#757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler

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0:04:34 the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim
0:04:38 Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to sit down with
0:04:44 world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books,
0:04:50 and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s
0:04:55 because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about,
0:05:02 and past one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best,
0:05:08 some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited
0:05:12 to give you these Super Combo episodes, and internally we’ve been calling these
0:05:17 the Super Combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names,
0:05:23 the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I consider stars.
0:05:29 These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
0:05:33 Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
0:05:38 Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
0:05:45 And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.log/combo.
0:05:50 And now, without further ado, please enjoy, and thank you for listening.
0:05:57 First up, Matthew McConaughey, Academy Award-winning actor who has starred in
0:06:03 Dazed and Confused, Dallas Buyer’s Club, Interstellar, and HBO’s True Detective,
0:06:11 producer, director, businessman, philanthropist, and the #1 New York Times best-selling author
0:06:19 of Green Lights and Just Because. You can find Matthew on Instagram @officiallymcconaughey.
0:06:24 Was it true in your family? I read this, of course. You can’t believe everything that you read.
0:06:28 Two things, number one, that your parents were divorced twice, married three times,
0:06:30 so they ended up getting up one more time, then they got knocked down.
0:06:40 True. Number two, that saying I can’t was forbidden or highly advised against.
0:06:41 Very helpful.
0:06:44 Heavily, heavily, heavily. I remember, cuss words, you could say,
0:06:51 shit, and fuck, and damn, and even occasionally, maybe get away with the Lord’s name in vain,
0:06:57 but you weren’t really, that was on the line, but the real words that we got, like either punish
0:07:06 for or were forbidden or hate and can’t. I remember with my dad, I remember one Saturday morning,
0:07:11 when I was about 12, my Saturday morning chores were, you know, mow the lawn, we’d eat,
0:07:15 shine his shoes, and sweep the board shoes and get the cobwebs out of the corners.
0:07:19 Well, I’d get up very early on a Saturday morning to do that, so I could have my Saturday afternoon
0:07:24 to play, and I went out to try and start our push lawnmower, and it wouldn’t start, pull again,
0:07:28 wouldn’t start, pull again, wouldn’t start, check the gas yet, got gas, what the heck’s going on,
0:07:34 damn it won’t start. I remember going into my dad inside, and I go, dad, I can’t get the lawnmower
0:07:38 started, and he kind of slowly turned his head to me, and I saw his molars meet,
0:07:46 kind of start to grit his teeth, and he goes, you what? And I knew enough right then to not
0:07:52 say the word again, and I said, and he got up, and I didn’t finish my sentence. He slowly walked
0:07:57 with me out of his bedroom through the kitchen, through the garage, around the back to the shed,
0:08:03 where this lawnmower was, that I was not getting started. He, without seeing the word, he knelt down,
0:08:08 looked at it, checked the gas, but anyway, he found the little tube where the gas was not
0:08:14 transferring, and it had been disconnected, so he reconnected that, pulled a few times,
0:08:21 and it started, and there over a new, now running, push lawnmower, he looked at me,
0:08:25 put his hands on my shoulders, and for the first time since I said, I can’t get it started,
0:08:28 he put his hands on my shoulders, looked at me, and very sternly said it, he goes,
0:08:37 you see, Simon, you were just having trouble driving this lawnmower, and boom, you know,
0:08:42 and I remember from that day, I was, that lesson was like, oh, even if you’re unable to do something
0:08:48 on your own, you can still go seek help, or get assistance, so you’re still only having trouble,
0:08:53 even if you, on your own, cannot do so. That was a, saying those words, still to this day,
0:08:58 if I let him slip, I kind of have to look over my shoulder, like, uh-oh, is that going to get me?
0:09:05 So there are many different forms of influences. I’d like to ask you about one that is
0:09:11 not your parents, it’s not your siblings, it’s a book that I’ve read you came across that had
0:09:18 an impact in your life, and that is The Greatest Salesman in the World by Augment Dino. Could you
0:09:23 explain for people listening why that book was impactful, or what impact it had?
0:09:30 Yeah, so I’ve never been a big reader, and growing up didn’t read much, and never really liked even
0:09:34 in school being told, hey, you got to read this book, you got to read this, just the fact of being
0:09:39 told I had to read something in school, or by someone else, sort of made it feel like it wasn’t
0:09:43 mine, and I was not going to have a subjective view of it, and plus I just don’t really like being
0:09:49 told what to do. But this came to me, this book, and I always say this, I didn’t find it, it found
0:09:54 me, and I’ll tell you how and why. It was between my sophomore and junior year in college at University
0:10:00 of Texas at Austin. Now, at this point, I was always on the track to become a lawyer. I was
0:10:04 going to become that defense attorney, you know, and get us some oil and mink money,
0:10:09 you know what I mean? Get the family some oil and mink money. I was a good major, I took good
0:10:13 stances, it started off in the family, they’re like, geez, oh man, you know, I would take the
0:10:16 table and win arguments with the family, and I’d be like, ah, damn it, you got to become a lawyer,
0:10:20 you got to become the family lawyer. So that was always the plan. But between my sophomore and
0:10:26 junior year in college, which is about the time when all those general liberal arts credits that
0:10:31 you’re getting need to have, start having some focus, or you’re going to lose them, you know what
0:10:36 I mean? Right. So I’m start not sleeping well with the idea of becoming a lawyer, but I’m doing
0:10:40 the math, I’m like, I’m not sure it’s what I want to do, I get out of here, I go to law school,
0:10:44 then I get out, then I start maybe get an intern, I’m really not going to be
0:10:49 rolling in my vocation until I’m in my 30s. And I was like, I don’t really want to spend my 20s
0:10:56 just learning, or so my 20s just in school. Now, I’d been writing a lot, been keeping a lot of
0:11:00 short stories in my diaries and a lot of them, which are in this book, Green Lights, but I didn’t
0:11:06 have the confidence to think that maybe I wanted to get in the storytelling business until a good
0:11:10 friend of mine, Rob Binler, who I think at the time was NYU film school, who had been sharing
0:11:15 some of these short stories with one another phone goes, Hey, you should think about getting in front
0:11:20 or behind the camera, you tell great stories, you got good character yourself, you know,
0:11:24 you’re a good writer to try this out. And I was always like, Oh, no, no, no, I mean, that’s like
0:11:31 to avant-garde, it’s to European, it’s to the artsy that I can’t do that. But he gave me the
0:11:38 confidence to really consider it. Now, I go to my fraternity house, the Dell house, into that
0:11:47 sophomore year for sophomore exams. I’m a studier. I’m making I got a 3.82 GPA, I like making my A’s.
0:11:52 And any amount of time I’ve got to study, I will use it every single minute. There’s never
0:11:59 enough time for me to study. I go to the Dell house and right behind it in a little bungalow
0:12:03 is one of my Dell brothers and I eat lunch and I sit on his couch and I’ve got three hours before
0:12:10 my exam. And I open up my book study for my psychology exam. For whatever reason, for the first
0:12:14 time in my life, I shut them and I go Macon I to myself, I go, You got this, you don’t need study
0:12:20 anymore. First time I’ve done that, I got three hours to go. I’ve been put on the TV. I love sports,
0:12:26 ESPN. I watch cricket, the strongest man competition. I watch, you know, two grasshoppers race.
0:12:34 For whatever reason, I just, I’m not interested. I turn off the TV. I look over to my left,
0:12:39 there’s a stack of magazines, there’s sports illustrated, some playboys. And I’m like,
0:12:43 geez, I like sports. I like checking out naked ladies in the playboy. Let’s check that out.
0:12:47 I pick up a playboy, flip through thumb through that half-hazardly and all of a sudden lose interest
0:12:53 in that. And I’m sitting there going, Okay, what am I supposed to do here? I got two and a half
0:12:59 about three hours to kill. Well, I start peeling back those magazines, playboys and sports illustrators
0:13:04 and everything else, and about seven deep in that stack of magazines to the left of the couch,
0:13:10 where I was sitting, I see this white paperback with this beautiful red cursive writing on it,
0:13:16 and it says the greatest salesman in the world. And I remember reaching for and allowed to myself
0:13:22 saying, who is that? And I pick up the book and I start reading it. Again, I’m not a reader,
0:13:27 but I start reading this book. And all of a sudden I lose track of time and I’ve gotten
0:13:33 past the whole prologue to the beginning of this first scroll in this book, which is,
0:13:37 I will form good habit to become their slave. Now, what this book had just told me and just
0:13:44 taken me on a journey and said, you will read each scroll, there’s 10 scrolls in this book,
0:13:48 each scroll three times a day for 30 days until you move on to the next scroll.
0:13:55 So it’s basically a 10 month read. And I had gotten to the first scroll and I now understood
0:14:02 that the greatest salesman in the world was whoever’s going to read that book. So I was like,
0:14:09 oh, that’s me. It’s talking to me. Well, bam, I look up, oh, my exam’s in 15 minutes. I got to go.
0:14:14 Right, head out. Go to my exam, my psychology exam. I ripped through that exam. I didn’t care if I
0:14:19 failed it. Something in this book had told me, no, this book is what you need to be into right now.
0:14:23 This book is going to give you confidence to go do what you need to do. I ripped through that
0:14:28 psychology exam and immediately go, I’m going to film school. I’m calling dad night. I’m not going
0:14:34 to go to law school anymore. I’ve got the confidence. This book found me. This is a seminal moment in
0:14:38 my life. I don’t know how or why, but it is. And I’m going to get the courage to call my dad and go.
0:14:45 And that night, I remember thinking about it. I’m going to call my dad at 7.30. He’ll have sat down,
0:14:49 maybe had his first cocktail, already had dinner, and he’ll be in a good mood for me to say,
0:14:56 you know, dad, I want to go to film school. I think, well, I call him 7.36 PM. Hey, dad. Hey,
0:15:01 what’s up, son? Listen, I don’t really, and I was nervous and I said, I don’t think I want to go to
0:15:05 law school anymore. I want to go to film school. That was hard for me to say because I thought he
0:15:11 was going to go, you want to do what boy? What the hell? I said, dad, I want to go to film school.
0:15:15 It was a long pause on the phone, about five seconds. And he says,
0:15:22 you sure that’s what you want to do, son? And I said, yes, sir. There’s another five second pause.
0:15:29 And then he said, three of the greatest words I’ve ever been told, don’t half-ass it.
0:15:37 I remember going, huh, don’t half-ass it. And I remember my eyes just, I lit up and I was like,
0:15:43 oh my gosh, one, my dad not only approved, he gave me a responsibility. He gave me freedom. He gave
0:15:48 me more than a privilege. He like sent me a flight and ending it with like, not only do I agree and
0:15:52 say that’s okay, son, I’m saying, if you’re going to do it, you better damn well go do it well and
0:15:58 don’t half-ass it. And I went down the next day, changed my course schedule. My GPA got me into
0:16:03 film school because I had a 3.82. I didn’t have any sort of art to show them. And I started off
0:16:08 behind the camera and then ended up as I am now in front of the camera as well. But that book,
0:16:16 that day, that book finding me and me feeling like it was my secret and it came to me and no one
0:16:20 told me here, you need to read this book. It’ll be good for you. Hey, you’re supposed to read this.
0:16:27 This is your, for school or even a recommendation, it was not rec, it found me. And I read that
0:16:33 book. I did exactly what it said, morning, noon and night. And I read, I’ve read it three times
0:16:40 now that way. But the first time, I didn’t miss one reading of that. I mean, and I had many a day
0:16:47 where I went out in the morning on a Saturday and my day of whimsy took me to a place where
0:16:52 all of a sudden it was 10 o’clock at night and I was like an hour and a half from my house.
0:16:58 And the book was back at my house. And I’d be like, hanging out, partying and going like,
0:17:05 Oh, geez. And I would stop, eat something, get some coffee, drink a bunch of water,
0:17:10 wait till whatever one 30 in the morning when I was time to drive. And I would drive back to my
0:17:16 place, grab that book and either read it and go to sleep in my bed or drive back to where I was
0:17:21 hanging out with the book and read it. I didn’t miss one single read for 10 straight months. And
0:17:26 that book is the most instrumental piece of literature and motivation I’ve ever read for
0:17:33 me in my life. And now you’ve produced Green Lights. This book, which as you’ve described it,
0:17:38 is not a traditional memoir or an advice book, but rather a playbook based on adventures in my
0:17:44 life. And I want to hop to a particular portion of this book, which is also a scrapbook of sorts.
0:17:50 It’s very multimedia in that respect, even though it’s in 2D and book format. I want to
0:17:58 ask you about a note and this will segue into the practice of writing. Since you’ve kept a
0:18:04 diary for somewhere between 35, 40 years at this point, I believe, there’s a note towards the end
0:18:16 of Green Lights from 9192. So 10 goals in life. This blew my mind. So I want to read these 10,
0:18:21 and then I want you to kind of place us in your life when you wrote these 10. And then I want
0:18:27 to zoom in on a few of them. But let me just read these 10 first. So 10 goals in life. This is in
0:18:33 1992. One, become a father. Two, find and keep the woman for me. Three, keep my relationship with God.
0:18:38 Four, chase my best self. Five, be an egotistical utilitarian. That’s going to be my first follow-up
0:18:45 question. Six, take more risks. Seven, stay close to mom and family. Eight, win an Oscar for best actor.
0:18:53 Nine, look back and enjoy the view. Ten, just keep living. Where were you and when were you
0:19:03 when you wrote these 10 goals? I was in a top bunk in the Delta Todd Delta house. I
0:19:08 believe my roommate was Monnie Wills, whom I’m still friends with today from Montgomery, Alabama.
0:19:14 I was in the top bunk. I think I just probably, it was the end of the night. It was about 930.
0:19:20 I was just getting nestled in for a good night’s sleep. So I just started. What was the full day,
0:19:28 93? What was the month in the day? That was September 1, 1992. Okay. Yes. So I had just done
0:19:35 days to confused. That’s right. Yeah. It was two days after finishing. Yeah. I just finished it.
0:19:43 A job, a summer hobby, a thing that there were three lines written in a script.
0:19:47 That I got cast in because I went to the right bar at the right time, met the right guy,
0:19:53 read for it. Richard Linklater said, come on and started throwing me in scenes. So three lines
0:19:57 turned into three weeks work. I loved it was getting paid $320 a day. People were telling me
0:20:03 I was good at it. And I was running around going like, is this legal? It’s so fun. And I finished it.
0:20:11 My father had just passed away like two weeks earlier. Yeah. August 17th of that year. So
0:20:17 I had just finished a job that was a hobby that became a career. I had just finished that. Think
0:20:21 about it. If you do the math, I didn’t think about till now, I just finished that augmentino 10 months
0:20:29 of reading that book. My father had just passed away. I was just going through what that meant to me,
0:20:32 what I felt like that should mean to me. And that’s where the just keep living comes from,
0:20:36 to keep his spirit alive, even though he’s physically not here, keep things alive that he
0:20:41 taught me to keep me incentivized throughout my life, even though I couldn’t rely on him personally
0:20:46 being here to back me up with him. And so I remember writing those goals down.
0:20:50 And the thing is that when you start off this conversation going, I don’t know what your
0:20:57 iradid rabbit was about it, but I found that just less than a year ago in my diaries. And I’d never
0:21:05 looked at it or remembered that I had written it since the day I did. That date on that list,
0:21:12 I never looked at that list again. I wrote it that night and forgot about it. Or at least I
0:21:18 thought I forgot about it. I didn’t. And that’s the wild part because somewhere subconsciously,
0:21:22 I obviously did remember it because so far I’ve accomplished those goals. And there’s some very
0:21:28 specific ones on there that I’m like, what? I always thought even the acting part, when an Oscar
0:21:32 for best actor, this is a time I just finished days confused. I didn’t know I was going to end up
0:21:37 being an actor. I still thought that didn’t have the courage to even think I could pursue it as a
0:21:42 career. At that time, I thought it might just be a hobby. I had a hobby for a summer. But obviously,
0:21:48 when I look back, I’m like, oh, you did want to be. You did want to be an actor and you wanted
0:21:52 to be a damn good one. So I could admit it on my journal page, but I couldn’t admit it to myself.
0:21:57 Hell, I couldn’t even admit it in my dreams. But I could admit it on my journal pages. So that’s
0:22:02 where I was. So those are three big things going on in my life. And I’d say the biggest
0:22:08 shapeshifter was father moving on. But that, with finishing days and with finishing the greatest
0:22:15 salesman, that’s when I wrote that. That’s quite a Venn diagram as far as a snapshot in time goes
0:22:22 with those three sort of momentous changes, those transitions. Why take more risks? Did you feel like
0:22:26 at the time you weren’t taking enough risks? Was it something you had learned about risks from
0:22:31 your parents or other people? Why take more risks? I think I was, at that time, seeing
0:22:39 risk that I’d take really pay off. The risk to end the bar at the top of the high at that night,
0:22:43 to go down and introduce myself to Don Phillips, who ended up being the casting director for Days
0:22:47 Confused, who four hours later at the end of the night after we got kicked out of the bar says,
0:22:54 hey, you ever done any acting? You might be right for this part. The risk to go and read for that
0:22:59 part. The risk for Richard Linklater to say, there’s nothing, you’re not supposed to be in
0:23:03 this scene. You’re not written in this scene, but you think orderson would be in it? The risk for me
0:23:09 to go, oh yeah, and just hop in the middle of the scene and improvise and play. Those risks were
0:23:15 paying off. I was also beginning to feel, you know, the risk that I took reading that damn book,
0:23:20 the greatest salesman. It was the first book I ever read cover to cover, and it’s a thin paperback.
0:23:25 Mind you, it takes 10 months to read, but that was a risk for me. And I was feeling very confident
0:23:33 with who I was. I was also thrown upside down by my dad moving on. Now, I don’t know, you know,
0:23:39 if you’ve lost a parent, but as the son losing a dad, you want to talk about forced into identity?
0:23:46 You know, my dad being this sort of crutch just because he was alive and above government and
0:23:53 above law was now gone. I had no crutch. I had no safety net. All of a sudden, I remember this very
0:23:57 clearly is coming to me, and besides the just keep living with keeping his spirit alive. I remember
0:24:02 one of the first lessons of him moving on was I was, and I carved this in a tree. I remember carving
0:24:10 this deeply in a tree for about three hours one night, less impressed, more involved. And that
0:24:17 leans into taking more risk because I was like, after dad moved on, I was like, oh, all of these
0:24:24 mortal things in life that I have a reverence for, even this point of just finishing acting and maybe
0:24:31 having a little, you know, dreams of fame. Wow. All these things that I revered that were mortal,
0:24:39 lowered down to eye level. And at the same time, everything that I noticed that I was condescending
0:24:44 or looking down upon or something my nose at are going, oh, that’s crap. Or, oh, they’re no good.
0:24:50 I was like, they raised up to eye level. And I remember going, oh, the world is flat.
0:24:55 Your dad’s moved on. You better look the world in the eye. And by seeing the world flat, I saw
0:25:01 further. I saw wider. I saw more clearly. I had more courage. I lost reverence for the mortal
0:25:05 things that I had reverence for. I still respected them, but I lost reverence for them. So that gave
0:25:12 me courage. And I lost this sort of a snub-nosed look at things that I thought were beneath me.
0:25:17 And I empowered them and they raised up to eye level. So all of a sudden, you know, that was
0:25:22 a version where the eye met the we for me. That was a version where what I looked up to maybe too
0:25:30 much met what I was looking down on. And it was right in front of me. And that was how I was also
0:25:36 taken more risk. I lost a lot of fear. I still had fear, but I gained a lot of courage to go meet
0:25:41 my fears. And I didn’t give enough credence to things that I probably shouldn’t fear or have too
0:25:46 much reverence for because they were mortal. And I was like, what’s that? That’s, you know, reverence
0:25:51 for fame or not taking a chance to go get what you want. That’s a mortal fear. That’s like putting a
0:25:57 limit on yourself. Why would you do that? I even called it a sin at that time, not to take a certain
0:26:03 risk and would feel guilty if I didn’t and feel like I didn’t meet my quote that day in God.
0:26:09 What is it that you’ve gotten from having a diary and maybe it’s changed over time?
