YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew McConaughey

lines on the record: 133
first: 2024-07-24
most recent: 2024-07-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It became unsustainable. So they started to contract because of market saturation, the economy started to contract in the 80s, and people could watch comedy on TV, the proliferation of comedy on television affected people going out to see it in a club. So there were like kind of those three factors all kind of intersecting. And when it happened, it was really aggressive. Like I said, I think there were maybe like five or six comedy clubs in San Francisco when I was in high school. And then by the time I was doing stand up in my 20s, there were two. And, you know, and they were attracting Cayenne peak talent. So, for example, this club's still there. It's called the Punchline. Punchline. I've been there for a while.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you couple that with this explosion in comedy clubs, which were a relatively new phenomenon. I mean, when Joan Rivers was doing a stand-up, she was doing standup in strip clubs. There were very few comedy clubs. And comedy was kind of a part of a vaudeville approach. So you'd hire a singer and then you'd hire a comic, but there wasn't, there weren't places dedicated to comedy. So these comedy clubs opened. It was really easy 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'd have huge margins on your booze. So these comedy clubs started proliferating. And then there was just peak clubs. Saturated.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. 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 TV and you think, and honestly, when, ha, the precursor to Comedy Central started, they needed comics and they needed opportunities. They needed clubs. They needed content.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was three factors. One factor was just there was just a glut. Live comedy in some ways in the 70s and 80s was kind of a new thing. And it's not like people hadn't been doing a standup 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 70s and 80s? Maybe because that was the period where there were these superstar comics that were I'm trying to think of who would have been really popular besides like Bill Hicks and”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The club committee was contracting, and some of the big clubs in San Francisco were closing. I think at one point there were maybe like five or six active clubs. And then by the time I was working consistently, there were only two. And there was just a lot of competition for stage time. And to get good at comedy, you can't just do it like once a weekend. You know, you need to be on stage like every night. It's like being a high diver. You know what? It's literally like Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours. And you're not going to get 10,000 hours to stand up hanging out in San Francisco. Like you have to go everywhere and take every single opportunity to be on stage that you can get. So 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 100 other people trying to get those same six minutes. So it was really competitive. The culture, I think, was pretty supportive. Like communities were supportive.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's far. San Francisco has 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. It was like where the alts comedy movement happened. And, you know, Mark Marin and Janine Garofflo and these kind of alternative comics, Brian Pussain, came out of. And it was a comedy town. But when I started doing comedy, it was like the beginning of the contraction of the comedy economy. So there was a period of time when there were just hundreds of comedy clubs everywhere and you could make a living doing stand-up. You could kind of go from place to place and you could get a gig and you could get paid. And I started doing standup at the beginning of the end of the comedy bubble. So when I started doing standup,”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's right there. It's not a big city, even though I think when you live there, it feels like it's an intimate place. It's an intimate place.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it gives you a freedom. People think it traps them, but I think it gives you this incredible freedom to just pursue art for art's sake and let a job pay for it and do it for so long that everything you do is just for joy. And it changes the way that you approach your art. You know, I would like and I'd go to work at like seven and I six or seven in the morning and I work until four and then I jump in the car and I drive two hours to Sacramento to do a set and I come back at midnight. I do it all over again. But I could do that and then it was just purely about the experience of performing and not about whether I was getting paid or not. So I did that for a long time before I finally quit my job.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do for fun. I kept my day job 100%, and I kept for a long time. I also didn't want to be like one of these kind of like Miserable, you know, sweating stand ups or like gripping their inky notebook and sleeping on their buddy's couch. I was in a relationship and I had a job that paid great and I could make flyers for my shows at work. I was embezzling a copy paper and push pins as aggressively as I could. So I was and I still am of the opinion that like you should absolutely keep your day job, which I know is not in the most popular.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so funny because, like, I don't think I even realized that Sin of Comedy was a job, you know. 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 Bill Hicks. I remember seeing live on the Sunset Strip when I was a kid. I just thought Richard Pryor was an alien. You know what I mean? Like a magical person who came down to do this thing. It just, the idea that that was like a vocation was just not in my head. So I remember seeing 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. I just remember everything hurt from laughing. My face and my stomach. And I just never experienced live comedy before. It didn't dovetail into like a job at first. It was just something I was going to do.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I'm a problem solver. I'm a matrix builder. I was like, well, how can I solve this problem right now? And I looked at all the ways that I could get on stage and Sandup Comedy was the only thing I didn't need to know anyone for, have an agent or a band or connections. I could just do stand up right away. And so I started studying it and watching the precursor to Comedy Central, which was this network called Ha, a very short-lived network, 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 it was just transformational. I was like, oh, 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
