#757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler

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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris 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 tenth year anniversary, which is insane to think about.
And past one billion downloads.

I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favourites.
From more than seven hundred 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 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.
Businessmen.
Philanthropist.
And the number one New York Times best selling author of Green Lights.
And just because.
You can find Matthew on Instagram.
At officially McConahay.
Was it true in your family? I 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 and then they got knocked down. True. Number two, that
Saying I can't.
Was
forbidden or highly advised against
Very heavily heavily, heavily, heavily.
I remember
Cusc word, you could say
Shit.
Talk and damn and even occasionally maybe get away with the Lord's name in vain, but no you weren't really that was on the line. But the real words that we got, like
Either punished for or war forbidden.
Or hate.
We can't.
And
I remember my dad, I remember one Saturday morning when when I was a about
twelve my Saturday morning chores were to, you know, mow the lawn, weed eed, shine his shoes and sweep the borses 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, pull again, wouldn't start, check the gas, yeah. It's got gas, what the heck's going on? Damn it, won't start.
I remember going into my dad inside and I go, Dad, the uh I can't get the lawnmower started and he
kinda slowly turned his head to me and I saw his molars meet.
Kind of.
And he goes.
You what?
And
I knew enough right then to not
Say the word again.
And I said I I
And he got up.
And I didn't finish my scent.
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 there that where the gas was not transferring.
And it had been disconnected, so they so he reconnected that.
Pulled a few times and it started.
And they're over a run new now running.
Push lawnmower.
He looked at me, put his hands on my shoulders, and for the first time since I said I I can't get it started, he put his hands on my shoulders, looked at me and very sternly said, He goes
You see selling?
You were just
having trouble.
Oh just one more.
And
Boom. You know, and I remember from that day, I was that lesson, it was like, Oh
Even if you're unable to do something on your own.
you can still go seek help or get assistance. So you're still only having trouble, even if you on your own cannot do so.
That was a
Saying those words, still to this day,
If I let him slip, I kinda have to look over my shoulder like, uh oh, that gonna 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 Augman Dino. Yep.
Could you
Explain for people listening.
Why that's

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 gotta read this book, you gotta 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 mine and and I was not gonna 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, 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.
Now
At this point
I was always on the track to become a m
A lawyer. I was gonna become that defense attorney. Yeah, get us some oil and make money. You know what I mean? Get the family some oil and make money.
I was a good invader. I took good stances. It started off in the family. Uh they were like, Jeez, oh man, you know, I would take the table and win arguments with the family and they'd be like, ah, damn it, you got to become a lawyer. You gotta become the family lawyer. So that was always the plan.
Well between my sophomore and junior year and college
Which is about the time when all those general liberal arts credits that you're getting need to have start having some focus or you're gonna lose them. You know what I mean?
Right. So I'm start
not sleeping well with the idea of becoming a lawyer, but I'm doing the math. I'm like, I'm not sure it's what I want to do. I get out of here, I go to law school, then I get out, then I start maybe get an intern. I'm really not going to be
rolling in my vocation until I'm in my thirties. And I was like
I don't really want to spend my twenties.
just learning. Or my twenties 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, Green Lights, 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 Benler.
who I think at the time was NYU Film School, who I'd been sharing some of these short stories with.
Well another one 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. J try this out. I was always like, Oh no, no, no, I don't I mean that's like too avant garde.
It's too European. It's too the artsy. I can't do that.
But he gave me the confidence to really consider it.
No.
I go.
To
my fraternity house, the Dell House, into that sophomore year for a sophomore exam.
I'm a studier.
All right. I'm making I got a three point eight two 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 open up my
books study for my psychology exam.
For whatever reason, for the first time in my life.
I shut him and I go, McConaughey to myself, I go, You got this. You don't need to study anymore.
First time I'd done that.
I got three hours to go. I didn't put on the TV.
I love sports, ESPN. I'll watch cricket, the strongest man competition. I'll watch, you know, two grasshoppers race.
Yeah.

For whatever reason I just
I'm not interested.
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, Jeez, 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 hazardly, and all of a sudden lose interest in that.
And I'm sitting there going, Okay.
Ha.
What am I supposed to do here?
Got two and a half about three hours to kill.
Well, I start peeling back those magazines, Playboys and Sports Illustrators 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 and allowed to myself say
Who is that?
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
Pass 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, it had just taken me on a journey and said.
You will read.
Each scroll, there's ten scrolls in space, each scroll three times a day for thirty days until you move on to the next scroll.
So
It's basically a ten month read.
And I had gotten to the first scroll.
And I now understood that the greatest salesman in the world
was whoever's gonna read them.
So I think.
Oh that's me.
Talking to me.
Well
Bam, I look up.
Oh, my exam's in fifteen minutes. I gotta go.
All right, head out.
Go to my exam, my psychology exam. I ripped through that exam. I didn't care if I failed it.
I 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.
I'm calling dad tonight. I'm not gonna 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 gonna get the courage to call my dad and go.
And that night
I uh
Remember thinking about it.
I'm gonna call my dad at seven thirty. He'll have sat down, maybe had his first cocktail, already had dinner.
Yeah, 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.
Seven thirty six PM.
Hey Dad.
Hey what's up, son?
Listen, I I don't
Really, and I was nervous and I said, I don't think I wanna go to law school anymore.
I wanna go to
Film scope.
That was hard for me to say,'cause I thought he was gonna go, You wanna do what, boy? What the hell?
I said, I w I'm gonna go to film school.
It was long pause on the phone, about five seconds.
And he says.
You sure that's what you wanna do, son?
I said, Yes, sir.
There's another five second pause.
Then he said.
Three of the greatest words I've ever been told.
Don't half ask it.
Ha ha.
I remember not.
Don't have acid.
I lit up 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 gonna 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.
That my GPA got me into film school.
I had a three point eight two. 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 rec it found me.
And
I read that
Book that did exactly what it said.
Morning, noon, and night.
And I read I've read it three times now that way, but the first time
I didn't miss
One reading of that.
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 ten 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 jeez.
And I would stop
Eat something, get some coffee, drink a bunch of water.
Wait till whatever one thirty 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 ten trait months. And that book is the most instrumental piece of
literature and motivation I've ever read for me in my life.
And now you've produced
Green lights.
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 uh this will segue into the practice of writing since you've kept a diary for somewhere between thirty-five
Forty years at this point, I believe. Yeah. There's a note towards the end of Green Lights.
From
Nine one ninety two.
So ten goals in life. This blew my mind. Mine.
So I wanna read these ten.
And then I want you to kind of place us in your life.
when you wrote these 10. And then I ha 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 nineteen ninety two. One become a father.
Two, find and keep the woman for me. Three, keep my relationship with God. Four, chase my best self. Five, be an egotistical utilitarian. That's gonna be my first follow-up question. Six, take more risks.
Seven, stay close to mom and family. Eight, win an Oscar for best actor. Nine, look back and enjoy the view.
Ten, just keep living.
Yeah.
Where were you and when were you?
when you wrote these ten goals.
Mm.
I was
In a top.
Bunk.
in the delta tall delta house.
I believe my roommate was Monty Wills.
I'm still friends with today from
Montgomery, Alabama.
As the top bunk.
I think I just probably
It was the end it was the end of the night, about nine thirty. I was just getting nestling in for for a good night's sleep.
So I just started.
What was the fo date ninety three? What was the month in the the the month in the day?
That was September first, nineteen ninety two. September first. Okay. Yeah. So I had just done
Days, confused.
That's right. Yeah, it was 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 Link letter said, Come on and started throwing me in scenes. So three lines turned into three weeks work. I loved it, was getting paid three hundred and twenty dollars a day. People were telling me I was good at it and I was running around going like Is this legal?
It's so fun. And I finish it.
My father.
had just passed away.
Like two weeks earlier. Yeah, August seventeenth.
Of that year.
So I just finished
A job that was a hobby that became a career.
I
Just finish that. Think about it. If you do the math, I didn't think about it till now. I just finished that Augma and Dino, ten months of reading that book.
Oh.
Other.
It 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.
keep things alive that he taught me that could keep me incentivized throughout my life, even though I couldn't rely on him personally being here to to back me up with him.
And so
I remember writing those goals down.
And the thing is that when when you you start off this conversation going, I don't know what your your adjunct or adverb was about it, but I found that.
Just
less than a year ago in my diaries, and I'd never
Looked at it.
Or remembered that I had written it.
Since the day I did.
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. Cause somewhere subconsciously, I obviously did remember it because.
so far have accomplished those goals. And there's some very specific ones on there.
But I'm like what?
I always thought even the acting part, win an Oscar for best actor. This is a time I had just finished days confusing. I didn't know I was gonna end up being an actor.
I still thought.
didn't have the courage to even think I could pursue it as a career. I at that time I thought it might just be a hobby.
I had a hobby for a summer.
But obviously
When I look back, I'm like, oh, you did want to be.
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 shape shifter.
Was father moving on.
But that
with finishing days 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
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 take really pay off.
The risk
Two
in the bar at the top of the Hyatt 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 and read for that part. The risk
For Richard Link Later to say, There's nothing you're not supposed to be in this scene, you're not written in this scene, but do you think Wooderson would be in it? The risk for me to go, Oh yeah.
And just hop in the middle of the scene.
and improvise and play.
Those risk were paying off.
I was be also beginning to feel
Yeah, the risk that I took.
Reading that damn book.
Very salesman.
It's the first book I ever read cover to cover and it's a thin paperback.
Mind you, it takes two 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, you know, if you've lost a parent.
But as a son losing a dad, you wanna talk about
Forced into identity?
You know, my dad being
This
sort of crutch just because he was a alive and above government and above law was now gone.
I had no crutch, I had no safety net. All of a sudden.
I remember this very clearly this coming to me.
Besides to 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.
Mm.
And that
leans into taking more risk.
I was like
After Dad moved on, I was like, Oh
All of these mortal things in life.
that I re have a reverence for.
Even
this point of just finishing acting and maybe having a l you know, dreams of fame.
Wow!
All these things that I revered that were mortal.
Lower down to eye level.
And at the same time
Everything that I noticed that I was condescending or looking down upon or snubbing my nose at, or going, Oh, that's crap, or oh, they're no good. I was like
They raised up to I 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 uh snub nosed look at things that I thought were beneath me.
And I empowered them and they raised up the I level. So all of a sudden
You know, that was a version where the I met the we.
For me, that was a version where what I looked up to maybe too much met
What I was looking down on.
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 I still had fear, but I I gained a lot of courage to go meet my fears.
And I didn't give enough creden to things that I probably shouldn't fear.
or have too much reverence for'cause they were mortal. And I was like, Well what what's that? That's, you know.
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, McConaughey. Why would you do that?
I even called it a sin at that time not to take certain risk.
And would feel guilty if I didn't.
And feel like I didn't meet my quote that day.
In God does.
What is it that you've
gotten from having a diary. And maybe it's changed over time. Yeah.
It's evolved. I mean, my diary started off
Like I think most people's diaries do. You write things down when you're
Not in a good place, or you're lost.
My early
Diary entries were the
The why what where when house, you know? The the existential question of what is going on. Does it matter who am I? Oh my God, this should so my girlfriend broke up with me. I lost it started off at that. So I've 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 gotta just like that Ogmandino book.
By hook or by crook, you read it three times a day.
I was like, Well we're gonna 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 gonna need to take time to go be introspective and write down my thoughts. Everything's everything's a green light. It's great.
Well
No, I said, Hang on a second, we're gonna 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, 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 I writing and what was I doing.
when I felt like everything was lickety split and I had 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.
Two
beauties in the world that I was noticing and really were affecting me, how I approach people, how I was approaching a day, how I was approaching conflict, how is 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, Rob Bilner said you should go into storytelling business.
is I was writing short stories, but I was also writing things down
Idiosyncrasies of myself.
I was really trying to get to know myself. I would always when I'd be in a movie theater.
I always laughed.
I thought the funniest jokes and I'd laugh. I'd be the only one laughing in the theater, and I'd never thought
The stuff that everybody laughed at was funny.
The collective laugh, I never even giggled at. I was like, Oh, it's very funny.
But I laughed how it's I was like and no one else laughing I was like no one else thinks it's funny? I'd say that in the theater.
I cried at things that
Other people didn't cry. Like I've never really cried in death.
I weep at birth.