0:26:13 Yeah, it’s evolved. I mean, my diary started off like I think most people’s diaries do. You write
0:26:19 things down when you’re not in a good place or you’re lost. My early diary entries were the
0:26:26 why, what, where, when, house, you know, the existential question of what is going on. Does
0:26:30 it matter who am I? Oh my God, this shoot. So my girlfriend broke up with me. I lost it.
0:26:34 Started off with that. So I noticed that I started writing down when I was in
0:26:42 times of distress or disillusion. And then I started to say, well, wait a minute,
0:26:47 you got a just like that augmenting a book by hooker by crook. You read it three times a day.
0:26:52 I was like, well, we’re going to write my diary every day, McConaughey. And so when do most of
0:26:57 us, including me, not write in our diary when things are going great? Oh, I got it figured out.
0:27:01 I’m not going to need to take time to go be introspective and write down my thoughts,
0:27:06 everything to everything’s a green light. It’s great. Well, no, I said, hang on a second. We’re
0:27:13 going to spend our life, a diary, the original use of a diary is to dissect failure or disillusion.
0:27:18 I think there’s some prudence and let’s dissect success. Let’s dissect what’s going on when
0:27:24 things are going well. Let’s write in this diary when you feel like everything’s clear and you feel
0:27:30 strong and confident and significant and you feel like yourself. So I started writing in my diary
0:27:36 when things are going well. And then started to map out certain things about found that what that
0:27:41 did is when I would get in a proverbial rut later, I could go back to that diary and look at what
0:27:47 was I writing and what was I doing when I felt like everything was liquidy split and I had it
0:27:53 everything handled. And I found consistencies. I found it from what I was eating to who I was
0:27:58 hanging out with, how much sleep I was getting to beauties in the world that I was noticing and
0:28:03 really were affecting me, how I approached people, how I was approaching a day, how I was approaching
0:28:08 conflict, how I was approaching and taking in things that work success. And I found consistencies.
0:28:13 And so sometimes going back in those diaries reading what I was writing when things were going
0:28:19 well would help get me out of a rut later on in life when I wasn’t doing so well. And I remember
0:28:24 this early on in college. It’s a reason that my buddy, as I mentioned earlier, Rob Billner said,
0:28:28 “You should go into storytelling business.” Because I was writing short stories, but I was also
0:28:34 writing things down, idiosyncrasies of myself. I was really trying to get to know myself. I would
0:28:38 always, when I’d be in a movie theater, I always laughed. I thought the funniest jokes and I’d
0:28:43 laugh. I’d be the only one laughing in the theater. And I’d never thought the stuff that everybody
0:28:47 laughed at was funny. The collective laugh, I never even giggled at. I was like, “I don’t
0:28:51 know, that ain’t very funny.” But I’d laugh how? And I was like, and no one else would laugh. I was
0:28:56 like, “No one else thinks that’s funny?” I would say that in the theater. I cried at things that
0:29:03 other people didn’t cry at. Like, I’ve never really cried at death. I weep at birth. Beginnings
0:29:09 always evade me cry more than proverbial ends. So I started writing these things down. And at
0:29:14 first, I was feeling like, “Are you weird? Hey, is this odd? Is this okay? Can you be this kind of
0:29:20 a person?” And got the confidence to go, “Yes, you can. It’s okay. But let’s write down those things.
0:29:24 Let’s write down what makes you laugh, what makes you happiest, what makes you sad, what makes you
0:29:31 angry. And don’t worry if it’s the collective choice of the majority. What does it mean to you
0:29:37 and write those things down?” And so that led to character, I believe. It led to my own character.
0:29:43 It led to me being able to maybe go play different characters to understand and empathize with
0:29:46 different people and have different people have different things that turn them on and turn them
0:30:00 off at different times. What is the art of running downhill? Okay. So I get successful. I got major
0:30:06 fame very quickly after “A Time to Kill” came out. The film I did in ’96. And I mean, from the Friday
0:30:13 afternoon before it came out to the Monday after the weekend, it came out. My whole world was
0:30:20 inverted. The world all of a sudden was one big mirror. I never meet strangers since that day.
0:30:24 It was inverted. I mean, that Friday afternoon before “A Time to Kill” comes out,
0:30:30 there’s 100 scripts out there. I want to do it all. Are you kidding me? I’ll do any of them.
0:30:37 Well, 99, no, you can’t. One of them, yes, you can’t. Well, in a matter of two days,
0:30:44 after that film opened that weekend and did well, that 100 scripts, it was, yes, you can do 99,
0:30:50 one no. So I was like, whoa, two days ago, I would have done any of these and could only do one.
0:30:57 And now, it’s only two days later, but you’re telling me I can do 99 of them. Help me, discernment,
0:31:01 discrimination. Can I make a choice? Who am I? Geez, what do I want to do? There’s only 24 hours
0:31:07 in the days. Last I checked, I need more. So I was a little, you know, imbalanced, overwhelmed,
0:31:12 didn’t have my feet, my soul on the ground. And there were times that, and I also remember that
0:31:16 same lawyer I talked about in the oil and mink story, Jerry Harris. I remember him telling me.
0:31:20 He reached out, I hadn’t talked to him for years. He reached out and he goes, hey,
0:31:24 Matthew, you’re from a small town, you’re out in Texas. You know, you came in through Longview,
0:31:27 Texas. Now you went out there, now you’re famous Hollywood star and you got all these things. He
0:31:33 goes, make sure you don’t suffer too much from the non-deserving complex. That happens with some
0:31:37 people that get real successful from sort of humble beginnings. And it made a lot of sense to me,
0:31:44 because I was noticing that, you know, in the name of obstacles being the way,
0:31:52 I was creating obstacles for myself, some of them very unnecessary, meaning here’s my life,
0:31:59 I’m successful, I’m rolling, I am catching green lights, I’m rolling downhill. I very less than
0:32:07 gracefully handled some of my success. I would become belligerent at times. I didn’t become
0:32:10 belligerent. At the end of the day, I always say this, it’s okay to have a point to prove,
0:32:14 just don’t always be trying to prove a point. I had many times where I would try to prove a point,
0:32:19 you know what I mean? And it was my own insecurity, it was my own self trying to find
0:32:24 some balance in this. It was me, I was seeing the mendacities of all these people in Hollywood,
0:32:28 all of a sudden saying, I love you. And I’m like, man, I’ve said that to four people in my life.
0:32:36 And everyone says it out here, they’re full of shit. I was taking things personally,
0:32:44 even and sort of sabotaging some of the red carpet wine and caviar that was being handed to me.
0:32:52 You know what I mean? And I was slipping to some of my more banal self at times and doing a proverbial
0:32:58 face plant, meaning I’m running downhill and this is all easy street, I need resistance. So I think
0:33:04 I’m going to trip myself and face plant and break my right into the concrete so I can break my nose
0:33:11 so I can go, ah, there I go. Now I’m earning it. Now I feel it. Now I’ve earned it. Now I deserve it.
0:33:18 Well, that can be a little foolish. There’s an art to going downhill. And so what I noticed was,
0:33:25 oh, hard times are going to come. It’s going to get dry. You’re not going to be able to do
0:33:30 whatever script you want to do. I’ve had birth times or in a relationship, we go through,
0:33:37 it doesn’t go well or someone gets sick in the family. A real uphill battle enters our life.
0:33:44 And so the art of running downhill is about, hey, enjoy it. When you’re going downwind downhill,
0:33:49 don’t trip yourself because that uphill is coming. It’s going to come whether you want it to or not.
0:33:54 So don’t trip yourself and face plant right now because you’re going to have to work your ass off
0:34:00 here very shortly anyway. Well, let’s talk about perhaps an uphill, perhaps a pause, perhaps something
0:34:07 else, which I’d love for you to comment on, which did come later. And that was a decision
0:34:17 which I’d love to explore, to say no to quite a lot of opportunities for a period of time. It seems
0:34:21 like at one point you’re very successful. You became very famous, like you said, practically
0:34:27 overnight. You’re being offered opportunities you couldn’t have imagined a week prior.
0:34:33 And you have a string of successes and then you realize, well, wait a minute here,
0:34:38 I might be getting painted into a corner and you start to say no. You start to turn down,
0:34:45 say, action film opportunities with big paychecks, things like that. Was that hard to do? Did other
0:34:51 people say that you were doing the right thing and encourage you? Could you walk us through and just
0:34:56 tell a story about that experience? Yeah, love to. So this is around, I don’t remember the year,
0:35:02 I’m guessing it’s around 12, 13 years ago. I was rolling with the romantic comedies. I had taken
0:35:09 the baton from Hugh Grant and was the male lead romcom go-to guy. Romcoms are mid-level budgets,
0:35:15 30, 35 million. They offer a good front end paycheck to me. They go make 60 million. I mean,
0:35:20 at the studios don’t have to overspend and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make them.
0:35:24 You get a good female and a male lead that have good chemistry. People love to go escape to them.
0:35:29 My romcoms are doing well. They were my bank. They were what Hollywood banked on me to be in.
0:35:34 At the same time, I’m living in Malibu, learning to surf, got my shirt off,
0:35:38 and the pop right to your discovery channel is I call them as documenting this and I’m like,
0:35:42 damn right, document it. This is the life I’m living. I love it. I worked and earned to get this
0:35:47 life. And those romantic comedies that I get paid so handsomely for actually pay the rent at the
0:35:53 house on the beach that I live in in front of this water that I’m surfing in. So I was full on
0:36:03 shaking hands with gun. Yes. At the same time, I did notice that any other dramas I wanted to do,
0:36:07 or even the way people sort of, when I said, don’t meet strangers anymore, even when this
0:36:12 sort of people thought of me or approached me or talked to me or about me, it was like,
0:36:18 you know, kind of, he’s the shirtless romcom guy. And I was like, yeah, I am. And I’m,
0:36:24 but there only I could answer that second question of and I’m, I only I could continue
0:36:27 that sentence. No one else could. They were like, Hollywood, for sure. It was like, no,
0:36:32 nothing else. And so any dramas I wanted to do or other pictures, no one wanted to make it with me.
0:36:42 And I remember we had just had Levi Camilla and I just had our first son. And my life was so vital.
0:36:49 Man, I just had a newborn. I’ve met the woman that I love and want to spend the rest of my life
0:36:58 with. I’m laughing harder. I’m crying harder. I’m happier than ever. Life is very vital. And I’m
0:37:05 in it. My real life is. But my work feels like, yeah, yeah, I could do that tomorrow morning.
0:37:08 Just give me the script tonight. Let me look at it. I could do it tomorrow. It wasn’t really
0:37:13 challenging me. And the romcoms weren’t challenging me. And my lifestyle was one big green light.
0:37:19 And, you know, if it’s all green lights, if it’s all sugar and candy, well, we can make
0:37:24 tyrants out of anybody. So I was saying, oh, I really want my, I wish my work could, I remember
0:37:29 saying this, at least, I remember looking in the mirror, actually, and going, okay, McConnell. So
0:37:34 if your life is more vital and true to who you are than your work, well, it’s got to be one
0:37:39 or the other. That’s a good thing because I know a lot of people that their work is more vital than
0:37:43 their life. So I said, that’s a good thing. I said, but geez, could I just get some work that
0:37:49 might challenge the vitality of my life and the man I am in it, where I can get some work where
0:37:58 I can be more me in it? Well, those roles were not being offered to me. Nothing. Nope, not a chance.
0:38:02 No studio will bank you in this drama role or this other role you want. I had control of Dallas
0:38:06 Byersglove at that time, but no one wanted to make it for me nor would he want to finance it.
0:38:12 So I decided that if I couldn’t do what I wanted to do and what I wanted to do was not being offered
0:38:18 to me, it would be prudent for me to just stop doing what I had been doing and what was in the
0:38:24 pipeline continually coming to me, which were the romantic comedies. I called my money manager,
0:38:28 said, all right, look, I’m going to stop doing the only work I’m getting offered. And I don’t know
0:38:32 how long it’s going to be till I work again. How am I doing with my money? He says, you’ve invested
0:38:37 well, conservatively, you’re fine. You can take time off. I remember calling my agent, Jim Toth,
0:38:42 at CA. Jim, I don’t want to do romantic comedies anymore. I remember this conversation. He goes,
0:38:47 great. And I go, wait, what do you mean? Great. He goes, great. And I go, how do you say that so
0:38:51 quick? What are you going to say Monday morning when you go into your superiors in the office and
0:38:56 say, McConaughey’s not doing romantic comedies. And McConaughey has been bringing a nice chunk of
0:39:00 10% commission into you guys with these romantic comedies for years now. And he said the coolest
0:39:05 thing to me because I don’t work for them. I work for you. Hi, that’s a good line.
0:39:11 That’s a good line, right? And then it was, I went to Camilla, my wife. And I’d been, you know,
0:39:17 I’d shed quite a few tears with her going through this. Am I feeling fraudulent in my work? Do I
0:39:23 feel a lack of significance in my work? Is it okay to be feeling this? I mean, like I said,
0:39:28 remember, as we said earlier, I’m kind of going running downhill. Why would you sabotage not
0:39:31 doing the work you’re getting offered where you can get paid so handsomely to do it?
0:39:38 But she understood that my soul was shaken and needed some recalibration and that the work
0:39:43 I was doing wasn’t the true sort of expression of who I was in my life. And I was, I told her,
0:39:47 I said, I want to hold out for some work that can challenge the vitality of the life that I’m living
0:39:53 with you and our son, Levi. And she repeated the lines to me. She goes, okay, you’re going to get
0:39:58 wobbly. I’ve been around you. You got to work, Matthew, and you love to accomplish. You’re going
0:40:02 to get wobbly. You might start reaching for a little sip of something to drink earlier in the
0:40:09 day too. And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, she’s like, she goes, days are going to be longer.
0:40:13 We don’t know how long this will last, how long we’ll be in this. She called it a desert. How
0:40:16 long this will be a desert? She goes, but if we’re going to do this, if you’re going to do this,
0:40:22 we’re not going to half-ass it. She repeated my dad’s line to me. And I went, yes, ma’am, gave her
0:40:28 a hug, put some tears on her shoulder. And we said, starting today, no more rom-coms. Well,
0:40:34 rom-com offers came in to my agent for about the next six months, but nothing but rom-com offers.
0:40:42 And I didn’t even, unless it was a major offer, I just said no. And they stopped at my agent’s desk,
0:40:49 Jim Toth, no. And then one of them came through that was like a gargantuan offer for it. And my
0:40:54 agent said, it’s a pretty damn good script too. And so I said, well, send it out. Let me read it.
0:41:03 And I remember this, the offer was like for $8 million. And the script was pretty good,
0:41:06 but it was still a code of a rom-com. And I remember reading it and going,
0:41:13 no, thank you. I remember feeling sort of emboldened and strengthened by saying, no, thank you. Great.
0:41:17 Sticking to my guns. No rom-coms. Six months into this drought. Nope. Not cave it in now.
0:41:22 Don’t half-ass him a conne. So they come back with a $10 million offer. No, thank you. They come
0:41:33 back with a $12.5 million. Now I go dot, dot, dot ellipsis ellipsis. No, thank you. Now they come
0:41:39 back with a $15 million offer. Wow. You know what? Let me have another reread of that script.
0:41:50 And I reread that. And you know what? At $15 million, the same script that I’ve been offered for
0:41:55 $8 million, the $15 million offer script, which was the same exact words as the $8 million offer
0:42:04 script, the $15 million script was better. It was funnier. It had possibilities. It had angles.
0:42:08 I had ideas. I could make this work. You know, I mean, this could work.
0:42:14 Now I’m imagining at this point, Jim is like, man, this saying no thing is really working out.
0:42:23 He’s in, and he’s over there teetering like, I know what we said, $15 million, and it’s not like,
0:42:28 it’s a pretty good script. I know it’s Romcom. It’s a pretty good script. But I said,
0:42:36 no, no, thank you. Well, that got the signal across Hollywood that McConaughey was taking a
0:42:42 serious sabbatical. And so don’t even send him a Romcom. It got around.
0:42:46 So that was kind of the crucible then. I mean, that was like the crux move, in a sense.
0:42:52 In a way, that was, that was a, yeah, I called an audible six months in and that had him thinking,
0:42:57 I might cave, I might just be posturing and come on back, McConaughey, we love you. And I said,
0:43:02 no. And when they had pumped the money offer up so much and people knew in the industry what
0:43:10 that offer was, it became very clear. Oh, oh, shit. Okay. McConaughey, I don’t know what he’s doing,
0:43:15 but he ain’t doing this stuff. He’s not doing any more Romcoms. And it became clear. So for
0:43:26 the next 12, 14 months, nothing came in, not a zilch, not an offer for anything. I mean,
0:43:30 I talked to my agent every couple of weeks, it’d just be like nothing came in, nothing.
0:43:37 So now we’re 20 months into this desert period. I do have my son to raise, which, you know,
0:43:41 being a father has always been the most important thing to me. So that, that’s got my compass,
0:43:47 at least directed in a place that I go, just trust in this, if it has something to do with
0:43:51 raising your son and being here on the land with your family, even if you start to wander,
0:43:56 just trust that that’s always going to be in the asset section, McConaughey. You can’t go wrong
0:44:02 with that. So I stuck to that. And I was now fine with not doing any work. I didn’t know what I was
0:44:07 going to be, didn’t know if I was going to change my career, if I was going to become a teacher,
0:44:12 coach, or go back to being a lawyer. I didn’t know, I didn’t think so, but I was writing more.
0:44:19 I was talking about forced winners. I had put a forced winner on myself. And I was pretty content.
0:44:22 I wasn’t, you know, waking up every morning, going, “Did an offer come in? Did something
0:44:28 new come in?” I was past that. And then all of a sudden, 20 months in, 20, 21 months into this
0:44:33 desert, I could start getting some offers that are interesting things. William Freakin,
0:44:39 Killer Joe, Lee Daniels, Paperboy, Jeff Nichols wrote mud for me. Stephen Satterberg called Magic
0:44:45 Wine. Richard Linklater and I go do Bernie together. True Detective comes around. All of a sudden,
0:44:52 Dallas Buyers Club. No one still wants to put a bunch of money up for a 1980s period drama about
0:44:57 AIDS, but all of a sudden, McConaughey, all the directors were, no directors would do Dallas
0:45:00 Buyers Club with me. They wanted, they wanted the script. They loved the script. They didn’t want
0:45:06 to do it with McConaughey. All of a sudden, we find John Mark Fellow, who says, “No, I’d like
0:45:15 to do it with McConaughey.” So what happened was that 22 months, that drought, that desert,
0:45:25 I unbranded. I didn’t rebrand. I unbranded. Me being away, me being in Texas, not being on a beach,
0:45:32 getting pictures of me shirtless on a beach, not being in rom-coms, I was out of the world’s view.
0:45:36 I was out of the industry’s view. I was not in your living room. I was not in your theater.
0:45:41 I was not in any of the places that the world would become expectant to see me and how to see me.
0:45:48 Where was I? I was gone. Where is McConaughey? Well, you’re gone long enough. All of a sudden,
0:45:57 I became a new good idea, which I was not a new good idea at any time earlier than that at the
0:46:01 end of that 20 month period. And then all of a sudden, the things came to me that I wanted to do,
0:46:07 and I remember saying, “You know what? Fuck the bucks. I’m going for the experience. If I read
0:46:12 a role that shakes me in my boots and challenges the vitality that I feel in my own real life and
0:46:17 challenges me, the man I am in my own real life, that’s what I’m going after.” And man, they came
0:46:23 in. Come in, I looked at each other, shed some more tears, and we said, “Let’s get after it.”
0:46:27 And I just started hammering them. The family came with me everywhere I went and just started
0:46:30 laying down work that really, really turned me on.
0:46:38 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:47:57 And now, Aisha Tyler, a star of the hit television show Criminal Minds, a comedian
0:48:05 and the host of the CW’s top-rated improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway, an award-winning director,
0:48:11 best-selling author and activist, and co-founder of the new premium margarita brand,
0:48:17 LaSophie. You can find Aisha on Twitter and Instagram @aishatyler.
0:48:25 Aisha, welcome to the show. Tim, hello. Thank you. I’m super excited to be here.
0:48:32 This is our away. It’s a very long home and away for us. It is. It is. And you are partially to
0:48:41 blame/credit for me having a podcast in the first place because I recall when you interviewed me
0:48:50 for Girl and Guy podcast in San Francisco at my place and I had so much fun speaking with you
0:48:57 and fielding some fantastic questions, one of which I’m going to bring up and then we’ll backpedal.