“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 allow 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.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was always doing kind of like performing things on the side. Like I went to a high school that had a performing arts kind of magnet or like a pocket school within the regular school called the Judine McIntyre School, the Arts. So I was kind of doing my regular classwork and then doing like improvin stuff and sketch on the side. And then I went to Dartmouth and I was doing some of the same stuff. Like, you know, I was in one of those infernal Ivy League a cappella groups that have been popularized since then by shows like Lee. So it 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 into parks and underserved neighborhoods that didn't have any outdoor space for kids to play. And it was like the mission was great because it wasn't just kind of conservation of conservation's sake. It was like conservation focused on engaging underserved communities and it was the grooviest. And I was just...”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The math class, I did fine, like I applied myself and I got a good grade. And then I went into my introduction to engineering three. And it was about 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.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In high school, so interesting because I was like super academic and I think I thought I'd be an attorney. You know, I was like a big activist and I organized and marched and did all that stuff and I was like in the outing club and I rock climbed and all that stuff. So I thought I was going to be like an environmental lawyer, either an environmental lawyer or an environmental engineer. I really wanted to go to a school that was like really grounded in a relationship to nature. So I was applying to like Marlborough College and Reed and Bard and these schools that were like out in the woods. I ended up going to Dartmouth, which is, you know, in New Hampshire and has this big land grant around it. And I thought I would be an environmental engineer. And I think I just took like the first prerequisite math course for engineering. And I was like, yeah, okay, this is not going to be, this is not, 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 think I've got the...”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 going to sleep with the hot person they want. Everybody is experiencing the same failures, these 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 potential for being special. There's nothing anybody's doing now that hasn't already been done that won't be done in the future. Those kinds of personalities drive me crazy because they're so stuck and boring.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their sense of like you need to know what it feels like to fail and then what comes next because what comes next is what did I learn? How can I adjust? How do I pivot? How do I move forward? And just most people don't develop those mental skills. They are 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 going to, how do people move through the planet? How do people move through life without pain? That's a false theory. It can't be done. It just cannot be done. And so people just become incapacitated the first minute they hit any kind of a speed bump in their lives and they don't know how to navigate disappointment. Whereas I was just deeply disappointed throughout my childhood, so I know exactly what it feels like.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was not one of my strong But as I pointed out, it wasn't the result that was important. It was just the effort. So I would ride my bike to camp every day and ride 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. And I think we just raise these. I mean, I know I sound like everybody's mom, but I just feel like we're curating young 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.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This isn't exactly a good example of a disappointment, but it's a perfect example of his attitude. I was going to camp. I must have been about. Eight or nine. No, I'll say nine. And I was going to like Jujitsu Camp. This was still during the free range parenting era where you just got up in the morning and you left at home and you came back later and that stuff was your responsibility. Did you?”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Engagement in your personal goals. Like, if I want to do something, whatever, I don't know, let's pick something really innocuous. Like if I want to hike every day for a month or if I want to start meditating, if I don't dial it, it's not as important to me as not looking back and saying to myself, ah, I should have done it. It's the doing for me that is the reward. And then sometimes things go away and sometimes they don't. But the thing I find most upsetting is regret. Yeah, because that's something I have control over in the sense of like, if you didn't do it, you have nobody to blame but yourself.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't The twisting is that it's an elevated, yes, an elevated form of aggression. I don't know. Like it's hard to say like I'm nailing it. That's not how I feel, but I do think that attitude of, and I wrote about a lot about it in my book, like the idea that my parents raised me to be brave and in some ways maybe too brave, but the result has been. Like a relentlessness and in the pursuit of the things that are important to me. And that's not the same as like, I'm winning. I don't really think about things that way, but it's just if I want to do something that I do it and I don't really worry too much about whether it's going to go my way, not because I expect it to go my way, but because it doesn't matter if it goes my way, because it's the engagement that's most meaningful to me. It's the effort.