The Tim Ferriss Show - #327: Aisha Tyler — How to Use Pain, Comedy, and Practice for Creativity

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take

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Starting point is 00:02:30 subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out, if the spirit moves you. Why hello, my darling little Marguerite. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out the habits, routines, experiences, life lessons, frameworks, etc. that you can hopefully apply to your own lives. My guest today is someone I've known for quite

Starting point is 00:03:25 a few years now. She's incredible. Aisha Tyler, that is A-I-S-H-A-T-Y-L-E-R on Twitter, Instagram, Vimeo, and beyond. She is an award-winning director, actor, comedian, bestselling author, podcaster, and activist. She does just about everything. And if you've enjoyed my episodes with, for instance, Brandon Stanton, Debbie Millman, or Adam Robinson, among others, you will love this one. Whether you do creative work, want to be too complex to categorize, want to overcome rejection and be the odds, despite the fears and insecurities we all have, this will have something for you. Ayesha voices super spy Lana Kane on FX's Emmy award-winning animated comedy series Archer, which won four back-to-back television critics choice awards. She is a regular

Starting point is 00:04:11 on the hit CBS show Criminal Minds now in its 13th season, for which she has also directed. Aisha continues to host the CW's hit improv show, Whose Line Is It Anyway? And she's launching a line of bottled cocktails she created, Courage and Stone, in summer of 2018. Take a breath. Sit back. That's not all. Let me get a little bit more in just to give you a taste. And man, this doesn't even capture a small fraction, but here we go. Ayesha was a co-host for seven seasons of CBS's Emmy-winning daytime show, The Talk, which she departed in September 2017 to focus more on acting and directing. She's also very well remembered for her character arc on Friends, where she was the

Starting point is 00:04:49 first African American to have a longstanding role on the show. Her feature film debut, the thriller Axis, all caps A-X-I-S, premiered 2017 and won the Outstanding Achievement in Feature Filmmaking Award at the 2017 Newport Beach Film Festival, and then had a theatrical run at Arclight Hollywood, Landmark NYC, and Drafthouse in my home of Austin, Texas. Alamo Drafthouse, so much fun. A San Francisco native, where I also spent a very, very long time, Ayesha graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in government and environmental policy, which you might not have known. She is an avid gamer and passionate advocate and occasional adversary of the gaming community. And her voice can be heard in video games like Halo, Reach, Gears of War 3, and Watch Dogs.

Starting point is 00:05:36 Aisha is a bourbon and hard rock fan, a snowboarder, and a sci-fi obsessive. And we cover so much ground in this episode. It's very wide ranging. She's hilarious. And I really, really, really enjoyed the twists and turns in this particular podcast episode. So without further ado, please enjoy and you can find more to enjoy at AishaTyler.com, of course, the namesake of AishaTyler.com, AishaTyler.com, of course. The namesake of AishaTyler.com, Aisha Tyler. Aisha, welcome to the show. 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.

Starting point is 00:06:20 It is. It is. And you are partially to blame slash credit for me having a podcast in the first place. Because I recall when you interviewed me for Girl on 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 going to bring up, and then we'll backpedal. Okay. But the question will not be surprising to you, I don't think, and I'm going to me deciding to take a break from writing books, which had completely burned me out and in turn helped birth the show. 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. It's so thrilling to hear and really, really gratifying. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I think podcasts are wonderful and terrible beasts, but like really satisfying,

Starting point is 00:07:33 even when they're like punishingly difficult to manage, they're still so satisfying. So I'm really happy. I'm happy that you're enjoying it. And you have, we're not going to get into this right now, although we can. You have a book titled Self-Inflicted Wounds, subtitled Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation. And can you maybe repeat or even paraphrase the question that you would always ask guests on your show? Oh, absolutely. I mean, that came that the name for that book came from this part of my show, Self-Inflicted Wounds, which is some what, you know, tell me a story about something that's gone wrong in your life. That's your own fault. Like, you know, you can't blame anyone else, you know, not your, not your ex, not the bullies in

Starting point is 00:08:22 your school, not the man, you know,, not the man. You did it to yourself. And 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 for that success is that they haven't made any mistakes and they haven't failed, that they've got a charmed life in some way or they figure some kind of formula out. And, you know, the most successful people are people who don't just manage risk, but engage in risk and court failure actively. And so I always love to, you know, have people listening see that someone that they admire and that they think is really accomplished has really shit the bed at some point in their lives, maybe multiple times, because I just think it's instructive. I think people don't start because they're afraid they're going to fail. And there's just no way around, you know, the path to success is through failure. You just can't get around it. So there's 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. And that is to your dad.

Starting point is 00:09:37 And I've, 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. Yeah. Well, I was raised, you know, my parents divorced when I was 10. And my father, my parents, you know, I always joke that like, you know that it's only rich people that can afford to fight about custody. You know what I mean? Poor people just do whatever they have to do to 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. And I was older, so I went with my father.

Starting point is 00:10:24 And he was like, which one can wash itself? And that was the one that he took. That was took one of us. And 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. That was the one for me. And he, you know, my father is the king of the very terse and pointed motivational speech. 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? 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.

Starting point is 00:11:13 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, 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, you know, he just encouraged me to be aggressive. 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, you know, I just think if you're a dad, the world just looks like, you know, a field of broken glass and potholes and molten lava. And then you've got this little kitten and you you're just so terrified to put the kitten down. 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 I have read was amicable. And it ended up resulting in you going with your father. And you have one sibling?

Starting point is 00:12:14 I have a younger sister. Younger sister. 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? You know, it's interesting, because I think it was more the second for me, like, it just was

Starting point is 00:12:35 what was happening. And I don't ever remember struggling in any grand way with the way that things were going. I, you know, it's, and look, maybe that's my nature. I do my, I know my parents worked very hard to be loving and available to both of us. And I had like lots of access to my mother and I talked to her all the time and I called her for advice. And when she got to kind of be the fun mom or the advice mom, you know, she didn't have to discipline me. She could just be the person who was there when I needed emotional support. I do know that one of the things that resulted, at least when we were younger, was my sister and I. But we weren't super close. But lots of siblings aren't super close when they're kids. Whether they're living in the same house or not, they're fighting and they're competitive.

Starting point is 00:13:21 But as we got older, I became wildly protective of my sister. And my relationship with her is so intensely loving and affectionate now. 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. I mean, 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. So, you know, I can't, 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.

Starting point is 00:13:58 Like, I do remember that when they got a divorce, I was like, they really gave it a shot. You know, I could see that they really, like, you know, I just, they would break up and they'd get back together and they'd break up and they'd get back together. And I remember 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, okay, yeah, I don't, I don't ever, I don't ever remember it being like a point of agony. It just, things changed, you know, and, and maybe as a result, I tolerate change better than I would otherwise, or maybe I even crave change. I don't know. Where you would frame what other people might try to frame as a very difficult, agonizing experience into something that was or at least is framed as something positive that you benefited from?

Starting point is 00:14:51 Or have you had more of the time a tendency to frame things negatively? That's a really good question. I think about that a lot because I think that my attitude or my point of view about things is half biochemistry and half like child rearing. My father is just like a preternaturally optimistic person. Like it's extraordinary. I always make this joke that if my father's house was on fire, he would like get a stick and marshmallows. Like he just cannot be deterred. I've never seen it. He's just never down.

Starting point is 00:15:25 And so I think that I inherited that. And maybe it's attitudinal. 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 are, if they have a hard time seeing the world positively or if they're struggling with depression, people are like, well, you 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. I just, you know, 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, you know, 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, I just, I just get up and I keep

Starting point is 00:16:10 going. And that was because, you know, my father was raised, he lost his father when he was very, very young. He's raised by a single mother and, you know, like tumble down 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 can just keep moving. And, and I, and I, so I think I've been nurtured in that way as well, which is the world is unfair. Uh, there, you know, it's shot through with assholes. I still have to get up in the morning and make a life for myself. Um, and so it's probably a combination of those two things. 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, you can gently grab balls.

Starting point is 00:16:57 You can't really gently grab and twist balls. Twisting is an elevated, yes, an elevated form of aggression. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's hard to say, like, oh that my parents raised me to be brave and in some ways maybe too brave. But the result has been like a relentlessness in the pursuit of the things that are important to me. And that's not the same as like, I'm winning. I don't really think about things that way, but it's just if I want to do something, then I do it. And I don't really worry too much about whether it's going to 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.

Starting point is 00:17:54 It's the effort. I got it. By engagement, you mean sort of the dogged persistence that you're developing. The engagement in your personal goals. Like if I want to do something, whatever, I don't know, let's pick something really innocuous. Like if I want to like 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, as, as not looking back and saying to myself, ah, I should have done it. Like it's, it's, it's the doing for me that is the reward.

Starting point is 00:18:23 And then sometimes things go my way and sometimes they don't. But the thing I find most upsetting is regret. 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. Right. You can always attempt. You can't predetermine success. Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 00:18:52 You can only own initiative. Do you recall any – you mentioned your dad being a walk-it-off dad. I want to explore that a little bit. Do you remember any, uh, while you were still under his watch or not, uh, early disappointments or self-inflicted wounds and, and, and how your dad responded or mistakes? Yeah. Um, well, this isn't, this is, this isn't exactly a good example of a disappointment, but it's, it's a perfect example of his attitude. I was going to camp. I was going to camp. I must have been about eight or nine. No, I'll say nine. And I was going to like, you know, jujitsu camp. And this was still during the free range parenting era where you just

Starting point is 00:19:38 got up in the morning and you left at home and you came back later. And that stuff was your responsibility. Did you say eight or nine and then jujitsu camp? Yeah. I was, I was really into martial arts when I was a kid. So it's making me think of the movie Hannah where this band of trains, his daughter to be a super killer. I'm just,

Starting point is 00:19:55 I wish I was that good at it. Fortunately, that was not one of my strong, strong air. But, but as I, as I pointed out, it wasn't the result that was important.

Starting point is 00:20:04 It was just the effort. So I would, I would ride my bike to camp every day and ride it home. 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. And it was a good ride. It was like a five-mile ride to camp. And I fell one day coming down like a hill, kind of, I don't know, free. This was like no helmets. This was a long time ago.

