YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew McConaughey

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2024-07-24

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2024-07-24

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1. “That was a short film The Some Guy Made on a Digital Camera. None of them were famous. They were just some guys in New York. That ended up being that Budweiser campaign”

   2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “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 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 people ask them what they did, the thing they were able to show was extraordinary. And I don't mean like expensive, extraordinary. I just mean unique and personal and crafted with care. And so if that's something that you wrote or if it's something that you made, if you made, you know, the number of, I mean, this is not the best example, but it's a good one. 20 years ago, there was this video tape going around Hollywood of these guys in an apartment. And it was VHS tape. That's how long ago it was. And people were dubbing it and sending and giving to friends of these guys in an apartment. These three black guys were the one guy goes up and hits the little intercomma goes wazah and then the other guy goes wazah and the third guy goes.”

   2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “It says hi. And again, I understand that maybe this is going to feel a little rified. 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 like flacking their show for them.”

   2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Go to bed, and then you just think, Am I growing? It's like any of this interesting? Am I going to, you know what I mean? I have one life and I'm just spending it in this 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 kind of cold called them and said, can I come visit? And they were super gracious.”

   2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “Well, it wasn't as prolonged of a period as it sounds like. I was on hiatus, so I was working on the talk at the time and we get a month off every year. So I went in that month. But I think if I was talking to a layperson who didn't work in television, I would say like, you know, 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 was 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 think we kind of went past it, but it's so interesting to me. I just really wanted more discomfort in my life. It's just very easy the older you get to be like, you know, get in car, go to work, eat, bag, lunch, get in car, go to gym, go home, eat food, watch TV.”

   2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “Yeah, it is. It's like the art center of Ireland. They've got a beautiful film festival in the summer. They've got an arts festival. 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's the film that became Axis.”

   2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “Us in Ireland, and I remember thinking to myself people always say that, and then you always say, Yeah, and then you never do it. I was like, I'm gonna do it. I'm fucking going to Ireland, man. I'm gonna be cool. I want to be a cool kid for once in my life. And so I ended up going over and visiting Penny Dreadful and Vikings shot right up the road. So I got them to let me visit that set. I just hung out and like passed out sandwiches and lifted stuff and asked questions and watched them work. And then while I was over there, I met a bunch of Irish actors and one of them, two of them actually, one was an actor, composer, one was a writer, a screenwriter, and an actor. And we ended up making a short film together in Ireland at the end of 2014. That was my first narrative short, my first kind of story-driven short. It was just great. It was just like, I was like, oh, this is like totally who I am. This is what I want to do with my life.”

   2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “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, I didn't work because I didn't have this kind of a person on set. I was feeding 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 help me make sure that it looked the way that I wanted it to look, like that the levels were set properly. At least when I got home to edit it, like I had some problems. But like it wasn't, they weren't catastrophic problems. They were just because, you know, I wasn't making Star Wars, you know what I mean? I was just able to be like, well, this is what it is. And I'm going to make this and move on. And then I was getting ready to, I really wanted to do a feature. I had some material I'd written, but it was kind of going to be an expensive movie. But I was still shadowing, so I had a friend who had a show called Petty Dreadful, John Logan, who created Penny Dreadful. I met him at Comic-Con. I'd hosted the panel for that show. And he was like, hey, you love this show. You should come visit.”

   2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “Yeah, like I think a lot of it was just skill building. How do you frame up and how do you make choices and how do you do coverage? And then how do you edit? Like a lot of it was just really tactical, as you would say practical, tactical.”

