welcome to this 360 special, the stephen colbert interview. he's been a familiar face for more than a decade, starting off in improve and becoming a regular correspondent on "the daily show." then came "the colbert report" where he played the role of an ultra conservative host. in 2015, he inherited the coveted late-night spot on cbs where david letterman had reigned for more than 20 years. all eyes and pressure were on colbert as he stopped playing a character and started being himself. after the 2016 election, stephen colbert really hit his stride as his show tried to make sense of the often nonsense cai call wor

of politics. there's a lot, though, you probably don't know about stephen colbert, his life and what he's been through. he is as intellectual and interesting as he is funny. over the next hour you'll hear our in-depth interview. stephen opens up about his life, his losses, his comedy and his faith. >> so there's a bunch of want to talk to you about. >> here come the gotchas, the mainstream media gotcha questio questions. >> let me ask you about what was in the news, ken cuccinelli. >> i blame you for ken cuccinelli, a lot. >> he was on cnn. >> i didn't watch much when he was on. i love your show. every night i come home, my wife and i have a glass of wine, hand full of nuts and watch a little anderson. that's how i end my day. >> a handful of nuts? >> i can't come home and binge

out. i have to stay in the suits. there are a few i have to skip over. cuccinelli would be one of them. >> if any other person in a prior administration had rewritten the words of lazarus's poem, which presidents from time in memorial have quoted with gre great reverence, it would be an outrage, it is a fundamental bedrock marker of who we are. >> there is our official constitution, and then there's our official bill of rights and the physical declaration of independence but there's also this motional constitution that america has there's an emotional reality that we all share that makes us all americans and one of them is things like the poem that's on the statue of liberty. we're constantly being told by this administration you don't see what you see, you don't hear what you hear. now they're saying you don't feel what you feel.

you don't actually feel that. you don't actually believe that this is a nation of immigrants. >> you called president trump i think a heretic of reality. >> heretic to reality. the greatest sin is heresy. not only are you a stray from the right path, you're invite, you're encouraging other people to come with you on that path, specifically heresy is proselytizing for the devil. the level of hell they're in is pretty bad. >> it doesn't get much worse. >> the worst spa treatment. and he, our president, wants to live in fantasy world where only the way he perceives the world is the way it is and only things that sort of serve his vision

and he's trying to convince us that is the only world that exists but he's also trying to invite us into this madness that he has. that's heresy against reality. that is prosly tiezielytizing f most selfish and basic instincts that all people have but he's not appealing to the better angels of our nature. >> i've heard you are say the thesis of your show has become, hey, you're not crazy. >> right. the audience is not crazy. how you feel is actually how you feel, what you think is actually what you think, what you hear is what he actually said. >> when you deal with news every night, people at a certain point get exhausted -- >> let me ask you a question. because i have the luxury of doing jokes. and i'm not taking anything away from the ridiculist.

you have the ridiculist, i have the absurdo chart. how do you keep going? >> even though you're in comedy, you are still doing the same pace that we are in news. >> we do five nights a week, hour a night, which is what you do. >> and in comedy normally people spend all day or in some cases if they only have one show a week, all week writing the material and thinking it and honing it. you have to change stuff 15 minutes before air, five minutes before air. >> right. we have an idea of what the show is going to be in the morning after we do the pif meeting actually in this room. we have some sense of what people are talking about because we want to talk about what people are talking about. i'm not hear to educate the audience. it's our opinion. it's like a long editorial is what it is. but that can all be thrown out the window, even though we have a plan starting at 10:30 in the morning, we have a general plan. as you know, it's only accelerating. at 4:30.

