The Tim Ferriss Show - #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler

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Starting point is 00:04:05 the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Optimal minimum. 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 like a good time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism,

Starting point is 00:04:21 living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

Starting point is 00:04:58 To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains

Starting point is 00:05:36 to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy, and thank you for listening. First up, Matthew McConaughey, Academy Award-winning actor who has starred in Dazed and Confused, Dallas Buyers Club, Interstellar, and HBO's True Detective, producer, director, businessman, philanthropist, and the number one New York Times bestselling author of Greenlights and Just Because. You can find Matthew on Instagram at Officially McConaughey. Was it true in your family, I read this, of course, you can't believe everything that you read, two things. Number one, that your parents were divorced family, I read this, of course, you can't believe everything that you read, two things. Number one, that your parents were divorced twice, married three times, so they ended up getting up one more time, then they got knocked down.

Starting point is 00:06:31 Yeah. True. Number two, that saying, I can't, was forbidden or highly advised against. Very heavily, heavily, heavily. I remember cuss words I remember one Saturday morning when I was about 12, my Saturday morning chores were mow the lawn, weed eat, shine his shoes and sweep the porches and get the cobwebs out of the corners. Well, I'd get up very early on a Saturday morning to do that. So I could have my Saturday afternoon to play. And I went out to try and start our push lawnmower and it wouldn't start. Pull again, wouldn't start.

Starting point is 00:07:25 Pull again, wouldn't start. Check the gas. Yeah, it's got gas. What the heck is going on? Damn it, it won't start. I remember going into my dad inside, and I go, Dad, I can't get the lawnmower started. He kind of slowly turned his head to me, and I saw his molars meet and kind of start to grit his teeth. He goes, you what?

Starting point is 00:07:43 I knew enough right then to not say the word again. And I said, I, and he got up and I didn't finish my sentence. He slowly walked with me out of his bedroom, through the kitchen, through the garage, around the back to the shed where this lawnmower was that I was not getting started. He, without saying a word, he knelt down, looked at it, checked the gas, but anyway, he found the little tube where the gas was not transferring and it had been disconnected. So he reconnected that, pulled a few times and it started. And there over a new, now running push lawnmower, he looked at me, put his hands on my shoulders. And for the first time since I said, I can't get it started. He put his hands on my shoulders, looked at me and very sternly said, he goes, you see your own, you can still go seek help or get assistance.

Starting point is 00:08:46 So you're still only having trouble even if you on your own cannot do so. That was a, saying those words still to this day, if I let them slip, I kind of have to look over my shoulder like, oh, is that going to get me? So there are many different forms of influences. I'd like to ask you about one that is not your parents, it's not your siblings. It's a book that I've read you came across that had an impact in your life. And that is The Greatest Salesman in the World by Augment Dino. Could you explain for people listening why that book was impactful or what impact it had? Yeah. So I've never been a big reader and growing up, didn't read much and never really liked even in school being told, Hey, you got to read this book. You got to read this. Just the fact of being told I had to read something in school or by someone else sort of made it feel like it wasn't

Starting point is 00:09:39 mine. And I was not going to have a subjective view of it. And plus I just don't really like being told what to do. But this came to me, this book, and I always say this have a subjective view of it. And plus, I just don't like being told what to do. But this came to me, this book. And I always say this. I didn't find it. It found me. And I'll tell you how and why. It was between my sophomore and junior year in college at University of Texas at Austin.

Starting point is 00:10:00 Now, at this point, I was always on the track to become a lawyer. I was going to become that defense attorney. You know, get us some oil and make money. You know what I mean? Get the families some oil and make money. I was going to become that defense attorney, you know, get us some oil and mink money. You know what I mean? Get the family some oil and mink money. I was a good leader. I took good stances. It started off in the family. They're like, geez, man, you know, I would take the table and win arguments with the family. And they'd be like, damn it, you got to become a lawyer. You got to become the family lawyer. So that was always the plan. But between my sophomore and junior year in college, which is about the time when all those general liberal arts credits that you're getting need to start having some focus or you're going to lose them. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 00:10:32 Right. So I start not sleeping well with the idea of becoming a lawyer. I'm doing the math. I'm like, I'm not sure it's what I want to do. I get out of here. I go to law school. Then I get out. Then I start maybe get an intern.

Starting point is 00:10:43 I'm really not going to be rolling in my vocation until I'm in my 30s. And I was like, I don't really want to spend my 20s just learning or spend my 20s just in school. Now, I had been writing a lot, been keeping a lot of short stories in my diaries and a lot of them which are in this book, Greenlights. But I didn't have the confidence to think that maybe I wanted to get in the storytelling business until a good friend of mine, Rob Bindler, who I think at the time was NYU film school, who I'd been sharing some of these short stories with, went on the phone and goes, hey, you should think about getting in front or behind the camera. You tell great stories. You got good character yourself. You know, you're a good writer. Try this out.

Starting point is 00:11:21 And I was always like, oh, no, no, no. I mean, that's like too avant- to European. It's the artsy. I can't do that. But he gave me the confidence to really consider it. Now, I go to my fraternity house, the Dell House, into that sophomore year for sophomore exams. I'm a studier. I'm making 3.82 GPA. I like making my A's. And any amount of time I've got to study, I will use it every single minute. There's never enough time for me to study. I go to the Delt House and right behind it in a little bungalow is one of my Delt brothers. And I eat lunch and I sit on his couch and I've got three hours before my exam. And I

Starting point is 00:12:05 open up my books, study for my psychology exam. For whatever reason, for the first time in my life, I shut them and I go, McConaughey, to myself, I go, you got this. You don't need to study anymore. First time I'd done that. I got three hours to kill. I then put on the TV. I love sports, ESPN. I'll watch cricket, the strongest man competition. I'll watch, you know, two grasshoppers race. For whatever reason, I just I'm not interested. I turn off the TV. I look over to my left. There's a stack of magazines. There's Sports Illustrated, some Playboys. And I'm like, geez, I like sports, like checking out naked ladies in the Playboy. Let's check that out. I pick up a Playboy, flip through thumb through that half-assually,

Starting point is 00:12:46 and all of a sudden lose interest in that. And I'm sitting there going, okay, what am I supposed to do here? I've got two and a half, about three hours to kill. Well, I start peeling back those magazines, Playboys and Sports Illustrated and everything else, and about seven deep in that stack of magazines to the left of the couch where I was sitting, I see this white paperback with this beautiful red cursive writing on it. And it says the greatest salesman in the world. And I remember reaching for it and aloud to myself saying, who is that?

Starting point is 00:13:18 And I pick up the book and I start reading it again. I'm not a reader, but I start reading this book and all of a sudden I lose track of time and I've gotten past the whole prologue to the beginning of this first scroll in this book, which is I will form good habits and become their slave. Now what this book had just told me and just taken me on a journey and said, you will read each scroll. There's 10 scrolls in this book, each scroll three times a day for 30 days until you move on to the next scroll. So it's basically a 10-month read. And I had gotten to the first scroll.

Starting point is 00:13:54 And I now understood that the greatest salesman in the world was whoever's going to read that book. So I was like, oh, that's me. He's talking to me. Well, bam, I look up. Oh, my exam's in 15 minutes. I got to go. I head out, go to my exam, my psychology exam. I ripped through that exam. I didn't care if I failed it. Something in this book had told me, no, this book is what you need to be into right now. This book is going to give you confidence to go do what you need to do. I ripped through that psychology exam and immediately go, I'm going to film school.

Starting point is 00:14:26 I'm calling dad tonight. I'm not going to go to law school anymore. I've got the confidence. This book found me. This is a seminal moment in my life. I don't know how or why, but it is. And I'm going to get the courage to call my dad and go. And that night, I remember thinking about it.

Starting point is 00:14:43 I'm going to call my dad at 730. He'll have sat down, maybe had his first cocktail, already had dinner, and he'll be in a good mood for me to say, you know, dad, I want to go to film school, I think. Well, I call him, 7.36 PM. Hey, dad. Hey, what's up, son? Listen, I don't really, and I was nervous. And I said, I don't think I want to go to law school anymore. I want to go to film school. That was hard for me to say because I thought he was going to go. You want to do what, boy? What the hell?

Starting point is 00:15:09 I said, I don't want to go to film school. It was a long pause on the phone, about five seconds. And he says, you sure that's what you want to do, son? And I said, yes, sir. There's another five second pause. And then he said. Three of the greatest words i've ever been told don't half-ass it i remember going huh don't half-ass it and i remember my eyes just i lit up

Starting point is 00:15:36 and i was like oh my gosh one my dad not only approved he gave me a responsibility he gave me freedom he gave me more than a privilege he like sent me a flight and ending it with like, not only do I agree and say, that's okay, son, I'm saying, if you're going to do it, you better damn well go do it well and don't half-ass it. And I went down the next day, changed my course schedule. My GPA got me into film school because I had a 3.82. I didn't have any sort of art to show them. And I started off behind the camera and then ended up as I am now in front of the camera as well. But that book. That day, that book finding me and me feeling like it was my secret and it came to me and no one told me here, you need to read this book. It'll be good for you. Hey, you're supposed to read this. This is your for school or even a recommendation. It was not right. It found me. And I read that book. I did exactly what it said morning, noon and night. And I read I've read it three times now that way.

Starting point is 00:16:34 But the first time I didn't miss one reading of that. I mean, and I had many a day where I went out in the morning on a Saturday and my day of whimsy took me to a place where all of a sudden it was 10 o'clock at night and I was like an hour and a half from my house and the book was back at my house. And I'd be like hanging out, partying and going like, oh geez. And I would stop, eat something, get some coffee, drink a bunch of water, wait till whatever, 1.30 in the morning when I was time to drive. And I would drive back to my place, grab that book and either read it and go to sleep in my bed or drive back to where I was hanging out with the book and read it. I didn't miss one single read for 10 straight months. And that book is the most instrumental piece of literature and

Starting point is 00:17:25 motivation I've ever read for me in my life. And now you've produced Greenlights, this book, which as you've described it, is not a traditional memoir or an advice book, but rather a playbook based on adventures in my life. And I want to hop to a particular portion of this book, which is also a scrapbook of sorts. It's very multimedia in that respect, even though it's in 2D in book format. I want to ask you about a note, and this will segue into the practice of writing, since you've kept a diary for somewhere between 35, 40 years at this point, I believe. There's there's a note towards the end of green lights from 9192. So 10 goals in life, this blew my mind. So I want to read these 10. And then I want you

Starting point is 00:18:17 to kind of place us in your life when you wrote these 10. And then I want to zoom in on a few of them. But let me just read these 10 first. So 10 goals in life. This is a 1992 one become a father to find and keep the woman for me. Three, keep my relationship with God for chase my best self five, be an egotistical utilitarian. That's going to be my first follow-up question.

Starting point is 00:18:39 Six, take more risks. Seven, stay close to mom and family. Eight, win an Oscar for best actor. Nine, look back and mom and family. Eight, win an Oscar for best actor. Nine, look back and enjoy the view. Ten, just keep living. Where were you and when were you when you wrote these 10 goals? I was in a top bunk in the Delta,

Starting point is 00:19:02 Delta house. I believe my roommate was Monty Wills. I'm still friends with today from Montgomery, Alabama. I was in the top bunk. I think I just probably, it was the end. It was the end of the night. It was about nine 30.

Starting point is 00:19:14 I was just getting nestled in for, for a good night's sleep. So I just started. What was the date? 93. What was the month in the, the month in the day? That was Septemberember 1st 1992

Starting point is 00:19:26 okay yeah so i just done days confused that's right yeah it's two days after finishing yeah i just finished it a job a summer hobby a thing that there were three lines written in a script that i got cast in because i went to the right bar at the right time, met the right guy, read for it. Richard Linkletter said, come on, and started throwing me in scenes. So three lines turned into three weeks work. I loved it. It was getting paid $320 a day. People were telling me I was good at it, and I was running around going like, is this legal?

