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Episode: #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:49:08

Episode Shownotes

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode

features segments from episode #474 "Matthew McConaughey — The Power of 'No, Thank You,' Key Life Lessons, 30+ Years of Diary Notes, and The Art of Catching Greenlights" and #327 "Aisha Tyler — How to Use Pain, Comedy, and Practice for Creativity."Please enjoy!Sponsors:Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra)LMNT electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/Tim (free LMNT sample pack with any drink mix purchase)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[04:58] Notes about this supercombo format.[05:51] Enter Matthew McConaughey.[06:19] The words forbidden in Matthew's house growing up.[08:58] The book that changed the course of Matthew's life.[17:27] Matthew's 10 goals in life (circa 1992).[22:20] Why take more risks?[26:04] The evolving purpose of keeping a diary.[29:48] The art of running downhill.[33:56] Learning to say "No" to rom-com typecasting.[47:50] Enter Aisha Tyler.[48:19] Aisha's role in The Tim Ferriss Show's existence.[49:43] Aisha's trademark podcast question.[51:06] Aisha's unorthodox childhood and family relationships.[52:06] How did Aisha answer the questions "Whose day is it?" and "What are you going to do?" every morning?[55:34] From where does Aisha get her general sense of optimism?[57:25] Following father's advice and views on regret.[59:22] Free-range parenting vs. modern overprotection.[1:03:33] Having a bad day? You're not special![1:05:27] Young Aisha's career aspirations.[1:06:52] Why was Aisha miserable at what she thought was her dream job?[1:08:51] Why did Aisha pick standup comedy to break into show business?[1:10:08] What it was like to keep a day job and do standup comedy as a hobby.[1:11:50] Commuting for comedy in San Francisco.[1:14:03] What made the comedy club bubble of the '80s burst?[1:18:11] How did Aisha practice to get better at standup?[1:19:01] A memorable set Aisha bombed and the gift it gave her.[1:22:22] Dealing with hecklers Bill Burr and Kenny Moore style.[1:28:20] Aisha shares some of her own heckler stories.[1:32:31] Aisha's academic approach to the math of comedy.[1:34:43] What's the Rule of Threes?[1:35:36] Gauging comic evolution.[1:36:46] Comedians compared to other artists.[1:38:04] Changing success metrics and creative traps.[1:40:41] How fear-based people-pleasing affects creativity.[1:43:52] If one likes big butts, one cannot lie — even if it might tick someone off.[1:46:03] Sometimes constructive feedback does make me change my mind.[1:46:33] Pursuing authentic, meaningful work.[1:48:32] Comedy's core beyond humor.[1:49:04] Expecting failures in creative beginnings.[1:49:52] Why it doesn't pay to emulate a master of a craft in their own field.[1:51:51] Aisha's transition to filmmaking.[1:54:47] Aisha believes in personal aggression.[1:55:28] How Aisha piggybacked resources for her first music video.[1:56:30] Learning filmmaking through short projects.[1:58:03] What lessons did Aisha learn from these projects?[1:59:06] How visiting the sets of Penny Dreadful and Vikings in Ireland led to making AXIS.[2:00:52] Financing the Ireland trip.[2:02:35] The email Aisha sent to visit the set of Vikings.[2:03:18] The impact of fan appreciation.[2:04:50] Budweiser's "Whassup" campaign origin.[2:05:38] Why Aisha made AXIS.[2:07:06] Resources for aspiring screenwriters and tech investors.[2:08:06] What is AXIS, and did anyone try to talk Aisha out of making it?[2:09:53] AXIS production experience and methods.[2:12:00] The magic, intensity, and clarity of operating on an aggressive deadline.[2:15:00] Aisha's current fears and goals.[2:16:33] One of Aisha's current struggles.[2:17:24] "If art imitates life, in order to create art, you have to have a life."[2:18:33] As a workaholic, how does Aisha manage to live a life that influences her art?[2:20:58] How would Aisha's life be different if she didn't have exercise as an element?[2:22:47] What equipment does Aisha use to work out?[2:23:36] What does a prototypical workout look like for Aisha?[2:23:53] How does Aisha take her glutathione, and what does it help with?[2:26:40] Morning routine and exercise timing.[2:27:40] Aisha works out at home to save transit time. What does she watch when she rows?[2:29:39] Does Aisha make New Year's resolutions?[2:32:17] Aisha likens her first (unwatchable and destroyed) short film to the standup set she bombed.[2:34:58] When has Aisha been extremely proud of herself?[2:37:46] How confidence transfers across projects.[2:39:46] To grow from failure, you have to be aggressive.[2:40:24] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
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00:02:27 Speaker_03
This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. I have been using 8Sleep pod cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed.

00:02:41 Speaker_03
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00:02:52 Speaker_03
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They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

00:04:14 Speaker_01
Can I ask you a personal question?

00:04:16 Speaker_04
Now or the soonest of your time.

00:04:20 Speaker_00
What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

00:04:25 Speaker_04
Me, Tim, Ferris, Joel.

00:04:32 Speaker_03
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:04:35 Speaker_03
Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

00:04:48 Speaker_03
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

00:04:58 Speaker_03
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.

00:05:10 Speaker_03
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:05:24 Speaker_03
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

00:05:33 Speaker_03
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:05:52 Speaker_01
First up, Matthew McConaughey, Academy Award-winning actor who has starred in Dazed and Confused, Dallas Buyers Club, Interstellar, and HBO's True Detective, producer, director, businessman, philanthropist, and the number one New York Times bestselling author of Greenlights and Just Because.

00:06:14 Speaker_01
You can find Matthew on Instagram at officiallymcconaughey.

00:06:20 Speaker_03
Was it true in your family, I read this, of course, you can't believe everything that you read, two things. Number one, that your parents were divorced twice, married three times, so they ended up getting up one more time, then they got knocked down.

00:06:30 Speaker_03
Yeah. True. Number two, that saying, I can't, was forbidden or highly advised against.

00:06:40 Speaker_02
Very heavily, heavily, heavily. I remember, cuss word you could say, shit. fuck, or damn, and even occasionally maybe get away with the Lord's name in vain. But you weren't really. That was on the line.

00:06:54 Speaker_02
But the real words that we got either punished for or were forbidden were hate and can't.

00:07:03 Speaker_02
And I remember my dad, I remember one Saturday morning when I was about 12, my Saturday morning chores were mow the lawn, weed-eat, shine his shoes, and sweep the porches and get the cobwebs out of the corners.

00:07:15 Speaker_02
Well, I'd get up very early on a Saturday morning to do that, so I could have my Saturday afternoon to play. And I went out to try and start our push lawnmower, and it wouldn't start. Pull again, wouldn't start. Pull again, wouldn't start.

00:07:26 Speaker_02
Check the gas. Yeah, it's got gas. What the heck's going on? Damn it, it won't start. I remember going into my dad inside, and I go, Dad, I can't get the lawnmower started.

00:07:34 Speaker_02
And he kind of slowly turned his head to me, and I saw his molars meet and kind of start to grit his teeth. And he goes, you what? And I knew enough right then to not say the word again. And I said I and he got up and I didn't finish my sentence.

00:07:52 Speaker_02
He slowly walked with me out of his bedroom, through the kitchen, through the garage, around the back to the shed where this lawnmower was that I was not getting started. He without saying a word, he knelt down, looked at it, checked the gas.

00:08:04 Speaker_02
But anyway, he found the little tube where the gas was not transferring and it had been disconnected. So they so he reconnected that. Pulled a few times and it started.

00:08:16 Speaker_02
And there over a new now running push lawnmower, he looked at me, put his hands on my shoulders.

00:08:22 Speaker_02
And for the first time since I said, I can't get it started, he put his hands on my shoulders, looked at me and very sternly said, he goes, you see, Simon, you were just having trouble.

00:08:36 Speaker_02
And boom, you know, and I remember from that day, that lesson was like, oh, even if you're unable to do something on your own, you can still go seek help or get assistance. So you're still only having trouble, even if you on your own cannot do so.

00:08:50 Speaker_02
That was a. Saying those words, still to this day, if I let them slip, I have to look over my shoulder like, uh-oh, is dad going to get me?

00:08:59 Speaker_03
There are many different forms of influences.

00:09:01 Speaker_03
I'd like to ask you about one that is not your parents, it's not your siblings, it's a book that I've read you came across that had an impact in your life, and that is The Greatest Salesman in the World by Augment Deno.

00:09:17 Speaker_03
Could you explain for people listening why that book was impactful or what impact it had?

00:09:23 Speaker_02
Yeah. I've never been a big reader. Growing up, didn't read much and never really liked even in school being told, hey, you got to read this book, you got to read this. Just the fact of being told I had to read something in school or by someone else.

00:09:38 Speaker_02
made it feel like it wasn't mine, and I was not going to have a subjective view of it. Plus, I just don't really like being told what to do.

00:09:45 Speaker_02
But this came to me, this book, and I always say this, I didn't find it, it found me, and I'll tell you how and why. It was between my sophomore and junior year in college at University of Texas at Austin.

00:09:56 Speaker_02
Now, at this point, I was always on the track to become a lawyer. I was going to become that defense attorney, you know, and get us some oil and make money. You know what I mean? Get the family some oil and make money. I was a good invader.

00:10:08 Speaker_02
I took good stances. It started off in the family. They're like, geez, man, you know, I would take the table and win arguments with the family. And they'd be like, damn it, you got to become a lawyer. You got to become the family lawyer.

00:10:18 Speaker_02
So that was always the plan. But between my sophomore and junior year in college,

00:10:22 Speaker_02
Which is about the time when all those general liberal arts credits that you're getting need to start having some focus or you're going to lose them, you know what I mean? Right. So I start not sleeping well with the idea of becoming a lawyer.

00:10:36 Speaker_02
I'm doing 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. Then I get out. Then I start maybe get an intern. I'm really not going to be rolling in my vocation until I'm in my 30s.

00:10:47 Speaker_02
And I was like, I don't really want to spend my 20s

00:10:50 Speaker_02
Just learning or so my twenties just in school now i've been writing a lot to keep a lot of short stories in my diaries and a lot of them which are in this book green lights but i didn't have the confidence to think that maybe i wanted to get the story telling business.

00:11:05 Speaker_02
Until a good friend of mine rob bender. who I think at the time was NYU film school, who I'd been sharing some of these short stories with, one night on the phone goes, hey, you should think about getting in front or behind the camera.

00:11:17 Speaker_02
You tell great stories. You got good character yourself. You're a good writer. Try this out. And I was always like, oh, no, no, no. I mean, that's like too avant garde. It's too European. It's too artsy. I can't do that.

00:11:30 Speaker_02
But he gave me the confidence to really consider it. Now, I go. to my fraternity house, the Dell house, into that sophomore year for sophomore exams. I'm a studier. I got a 3.82 GPA. I like making my A's.

00:11:47 Speaker_02
And any amount of time I've got to study, I will use it every single minute. There's never enough time for me to study.

00:11:55 Speaker_02
I go to the Delt house and right behind it in a little bungalow is one of my Delt brothers and I eat lunch and I sit on his couch and I've got three hours before my exam and I open up my book, study for my psychology exam.

00:12:09 Speaker_02
For whatever reason, for the first time in my life, I shut him and I go, McConaughey, to myself, I go, you got this. You don't need to study anymore. First time I've done that. I got three hours to kill. I then put on the TV. I love sports, ESPN.

00:12:21 Speaker_02
I'll watch cricket, the strongest man competition. I'll watch, you know, two grasshoppers race. For whatever reason, I just I'm not interested. I turn off the TV.

00:12:33 Speaker_02
I look over to my left, there's a stack of magazines, there's Sports Illustrated, some Playboys, and I'm like, geez, I like sports, I like checking out naked ladies in the Playboy, let's check that out.

00:12:43 Speaker_02
I pick up a Playboy, flip their thumb through that, half-ashley, and all of a sudden lose interest in that. And I'm sitting there going, okay, what am I supposed to do here? I got two and a half, about three hours to kill.

00:12:55 Speaker_02
Well, I start peeling back those magazines, Playboys and Sports Illustrated and everything else.

00:13:00 Speaker_02
And about seven deep in that stack of magazines to the left of the couch where I was sitting, I see this white paperback with this beautiful red cursive writing on it. And it says the greatest salesman in the world.

00:13:13 Speaker_02
And I remember reaching for it and aloud to myself saying, who is that? And I pick up the book. And I start reading it.

00:13:21 Speaker_02
Again, I'm not a reader, but I start reading this book and all of a sudden I lose track of time and I've gotten past the whole prologue to the beginning of this first scroll in this book, which is, I will form good habits and become their slave.

00:13:35 Speaker_02
Now what this book had just told me, it's just taken me on a journey and said, you will read. Each scroll there's ten scrolls each scroll three times a day for thirty days until you move on to the next scroll.

00:13:49 Speaker_02
So it's basically a ten month read and i had gotten to the first scroll and i now understood that the greatest salesman in the world. was whoever's gonna read that book. So I was like, oh, that's me. He's talking to me.

00:14:05 Speaker_02
Well, bam, I look up, oh, my exam's in 15 minutes. I gotta go. I head out, go to my exam, my psychology exam. I ripped through that exam. I didn't care if I failed it.

00:14:15 Speaker_02
Something in this book had told me, no, this book is what you need to be into right now. This book is gonna give you confidence to go do what you need to do. I ripped through that psychology exam and immediately go, I'm going to film school.

00:14:26 Speaker_02
I'm calling dad night. I'm not going to go to law school anymore. I've got the confidence. This book found me. This is a seminal moment in 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.

00:14:39 Speaker_02
And that night, I remember thinking about it. I'm going to call my dad at 730. He'll have sat down, maybe had his first cocktail, already had dinner, and he'll be in a good mood for me to say, you know, Dad, I want to go to film school, I think.

00:14:53 Speaker_02
Well, I call him. 736 p.m. Hey, Dad. Hey, 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 law school anymore. I want to go to film school. That was hard for me to say because I thought he was going to go.

00:15:06 Speaker_02
You want to do what? What the hell? But I said, I don't want to go to film school. It was long pause on the phone about five seconds. And he says. You sure that's what you want to do, son? I said, yes, sir. There's another five second pause.

00:15:22 Speaker_02
And then he said, three of the greatest words I've ever been told, don't half-ass it. I remember going, don't half-ass it. I remember my eyes just lit up and I was like, oh my gosh. One, my dad not only approved, he gave me a responsibility.

00:15:42 Speaker_02
He gave me freedom. He gave me more than a privilege. He sent me a flight and ending it with like, not only do I agree and say that's okay, son. I'm saying if you're going to do it, you better damn well go do it well and don't half-ass it.

00:15:54 Speaker_02
I went down the next day, changed my course schedule. My GPA got me into film school. because I had a 3.82. I didn't have any sort of art to show them. And I started off behind the camera and then ended up as I am now in front of the camera as well.

00:16:08 Speaker_02
But that book, that day, that book finding me and me feeling like it was my secret and it came to me and no one told me, here, you need to read this book. It'll be good for you. Hey, you're supposed to read this.

00:16:20 Speaker_02
This is your for school or even a recommendation. It was not. It found me. And I read that book that did exactly what it said morning, noon and night. And I read I've read it three times now that way. But the first time I didn't miss one reading of that.

00:16:38 Speaker_02
I mean, and I had many a day where I went out in the morning on a Saturday and my day of whimsy took me to a place where all of a sudden it was 10 o'clock at night and I was like an hour and a half from my house and the book was back at my house.

00:16:55 Speaker_02
And I'd be like hanging out, partying, and going like, oh, geez.

00:17:00 Speaker_02
And I would stop, eat something, get some coffee, drink a bunch of water, wait till whatever 1.30 in the morning when I was time to drive, and I would drive back to my place, grab that book,

00:17:13 Speaker_02
and either read it and go to sleep in my bed or drive back to where I was hanging out with the book and read it. I didn't miss one single read for 10 straight months.

00:17:21 Speaker_02
And that book is the most instrumental piece of literature and motivation I've ever read for me in my life.

00:17:27 Speaker_03
And now you've produced Greenlights, this book, which as you've described it, is not a traditional memoir or an advice book, but rather a playbook based on adventures in my life.

00:17:39 Speaker_03
And I want to hop to a particular portion of this book, which is also a scrapbook of sorts. It's very multimedia in that respect, even though it's in 2D in book format. I want to ask you about a note

00:17:53 Speaker_03
And this will segue into the practice of writing since you've kept a diary for somewhere between 35, 40 years at this point, I believe. There's a note towards the end of Greenlights from 9192. And So 10 goals in life. This blew my mind.

00:18:14 Speaker_03
So I want to read these 10, and then I want you to place us in your life when you wrote these 10. And then I want to zoom in on a few of them. But let me just read these 10 first. So 10 goals in life. This is 1992. One, become a father.

00:18:29 Speaker_03
To find and keep the woman for me three keep my relationship with god for chase my best self five be an egotistical utilitarian that's can be my first follow up question six take more risks.

00:18:41 Speaker_03
Seven stay close to mom and family eight win an oscar for best actor nine look back and enjoy the view ten just keep living. Where were you and when were you when you wrote these ten goals.

00:18:58 Speaker_02
I was in a top bunk in the Delta Tall Delta house. I believe my roommate was Monty Wills, who I'm still friends with today from Montgomery, Alabama. I was in the top bunk. I think I just probably, it was the end of the night. It was about 9.30.

00:19:14 Speaker_02
I was just getting, nestling in for a good night's sleep. So I just started What was the date, 93, what was the month in the day? That was September 1st, 1992. September 1st, okay, yeah, so I had just done Days Confused.

00:19:30 Speaker_02
That's right, yeah, it was two days after finishing. Yeah, I had just finished it. A job, a summer hobby, a thing that there were three lines written in a script that I got cast in because I went to the right bar at the right time, met the right guy.

00:19:49 Speaker_02
Red Fort, Richard Linklater said, come on and started throwing me in scenes. So three lines turned into three weeks work. I loved it was getting paid $320 a day. People were telling me I was good at it.

00:19:58 Speaker_02
And I was running around going like, is this legal? It's so fun. And I finish it. My father had just passed away like two weeks earlier. Yeah. August 17th. of that year. So I just finished a job that was a hobby that became a career.

00:20:15 Speaker_02
I had just finished that. Think about it. If you do the math, I didn't think about it until now. I just finished that Ogmandino, 10 months of reading that book. My father had just passed away.

00:20:25 Speaker_02
I was just going through what that meant to me, what I felt like that should mean to me. And that's where the just keep living comes from, to keep his spirit alive, even though he's physically not here.

00:20:35 Speaker_02
keep things alive that he taught me to keep me incentivized throughout my life, even though I couldn't rely on him personally being here to back me up with him. And so I remember writing those goals down.

00:20:46 Speaker_02
And the thing is that when you start off this conversation going, I don't know what your adage or adverb was about it, but I found that just less than a year ago in my diaries, and I'd never looked at it or remembered that I had written it since the day I did.

00:21:03 Speaker_02
That date on that list, I never looked at that list again. I wrote it that night and forgot about it. Or at least I thought I forgot about it. I didn't, and that's the wild part.

00:21:17 Speaker_02
Because somewhere subconsciously, I obviously did remember it because so far I've accomplished those goals. And there's some very specific ones on there that I'm like, what? I always thought, even the acting part, win an Oscar for best actor.

00:21:29 Speaker_02
This is a time, I just finished Days of Confusion. I didn't know I was going to end up being an actor.

00:21:33 Speaker_02
I still thought didn't have the courage to even think i could proceed as a career i at that time i thought it might just be a hobby i had a hobby for a summer but obviously when i look back i'm like oh you did want to be.

00:21:45 Speaker_02
You did want to be an actor and you want to be a damn good one so i can admit it on my journal page but i couldn't admit it to myself i couldn't even admit it in my dreams. But I could admit it on the journal pages. So that's where I was.

00:21:58 Speaker_02
Those are so those are three big things going on in my life. And I'd say the most, you know, the biggest shape shifter was father moving on. But that with Finishing Dazed and with finishing The Greatest Salesman, that's when I wrote that.

00:22:11 Speaker_03
That's quite a Venn diagram as far as a snapshot in time goes with those three sort of momentous changes, those transitions. Why take more risks? Did you feel like at the time you weren't taking enough risks?