0:49:03 Okay. But the question will not be surprising to you. I don’t think and I’m going to ask you
0:49:09 to bring it up. But the conversation that we had in part contributed to me deciding to take a break
0:49:16 from writing books, which had completely burned me out and in turn helped birth the show. So thank
0:49:23 you for helping to send me on this path because it’s become one of the most gratifying and fascinating
0:49:28 things I could possibly imagine doing. So thank you for that. It’s so thrilling to hear and really,
0:49:34 really gratifying. Yeah. I mean, it’s amazing. I think podcasts are wonderful and terrible beasts,
0:49:40 but really satisfying even when they’re punishingly difficult to manage. They’re still so
0:49:46 satisfying. So I’m really happy. I’m happy that you’re enjoying it. And we’re not going to get
0:49:51 into this right now, although we can. You have a book titled “Self-Inflicted Wounds,” subtitled
0:49:58 “Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation.” Can you maybe repeat or even paraphrase the question
0:50:04 that you would always ask guests on your show? Oh, absolutely. I mean, the name for that book
0:50:09 came from this part of my show, “Self-Inflicted Wounds,” which is some what, you know, tell me a
0:50:14 story about something that’s gone wrong in your life. That’s your own fault. You know, you can’t
0:50:19 blame anyone else, not your ex, not the bullies in your school, not the man. You know, you did it to
0:50:24 yourself. And it was really a way of initiating a conversation about risk and failure, because I
0:50:28 feel like people see people who are successful and assume that a part of that success or the
0:50:31 reason for that success is that they haven’t made any mistakes and they haven’t failed, that they’ve
0:50:37 got a charmed life in some way, or they figure some kind of formula out. And the most successful
0:50:44 people are people who don’t just manage risk, but engage in risk and court failure actively.
0:50:48 So I always love to, you know, have people listening see that some of that they admire and
0:50:54 that they think has really accomplished has really shit the bed. At some point in their lives,
0:50:59 maybe multiple times, because I just think it’s instructive. I think people don’t start
0:51:02 because they’re afraid they’re going to fail. And there’s just no way around
0:51:06 the path to success is through failure. You just can’t get around it.
0:51:11 There’s so many different directions. I could go with this. And I want to go way back as maybe
0:51:16 up like sort of a montage flashback that we could have as a visual overlay, as you’re saying some
0:51:23 of these things. And that is to your dad. And I’ve in the process of doing homework,
0:51:30 read about your dad’s favorite saying or question that he would ask. And I was hoping
0:51:35 you could explain this or share this with people who are listening, because I think it’s kind of
0:51:42 amazing. Well, I was raised, you know, my parents divorced when I was 10. And my father, my parents,
0:51:46 you know, I always joke that, you know, it’s only rich people that can afford to fight about
0:51:49 custody. You know what I mean? Poor people just do whatever they have to do to like manage.
0:51:54 And my parents, neither of them could really afford to kids and also neither of them could afford to
0:52:00 pay child support. So each of them just took one of us. I was older, so I went with my father.
0:52:03 And he was like, you know, which one can wash itself? And then that was the one that he took.
0:52:10 And, you know, my father is the king of the very terse and pointed motivational speech.
0:52:16 So I would leave for school in the morning and I grew up in San Francisco. And at one point,
0:52:19 we lived upstairs in a Victorian. So I’d go down these very steep stairs and
0:52:24 he’d lean over the railing and he’d go, who’s day is it? I’d have to say, it’s my day.
0:52:28 And then he’d say, what are you going to do? And I’d have to say, grab it by the balls.
0:52:33 And then what are you going to do? And I’d have to say, and twist and twist.
0:52:41 But, you know, it’s funny because it was like my dad was just, he was such a great dad. He was a
0:52:48 really engaged guy. But, you know, I mean, he was a single father and relatively young. So maybe
0:52:53 there were a few boundaries of propriety that he danced along. But he just encouraged me to be
0:52:58 aggressive. You know, he was one of those, I think it’s very hard for single parents, period. And I
0:53:03 think it’s very hard for fathers and daughters because, you know, I just think if you’re a dad,
0:53:08 the world just looks like a field of broken glass and potholes and molten lava. And then you’ve got
0:53:13 this little kitten and you’re just like so terrified to put the kitten down. So either they grip very
0:53:19 tightly or in my father’s case, they throw you up in the air and, you know, and expect that they’ve
0:53:22 given you the skills to land. And that was definitely his strategy.
0:53:30 Now you mentioned the divorce, which I have read was amicable. It ended up resulting in you going
0:53:36 with your father and you have one sibling. I have a younger sister and she stayed with me.
0:53:42 Stayed with your mom. Was that hard or did it not even occur to you to be hard because it just
0:53:48 is what it was? Or was that difficult? And did you have constant contact or what was the dynamic
0:53:53 like? You know, it’s interesting because I think it was more the second for me. Like it just was
0:53:59 what was happening. And I don’t ever remember struggling in any grand way with the way that
0:54:03 things were going. Look, maybe that’s my nature. I do my I know my parents worked very hard to
0:54:09 be loving and available to both of us. And I had lots of access to my mother and I talked to her
0:54:13 all the time and I called her for advice. And when she got to kind of be the fun mom or the advice
0:54:16 mom, you know, she didn’t have to discipline me and she could just be the person who was there when
0:54:21 I needed like emotional support. I do know that like one of the things that resulted and at least
0:54:26 when we were younger was my sister and I, we weren’t super close, but you know, lots of siblings
0:54:29 aren’t super close in their kids, whether they’re living in the same house or not, they’re fighting
0:54:34 and they’re competitive. But as we got older, I became like wildly protective of my sister and
0:54:42 my relationship with her is so intensely loving and affectionate now. And I don’t know me if we
0:54:46 lived in the same house driving each other, you know, nuts all the time, we wouldn’t be as close
0:54:50 as we are now. I mean, we spent the formative years of our lives living in different houses,
0:54:55 but we like the same stuff and we care about the same things and our connections are really deep.
0:54:59 So I, you know, I can’t, I don’t ever remember kind of sitting up at night feeling any kind
0:55:03 of agony about the fact that my parents were divorcing. I did watch them try very hard to
0:55:07 stay together. Like, I do remember that when they got a divorce, I was like, they really gave it a
0:55:11 shot. You know, I can see that they really like, you know, I just, they would break up and they’d
0:55:14 get back together and they’d break up and they get back together. And I remember I, I’d like
0:55:18 walking on them, they’d be making out on the couch. I was like, they are really giving this to go. So
0:55:24 when they decide when this was over, I was like, okay, I don’t ever remember it being
0:55:29 like a point of agony. Just things changed, you know, and, and maybe as a result,
0:55:34 I tolerate change better than I would otherwise. Or maybe I even crave change. I don’t know.
0:55:41 Has it been your demeanor to generally look at things through a positive lens like that where
0:55:47 you would frame what other people might try to frame as a very difficult agonizing experience
0:55:52 into something that was or at least is framed as something positive that you benefited from? Or
0:55:57 have you had more of the time, a tendency to frame things negatively?
0:56:02 I think about that a lot because I think that my attitude or my point of view about things is
0:56:10 half biochemistry and half child rearing. My father is just like a preternaturally optimistic
0:56:13 person. It’s extraordinary. I always make this joke that if my father’s house was on fire,
0:56:18 he would get a stick and marshmallows. Like he just cannot be deterred. I’ve never seen it. You
0:56:23 know, he’s just never down. And so I think that I inherited that. Maybe it’s attitudinal. I think
0:56:30 I just probably make up the chemicals in my brain that kind of keep me typically upbeat. You know
0:56:34 what I mean? And I think it’s important because I think a lot of times of people, if they have a
0:56:37 hard time seeing the world positively or they’re struggling with depression, people are like,
0:56:40 “We just need to look at it a different way.” But I think that I probably just make more of
0:56:46 the chemicals that enable me to be optimistic. I’ve never really been depressed, but my father
0:56:50 also was just a walk-it-off dad. He just did not feel sorry for me. And I was not allowed to feel
0:56:55 sorry for myself. And so when things went wrong, and this is definitely sustained until I was an
0:57:00 adult, I just get up and I keep going. And that was because, you know, my father was raised.
0:57:04 He lost his father when he was very, very young. He’s raised by a single mother and
0:57:08 tumbled down Pittsburgh with the very few opportunities for a black man at that time.
0:57:13 And he just never felt sorry for himself. He was just like, “Look, I can complain about the
0:57:17 situation or I can just keep moving.” So I think I’ve been nurtured in that way as well, which is
0:57:21 the world is unfair. You know, it’s shot through with assholes. I still have to get up in the
0:57:25 morning and make a life for myself. So it’s probably a combination of those two things.
0:57:30 Were you, would you say good at following his advice of not only grabbing life by the balls,
0:57:37 but twisting, which is a whole new level? Those are two really like, yeah, like you can gently
0:57:46 grab balls. You can’t really gently grab and twist balls. Twisting is an elevated form of
0:57:54 aggression. I don’t know. Like it’s hard to say like, “Oh, I’m nailing it.” That’s not how I feel.
0:57:58 But I do think that like that attitude of like, and I wrote about it a lot about it in my book,
0:58:03 like the idea that like my parents raised me to be brave and in some ways maybe too brave,
0:58:10 but the result has been like a relentlessness and in the pursuit of the things that are important
0:58:14 to me. And that’s not the same. He’s like, “I’m winning. I don’t really think about things that
0:58:19 way, but it’s just if I want to do something that I do it and I don’t really worry too much about
0:58:23 whether it’s going to go my way.” Not because I expect it to go my way, but because it doesn’t
0:58:29 matter if it goes my way, because it’s the engagement that’s most meaningful to me. It’s
0:58:35 the effort. I got it. So the engagement, you mean sort of the dogged persistence that you’re
0:58:41 developing? The engagement in your personal goals. Like if I want to do something, whatever,
0:58:44 I don’t know. Let’s pick something really innocuous. Like if I want to hike every day for a month or
0:58:50 if I want to start meditating, if I don’t dial it, it’s not as important to me as is not looking back
0:58:55 and saying to myself, “Ah, I should have done it.” It’s the doing for me that is the reward. And then
0:59:01 sometimes things go my way and sometimes they don’t. But the thing I find most upsetting is
0:59:05 regret. Because that’s something I have control over in the sense of like, if you didn’t do it,
0:59:09 you have nobody to blame but yourself. Right. You can always attempt. You can’t predetermine
0:59:16 success. You can’t pre-determine the outcome, but you can predetermine the effort because
0:59:22 the effort is the only thing that you own. You can’t own results. You can only own initiative.
0:59:26 Did you recall any, you mentioned your dad being a walk-it-off dad. I want to explore that a little
0:59:33 bit. Do you remember any while you were still under his watch or not, early disappointments or
0:59:41 self-inflicted wounds and how your dad responded or mistakes? This isn’t exactly a good example of a
0:59:45 disappointment, but it’s a perfect example of his attitude. I was going to camp. I must have been
0:59:53 about eight or nine. No, I’ll say nine. And I was going to like jujitsu camp. This was still during
0:59:56 the free-range parenting era where you just got up in the morning and you left at home and you came
1:00:01 back later. And that stuff was your responsibility. Did you say eight or nine and then jujitsu camp?
1:00:08 I was really into martial arts when I was a kid. So it’s making me think of the movie Hannah where
1:00:13 this Eric Bandit trains his daughter to be a super killer. I wish I was that good at jujitsu.
1:00:20 But as I pointed out, it wasn’t the result that was important. It was just the effort. So
1:00:24 I would ride my bike to camp every day and ride at home. And it was a good ride. It was like a
1:00:31 five-mile ride to camp. And I fell one day coming down like a hill, you know, kind of, I don’t know,
1:00:35 you know, free. This was like no helmets. This was a long time ago. I’m very old. Like, you know,
1:00:40 no helmets, just like willy-nilly your backpack on and you know, you’re not signaling. And I fell
1:00:47 and I hurt my arm very badly. And I can’t remember, but I contacted my dad and he’s like,
1:00:50 “I’m not going to come get you. I can’t leave work. You have to get home on your own.”
1:00:55 So I rode my bike back from camp, you know, like another three, four miles and my arm was broken.
1:01:00 It was definitely broken. I had broken my arm and I got home and my dad was like, “Your arm’s not
1:01:05 broken. I mean, you need some complaining.” You know, it was a sore. And the next day I woke up,
1:01:09 it was like black and swollen and I had to like lift it off the pillow and he finally took me to
1:01:13 the doctor and it was absolutely like a compound fracture. The bone hadn’t come through the skin,
1:01:20 but it was a multiple fracture. I think at the time it felt cruel, but I think my dad’s larger
1:01:25 attitude was like, no one is coming to save you. You have to save yourself. You have to find a way
1:01:31 every single day to save yourself. And as a result, I think that as an adult, I just don’t spend a lot
1:01:36 of time anguishing over what’s been done to me. And I was fine. I did ride my bike home and my arm
1:01:40 was broken, but I still got home on my bike. And then the next day I got a super dope cast.
1:01:46 And I think we just raised like these, I mean, I know I sound like everybody’s mom,
1:01:51 but I just feel like we’re curating young people’s experiences so aggressively nowadays
1:01:57 that they just don’t have any way to discover things about themselves. They don’t develop
1:02:01 not just self-sufficiency, but like a curiosity about themselves and their abilities and what
1:02:07 they can tolerate and what they can do if left alone because they’re just never left alone.
1:02:12 I had a lot of time alone when I was a kid and I still really like being alone as an adult.
1:02:19 Right. And also it strikes me that if you’re so protective of your child and your child’s ego
1:02:26 that you effectively disallow them to fail or engage with risk that the delta, the difference
1:02:34 between their actual competencies and abilities for self-preservation and their over-inflated
1:02:38 sense of their capabilities is actually a huge disservice.
1:02:47 And there’s sense of like you need to know what it feels like to fail and then what comes next.
1:02:52 Because what comes next is what did I learn? How can I adjust? How do I pivot? How do I move forward?
1:02:58 And just most people don’t develop those mental skills. They’re crushed by failure
1:03:03 and it’s just an unavoidable element of life. And there’s so many people that I know who’s
1:03:07 out of real, I mean, genuine love. Parents like I just don’t want to see my kid in pain.
1:03:10 But like how are you going to, how do people move through the planet? How do people move
1:03:15 through life without pain? That’s a false theory. It can’t be done. It just cannot be done.
1:03:20 And so people just become incapacitated the first minute they hit any kind of a speed bump in their
1:03:24 lives and they don’t know how to navigate disappointment. Whereas I was just deeply
1:03:27 disappointed throughout my childhood. So I know exactly what it feels like.
1:03:32 I was just like a max. I’m like, oh, that didn’t go my way. Moving on, you know.
1:03:41 It makes me conjure my mind the image of this increasing amplitude of pain consequence
1:03:45 over your life from like childhood to adulthood where the consequences grow
1:03:47 potentially greater and greater. Where in the beginning, like when you’re a child,
1:03:53 you’re basically engaging with pain and I shouldn’t say pain, but failure in many cases,
1:03:57 not all cases, but many cases where you’re effectively in one of those like birthday party
1:04:02 blow up sumo suits. Do you know what I’m talking about? And it’s like, so you can sort of engage
1:04:06 with failure that way. And if you get knocked on your ass, there aren’t really real consequences.
1:04:10 Then you get, you get to high school college and it’s like, okay, you’re out of the sumo suit,
1:04:16 but you’ve got big kind of blow up boxing gloves on and huge piece of headgear.
1:04:20 Then when you get out into some aspects of the real world, it’s just a bare-knuckle brawl.
1:04:25 Permanent consequences. Yeah, exactly. So if you haven’t had the chance to get
1:04:28 wailed in the face with the sumo suit, you’re not going to be ready for
1:04:33 the blow up boxing gloves and the headgear. And if you certainly, if you don’t get whacked in the
1:04:38 face a few times doing that, you’re just going to be crippled when you get out into the real world
1:04:42 and get, you know, drop kicked in the face by someone who doesn’t follow the same rules.
1:04:47 And crippled in that way that, you know, and I know you’ve interacted with people like this,
1:04:52 in that way where when something bad happens, their whole monologue is like, why me? Like,
1:04:55 why did this happen to me? You don’t understand what I’m going through. It’s like,
1:05:00 you’re not special. Everybody is experiencing the same thing. Everybody’s heart is being broken.
1:05:03 Everybody isn’t getting the job they want. Everybody isn’t going to sleep with what the
1:05:08 hot person they want. Everybody is experiencing the same failures, the same injuries, but you
1:05:12 just don’t know how to tolerate them. You are not special. And that’s not the same as saying,
1:05:16 you don’t have the potential for being special. You know, there’s nothing anybody’s doing now
1:05:19 that hasn’t already been done it that won’t be done in the future. Those kinds of personalities
1:05:29 drive me crazy because they’re so stuck and boring. What did you think you were going to
1:05:33 be when you grew up, when you were in high school or college?
1:05:40 In high school, so interesting because I was like super academic. And I think I would thought I’d
1:05:44 be an attorney. You know, I was like a big activist and I organized and marched and
1:05:48 all that stuff. And I was like in the outing club and I rock climbed and all that stuff.
1:05:50 So I thought I was going to be like an environmental lawyer, either an environmental
1:05:54 lawyer or an environmental engineer. I really wanted to go to a school that was like really
1:06:00 grounded in a relationship to nature. So I was applying to like Marlboro College and Reed and
1:06:06 Bard and these schools that were like out in the woods. And I ended up going to Dartmouth,
1:06:11 which is in New Hampshire and has this big land grant around it. And I thought I would be an
1:06:15 environmental engineer. And I think I just took like the first prerequisite math course for
1:06:21 engineering. And I was like, yeah, okay, it’s not just not going to be just nothing. I always love
1:06:26 science, but I’m just a person of letters, I guess. I didn’t have the appetite for it. It wasn’t as
1:06:29 glamorous as I thought. I think when I took my first engineering, I did, I think I’ve got through
1:06:33 the math class, like did fine. Like I applied myself and I got a good grade. And then I went
1:06:38 to my like, you know, an introduction to engineering three. And it was about like building
1:06:42 like a fecal matter treatment plant. And I was like, this isn’t feeling like hugging trees at all,
1:06:49 man, we’re just talking about poop all day. I lost my appetite for that really quickly.
1:06:57 So then what did you just have this great existential angst? Or did you sort of shift
1:07:04 to something else immediately following that? I was always doing kind of like performing things
1:07:09 on the side, like I went to a high school that had a performing arts kind of magnet or like a
1:07:14 pocket school within the regular school called the J. U. D. Maccoteer School of the Arts. So I was
1:07:18 kind of doing my regular classwork and then doing like improv and stuff and sketch on the side. And
1:07:21 then I went to Dartmouth and I was doing some of the same stuff like, you know, I was in one of
1:07:27 those infernal Ivy League acapella groups that have been popularized since then by shows like
1:07:31 Lee. So I was always kind of doing that as a hobby because it just never felt like a real job.
1:07:34 And I graduated and I was living in San Francisco and I was working for a conservation
1:07:41 organization. I got like my dream job. It was a group that purchased blighted urban land and
1:07:45 turned into parks and underserved neighborhoods that didn’t have any outdoor space for kids to play.
1:07:49 And, you know, it was like the mission was great because it wasn’t just kind of conservation of
1:07:54 conservation’s sake. It was like conservation focused on engaging underserved communities.
1:07:58 And it was the grooviest and I was just miserable. And I just…
1:07:59 Why were you miserable?
1:08:05 I didn’t know. It was a really good question. You know, it was like, why if I have my dream job
1:08:10 in the city of my birth, why am I so unhappy? And I just did a lot of soul searching. And I
1:08:13 realized it was because for the first time in my life, I wasn’t doing anything creative. I wasn’t
1:08:19 performing. And so I’m a problem solver. I’m a matrix builder. I was like, well, how can I solve
1:08:25 this problem right now? And I looked at all the ways that I could get on stage and stand-up comedy
1:08:31 was the only thing I didn’t need to know anyone for, have an agent or a band or connections. I
1:08:37 could just do stand-up right away. And so I started studying and watching the precursor to Comedy
1:08:43 Central, which was this network called HA, a very short-lived network, taking notes and then, you
1:08:47 know, after a while, just kind of screwed up the courage to go and do an open mic. And then
1:08:50 that was, it was just transformational. I was like, oh, this is what I want to do with my life.