4:40, 4:45, someone is popping their head in, "chopper talk." >> chopper talk? >> the president is standing in front of marine one. we call is chopper talk. he should just stand in front of a margarita maker because at least there would be a margarita at the end of it. >> you have a helicopter. >> oh, that. that's a helicopter? i thought that was the sound of your presidency going down the toilet. i wasn't sure. >> the pace of it, i think about the people who work in the white house, i think president trump, you know, daughter thiyou dooroe born to the storm find chaos very boring. >> he's says i'm a sea captain,

we're going to ride it out, boys. he loves that. >> i think everybody around him, how exhausting it must be to be in that orbit. >> every person -- like every person who leaves goes, god, it was crazy in there. >> rick wilson, a republican strategist who we have on the show wrote a bike called "everything trump touches dies." and i actually think it's a really interesting title. it sort of reminds me of rogue and x-man, everything she touches sucks the life blood out of you and kills you. do you ever worry about that? the thing about rogue is it's not just people that she kissed who die, it's people who go against her. and there are many people who have already destroyed themselves because they've so gone after trump that they themselves, it blows back -- they've gone to his level. >> i'm not going against him. i am not the resistance. i said this i think the first

night after he was elected. i think it was the next day because there were like -- remember there were like the next day a little too late there were marches in all the streets. people are like, wait, no, we care, like a day after it mattered. i think what i said at the top of the monologue is this is not the resistance. this is al tern it have programmiprogra -- alternative programming because i could foresee the madness and heart break of that guy being in a very important moral position. and so what we want to do is to point and laugh at what he thinks is his own unassailable dignity that he thinks he gets from that office. that's not resisting, that's laughing. it's not the same thing. i'm not a political figure. >> it is interesting because the whole notion of people laughing at him is something he has brought up time and time again. i'm sure you've done montages of this. it's a recurring theme for him to say under obama the world was

laughing at us, they're not laughing anymore. they're not laughing now. the irony is -- >> they are laughing. >> exactly. but he says this -- i mean, you can go back and find a dozen easily references to the people that aren't laughing at us anymore. it is very important to him in his mind that he's not being laughed at which is why probably your show, he has -- he's described you as saying filthy things. >> exactly. that's the most i've been able to get to say about me. does he tweet about you? >> no, surprisingly he has not. >> i have yet to get him to tweet about me runs. >> really? >> yeah. my feelings are hurt. >> the guy on cbs, what a low life. what a low life. i mean, this guy on cbs has no talent. >> hey, mr. president, i will not stand here and let you talk that way about james cordon.

>> one of the things i read your mom used to say to you as a kid was with any hardship you were going through to view it in the light of eternity. i've been thinking about it the last couple of days since i read that, i want to say how do you -- i won't say eternity but history is going to view this president? >> poorly. >> you have no doubt about that? >> oh, no. no, no, no, no. >> often times a president leaves, he's not popular -- george w. bush left with low ratings i guess you would say or opinion polls and now is viewed much more different. not much more different. >> i question your research on that one. i don't think george w. bush -- >> compared to trump? >> well, sure. well, sure. i mean, if our next president is a single celled organism, trump's going to look great, you know? some sort of slime mold, yeah. no, i don't think so. i'm all in. chips are all in on this not being a good one.

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i am totally blind. and non-24 can throw my days and nights out of sync, keeping me from the things i love to do. talk to your doctor, and call 844-214-2424. skip to the good part with alka-seltzer plus. now with 25% more concentrated power. nothing works faster for powerful cold relief. oh, what a relief it is! so fast! of millions of americans during the recession. so, my wife kat and i took action. we started a non-profit community bank with a simple theory - give people a fair deal and real economic power. invest in the community, in businesses owned by women and people of color, in affordable housing. the difference between words and actions matters. that's a lesson politicians in washington could use right now. i'm tom steyer, and i approve this message.

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out every so often in presidential elections is that there's a large group of americans, and i don't even think it's necessarily democrat or republican, there's a large group of americans who think the president should be a complete jerk, he shouldn't be somebody you necessarily admire. a guy who is willing to work on the dark side and get things done. >> i also think there's people that you're upset about him, that we're covering him. >> i'm familiar with the term drinking liberals' tears. that seeps like a huge price to pay -- >> he's a tough guy who doesn't take any guff and he's not politically correct and there's an element of people who like that. they can't be that way in their own life -- >> those are not policy positions that's just people who, perhaps and perhaps for real reasons, feel like that they have been made to suffer in some way and then they use him as a tool to inflict suffering on others so we're all even.