Starting point is 00:20:00 It's so fun. And I finish it. My father had just passed away like two weeks earlier. Yeah. August 17th of that year. So I just finished a job that was a hobby that became a career. I had just finished that. Think about it. If you do the math, I didn't think about it till now. I just finished that Ogmandino, 10 months of reading that book. My father had just passed away. I was just going through what that meant to me, what I felt like that should mean to me. And that's where the just keep living comes from, to keep his spirit alive, even though he's physically not here,

Starting point is 00:20:35 keep things alive that he taught me to keep me incentivized throughout my life, even though I couldn't rely on him personally being here to back me up with him. And so I remember writing those goals down. And the thing is that when you start off this conversation going, I don't know what your adverb was about it, but I found that just less than a year ago in my diaries. And I'd never looked at it or remembered that I had written it since the day I did. That date on that list, I never looked at that list again. I wrote it that night and forgot about it, or at least I thought I forgot about it. I didn't, and that's the wild part, because somewhere subconsciously, I obviously did remember it because so far I've accomplished those goals, and there's some very specific

Starting point is 00:21:23 ones on there that I'm like, what? I always thought even the acting part, win an Oscar for best actor. This is a time I just finished Days of Confusion. I didn't know I was going to end up being an actor. I still thought I didn't have the courage to even think I could pursue it as a career. At that time, I thought it might just be a hobby. I had a hobby for a summer. But obviously, when I look back, I'm like, oh, you did want to be.

Starting point is 00:21:45 You did want to be an actor. And you wanted to be a damn good one. So I could admit it on my journal page, but I couldn't admit it to myself. Hell, I couldn't even admit it in my dreams, but I could admit it on my journal pages. So that's where I was. Those are so those are three big things going on in my life. And I'd say the most, you know, the biggest shapeshifter was father moving on. But that, with finishing dazed and with finishing the greatest salesman, that's when I wrote that. That's quite a Venn diagram as far as a snapshot in time goes with those three

Starting point is 00:22:16 sort of momentous changes, those transitions. Why take more risks? Did you feel like at the time you weren't taking enough risks? Was it something you had learned about risks from your parents or other people why take more risks i think i was at that time seeing risk that i'd take really pay off the risk to in the bar at the top of the high at that night to go down and introduce myself to don phillips who ended up being a casting director for days confused who four hours later at the end of the night after we got kicked out of the bar says, hey, you ever done any acting? You might be right for this part. The risk to go and read for that part, the risk for Richard Linklater to say, there's nothing, you're not supposed to be in this scene. You're not written in this scene, but you think Wooderson would be in it? The risk for

Starting point is 00:23:03 me to go, oh yeah, and just hop in the middle of the scene and improvise and play. Those risks were paying off. I was also beginning to feel the risk that I took reading that damn book, The Greatest Salesman. It was the first book I ever read cover to cover, and it's a thin paperback. Mind you, it takes 10 months to read, but that was a risk for me. And I was feeling very confident with who I was. I was also thrown upside down by my dad moving on. Now, I don't know if you've lost a parent, but as a son losing a dad, you want to talk about forced into identity? My dad being this sort of crutch just because he was alive and above government and above law was now gone. I had no crutch. I had no safety net.

Starting point is 00:23:51 All of a sudden, I remember this very clearly. This is coming to me. And besides the just keep living with keeping his spirit alive, I remember one of the first lessons of him moving on was I was – and I carved this in a tree. I remember carving this deeply in a tree for about three hours one night. Less impressed, more involved. And that leans into taking more risk. Because I was like, after dad moved on, I was like, oh, all of these mortal things in life that I have a reverence for. Even this point of just finishing acting and maybe having dreams of fame. Wow.

Starting point is 00:24:28 All these things that I revered that were mortal, lowered down to eye level. And at the same time, everything that I noticed that I was condescending or looking down upon or snubbing my nose at or going, oh, that's crap or, oh, they're no good. I was like, they raised up to eye level. And I remember going, oh, the world is flat. Your dad's moved on. You better look the world in the eye. And by seeing the world flat, I saw further. I saw wider. I saw more clearly. I had more courage. I lost reverence for the mortal things that I had reverence for. I still respected them, but I lost reverence for them. So that gave me courage. And I lost this sort of snub-nosed look at things that I thought were beneath me.

Starting point is 00:25:12 And I empowered them and they raised up to eye level. So all of a sudden, that was a version where the eye met the we for me. That was a version where what I looked up to maybe too much met what I was looking down on. And it was right in front of me. And that was how I was also taking more risk. I lost a lot of fear. I still had fear, but I gained a lot of courage to go meet my fears. And I didn't give enough credence to things that I probably shouldn't fear

Starting point is 00:25:40 or have too much reverence for because they were mortal. And I was like, what's that? That's reverence for fame or not taking a chance to go get what you want. That's a mortal fear. That's like putting a limit on yourself, Makani. Why would you do that? I even called it a sin at that time not to take certain risks and would feel guilty if I didn't and feel like I didn't meet my quote that day in God's eyes. What is it that you've gotten from having a diary? And maybe it's changed over time. Yeah, it's evolved.

Starting point is 00:26:10 I mean, my diary started off like I think most people's diaries do. You write things down when you're not in a good place or you're lost. My early diary entries were the why, what, where, when, hows. You know, the existential questions of what is going on. Does it matter who am I? Oh, my God, this shit. So my girlfriend broke up with me. I lost it.

Starting point is 00:26:31 Started off with that. So I noticed that I started writing down when I was in times of distress or disillusion. And then I started to say, well, wait a minute. You got it. Just like that Augmandino book, by hook or by crook, you read it three times a day. I was like, well, we're going to write my diary every day, McConaughey. And so when do most of us, including me, not write in our diary? When things are going great. Oh, I got it figured out. I'm not going to need to take time to go be introspective and

Starting point is 00:27:00 write down my thoughts. Everything's a green light. It's great. Well, no, I said, hang on a second. If we're going to spend our life, a diary, the original use of a diary is to dissect failure or disillusion. I think there's some prudence and let's dissect success. Let's dissect what's going on when things are going well. Let's write in this diary when you feel like everything's clear and you feel strong and confident and significant and you feel like yourself. So I started writing in my diary when things were going well and then started to map out certain things about found that what that did is when I would get in a proverbial rut later, I could go back to that diary and look at what was

Starting point is 00:27:42 I writing and what was I doing when I felt like everything was lickety split and I had it, everything handled. And I found consistencies. I found it from what I was eating to who I was hanging out with, how much sleep I was getting to beauties in the world that I was noticing and really were affecting me, how I approach people, how I was approaching the day, how I was approaching conflict, how I was approaching and taking in things that work, success. And I found consistencies. And so sometimes going back in those diaries, reading what I was writing when things were going well would help get me out of a rut later on in life when I wasn't doing so well. And I remember this early on in college. It's a reason that my buddy, as I mentioned earlier,

Starting point is 00:28:23 Rob Billner said, you should go into storytelling business. I was writing short stories, but I was also writing things down, idiosyncrasies of myself. I was really trying to get to know myself. When I'd be in a movie theater, I always laughed. I thought the funniest jokes, I'd laugh. I'd be the only one laughing in the theater. I'd never thought the stuff that everybody laughed at was funny. The collective laugh, I never even giggled at. I was like, I don't know, it wasn't very funny. But I'd laugh at how it was. And no one else would laugh. I was like, no one else thinks that's funny? I'd say that in the theater. I cried at things that other people didn't cry at. I've never really cried at death. I weep at birth. Beginnings always have made me cry more than proverbial ends. So I started writing these things down and at first was feeling like, are you weird?

Starting point is 00:29:11 Hey, is this odd? Is this is this OK? Can you be this kind of a person? And got the confidence to go, yes, you can. It's OK. But let's write down those things. Let's write down what makes you laugh, what makes you happiest, what makes you sad, what makes you angry. And don't worry if it's the collective choice of the majority. What does it mean to you? And write those things down. And so that led to character, I believe. It led to my own character. It led to me being able to maybe go play different characters to understand and empathize with different people and have different people, have different things that turn them on and turn them off at different times. What is the art of running downhill?

Starting point is 00:29:50 OK, so I get successful. I got major fame very quickly after A Time to Kill came out. The film I did in 96. And I mean, from the Friday afternoon before it came out to the Monday after the weekend it came out, my whole world was inverted. The world all of a sudden was one big mirror. I never meet strangers since that day. It was inverted. I mean, that Friday afternoon before A Time to Kill comes out, there's hundred scripts out there. I want to do all. Are you kidding me? I'll do any of them.

Starting point is 00:30:31 Well, 99, no, you can't. One of them, yes, you can. Well, in a matter of two days after that film opened that weekend and did well, that hundred scripts, it was yes yes you can do 99 one no so i was like whoa two days ago i would have done any of these and could only do one and now it's only two days later but you're telling me i can do 99 of them help me discernment discrimination can i make a choice who am i geez what i want to do there's only 24 hours in the day is last i the last I checked. I need more. So I was a little, you know, imbalanced, overwhelmed, didn't have my feet, my soul on the ground. And there were times that, and I also remember that same lawyer I talked about in the Oil & Ink story, Jerry Harris. I remember him telling me, he reached out, I hadn't talked to him for years. He reached out and he goes, hey, Matthew, you're from a small town, Uvalde, Texas.

Starting point is 00:31:23 You know, you came in through Longview, Texas. Now you went out there. Now you're a famous Hollywood star and you got all these things. He goes, make sure you don't suffer too much from the non-deserving complex. That happens with some people that get real successful from humble beginnings. And it made a lot of sense to me because I was noticing that in the name of obstacles being the way I was creating obstacles for myself, some of them very unnecessary, meaning here's my life. I'm successful. I am rolling. I am catching green lights. I'm rolling downhill. I very less than gracefully handled some of my success. I would become belligerent at times. I didn't become belligerent. Trying to, you know, at the end of the day, I always say this. It's okay to have a point to

Starting point is 00:32:10 prove. Just don't always be trying to prove a point. I had many times where I would try to prove a point. You know what I mean? And it was my own insecurity. It was my own self trying to find some balance in this. It was me. I was seeing the mendacities of all these people in Hollywood all of a sudden saying, I love you. And I'm like, and I've said that for people in my life and everyone says that here. So they're full of shit. I was taking things personally, even and sort of sabotaging some of the red carpet wine and caviar that was being handed to me. You know what I mean? And I was slipping to some of my more banal self at times and doing a proverbial face plant, meaning I'm running downhill and this is all easy street. I need resistance. So I think I'm going to trip

Starting point is 00:32:59 myself and face plant and break my right into the concrete so I can break my nose so I can be like, ah, there I go. Now I'm earning it. Now I feel it. Now I've earned it. Now I deserve it. Well, that can be a little foolish. There's an art to going downhill. And so what I noticed was, oh, hard times are going to come. It's going to get dry. You're not going to be able to do whatever script you want to do. I've had birth times or in a relationship we go through, it doesn't go well, or someone gets sick in the family, a real uphill battle enters our life. And so the art of running downhill is about, hey, enjoy it. When you're going downwind, downhill, don't trip yourself because that uphill

Starting point is 00:33:46 is coming. It's going to come whether you want it to or not. So don't trip yourself and face plant right now because you're going to have to work your ass off here very shortly anyway. Let's talk about perhaps an uphill, perhaps a pause, perhaps something else, which I'd love for you to comment on, which did come later. And that was a decision, which I'd love to explore, to say no to quite a lot of opportunities for a period of time. It seems like at one point, you were very successful. You became very famous, like you said, practically overnight. You're being offered opportunities you couldn't have imagined a week prior. And you have a string of successes. And then you realize,

Starting point is 00:34:32 well, wait a minute here. I might be getting painted into a corner. And you start to say no. You start to turn down, say, action film opportunities with big paychecks, things like that. Was that hard to do? Did other people say that you were doing the right thing and encourage you? Could you walk us through and just tell a story about that experience? Yeah, I'd love to. So this is around, I don't remember the year. I'm guessing it's around 12, 13 years ago. I was rolling with the romantic comedies. I had taken the baton from Hugh Grant and was the male lead rom-com go-to guy. Rom-coms are mid-level budgets, 30, 35 million. They offer a good front

Starting point is 00:35:11 end paycheck to me. They go make 60 million. I mean, the studios don't have to overspend and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make them. You get a good female and a male lead that have good chemistry. People love to go escape to them. My outcomes are doing well. They were my bank. They were what Hollywood banked on me to be in. At the same time, I'm living in Malibu, learned to surf, got my shirt off. And the pop right to your discovery channel is like, I'm just documenting this. And I'm like, you're damn right, document it. This is the life I'm living. I love it. I worked and earned to get this life. And those romantic comedies that I get paid so handsomely for actually pay the rent at the house on the beach that I live in in front of this water that I'm surfing in. So I was full on shaking hands with going, yes.