Things 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, McCona Hey? Is this odd? Is this is this okay?
Can you be this kind of a person?
And got the comments to go, Yes, you can.
It's okay.
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 the then empathize with different people and have the how different people have different things that turn them on and turn them off at different times.
What is the art of running downhill? Okay.

So
I get
Successful.
I
Got.
major fame very quickly A Time to Kill came out.
The film I did in ninety six. And I mean from the Friday afternoon before it came out.
To the Monday.
After the week and it came out, my whole world was
Nope.
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 time to kill comes out.
There's a hundred scripts out there. I wanna do all are you kidding me? I'll do any of them.
Well
Ninety-nine, no you can't.
One of'em, 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 you can do ninety nine.
One no.
So I was like, Whoa.
Two days ago I would have done any of these.
And can only do one.
And now
It's only two days later, but you're telling me I can do
Ninety nine of them.
Help me discernment, discrimination. Can I make a choice? Who am I? Geez, what do I want to do? There's only twenty four hours in the day. This is 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 also
Remember that same lawyer I talked about in the oil of ink story, Jerry Harris.
I remember him telling me.
He reached out, I hadn't talked to him for years. He reads out and he goes.
Hey Matthew, you're from a small town in U, Texas. You know, you came in through Longview, Texas. Now you went out there, now you're 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 sort of humble beginnings.
And it made a lot of sense to me,'cause I was noticing
That's
You know, 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'm 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 pre you know they always say this.
It's okay to have a point to prove, just don't always be trying to prove a point.
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
Of all these people in in Hollywood all of a sudden saying, I love you. And I'm like, Man, I've said that to four people in my life.
And everyone says it out here. So they're they're full of shit. It was it was I was taking things personally.
Even.
And sort of
Sabotaging
Some of the uh 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.
It timed.
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 gonna trip myself.
and face plant and break my right into the concrete so I can break my nose so I can be like, ah, there I go. Now I'm earning it. Now I feel it.
Now I've earned it. Now I deserve it.
Yeah.
That can be a little foolish.
And so what I noticed was
Oh
Hard times are gonna come.
It's gonna get dry. You're not gonna be
Yeah, able to do whatever script you want to do and kinda I've had those 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 A
Enjoy it.
When you're going down wind downhill, don't trip yourself.
Because that uphill's common.
It's gonna come whether you want it to or not. So don't trip yourself and face plant right now because you're gonna have to work your ass off here very shortly, anyway.
Let's talk about
Perhaps an uphill, perhaps a pause, perhaps something else.
Which I 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.
Two
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 you couldn't have imagined a week prior and
You have a string of successes and then you realize, well, wait a minute here.
I might be getting
painted into a corner and you start to say no. 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 are 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 romanti comedies.
I had taken the baton from Hugh Grant and was the male le rom com go to guy.
Prom comms are mid-level budgets, 30, 35 million.
They offer a good front end paycheck to me. They go make sixty million. I mean it the studios don't have to overspend and spend
hundreds of millions of dollars to make them.
You get a good female and a male lead that have good chemistry.
People love to go escape to them. My Roncoms 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, learning to surf, got my shirt off.
And the Pop Ratier Discovery channel is like I'm documenting this. And I'm like, You 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 how is
Hold on.
Shaking hands with gun, yes.
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 talked to me.
Or about me.
It was like
Conhece the shirtless rom com guy.
And I was like
Yeah.
I am.
And um
But there only I could answer that second question of and I'm
I only I could continue that sentence. No one else could. They were like Hollywood for sure was like no, nothing else. And so any dramas I wanted to do or other pictures.
No one wanted to make it with me.
And
I remember
We had just had
Levi, Camille and I just had our first son.
And
My life.
Was so vital.
Man, I just had a newborn. I've I've 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, yeah, I could do that tomorrow morning.
Just give me the script tonight, let me look at it I can do it tomorrow and 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, it's all green lights.
If it's all sugar and candy, we'll make tyran tet anybody.
So
I was saying, Oh, I really want my w I wish my work could I remember saying this.
At least Mc I remember looking in the mirror actually and go, Okay, McConaughey, so
If your life is more vital and true to who you are than your work, well
If it's gotta 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.
We're 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. I had control of Dallas Buyers Club at that time, but no one wanted to make it for me, nor would 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 gonna stop doing
The only work I'm getting offered and I don't know how long
It's gonna 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 that off. I remember calling my agent, Jim Toth.
It's CA, Jim.
I don't want to do romantic comedy anymore. I remember this conversation. He goes, Great.
And I go, wait, wait, wait, what do you mean great?
He goes, Great.
I go.
How do you say that so quick? What are you gonna say Monday morning when you go into your superiors in the office and say McConaughey's not doing romantic comedies? And McConaughey's been bringing a nice chunk of ten percent 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.
And then it was I went to Camilla, my wife.
And I'd been, you know, 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 I'm the I'm d as we said earlier, I'm
Connor 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 the true
sort of expression.
Of who I was in my life. And I was I told her I said, Well, I want to hold up 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 gonna get wobbly.
I've been around you. You gotta work, Matthew, and you love to accomplish. You're gonna get wobbly. You might start
Reaching for a little sip of something to drink earlier in the day too. And I'm like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's like,
She goes.
Days are gonna be longer.
We don't know how long this'll last, how long we'll be in this we should called it a desert. How long this'll be a desert.
She goes, but if we're gonna do this, if you're gonna do this.
We're not gonna 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
Well, I I just said no. And I they just stopped at my
Agent's desk, Jim Doll. No.
And then one of them came through.
That was like a gargantuan offer.
for it and my agent said it's a pretty damn good script too.
And so I said, Well send it out. Let me read it.
And I remember this the offer was like for
Eight million dollars.
And the script is pretty good.
But it was still a sort of a rom. And I remember reading it and going
No, thank you.
I remember feeling sort of emboldened and strengthened by saying, No, thank you.
Great.
Sticking to my guns, no rom coms. Six months into this drought, nope, not caving in now.
Don't have acid McConaughey.
So they come back with a ten million dollar offer.
No, thank you.
They come back with a twelve point five million dollar.

Now I go
Mm dot dot dot ellipsis ellipsis na no thank you.
Now they come back with a fifteen.
Million dollar offer. Wow. You know what?
Let me have another reread of that script.

And I re read that. And you know what?
At fifteen million dollars.
Same script that I've been offered for eight million dollars, the$50 million offer script, which was the same exact words as the eight million dollar offer script, the fifty million dollar script was better.
It was funnier.
It had possibilities, it had angles, I had ideas, I could make this work, you know, I mean this could work.
No, I'm imagining at this point Jim is like man, this saying no thing is really working out.
He's in and he's over there teetering like
I know what we said.
fifty billion dollars and it's not like it's a pretty good script.
I know it's rom com, it's a pretty good script.
But I said uh
No.
No thank you
Well.
That got the signal across Hollywood that
McConahe 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. In a way, that was that was a uh yeah, I called an Audible six months in and that had him thinking I might cave, I might just be posturing.
And come on back, Makana, hey, 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.
Mm.
I don't know what he's doing.
But
He ain't doing this stuff.
He's not doing any more arm count.
And it became clear.
So for the next
Foo, twelve
Fourteen months.
Nothing.
Amen.
Nada.
Zilch, not an offer for anything.
I mean I'd check talk to my agent every couple of weeks, they'd just be like nothing came in. Nothing.