>> max boot wrote about this recently, the president -- conservatives used to make fun of liberals for victimhood, that they were always portraying themselves as victims, according to conservatives donald trump is promoting a sense of victimhood that seems appealing to a lot of the people listening to him, that he and they are being discriminated, that he's such a strong christian as he told chris cuomo once after a debate that that's why the irs is auditing him allegedly, no proof actually offered. >> sure. i agree with you, that is one of the appeals of donald trump, is that there are people who feel that the -- strangely feel like they are like him or that he is like them when i don't know anyone like him. but he says you and me are the same and i am being victimized,

therefore, i understand your experience. but, a, he's not being victimized and he's like no one. he was born with a gold spoon in his mouth. maybe he is like everybody else, i don't know. the odd thing about the president is that we know nothing about him. we don't know his -- we don't know school grades, we don't know his actual skin color, we don't know what his actual hair is like, we don't know what he's worth. we don't know anything about his conversations with other world leaders. we don't know anything about him. that's the odd part. for a guy who likes who always have a camera pointed at him and talk about himself, there's very little we can say about him with certainty. >> on a serious level, does it worry you, because it worries me about abnormal behavior being normalized. >> of course. that was the first worry. >> and the daily repetition of this stuff after a while, you start to think, okay, it's normal that he has just accused of clintons of being involved in the killing of jeffrey epstein, even if it was in a retweet.

>> every so often we have to metaphorically pull over the car of our show, get out, take a breath and say where are we now? you have to remain shocked. you have to be reminded -- you have to remind yourself that this is insane. >> of course trump is lying in that tweet and here's how you know. he's the one saying it. >> the power of repetition is that it just becomes the normal thing. and that's -- i mean, he's really good at marketing. he's really good at marketing a single idea over and over again. and i'm sure the challenge for real news is to fact check him more than twice. because the third fact check sounds like you're being a little bitchy. you know what i mean? we went over there. but he'll never stop. and we want to keep you connected to those you love, with the new iphone 11. so t-mobile is giving you an iphone 11 on us

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would you want to have trump on your show again? >> can i suggest something? can i suggest something? >> go ahead. >> how about two walls, okay -- >> connected? >> no, no, not connected. two walls, one here, one there,

in between a moat filled with fire. >> the quick answer would be no because i -- it would be hard for me to be properly respectful of the office because i think that he is so disrespectful of the office that it's very hard to perceive him as i would want to perceive a president in terms of status and the dignity and their representation of united states. i think just for safety sake it wouldn't be a good idea. >> obviously all the democratic candidates are being asked if they believe trump is a white nationalist, white supremacist? >> he calls himself a nationalist. it's a fairly simple equation to say that is white nationalism. >> you had ideas about what the show was going to be before you started. everything does. >> kind of.

i kind of had an idea. i didn't really know. >> the thing people do not understand about starting a show is it becomes something -- whatever you think it's going to be, you don't really know until you actually start. >> mike tyson said it best, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. and that's what it is. >> no, but it's true. you are doing it without a net in front of -- and everybody's kmo commenting on it, sure. it does seem like you found the mission, the thesis. you did that live show on showtime, on election night. >> yeah. >> that -- to me that seemed the turning point. in your mind was it or had you already been thinking? >> no, that was significant because -- that was significant in a way as a performer because the last 11 minutes or so, something like that, is largely improvised or i'm just speaking. >> um, i think we can agree that this has been an absolutely exhausting, bruising election for everyone. >> that's right. >> and it has come to an ending

that i did not imagine. we all now feel the way rudy giuliani looks. >> what that was was i was completely emotionally raw. and i think it's important for the audience to know that you're not lying to them or you're not selling them a bill of goods. it doesn't mean like every night is a confession. it just means there's some emotional truth to what you're talking about. >> the camera is a little piece of glass. i think it transmits you a th authenticity. people know who is full of shit and who is not. >> at that point i ran out of bull shit. it was not necessarily impossible to me that would happen. we -- we considered it. i just knew that if it happened, i would have a room full of very upset people and i didn't really want to engage in it.