Starting point is 00:35:55 At the same time, I did notice that. Any other dramas I wanted to do or even the way people sort of, when I said, don't meet strangers anymore, even the way this sort of people thought of me or approached me or would talk to me or about me, it was like, you know, kind of, he's the shirtless rom-com guy. And I was like, yeah, I am. And I'm, but there only I could answer that second question of, and I'm like, only I could continue that sentence. No one else could. They were like, Hollywood for, and I'm like, only I could continue that sentence. No one else could. They were like, Hollywood for sure. It was like, no, nothing else. And so any dramas I wanted to do or other pictures, no one wanted to make them with me. And I remember we had just had Levi, Camilla and I just had our first son and my life was so vital, man, I just had a newborn.

Starting point is 00:36:46 I've met the woman that I love and want to spend the rest of my life with. I'm laughing harder. I'm crying harder. I'm happier than ever. Life is very vital, and I'm in it. My real life is. But my work feels like, yeah, I could do that tomorrow morning. Just give me the script tonight.

Starting point is 00:37:06 Let me look at it. I could do it tomorrow morning. It wasn't really challenging me. And the rom-coms weren't challenging me. And my lifestyle was one big green light. And, you know, if it's all green lights, if it's all sugar and candy, well, it'll make Tyrant out of anybody. So I was saying, oh, I really want my work.

Starting point is 00:37:23 I wish my work could. I remember saying this. At least, I remember looking in the mirror, actually, I really want my, I wish my work could, I remember saying this, at least, I remember looking in the mirror actually and going, okay, McConaughey, so if your life is more vital and true to who you are than your work, well, it's got to be one or the other. That's a good thing because I know a lot of people that their work is more vital than their life. So I said, that's a good thing. I said, but geez, could I just get some work that might challenge the vitality of my life and the man I am in it where I can get some work where I can be more me in it? Well, those roles were not being offered to me. Nothing. Nope. Not a chance. No studio will bank you in this drama role or this other role you want.

Starting point is 00:38:01 I had control of Dallas Buyers Club at that time, but no one wanted to make it for me, nor did anyone finance it. So I decided that if I couldn't do what I wanted to do and what I wanted to do was not being offered to me, it would be prudent for me to just stop doing what I had been doing and what was in the pipeline continually coming to me, which were the romantic comedies. I called my money manager, said, all right, look, I'm going to stop doing the only work I'm getting offered. And I don't know how long it's going to be till I work again. How am I doing with my money? He says, you've invested well, conservatively, you're fine. You can take time off. I remember calling my agent, Jim Toth at CAA. Jim, I don't want to do romantic comedies anymore. I remember this conversation. He goes, great. And I go, wait,

Starting point is 00:38:43 whoa, whoa, what do you mean great? He goes, great. And I go, how do you say that so quick? What are you going to say Monday morning when you go into your superiors in the office and say, McConaughey's not doing romantic comedies and McConaughey has been bringing a nice chunk of 10% commission into you guys with these romantic comedies for years now. And he said the coolest thing to me, he goes, I don't work for them. I work for you. That's a good line. It's a good line, right? And then it was, I went to Camilla, my wife. And I'd shed quite a few tears with her going through this. Am I feeling fraudulent in my work? Do I feel a lack of significance in my work? Is it okay to be feeling this? I mean, like I said, remember, as we said

Starting point is 00:39:24 earlier, I'm kind of going running downhill. Why would you sabotage not doing the work you're getting offered when you can get paid so handsomely to do it? But she understood that my soul was shaken and needed some recalibration and that the work I was doing wasn't a true sort of expression of who I was in my life. And I told her, I said, I want to hold out for some work that can challenge the vitality of the life that I'm living with you and our son Levi. And she repeated the lines to me. She goes, okay, you're going to get wobbly. I've been around you. You got to work, Matthew, and you love to accomplish. You're going to get wobbly. You

Starting point is 00:39:58 might start reaching for a little sip of something to drink earlier in the day too. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. She's like, she goes, days are going to be longer. We don't know how long this will last, how long we'll be in this. She called it a desert. How long this will be a desert. She goes, but if we're going to do this, if you're going to do this, we're not going to half-ass it. She repeated my dad's line to me. And I went, yes, ma'am. Gave her a hug, put some tears on her shoulder. And we said, starting today, no more rom-coms. Well, rom-com offers came in to my agent for about the next six months, but nothing but rom-com offers. And I didn't even, unless it was a major offer, I just said no. And they just stopped at my agent's desk,im toff no and then one of them came through that

Starting point is 00:40:46 was like a gargantuan offer for it and my agent said it's a pretty damn good script too and so i said we'll send it out let me read it and i remember this the offer was like for eight million dollars and the script was pretty good but it was still a sort of a rom-com. And I remember reading it and going, no, thank you. I remember feeling sort of emboldened and strengthened by saying,

Starting point is 00:41:11 no, thank you. Great. Sticking to my guns. No rom-coms. Six months into this drought. Nope, not caving in now. Don't have Fast and McConaughey. So they come back with a $10 million offer.

Starting point is 00:41:21 No, thank you. They come back with a $12.5 million offer. Now I go dot, dot, dot, ellipsis, ellipsis. No, thank you. Now they come back with a $15 million offer. Wow. You know what? Let me have another reread of that script. And I reread that. And you know what? At $15 million, the same script that I've been offered for $8 million,

Starting point is 00:41:52 the $15 million offer script, which was the same exact words as the $8 million offer script. The $15 million script was better. It was funnier. It had possibilities. It had angles. I had ideas. I could make this work. know i mean this could work now i'm imagining at this point jim is like man this say no thing is really working out he's in and he's over there teetering like i know what we said50 million. And it's not like it's a pretty good script.

Starting point is 00:42:26 I know it's a rom-com. It's a pretty good script. But I said, no, no, thank you. Well, that got the signal across Hollywood that McConaughey was taking a serious sabbatical. And so don't even send him a rom-com. It got around. So that was kind of the crucible then. I mean, that was like the crux move in a sense.

Starting point is 00:42:52 In a way, that was a, yeah, I called an audible six months in and I had him thinking I might cave. I might just be posturing. And come on back, McConaughey, we love you. And I said, no. And when they had pumped the money offer up so much and people knew in the industry what that offer was it became very clear oh oh shit okay mcconaughey i don't know what he's doing but he ain't doing this stuff he's not doing any more rom-coms and it became clear so for the next two 12 14 months nothing came in nada zil, not an offer for anything. I mean, I'd talk to my agent every couple of weeks.

Starting point is 00:43:28 It'd just be like, nothing came in, nothing. So now we're 20 months into this desert period. I do have my son to raise, which, you know, being a father has always been the most important thing to me. So that's got my compass at least directed in a place that I go, just trust in this. If it has something to do with raising your son and being here on the land with your family, even if you start to wander, just trust that that's always going to be in the asset section, McConaughey. You can't go wrong with that. So I stuck to that, and I was now fine with not doing any work.

Starting point is 00:44:02 I didn't know what I was going to be. I didn't know if I was going to change my career, if I was going to become a teacher or coach or go back to being a lawyer. I didn't know. I didn't think so, but I was writing more. I was talking about forced winners. I had put a forced winner on myself and I was pretty content. I wasn't waking up every morning going, did an offer come in? Did something new come in? I was past that. And then all of a sudden, 20 months in, 20, 21 months into this desert, I start getting some offers that are interesting things. William Friedkin, Killer Joe, Lee Daniels, Paperboy. Jeff Nichols wrote Mud for me.

Starting point is 00:44:39 Steven Soderbergh called Magic Wine. Richard Linklater and I go do Bernie together. True Detective comes around. All of a sudden, Dallas Buyers Club. No one still wants to put a bunch of money up for a 1980s period drama about AIDS. But all of a sudden, McConaughey, all the directors were no directors would do Dallas Buyers Club with me. They wanted the script. They loved the script.

Starting point is 00:45:00 They didn't want to do it with McConaughey. All of a sudden, we find Jean-Marc Vallee, who says, no, I'd like to do with mcconaughey all of a sudden we find jean-marc valet who want who says no i'd like to do with mcconaughey so what happened was that 22 months or whatever that drought that desert i unbranded i didn't rebrand i unbranded me being away me being in texas not being on a beach getting pictures to, not being on a beach, getting pictures of me shirtless on a beach, not being in rom-coms. I was out of the world's view. I was out of the industry's view. I was not in your living room. I was not in your theater. I was not in any of the places that the world had become expectant to see me and how to see me. Where was I? I was gone. Where is McConaughey? Well, you're gone long enough. All of a sudden, I became a new good idea, which I was not a new good idea at any time

Starting point is 00:45:56 earlier than that at the end of that 20-month period. And then all of a sudden, the things came to me that I wanted to do. And I remember saying, you know what? Fuck the bucks. I'm going for the experience. If I read a role that shakes me in my boots and challenges the vitality that I feel in my own real life and challenges me, the man I am in my own real life, that's what I'm going after. And man, they came in. Come in. I looked at each other, shed some more tears. And we said, let's get after it. And I just started hammering them. The family came with me everywhere I went and just started laying down work that really, really turned me on. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element?

Starting point is 00:46:44 It is a delicious sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or paleo diet. So if you're on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their master chief, marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive

Starting point is 00:47:22 hydration partner to Team USA weightlifting and on and on. Get your free sample pack with any element purchase at drinklmnt.com slash Tim. Be sure to also try the new element sparkling, a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out. drinklmnt.com slash tim, drinkelmnt.com slash tim. And now, Ayesha Tyler, a star of the hit television show Criminal Minds, a comedian and the host of the CW's top-rated improv show, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, an award-winning director, best-selling author, and activist, and co-founder of the new premium margarita brand, Lossify. You can find Ayesha on Twitter and Instagram, at Ayesha Tyler. Ayesha, welcome to the show.

Starting point is 00:48:21 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:48:55 and then we'll backpedal. But the question will not be surprising to you, I don't think. And I'm going to ask you to bring it up. But the conversation that we had, in part, contributed to me deciding to take a break from writing books, which had completely burned me out. And in turn, helped birth the show. 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, 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 really satisfying. Even when they're punishingly difficult to manage, they're still so satisfying. So I'm really happy. I'm happy that you're

Starting point is 00:49:42 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. 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 what, you know, tell me a story about something that's gone wrong in your life. That's your own fault. You know, you can't blame anyone else, not your ex, not the bullies in your school, not the man, you know, you did it to yourself. And it

Starting point is 00:50:20 was, it was really a way of initiating a conversation about risk and failure, because I feel like people see people who are successful and assume that a part of that success or the reason 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 the most successful people are people who don't just manage risk but engage in risk and court failure actively. So I always love to have people listening see that someone that they admire and that they think is really accomplished has really shit the bed 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 the path to success is through failure. You just can't get around it. There's so many different directions I could go with this. And I want to go way back as maybe like sort of a montage flashback that we could have as a visual

Starting point is 00:51:15 overlay as you're saying some of these things. And that is to your dad. 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. Well, I was raised, you know, my parents divorced when I was 10. And my father, my parents, you know, I always joke that, you know, it's only rich people that can afford to fight about custody, you know, I always joke that, you know, 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 like manage. And my parents, neither of them could really afford two kids. And also,

Starting point is 00:51:53 neither of them could afford to pay child support. So, you know, each of them just took one of us. I was older, so I went with my father. And he was like, you know, which one can wash itself? And then that was the one that he took. And, you know, my father is the king of the very terse and pointed motivational speech. 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?

Starting point is 00:52:31 And I'd have to say, and twist and twist. 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 propri glass and potholes and molten lava. And then you've got this little kitten, and you're just like 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, you know, and expect that they've given you the skills to land. And that was definitely his strategy. Now, you mentioned the divorce, which I have

Starting point is 00:53:26 read was amicable. It ended up resulting in you going with your father and you have one sibling? I have a younger sister and she stayed with me. 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 what was happening. And I don't ever remember struggling in any grand way with the way that things were going. Look, maybe that's my nature. I do my I know, my parents worked very hard to

Starting point is 00:54:04 be loving and available to both of us. And I had lots of access to my mother and I talked to her all the time and I called her for advice. And when she got to kind of be the fun mom or the advice mom, she didn't have to discipline me and she could just we were younger, was my sister and I, we weren't super close, but lots of siblings aren't super close in their kids. Whether they're living in the same house or not, they're fighting and they're competitive. But as we got older, I became wildly protective of my sister. And my relationship with her is so intensely loving and affectionate now. 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 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

Starting point is 00:55:03 to stay together. 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, 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, walk in on them, they'd be making out on the couch. I was like, they are really giving this a go.