So now we're twenty months into this desert.
period. I do have my son to raise, which, you know, being a father's always been the most important thing to me. So that that's got my compass at least directed in a place that I I go just trust in this. If you 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 gonna be
in the asset section, McConaughey. You can't go wrong with that.
So I stuck to that.
And um
I was now fine with not doing any work. I didn't know what I was gonna be.
Didn't know if I was gonna change my career.
I was gonna 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 um
Pretty content.
I wasn't
You know, waking up every morning going, Did an offer come in? Did something new come in? I I was past that.
And then all of a sudden
Twenty months in twenty twenty one months into this desert.
I can start getting some offers that are interesting things. William Freakan, Killer Joe.
The Daniels Paperboy.
Jeff Nichols wrote Mud for me.
Steven Soderbergh called Magic Mine.
Richard Link later and I go do Bernie.
Together.
Your detective comes around.
All of a sudden
Dallas Buyers Club.
No one still wants to
put a bunch of money up for a nineteen eighties period drama that age, but all of a sudden
McConaughey all the directors were no directors would do Dallas Spirit's Club with me. They wanted they wanted the script. They love the script. They didn't want to do it with McConaughey. All of a sudden.
We find Jean Marc Valet.
Who won who says, No, I'll I'd I'd like to deal with McConaughey.
So
What happened?
Was
That twenty two months or what that drought.
Mm.
Desert.
I
Uh.
Branded.
I didn't rebrand, I unbranded.
Me being away, me being in Texas.
Not being on a beach.
Getting pictures of me shirtless on a beach, not being in rom coms.
I was out of
The world 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 McConaha?
Well, you're gone long enough, all of a sudden
I became a new
Good idea.
Which I was not a new good idea.
in any time earlier than that at the end of that twenty 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 and I looked at each other.
Shed some more tears and she 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.
I
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
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I
And now
Aisha 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
Losophy
You can find Aisha on Twitter and Instagram.
At Aisha Tyler.
Aisha, welcome to the show.
Tim, hello, thank you. I'm super excited to be here. This is our away. It's a very long home and away for us. 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 and Guy Podcast.
in San Francisco, at my place
And
I had so much fun.
speaking with you and fielding
Some fantastic questions.
One of which

And then we'll backpedal.
Okay.
This the the question will not be surprising to you.
I don't think and I'm gonna 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, really gratifying. Yeah, I mean that's a it's amazing. I think podcasts are
wonderful and terrible beasts, but like really satisfying. Even when they're like punishingly difficult to manage. They're still so satisfying. So I'm really happy. I'm happy that you're enjoying it. And
You have we're not gonna get into this right now, although we can.
You have a book titled Self Inflicted Wounds, subtitled Heart Warming 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 some what you know, tell me a story.
about something that's gone wrong in 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 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 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, you know, s 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 gonna 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 I could go with this and I want to go way back
as uh maybe a like sort of a montage flashback that we could have as a visual overlay as you're saying some of these things.
And that is to
Your dad.
And I've uh 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, uh my my parents divorced when I was ten and my father, my parents
You know, I always joke that, you know, it's only rich people that can afford to fight about custody. You know what I mean? Poor people just do whatever they have to do to like manage. And my parents neither of them could really afford
to kids and also neither of them could afford to pay child support. So just
Each of them just took one of us. I was older, so I went with my father.
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
person 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? And I'd have to say, It's my day. And then he'd say, What are you gonna do? And I'd have to say, Grab it by the ball.
What are you gonna do and I'd have to say and twist, and twist.
But you know, it's funny because it was like my dad was just uh he was such a great dad, he was a really engaged guy. But you know, I mean
He was a s he was a single father and relatively young. So maybe there were a few boundaries of propriety that he he danced along, but he just encouraged me to be aggressive. You know, he was one of those, I think
It's very hard for
single parents period. And I think it's very hard for fathers and daughters because
You know, I just think if you're a dad, the world just looks like
a field of broken 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
giving you the skill to land and and that was definitely his strategy.
Divorce, which I have
Red was amicable.
It ended up resulting in you going with your father and uh you have one sibling?
Mm, I have a younger sister and she's staying with you.
Stayed with your mom. Was that hard? Or 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 c have constant contact, or what was the dynamic like?
You know, it's interesting'cause 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
be loving and available to both of us. And I had lots of access to my mother and I I talked to her all the time and I called her for advice and
When she got to kind of be the fun mom or the advice mom, you know, she didn't have to discipline me and she could just be the person who was there when I needed like emotional support.
I do know that like one of the things that resulted in at least when we were younger was my sister and I
We weren't super close, but I you know, 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 like 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, you know, 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 really deep. So I I you know I can't
I don't ever remember kind of sitting up at night feeling any kind of agony about the fact that my parents were divorcing. I I did watch them try very hard to stay together. Like I do remember that when they got a divorce
I was like, they really gave it a shot. You know, I could see that they really like, you know, I just they would break up and they'd get back together and they'd break up and they get back together and I remember I'd like walking on them, they'd be making out on the couch. I was like, they are really giving us a go. So when they decide when they said it was over, I was like, Okay.
I don't ever remember it being like a point of agony. It just things changed, you know, and
And maybe as a result
I tolerate change better than I would otherwise, or maybe I even crave change, I don't know.
Has it been your
Demeanor to
generally look at things through a positive lens like that, where you would
frame what other people might try to frame as a very difficult, agonizing experience into something.
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'cause I think that
My attitude or my point of view about things is
half biochemistry and 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 in marshmallows. Like he just cannot be deterred. I've never seen it. You know, he's just never down. And so I think that I've I inherited that.
Maybe it's attitudinal. I think I just probably make up the chemicals in my brain.
That kind of keep me
Typically
Upbeat. You know what I mean? And 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 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 and that was because you know, my father was raised he lost his father when he was very, very young. He's raised by a single mother and