Starting point is 00:20:23 I'm very old. Like, you know, no helmets, just like willy-nilly your backpack on and, you know, you, this was like, this was like no helmets. This was a long time ago. I'm very old. Like, you know, no helmets, just like willy nilly your backpack on and you know, you're not signaling. And, uh, I fell and I hurt my arm very badly. And, uh, like I went, I can't remember, but I contacted my dad and he's like, I'm not going to come get you. I can't leave work. You have to get home on your own. Um, and, and I And so I rode my bike back from camp, you know, like another three, four miles. And my arm was broken. It was definitely broken. I had broken my arm. And I got home and my dad was like, your arm's not broken. I mean, you need to stop complaining. You know, it's just sore. And the next day I woke up, it was like black and swollen. And I had to like, you know, like lift it off the pillow. And he finally took me to the doctor and it was absolutely like compound fracture.

Starting point is 00:21:08 The bone hadn't come through the skin, but it was a multiple fracture. But I think at the time it felt cruel. 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. And as a result, I think that, you know, as an adult, I just don't spend a lot of time like anguishing over what's been done to me, you know. And I was fine. I did ride my bike home and my arm was broken, but I still got home on my bike. And, the next day, I got a super dope cast. And I think we just raise these... I mean, I know I sound like everybody's mom, but I just feel like we're curating young

Starting point is 00:21:53 people's experiences so aggressively nowadays that they just don't have any way to discover things about themselves. 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. And I had a lot of time alone when I was a kid, and I still really like being alone as an adult. Right. 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 overinflated sense

Starting point is 00:22:42 of their capabilities is actually a huge disservice. Oh, absolutely. And their sense of, 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:23:19 Parents are like, I just don't want to see my kid in pain. But like, how are you going to, how do people move through the planet? How do people move through life without pain? That's a false theory. It can't be done. It just cannot be done. And so people just become incapacitated the first minute they hit any kind of a speed bump in their lives. And they just don't know how, they don't know how to navigate disappointment. Whereas I was just deeply disappointed throughout my childhood, so I know exactly what it feels like. I'm just like a next.

Starting point is 00:23:49 I'm like, oh, that didn't go my way. Moving on, you know? Well, yeah, it makes me conjure in my mind the image of this increasing sort of amplitude of pain consequence over your life from like childhood to adulthood, where the consequences grow potentially greater and greater. Where in the beginning, like when you're a child, 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 effectively in one of those like birthday party blow up sumo suits. Do you know what I'm talking

Starting point is 00:24:23 about? And it's like, all right, you can, so you can, you can sort of engage with failure that way. And if you get knocked on your ass, it doesn't, there aren't really real consequences.

Starting point is 00:24:32 And then, then you get, 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 head

Starting point is 00:24:43 gear. And then you, then when you get out into some aspects of the real world, it's just a bare-knuckle brawl. And so if you haven't had the chance... Permanent consequences. Yeah, exactly. So if you haven't had the chance to get wailed in the face with the sumo suit,

Starting point is 00:24:58 you're not going to be ready for the blow-up boxing gloves and the headgear. And certainly if you don't get whacked in the face a few times doing that, you're just going to be crippled when you get out into the real world and get dropkicked in the face by someone who doesn't follow the same rules. And crippled in that way that, and I know you've interacted with people like this, in that way where when something bad happens, their whole monologue is like, why me, 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. Everybody's heart is being broken. Everybody isn't getting the job they want. Everybody isn't getting to sleep with the hot person they want. Everybody is experiencing the same failures, the same injuries, but you just

Starting point is 00:25:44 don't know how to tolerate them. You are not special. And that's not the same failures, the same injuries, but you just don't know how to tolerate them. You are not special. And that's not the same as saying you don't have the potential for being special. There's nothing anybody is doing now that hasn't already been done and that won't be done in the future. Those kinds of personalities drive me crazy because they're so stuck and boring. What did you think you were going to be when you grew up, when you were in high school or college? Oh, God. In high school, it's so interesting because I was super academic.

Starting point is 00:26:23 And I think I thought I'd be an attorney. I was a a big activist and I organized and marched and did all that stuff and I was I was like a really like in the you know the outing club and I rock climbed and all that stuff so I thought I was going to be like an environmental lawyer um either an environmental lawyer an environmental engineer and then I got to and I wanted I really wanted to go to a school that was like like really grounded in like 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 I ended up going to Dartmouth, which is in New Hampshire and has this big land grant around it. And I thought I would be an environmental engineer.

Starting point is 00:27:03 And I think I just took like the first prerequisite math course for engineering. I was like, yeah, okay, it's not just not going to be, it's not for me. I always love science, but I'm just a person of letters, I guess. And I didn't have the appetite for it. It wasn't as glamorous as I thought. I think when I took my first engineering, I think I got through the math class, like did fine. Like I applied myself and I got a good grade. And then I went into my like, you know, an introduction to engineering three. And it was about like building like a fecal matter treatment plant. And I was like, this isn't feeling like hugging trees at all, man.

Starting point is 00:27:36 We're just talking about poop all day. I lost my appetite for that really quickly. So then what? Did you just have this great existential angst or did you sort of shift to something else immediately following that? I was always doing kind of like performing things on the side. Like I, I went to a high school that had a performing arts kind of like magnet or like a pocket school within the, the, the regular school called the, uh, J. U. D. McAteer School of the Arts. 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 doing some of the same stuff. Like, you know,

Starting point is 00:28:20 I was in one of those infernal, you know, Ivy League acapella groups that have been popularized since then by shows like Glee. And so I was always kind of doing that as a hobby because it just never felt like a real job. And I graduated and I was living in San Francisco and I was working for a conservation organization that was like a killer. It was like, I got like my dream job. It was a group that purchased like blighted urban land and turned it into parks and underserved neighborhoods that didn't have any outdoor space for kids to play. And, you know, it was like the mission was great because it was 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.

Starting point is 00:29:01 And I was just miserable. And I just. Why were you miserable? Because I just, I didn't know. It was a really good question. You know, it was like,

Starting point is 00:29:10 why, why, if I have my dream job in the city of my birth, uh, why am I so unhappy? And, um, and I just did a lot of soul searching and I realized it was because I,

Starting point is 00:29:21 for the first time in my life, I wasn't doing anything creative. I wasn't performing. And so, um, I, I'm, I'm a problem. I'm a, I'm a problem solver. I'm a matrix builder. I was like, well, how can I solve this problem right now? And, um, 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. I could just do stand-up right away. And so I started studying it and watching the precursor to Comedy Central, which was this network called HA, a very short-lived network, and taking notes.

Starting point is 00:29:59 And then, you know, after a while, just kind of screwed up the courage to go and do an open mic. And then it was just transformational. I was like, oh, this is what I want to do with my life. 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? 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 going to be great i'll continue doing this job and i'll scratch my creative performance itch on the weekends with open mics yeah it's so funny

Starting point is 00:30:37 because like i don't think i even realized that stand-up comedy was a job um you know i mean i was i was like a really bookish kid. You know, a lot of guys will have these stories about how they grew up, you know, with like Red Fox, you know, on vinyl that they listened to hundreds of times or, you know, following, you know, Letty Bruce or, you know, these idols

Starting point is 00:30:57 or Bill Hicks. I just, I didn't, like, I remember seeing Live on the Sunset Strip when I was a kid, but like, I just thought Richard Pryor was an alien. Like I, 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.

Starting point is 00:31:15 So I remember seeing standup at Dartmouth when I was like a sophomore and coming out of a show and being like, like, do you got like, do people know that this, like, you can go and have this feeling for an hour? Like, this is insanity. Like, I just remember like everything hurt from laughing, my face and my stomach. And I just never experienced live comedy before. So it, it, it, it, it didn't dovetail into like a job at first. It was just something I was going to do for fun. I kept my day job 100%. And I kept it for a long time. I also didn't want to be like one of these kind of like miserable, you know, sweating stand-ups who are like gripping their, you know, kind of inky notebook and sleeping on their buddy's couch. You know, like I was in a relationship and I had a job that paid great and I could make flyers for my shows at work. I was embezzling, you know, a copy paper and push pins as aggressively as I could make flyers for my shows at work. I was embezzling a copy paper and push pins as aggressively as I could.

Starting point is 00:32:08 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. I'm of the same opinion. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, 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'd jump in the car and I'd drive two hours to Sacramento to do a set, and I'd come back at midnight and I'd do it all over again.

Starting point is 00:32:49 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. Now, for those people who don't know the geography of Northern California, where I lived for 17 years. And coincidentally, this, the high school that you went to, is that now the Ruth Asawa school on O'Shaughnessy? Um, it's on O'Shaughnessy. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:14 Up there at the twin, like kind of like the nexus of Twin Peaks slash Glen Park Canyon. Exactly. So I literally lived for five or six years about a quarter mile from that school. That's amazing. It was right there. It's not a big city, even though I think when you live there, it feels like it. But it's an intimate place.

Starting point is 00:33:35 It's an intimate place. And given the density of San Francisco and the fact that it is – well, I'm not going to go so I don't know if people would consider it a comedy town but there's certainly clubs and so on. 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

Starting point is 00:33:58 away from San Francisco. It's far. San Francisco's always had a reputation for being a comedy town. Like the big comedy towns in the United States from comedians' perspectives are San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York. LA is not, I mean, LA is a company town, but it's not a comedy town. 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.

Starting point is 00:34:28 And, you know, Mark Maron and Janine Garofalo and these kind of alternative comics, Brian Poussain 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. 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. And I started doing stand-up at the beginning of the end of the comedy bubble. So when I started doing stand-up,

Starting point is 00:34:59 the club community was contracting and some of the big clubs in San Francisco were closing. 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 once a weekend. You know, you need to be on stage like every night. It's like being a high diver. You know what? It's literally like Malcolm Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours and you're not going to get 10,000 hours of standup hanging out in San Francisco. Like you have to go everywhere and take every single opportunity to be on stage that you can get. So, um, I would drive to Sacramento. I would drive to Fresno. I would do these terrible, you know, like bar shows and in Menlo park., oh, God, I don't even remember some of the places.

Starting point is 00:35:49 Cupertino and Martinez. 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. I mean, the culture, I think, was pretty supportive. Like, comedians were supportive of each other, but there just wasn't enough stage time. So you just do anything and go anywhere to get it. So I want to 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.

