Comedian Joe Rogan opens up about why he started keeping a journal and why he thinks it s important to keep track of your thoughts and feelings in order to stay on track in life and in comedy. He also talks about the importance of journaling and how it can help you stay on top of your game when things don t go your way. Joe also discusses how he keeps track of his highs and lows of his life and how he uses it as a tool to help him recalibrate and find his "frenemy" in life. Joe also shares some of the things he's learned about himself that have helped him become the best version of himself and how they've helped him stay on the right track in comedy and in his life as an actor and as a person. Joe is a stand-up comic, actor, comedian, writer, and podcaster. He is also the author of a new memoir, and is the host of the show on Comedy Central's . The Joe Rogans Experience. Check it out! The Experience is a podcast by day and podcast by night, all day! All day long! all day, all the time! Check out the show on social media to see what he's up to and what he s up to at night! You can find him on Insta: , Insta , and his book on Instagaming Instapod Instafam or Instacademy Instar Instare Instago Instablogic Instanagram Instagram: . Insta/ Insta? Instarcade Instaic Instae? Instacode? Instagami? Insta! Insta. Instajare? Instago? Instafare? INSTA? Instare! Instagare? Or Instagore? Instapacode Instaffe? Instaic? Instanacare? or Instagode? or Instacore? And so much more! Instative? We re a friend of the show and a fan of the podcast and a fellow comedian? ? We ll be sure to keep you up to date with the latest in the latest and the latest? and the most relatable guy in the game? You ll get the latest updates on what s going on?
00:02:35.000You know, so many times we dissect failure and hardships, but we don't dissect success.
00:02:41.000And going back in those journals, I found that there were times when I got in a rut later and I was able to go back to those journals and go, what were your habits when you were rolling, man?
00:05:03.000I mean, the other thing that I didn't tell you was to book in the day before I say my prayers at night, to go through the day, which I don't know about you, but it can be hard to remember what you had for breakfast after dinner when you're going to bed.
00:05:16.000It can be hard to remember what those first things we did in the day.
00:06:08.000The longer the list, the more things I can mark off that day, the more I feel like I accomplished and the more it makes it kind of easy to do the hard stuff.
00:06:15.000I do that with some things that I have to do, like exercise and writing.
00:06:22.000But it seems like you're very meticulous with this.
00:06:26.000I go through hot streaks and cold streaks on it.
00:06:28.000I do it more times than others, but I've found that those are the common denominators of some of the things I do when I am the most happy.
00:06:35.000I'm not a big meditator, but my exercise, what I call breaking a sweat once a day, exercising, I find for me that is necessary because it puts a demarcation between all of my responsibilities.
00:06:48.000And I can sometimes look up, you know how it is, Sometimes you go through the day or days and you're so busy.
00:06:55.000And I'm good on autopilot at getting stuff done.
00:06:57.000But everything you have to do, stress comes when those responsibilities feel like they're stacked vertically on our shoulders.
00:07:05.000And there's a proverbial weight on our shoulders.
00:07:08.000When I go break a sweat, all of a sudden all those things that were stacked vertically on my shoulders, my responsibilities, lay down and they're laterally out in front of me.
00:07:16.000So there's no more weight on my shoulder.
00:07:18.000And I find that I get those things done better.
00:07:20.000And with more enjoyment, if I just go, oh, there they are in front of you.
00:07:24.000Just handle one, then hop to the next one and handle that.
00:07:26.000Then hop to the next one and handle that.
00:07:27.000I handle it much more better, but I see demarcations between my responsibilities if I go break a sweat.
00:07:35.000Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that.
00:07:37.000I think there's a biological need for that when human beings are under pressure.
00:07:41.000Because I think the way our bodies are set up, pressure historically, genetically meant your life was in danger.
00:08:29.000And I love hearing people like yourself, successful people that have thought about a lot of the various aspects of what's good and bad about their life express that.
00:08:40.000Because I think everyone needs to hear it.
00:08:43.000It's just we need to hear it from enough people so that it just becomes ingrained in everyone's head.
00:10:35.000I love hard work, but I've got many times in my life where I'm doing the wrong kind of work.
00:10:39.000I love the kind of work where I've accomplished what I needed to do during the day, and I lay my head on the pillow, and I'm exhausted because I got done what I needed to get done as best I could.
00:10:48.000I do not like the exhaustion at the end of the day where I'm like, Man, I feel like I was just going to revolutions, man.
00:10:54.000I don't know if today had any ascension to it.
00:11:09.000The only thing I get good out of those shitty days is a desire to never have those shitty days again.
00:11:14.000I think the good aspects of negative feelings is recognizing how good positive feelings are, how good the feelings of accomplishment are by failing.
00:11:24.000That's why we're talking about no stress, just live in peace.
00:12:28.000Things I did not do growing up, going like, no, that'd be a lot of fun, but not so much, not more fun Then how much it's going to suck if I get caught.
00:12:40.000Physical consequences, it's a very controversial subject because a lot of people think, I don't hit my kids, but a lot of people that I know who are my age were hit when they were young and they look back on it and they say, you know what?
00:12:54.000I learned from that and my parents didn't beat me.