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, it I can complain about the situation or I could just keep moving. So I think I've been nurtured in that way as well, which is
The world is unfair.
You know, it's shot through with assholes.
I still have to get up in the morning and make a life for myself.
So it's probably a combination of those two things.
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. The twisting is a it's an elevated yes, that's a very an elevated form of aggression. I don't know. Like it's hard to say like
Oh I'm nailing it. You know, I that's not how I feel.
But I d I do think that like that attitude of like
And I wrote about it a lot about it in my book, like the idea that like my parents raised me to be brave and 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 wanna do something that I
do it and I don't really worry too much about whether it's gonna go my way, not because I expect it to go my way, but because it doesn't matter if it goes my way, because it's the engagement that's most meaningful to me.
It's the effort.
I got it. So the by engagement you mean sort of the dogged persistence that you're developing.
The engagement in in your personal goals. Like if I wanna do something
Uh, whatever. I don't know. Let's pick something really innocuous. Like if I wanna like hike every day for a month or if I wanna start meditating. If I don't dial it, it's not as important to me as as not looking back and saying to myself, Ah, I should have done it. It's the doing.
for me that is the reward. And then sometimes things go away and sometimes they don't, but
The thing I find most
Upsetting is regret.
Yeah, because that's that's something I have control over in the sense of like if you didn't do it, you have nobody to blame but yourself. Right. You can always attempt.
You can't pre determine
Excuse.
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.
This isn't exactly
Yeah.
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 um I was going to like Jiu Jitsu 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, you know, I was I was really into martial arts when I was a kid, so it's making me think of the movie Hannah where this art bandit trains his daughter to be a superkiller.
I wish I was that good at the future, right? Fortunately that was not one of my 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 at 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 is like this was like no helmets. This was a long time ago, I'm very old. Like, you know, no helmets, just like w willy nilly, your backpack on and you know, you're not signaling and I fell and I
hurt my arm very badly and
I can't remember, but I contacted my dad and he's like, I'm not gonna 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 had broken my arm.
And I got home and my and my dad was like
Uh, your arm's not broken. I mean you need to stop complaining. No, it's just sore.
And it the next day I woke up, it was like black and swollen and he I had like lift it off the pillow and he finally took me to the doctor and it was absolutely like compo 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
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 you know, then the next day I got a super dope cast.
And I think we just raise like these I mean, I 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.
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
Лак, у них тот фелз.
And then what comes next.
Because what comes next is what did I learn?
How can I just
How do I pivot? How do I move forward? And just most people don't develop
those mental skills they just they they're crushed by failure and it's just an unavoidable element of life.
And you know, there's so many people that I know who's
out of real, I mean, you know, genuine love. Parents like, I just don't want to see my kid in pain. But like, how are you gonna, how do people move through the planet? How do the people move through life without pain? That's
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.
Wars I was just deeply disappointed throughout my childhood, so I know exactly what it feels like. It makes me conjure my mind the image of this
increasing amplitude of pain consequence over your life from like childhood to adulthood where the consequences grow potentially greater and greater. Where in the beginning, like when you're a child
You're basically engaging with pain in f uh, 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 okay, you're out of the sumo suit, but you've got big
kinda blow up boxing gloves on and huge hip piece of headgear.
Then w when you get out into some aspects of the real world, it's just a bare knuckle brawl. Permanent consequences.
Yeah, exactly. So if you haven't had the chance to get wailed in the face with the sumo suit, you're not gonna be ready for
the blow up boxing gloves and the headgear and if you certainly if you don't get whacked in the face a few times doing that, you're just gonna be crippled when you get out into the real world and get
you know, j drop kicked in the face by 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 they want, everybody isn't getting sleep with the what the hot person they want. Everybody is experiencing the same failure, 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. You know, 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
B when you grew up, when you were in high school or college.
In high school
So interesting'cause I was like super academic.
And I think I was 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 into you know, out in club and I rock climbed and all that stuff. So I thought I was gonna 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 r 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. I was like, Yeah, okay. I I always 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 did I think I got through the math class, like did fine. Like I applys and I got a good grade. And then I went into my like, you know, an introduction to engineering three.
And I it was about like building like a
fecal matter treatment plant. And I was like, this isn't feeling like hugging trees at all, man. We're just talking about poop all day. I lost my appetite for that really quickly.
So then what? Did you just have this great existential angst or did you
Sort of shift.
to something else immediately following that.
I was always doing kind of like performing things on the side, like I went to a high school that had a performing arts kind of
magnet or like a pocket school within the the regular school called the J U Dean McIntyre School of the Arts. So I was kind of doing my regular classwork and then doing like improv and stuff and then 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 a cappella 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 and I was working for a conservation organization. I got like 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
You know, it was like the mission was great because it wasn't just kind of conservation or conservation's sake, it was like conservation focused on
engaging underserved communities and it was the groovyest and I was just miserable.
And I why were you miserable?
I didn't know. It was a really good question. You know, it was like
Why if I have my dream job in the city of my birth
Why am I so unhappy?
And I just did a lot of soul searching and I realized it was because I for the first time in my life I wasn't doing anything creative, I wasn't performing.
And so
I'm a problem solver. I'm 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, or have a a an agent or a or a band or connections. I could just do stand up right away.
And so I started studying it and
Watching
the precursor to Comedy Central, which was this network called Ha.
very short lived network, taking notes and then, you know, after a while just kind of screwed up the courage to go and do an open mic.
And then that was it was just transformational. I was like, Oh, this is what I want to do with my life.
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. Like was it a career move from when you first built the Matrix and decided on standup? Or was it, you know what, this is gonna be great. I'll continue doing this job and I'll
Scratch my creative performance itch on the weekends with open mics.
It's so funny because like I don't think I even realized that stand up comedy was a job.
Um you know, I mean I was I was like a really bookish kid. A lot of guys will have these stories about
how they grew up, you know, with
Red Fox, you know, on vinyl that they listen to hundreds of times or
following Letty Bruce or you know, these idols or P Bill Hicks. I just I didn't
I remember seeing Live on the Sunset Strip when I was a kid. I just thought Richard Pryor was an alien. Like I you know 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 Stand Up at Dartmouth when I was like a sophomore and
Coming out of a show and being like
Do people know that this like you can go and have this feeling for an hour? Like this is insanity. Like I just remember like everything hurt from laughing, my face and my stomach, and I just never experienced live comedy before.
It didn't dovetail into like a job at first. It was just I something I was gonna do for fun. I kept my day job one hundred percent. 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.
stand ups were like gripping their inky notebook and sleeping on their buddy's couch, you know, like I was in a relationship and I had a job and it paid great and I could make flyers for my shows at work. I was like embezzling, you know, a copy paper and push pins as aggressively as I could. So I was and I still am of the opinion that like you should absolutely keep your day job, which I know is not the most popular
I'm of the I'm of the 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. Yeah. And
Let a job pay for it and do it for so long that everything you do is just for joy and it changes the way that you approach your art. You know, I would like get a
And I'd go to work at like seven and I'd you know 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, you know, a set and I'd come back at midnight and I'd do it all over again. And 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
Seventeen years. And coincidentally the high school
that you went to is that now the Rutaswa
School on O'Shaughnessy.
It's on a shot sea up the they're at the nexus of the Twin Peak slash Glen Park Canyon.
Exactly. So I literally
lived for five or six years about a quarter mile from that school. It's not a big city, even though I think when you feel 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 why 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 ten minute drive away from San Francisco.
It's far San Francisco's always had a reputation for being a comedy town. Like the big comedy towns
in the United States.
from comedians' perspectives are San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York. LA is not I mean
LA is a company town, but it's not a comedy town.
And San Francisco was always one of those places that people saw as like a real crucible for kind of original comedy, you know, it was like where the alts.
comedy movement happened, and you know, Mark Marin and Janine Garoflo and and these kind of alternative comics, Brian Pussein came out of. And
Uh, it was a comedy town, but when I started doing comedy, it was like the beginning of the contraction of the comedy economy. So there was a period of time when there were just
hundreds of comedy clubs everywhere and you could make a living doing stand up. You could kind of go from place to place and you could get a gig and you could get paid and
I started doing stand up at the beginning of the end of the comedy bubble. So when I started doing stand up
the club community was contracting and and some of the big clubs in San Francisco were closing. I think at one point there were maybe like five or six active clubs. And then by the time I was working consistently, there were only two.
And there was just a lot of competition for stage time. And to get good at comedy, you can't just do it like
Once a weekend, you know, you need to be on stage like every night.
It's like being a high diver. Like you know what? It's it's literally like Malcolm Gladwell's ten thousand hours. And you're not gonna get 10,000 hours of stand up hanging out in San Francisco. Like you have to go everywhere and 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 and
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 a hundred other people trying to get those same six minutes. So it was really competitive. I mean the culture where I think was pretty supportive, like comedians were supportive of each other, but it just there just wasn't enough stage time. So you just do anything and go anywhere to get it.
I wanna
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. Like people were like really the beanie babies. It's like no comedy isn't cool anymore. And then like all the clubs closed. What w 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 seventies and eighties was kind of a new thing, and it's not like people hadn't been doing a 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, I honestly don't know. Like why were there so many more comics doing stand up in the seventies and eighties? 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 like Bill Hicks and
I could see that though. Maybe it's analogous to like celebrity chefs in the last fifteen years. Yeah, exactly. And and part of the reason why there are so many more celebrity chefs is because there started to be celebrity chefs on television. Right.
So if you think about that in terms of comedy, what you see is, oh, that's a job. 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 T V and you think and honestly when Ha the pre precursor
to comedy central.
Yeah.
They needed comics and they needed opportunities. They needed clubs. They needed they needed content. It was a twenty four hour network. So there were some good comedians on that station and there were some really
Some really shitty one. Really bad. And so a lot of people watching probably thought.
Well, I can do that.
You know
I also think about guys like you know Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay, there was kind of like a golden era in that time and we were seeing all those people on TV, then we were seeing a lot of people that were like really subpar and a lot of people were thinking, Well, exactly I can write, you know, five crappy minutes about an airplane. I can. But then you couple that with this explosion in comedy clubs, which were a a relatively new phenomenon. I mean
When Joan Rivers was doing a stand up, she was doing stand up in in strip clubs. There were
very few comedy clubs and and comedy was kind of a part of a vaudeville approach. So you'd you'd hire a singer and then you'd hire a comic, but there wasn't a there weren't places dedicated to comedy.
So these comedy clubs opened
it was a really easy to way way to make money because comics weren't that expensive. And you know, you had a two drink minimum, people would come in, they would get wasted, you have huge margins on your booze. All these comedy clubs started proliferating. And then there was just peak clubs. It was it was saturation. Yeah. It became unsustainable.
So they started to contract
Because of market saturation, the economy started to contract in the eighties, and people could watch comedy on TV.
the proliferation of comedy on television.
affected people going out.
To see it in a club.
So they 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 then by the time I was doing stand up in my twenties, there were two.
And you know, and they were attracting like high end peak talent. So
For example, this club's still there. It's called the Punchline. Punchline. I've been there a few times.
There was the punchline and there was Cobbs, and those are still the the the only two clubs and maybe there's some minor clubs that have sprung up since then.
But you know, they would book these big headliners, so the only time you could go up if you were an amateur or like a young comic was on a Sunday.
Or a Wednesday.
and there'd be twenty 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
You know, when you watch like a 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 and reinforcing them. But when you're up in front of a comedy club owner and you 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. I was gonna say, how do you get in your rough drafts then? I mean, how do you work on the material?
Drive to Martinez. Oh, I see. I see. So you'd right, work out the kinks with Exactly.
Turlock and then
foo bars or rooster tea feathers or you know, one of these other places that yeah. No, 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, you know if you're sharp or flat, you know if you hit all the notes, you know if the tempo's 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 when you're a young comic is stage time.
Do you remember your early
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 the f what is your first memory
that comes to mind of bombing.
Yeah.
Oh God, I bombed so many times. It's just it all seeps together into an inky blackness. Um any comment that tells you that ever bombed is lying. And again, the only way to get funny is to bomb. No one ever gets funnier.
After they kill.
You know, they just walk follow that, bitches and they drop the mic, you know what I mean? And then they go off and do shots of their friends. I mean you really need to you really need to bomb and bomb hard to get funny.
I remember doing this one show. Oh God. So there was it was an open mic.
In a laundromat.
South market.
around the police station there. So what maybe like you know eighth and mission or something like that for people in 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 and pause where you think the laughter might occur if you were in front of actual human beings. And I just did a set where I just n I did not get one
Laugh.
And I remember that one not even like a not even like a cursory titter. And I remember just silent just like like just a wall of silence. And I got off even thinking about it right now, it's so funny to me. Like I talked to a girlfriend afterwards, I was like, Oh my God.
I couldn't even call that a bad set. I don't know what that was, but it was so funny to me.
That I didn't get a laugh. There was this
bulletproofness that I got from that set.
That just made me impervious to anything ever going wrong in my life or career again. Even when I'm talking about now, it's like 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
Yeah.
Wow.
No one is laughing.
Was it like the reverse of the five stages of grief or like what or did you just go straight to like, yeah, motherfuckers, this is great. Like, this is gonna make a great story however many years from now on Tim Ferris' podcast.
Well, one thing comedians love is agony. I mean it's we we dine out on it is definitely like our 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 gonna make a great story. That happens almost instantaneously. So we we have a little bit of uh we have some armor in w 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 a local language, and you'd be thinking, Okay, what if I live, this is gonna make a killer story.
So I think in the moment I just thought
I had watched a couple other people go up and not do very well either. I was prepared.
for it not going my way.
And I think also there's a discipline to comedy.
But if you're not a comedian you can't understand, which is that you've got to get up and do your set.
You don't get to tap out. Like tapping out is true failure.
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. So can can you for people who don't know the story, can you please describe it?'Cause it's just
It's so it's uh amazing.
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 at like some local station, you know, K Rock ninety seven 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 people still do this, but you know, 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.
you know, early in the day and and
No one pays to see Nickelback and then wants to sit through fifteen minutes of stand up. Everyone's drunk and drugs. They're not even facing forward. You know what I mean? It's just like the work like there's nothing
The only thing worse than performing in front of an outdoor audience
is performing in front of people who are eating.
Yeah, this is like a this was like a tailgate at like
Eleven AM or one PM or something. Yeah.
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 fallen out of their head. Nobody cares about your jokes about your mom and your family. So they're just like could not muster compassion if they tried. So he starts doing stand up and it just