   2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “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 need to have any like narrative linearity. You can experiment. You can be radical. It could just be like a series of images. And I also thought, well, people who like this band, I love this band will want to see something about them. And it'll be a great way for people to see something. And then hopefully I can tell a story at the same time. And so I did three of those. And 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.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “The road with Silver Sun pickups for a couple of dates and then spending a day with Clutch when they were performing at Anaheim. And then I just gave them, I just cut music videos and delivered it to them. And so then I just started to have examples of what I could do.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “I mean, yeah, like the crew was already going to come up the day before and leave the day after to shoot the special. And we'd already rented the cameras and everything like that. But I had still had to pay them for the extra work. I took my fee and I used it to pay everybody else. And then because I didn't have any more money after that, I learned how to edit and I edited it myself and I delivered it to the network because I couldn't afford to pay for additional edit time. And then after that, I thought, okay, I want to do more of this. So then I rented a camera, I rented like a can of 5D. And I had some friends who were in bands. And again, like it sounds fancy, but everybody probably knows somebody who does something just because I had some friends who were in a famous band doesn't mean that people out there don't have friends who are in bands. So I just called some buddies of mine that were in bands and I said, hey, if you let me come on tour with you, I will make you a free music video, just a piece of fan art. You can use it however you like. I'm not going to charge anybody any money for it. But just I want to make something and I want to make something for you. And so I ended up going on.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “Personal question. I just believe that if you want to make a movie, just start making a movie. And I don't mean like, oh, get a camera and start shooting it, but what I do mean is be hard on yourself. Learn, read, learn, watch, study. Think critically. Ask people questions. And then make a movie and then let it be shitty and then make another one and let that one be shitty and keep doing it until you get better at it. Like the first short film I made was, I mean, it's an abomination and we'll never see the light of day. I had no idea what I was doing. But that did make me not want to be a director. It just made me realize I needed to learn more. And then I started to feel like I was more ready and I was like, I need to make some stuff. So first thing was I did a comedy central special and I took the money that would have been my salary and I use it to make a 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 want to do something different. So I wrote this song and I performed it and I made a music video. And that was the kind of the first thing I directed. I just used the crew that was already working on the special and shot this video with them.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “On the wire in its last season. Yeah, and just got to just be on the other side of a process that can be relatively opaque when you're an actor. You just kind of show up and say your lines and leave. And then I started making shorts. And I guess this is going to sound very glib, but because I'm sure I have resources available to me that lots of people don't. I do believe in it. Like I just believe in personal aggression. Like I just believe in doing stuff.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “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 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 someone to create that experience for other people. And I just realized like I didn't know what directing entailed. I didn't have any idea about what that was going to be like. And I just went away and started trying to learn about directing. And so I kind of would call people that I knew that were directors. If I was working on something, I would ask to come back to set when I wasn't working so I could hang out and shadow, which is where you just kind of hang around behind a director and watch them work. And ended up shadowing with some really incredible people. I ended up spending several days.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “It is tough. So that's a really good question because I feel like there's the really humiliating kind of clam about, you know, well, I'm an actor, but what I really want to do is direct. And it feels very cliched. I feel like it was more organic for me because again, I wasn't someone who kind of, I didn't go to film school. And I also don't think I had the huge.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “You have to please yourself. I mean, you just have to please yourself, period. Because I might not go your way anyway. But the worst thing is creating something to figure out what people want and then creating some piece of shit, some like crass, you know, glib, solicitous piece of shit. And people don't buy it anyway. Why not make something you love and then people don't buy it? At least it was something that you loved and you're not embarrassed by it.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

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

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “So, it's really interesting also because I think if you're an artist specifically, this is a really important conversation to have with yourself, which is like when I first started out at stand-up, you know, this was like kind of the period when like DEF comedy jam was really popular. And for lack of a better way of articulating, like black comedy had a very specific look and feel and style and tempo. And I just wasn't doing that kind of comedy. And I wasn't ever going to be able to do that kind of comedy. It wasn't who I was. It wasn't experientially what I was doing. 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. They'd kind of be one way offstage 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.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “Your thing because go find something that's your thing their opinion is valuable to you. Like, I think there's a freedom in saying, I don't need everybody to like me. I think that 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 going to get back, which I totally.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “To realize how little you know and how the only way to learn is to constantly be like skinning your knees and that that doesn't go away. Like the older you get, the more you know that you know very little and that you cannot learn if you are constantly trying to maintain a posture of perfection. That's why I'm a total mess.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “That's so good. And that's so interesting to me. And it's different than just being a slob. What you're saying is I refuse to create a box within which I will be kept by others. I think that comes also from a curiosity about the world. I actually think that people are trying to remain perfect all the time, are fear driven. That's not a position of strength. People think they're maintaining position of strength when they're trying to maintain an appearance of perfection, but that is by its very nature a posture of fear, which is I cannot be seen to have imperfections. I cannot be seen to have flaws. There can be no chinks in my armor. And I'm terrified of being judged. But there is something very liberating, and I think it comes from age as well and from experience. I don't mean experience like resume, but like just having experiences.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “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 and things that are bullshit. But I think that people are working very hard to make it harder for the rest of us to distinguish between the two. 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 are just more critical thinkers, but it's hard to be a critical thinker when you're just scrolling through your Instagram feed looking at like butts and cupcakes all day long.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “Right. Also, it's interesting when I went to school, we had the honor system and you were just expected to hold yourself to a high standard because that was what was right. It's what you did. You know what I mean? You just, you were going to be called upon to stand behind your work. And so you tried to work very hard to make sure that you could defend it. I don't think that it's like we're any less ethical than we've ever been. It's just like you said our metrics have changed. And I think that people value fame for fame's sake rather than for the foundational reasons that people become famous. And I think that's the problem. And I don't think it just exists in journalism. I think that people value infamy. They can't distinguish between fame and infamy. And, you know, with a 24-hour news cycle, like the bright burst is as meaningful as a slow burn. I actually don't really know what we do or what should be done or what should happen to counteract that other than people start to maybe”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “Writers too, probably for writers. It's like I'm going to find a space that really says something about my accumulated understanding and knowledge of the world. And it's not just enough to say something. Like I need to say something that's uniquely mine, something you can only do by being prolific because you need to be able to let things go in order to figure out what should stay”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “When you're a baby comic, every joke is meaningful to you because you only have like eight jokes, right? And so even if they're stupid or juvenile or unsophisticated or valueless or coreless, you'll still do them because that's all you have. And then as you get older, you start to think, okay, like I want to have a body of work here. Does this hang together? Does it have a strong point of view? Does it have an identity? And then those other jokes start to fall away. And then the material really becomes about trying to 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?”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