00:12:59.000They physically punished me for something that I did wrong and they didn't do it to be sadistic.
00:13:05.000They did it because they cared about me and that's how they were raised.
00:13:09.000It's a very controversial subject because people get up in arms with the idea of hitting children.
00:13:14.000So you bringing it up that it was beneficial to you is going to have a lot of people's hackles raised.
00:13:21.000And I get asked all the time and I've shared it openly how I was raised and what kind of corporal punishment we got.
00:13:27.000I don't choose to discipline my children the same way my parents did.
00:13:33.000But I've said this before, I wouldn't trade one single of those ass whoopings I got for the values that were instilled in me from getting them.
00:13:41.000And I'm very clear and was at the time that I earned every one I got.
00:13:50.000And we were a family, you know, my parents were like, we get it over with, and over, take it, and it's over.
00:13:57.000And we don't hold grudges, no one's going to speak of it again.
00:13:59.000And if you got in trouble, that was the night Dad would take us across town to our favorite burger joint and let us stay up as late as we wanted.
00:14:15.000You could not go to sleep in our family holding a grudge.
00:14:18.000My parents would stay up all night and let you miss school to sit there and keep passion out until we could hug it out, cry it out, and say I love you and move on.
00:14:46.000Like I said, I don't choose to discipline my kids the way my parents discipline me, but I damn sure don't judge them or say what they did was wrong.
00:14:56.000They came from a different era as well, right?
00:14:58.000Yeah, they came from a different era, yeah.
00:15:00.000That's the thing that is very difficult for people to come to grips with.
00:15:05.000Human beings that were raised 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, it was a different world.
00:16:04.000Is some of it almost like Like letters to your younger self, like a lesson to people who are like you coming up.
00:16:15.000Because one of the things that's so beneficial to young people with reading autobiographies and memoirs of successful people who've lived extraordinary lives is you get to see all the thought process.
00:16:46.000And maybe I can one day achieve heights like him as well.
00:16:52.000Or maybe I read this book and I'm someone who feels like You know, as we often do when we're going through a crisis, that we're the only ones.
00:17:06.000And you can read and go, well, here's a guy who's successful, who, shoot, I even maybe thought he just kind of rolls out of bed and makes everything look easy, which you find out.
00:17:35.000McConaughey handled it or wished he would have handled it or here's some help he got along the way.
00:17:39.000Here's somewhere where he took a walkabout with himself and found out some things about himself.
00:17:44.000Maybe that's something I could do for myself.
00:17:46.000So there are some tools in the book for someone to seed themselves in and help navigate our way out of crisis, red and yellow lights, but also how to navigate things when we are catching green lights because I have a chapter here called The Art of Running Downhill.
00:18:03.000I've self-sabotaged myself when things were going too well before until I learned that that really wasn't my right to put a roof over my expectations for myself and who the hell did I think I was?
00:18:14.000Well, that's more common than not, isn't it?
00:18:16.000People get what they call imposter syndrome.
00:18:21.000You don't feel like you deserve all the good things that are happening to you.
00:18:33.000But when it's happening to you, it's almost like this is uncomfortable because this is not normal, and so I'm going to fuck this up so that I feel like I used to feel before, which at least, even if it was failure, it's comfortable.
00:19:27.000The world will do unto you or you'll do it unto yourself.
00:19:29.000So don't trip yourself running downhill and face plant and break your frickin' nose just because you needed some resistance running downhill.
00:19:40.000To go to the first part of that, I'm a big fan of creating resistance to keep myself in check and to make sure that I'm feeling most alive to overcome the right things in my life.
00:19:53.000I find physical resistance is the best thing to calm my mind and to provide physical challenges that allow me to deal with success easier.
00:20:05.000Because there's bullshit that I have to deal with, but the bullshit is physical.
00:20:10.000It's sometimes challenging mentally to do very physically exerting exercises, particularly jujitsu or martial arts, because it just breaks you down.
00:20:20.000The other stuff that seems like it should be complicated, but it's not, you don't know why, you don't sweat it as much.
00:20:30.000And it sobers you up in a very literal way.
00:20:33.000In the same way, it's a daily routine to sober yourself up, to throw off the mendacious bullshit in your life that you were so concerned about and get down to what really needs to happen.
00:21:11.000And I remember when he moved on, I carved this in a tree, be less impressed, more involved.
00:21:18.000And what it was, as soon as he passed away, I noticed that all the things that I was revering in life Mortally, like the fame, people, success, money.
00:21:29.000They lowered down to high level things that I was looking up at.
00:21:33.000And all the things that I was patronizing and condescending and going, oh, sloughing off, that's not worthy of me.
00:21:51.000And I stood with my heart higher, I stood with my head higher, and I walked forward and started doing things in that way that I was saying earlier, without asking so much permission all the time, and got a lot more done and became a lot more myself and found more satisfaction.
00:22:03.000Yeah, sometimes people do need some wake-up call to let you know that this is a temporary existence.
00:24:07.000But I, along with you, I'm almost always optimistic.
00:24:12.000And I have a lot of faith in human beings and I think that we can get through this and have a very valuable lesson about when things do happen that are positive and good, maybe we won't take it for granted as much as we did before.