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 could tolerate, right? But like people are screaming at him to get off stage. And he
He makes it very clear to the audience. You have to watch it because I'll never be able to do it justice. But he makes it very clear to the audience
that he is not leaving the stage until he does his ten minutes, that he does not care how they feel about him.
And he's counting down the minute. Yeah. Yeah. Every minute he's like, Nine minute, you fucking fuck. Exactly. He says something really outrageous, like, I hope your mother gets cancer in the center of her asshole. Seven minutes. Later.
You know
He was embarrassed by it, but every comedian understands this kind of blood battle that you sometimes have with an audience where
They're not going to scare you and they're not going to drive you away. 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 right thinking almost immediately, well, okay, I'm not gonna get any laughs, I'm just gonna kinda like listen to this set and see what it feels like, see what the words feel like, see what might play in front of actual people.
But it started to get really delicious. And I think if you watch the Bill Burr video, you'll also see that it's he 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's 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 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 uh use as teasers for people who should watch this video. I think it was in Phil um
Almost a hundred percent positive is in Philadelphia. Philadelphia, I think that's I know either that or Jersey, but it we have to do it. Yeah, I think it was Philadelphia because he started
ridiculing Rocky. And he said, Your hero is a fictional person and just tearing into them. And he basically for the for half of his set just decided to abandon his material and just attack these people in the town. And uh Which by the way is a no no generally. Yeah, which is a which is a no no generally
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. But this is just a sidebar, but don't forget what you were gonna 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 a 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 lives. 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 comic's 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 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 sort of suck in there.
And
He got a
Standing up well, I mean everybody's already standing, but he got
massive applause from the audience at the end. Which is just a because they're just like, what the fuck? Like it didn't even fit into like any mental heuristic
of comedy that they could expect. It was it was straight prison yard dynamics, right? Like nobody know you know the line from uh out of sight, right? Just like the yard, nobody backing down. Nobody's backing down. And he just, you know, I think they there was like a thousand of them to one of them or probably like ten thousand of them to one of them
And he just did not back down. He got the slowest back clap at the end of the show. So I wasn't gonna go to heckling, but why not, since we're already here.
Do you have any memorable heckling stories? Did you recall the first time you got heckled?
I started doing stand up.
like twenty five years ago. So at at this point, like all the sets have just kind of blended, but and heckling can be lots of different things. It doesn't always have to be like the conventional kind of you suck heckle. I one
I I w at 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. And it was driving me crazy. That's awful. It was like a bee in my ear. And 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 they look up on
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? She likes lady the front time of the night. And it really I mean, that was I I remember that I got really went off the rails last night. And I generally have a rule with Pecklers that unless they're really disruptive to the entire room, I just never address them.
Because what you do is again, you've derailed a show for five hundred or a thousand people to deal with one person. And everyone's never gonna really understand what's going on unless that person's so loud that they've affected everybody else's enjoyment of the night. But sometimes the affectionate hecklers are the worst because typically hecklers just wanna be a part of the show.
And so, you know, they say something, you slam them a little bit, they shut up'cause they they think they're helping you out. He was
The famous line is they'll come up and be like, Hey, like how I helped you out. I'm like, but I I came with jokes. I don't I don't need a I don't I don't have a box jumper in my act, right? I I showed up ready to go. But um but
When people are affectionate, you can't insult them.
They're the most unmanageable kind of people. Yeah, by affectionate means so it's like I love you. I love you. I love you. I had this one girl at one show in San Francisco, just so drunk. I'm just cross-eyed and
For the ninety minutes I was on stage, I love you, I love you so much, I love you and I was just like
Lady, all you are doing is making me want to hit you in the head with this microphone stand. Your affection is not welcome here. And everybody else is like staring at this woman. And but she just is a genuine expression of emotion for this person that is destroying my joy completely. So I really have a
a habit of just not talking to hecklers. What did you do in that case? Did you ignore?
I think that I kept saying like, thank you, that's super sweet. Shut the fuck up. That was like like you know, clearly you weren't hugged enough as a child. I mean I just eventually got mean because it was just like I couldn't get this woman to stop talking.
And I think the people around her got embarrassed.
And they eventually kinda shut her up, which was nice.
And I I try to think there are any other really good aclers that
Oh I had one guy.
It's a mental discipline too because you know, like again, like it's your show. You have the microphone, you're in control.
You know, I think the audience thinks they're in control, but they're not. I mean that the Bilber
scenario is a perfect example. The person with the microphone has all the power.
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 twelve people and they were all like laughing their asses off. And then he was just
Arms crossed just look like he just had
Just eating a big scoop of fecal matter and I was all he was all I could see. Like, you know what I mean? Like the whole audience had disappeared and it was just straight vignette on this guy's like sour puss face.
And I couldn't it was just wrecking my whole night and I finally said, If you don't want to be here, just fucking go, man. I'll give you your money back. I cannot look at your face for one more minute.
And it I meant it. It wasn't even a joke. I was just like, get out, man. You are harshing my mellow so hard. And he left. I didn't feel bad about it.
And then I went on with the show and his girlfriend goes, He had a bad day. I was like
But what was great was nobody else at the table wanted to leave. They were like, you know, good bridgens to bad rubbish and he you know, he went on and the rest of the people enjoyed their night. So but again, that was me. That was my you know I should have been disciplined enough not to be distracted by, you know, old sour pus, but
I'm only human. You know what I mean? If the Grinch is sitting in the front row, you know, 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.
You
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 hone your craft?
Or maybe a better question is what helped the most in honing your craft?
You know, it's interesting. Like, I think that there's a definite math to comedy.
And then there's also
A secondary
Ineffability. I guess what I mean is like
You can learn how to be a better comic.
But you can't learn how to be a comic.
Or
You had a different way.
I really l wanted to be an engineer and I could have really suffered and struggled through like the elevated math that would
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 workmanli, can learn how to do comedy. And then there's some people who are just naturally comedic and they still have to work to be better at it, you know?
You say Bolt still has to train, even though he was born with more fast switch muscles than everybody else, he still has to train to become a champion. So I feel like with comedy, you know, people can be the class clown or they can be that guy's naturally funny. There's still
a methodology and there's still a a mathematics to becoming a comic.
And then at the same time, if they have this
this ephemeral, ineffable kind of understanding of the math of comedy.
they're gonna be able to do something magical with
Yeah.
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 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, not be not be rejected. 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're 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 what's the rule of threes?
I probably won't even be able to articulate it properly. It's just that like if you're going to do a series of jokes or a series of builds to a punchline, it needs to be three. I get it. I get it. And also if you're going to do any kind of a of a diversion, if you're going to lead people in one direction and then snap around to a different kind of absurdist result, you can't do that in two. It has to be
The pace of it has to 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 a time to involve into a false sense of security before you kind of pull the rug out from under them. As soon as you start explaining that uh 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 is 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
I'm also really an on
disciplined comedian. And and what I mean is like
Like there's a there's a documentary about Gary Shanling out 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 and sometimes it would be pages and pages of material without fail. Other comics would be like, Hey, let's get a beer and be like, No, I have to write. And every day he would write on this like legal
Mm-hmm.
Probably
True and apocrypha at the same time, on this like legal lineup back, this tiny handwriting, and 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.

I record my sets, but I never I ha 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 en engage in that behavior when it it's clearly
Not useful to me. I think the more you do it, the more you intuitively understand, oh, this is a rich area, people are connecting with this, this other stuff.
There's also something you learn s 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
or valueless or core less, you'll still do them because that's all you have. And then as you get older, you start to think, Okay, like I I I wanna have a body of work here. Does this hang together? Does it have a 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
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. Does make sense.
Absolutely. I think that's true for musicians. I think it's true for
Many different artists. Writers too, probably for writers. It's like
I'm gonna find a space that's
that it really says something about like my accumulated understanding and and knowledge of of the world. And it's not just enough to say something like I need to say
Something that's uniquely m 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 uh you know, 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
That's what we're all turning into. Yeah. Society in general, I would hope, just seeing the number of hatchet jobs and the amount of yellow journalism and
clickbaiting with

And take down pieces of folks who are otherwise doing actually a lot of good in the world, but
Yeah.
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 and yeah, I think you can figure out a way to make it a non binary decision.
In 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?
Mm-hmm.
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 uh.
Evergreen.
Right.
And also like it's it's interesting.
Like when I went to school
We had the you know, the honor system and you were just expected to hold yourself to a high standard
Because that was what was right. It's just what you did. You know what I mean? You just
you were gonna be called upon to stand behind your work and and so y 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.
And you know, with a twenty four hour news cycle like
The bright bursts is as meaningful as a slow burn. I actually don't really know what we do.
What 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 bedded in things that are bullshit. But I think that people are working very hard to make it harder for the rest of us to distinguish between the two. So there are, you know, without me sounding like a crazy person, there are nefarious forces at work trying to make it very hard for us to figure out what's real and what's not real.
And I think
We have to start to raise people who