27. “True and apocrypha at the same time on this legal lie notebook, this tiny handwriting, he would just write and write and write and write. I do not do that. I've never worked that way. I just get on stage. I try a bunch of stuff. I keep what works. I know what works. I already know right away what works. I'll run off stage. I'll write down the things that I knew hit. I'll write down the things I know didn't hit. And then I'll go back and try it again dropping the stuff that wasn't good and putting new stuff in. I record my sets, but I never, I cannot listen to my own voice. So I have hours and hours of material on tape that I just have never listened to. So I don't know why I still engage in that behavior when it's clearly not useful to me. I think the more you do it, the more you intuitively understand, oh, this is a rich area people are connecting with this, this other stuff. There's also something you learn as you move through comedy, which is it's not just important to get a laugh. Does this material say something specific and personal about me?”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “Then pass through, you're starting to draw things out too long, but two doesn't give people enough of a time to get balled into a false sense of security before you kind of pull the rug out from under them. As soon as you start explaining the math of comedy, like none of it makes any sense. You know what I mean? Like it's those two things. You know, someone who's really gifted at physics, they know that there are rules, but still they see things that other people can't see. They see the world as numbers and data and the rest of us are just like table, chair, water sex. I guess the way that I did it was that I'm also really an undisciplined comedian. And what I mean is like there's a documentary about Gary Chandling 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 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 legal, this is probably.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

29. “Probably won't even be able to articulate it properly. It's just that if you're going to do a series of jokes or a series of builds to a punchline, it needs to be three. And also, if you're going to do any kind of a diversion, if you're going to lead people in one direction and then snap around to a different kind of absurdist result, you can't do that in two. It has to be, the pace of it has to be three.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

30. “If they have this ephemeral, ineffable kind of understanding of the math of comedy, they're going to be able to do something magical with those skills. So for me, I don't know that I thought I was a funny kid, but I was an observer. And I was really nerdy and a little bit of a social pariah. So storytelling came a way to make friends. You know what I mean? 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 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 are definitely people who can say, oh, you know, there's a total methodology to comedy. The rule of threes and, you know, stretching reality to the point of breaking but not past it. I mean, there are, you know, some specific kind of rules.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

31. “It's interesting, 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 even a different way, I really wanted to be an engineer and I could have really suffered and struggled through like the elevated math. I would need to become an engineer, but it would never be effortless for me. And I think with comedy, there are people who very workmanlike can learn how to do comedy. And then there's some people who are just naturally comedic, and they still have to work to be better at it. You say Bolt still has to train, even though he was born with more fast switch muscles 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 and they can be that guy's naturally funny. There's still a methodology and there's still a mathematics to becoming a comic. And then at the same time,”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