00:24:25.000Because we never thought that something like this was ever going to come along where the whole world was going to shut down for 7, 8, 9, 10, who knows how many months.
00:26:08.000The half the glass has got nothing in it or the half that's got something in it?
00:26:11.000Well, I think what I can do is, with the half that's got something in it, make something, irrigate something, create more water so I can fill it up.
00:26:17.000I mean, it's choosing where can we be constructive.
00:26:21.000Choose the affirmative, and that's not a foolish optimism because a lot of times I think certain optimisms, Hallmark card optimisms, can almost deny that there was the other half of glass that was empty or deny there's a problem.
00:26:34.000And I'm not really a purchaser of denying where there's a problem.
00:26:41.000You've got what I call whiskey philosopher wisdom.
00:26:47.000Like, if you and I were having a couple of drinks at the bar, I have a feeling you would say some cool shit that I would remember and I would take home and I'd go, hmm, I'd be like lying in bed going, I'm going to remember that.
00:27:38.000Or you just sort of slowly developed it?
00:27:41.000I think I'm guessing it was slowly developed.
00:27:44.000I mean, again, I come from a family of storytellers where we sat around the table and told stories.
00:27:48.000And if you didn't tell your story good, somebody else at the table took it over.
00:27:52.000And you better be telling a good story and not dragging on or losing your train of thought because somebody else will step in and roll over you.
00:27:59.000So when you wanted to get a word in, you better be a good storyteller.
00:30:23.000It's totally understandable that it would fall into some form of self-sabotage if it came that easy.
00:30:30.000If all of a sudden you're on Dazed and Confused, all of a sudden you do your first two auditions, you get the gig, everything's rolling, you're young and handsome.
00:33:03.000I was forced to be with myself and my thoughts in my own company, which I was not enjoying.
00:33:08.000So after about 12 days of shaking the monkeys off my back, figuring out what the hell I was going to forgive myself for and what I was going to lay down the hammer and say enough's enough about, I came out of it, woke up one morning light as a feather and shook hands with myself and said, we're going to be all right,
00:33:24.000You're the one person I can't get rid of, McConaughey, so we might as well get along and reentered.
00:33:28.000And that recalibration helped a lot to disseminate through all the bullshit and all the excess of affluence that was coming at me at the time.
00:37:56.000Because your son or daughter's future and who they are is depending on how you deal with it.
00:38:02.000I've also seen parents handle it really, really well.
00:38:05.000You're going to work, you have a job to do, if you have a talent to do that, but you still come home and you still do the chores and you're still my son or my daughter who acts just like you do and we don't do any of that BS. Things aren't changing around here.
00:39:57.000If you're playing dress-up every day and you have the option to be whoever the heck you want and, you know, you want to go to the club all night, you can do that too.
00:40:46.000Yeah, I've talked to a few child stars that sort of got, like Miley Cyrus is one that I talked to recently, and you see it in the conversation when she's describing what it was like to grow up famous.
00:41:26.000And, you know, after I won the Oscar for Best Actor, my kids were like, well, what'd you get the trophy for?
00:41:34.000And I said, well, you remember a year and a half ago, we were in New Orleans, Popeye would go away, you'd wake up in the morning, I was already at work, and I'd come home, and have dinner with y'all, and tuck you in, and you wake up the next morning, I was gone again, and remember you said I looked like a giraffe because I was so skinny?
00:41:50.000They're like, yeah, and I go, well, what I was doing for those 30 days when I was gone all day, a year and a half later, somebody said, deemed that excellent work, and they gave me a trophy for that work.
00:42:04.000What I did a year and a half ago, and I remember I saw them click.
00:42:08.000They were like, oh, Oh, our future is a compounding interest, you know what I mean?
00:42:13.000Oh, you can build, you can do something today and get rewarded tomorrow.
00:42:19.000And it was an example that worked for them of understanding, you know, that you can invest and make choices to engineer more ROI. I know that was a milestone for you,
00:42:34.000and obviously you won the Oscar for it, but there's something about these physical transformation roles when an actor does something where you realize, like, they're literally torturing themselves.
00:43:20.000Where I'd have my tapioca pudding or whatever, three egg whites in the morning, five ounce of fish, a cup of vegetables for lunch, five ounce of fish, a cup of vegetables for dinner, as much wine as I wanted to drink, and I lost 2.5 pounds a week like clockwork, no exercise.
00:43:51.000And what happened during that time, and this is another reason that I really didn't torture myself, when people say, oh my gosh, it's been so hard.
00:43:56.000I was like, no, what did I learn from it?
00:43:57.000That the body's more resilient than we give it credit for.
00:44:02.000The power I lost from the neck down, equally or more so, sublimated to the neck up.
00:44:08.000My mental game was so acute and so on point.
00:44:39.000Like, why did your brain work better when you were starving yourself?
00:44:43.000I think because it wasn't relying on it.
00:44:45.000I think on a cellular level, I felt my body going, hey, to use a baseball term, you got people over there on the bench in the dugout, then you got people out in the field that are, you know, sitting in the bullpen not working out.