1:08:59 Was the thinking immediately on how to turn performance into a career? Or did you expect
1:09:05 that you would continue doing your job and doing stand-up on the side? Like, was it a career move
1:09:10 from when you first built the matrix and decided on stand-up? Or was it, you know what, this is
1:09:15 going to be great. I’ll continue doing this job and I’ll scratch my creative performance itch
1:09:19 on the weekends with open mics. It’s so funny because, like, I don’t think I even realized
1:09:25 that stand-up comedy was a job. You know, I was like a really bookish kid. A lot of guys will have
1:09:31 these stories about how they grew up, you know, with Red Fox, you know, on vinyl that they listen
1:09:35 to hundreds of times or following Letty Bruce or, you know, these idols or Bill Hicks. I just,
1:09:40 I didn’t, I remember seeing Live on the Sunset Strip when I was a kid. I just thought Richard
1:09:47 Pryor was an alien. Like, I’m a magical person who came down to do this thing. I just, the idea
1:09:54 that that was like a vocation was just not in my head. So I remember seeing stand-up at Dartmouth
1:09:59 when I was like a sophomore and coming out of a show and being like, do people know that this,
1:10:03 like, you can go and have this feeling for an hour? Like, this is insanity. Like, I just remember,
1:10:07 like, everything hurt from laughing, my face and my stomach and I just never experienced
1:10:12 live comedy before. It didn’t dovetail into like a job at first. It was just something I was going
1:10:18 to do for fun. I kept my day job 100% and I kept for a long time. I also didn’t want to be like one
1:10:25 of these kind of like miserable, you know, sweating stand-ups or like gripping their inky notebook
1:10:28 and sleeping on their buddy’s couch, you know, like I was in a relationship and I had a job that
1:10:32 paid great and I could make flyers for my shows at work. I was like embezzling, you know, a copy
1:10:38 paper and push pins as aggressively as I could. So I was and I still am of the opinion that like you
1:10:43 should absolutely keep your day job, which I know is not the most popular. I’m of the same opinion.
1:10:47 Absolutely. I think it gives you a freedom. People think it traps them, but I think it gives you
1:10:53 this incredible freedom to just pursue art for art’s sake and let a job pay for it and do it for
1:10:58 so long that everything you do is just for joy and it changes the way that you approach your art.
1:11:02 You know, I would like get up and I’d go to work at like seven and I, you know, six or seven in the
1:11:05 morning and I work until four and then I jump in the car and I drive two hours to Sacramento to do,
1:11:09 you know, a set and I come back at midnight and I do it all over again. But I could do that
1:11:12 and then it was just purely about the experience of performing and not about whether I was getting
1:11:16 paid or not. So I did that for a long time before I finally quit my job. Now, for those people who
1:11:23 don’t know the geography of Northern California where I lived for 17 years and coincidentally,
1:11:30 the high school that you went to, is that now the Ruth Asawa School on O’Shaughnessy?
1:11:33 It’s on O’Shaughnessy up there at the nexus of…
1:11:35 Twin Peaks/Glen Park Canyon. Exactly.
1:11:42 So I literally lived for five or six years about a quarter mile from that school.
1:11:48 It’s not a big city even though I think when you feel, when you live there, it feels like it’s
1:11:54 an intimate place. It’s an intimate place. And given the density of San Francisco and the fact that
1:11:59 I don’t know if people would consider it a comedy town, but there are certainly clubs and…
1:12:00 Oh, it’s a comedy town.
1:12:04 Yeah. So why would you go all the way to Sacramento? Sacramento is not
1:12:09 for those people who don’t know the area. It’s not like a 10-minute drive away from San Francisco.
1:12:12 It’s far. San Francisco has always had a reputation for being a comedy town. Like the
1:12:19 big comedy towns in the United States from comedians perspectives are San Francisco,
1:12:24 Chicago, Boston, and New York. LA is not, I mean, LA is a company town, but it’s not a comedy town.
1:12:29 And San Francisco was always one of those places that people saw as like a real crucible for kind
1:12:34 of original comedy. You know, it was like where the Alts comedy movement happened. And, you know,
1:12:40 Mark Merrin and Janine Garofalo and these kind of alternative comics, Brian Possane, came out of.
1:12:45 And it was a comedy town. But when I started doing comedy, it was like the beginning of the
1:12:50 contraction of the comedy economy. So there was a period of time when there were just
1:12:54 hundreds of comedy clubs everywhere and you could make a living doing stand-up. You could
1:12:58 kind of go from place to place and you could get a gig and you could get paid. And I started
1:13:02 doing stand-up at the beginning of the end of the comedy bubble. So when I started doing stand-up,
1:13:06 the club community was contracting and some of the big clubs in San Francisco were closing.
1:13:10 I think at one point there were maybe like five or six active clubs. And then by the time I was
1:13:15 working consistently, there were only two. And there was just a lot of competition for stage time.
1:13:21 And to get good at comedy, you can’t just do it like once a weekend. You know, you need to be on
1:13:26 stage like every night. It’s like being a high diver. You know what? It’s literally like Malcolm
1:13:30 Gladwell’s 10,000 Hours. And you’re not going to get 10,000 Hours of stand-up hanging out in
1:13:34 San Francisco. Like you have to go everywhere and take every single opportunity to be on stage
1:13:40 that you can get. So I would drive to Sacramento. I would drive to Fresno. I would do these terrible
1:13:46 bar shows in Menlo Park. And oh God, I don’t even remember some of the places. Cupertino and
1:13:50 Martinez. I mean, you would just go anywhere that you could get six minutes on stage. And
1:13:54 there were a hundred other people trying to get those same six minutes. So it was really competitive.
1:13:58 The culture where I think was pretty supportive, like comedians were supportive of each other,
1:14:02 but it just, there just wasn’t enough stage time. So you just do anything and go anywhere to get it.
1:14:08 I want to ask about this comedy contraction. We won’t spend too much time on this because I don’t
1:14:12 want to take us completely off the reservation. But what happened? I mean, it was like beanie
1:14:16 babies. Like people were like, really, the beanie babies. And it’s like, no, comedy isn’t cool
1:14:22 anymore. And then all the clubs closed. Was it just a macroeconomic downturn? I mean, what happened?
1:14:28 I think it was three factors. One factor was just, there was just a glut. Live comedy in some ways
1:14:31 in the 70s and 80s was kind of a new thing. And it’s not like people hadn’t been doing stand-up
1:14:38 prior to that. But the proliferation of stand-up comedians in the culture really started happening
1:14:43 at that time. And what that was fueled by, I honestly don’t know, like why were there so
1:14:47 many more comics doing stand-up in the 70s and 80s? Maybe because that was the period where there
1:14:53 were these superstar comics that were, I’m trying to think of who would have been really popular
1:14:57 besides like Bill Hicks. And I can see that though. Maybe it’s analogous to like celebrity
1:15:01 chefs in the last 15 years. Yeah, exactly. And part of the reason why there are so many more
1:15:05 celebrity chefs is because there started to be celebrity chefs on television. So if you think
1:15:11 about that in terms of comedy, what you see is, oh, that’s a job. I can make money at that. Whereas
1:15:17 people weren’t really encountering live comedy if they didn’t go to a live comedy show. So you
1:15:23 start to see these guys on TV and you think, and honestly, when Ha, the precursor to Comedy Central
1:15:29 started, they needed comics and they needed opportunities. They needed clubs. They needed
1:15:34 content. It was a 24-hour network. So there were some good comedians on that station, and there
1:15:42 were some really, some really shady ones. Really bad. And so a lot of people watching probably
1:15:48 thought, well, I can do that. I also think about guys like Sam Kinnison and Andrew Ace Clay. There
1:15:52 was kind of like a golden era in that time. And we were seeing all those people on TV. Then we
1:15:55 were seeing a lot of people that were really subpar. And a lot of people were thinking, well,
1:16:00 if that guy can write five crappy minutes about an airplane, I can. Then you coupled that with
1:16:05 this explosion in comedy clubs, which were a relatively new phenomenon. I mean, when Joan
1:16:10 Rivers was doing stand-up, she was doing stand-up in strip clubs. There were very few comedy
1:16:14 clubs. And comedy was kind of a part of a vaudeville approach. So you’d hire a singer and
1:16:19 then you’d hire a comment, but there weren’t places dedicated to comedy. So these comedy clubs opened.
1:16:24 It was a really easy way to make money because comics weren’t that expensive.
1:16:29 And you had a two-drink minimum. People would come in, they would get wasted. You’d have huge
1:16:33 margins on your booze. So these comedy clubs started proliferating. And then there was just
1:16:39 peak clubs. Saturation. Yeah, it became unsustainable. So they started to contract
1:16:46 because of market saturation. The economy started to contract in the ’80s. And people could watch
1:16:52 comedy on TV. The proliferation of comedy on television affected people going out to see it
1:16:59 in a club. So there were like kind of those three factors all kind of intersecting. And when it
1:17:02 happened, it was really aggressive. Like I said, I think there were maybe like five or six comedy
1:17:06 clubs in San Francisco when I was in high school. And by the time I was doing stand-up in my 20s,
1:17:12 there were two. And they were attracting like high-end peak talent. So for example, this club’s
1:17:15 still there. It’s called the Punchline. Punchline. I’ve been there a few times.
1:17:19 There was the Punchline and there was COBS. And those are still the only two clubs. And maybe
1:17:24 there’s some minor clubs that have sprung up since then. But they would book these big headliners.
1:17:29 So the only time you could go up if you were an amateur, like a young comic, was on a Sunday
1:17:34 or a Wednesday. And there’d be 20 other guys trying to get on as well. And it would be wildly
1:17:39 competitive. And you wouldn’t be getting paid. And then you’d be super anxious because you’d be
1:17:44 hoping, okay, I need to go up and I need to destroy because I want this club owner to hire me again.
1:17:50 So I can’t work out. I can’t fail in front of this guy because he won’t see this, you know,
1:17:55 when you watch like an Olympic skater during practice and they’re falling. That’s what practice
1:18:01 is for. You know, practices for like finding your weak spots and reinforcing them. But when you’re
1:18:04 up in front of a comedy club owner and you, it’s been six months that you’ve been trying to get
1:18:08 out on this club and you finally get five minutes, it’s got to be a monster five minutes. There was
1:18:13 just no way to improve. I was going to say, how do you get in your rough drafts? I mean, how do
1:18:21 you work on the material? Drive to Martinez. Oh, I see. I see. So you’d right, work out the kinks
1:18:29 with the crew at the such and such casino and God knows where Turlock and then Fubars or Roostertea
1:18:33 Feathers or, you know, one of these other places that, yeah, you know, it’s different than being
1:18:41 an author or an athlete or even a musician because there’s an autonomy to comedy. Absolutely.
1:18:47 But you need other people. You can’t do it. It can’t just sit around your place practicing.
1:18:50 You know what I mean? Like with music, you know, if it’s night, you know, if you’re sharp or flat,
1:18:53 you know, if you hit all the notes, you know if the tempo is right. But with comedy, the only way
1:18:58 it works is in front of an audience. And so you’re very dependent on, on stage time. And
1:19:00 that’s everything when your young comic is stage time.
1:19:06 Do you remember your early content? I mean, what kind of, what was your approach early on? Do you
1:19:10 remember the first, and maybe I mean, a different way to approach this, you could take it, answer it
1:19:15 however you like. Do you remember the first time that you bombed or the, what is your first memory
1:19:21 that comes to mind of bombing? Oh, God, I bombed so many times. It’s just, it all seeps together
1:19:26 into an inky blackness. Any comic could tell you that ever bombed is lying. And again, the only
1:19:31 way to get funny is to bomb. No one ever gets funnier after they kill. You know, they just walk,
1:19:34 I’m like, follow that bitches or they drop the bike. You know what I mean? They go off into shots
1:19:38 with their friends. I mean, you really need to, you really need to bomb and bomb hard to get funny.
1:19:44 I remember doing this one show. Oh God. So there was, there was an open mic in a laundromat
1:19:50 south of market around the police station there. So what, maybe like, you know, eighth and mission
1:19:54 or something like that for people in San Francisco. And I think it was called brainwash. I think the
1:19:58 place was called brainwash. And they would have this open mic in the back of this laundromat.
1:20:03 And in comics, no, you know, with these open mics, with these local open mics that typically
1:20:08 there are no actual audience members in the audience. It is just a roomful of comedians
1:20:12 waiting for you to be done so that they can try out their material, all of them looking at their
1:20:16 notebooks, not listening, not laughing. And you’re just kind of trying to gut it out and pause where
1:20:20 you think the laughter might occur if you were in front of actual human beings. And I just did a
1:20:27 set where I just, I did not get one laugh. And I remember that one, not even like, not even like
1:20:34 a cursory titter. And I remember just silence, just like, like, like just a wall of silence.
1:20:37 And I got off, even thinking about it right now, it’s so funny to me. Like I talked to a girlfriend
1:20:41 afterwards, I was like, Oh my God, I couldn’t even call that a bad set. I don’t know what that was,
1:20:48 but it was so funny to me that I didn’t get a laugh. There was this bullet proofness that I got
1:20:54 from that set that just made me impervious to anything ever going wrong in my life or career
1:20:58 again. Even when I’m talking about now, it’s like there’s a huge smile on my face because it was so
1:21:05 funny. How little I was able to elicit out of that audience. It just made me so mentally strong.
1:21:11 Was that the immediate response that you had? I mean, or were you in the middle of the set when
1:21:18 you’re like, in the back of your mind thinking, Wow, no one is laughing. Was it like the reverse of
1:21:23 the five stages of grief? Or did you just go straight to like, yeah, motherfuckers, this is great.
1:21:29 This is going to make a great story however many years from now on Tim Ferriss’s podcast.
1:21:35 Well, one thing comedians love is agony. I mean, we dine out on it as definitely like our stock
1:21:39 in trade. So a comedian very quickly transitions from, Oh my God, this is the worst night of my
1:21:42 life too. Oh my God, this is going to make a great story. That happens almost instantaneously.
1:21:48 So we have a little bit of a, we have some armor in that regard because we could wake up like naked
1:21:51 and shivering on the side of the road with like no money and no phone and not speak the local
1:21:55 language. And you’d be thinking, okay, if I live, this is going to make a killer story.
1:22:00 So I think in the moment, I just thought I had watched a couple other people go up and not do
1:22:06 very well either. I was prepared for it not going my way. And I think also there’s a discipline to
1:22:10 comedy that if you’re not a comedian, you can’t understand which is that you’ve got to get up
1:22:15 and do your set. You don’t get to tap out like tapping out as true failure. If you went up and
1:22:18 you had a bad set, well, you just need to write new jokes. But if you go up and you give up,
1:22:24 that’s true failure for a comedian. There are some really famous examples of this online.
1:22:26 I don’t know if you know the comedian, Bill Burr, but-
1:22:31 So I interviewed Bill Burr about a year and a half ago and I played the video,
1:22:33 which he had never seen or he claimed to have never seen.
1:22:35 Yes, he checked some wheel. He has still had some trauma. He has like some-
1:22:40 So can you, for people who don’t know the story, can you please describe it? Because it’s just
1:22:46 so amazing. It’s insane, right? It’s insane. So he was doing one of those big radio,
1:22:50 those radio station concerts, like the Jingle Ball or whatever. And I don’t remember. It was
1:22:54 called the Weenie Rose. I think it was the Weenie Rose. So it’s one of the shows at some local
1:22:59 stage, you know, like K-Rock, 97. Rock, K-Rock, you know, like one of those shows. And it’s,
1:23:03 I don’t know, Weezer’s too cool of a band. It would be like Nickelback and, you know,
1:23:07 some other band that sounds like Nickelback and then the Nobody Man you never heard of. Anyway,
1:23:10 I don’t know why people still do this, but if you’re a comic and someone offers you money,
1:23:15 you take it. So they would hire a comic to kind of warm up the crowd, you know, early in the day.
1:23:20 And no one pays to see Nickelback and then wants to sit through 15 minutes of stand-up. You know,
1:23:24 everyone’s drunk and on drugs. They’re not even facing forward, you know what I mean? It’s just
1:23:28 like the work, like there’s nothing, the only thing worse than performing in front of an outdoor
1:23:34 audience is performing in front of people who are eating. Yeah, this is like a tailgate at like
1:23:40 11 a.m. or 1 p.m. or something. Yeah. Everybody’s been, you know, everybody like busted out there
1:23:44 like marijuana brownie recipe for the year. They’re all like completely looped, you know,
1:23:47 like one of their eyes is completely dilated and the other one is like falling out of their head.
1:23:52 Nobody cares about your jokes about your mom and your family. So they’re just like, could not
1:23:58 muster compassion if they tried. So he starts doing stand-up and it just immediately starts
1:24:06 getting booed. And it’s just this tidal wave of disdain. And he knows if he doesn’t finish,
1:24:12 he will not get paid. But it’s not like it’s like silence. You can tolerate, right? But like people
1:24:17 are screaming at him to get off stage. And he makes it very clear to the audience. You have to
1:24:21 watch it because I’ll never be able to do it justice. But he makes it very clear to the audience
1:24:25 that he is not leaving the stage until he does his 10 minutes, that he does not care how they feel
1:24:30 about him. And he’s counting down the minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Every minute he’s like, nine minute,
1:24:35 you fucking fucks. Exactly. I hope he says something really outrageous. Like, I hope your
1:24:42 mother gets cancer in the center of her asshole, seven minutes. It’s so, it’s so, it’s just a
1:24:49 demonstration of tenacity. Later, you know, he was embarrassed by it. But every comedian understands
1:24:53 this kind of blood battle that you sometimes have with an audience where
1:24:57 they’re not going to scare you and they’re not going to drive you away. You’re going to deliver
1:25:01 the material that you were hired to deliver. You’re going to make your money and then you’re
1:25:05 going to go off and spend it on life here in chicken wings. But no one is, you will not be
1:25:09 deterred. So I think because you understand that as a comedian very early on in your career,
1:25:15 no matter what happens on stage, I will not be moved. So I just, I had material to do and I
1:25:19 did it. And I think, I remember thinking almost immediately, well, okay, I’m not going to get
1:25:22 any laughs. So I’m just going to kind of like listen to this set and see what it feels like,
1:25:25 see what the words feel like, see what might play in front of actual people.
1:25:29 But it started to get really delicious. And I think if you watch the Bill Burr video,
1:25:33 you’ll also see that he starts to really enjoy it. It starts to be like the savory
1:25:40 masochism towards the end where he’s so powerful in his lack of caring. You watch it and it’s,
1:25:45 it is to be studied because he goes from kind of anguish to rage to this kind of delightful
1:25:49 detachment by the end of the set. And I’ve seen, I’ve seen some other guys do similar stuff and
1:25:55 it’s always really fun to watch. So a couple of things that I want to use as teasers for people
1:25:59 who should watch this video. I think it was in, I’m almost 100% positive it was in Philadelphia.
1:26:03 Philadelphia, I think. I know either that or Jersey, but yeah. I think it was Philadelphia
1:26:10 because he started ridiculing Rocky and he said your hero is a fictional person and just tearing
1:26:16 into them. And he basically for the, for half of his set just decided to abandon his material and
1:26:22 just attack these people in the town and- Which way is a no-no generally? Yeah, which is a no-no
1:26:26 generally. Like if people hate you, I mean there are like these unwritten rules of comedy and one
1:26:29 of them is like you don’t, if some of the people in the audience hate you, like don’t turn all of
1:26:32 them against you. This is just a sidebar, but don’t forget what you were going to say. There’s
1:26:37 another very famous video, very famous, and it happened at the Punchline in San Francisco
1:26:43 where there’s a guy playing, he’s a good guitar comic and a guy’s heckling him. It’s kind of just
1:26:47 combative back and forth, but nothing too extreme. But then the guy gets up and he comes towards the
1:26:52 stage, whatever, to defend himself or the girl he’s with, something like that. And the guy just
1:26:59 hauls off and hits him in the head with a guitar. Sorry, sorry. Not funny, it’s tragic, but Jesus
1:27:05 Christ. Everybody live. But what happens is up until that beat, the whole audience has been
1:27:11 on the comedian side against this guy. It is a hairpin turn from them being like, yeah, shut up.