00:22:24 Speaker_03
Was it something you had learned about risks from your parents or other people? Why take more risks?

00:22:29 Speaker_02
I think I was at that time seeing risk that I'd take really pay off. The risk

00:22:36 Speaker_02
to in the bar at the top of the Hyatt that night to go down and introduce myself to Don Phillips, who ended up being the casting director for Days Confused, who four hours later at the end of the night after we got kicked out of the bar says, hey, you ever done any acting?

00:22:49 Speaker_02
You might be right for this part. The risk to go and read for that part, the risk for Richard Linklater to say, there's nothing, you're not supposed to be in this scene, you're not written in this scene, but do you think Watterson would be in it?

00:23:02 Speaker_02
The risk for me to go, oh, yeah, and just hop in the middle of the scene and improvise and play. Those risks were paying off. I was also beginning to feel the risk that I took reading that damn book, The Greatest Salesman.

00:23:17 Speaker_02
It was the first book I ever read cover to cover, and it's a thin paperback. Mind you, it takes 10 months to read, but that was a risk for me. And I was feeling very confident with who I was. I was also thrown upside down by my dad moving on.

00:23:31 Speaker_02
Now, I don't know if you've lost a parent, but as a son losing a dad, you want to talk about forced into identity? You know, my dad being this sort of crutch just because he was alive and above government and above law was now gone. I had no crutch.

00:23:50 Speaker_02
I had no safety net. All of a sudden, I remember this very clearly, this coming to me, besides the just keep living with keeping his spirit alive. I remember one of the first lessons of him moving on was I was and I carved this in a tree.

00:24:01 Speaker_02
I remember carving this deeply in a tree for about three hours one night. less impressed, more involved. And that leans into taking more risk.

00:24:12 Speaker_02
Because I was like, after dad moved on, I was like, oh, all of these mortal things in life that I have a reverence for, even this point of just finishing acting and maybe having dreams of fame. Wow.

00:24:29 Speaker_02
All these things that I revered that were mortal, lower down to eye level. And at the same time, everything that I noticed that I was condescending or looking down upon or snubbing my nose at or going, oh, that's crap or oh, they're no good.

00:24:44 Speaker_02
I was like, they raised up to eye level. And I remember going, oh, the world is flat. Your dad's moved on. You better look the world in the eye. And by seeing the world flat, I saw further. I saw wider. I saw more clearly. I had more courage.

00:24:59 Speaker_02
I lost reverence for the mortal things that I had reverence for. I still respected them, but I lost reverence for them. So that gave me courage. And I lost this sort of snub-nosed look at things that I thought were beneath me.

00:25:12 Speaker_02
And I empowered them, and they raised up to eye level. So all of a sudden, You know, that was a version where the I met the we for me. That was a version where what I looked up to maybe too much met what I was looking down on.

00:25:25 Speaker_02
And it was right in front of me. And that was how I was also taking more risk. I lost a lot of fear. I still had fear, but I gained a lot of courage to go meet my fears.

00:25:37 Speaker_02
And I didn't give enough credence to things that I probably shouldn't fear or have too much reverence for because they were mortal. And I was like, well, what's that? That's, you know, reverence for fame or not taking a chance to go get what you want.

00:25:49 Speaker_02
That's a mortal fear. That's like putting a limit on yourself. Why would you do that? I even called it a sin at that time not to take certain risks and would feel guilty if I didn't and feel like I didn't meet my quote that day in God's eyes.

00:26:04 Speaker_03
What is it that you've gotten from having a diary? Maybe it's changed over time.

00:26:09 Speaker_02
It's evolved i mean my diary started off like i think most people's diaries do you write things down when you're not in a good place or you're lost my early diary entries were the why what where when house.

00:26:23 Speaker_02
The existential questions of what is going on doesn't matter who am i oh my god this should so my girlfriend broke up with me i lost it started off that so i noticed that i started writing down when i was in times of distress or disillusion and then.

00:26:38 Speaker_02
I started to say, well, wait a minute. You got to, just like that Ogmandino book, by hook or by crook, you read it three times a day. I was like, well, we're going to write my diary every day, McConaughey.

00:26:51 Speaker_02
And so when do most of us, including me, not write in our diary? When things are going great. Oh, I got it figured out. I don't need to take time to go be introspective and write down my thoughts. Everything's a green light. It's great.

00:27:04 Speaker_02
Well, no, I said, hang on a second, we're going to spend our life a diary. The original use of a diary is to dissect failure or disillusion. I think there's some prudence and let's dissect success.

00:27:17 Speaker_02
Let's dissect what's going on when things are going well. Let's write in this diary when you feel like everything's clear and you feel strong and confident and significant.

00:27:27 Speaker_02
Can you feel like yourself so i started writing my diary when things are going well and then started to map out certain things about found that what that did is when i would get in a proverbial right later i could go back to that diary and look at what was i writing what was i doing.

00:27:44 Speaker_02
when I felt like everything was lickety split and I had everything handled. And I found consistencies.

00:27:51 Speaker_02
I found it from what I was eating to who I was hanging out with, how much sleep I was getting to beauties in the world that I was noticing and really were affecting me, how I approached people, how I was approaching the day, how I was approaching conflict, how I was approaching and taking in things that work, success.

00:28:07 Speaker_02
And I found consistencies. And so sometimes going back in those diaries, reading what I was writing when things were going well would help get me out of a rut later on in life when I wasn't doing so well. I remember this early on in college.

00:28:20 Speaker_02
It's a reason that my buddy, as I mentioned earlier, Rob Billner, said you should go into storytelling business. I was writing short stories, but I was also writing things down idiosyncrasies of myself. I was really trying to get to know myself.

00:28:34 Speaker_02
I would always, when I'd be in a movie theater, I always laughed. I thought the funniest jokes, and I'd laugh. I'd be the only one laughing in the theater. And I'd never thought the stuff that everybody laughed at was funny.

00:28:44 Speaker_02
The collective laugh, I never even giggled at. I was like, that wasn't very funny. But I'd laugh at how it was. And no one else would laugh. And I was like, no one else thinks that's funny? I would say that in the theater.

00:28:54 Speaker_02
I cried at things that other people didn't cry at. Like, I've never really cried at death. I weep at birth. Beginnings always have made me cry more than proverbial ends.

00:29:06 Speaker_02
So I started writing these things down, and at first was feeling like, are you weird? I'm kind of, hey, is this odd? Is this OK? Can you be this kind of a person? And got the confidence to go, yes, you can. It's OK. But let's write down those things.

00:29:20 Speaker_02
Let's write down what makes you laugh, what makes you happiest, what makes you sad, what makes you angry. and don't worry if it's the collective choice of the majority. What does it mean to you? Write those things down. That led to character, I believe.

00:29:36 Speaker_02
It led to my own character. It led to me being able to maybe go play different characters to understand and empathize with different people. Different people have different things that turn them on and turn them off at different times.

00:29:48 Speaker_02
What is the art of running downhill? Okay. So I get successful. I got major fame very quickly after A Time to Kill came out, the film I did in 96.

00:30:05 Speaker_02
And I mean, from the Friday afternoon before it came out to the Monday after the weekend it came out, my whole world was inverted. The world all of a sudden was one big mirror. I never meet strangers since that day. It was inverted.

00:30:22 Speaker_02
I mean, that Friday afternoon before Time to Kill comes out, there's a hundred scripts out there. I wanna do all, are you kidding me? I'll do any of them. Well, 99, no, you can't. One of them, yes, you can.

00:30:35 Speaker_02
Well, in a matter of two days after that film opened that weekend and did well, that hundred scripts, it was, yes, you can do 99, one, no. So I was like, whoa, two days ago, I would have done any of these. and could only do one.

00:30:51 Speaker_02
And now it's only two days later, but you're telling me I can do 99 of them. Help me discernment, discrimination. Can I make a choice? Who am I? Geez, what I want to do. There's only 24 hours in the day is last I checked. I need more.

00:31:04 Speaker_02
So I was a little, you know, imbalanced, overwhelmed, didn't have my feet, my soul on the ground. And there were times that and also remember that same lawyer I talked about in the Olympic story, Jerry Harris. I remember him telling me.

00:31:16 Speaker_02
You reached out and talk to him for years you reach out and he goes. Hey man do you from a small town in texas you can't do long v texas now you're not there now you're famous hollywood star and you got all these things.

00:31:28 Speaker_02
Make sure you don't suffer too much from the non deserving complex. That happens with some people get real successful from sort of humble beginnings and made a lot of sense to me cuz i was noticing.

00:31:40 Speaker_02
that in the name of obstacles being the way, I was creating obstacles for myself, some of them very unnecessary, meaning here's my life, I'm successful, I am rolling, I am catching green lights, I'm rolling downhill.

00:31:58 Speaker_02
I very less than gracefully handled some of my success. I would become belligerent at times. I didn't become belligerent. You know, they always say this, it's okay to have a point to prove, just don't always be trying to prove a point.

00:32:12 Speaker_02
I've had many times where I would try to prove a point. You know what I mean? And it was my own insecurity. It was my own self trying to find some balance in this.

00:32:20 Speaker_02
It was me, I was seeing the mendacities of all these people in Hollywood all of a sudden saying, I love you. And I'm like, man, I've said that to four people in my life. And everyone says it out here. They're full of shit.

00:32:34 Speaker_02
I was taking things personally, even, and sort of sabotaging some of the red carpet wine and caviar that was being handed to me. You know what I mean?

00:32:46 Speaker_02
And I was slipping to some of my more banal self at times and doing a proverbial face plant, meaning I'm running downhill and this is all easy street. I need resistance.

00:32:58 Speaker_02
So I think I'm going to trip myself and face plant and break my right into the concrete so I can break my nose so I can be like, ah, there I go. Now I'm earning it. Now I feel it. Now I've earned it. Now I deserve it. Well, that can be a little foolish.

00:33:15 Speaker_02
There's an art to going downhill. And so what I noticed was, oh, hard times are going to come. It's going to get dry. You're not going to be able to do whatever script you want to do. I've had hard times. Or in a relationship. we go through.

00:33:31 Speaker_02
It doesn't go well, or someone gets sick in the family. A real uphill battle enters our life. And so the art of running downhill is about, hey, enjoy it. When you're going downwind, downhill, don't trip yourself, because that uphill is coming.

00:33:47 Speaker_02
It's gonna come whether you want it to or not. So don't trip yourself and face plant right now because you're gonna have to work your ass off here very shortly.

00:33:55 Speaker_03
Anyway, let's talk about perhaps an uphill, perhaps a pause, perhaps something else.

00:34:01 Speaker_03
which I'd love for you to comment on, which did come later, and that was a decision which I'd love to explore to say no to quite a lot of opportunities for a period of time. It seems like at one point, you were very successful.

00:34:19 Speaker_03
You became very famous, like you said, practically overnight. You're being offered

00:34:24 Speaker_03
opportunities you couldn't have imagined a week prior, and you have a string of successes, and then you realize, well, wait a minute here, I might be getting painted into a corner, and you start to say no.

00:34:36 Speaker_03
You start to turn down, say, action film opportunities with big paychecks, things like that. Was that hard to do? Did other people say that you were doing the right thing and encourage you?

00:34:50 Speaker_03
Could you walk us through and just tell a story about that experience?

00:34:53 Speaker_02
Yeah, I'd love to. This is around, I don't remember the year, I'm guessing it's around 12, 13 years ago. I was rolling with the romantic comedies. I had taken the baton from Hugh Grant and was the male lead rom-com go-to guy.

00:35:07 Speaker_02
Rom coms are mid level budgets thirty thirty five million they offer a good front end paycheck to me they go make sixty million i mean it the studios don't have to overspend and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make them, you get a good female and male lead that have good chemistry people love to go escape to my rom coms are doing well they were my bank they were what hollywood banked on me to be in.

00:35:30 Speaker_02
At the same time, I'm living in Malibu, learning to surf, got my shirt off. And the paparazzi or Discovery Channel is like almost documenting this. And I'm like, damn right, document it. This is the life I'm living. I love it.

00:35:41 Speaker_02
I worked and earned to get this life. And those romantic comedies that I get paid so handsomely for actually pay the rent at the house on the beach that I live in in front of this water that I'm surfing in. So I was full on shaking hands with gun. Yes.

00:35:55 Speaker_02
At the same time, I did notice that

00:36:00 Speaker_02
any other dramas I wanted to do, or even the way people sort of, when I said don't meet strangers anymore, even the way this sort of people thought of me or approached me or talked to me or about me, it was like, you know, I kind of hate the shirtless rom-com guy.

00:36:15 Speaker_02
And I was like, yeah, I am. And I'm But only I could answer that second question. Only I could continue that sentence. No one else could. Hollywood, for sure, was like, no, nothing else.

00:36:28 Speaker_02
And so any dramas I wanted to do or other pictures, no one wanted to make them with me. And I remember we had just had Levi. Camilla and I just had our first son. And my life was so vital. Man, I just had a newborn.

00:36:46 Speaker_02
I've met the woman that I love and want to spend the rest of my life with. I'm laughing harder. I'm crying harder. I'm happier than ever. Life is very vital, and I'm in it. My real life is. But my work feels like

00:37:03 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, I could do that tomorrow morning. Just give me the script tonight, let me look at it, I could do it tomorrow morning. It wasn't really challenging me. And the rom-coms weren't challenging me. And my lifestyle was one big green light.

00:37:14 Speaker_02
And, you know, if it's all green lights, if it's all sugar and candy, well, that'll make tyrants out of anybody.

00:37:21 Speaker_02
So I was saying, I wish my work could, I remember saying this, at least, I remember looking in the mirror actually and going, okay, McConaughey, so if your life is more vital and true to who you are than your work, well, it's got to be one or the other.

00:37:34 Speaker_02
That's a good thing because I know a lot of people that their work is more vital than their life. So I said, that's a good thing. I said, but geez, could I just get some work that might challenge the vitality of my life and the man I am in it?

00:37:48 Speaker_02
where I can get some work, where I can be more me in it. Well, those roles were not being offered to me. Nothing. Nope, not a chance. No studio will bank you in this drama role or this other role you want.

00:38:01 Speaker_02
I had control of Dallas Buyers Club at that time, but no one wanted to make it for me, nor did anyone finance it.

00:38:06 Speaker_02
So I decided that if I couldn't do what I wanted to do and what I wanted to do was not being offered to me, it would be prudent for me to just stop doing

00:38:16 Speaker_02
what I had been doing and what was in the pipeline continually coming to me, which were the romantic comedies.

00:38:22 Speaker_02
I called my money manager and said, all right, look, I'm going to stop doing the only work I'm getting offered, and I don't know how long it's going to be until I work again. How am I doing with my money?

00:38:32 Speaker_02
He says, you've invested well, conservatively, you're fine. You can take that one. I remember calling my agent, Jim Toth at CA. Jim, I'd only do romantic comedies more. I remember this conversation. He goes, great. And I go, wait, what do you mean? Great.

00:38:44 Speaker_02
He goes, great. And I go, how do you say that so quick?

00:38:48 Speaker_02
What are you going to say Monday morning when you go into your superiors in the office and say McConaughey is not doing romantic comedies and McConaughey has been bringing a nice chunk of 10 percent commission into you guys with these romantic comedies for years now?

00:39:00 Speaker_02
And he said the coolest thing to me because I don't work for them. I work for you. That's a good line. It's a line, right? Then it was I went to Camilla, my wife. I'd shed quite a few tears with her going through this. Am I feeling fraudulent in my work?

00:39:17 Speaker_02
Do I feel a lack of significance in my work? Is it okay to be feeling this? Like I said, remember, as we said earlier, I'm going running downhill.

00:39:27 Speaker_02
Why would you sabotage not doing the work you're getting off with when you can get paid so handsomely to do it?

00:39:33 Speaker_02
But she understood that my soul was shaken and needed some recalibration and that the work I was doing wasn't the true sort of expression of who I was in my life.

00:39:43 Speaker_02
And I told her, I said, well, I want to hold out for some work that can challenge the vitality of the life that I'm living with you and our son Levi. And she repeated the lines to me. She goes, okay, you're going to get wobbly. I've been around you.

00:39:55 Speaker_02
You got to work, Matthew, and you love to accomplish. You're going to get wobbly. You might start, Reaching for a little sip of something to drink earlier in the day too. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. She's like, she goes, days are going to be longer.

00:40:09 Speaker_02
We don't know how long this will last, how long we'll be in this. She called it a desert. How long this will be a desert. She goes, but if we're going to do this, if you're going to do this, we're not going to half-ass it.

00:40:19 Speaker_02
She repeated my dad's line to me. And I went, yes, ma'am. Gave her a hug, put some tears on her shoulder. And we said, starting today, no more rom-coms. Well, RomCom offers came in to my agent for about the next six months, but nothing but RomCom offers.

00:40:34 Speaker_02
And I didn't even, unless it was a major offer, I just said no. And they just stopped at my agent's desk and jimmed off, no. And then one of them came through that was like a gargantuan offer for it.

00:40:48 Speaker_02
And my agent said, it's a pretty damn good script too. And so I said, well, send it out. Let me read it. And I remember this. The offer was like for eight million dollars. And the script is pretty good, but it was still a code of a romcom.

00:41:05 Speaker_02
And I remember reading it and going. No, thank you. I remember feeling sort of emboldened and strengthened by saying, no, thank you. Great. Sticking to my guns. No romcoms. Six months into this drought. No, I'm not caving in now. Don't half ass him, OK?

00:41:19 Speaker_02
So they come back with a $10 million offer. No, thank you. They come back with a $12.5 million offer. Now I go, dot, dot, dot, ellipses, ellipses. No, thank you. Now they come back with a $15 million offer. Wow. You know what?

00:41:38 Speaker_02
Let me have another reread of that script. And I re-read that. And you know what?

00:41:47 Speaker_02
At $15 million, the same script that I've been offered for $8 million, the $15 million offer script, which was the same exact words as the $8 million offer script, the $15 million script was better. It was funnier. It had possibilities. It had angles.

00:42:04 Speaker_02
I had ideas. I could make this work. You know, I mean, this could work.

00:42:09 Speaker_03
Now I'm imagining at this point, Jim is like, man, this saying no thing is really working out.

00:42:14 Speaker_02
He's in and he's over there teetering. Like, I know what we said, $15 million. And it's not like, it's a pretty good script. I know it's rom-com. It's a pretty good script. But I said, uh, you No, thank you.

00:42:31 Speaker_02
Well, that got the signal across Hollywood that McConaughey was taking a serious sabbatical. And so don't even send him a rom-com. It got around.

00:42:42 Speaker_03
So that was kind of the crucible then. I mean, that was like the crux move in a sense.

00:42:46 Speaker_02
In a way, that was a, yeah, I called an audible six months in and I had him thinking I might cave, I might just be posturing and come on back, McConaughey, we love you. And I said, no.

00:42:58 Speaker_02
And when they had pumped the money offer up so much and people knew in the industry what that offer was, it became very clear. Oh, oh shit. Okay. McConaughey, I don't know what he's doing, but he ain't doing this stuff. He's not doing any more rom-coms.

00:43:14 Speaker_02
And it became clear. So for the next, True, 12, 14 months. Nothing came in, nada, zilch, not an offer for anything. I mean, I'd talk to my agent every couple of weeks. They'd just be like, nothing came in, nothing.

00:43:31 Speaker_02
So now we're 20 months into this desert period. I do have my son to raise, which being a father has always been the most important thing to me. So that's got my compass, at least, directed in a place that I go, just trust in this.

00:43:45 Speaker_02
If it has something to do with raising your son and being here on the land with your family, Even if you start to wander, just trust that that's always going to be in the asset section, McConaughey. You can't go wrong with that. So I stuck to that.

00:43:58 Speaker_02
And I was now fine with not doing any work. I didn't know what I was going to be. I didn't know if I was going to change my career, if I was going to become a teacher or coach or go back to being a lawyer. I didn't know. I didn't think so.

00:44:10 Speaker_02
But I was writing more. I was talking about forced winners. I had put a forced winner on myself. And I was pretty content. I wasn't waking up every morning going, did an offer come in? Did something new come in? I was past that.

00:44:25 Speaker_02
And then all of a sudden, 20 months in, 20, 21 months into this desert, I started getting some offers that are interesting things.