00:45:00.000On a cellular level, cellularly, My sales that were in the dugout and over there in the bullpen had to get up and go, whoa, we're not getting fed what we used to get fed.
00:47:01.000I'd be sitting there as a kid, and my dad was a big guy, 6'4", 265, played Kentucky under Bear Bryant, got drafted by the Green Bay Packers.
00:49:32.000Yeah, I knew when I got down to 135, I was like, oh, okay, that's good.
00:49:37.000And mind you, I will tell you this, when I started to eat more at 135 to say, let's slow this train down and quit losing weight, my body had already got the message and had its blinders on that we're going south, and it kept going south.
00:49:48.000So that was a bit scary because I kept losing the weight because my body had already gotten in the rhythm of losing weight.
00:49:55.000And like I said, it turned a blind eye on getting any more food.
00:49:58.000So there was a tough transition there for about two weeks to get my weight to balance out again and say, let's just hold at 135. So you dropped below 135 at one point in time?
00:50:08.000Just went below 135, got down about 132 and then brought it back up.
00:50:15.000Now, how long did it take for you to physically recover from something like that?
00:50:24.000I thought that when I saw you in that film, I told my wife, I remember saying this, like, this is going to take a long time for him to bounce back.
00:50:31.000Because I know how hard it is for guys to cut weight for fights.
00:50:34.000And I know a lot of guys that have really depleted their body doing that.
00:50:38.000And when I saw you that gaunt and skinny, I was like, he's eating his body.
00:50:48.000Look, I came back and I did True Detective after that, and I got on True Detective, I got to about 167 and held.
00:50:54.000And I loved that weight as well, because I had a little more leverage, I had a little more athletic ability, I had a little more insulation around my joints, but I was still pretty stripped and ripped.
00:51:04.000Slowly coming back from that, I did learn this.
00:51:07.000I had to come back very slowly because I'd heard stories about people that go, well, now I'm going to gain weight.
00:51:52.000Now that was, I've never talked about at that time, I was still mentally sharp, not as sharp as I was when I was down at 135, but at 220, libido was through the roof.
00:52:05.000I couldn't catch a cold if I swam in the damn canals of Amsterdam, man.
00:53:24.000Yeah, I watched it again recently just to kind of get it into my head, and that's when I was thinking, this is going to take a while to bounce back from.
00:54:33.000But the main thing I look at is this character.
00:54:39.000The last 12 years, I've been able to choose characters that made me shake in my boots the right way.
00:54:45.000You know, that good kind of scared, where you're like, ooh, I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do with this, but I can't wait to find out.
00:54:51.000I like characters where the decisions are really going to cost them, where there's consequences with every single scene that they're in.
00:55:00.000And the favorite consequences to have are something like a Ron Woodruff.
00:55:36.000No one's going to tell me you can't laugh that hard.
00:55:38.000No one's going to tell me you can't hurt that bad.
00:55:41.000I've been enjoying choosing roles that have a really high ceiling and a limitless ceiling and a limitless basement to where I, Matthew, can go as deep or as high as I want to with them.
00:55:52.000There's a lot of roles that I've done in my career, for instance, like with romantic comedies, where those emotions are compressed for a reason.
00:55:59.000The ceiling, you can't laugh that loud.
00:56:09.000I've been enjoying the dramatic roles and that's what I love about drama is that, no, it's to the individual actor.
00:56:15.000Your ceiling of how much you want to love or your basement of how much you want to hate, go for it.
00:56:21.000There is no limit on either one of those.
00:56:24.000That's the kind of role that really has been turning me on.
00:56:27.000And that makes me feel like I'm having an experience in the making of the movie, in the architecture of the character, rather than just going and doing a job and getting a paycheck.
00:56:38.000During the quarantine, the lockdown, my family and I had movie night basically every night.
00:56:43.000Especially when the kids were doing Zoom classes.
00:56:47.000We had to do something different, so we mixed it up.
00:57:06.000Like a movie that gives you a different perspective on the possibilities of contact and just the fact that it was a Carl Sagan book and there's just so much good to it.
00:57:18.000That character that you played was a fascinating guy and I kind of feel like there's some of you in that guy.
00:58:36.000And I never saw those as contradictions.
00:58:38.000And that's part of what the reason I attacked that role and became part of that movie.
00:58:44.000I wanted to play a person that had that point of view of a believer in a world of science.
00:58:50.000Not at the exclusion of science and not at the exclusion of belief.
00:58:54.000Yeah, it's a confusing role for a lot of people if someone is a believer and also a proponent of science, because they want to know what are your literal beliefs.
00:59:06.000Like, are you taking the Bible at its literal word, or do you use it as some sort of a guidebook of the experiences of these people that lived thousands of years ago that have been translated from multiple different languages back to English?
00:59:22.000And is there wisdom in those translations?
00:59:25.000Is there wisdom in those original thoughts, these thousands of years of people contemplating and mulling on these things, and that so many have used these as a scaffolding for morals and ethics and for societies?
01:00:36.000I felt success in my relationships and my relationship with the day, with my career, by following that, by treating others how I wanted to be treated, the golden rule.
01:00:46.000So I take the practical stuff myself and try to utilize it and pick out what can work for me.