1:27:14 You know, the comics like, hey, you know, people can enjoy the show because you’re talking, keep it
1:27:20 down. And then he hits this guy and the whole audience just turns on him, just like instantaneous
1:27:24 like Frankenstein’s monster mob, just the pitchforks come flying out. And so one of the unwritten
1:27:29 rules of comedy is that, you know, you just don’t, you want to try to at all costs avoid turning
1:27:33 everybody against you, which so Bill broke a bunch of rules, but he just, he never gave up, you know,
1:27:37 which I think it becomes this, you know, it’s like the Rudy moment at the end of the movie,
1:27:43 like, man, that sucked, but you sure suck in there. And he got a standing up. Well, I mean,
1:27:48 everybody’s already standing, but he got massive applause from the audience at the end, which is
1:27:53 just, because they’re just like, what the fuck? Like it didn’t even fit into like any mental
1:27:59 shuristic of comedy that they could expect. It was, it was straight prison yard dynamics, right?
1:28:06 Like nobody, you know, the line from out of sight, right? Just like the yard. Nobody back
1:28:11 in town. Nobody’s backing down. And he just, you know, I think they, there was like a thousand
1:28:15 of them to one of her, probably like 10,000 of them to one of him. And he just did not back down.
1:28:21 He got the slow respect clap at the end. Oh my God. So I wasn’t going to go to heckling,
1:28:26 but why not? Since we’re already here. Do you have any memorable heckling stories? Did you
1:28:32 recall the first time you got heckled? I started doing standup like 25 years ago. So at this point,
1:28:36 like all the sets have just kind of blended, but, and heckling can be lots of different things. It
1:28:44 doesn’t always have to be like the conventional kind of you suck heckle one. I had one time where
1:28:48 this woman and this kind of dovetails perfectly with the old like, don’t turn the audience against
1:28:54 you where this woman was talking to me. She was sitting in the front row and she was talking to
1:29:00 me the entire show just loud enough that I could hear her, but not really loud enough so the audience
1:29:04 could hear her except for the people right around her. And it was driving me crazy. That’s awful.
1:29:12 It was like a B in my ear. And as a result, I just seemed insane. Stopping to yell at this person
1:29:18 that no one could hear. It was a very effective echo because she just completely derailed my show.
1:29:22 And I just seemed like a dick because I was like, shut up lady. But no one could hear what she was
1:29:30 saying. I remember that I really went off the rails last night and I generally have a rule
1:29:34 with hecklers that unless they’re really disruptive to the entire room, I just never address them.
1:29:39 Because what you do is, again, you derailed a show for 500 or 1000 people to deal with one
1:29:42 person. And everyone’s never going to really understand what’s going on unless that person’s
1:29:46 so loud that they’ve affected everybody else’s enjoyment of the night. But sometimes the affectionate
1:29:52 hecklers are the worst because typically hecklers just want to be a part of the show. And so, you
1:29:55 know, they say something, slam them a little bit, they shut up because they think they’re helping
1:29:59 you out. It was the famous line is they’ll come up and be like, hey, like I helped you out. I’m like,
1:30:04 buddy, I came with jokes and I don’t need this. I don’t have a box jumper in my act. I showed up
1:30:12 ready to go. But when people are affectionate, you can’t insult them. They’re the most unmanaged
1:30:16 of kind of. Now by affection, he’s always like, I love you. I love you. I love you. I had this one
1:30:21 girl at one show in San Francisco, just so drunk. I’m just cross-eyed. And for the 90 minutes I was
1:30:29 on stage, I love you so much. And I was just like, lady, all you’re doing is making me want to
1:30:34 hit you in the head with this microphone stand. Your affection is not welcome here. And everybody
1:30:38 else is like staring at this woman. But she just is a genuine expression of emotion for this person
1:30:45 that is destroying my joy completely. So I really have a habit of just not talking to hecklers.
1:30:47 What did you do in that case? Did you ignore her?
1:30:52 I think that I kept saying like, thank you. That’s super sweet. Shut the fuck up.
1:30:58 Like, you know, clearly you weren’t hugged enough as a child. I mean, I just eventually got mean
1:31:02 because it was just like, I couldn’t get this woman to stop talking. And I think the people
1:31:07 around her got embarrassed and they eventually kind of shut her up, which was nice. And I’m
1:31:13 trying to think of any other really good hecklers that, oh, I had one guy. It’s a mental discipline,
1:31:16 too, because, you know, like, again, like, it’s your show. You have the microphone. You’re in
1:31:19 control. You know, I think the audience thinks they’re in control, but they’re not. I mean,
1:31:24 that the Bilber scenario is a perfect example. The person with the microphone has all the power.
1:31:28 As long as it cannot be moved, they will eventually win. But I had this one guy,
1:31:32 it was sitting like really close to the stage. It was like a group of 12 people and they were all
1:31:37 like laughing their asses off. And then he was just arms crossed, just looked like he just had
1:31:41 just seen a big scoop of fecal matter. And I, it was all, he was all I could see, like, you know,
1:31:45 anything like the whole audience had disappeared. And it was just straight vignette on this guy’s
1:31:52 like sour puss face. And it was just wrecking my whole night. And I finally said, if you don’t
1:31:56 want to be here, just fucking go, man, I’ll give you your money back. I cannot look at your face
1:32:02 for one more minute. And I met it. It wasn’t even a joke. I was just like, get out. And you are
1:32:07 harshing my mellows so hard. And he left. I didn’t feel bad about it. And then I went on with the
1:32:14 show and his girlfriend goes, he had a bad day. But what was great was nobody else at the table
1:32:17 wanted to leave. They were like, you know, good riddance to bad rubbish. And he, you know, he
1:32:21 went on and the rest of the people enjoyed their night. So again, that was me. That was my, you
1:32:24 know, I should have been disciplined enough not to be distracted by, you know, old sour puss.
1:32:29 But I’m only human, you know, if the Grinch is sitting in the front row, you know, something
1:32:36 must be done. When you were just getting started, how did you get better at comedy? And what I mean
1:32:43 by that is you’re very smart. You, like you mentioned, matrix capable. Did you do any type
1:32:48 of postgame analysis? Did you watch video of yourself? Did you watch video of other comics?
1:32:53 How did you hone your craft? Or maybe a better question is what helped the most in honing your
1:32:58 craft? You know, it’s interesting. Like, I think that there’s a definite math to comedy. And then
1:33:04 there’s also a secondary ineffability. I guess what I mean is like, you can learn how to be a
1:33:12 better comic, but you can’t learn how to be a comic. Or even a different way. I really wanted
1:33:16 to be an engineer. And I could have really suffered and struggled through like the elevated math that
1:33:23 would I would need to become an engineer. But it would never be effortless for me. And I think
1:33:28 with comedy, there are people who very workmen like can learn how to do comedy. And then there’s
1:33:31 some people who are just naturally comedic and they still have to work to be better at it. You
1:33:36 know, you say both still has to train, even though he was born with more fast-switch muscles than
1:33:40 everybody else, he still has to train to become a champion. So I feel like with comedy, you know,
1:33:44 people can be the class clown or they can be the guys naturally funny. There’s still a methodology
1:33:50 and there’s still a mathematics to becoming a comic. And then at the same time, if they have this
1:33:56 this ephemeral ineffable kind of understanding of the math of comedy,
1:34:02 they’re going to be able to do something magical with those skills. So for me, I don’t know that
1:34:07 I thought I was a funny kid, but I was an observer. And I was really nerdy and a little bit of a
1:34:11 social pariah. So storytelling, we came away to make friends, you know what I mean? Like to
1:34:16 like, ingratiate myself. I would kind of like try to talk my way into situations or if I was in
1:34:23 a social situation, talk really fast to try to keep myself engaging, not be rejected. So that
1:34:27 was what I brought to it was like that combination of being an outsider and an observer and then
1:34:32 using those skills to try to kind of connect with people. But with comedy, I never took
1:34:35 any classes. I never read any books. There’s definitely people who can say, oh, you know,
1:34:39 there’s a total methodology to comedy. It’s, you know, the rule of threes and, you know,
1:34:42 stretching reality to the point of breaking, but not past it. I mean, there are, you know,
1:34:46 some specific rules. What’s the rule of threes? I probably wouldn’t even be able to articulate it
1:34:51 properly. It’s just that like, if you’re going to do a series of jokes or a series of builds to a
1:34:56 punchline, it needs to be three. I get it. I get it. And also if you’re going to do any kind of a
1:35:00 diversion, if you’re going to lead people in one direction and then snap around to a different
1:35:06 kind of absurdist results, you can’t do that in two. It has to be the pace of it has to be three.
1:35:11 I see. And then past three, you’re starting to draw things out too long, but two doesn’t give
1:35:17 people enough of a time to be pulled into a false sense of security before you kind of pull the
1:35:20 rug out from under them. As soon as you start explaining that, the math of comedy, like none of
1:35:23 it makes any sense, you know what I mean? Like it’s those two things, you know, someone who’s
1:35:27 really gifted at physics, they know that there are rules, but still they see things that others
1:35:33 people can’t see. They see the world as numbers and data and the rest of us are just like table,
1:35:41 chair, water, sex. So I guess the way that I did it was that I’m also really an undisciplined
1:35:46 comedian. And what I mean is like, like there’s a documentary about Gary Shalling out right now,
1:35:50 which I haven’t watched, but I’m sure that this is in there because he was very famous for being a
1:35:53 really disciplined writer. Like he would get up and he would write every single day. And sometimes
1:35:57 it would be pages and pages of material without fail. Other comments like, hey, let’s get a beer
1:36:02 and be like, no, I have to write. And every day he would write on this like legal, this is probably
1:36:06 true and apocryph at the same time on this like legal, I knew about this tiny handwriting. He
1:36:09 would just write and write and write and write. I do not do that. I’ve never worked that way.
1:36:15 I just get on stage. I try a bunch of stuff. I keep what works. I know what works. I already
1:36:18 know right away what works. I’ll run off stage. I’ll write down the things that I knew hit. I’ll
1:36:21 write down the things I know didn’t hit. And then I’ll go back and try it again,
1:36:27 dropping the stuff that wasn’t good and putting new stuff in. I record my sets, but I never,
1:36:31 I cannot listen to my own voice. So I have hours and hours of material on tape that I just
1:36:36 have never listened to. So I don’t know why I still engage in that behavior when it’s clearly
1:36:42 not useful to me. I think the more you do it, the more you intuitively understand, oh,
1:36:47 this is a rich area. People are connecting with this, this other stuff. There’s also something
1:36:52 you learn as you move through comedy, which is, it’s not just important to get a laugh. Like,
1:36:58 does this material say something specific and personal about me? Because when your baby comic,
1:37:02 every joke is meaningful to you because you only have eight jokes, right? And so even if they’re
1:37:08 stupid or juvenile or unsophisticated or valueless or coreless, you’ll still do them because that’s
1:37:12 all you have. And then as you get older, you start to think, okay, I want to have a body of
1:37:16 work here. Does this hang together? Does it have a strong point of view? Does it have an identity?
1:37:20 And then those other jokes start to fall away. And then the material really becomes about trying to
1:37:23 tell some kind of a story about yourself and the way you perceive the world. And then that’s how
1:37:28 you shape it. And so sometimes things that are really funny go away, things that are less funny
1:37:32 stay because they’re more impactful. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense. Absolutely.
1:37:38 I think that’s true for musicians. I think it’s true for many different artists writers too,
1:37:44 probably for writers. It’s like, I’m going to find a space that’s that really says something about
1:37:49 like my accumulated understanding and knowledge of the world. And it’s not just enough to say
1:37:54 something like I need to say something that’s uniquely mine, something you can only do by being
1:37:59 prolific, because you need to be able to let things go in order to figure out what should stay.
1:38:03 Definitely. I mean, there’s a certain volume to it, thinking of it almost as a funnel.
1:38:08 And, you know, I think and I certainly hope for the sake of our, not to sound like an old man,
1:38:15 but I guess that’s what I’m turning into. For the sake of our society in general,
1:38:19 I would hope just seeing the number of hatchet jobs and the amount of yellow journalism and
1:38:28 click baiting with pieces that have not been fact checked and so on, and take down pieces of
1:38:33 folks who are otherwise doing actually a lot of good in the world, but people feeling no compunction
1:38:40 about running pieces that get a lot of clicks, because that’s the only metric they’re focused on.
1:38:46 At some point go from what can I write that will get the most clicks to what can I write that I
1:38:53 will be proud of that may or may not. And I think you can figure out a way to make it a non-binary
1:38:58 decision. In other words, you can figure out something you can be proud of that is simultaneously
1:39:05 likely to find some type of sizable audience. I think in the beginning, there’s a temptation,
1:39:09 particularly if you have quit your job and you’re like, where’s my next rent check coming from?
1:39:14 How can I appeal to the widest number of people possible? And that’s a very
1:39:21 precarious position or mindset to put yourself into if you’re hoping to do anything creatively
1:39:29 evergreen. Right. And also, it’s interesting, when I went to school, we had the honor system,
1:39:34 and you were just expected to hold yourself to a high standard, because that was what was right.
1:39:40 That’s what you did. You were going to be called upon to stand behind your work, and so you tried
1:39:44 to work very hard to make sure that you could defend it. I don’t think that it’s like we’re
1:39:47 any less ethical than we’ve ever been. It’s just like you said, our metrics have changed.
1:39:54 And I think that people value fame for fame’s sake rather than for the foundational reasons
1:39:57 that people become famous. And I think that’s the problem. And I don’t think it just exists in
1:40:02 journalism. I think that people value infamy. They can’t distinguish between fame and infamy.
1:40:10 And with a 24-hour news cycle, like the bright burst is as meaningful as a slow burn. I actually
1:40:15 don’t really know what we do or what should be done or what should happen to counteract that other
1:40:22 than people start to maybe get hip to it and start rejecting baseless journalism. And let me take
1:40:25 the back. I find it very easy to distinguish between things that seem like they’ve been thoroughly
1:40:29 bedded and things that are bullshit. But I think that people are working very hard to make it harder
1:40:33 for the rest of us to distinguish between the two. So there are, without me sounding like a crazy
1:40:38 person, there are nefarious forces at work trying to make it very hard for us to figure out what’s
1:40:44 real and what’s not real. And I think we have to start to raise people who are just more critical
1:40:47 thinkers, but it’s hard to be a critical thinker when you’re just scrolling through your Instagram
1:40:56 feed looking at butts and cupcakes all day long. Have you been watching my feed? Are you looking
1:41:00 over my shoulder? Are you one of the nefarious forces? I’m following you and I know what you’re
1:41:09 into. You know, I have to admit there was a day and you would think supposedly being a tech
1:41:14 investor and all this stuff for 10 years that I would figure this out. There was a day when I
1:41:21 was scrolling through cupcakes and thongs and I looked up at my profile and I was like, “Wait a
1:41:32 minute. People can see what I follow?” And I was like, “Oh, fuck.” You know, fortunately, I’ve
1:41:38 systematically dismantled and deliberately tarnished any semblance of any reputation I might
1:41:44 have very deliberately, so that I feel… I’m going to start interviewing you now. This is so
1:41:52 interesting. So that I don’t feel I have any, you know, Stepford Wives polished persona to preserve,
1:41:58 right? It’s like, yeah. That’s so good and that’s so interesting to me and it’s different than just
1:42:05 being a slob. What you’re saying is I refuse to create a box within which I will be kept by others.
1:42:08 I think that comes also from a curiosity about the world. I actually think that like people
1:42:13 who are trying to remain perfect all the time are fear driven. That’s not a position of strength.
1:42:16 People think they’re maintaining position of strength when they’re trying to maintain an
1:42:21 appearance of perfection, but that is by its very nature, a posture of fear, which is I cannot be
1:42:26 seen to have imperfections. I cannot be seen to have flaws. There can be no chinks in my armor
1:42:30 and I’m terrified of being judged. But there is something very liberating and I think it comes
1:42:35 from age as well and from experience. I don’t mean experience like a resume, but like just having
1:42:44 experiences to realize how little you know and how the only way to learn is to constantly be like
1:42:49 skinning your knees and that that doesn’t go away. Like the older you get, the more you know
1:42:55 that you know very little and that you cannot learn if you are constantly trying to maintain
1:42:58 a posture of perfection. That’s why I’m a total mess.
1:43:06 Well, if you don’t practice skinning your knees just to like really bleed the metaphor for all
1:43:09 it’s worth, if you don’t practice skinning your knees, you’re not going to develop the callus
1:43:17 for increasingly painful grades of sandpaper. This is really awkwardly overextended now. But
1:43:25 the point being, if you operate from a place of fear and want to please this nebulous majority
1:43:31 more than you want to please yourself, that’s not to say that I’m always, I’ve always viewed
1:43:35 my entire life and all my decisions as a singular locus of control and the palm of my hand and I
1:43:38 care what no one thinks. That’s not true because that’s not how humans have evolved. But if you
1:43:45 are deferring to others, your perception of what others want on the small things, then it’s going
1:43:48 to become harder on the medium things and then impossible and then it’s going to become harder
1:43:54 and impossible on the big things. And for that reason, I find it very valuable to
1:44:02 deliberately expose yourself to different types and levels of discomfort so that you
1:44:06 can actually stand up for the important stuff when it matters. Because if you don’t practice on the
1:44:12 smaller stuff, for instance, like if I’m so humiliated by the fact that I like gorgeous female
1:44:16 asses and I’m like, oh my god, and I put something up about, I put up this picture. So this is what
1:44:20 I do occasionally when I’m like, you know what, I think I’m getting a little, a little fat and happy
1:44:26 and complacent and maybe I have too much FOMO or something like that. I will, I remember at one
1:44:35 point, I put up this photo of this gorgeous Latin ass and female and it said like “nalgofilia” and I
1:44:41 had this, in Spanish, this explanation of this fake condition which was “nalgofilia”. Anyway,
1:44:46 I think it was “nalgofilia”. Anyway, “nalgas” is like ass in Spanish. Anyway, so I put this up on
1:44:51 Instagram. So it’s Spanish for “assman” is what you’re saying. That’s right. It’s Spanish for like
1:44:56 “assman syndrome”, right? Or “assman disorder”. And I put it up and as to be expected, there is
1:44:59 immediate outrage. I mean, there are plenty of people who think it’s kind of funny. Plenty of
1:45:03 people are like, yeah, high five. And then there are plenty of other people who are just completely
1:45:08 outraged. Disgusted with you, yeah. Disgusted with this fact that I find attractive women attractive.
1:45:15 And yes, outrage is contagious. Yeah, it’s so, but I left it up because I like to call my audience,
1:45:21 number one. Yes. If you don’t want to be here, please, I invite you to unfollow. Yeah, exactly.
1:45:25 Right. It’s like the sourpuss in the front row. It’s like, let me give you,
1:45:32 you look like you’re unhappy, but you’re still here. And let me give you, let me give you another
1:45:35 reason to leave if I’m not your thing. Because go find something that’s your thing.
1:45:39 Your opinion is valuable to you. Like I think there’s a freedom in saying I don’t need everybody
1:45:44 to like me. I think that like there is something very meaningful in saying like, this is who I am.
1:45:49 I’ll defend it, but I’m not here to be savaged by you. And honestly, we don’t know each other. I
1:45:55 don’t care what you think anyway. Or maybe that person makes you think more critically about what
1:45:58 you did. And then you take the big booty picture down. I don’t know. But I think you put it up
1:46:03 purposefully to see what you were going to get back, which I totally did. And there are other,
1:46:09 there are cases just so I don’t sound like a complete dick. There are other cases where I put
1:46:16 something up without really thinking about it. And I do get feedback and realize, you know what,
1:46:20 that’s actually a really kind of insensitive thing to put up. And I didn’t think it through,
1:46:26 take it down. And there are cases when I do that. And people give me hopefully constructive feedback
1:46:31 that isn’t just spitting acid into my face. And I take it down. So I do pay attention
1:46:36 at the same time. I try to keep in mind advice that I was given years ago. I don’t remember
1:46:41 who gave me this advice, but they said the advice was, it’s not about how many people don’t get it.
