Filmmaker Max Joseph on Failure, Happiness, & Finding Your Creative Voice

Max Joseph is a filmmaker, digital content creator, and former co-host of MTV’s Catfish. This conversation explores Max’s journey through the evolving media landscape and his search for creative fulfillment and happiness. We discuss his experience directing a Hollywood feature, the aftermath of a high-profile box office disappointment, and his new YouTube series on the science of well-being. He shares insights on straddling traditional and new media, creative struggles, the neuroscience of happiness, and the importance of connection. Max is a thoughtful, vulnerable storyteller. And this conversation is a reflection of resilience and creative reinvention. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Eight Sleep: Use code RICHROLL to get $350 OFF Pod 4 Ultra👉 eightsleep.com/richroll Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL 👉ROKA.com/RICHROLL Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF 👉boncharge.com Waking Up: Get a FREE month, plus $30 OFF 👉wakingup.com/RICHROLL Whoop: Unlock the best version of yourself 👉join.whoop.com/roll This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp: Listeners get 10% off their first month 👉BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I kind of came up wanting to be this traditional filmmaker, but traditional in the kind of 90s sense of, you know, art house filmmaking. But I was a web filmmaker. I was making content, like web stuff, which was this really exciting world of like, oh my God, like YouTube. It's like, oh, information can be made to be exciting. Like that can go viral, educating people, bringing these other interests I had in like geopolitics and social issues. Like there's a place to make stuff here that can be really impactful. And man, was it powerful. Like the first couple of videos I made for Good, one of them went bananas viral. In the first two days, it got 5 million views.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  And I was like checking my phone every second. Like I would just refresh and it would just jump up like 100,000. And that was like, welcome to the drug.

• 0:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Like what else can we do? I'm going to take these lessons and I'm going to translate them and adapt them and scale them up to here.

• 1:04Rich Roll?

  And reinvent cinema.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  And reinvent cinema, I did. Zac Efron movie makes no friends. Biggest box office bomb since 1984. I definitely went into a multi-year-long tailspin. I was really paranoid that this failure was going to define me. And it was bad.

• 1:35Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. My guest today is Max Joseph. Max is a storyteller. He is a filmmaker. You might recognize him from the many years he spent hosting Catfish, an MTV show that popularized the term for online deception, or from a movie called We Are Your Friends, which was a studio feature film he directed starring Zac Efron. I know Max best from the dozens of short films and documentaries he has written, directed, or produced outside of Hollywood. A longtime and frequent collaborator with my friend and friend of the podcast,

• 2:15Rich Roll?

  Casey Neistat, Max is one of YouTube's most talented and most creative filmmakers, as evidenced by his latest offering, which is this incredible docu-series called Happiness, in which he travels the world in an effort to crack the code on the philosophy, the science, and the secrets of you guessed it, happiness. I've got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one, but first.

• 2:48Rich Roll?

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• 3:33Rich Roll?

  of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 3:55Rich Roll?

  All right. Max's story is wild. It's as much about pursuing a dream as it is about the discipline of letting go and making room for new dreams. It's about investing in yourself, and it's about what matters most. I love this guy. I've admired his work for a very long time, and this one is great because, as you are about to discover, Max indeed is a master of his craft.

• 4:25Rich Roll?

  Your career is fascinating. My entry point to you is through, I think originally just you being part of like the extended Casey universe. This, you know, loose association of friends who kind of came up together in New York City and were doing all kinds of interesting things. And you've all taken kind of very interesting and different career paths. But when I reflect upon all the things that you've done, like I've sort of kept tabs on you from a distance for a long time, like always enjoyed the content that you put out. And yet, when I reflect on it, it's like it's sort of all over the place. You've done a bunch of YouTube, you're co-hosting Catfish for like, how many years, like seven years or something like that? So you're on TV, you make a documentary

• 5:08Rich Roll?

  for HBO, you make this feature film. I have a lot of questions about that. And now with your, and like the bookstore movie, I thought was exceptional. Like, I just love that. I re-watched it again this morning. And that was like five years ago, right? But you kind of disappear, and then you come back and it's something different or new. I'm trying to make sense of like how all these pieces fit together. I'm not sure they do, you know?

• 5:37Speaker 00

  I'm also trying to make sense.

• 5:39Rich Roll?

