At this stage in your career, is it tough to be both politically correct and unapologetic about how you really feel? In the deposition, I could see why people would say you were being a brat. But there are a lot of people who thought it was funny. Do you struggle with the balance?

I’ve learned to counter balance. I don’t have to be a super proper, stiff guy. I can still have fun with stuff. Sometimes it might look like I’m being a little arrogant; sometimes I’m playing around and having fun. I think the deposition was a little too much. I’m trying to encourage people, and I don’t think that that’s the right attitude to have. I was also frustrated. I was in a weird place. It was annoying. I just felt like I didn’t owe the guy anything. I was just going to mess with every question he had. I got him, too. He was so frustrated. An hour of him just being like, I don’t know what to do or say.

Of all the criticism you got, do you think any of it was petty, or unfair?

Honestly, I think the pissing in the bucket wasn’t as big as people made it seem. Just because, dude, think about it. Imagine, you hear that fucking Ozzy Osbourne pisses backstage. Immediately, “Oh, he’s a freaking rock star!” As soon as I do it, “He’s being a brat.” Dude, what is bratty about pissing in a bucket? I had to go piss—we all have to pee. The bathroom was like on the other side, and the dude in the club was like, “Just pee here.” He told me I could and it wasn’t like I was being disrespectful. I feel like that was pretty ostracizing—bigger than it should’ve been.

Do you think some people around you wanted you to rebel?

Yeah, I think so.

Did you have to cut a lot of people off recently?

Yeah, and it’s not even their fault. It wasn’t like I was cutting them off like, this person’s toxic. I could be around that person and not do that stuff because the stuff I do is not who I am. What I really want people to see in this next chapter is not Justin Bieber the artist. I want people to start seeing me and feel like they can connect with me. I’ve made myself so unrelatable the past year with all the stuff that I was doing. Not even bad stuff sometimes, just outrageous stuff. Like, you got a monkey, what are you doing?

Right.

I could say it over and over again, I’m changing and doing this with my life, but unless they start seeing something tangible like, “Oh he’s helping this person; he would’ve never said something like this a year ago; he would’ve never taken responsibility for something like that a year ago, but now he’s actually being a man about it and understanding commitment, understanding the value of time, understanding the value of people....” When you get famous, you get people that will encourage whatever you do. You’ll do something and they’ll be like, “That was dope, Justin!” When you’re young especially, you don’t know who’s bullshitting you. I’m gonna make sure that I don’t have people around me who make me look like an idiot. You don’t understand—that’s a normal thing for human beings, but I never had that in my life. I didn’t even have that with my parents. I think they just didn’t know how. We never built the right relationships. Now I’m having real relationships where it’s two ways. I didn’t understand how that works because the way people would interact with me was always so weird and it was never completely 100 percent genuine.

You also fell in love at an early age.

Yes.

What did you learn from it?

Don’t fall in love. No, I’m just kidding. I learned a lot. I moved in with my girlfriend when I was 18. Started my own life with her. It was a marriage kind of thing. Living with a girl, it was just too much at that age. But we were so in love. Nothing else mattered. We were all about each other. But when it’s like that and you get your value from that, people will always disappoint you. Your girl or your dude, they’re always going to disappoint you. Your full identity can’t be in that person. My identity was in her. Her identity was in me. When stuff would happen, I would lose my freakin’ mind, and she would lose her mind, and we would fight so hard because we were so invested in each other. Love is a choice. Love is not a feeling. People have made it seem in movies that it’s this fairy tale. That’s not what love is. You’re not gonna want to love your girl sometimes but you’re gonna choose to love her. That’s something in life that I had to figure out. I can’t lean on people. I got to lean on God. I gotta trust in him through all my situations. Then, hopefully, my other relationships will flourish around me. But if I’m gonna be so invested in you, if you die, or something happens to you, I’m gonna be so destroyed, I won’t be able to go on. If I can love you and know that I’m not who I am because you’re being nice to me, but that I love you and I think you’re an incredible person but you’re just as broken as I am on the inside. We’re all just trying to figure it out.