i said we'll just improvise if that happened and that's what we had to do. that led to an authentic response that i think people responded to. but we found the show months before. everybody samples when you first start and then people went away. and we worked our way back to the kind of show we wanted to do. we're going to talk about what just happened, what is our opinion from an emotional point of view hopefully with some emotional truth because it is on some level an art. about what everybody's talking about today, my fear was that even though i think we had found it, mostly through the life shows because immediacy leads to authenticity, even a scene as an actor brings some sort of reality to it, my concern was no one would have come back to see

if we found it. like we could have found the whole treasure and people could be like there's nothing down that cave. that night we made enough of people splash and say, oh, they found something. that was the expression. and the show basically got people -- it built an audience again between that and inauguration day. and by inauguration day people i think were hungry were talking about somebody paccing about what was happening on a daily basis because the news cycle had become so fast because the president is the person you rightly should pay attention to. it's not like we're indulging some madman. he's the president of the united states. it's right and proper you would pay aeverything he says because everything he says has an effect. nervous? yeah. yeah me too.

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you wrote me a letter after my mom died. in it you said i hope you find peace in your grief. one of the things i've been thinking a lot about is how we don't really talk about grief and loss. people aren't comfortable talking about it. and one of the things i found in the last two months since my mom died is people coming up to me on the street or reaching out to me in instagram or wherever and sharing their grief and their loss with me. and i found that the most helpful thing. i found it to be the most powerful and moving thing.

and i kind of oddly don't want that to stop because in regular times people don't do that. >> right. >> and you've spoken very publicly about what you experienced as a kid, and i just -- a lot of it i didn't know and i think a lot of people don't know. if you don't mind, i wanted to talk to you a little bit about it and how it has shaped who you are now. your dad was killed in a plane crash, you were 10 years old, along to your two brothers, peter and paul. >> right, because i'm the youngest of 11. >> my dad died when i was 10, too. it such a horrible age to lose a father, i can't imagine losing both my brothers as well as. to me losing my dad, it changed the trajectory of my life. i'm a different person than i

was meant to be. and i feel like -- i remember when i was 10, i felt like i mark time and to this day i mark time between while my dad was alive and after. it's like the new year zero. >> without a doubt. without a doubt. yeah, there's another guy, there's another steve. there's a steve colbert, there's that kid before my father and my brothers died. it's actually kind of difficult. i have fairly vivid memories from right after they died to the present. like it's continuous and contiguous. it all connected. there's this big break in the cable of my my memory at their death. everything before that has got an odd, ghostly -- >> to me it like shards of glass. >> flashes. little bits of it. and then the things that really -- like music, because they died in september, they

died on september 11th, 1974. and the music from that summer leading up to it will undo me in an instant. you know, the song of the summer was "band on the run." do not play "band on the run" around me. you know. um, yes, you become a different person. i was personally shattered and then you kind of reform yourself in this quiet, grieving world that was created in the house. my mother had me to take care of, which i think was sort of a gift for her, a sense of purpose at that point because i was the last child. but i also had her to take care of. it became a very quiet house, very dark, and ordinary concerns of childhood suddenly kind of

disappeared. i became -- i won't say mature because that actually was kind of delayed by the death of my father, by sort of just restarting at 10. but i had certainly a different point of view than the children around me. >> there's a writer, mary gordon who wrote about follow those girls and my mom use to quote it to me all the time and i think it applies to boys as well. it's a fatherless child thinks all things possible and nothing is safe. i never really understood it when my mom would say it when i was young but i've come to understand it -- >> all things are possible in both the positive and the negative. >> great things can happen. the phone can ring and your whole life can change for better or worse. but i became what i refer to jokingly as a catastrophist because i did not want to be surprised and hurt again so i sorted plunging ahead first into the things that scared me most. i would take survival courses in the wilderness to know that i could survive in -- >> i did not have that reaction.