Starting point is 00:55:18 So when they decided it was over, I was like, okay. I don't ever remember it being, like, a point of agony. Just things changed, you 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? Or have you had more of the time, a tendency to frame things negatively? I think about that a lot, because I think that my attitude or my point of view about things is half biochemistry and half child rearing. My father is just like a preternaturally optimistic person. It's extraordinary. I always make this joke that if my father's house was on fire, he would get a stick and marshmallows. Like he just cannot be deterred. I've never seen it. You know, he's just never down. And so I think

Starting point is 00:56:20 that I inherited that. Maybe it's attitudinal. I think I just probably make 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, if they have a hard time seeing the world positively or if they're struggling with depression, people are like, we just need to look at it a different way. But I think that I probably just make more of the chemicals that enable me to be optimistic. I've never really been depressed, but my father also was just a walk it off dad. He just did not feel sorry for me. And I was not allowed to feel sorry for myself. And so when things went wrong, and this is definitely sustained until I was an adult, I just get up and I keep going. And that was because, you know,

Starting point is 00:56:59 my father was raised, he lost his father when he was very, very young. He's raised by a single mother in Tumbledown, Pittsburgh, with the very few opportunities for a black man at that time. And he just never felt sorry for himself. He was just like, look, I can complain about the situation or I can just keep moving. So I think I've been nurtured in that way as well, which is the world is unfair. It's shot through with assholes. I still have to get up in the morning and make a life for myself. So it's probably a combination of those two things. Were you, would you say good at following his advice of not only grabbing life by the balls, but twisting, which is a whole new level. Those are two really like, yeah, like you can gently grab balls. You can't really gently grab and twist balls.

Starting point is 00:57:41 Twisting is an elevated, yes, an elevated form of aggression. I don't know. It's hard to say, like, oh, I'm nailing it. That's not how I feel. But I do think that that attitude of like, and I wrote a lot about it in my book, the idea that my parents raised me to be brave and in some ways maybe too brave, but the result has been like a relentlessness and 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 that 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. It's the effort.

Starting point is 00:58:30 I got it. So the 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 is not looking back and saying to myself, I should have done it. It's the doing for me that is the reward. And then sometimes things go my way. And sometimes they don't. But the thing I find most upsetting is regret. Yeah, because that's something I have control over in the sense of like,

Starting point is 00:59:05 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. 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, while you were still under his watch or not, early disappointments or self-inflicted wounds and how your dad responded or mistakes?

Starting point is 00:59:38 This isn't exactly a good example of a disappointment, but it's a perfect example of his attitude. I was going to camp. I must have been about eight or nine. No, I'll say nine. And I was going to like jujitsu camp. This was still during the free range parenting era where you just 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 really into martial arts when I was a kid. Oh, okay. It's making me think of the movie hannah where this band of trains his daughter to be a super killer i'm just i wish i was that good at jujitsu okay all right firstly that was not one of my

Starting point is 01:00:15 strong stronger but as i 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, you know, kind of, I don't know, you know, free. 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 I fell and I hurt my arm very badly.

Starting point is 01:00:43 And 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. 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'd broken my arm. And I got home and my dad was like, your arm's not broken.

Starting point is 01:01:01 I mean, you need to stop complaining. You know, it's just sore. And the next day I woke up, you just need to stop complaining. It's a sore. And the next day I woke up, it was like black and swollen. And I had to like lift it off the pillow. And he finally took me to the doctor and it was absolutely like compound fracture. The bone hadn't come through the skin, but it was a multiple fracture. 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 as an adult, I just

Starting point is 01:01:30 don't spend a lot of time anguishing over what's been done to me. And I was fine. I did ride my bike home and my arm was broken, but I still got home on my bike. And then the next day, I got a super dope cast. And I think we just raise like these, I mean, I know I sound like everybody's mom, but I just feel like we're curating young people's experiences so aggressively nowadays that they just don't have any way to discover things about themselves. 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. I had a lot of time alone when I was a kid, and I still really like being alone as an adult.

Starting point is 01:02:13 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 over-inflated sense of their capabilities is actually a huge disservice 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

Starting point is 01:03:02 I know who's out of real, I mean, you know, genuine love. Parents are like, I just don't want to see my kid in pain. 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 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. I'm like, oh, that didn't go my way. Moving on. It makes me conjure in my mind the image of this increasing amplitude of pain consequence over your life from childhood to adulthood where the consequences grow potentially greater and greater. Where in the beginning, like when you're a child,

Starting point is 01:03:48 you're basically engaging with pain and I shouldn't say pain, but failure in many cases, not all cases, but many cases where you're, you're effectively in one of those like birthday party blow up sumo suits. Do you know what I'm talking about? And it's like, so you can sort of engage with failure that way. And if you get knocked on your ass, there aren't really real consequences. Then you get, you get to high school, college, and it's like so you can sort of engage with failure that way and if you get knocked on your ass there aren't really real consequences 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 headgear then when you get out into some aspects of the real world it's just a bare knuckle brawl permanent consequences yeah yeah exactly so if you haven't had the chance to get wailed in the face with the sumo suit, you're not going to be ready for the blow up boxing gloves and the

Starting point is 01:04:31 headgear. And if you 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, you know, drop kicked in the face by someone who doesn't follow the same rules. And crippled in that way that, you know, and I know you've interacted with people like this in that way where when something bad happens, their whole monologue is like, why me? Like, why did this happen to me? You don't understand what I'm going through. It's like, you're not special. Everybody is experiencing the same thing. Everybody's heart is being broken. Everybody isn't getting the job

Starting point is 01:05:01 they want. Everybody isn't going to sleep with the hot person they want. Everybody is experiencing 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's 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? In high school, so interesting because I was like super academic. And I think I thought I'd be an attorney. I was like a big activist and I organized and marched and did all that stuff. And

Starting point is 01:05:44 I was like in the outing club and I rock climbed and all that stuff. So I thought I'd be an attorney. You know, I was like a big activist and I organized and marched and did all that stuff. And I was like in the, you know, outing club and I rock climbed and all that stuff. So I thought I was going to be like an environmental lawyer, either an environmental lawyer or an environmental engineer. I really wanted to go to a school that was like really grounded in a relationship to nature. So I was applying to like Marlborough College and Reed and Bard and these schools that were like out in the woods. And I ended up going to Dartmouth, which is, you know, in New Hampshire and has this big land grant around it. And I thought I would be an environmental engineer. And I think I just took like the first prerequisite math course for engineering. And I was like, yeah, okay, it's not just not going to be, it's not for me. I always

Starting point is 01:06:20 love, I always love science, but I'm just a person of letters, I guess. 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, did fine. I applied myself and I got a good grade. And then I went into my introduction to engineering three, and it was about building a fecal matter treatment plant. And I was like, this isn't feeling like hugging trees at all, man. We're just talking about poop all day. I lost my appetite for that really quickly.

Starting point is 01:06:57 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 went to a high school that had a performing arts kind of magnet or like a pocket school within the regular school called the J. U. D. McAteer School of the Arts. 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, I was in one of those infernal Ivy League acapella groups that have been popularized since then by shows like Glee. So I was always kind of doing that as a hobby because it just never felt like a real job. And I graduated and I was living in San Francisco

Starting point is 01:07:33 and I was working for a conservation organization. I got my dream job. It was a group that purchased blighted urban land and turned it into parks and underserved neighborhoods that didn't have any outdoor space for kids to play. And it was like the mission was great because it wasn't just kind of conservation of conservation's sake. It was like conservation focused on engaging underserved communities. And it was the grooviest and I was just miserable. And I just... Why were you miserable? I didn't know. It was a really good question. You know, it was like, why, if I have my dream job in the city

Starting point is 01:08:05 of my birth, why am I so unhappy? And I just did a lot of soul searching. And I realized it was because for the first time in my life, I wasn't doing anything creative. I wasn't performing. And so I'm a problem solver. I'm a matrix builder. I was like, well, how can I solve this problem right now? And I looked at all the ways that I could get on stage and stand-up comedy was the only thing I didn't need to know anyone for, have an agent or a band or connections. I could just do stand-up right away. And so I started studying and watching the precursor to Comedy Central, which was this network called HA, a very short-lived network, taking notes. And then, you know, after a while, just kind of screwed up the courage

Starting point is 01:08:45 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? It's so funny because I don't think I even realized that stand-up comedy was a job. I was a really bookish kid.

Starting point is 01:09:26 A lot of guys will have these stories about how they grew up, you know, with Red Fox, you know, on vinyl that they listened to hundreds of times or following Letty Bruce or, you know, these idols or Bill Hicks. I just, I didn't, I remember seeing Live on the Sunset Strip when I was a kid.

Starting point is 01:09:39 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. So I remember seeing standup at Dartmouth when I was like a sophomore and coming out of a show and being like, do people know that this,

Starting point is 01:09:59 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. 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 for a long time. I also didn't want to be like one of these kind of like miserable, you know, sweating standups who are like gripping their inky notebook and sleeping on their buddy's couch. I was in a relationship and I had a job that paid great and I could make flyers for my

Starting point is 01:10:30 shows at work. I was embezzling a copy paper and push pins as aggressively as I could. So I was, and I still am, of the opinion that you should absolutely keep your day job, which I know is not the most popular. I'm of the same opinion. Absolutely. I think it gives you a freedom. People think same opinion. Absolutely. 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

Starting point is 01:10:52 and do it for so long that everything you do is just for joy and it changes the way that you approach your art. I would get up and I'd go to work at like seven and six or seven in the morning and I'd work until four and then I'd jump in the car and I'd drive two hours to Sacramento to do a set. And I come back at

Starting point is 01:11:06 midnight and I do it all over again. 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, the high school that you went to, is that now the Ruth Asawa school on O'Shaughnessy? It's on O'Shaughnessy. They're at the nexus of Twin Peaks slash Glen Park Canyon. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:11:35 So I literally lived for five or six years about a quarter mile from that school. It's amazing. It's right there. It's not a big city, even though I think when you feel think when you live there, it feels like it's an intimate place. It's an intimate place. And given the density of San Francisco and the fact that, I don't know if people would consider it a comedy town, but there's certainly clubs and so on.

Starting point is 01:12:00 Oh, it's a comedy town. It's a comedy town. So why would you go all the way to Sacramento? Sacramento is not, for those people who don't know the area, it's not like a 10-minute drive away from San Francisco. It's far. San Francisco's always had a reputation for being a comedy town. The big comedy towns in the United States, from comedians' perspectives, are San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York. L.A. is a company town, but it's not a comedy town. 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 and, you know, where Marc Maron and Janine Garofalo and these kind of alternative comics, Brian Poussaint

Starting point is 01:12:38 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 standup. You could kind of go from place to place and you could get a gig and you could get paid. And I started doing standup

Starting point is 01:12:58 at the beginning of the end of the comedy bubble. So when I started doing standup, 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 need to be on stage like every night. It's like being a high diver. You know what? It's

Starting point is 01:13:25 literally like Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours. And you're not going to get 10,000 hours of stand up hanging out in San Francisco. You have to go everywhere and take every single opportunity to be on stage that you can get. So I would drive to Sacramento. I would drive to Fresno. I would do these terrible bar shows in Menlo Park. And oh, God, I don't even remember some of the places. Cupertino and Martinez. I mean, you would just go anywhere that you could get six minutes on stage. And there were 100 other people trying to get those same six minutes. So it was really competitive. I mean, the culture, I think, was pretty supportive. Communities were supportive of each other, but there just wasn't enough stage time. So you just do anything and go anywhere

Starting point is 01:14:02 to get it. 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. People were like, really? The Beanie Babies? It's like, no, comedy isn't cool anymore. And then all the clubs closed? Was it just a macroeconomic downturn? I mean, what happened? I think it was three factors. One factor was just, there was just a glut. Live comedy, in some ways in the 70s and 80s, was kind of a new thing. And it's not like people hadn't been doing stand-up prior to that. But the proliferation of stand-up comedians in the culture really started happening at that time. And what that was fueled by,

Starting point is 01:14:41 I honestly don't know. Like, why were there so many more comics doing stand-up in the 70s and 80s? Maybe because that was the period where there were these superstar comics that were – I'm trying to think of who would have been really popular besides Bill Hicks. I could see that, though. Maybe it's analogous to celebrity chefs in the last 15 years. Yeah, exactly. Part of the reason why there are so many more celebrity chefs is because there started to be celebrity chefs on television. Right. So if you think about that in terms of comedy, what you see is, oh, that's a job.

Starting point is 01:15:11 I can make money at that. Whereas people weren't really encountering live comedy if they didn't go to a live comedy show. So you start to see these guys on TV and you think, and honestly, when HA, the precursor to Comedy Central started, they needed comics and they needed opportunities. They needed clubs. They needed content. It was a 24-hour network. So there were some good comedians on that station and there were some really shitty ones on that station.