  But I think when you, when you, when you shared the trailer for this happiness series, I was like, oh, this is great. Like this not only dovetails perfectly with all the kind of things that we talk about here, but it gave me an excuse and an opportunity to reach out to you because I've always been curious about your career and always wanted to meet you. So before we even go further, like, thank you for coming out here to share with me today.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I'm also kind of an admirer from afar. I'm very interested in a lot of the things you're interested in. And in a lot of ways, I like meeting lots of different kinds of people and asking them questions and kind of tapping their wisdom and trying to integrate it into my life. And I, that's certainly a lot of the work I'm doing on the nonfiction side. And I don't see it as that different from what you're doing. And I mean, like, just, I'm curious and I want to meet people. And it's an exploration, certainly the nonfiction side. So like pod, like having a podcast like

• 6:45Speaker 00

  this and having kind of people at the level that you're

• 6:51Speaker 00

  The guests, the level of the guests that you have on the show is like amazing that you can have these, you know, hour and a half, two hour long conversations with people and just get the juice.

• 7:02Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Like get the

• 7:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's good.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean Jonathan, you just had Jonathan Haidt on the show, like total, total hero of mine. Like his happiness hypothesis book is, you know, I want to make a whole video on that book alone. I know he talked about it a little bit on the podcast.

• 7:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  But it's like, it's a real incredible book, a gift. And, and yeah, there is an aspect of filmmaking that I do feel is very much like what you're doing. Like you're, you're fascinated, you're interested in a certain topic and then you want to, you want to meet the people who have done the 10,000, 20,000 hours in that, you know, vertical and understand what their, you know, how, how they make sense of it, what their perspective is, what the wisdom that they've accrued over the years is. But yeah, in terms of my career and like looking back on it, it, it really, like sometimes

• 8:04Speaker 00

  I get asked to speak, you know, with, to film students and, and kids and they're like, how should I plan my career? Like, how do you, I'm like, just don't do what I do.

• 8:16Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Like, like there are two ways to

• 8:19Rich Roll?

  Well, I think there's, there's two ways to slice it. Like the, the sort of charitable, positive way to look at it is you are led by your curiosity and you do, you know, follow your muse and when something lights you up, then you pursue that and it ends up in some form of visual content that you're sharing. From like a strategic career perspective, it, it does feel a little scattershot. You know, like what are, what are we actually doing here, Max? You know, what is the, what's the plan? And maybe there doesn't need to be a plan. I'm not judging you. But in, in like trying to piece it all together, I was like, where's the through line? You know, where is this leading and what is, you know, what is kind of like the meta

• 9:03Rich Roll?

  theme to what you're trying to express as an artist?

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I've struggled with this, not just in my filmmaking, but just kind of in my life, like, you know, what am I about? There are so many things I'm interested in. I do have a lot of passions, you know, I love music. I love film, but I also really love exploring human nature and understanding what makes people tick, what makes me tick. I've had a lot of anxiety and depression, just like any other person. I started going to, my parents sent me to a therapist when I was 11. I'm a New York City kid.

• 9:49Rich Roll?

  That's a very New York, yeah, thing.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I was ashamed about it at first, and I was like, oh, is what's wrong with me so bad that you guys can't deal with it, that you need to send me to someone? And then, of course, you know, over the course of time, it becomes more normalized and then you can actually start talking about it and then it's a source of, it's a badge of pride for a little bit, and maybe there are problems with that as well. When kids ask me, how do I plan my career? I say, well, there are two ways to really go about planning your career as a filmmaker. Like, one is to set a goal and say, in five years, I want to be directing this kind of movie, or I want to be at Cannes, or I want to be at the Academy Awards, or I want to

• 10:32Speaker 00

  be like making great horror movies like this. And then every step you take is kind of servicing that goal, right? That's a pretty logical, rational way to do it. And then there's the like, just follow, do what you love, explore what you love. And there are certain things I really want to make that start with me. They're just ideas I have, that I have a hankering to make this thing, and I do them. And then sometimes things come my way, jobs come, and they ask me if I would be interested in doing this, and sometimes I am. It's like, it's not something I thought I would want to do, but I kind of like saying

• 11:16Speaker 00

  yes to things and see where they take me. Like, Catfish, being on Catfish was a total, just saying yes to destiny in some way.

• 11:26Rich Roll?

  Well, and you got to work with your friends.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  I did, but I never, to talk about like, you know, things I thought were a bad idea. They, my friends made this amazing movie documentary. I was at Sundance that year with a short film of mine that I was really proud to have at Sundance. And they were there with Catfish. And I knew about Catfish, I knew that they were making it. They asked me, you know, what I thought the title should be of the movie. There was a lot of time where they were debating what the title should be. And they were like, yeah.

• 11:58Rich Roll?

  It's insane that anybody would ever consider naming that movie Anything But Catfish. I mean, how many people get to craft a word that just becomes endemic to, you know, the English language? I mean, that is an amazing thing in and of itself. And I mean, the movie's incredible. And I still remember the first time I watched that movie. It's unbelievable. But to have that word so lodged in mainstream awareness is quite a thing.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  It's crazy. Yeah, I never, I certainly never thought the movie would go on to spawn such, this phenomenon.

• 12:38Rich Roll?