Starting point is 00:36:21 Like people were like, really? The Beanie Babies? It's like, no, comedy isn't cool anymore. And then like all the clubs closed? Was it just a macroeconomic downturn? I mean, what happened? in some ways in the 70s and 80s was kind of a new thing. And it's not like people hadn't been doing standup prior to that, but the proliferation of standup 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 standup in the 70s and 80s? Maybe because that was the period where there were these superstar comics um that were kind of you know i'm trying to think of who would have been really popular besides like bill hicks and um i could see that though maybe it's analogous to like celebrity celebrity chefs in the

Starting point is 00:37:16 last 15 years yeah exactly and and you know part of the reason why there are so many more celebrity chefs is because there started to be celebrity chefs on television right and so if you think about that in terms of comedy what you what you see is oh that's a job i can make money at that whereas people weren't really encountering live comedy if they didn't go to a live comedy show uh and so you start to see these guys on tv and you think, and honestly, when, when HA, the precursor, um, to Comedy Central started, they needed, like they needed comics and they needed opportunities. They needed clubs. They needed, they needed content. It was a 24 hour network. So there were, there were some good comedians on that station and there were some really, uh, some really shitty ones. And so a lot of people watching probably thought, well, I can do that. You know? Um, I also think about guys like, you know,

Starting point is 00:38:14 Sam Kinison and Andrzej 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. 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, when Joan Rivers was doing standup, she was doing standup in strip clubs. There were very few comedy clubs and comedy was kind of a part of a vaudeville approach. 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 had a two drink minimum,

Starting point is 00:38:57 people would come and they would get wasted. You'd have huge margins on your booze. So all these comedy clubs started proliferating. And then there was just peak clubs. Saturation. 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. 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. Like I said, I think there were maybe like five or six comedy clubs in San Francisco when I was in high school.

Starting point is 00:39:37 By the time I was doing standup in my twenties, there were two. And so you would do, and they were attracting like high end, like peak talent. So for example, Wow. 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 would be 20 other guys trying to get on as well. And it would be wildly competitive. And you wouldn't be getting paid. And then you'd be super anxious because you'd be hoping, okay, I need to go up and I need to destroy because I want this club owner to hire me again. So I can't go up and I can't work out. I can't, I can't fail in front of this guy because he won't see this, like, um, you know, when you watch like an Olympic skater

Starting point is 00:40:35 during practice and they're falling, I mean, that's, that's what practice is for, you know, practices for like finding your weak spots and reinforcing them. But when you're up in front of a comedy club owner and you, he's, practices for like finding your weak spots and reinforcing them. But when you're up in front of a comedy club owner and you, he's, it's been six months that you've been trying to get out of this club and you finally get five minutes, it's gotta be a monster five minutes. And, and so, um, there was just no way to improve. You can't improve. You can't. I was going to say, how do you, how do you get in your rough drafts then? I mean, how do you work on the material?

Starting point is 00:41:03 Drive to Martinez. Oh, I see. I see. So you'd work out the kinks with the crew at the such and such casino and God knows where, Turlock. Or Fubars or Rooster Teeth Feathers or one of these other places. Yeah. these other places that yeah um and and there was this um you know 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 you 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're sharp or flat you know if you hit all the

Starting point is 00:41:45 notes you know if the tempo is right but with comedy the only way it works is in front of an audience um and so you're very dependent on on stage time and that's it's everything when you're a young comic is stage time well do you remember your early content i mean what kind of what was your approach early on uh do you remember the first – and maybe a different way to approach this. You can 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? Oh, God.

Starting point is 00:42:14 I bombed so many times. It all seeps together into an inky blackness. Any comic who tells you they've ever bombed is lying. And, again, the only way to get funny is to bomb, you know, whenever, no one ever gets funnier after they kill, you know, they just walk out of that, follow that bitches and they drop the mic. You know what I mean? They go off and do shots of their friends.

Starting point is 00:42:34 I mean, you really need to, you really need to bomb and bomb hard to get funny. Um, I remember doing this one show. Oh God. doing this one show oh god so there was there was an open mic in a laundromat um in like like south of market around the police station there so what maybe like you know eighth and mission or something like that for people in san francisco uh 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 and comics know you know with these open, 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

Starting point is 00:43:13 you to be done so that they can try out their material. You know, look, 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. And I just did a set where I did not get one laugh. And I remember – not even like a cursory titter. And I remember just silence, just like a wall of silence. And I got off. Even thinking about it right now, it's so funny to me. Like I called a

Starting point is 00:43:46 friend or I talked to a girlfriend afterwards. I was like, oh my God, like 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. It was, there was this, there was this like bulletproofness that I got from that set that just made me impervious to anything ever going wrong in my in my life or career again and and every like even when I'm talking about now it's like there's a huge smile on my face because it was so funny how how little how little I was able to elicit out of that audience um but but it made it made me it just made me so mentally strong. Was that the immediate response that you had? I mean, or were you in the middle of the set when you're like in the back of your mind thinking, wow, no one is laughing? Was there – did you go from like – was it like the reverse of the five stages of grief or like what?

Starting point is 00:44:41 Or did you just go straight to like, yeah, motherfuckers, this is great. Just full acceptance this is gonna make a great story however many years from now on tim ferris's podcast well one thing comedians love is is uh agony i mean it's we dine out on it is definitely like our our stock and trade so uh a comedian very quickly uh transitions from oh my god this is the worst night of my life to oh oh my God, this is going to make a great story. That happens almost instantaneously. So we have a little bit of, we have some armor in that regard because, you know, you could just, we could wake up like naked and shivering on the side of the road with like no money and no phone and, you know, and not speak the local language. 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

Starting point is 00:45:26 do very well either. I was prepared for it not going my way. And I just thought, I'm just, 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. There is no, you don't get to tap out. Like tapping out is true failure. You know, if you no, you don't get to tap out. Like tapping out is tapping out is true failure. You know, if you, 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. Um, and, and there, there are some really famous examples of this online. Um, I don't know if you know the comedian Bill Burr, but I, so I interviewed Bill Burr about a year and a half ago, and I played the video, which he had never seen or he claimed to have never seen.

Starting point is 00:46:09 He still has some psychic – he has some trauma. So can you – for people who don't know the story, can you please describe it? Because it's just – it's amazing. It's insane. So he was doing one of those big 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. So it's one of those shows at some local station, like K-Rock, 97. Rock, K-Rock, one of those shows. And it's like, I don't know, Weezer's too cool of a band. It would be like Nickelback and some other band that sounds like Nickelback and then an opening band you never heard of. Anyway, but they paid, I don't know why people still do this, but if you're a comic and someone offers you money,

Starting point is 00:46:52 you take it. So they would hire a comic to kind of warm up the crowd early in the day. And no one pays to see Nickelback and then wants to sit through 15 minutes of standup. Everyone's drunk and on drugs. They're not even facing forward. You know what I mean? It's just like the work,

Starting point is 00:47:07 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. Yeah. Yeah. This is like a, this is like a tailgate at like 11 AM or 1 PM or something. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:21 Every, everybody's been, you know, everybody like busted out there, like, you know, their marijuana brownie recipe for the year. They're Yeah. Everybody's been, you know, everybody like busted out their like, you know, their marijuana brownie recipe for the year. They're all like completely looped, you know, like one of their eyes is completely dilated and the other one is like falling out of their head. Nobody cares about your jokes about your mom and your family. So they could

Starting point is 00:47:37 not muster compassion if they tried. So he starts doing standup 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. But it's not like silence you can tolerate, right? But people are screaming at him to get off stage. And 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. And he's counting down the minutes.

Starting point is 00:48:17 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 so, it's so, it's just a demonstration of tenacity.

Starting point is 00:48:36 You know, he later, you know, he was embarrassed by it, but every comedian understands, you know, this kind of, this kind of blood battle that you sometimes have with an audience where, you know, this kind of, this kind of blood battle that you sometimes have with an audience where, you know, you're not, they're not going to scare you and they're not going to drive you away. 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

Starting point is 00:48:58 light beer and chicken wings. But, but no one is, you will not be deterred. And so, so I think because you understand that as a comedian very early on in your career, no matter what happens on stage, you know, I will not be moved. So I just, I had material to do and I did it. And I think, I remember thinking almost immediately, well, okay, I'm not going to get any laughs. 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. 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 kind of like savory masochism towards the end where he just, he's so powerful in his, in his, in his lack of caring, you know what I mean? Like, and, and, uh and i i you you watch it and it's it it is

Starting point is 00:49:47 to be studied because he goes from kind of anguish to rage to this kind of delightful detachment by the end of the set uh and i've seen i've seen some other guys do similar stuff and it's always really fun to watch so a couple of a couple of things that i want to use as teasers for people who should watch this video. I think it was in – I'm almost 100% positive it was in Philadelphia. Philadelphia, I think. I know either that or Jersey. 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.

Starting point is 00:50:22 And he basically for half of his set just decided to abandon his material and just attack these them. 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. Yeah, like if people hate you, there are these unwritten rules of comedy. And one of them is if some of the people in the audience hate you,

Starting point is 00:50:42 don't turn all of them against you. Yeah. And this is just a sidebar, but don't forget what you were going to say. There's another very famous video, very famous. And it happened at the punchline in San Francisco where, um, there's a guy playing, he's a guitar comic and a guy's heckling him. And, uh, 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 to defend himself or the girl he's with, something like that.

Starting point is 00:51:10 And the guy just hauls off and hits him in the head with a guitar. Sorry, sorry. Not funny. It's tragic, but Jesus Christ. Everybody live. But what happens is, up until that beat, the whole audience has been on the comedian's side against this guy.

Starting point is 00:51:27 And it is a hairpin turn from them being like, yeah, shut up. Because the comic's like, hey, people can't enjoy the show because you're talking. Keep it down. And then he hits this guy and the whole audience just turns on him just like instantaneous like Frankensteinstein's monster mob just the pitchforks come flying out and so the one of the unwritten rules of comedy is that you know you just don't you want to try to at all costs avoid turning everybody against you which so so bill broke a bunch of rules but 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 stuck in there and he got

Starting point is 00:52:05 a standing of well I mean everyone's already standing but he got massive applause from the audience at the end which is just because they're just like what the fuck like it didn't even fit into like any mental heuristic of comedy that they could expect it was it was straight prison that was straight prison yard dynamics right like nobody it's the line from uh out of sight right just like the yard nobody's backing down nobody's backing down and he just you know i think they there was like a thousand of them to one of her probably like ten thousand of them to one of him and he just did not back down you know so he got he got the slow respect clap at the end oh my god

Starting point is 00:52:45 so i wasn't gonna 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 um god yeah i mean again i mean i mean i started doing stand-up like 25 years ago so i at this point like all the sets have just kind of blended but um and heckling can be lots of different things it doesn't always have to be like the conventional kind of you suck heckle one i i had 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 to me she was sitting in the front row and she was talking to me the entire show.