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wrong, and this is definitely sustained until I was an adult Just get up and I keep going, and that was because my father was raised, he lost his father, he was very, very young. He's raised by a single mother and tumble down Pittsburgh with the very few opportunities for a black man at that time. And he just never felt sorry for himself. He was just like, look, I can complain about the situation or I can just keep moving. So I think I've been nurtured in that way as well, which is the world is unfair. It's shot through with assholes. I still have to get up in the morning and make a life for myself. So it's probably a combination of those two things.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think about that a lot because I think that my attitude or my point of view about things is half biochemistry and half child rearing. My father is just like a preternaturally optimistic person. It's extraordinary. I always make this joke that if my father's house was on fire, he would get a stick in marshmallows. Like he just cannot be deterred. I've never seen it. He's just never down. And so I think that I inherited that maybe it's attitudinal. I think I just probably make the chemicals in my brain that kind of keep me typically upbeat. You know what I mean? And I think it's important because I think a lot of times when people, if they have a hard time seeing the world positively or if they're struggling with depression, people 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 that. He just did not feel sorry for me. And I was not allowed to feel sorry for myself. And so when things went”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 connection's really deep. So I can't, I don't ever remember kind of sitting up at night feeling any kind of agony about the fact that my parents were divorcing. I did watch them try very hard to stay together. 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 this a go. When they decide when they decide it was over, I was like, okay, I don't ever remember it being like a point of agony. Just things changed, you know, and maybe as a result, I tolerate change better than I would otherwise. Or maybe I even crave change. I don't know.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it's interesting because I think it was more the second for me, like, it just was what was happening. And I don't ever remember struggling in any grand way with the way that things were going. Look, maybe that's my nature. I know my parents worked very hard to be loving and available to both of us. And I had lots of access to my mother and I talked to her all the time and I called her for advice. 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, and at least when we were younger, was my sister and I, we weren't super close, but, 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,”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a single father and relatively young, so maybe there were a few boundaries of propriety that he danced along. But he just encouraged me to be aggressive. He was one of those, I think it's very hard for single parents, period. And I think it's very hard for fathers.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, my father is the king of the very terse and pointed motivational speech. So I would leave for school in the morning and I grew up in San Francisco and at one point we lived upstairs in a Victorian. So I'd go down these very steep stairs and he'd lean over the railing and he'd go, whose day is it? I'd have to say, it's my day. And then he'd say, what are you going to do? And I'd have to say, grab it by the balls. Then, what are you going to do? And I'd have to say and twist and twist. The door, but you know, it's funny because it was like my dad was just, he was such a great dad. He was a really indian. Guy, but you know, I mean”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was raised at my parents' divorce when I was 10, and my father, my parents, you know, I always joke that, you know, it's only rich people that can afford to fight about custody. You know what I mean? 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 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?”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some point in their lives, maybe multiple times, because I just think it's instructive, I think people don't start because they're afraid they're going to fail. And there's just no way around the path to success is through failure. You just can't get around it.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, a way of initiating a conversation about risk and failure because I feel like people see people who are successful and assume that a part of that success or the reason that that success is that they haven't made any mistakes and they haven't failed, that they've got a charmed life in some way, or they figured some kind of formula out. And the most successful people are people who don't just manage risk, but engage in risk and court failure actively. So I always love to have people listening see that some of that they admire and that they think is really accomplished has really shit the bed.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. I mean, that came, the name for that book came from this part of my show Self Inflicted Wounds, which is, you know, tell me a story about something that's gone wrong in your life. That's your own fault. You know, you can't blame anyone else, not your ex, not the bullies in your school, not the man. You know, you did it to yourself. And it was.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So thrilling to hear and really, really gratifying. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I think podcasts are wonderful and terrible beasts, but like really satisfying, 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.”
2024-07-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #757: Matthew McConaughey and Aisha Tyler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT