Kevin Hart has addressed his own personal monsters in the past. The comedian cast himself as a bit of a motivational speaker his audiobook, Monsters and How to Tame Them: Taking Charge of the Voices in Your Head. Hart wants listeners to gain control over the negative self-talk that prevents them from living their best life, complemented by Hart’s brand of honesty, humor, and storytelling.
The 38-year-old Night School star also addressed his 2017 cheating scandal through the book, detailing the situation that morphed into a sex tape extortion attempt. Hart later apologized to his wife, Eniko, for the issue, saying he would rather admit his mistakes than be extorted for money. “The first thing that should have completely broken the monster spells was when I got caught cheating,” the actor said in the recording. “Yeah, I said it. I got caught. Everybody knows, it’s not like it’s a f– secret. That should have woken me up right there. That right there should have changed my life to the point where everything was crystal clear.”
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“I only woke halfway up,” he continued. “It was like I was in the movie, you know that movie, Inception. The guys just rolls up to the next level in a dream world, and in the event of infidelity, do you get better? Of course. You do get better. But you got to face your partner, you got to be honest, you got to own up to the actions. It’s agonizing. The mind comes out of it saying things like damn, I was an idiot… I’m never doing this again… I’m never going to a strip club again…What was I thinking… I’m never going out… I’m never gonna look a woman in the eye…I ain’t shaking no more hands, no more hugs, no more hellos coming from me.”
Hart added, “I love my wife. I can’t risk losing my family. I can’t do that. No, no, no no, no. But that’s only half of the problem. Because you don’t realize how other surrounding factors put you in a position to do it in the first place. The Not Me Monsters deny, the Approval Monsters desire for attention, the Me First Monster is selfishness. That’s the real reason why you found yourself in that position.”
According to Audible, the audiobook identifies several other mental gremlins and provide strategies for overcoming them, such as the Control Monster (a need to control everything around you) and the Comparison Monster (benchmarking yourself against others, resulting in irrational jealousy).”I already know you guys probably got one of these annoying inner monsters on your back, too,” Hart says in the audiobook’s trailer. “I’m gonna give a quick lesson on how to deal with them.”
The situation in Las Vegas is still affecting Hart’s life a bit. It spooked him to the point that he won’t travel to the city without his wife going forward.
Hart’s Monsters and How to Tame Them follows his two previous books, the 2017 autobiography I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons and The Decision: Overcoming Today’s BS for Tomorrow’s Success, an audiobook released in 2020. He co-wrote Monsters and How to Tame Them Neil Strauss, a journalist and author best known for his book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Hart and Strauss also co-authored I Can’t Make This Up.
Hart signed a multiyear deal with Audible in February to develop and produce original content. One of his projects, Summer of ’85, examines the juxtaposition of two events in Philadelphia that year: Live Aid for Africa and the bombing of MOVE, a controversial group of Black citizens aiming to establish a thriving African community. Monsters and How to Tame Them released on Sept. 15, and is currently available on Audible.