1:46:47 It’s about how many people get it. So as long as you have a certain critical mass, whatever that
1:46:51 means to you, and there’s an article called 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly that everybody should
1:46:55 read to this effect, if you’re creative. But as long as you have a critical mass, and it could be a
1:47:00 very small number of people who love your stuff, that’s all that matters. That’s like a pass fail.
1:47:05 Right? As long as you have that pass, you’re green. Instead of focusing on the vast majority
1:47:09 who hate your shit. It’s like, look, there are millions of people who hate like Christopher
1:47:13 Nolan stuff. There are millions of people who can’t stand Wes Anderson. It’s like, look, some people
1:47:17 just aren’t going to fucking like Wes Anderson. So it’s really interesting also, because I think
1:47:21 if you’re an artist specifically, this is a really important conversation to have with yourself,
1:47:25 which is like when I first started out at standup, you know, this is like kind of the
1:47:29 period when like deaf comedy jam was really popular. And for lack of a better way of articulating,
1:47:33 like black comedy had a very specific like look and feel and style and tempo. And I just wasn’t
1:47:37 doing that kind of comedy. And I wasn’t ever going to be able to do that kind of comedy. It
1:47:41 wasn’t who I was. It wasn’t experientially what I was doing. And I didn’t want to lie. And I knew
1:47:45 there were comedians who were kind of falling into that stylistic approach to comedy. And it was
1:47:49 really very false. You know, they kind of be one way off stage and then kind of fall into this
1:47:53 character on stage. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to connect with an audience, but I just
1:47:57 didn’t want to copy other people to try to get people to like me. And you know, for a long time,
1:48:03 I really struggled. And then eventually my tribe found me, but I was able to stay. Oh, now I sound
1:48:08 like a self help book, but like true to who I was because that was the only way forward. The
1:48:13 only way forward as an artist is to be truthful. In the end, your work is not going to be interesting
1:48:16 or meaningful if you are trying to emulate somebody else or trying to figure out what people want
1:48:21 from you or what they like or what’s popular. Meaningful art only lasts. It only connects
1:48:27 if it’s authentic and if it comes from your own personal experiences. And until you figure that
1:48:32 out, like what that is, it’s never going to be interesting. It’s never going to be good. I always
1:48:36 tell people it’s not being funny is not really actually the most important part of comedy.
1:48:41 Being truthful is because if someone sees a good show, they go, that guy was really funny. But
1:48:46 when you tell the truth about yourself, people go, Oh my God, holy shit, that guy like spoke to me
1:48:52 or about me or was so vulnerable in that moment. Like that was amazing. And that’s the difference
1:48:56 between good comedy and great comedy or between good art and great art or writing or anything.
1:49:02 Yeah, it’s true. That’s that’s advice that I’ve also heard for screenwriting and many other things.
1:49:05 I’m so glad you said that and reminded me of that. You have to please yourself. I mean,
1:49:10 you just have to please yourself period because it might not go your way anyway. But the worst thing
1:49:15 is creating something to figure out what people want and then creating some piece of shit, some
1:49:19 like crass, you know, glib, solicitous piece of shit, and people don’t buy it anyway.
1:49:22 Why not make something you love and then people don’t buy at least it was something that you
1:49:27 loved and you’re not embarrassed by it. Right. You said it may not work out. And if you’re in
1:49:31 the creative game, at least from what I’ve seen, particularly in the beginning, most things are
1:49:36 not going to work out. Yeah, nothing ever goes your way. Right. So you might as well have one
1:49:41 person who’s happy about the process. And exactly. Exactly. That was what I was saying about engagement.
1:49:47 At least the experience was satisfying. And I would also, I feel like I’m talking too much,
1:49:56 because I’m going to stop. But the other thought I might underscore for folks that is
1:50:01 kind of practical tactical from a competitive standpoint, if you’re trying to play someone
1:50:08 else’s game by taking on a persona, someone who is actually in, for instance, in the
1:50:13 Def Comedy Jam example that you gave, right? If somebody is on stage and they are playing
1:50:20 their game, that is who they are, you are never going to be able to take on like the cognitive
1:50:27 load and the fatigue of pretending to be that type of person and beat someone who is good at
1:50:33 that game. You’re just not going to. You’re not here so right. Yeah, you’re just not going to win.
1:50:39 So it’s like you will not ultimately in any field that is competitive, which is effectively every
1:50:45 field that people get paid for. If you want to be the best, you actually have to harness your
1:50:53 latent abilities and or you’re fucked like you can’t like you mentioned on the engineering
1:50:57 front. I mean, there’s so many places where, for instance, in writing, it’s like, I could try to
1:51:02 be John McPhee who writes for the New Yorker or one of these folks, but I can’t be those people.
1:51:07 I’m not going to be. I’m not going to ever be the wordsmith that say a toll story was, but
1:51:13 do I like teaching? Do I obsessively think about teaching and deconstructing things that are
1:51:20 complex? I do. So I can use books as a medium for teaching and think of it that way, because if I
1:51:25 try to out McPhee, McPhee, I’m going to get my face ripped off. And well, you know, this is,
1:51:29 we’re talking about creativity and creative pursuits, which by the way, almost everything
1:51:34 is, even if you’re, if you meet people who are the top of their game in accounting, the top of
1:51:38 the game, we’re not talking about shady money laundering shit. I’m just saying in accounting,
1:51:44 in technology, there’s an element, there’s certainly an element of creativity. If you’re
1:51:50 looking at the people who are really at the top and innovating in any way, doing exceptional work,
1:51:57 you have done so many different things, acting, comedy, directing, writing, activism.
1:52:05 You’ve been a host, you’ve done voiceover, you have engaged in so many different acts of creation.
1:52:13 I want to talk about short films, films, and so on. I want to talk about movies,
1:52:20 because as long-term listeners will know, I’ve been sort of teasing with the idea,
1:52:30 which by the way, just means procrastinating of writing some short films. And I’m still at
1:52:36 step zero, and I’m ashamed of that. But no shame. There’s no shame. Yeah. How did you decide to
1:52:42 get into film and why? Film is hard. Why do it? It is tough. So that’s a really good question,
1:52:47 because I feel like there’s the, you know, that like really humiliating kind of clam about, you
1:52:52 know, I’m an actor, but what I really want to do is direct, and it feels very cliched. I feel
1:52:57 like it was more organic for me, because again, I wasn’t someone who kind of, I didn’t go to film
1:53:02 school. And I also don’t think I had the hubris to think like, oh, I’ve done this a couple years
1:53:06 now, I can direct. It was, I love movies. Like, you know, we were talking about earlier, I was raised
1:53:12 by a single dad, and I was one of those kids who like, I’d go with my dad to see like Die Hard,
1:53:15 or Road Warrior, and way too early of an age. It’s super inappropriate. You know,
1:53:19 like when I was in high school, I’d seen the Terminator, like the first Terminator film,
1:53:23 like 20 or 30 times. Like, I just loved movies. I’d go to the theater, I’d buy a matinee ticket,
1:53:26 and I’d stay in the theater until like eight o’clock at night, and I would just like, watch
1:53:31 movie after movie after movie. So it just came out of a real end user’s love for film. Like,
1:53:36 I was just someone who was transported by movies. And then when I left TalkSoup,
1:53:44 I had been writing on that show, and there was a void, and I wrote a script that I was developing
1:53:48 with a company, and I just kept talking about how I thought it should look, and how I thought it
1:53:53 should feel. And, you know, it was just so much more specific than being a writer. And they were
1:53:56 like, you know, you should direct, this is clearly like a movie that you should direct.
1:54:02 And I hadn’t really thought about it. But I was just so intertwined with the material,
1:54:06 and what I wanted it to feel like, because I know what movies that I love make me feel like,
1:54:10 that I wanted that, someone to create that experience for other people. And I just realized
1:54:13 like, I didn’t know what directing entailed. I didn’t have any idea about what that was going to be
1:54:20 like. And I just went away to and started trying to learn about directing. And so I kind of would
1:54:24 call people that I knew that were directors, if I was working on something, I would ask to come
1:54:28 back to set when I wasn’t working, so I could hang out and shadow, which is where you just kind
1:54:31 of hang around behind a director and watch them work. And I ended up shadowing with some really
1:54:36 incredible people. I ended up spending several days on the wire in its last season. And yeah,
1:54:40 and just got to just be on the other side of a process that can be relatively opaque when you’re
1:54:44 an actor, you just kind of show up and say your lines and leave. And then I started making shorts.
1:54:51 And I, and I guess this is going to sound very glib, but because I’m sure I have resources
1:54:55 available to me that lots of people don’t, I do believe in it, like I just believe in personal
1:54:59 aggression, like I just believe in doing stuff that personal aggression, personal aggression,
1:55:03 like I just believe that like, if you want to make a movie, just start making a movie. And I don’t
1:55:08 mean like, Oh, get a camera and start shooting it. But what I do mean is like, be hard on yourself,
1:55:12 learn, read, learn, watch, study, think critically, ask people questions,
1:55:16 and then make a movie and then let it be shitty and then make another one to let that one be
1:55:19 shitty and keep doing it until you get better at it. Like the first short film I made was,
1:55:23 and it’s an abomination, it will be never see the light of day. I had no idea what I was doing,
1:55:27 but that didn’t make me not want to be a director. It just made me realize I needed to learn more.
1:55:33 And then I started to feel like I was more ready and I, I was like, I need to make some stuff. So
1:55:37 first thing was I did a comedy central special and I took the money that would have been my salary
1:55:41 and I used it to make a like a little short music video that opens the comedy special. It wasn’t
1:55:44 anything that was mandated by the network. I was like, I want to do something different.
1:55:48 So I wrote this song and I performed it and I made a music video and that was the kind of the
1:55:52 first thing I directed. I just used the crew that was already working on the special and shot
1:55:58 this video with them. That’s really smart. So I would imagine, not to interject, but you piggybacked
1:56:03 on something that was in your main line of business, so to speak. Exactly. And I imagine you
1:56:10 saved a lot of costs by doing that, right? I mean, yeah, like the crew was already going to come up
1:56:15 the day before and leave the day after to shoot the special. And we’d already rented the cameras
1:56:21 and everything like that, but I had to still have to pay them for the extra work. I took my fee and
1:56:25 I used it to pay everybody else. And then because I didn’t have any more money after that, I learned
1:56:28 how to edit it and I edited it myself and I delivered it to the network because I couldn’t
1:56:34 afford to pay for additional edit time. And then after that, I thought, okay, I want to do more
1:56:38 of this. So then I rented a camera. I rented like a can of 5D and I had some friends who were in bands
1:56:42 and again, like it sounds fancy, but everybody probably knows somebody who does something just
1:56:45 because I had some friends who were in a famous band. Doesn’t mean that people out there don’t
1:56:48 have friends who were in bands. So I just called some buddies of mine that were in bands and I
1:56:53 said, “Hey, if you let me come on tour with you, I will make you a free music video, just a piece
1:56:57 of fan art you can use in it, however you like. I’m not going to charge anybody any money for it,
1:57:01 but just I want to make something and I want to make something for you.” And so I ended up
1:57:06 going on the road with Silver Sun Pickups for a couple of dates and then spending a day with
1:57:11 Clutch when they were performing at Anaheim and then I just gave them, I just cut music videos and
1:57:15 delivered it to them. And so then I just started to have like examples of what I could do.
1:57:20 Why music videos instead of something else? It just felt like a way to get more people to see it.
1:57:24 I had done that first music video for my Comedy Central special, which was really like a comedic
1:57:28 video, but then I was like, “Oh, I really like working in this space.” And a lot of directors
1:57:32 come out of music video because you can be kind of radically creative in that space. You don’t
1:57:36 need to have any like narrative linearity. You can experiment. You can be radical. It could just
1:57:41 be like a series of images. And I also thought, well, people who like this band, I love this band,
1:57:46 will want to see something about them. It’ll be a great way for people to see something. And then
1:57:51 hopefully I can tell a story at the same time. And so I did three of those and I did a little
1:57:56 action short. Like I just kind of kept making stuff. Every time I did it, I learned something.
1:57:58 Every time I did it, I took a bigger risk creatively.
1:57:59 How long are these shorts?
1:58:01 Like three to five minutes.
1:58:06 Three to five minutes. Can you think of any particular lessons that you took away from
1:58:06 any one of those?
1:58:12 Yeah, like I think a lot of it was just skill building. How do you frame up? And how do you
1:58:16 make choices? And how do you do coverage? And then how do you edit? Like a lot of it was just
1:58:24 really tactical, as you would say, practical, tactical. Oh, God, I have my pet phrases. This
1:58:25 is also my weakness.
1:58:27 I’m going to steal it. Steal it again from Tim.
1:58:29 My pet phrase is so good.
1:58:34 And then a lot of it was just getting confident with my own ability and my ability to articulate
1:58:39 what I wanted from other people. You know, just how do the other jobs on a set work? Who does what?
1:58:43 What do I need? Oh, God, this didn’t work. You know, I didn’t work because I didn’t have
1:58:48 this kind of a person on set. Like, you know, I was shooting digitally and then on one show,
1:58:53 on one of my things that I shot, like we didn’t have like a tech on set to like to help me
1:58:56 make sure that it looked the way that I wanted it to look like that the levels were set properly.
1:58:58 So when I got home to edit it, like I had some problems, but like it wasn’t,
1:59:02 they weren’t catastrophic problems. It was just because, you know, I wasn’t making Star Wars,
1:59:04 you know what I mean? I was just able to be like, well, this is what it is, and I’m going to make
1:59:10 this and move on. And then I was getting ready to do, I really wanted to do a feature. I had some
1:59:15 material I’d written, but it was kind of going to be an expensive movie. But I was still shadowing.
1:59:19 So I had a friend who had a show called Penny Dreadful, John Logan to create a Penny Dreadful.
1:59:23 I met him at Comic-Con. I had hosted the panel for that show. And he was like, hey, why don’t you
1:59:27 you love the show? You should come visit us in Ireland. And I remember thinking like to myself,
1:59:30 people always say that, and then you always say, yeah, and then you never do it. I was like,
1:59:34 I’m going to do it. I’m fucking going to Ireland, man. That’s, I’m going to be cool. I want to,
1:59:39 I want to be a cool kid for once in my life. And so I ended up going over visiting Penny Dreadful
1:59:44 and Vikings shot right up the road. So I got them to let me visit that set. I just hung out at like
1:59:48 passed out sandwiches and, you know, lifted stuff and asked questions and watched them work. And
1:59:53 and then while I was over there, I met a bunch of Irish actors and one of them, two of them,
1:59:57 actually, one was it was an actor composer, one was a writer, a screenwriter and an actor. And
2:00:01 we ended up making a short film together in Ireland at the end of 2014. That was my first
2:00:05 narrative short, my first kind of story driven short. It was just great. It was just like,
2:00:09 I was like, oh, this is like totally who I am. This is what I want to do with my life.
2:00:15 Where did you film in Ireland? In Galway, which is the beautiful town.
2:00:21 Yeah, such a great place. I lived there for a month in 2005. Oh, yeah. Amazing. Oh, that’s so cool.
2:00:25 Incredible arts festival there. It’s a really beautiful spot. Yeah, it is. It’s like the arts
2:00:29 center of Ireland. They’ve got a beautiful film festival in the summer. They’ve got an arts festival
2:00:35 and you know, like local theater and it was just a great experience. And, you know, things went wrong
2:00:40 and things went right. But, you know, we got it in the can in three days and it was just super
2:00:46 cool and personal. And then that same writer who had written that short had a feature he had already
2:00:50 written and he asked me if I wanted to take a look at it and it was just a perfect first film. And
2:00:57 that’s the film that became Access. Okay, so I want to dig in to Access. But before we get to that,
2:01:03 you’re taking these trips, doing these music videos. During that period, did you save up for
2:01:09 that period knowing that you would need to work out of your savings? Are you depending on royalties
2:01:16 and other streams to pay your bills? How are you covering the necessities of life as you are
2:01:20 handing out sandwiches and doing all these various things? Well, it wasn’t it wasn’t as prolonged
2:01:25 of a period as it sounds like. I was on hiatus. So like I was working on the talk at the time
2:01:30 and we get a month off every year. So I went in that month. But I think if I was talking to a lay
2:01:36 person who didn’t work in television, I would say like, you know, if if what you want is to grow
2:01:41 in whatever field you’re interested in, like, just create a space for that, make that your
2:01:45 vacation. It wasn’t like I like was like riding around in a limousine, like I just flew over and I
2:01:50 hung around, you know, for like a week and watch people work. And it wasn’t any more or less burdensome
2:01:56 than taking a vacation. But one thing I was more interested in doing as I got older, and we started
2:02:01 with this in the beginning. It’s like, you said it. And I think we kind of went past it. But it’s
2:02:06 so interesting to me. It was I just really wanted more discomfort in my life. It’s just very easy,
2:02:10 the older you get to be like, you know, get in car, go to work, eat bag lunch, get in car, go to
2:02:16 a gym, go home, eat food, watch TV, go to bed. And then you just think like, am I growing? It’s
2:02:22 like any of this interesting? Am I going to be like, I have one life and I’m just spending it in
2:02:28 this like torpor. And so for that, I was going to a place where I mean, I knew one guy at Petty
2:02:31 Dreadful, but I didn’t know anybody at this other show. And I just kind of cold called them and said,
2:02:38 can I come visit and they were super gracious. I’m so curious just to interrupt you yet again.
2:02:43 What does that email say? It says hi. And again, I understand that maybe this is going to feel a
2:02:48 little rarefied. Hi, I’m an American actress. I’ve worked on these shows. I’ve been shadowing
2:02:52 to direct for a long time. I would be really grateful if I could come and visit your show
2:02:58 for a few days and shadow. And I will be as unobtrusive and invisible as I possibly can.
2:03:02 And I’ll be here these days. And I understand if you can’t accommodate me, but I would really
2:03:08 be grateful. And I think it helped in my particular case because I had tweeted a lot about how much
2:03:13 I loved Vikings. So they kind of knew that I was a big fan of the show. And I did some tweeting
2:03:20 from set. I kind of paid my way in like flacking their show for them. But just to… I’m not over
2:03:25 caffeinated, I swear to God. You’re making so many important points that I just want to pause
2:03:32 and help. Well, as much for myself as anyone else, just people to reflect on. So what you did
2:03:35 in terms of tweeting, people might say, well, I don’t have a verified account and nobody’s
2:03:41 going to pay attention to one tweet in the Twitter feed of 10,000 if it’s a popular TV show.
2:03:49 But I can tell you from personal experience that you could, for instance,
2:03:56 write something for Medium or for film the blank outlet that has a high Google, in other words,
2:04:03 PageRank. And that many of the producers, actors, and so on will have Google alerts or other alerts
2:04:09 set that deliver to their inboxes relevant media that mentioned, say, the show or the actors.
2:04:17 And you do not need to be a famous actress or an author or any of those things to do that.
2:04:24 All you need to do is work at the highest possible caliber of quality that you can. I mean, I think
2:04:27 you also touched on this about the idea that people are like more interested in being expeditious than
2:04:33 they are in being good. I think that this holds very, very true for this business. A lot of people
2:04:37 have made headway because they did something that nobody saw. But when people asked them what they
2:04:41 did, the thing they were able to show was extraordinary. And I don’t mean like expensive
2:04:45 extraordinary. I just mean unique and personal and crafted with care. And so if that’s something
2:04:50 that you wrote or if it’s something that you made, if you made, you know, the number of,
2:04:56 I mean, this is not the best example, but it’s a good one. Twenty years ago, there was this video
2:05:02 tape going around Hollywood of these guys in an apartment. And it was VHS tape. That’s how
2:05:05 long ago it was. And people were dubbing it and sending and giving to friends of these guys in
2:05:09 an apartment. It’s these three black guys where the one guy goes up and it’s the little intercom,
2:05:13 it goes, “Wzah.” And then the other guy goes, “Wzah.” And the third guy goes, “Wzah.” That was a
2:05:18 short film that some guy made on like a digital camera. None of them were famous. They were just
2:05:24 some guys in New York that ended up being that Budweiser campaign. That’s crazy. I had no idea.
2:05:28 That was the origin. I mean, it was a short film. It was a two and a half minute short film
2:05:32 that was just funny. We didn’t know these guys. No one knew who they were. And they didn’t have
2:05:38 any connections. And I think it was just about doing something that felt original and personal.