01:00:52.000When you say you don't know what to do with the burning bush, what do you mean by that?
01:00:58.000I don't know what to do on a daily basis with the teaching of, and then he showed up as a burning bush, or the magic tricks.
01:01:07.000And I don't know what to do with, and Jesus healed everyone, and he couldn't walk, and now he touched me and he can walk.
01:01:15.000I don't know how to take that into my life and go, oh, there's something useful and practical and healthy for you, Matthew, that you can practice there.
01:01:23.000So the magic that leans in towards what we would call now more fantasy, I don't know what to do with that.
01:01:30.000There's philosophies and there's proverbs and there's teachings that I think are very valid and very helpful that we could all be reminded of that are in the Bible that I do find quite useful.
01:01:41.000Yeah, I think it's almost impossible to figure out what they were trying to say with a lot of the things.
01:01:48.000It's why it's open to interpretation, but also open to manipulation.
01:01:52.000And that's where people have a real problem with it, when it's used for...
01:02:48.000Does that mean that you throw the messenger out?
01:02:51.000Because you're like, oh, bullshit, you weren't following all that stuff.
01:02:53.000No, you take the message that this is the stuff that you can, that could work for you, that maybe they wanted it for you, they couldn't follow through on it themselves.
01:03:01.000There's certain parts of the Bible that have that too.
01:03:04.000You don't throw out the whole, you can't, I don't think it makes any sense to throw out the whole book.
01:03:50.000Have you encountered difficulty expressing this in Hollywood?
01:03:57.000You know, Hollywood is predominantly left-wing and very secular or Jewish in some circles, but it's not like a place where Christian fundamental values are espoused openly.
01:04:12.000You know, a lot of Jewish folks are in Hollywood, and that seems to be okay with a lot of people, but Some other religions, particularly if you're a fundamentalist Christian or if you have Christian values, a lot of people frown upon that.
01:04:27.000Why do you think that is, and have you had difficulties with that?
01:04:34.000I have had, and I won't throw any people under the bus, but I have had moments where I was on stage receiving an award in front of my peers in Hollywood.
01:04:50.000And there were people in the crowd that I have prayed with before dinners many times.
01:04:56.000And when I thank God, I saw some of those people go to clap, but then notice that, whoa, whoa, it's gonna be a bad thing on my resume, and then sit back on their hands.
01:05:28.000I just wish that it seems like a silly argument.
01:05:35.000One of the things that are some people in our industry, not all of them, but there's some that go to the left so far As our friend Jordan Peterson, who's back, saw his video being back,
01:05:51.000that go to the illiberal left side so far that it's so condescending and patronizing to 50% of the world that need the empathy that the liberal side gives and should give to Throw somebody's,
01:06:13.000illegitimize them because they say they are a believer.
01:06:26.000Yeah, so I haven't run into, you know, I haven't head-butted trouble on that, but I've always, you look, my career, I've pretty much gone my own path.
01:06:36.000And by hook or by crook, just trying to figure a way out into what I was doing.
01:06:40.000And I haven't measured or noticed where it has harmed or gotten my way of what I wanted to achieve in Hollywood.
01:08:00.000You can hit that red carpet, wear your short leather dress and talk whatever, tell whatever stories you want to.
01:08:05.000But again, it took a while for me to feel stable enough to slip through the net and let her go be herself as well.
01:08:11.000This thing you're talking about with people disparaging people for their opinions and their beliefs and the way they live in their life, I think a lot of this is coming from this condensed way of impersonal communication that we're getting from social media.
01:08:28.000I think this is so much of the way people are judging people and the way people are communicating with people.
01:08:35.000One-on-one is how human beings are supposed to talk.
01:08:38.000That's how we're supposed to work things out.
01:08:40.000And when you look at a person's eyes and you experience their feelings and you read their social cues, that's how we communicate and that's how we work things out and hash things out and figure each other out.
01:08:53.000And maybe someone has a different set of beliefs than you, but they happen to be your neighbor and you like them.
01:08:58.000And you're like, hey man, tell me, what's it like to be a Sikh?
01:09:14.000And he was a weird dude, man, but he was always friendly as hell.
01:09:18.000I would go outside, we'd have weird conversations about these things that he was doing, and I'd just try to figure him out, and he'd try to figure me out.
01:09:26.000We always waved to each other, we were always friendly.
01:09:30.000But he and I, if we were talking online, I'd be like, you know, if I was a younger man and I was dumber and he said something about his belief and I thought that was stupid, I'd probably say, what kind of dumb shit is that?
01:09:44.000You believe that nonsense written by a science fiction author?
01:09:47.000But talking to the guy, that was never the way I talked to him.
01:09:51.000When he and I were looking at each other, we were just two neighbors trying to figure each other out and just trying to be friendly and have a harmonious neighborhood.
01:10:01.000Well, it's one of the things I think you're going to like about your new home, the city.
01:10:08.000I think I mentioned this to you when I called you to say welcome.
01:10:12.000You know, one of the great things about Austin, Texas is even though it's the blueberry and tomato soup, the more liberal city in the conservative state.
01:10:21.000You can see neighbors next door to each other talking to each other and one has a Trump sign in the yard, the other one has a Biden sign in the yard.