Starting point is 00:53:29 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. That's awful. 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. And I just

Starting point is 00:53:52 seemed like a dick because I was like, shut up, lady. But no one could hear what she was saying. What's wrong? Nice lady. I remember that really went off the rails last night. And I generally have a rule with hecklers that unless they're really disruptive to the entire room, I mean, that was, I remember that really went off the rails last night. 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've derailed a show for 500 or a thousand people to deal with one person. 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.

Starting point is 00:54:24 But sometimes the affection um but but sometimes the affectionate hecklers are the worst because because they don't like you know 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 it was 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 like i don't i don't have a box jumper in my act. All right. I showed up ready to go. But, um, but when people are affectionate, you, you can't insult them. And they're, they're the most unmanageable kind of affectionate me. So it was like, I love you. I love you. I had this one girl at one show in San Francisco, just so drunk. I'm just cross-eyed.

Starting point is 00:55:01 And for the 90 minutes I was on stage, I love you. I love you so much. I love you. And I was just like, lady, like, all you're doing is making me want to hit you in the head with this microphone stand. Your affection is not welcome here. And everybody else is like staring at this woman. but she just is a genuine expression of emotion for this person that is destroying my joy completely. So, um, you know, I, I, I really have a habit of just not talking to hecklers. What did you do in that case? Did you ignore her? I think that I kept saying like, thank you. That's super sweet. Shut the fuck up. That was like, 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. Um, and, uh, and I think the people around her got embarrassed and they eventually

Starting point is 00:55:54 kind of shut her up, which was nice. Um, and I'm trying to think of any other really good hecklers that, uh, Oh, I had one guy and it's's 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 that the bilber scenario is a perfect example the person with the microphone has all the power uh and as long as they as long as they cannot be moved they will they will eventually win but i had um this one guy who was sitting like really close to the stage it was like a group of 12 people and they were all like laughing their asses off. And then he was just arms crossed, just looked like he just had just eaten a big scoop of fecal matter.

Starting point is 00:56:33 And I just, he was all I could see. Like, you know what I mean? Like the whole audience had disappeared and it was just like straight vignette on this guy's like sourpuss face. And I couldn't, 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.

Starting point is 00:56:56 It wasn't even a joke. I was just like, get out. And you are harshing my mellows so hard. And, and, and, and he left and I, 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. But what was great was nobody else at the table wanted to leave. They were like, you know, good riddance to bad rubbish.

Starting point is 00:57:14 And he went on and the rest of the people enjoyed their night. But, again, that was me. That was my, you know, I should have been disciplined enough not to be distracted by, you know, old sourpuss. But I just, I'm only human. If the Grinch is sitting in the front row, something must be done. 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? Did you watch video of other comics? How did you you can learn how to be a better comic, but you can't learn how to be a comic or even a different way, I really wanted to be an engineer. And I could have really suffered and struggled through the elevated math that I would need to become an engineer, but it would never be effortless for me. And I think with comedy, there are people who,

Starting point is 00:58:37 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. You know, like Usain Bolt still has to train. Even though he was born with, you know, more fast-twitch 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 or they can be the guys 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, this ephemeral ineffable kind of understanding of the math of comedy, they're going to be able to do something magical with those skills. 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

Starting point is 00:59:22 little bit of a social pariah. So storytelling became a way to make friends, you know what I mean? Like to like ingratiate myself. I would, I, you know, I would kind of like try to talk my way into situations or if I was in a social situation, talk really fast to try to keep myself engaging, not be, not be rejected. Um, so like that was what I, 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. There are definitely people who can say, oh, there's a total methodology to comedy.

Starting point is 00:59:58 It's the rule of threes and stretching reality to the point of breaking but not past it. There are some specific kind of rules. What's the rule of threes? The rule of threes is that – I mean definitely maintain your train of thought. Right. I probably won't even be able to articulate it properly. It's just that like if you're going to do a series of jokes or a series of builds to a punchline, it needs to be three.

Starting point is 01:00:20 I get it. I get it. And also if you're going to do any kind of a, 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, you can't do that in two. It has to, it has to be, it has to be the pace of it has to be three. I see. And then past three, you're starting to, you know, draw things out too long, but two doesn't give people enough of a time to be called into a false sense of security before you kind of pull the rug out from under them.

Starting point is 01:00:52 As soon as you start explaining the math of comedy, none of it makes any sense. It's those two things. Someone who's really gifted at physics, 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

Starting point is 01:01:10 chair water sex um so um i i guess the way that i did it was that i i'm also really an undisciplined comedian and what i mean is like um like there's a there's 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. And sometimes it would be pages and pages of material without fail. Other comics would be like, hey, let's get a beer and be like, no, I have to write. And every day he would write like, you know, on this like legal – this is probably true and apocryphal at the same time. On this like legal – I knew about this tiny handwriting. He would just write and write and write and write. And every day he would write like, you know, on this like legal, this is, this is probably true and apocryphal at the same time on this, like legal, I knew about this tiny handwriting. He would just write and write and write and write. I do not do that. I've never worked that way. Um, I just get on stage. I try a bunch of stuff. I keep what works. I know what works. I already

Starting point is 01:01:58 know right away what works. I'll run off stage. I'll write down the things that I knew hit. 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. I record my sets, but I never, 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. But 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. 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 valueless or coreless, you'll still do them because that's all you have.

Starting point is 01:02:58 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? 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.

Starting point is 01:03:14 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? Yeah, it does make sense. Absolutely. I think that's true for musicians. I think it's true for musicians i think it's true for many different artists writers too probably for writers it's like i'm going to find a space

Starting point is 01:03:32 that's that it really says something about like my accumulated understanding and knowledge of of the world and it's not just enough to say something like i need to say something that's uniquely mine you know and as something you can only do with by being prolific because you need to be able to let things go in order to figure out what should stay definitely yeah there's i mean there's a certain volume to it or thinking of it almost as a funnel and uh you know i 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 uh 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 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

Starting point is 01:04:33 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 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. In other words, you can figure out something you can be proud of that is simultaneously likely to find some type of sizable audience. Right. And, uh, 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? And that's a very precarious position, uh, or mindset to put yourself into if you're hoping to do anything creatively evergreen. Right, right.

Starting point is 01:05:30 And also, like, it's interesting. Like, you know, like when I went to school, you know, 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. That's what you did. You know what I mean? You just you were going to be 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 think that I don't think that it's like we're any less ethical than we've ever been.

Starting point is 01:05:58 It's just like you said, our metrics have changed. Like, and I think that people value fame for fame's sake rather than for like the foundational reasons that people become famous. And I think that's the problem. And I don't think it just exists in journalism. I think that people value infamy or they can't distinguish between fame and infamy. And, you know, with a 24-hour news cycle, like, you know, a bright burst is as meaningful as a slow burn. And I don't really know. 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, you know, baseless journalism. And, you know, it's just so hard to distinguish. I don't know. I find it, let me take that back. I find it very easy to distinguish

Starting point is 01:06:51 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. So there are, you know, without me sounding like a crazy person, there are nefarious, you know, forces at work trying to make it very hard for us to figure out what's real and what's not real. 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 butts and cupcakes all day long. Have you been watching my feed? Are you looking over my shoulder? Are you one of the nefarious forces?

Starting point is 01:07:28 I'm following you and I know what you're into. I see what you're into, Tim. Oh, God. You know, I have to, 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. 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? And I was like, oh, fuck. Fortunately, I've systematically dismantled and deliberately tarnished any semblance of any reputation I might have very deliberately.

Starting point is 01:08:10 So that I feel – I do, too. So that I don't feel – I'm going to start interviewing you now. This is so interesting. So that I don't feel I have any Stepford Wives polished persona to preserve, right? It's like, yeah. That's so good.

Starting point is 01:08:29 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. And I think like that comes also from a curiosity about the world. I actually think that like people who are trying to remain perfect all the time are fear-driven. That's not a position of strength. 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.

Starting point is 01:09:01 I cannot be seen to have flaws. There can be no chinks in my armor. And I am terrified of being judged. 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 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:09:38 Absolutely. And that's why I'm a total mess. Well, if you don't, if you don't practice skinning your knees, just to like 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 sort of increasingly painful grades of, of sandpaper. This is really awkwardly overextended now, but the point being, if you operate from a place of fear and want to please this nebulous majority more than you want to please yourself, and that's not to say that I'm

Starting point is 01:10:17 always, 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. That's not true because that's not how humans have evolved. But if you are, if you are deferring to others, your perception of what others want, uh, on the small things, 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. 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. Because if you don't practice on the smaller stuff, for instance, like if I'm so

Starting point is 01:11:05 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. 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. I will. I remember at one point I had at this i put up this photo of this gorgeous like latin ass and um female and uh and it said like nalgofilia and i had this in spanish this explanation of this fake condition which was nalgofilia anyway i think it was nalgofilia anyway las nalgas is like ass in in spanish so anyway so i put this up on instagram spanish spanish for ass man is what you're saying that's right it's spanish for like ass man ass man

Starting point is 01:11:50 syndrome right or ass man disorder and i put it up and as to be expected there is immediate outrage i mean there are there are plenty of people who think it's kind of funny plenty of people are like yeah high five and then there are plenty of other people who are just completely outraged disgusted with you. Disgusted with this fact that I find attractive women attractive. Yes, outrage is contagious. Yeah. But I left it up because I like to call my audience, number one.

Starting point is 01:12:19 Yes. If you don't want to be here, please, I invite you to unfollow. Yeah, exactly. Right. It's like the sourpuss in the front row. It's please, I invite you to unfollow. Yeah, exactly. Right. It's like the sourpuss in the front row. It's like, let me give you – you look like you're unhappy, but you're still here. And let me give you another reason to leave if I'm not your thing because go find something that's your thing. Their opinion is valuable to you.

Starting point is 01:12:42 I think there's a freedom in saying I don't need everybody to like me. That's, you know what I mean? I think, I think that like, there is something very meaningful in saying like, this is who I am. 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, you know? Um, uh, or maybe that person makes you think more critically about what you did and then you take the big booty picture down. I don't know. But I think you put it up purposefully to see what you were going to get back. I totally did. Entertaining.