00:44:32 Speaker_02
William Friedkin, Killer Joe, Lee Daniels, Paperboy, Jeff Nichols wrote Mud for me, Steven Soderbergh called, Magic Wine. Richard Linklater and I go do Bernie together. True Detective comes around. All of a sudden, Dallas Buyers Club.

00:44:47 Speaker_02
No one still wants to put a bunch of money up for a 1980s period drama about AIDS. But all of a sudden, McConaughey, all the directors were, no directors would do Dallas Buyers Club with me. They wanted the script. They loved the script.

00:45:00 Speaker_02
They didn't want to do it with McConaughey. All of a sudden, we find Jean-Marc Vallée, who says, no, I'd like to do it with McConaughey. So what happened was that 22 launch, that drought, that desert, I unbranded. I didn't rebrand, I unbranded.

00:45:21 Speaker_02
Me being away, me being in Texas, not being on a beach, getting pictures of me shirtless on a beach, not being in rom-coms, I was out of the world's view. I was out of the industry's view. I was not in your living room. I was not in your theater.

00:45:36 Speaker_02
I was not in any of the places that the world would become expectant to see me and how to see me. Where was I? I was gone. Where is McConaughey? Well, you're gone long enough. All of a sudden I became a new good idea.

00:45:53 Speaker_02
which I was not a new good idea at any time earlier than that at the end of that 20-month period. And then all of a sudden, the things came to me that I wanted to do. And I remember saying, you know what? Fuck the bucks. I'm going for the experience.

00:46:06 Speaker_02
If I read a role that shakes me in my boots and challenges the vitality that I feel in my own real life and challenges me, the man I am in my own real life, that's what I'm going after. And man, they came in. Come in, I looked at each other.

00:46:20 Speaker_02
She had some more tears and we said, let's get after it. And I just started hammering them. The family came with me everywhere I went and just started laying down work that really, really turned me on.

00:46:34 Speaker_03
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00:47:03 Speaker_03
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00:47:50 Speaker_01
And now, Ayesha Tyler, a star of the hit television show, Criminal Minds, a comedian and the host of the CW's top-rated improv show, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, an award-winning director, best-selling author, and activist, and co-founder of the new premium margarita brand, L'Eau Sophie.

00:48:12 Speaker_01
You can find Ayesha on Twitter and Instagram, at Ayesha Tyler.

00:48:19 Speaker_03
Aisha, welcome to the show.

00:48:21 Speaker_00
Tim, hello. Thank you. I'm super excited to be here. This is our away. It's a very long home and away for us.

00:48:28 Speaker_03
It is. It is. And you are partially to blame slash credit for me having a podcast in the first place because I recall

00:48:38 Speaker_03
When you interviewed me for girl and guy podcast in San Francisco at my place and I had so much fun Speaking with you and fielding some fantastic questions one of which I'm gonna bring up and then we'll backpedal okay, but

00:48:59 Speaker_03
The question will not be surprising to you, I don't think, and I'm going to ask you to bring it up.

00:49:04 Speaker_03
But the conversation that we had in part contributed to me deciding to take a break from writing books, which had completely burned me out, and in turn helped birth the show.

00:49:15 Speaker_03
So thank you for helping to send me on this path, because it's become one of the most gratifying and fascinating things I could possibly imagine doing. So thank you for that.

00:49:25 Speaker_00
It's so thrilling to hear and really, really gratifying. Yeah. I mean, that's, it's amazing. I think podcasts are. Wonderful and terrible beasts, but like really satisfying even when they're like punishingly difficult to manage.

00:49:39 Speaker_00
They're still so satisfying So I'm really happy.

00:49:42 Speaker_03
I'm happy that you're enjoying it and You have we're not gonna get into this right now Although we can you have a book titled self-inflicted wounds subtitle heartwarming tales of epic humiliation Can you maybe repeat or even paraphrase the question that you would always ask guests on your show?

00:50:02 Speaker_00
Oh, absolutely. I mean, that came that the name for that book came from this part of my show, Self-Inflicted Wounds, which is what, you know, tell me a story about something that's gone wrong in your life. That's your own fault.

00:50:14 Speaker_00
You know, you can't blame anyone else, not your ex, not the bullies in your school, not the man. You know, you did it to yourself.

00:50:20 Speaker_00
And it was it was really a way of initiating a conversation about risk and failure, because I feel like people see people who are successful and assume that a part of that success or the reason that success is that they haven't made any mistakes and they haven't failed, that they've got

00:50:32 Speaker_00
a charmed life in some way, or they figure some kind of formula out. And the most successful people are people who don't just manage risk, but engage in risk and court failure actively.

00:50:44 Speaker_00
So I always love to have people listening see that someone that they admire and that they think is really accomplished has really shit the bed severely at some point in their lives, maybe multiple times. Because I just think it's instructive.

00:50:57 Speaker_00
I think people don't start because they're afraid they're going to fail, and there's just no way around. The path to success is through failure. You just can't get around it.

00:51:06 Speaker_03
There are so many different directions I could go with this, and I want to go way back as maybe sort of a montage flashback that we could have as a visual overlay as you're saying some of these things. That is to your dad.

00:51:21 Speaker_03
In the process of doing homework, read about your dad's favorite saying or question that he would ask? And I was hoping you could explain this or share this with people who are listening, because I think it's kind of amazing.

00:51:37 Speaker_00
Well, I was raised, you know, my parents divorced when I was 10. And my father, my parents, You know, I always joke that, you know, it's only rich people that can afford to fight about custody. You know what I mean?

00:51:47 Speaker_00
Poor people just do whatever they have to do to, like, manage. And my parents, neither of them could really afford two kids, and also neither of them could afford to pay child support. So each of them just took one of us.

00:51:58 Speaker_00
I was older, so I went with my father. And he was like, you know, which one can wash itself? And then that was the one that he took. And, you know, my father is the king of the very terse and pointed motivational speech.

00:52:11 Speaker_00
So I would leave for school in the morning and I grew up in San Francisco and at one point we lived upstairs in a Victorian, so I'd go down these very steep stairs and he'd lean over the railing and he'd go, whose day is it?

00:52:23 Speaker_00
I'd have to say, it's my day. And then he'd say, what are you going to do? And I'd have to say, grab it by the balls. And then what are you going to do? And I'd have to say, and twist and twist. Sorry, going out the door.

00:52:37 Speaker_00
But you know, it's funny because it was like my dad was just, he was such a great dad, he was a really engaged guy.

00:52:43 Speaker_00
But you know, I mean, he was a single father and relatively young, so maybe there were a few boundaries of propriety that he danced along. But he just encouraged me to be aggressive.

00:52:54 Speaker_00
You know, he was one of those, I think, it's very hard for single parents, period. And I think it's very hard for fathers and daughters because,

00:53:02 Speaker_00
I just think if you're a dad, the world just looks like a field of broken glass and potholes and molten lava, and then you've got this little kitten, and you're just so terrified to put the kitten down.

00:53:12 Speaker_00
So either they grip very tightly, or in my father's case, they throw you up in the air and expect that they've given you the skills to land, and that was definitely his strategy.

00:53:23 Speaker_03
Now, you mentioned the divorce, which I have read was amicable. It ended up resulting in you going with your father, and you have one sibling?

00:53:34 Speaker_00
Mm-hmm. I have a younger sister, and she stayed with me.

00:53:36 Speaker_03
Stayed with your mom. Was that hard? Or did it not even occur to you to be hard because it just is what it was? Or was that difficult? And did you have constant contact? Or what was the dynamic like?

00:53:49 Speaker_00
You know, it's interesting because I think it was more the second for me, like it just was what was happening. And I don't ever remember struggling in any grand way with the way that things were going. Look, maybe that's my nature.

00:54:01 Speaker_00
I do my I know my parents worked very hard to be loving and available to both of us. And I had lots of access to my mother and I talked to her all the time and I called her for advice.

00:54:11 Speaker_00
And when she got to kind of be the fun mom or the advice mom, you know, she didn't have to discipline me and she could just be the person who was there when I needed like emotional support.

00:54:19 Speaker_00
I do know that one of the things that resulted, and at least when we were younger, was my sister and I, we weren't super close, but lots of siblings aren't super close in their kids.

00:54:27 Speaker_00
Whether they're living in the same house or not, they're fighting and they're competitive. But as we got older, I became wildly protective of my sister, and my relationship with her is so intensely loving and affectionate now.

00:54:40 Speaker_00
And I don't know, maybe if we lived in the same house driving each other nuts all the time, we wouldn't be as close as we are now.

00:54:47 Speaker_00
We spent the formative years of our lives living in different houses, but we like the same stuff and we care about the same things and our connections are really deep.

00:54:57 Speaker_00
I don't ever remember kind of sitting up at night feeling any kind of agony about the fact that my parents were divorcing. I did watch them try very hard to stay together.

00:55:03 Speaker_00
Like, I do remember that when they got a divorce, I was like, they really gave it a shot. You know, I can see that they really like, you know, they would break up and they'd get back together and they'd break up and they'd get back together.

00:55:13 Speaker_00
And I'd like walking on them, they'd be making out on the couch. I was like, they are really giving this a go. So when they decided it was over, I was like, OK.

00:55:23 Speaker_00
I don't ever remember it being like a point of agony, just things changed, and maybe as a result, I tolerate change better than I would otherwise, or maybe I even crave change, I don't know.

00:55:34 Speaker_03
Has it been your demeanor to generally look at things through a positive lens like that, where you would frame what other people might try to frame as a very difficult, agonizing experience into something

00:55:48 Speaker_03
that was or at least is framed as something positive that you benefited from or have you had more of the time a tendency to frame things negatively?

00:55:58 Speaker_00
I think about that a lot because I think that my attitude or my point of view about things is half biochemistry and half child-rearing. My father is just like a preternaturally optimistic person. It's extraordinary.

00:56:11 Speaker_00
I always make this joke that if my father's house was on fire, he would get a stick and marshmallows. He just cannot be deterred. I've never seen it. He's just never down. And so I think that I inherited that. Maybe it's attitudinal.

00:56:23 Speaker_00
I think I just probably make up the chemicals in my brain that kind of keep me typically upbeat. You know what I mean? And I think it's important because I think a lot of times when people

00:56:33 Speaker_00
if they have a hard time seeing the world positively, or if they're struggling with depression, people are like, we just need to look at it a different way. But I think that I probably just make more of the chemicals that enable me to be optimistic.

00:56:44 Speaker_00
I've never really been depressed, but my father also was just a walk-it-off dad. He just did not feel sorry for me, and I was not allowed to feel sorry for myself. And so when things went wrong, and this is definitely sustained until I was an adult,

00:56:57 Speaker_00
I just get up and I keep going. And that was because, you know, my father was raised, he lost his father when he was very, very young.

00:57:02 Speaker_00
He's raised by a single mother in Tumbledown, Pittsburgh, with the very few opportunities for a black man at that time. And he just never felt sorry for himself. He was just like, look, I can complain about the situation or I could just keep moving.

00:57:14 Speaker_00
So I think I've been nurtured in that way as well, which is the world is unfair. You know, it's shot through with assholes. I still have to get up in the morning and make a life for myself. So it's probably a combination of those two things.

00:57:25 Speaker_03
Were you, would you say good at following his advice of not only grabbing life by the balls, but twisting, which is a whole new level. Those are two really like, yeah, like you can gently grab balls. You can't really gently grab and twist balls.

00:57:41 Speaker_00
The twisting is an elevated form of aggression. I don't know. Like it's hard to say. Oh, I'm nailing it. That's not how I feel.

00:57:54 Speaker_00
But I do think that like that attitude of like, and I wrote about a lot about it in my book, like the idea that like my parents raised me to be brave and in some ways, maybe too brave, but the result has been like a relentlessness.

00:58:08 Speaker_00
and in the pursuit of the things that are important to me. And that's not the same as like, I'm winning.

00:58:12 Speaker_00
I don't really think about things that way, but it's just, if I wanna do something, that I do it, and I don't really worry too much about whether it's gonna go my way, not because I expect it to go my way, but because it doesn't matter if it goes my way, because it's the engagement that's most meaningful to me.

00:58:29 Speaker_00
It's the effort.

00:58:30 Speaker_03
I got it. So by engagement, you mean sort of the dogged persistence that you're developing.

00:58:36 Speaker_00
The engagement in your personal goals, like if I want to do something, whatever, I don't know, let's pick something really innocuous.

00:58:43 Speaker_00
Like if I want to hike every day for a month or if I want to start meditating, if I don't dial it, it's not as important to me as not looking back and saying to myself, ah, I should have done it. It's the doing for me that is the reward.

00:58:55 Speaker_00
And then sometimes things go my way and sometimes they don't. But the thing I find most upsetting is regret. Yeah, because that's something I have control over, in the sense of like, if you didn't do it, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

00:59:07 Speaker_03
Right, you can always attempt. You can't predetermine success.

00:59:13 Speaker_00
You can't predetermine the outcome, but you can predetermine the effort, because the effort is the only thing that you own. You can't own results. You can only own initiative.

00:59:23 Speaker_03
You mentioned your dad being a walk-it-off dad. I want to explore that a little bit. Do you remember any while you were still under his watch or not, early disappointments or self-inflicted wounds and how your dad responded or mistakes?

00:59:38 Speaker_00
This isn't exactly a good example of a disappointment, but it's a perfect example of his attitude. I was going to camp. I must have been about eight or nine. No, I'll say nine. I was going to a jujitsu camp

00:59:52 Speaker_00
This was still during the free range parenting era where you just got up in the morning and you left home and you came back later and that stuff was your responsibility.

00:59:58 Speaker_03
Did you say eight or nine and then jujitsu camp?

01:00:02 Speaker_00
Yeah, you know, I was I was really into martial arts when I was a kid.

01:00:04 Speaker_03
So it's making me think of the movie Hannah where this band of trains his daughter to be a super killer.

01:00:11 Speaker_00
I'm just wish I was that good. Okay, all right. That was not one of my strong stronger. But as I pointed out, it wasn't the result that was important. It was just the effort. So I would ride my bike to camp every day and ride it home.

01:00:23 Speaker_00
And it was a good ride. It's like a five mile ride to camp. And I fell one day coming down like a hill, you know, kind of, I don't know, you know, free. This was like, this was like no helmets. This was a long time ago. I'm very old.

01:00:35 Speaker_00
Like, you know, no helmets, just like willy nilly your backpack on and, you know, you're not signaling. And I fell and I hurt my arm very badly. And I can't remember, but I contacted my dad and he's like, I'm not going to come get you.

01:00:48 Speaker_00
I can't leave work. You have to get home on your own. So I rode my bike back from camp, you know, like another three, four miles and my arm was broken. It was definitely broken.

01:00:56 Speaker_00
I'd broken my arm and I got home and my dad was like, ah, your arm's not broken. I mean, you just need to stop complaining. You know, it's a sore. And the next day I woke up, it was like black and swollen and I had to like lift it off the pillow.

01:01:08 Speaker_00
And he finally took me to the doctor and it was absolutely like a compound fracture. The bone hadn't come through the skin, but it was a multiple fracture. I think at the time it felt cruel.

01:01:18 Speaker_00
But I think my dad's larger attitude was like, no one is coming to save you. You have to save yourself. You have to find a way every single day to save yourself.

01:01:27 Speaker_00
And as a result, I think that as an adult, I just don't spend a lot of time anguishing over what's been done to me. And I was fine. I did ride my bike home and my arm was broken, but I still got home on my bike.

01:01:38 Speaker_00
And then the next day I got a super dope cast.

01:01:42 Speaker_00
And I think we just raise like these, I mean, I know I sound like everybody's mom, but I just feel like we're curating young people's experiences so aggressively nowadays that they just don't have any way to discover things about themselves.

01:01:56 Speaker_00
They don't develop not just self-sufficiency, but like a curiosity about themselves and their abilities and what they can tolerate and what they can do if left alone, because they're just never left alone.

01:02:06 Speaker_00
I had a lot of time alone when I was a kid, and I still really like being alone as an adult.

01:02:13 Speaker_03
And also, it strikes me that if you're so protective of your child and your child's ego that you effectively disallow them to fail or engage with risk, that the delta, the difference between their actual competencies and abilities for self-preservation and their over-inflated sense of their capabilities is actually a huge disservice.

01:02:41 Speaker_00
Like you need to know what it feels like to fail. And then what comes next? Because what comes next is what did I learn? How can I adjust? How do I pivot? How do I move forward? And just most people don't develop those mental skills.

01:02:55 Speaker_00
They just they're crushed by failure. And it's just an unavoidable element of life. And, you know, there's so many people that I know who's out of real, I mean, you know, genuine love. Parents are like, I just don't want to see my kid in pain.

01:03:07 Speaker_00
But like, how are you going to, how do people move through the planet? How do people move through life without pain? That's, that's a false theory. It can't be done. It just cannot be done.

01:03:16 Speaker_00
And so people just become incapacitated the first minute they hit any kind of a speed bump in their lives, and they don't know how to navigate disappointment.

01:03:24 Speaker_00
Whereas I was just deeply disappointed throughout my childhood, so I know exactly what it feels like. I'm just like a next. I'm like, oh, that didn't go my way. Moving on.

01:03:33 Speaker_03
It makes me conjure in my mind the image of this increasing amplitude of pain consequence over your life from childhood to adulthood, where the consequences grow potentially greater and greater. Where in the beginning, like when you're a child,

01:03:48 Speaker_03
you're basically engaging with pain and I shouldn't say pain, but failure in many cases, not all cases, but many cases where you're, you're effectively in one of those like birthday party, blow up sumo suits. Do you know what I'm talking about?

01:04:00 Speaker_03
And it's like, so you can sort of engage with failure that way. And if you get knocked on your ass, there aren't really real consequences.

01:04:06 Speaker_03
Then you get to high school, college, and it's like, okay, you're out of the sumo suit, but you've got big kind of blow up boxing gloves on and huge piece of headgear.

01:04:16 Speaker_03
Then when you get out into some aspects of the real world, it's just a bare knuckle brawl. Yeah, exactly.

01:04:24 Speaker_03
So if you haven't had the chance to get whaled in the face with the sumo suit, you're not gonna be ready for The blow-up boxing gloves and the headgear and if you certainly if you don't get whacked in the face a few times doing that You're just gonna be crippled when you get out into the real world and get you know drop kicked in the face by someone who doesn't follow the same rules and crippled in that way that you know, and I know you've interacted with people like this in that way where if

01:04:49 Speaker_00
When something bad happens their whole monologue is like why me like why did this happen to me you don't understand what i'm going through it's like you're not special everybody is experiencing the same thing.

01:04:59 Speaker_00
Everybody's heart is being broken everybody isn't getting the job they want everybody's gonna sleep with the hot person they want everybody is experiencing the same. These same injuries, but you just don't know how to tolerate them.

01:05:09 Speaker_00
You are not special. That's not the same as saying you don't have the potential for being special. There's nothing anybody's doing now that hasn't already been done or that won't be done in the future.

01:05:18 Speaker_00
Those kinds of personalities drive me crazy because they're so stuck and boring.

01:05:27 Speaker_03
What did you think you were going to be when you grew up, when you were in high school or college?

01:05:36 Speaker_00
It's so interesting because I was like super academic and I think I thought I'd be an attorney. You know, I was like a big activist and I organized and marched and did all that stuff.

01:05:44 Speaker_00
And I was like in the, you know, outing club and I rock climbed and all that stuff. So I thought I was going to be like an environmental lawyer, either an environmental lawyer or an environmental engineer.

01:05:52 Speaker_00
I really wanted to go to a school that was like really grounded in a relationship to nature. So I was applying to like Marlboro College and Reed and Bard and these schools that were like out in the woods and

01:06:04 Speaker_00
I ended up going to Dartmouth, which is, you know, in New Hampshire and has this big land grant around it. And I thought I would be an environmental engineer. And I think I just took like the first prerequisite math course for engineering.

01:06:15 Speaker_00
I was like, yeah, okay, it's not just not going to be, this is not for me. I always love, I always love science, but I'm just a person of letters, I guess.

01:06:24 Speaker_00
I didn't have the appetite for it wasn't as glamorous as i thought i think when i took my first engineering i did i think i got to the math class like define like i applied myself and i got a good grade and then i went to my like you know an introduction to engineering three,

01:06:36 Speaker_00
And it was about building a fecal matter treatment plant, and I was like, this isn't feeling like hugging trees at all, man. We're just talking about poop all day. I lost my appetite for that really quickly.

