sorry. Yeah. Our birthdays are three days apart.

Honestly, I think I've grown a lot in the last three years.

Yeah. Getting older and realizing there are certain parts of me that have really needed serious work about intimacy with people, women specifically, like being in a real healthy relationship. And also because I'm a father and I'm like, I just want to, the least amount of damage that I could do to my daughter, please let me work on myself.

And it's all just getting older and people dying and mortality. Time's accelerating. That's the currency. That's it.

Nothing but time. And I think being at a place where I felt like I was willing to go to those places and a dear friend turned me on to this incredible therapist that like changed my life and really realizing the problem was I had no self-esteem. I think that when I came on before we talked about this, which was years ago now, I think it was not recent.

It was at least two years ago. You would have been promoting- I don't think it was- The Guillermo movie. It was. Oh, so it wasn't that long ago.

So two years. Two years, two months. Okay. I thought it was more than that. Okay. Yeah. We're okay. A lot of that. Yeah.

everything's okay we can it does feel like a long time ago i was maybe like a year into it at that point self-esteem and it all stemmed from i don't know if you feel this but creating a narrative about my upbringing that wasn't really my upbringing so i was starting it all on a false premise interesting i'm like i'm from philly i thought i was like a beautiful kid and they thought i was a girl and a chip on my shoulder and loving parents that's

That's actually not exactly the situation. Yeah. So if you're starting it out, and also Dax and I connected earlier on about our childhoods to a huge degree and our relationships to our fathers and all this stuff.

That's right.

But I guess that was part of my false narrative to a degree too. Was that all it was or was there more?

I used to, not even knowing it, because that's how the behavior, I just found myself adrift. And starting with the real foundation.

Exactly. And what one serves you in a feeling state, at least, I can tell when I'm more present when I'm not as a human being in my life. When I started to do this work of reevaluating the foundation of my life and trying to look at it with a more critical eye on honesty and reflecting on true memory, I found that the benefit is I'm much more present in my life.

I don't need the things I thought I needed to fill up whatever hole I had. And all of a sudden, I'm willing to be more expressive, creative, present, giving, boundaried. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So to me, yes, it's another story, but it felt like, boy, it's way closer to something honest because the benefits are practical. Does that make sense?

Relatively speaking, we're already in the stratosphere on that benchmark. But what's the goal? Why are we doing this? And the goal for me was I want to be able to be more of service to people in my life and then me also. And I wanted to stop living in my head so much, really, so that I could be present. And I wanted to love myself, like in a real way.

And then through that, all of a sudden boundaries just came up that I could never create in relationships. What do those look like? My relationship with my mother completely changed. Oh, boundaryless, yeah. Like completely, my relationship to friendships, my daughter.

Right, right. Do I fall back into adolescent and childlike feelings and behaviors? Absolutely. But my baseline as an adult, whereas before my baseline was adolescence, when I was in a good space, I could live in the adult world for a little bit, but that wasn't my norm.

And talk about there's boundaries. You're walking into a systematic, very clear- There's a start time and a high time. Hierarchy and everything. I definitely have escaped in work before. Yeah, because it feels like a very adult thing. Yeah, well, and being a parent is a very adult thing too.