i read a lot of science fiction. that was my reaction. >> i have heard you say that you do believe in, like, pushing toward things you are afraid of. you've talked about standing in an elevator and making it -- and having an awkward experience intentionally -- >> that's awkwardness. i suppose there's fear involved in that, but i -- so your dad dies and your brothers who are almost as big as your dad because they're your older brothers and they hung the moon in your mind. so suddenly this important thing disappears and important things suddenly lose some of their power, supposedly important things. it doesn't mean you love your dad or your brothers any less, but things supposedly have status don't have status anymore. so be willing to be ridiculous or not worrying what people thought of your status suddenly became easier. and actually sort of the bits of

embarrassment you might feel about being ridiculous in public like singing out loud in an elevator full of strangers, which is an awkward and embarrassing thing to do, i would do it on purpose to get that feeling of embarrassment or kind of destruction of personal status, that protective feeling that you have to stay straight and to stay sort of in control or well thought of, and i would purposefully embrace that awkward moment of embarrassment. it would kind of run through me like an electric little current. i like that feeling. i think it has something to do with not thinking that anything is important, including my own embarrassment. >> i know you've said -- >> that's related to status. >> i know you've said that school suddenly didn't seem important and teachers would try to -- >> no, i was like a golden child in terms of like my school when i was -- after that i was like forget it. >> you blew of school. but you were reading a book a

day at home. >> i was escaping into fantasy and science fiction. science fiction first and then fantasy. >> when you lost your pro brothers -- >> it was always dad and the boys. peter and paul but dad and the boys. >> and most of your other siblings had left because they were at college or had families of their own, it was mostly you and your mom. >> yes. >> that is a difficult thing. i talked to howard stearn about this as well. he said he always felt he had to treat his mom like a china tea cut. i always viewed my mom as a space alien who landed on this planet and whosesh ship was immobilized and i had to protect her and show her how to live in this world. and i felt that until the day she died. and now i look back at it and i realize whun one of my mom's grt

strengths, which as a kid drove me bananas, was despite tragedies and losses, she was -- she consciously chose to remain open and vulnerable and optimistic and believing the best in, like, everybody she met. and i felt like, okay, she can do that because i'm running interference and i'm scheming and plotting and, you know, willing to do -- >> any chance she was doing it because you were there and needed a good example? >> i don't think so on those terms, to be honest. you know, she wasn't -- your mom i think was very parental. my mom was more -- she was, you know, an amazing creature but it was -- >> because my mom was so shattered by the loss, not destroyed but shattered by the loss, we used to joke that i raised my mom after the age of

10. >> i completely understand. >> a child in some way is struck in a different way but a child is also resilient. their world view is not fully view. now my world view includes dad and your brothers dying. that's part of the world view. my age now, which is around the age my father and my mother were when he died, i'm not sure if i could be as resilient. so i don't entirely know how she did it. i have a friend who lost someone recently, lost a child and she said how did your mother do this? i said i wish she was here to tell you. it had to do with love and her loving god and i have the crucifix on my wall that was hers. i inherited it when she died. and she would pray to our lady and say she knows what it is to lose a child.

and her example of her faith stays with me. and that is -- we asked to accept the world that god gives us and to accept it with love, you know. if god is everywhere and god is in everything, then the world as it is is all just an expression of god and his love and you have to accept it with gratitude because what is the option? what is the option? and i'm part of the team building the most powerful 5g experience for america. it's 5g ultra wideband-- --for massive capacity-- --and ultra-fast speeds. almost 2 gigs here in minneapolis. that's 25 times faster than today's network in new york city. so people from midtown manhattan-- --to downtown denver-- --can experience what our 5g can deliver. (woman) and if verizon 5g can deliver performance like this in these places... it's pretty crazy. ...just imagine what it can do for you. ♪