more critical thinkers, but it's hard to be a critical thinker when you're just scrolling through your Instagram feed looking at like butts and cupcakes all day long.
Have you been have you been
Watching my my feet. Are you looking over my shoulder? Are you one of the nefarious forces? I'm following you and I know I know what you're into. I see what you're into. Oh God. Oh God. You know, I have to I'll admit there was a day
And you would think
Supposedly being a tech investor in all this stuff for
ten years that I would figure this out. There was a day when I was scrolling through cupcakes and thongs.
And
I looked up at my profile and I was like, Wait a minute
People can see what I follow
Oh and I was like oh fuck Uh fortunately I've systematically
dismantled and deliberately tarnished any semblance of any reputation I might have very deliberately. So that I I feel like I don't feel like I start interviewing you now. This is so interesting.
Yeah, Stepford Wives.
Polished.
Yeah, any kind of perfection. Preserve, right? It's like 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 were 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 something very liberating, and I think it comes from age as well, and from experience. And I don't mean experience like a resume, but like just ex 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
No very little.
And that you cannot learn.
If you are constantly trying to maintain
A posture of perfection.
That's why I'm a total mess. Woo
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 uh overextended now. But the point being
If you operate from a place of fear and
What to please
this nebulous majority more than you want to please yourself.
That's not to say that I'm always
I've always view my entire life and all my decisions as a singular locus of control in the palm of my hand and I care what no one thinks. That's not true because that's not how humans have evolved. But if you are 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 if I'm so humiliated by the fact that I like gorgeous female asses, and I'm like, Oh my God and I put something up about I put up this picture. So this is what I do occasionally when I'm like, you know what, I think I'm getting a little a little fat and happy and complacent.
And maybe I have too much FOMO or something like that. I will
I remember at one point I this I put up this photo of this
Gorgeous Latin ass and um female and uh and it said like nalgophilia, and it had this in Spanish this explanation of this fake condition, which was
Nalgofil N nalgafila. Anyway, I think it was nalgafila, anyway. Las nalgas is like ass in in Spanish. Anyway, so I put this up on Instagram. And I put it up and as to be expected, there is
Immediate outrage. I mean there are plenty of people who think it's kind of funny, plenty of people who 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, outrageous contagious. Yeah, it's so but I left it up
Because I like to call my audience, number one. Yes. If you don't want to be here, please, I invite you to unfollow. Yeah, exactly. You're right. It's like the sour pus in the front row. It's like let me give you a you look like you're unhappy, but you're still here.
Mm-hmm. 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. 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 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 gonna get back, which I totally did. And there are now there are there 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 there are cases when I do that and people give me
hopefully constructive feedback that isn't just
spitting acid into my face. And I take it down. So I do pay attention
At the same time, I try to keep in mind
advice that I was given years ago. I don't remember who gave me this advice, but they said the 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 One Thousand True Fans by Kevin Kelly that everybody should read to this effect, if you're creative, but as long as you have a critical mass, and it could be a very small number, of people who love your stuff.
That's all that mattered. That's like a pass fail. As long as you have that pass.
You're green.
Instead of focusing on the vast majority who hate your shit. 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 this is really interesting also because I think if you're an artist specifically, this is a really important conversation to have with yourself, which is
Like when I first started out at stand up, you know, this was like kind of the period when like Deaf Comedy Jam was really popular. And
For lack of a better way of articulating, 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.
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 they'd kind of be one way off stage and then kind of fall into this character on stage. And
There's nothing wrong with trying to connect with an audience, but I just didn't want to copy other people to try to get people to like me. And you know, for a long time I really struggled. And then eventually my tribe found me, but I was able to stay.
Oh, now I sound like a self-help book, but like true to who I was because that was the only way forward. The only way forward as an artist is to be truthful. 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 gonna be interesting. 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 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 figure out what people want and then creating some piece of shit.
Some like cras, you know, glib, solicitous piece of shit, and people don't buy it anyway. Why not make something you love and then people don't buy it? At least it was something that you love, then you're not embarrassed by it. Right. You said you know 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 their way. Right. So
You might as well have one person who's happy about the process and uh Exactly. Exactly.
That was what I was saying about engagement, at least the experience.
Was satisfying.
And I would also
I feel like I'm talking too much, but I'm gonna I'm gonna stop in a second. 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 and
Someone who is actually
In for instance, in the the Deaf Comedy Jam example that you gave. If somebody's on stage and they are playing their game, that is who they are.
you are never going to be able to
take on like the cognitive load and the fatigue of pretending to be that type of person and
Beat someone who is good at
that game. You're just not going to. So right. Yeah. You're just not gonna win. So it's like you will not
ultimately in in any field that is competitive, which is effectively every field that people get paid for.
If you want to be the best, you actu you have to harness your
Latent.
abilities.
And or you're fucked. Like you can't the 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.
I can't be those people. I'm not going to be I'm not going to ever be the wordsmith that say Tolstoy was but
Uh, do I like teaching? Do I obsessively think about teaching and
deconstructing things that are complex. I do. So I can
Use
books as a medium for teaching and think of it that way because if I try to out McFee McFee I'm gonna get my face ripped off.
And
Well, you don't I th this is we're talking about creativity and creative pursuits, which by the way almost everything is, even if you're
If you meet people who are the top of their game in accounting, the top of the game I'm not talking about shady money laundering shit. I'm just saying
In accounting, in uh technology there's an element
There's certainly an element of creativity. If you're looking at the people who are really at the top and
innovating in any way, doing exceptional work.
You have done so many different things. Acting, comedy

You've been a host, you've done voice over.
You have to have a
Engage in so many different
Acts of creation.
I wanna talk about
Short
Films, films, and so on. I want to talk about
movies.
Because as long term listeners will know, I've been um
sort of teasing with the idea, which by the way just means procrastinating of
Right writing
Some short films and I'm I'm still at step zero and I'm ashamed of that. But no shame. There's no shame in the
How did you decide to
get into film and why? Film is hard. Why do it is hard. It is tough. So that's a really good question because I feel like there's the you know that like really humiliating
kind of clam 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 m more organic for me because I you know I again I wasn't someone who kind of
I didn't go to film school. And I also don't think I had the the hubris to think like, Oh, I've done this a cup for a couple of years, now I can direct. It was I love movies. Like, you know, uh we were talking about earlier, I was raised by a single dad and I was one of those kids who like I'd go
I'd go with my dad to see like Die Hard or Road Warrior and way too early in age, like super inappropriate. You know, like when I was in in high school, I'd seen the terminator like
the first terminator from like twenty or thirty times. Like I I just loved movies. I'd go to the theater, I'd buy a matinee ticket and I'd stay in the theater until like eight o'clock at night and just like watch movie after movie after movie.
So it just came out of a a real end user's love for film. Like I was just someone who was transported by movies.
And then
When I left talk soup, um
I had been writing on that show, and there was a void, and I wrote a script.
that I was developing with a company and I just kept talking about how I thought it should look and how I thought it should feel. And you know, it was just so much more specific than being a writer. And they they were like, you know, you should direct this is clearly like a movie that you should direct.
And I hadn't really thought about it.
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 experience for other people. And I just realized like I didn't know what directing entailed. I didn't ha have any idea about what that was gonna 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 wasn't working on something, I would ask to come back to set when I wasn't working so I could hang out and shadow, which is where you just kinda hang around behind a director and watch them work and
ended up shadowing with some really incredible people, I ended up spending several days on the wire and it's last season. And wow. Yeah. And just got to just be on the other side of a process that can be relatively opaque when you're an actor. You just gotta show up and say your lines and leave. And
And then I started making shorts and I
And I guess
This is gonna sound very
Clip
But
'Cause I'm I'm sure I have resources available to me that lots of people don't. I do believe in it, like I just believe in personal aggression. Like I just believe in doing stuff. Said personal aggression. Personal aggression. Like I just believe that like if you want to make a movie
Just start making a movie. And I don't mean like go get a camera and start shooting it, but what I do mean is like
Be hard on yourself. 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. Like the first short film I made was and it's an abomination. It will be never see the light of day. I had no idea what I was doing. But that didn't make me not want to be a director. It just made me realize I needed to learn more.
And then
I started to feel like I was more ready and I
I was like, I need to make some stuff. So first thing was I did a comedy central special and and I took the money that would have been my salary and I used it to make a sh like a little short music video that opens the comedy special. It wasn't anything that was mandated by the network. I was like, I wanna do something different. So I wrote the song and I performed it and I
made music video and and that was the kind of the first thing I directed. I just used the crew that was already working on the special and and shot this video with that. That's really smart. So I I would imagine not not to interject, but you piggybacked on something that was in your main line of business, so to speak. Exactly. And I I imagine you saved a lot of costs by doing that.
I mean you had like a
Yeah, like the guy the the the crew was already gonna 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 had to still had to pay them for the extra work. I just took my I took my fee and I used it to pay everybody else.
And then because I didn't have any more money after that, I 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 wanna do more of this. So then I I rented a camera, I rented like a can of five D 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 I just called some buddies of mine that were in bands and I said, Hey, if 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 gonna charge anybody any money for it.