Starting point is 01:15:38 Really bad. And so a lot of people watching probably thought, well, I can do that. I also think about guys like Sam Kinison and Andrzej Cley. 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 really subpar, and a lot of people were thinking, well, if that guy can write 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 stand-up, she was doing stand-up in strip clubs.

Starting point is 01:16:08 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. People would come in, they would get wasted. You'd have huge margins on your booze. So all these comedy clubs started proliferating. And then there was just

Starting point is 01:16:34 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. And by the time I was doing standup in my twenties, there were two. And they were attracting like high end peak talent. So for example, this club's still there. It's called the Punchline.

Starting point is 01:17:14 Punchline. I've been there a few times. There was the Punchline and there was Cobbs. And those are still the only two clubs. And maybe there's some minor clubs that have sprung up since then. 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 work out. I can't fail in front of this guy because he won't see this.

Starting point is 01:17:50 You know, when you watch like an Olympic skater during practice and they're falling, that's what practice is for. You know, practice is for like finding your weak spots and reinforcing them. But when you're up in front of a comedy club owner and it's been six months that you've been trying to get out of this club and you finally get five minutes, it's got to be a monster five minutes. There was just no way to improve. You can't improve. I was going to say, how do you get in your rough drafts then?

Starting point is 01:18:13 How do you work on the material? 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 Foo Bars or Rooster Teeth Feathers or one of these other places.

Starting point is 01:18:32 Yeah. It's different than being an author or an athlete or even a musician because there's an autonomy to comedy, absolutely. But you need other people. You can't do it. You can't just sit around your place practicing you know what i mean like with music you know if you know if you're sharp or flat you know if you hit all the notes you know if the tempo is right but with comedy the only way it works is in front of an audience and so you're very dependent on on stage time and it's everything

Starting point is 01:18:59 when you're a young comic is stage time do you remember your early content i mean what kind of what was your approach early on? Do you remember the first, and maybe, I mean, a different way to approach this, you could take it, 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, I bombed so many times. It's just, it all seeps together into an inky blackness. Any comic who tells you they've never bombed is lying. And again, the only way to get funny is to bomb. No one ever gets funnier after they kill.

Starting point is 01:19:30 You know, they just walk, I'm like, follow that, bitches, and they drop the mic, you know what I mean? They go off and do shots of their friends. I mean, you really need to bomb and bomb hard to get funny. I remember doing this one show. Oh, God. So there was an open mic in a laundromat

Starting point is 01:19:44 south of Market around the police station there so what maybe like you know eighth and mission or something like that for people san francisco and i think it was called brainwash i think the 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 mics with these local open mics that typically there are no actual audience members in the audience. It is just a room full of comedians waiting for you to be done so that they can try out their material. 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.

Starting point is 01:20:20 And I did a set where I did not get one laugh. And I remember, not even I did not get one laugh. And I remember, not even like a cursory titter, and I remember just silence, just a wall of silence. And I got off. Even thinking about it right now, it's so funny to me. I talked to a girlfriend afterwards, and I was like, oh, my God. I couldn't even call that a bad set. I don't know what that was, but it was so funny to me that I didn't get a laugh. There was this bulletproofness that I got from that set that just made me impervious to

Starting point is 01:20:52 anything ever going wrong in my life or career again. Even when I'm talking about it now, there's a huge smile on my face because it was so funny how little I was able to elicit out of that audience. 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 it like the reverse of the five stages of grief? Or did you just go straight to like, yeah, motherfuckers, this is great. Like, just full acceptance. this is great. Just full acceptance. This is going to make a great story however many years from now on Tim Ferriss' podcast.

Starting point is 01:21:29 Well, one thing comedians love is agony. I mean, we dine out on it. It's definitely like our stock and trade. So a comedian very quickly transitions from, oh, my God, this is the worst night of my life to, oh, my God, this is going to make a great story. That happens almost instantaneously. So we have a little bit of a, we have some armor in that regard because we could wake up like naked and shivering on the side of the road with like no money and no phone and not speak the local language. And you'd be thinking, okay, if I live, this is going to make a killer story. So I think in the moment, I just thought, I had watched a couple other people go up and not do

Starting point is 01:22:01 very well either. I was prepared for it not going my way. And I think also there's a discipline to comedy that if you're not a comedian, you can't understand, which is that you've got to get up and do your set. You don't get to tap out. Tapping out is true failure. If you went up and you had a bad set, well, you just need to write new jokes. But if you go up and you give up, that's true failure for a comedian. There are some really famous examples of this online. I don't know if you know the comedian Bill Burr, but... 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. Yes, he still has some trauma. He has like some...

Starting point is 01:22:36 So can you, for people who don't know the story, can you please describe it? Because it's just... It's so insane, right? It's insane. So he was doing one of those big like radio you know those radio station concerts like the jingle ball or whatever and i don't remember it was called the weenie roast i think it was the weenie roast so it's one of the shows that like some local stage you know k-rock 97 point rock k-rock you know like one of those shows and it's i don't know weezer's too cool of a band it would be like nickelback and you know some other band that sounds like nickelback and then an opening band you never heard of. Anyway, I don't know why

Starting point is 01:23:08 people still do this, but if you're a comic and someone offers you money, you take it. So they would hire a comic to kind of warm up the crowd early in the day. No one pays to see Nickelback and then wants to sit through 15 minutes of stand-up. Everyone's drunk and on drugs. They're not even facing forward.

Starting point is 01:23:23 You know what I mean? The only thing worse than performing in front of an outdoor audience is performing in front of people who are eating yeah this is like this is like a tailgate at like 11 a.m or 1 p.m or something yeah every everybody's been you know everybody like busted out their like 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 not muster compassion if they tried. So he starts doing standup and it just immediately starts

Starting point is 01:23:58 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, it's like silence you can tolerate, right? But like 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.

Starting point is 01:24:19 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. Yeah. Yeah. Every minute he's like, nine minute, you fucking fucks. He says something really outrageous. Like, I hope your mother gets cancer in the center of her asshole. Seven minutes. It's just a demonstration of tenacity. Later, you know, he was embarrassed by it.

Starting point is 01:24:52 But every comedian understands this kind of blood battle that you sometimes have with an audience where they're not going to scare you and they're not going to drive you away. You're going to deliver the material that you were hired to deliver. You're going to make your money and then you're going to go off and spend it on light beer and chicken wings. But no one is you will not be deterred. So i think because you understand that as a comedian very early on in your career no matter what happens on stage i will not be moved so i just i had material to do and i did it and i think i remember i thinking almost immediately well okay i'm not gonna get any laughs i'm just gonna kind of like listen to this set and see what it feels like see what the words feel

Starting point is 01:25:23 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 the savory masochism towards the end where he's so powerful in his lack of caring. You watch it and it is to be studied because he goes from kind of anguish to rage to this kind of delightful detachment by the end of the set. And I've seen some other guys do similar stuff, and it's always really fun to watch. So 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.

Starting point is 01:26:00 Philadelphia, I think. Either that or Jersey. I think it was Philadelphia because he started ridiculing Rocky. And he said, your hero is a fictional person and just tearing into 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.

Starting point is 01:26:23 Like if people hate you. I mean, there are these unwritten rules of comedy. And one of them is if-no generally. Like if people hate you, I mean, there are like these unwritten rules of comedy. And one of them is like you don't, if some of the people in the audience hate you, like don't turn all of them against you. 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 there's a guy playing, he's a guitar comic, and a guy's heckling him. It's kind of just combative back and forth, but nothing too extreme. But then the guy gets up and he comes towards the stage, whatever, to defend himself or the girl he's with, something like that. 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.

Starting point is 01:27:01 But what happens is up until that beat, the whole audience has been on the comedian side against this guy. It is a hairpin turn from them being like, yeah, shut up. You know, the comics like, hey, you know, 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 Frankenstein'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 Bill broke a bunch of rules, but he just he never gave up, you know, which I think it becomes this, you know, it's like the Rudy moment at the end of the movie, like, man, that sucked, but you should suck in there. And he got a standing up while I mean, everybody's already standing, but he got massive applause from the audience at the end, which is just –

Starting point is 01:27:50 Because they were just like, what the fuck? It didn't even fit into any mental heuristic of comedy that they could expect. It was straight prison yard dynamics, right? Like nobody – you know what I mean? It's the line from Out of Sight, right? Just like the yard. Nobody backing down. Nobody's backing down. You know what I mean? It's the line from Out of Sight, right? Just like the yard. Nobody's backing down.

Starting point is 01:28:09 Nobody's backing down. And he just, you know, I think there was like 1,000 of them to one of her, probably like 10,000 of them to one of him. And he just did not back down. He got the slow respect clap at the end of the show. Oh, my God. So I wasn't going to go to heckling, but why not since we're already here? Do you have any memorable heckling stories?

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

Starting point is 01:29:01 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 and it looked like a great town you know it was a very effective echo because she just completely derailed my show and i just seemed like a dick because i was like shut up lady and but no one could hear what she was saying like what's wrong nice lady and it really i mean that was i remember that i really went off the rails last night and i because I was like, shut up, lady. But no one could hear what she was saying. It's like, what's wrong with you, nice lady? The front line of the night. And it really, I mean, that was, I remember that really went off the rails last night.

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

Starting point is 01:29:43 that they've affected everybody else's enjoyment of the night. But sometimes the affectionate hecklers are the worst because typically hecklers just want to be a part of the show. And so, you know, they say something, you slam them a little bit, they shut up because they think they're helping you out. 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 a system. I don't have a box jumper in my act. I showed up ready to go.

Starting point is 01:30:06 But when people are affectionate, you can't insult them. They're the most unmanageable kind of hacker. Now, by affectionate, you mean someone who's like, I love you. I love you. Exactly. I love you. I had this one girl at one show in San Francisco, just so drunk. I'm just cross-eyed. And for the 90 minutes I was on stage, just, I love you. I love you so much. I love you. And I was just like, lady, all you'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 I really have a habit of just not talking to hecklers.

Starting point is 01:30:45 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, 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. And I think the people around her got embarrassed and they eventually kind of shut her up, which was nice. And I'm going to stop talking. And I think the people around her got embarrassed and they eventually kind of shut her up, which was nice. And I'm trying to think of any other really good hecklers that, oh, I had one guy. It's a mental discipline too, because, you know, like, again, like it's your show.

Starting point is 01:31:15 You have the microphone, you're in control. You know, I think the audience thinks they're in control, but they're not. I mean, the Bilber scenario is a perfect example. The person with the microphone has all the power. As long as it cannot be moved 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 01:31:39 and i it was all he was all i could see like you know anything like the whole audience had disappeared and it was just straight vignette on this guy's sourpuss face. It was just wrecking my whole night. 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. I meant it. It wasn't even a joke.

Starting point is 01:32:01 I was just like, get out. You are harshing my mellows so hard. He left. I didn't feel bad about it. Then I went on with the show I was just like, get out. And you are harshing my mellows so hard. And he left. I didn't feel bad about it. And then I went on with the show and his girlfriend goes, he had a bad day. I was like, oh, but what was great was nobody else at the table wanted to leave. They were like, you know, good riddance to bad rubbish. And he went on and the rest of the people enjoyed their night.

Starting point is 01:32:19 So, 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'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 can learn how to be a better comic, but you can't learn how to be a comic. Or even in a different way, I really wanted to be an engineer. And I could have really suffered and struggled through like the elevated math that

Starting point is 01:33:16 I would need to become an engineer, but it would never be effortless for me. And I think with comedy, there are people who very workmanlike can learn how to do comedy. And then there's some people who are just naturally comedic and they still have to work to be better at it. You say Bolt still has to train, even though he was born with more fast switch muscles

Starting point is 01:33:36 than everybody else, he still has to train to become a champion. So I feel like with comedy, people can be the class clown or they can be that guy who's naturally funny. There's still a methodology and there's still a mathematics to becoming a comic. And then at the same time, if they have this, this ephemeral ineffable kind of understanding

Starting point is 01:33:54 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 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 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 and not be rejected.