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i'm running for president because unlike other candidates, i can go head to head with donald trump on the economy, and expose him fo what he is: a fraud and a failure.

it's one of the things i have touched by and sort of healed by the last two months is just people having real conversations with me about loss and grief and their pain. i find it, you know, i'm a wasp, we like to push all our emotions deep down inside and pretend everything's great but it's nice to actually relate to somebody on that and talk about something other than this -- >> i think when you meet someone who has had a loss, you have two options. one is to say i'm sorry for your loss, which is a perfectly lovely thing to do, but if you

can share your experience, then they're not alone. >> it's always interesting to me how when you, you know, i bring it up, meeting somebody for the first time and they say, oh, i'm sorry to bring it up. and i'm thinking about it all the time. >> exactly. exactly. >> it's one of my arms. it is an extension of who i am. >> and quite possibly for the rest of your life. >> without a doubt. it be it's been 31 years since my brother died. and my father longer. >> my brothers died 45 years ago and sometimes i go how come nobody's asking me about paul? but how would they know to ask? they don't know i'm thinking about him. >> and they would be uncomfortable to ask. this is going to sound weird. i for a long time and probably

still to this day wish i had a scar -- >> harry potter -- >> running down my face because it would be a silent signal that everybody i met that i'm not the person i was meant to be or the person i started out being. >> but you're entirely the person you were meant to be. >> i don't know. maybe not. maybe there's a warped -- >> so there's another timeline with a happier anderson cooper? >> i don't know. i guess maybe in an alternate universe. >> my example from my mother and from what i read and experience of my particular faith, extremely imperfectly admittedly, is that, um, there isn't another timeline and this is it and the bravest thing you can do is to accept with

gratitude the world as it is. and then as gandolf says, so do all people who are in such times. >> you told an interviewer that you have learned to, in your words, love the thing that i most wish had not happened. um -- you went on to say what punishments of god are not gifts. do you really believe that? >> yes. it's a gift to exist. it's a gift to exist. and with existence comes suffering. there's no escaping that. i guess i'm either a catholic or a buddhist when i say those things because i've heard those from both traditions. but i didn't learn it, that i was grateful for the thing i

most wish hadn't happened, is that i realized it. it's an oddly guilty feeling. >> it doesn't mean you're happy about it. >> i don't want it to have happened. i want it to not have happened, but if you're grateful for your life, which i think is a positive thing to do, not everybody is and independe'm no but it's the most positive thing to do, then you have to be grateful for all of it. you can't pick and choose what you're grateful for. so then what do you get from loss? you get awareness of other people's loss. >> empathy. >> which allows you to connect that with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply and understand what it's like to be a human being, if it's true that all humans suffer. at a young age i suffered something so that by the time i was in serious relationships in my life, with friends or with my wife or with my children, i'm understanding that everybody is

suffering and however imperfectly acknowledge their suffering and to connect with them and to love them in a deep way that not only accepts that all of us suffer but also then makes you grateful for the fact that you that's what i mean. it's about the fullness of your humanity. what's the point of being here and being human if you can't be the most human you can be? i'm not saying best because you can be a bad person and most human. i want to be the most human i can be, and that involves acknowledging and ultimately being grateful for the things that i wish didn't happen because they gave me a gift. >> one of the things my mom would often say is that -- she said, you know, i never ask why me, like why did this happen to me? she would always say, why not me? why would me be exempt from what has -- >> sure. >> -- befallen everybody, countless others over the

centuries? that's another thing that has made mow thie think, of course, not me? this is part of being alive. the suffering, sadness, these are all, you know -- you can't have happiness without having loss and suffering. >> and in my tradition, that's the great gift of the sacrifice of christ is that god does it too. >> mm-hmm. >> that you're really not alone. god does it too. >> i heard you say something once. you said that you don't proselytize because -- something about -- i'm going to mull it, but it was basely you don't proselytize. more jesus for me. >> i don't necessarily want to make anybody from my point of view. more jesus for me. here at the old heaven buffet. i don't even -- i don't even have a well-defined enough