2:05:41 And again, it just comes back to like, don’t try to figure out what people want. Just do what’s
2:05:45 interesting and important to you and then keep doing it until you come up with something extraordinary.
2:05:49 And that will be your calling card. It may not happen as fast as you want or as aggressively as
2:05:55 you want or as expansively as you want. But in the meantime, you’re doing cool shit, which should
2:06:01 be your primary goal in any event. When I made Access, honestly, I just wanted to make a movie
2:06:06 to show people I could make a movie. I wanted to make the best movie I could. And I was very
2:06:10 rigorous in leveraging the resources that I had to the best of my ability. But I don’t know that
2:06:15 I had a lot of expectation that a lot of people would see it. It’s just because I made the best
2:06:20 movie I could that it got all of this attention. But I don’t think I was going in like, this is
2:06:23 going to be a massive hit. I was like, I’m going to make this little movie. And then for the next
2:06:26 one, when people say, well, what have you done? I could be like, look at this little thing I made.
2:06:32 So I think you have to always be focused on the results, not the result, on the thing and not
2:06:37 the result, because the result is directly tied to the quality of the thing. So it’s not about
2:06:41 being for me. It’s about fame and fame is based on quality of your work. So just be doing excellent
2:06:45 shit all the time. And eventually, one of those things will connect with other people.
2:06:50 Yeah, not to sound like a fortune cookie on top of all of that, but like the only uncrowded market
2:06:56 is great. There’s always a fucking market for great. There’s exactly be radically great. Like
2:07:01 don’t be like, I saw 10 things like this, let me do the 11th thing. Be brave enough
2:07:05 to court failure. That’s probably when you’re going to do something great.
2:07:10 Absolutely. And if you are really in love with something, I’ll give two examples. If you’re
2:07:16 really in love with, say, screenplays and film, or if you’re really in love and passionate about,
2:07:21 maybe is a better word, possessed by technology investing, early stage technology investing,
2:07:28 two phenomena, two companies at this point, certainly that are worth looking at and just
2:07:34 investigating the stories of, demonstrate very clearly what you can do if you are just rejected
2:07:39 by the establishment, or if you want to not operate within the existing power structure.
2:07:44 So the two examples are the blacklist, look up Franklin Leonard and the blacklist.
2:07:49 And then the second is, and we don’t have to get into both these right now, the second is,
2:07:54 just by coincidence, also has the list at the end, but Angel List and Naval Ravikant,
2:08:01 and people can look up, the Avenging Angel was the title of his interview in his alumni magazine
2:08:06 at Dartmouth, in fact. But I get excited when I hear these types of stories, so they should check
2:08:13 them out. Let’s come back to Axis. What is Axis? And did you have anybody try to talk you out of
2:08:24 doing Axis? Well, so Axis is a thriller about an expatriate Irish actor who living in Los Angeles,
2:08:31 who has had a lot of success, kind of explosive success in his youth, and has really just used
2:08:36 all of his resources to just wreck his life. He’s a drunk, and he’s a drug addict, and he’s
2:08:41 terrible at relationships, and he’s addicted to everybody. And when we meet him, he’s trying to
2:08:46 turn his life around. And it’s really about a guy who’s not a bad person, but he’s done
2:08:50 some bad stuff, which I think almost every human being can relate to. I mean, we all have a little
2:08:54 bit of a demon inside of us, and I think this is just a guy who’s, he’s been frail in the past,
2:08:59 but he’s really trying to be a better version of himself. But slowly over the course of an
2:09:02 afternoon, and the movie takes place in real time as he’s driving through Los Angeles,
2:09:06 his life starts to unravel. And it’s really about him trying to hold things together,
2:09:09 trying to be a better person, trying to be a better person in his relationships with his family,
2:09:14 with the people that he works with, just trying to be better. It’s really dark. It’s very funny.
2:09:18 I happen to think, and I’m sure I’ll get some letters about this, but I happen to find that
2:09:24 addicts are really entertaining people. And I don’t mean they’re funny, like laugh at them.
2:09:29 I find that typically people who are, who’ve broken themselves down are just more honest
2:09:34 than people who are trying to be perfect all the time. And so, you know, he’s just, he’s a guy
2:09:39 who’s self-aware. He’s aware of the mistakes he’s made. So it’s a very darkly funny movie.
2:09:44 And then it’s very twisty. It’s a thriller. So it’s got a lot of secrets. And the most unique
2:09:48 aspect of the movie is that the whole thing takes place in real time inside a car as he’s driving
2:09:52 through Los Angeles. So the lead actor is the only actor on screen. And all the other actors are,
2:09:56 our voice actors on the phone with him. How would you describe your experience of being involved
2:10:01 with this film? It was so wonderful. You asked if people tried to dissuade me from doing it. And
2:10:06 the short answer is in Hollywood, the way that people dissuade you from doing stuff is just by
2:10:13 not helping you. You don’t even get no, you just get like silence. But this happened very quickly.
2:10:17 So I didn’t have a traditional kind of like discouraging period of frustration with trying
2:10:24 to put this movie together because I read it in like August or September of 2015. And I was kind
2:10:29 of at peak engagement at the time in terms of work. Like I was on four shows and I really only had a
2:10:35 little bit of time off in 2016. And I realized if I didn’t make the movie in this one single week in
2:10:41 May of 2016, that I wasn’t going to be able to make it at all in that year. And I have to push to
2:10:46 the next year. And so then it just became about hitting that target. Like how can I hit this target?
2:10:49 So I never even went like the traditional way of trying to find like people to finance the
2:10:52 movie in a studio because they were going to say like, we don’t know who this actor is,
2:10:56 like he’s unknown. Can we put somebody famous in this role? Can it be Ryan Gosling? And then
2:11:00 can it not be with just him on camera? Can we have other actors in the movie? And then
2:11:03 can we make it not in a car? Can we make it? I mean, like we’re just gonna, you know, the whole
2:11:07 kind of concept of the film was going to unravel. You know, it’s very typical in Hollywood where
2:11:10 people are so risk averse that they take all of the edge and singularity out of a project.
2:11:15 So very quickly, I realized that I was going to have to probably crowdfund the movie if I wanted
2:11:24 to do it my way and on my time, on my timeframe. So in March of 2016, I had my like first exploratory
2:11:28 conversation with the people around me and with Kickstarter. They have people over there who are
2:11:32 kind of like around to like help you kind of figure out how to put a project together.
2:11:39 I built the campaign in three weeks. I launched it in April. And one of the rules about crowdfunding
2:11:43 and Kickstarter specifically, it’s not a hard and fast rule. It’s not like in rules that they
2:11:47 enforce, but it’s just like a rule of thumb that if you raise half of your money in the first week,
2:11:51 you’ll probably fund fully. So we had raised half of our money in that first week. And then
2:11:56 I started hiring people on the film. And we did raise a lot of money for a feature. It was about
2:12:01 $200,000 that we raised. And so that was what we had to make the movie. So originally, it was,
2:12:06 we were going to make it nine days, but I realized if I made it faster, I’d have more money available
2:12:12 to me like daily. I have like my daily resource load would be higher. So we cut the schedule from
2:12:17 nine days to seven days, which is incredibly aggressive for a feature. Whenever I tell people
2:12:24 I made it in seven days, they ask, “Is it short?” So we had to be really aggressive. So we ended
2:12:31 up doing it in this way that was so terrifying and so breakneck, but so exhilarating, which is that
2:12:36 we shot the first 15 pages of the movie in the first day. And then we shot the next 65 pages of
2:12:41 the movie. It was actually, you saw about 17 pages in the first day, about 67 pages on day two through
2:12:46 seven. And that meant that the actor had to do 67 pages of dialogue a day. For people that don’t
2:12:52 know, typically on a movie, you do like between three and six pages of dialogue a day. So he was
2:12:56 essentially doing the entire movie all the way through every day, locked in a hot car with no
2:13:02 air conditioning in May, beginning of June, essentially, in Los Angeles. And it was just
2:13:08 so intense, but we shot three cameras. So by day three, we essentially had the entire movie in the
2:13:12 cam because we were doing the whole thing all the way through from three angles. So by day two,
2:13:17 we had six angles and we had the whole movie on wax on the digital version of wax. And so
2:13:21 then the next four days were just about kind of creative play. And I think that what the result
2:13:28 is is I made a movie in a week. It’s experimental. It’s unusual. It’s transporting and strange.
2:13:33 And going in, I thought, I’ll never make a movie this way again. But now I would make a movie that
2:13:40 way again, because I just didn’t have any time to be afraid or feel down. There was no time to be
2:13:44 anxious. I just had to go. It was wonderful. It was just like one of the seminal experiences of my
2:13:52 life. There’s definitely some magic in the ether when you have a hyper aggressive deadline. There’s
2:13:59 just something that happens to the space time continuum and what you can achieve when everything
2:14:06 gets compressed that intensely. Certain things just come to the surface. Certain things are
2:14:10 thrown into relief. And it’s not like you can’t make mistakes. But I think you get a clarity
2:14:16 sometimes because you can’t dither. There’s no time for paralysis by analysis. I am making this
2:14:21 decision. I am making it definitively. It may be the wrong one, but I’m going to lean all the way
2:14:26 into it and we’re going to see what happens. And also because we shot the whole movie all the way
2:14:33 through, if there were errors, I had the next day to recalibrate in a way that you don’t get when
2:14:37 you typically make a movie for people again who don’t know. I’m an actor as well. So when I’m on
2:14:40 a TV show or I’m doing a movie or whatever, I’ll leave at the end of the day and go, “Oh,
2:14:44 shit, man. I wish I’d done this with that scene. I wish I’d tried this.” But every day, the next
2:14:48 day, we got to wake up and go, “You know what? We have a whole new bite at this apple. We’re going
2:14:53 to do it a whole different way today.” And so at the end, I really felt like we really fully
2:14:57 explored the material, which we wouldn’t have been able to do if we had been making a movie in seven
2:15:03 days and not doing it with this kind of volume approach that we had. So I’m looking at text
2:15:11 in a book that you contributed to. Happens to be this fantastic book. Oh, let me see. Here it is
2:15:19 for those of you who get the “What about Bob?” reference. There’s this groundbreaking new book.
2:15:22 Oh, yes, here it is. And there’s an entire shelf of the therapist’s own book.
2:15:27 Richard Dreyfus, in any case, the question to what you would put on a gigantic billboard,
2:15:32 metaphorically speaking, to get a message to millions or billions of people, in this case,
2:15:37 what you selected was a Jack Canfield quote, “Everything you want is on the other side of
2:15:43 fear.” And many of the stories that you’ve told so far illustrate that, certainly. What are you
2:15:51 afraid of now or what fear are you hoping, say, in the next year to get on the other side of?
2:15:55 Does anything come to mind? It’s interesting because I think the one that feels the most
2:15:59 obvious is, I’m afraid I won’t get to make another film. But I’m not really legitimately
2:16:02 afraid of that because I feel like I’m just going to put this next movie together and make it.
2:16:07 I think now that I’ve done one, no help and no assistance from anybody, the next one’s going
2:16:11 to be cake. I had help. I had my team, but I didn’t have the traditional Hollywood help
2:16:15 where I had a team of agents making magic. It was really just a scrappy little group of
2:16:19 filmmakers doing this film with me, the lead actor and screenwriter and my creative executives.
2:16:25 It was a small group of people completely outside of the system. But it’s not that I’m
2:16:31 fearless. It may just be that the things that are interesting to me now don’t engender fear the way
2:16:38 that they used to. I can also tackle this from a different angle, which is, what is one of your
2:16:43 greatest struggles right now? What do you struggle with, if anything? My main struggle is just always
2:16:47 being as effective as I want to be. You know what I mean? I’m just super ambitious. I have
2:16:52 highly developed. I don’t mean I’m good at it. I mean, it’s very far advanced
2:16:59 workaholism. I have pathological workaholism. It’s a sickness. Whenever I say I’m workaholic,
2:17:04 people always laugh. I go, “Look, it’s a problem. I don’t know how to rest. It’s not that I don’t
2:17:12 like to play. I do like play. I don’t think I have any time to rest.” I worry that it could
2:17:15 result in me not being an interesting artist because I think you need to play into daydream
2:17:19 and to rest and to experience things, to be able to tell interesting stories. No one wants to hear
2:17:23 about your daily trek from your home to your office. It’s just not compelling.
2:17:28 Well, I remember, I think it was Amanda Palmer who said this. I apologize to whoever said it,
2:17:34 if I’m misattributing, but the Amanda Palmer Creative Musician Extraordinaire. She said,
2:17:39 “I think it was her who said in order to have…” Is she married to Neil Gaiman?
2:17:40 She is. Yeah.
2:17:41 Braised author of all time?
2:17:42 Yeah, exactly.
2:17:44 After you and after me. Thank you.
2:17:51 Yeah. I will bow at the feet of Neil Gaiman as a writer. Everybody should listen to his audio
2:17:56 book of the Graveyard book, narrated by him. He is also the most soothing voice imaginable,
2:17:58 but I digress. What the fuck was I saying?
2:18:01 So Amanda Palmer has a quote about…
2:18:07 Yes, that if art imitates life, in order to create art, you have to have a life, right?
2:18:08 Yeah, absolutely.
2:18:12 And I’m paraphrasing it. It’s butchered, but it makes the point.
2:18:15 But like a radical life. You can’t… I’m sure there are other theories. There’s a very famous
2:18:20 French writer. It’s not south. It’s somebody anyway, about like have a bourgeois life and
2:18:24 be radical in your work. But I actually don’t think… I actually think that you need to be
2:18:30 fully engaged in your life in order to be an interesting artist, because you need to be alive
2:18:33 to be able to speak about the human condition.
2:18:42 So if you have advanced early onset workaholism, right? You’ve really turned this into a default
2:18:51 mode. Are you doing anything and manage that or create more slack in the system for the day
2:18:51 dreaming and so on?
2:18:56 I mean, it’s like that’s my daily practice. That’s my like, that’s my one day at a time.
2:19:03 It’s like just constantly trying to remind myself to rest. I engage socially a lot more
2:19:04 than I used to.
2:19:06 And by socially you mean out in the real world.
2:19:11 Yeah, out in the real world. I go out and I try to not just be like… I just had a period
2:19:14 of life where I was just like up, Jim, work, sleep. I just remember one day, I was like,
2:19:19 “I’m going to die. I’m going to die of boredom. I bore myself.”
2:19:27 And so, I think I try to court danger in a safe way. It’s not like I’m jumping out of play with
2:19:32 no parachute or bullfighting or bare knuckle brawling in an alley filled with needles.
2:19:37 But I am trying to just like be, not always have my head in my computer.
2:19:40 But the reason that people are workaholics, well, there’s lots of reasons I’m sure social
2:19:46 pressures. But for me, I just get this big serotonin release. Is it serotonin? What’s
2:19:47 the brain? What’s the satisfaction drug?
2:19:48 Dopamine, perhaps?
2:19:52 Dopamine. That’s it. Dopamine. Serotonin is sleepy time. Yeah, dopamine.
2:19:58 I get a dopamine release when I complete tasks. And I just, you know, I get higher and higher
2:20:02 the more that I execute. I find executing in and of itself really enjoyable.
2:20:06 So, I’m just trying to apply that aggression to leisure. Like, can I get the same satisfaction?
2:20:12 If I make a to-do list and one of the things is have fun, well, I get the same dopamine release
2:20:13 if I had a lot of fun.
2:20:18 How can I turn fun into work most effectively?
2:20:22 And then be like, “I don’t know about you guys, but I just fucking crushed my to-do list. What?”
2:20:29 I realized, even though I can feel very harried, it’s interesting to me to be feeling like a part
2:20:34 of being on this planet is like fully engaging and doing everything I can do and everything I’m
2:20:38 interested in. Because I don’t want to look back and be like, “Man, I should have tried that. I’m
2:20:42 happy to look back and say, “Man, I tried that and it went terribly for me.” That’s a perfectly
2:20:45 comfortable space for me to be like, “Man, I tried that and I should completely shit the bed.”
2:20:50 But what I find very uncomfortable is the idea that I always wanted to do something and I never
2:20:57 did it. And so that’s what I fear. What I fear is not trying, not experiencing all the things that
2:21:06 I want to experience. How do you think your life, because you live so aggressively, you milk the
2:21:12 most out of the hours that you have, how would you or your life be different if you didn’t have
2:21:19 exercise as an element? Do you think? Well, it’s interesting because I really love
2:21:27 working out. But there’s a constant battle for me between being effective with work and I’m the
2:21:31 queen of getting up at 5 a.m. to work out, putting on my workout clothes, and then being in front of
2:21:37 my computer at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and I haven’t moved. That’s just a normal day. I didn’t
2:21:41 move, didn’t eat, didn’t do anything, just been in front of the computer for 11 hours.
2:21:46 But it’s just such a great stress manager. And I also think that there’s another thing there,
2:21:53 which is it just, again, puts you back in your body, this thing that’s carrying your brain around
2:22:00 and making you effective. And I think that with everything, all of the stimuli that we
2:22:04 experience nowadays, all the pictures and the images of perfection that are coming in at a
2:22:09 much faster and more voluminous pace, it’s really easy to fall into an abusive relationship with
2:22:15 exercise, either doing it so much that you’re hurting yourself or not doing it and then engaging
2:22:18 in that inner monologue about how you’re worthless and you can’t get your shit together. And I don’t
2:22:22 have either of those things. I just know I’m happier and better when I work out. I’ve finally
2:22:28 dropped the monologue about I’m not a good person if I don’t crush a workout. I just try to do it
2:22:33 every day because I know I’m better mentally. And I also cheat completely. I took a hike today.
2:22:37 I had my phone with me and I stopped every 10 minutes to write something down.
2:22:42 So I’m not really fully, and I’m not being in the moment when I’m working out. A lot of times,
2:22:46 I’m stopping like hundreds of times to make notes and remind myself of stuff I have to do
2:22:51 or put stuff on my calendar. Do you still use Concept 2 or a rowing machine? I still use my
2:22:56 ergometer, my Concept 2 ergometer. I have had it since 2000. It is 18 years old. I’ve never had to
2:23:01 repair it or replace any parts. It’s the best. It’s the single best piece of equipment that I have.
2:23:07 My whole gym now, I have my whole gym in my place. I have a TRX body weight system. I have two kettle
2:23:12 bells, a 25 and a 35. I have my ergometer. I have battle ropes that are attached to my dining
2:23:17 room table. And I have one big power step that I just use to do like pistols and stuff like that.
2:23:22 And I get everything done with those five things. That is fantastic. So pistols,
2:23:28 for people who don’t know, those are one-legged squats. And they can be very, very difficult,
2:23:32 depending on how you go about it. Adventure a step can help you because it can just kind of do like
2:23:36 single leg step downs until you build up your quad and your glute strength to do pistols.
2:23:42 Could you describe for us a recent workout or what a prototypical workout of yours might look like?
2:23:46 I hiked today. That was just like a 90-minute hike, which was just more about like feeling groovy.
2:23:50 But right now I’m obsessed with my ergometer. I kind of go through periods of like not rowing
2:23:54 and then periods of rowing really aggressively. And this is going to be right up your alley, Tim.
2:23:59 I’m ready. This is like bullseye for you and your audience. I started going to a natural path,
2:24:05 so I’d be like supplementing differently. And I started taking glutathione. And I’m rowing like
2:24:10 faster now than I did in my 20s. Like I just keep getting personal bests on my row. It’s
2:24:16 confusing. I’m a lot older than I was when I was rowing competitively. And I just keep like
2:24:20 knocking like 30 seconds and then 45 seconds and then a minute and 10 seconds off my rowing time.
2:24:23 So now I’m just obsessed with like hitting personal bests every time I row.
2:24:29 Okay, let’s dig into this. So the glutathione, how is it for those who aren’t familiar,
2:24:35 glutathione is thought of a simple way to think of it or the way it’s often described as a
2:24:40 master antioxidant of sorts. How are you having it administered? Is it being…
2:24:45 Sometimes I get, oh, this is so insight baseball. Sometimes I get IVs. I get IVs if I really like,
2:24:49 if I’m wrecked, like if I travel a lot or if I went to Coachella.