32. “Audience had disappeared, and it was just straight vignette on this guy's like sour puss face. And it was just wrecking my whole night. And I finally just said, if you don't want to be here, just fucking go, man. I'll give you your money back. I cannot look at your face for one more minute. And I meant it. It wasn't even a joke. 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 riddance to bad rubbish. And he, you know, he went on and the rest of the people enjoyed their night. So again, that was me. That was my, you know, I should have been disciplined enough not to be distracted by, you know, old sour puss. 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.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

33. “I think that I kept saying thank you. That's super sweet. Shut the fuck up. Like, you know, clearly you weren't hugged enough as a child. I mean, I just eventually got mean because it was just like, I couldn't get this woman to stop talking. And I think the people around her got embarrassed and they eventually kind of shut her up, which was nice. And I don't think there are any other really good hecklers that, oh, I had one guy. It's a mental discipline too, because, you know, like, again, like it's your show. You have the microphone. You're in control. You know, I think the audience thinks they're in control, but they're not. I mean, the Bilber scenario is a perfect example. The person with the microphone has all the power. As long as it cannot be moved, they will eventually win. But I had this one guy who was sitting like really close to the stage. It was like a group of 12 people and they were all laughing their asses off. And then he was just arms crossed to look like he just had just eaten a big scoop of fecal matter. And he was all I could see. Like, you know what I mean? Like the whole...”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

34. “I love you. I had this one girl at one show in San Francisco just so drunk. I'm just cross eyed. And for the 90 minutes I was on stage, I love you. I love you so much. And I was just like, lady, all you are doing is making me want to hit you in the head.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

35. “With jokes. I don't eat, I don't have a box jumper in my act, right? I showed up ready to go. When people are affectionate, you can't insult them. They're the most unmanageable kind of happiness.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

36. “It was like a bee in my ear. And as a result, I just seemed insane. You know what I mean? Stopping to yell at this person that no one could hear. It looks like I'm great town. 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. But no one could hear what she was saying. Nice lady in the front trying to throw the night. And it really, I remember that really went off the rails last night. And I generally have a rule of heckler's that unless they're really disruptive to the entire room, I just never address them. Because what you do is, again, you've derailed a show for 500 or 1,000 people to deal with one person. And everyone's never going to really understand what's going on unless that person's so loud that they've affected everybody else's enjoyment of the night. But sometimes the affectionate hecklers are the worst because typically hecklers just want to be a part of the show. And so, you know, they say something, you slam them a little bit, they shut up because they think they're helping you out. The famous line is they'll come up and be like, hey, you like how I helped you out? I'm like, buddy, I can't.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

37. “I started doing stand up like 25 years ago. So at this point, all the sets have just kind of blended. And heckling can be lots of different things. It doesn't always have to be like the conventional kind of, you suck, heckle. One time where this woman, and this kind of dovetails perfectly with the old like, don't turn the audience against you, where this woman was talking to me, she was sitting 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.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

38. “It was straight prison yard dynamics, right? Like nobody's the line from out of sight, right? Just like the yard. Nobody backing down. Nobody's backing down. And he just, you know, I think there was like a thousand of them to one of, probably like 10,000 of them to one of him. And he just did not back down. So he got the slowest spec clap at the end of the show.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

39. “It is a hairpin turn from them being like, yeah, shut up. You know, the comics like, hey, you know, people can't enjoy the show because you're talking, keep it down. And then he hits this guy in the whole audience, just turns on him, just like instantaneous, like Frankenstein's monster mob, just the pitchforks come flying out. And so one of the unwritten rules of comedy is that, you know, you just don't, you want to try to at all costs, avoid turning everybody against you, which, so Bill broke a bunch of rules, but he just, he never gave up, which I think it becomes this, you know, it's like the rudy moment at the end of the movie, like, man, that sucked, but you should suck in there.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

40. “Like, if people hate you, there are like these unwritten rules of comedy. And one of them is 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 going to say. There's another very famous video, very famous, and it happened at the punchline in San Francisco, where there's a guy playing music 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. Everybody lives. But what happens is up until that beat, the whole audience has been on the comedian side against this guy.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

41. “Really delicious. And I think if you watch the Bill Burr video, you'll also see that he starts to really enjoy it. It starts to be like the savory masochism towards the end where he's so powerful in his lack of caring. You watch it and it is to be studied because he goes from kind of anguish to rage to this kind of delightful detachment by the end of the set. And I've seen some other guys do similar stuff and it's always really fun to watch.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