Starting point is 01:13:13 Now, 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. 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. 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. Uh, at the same time, I try to keep in mind, uh, advice that I was given years ago. I don't remember who gave me this advice, but they said the advice was, it's not about how many people don't get it. It's about how many people get it. So, so as long as you have a certain critical mass, whatever that means to

Starting point is 01:14:04 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, pay it. That's all that matters. That's like a pass fail. As long as you have that pass, you're green. And instead of focusing on the vast majority who hate your shit it's like look there are millions of people who hate like christopher nolan stuff there are millions of people who can't stand wes anderson it's like look some people just aren't going to

Starting point is 01:14:35 fucking like wes anderson exactly exactly so 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-, you know, this is like kind of the period when like deaf comedy jam was really popular. And, you know, and for lack of a better way of articulating it, like 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. It wasn't experientially what I was doing.

Starting point is 01:15:03 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. You know, they'd kind of be one way off stage and then kind of fall into this character on stage. And 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. And, you know, 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 like true to who I was because that was the only way forward. The only way forward as an artist is to be truthful. else or trying to figure out what people want from you or what they like or what's popular. Meaningful art only lasts, it only connects if it's authentic and if it comes from, you know, your own personal experiences. And until you figure that out, like what that is,

Starting point is 01:16:01 it's never going to be interesting. It's never going to be good. And 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. 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 or between good art and great art or writing or anything. Yeah, it's truth. That's advice that i've also heard for screenwriting and many other things it's like yeah uh i'm so glad you said that and reminded me of that you know you have to please

Starting point is 01:16:36 yourself i mean you just have to please yourself period because it might not go your way anyway but the worst thing is creating something to figure out what people want and then creating some piece of shit, some like crass, you know, glib, solicitous piece of shit. And people don't buy it anyway. 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. Right. And 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. Yeah, nothing ever goes your way. Right. So you might as well have one person who's happy about the process.

Starting point is 01:17:18 Exactly. That was what I was saying about engagement. 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. Don't talk. I'm talking to myself. 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, right? If somebody is on stage and they are playing their game, that is who they are, 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 so not you're so right yeah you're just not going to win so it's like you have you will not ultimately in any field that is competitive which is effectively every field that people get paid for uh the only if you want to be the best you actually you have to harness your latent abilities and or you're fucked like you can't like you mentioned uh on

Starting point is 01:18:36 the engineering front i mean there's so many places where for instance in writing it's like i could try to be uh john mcphee who writes for The New Yorker, or one of these folks, but I can't be those people. 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. So I can use books as a medium for teaching and thinking of it, think of it that way. Because if I try to be, if I try to out McPhee McPhee, I'm going to get my face ripped off. Um, and, um, well, you know, this is, we're talking about creativity and creative pursuits, which by the

Starting point is 01:19:19 way, almost everything is, even if you're, uh, if you meet people who are the top of their game in accounting, the top of the game, I'm not talking about shady, uh, money laundering shit. I'm just saying in accounting, in, uh, technology, there's an element. There's certainly an element of creativity. 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. 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,

Starting point is 01:20:08 and so on. I want to talk about movies because as long-term listeners will know, I've been sort of teasing with the idea, which by the way, just means procrastinating of writing, writing short films. And I'm still at step zero. And I'm ashamed of that. But no, no shame. There's no shame. Yeah. So how did you how did you decide to get into film? And why? I mean, film is hard. Film is hard. Why do it? It is tough.

Starting point is 01:20:42 Yeah, like, so that's a really good question, because I feel like there's the, you know, that like really humiliating kind of, you know, clam about, you know, well, I'm an actor, but what I really want to do is direct. And it feels very cliched. I feel like it was more organic for me because I, you know, I, again, I wasn't someone who kind of, 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 of years now. I can direct.

Starting point is 01:21:07 It was I had written some. I love movies like, you know, we were talking earlier. I was raised by a single dad. And, you know, 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, you know, way too early in age, like super inappropriate, you know, or like by the time, you know, like when I was in high school, I'd seen the Terminator, like the first Terminator from like 20 or 30 times. Like I just loved movies. I'd go to the theater, I'd buy a matinee ticket and I'd stay in the theater until like eight o'clock at night. And I would just like watch movie after movie after movie. And so it just came out of a, like a real end user's love for film. Like I was

Starting point is 01:21:42 just someone who was transported by movies. And then when I, when I left talk soup, um, I had been writing on that show and, and like there was a void and I wrote a script that I was developing with, uh, with a company. And, and I just kept talking about how I thought it should look and how I thought it should feel. 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. And I hadn't really thought about it.

Starting point is 01:22:12 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. And I just realized, like, 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 to and started trying to learn about directing and so I kind of would call people that I knew that were directors 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.

Starting point is 01:22:47 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. 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'm sure I have resources available to me that lots of people don't. But I do feel – I do believe in it.

Starting point is 01:23:18 Like I just believe in personal aggression. Like I just believe in doing stuff. You said personal aggression? Personal aggression. Like I just believe that like if you want to make a movie, just start making a movie. And I don't mean like go get a camera and start shooting it. But what I do mean is like be hard on yourself. Like learn, read, learn, watch, study, think critically, ask people questions.

Starting point is 01:23:38 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 – I and it's an abomination. It will be never see the light of day. 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, uh, I started to feel like I was more ready and I was like, I need to make some stuff. 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.

Starting point is 01:24:11 It wasn't anything that was mandated by the network. 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 kind of the first thing I directed. I just used the crew that was already working on the special and shot this video with them. That's really smart. So I would imagine not, not to interject, but you piggybacked on something that was in your main line of business, so to speak. Exactly. I imagine you saved a lot of costs by doing that, right? I mean, yeah, like, like the, the, the crew was already going to come up the day before and leave the day after to shoot the special.

Starting point is 01:24:51 And we'd already rented the cameras and everything like that. But I still had to pay them for the extra work. 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. And then after that, I thought, okay, I want to do more of this. So then I rented a camera. I rented like a can of 5D and I had some friends who were in bands. And again, like it sounds fancy, but everybody probably knows somebody who does something. You know, just because I had some friends who were in a famous band doesn't mean that people out there don't have friends who are 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, I will make you a free music video,

Starting point is 01:25:30 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. 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. And so then I just started to have 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. I had done that first music video for my Comedy Central special, which was really like a comedic video.

Starting point is 01:26:07 But then I was like, oh, I really like working in this space. 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 narrative linearity. You can experiment. You can be radical. It could just be like a series of images. And I also thought, well, people who like this band band and I love this band will want to see something about them and it'll be a great way for people

Starting point is 01:26:28 to see something and then hopefully I can tell a story at the same time and so I did three of those and then I did a little action short like I just kind of kept making stuff you know every time I did it I learned something every time I did it I took a bigger risk creatively

Starting point is 01:26:43 how long are these shorts? Like three to five minutes. Three to five minutes. Can you think of any particular lessons that you took away from any one of those? Yeah, like I think a lot of it was just skill building. Like how do you frame up and how do you make choices and how do you do coverage and, you know, and then how do you edit? Like a lot of it was just really tactical, as you would say, practical tactical. Oh, God.

Starting point is 01:27:13 I have my pet phrases. This is also my weakness. I'm going to steal it. Stealing it from Tim. My pet phrases. Oh, God. And then a lot of it was just like 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?

Starting point is 01:27:34 Who does what? What do I need? Oh, God, this didn't work. You know why it didn't work? Because I didn't have this kind of a person on set. you know, we, I was shooting digitally and then on one show, uh, on one of my things that I shot, like we didn't have, um, uh, like a tech on set, on set to like, to help me make sure that it looked the way that I wanted it to look like that the levels were set properly. So when I got home to edit it, like I had some problems, but like, it wasn't, they weren't, they weren't catastrophic

Starting point is 01:28:00 problems. They were just cause, because I, you know, I wasn't making Star Wars, you know what I mean? 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 to do... 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. 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, you love the show. You should come visit us in Ireland.

Starting point is 01:28:30 And I remember thinking 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. I'm going 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.

Starting point is 01:28:47 So I got them to let me visit that set. I just hung out at like passed out sandwiches and, you know, lifted stuff and asked questions and watched them work. 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. 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. And it was just great.

Starting point is 01:29:15 It was just like, I was like, oh, this is like totally who I am. This is what I want to do with my life. Where did you film in Ireland? In Galway, in Galway, which is a beautiful town. Yeah. Such a great place. I lived there for a month in 2005.

Starting point is 01:29:30 Oh yeah. Amazing. Oh, that's so cool. Incredible arts festival there. It's a really beautiful spot. Yeah, it is.

Starting point is 01:29:36 It's like, it's, it's like the art center of, of Ireland, you know, um, they've got a beautiful film festival in the summer. They've got an arts festival,

Starting point is 01:29:42 um, you know, like local theater. And, um, it was just a great experience. Uh, and you know, things went wrong and things went right, but you know, we got it in the can in three days and it was just super cool and personal. And then, uh, that same writer who had written that short, uh, had a feature he had already written and he asked me if i wanted to

Starting point is 01:30:05 take a look at it and it was just a perfect first film and that's the film that became access okay so i i want to dig in to access but before we get to that you're taking these trips doing these music videos during that period are you did you save up for that period knowing that you would need to work out of your savings? Are you depending on royalties and other streams to pay your bills? How are you covering the necessities of life as you're handing out sandwiches and doing all these various things. Well, it wasn't as prolonged of a period as it sounds like. I was on hiatus. So 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,

Starting point is 01:31:00 I would say, if what you want is to grow in whatever field you're interested in, just create a space for that. Make that your vacation. It wasn't like I was riding around in a limousine. I just flew over and I hung around for a week and watched people work. It wasn't any more or less burdensome than taking a vacation. But one thing I was more interested in doing as I got older, and we started with this in the beginning, is like, you said it, and I think we kind of went

Starting point is 01:31:32 past it, but it's so interesting to me. I just really wanted more discomfort in my life. I was like, you know, it's just very easy the older you get to be like uh 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 am i growing it like it's like any of this interesting am i gonna you know i mean like i have one life and i'm just spending it in this like torpor and so um for that i was going to a place where i mean i knew i knew one guy at petty dreadful but I didn't know anybody at this other show. And I just kind of cold called them and said, can I come visit? And they were super gracious.

Starting point is 01:32:15 I'm so curious just to interrupt you yet again. What does that email say? 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. I would be really grateful if I could come and visit your show for a few days and shadow.

Starting point is 01:32:42 And I will be as unobtrusive and, and, um, and invisible as I possibly can. Uh, and I'll be here these days and, and, um, you know, I understand if you can't accommodate me, but I would really be grateful. And I think it helped in my particular case, because I had tweeted a lot about how much I loved Vikings. So they kind of knew that I was a big fan of the show. And I, and I did some tweeting from set, you know, I kind of, I kind of like paid my way in, in, in, in, you know, like flacking their show for them. But, um, which can just to, I, I, I'm not over caffeinated. I swear to God, I'm just, you're making, you're making so many important points that I just want to pause and help. Uh, well,

Starting point is 01:33:27 as much for myself as anyone else, just people to reflect on. 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, the, the Twitter feed of 10,000, if it's a popular TV show. 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, actors, and so on will have Google alerts or other alerts set 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. 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. 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,

Starting point is 01:34:42 but when people asked them what they did, the thing they were able to show was extraordinary. And I don't mean like expensive extraordinary. I just mean unique and personal and crafted with care. 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. 20 years ago, there was this video tape going around hollywood uh of these guys in an apartment uh and it was vhs tape that's how long ago it was uh and people were dubbing it and sending and giving to friends of these guys in apartments these three black guys where the one guy goes up and it's the little intercom it goes was uh and then the other guy goes was uh and the third guy that was a short film that some guy made on like a digital camera.

Starting point is 01:35:26 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. I mean, it was a short film and it wasn't, it was a, it was a two and a half minute short film that was just funny.

Starting point is 01:35:39 You didn't know who was, you didn't, we didn't know these guys. No one knew who they were and, and they didn't know who was it. We didn't know these guys. No one knew who they were. And they didn't have any connections. And I think 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. It may not happen as fast as you want or as aggressively as you want or as expansively

Starting point is 01:36:03 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. When I made Access, honestly, I just wanted to make a movie to show people I could make a movie. I wanted to make the best movie I could, and I was 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 that, you know, it got all of this attention. But I don't think I was going in like, this is going to be a massive hit. I was like, I'm going to make this little movie. And then for the next one, when people say, well, what have you done?

Starting point is 01:36:41 I can be like, look at this little thing I made. So I think you have to always be focused on the results, not the result, on the thing and not the result. Because the result is directly tied to the quality of the thing. So it's not about infamy. It's about fame. And fame is based on the quality of your work. So just be doing excellent shit all the time. And eventually, one of those things will connect with other people. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:03 Not to sound like a fortune cookie on top of all of that, but the only uncrowded market is great. There's always a fucking market for great. Exactly. And be radically great. 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. And if you are really in love

Starting point is 01:37:32 with something, and I'll give two examples. 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 technology investing, early stage technology investing. Two phenomena, two companies at this point, certainly, that are worth looking at and just investigating the stories of 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 to it so the two examples are the blacklist look up franklin leonard and the blacklist sample absolutely and then the second is and we don't have to get into both these right now the second is just by coincidence, also has the list at the end, but Angel List and Naval Ravikant.

Starting point is 01:38:25 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. And so let's come back to Axis. What is Axis? these types of stories. So they should check them out. And this, so let's come back to, let's come back to access. Yeah. What is access? And did you, did you have anybody try to talk you out of doing access? Um,

Starting point is 01:38:55 God, that's such a good question. Well, so access is a thriller. Um, about, uh, about,

Starting point is 01:39:04 uh, an expatriate Irish actor living in Los Angeles who has had a lot of success, uh, kind of explosive success in his youth and has really just used all of his resources to just wreck his life. You know, he's, he's a drunk and he's a drug addict and he's terrible at relationships and he's a dick to everybody. Um, and, uh, and, and when we, when we meet him, he's trying to turn his life around. Uh, and, and it, and it's really about a guy who's not a bad person, but he's done, done some bad stuff, which I think almost every human being can relate to. You know, I mean, we all, we all have a little bit of a demon inside of us. And I think this is just a guy who's been, he's, he, he's, he's been frail in the past, but he's really trying to be a better version of himself.

Starting point is 01:39:50 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. 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. Um, just trying to, trying to be better. Uh, it's really dark. It's very funny. Uh, I, I have been thinking of this. I'm sure I'll get some letters about this, but I happen to find, uh, that addicts are really entertaining people. And I don't mean they're funny, like, like laugh at them.

Starting point is 01:40:22 I, I, I find that they, um, 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 he's a guy who's self-aware. He's aware of the mistakes he's made. So it's a very darkly funny movie. And then 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.

Starting point is 01:40:53 So the lead actor is the only actor on screen. And all the other actors are voice actors on the phone with him. How would you describe your experience of being involved with this film? It was so wonderful. You asked if people tried to dissuade me from doing it. How would you describe your experience of being involved with this film? It 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. You don't even get no. You just get silence.

Starting point is 01:41:19 But this happened very quickly. 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. Like I was on four shows and I really only had a little bit of time off in 2016. And I realized if I didn't make the movie in this one single week in, in May of 2016, that I wasn't going to be able to make it at all in that year. And I have to push to the next year. And so then it just became about hitting that target. 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 know who this actor is like he's unknown 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

Starting point is 01:42:11 actors in the movie and then can we can we make it not in a car can we make it i mean like we're just gonna 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 and um and like singularity out of a project. 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. So, uh, in about in, in, in, in March of 2016, I had my like first exploratory conversation with like the people around me and with Kickstarter, I was able to, you know with the people around me and with Kickstarter.

Starting point is 01:42:45 I was able to... They have people over there who are around to help you figure out how to put a project together. I built the campaign in three weeks. I launched it in April. One of the rules about crowdfunding, and Kickstarter specifically, it's not a hard and

Starting point is 01:43:02 fast rule. It's not like in rules 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. 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. Um, and so originally it was, we were going to make it nine days, but I realized if I made it faster, I'd have more money available to me like daily. I'd have like my daily resource load would be higher. So we cut the schedule from nine days to seven days, which is incredibly aggressive for a feature.

Starting point is 01:43:42 Whenever I tell people I made it in seven days, they ask, well, how is it short? But so we had to be really aggressive. So everything, 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. It was actually, you shot about 17 pages in the first 15 pages of the movie in the first day. And then we shot the next 65 pages of the movie. It was actually, you shot about 17 pages on the first day

Starting point is 01:44:07 to about 67 pages on day two through seven. And that meant that the actor had to do 67 pages of dialogue a day. For people that don't know, typically on a movie you do like between three and six pages of dialogue a day. 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, the beginning of June, essentially,

Starting point is 01:44:30 in Los Angeles. And it was just so intense. But we shot three cameras. So by day three, we essentially had the entire movie in the can, because, you know, 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, uh, you know, not on wax on the digital version of wax. And so then the next four days were just about kind of creative play. And, and I think that what the result is, is this, I made a movie in a week. Um, it's experimental, it's unusual, it, it, it's transporting and strange and going in. I thought I'll never make a movie this way again, but now I would make a movie that way again because, um, I just didn't have any time to be,. I just had to go. It was wonderful. It was like one of the seminal experiences of my life. There's definitely some magic in the ether when you have a hyper-aggressive deadline.

Starting point is 01:45:38 There's just something that happens to the space-time continuum and what you can achieve when everything gets compressed that intensely. 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, right? There's no time for paralysis by analysis. I am making this decision i'm 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 and also because we shot the whole movie all the way through if if there were errors i had the next day to recalibrate in a way that you don't get

Starting point is 01:46:22 when you typically make a movie for people again who don't know like on a like on you know i'm an actor as well so like 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 oh shit man i wish i'd done this with that scene i wish i tried this but every day the next day we got to wake up and go you know what we have a whole new bite at this apple we're gonna do it a whole different way today um and so at the end i really felt like we we really fully explored the material which would not have we wouldn't have been able to do if we'd be making movie in seven days and not doing it like with this kind of volume approach that we had so i'm looking at text in a book that you contributed to happens to be this fantastic book. Oh, let me see. Here it is.

Starting point is 01:47:10 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 Drivers. In any case, the question to what you would put on a gigantic billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message to millions or billions of people. 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 or what fear are you hoping say in the next year to get on the other side of does anything come to mind that's a good question well you know it's interesting because like i think like the one that feels the most obvious is like, I'm afraid I won't get to make another film, but I, I, I'm not really legitimately afraid of that.

Starting point is 01:48:10 Cause I feel like I'm just going to put this next movie together and make it like, you know, like I think now that I've done one, like no help and no assistance from anybody, like the next one's going to be cake. Um, I mean, I had help, I had my team, but I didn't have the kind of traditional Hollywood help where I had like a team of agents kind of, you know, making magic. Like it was really just like a scrappy little group of filmmakers, you know, doing this film with me, the lead actor and screenwriter and my creative executives. It was a small group of people, you know, outside, completely outside of the system. But what am I afraid of? God, that's a really good. And then it's not that I'm fearless. It,

Starting point is 01:48:46 it may just be that the things that are interesting to me now don't engender fear the way that they used to. I can also, I can also, I think tackle this from a different angle, which is what do you currently, what is one of your greatest struggles right now? What do you struggle with?

Starting point is 01:49:08 If anything. You know, 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 like highly developed – I don't mean like I'm good at it. I mean like it's very far advanced like workaholism. I mean like I have pathological workaholism. It's like a sickness. And whenever I say I'm a workaholic, people always laugh and I go like, look, like it's a problem. You know, I don't know how to rest. It's not that I don't like to play. I do like play, but, um, like, I don't think I

Starting point is 01:49:46 have any time to, to rest. And, and I worry that it makes me, it, it, 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. You know, no one wants to hear about, you know, your daily trek from your home to your office. It's just not compelling. 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 – I think it was her who said in order to –

Starting point is 01:50:21 Is she married to Neil Gaiman? She is, yeah. Great author of all time? Yeah, exactly. For those of you – after you and after me oh yeah yeah i will i will bow at the feet of neil gaiman as a writer uh and everybody should listen to his audio book of the graveyard book narrated by him he is also the most soothing voice imaginable. But I digress. What the fuck was I saying? So Amanda Palmer has a quote about – Ah, yes. That if art imitates life, in order to create art, you have to have a life, right?