2:24:54 And is that, is that pure, is that, is that just glutathione or are you doing that at the…
2:24:58 B vitamins. I can do it at the end of my IV. I’ll get like B vitamins and like, you know, just…
2:25:00 And a glutathione push at the end or something like that.
2:25:04 Yeah, exactly. You can get like fat soluble. You can get this like fat soluble glutathione
2:25:09 that you just take, you just like gulp down. It tastes like axle grease.
2:25:16 Is this… What is this company? Lipo… It’s lipospheric. That’s the name. Lipospheric
2:25:21 glutathione. Lipospheric glutathione, yeah. I’m just fitting it to the glutathione because before
2:25:26 the glutathione, I was rowing slow and now I’m just like a jackrabbit. So it could be something
2:25:30 else, but I’m gonna say it’s the glutathione. I will warn people in advance. I had some of
2:25:34 this lipospheric glutathione at one point and I gave it to a friend of mine and I think it might
2:25:40 have been for those who know my buddy Kevin Rose since I like to mention him, even mis-tribute
2:25:44 things to him just for fun. I think I gave him one and he said something like, “What is this horse
2:25:52 semen? It does have a weird, has a very weird consistency.” It’s tarot. No, my father calls
2:25:57 it axle grease. That’s what he’s like, “Give me this axle grease.” Because I gave it to my dad,
2:26:01 I was like, “I think this would really help you and you’re supposed to take it in liquid,
2:26:05 but he’s just been eating it on a spoon. He’s a better man than I.” Oh, I just like squeegee it
2:26:10 out of the little packet. Do you have a mouth? Yeah, to my mouth. I take it with like about
2:26:16 two ounces of kombucha in the morning so I don’t have to think about it. I mean, I’m sure you’re
2:26:20 like this or maybe after all of that experimentation on yourself, you just get up and have a bowl of
2:26:24 frost of flakes in the morning, Tim, but you know, it’s like I do that and I have my bowl of
2:26:30 supplements that I have my fish oil and I have my curcumin and then I have my turmeric. By the
2:26:35 end of the morning, I’ve supplemented that it’s like a banquet. I don’t even need to eat. I’ve
2:26:41 taken so many crappy tablets. All right, just to hit pause again. So is the exercise before
2:26:46 breakfast? Is it the first thing you do? What is your first ideal morning? What’s the first 90
2:26:52 minutes, 60 to 90 minutes look like? A special shot, glutathione workout. What time do you wake up?
2:26:57 It depends on the day. Like, you know, between like six and seven. I used to pick up a lot
2:27:01 earlier, but I let one of my shows go so I don’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn every day
2:27:05 anymore. So like between like, you know, like six and seven o’clock and then I have to work out in
2:27:08 the morning or I won’t get, I won’t work out at all. So you wake up, you have espresso shot,
2:27:14 glutathione with… I always have coffee before I work out like without fail. And then the glutathione
2:27:20 with the kombucha, any particular type of kombucha that’s your preferred axle grease mixer?
2:27:27 I like better butch. And I like, was it life aid? I think is one of the other. I love kombucha. I’m
2:27:32 very slutty when it comes to kombucha. I’ll drink any kombucha. I’m a big kombucha fan.
2:27:37 All right. So then you buckle down to workout. And this is going to sound like I’m just looking
2:27:42 for opportunities to plug, which maybe I am, but the, you described your, your work, the, one of
2:27:49 your workouts, the concept to like mid-distance 5k rows punctuated by short distance 2k hit sprints,
2:27:53 high intensity interval training, high intensity interval training with, with a 10k long distance
2:27:59 row once or twice a week. Would that be a current workout? Yeah. That’s typically my workouts. And
2:28:04 then I’ll do like a set of 5, 5 by 25 kettlebell sets. Like, you know, like I’ll get up in morning
2:28:10 and just do 125 kettlebell swings in front of the television. And then sometimes I’ll do a TRX workout
2:28:13 because I didn’t have really a way to simulate pull ups. So that was like, that was why I got the
2:28:17 TRX. So I could do, that was like the one thing I didn’t have in here was a pull up bar. Is the
2:28:22 TRX attached to a door? Is it? Yeah, it’s such like a railing, like an upstairs railing, and it
2:28:26 just hangs off of the railing. And that’s it. I mean, I tried, I tried to keep it like relatively
2:28:30 simple so that I’ll do it. I don’t really train with anybody because I just can’t, I can manage
2:28:35 the hour workout, but I can’t manage the transit between a nice home and a flat. I don’t have
2:28:39 enough time to do that too. You know what I mean? Like I’ve got the hour. I don’t have two hours.
2:28:44 So I don’t go to a gym anymore because I just, I just would be, I wouldn’t have the time for it.
2:28:47 Yeah, the transit time that. Yeah, transit time was what killed me. And I was like,
2:28:51 I have an hour to work out, but I don’t have an half hour on either side of that to go to the gym.
2:28:55 Do you still watch shows when you row? Totally. Any recent favorites? Or what are you watching
2:29:00 currently? Like fantastic junk. I mean, some good stuff. Like I love, I watched The Walking Dead
2:29:03 Fear, The Walking Dead. That’s always really good workout shows. Right now I’m watching The Magicians
2:29:08 during my workouts. And then when I finish that, what will I watch after that? Sometimes I watch
2:29:11 stuff that’s on streaming services because I hate to have to, when I’m rowing, I don’t want to have
2:29:16 to watch commercials. And I can’t stop to fast forward because I’m trying to beat my previous
2:29:24 row time. So like I’ll stream extreme stuff on Hulu, like X-Files or Handmaid’s Tale, or I just watched
2:29:29 a show called Deutschland 83. That was pretty great. It has to be something that I can kind of
2:29:34 watch, which is why I’ll typically watch something that’s like not too mentally demanding. I can’t
2:29:42 pay attention too closely to plot points. Do you make New Year’s resolutions? Do you have any
2:29:46 routines or rituals around New Year’s? We’re talking just for people who may be listening to
2:29:53 this at another time. We’re chatting at the end of March. Like to take any this year? Right.
2:29:59 I make the same one every year, which is to arrest more. I mean, it’s the same resolution
2:30:03 every year, arrest. So how are you going to do that this time? I don’t know. I should just give
2:30:07 up. I should stop making resolutions, and then I won’t have to have not accomplished that.
2:30:13 I mean, look, maybe a part of success or like success at being you, like figuring out being you,
2:30:17 is like understanding what your strengths and your weaknesses are. You know, like my strength is my
2:30:21 aggressive work ethic. It was when I was a young comic, I would be like, “Oh, I should be writing
2:30:26 every day. I should write. I should be like this guy.” Well, like that’s just not how I operate.
2:30:32 So I think once you accept like what your own methodology. This is why you watch The Terminator
2:30:38 30 times. Like this is my people, right? I mean, I definitely have a CD. I’m definitely
2:30:42 obsessive of personality. But like once you accept like these are my strengths, this is where I
2:30:47 excel. This is how I excel. Rather than trying to force yourself into someone else’s like workflow,
2:30:51 like figure out what yours is as a writer. And you’re written lots of books. I’ve only written
2:30:57 two. But with both books, I had this huge lead time. And it wasn’t that I was lazy or procrastinating.
2:31:00 Like the book wasn’t there yet. And then just one day, the book was there. And then I sat down
2:31:06 and I wrote the entire book in a few weeks. But it just needed to gel. It needed to synthesize.
2:31:09 And if I had been trying to sit down and kind of write a little bit every day, it would have just
2:31:13 been like this like big agglomeration of glop. But just one day, I was like, “Oh, the book is in me.
2:31:15 The book is in me now. The book is in me.” And then I got it out, you know?
2:31:18 God, I wish I had that experience, man. I’m so jelly.
2:31:23 Everybody’s different. You know what I mean? Like a long time, I would have wanted to be more
2:31:27 like you like disciplined and sitting down. And because, you know, there’s a panic that ensues when
2:31:33 you are seven weeks from your deadline and you had nine months to write a book. But it’s just like
2:31:40 that. For me, certain threads have to connect and that requires rumination and time. And I can’t
2:31:45 just can’t do it any other way. So I don’t. I think my strength is every day trying to eat a wheel
2:31:52 barrel full of glass and shit out diamonds or something like that. That should be a tattoo.
2:31:59 Well, speaking of eating glass, this might be predictable, but I’m okay with predictable.
2:32:05 I would like to start to wrap up with a handful of questions. And the first one I’m going to ask is,
2:32:10 and you actually give people a heads up on this with the self-inflicted wounds.
2:32:16 So you usually say, at some point, I’m going to ask you about X, but I’m sure you’ve had time
2:32:24 to think about this. So do you have any favorite stories of self-inflicted wounds of your own?
2:32:29 I mean, obviously, the book is just a collection, not even a comprehensive one, but quite detailed
2:32:33 of many, many mistakes that I’ve made. I’m trying to think of something that’s happened recently.
2:32:37 It’s interesting. I see my mistakes differently now than I did when I was younger. They just
2:32:45 feel like an aspect of being human versus like some kind of tragic flaw. Exactly. They just seem
2:32:49 like an unavoidable aspect of being alive. And then I’m thinking once recently that don’t feel
2:32:55 like that cataclysmic. So they’re like lame stories. Oh, you could pick a classic also,
2:33:00 like the greatest hits. Like if you’re watching TV 15 years ago and it’s like hits from the 80s.
2:33:05 We could take one of those as well. It’s interesting. Like I was talking about that
2:33:09 short film that I made that was like the one that will never be seen by any human being.
2:33:13 Actually, I think it’s been destroyed where it was just like, I just thought that I could just
2:33:18 charm my way through this short and I had a bunch of friends kind of show up and it was such an odd
2:33:24 idea. It didn’t make any sense. It was about a guy who flashed women and he flashed women and I
2:33:31 can’t remember why he flashed women, but it was something to do with like bravery. It was like
2:33:37 a metaphor for bravery that this guy would like flash women and also maybe like hubris like the
2:33:40 idea that like we’re going to be super excited to see this guy’s penis and he would kind of like
2:33:45 try to use it as currency and whatever kind of goes away. But it just made no sense. It just
2:33:50 ended up being like a series of vignettes about a guy like revealing his penis to strangers.
2:33:54 I just remember at the end like literally thinking, it’s one thing to think like people don’t get me.
2:34:03 I was like, I don’t get myself. It just never, ever coalesced. But it was fine because it was like,
2:34:06 I remember kind of enjoying the process of making it and then being really kind of surprised and
2:34:10 delighted by what a piece of shit it was. Much like that set where nobody laughed. I thought,
2:34:16 well, man, that didn’t work at all. Okay, I need to go back and figure out what to do next.
2:34:20 Like I think every artist, I think Quentin Tarantino has a famous story about his first
2:34:25 film being unwatchable. I just think sometimes if your personality is to be really aggressive and
2:34:31 kind of dive in, you’re bound to make some spectacular failures and you just have to
2:34:35 have a high tolerance for that and not take it personally and keep moving forward.
2:34:39 But yeah, I literally was like, I know you guys don’t get it. I don’t get it. I don’t know what
2:34:44 I can’t explain it to you. I have no idea what I was thinking. Thank you for putting
2:34:48 yourselves in my hands. It was a terrible mistake on your part, but you’re very gracious to have
2:34:51 trusted me with your lives. What’s the name of the shirt? It was called The Whipper.
2:34:59 Conjures all sorts of images. It makes no sense whatsoever. When have you been
2:35:06 extremely proud of yourself? Could be any point in your life. Can you think of a standout point
2:35:12 where you’re like, God damn, good for me, fucking A? I hate to have it be about this because it
2:35:17 sounds like it’s super self-promotional, but I really am proud of this film and I, for a variety
2:35:22 of reasons, it was, yeah, access because it was such a, I mean, I was lucky that I was brought
2:35:28 a great script and I had a really talented actor, but we put this movie together so quickly.
2:35:33 And I had a vision for it, but I also was, because we were moving so fast, feeling my way
2:35:38 through the dark in some aspect. And I think one of the reasons why it came together the way that
2:35:43 it did was because I was both, I both had a vision for the film, but I was open to modulating. And I
2:35:46 think that’s really important in anything that you’re doing, no matter what field you’re in,
2:35:50 is that you have to both reprise vision and kind of rigidity in this culture. But I think that
2:35:56 being able to pivot and be nimble is way more important than being kind of a rigid visionary.
2:36:01 You have to be able to look at data and interpret it and then apply it to your situation or you just,
2:36:05 you’re just going to keep banging your head against the wall. So we made this movie.
2:36:11 We got into the very first second day of filming. We started really late. We lost our light.
2:36:14 We had to kind of pivot that day. I ended up having to throw all that footage away.
2:36:18 Another day, we lost light and had to get back up at five in the morning and kind of shoot down
2:36:22 for dust, but we just kept pivoting. We just kept, nothing was catastrophic. Okay. And I think that’s
2:36:24 something I got from my father. It’s like, okay, this isn’t working. Okay, so we’re going to do
2:36:27 this. Okay, that’s not working. We’re going to do this rather than, oh my God, this is the end
2:36:32 of the world. What are we going to do? And then in post, I had very little money for post and very
2:36:36 little time to cut the movie together. And about four weeks in the editor that I had cutting the
2:36:40 movie, who was a great guy, really talented, just wasn’t connecting with the material, wasn’t able
2:36:45 to assemble the movie. It was an unusual movie. It’s one guy in a car. And I had to let him go.
2:36:49 And then I had to learn Avid, the Avid system and start cutting the movie myself. But again,
2:36:51 I wasn’t like, what am I going to do? I don’t have an editor. I’m going to die. I just thought,
2:36:55 okay, well, like the, the answer here is that I’m going to learn this skill set and I’m going to
2:37:00 keep moving forward. And then, you know, I made this little film that was, you know, strange and
2:37:04 atmospheric and dreamlike and, you know, it didn’t get into Sundance and everybody always wants to
2:37:08 get into Sundance. But then it got into eight other festivals and won two awards and got picked
2:37:12 up for distribution. And the result has been much better than I ever could have anticipated.
2:37:19 And I’m really proud of it because I mean, I made it for what is typically the catering budget
2:37:27 on a regular Hollywood movie. You know what I mean? We made it for just no money and in no time.
2:37:31 And, and I think it also says something. I think what I’m also proud of is that the movie actually
2:37:37 does have a strong point of view and a strong visual personality and a strong style that is my own.
2:37:41 When I look at it, I don’t think I’m trying to emulate anybody. I feel like this is something
2:37:46 that I made. It’s my little lumpy ashtray from shop class and I really love it.
2:37:52 Good for you. I think it’s easy to, I’m not saying you, but for humans to look at
2:37:59 the people who are showcased on the covers of magazines or on the front pages of popular websites
2:38:08 and think, wow, they figured out all the secret sauce or they have the keys to the kingdom and
2:38:15 they’re able to show up and just hit homeruns every time they step to the plate. And when you
2:38:23 look at the origin stories of some of these incredible creations that people are familiar
2:38:29 with, whether it’s Jaws or the company Alibaba is one example. Jack Ma, the founder, I think he’s
2:38:34 the richest man in China or certainly one of the top few at this point. And he said, I’m paraphrasing,
2:38:40 but we had a huge advantage in the beginning and that was we had no experience, no money and no plan.
2:38:50 And it forces you to really think outside of the box. And even if that project doesn’t succeed by
2:38:58 outside measures, the confidence that you develop in exploring areas outside of the box can then
2:39:03 transfer to future projects. I remember there’s this fantastic documentary, I’m going to butcher
2:39:08 his name. Well, it’s fantastic mostly for the message, not for all of the content, which I hope
2:39:14 makes sense, but it’s called Yoda Warski’s Dune. And it’s the story of this attempt to make a movie
2:39:21 about Dune. And the thing is a complete unmitigated disaster, like complete unmitigated disaster.
2:39:28 But the talent that was assembled went on to just do incredible things. And if that disaster
2:39:35 hadn’t happened, one could argue that if you’d stepped on that butterfly, these other careers
2:39:40 wouldn’t have blossomed in the way that they did. And you wouldn’t have the Geiger design of the alien
2:39:47 that people now know as the alien of aliens and so on. So it’s I just love that no one ever learns
2:39:52 from success, you can kind of do a post mortem and say, Oh, this stuff worked. But failure is where
2:39:57 you have explosive growth, where you really have to reconsider all of your assumptions. And it’s
2:40:03 so much more powerful than success is at making you eventually successful. Yeah, aggressive. Yeah,
2:40:12 be aggressive. Be aggressive. A G G R S S I V E. Totally. Yes, I that’s that’s that’s my life
2:40:19 philosophy. Be aggressive. Be aggressive. And we want you around for a long time. So take your
2:40:28 catnaps at the very least. That’s my goal. And do you have anything you would like to say or ask
2:40:32 of the audience suggestions you’d like to make anything at all that you’d like to
2:40:39 to say before we wrap up? Other than watch my movie. Other than watch your movie. Exactly. I
2:40:44 mean, I guess like I like when I when I did my podcast, you know, like thematically, the stuff
2:40:46 that we’ve talked about was always stuff that I talked about, which is like, it doesn’t matter
2:40:52 what you’re what you want to do. It sounds very greeting card, but like, the barriers are they’re
2:40:55 imagined. You know what I mean? And maybe you’re gonna have to start small and maybe you’re gonna
2:41:01 have to start close to home. But like, the greater regret will always be not having started. And
2:41:06 I’m always trying to find a way to be more bold in my life. And hopefully share the things that
2:41:11 have helped me do that with other people. So it is exciting to be having the conversation with you,
2:41:15 because I think that’s a lot of what you’ve done is you’ve kind of lived these experiences so that
2:41:20 the things that you learn could be shared with other people. Just go out and do awesome shit.
2:41:28 Get your hands dirty. It’s not the the rough drafts are not a clean business.
2:41:36 Absolutely not. Well, Asia, thank you so much for taking the time.
2:41:41 It was a pleasure. So much fun. I know. Super fun. And now that I know where you are,
2:41:47 I will track you down the next time I’m in your neck of the woods. Yeah, barbecue, music, whatever
2:41:54 it might be, and Austin Tejas come visit. And people can visit you is the best best site.
2:41:59 ishtyler.com. Yeah, ishtyler.com. But you know, who spends time on a website anymore? Just follow
2:42:03 me on that. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all that stuff is just ishtyler one
2:42:11 word. A-I-S-H-A-T-Y-L-E-R. Absolutely. Absolutely. I don’t know if this is going to post, but I post
2:42:15 stuff about all the stuff I’m doing, the movies out on the 10th of April on video, Neiman itunes,
2:42:20 all that stuff. And then Archer starts, I think on the 24th of April and all the others, I don’t
2:42:24 know, TV, whatever, you can find me online. I don’t know when you’re going to listen to this,
2:42:29 but you know, just come say hi to me on socials. For days and weeks and months and
2:42:33 years and millennia to come, hopefully. We’ll see. Cockroaches will be listening to this on
2:42:39 the tiny cockroaches computers when the rest of us are dead. That’s exactly right. Cockroaches,
2:42:44 remember us fondly. And for you non-cockroaches, actually, if cockroaches listening, you’re welcome
2:42:49 also to check out the show notes where I will provide links to everything that we’ve talked about,
2:42:56 including access. And you can find all of those at tim.blog/podcast along with the show notes for
2:43:04 every other episode. And Archer, thank you so much one more time for being so goddamn entertaining
2:43:09 and inspiring at the same time. It’s a rare combo. Thank you. So I really appreciate it. It’s great
2:43:16 to talk with you. Thanks, Jim. Of course. And to everybody out there on the interwebs, be safe,
2:43:22 maybe more important, be aggressive, get out there. If you’re dreaming of doing something,
2:43:28 creating something someday, just get out a shitty first draft. Because guess what? All the first
2:43:34 drafts are really fucking awful. It’s very rare that someone just as I was alluding to shits out
2:43:41 diamonds on a daily basis, it starts with putting something out there into the world. And hopefully,
2:43:48 at least it makes a market of one happy and that is you. So I will close there and thanks to everybody
2:43:55 for listening. Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off and that is
2:44:00 Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides
2:44:05 a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free
2:44:11 newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
2:44:17 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or
2:44:21 discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
2:44:27 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos,
2:44:33 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast
2:44:40 guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share
2:44:46 them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before
2:44:50 you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to
2:44:56 tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you’ll
2:45:03 get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have
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