42. “Exactly. He says something really outrageous. Like, I hope your mother gets cancer in the center of her asshole. Seven minutes. It's just so, it's so, it's just a demonstration of tenacity 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 Lightbeard and Chicken Wings. But no one, 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 had material to do and I did it. And I think I remember thinking almost immediately, well, okay, I'm not going to get any laugh. So I'm just going to kind of like listen to this set and see what it feels like, see what the words feel like, see what might play in front of actual people. But it started to get.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

43. “Everybody's been, you know, everybody likes busted out there like marijuana brownie recipe for the year. They're all completely looped. One of their eyes is completely dilated and the other one is like falling out of their head. Nobody cares about your jokes about your mom and your family. They could not muster compassion if they tried. So he starts doing stand up and it just immediately starts getting booed. And it's just this tidal wave of disdain. He knows if he doesn't finish, he will not get paid. But it's not like it's like silence you can tolerate, right? But like people are screaming at him to get off stage. And he makes it very clear to the audience. You have to watch it because I'll never be able to do it justice, but he makes it very clear to the audience that he is not leaving the stage until he does his 10 minutes, that he does not care how they feel about him. And he's counting down the minute.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

44. “It's amazing, right? It's insane. So he was doing one of those big radio, you know, those radio station concerts, like the jingle ball or whatever. And I don't remember it was called the Weenie Rose. I think it was the Weenie Roast. So it's one of the shows that some local station, K-Rock, 97. K-Rock, you know, like one of those shows. And it's, I don't know.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

45. “Well, one thing comedians love is agony. I mean, we dine out on it as definitely like our stock and trade. So a comedian very quickly transitions from, oh my God, this is the worst night of my life to, oh my God, this is going to make a great story. That happens almost instantaneously. So we have a little bit of, we have some armor in that regard because we could wake up like naked and shivering on the side of the road with like no money and no phone and not speak the local language and you'd be thinking, okay, if I live, this is going to make a killer story. So I think in the moment, I just thought I had watched a couple other people go up and not do very well either. I was prepared for it not going my way. And I think also there's a disciplined accomedy that if you're not a comedian, you can't understand, which is that you've got to get up and do your set. You don't get to tap out. Like tapping out is true failure. 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.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

46. “Just like 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 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, 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.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

47. “And comics know with these open mics, with these local open mics, that typically there are no actual audience members in the audience. It is just a room full of comedians waiting for you to be done so that they can try out their material, all of them looking at their notebooks, not listening, not laughing. And you're just kind of trying to gut it out and pause where you think the laughter might occur if you were in front of actual human beings. And I just did a set where I just, I did not get one laugh. And I remember not even like a cursory titter. And I remember.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

48. “Oh god, I bombed so many times. It's just it all seeps together into an inky blackness. Any comic could tell you that they've 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 and they're like, follow that bitches and they drop the bike. You know what I mean? They go off into shots of their friends. I mean, you really need to bomb and bomb hard to get funny. I remember doing this one show, oh God. So there was an open mic in a laundromat south of market around the police station there. So what maybe like, you know, eighth and mission or something like that for people in San Francisco. I think it was called Brainwash. I think the place was called Brainwash. And they would have this open mic in the back of this laundromat.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

49. “Knows where Turlock or Fubars or Rooster Tea feathers or one of these other places. Yeah. It's different than being an author or an athlete or even a musician because There's an autonomy to comedy, absolutely, but you need other people. You can't do it. It can't just sit around your place practicing. You know what I mean? Like with music, you know if you're sharper flat, you know if you hit all the notes, you know if the tempo is right but with comedy the only way it works is in front of an audience and so you're very dependent on stage time and it's everything when you're a young comic is stage time”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

50. “Was the punchline and there was Cobbs, and those are still the only two clubs, and maybe there's some minor clubs that have sprung up since then. But, 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 20 other guys trying to get on as well. And it would be wildly competitive. And you wouldn't be getting paid. And then you'd be super anxious because you'd be hoping, okay, I need to go up and I need to destroy because I want this club owner to hire me again. So I can't work out. I can't fail in front of this guy because he won't see this when you watch like an Olympic skater during practice and they're falling. That's what practice is for. Practice is for like finding your weak spots and reinforcing them. But when you're up in front of a comedy club owner and it's been six months that you've been trying to get out on this club and you finally get five minutes, it's got to be a monster five minutes. There was just no way to improve.”

    2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT