OCD, Comedy, and Cannabis with Mike Glazer

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (0:10)
Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast, appreciate you being here. Mike Glazer is the guest today, comedian, writer, podcast host. He's got an upcoming special. Netflix is a joke, right? Isn't that coming up? As well as a comedy tour, which I'm guessing you're saying is a stand-up tour. Are there date, where can they find dates?

**Mike Glazer** (0:28)
They can find dates on my Instagram at glazerboohoo. I'll be in Chicago, Toronto, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Vegas, hopefully Montreal. A bunch of dates coming up.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (0:38)
Glazer with a Z. And tell us about your podcast.

**Mike Glazer** (0:43)
Well, I was doing a podcast, but now I'm turning it into a book because that's just the way things work sometimes.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (0:50)
Oh, interesting. Yeah. And what's the topic?

**Mike Glazer** (0:53)
The topic is, I was the best roller hockey goalie in the country for the first 25 years of my life. I was like a prodigy roller hockey goalie. But through that, we were sponsored by strippers and strip clubs. I was playing with men. I developed OCD. There was a lot of death and drugs, and I ended up almost becoming an Olympian by the end of that journey.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (1:21)
Nice. Olympian in roller hockey.

**Mike Glazer** (1:24)
But they took mixed doubles badminton. The year that we would have been a summer Olympic game, they took mixed doubles badminton instead of roller hockey. So I have a gold medal from the Pan-American Games, but my Olympic dreams never came true.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (1:38)
Wow. Crazy. Where did you grow up?

**Mike Glazer** (1:40)
St. Louis, Missouri.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (1:41)
And immediately makes me think of roller hockey. No. How come it wasn't ice hockey?

**Mike Glazer** (1:46)
A couple of reasons. Ice hockey is expensive. And also, I was the fat kid wearing a t-shirt to play sports growing up. And so it was at the height of the Mighty Ducks. And so we'd be playing in the church parking lot. And they were like, oh, you're like Goldberg, the goalie will stick you in goal and shoot pucks at you. And I was like, great. If that means I get to hang out with you and be friends, I'll take it. It means it's like you like me. Yeah.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (2:13)
That's sort of like how a lot of things work.

**Mike Glazer** (2:18)
It is. There's something about making the most out of what feels bad. I feel like, and I'm not sure how else to say it, but like, you know, being a really uncomfortable, nervous kid who was having trouble relating. So, I had the goal behind me. It felt like a safe island amongst the team. And that allowed me to try and flourish and become the best I could be.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (2:42)
And you mentioned a number of different sort of headlines, psychiatric stuff. Was there a mental illness in your family?

**Mike Glazer** (2:48)
A lot of mental illness in my family. So, my uncle has schizophrenia. I'm wary to diagnose anyone in my family as I am not a doctor, but I will say things like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, narcissism, and severe depression all course through our family tree pretty strongly.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (3:09)
And you have to wonder, if you had bipolar, you wonder if that depression wasn't actually a bipolar thing that just never went on to a type 1 bipolar. You know, type 2s can look like just depression sometimes.

**Mike Glazer** (3:24)
Is that right? Well, I'll tell you what, there's a... Does that mean that type 2 can become type 1 if certain things are exacerbated?

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (3:32)
That either it can become a type 1 all of a sudden. Usually, in my experience, drugs or medication are involved with that. Like somebody gets on an antidepressant, and all of a sudden they're manic. It's like, well, they maybe never would have had mania in their life had it not been for that Prozac. But indeed, the fact that they got the mania throws them into that type 1 Or, you look back at their life, and you go, you know, when they were 19, they did have some hypomanic episodes, and that sort of keeps them in that type 2 zone.

**Mike Glazer** (4:07)
Yeah. Well, for me, I would say, growing up with a mom who sometimes spent some time on the kitchen floor crying, or I'd have to tuck her into bed, and then my parents were like, why are you sleeping so much all the time? And if I wasn't sleeping, I was binge eating, and if I wasn't binge eating, it was a safe way for me to try and knock myself out and destroy this world. And then right around my teens, I started really getting into weed and really loving that. And then we can cut to college. And I have some deep regrets there as far as staying up for a really long time, alienating my friends, yelling that nobody understands me and I'm the greatest artist in the world.