01:10:29.000No one's going, sneaking out in the middle of the night to go rip that other person's sign out.
01:10:35.000When Austin is at its best, it has that.
01:10:38.000You know, I think that the, you know, and I've got young children and they're starting to get, we don't allow them on social media yet, but you see these people who are living in a time where you put out Something of yourself.
01:10:51.000And your whole value of yourself is reliant on what the world out there, strangers you don't know, comment about that.
01:11:00.000And if I put out a picture that I'm really happy and excited about on Instagram tonight, and if I'm going to look what the reaction is, and the majority says, oh, F you, McConaughey, all of a sudden I have a bad night.
01:13:06.000You see people getting praised because they're famous and because they're wealthy.
01:13:10.000I mean, how much of what social media is for a lot of young kids is seeing famous people in front of Lamborghinis with a million dollar watch on?
01:13:19.000It's a bizarre posing ritual that people are doing.
01:14:26.000In the next 20 minutes, two other guys came by.
01:14:30.000And I asked the guy, I go, is that your Lamborghini?
01:14:32.000He goes, no, no, no, I just rented it for the day for my Tinder page pic.
01:14:36.000Two guys walked by in the next 20 minutes and paid him 50 bucks to lean against his purple rented Lamborghini to get their Tinder page pic.
01:15:19.000Before I was doing my last Netflix special, I was using these yonder bags.
01:15:23.000And what a yonder bag is, is you have to put your cell phone in the bag when you go in there so you can't film the show or you can't talk on it.
01:15:30.000And the idea is that the people won't be distracted because their cell phone will be in this magnetic pouch.
01:17:57.000And stories like that make great films, though, because there's real live stories about this country in particular, but this world in general, like Scarface or something like that, where it's just like, this is kind of based on reality.
01:18:15.000You know, it's one of the beautiful things about a film is that a film like Scarface will make you look into that like, well, how much of this is real?
01:19:37.000Well, so in your life right now, when, you know, you've had this incredibly successful career, and I assume you're still writing down these lists of things to do.
01:19:48.000When you look at, like, what you would like to accomplish, I mean, you've accomplished so much in the world of acting and filmmaking.
01:19:56.000Is there something out there that really is a goal or a thought that's sticking in your mind or something you haven't done yet?
01:20:08.000One of the things I've got to do that's at the top of the list is do my best to shepherd three young children through this life so they can go off and be independent and autonomous and hopefully competent young individuals.
01:21:27.000If too many people come to Austin from California, wherever they're coming from, and try to turn Austin into a why they left where they were coming from, we're gonna look up in 10 years and go, what the hell happened, man?
01:22:48.000And I think we all know progress is not saying yes to every new thing.
01:22:54.000Progress is more about innovation, but it's also relying on tried and true things that work, have worked, and will continue to work.
01:23:00.000And I just want to remind us all the certain values that we have as Austinites and as individuals.
01:23:07.000Where that goes from there, if that goes outside of Austin and through the United States, it's a scalable idea that I dream of that could go outside of the United States.
01:23:19.000I like looking at cities and people, looking at cities as individuals that have personalities and reminding the people, let's sell a city to the people that live in it.
01:23:30.000Sell Austin to Austinites and to people who are coming to it.
01:25:03.000It is a place, like I said, that nobody's too good and everybody's good enough.
01:25:07.000We don't run over people to get where we're going.
01:25:10.000Austin will open up their proverbial roller decks, and you tell me if you've felt this with yourself, quicker than any city I've ever been to as a newcomer.
01:25:57.000We still got boots on and we still pull them on and strap them on and get work done.
01:26:03.000Even though we're young and innovative in tech town, we're still a classic and It's accountability, it's responsibility, it's fairness to other people.
01:26:13.000It's understanding where is Austin idyllic and what is it really?
01:26:19.000Because in some ways I think of Austin, I'm finding out it's not as ideal as I think it is in my mind.
01:26:27.000Well, I've got a listening tour and I talk about the diversity in Austin.
01:26:31.000And it is a international destination.
01:26:33.000And I talk about the, you know, the equality of Austin.
01:26:37.000You know, the rule in Austin has always been, all you gotta do is be yourself.
01:26:44.000Not what you think you ought to be, but just be yourself.
01:26:46.000Doesn't matter if you're blue haired, short, lesbian, American Indian, cowboy, sheriff, whatever.
01:26:54.000Everyone's sitting at the same bar having a drink and no one's yelling about their place because If you're yelling about, hey, I want to let you know how I'm different in Austin, Austin's like going, what were you yelling about?
01:29:19.000Look, a lot of these, most of these people have a mental challenge or they've gotten drugs.
01:29:24.000And so, you know, in Austin, we're putting some up in some vacated hotels.
01:29:32.000I don't know to what extent that's working.
01:29:36.000I've got friends who have businesses downtown who they've got homeless people camping out in front and if someone walks in, they're getting berated by this person that's homeless that has something mentally askew in their nugget.
01:29:55.000You can't eliminate the problem, but this question of how do we rehabilitate is an ongoing question, not just with homeless people.