01:06:52 Speaker_03
So then what? Did you just have this great existential angst, or did you sort of shift to something else immediately following that?

01:07:01 Speaker_00
I was always doing kind of like performing things on the side. Like I went to a high school that had a performing arts kind of magnet or like a pocket school within the regular school called the J.U.D. McAteer School of the Arts.

01:07:14 Speaker_00
So I was kind of doing my regular classwork and then doing like improv and stuff and sketch on the side. And then I went to Dartmouth and I was

01:07:20 Speaker_00
doing some of the same stuff like, you know, I was in one of those infernal Ivy League acapella groups that have been popularized since then by shows like Glee. So I was always kind of doing that as a hobby because it just never felt like a real job.

01:07:31 Speaker_00
And I graduated and I was living in San Francisco and I was working for a conservation organization. I got like my dream job.

01:07:37 Speaker_00
It was a group that purchased blighted urban land and turned it into parks and underserved neighborhoods that didn't have any outdoor space for kids to play and

01:07:46 Speaker_00
You know, it was like the mission was great because it wasn't just kind of conservation of conservation's sake. It was like conservation focused on engaging underserved communities, and it was the grooviest, and I was just miserable.

01:07:57 Speaker_00
And I just... Why were you miserable? I didn't know. It was a really good question. You know, it was like, why, if I have my dream job in the city of my birth, why am I so unhappy?

01:08:08 Speaker_00
And I just did a lot of soul searching, and I realized it was because I, for the first time in my life, I wasn't doing anything creative. I wasn't performing. And so I'm a problem solver. I'm a matrix builder.

01:08:18 Speaker_00
I was like, well, how can I solve this problem right now? And I looked at all the ways that I could get on stage and stand-up comedy was the only thing I didn't need to know anyone for, have an agent or a band or connections.

01:08:31 Speaker_00
I could just do stand-up right away. And so I started studying and watching the precursor to Comedy Central, which was this network called Ha. a very short-lived network, taking notes.

01:08:42 Speaker_00
And then, you know, after a while, just kind of screwed up the courage to go and do an open mic. And then that was it was just transformational. I was like, oh, this is what I want to do with my life.

01:08:51 Speaker_03
Was the thinking immediately on how to turn performance into a career, or did you expect that you would continue doing your job and doing stand-up on the side?

01:09:03 Speaker_03
Was it a career move from when you first built The Matrix and decided on stand-up, or was it, you know what, this is gonna be great, I'll continue doing this job and I'll scratch my creative performance itch on the weekends with open mics?

01:09:17 Speaker_00
It's so funny because I don't think I even realized that stand-up comedy was a job. I was like a really bookish kid. A lot of guys will have these stories about...

01:09:27 Speaker_00
how they grew up, you know, with Red Fox, you know, on vinyl that they listened to hundreds of times or following Letty Bruce or, you know, these idols or Bill Hicks. I just, I didn't, I remember seeing Live on the Sunset Strip when I was a kid.

01:09:39 Speaker_00
I just thought Richard Pryor was an alien. Like, you know what I mean? Like a magical person who came down to do this thing. It just, the idea that that was like a vocation was just not in my head.

01:09:51 Speaker_00
So, I remember seeing stand-up at Dartmouth when I was like a sophomore and coming out of a show and being like, do people know that you can go and have this feeling for an hour? This is insanity.

01:10:02 Speaker_00
I just remember everything hurt from laughing, my face and my stomach. I just never experienced live comedy before. It didn't dovetail into a job at first. It was just something I was going to do for fun. I kept my day job 100%. I kept it for a long time.

01:10:16 Speaker_00
I also didn't want to be one of these miserable, sweating stand-ups who are gripping their inky notebook and sleeping on their buddy's couch. I was in a relationship and I had a job that paid great and I could make flyers for my shows at work.

01:10:31 Speaker_00
I was embezzling copy paper and push pins as aggressively as I could. So I was and I still am of the opinion that you should absolutely keep your day job, which I know is not the most popular.

01:10:42 Speaker_03
I'm of the same opinion. Absolutely.

01:10:44 Speaker_00
I think it gives you a freedom. People think it traps them, but I think it gives you this incredible freedom to just pursue art for art's sake and let a job pay for it and do it for so long that everything you do is just for joy.

01:10:55 Speaker_00
And it changes the way that you approach your art.

01:10:58 Speaker_00
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 morning and I work until four and then I jump in the car and I drive two hours to Sacramento to do a set and I come back at midnight and I do it all over again.

01:11:08 Speaker_00
But I could do that. And then it was just purely about the experience of performing and not about whether I was getting paid or not. So I did that for a long time before I finally quit my job.

01:11:16 Speaker_03
Now, for those people who don't know the geography of Northern California, where I lived for 17 years, and coincidentally, the high school that you went to, is that now the Ruth Asawa School on O'Shaughnessy?

01:11:30 Speaker_00
It's on O'Shaughnessy. They're at the nexus of Twin Peaks slash Glen Park Canyon. Exactly.

01:11:36 Speaker_03
So I literally lived for five or six years about a quarter mile from that school. It's amazing. It's right there.

01:11:44 Speaker_00
It's not a big city, even though I think when you live there, it feels like it's an intimate place.

01:11:49 Speaker_03
It's an intimate place. And given the density of San Francisco and the fact that I don't know if people would consider it a comedy town, but there's certainly clubs and so on.

01:12:00 Speaker_00
It's a comedy town.

01:12:01 Speaker_03
Why would you go all the way to Sacramento? Sacramento is not, for those people who don't know the area, it's not like a 10-minute drive away from San Francisco.

01:12:09 Speaker_00
It's far. San Francisco's always had a reputation for being a comedy town. The big comedy towns in the United States, from comedians' perspectives, are San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York. L.A. is a company town, but it's not a comedy town.

01:12:25 Speaker_00
And San Francisco was always one of those places that people saw as like a real crucible for kind of original comedy. You know, it was like where the alt comedy movement happened.

01:12:34 Speaker_00
And, you know, where Marc Maron and Janine Garofalo and these kind of alternative comics Brian Poussin came out of. And it was a comedy town. But when I started doing comedy, it was like the beginning of the contraction of the comedy economy.

01:12:48 Speaker_00
So there was a period of time when there were just hundreds of comedy clubs everywhere, and you could make a living doing stand-up. You could kind of go from place to place, and you could get a gig, and you could get paid.

01:12:58 Speaker_00
I started doing stand-up at the beginning of the end of the comedy bubble. So when I started doing stand-up, The club community was contracting and some of the big clubs in San Francisco were closing.

01:13:07 Speaker_00
I think at one point there were maybe like five or six active clubs. And then by the time I was working consistently, there were only two. And there was just a lot of competition for stage time. And to get good at comedy, you can't just do it like

01:13:19 Speaker_00
once a weekend. You need to be on stage every night. It's like being a high diver. You know what? It's literally like Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours. And you're not going to get 10,000 hours of stand-up hanging out in San Francisco.

01:13:31 Speaker_00
You have to go everywhere and take every single opportunity to be on stage that you can get.

01:13:36 Speaker_00
So, I would drive to Sacramento, I would drive to Fresno, I would do these terrible bar shows in Menlo Park and, oh God, I don't even remember some of the places, Cupertino and Martinez.

01:13:47 Speaker_00
I mean, you would just go anywhere that you could get six minutes on stage. And there were a hundred other people trying to get those same six minutes, so it was really competitive. The culture, I think, was pretty supportive.

01:13:57 Speaker_00
Communities were supportive of each other, but there just wasn't enough stage time, so you would just do anything and go anywhere to get it.

01:14:04 Speaker_03
ask about this comedy contraction. We won't spend too much time on this because I don't want to take us completely off the reservation, but what happened? I mean, it was like Beanie Babies. People were like, really? The Beanie Babies?

01:14:14 Speaker_03
It's like, no, comedy isn't cool anymore. And then all the clubs closed? Was it just a macroeconomic downturn?

01:14:21 Speaker_00
I mean, what happened? I think it was three factors. One factor was just there was just a glut. Live comedy, in some ways in the 70s and 80s, was kind of a new thing. And it's not like people hadn't been doing stand-up prior to that. But

01:14:34 Speaker_00
The proliferation of stand-up comedians in the culture really started happening at that time. And what that was fueled by, I honestly don't know. Like, why were there so many more comics doing stand-up in the 70s and 80s? Maybe because

01:14:47 Speaker_00
that was the period where there were these superstar comics that were, I'm trying to think of who would have been really popular besides like Bill Hicks. And I can see that though. Maybe it's analogous to like celebrity chefs in the last 15 years.

01:14:59 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly. And, and part of the reason why there are so many more celebrity chefs is because there started to be celebrity chefs on television. Right? So if you think about that in terms of comedy, what you see is, Oh, that's a job.

01:15:10 Speaker_00
I can make money at that. Whereas people weren't really encountering live comedy if they didn't go to a live comedy show.

01:15:16 Speaker_00
So you start to see these guys on TV and you think, and honestly when HA, the precursor to Comedy Central started, they needed comics and they needed opportunities, they needed clubs, they needed content. It was a 24-hour network.

01:15:32 Speaker_00
So there were some good comedians on that station and there were some really, some really shitty ones. Really bad. And so a lot of people watching probably thought, well, I can do that.

01:15:45 Speaker_00
You know, I also think about guys like, you know, Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay. There was kind of like a golden era in that time. And we were seeing all those people on TV. Then we were seeing a lot of people that were like really subpar.

01:15:54 Speaker_00
And a lot of people were thinking, well, if that guy can write, you know, five crappy minutes about an airplane, I can. Then you couple that with this explosion in comedy clubs, which were a relatively new phenomenon. I mean,

01:16:05 Speaker_00
When Joan Rivers was doing stand-up, she was doing stand-up in strip clubs. There were very few comedy clubs, and comedy was kind of a part of a vaudeville approach.

01:16:13 Speaker_00
So you'd hire a singer and then you'd hire a comic, but there weren't places dedicated to comedy. So these comedy clubs opened. It was a really easy way to make money because comics weren't that expensive. And, you know, you had a two drink minimum.

01:16:27 Speaker_00
People would come in, they would get wasted. You have huge margins on your booze. So all these comedy clubs started proliferating. And then there was just peak clubs.

01:16:34 Speaker_03
Saturation.

01:16:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, it became unsustainable. So they started to contract because of market saturation. The economy started to contract in the 80s. And people could watch comedy on TV.

01:16:47 Speaker_00
The proliferation of comedy on television affected people going out to see it in a club. So there were like kind of those three factors all kind of intersecting. And when it happened, it was really aggressive.

01:17:00 Speaker_00
Like I said, I think there were maybe like five or six comedy clubs in San Francisco when I was in high school. And by the time I was doing stand-up in my 20s, there were two. And you know, and they were attracting like high-end peak talent.

01:17:10 Speaker_00
So for example, this club's still there. It's called the Punchline. Punchline.

01:17:14 Speaker_03
I've been there a few times.

01:17:16 Speaker_00
There was the Punchline and there was Cobbs, and those are still the only two clubs, and maybe there's some minor clubs that have sprung up since then.

01:17:22 Speaker_00
But they would book these big headliners, so the only time you could go up if you were an amateur, like a young comic, was on a Sunday or a Wednesday. And there'd be 20 other guys trying to get on as well, and it would be wildly competitive.

01:17:35 Speaker_00
And you wouldn't be getting paid. And then you'd be super anxious because you'd be hoping, OK, I need to go up and I need to destroy it because I want this club owner to hire me again. So I can't work out.

01:17:46 Speaker_00
I can't fail in front of this guy because he won't see this. You know, when you watch like an Olympic skater. during practice and they're falling. That's what practice is for. Practice is for finding your weak spots and reinforcing them.

01:18:00 Speaker_00
But when you're up in front of a comedy club owner and it's been six months that you've been trying to get out of this club and you finally get five minutes, it's got to be a monster five minutes. There was just no way to improve. You can't improve.

01:18:11 Speaker_03
I was going to say, how do you get in your rough drafts then? How do you work on the material?

01:18:15 Speaker_00
Drive to Martina's.

01:18:18 Speaker_03
Oh, I see, I see. So you'd work out the kinks with the crew at the such and such casino in God knows where, Turlock.

01:18:28 Speaker_00
Foobars or Rooster Teeth Feathers or one of these other places. Yeah. It's different than being an author or an athlete or even a musician because there's an autonomy to comedy, absolutely, but you need other people.

01:18:43 Speaker_00
You can't do it you can't just sit around your place practicing you know what i mean like with music you know if you know if you're sharp or flat you know if you hit all the notes you know if the tempos right but with comedy the only way it works is in front of an audience.

01:18:56 Speaker_00
And so you're very dependent on stage time, and it's everything when you're a young comic is stage time.

01:19:01 Speaker_03
Do you remember your early content? What was your approach early on?

01:19:05 Speaker_03
Do you remember the first, and maybe a different way to approach this, you could answer it however you like, do you remember the first time that you bombed, or what is your first memory that comes to mind of bombing?

01:19:17 Speaker_00
Oh God, I bombed so many times. It's just, it all seeps together into an inky blackness. Any comic who tells you they've never bombed is lying. And again, the only way to get funny is to bomb. No one ever gets funnier after they kill.

01:19:30 Speaker_00
You know, they just walk, and they're like, follow that, bitches, and they drop the mic, you know what I mean? They go off and do shots with their friends. I mean, you really need to bomb and bomb hard to get funny.

01:19:38 Speaker_00
I remember doing this one show, oh God, so there was an open mic in a laundromat south of Market, Around the police station there. So what maybe like, you know, 8th and mission or something like that for people in San Francisco.

01:19:52 Speaker_00
I think it was called brainwash. I think the place was called brainwash and they would have this open mic in the back of this laundromat.

01:19:59 Speaker_00
And comics know, you know, with these open mics, with these local open mics, that typically there are no actual audience members in the audience. It is just a room full of comedians waiting for you to be done so that they can try out their material.

01:20:11 Speaker_00
All of them looking at their notebooks, not listening, not laughing. And you're just kind of trying to gut it out and pause where you think the laughter might occur if you were in front of actual human beings.

01:20:20 Speaker_00
And I just did a set where I just, I did not get one laugh. I remember not even like a cursory titter, and I remember just a wall of silence. Even thinking about it right now, it's so funny to me.

01:20:37 Speaker_00
I talked to a girlfriend afterwards, I was like, oh my God, I couldn't even call that a bad set. I don't know what that was, but it was so funny to me. that I didn't get a laugh.

01:20:45 Speaker_00
There was this bulletproofness that I got from that set that just made me impervious to anything ever going wrong in my life or career again.

01:20:55 Speaker_00
Even when I'm talking about it now, there's a huge smile on my face because it was so funny how little I was able to elicit out of that audience.

01:21:03 Speaker_03
It just made me so mentally strong. Was that the immediate response that you had? Or were you in the middle of the set when you're in the back of your mind thinking, wow, no one is laughing? Was it the reverse of the five stages of grief?

01:21:20 Speaker_03
Or did you just go straight to like, yeah, motherfuckers, this is great.

01:21:24 Speaker_00
Just full acceptance.

01:21:25 Speaker_03
This is going to make a great story however many years from now on Tim Ferriss' podcast.

01:21:29 Speaker_00
Well, one thing comedians love is agony. I mean, we dine out on it as definitely like our stock and trade. So a comedian very quickly transitions from, oh my God, this is the worst night of my life to, oh my God, this is going to make a great story.

01:21:41 Speaker_00
That happens almost instantaneously. So we have a little bit of a, we have some armor in that regard because we could wake up like naked and shivering on the side of the road with like no money and no phone and not speak the local language.

01:21:52 Speaker_00
And you'd be thinking, okay, if I live, this is going to make a killer story. So I think in the moment, I just thought, I had watched a couple other people go up and not do very well either. I was prepared for it not going my way.

01:22:04 Speaker_00
And I think also there's a discipline to comedy that if you're not a comedian, you can't understand, which is that you've got to get up and do your set. You don't get to tap out. Like tapping out is true failure.

01:22:15 Speaker_00
If you went up and you had a bad set, well, you just need to write new jokes. But if you go up and you give up, that's true failure for a comedian. There are some really famous examples of this online. I don't know if you know the comedian Bill Burr.

01:22:26 Speaker_03
I interviewed Bill Burr about a year and a half ago, and I played the video, which he had never seen, or he claimed he had never seen.

01:22:34 Speaker_00
He still has some trauma.

01:22:36 Speaker_03
For people who don't know the story, can you please describe it? It's amazing.

01:22:43 Speaker_00
Right? It's insane. So he was doing one of those big like radio, you know, those radio station concerts, like the jingle ball or whatever. And I don't remember it was called the weenie roast. I think it was the weenie roast.

01:22:53 Speaker_00
So it's one of the shows that like some local stage, you know, K rock, 97 point rock, K rock, you know, like one of those shows. And it's, I don't know, Weezer's too cool of a band. It would be like Nickelback and you know,

01:23:03 Speaker_00
some other band that sounds like Nickelback and then an opening band you never heard of. Anyway, I don't know why people still do this, but you know, if you're a comic and someone offers you money, you take it.

01:23:11 Speaker_00
So they would hire a comic to kind of warm up the crowd, you know, early in the day. And no one pays to see Nickelback and then wants to sit through 15 minutes of standup. You know, everyone's drunk and on drugs. They're not even facing forward.

01:23:23 Speaker_00
You know what I mean? It's just like the worst, like there's nothing, the only thing worse than performing in front of an outdoor audience is performing in front of people who are eating.

01:23:32 Speaker_03
This was like a tailgate at 11 a.m. or 1 p.m. or something.

01:23:37 Speaker_00
Yeah. Everybody busted out their marijuana brownie recipe for the year. They're all completely looped. One of their eyes is completely dilated and the other one is falling out of their head. Nobody cares about your jokes about your mom and your family.

01:23:50 Speaker_00
So they could not muster compassion if they tried. So he starts doing stand up and he just immediately starts getting booed. And it's just this tidal wave of disdain. And he knows if he doesn't finish, he will not get paid.

01:24:08 Speaker_00
But it's not like, it's like silence you could tolerate, right? But like people are screaming at him to get off stage.

01:24:15 Speaker_00
And he, he makes it very clear to the audience, you have to watch it because I'll never be able to do it justice, but he makes it very clear to the audience that he is not leaving the stage until he does his 10 minutes, that he does not care how they feel about him.

01:24:26 Speaker_00
And he's counting down the minutes. Yeah, every minute he's like, nine minute you fucking fucks. He says something really outrageous like, I hope your mother gets cancer in the center of her asshole. Seven minutes! It's just a demonstration of tenacity.

01:24:45 Speaker_00
Later, you know, he was embarrassed by it. But every comedian understands this kind of blood battle that you sometimes have with an audience where they're not going to scare you and they're not going to drive you away.

01:24:56 Speaker_00
You're going to deliver the material that you were hired to deliver. You're going to make your money and then you're going to go off and spend it on light beer and chicken wings, but no one is, you will not be deterred.

01:25:06 Speaker_00
So I think because you understand that as a comedian very early on in your career, no matter what happens on stage, I will not be moved. So I just, I had material to do and I did it.

01:25:15 Speaker_00
And I think, I remember thinking almost immediately, well, okay, I'm not going to get any laughs.

01:25:19 Speaker_00
I'm just going to kind of like listen to this set and see what it feels like, see what the words feel like, see what might play in front of actual people. But it started to get really delicious.

01:25:27 Speaker_00
And I think if you watch the Bill Burr video, you'll also see that he starts to really enjoy it. It starts to be like this savory masochism towards the end where He's so powerful in his lack of caring.

01:25:39 Speaker_00
You watch it and it is to be studied because he goes from anguish to rage to this delightful detachment by the end of the set. I've seen some other guys do similar stuff and it's always really fun to watch.

01:25:51 Speaker_03
So a couple of things that I want to use as teasers for people who should watch this video. I'm almost 100% positive it was in Philadelphia.

01:25:59 Speaker_00
Philadelphia, I think that's right. Either that or Jersey.

01:26:02 Speaker_03
Yeah, I think it was Philadelphia because he started ridiculing Rocky. And he said, your hero is a fictional person, and just tearing into them.