Starting point is 01:34:22 So that was what I brought to it was like that combination of being an outsider and an observer and then using those skills to try to kind of connect with people. But with comedy, I never took any classes. I never read any books. There's definitely people who can say, oh, you know, there's a total methodology to comedy. It's, you know, the rule of threes and, you know, stretching reality to the point of breaking, but not past it. I mean, there are, you know, some specific kind of rules. What's the rule of threes? I probably wouldn't even be able to articulate it properly. It's just that if you're going to do a series of jokes

Starting point is 01:34:50 or a series of builds to a punchline, it needs to be three. I get it. And also, if you're going to do any kind of a diversion, if you're going to lead people in one direction and then snap around to a different kind of absurdist result, you can't do that in two. It has to be, the pace of it has to

Starting point is 01:35:05 be three. I see. And then past three, you're starting to 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. As soon as you start explaining the math of comedy, like none of it makes any sense. You know what I mean? Like it's those two things, you know, 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, chair, water, sex. So I guess the way that I did it was that I'm also really an undisciplined comedian. And what I mean is like, like there's a documentary

Starting point is 01:35:45 about Gary Shandling right now, which I haven't watched, but I'm sure that this is in there because he was very famous for being a really disciplined writer. Like he would get up and he would write every single day. And sometimes it would be pages

Starting point is 01:35:54 and pages of material without fail. Other comics were like, hey, let's get a beer and be like, no, I have to write. And every day he would write on this like legal, this is probably true and apocryphal at the same time,

Starting point is 01:36:03 on this like legal line 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. I just get on stage. I try a bunch of stuff. I keep what works. I know what works. I already know right away what works. I'll run off stage. I'll write down the things that I knew hit. 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. I think the more you do it,

Starting point is 01:36:41 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. Like, does this material say something specific and personal about me? Because when you're a baby comic, every joke is meaningful to you because you only have like eight jokes, right? And so even if they're stupid or juvenile or unsophisticated or valueless or coreless, you'll still do them because that's all you have. And then as you get older, you start to think, okay, like I want to have a body of work here. Does this hang together? Does it have a strong point of view? Does it have an identity? And then those other jokes start to fall away. And then the material really becomes about trying to

Starting point is 01:37:20 tell some kind of a story about yourself and the way you perceive the world. And then that's how you shape it. 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.

Starting point is 01:37:38 I think it's true for many different artists. Writers too, probably for writers. It's like, I'm going to find a space that really says something about my accumulated understanding and knowledge of the world. And it's not just enough to say something. I need to say something that's uniquely mine, something you can only do by being prolific, because you need to be able to let things go in order to figure out what should stay. Definitely. I mean, there's a certain volume to it, thinking of it almost as a funnel. And I think, and I certainly hope for the sake of our, not to sound like an old man, but I guess that's what I'm turning into, for the sake of our society in general, I would hope just seeing the number of hatchet jobs and the amount of yellow journalism and 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

Starting point is 01:38:33 compunction about running pieces that get a lot of clicks because that's the only metric they're focused on, at some point go from, what can I write that will get the most clicks to 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. 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 or mindset to put yourself into if you're hoping to do anything creatively evergreen.

Starting point is 01:39:22 Right. And also, it's interesting. When I went to school, we had 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 were going to be called upon to stand behind your work, and so you tried to work very hard to make sure that you could defend it. I don't think that it's like we're any less ethical than we've ever been. It's just, like you said, our metrics have changed. And I think that people value fame for fame's sake rather than for the foundational reasons that people become famous. And I think that's the problem. And I don't think it just exists in journalism. I think that people value infamy. They can't distinguish between fame and infamy.

Starting point is 01:40:04 And, you know, with a 24-hour news cycle, like, a bright burst is as meaningful as a slow burn. I actually don't really know what we do or what should be done or what should happen to counteract that other than people start to maybe get hip to it and start rejecting baseless journalism. And let me take that back. I find it very easy to distinguish between things that seem like they've been thoroughly vetted and things that are bullshit. But I think that people are working very hard to make it harder for the rest of us to distinguish between the two. So there are, without me sounding like a crazy person, there are nefarious forces at work trying to make it very hard for us to figure out what's real and what's not real.

Starting point is 01:40:40 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? I'm following you, and I know what you're into. I see what you're into, Tim. Oh, God.

Starting point is 01:41:03 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

Starting point is 01:41:14 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, 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 so that I feel... I'm going to start interviewing you now this is so interesting so that I don't feel I have any you know Stepford Wives polished yes any kind of perfection preserve

Starting point is 01:41:52 right it's like yeah that's so good and that's so interesting to me and it's different than just being a slob what you're saying is I refuse to create a box within which I will be kept by others I think that comes also from a curiosity about the world. 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 position of strength when they're trying to maintain an appearance of perfection, but that is by its very nature, a posture of fear, which is I cannot be seen to have imperfections. I cannot be seen to have flaws. There can be no chinks in my armor. And that's, I'm terrified of being judged, but there is

Starting point is 01:42:29 something very liberating. And I think it comes from age as well. And from experience, I don't mean experience like a resume, but like 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. 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 increasingly painful grades of sandpaper. This is really awkwardly overextended now. place of fear and want to please this nebulous majority more than you want to please yourself. That's not to say that I've always viewed my entire life and all my decisions as a singular

Starting point is 01:43:33 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 deferring to others, your perception of what others want 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 humiliated by the fact that I like gorgeous female asses, I'm like, oh my God. And I put something up

Starting point is 01:44:14 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 fat and happy and complacent. And maybe I have too much fomo or something like that i will i remember at one point at this i put up this photo of this gorgeous 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 Spanish. Anyway, so I put this up on Instagram. So it was Spanish for ass man is what you're saying. That's right. It's Spanish for like ass man syndrome, right? Or ass man disorder. And I put

Starting point is 01:44:54 it up and as to be expected, there is immediate outrage. I mean, there are plenty of people who think it's kind of funny. Plenty of people are like, yeah, high five. 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. Yes.

Starting point is 01:45:17 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 like, let me give you, you look like you're unhappy, but you're still here. And let me give you, 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. Like, I think there's a freedom in saying, I don't need everybody to like me. I think that like, there is something very meaningful in saying

Starting point is 01:45:42 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. 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. And there are other, there are cases, just so I don't sound like a complete dick. There are other cases where I put something up without really thinking about it. 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

Starting point is 01:46:22 do that. And people give me hopefully constructive feedback that isn't just spitting acid into my face and I take it down. So I do pay attention. At the same time, I try to keep in mind advice that I was given years ago. 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 as long as you have a certain critical mass, whatever that means to you, and there's an article called 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly that everybody should read to this effect if you're creative. But as long as you have a critical mass, and it could be a very small number of people who love your stuff, that's all

Starting point is 01:46:59 that matters. That's like a pass fail, right? As long as you have that pass, you're green. Instead of focusing on the vast majority who hate your shit it's like look there are millions of people who hate 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 fucking like wes anderson so it's really interesting also because i think if you're an artist specifically this is a really important conversation to have with yourself which is like when i first started out at stand-up you, this was like kind of the period when like deaf comedy jam was really popular. And for lack of a better way of articulating it, like black comedy had a very specific, like look and feel and style and tempo. And I just wasn't doing that kind of comedy.

Starting point is 01:47:35 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:47:58 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. In the end, your work is not going to be interesting or meaningful if you are trying to emulate somebody else or trying to figure out what people want from you or what they like or what's popular. Meaningful art only lasts, it only connects if it's authentic and if it comes from your own personal experiences. And until you figure that out, like what that is, it's never going to be interesting.

Starting point is 01:48:30 It's never going to be good. 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

Starting point is 01:48:55 art or writing or anything. Yeah, it's truth. That's, that's advice that I've also heard for screenwriting and many other things. I'm so glad you said that and reminded me of that. You have to please 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?

Starting point is 01:49:21 At least it was something that you loved and you're not embarrassed by it. Right. You said it may not work out. And if you're in the creative game, at least from what I've seen, particularly in the beginning, most things are not going to work out. Yeah, nothing ever goes your way. Right. So you might as well have one person who's happy about the process. Exactly. That was what I was saying about engagement.

Starting point is 01:49:41 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. No, no, stop. 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, if somebody's on stage and they're playing their game, that is who they are, you are never going to be able to take on the cognitive load

Starting point is 01:50:21 and the fatigue of pretending to be that type of person and beat someone who is good at that game. You're just not going to. You're not. You're so right. Yeah. You're just not going to win. So it's like you will not ultimately in any field that is competitive, which is effectively every field that people get paid for. If you want to be the best, you have to harness your latent abilities, or you're fucked. Like you mentioned on the engineering front, I mean, there's so many places where, for instance, in writing, it's like, I could try to be John McPhee, who writes for the New Yorker, or one of these folks, but I can't be those people. I'm not going to ever be the wordsmith that, say, a Tolstoy was. But do I like teaching? Do I obsessively think about teaching and

Starting point is 01:51:12 deconstructing things that are complex? I do. So I can use books as a medium for teaching and think of it that way, because if I try to out McPhee McPhee, I'm going to get my face ripped off. We're talking about creativity and creative pursuits, which, by the way, almost everything is. If you meet people who are at the top of their game in accounting, I'm not talking about shady money laundering shit. I'm just saying in accounting, in technology, 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,

Starting point is 01:52:10 films, 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 short films, and I'm still at step zero, and I'm ashamed of that. No shame. There's no shame. Yeah. How did you decide to get into film, and why? Film is hard. Why do it? It is tough. So that's a really good question, because I feel like there's that really humiliating kind of clam about, well, I'm an actor, but what I really want to do is tough. So that's a really good question. Cause I feel like there's the, you know, that like really humiliating kind of 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,

Starting point is 01:52:54 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. It was, I love movies. Like, you know, we were talking about earlier, I've done this for a couple of years now, I can direct. I love movies. We were talking earlier, I was raised by a single dad and I was one of those kids who I'd go with my dad to see Die Hard or Road Warrior and way too early in age, super inappropriate. When I was in high school, I'd seen The Terminator, the first Terminator from 20 or 30 times. I just loved movies. I'd go to the theater, I'd buy a matinee ticket and I'd stay in the the theater until like eight o'clock at night. And I would just watch movie after movie after movie. So it just came out of a real end user's love for film. I was just someone who was transported by movies. And then when I left TalkSoup, I had been writing on that show and there was a void.

Starting point is 01:53:41 And I wrote a script that I was developing with a company. And I just kept talking about how I thought it should look and how I thought it should feel. And it was just so much more specific than being a writer. And they were like, you should direct. This is clearly like a movie that you should direct. And I hadn't really thought about it. But I was just so intertwined with the material and what I wanted it to feel like, because I know what movies that I love make me feel like that I wanted that 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

Starting point is 01:54:23 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. And I ended up shadowing with some really incredible people. I ended up spending several days on The Wire in its last season. And 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. I do believe in it. I just believe in personal aggression. I just believe in doing stuff.

Starting point is 01:54:57 Is that personal aggression? Personal aggression. I just believe that if you want to make a movie, just start making a movie. And I don't mean like, oh, get a camera and start shooting it. But what I do mean is be hard on yourself. Learn, read, learn, watch, study, think critically, ask people questions. 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.

Starting point is 01:55:18 The first short film I made was, I mean, it's an abomination. It will 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 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. It wasn't anything that was mandated by the network. I was like, I want to do something

Starting point is 01:55:44 different. So I wrote this song and I performed it. And I made a music video. And that opens the comedy special. 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 the 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 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 the crew was already going to come up the day before and leave the day after to shoot the special. And we'd already rented the cameras and everything like that. But I still had to pay them for the extra work. I took my fee and I used it to pay everybody else.

Starting point is 01:56:23 And then because I didn't have any more money after that, I learned how to edit it. 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 Canon 5D and I had some friends who were in bands. And again, like it sounds fancy, but everybody probably knows somebody who does something. 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,

Starting point is 01:56:49 if you let me come on tour with you, I will make you a free music video, just a piece of fan art. You can use it however you like. I'm not going to charge anybody any money for it, but just I want to make something and I want to make something for you. 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.

Starting point is 01:57:21 I had done that first music video for my Comedy Central special, which was really like a comedic video. But then I was like, oh, I really like working in this space. And a lot of directors come out of music video because you can be kind of radically creative in that space. You don't need to have any like narrative linearity. You can experiment, you can be radical. It could just be like a series of images. And I also thought, well, people who like this band, I love this band, will want to see something about them. It'll be a great way for people to see something. And then hopefully I can tell a story at the same time. And so I did three of those. And then I did a little action short. I just kind of kept making stuff. Every time I did it, I learned something. Every time I did it, I took a bigger risk creatively. How long are these shorts?