01:30:06.000With people that don't have mental problems, we have the question of rehabilitation.
01:30:14.000And for those people, I'm like, well, you have to be sincerely seeking retribution and understand what you did wrong to get the chance to be forgiven and rehabilitate and get a second chance.
01:30:29.000For the homeless people, I think if you're going to go to the How do we get them more mentally stable, and can we to what extent?
01:32:16.000You're coming out with the scarlet letter on you and you're going to have to work five times harder than the next guy to get that job.
01:32:24.000If you're an offender of such, you're going to be found and located and they're going to share your location through the city and you're going to find out from your neighbor that you're moving in.
01:32:34.000And you can understand the people going, I don't want that somebody living next door to me.
01:32:38.000Well, if rehabilitation worked, it would be like, well, no, it's okay, because they did their stint.
01:33:13.000But the problem with equality of outcome is there's not equality of effort.
01:33:18.000And it's one of the beautiful things about society is that you...
01:33:22.000And this is what we were talking about before about reading your memoir and reading an autobiography of a successful person is realizing that there's work to be done.
01:33:30.000There's things you have to do in order to be this person that people admire.
01:33:52.000They start off with different challenges and different physical attributes and physical problems.
01:34:00.000Everyone has their own hand of cards that you're dealt.
01:34:04.000But treating people equally and giving people the best possible chance that we can as a community and as a culture, that's what we all strive for.
01:34:14.000And the problem with the homeless situation and the problem with prisons, it's a similar problem, is that the downtrodden, the people that have hit a bad spot in the game of life, What is our responsibility to them?
01:34:28.000And if we are a community, if there's only three of us and one of us is fucked up, we go, hey, let's help Mike.
01:34:35.000Let's try to bring Mike into the fold and give him some life lessons and give him some love and hope that we can bring him back up to a point where a couple years from now we're looking back on this going, hey, look, you used to be over there and now you're here and everything's great.
01:35:33.000Because we are all born with different innate abilities.
01:35:37.000And if we're fortunate enough to be in a position where we go, well, I'm going to do what I'm good at and I'm going to work my backside off for it.
01:35:46.000And I'm going to get educated about it.
01:36:34.000So, you know, I was, some would say, symmetrically speaking, I'm a good looking guy, so that's got me indoors that maybe it wouldn't have got other people into.
01:36:44.000I tried to do my best once I got in the door.
01:36:46.000I'm not gonna apologize for any opportunities I've had, but I do understand that I've had opportunities.
01:36:53.000I've created many on my own, but I've also been introduced and met people who opened those doors for me that would not have been open for other people.
01:37:51.000That's where what we want is what we need.
01:37:55.000And what we need is actually what we want.
01:37:57.000Where what's best for us is best for the most amount of people.
01:37:59.000Where we're the most selfless, we're actually the most selfish.
01:38:03.000Where we're the most selfish, we're actually the most selfless.
01:38:06.000That's the place where, when I talk about like green lights, There's a place to create green lights that are best for ourselves and others at the same time.
01:38:16.000I don't know exactly what that place is all the time, but that's the place I think we could all be a little more conscious of how we go about moving forward and making choices based on that.
01:38:27.000Austin seems to be of a manageable size.
01:38:30.000I was trying to describe this to one of my friends in LA. He's like, what's so great about Austin?
01:38:34.000I was like, first of all, people aren't devalued because there's not too many of them.
01:38:40.000There's a problem with when there's too many people, then people become a nuisance.
01:39:17.000We wanted to just grow and turn our backs on that and not look at it, and now all of a sudden it's out of hand and I don't know what to do with it.
01:40:18.000Well, there's a lot of, you know, there is a community in Austin, and Austin at its best does come together and realize that it has an identity to move forward with, to protect.
01:40:29.000And you're right, it's not so big, and I believe that it can grow.
01:40:34.000But it can grow while still having a sense of itself and its own identity and to protect that identity and grow forward.
01:40:41.000Turn the page, progress, yes, it's coming.
01:40:43.000But also preserve the core DNA of who we are.
01:40:47.000We're no longer the little hippie town that just had some music in the capital and a university.
01:40:52.000No, we're dot com, tech town, we're banker town, lawyer town, international destination, all those things, that's fine.
01:40:59.000But in that, there's a, you know, Austin has, I wanna help define I'm listening to a lot of Austinites as well.
01:41:05.000What our constitution is in Austin that's separate from anywhere else.
01:41:09.000So this is something you're actively trying to do.
01:41:20.000I have a shared values campaign that I've put together.
01:41:27.000And I want to sort of advertise and sell Austin to Austin, all around Austin.
01:41:34.000And it's just sort of value-based, aspirational messages just to remind us who we are, to keep the community as tight as possible, to form expectations and solidify expectations amongst ourselves.
01:41:49.000So if someone acts outside of those, they're noticed and they're kind of nudged back.
01:41:53.000That's another thing Austin does very well.
01:41:55.000Austin, I don't know how it is now, since we've had the protests with Black Lives Matter and stuff.
01:42:02.000But Austin used to be, there was a great relationship with the police force.
01:42:11.000Not just with me, with seeing Matthew McConaughey walk down the street, with John and Jane Doe.