01:26:11 Speaker_03
And he basically, for half of his set, just decided to abandon his material and just attack these people in the town. Which, by the way, is a no-no generally. Yeah, which is a no-no generally.

01:26:23 Speaker_00
Especially if people hate you. I mean, there are these unwritten rules of comedy. And one of them is, if some of the people in the audience hate you, don't turn all of them against you.

01:26:30 Speaker_00
This is just a sidebar, but don't forget what you were going to say. There's another very famous video

01:26:34 Speaker_00
Very famous and it happened at the punchline in San Francisco where there's a guy playing music guitar comic and a guy's heckling him It's kind of just combative back and forth but nothing too extreme, but then the guy gets up and he comes towards the stage Whatever to defend himself or the girlies with something like that and the guy just hauls off and hits him in the head with a guitar

01:26:56 Speaker_03
Sorry, sorry. Not funny. It's tragic, but Jesus Christ.

01:27:00 Speaker_00
Everybody live. But what happens is up until that beat, the whole audience has been on the comedian side against this guy. It is a hairpin turn from them being like, yeah, shut up.

01:27:11 Speaker_00
You know, the comics like, hey, you know, people can't enjoy the show because you're talking, keep it down.

01:27:15 Speaker_00
And then he hits this guy and the whole audience just turns on him just like instantaneous, like Frankenstein's monster mob, just the pitchforks come flying out. And so one of the unwritten rules of comedy is that

01:27:26 Speaker_00
you know, you just don't, you want to try to at all costs avoid turning everybody against you, which, so Bill broke a bunch of rules, but he just, he never gave up, you know, which I think it becomes this, you know, it's like the Rudy moment at the end of the movie, like, man, that sucked, but you sure sucked in there.

01:27:39 Speaker_00
And.

01:27:41 Speaker_03
He got a standing, well, I mean, everyone was already standing, but he got massive applause from the audience at the end, which is just, because they're just like, what the fuck?

01:27:51 Speaker_03
Like, it didn't even fit into like any mental charistic of comedy that they could expect.

01:27:57 Speaker_00
It was straight prison yard dynamics, right? It's the line from Out of Sight, right? Just like the yard, nobody backing down. Nobody's backing down.

01:28:09 Speaker_00
And he just, I think there was like a thousand of them to one of her, probably like 10,000 of them to one of him. And he just did not back down. He got the slowest back clap at the end of the show.

01:28:19 Speaker_03
Oh my God. So I wasn't going to go to heckling, but why not, since we're already here. Do you have any memorable heckling stories? Did you recall the first time you got heckled?

01:28:29 Speaker_00
I started doing stand-up like 25 years ago. So at this point, like all the sets have just kind of blended. And heckling can be lots of different things. It doesn't always have to be like the conventional kind of you suck heckle.

01:28:44 Speaker_00
One time where this woman, and this kind of dovetails perfectly with the old like don't turn the audience against you, where this woman was talking

01:28:51 Speaker_00
To me, she was sitting in the front row and she was talking to me the entire show, just loud enough that I could hear her, but not really loud enough so the audience could hear her except for the people right around her. And it was driving me crazy.

01:29:04 Speaker_03
That's awful.

01:29:05 Speaker_00
It was like a bee in my ear. And as a result, I just seemed insane. You know what I mean? stopping to yell at this person that no one could hear. It was a very effective echo, because she just completely derailed my show.

01:29:19 Speaker_00
And I just seemed like a dick, because I was yelling, shut up, lady. But no one could hear what she was saying. I was like, what's wrong? She's a nice lady in the front, trying to enjoy the night. I remember that really went off the rails last night.

01:29:29 Speaker_00
And I generally have a rule with hecklers that unless they're really disruptive to the entire room, I just never address them. Because what you do is, again, you derailed a show for 500 or 1,000 people to deal with one person.

01:29:39 Speaker_00
And everyone's never going to really understand what's going on unless that person's so loud that they've affected everybody else's enjoyment of the night.

01:29:45 Speaker_00
But sometimes the affectionate hecklers are the worst because typically hecklers just want to be a part of the show. And so, you know, they say something, you slam them a little bit, they shut up because they think they're helping you out.

01:29:56 Speaker_00
The famous line is they'll come up and be like, hey, you like how I helped you out? I'm like, buddy, I came with jokes. I don't need this. I don't have a box jumper in my act. I showed up ready to go.

01:30:07 Speaker_00
But when people are affectionate, you can't insult them. They're the most unmanageable kind of people. Now, by affectionate, you mean someone's like, I love you. I love you. I love you.

01:30:16 Speaker_00
I had this one girl at one show in San Francisco, just so drunk, I'm just cross-eyed, and for the 90 minutes I was on stage, just, I love you, I love you so much, I love you, and I was just like, lady, all you are doing is making me want to hit you in the head with this microphone stand.

01:30:31 Speaker_00
Your affection is not welcome here, and everybody else is like staring at this woman, but she, this is a genuine expression of emotion for this person that is destroying my joy completely. So I really have a habit of just not talking to hecklers.

01:30:45 Speaker_00
What did you do in that case?

01:30:46 Speaker_03
Did you ignore her?

01:30:47 Speaker_00
I think that I kept saying, like, thank you. That's super sweet. Shut the fuck up. Like, you know, clearly you weren't hugged enough as a child. I mean, I just eventually got mean because it was just like, I couldn't get this woman to stop talking.

01:31:01 Speaker_00
And I think the people around her got embarrassed. And they eventually kind of shut her up, which was nice. And I'm trying to think of any other really good hecklers that, oh, I had one guy.

01:31:12 Speaker_00
It's a mental discipline too, because, you know, like, again, like it's your show, you have the microphone, you're in control. You know, I think the audience thinks they're in control, but they're not. I mean, the Bilbo scenario is a perfect example.

01:31:22 Speaker_00
The person with the microphone has all the power. As long as they cannot be moved, they will eventually win. But I had this one guy who was sitting really close to the stage, it was a group of 12 people, and they were all laughing their asses off.

01:31:34 Speaker_00
And then he was just, arms crossed, just looked like he had just eaten a big scoop of fecal matter. And he was all I could see, you know what I mean? The whole audience had disappeared and it was just straight vignette on this guy's sourpuss face.

01:31:47 Speaker_00
And it was just wrecking my whole night. And I finally said, if you don't want to be here, just fucking go, man. I'll give you your money back. I cannot look at your face for one more minute. And I meant it. It wasn't even a joke.

01:32:01 Speaker_00
I was just like, get out and you are harshing my mellow so hard. And he left. I didn't feel bad about it. And then I went on with the show and his girlfriend goes, he had a bad day. I was like, oh, clearly.

01:32:13 Speaker_00
But what was great was nobody else at the table wanted to leave. They were like, you know, good riddance to bad rubbish. And he, you know, he went on and the rest of the people enjoyed their night. So, but again, that was me.

01:32:20 Speaker_00
That was my, you know, I should have been disciplined enough not to be distracted by, you know, old sourpuss, but. I'm only human, you know what I mean? If the Grinch is sitting in the front row, something must be done.

01:32:31 Speaker_03
When you were just getting started, how did you get better at comedy? And what I mean by that is, you're very smart. Like you mentioned, Matrix capable. Did you do any type of postgame analysis? Did you watch video of yourself?

01:32:46 Speaker_03
Did you watch video of other comics? How did you hone your craft? Or maybe a better question is, what helped the most in honing your craft?

01:32:54 Speaker_00
You know, it's interesting, like, I think that there's a definite math to comedy, and then there's also a secondary ineffability. I guess what I mean is, like, you can learn how to be a better comic, but you can't learn how to be a comic.

01:33:09 Speaker_00
Or, even in a different way, I really wanted to be an engineer, and I could have really suffered and struggled through, like, the elevated math that I would need to become an engineer, but it would never be effortless for me.

01:33:23 Speaker_00
And I think with comedy, there are people who very workmanlike can learn how to do comedy. And then there's some people who are just naturally comedic and they still have to work to be better at it.

01:33:31 Speaker_00
You know, Usain Bolt still has to train, even though he was born with more fast switch muscles than everybody else. He still has to train to become a champion. So I feel like with comedy, you know, people can be the class clown.

01:33:41 Speaker_00
They can be that guy's naturally funny. There's still a methodology and there's still a mathematics to becoming a comic. And then at the same time, if they have this,

01:33:51 Speaker_00
this ephemeral, ineffable kind of understanding of the math of comedy, they're going to be able to do something magical with those skills.

01:34:00 Speaker_00
So, for me, I don't know that I thought I was a funny kid, but I was an observer, and I was really nerdy and a little bit of a social pariah, so storytelling became a way to make friends, you know what I mean? Like, to, like, ingratiate myself.

01:34:13 Speaker_00
I would kind of, like, try to talk my way into situations. if I was in a social situation, talk really fast to try to keep myself engaging and not be rejected.

01:34:22 Speaker_00
So that was what I brought to it was like that combination of being an outsider and an observer and then using those skills to try to kind of connect with people. But with comedy, I never took any classes. I never read any books.

01:34:33 Speaker_00
There's definitely people who can say, oh, you know, there's a total methodology to comedy. It's, you know, the rule of threes and, you know, stretching reality to the point of breaking, but not past it.

01:34:41 Speaker_00
I mean, there are, you know, some specific kind of rules.

01:34:43 Speaker_03
What's the rule of threes?

01:34:45 Speaker_00
I probably won't even be able to articulate it properly. It's just that if you're going to do a series of jokes or a series of builds to a punchline, it needs to be three.

01:34:52 Speaker_04
I get it.

01:34:53 Speaker_00
I get it. Also, if you're going to do any kind of a diversion, if you're going to lead people in one direction and then snap around to a different kind of absurdist result, you can't do that in two. The pace of it has to be three.

01:35:06 Speaker_03
I see.

01:35:07 Speaker_00
Then past three, you're starting to draw things out too long, but two doesn't give people enough

01:35:12 Speaker_00
About all the to a false sense of security before you kind of pull the rug out from under them as soon as you start explaining that the math of comedy like that makes any sense like it's those two things you know someone is really gifted at physics.

01:35:24 Speaker_00
They know that there are rules, but still they see things that other people can't see. They see the world as numbers and data and the rest of us are just like table, chair, water, sex.

01:35:35 Speaker_00
So I guess the way that I did it was that I'm also really an undisciplined comedian. And what I mean is like,

01:35:44 Speaker_00
Like there's a documentary about Gary Shandling right now, which I haven't watched, but I'm sure that this is in there because he was very famous for being a really disciplined writer. Like he would get up and he would write every single day.

01:35:53 Speaker_00
And sometimes it would be pages and pages of material without fail. Other comics were like, hey, let's get a beer and be like, no, I have to write.

01:35:58 Speaker_00
And every day he would write on this like legal, this is probably true and apocryphal at the same time, on this like legal, I knew about this tiny handwriting and he would just write and write and write and write. I do not do that.

01:36:08 Speaker_00
I've never worked that way. I just get on stage. I try a bunch of stuff. I keep what works. I know what works. I already know right away what works. I'll run off stage. I'll write down the things that I knew hit.

01:36:18 Speaker_00
I'll write down the things I know didn't hit, and then I'll go back and try it again, dropping the stuff that wasn't good and putting new stuff in.

01:36:25 Speaker_00
I record my sets, but I cannot listen to my own voice, so I have hours and hours of material on tape that I just have never listened to. So I don't know why I still engage in that behavior when it's clearly not useful to me.

01:36:40 Speaker_00
I think the more you do it, the more you intuitively understand, oh, this is a rich area, people are connecting with this, this other stuff. There's also something you learn as you move through comedy, which is it's not just important to get a laugh.

01:36:51 Speaker_00
Like, does this material say something specific and personal about me? Because when you're a baby comic, every joke is meaningful to you because you only have like eight jokes, right? And so even if they're stupid or juvenile or unsophisticated or

01:37:06 Speaker_00
or valueless or coreless, you'll still do them because that's all you have. And then as you get older, you start to think, okay, like, I want to have a body of work here. Does this hang together? Does it have a strong point of view?

01:37:16 Speaker_00
Does it have an identity? And then those other jokes start to fall away. And then the material really becomes about trying to tell some kind of a story about yourself and the way you perceive the world. And then that's how you shape it.

01:37:25 Speaker_00
And so sometimes things that are really funny go away. Things that are less funny stay because they're more impactful. Does that make sense?

01:37:31 Speaker_03
Yeah, it does make sense. Absolutely. I think that's true for musicians. I think it's true for many different artists, writers to probably for writers.

01:37:39 Speaker_00
It's like, I'm going to find a space that's, that really says something about like my accumulated understanding and knowledge of the world.

01:37:48 Speaker_00
And it's not just enough to say something like I need to say something that's uniquely mine, something you can only do by being prolific because you need to be able to let things go. in order to figure out what should stay.

01:37:59 Speaker_03
Definitely. I mean, there's a certain volume to it, thinking of it almost as a funnel.

01:38:05 Speaker_03
I think and I certainly hope for the sake of our, not to sound like an old man, but I guess that's what I'm turning into, for the sake of our society in general, I would hope just seeing the number of hatchet jobs and the amount of yellow journalism and

01:38:20 Speaker_03
click baiting with pieces that have not been fact checked and so on, and take down pieces of folks who are otherwise doing actually a lot of good in the world, but people feeling no compunction about running pieces that get a lot of clicks, because that's the only metric they're focused on, at some point go from, what can I write that will get the most clicks to

01:38:46 Speaker_03
What can I write that I will be proud of that may or may not? And I think you can figure out a way to make it a non-binary decision.

01:38:54 Speaker_03
In other words, you can figure out something you can be proud of that is simultaneously likely to find some type of sizable audience.

01:39:02 Speaker_03
I think in the beginning, there's a temptation, particularly if you have quit your job and you're like, where's my next rent check coming from? How can I appeal to the widest number of people possible?

01:39:13 Speaker_03
And that's a very precarious position or mindset to put yourself into if you're hoping to do anything creatively evergreen, right?

01:39:23 Speaker_00
And also like it's interesting. Like when I went to school, we had the, you know, the honor system and you were just expected to hold yourself to a high standard because that was what was right. It's what you did. You know what I mean? You just,

01:39:37 Speaker_00
you were going to be called upon to stand behind your work. And so you tried to work very hard to make sure that you could defend it. I don't think that it's like we're any less ethical than we've ever been.

01:39:45 Speaker_00
It's just, like you said, our metrics have changed. And I think that people value fame for fame's sake rather than for the foundational reasons that people become famous. And I think that's the problem. And I don't think it just exists in journalism.

01:39:58 Speaker_00
I think that people value infamy. They can't distinguish between fame and infamy. And, you know, with a 24-hour news cycle, a bright burst is as meaningful as a slow burn.

01:40:09 Speaker_00
I actually don't really know what we do or what should be done or what should happen to counteract that, other than people start to maybe get hip to it and start rejecting baseless journalism. And let me take that back.

01:40:22 Speaker_00
I find it very easy to distinguish between things that seem like they've been thoroughly vetted and things that are bullshit. But I think that people are working very hard to make it harder for the rest of us to distinguish between the two.

01:40:32 Speaker_00
So there are, you know, without me sounding like a crazy person, there are nefarious forces at work trying to make it very hard for us to figure out what's real and what's not real.

01:40:40 Speaker_00
And I think we have to start to raise people who are just more critical thinkers, but it's hard to be a critical thinker when you're just scrolling through your Instagram feed looking at like butts and cupcakes all day long.

01:40:51 Speaker_03
Have you been watching my feet? Are you looking over my shoulder? Are you one of the nefarious forces?

01:40:59 Speaker_00
I'm following you, and I know what you're into. I see what you're into, Tim. Oh, Jesus. Oh, God.

01:41:03 Speaker_03
Oh, God. You know, I'll admit, there was a day And you would think, supposedly being a tech investor and all this stuff for 10 years, that I would figure this out.

01:41:13 Speaker_03
There was a day when I was scrolling through cupcakes and thongs and I looked up at my profile and I was like, wait a minute, people can see what I follow?

01:41:26 Speaker_03
And I was like, oh fuck You know, fortunately I've systematically Dismantled and deliberately tarnished any semblance of any reputation. I might have very deliberately so that I Don't feel I have any

01:41:47 Speaker_03
you know, Stepford Wives polished persona to preserve, right? It's like, that's so good.

01:41:55 Speaker_00
And that's so interesting to me. And it's different than just being a slob. What you're saying is I refuse to create a box within which I will be kept by others. I think that comes also from a curiosity about the world.

01:42:07 Speaker_00
I actually think that like people are trying to remain perfect all the time, are fear-driven. That's not a position of strength.

01:42:13 Speaker_00
People think they're maintaining a position of strength when they're trying to maintain an appearance of perfection, but that is, by its very nature, a posture of fear, which is, I cannot be seen to have imperfections, I cannot be seen to have flaws, there can be no chinks in my armor, and I'm terrified of being judged.

01:42:28 Speaker_00
But there is something very liberating, and I think it comes from age as well, and from experience. I don't mean experience like a resume, but just having experiences

01:42:38 Speaker_00
to realize how little you know and how the only way to learn is to constantly be like skinning your knees and that that doesn't go away.

01:42:47 Speaker_00
Like the older you get, the more you know that you know very little and that you cannot learn if you are constantly trying to maintain a posture of perfection. That's why I'm a total mess. Woo!

01:43:01 Speaker_03
Well, if you don't practice skinning your knees, just to really bleed the metaphor for all it's worth, if you don't practice skinning your knees, you're not going to develop the callus for increasingly painful grades of sandpaper.

01:43:13 Speaker_03
This is really awkwardly overextended now, but the point being...

01:43:18 Speaker_03
If you operate from a place of fear and want to please this nebulous majority more than you want to please yourself, that's not to say that I've always viewed my entire life and all my decisions as a singular locus of control in the palm of my hand and I care what no one thinks.

01:43:36 Speaker_03
That's not true because that's not how humans have evolved. But if you are deferring to others, your perception of what others want on the small things,

01:43:44 Speaker_03
then it's going to become harder on the medium things and then impossible and then it's going to become harder and impossible on the big things.

01:43:50 Speaker_03
And for that reason, I find it very valuable to deliberately expose yourself to different types and levels of discomfort so that you can actually stand up for the important stuff when it matters.

01:44:05 Speaker_03
Because if you don't practice on the smaller stuff, for instance, like if I'm so humiliated by the fact that I like gorgeous female asses, I'm like, Oh my God. And I put something up about, I put up this picture.

01:44:15 Speaker_03
So this is what I do occasionally when I'm like, you know what? I think I'm getting a little, a little fat and happy and complacent and maybe I have too much FOMO or something like that.

01:44:25 Speaker_03
I will, I remember at one point I had this, I put up this photo of this gorgeous Latin ass and, um, female and, uh, It said like Nalga Ophelia and I had this in Spanish this explanation of this fake condition, which was Nalga Ophelia.

01:44:41 Speaker_03
Anyway, I think it was Nalga Ophelia. Anyway, Las Nalgas is like ass in Spanish. Anyway, so I put this up on Instagram.

01:44:47 Speaker_00
Spanish for ass man is what you're saying. That's right.

01:44:50 Speaker_03
It's Spanish for like, ass man syndrome, right? Or ass man disorder. And I put it up, and as to be expected, there is immediate outrage. I mean, there are plenty of people who think it's kind of funny. Plenty of people are like, yeah, high five.

01:45:01 Speaker_03
And then there are plenty of other people who are just completely outraged.

01:45:04 Speaker_00
Disgusted with you.

01:45:05 Speaker_03
Disgusted with this fact that I find attractive women attractive.

01:45:08 Speaker_00
Yes, outrage is contagious.

01:45:10 Speaker_03
Yeah. But I left it up because I like to call my audience, number one.

01:45:17 Speaker_00
If you don't want to be here, please, I invite you to unfollow. Yeah, exactly.

01:45:21 Speaker_03
You're right. It's like the sourpuss in the front row. It's like, you look like you're unhappy, but you're still here. Let me give you another reason to leave if I'm not your thing, because go find something that's your thing.

01:45:35 Speaker_00
People assume that their opinion is valuable to you. I think there's a freedom in saying, I don't need everybody to like me. I think that there is something very meaningful in saying, This is who I am.

01:45:44 Speaker_00
I'll defend it, but I'm not here to be savaged by you. And honestly, we don't know each other. I don't care what you think anyway. Or maybe that person makes you think more critically about what you did, and then you take the big booty picture down.

01:45:57 Speaker_00
I don't know. But I think you put it up purposefully to see what you were going to get back.

01:46:01 Speaker_03
I totally did. Entertaining. And now there are other, there are cases, just so I don't sound like a complete dick, there are other cases where I put something up without really thinking about it.

01:46:12 Speaker_03
And I do get feedback and realize, you know what, that's actually a really kind of insensitive thing to put up, and I didn't think it through, take it down.

01:46:21 Speaker_03
And there are cases when I do that, and people give me, hopefully, constructive feedback that isn't just spitting acid into my face, and I take it down. So I do pay attention. At the same time, I try to keep in mind advice that I was given years ago.

01:46:36 Speaker_03
I don't remember who gave me this advice, but the advice was, it's not about how many people don't get it, it's about how many people get it.

01:46:43 Speaker_03
So as long as you have a certain critical mass, whatever that means to you, and there's an article called 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly that everybody should read to this effect if you're creative, but as long as you have a critical mass, and it could be a very small number of people who love your stuff, that's all that matters.

01:46:59 Speaker_03
That's like a pass fail, right? As long as you have that pass. you're green, instead of focusing on the vast majority who hate your shit. It's like, look, there are millions of people who hate Christopher Nolan stuff.

01:47:10 Speaker_03
There are millions of people who can't stand Wes Anderson. It's like, look, some people just aren't going to fucking like Wes Anderson.

01:47:16 Speaker_00
This is really interesting also because I think if you're an artist specifically, this is a really important conversation to have with yourself, which is like when I first started out at stand-up, this was the period when Def Comedy Jam was really popular.

01:47:28 Speaker_00
And for lack of a better way of articulating it, black comedy had a very specific look and feel and style and tempo. And I just wasn't doing that kind of comedy. And I wasn't ever going to be able to do that kind of comedy. It wasn't who I was.

01:47:38 Speaker_00
It wasn't experientially what I was doing. And I didn't want to lie. And I knew there were comedians who were kind of falling into that stylistic approach to comedy. And it was really very false.

01:47:46 Speaker_00
They'd kind of be one way off stage and then kind of fall into this character on stage. There's nothing wrong with trying to connect with an audience, but I just didn't want to copy other people to try to get people to like me.

01:47:56 Speaker_00
And for a long time, I really struggled. And then eventually my tribe found me, but I was able to stay, oh, now I sound like a self-help book, but true to who I was, because that was the only way forward.

01:48:08 Speaker_00
The only way forward as an artist is to be truthful. In the end, your work is not going to be interesting or meaningful if you are trying to emulate somebody else or trying to figure out what people want from you or what they like or what's popular.

01:48:19 Speaker_00
Meaningful art only lasts, it only connects if it's authentic and if it comes from your own personal experiences. And until you figure that out, like what that is, it's never gonna be interesting. It's never going to be good.

01:48:32 Speaker_00
I always tell people it's not, being funny is not really actually the most important part of comedy. being truthful is. Because if someone sees a good show, they go, that guy was really funny.

01:48:41 Speaker_00
But when you tell the truth about yourself, people go, oh my God, holy shit, that guy like spoke to me or about me or was so vulnerable in that moment. Like, that was amazing. And that's the difference between good comedy and great comedy.

01:48:54 Speaker_00
Or between good art and great art or writing or anything.

01:48:57 Speaker_03
Yeah, it's truth. That's advice that I've also heard for screenwriting and many other things. I'm so glad you said that and reminded me of that.

01:49:04 Speaker_00
You have to please yourself. I mean, you just have to please yourself, period. Because it might not go your way anyway.

01:49:09 Speaker_00
But the worst thing is creating something, trying to figure out what people want, and then creating some piece of shit, some like crass, glib, solicitous piece of shit, and people don't buy it anyway.

01:49:20 Speaker_00
Why not make something you love and then people don't buy it? At least it was something that you loved and you're not embarrassed by it.

01:49:24 Speaker_03
Right, you said it may not work out. And if you're in the creative game, at least from what I've seen, particularly in the beginning, most things are not going to work out.

01:49:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, nothing ever goes your way.

01:49:34 Speaker_03
Right, so you might as well have one person who's happy about the process. Exactly, exactly.

01:49:40 Speaker_00
That was what I was saying about engagement.

01:49:41 Speaker_03
At least the experience was satisfying. And I would also, I feel like I'm talking too much, so I'm going to stop in a second.

01:49:51 Speaker_03
But the other thought I might underscore for folks that is kind of practical, tactical, from a competitive standpoint, if you're trying to play someone else's game by taking on a persona, someone who is actually, for instance, in the Def Comedy Jam example that you gave, if somebody's on stage and they're playing their game, that is who they are,

01:50:16 Speaker_03
you are never going to be able to take on the cognitive load and the fatigue of pretending to be that type of person and beat someone who is good at that game. You're just not going to. You're just not going to win.

01:50:35 Speaker_03
Ultimately, in any field that is competitive, which is effectively every field that people get paid for, if you want to be the best, you have to harness your latent abilities, or you're fucked.

01:50:51 Speaker_03
Like you mentioned on the engineering front, I mean, there's so many places where, for instance, in writing, it's like, I could try to be John McPhee, who writes for The New Yorker, or one of these folks, but I can't be those people.

01:51:02 Speaker_03
I'm not going to ever be the wordsmith that, say, Tolstoy was. But do I like teaching? Do I obsessively think about teaching and deconstructing things that are complex? I do.

01:51:14 Speaker_03
So I can use books as a medium for teaching and think of it that way, because if I try to out McPhee McPhee, I'm going to get my face ripped off.

01:51:22 Speaker_03
We're talking about creativity and creative pursuits, which by the way, almost everything is, even if you're

01:51:31 Speaker_03
If you meet people who are at the top of their game in accounting, the top of the game, I'm not talking about shady money laundering shit, I'm just saying, in accounting, in technology, there's an element, there's certainly an element of creativity.

01:51:44 Speaker_03
If you're looking at the people who are really at the top and innovating in any way, doing exceptional work. You have done so many different things, acting, comedy, directing, writing, activism.

01:51:58 Speaker_03
You've been a host, you've done voiceover, you have engaged in so many different acts of creation. I want to talk about short films, films, and so on. I want to talk about movies, because as long-term listeners will know, I've been

01:52:18 Speaker_03
sort of teasing with the idea, which by the way, just means procrastinating of writing some short films. And I'm still at step zero. And I'm ashamed of that.

01:52:32 Speaker_00
But... No shame. There's no shame.

01:52:34 Speaker_03
Yeah. How did you decide to get into film? And why? Film is hard. Why do it?

01:52:40 Speaker_00
It is tough. So that's a really good question. Because I feel like there's the, you know, that like really humiliating kind of clam

01:52:47 Speaker_00
About you know i'm an actor but i really want to do is direct and it feels very cliched i feel like it was more organic for me because i again i wasn't someone who kind of.

01:52:57 Speaker_00
I didn't go to film school, and I also don't think I had the hubris to think, like, oh, I've done this for a couple years now, I can direct. It was, I love movies.

01:53:04 Speaker_00
Like, you know, we were talking earlier, I was raised by a single dad, and I was one of those kids who, like, I'd go, I'd go with my dad to see, like, Die Hard or Road Warrior, and way too early of an age, like, super inappropriate.

01:53:15 Speaker_00
You know, like, when I was in high school, I'd seen The Terminator, like, the first Terminator film, like, 20 or 30 times. Like, I just loved movies. I'd go to the theater,

01:53:22 Speaker_00
I'd buy a matinee ticket and I'd stay in the theater until like eight o'clock at night. I would just like watch movie after movie after movie. So it just came out of a real end-user's love for film.

01:53:31 Speaker_00
Like I was just someone who was transported by movies. And then when I left TalkSoup,

01:53:38 Speaker_00
I had been writing on that show and there was a void and I wrote a script that I was developing with a company and I just kept talking about how I thought it should look and how I thought it should feel.

01:53:49 Speaker_00
And, you know, it was just so much more specific than being a writer. And they were like, you know, you should direct. This is clearly like a movie that you should direct.

01:53:57 Speaker_00
And I hadn't really thought about it, but I was just so intertwined with the material and what I wanted it to feel like, because I know what movies that I love make me feel like, that I wanted someone to create that experience for other people.

01:54:09 Speaker_00
And I just realized I didn't know what directing entailed. I didn't have any idea about what that was going to be like. And I just went away and started trying to learn about directing. I kind of would call people that I knew that were directors.

01:54:22 Speaker_00
If I was working on something, I would ask to come back to set when I wasn't working so I could hang out and shadow, which is where you just kind of hang around behind a director and watch them work.

01:54:29 Speaker_00
And I ended up shadowing with some really incredible people. I ended up spending several days on The Wire in its last season. Wow. Yeah. And just got to just be on the other side of a process that can be relatively opaque when you're an actor.

01:54:41 Speaker_00
You just kind of show up and say your lines and leave. And then I started making shorts. And I guess This is going to sound very glib, but because I mean, I'm sure I have resources available to me that lots of people don't. I do believe in it.

01:54:54 Speaker_00
Like I just believe in personal aggression. Like I just believe in doing stuff. Is that personal aggression? Personal aggression. Like I just believe that like if you want to make a movie, just start making a movie.

01:55:03 Speaker_00
And I don't mean like, oh, get a camera and start shooting it. But what I do mean is like, be hard on yourself. Learn, read, learn, watch, study, think critically, ask people questions.

01:55:13 Speaker_00
And then make a movie and then let it be shitty and then make another one and let that one be shitty and keep doing it until you get better at it. Like the first short film I made was, and it's an abomination and will be never see the light of day.

01:55:22 Speaker_00
I had no idea what I was doing, but that didn't make me not want to be a director. It just made me realize I needed to learn more. And then I started to feel like I was more ready and I, I was like, I need to make some stuff.

01:55:32 Speaker_00
So first thing was I did a Comedy Central special, and I took the money that would have been my salary, and I used it to make a little short music video that opens the comedy special. It wasn't anything that was mandated by the network.

01:55:43 Speaker_00
I was like, I want to do something different. So I wrote this song, and I performed it, and I made a music video. And that was the first thing I directed. I just used the crew that was already working on the special and shot this video with them.

01:55:53 Speaker_03
That's really smart. So I would imagine, not to interject, but you piggybacked on something that was in your main line of business, so to speak.

01:56:02 Speaker_00
Exactly.

01:56:03 Speaker_03
I imagine you saved a lot of costs by doing that, right?

01:56:07 Speaker_00
Yeah, like the crew was already going to come up the day before and leave the day after to shoot the special. And we'd already rented the cameras and everything like that. But I still had to pay them for the extra work.

01:56:20 Speaker_00
I took my fee and I used it to pay everybody else. And then, because I didn't have any more money after that, I learned how to edit, and I edited it myself, and I delivered it to the network, because I couldn't afford to pay for additional edit time.

01:56:30 Speaker_00
And then, after that, I thought, okay, I want to do more of this. So then I rented a camera, I rented like a Canon 5D, and I had some friends who were in bands. And again, like, it sounds fancy, but everybody probably knows somebody who does something.

01:56:43 Speaker_00
Just because I had some friends who were in a famous band doesn't mean that people out there don't have friends who were in bands. So I just called some buddies of mine that were in bands, and I said, hey, if you let me come on tour with you,

01:56:51 Speaker_00
I will make you a free music video, just a piece of fan art. You can use it however you like. I'm not going to charge anybody any money for it, but just I want to make something and I want to make something for you.

01:57:00 Speaker_00
And so I ended up going on the road with Silver Sun Pickups for a couple of dates and then spending a day with Clutch when they were performing in Anaheim. And then I just gave them, I just cut music videos and delivered it to them.

01:57:12 Speaker_00
And so then I just started to have like examples of what I could do. Why music videos instead of something else? It just felt like a way to get more people to see it.

01:57:21 Speaker_00
I had done that first music video for my Comedy Central special, which was really like a comedic video. But then I was like, oh, I really like working in this space.

01:57:27 Speaker_00
And a lot of directors come out of music video because you can be kind of radically creative in that space. You don't need to have any like narrative linearity. You can experiment. You can be radical. It could just be like a series of images.

01:57:38 Speaker_00
And I also thought, well, people who like this band, I love this band, will want to see something about them. It'll be a great way for people to see something. And then hopefully I can tell a story at the same time. And so I did three of those.

01:57:51 Speaker_00
I did a little action short. I just kept making stuff. Every time I did it, I learned something. Every time I did it, I took a bigger risk creatively. How long are these shorts? Three to five minutes.

01:58:02 Speaker_03
Three to five minutes. Can you think of any particular lessons that you took away from any one of those?

01:58:07 Speaker_00
Yeah. I think a lot of it was just skill building. How do you frame up? How do you make choices? How do you do coverage? And then how do you edit? Like a lot of it was just really tactical, as you would say, practical, tactical.

01:58:24 Speaker_00
And then a lot of it was just getting confident with my own ability and my ability to articulate what I wanted from other people. You know, just how do the other jobs on a set work? Who does what? What do I need? Oh God, this didn't work.

01:58:42 Speaker_00
You know why it didn't work? Because I didn't have this kind of a person on set.

01:58:46 Speaker_00
I was shooting digitally, and then on one show, on one of my things that I shot, we didn't have a tech on set to help me make sure that it looked the way that I wanted it to look, that the levels were set properly.

01:58:56 Speaker_00
So when I got home to edit it, I had some problems. But they weren't catastrophic problems. It was just because I wasn't making Star Wars, you know what I mean?

01:59:02 Speaker_00
I was just able to be like, well, this is what it is, and I'm going to make this and move on. And then I was getting ready. I really wanted to do a feature. I had some material I'd written, but it was kind of going to be an expensive movie.

01:59:14 Speaker_00
But I was still shadowing. So I had a friend who had a show called Penny Dreadful, John Logan, who created Penny Dreadful. I met him at Comic-Con. I'd hosted the panel for that show. And he was like, Hey, why don't you love the show?

01:59:23 Speaker_00
You should come visit us in Ireland. And I remember thinking like, to myself, people always say that, and you always say, yeah, and then you never do it. I was like, I'm going to do it. I'm fucking going to Ireland, man. I'm going to be cool.

01:59:33 Speaker_00
I want to be a cool kid for once in my life. And so I ended up going over and visiting Penny Dreadful, and Vikings shot right up the road. So I got them to let me visit that set. I just hung out.

01:59:43 Speaker_00
I passed out sandwiches and lifted stuff and asked questions and watched them work.

01:59:50 Speaker_00
And then while I was over there, I met a bunch of Irish actors and one of them, two of them actually, one was an actor, composer, one was a writer, a screenwriter and an actor.

01:59:57 Speaker_00
And we ended up making a short film together in Ireland at the end of 2014. That was my first narrative short, my first kind of story-driven short. It was just great. It was just like, I was like, oh, this is like totally who I am.

02:00:07 Speaker_00
This is what I want to do with my life.

02:00:10 Speaker_03
Where did you film in Ireland?

02:00:11 Speaker_00
In Galway. Beautiful town. Yeah, such a great place.

02:00:16 Speaker_03
I lived there for a month in 2005. Oh, yeah. Amazing.

02:00:19 Speaker_00
Oh, that's so cool.

02:00:21 Speaker_03
Incredible arts festival there. It's a really beautiful spot.

02:00:23 Speaker_00
Yeah, it is. It's like the art center of Ireland. They've got a beautiful film festival in the summer. They've got an arts festival, local theater. It was just a great experience. Things went wrong and things went right, but

02:00:37 Speaker_00
You know we got it in the can in three days and it was just super cool and personal and then.

02:00:43 Speaker_00
That same writer who had written that short had a feature he'd already written, and he asked me if I wanted to take a look at it, and it was just a perfect first film, and that's the film that became Axis.

02:00:52 Speaker_03
Okay, so I want to dig in to Axis, but before we get to that, you're taking these trips, doing these music videos. During that period, did you save up for that period, knowing that you would need to work out of your savings?

02:01:06 Speaker_03
Are you depending on royalties and other Streams to pay your bills. How are you covering the necessities of life as you were handing out sandwiches and doing all these various things?

02:01:19 Speaker_00
Well, it wasn't it wasn't as prolonged of a period as it sounds like I was on hiatus So like I was working on the talk at the time and we get a month off every year So I went in that month, but I think if I was talking to a layperson who didn't work in television I would say like, you know if if what you want is to grow in whatever field you're interested in like I

02:01:39 Speaker_00
Just create a space for that make that your vacation wasn't like i like was like riding around in a limousine like i just flew over and i hung around you know for like a week and watch people work and it wasn't any more or less burdensome than taking a vacation.

02:01:52 Speaker_00
But one thing i was more interested in doing as i got older and we started with this in the beginning it's like, You said it, and I think we kind of went past it, but it's so interesting to me. I just really wanted more discomfort in my life.

02:02:05 Speaker_00
It's just very easy the older you get to be like, you know, get in car, go to work, eat bag lunch, get in car, go to gym, go home, eat food, watch TV, go to bed. And then you just think like, Am I growing? Is any of this interesting?

02:02:18 Speaker_00
You know what I mean? I have one life and I'm just spending it in this torpor. And so for that, I was going to a place where, I mean, I knew one guy at Petty Dreadful, but I didn't know anybody at this other show.

02:02:29 Speaker_00
And I just kind of cold called them and said, can I come visit? And they were super gracious.

02:02:35 Speaker_03
I'm so curious, just to interrupt you yet again, what does that email say?

02:02:40 Speaker_00
It says, hi, and again, I understand that maybe this is going to feel a little rarefied. Hi, I'm an American actress. I've worked on these shows. I've been shadowing to direct for a long time.

02:02:49 Speaker_00
I would be really grateful if I could come and visit your show for a few days and shadow, and I will be as unobtrusive and invisible as I possibly can. and I'll be here these days. I understand if you can't accommodate me, but I'd really be grateful.

02:03:03 Speaker_00
I think it helped in my particular case because I had tweeted a lot about how much I loved Vikings. They knew that I was a big fan of the show, and I did some tweeting from set. I paid my way in flacking their show for them.

02:03:19 Speaker_03
I'm not over-caffeinated, I swear to God. You're making so many important points that I just want to pause and help, well, as much for myself as anyone else, just people to reflect on.

02:03:29 Speaker_03
So what you did in terms of tweeting, people might say, well, I don't have a verified account and nobody's going to pay attention to one tweet in the Twitter feed of 10,000 if it's a popular TV show.

02:03:42 Speaker_03
But I can tell you from personal experience that you could, for instance, write something for Medium or for fill-in-the-blank outlet that has a high Google, in other words, page rank, and that many of the producers, actors, and so on will have Google alerts or other alerts set

02:04:05 Speaker_03
that deliver to their inboxes relevant media that mention, say, the show or the actors. And you do not need to be a famous actress or an author or any of those things to do that.

02:04:17 Speaker_00
All you need to do is work at the highest possible caliber of quality that you can. I mean, I think you also touched on this about the idea that people are more interested in being expeditious than they are in being good.

02:04:30 Speaker_00
I think that this holds very, very true for this business. A lot of people have made headway because they did something that nobody saw, but when people asked them what they did, the thing they were able to show was extraordinary.

02:04:40 Speaker_00
And I don't mean like expensive extraordinary, I just mean unique and personal and crafted with care.

02:04:45 Speaker_00
And so if that's something that you wrote, or if it's something that you made, if you made, you know, the number of, I mean, this is not the best example, but it's a good one.

02:04:54 Speaker_00
20 years ago, there was this videotape going around Hollywood of these guys in an apartment, and it was a VHS tape, that's how long ago it was, and people were dubbing it and sending and giving to friends, of these guys in an apartment.

02:05:06 Speaker_00
It was these three black guys where the one guy goes up and hits the little intercom and goes, wuzzah, and then the other guy goes, wuzzah, and the third guy goes, wuzzah. That was a short film that some guy made on a digital camera

02:05:17 Speaker_00
None of them were famous. They were just some guys in New York. That ended up being that Budweiser campaign. That's crazy. I had no idea. That was the origin. It was a short film. It was a two and a half minute short film that was just funny.