Starting point is 01:58:00 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. How do you frame up and how do you make choices and how do you do coverage and then how do you edit? Like a lot of it was just really tactical, as you would say, practical tactical. Oh, God, I have my pet phrases. This is also my weakness. Never heard that one. I'm going to steal it. Stealing it from Tim. My pet phrases this is also my weakness i'm gonna steal it stealing it from my pet phrases and then a lot of it was just getting confident with my own ability and my

Starting point is 01:58:33 ability to articulate what i wanted from other people you know just how do the other jobs on a set work who does what what do i need oh god this didn't work you know i didn't work because i didn't have this kind of a person on set like there were you know I was shooting digitally and then on one show on one of my things that I shot like we didn't have like a tech 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 catastrophic problems they were just 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 gonna make this and move on. And then I was getting ready to do,

Starting point is 01:59:08 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'd 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. And I remember thinking to myself, people always say that. And then 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. So I got them

Starting point is 01:59:41 to let me visit that set. I just hung out. I passed out sandwiches and 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. It was just great. 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.

Starting point is 02:00:10 Where did you film in Ireland? In Galway, which is the farthest. Beautiful town. Yeah, such a great place. I lived there for a month in 2005. Oh, yeah. Amazing. Oh, that's so cool.

Starting point is 02:00:21 Incredible arts festival there. It's a really beautiful spot. Yeah, it is. It's like the art center of Ireland. They've got a beautiful film festival in the summer. They've cool incredible arts festival there it's a really beautiful spot yeah it is it's like the arts center of vireland they've got a beautiful film festival in the summer they've got an arts festival you know like local theater and it was just a great experience 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 that same writer who had written that short had a feature he had already written. And he asked me if I wanted to take a look at it. And it was just a perfect

Starting point is 02:00:50 first film. And that's the film that became Axis. Okay, so I want to dig in to Axis. But before we get to that, you're taking these trips doing these music videos. During that period, did you save up for that period knowing that you would need to work out of your savings? Are you depending on royalties and other streams to pay your bills? How are you covering the necessities of life as you were handing out sandwiches and doing all these various things? 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, I would say,

Starting point is 02:01:33 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. And 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 you said it. And I think we kind of went past it, but it's so interesting to me. I just really wanted more discomfort in my life. It's just very easy the older you get to be like, get in car, go to work, eat bag lunch, get in car, go to gym, go home, eat food, watch TV, go to bed.

Starting point is 02:02:14 And then you just think, am I growing? Is any of this interesting? Am I going to – you know what I mean? I have one life, and I'm just spending it in this torpor. And so for that, I was going to a place where – I mean, I knew one guy at Petty Dreadful, but I didn't know anybody at this other show. And I just kind of cold called them and said, can I come visit? And they were super gracious. I'm so curious, just to interrupt you yet 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, and I will be as unobtrusive and invisible as I possibly can. And I'll be here these days. And

Starting point is 02:03:00 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 did some tweeting from set. I kind of paid my way in flacking their show for them. But just to – I'm not over-caffeinated, I swear to God. I'm just – you're making so many important points that I just want to pause and help, well, as much for myself as anyone else, just people to reflect on. So what you did in terms of tweeting, people might say, well, I don't have a verified account,

Starting point is 02:03:35 and nobody's going to pay attention to one tweet in 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, in other words, page rank, and that many of the producers, actors, and so on will have Google alerts or other alerts set that deliver to their inboxes relevant media that mention, say, and so on will have Google alerts or other alerts set that deliver to their inboxes relevant media that mentioned, 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,

Starting point is 02:04:24 I think you also touched on this about the idea that people are like 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. 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 times. I mean, this is not the best example, but it's a good one. Twenty years ago, there was this videotape going around Hollywood of these guys in an apartment.

Starting point is 02:05:01 And it was a VHS tape. That's how long ago it was. And people were dubbing it and sending and giving to friends of these guys in apartments, these three black guys where the one guy goes up and hits the little intercom and goes, was that? And then the other guy goes, was that? And the third guy goes, what? That was a short film that some guy made on like a digital camera. 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. It was a two and a half minute short film that was just funny.

Starting point is 02:05:29 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 as you want. But in the meantime, you're doing cool shit, which should be your primary goal in any event.

Starting point is 02:05:58 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 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 to the next one when when people say, well, what have you done? 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

Starting point is 02:06:32 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 02:06:46 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. 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.

Starting point is 02:07:02 That's probably when you're going to do something great. Absolutely. And if you are really in love with something, 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

Starting point is 02:07:37 within the existing power structure. So the two examples are the blacklist. Look up Franklin Leonard and the blacklist. I get that example, absolutely. And then the second is, and we don't have to get into both of these right now, the second examples are the blacklist look up franklin leonard and the blacklist example 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 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

Starting point is 02:08:05 of stories. So they should check them out. Let's come back to Axis. What is Axis? And did you have anybody try to talk you out of doing Axis? Well, so Axis is a thriller about an expatriate Irish actor living in Los Angeles who has had a lot of success, kind of explosive success in his youth and has really just used all of his resources to just wreck his life. He's a drunk and he's a drug addict and he's terrible at relationships and he's a dick to everybody. And when we meet him, he's trying to turn his life around. And it's really about a guy who's not a bad person, but he's done some bad stuff, which I think almost every human being can relate to.

Starting point is 02:08:48 I mean, we all have a little bit of a demon inside of us. And I think this is just a guy who's, he's been frail in the past, but he's really trying to be a better version of himself. 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, just trying to be better. It's really dark. It's very funny.

Starting point is 02:09:14 I happen to think, and I'm sure I'll get some letters about this, but I happen to find that addicts are really entertaining people. And I don't mean they're funny, like laugh at them. I find that typically people who have broken themselves down are just more honest than people who are trying to be perfect all the time. And so 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

Starting point is 02:09:47 through Los Angeles. 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. And the short answer is in Hollywood, the way that people dissuade you from doing stuff is just by not helping 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 like silence. 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

Starting point is 02:10:18 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 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't 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 actors

Starting point is 02:10:59 in the movie? And then can we make it not in a car? Can we make it, I mean, like we're just going to, you know, the whole kind of concept of the film was going to unravel you know it's very typical in hollywood where people are so risk averse that they take all of the edge and singularity out of a project 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 time frame so in march of 2016 i had my like first exploratory conversation with the people around me and with Kickstarter. They have people over there who are kind of around to help you kind of figure out how to put a project together. I built the campaign in three weeks.

Starting point is 02:11:35 I launched it in April. And one of the rules about crowdfunding, and Kickstarter specifically, it's not a hard and fast rule. It's not like a rule that they enforce, but it's just like a rule of thumb that if you raise half of your money in the first week, you'll probably fund fully. So we had raised half of our money in that first week. 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. So originally, we were going to make it nine days. But I realized if I made it faster, I'd have more money available to me daily. My daily resource load would be higher.

Starting point is 02:12:10 So we cut the schedule from nine days to seven days, which is incredibly aggressive for a feature. Whenever I tell people I made it in seven days, they ask, well, is it short? So we had to be really aggressive so 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 day at 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

Starting point is 02:12:50 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, beginning of June, essentially 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 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 wax, on the digital version of wax. And so then the next four days were just about kind of creative play. And I think that what the result is, is I made a movie in a week. It's experimental. It's unusual. It's transporting and strange.

Starting point is 02:13:29 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 I just didn't have any time to be afraid or feel down. There was no time to be anxious. 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. There's just something that happens to the space-time continuum and what you can achieve when everything

Starting point is 02:13:59 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. There is no time for paralysis by analysis. I am making this decision. I am making it definitively. It may be the wrong one, but I'm going to lean all the way into it.

Starting point is 02:14:22 And we're going to see what happens. And also because we shot the whole movie 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 there were errors, I had the next day to recalibrate in a way that you don't get when you typically make a movie for people, again, who don't know. I'm an actor as well. So when I'm on a TV show or I'm doing a movie or whatever, I'll leave at the end of the day and go, oh shit, man, I wish I'd done this with that scene. I wish I'd tried this. But every day, the next day we got to wake up and go, you know what? We have a whole new bite at this apple. We're going to do it a whole different way today. And so at the end, I really

Starting point is 02:14:52 felt like we really fully explored the material, which we wouldn't have been able to do if we'd been making a movie in seven days and not doing it with this kind of volume approach that we had. 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. 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 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'm not really legitimately afraid of that because i feel like i'm just going

Starting point is 02:16:00 to put this next movie together and make it like you know like i I've done one, with no help and no assistance from anybody, the next one's going to be cake. I mean, I had help. I had my team, but I didn't have the kind of traditional Hollywood help where I had a team of agents kind of making magic. It was really just a scrappy little group of filmmakers doing this film with me,

Starting point is 02:16:17 the lead actor and screenwriter and my creative executives. It was a small group of people, completely outside of the system. But it's not that I'm fearless. It may just be that the things that are interesting to me now don't engender fear the way that they used to. I can also tackle this from a different angle, which is what is one of your greatest struggles right now? What do you struggle with, if anything? My main struggle is just always being as effective as I want to be. You know what I mean? I'm just super ambitious. I have highly developed, I don't mean like I'm good at it. I mean, like it's very far advanced workaholism. I mean, like I have pathological

Starting point is 02:16:55 workaholism. It's like a sickness. And whenever I say I'm a workaholic, people always laugh and I go like, look, 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. I don't think I have any time to rest. And I worry that it makes me, 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.

Starting point is 02:17:18 No one wants to hear about 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 have- Is she married to Neil Gaiman?

Starting point is 02:17:39 She is, yeah. Great author of all time? Yeah, exactly. For those of you- After you and after me, then him. Yeah, I will bow at the feet of Neil Gaiman as a writer. Everybody should listen to his audio book of the Graveyard book. Narrated by him, he has also the most soothing voice imaginable.

Starting point is 02:17:56 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? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm paraphrasing, it's butchered, but it makes a point. I'm sure there are other theories. There's a very famous French writer, it's not Charles, but it's somebody anyway, about like, have a bourgeois life and be radical in your work.

Starting point is 02:18:21 But I actually don't think, I actually think that you need to be fully engaged in your life in order to be an interesting artist, because you need to be alive to be able to speak about the human condition. So if you have advanced early onset workaholism, right? You've really turned this into a default mode. Are you doing anything and manage that or create more slack in the system for the daydreaming and so on? I mean, it's like, that's my daily practice. That's my like, that's my one day at a time. It's like, just constantly trying to remind myself to rest. I engage socially a lot more than I used to.

Starting point is 02:19:04 And by socially, you mean out in the real world? Yeah, like out in the real world. I go out and I try to not just be like, I just had a period of life where I was just like, up, gym, work, sleep. I just remember one day I was like, I'm going to die. I'm going to die of boredom. I bore myself, you know what I mean?

Starting point is 02:19:20 And so I think I try to court danger in a safe way it's not like i'm jumping out of play with no parachute or bullfighting or bare knuckle brawling in an alley you know filled with needles but i am trying to just like be not always have my head in my computer but the reason that people are workaholics well there's lots of reasons i'm sure social pressures but for me i just get this big serotonin release. Is it serotonin? What's the brain? What's the satisfaction drug? Dopamine, perhaps? Dopamine. That's it. Dopamine. Serotonin, sleepy time. Yeah, dopamine. I get a dopamine release

Starting point is 02:19:53 when I complete tasks. And 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 leisure. Like, can I get the same satisfaction? 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? 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. I realized even though I can feel very harried, it's interesting to me to be feeling like

Starting point is 02:20:29 a part of being on this planet is like fully engaging and doing everything I can do and everything I'm interested in. Because I don't want to look back and be like, man, I should have tried that. 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,

Starting point is 02:20:43 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,

Starting point is 02:21:00 because you have, you live so aggressively, you milk the most out of the hours that you have. How would you or your life be different if you didn't have exercise as an element, do you think? Well, it's interesting because I really love working out. But there's a constant battle for me between like being effective with work. And I'm the queen of like getting up at like 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 move, didn't eat, didn't do anything,

Starting point is 02:21:39 just been in front of the computer for like 11 hours. 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, this thing that's carrying your brain around and making you effective. And 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 like an abusive relationship with exercise, either doing it so much that you're hurting yourself or not doing it and then engaging

Starting point is 02:22:15 in that inner monologue about how you're like 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. 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 crush a workout. I just try to do it every day because I know I'm better mentally. 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 and 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 Concept2 or a rowing machine?