Starting point is 01:50:57 Yeah, absolutely. And like – And I'm paraphrasing. That's butchered, but it makes the point. Like you can't – I'm sure there are other theories there's a there's a very famous french writer it's not south but it's uh it's uh it's somebody anyway about like have a bourgeois life and be radical in your work but i actually don't think i i and i actually think that you you need to be fully engaged in your life in order to be an interesting artist um because you know you need to be alive to be able to speak about the human condition. So if you have advanced early onset workaholism, right, you've really turned this into a default mode. into a default mode, are you doing anything to try and manage that or create more slack in the

Starting point is 01:51:53 system for the daydreaming and so on? I mean, that's my daily practice. That's my one day at a time. It's just constantly trying to remind myself to rest. I engage socially a lot more than I used to. And by socially, you mean out in the real world? Yeah, like out in the real world. Like I go out and I, you know, 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. You know, I just remember one day I was like, I'm going to die. Like I'm going to die of boredom. I bore myself. You know what I just, I just remember one day I was like, I'm going to die. Like I'm going to, I'm going to die of boredom. I'm bored. I bore myself, you know what I mean? Um, and so,

Starting point is 01:52:30 you know, like I, I think I try to court danger in a, in a safe way. It's not like I'm jumping out of play with no parachute or bullfighting or, you know, bare knuckle brawling in an alley, you know, filled with needles. But I, but I am trying to just like be, be not always have my head in my computer. But, but look, the reason that people are workaholics, uh, well, there's lots of reasons I'm sure social pressures, but for me, I just get this big, like serotonin releases. It's serotonin. What's the brain? What's the satisfaction drug? Uh, I would say dopamine perhaps. Dopamine. That's it. Dopamine. Serotonin sleepy time. Yeah, dopamine.

Starting point is 01:53:07 I get a dopamine release when I complete tasks. And I just – I get higher and higher the more that I execute. I find executing in and of itself really enjoyable. So I'm just trying to apply that aggression to like leisure. Like can I get the same satisfaction from – 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 um how can i turn fun into work most effectively and then be like i don't know about you guys but i just fucking crushed my to-do list what uh you know I, uh, I, I realized that like, I, I, even though I can feel very harried, it's interesting to me to be feeling like a part of being on this planet is like fully engaging

Starting point is 01:53:54 and doing everything I can do and everything I'm interested in. And, uh, because I don't want to look back and be like, man, I should have tried that. I'm happy to look back and say, man, I tried that and it went terribly for me. That's a, that's a perfectly comfortable space for me and be like, man, I should have tried that. 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. 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. 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

Starting point is 01:54:45 exercise as an element do you think well it's interesting because i really i really love working out uh but there's a constant battle for me between like being effective like with work and like you know i i'm the queen of like getting up at like 5 a.m to work and like, you know, I, I'm, I'm the queen of like getting up at like 5am to work out, putting on my workout clothes and then being in front of my computer at four o'clock in the afternoon. And I haven't moved. Like, I mean, that's just like my, it's just a normal day. Like didn't, didn't move, didn't eat, didn't do anything. Just been in front of the computer for like 11 hours. Um, but it just, it's just such a great stress manager. And I also think that there's another thing there, which is it just, again, puts you back in your body.

Starting point is 01:55:28 This thing that's carrying your brain around and making you effective. I think that with 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. 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. And I don't have either of those things. I just know I'm happier and better when I work out. But I don't, I don't, I don't do, I've finally dropped the monologue about like, you know, I'm like, I'm not, I'm not a good person if I don't like, if I don't crush a workout. I just try to do it every day because I know I'm better mentally.

Starting point is 01:56:18 And I also cheat completely. Like I have my phone, I took a hike today, you know, I have my phone with me and like I stopped every 10 minutes, like write something down. So, you know, I'm not really like fully, I'm not being in the moment when I'm working out. A lot of times I'm stopping like hundreds of times to make notes and remind myself of stuff I have to do or put stuff on my calendar. Do you still use a concept two or a rowing machine? I still use my ergometer, my concept two ergometer. I have had it since 2000. It is 18 years old. I've never had to repair it or replace any parts. It's the single best piece of equipment that I have. My whole gym now, I have my whole gym in my place. I have a TRX body weight 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.

Starting point is 01:57:02 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. 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. But a bench or a step can help you because it could just kind of do like single leg step downs until you build up your quad and your glute strength to do pistols. What could you describe for us a recent workout or what a prototypical workout of yours might look like? Well, I hiked today.

Starting point is 01:57:37 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 not rowing and then periods of rowing really aggressively. more about like feeling groovy. But, um, right now I'm obsessed with my ergometer. Uh, I like, I kind of go through periods of like not rowing and then periods of rowing really aggressively. And, uh, this is, this is going to be right up your alley, Tim. I'm ready. It's, this is, this is like center. This is like bullseye for you and your audience. I, I, I started going to a naturopath. So I'd be like supplementing differently. And I started taking glutathione and I'm rowing like faster now than I did in my twenties. Like I just keep getting personal bests on my rower.

Starting point is 01:58:12 It's confusing. I'm a lot older than I was when I was rowing competitively. And I just keep like knocking like 30 seconds and then 45 seconds and then a minute and 10 seconds off my rowing time. So now I'm just obsessed with like hitting personal best every time I row. Okay. Let's dig into this. So, so the glutathione, uh, how is it for those who, who aren't familiar, glutathione is thought of a simple way to think of it or the way it's often described as, as a, a master antioxidant of sorts. Uh, how are you having it administered? Is it being... Sometimes I get... Oh, this is so inside baseball. Sometimes I get IVs. I get IVs if I'm really like, if I'm wrecked, like if I travel a lot or if I went to Coachella.

Starting point is 01:58:54 And is that pure? Is that just glutathione or are you doing that at the... B vitamins. I can do it at the end of my IV. I'll get B and like you know and a glutathione push at the end yeah exactly but you can get you can get like fat soluble we can get this like fat soluble glutathione that you just take uh you just like gulp down it tastes like axle grease yeah I wait is this the uh is this what is this company uh lipo it's Lipospheric. That's the name. Lipospheric Glutathione. Lipospheric Glutathione, yeah.

Starting point is 01:59:28 Yeah, I remember. I was contributing 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. 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. And I think it might have 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?

Starting point is 02:00:01 It does have a weird – has a very weird consistency. It's terrible. No, my father calls it axle grease. He's like, give me this axle grease. Because I gave it to my dad i was like i think this would really help you and uh and you're supposed to take it in liquid but he's just been eating it on a spoon he's a he's a he's a better man than i oh i just like squeegee it out of the little packet into your mouth yeah to my mouth i take it i take it with like about two like two ounces of kombucha in the morning so I don't have to think about it. Yeah, you're smart.

Starting point is 02:00:27 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 Frosted Flakes in the morning, Tim. But it's like I do that and then I have my bowl of supplements and then I have my fish oil and 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. Like I don't even need to eat. I've taken so many crappy tablets. Um, all right. Just do just hit pause again. So you is the exercise before breakfast. Is it the first thing you do? What is your first ideal morning? What's the first 90 minutes, 60 to 90 minutes look like? Espresso shot, glutathione, workout. What time do you wake up?

Starting point is 02:01:12 It depends on the day. Between like 6 and 7. 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 like 6 and 7 o'clock. And I have to work out in the morning or I won't work out at all. Since you wake up, you have espresso shot, glutathione with – I always have coffee before I work out, like without fail. And then the glutathione with the kombucha.

Starting point is 02:01:35 Any particular type of kombucha that's your preferred axle grease mixer? I like Better Booch. And I like – was it Life Aid I think is one of the other? I to like mid-distance 5k rows punctuated by short distance 2k hit sprints high intensity interval training or yeah high intensity interval training with with a 10k long distance row once or twice a week is that would that be a current workout yeah that's typically my workouts and then i'll do like i'll do like like a set of five five by 25 kettlebells that's like you know like i'll get up one morning and just do 125 kettlebell swings in front of the television and then sometimes i'll do a trx workout uh because

Starting point is 02:02:37 i didn't have really a way to simulate pull-ups so that was like that was why i got the trx so i could do that was like the one thing i didn't have and here was a pull-up bar. Is the TRX attached to a door? Yeah, it's such like a railing. I have like an upstairs railing and it just hangs off of the railing. Got it. Yeah. And that's it. I mean I try to keep it like relatively simple so that I'll do it.

Starting point is 02:02:59 Yeah. I don't really train with anybody because I just can't, I can manage the hour workout, but I can't manage the, the, the transit between my home and 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. So I just, I don't go to a gym anymore because I just, I just would be, I wouldn't have the time for it. Um, yeah, the transit time that transit time was what killed me. 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, to go to go to the gym. Do you still watch shows when you row? Totally. What do you watch? What do you, what any, any recent favorites or what

Starting point is 02:03:32 are you watching currently? Just like fantastic junk. Uh, 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, um, during my workouts. 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. And I can't stop to fast forward because I'm trying to beat my previous row time. So like I'll stream stuff on Hulu like X-Files or Handmaid's Tale, or I just watched a show called Deutschland 83. That was pretty great. Um, 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. Uh,

Starting point is 02:04:17 you know, so I don't, I can't, I can't pay attention too closely to plot points. Right. Uh, do you make New Year's's resolutions do you have any routines or rituals around new year's we're talking just for people who may be listening to this at another time we're chatting at the end of march and like make any this year right i make the same one every year which is to rest more i mean it's the same resolution every year, which is to rest more. It's the same resolution every year, rest. So how are you going to do that this time? I don't know. I should just give up.

Starting point is 02:04:49 I should stop making resolutions and then I won't have to not accomplish them. I mean, look, maybe a part of success or success at being you, like figuring out being you, is understanding what your strengths and your weaknesses are. My strength is my aggressive work ethic and and i'm 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 so i think once you accept like what your own methodology this is why you know this is why you watch the terminator 30 times yeah you're like like this this is my people, right?

Starting point is 02:05:27 Yes. I mean, I definitely have OCD. I'm definitely an obsessive personality. But once you accept, like, 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.

Starting point is 02:05:41 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. 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. But just one day, I was like, oh, the book is in me now.

Starting point is 02:06:08 The book is in me. And then I got it out. God, I wish I had that experience. Man, I'm so jelly. Everybody's different. You know what I mean? A long time, I would have wanted to be more like you, disciplined and sitting down. Because there's a 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.

Starting point is 02:06:36 But it's just like that for me, certain threads have to connect and that requires like rumination and time. And, you know, I just can't do it any other way, so I don't. I think my strength is eating, like every day trying to eat a wheelbarrow full of glass and shit out diamonds or something like that. That's a good one. That should be a tattoo. Well, speaking of eating glass, so what I,

Starting point is 02:06:59 this is, this, this may, might be predictable, but I'm okay with predictable. I would like to start to wrap up with a handful of questions. 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. So do you have any favorite

Starting point is 02:07:27 stories of self-inflicted wounds of your own that you could share? 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. 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. But I'm trying to think if there's one.