cosmology of a sense of what's going to happen. but i want to talk about that gifts of god, what punishments of god are not gifts. i'm quoting tolkien there. there are elves and men, which are children of the luvatar. >> and the elves lives forever. >> elves live forever. they are part of the world. >> whom do we know who is an expert on all things lord of the rings? folks, when i spent my entire teenage areas reading tolkien. i knew i was preparing myself for something important. why else would i ignore all my class work, abandon sports, and achieve a paleness i have yet to shake off? >> your mom had studied theater, wanted to be an actress. >> yes. she was going to carnegie. >> was that something that -- and she was then in haiti for

reasons i'm not sure. >> i think it was haiti. it was in the caribbean. >> and she got really sick with a tropical disease. >> yeah, classical like a rare tropical disease, almost like a cartoon of a disease, and she almost died. >> but in that process of recovery, ended up -- >> my dad said, will you marry me, and instead of having an acting career, she started her  own theater company, which is 11 children. >> that's how it was. but did her desire to act, which was then given up to have that family, was that something that you absorbed? >> it seems obvious that that would be one of my motivators. >> right. >> that me with my mom slash lord buddy, we became very close friends, that i would do this in some way for her. it's self-evident, right? did not occur to me. did not occur to me for many years. it wasn't until she died that i

realized a lot of what i did was still going back to making her happy from those early years after dad and the boys died. like we remember distinctly when she laughed for the first time. it was like a year later or something like that. but, you know, that's inside of you as a young person. you absorb that and digest that, but aren't necessarily aware of that until much later. i mean when my sister, mary, said a very interesting thing after mom died. we were all going through this normal grief of my mother's death. >> mm-hmm. >> and as i said, after she died, like we were so lucky to have her for so long. >> she was 92 when she died. >> 92, exactly. but, you know, it might seem selfish to want more of someone you've known so long. but, you know, it merely amplifies the enormity of the room whose door is now so quietly shut. like you can't ever open that door again. but on top of that, we realized, oh, now we also lost dad and the boys. in some ways, we were here for

her because of her loss of her husband and her children. and when she went, she kind of took them with her in a way. so we all -- or at least i and i know i talked to a couple of my brothers and sisters about this. we kind of reexperienced that, and there had been this delayed dealing with all of that over 40-plus years. and i realized in that moment, oh, damn, i wonder if i want to still do comedy because i kind of was doing this for her. still enjoying it and having all the love and the friendship and the camaraderie of it but i realized the sea crystal was make her laugh. >> that's interesting. ove, with the new iphone 11. so t-mobile is giving you an iphone 11 on us for each new line of unlimited. for yourself, or up to a family of four. keep your family connected, and hurry into t-mobile today, to get up to four iphone 11's on us.

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can you love your enemies? can you love the people you dislike? >> you certainly should. you certainly should. i don't know. i suppose you can. i've seen people do it. >> do you try? >> i've seen people do it. i don't hate. i don't -- i try not to hate. like people have come on the show and say, i know you hate trump. i'm like, no, i just don't trust the cat. and, yes, i just said cat,

daddy-o. can you dig it? are you hep to that scene, daddy-o? >> i think that's how we'll end. thank you. it was a pleasure talking to you. >> nice to talk to you too. welcome to this "ac 360" special, "the howard stern interview." for much of his career in radio, howard stern has been known as a shock jock with wild on-air stunts that were sometimes criticized, often criticized, as vulgar, lewd, even offensive. he became incredibly popular with a devoted fan base which he still has, but stern says he is now a changed man. looking back on those days makes him at times want to cringe. he went through years of intensive psychotherapy and also moved off terrestrial radio and onto satellite radio joining sirius xm in 2006. there, he slowly began to reinvent himself, both on the radio and in his own life through therapy. there was less raunch and more thoughtful conversations. his long, in-d