Starting point is 02:22:50 I still use my ergometer, my Concept2 ergometer. I have had it since 2000. It is 18 years old. I have never had to repair it or replace any parts. It's the best, it's the single best piece of equipment that I have. My whole gym now, I have my whole gym in my place. I have a TRX bodyweight system. I have two kettlebells, a 25 and a 35. I have my ergometer. I have battle ropes that are attached to my dining room table. And I have one big power step that I just use to do 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 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

Starting point is 02:23:33 until you build up your quad and your glute strength to do pistols. Could you describe for us a recent workout or what a prototypical workout of yours might look like? I hiked today. That was just like a 90-minute hike, which was just more about 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. And this is going to be right up your alley, Tim. I'm ready. This is like bullseye for you and your audience.

Starting point is 02:23:57 I started going to a naturopath, so I'd be supplementing differently. And I started taking glutathione. And I'm rowing faster now than I 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. It's confusing. I'm a lot older than I am. 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 getting personal bests every time I row. Okay. Let's dig into this. So the glutathione, how is it for those who aren't familiar,

Starting point is 02:24:29 glutathione is thought of a simple way to think of it or the way it's often described is as a master antioxidant of sorts. How are you having it administered? Is it being This is so inside baseball. Sometimes get ivs i get ivs if i really like if i'm wrecked like if i travel a lot or i went to coachella and is that is that is that is that just glutathione or are you doing that at the b vitamins i could do at the end of my iv i'll get like b vitamins and like you know and a glutathione push at the end yeah exactly you can get like fat soluble we can get this like fat soluble glutathione that you just take you just like gulp down it tastes like axle grease i wait is this the uh is this what is this company uh lipa it's lipospheric that's the name lipospheric glutathione yeah

Starting point is 02:25:18 yeah i'm just fitting 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've been for those who know my buddy, Kevin Rose, since I like to mention him, even misattribute things to him just for fun. I think I gave him one and he said something like, what is this? Horse semen? It does have a weird, has a very weird consistency. It's terrible. No, my father calls it axle grease. That's what 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 you're supposed to take it in liquid, but he's just been eating it on a spoon.

Starting point is 02:26:02 He's a better man than I. Oh, I just squeegee it out of the little packet. To your mouth? Yeah, to my mouth. I take it with about two ounces of kombucha in the morning, so I don't have to think about it. Yeah, you're smart. 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 Frosted Flakes in the morning, Tim. But it's like I do that, and then I have my bowl of supplements, and then I supplements that I have my fish oil and I have my curcumin and then I have my turmeric. And like by

Starting point is 02:26:30 the end of the morning, like I've supplemented, it's like a banquet. Like I don't even need to eat. I've taken so many crappy tablets. All right. Just to just hit pause again. So is the exercise before breakfast? Is it the first thing you do? What is your first ideal morning? What's the first 90 minutes, 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? It depends on the day.

Starting point is 02:26:55 Like, you know, 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 like between like 6 and 7 o'clock. And I have to work out in the morning or i won't i won't i won't 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 any particular type of kombucha that's your preferred axle grease mixer i like better booch and i like it Life Aid, I think is one of the other.

Starting point is 02:27:25 I love kombucha. I'm very slutty when it comes to kombucha. I'll drink any kombucha. I'm a big kombucha fan. All right. So then you buckle down to workout. And this is going to sound like I'm just looking for opportunities to plug, which maybe I am. But you described one of your workouts, the concept to mid-distance 5K rows punctuated by short-distance 2K HIIT sprints, high-intensity interval training. Yeah, high-intensity interval training with a 10K long-distance row once or twice a week. Would that be a current workout? Yeah, that's typically my workouts. And then I'll do a set of 5x25 kettlebell sets.

Starting point is 02:28:03 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 because 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 in here was a pull-up bar is the trx attached to a door is it uh yeah it's such like a railing like an upstairs railing and it just hangs off of the railing and that's it i mean i mean, I try to keep it relatively simple so that I'll do it. I don't really train with anybody because I just can't. I can manage the hour workout, but I can't manage the transit between my home and a place. I don't have enough time to do that, too.

Starting point is 02:28:37 You know what I mean? Like, I've got the hour. I don't have two hours. So I don't go to a gym anymore because I just would be – I wouldn't have the time for it. Yeah, the transit time that. Yeah. Transit time was what killed me. And I was like, I have an hour to work out, but I don't have a half hour on either side of that to go to the gym. Do you still watch shows when you row?

Starting point is 02:28:53 Totally. Any recent favorites or what are you watching currently? Like fantastic junk. I mean, some good stuff. Like I love, I watched Walking Dead, Fear of the Walking Dead. That's always really good workout shows. Right now I'm watching the magicians during my workouts. 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.

Starting point is 02:29:13 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. It has to be something that I can kind of watch, which is why I'll typically watch something that's not too mentally demanding. I can't pay attention too closely to plot points.

Starting point is 02:29:37 All right. Do you make New Year'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. Like, did you 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, rest.

Starting point is 02:29:59 So how are you going to do that this time? I don't know. I should just give up. 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, figuring out being you, is understanding what your strengths and your weaknesses are. My strength is my aggressive work ethic. It was when I was a young comic, I would be like, oh, I should be writing every day. I should write.

Starting point is 02:30:22 I should be like this guy. Well, that's just not how I operate. So I think once you accept what your own methodology and what your own... This is why you watch The Terminator 30 times. Yeah, exactly. You're like, this is my people, right? Yeah. I mean, I definitely have OCD. I'm definitely an obsessive personality. But once you accept these are my strengths, this is where I excel, this is how I excel, rather than try to force yourself into someone else's workflow, figure out what yours is. 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

Starting point is 02:30:58 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 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 kind of write a little bit every day, it would have just been like this like big agglomeration of glop. But just one day, I was like, oh, the book is in it. The book is in me now. 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? Like a long time, I would have wanted to be more like you, like disciplined and sitting down. there's there's this panic that ensues when

Starting point is 02:31:27 you are seven weeks from your deadline and you had nine months to write a book and yeah but it's just like that for me certain threads have to connect and that requires rumination and time and i can't just can't do it any other way so i don't i think my strength is like every day trying to eat a wheelbarrow full of glass and shit out diamonds or something like that. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. That should be a tattoo. Well, speaking of eating glass, this might be predictable, but I'm okay with predictable. I would like to start to wrap up with a handful of questions. And the first one I'm going to ask is, and you

Starting point is 02:32:06 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 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

Starting point is 02:32:46 alive and then i'm thinking ones that recently that don't feel like that cataclysmic so they're like they're like lame like lame stories oh you could pick a classic also like the greatest hits like if you're watching tv 15 years ago and it's like hits from the 80s we could take one of those as well it's interesting like I was talking about that short film that I made that was 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 and he flashed women. And I can't remember why he flashed women,

Starting point is 02:33:26 but it was something to do with like bravery. It was like a metaphor for bravery that this guy would like flash women. And also maybe like hubris, like the idea that like, we're going to 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.

Starting point is 02:33:45 It just ended up being like a series of vignettes about a guy like revealing his penis to strangers. And 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 know what I'm trying to accomplish here. It just never, ever coalesced.

Starting point is 02:34:00 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 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. Okay. I need to go back and figure out what to do next. Like I think every artist, you know, I think Quentin Tarantino has a famous story about his first film being unwatchable. You know, I just think sometimes if your personality is to be really aggressive and kind of dive in, you're bound to make some spectacular failures. And you just

Starting point is 02:34:30 have to have a high tolerance for that and not take it personally and keep moving forward. But yeah, 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 your lives. What's the name of the shirt? It was called The Whipper. Conjures all sorts of images. That makes no sense whatsoever.

Starting point is 02:34:58 When have you been extremely proud of yourself? Could be any point in your your life 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 this because it sounds like it's super self-promotional but i really am proud of this film and i for a variety of reasons access 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 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 was both, I both had a vision for the film, but I was open to modulating. And I think that's really

Starting point is 02:35:43 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 a wall. So we made this movie. We got into the very first, 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 five in the morning and kind of shoot dawn for dust. But we just kept pivoting. We just kept, nothing was catastrophic. Okay. 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

Starting point is 02:36:24 do this. Okay. That's not, 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? Then in post, I had very little money for post and very little time to cut the movie together. 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.

Starting point is 02:36:44 I had to let him go. Then I had to learn learn Avid, the Avid system and start cutting the movie myself. But again, I wasn't like, what am I going to do? I don't have an editor. I'm going to die. I just thought, okay, well, like the answer here is that I'm going to learn this skill set and I'm going to keep moving forward. And then, you know, I made this little film. It was, you know, strange and atmospheric and dreamlike. 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.

Starting point is 02:37:09 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? We made it for just no money and in no time. And I think it also says something.

Starting point is 02:37:29 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. 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. I think it's easy to, I'm not saying you, but for

Starting point is 02:37:50 humans to look at the people who are showcased on the covers of magazines or on the front pages of popular websites and think, wow, they figured out 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. 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.

Starting point is 02:38:47 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 was 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. And the thing is a complete unmitigated disaster, like complete unmitig a 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'd stepped on that butterfly, these other careers wouldn't have blossomed in the way that they did. And you wouldn't have the Geiger design of the alien that people now know as the alien of aliens and so on. So it's, I just love...

Starting point is 02:39:47 No one ever learns from success. 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. Be aggressive. Yeah, be aggressive. Be aggressive. A-G-G-R-A-S Yeah, be aggressive. B-E, aggressive. A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E. Totally.

Starting point is 02:40:10 Yes, that's my life philosophy, be aggressive. Be aggressive. And we want you around for a long time, so take your catnaps at the very least. That's my goal. And do you have anything you would like to say or ask of the audience suggestions you'd like to make anything at all that you'd like to to say before we wrap up other than watch my movie other than watch your movie exactly i mean

Starting point is 02:40:39 i guess like i like when i when i did my podcast you know like thematically the stuff that we've talked about was always stuff that i talked about, which is like, it doesn't matter what you're, what you want to do. It sounds very greeting card, but like, the barriers are they're imagined, you know what I mean? And maybe you're gonna have to start small, and maybe you're gonna have to start close to home. But like, the greater regret will always be not having started. And I'm always trying to find a way to be more bold in my life and hopefully share the things that have helped me do that with other people. 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 lived these experiences so that the things that you learn

Starting point is 02:41:16 could be shared with other people. Just go out and do awesome shit. Get your hands dirty. Get them dirty. The rough drafts are not a clean business. Absolutely not. Well, Aisha, thank you so much for taking the time. It was a pleasure. So much fun.

Starting point is 02:41:39 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. Barbecue, music, whatever it might be and austin tejas come visit and people can visit you is the best uh best site aisha tyler.com yeah i tell her calm but you know who spends time on a website anymore just follow me on follow me on twitter facebook instagram all that stuff is just aisha tyler one word a-i-S-H-A-T-Y-L-E-R. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Starting point is 02:42:09 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 No Man, iTunes, all that stuff. And then Archer starts, I think, on the 24th of April. And all the others. I don't know. TV, whatever. You can find me online. I don't know when you're going to listen to this.

Starting point is 02:42:24 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.

Starting point is 02:42:39 Cockroaches remember us fondly. And for you non-cockroaches, actually, 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

Starting point is 02:42:56 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. So I really appreciate it. Great to talk with you. Thanks, Tim. Of course. And to everybody out there on the interwebs, be safe, maybe more important, be aggressive, get out there. If you're dreaming of doing something, creating something someday,

Starting point is 02:43:24 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 diamonds on a daily basis. It starts with putting something out there into the world. And hopefully, at least it makes a market of one happy and that is you. So I will close there. And thanks to everybody for listening. Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up,

Starting point is 02:44:10 easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before

Starting point is 02:44:46 you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using Eight Sleep pod cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. 8sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod, and I'm excited to test it out, Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second. First,

Starting point is 02:45:26 Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool, even in a heat wave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that. Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience. And for those snore heavy nights, the pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring. Plus with the Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the

Starting point is 02:46:05 nightstand. You won't need them because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself. They have imperceptible sensors, which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking as just one example is at 99% accuracy. So get your best night's sleep. Head to 8sleep.com slash Tim and use code Tim to get $350 off of the Pod 4 Ultra. That's 8sleep, all spelled out, 8sleep.com slash Tim and code Tim, T-I-M, to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. This episode is brought to you by Momentous. Momentous offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance,

Starting point is 02:46:51 sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. One of the things I love about Momentous is that they offer many single ingredient and third-party tested formulations. I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later. Personally, I've been using Momentous Mag3 and 8 L-theanine and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentous Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. I've also been using Momentous Creatine, which doesn't just help for physical performance, but also for cognitive performance. In fact, I've been taking it daily, typically before podcast recording, as there are

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler

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