But just I I wanna make something and I wanna 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 and delivered it to them.
And so then I just started to have like examples of what I could do. Why music videos instead of something else?
It just felt like a way to get more people to see it.
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 ha 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 w who like this band, I love this band, will want to see something that 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
Then I did a little action short. Like 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?
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
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. Stealing it from T. Pet phrases. And then a lot of it was just getting confident.
with my own ability and my ability to articulate what I wanted.
from other people, you know, just how do the other jobs on a set work? Who does what?
What do I need? Oh God, this didn't work. You know why it didn't work?'Cause 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. It were just'cause 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
And then
I was getting ready to do to I really wanted to do a feature.
I had some material I'd written, but it was kind of gonna be an expensive movie.
But I was still shadowing, so I had a friend who had a show
Called Petty Dreadful, John Logan, who created Penny Dreadful. I've met him at Comic Con, I host the panel for that show. And he was like, Hey, why don't you love the show? You should come visit us in Ireland. And I remember thinking, like,
To myself.
People always say that and then you always say, Yeah and then you never do it. I was like, I'm gonna do it. I'm fucking going to Ireland, man. That's
I'm gonna be cool.
I wanna I'm I'm gonna be a cool kid for once in my life. And so I ended up going over visiting
Petty Dreadful and and Vikings shot right up the road. So I got them to let me visit that set. I just hung out at like passed out sandwiches and, you know, lifted stuff and asked questions and watched them work and
And then while I was over there, I met a bunch of Irish actors and one of them, two of them actually, one was a 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 twenty fourteen. 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.
Where did you film in Ireland?
In in Galway. In Galway, which is uh the beautiful town. Yeah, such a great place. I lived there for a month in two thousand five. Oh yeah. Incredible arts festival there. It's a really beautiful spot. Yeah, it is. It's like the arts center of Ireland. They've got a beautiful film festival in the summer, they've got an arts festival, and you know, with 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 first film and that that's the film that became Axis. Okay, so I want to dig into 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 uh
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 it wasn't as prolonged of a period as it sounds like. I was on hiatus. So like I was working on the talk at the time and we get a month off every year. So I went in that month.
But I think if I was talking to a lay person who didn't work in television, I would say, like, you know, if if what you want is to grow in whatever field you're interested in, like
Just create a space for that. Make that your vacation. It wasn't like I like
was like riding around in a limousine, like I just flew over and I hung around, you know, for like a week and 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 like
You said it and I w I I think we kind of went past it, but it's so interesting to me. It was I just really wanted more discomfort in my life. It's just very easy the older you get to be like, uh, you know, get in car, go to work, eat bag lunch, get in car, go to a gym, go home, eat food, watch TV, go to bed, and then you just think like
Am I growing it like is is like any of this
Interesting. Am I gonna you know what I mean? Like I've I have one life and I'm just spending it in this like 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 kinda cold called them and said, Can I come visit? And they were super gracious.
I'm so curio just to interrupt you yet again. What does that email say?
It says, Hi, and again, I I understand that maybe this is gonna 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 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, you know, I kind of paid my way in in like flacking their show for them. But just to
I'm not overcaffeinated, I swear to God. I'm just you're making so many important points that I just want to pause and
help well f as much for myself as anyone else, just people to reflect on. So
What you did.
In terms of tweeting. People might say, Well, I don't have a verified account and nobody's gonna pay attention to one tweet in the Twitter feed of ten thousand if it's v a popular T V 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, the show or the actors. And you do not need to be a famous actress or an author or any of those things
All you need to do is work.
At the highest possible
Caliber
of quality that you can. I mean, I think you also touched on this about the idea that people are like more interested in being expeditious than they are in and 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 they 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 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
Th the the number of t I mean, this is not the best example, but it's a it's a good one.
Twenty years ago there was this video tape going around Hollywood.
Of these guys in an apartment.
And it was VHS table, that's how long ago it was. And people were dubbing it and sending and giving to friends of these guys in an apartment of these three black guys where the one guy goes up and hits the little inner comment goes uh and then the other guy goes, and the third guy goes. 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.
It was a two and a half minute short film that was just funny. 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. And 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.
uh 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 gonna be a massive hit. I was like, I'm gonna make this little movie and then for the next one, when people say, Well, what have you done? I could be like, Look at this little thing I made, you know? So I think you have to always be focused on the results, not the result.
on the thing and not the result, because the result is directly tied to the quality of the thing. So it's and 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. Not to sound like a fortune cookie on top of all of that, but like the only uncrowded market is great. There's always a fucking market for great. There's exactly be radically great. Like don't be like I saw ten things like this, let me do the eleven thing. Be brave enough
to core failure, 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, screws 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.
phenomena to
Companies at this point, certainly, that are worth looking at and just investigating the stories of
Demonstrate very clearly what you can do if you are just rejected by the establishment or if you want to not
operate within the existing power structure. So the two examples are the blacklist, look up Franklin Leonard and the Blacklist.
Well absolutely. And then the second is, and we we don't have to get into both of these right now, the second is just by coincidence also has the list at the end, but Angel List.
And Naval Ravakan.
The Avenging Angel was the title of his interview in his alumni magazine at Dartmouth, in fact. But I get excited when I hear these types of stories, so they should check them out. Let's come back to Axis.
What is access?
And did you ha did you have anybody try to talk you out of doing
Excuse me.
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. You know, he's he's a drunk and he's a drug addict and he's terrible at relationships and he's a dick to everybody. And
When we meet him he's trying to turn his life around.
And it 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, you know. 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 or 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. I happen to think and this I'm sure you'll 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 are who have broken themselves down are just more honest than people who are trying to be perfect all the time. And so, you know, he's just he's a guy who's self aware. He's a
Wherever 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 l thro Los Angeles. So the lead actor is the only actor on screen and all the other actors are 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 you by not extending the fees because you don't even get no, you just get like silence. Right.
But this happened very quickly. So I I didn't have a traditional kind of like discouraging period of frustration with trying to put this movie together because
I read it.
in like August or September of twenty fifteen
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 twenty
sixteen and I realized if I didn't make the movie in this one single week in
May of twenty sixteen
that I wasn't gonna 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 gonna 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 p just him on camera? Can we have other actors in the movie? And then can we make it not in a car? Can we make it I mean, like we're just gonna
You know, the whole kind of concept of the film was gonna 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 gonna 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 twenty sixteen, I had my like first exploratory conversation with the people around me and with
Kickstarter. I they have people over there who are kind of like
around to like help you kind of figure out how to put a project together.
I built the campaign in three weeks. I launched it in April.
And
One of the rules about crowdfunding and Kickstarter specifically is not
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 two hundred thousand dollars that we raised. And so that was what we had to make the movie.
So originally it was we were gonna make it in nine days, but I realized if I made it faster, I'd have more money available to me like daily. I'd have it like my daily resource load would be higher.
So we cut the schedule from nine days to seven days.
Which is incredibly aggressive for a feature. Whenever I tell people I made it in seven days, they ask, Well, how how is it a short?
So
we had to be really aggressive. So we ended up doing it in this way that was so terrifying and so f breakneck.
But so exhilarating.
Which is that we shot the first fifteen pages of the movie in the first day, and then we shot the next sixty five pages of the movie. It was actually you shot about seventeen pages on the first day to about sixty seven pages on day two through seven.
And that meant that the actor had to do sixty seven pages of dialogue a day. For people that don't know, typically on a movie you do like between three and
six pages of dialogue a day. So he was essentially doing the entire movie all the way through every day, locked in a hot car with no air conditioning in 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 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.
And
going in, I thought I'll never make a movie this way again. But now I I would make a movie that way again because I just didn't have any time to be be afraid.
Or feel down. You know, I mean I just there was no time to be anxious. I just had to go.
It was wonderful. It was just 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 like the space time continuum and what you can achieve when everything gets compressed.
That intensely.
Certain things just
come to the surface. Like certain 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's 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 gonna lean all the way into it.
And we're gonna see what happens.
And
Also because we shot the whole movie all the way through. If I 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.
You know, I'm an actor as well. So like when I'm on a TV show or I'm doing a movie or whatever, I'll leave at the end of the day and go, Oh shit, man, I wish I'd done this with that scene. I wish I'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 gonna do it a whole different way today.
And so at the end, I really felt like we had really fully explored the material, which we wouldn't have been able to do if we had 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.

This fantastic book. Oh let me see. Here it is for the for those of you who get the Bible 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 U.S.
the therapist soundbook. Uh Richard Drivis. 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 f afraid of that because I feel like I'm just gonna put this next movie together and make it. Like you know, like I think now that I've done one with the with like no help and no assistance from anybody, like the next one's gonna 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 like a team of like of agents kind of making magic. Like it was really just like a scrappy little group of filmmakers doing this film with me, the the lead actor and screenwriter and my creative executives. It was a small group of people, you know, completely outside 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 like 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 workaholism. It's like a sickness. And whenever I say I'm workaholic people always laugh and I go, like, look, it's 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
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. You know no one wants to hear about, you know, your daily trek from your home to your office. It's just not compelling. Well I remember, you know, I think it was Amanda Palmer who said this. I apologize to ever said it if I'm misattributing.
But the Amanda Palmer creative musician extraordinaire and she said, You don't I think it was her who said in order to haunt it.

Yeah, I I will I will bow at the feet of Neil Gaiman as a writer. Everybody should listen to his audiobook of the graveyard book, narrated by him. He is also the most soothing voice imaginable, but I digress.
What the fuck was I saying?
So Manipolar has a quote about it.
If art imitates life, in order to create art, you have to have a life, right? Yeah. Absolutely. And and like And I'm paraphrasing it. It's butchered. But like a radical makes a point. You can't you know, I'm sure there are other theories. There's a very famous French writer, uh, it's not South, but it's somebody anyway, about like
have a bourgeois life and be radical in your work. But I actually don't think
I actually think that you 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.
Workholism, right? You've you've really
turn this into a default
Mode.
Are you doing anything?
and manage that or create more
Slack in the system.
For the day dreaming 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. You know, it's like just constantly trying to remind myself to rest. I engage socially a lot more than I used to. And by socially you mean out the real world. Yeah, like out the real world. Like I go out and I and I try to not just be like
You know, I just had a period of life where I was just like up, gym, work, sleep.
I just remember one day I was like I'm gonna die like the I'm gonna I'm gonna die of boredom. I'm bor I'm I I bore myself, you know what I mean? And so, you know, like I I I think I try to court
danger in a in a s a safe way. It's not like I'm jumping out of plane with no parachute or bullfighting or
bare knuckle brawling in an alle, 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. Dope. Dopamine. That's it. Dopamine. Serotonin and sleepy sleepy time. Yeah, dopamine. I get a dopamine release when I complete tasks and I just
You know, I get I'm 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.
Um how can I turn fun into work most effectively? And then be like, uh, I don't know about you guys, but I just fucking crushed my to-do list. Fuck.
I realize
Even though I can feel very harried.
It's interesting to me to be
feeling like a part of being on this planet of like fully engaging and doing everything I can do.
And everything I'm interested in.
Because I don't want to look back and be like, Man, I should have tried that. I'm happy to look back and say, Man, I tried that and it went terribly for me.
That's a perfectly comfortable space for me to be like, man, I try that and I sh completely shit the bed.
What what I find very uncomfortable is the idea that I I always wanted to do something and I never did it. And so that's what I fear.
What I fear is not.
Trying
not experiencing all the things that I want to experience.
How do you think your life because you you have
You live so aggressively.
You
It's gonna 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 I really love
working out but it there's a constant battle for me between
like being effective with work and I'm the queen of like getting up at like five a.m.
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 that's just a normal day. Like didn't didn't move, didn't eat, didn't do anything, just been in front of the computer for like eleven hours.
But it just
It's just such a great stress manager. And I also think that there's an another thing there, which is it just
Again, like puts you back in your body.
You know, this like thing that's carrying your brain around and making you effective and
I think that
With
everything, the all of the stimuli that we experience nowadays, all the pictures and the images of 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 in that inner monologue about how you're like worthless and you can't get your shit together. And I 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 I'm not good, I'm not a good person if I don't crush a workout. I just try to do it every day because I know it 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 ten minutes to 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 concept two or a rowing machine?
I still use my ergometer, my concept to ergometer. I have had it since two thousand. It is eighteen 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 twenty five and a thirty five. 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 like pistols and stuff like that. And I get everything done with those five things. That is fantastic. So pistols for people who don't know, those are one legged squats. And uh they can be very, very difficult depending on how you go about it. But a bench or a step can help you because it could just kind of be like single leg step downs until you build up your your quad
in your glute strength to do crystals.
prototypical work out of yours might look like.
I hiked today. That was just like a ninety minute hike, which was just more about like feel feeling groovy, but right now I'm obsessed with my ergometer.
I kind of go through periods of like not rowing and then periods of rowing really aggressively. And this is gonna be right up your alley, Tim. I'm ready. This is like bullseye for you and your audience. I started going to a naturopath, so I've been like supplementing differently. And I started taking glutathione.
Yeah.
I'm rowing
Like
faster now than I did in my twenties.
Like I just keep getting personal bests on a rower. It's confusing. I'm a lot older than I'm a lot older than I was when I was rowing competitively. And I just keep like knocking like
thirty seconds and then forty five seconds and then a minute and ten seconds off my rowing time. So now I'm just obsessed with like hidden personally best every time I row.
Okay. Let's dig into this.
How is it for those who who aren't familiar, glutathione is thought of a simple way to think of it or the way it's often
described as as a master antioxidant of sorts. How are you having it administered? Is it being uh in which I thought oh this is so insight baseball. Sometimes I get I Vs. I get I Vs if I'm really like if I'm wrecked, like if I travel a lot or
I went to Coachella. And is that pu is that just glutathione, or are you doing that at the end of the
B vitamins. I can do at the end of my IV. I'll get like B vitamins and like you know, just 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 axle grease. I I
Is this what is this company? Uh Lipos it's lipospheric. That's the name. Lipospheric glutathione. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm trading 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 gonna say it's the glutathione. I will warn people in advance. I had some of this lipospheric glutathione at one point and I gave it to a friend of mine. And I think it might have been for those who know my buddy Kevin Rose since I like to
mention him, even misattribute things to him just for fun. I think I gave him one and he said something like what is this horse semen? It does have a weird has a very weird consistency and
It's tarot. No, my father calls it axle grease. That's what it is. He's like, give me this axle grease. I was like, I think this would really help you and uh and you're supposed to take it in liquid, but he's just been eating it on a spoon. He's a better man than I. Oh, I just like squeegee it out of the little packet with your mouth. Yeah, to my mouth.
I take it with like about two ounces of kombucha in the morning so I don't have to think about it. Yeah, I'm but you're like I take soap. I mean you're I'm sure you're like this. Or maybe you maybe after all of that experimentation on yourself, you just get up and have a bowl of like
Frost of flakes in the morning too, but
You know, it's like I do that and then I have my bowl of supplements, then I have my fish oil, then I have my curcumin, and then I have my turmeric, and like by the end of the morning, like I
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?
Ideal morning.
What's the first ninety minutes?
Sixty to ninety minutes look like.
A special shot, glutathione, what time do you wake up?
Uh depends on the day. Like you know, between like
Six and seven. Okay. I used to pick up a lot earlier, but I 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 you know, like six and seven o'clock. And then um
And I have to work out in the morning or I won't get I won't I won't work out at all. You have espresso shot
Mm-hmm. 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.
Ha I like better booch.
And I like was it life aid, I think is one of the other I love kombucha. I'm very slutty when it comes to kombucha, I'll drink any kombucha. I'm just a big kombucha fan. All right, so then you buckle down to work out.
This is gonna sound like I'm just looking for opportunities to plug, which maybe I am, but the you described your your work the one of your workouts, the concept to like mid distance, five K rows punctuated by short distance, two K
Hit sprints, high intensity interval training. Yeah, high intensity interval training with with a ten K 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 like a set of five
Five by twenty five kettlebells. That's like, you know, like I'll get up one morning and just do a hundred twenty five 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 it's touched like a railing, like a an upstairs railing, and it just hangs off of the railing.
And that's it. I mean I tried I try to keep it like 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 work out, but I can't manage the
transit between a my home and a pl I don't have enough time to do that too.
You know what I mean? Like I've got the hour. I don't have two hours. So I don't go to a gym anymore because I just
I just would be I wouldn't have the time for it. Yeah, the transit time. That Yeah, transit time was what killed me. You know, it's 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?
Totally. Any recent favourites or what are you watching currently?
Like fantastic junk. I mean some good stuff. Like I love I I watch Walkie Dead Fear The Walkie 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 growing, I don't want to have to s watch commercials and I can't stop to fast forward because I'm trying to
beat my previous road time. So like I'll stream like stream stuff on Hulu like X Files or Handmaid's Tale or I just watched a show called Deutschland eighty three. 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 like not too
Mentally demanding
I can't pay attention too closely to plot points.
Ha
Alright.
Do you make New Year's resolutions?
Do you have any
routines or rituals around New Year's. We're we're talking just for people who may be listening to this at another time. We're chatting at the end of March.
Mm-hmm.
And make any this year.
Uh I make the same one every year, which is to rest more.
I mean it's it's the same resolution every year rest. Rest. So how are you gonna 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 have not accomplished that. I mean, look, maybe a part of success or like success at being you, like figuring out being you is like
understanding what your strengths and your weaknesses are. You know, like my strength is my aggressive work ethic. It was when I like when I was a young comic
I would be like, oh, I should be writing every day. I should write. I should be like this guy. Well, like that's just not my that's just not how I operate. So I think once you accept like what your own methodology of what you know this is why you watch the terminator thirty times. Yeah. You're like this, this is my people, right? Yeah. So I I mean I have definitely have O C D I'm definitely an obsessed with a personality, but like once you
except like these are my strengths, this is where I excel. This is how I excel.
Rather than try to force yourself into someone else's like workflow, like 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, like the book wasn't there yet. And then just one day the book was there. And then I sat down and I wrote the entire book in a few weeks.
But it just needed to gel, it needed to synthesize. And if I had been trying to sit down and kind of write a little bit every day, it would have just been like this like big agglomeration of glob. 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, you know. God, I wish I had that experience, man. I'm so jelly. Oh, but everybody's different. You know what I mean? Like
long time I would have wanted to be more like you, like disciplined and sitting down and because you know there's there's this panic that ensues when you are seven weeks from your deadline and you had nine months to write a book and gotta fight the whole thing. But it's just like that for me, certain threads have to connect and that requires
rumination and 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. 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 gonna ask is
And you actually give people
a heads up on this with the self inflicted wounds. So uh usually say at some point I'm going to ask you about X, uh but I'm 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. 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 uh flaw. Exactly. They just it just seemed like an unavoidable aspect of being 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 uh also like the greatest hits. Like if you're watching
T V fifteen years ago and it's like hits from the eighties. We could take one of those as well.
It's interesting. Like I was talking about that short film that I made that was like the one that will never be seen by any human being. I 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, 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 gonna be super excited to see this guy's penis and he would kind of like try to use it as currency and it would never kinda go his way. But it just made no sense. It just ended up being like a series of vignettes about a guy like revealing his penis to strangers. 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 accomplish here. It just never ever coalesced, but
It was fine because it was like
I remember kind of enjoying the process of making it and then being really kind of surprised and delighted by what a piece of shit it was. 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 if your personality is to be really aggressive and kind of dive in, you're bound to make some spectacular
failures, you know, and you just have to have a high tolerance for that and not take it personally and and keep moving forward.
But yeah, I I literally was like, Uh 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.
When have you been

Extremely proud of yourself.
Could be any point in your life. Can you think of a stand out point
Where you're like God damn, like good for me. Fucking A.
I hate I hate to have it be about this'cause it sounds like it's super self promotional, but uh I really am proud of this film and I
For a variety of reasons.
Yeah.
It was such a
I mean I was lucky that I I was brought a great script and and I had a really talented actor, but we we put uh 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.
But I think
One of the reasons why it it
came together the way that it did was because I was both I both had a vision for the film, but I was open.
to modulating. And I think that's really important in anything that you're doing, no matter what field you're in, is that you have to both
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 just you're just gonna keep banging your head against the wall. So we made this movie, uh we got into the very first second day of of filming. We 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 dusk, but we just kept pivoting. We just kept it 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 gonna do this. Okay, that's not working, we're gonna do this rather than oh my God, this is the end of the world. What are we gonna do?
And then in in post, I had very little money for post and very little time to cut the movie together, and about four weeks in
the editor that I had cutting the movie, he was a great guy, really talented, just wasn't connecting with the material, wasn't wasn't able to assemble the movie. It was an unusual movie. It's one guy in a car. And I had to let him go and then I had to learn Avid, the Avid system and 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
The answer here is that I'm gonna learn this skill set and I'm going to keep moving forward.
And then you know, I made this little film that was, you know, strange and atmospheric and dreamlike and
You know, it didn't get into Sundance and everybody else wants to get into Sundance, but then it got into eight other festivals and won two awards and got picked up for distribution, and the result has been much better than I ever could have anticipated.
And
I'm really proud of it because it w I mean I made made it for
what is typically the catering budget.
On a on a regular Hollywood movie. You know what I mean?
We made it for just no money and in no time. And and I think it also says something. I think what I'm also proud of is that the movie actually does have a strong point of view and a strong visual personality and a strong style that is my own. When I look at it, 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 humans to look at
the people who are showcased on the covers of magazines or on the front
Yeah.
And think.
Wow. They figure it out.
All the secret sauce.
Or they have the 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
Company Alibaba is one example. Jack Ma, the founder.
think he's the richest man in China, or certainly one of the top few at this point. And and he said uh I'm paraphrasing, but we had a huge advantage in the beginning, and that was we had
No experience, no money, and no plan.
And
It forces you to really think
outside of the box and even if that project
doesn't succeed by outside measures the
confidence that you develop
in exploring areas outside of the box.
can then transfer to future projects. I remember there's uh this fantastic documentary, get a butcher his name. Well it's fantastic mostly for the message, not for all of the content, which I hope makes sense, but it's called Yodowski'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 completely unmitigated disaster. But the talent that was assembled went on to just do incredible things. And if that disaster hadn't happened
One could argue
That's
If you had stepped on that butterfly, the 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 uh I I just love
That 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.
Totally.
Yeah, I that's that's that's my life philosophy. Be aggressive. Be aggressive and uh
We want you around for a long time. So
Take your cat naps at the very least. I know 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 I guess like I like when I when I did my podcast, you know, like it thematically the stuff that we've talked about was always stuff that I talked about, which is like it doesn't matter what your
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 we're gonna have to start small and maybe we'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
live these experiences so that the things that you learn could be shared with other people. Just
go out and do awesome shit.
Get your hands dirty.
The rough drafts are not a clean business. Absolutely not.
Aisha, thank you so much for taking the time.
It was a pleasure. So much fun.
With you, I know. Super fun. And now that I know where you are, I will track you down the next time I'm in your neck of the woods. Yeah.
Barbecue music, whatever it might be, in Austin Tejas come visit. And
People can visit you.
Is the best uh best site.
AishaTyler.com. Yeah, IshTyller.com, but you know, who spends time on a website anymore? Just follow me on the 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.
I don't know when the this is gonna post, but I post stuff about all the stuff I'm doing. The movies out on the tenth of April on video demand iTunes, all that stuff. And then Archer starts I think on the twenty fourth.
Fourth of April and all the other stuff I don't know, T V, whatever. You can find me online. I don't know when you're gonna listen to this, but you know, just come say hi to me on on social.
That's exactly right. Cockroaches remember us fondly. And uh for you non-cockroaches, actually if cockroaches are listening, you're welcome also to check out the uh show notes where I will provide links to everything that we've talked about, including access.
And uh you can find all of those at Tim.blog forward slash podcast, along with the show notes for every other episode and
Aisha, thank you so much one more time for
Being so goddamn entertaining and inspiring at the same time. It's a rare combo. Um really appreciate that. 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.
Just get out a shitty first draft.
Because guess what? All the first straps 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.
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