02:05:29 Speaker_00
We didn't know these guys. No one knew who they were and they didn't have any connections. And I think

02:05:35 Speaker_00
It was just about doing something that felt original and personal and I get it just comes back to like don't try to figure out what people want, just do what's interesting and important to you and then keep doing it until you come up with something extraordinary and that will be your calling card.

02:05:47 Speaker_00
It may not happen as fast as you want or as aggressively as you want or as expansively as you want, but in the meantime, you're doing cool shit, which should be your primary goal in any event.

02:05:58 Speaker_00
When i made access honestly i just wanted to make a movie to show people i can make a movie i want to make the best movie i could and i was.

02:06:06 Speaker_00
Very rigorous in leveraging the resources that i had to the best of my ability but i don't know that i had a lot of expectation that a lot of people would see it. It's just because i made the best movie i could.

02:06:17 Speaker_00
that you know it got all of this attention but i don't think i was going to be a massive it was like i'm gonna make this little movie and then to the next one when people say what have you done i can be like look at this little thing i made you know so i think you have to always be focused on the results not the result on the thing and not the results because the result is directly tied to the quality of the thing so it's not about being for me it's about fame and famous based on quality work so just be doing excellent shit all the time.

02:06:43 Speaker_00
And eventually one of those things will connect with other people.

02:06:45 Speaker_03
Yeah. Not to sound like a fortune cookie on top of all of that, but like the only uncrowded market is great. There's always a fucking market for great.

02:06:53 Speaker_00
Exactly. Be radically great. Like, don't be like, I saw 10 things like this. Let me do the 11th thing. Be brave enough. to court failure, that's probably when you're going to do something great. Absolutely.

02:07:05 Speaker_03
And if you are really in love with something, I'll give two examples.

02:07:10 Speaker_03
If you're really in love with, say, screenplays and film, or if you're really in love and passionate about, maybe is a better word, possessed by, right, technology investing, early stage technology investing, two

02:07:23 Speaker_03
phenomena to companies, at this point certainly, that are worth looking at and just investigating the stories of.

02:07:30 Speaker_03
Demonstrate very clearly what you can do if you are just rejected by the establishment or if you want to not operate within the existing power structure. So the two examples are the blacklist. Look up Franklin Leonard and the blacklist.

02:07:45 Speaker_00
Right.

02:07:45 Speaker_03
And then the second is, and we don't have to get into both of these right now, the second is, just by coincidence, also has the list at the end, but Angel List and Naval Ravikant.

02:07:55 Speaker_03
And people can look up, The Avenging Angel was the title of his interview in his alumni magazine at Dartmouth, in fact. But I get excited when I hear these types of stories, so they should check them out. Let's come back to Axis. What is Axis?

02:08:10 Speaker_03
And did you have anybody try to talk you out of doing

02:08:14 Speaker_00
Axis. Well, so Axis is a thriller about an expatriate Irish actor living in Los Angeles who has had a lot of success, kind of explosive success in his youth, and has really just used all of his resources to just wreck his life.

02:08:34 Speaker_00
You know, he's a drunk, and he's a drug addict, and he's terrible at relationships, and he's a dick to everybody. And when we meet him, he's trying to turn his life around.

02:08:43 Speaker_00
And it's really about a guy who's not a bad person, but he's done some bad stuff, which I think almost every human being can relate to. I mean, we all have a little bit of a demon inside of us.

02:08:51 Speaker_00
And I think this is just a guy who's, he's been frail in the past, but he's really trying to be a better version of himself.

02:08:57 Speaker_00
But slowly over the course of an afternoon, and the movie takes place in real time as he's driving through Los Angeles, his life starts to unravel.

02:09:04 Speaker_00
And it's really about him trying to hold things together, trying to be a better person, trying to be a better person in his relationships, with his family, with people that he works with. Just trying to be better. It's really dark, it's very funny.

02:09:14 Speaker_00
I have been thinking, I'm sure I'll get some letters about this, but I happen to find that addicts are really entertaining people. And I don't mean they're funny, like laugh at them.

02:09:25 Speaker_00
I find that typically people who have broken themselves down are just more honest than people who are trying to be perfect all the time. And so, you know, he's just, he's a guy who's self-aware, he's aware of the mistakes he's made.

02:09:37 Speaker_00
So it's a very darkly funny movie. And it's very twisty. It's a thriller. So it's got a lot of secrets. And the most unique aspect of the movie is that the whole thing takes place in real time inside a car as he's driving through Los Angeles.

02:09:49 Speaker_00
So the lead actor is the only actor on screen and all the other actors are voice actors on the phone with him.

02:09:54 Speaker_03
How would you describe your experience of being involved with this film?

02:09:57 Speaker_00
That was so wonderful. You asked if people tried to dissuade me from doing it. And the short answer is in Hollywood, the way that people dissuade you from doing stuff is just by not helping you, just by not engaging with you.

02:10:09 Speaker_00
You don't even get no, you just get like silence. But this happened very quickly.

02:10:13 Speaker_00
So I didn't have a traditional kind of like discouraging period of frustration with trying to put this movie together because I read it in like August or September of 2015. And I was kind of at peak engagement at the time in terms of work.

02:10:27 Speaker_00
I was on four shows, and I really only had a little bit of time off in 2016.

02:10:32 Speaker_00
And I realized if I didn't make the movie in this one single week in May of 2016, that I wasn't going to be able to make it at all in that year, and I'd have to push to the next year. And so then it just became about hitting that target.

02:10:44 Speaker_00
Like, how can I hit this target? So I never even went like the traditional way of trying to find like people to finance the movie in a studio because they were going to say, like, we don't know who this actor is. Like, he's unknown.

02:10:53 Speaker_00
Can we put somebody famous in this role? Can it be Ryan Gosling? And then can it not be with just him on camera? Can we have other actors in the movie? And then can we make it not in a car? Can we make it?

02:11:02 Speaker_00
I mean, like, we're just going to, you know, the whole kind of concept of the film was going to unravel. You know, it's very typical in Hollywood where people are so risk averse that they take all of the edge and singularity out of a project.

02:11:11 Speaker_00
So very quickly I realized that I was going to have to probably crowdfund the movie if I wanted to do it my way and on my time, on my timeframe.

02:11:19 Speaker_00
So in March of 2016, I had my like first exploratory conversation with the people around me and with Kickstarter. They have people over there who are kind of like around to like help you kind of figure out how to put a project together.

02:11:32 Speaker_00
I built the campaign in three weeks. I launched it in April. And one of the rules about crowdfunding and Kickstarter specifically, it's not a hard and fast rule.

02:11:42 Speaker_00
It's not like a rule that they enforce, but it's just like a rule of thumb that if you raise half of your money in the first week, you'll probably fund fully. So we had raised half of our money in that first week.

02:11:51 Speaker_00
And then I started hiring people on the film. And we did raise a lot of money for a feature. It was about $200,000 that we raised. And so that was what we had to make the movie.

02:12:01 Speaker_00
Originally, we were going to make it nine days, but I realized if I made it faster, I'd have more money available to me daily. My daily resource load would be higher.

02:12:11 Speaker_00
We cut the schedule from nine days to seven days, which is incredibly aggressive for a feature. Whenever I tell people I made it in seven days, they ask, is it short? We had to be really aggressive.

02:12:23 Speaker_00
We ended up doing it in this way that was so terrifying and so breakneck. but so exhilarating, which is that we shot the first 15 pages of the movie in the first day, and then we shot the next 65 pages of the movie.

02:12:37 Speaker_00
It was actually, you shot about 17 pages in the first day and about 67 pages on day two through seven. And that meant that the actor had to do 67 pages of dialogue a day.

02:12:46 Speaker_00
For people that don't know, typically on a movie, you do like between three and six pages of dialogue a day.

02:12:51 Speaker_00
So he was essentially doing the entire movie all the way through every day, locked in a hot car with no air conditioning in May, beginning of June, essentially, in Los Angeles. It was just so intense, but we shot three cameras.

02:13:06 Speaker_00
So by day three, we essentially had the entire movie in the can because we were doing the whole thing all the way through from three angles. So by day two, we had six angles and we had the whole movie on, on wax on the digital version of wax.

02:13:16 Speaker_00
And so then the next four days were just about kind of creative play. And I think that what the result is, is I made a movie in a week. It's experimental, it's unusual, it's transporting and strange. And

02:13:30 Speaker_00
going in, I thought I'll never make a movie this way again. But now I would make a movie that way again, because I just didn't have any time to be afraid or feel down. I mean, I just there was no time to be anxious. I just had to go. It was wonderful.

02:13:42 Speaker_00
It was like one of the seminal experiences of my life.

02:13:45 Speaker_03
There's definitely some magic in the ether when you have a hyper-aggressive deadline. There's just something that happens to the space-time continuum and what you can achieve when everything gets compressed. that intensely.

02:14:03 Speaker_00
Certain things just come to the surface. Certain things are thrown into relief, and it's not like you can't make mistakes, but I think you get a clarity sometimes because you can't dither. There is no time for paralysis by analysis.

02:14:16 Speaker_00
I am making this decision. I am making it definitively. It may be the wrong one, but I'm going to lean all the way into it, and we're going to see what happens.

02:14:24 Speaker_00
And also because we shot the whole movie all the way through, if there were errors, I had the next day to recalibrate in a way that you don't get when you typically make a movie. For people, again, who don't know, I'm an actor as well.

02:14:36 Speaker_00
So when I'm on a TV show or I'm doing a movie or whatever, I'll leave at the end of the day and go, ah, shit, man, I wish I'd done this with that scene. I wish I'd tried this. But every day, the next day, we got to wake up and go, you know what?

02:14:46 Speaker_00
We have a whole new bite at this apple. We're going to do it a whole different way today.

02:14:50 Speaker_00
And so at the end, I really felt like we really fully explored the material, which we wouldn't have been able to do if we'd been making a movie in seven days and not doing it with this kind of volume approach that we had.

02:15:01 Speaker_03
So I'm looking at text in a book that you contributed to. Happens to be this fantastic book. Oh, let me see.

02:15:07 Speaker_00
Here it is.

02:15:08 Speaker_03
For those of you who get the... For those of you who get the what about Bob reference, there's this groundbreaking new book. Oh, yes, here it is. And there's an entire shelf of the therapist's own book, Richard Dreyfuss.

02:15:24 Speaker_03
In any case, the question to what you'd put on a gigantic billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message to millions or billions of people,

02:15:31 Speaker_03
In this case, what you selected was a Jack Canfield quote, everything you want is on the other side of fear. And many of the stories that you've told so far illustrate that, certainly. What are you afraid of now?

02:15:44 Speaker_03
Or what fear are you hoping, say, in the next year to get on the other side of? Does anything come to mind?

02:15:52 Speaker_00
You know, it's interesting because I think the one that feels the most obvious is like, I'm afraid I won't get to make another film.

02:15:57 Speaker_00
But I'm not really legitimately afraid of that because I feel like I'm just going to put this next movie together and make it. I think now that I've done one with no help and no assistance from anybody, the next one's going to be cake.

02:16:08 Speaker_00
I mean, I had help. I had my team, but I didn't have the kind of traditional Hollywood help where I had a team of agents kind of making magic.

02:16:14 Speaker_00
It was really just like a scrappy little group of filmmakers doing this film with me, the lead actor and screenwriter and my creative executives. It was a small group of people, you know, completely outside of the system.

02:16:23 Speaker_00
But it's not that I'm fearless. It may just be that the things that are interesting to me now don't engender fear the way that they used to.

02:16:33 Speaker_03
I can also tackle this from a different angle, which is, what is one of your greatest struggles right now? What do you struggle with, if anything?

02:16:41 Speaker_00
My main struggle is just always being as effective as I want to be. You know what I mean? I'm just super ambitious. I have highly developed, I don't mean like I'm good at it, I mean like it's very far advanced. workaholism.

02:16:54 Speaker_00
I mean, I have pathological workaholism. It's like a sickness. And whenever I say I'm a workaholic, people always laugh. And I go, look, it's a problem. I don't know how to rest. It's not that I don't like to play. I do like play.

02:17:05 Speaker_00
I don't think I have any time to rest. And I worry that it could result in me not being an interesting artist, because I think you need to play, and to daydream, and to rest, and to experience things, to be able to tell interesting stories.

02:17:19 Speaker_00
No one wants to hear about your daily trek from your home to your office. It's just not compelling.

02:17:23 Speaker_03
Well, I remember, I think it was Amanda Palmer who said this. I apologize to whoever said it, if I'm misattributing. But Amanda Palmer, creative musician extraordinaire, and she said, you know,

02:17:35 Speaker_03
I think it was her who said, in order to have... Is she married to Neil Gaiman?

02:17:39 Speaker_00
She is, yeah. Great author of all time, okay. Yeah, exactly. For those of you... After you and after me, then him.

02:17:44 Speaker_03
Yeah, I will bow at the feet of Neil Gaiman as a writer. Everybody should listen to his audio book of The Graveyard Book, narrated by him. He has also the most soothing voice imaginable, but I digress. What the fuck was I saying?

02:17:59 Speaker_03
So Amanda Palmer has a quote about yes that if art imitates life in order to create art you have to have a life Yeah, absolutely.

02:18:09 Speaker_00
And and like and I'm paraphrasing that's butchered You know, I'm sure there are other theories there's a very famous French writer it's not South but it's somebody anyway about like have a bourgeois life and be radical in your work, but I actually don't think

02:18:23 Speaker_00
I actually think that you need to be fully engaged in your life in order to be an interesting artist, because you need to be alive to be able to speak about the human condition.

02:18:32 Speaker_03
So if you have advanced, early-onset workaholism, you've really turned this into a default mode. Are you doing anything to manage that or create more slack in the system for the daydreaming and so on?

02:18:52 Speaker_00
I mean, that's my daily practice. That's my one day at a time. just constantly trying to remind myself to rest. I engage socially a lot more than I used to.

02:19:03 Speaker_03
And by socially, you mean out in the real world?

02:19:06 Speaker_00
Yeah, like out in the real world. I go out and I try to not just be like, you know, I just had a period of life where I was just like, up, gym, work, sleep. I just remember one day I was like, I'm going to die. I'm going to die of boredom.

02:19:18 Speaker_00
I bore myself, you know what I mean? And so, you know, I think I try to court danger in a safe way. It's not like I'm jumping out of a plane with no parachute or bullfighting or bare knuckle brawling in an alley, you know, filled with needles.

02:19:32 Speaker_00
But I am trying to just like be, not always have my head in my computer. But the reason that people are workaholics, well, there's lots of reasons, I'm sure, social pressures. But for me, I just get this big serotonin release. Is it serotonin?

02:19:45 Speaker_00
What's the brain? What's the satisfaction drug? Dopamine, perhaps? Dopamine. That's it. Dopamine. Serotonin, sleepy time. Yeah, dopamine. I get a dopamine release when I complete tasks. I get higher and higher the more that I execute.

02:19:59 Speaker_00
I find executing in and of itself really enjoyable. So I'm just trying to apply that aggression to leisure. Can I get the same satisfaction?

02:20:07 Speaker_00
If I make a to-do list and one of the things is have fun, will I get the same dopamine release if I had a lot of fun?

02:20:14 Speaker_03
How can I turn fun into work most effectively?

02:20:18 Speaker_00
And then be like, I don't know about you guys, but I just fucking crushed my to-do list. I realized, even though I can feel very harried, it's interesting to me to be

02:20:28 Speaker_00
feeling like a part of being on this planet of like fully engaging and doing everything I can do and everything I'm interested in. Because I don't want to look back and be like, man, I should have tried that.

02:20:38 Speaker_00
I'm happy to look back and say, man, I tried that and it went terribly for me. That's a perfectly comfortable space for me to be like, man, I tried that and I completely shit the bed.

02:20:46 Speaker_00
But what I find very uncomfortable is the idea that I always wanted to do something and I never did it. And so that's what I fear. What I fear is not trying not experiencing all the things that I want to experience.

02:20:59 Speaker_03
How do you think your life, because you live so aggressively, you milk the most out of the hours that you have, how would you or your life be different if you didn't have exercise as an element, do you think?

02:21:16 Speaker_00
Well, it's interesting, because I really love working out, but there's a constant battle for me between, like, being effective with work. And I'm the queen of, like, getting up at, like, 5 a.m.

02:21:29 Speaker_00
to work out, putting on my workout clothes, and then being in front of my computer at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and I haven't moved. Like, I mean, that's just, like, my, that's just a normal day.

02:21:37 Speaker_00
Like, didn't move, didn't eat, didn't do anything, just been in front of the computer for, like, 11 hours. But it just, it's just such a great stress manager.

02:21:45 Speaker_00
And I also think that there's another thing there, which is it just, again, like, puts you back in your body. you know, this like thing that's carrying your brain around and making you effective. And I think that with

02:21:58 Speaker_00
everything, all of the stimuli that we experience nowadays, all the pictures and the images of perfection that are coming in at a much faster and more voluminous pace.

02:22:06 Speaker_00
It's really easy to fall into an abusive relationship with exercise, either doing it so much that you're hurting yourself or not doing it and then engaging in that inner monologue about how you're worthless and you can't get your shit together.

02:22:18 Speaker_00
I don't have either of those things. I just know I'm happier and better when I work out. I've finally dropped the monologue about I'm not a good person if I don't crush a workout. I just try to do it every day because I know I'm better mentally.

02:22:30 Speaker_00
And I also cheat completely. I took a hike today. I had my phone with me and I stopped every 10 minutes to write something down. I'm not really fully, I'm not being in the moment when I'm working out.

02:22:42 Speaker_00
A lot of times I'm stopping hundreds of times to make notes and remind myself of stuff I have to do or put stuff on my calendar.

02:22:47 Speaker_03
Do you still use Concept2 or a rowing machine?

02:22:50 Speaker_00
I still use my ergometer, my Concept2 ergometer. I have had it since 2000. It is 18 years old. I have never had to repair it or replace any parts. It's the best, it's the single best piece of equipment that I have.

02:23:01 Speaker_00
My whole gym now, I have my whole gym in my place. I have a TRX bodyweight system. I have two kettlebells, a 25 and a 35. I have my ergometer. I have battle ropes that are attached to my dining room table.

02:23:13 Speaker_00
And I have one big power step that I just use to do like pistols and stuff like that. And I get everything done with those five things.

02:23:20 Speaker_03
That is fantastic. So pistols, for people who don't know, those are one-legged squats. And they can be very, very difficult, depending on how you go about it.

02:23:29 Speaker_00
But a bench or a step can help you because it can just kind of be like single leg step downs until you build up your quad and your glute strength to do pistols.

02:23:36 Speaker_03
Could you describe for us a recent workout or what a prototypical workout of yours might look like?

02:23:42 Speaker_00
I hiked today, that was just like a 90 minute hike, which was just more about like feeling groovy. But right now I'm obsessed with my ergometer. I kind of go through periods of like not rowing and then periods of rowing really aggressively.

02:23:52 Speaker_00
And this is going to be right up your alley, Tim.

02:23:54 Speaker_03
I'm ready.

02:23:55 Speaker_00
This is bullseye for you and your audience. I started going to a naturopath, so I'd be supplementing differently. And I started taking glutathione. And I'm rowing faster now than I did in my 20s. I just keep getting personal bests on my rower.

02:24:10 Speaker_00
It's confusing. I'm a lot older than I was when I was rowing competitively. And I just keep knocking like, 30 seconds, and then 45 seconds, and then a minute and 10 seconds off my rowing time.

02:24:20 Speaker_00
So now I'm just obsessed with hitting personal best every time I row.

02:24:23 Speaker_03
Okay, let's dig into this. So the glutathione, how is it, for those who aren't familiar, glutathione is thought of, a simple way to think of it, or the way it's often described as a master antioxidant of sorts. How are you having it administered?

02:24:40 Speaker_00
Is it being... Sometimes I get... Oh, this is so inside baseball. Sometimes I get IVs. I get IVs if I'm wrecked, if I travel a lot or if I went to Coachella.

02:24:49 Speaker_03
Is that just glutathione or are you doing that at the...

02:24:55 Speaker_00
I can do it at the end of my IV. I'll get B vitamins.

02:24:58 Speaker_03
And a glutathione push at the end.