01:42:16.000You went jaywalking across Sixth Street, they caught you before and nudged you over and said, hey, don't do that, before they gave you the ticket.
01:42:23.000There was a play of like they were part of the community.
01:42:27.000They felt like, you know, you give them a wave.
01:42:29.000You didn't see a cop in Austin and go, oh shit.
01:42:32.000You saw one, you waved, and if they weren't looking, you never felt like they were looking to get you.
01:42:39.000Crime was low, you know, so we'll see how that relationship has to be worked on in the city of Austin right now, you know, quite a bit.
01:42:48.000Yeah, what were your thoughts when the whole idea to defund the police came to fruition?
01:42:56.000Defund the police, that moniker, if you wanted to say...
01:43:02.000It's almost like it should have been renamed because defund the police does not sound anything like there's been money reallocated to different areas of handling some police exercise.
01:43:13.000It sounds like you got a million, we're taking 300,000, good luck.
01:43:17.000And it's not exactly what it is, to be fair.
01:43:24.000The community and the police, and not just in Austin, but all over, and I think they are doing this in Miami, to bring up Miami, Need to get back together.
01:43:33.000And the community needs to say, here's what's unfair.
01:43:36.000Here's how I feel unfair as a black man or a person of color or whatever situation.
01:43:45.000Here's my problem with my relationship with you as cops.
01:43:50.000Well, the police gotta get clear to go, okay.
01:43:59.000We got a few bad apples that either need to be trained better, so we don't have those kind of bad apples or people or cops choking under, under, under, under, and I mean the word as in fumbling at the goal line.
01:44:22.000So, few of these bad apples need to be removed, but they also, we need to make sure we're training them better.
01:44:28.000Now, also the cops need to go to the community and go, can y'all remember and understand our point of view that we're like the tow truck driver.
01:44:36.000We're not called when there's good news.
01:44:39.000We're called when it's bad news, so we're coming in going, looking for trouble, all right?
01:44:44.000So we're already under stress if we even get a call.
01:44:47.000So can y'all help us in our way that we communicate?
01:44:52.000Can we get trust again that if a cop says, hey, Stand still, take your hands out of your pocket, hold them up.
01:46:05.000So hopefully we'll see if this is just sort of guinea-pigging the idea.
01:46:10.000We'll see how it works, but I'm more for saying, okay, instead of taking away your money and your funds, which you could use to train better and work on the relationship of what your job is and what you expect and what communities expect from you,
01:46:27.000I'd rather have done that than pull money from them.
01:46:31.000So we're gonna see how this experiment goes.
01:46:38.000And I think we all need to understand that there's a tremendous amount of these people that are under insane stress every day, and they probably have massive PTSD. And every time you're pulling somebody over, you're worried about getting shot.
01:46:52.000Every time you're visiting someone's apartment for a domestic abuse case, you're worried you're going to get killed, or you're going to see someone killed.
01:47:00.000You've seen murders and deaths, and The human mind is not designed to deal with that kind of stress day in, day out.
01:47:08.000And a lot of these people, when you see these horrible reactions that cops have to situations where they do completely overstep their boundaries and abuse people, I think a lot of those people are really fucked up by the time they get to that point.
01:48:03.000It seems like a popular social sentiment that people are repeating because it puts you in this ideology of a person who cares and is progressive.
01:48:13.000But I don't think it's ever been fleshed out.
01:48:15.000I don't think people have thought it out in the long term.
01:48:18.000And if you're looking at the consequences of how this is playing out in New York City, homicides are up by hundreds of percent, burglaries, armed robberies, everything's up.
01:48:39.000But Governor Abbott has stepped in and said he's going to put a stop to that, which is, you know, there's talk about not giving the towns that do this, they're not going to have access to property taxes, and obviously there's no income tax in Austin, in the state of Texas.
01:48:56.000So the governor has supposedly stepped in and going to iron this out.
01:49:01.000So I'm hoping it works out and cooler heads will prevail.
01:49:06.000I'm with you training and have more reverence for the job and understand they're called in.
01:49:11.000They're not called in when it's good news.
01:49:13.000You know, my brother, Rooster, has a real good, interesting take, I think, on gun control.
01:49:20.000And Texas is a big right to carry state and a gun state.
01:49:27.000He brought up the samurai sword, how there was a reverence for it.
01:49:31.000And I remember how we were brought up.
01:49:32.000You got your toy gun and then you got your daisy one pump.
01:49:37.000And until you'd mastered that, like not turning and ever, if you turned and even though it wasn't cocked, if it was aimed at someone, nope, you got the gun taken away from you.
01:50:07.000And the samurai sword is a good example because there's a reverence for that.
01:50:11.000There's an initiation period to get to where you could have that.
01:50:16.000And I think that's kind of one of the places where I lie, that it's too easy to get a gun sometimes, that there should be that background check, which goes back into what we're talking about with police force.
01:50:30.000Background check, training, have a reverence for the job, understand the expectations, understand it's a high-stress job.
01:51:00.000When someone does a horrible thing, like the George Floyd case, all those good cops who would never think about doing that, ever in their life, ever, are lumped into the same category as that guy.