Starting point is 02:08:00 And then I'm thinking of ones recently that don't feel like that cataclysmic. So they're like lame stories. Oh, you could pick a classic also. Like the greatest hits. And then I'm thinking ones that recently that don't feel like that cataclysmic. So they're like lame stories. Oh, you could pick a classic also. Like the greatest hits. Like if you were watching TV 15 years ago and it's like, hits from the 80s. We could take one of those as well. Oh, God. It's interesting.

Starting point is 02:08:27 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. 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. It was about a guy who flashed women. Uh, and, um, 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.

Starting point is 02:09:10 And also maybe like hubris, like the idea that like people were 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. It just ended up being like a series of vignettes about a guy like revealing his penis to strangers.

Starting point is 02:09:26 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. I don't get what I'm trying to accomplish here. And it was – 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. Much like that set where nobody laughed. I thought, well, man, that didn't work at all. OK, I need to go back and figure out what to do next.

Starting point is 02:09:55 And I think like I think every artist, you know, I think Quentin Tarantino has a famous story about his first film being unwatchable. You know, um, I think, I just think, you know, sometimes if your personality is to be really aggressive and kind of dive in, you're bound, you're bound to make some spectacular failures, you know, and, and you just have to have a high tolerance for that and, and, and not take it personally and keep moving forward. Uh, but yeah, I, I literally was like, I know you guys don't get it. I don't get it. I don't know what, I can't explain it to you. I have no idea what I was thinking. Thank you for putting yourselves in my hands. It was a terrible mistake on your part, but you're very gracious to have trusted me with

Starting point is 02:10:33 your lives. What's the name of the shirt? It was called the whipper. Conjures all sorts of images. It makes no sense whatsoever. When have you been extremely proud of yourself could be any point in your life can you can you think of a standout point where you're like god damn like good for me fucking a i hate i hate to have it be about

Starting point is 02:10:59 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, I think because it did, it did. Access. It was, 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.

Starting point is 02:11:20 And I knew, 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. And I think one of the reasons why it came together the way that it did was because 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—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. 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 the wall.

Starting point is 02:11:59 So, you know, we made this movie. We got into the very first very second day of filming. We started really late. We lost our light. We had to kind of pivot that day. I ended up having to throw all that footage away. Another day we lost light and had to get back up at 5 in the morning and kind of shoot dawn for dusk. But we just kept pivoting.

Starting point is 02:12:17 We just kept – nothing was catastrophic. Okay, like – and I think that's something I got from my father. It's like, okay, this isn't working. Okay, so we're going to do this. Okay, that's not working. We're going to do this rather than, oh, my God, this is the end of the world. What are we going to do? And then in post, I had very little money for post and very little time to cut the movie together.

Starting point is 02:12:34 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. And then I had to learn Avid, the Avid system, and to assemble the movie it was an unusual movie it's one guy in a car and i i had to let him go and then i had to learn avid the avid system and start cutting the movie myself um but again i wasn't like what i'm gonna do i don't have an editor i'm gonna die i just thought okay well like the the answer here is that i'm gonna learn this skill set and i'm going to keep moving forward um and then you know i made this little film it was you know strange and atmospheric and dreamlike and you know it didn't this little film. It was, you know, strange and atmospheric and dreamlike.

Starting point is 02:13:08 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. 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, I made it for what is typically the catering budget on a regular Hollywood movie. You know what I mean? 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.

Starting point is 02:13:45 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. Good for you. There's this... 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

Starting point is 02:14:18 and think, wow, they figured out 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. 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, I think he's the richest man in China, or certainly one of the top few at this point.

Starting point is 02:14:52 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. And it forces you to really think outside of the box. And even if that project doesn't succeed by outside measures, the confidence that you develop in exploring areas outside of the box can then transfer to future projects. I remember there's a,

Starting point is 02:15:23 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, but it's called Jodaworski's Dune, and it's the story of this attempt to make a movie about Dune.

Starting point is 02:15:37 And the thing is a complete unmitigated disaster, a complete unmitigated disaster. But the talent that was assembled went on to just do incredible things. And if that disaster hadn't happened, one could argue that if you had 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. So it's – I just love – No one ever learns from success.

Starting point is 02:16:14 I mean you can kind of do a postmortem and say, oh, this stuff worked. But 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. So, be aggressive. Yeah, be aggressive. B-E, aggressive. A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E. Totally. Yes, that's my life philosophy be aggressive be aggressive and uh

Starting point is 02:16:48 we want you around for a long time so take your cat naps at the very least that's my goal and i 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, to say before we wrap up. Other than watch my movie. Other than watch your movie. Exactly. Um,

Starting point is 02:17:14 God, that's interesting. I mean, uh, I mean, I guess like I, like when I, when I did my podcast,

Starting point is 02:17:19 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 you're, what you want to do. Like, you know, and again, it sounds very greeting card, but like the barriers are, they're imagined, you know what I mean? And, and, and maybe you're going to have to start small and maybe you're going to have to start, uh, close to home, but like the, the greater regret will always be not having started. And, and,

Starting point is 02:17:47 uh, this it's, 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. 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, you know, live these experiences so that the things that you learn could be shared with other people. And it is, you know, just go out and do awesome shit.

Starting point is 02:18:15 Get your hands dirty. It's not the, the rough drafts are not a clean business. Absolutely not. Aisha, thank you so much for taking the time. It was a pleasure. So much fun.

Starting point is 02:18:33 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. Yeah. Barbecue, music, whatever it might be in Austin Tejas,

Starting point is 02:18:43 come visit. And people can visit you. Is the best site AishaTyler.com? Yeah, AishaTyler.com, but who spends time on a website anymore? Just follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all that stuff is just Aisha Tyler, one word.

Starting point is 02:18:59 A-I-S-H-A-T-Y-L-E-R. Absolutely. Absolutely. And to everyone, I'm sorry, you were going to say something. 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 Nomad, iTunes, all that stuff. And then Archer starts, I think, on the 24th of April. And all the others.

Starting point is 02:19:20 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. For days and weeks and months and years and millennia to come, hopefully. We'll see. Cockroaches will be listening to this on their tiny cockroach computers when the rest of us are dead. That's exactly right. Cockroaches, remember us fondly. And for you non-cockroaches, actually,

Starting point is 02:19:43 if cockroaches are 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 and you can find all of those at tim.blog 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. Um, so I really appreciate it.

Starting point is 02:20:09 Great to talk with you. Thanks, Tim. Of course. And to everybody out there on the interwebs, uh, be safe. Maybe,

Starting point is 02:20:19 uh, more important, be aggressive, get out there. If you've, if you're dreaming of doing something, creating something someday, just get out a shitty first draft. Because guess what? All the first drafts are really fucking awful. It's very rare that someone just, as I was alluding to, shits out

Starting point is 02:20:37 diamonds on a daily basis. It starts with putting something out there into the world and, uh, 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. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance.

Starting point is 02:21:37 And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom, which more than 2 million Americans have used to help start their businesses. Past guests even, such as WordPress lead developer, CEO of Automatic, Matt Mullenweg, now valued at more than a billion

Starting point is 02:22:11 dollars, have used LegalZoom to help with their business needs, specifically in his case, to form his company. But LegalZoom isn't just for launching your business. Their services include everything from helping you to manage changing tax laws, reviewing contracts, creating NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, important stuff, handling lease agreements, and assisting with really any other legal challenge, hurdle, inconvenience that typically takes time and effort away from running your business. The best part is that you won't get charged by the hour because LegalZoom isn't a law firm. So they won't be running the clock up and spinning circles just to raise your bill. Instead, they just ask you to pay one low upfront price for whatever it is that you're looking to get a la carte style. So visit LegalZoom.com and check out

Starting point is 02:22:57 their business section for all of their services. And if you want special savings, that's the terminology in the copy that they suggest. I don't know what the special savings is, folks, but it's titillating. If you want special savings, enter promo code TIM, T-I-M, at checkout. Capital T, lowercase I-M. Again, take a peek, LegalZoom.com, and enter promo code TIM. This episode is brought to you by Teeter. I am so thrilled to have connected with these guys because I've used Teeter products for many, many years. I've traveled around the

Starting point is 02:23:32 country and the world with Teeter products, and I'm sitting about 15 feet in my home from one of their inversion tables, and we're going to talk more about all of that. One of my rituals is hanging, and I should say, not really that. One of my rituals is hanging. And I should say, not really that it's a maintenance and performance program. I hang not just in the morning, potentially, but particularly after a day of bearing weight, whether that includes weight training in Jersey, Gregorick world record holder insists on this type of inversion therapy after training, or just wearing a heavy backpack around, a few minutes goes a long way towards better sleep in my case, less back pain, neck pain, leg pain. It's not a panacea, obviously, but inversion therapy, which uses gravity and your own body weight to decompress

Starting point is 02:24:17 the spinal pressure on the discs and surrounding nerves, seems to help with a whole slew of conditions. And just as a general maintenance program, it's one of my favorite things to do. So what to say about that? Teeter. Why Teeter? Teeter is the best known name in inversion tables. Since 1981, more than 3 million people have put their trust in Teeter. Teeter is also the only inversion table brand that has been both safety certified by under-registered laboratories that's ul for you people in that industry you will recognize it and registered with the fda as a class one medical device and they're giving a very special offer just to you guys my listeners for a limited time you can get the teeter inversion table with bonus accessories which i have a bunch

Starting point is 02:25:01 of again in the room next to, and a free pair of gravity boots so that you can invert at home or take the boots with you to the gym. So these gravity boots, I have three separate pairs of gravity boots bought with my own monies in three different cities that I've had for a very, very long time because I don't want to travel with them necessarily. They look kind of like ski boots, but without the foot portion, and they hook you upside down. So you can take them really anywhere you want to go. To get this deal, which is a savings of over $148, it's very specific, so maybe it's $149, you have to go to teeter.com forward slash Tim.

Starting point is 02:25:39 That's teeter.com forward slash Tim, T-E-E-T-E-R. You also get free shipping, a 60-day money-back guarantee, and free returns. So why not try it out? Remember, you can only get the Teeter inversion table with bonus accessories and a free pair of gravity boots by going to Teeter.com forward slash Tim. So if you're thinking to yourself, what the hell is this thing that he's talking about? I can't even envision it in my head. Well, take a look at the photos.

Starting point is 02:26:04 Go to Teeter.com forward slash Tim.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #327: Aisha Tyler — How to Use Pain, Comedy, and Practice for Creativity

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #327: Aisha Tyler — How to Use Pain, Comedy, and Practice for Creativity

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.