02:25:00 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly. We can get this fat-soluble glutathione that you just gulp down. It tastes like axle grease.

02:25:09 Speaker_03
What is this company? It's Lipospheric. That's the name. Lipospheric glutathione.

02:25:17 Speaker_00
Lipospheric glutathione, yeah. I'm just attributing it to the glutathione because before the glutathione, I was running slow and now I'm just like a jackrabbit. So it could be something else, but I'm going to say it's the glutathione.

02:25:28 Speaker_03
I will warn people in advance. I had some of this lipospheric glutathione at one point and I gave it to a friend of mine.

02:25:34 Speaker_03
And I think it might've been, for those who know my buddy, Kevin Rose, since I like to mention him, even misattribute things to him just for fun. I think I gave him one and he said something like, what is this horse semen? It does have a weird...

02:25:47 Speaker_03
as a very weird consistency.

02:25:51 Speaker_00
It's taro. No, my father calls it axle grease. That's what he's like. Give me this axle grease. Cause I gave it to my dad. I was like, I think this would really help you. And you're supposed to take it in liquid, but he's just been eating it on a spoon.

02:26:03 Speaker_00
He's a better man than I. Oh, I just like squeegee it out of the little packet.

02:26:06 Speaker_03
Into your mouth? Yeah, into my mouth.

02:26:09 Speaker_00
I take it with like about two ounces of kombucha in the morning so I don't have to think about it. I mean, I'm sure you're like this or maybe after all of that experimentation on yourself, you just get up and have a bowl of like...

02:26:21 Speaker_00
frosted flakes in the morning, Tim. It's like I do that and then I have my bowl of supplements, then I have my fish oil, then I have my curcumin, and then I have my turmeric. By the end of the morning, I've supplemented. It's like a banquet.

02:26:34 Speaker_00
I don't even need to eat. I've taken so many crappy tablets.

02:26:37 Speaker_03
All right. Just hit pause again. Is the exercise before breakfast, is it the first thing you do? What is your first ideal morning? What's the first 60 to 90 minutes look like?

02:26:50 Speaker_00
A special shot, glutathione, workout.

02:26:52 Speaker_03
What time do you wake up?

02:26:53 Speaker_00
It depends on the day, between six and seven. I used to wake up a lot earlier, but I let one of my shows go, so I don't have to wake up at the crack of dawn every day anymore, so it's between six and seven o'clock.

02:27:04 Speaker_00
I have to work out in the morning or I won't get it off. Since you wake up, you have espresso shot, glutathione with- I always have coffee before I work out, without fail.

02:27:14 Speaker_03
Then the glutathione with the kombucha, any particular type of kombucha that's your preferred axle grease mixer?

02:27:22 Speaker_00
I like Better Booch, and I like, was it LifeAid, I think is one of the other? I love kombucha. I'm very slutty when it comes to kombucha. I'll drink any kombucha. I'm a big kombucha fan.

02:27:32 Speaker_03
All right, so then you buckle down to workout, and this is gonna sound like I'm just looking for opportunities to plug, which maybe I am, but you described one of your workouts, the concept to mid-distance 5K rows punctuated by short-distance 2K.

02:27:48 Speaker_03
Hit sprints high-intensity interval training. Yeah high-intensity interval training with with a 10k long-distance row once or twice a week Would that be a current workout?

02:27:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's typically my workouts and then I'll do like a set of five five by twenty five kettlebells That's like, you know, like I'll get up one morning and just do 125 kettlebell swings in front of the television. I

02:28:06 Speaker_00
And then sometimes I'll do a TRX workout, because I didn't have really a way to simulate pull-ups. So that was why I got the TRX, so I could do, that was the one thing I didn't have, and here was a pull-up bar.

02:28:17 Speaker_03
Is the TRX attached to a door?

02:28:19 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's attached to an upstairs railing, and it just hangs off of the railing. And that's it. I try to keep it relatively simple, so that I'll do it. I don't really train with anybody, because I just can't.

02:28:30 Speaker_00
I can manage the hour workout, but I can't manage the transit between my home and a place. I don't have enough time to do that, too. You know what I mean? Like I've got the hour. I don't have two hours.

02:28:39 Speaker_00
So I don't go to a gym anymore because I just, I just would be, I wouldn't have the time for it. Yeah. The transit time that transit time was what killed me.

02:28:47 Speaker_00
And I was like, 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.

02:28:51 Speaker_03
Do you still watch shows when you row? Totally. Any recent favorites or what are you watching currently?

02:28:56 Speaker_00
Like Fantastic Junk. I mean, some good stuff. Like I love, I watched Walking Dead, Fear of the Walking Dead. That's always really good workout shows. Right now I'm watching The Magicians during my workouts.

02:29:05 Speaker_00
And then when I finish that, what will I watch after that? Sometimes I watch stuff that's on streaming services because I hate to have to, when I'm rowing, I don't want to have to watch commercials.

02:29:13 Speaker_00
And I can't stop to fast forward because I'm trying to beat my previous row time. So like I'll stream, like stream stuff on Hulu like X-Files or Handmaid's Tale or I just watched a show called Deutschland 83 that was pretty great.

02:29:27 Speaker_00
It has to be something that I can kind of watch, which is why I'll typically watch something that's like not too mentally demanding. I can't pay attention too closely to plot points.

02:29:38 Speaker_03
Right Do you make New Year's resolutions? Do you have any routines or rituals around New Year's work?

02:29:44 Speaker_03
We're talking just for people who may be listening to this at another time We're chatting at the end of March Mm-hmm and like make any this year, right?

02:29:54 Speaker_00
I make the same one every year, which is to rest more. I Mean, it's the same resolution every arrest.

02:30:00 Speaker_03
So how are you gonna do that this time? I

02:30:02 Speaker_00
I don't know, I should just give up. I should stop making resolutions and then I won't have to not have not accomplished that.

02:30:08 Speaker_00
I mean, look, maybe a part of success or like success at being you, like figuring out being you, is like understanding what your strengths and your weaknesses are. You know, like my strength is my aggressive work ethic.

02:30:18 Speaker_00
It was when I, like when I was a young comic, I would be like, oh, I should be writing every day. I should write, I should be like this guy. Well, like that's just not my, that's just not how I operate.

02:30:26 Speaker_00
So I think once you accept like what your own method

02:30:30 Speaker_03
This is why you watch the Terminator 30 times. You're like, this is my people, right?

02:30:37 Speaker_00
I mean, I definitely have a CD. I'm definitely an obsessive personality. But once you accept, these are my strengths, this is where I excel, this is how I excel, rather than try to force yourself into someone else's workflow, figure out what yours is.

02:30:49 Speaker_00
As a writer, and you've written lots of books, I've only written two, but with both books, I had this huge lead time. And it wasn't that I was lazy or procrastinating. The book wasn't there yet. And then just one day, the book was there.

02:31:00 Speaker_00
And then I sat down and I wrote the entire book in a few weeks. But it just needed to gel. It needed to synthesize. And if I had been trying to sit down and write a little bit every day, it would have just been this big agglomeration of glop.

02:31:11 Speaker_00
But just one day, I was like, oh, the book is in me now. The book is in me. And then I got it out.

02:31:16 Speaker_03
God, I wish I had that experience. Man, I'm so jelly.

02:31:20 Speaker_00
Everybody's different, you know what I mean? Like, a long time I would have wanted to be more like you, like disciplined and sitting down.

02:31:25 Speaker_00
Because, you know, there's this panic that ensues when you are seven weeks from your deadline and you had nine months to write a book and you've got to write the whole thing.

02:31:33 Speaker_00
But it's just like that, for me, certain threads have to connect and that requires rumination and time. And I just can't do it any other way, so I don't.

02:31:42 Speaker_03
I think my strength is every day trying to eat a wheelbarrow full of glass and shit out diamonds or something like that.

02:31:49 Speaker_00
That's a good one. That should be a tattoo.

02:31:54 Speaker_03
Well, speaking of eating glass, this might be predictable, but I'm okay with predictable. I would like to start to wrap up with a handful of questions.

02:32:03 Speaker_03
And the first one I'm going to ask is, and you actually give people a heads up on this with the self-inflicted wounds. So you usually say, at some point, I'm going to ask you about X, but I'm sure you've had time to think about this.

02:32:17 Speaker_03
So do you have any favorite stories of self-inflicted wounds? of your own that you could share?

02:32:25 Speaker_00
I mean, obviously, the book is just a collection, not even a comprehensive one, but quite detailed of many, many mistakes that I've made. I'm trying to think of something that's happened recently. It's interesting.

02:32:34 Speaker_00
I see my mistakes differently now than I did when I was younger. They just feel like an aspect of being human versus like some kind of tragic flaw. Exactly. They just seem like an unavoidable aspect of being alive.

02:32:47 Speaker_00
And then I'm thinking ones that recently that don't feel like that cataclysmic. So they're like, they're like lame, like lame stories.

02:32:53 Speaker_03
Oh, you could pick a classic. Also, like the greatest hits, like if you're watching TV 15 years ago, and it's like, hits from the 80s. We could take one of those as well.

02:33:03 Speaker_00
It's interesting, like I was talking about that short film that I made that was like the one that will never be seen by any human being.

02:33:09 Speaker_00
Actually, I think it's been destroyed, where it was just like, I just thought that I could just charm my way through this short and I had a bunch of friends kind of show up and it was such an odd idea. It didn't even make any sense.

02:33:20 Speaker_00
It was about a guy who flashed women and he flashed women and I can't remember why he flashed women, but it was something to do with like bravery. It was like a metaphor for bravery that this guy would like flash women.

02:33:36 Speaker_00
And also maybe like hubris, like the idea that like we're gonna be super excited to see this guy's penis and he would kind of like try to use it as currency and it would never kind of go his way. But it just made no sense.

02:33:45 Speaker_00
It just ended up being like a series of vignettes about a guy like revealing his penis to strangers. I just remember at the end like literally thinking, it's one thing to think like people don't get me. I was like, I don't get myself.

02:33:56 Speaker_00
It was fine to accomplish here. It just never, ever coalesced, but it was fine because it was like, I remember kind of enjoying the process of making it and then being really kind of surprised and delighted by what a piece of shit it was.

02:34:09 Speaker_00
Much like that set where nobody laughed. I thought, well, man, that didn't work at all. Okay. I need to go back and figure out what to do next.

02:34:16 Speaker_00
Like I think every artist, you know, I think Quentin Tarantino has a famous story about his first film being unwatchable. You know, I just think,

02:34:23 Speaker_00
Sometimes if your personality is to be really aggressive and kind of dive in, you're bound to make some spectacular failures, you know, and you just have to have a high tolerance for that and not take it personally and keep moving forward.

02:34:35 Speaker_00
But yeah, I literally was like, I know you guys don't get it. I don't get it. I don't know. I can't explain it to you. I have no idea what I was thinking. Thank you for putting yourselves in my hands.

02:34:45 Speaker_00
It was a terrible mistake on your part, but you're very gracious to trust me with your lives. What's the name of the short? It was called The Whipper.

02:34:54 Speaker_03
It conjures all sorts of images.

02:34:56 Speaker_00
It makes no sense whatsoever.

02:34:58 Speaker_03
When have you been extremely proud of yourself? Could be any point in your life. Can you think of a standout point where you're like, God damn, good for me, fucking A.

02:35:10 Speaker_00
I hate to have it be about this because it sounds like it's super self-promotional, but I really am proud of this film. And I, for a variety of reasons. Access.

02:35:19 Speaker_00
Yeah, access, because it was such a, I mean, I was lucky that I was brought a great script and I had a really talented actor, but we put this movie together like so quickly.

02:35:28 Speaker_00
And I had a vision for it, but I also was, because we were moving so fast, feeling my way through the dark in some aspect.

02:35:35 Speaker_00
And I think one of the reasons why it came together the way that it did was because I was both I both had a vision for the film but I was open to modulating and I think that's really important in anything that you're doing no matter what field you're in is that you have to both.

02:35:47 Speaker_00
We prize vision and kind of rigidity in this culture but I think that. Being able to pivot and be nimble is way more important than being kind of a rigid visionary.

02:35:56 Speaker_00
You have to be able to look at data and interpret it and then apply it to your situation or you're just going to keep banging your head against a wall. So we made this movie. We got into the very second day of filming. We started really late.

02:36:10 Speaker_00
We lost our light.

02:36:11 Speaker_00
We had to kind of pivot that day and then having to throw that footage away another day we lost light and had to get back up at five in the morning kind of shoot down for dust but we just kept pivoting we just kept, nothing was catastrophic okay and i think that's something i got my father's like okay this isn't working okay so we're gonna do this okay that's not working gonna do this rather than oh my god this is the end of the world what we gonna do,

02:36:29 Speaker_00
And then in post, I had very little money for post and very little time to cut the movie together.

02:36:33 Speaker_00
And about four weeks in, the editor that I had cutting the movie, he was a great guy, really talented, just wasn't connecting with the material, wasn't able to assemble the movie. It was an unusual movie. It's one guy in a car. And I had to let him go.

02:36:45 Speaker_00
And then I had to learn Avid, the Avid system and start cutting the movie myself. But again, I wasn't like, what I'm going to do, I don't have an editor, I'm going to die.

02:36:51 Speaker_00
I just said, okay, well, like, the answer here is that I'm going to learn this skill set, and I'm going to keep moving forward. And then, you know, I made this little film. It was, you know, strange and atmospheric and dreamlike.

02:37:01 Speaker_00
And, you know, it didn't get into Sundance and everybody always wants to get into Sundance. But then it got into eight other festivals and won two awards and got picked up for distribution.

02:37:09 Speaker_00
And the result has been much better than I ever could have anticipated. And I'm really proud of it because, I mean, I made it for what is typically the catering budget on a regular Hollywood movie. You know what I mean?

02:37:24 Speaker_00
We made it for just no money and in no time. And I think it also says something. I think what I'm also proud of is that the movie actually does have a strong point of view and a strong visual personality and a strong style that is my own.

02:37:38 Speaker_00
When I look at it, I don't think I'm trying to emulate anybody. I feel like this is something that I made. It's my little lumpy ashtray from shop class and I really love it.

02:37:46 Speaker_03
Good for you. I think it's easy to, I'm not saying you, but for humans to look at the people who are showcased on the covers of magazines or on the front pages of popular websites and think, wow, they figured out

02:38:04 Speaker_03
all the secret sauce, or they have the keys to the kingdom and they're able to show up and just hit home runs every time they step to the plate.

02:38:14 Speaker_03
And when you look at the origin stories of some of these incredible creations that people are familiar with, whether it's Jaws or the company Alibaba is one example, Jack Ma, the founder

02:38:29 Speaker_03
I think he's the richest man in China, or certainly one of the top few at this point. And he said, I'm paraphrasing, but we had a huge advantage in the beginning, and that was we had no experience, no money, and no plan.

02:38:42 Speaker_03
And it forces you to really think outside of the box. And even if that project doesn't succeed by outside measures, confidence that you develop in exploring areas outside of the box can then transfer to future projects.

02:39:00 Speaker_03
I remember there's this fantastic documentary, I'm going to butcher his name. It's fantastic mostly for the message, not for all of the content, which I hope makes sense.

02:39:09 Speaker_03
but it's called Yodawarski's Dune, and it's the story of this attempt to make a movie about Dune. And the thing is a complete unmitigated disaster, a complete unmitigated disaster.

02:39:21 Speaker_03
But the talent that was assembled went on to just do incredible things. And if that disaster hadn't happened,

02:39:30 Speaker_03
One could argue that if you'd stepped on that butterfly, these other careers wouldn't have blossomed in the way that they did, and you wouldn't have the Geiger design of the alien that people now know as the alien of aliens and so on.

02:39:44 Speaker_03
So it's, I just love... No one ever learns from success.

02:39:49 Speaker_00
You can kind of do a postmortem and say, oh, this stuff worked.

02:39:52 Speaker_00
Failure is where you have explosive growth, where you really have to reconsider all of your assumptions, and it's so much more powerful than success is at making you eventually successful. Be aggressive. Yeah, be aggressive.

02:40:04 Speaker_03
Be aggressive, A-G-G-R-A-S-S-I-V-E.

02:40:09 Speaker_00
Totally. Yes, that's my life philosophy, be aggressive.

02:40:14 Speaker_03
Be aggressive and we want you around for a long time, so take your catnaps at the very least. That's my goal.

02:40:22 Speaker_03
And do you have anything you would like to say or ask of the audience, suggestions you'd like to make, anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up?

02:40:35 Speaker_00
Other than watch my movie, other than watch your movie. Exactly.

02:40:39 Speaker_00
I mean, I guess like I like when I when I did my podcast, you know, like, thematically, the stuff that we've talked about was always stuff that I talked about, which is like, it doesn't matter what your

02:40:48 Speaker_00
what you want to do, it sounds very greeting card, but like the barriers are, they're imagined. You know what I mean?

02:40:53 Speaker_00
And maybe you're going to have to start small and maybe you're going to have to start close to home, but like the greater regret will always be not having started.

02:41:01 Speaker_00
And I'm always trying to find a way to be more bold in my life and hopefully share the things that have helped me do that with other people.

02:41:09 Speaker_00
So it is exciting to be having the conversation with you because I think that's a lot of what you've done is you've kind of live these experiences so that the things that you learn could be shared with other people. Just go out and do awesome shit.

02:41:22 Speaker_03
Get your hands dirty. The rough drafts are not a clean business.

02:41:30 Speaker_00
Absolutely not.

02:41:32 Speaker_03
Aisha, thank you so much for taking the time.

02:41:37 Speaker_00
It was a pleasure.

02:41:38 Speaker_03
So much fun.

02:41:39 Speaker_00
With you, I know, super fun. And now that I know where you are, I will track you down the next time I'm in your neck of the woods.

02:41:44 Speaker_03
Yeah. Barbecue, music, whatever it might be, and Austin Tejas, come visit. And People Can Visit You is the best site, AyeshaTyler.com?

02:41:56 Speaker_00
Yeah, AyeshaTyler.com. But you know, who spends time on a website anymore? Just follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all that stuff is just Ayesha Tyler, one word.

02:42:04 Speaker_03
A-I-S-H-A-T-Y-L-E-R Absolutely, absolutely.

02:42:09 Speaker_00
I don't know when this is going to post, but I post stuff about all the stuff I'm doing. The movie's out on the 10th of April on Video On Demand, iTunes, all that stuff. And then Archer starts, I think, on the 24th of April and all the other stuff.

02:42:20 Speaker_00
I don't know, TV, whatever. You can find me online. I don't know when you're going to listen to this, but just come say hi to me on socials.

02:42:27 Speaker_03
For days and weeks and months and years and millennia to come, hopefully.

02:42:31 Speaker_00
We'll see. Cockroaches will be listening to this on their tiny cockroach computers when the rest of us are dead.

02:42:36 Speaker_03
That's exactly right. Cockroaches, remember us fondly. And for you non-cockroaches, actually, if cockroach is listening, you're welcome also to check out the show notes where I will provide links to everything that we've talked about, including Axis.

02:42:52 Speaker_03
And you can find all of those at Tim.blog.com forward slash podcast along with the show notes for every other episode. And Aisha, thank you so much one more time for... Being so goddamn entertaining and inspiring at the same time, it's a rare combo.

02:43:07 Speaker_00
Thank you. So I really appreciate the time. It's always great to talk with you. Thanks, Tim.

02:43:11 Speaker_03
Of course. And to everybody out there on the interwebs, be safe, maybe. More important, be aggressive. Get out there. If you're dreaming of doing something, creating something someday, Just get out a shitty first draft, because guess what?

02:43:27 Speaker_03
All the first drafts are really fucking awful. It's very rare that someone just, as I was alluding to, shits out diamonds on a daily basis.

02:43:36 Speaker_03
It starts with putting something out there into the world, and hopefully, at least it makes a market of one happy, and that is you. So I will close there, and thanks to everybody for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

02:43:52 Speaker_03
Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

02:44:02 Speaker_03
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

02:44:11 Speaker_03
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered. or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

02:44:22 Speaker_03
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

02:44:34 Speaker_03
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

02:44:48 Speaker_03
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep.

02:45:03 Speaker_03
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02:46:54 Speaker_03
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02:47:08 Speaker_03
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02:47:43 Speaker_03
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