  The show's still going on.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  I know.

• 12:40Rich Roll?

  What year did Catfish come out?

• 12:43Speaker 00

  It's been on for, I think, 11 years or 12, 11 to 12 years.

• 12:48Rich Roll?

  The documentary was like?

• 12:48Speaker 00

  2010. 2010 was the documentary. So my friends made this documentary. I introduced them, Henry and Rel. I went to, I went to high school with Henry. He came in my senior year of high school. He was a year younger than me and he was like a filmmaker.

• 13:02Rich Roll?

  Henry Juiced.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Kid.

• 13:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  And I was a filmmaker kid. And I was doing, at our high school, you could do like a senior project. And I did a senior project. I wanted to make a film and I did. And the thing is, I had a camera, but I didn't have a computer that could edit it. And Henry had the computer. And so, and I didn't have to go to school to, because I was making this senior project. And so I actually asked Henry, who I was kind of friendly with, but I wasn't like friends, friends, friends with him at that point. He was just new to the school when I was a senior. And he had the computer though, and I knew that. And I asked him, can I come to your house while you're at school and edit this movie?

• 13:49Speaker 00

  And he said, yes. So I would go to his house every day. It was just me and his mom.

• 13:53Rich Roll?

  And his mom.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  And his cat. And I would edit this movie. And, and then over the summer, Henry and I would hang out. And I asked, you know, Rel was a really close friend of mine. He went to a different high school. And we would all hang out. We were all into film. And then after college, I went to LA to kind of pursue my, my future here. And they stayed in New York and they ended up kind of like gravitating towards each other and becoming like filmmaker partners. And, and Rel had worked as an intern for Casey.

• 14:32Rich Roll?

  Oh, so that's, that's the connection to Casey.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I actually didn't even meet Casey. I knew him from afar as this kind of force of nature that, that Rel had worked for. Um, and, but I didn't work, I didn't ever know him, meet him in person until after I made a short film in 2011 with Rel and Henry. And I had edited it for them and he saw that and was like, hey, I'm making a couple of videos for Nike. Do you want, can you, can you come and edit for me?

• 15:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Um, but separate from that, jumping back to the Catfish.

• 15:09Rich Roll?

  And you edited the, the Casey movie, the Nike one where he travels all over the world, right?

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I went with him.

• 15:16Rich Roll?

  Which is still my favorite of all of his films. I just love that. And your editing job on that was brilliant.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Thanks.

• 15:23Rich Roll?

  But keep going.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Well, so the Catfish thread, just for, just to finish that one off. So they told me, they, they were kind of brainstorming between all their friends what the title of the movie should be. And they were like, oh, Neve's Internet Girlfriend, like Facebook Neve. And they were like Catfish. And I hadn't seen the movie, so I didn't really understand where that title was coming from. They're like, oh, it's like, it's a line someone says in the movie. It resonates well. And I was like, that's a bad title.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  That is a bad title. It's like it's bad associations, fish. So it's like, it's bad. I'm there for the premiere of the movie at Sundance and I'm blown away. I can't, I'm like, oh my God, this is so tremendous. And I watch, I watch, I'm in the theater in slow motion as like the lights come up, everyone's clapping. I watch the industry descend on them. I am, my jealousy and envy is just fully inflamed. I'm also blown away by the movie. So I'm like feeling lots of different things. And, uh, and then, you know, they, they go on this huge press tour and the movie gets all, you know, gets this huge release from Universal Studios.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  And it's like, it's like a giant, like this doesn't happen with documentaries.

• 16:44Rich Roll?

  No.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  And, you know, it's this crazy thing and they market it like a horror movie and people felt like they were, you know, they were faked out a little bit by the marketing.

• 16:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because there's this big reveal.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, they think it's going to be some Blair Witch thing and it ends up being what made way more human. And like, and

• 17:04Rich Roll?

  And heartbreaking and confusing. Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  And I loved that about the movie. And then they're like, oh, we're, we're thinking about spinning it off into like a reality show for MTV. And I was like, guys, you make this amazing movie. Now you're going to turn it into like a reality show for MTV? Like, that's a terrible idea. Don't do that.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  What are you guys doing? You're ruining the legacy of this great thing. And then, um, I make a short film that I, I make like a proper short film that I, I raised money for on, on Kickstarter. And this is going to be like, I'd, I'd made a lot of like web content up to that point, but this was like, I wrote this. This was going to be like my film school thesis kind of film. I like, you know, I was very inspired by Peter Ware and, and Picnic at Hanging Rock and like these very kind of, um, atmospheric films. And this is kind of sexual, atmospheric, somewhat like tense, suspenseful film.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  And I'm making it and I get into the edit of it. I shot it. I had real stars in it. And I start editing it and I'm like, I fucked up. I barked up the wrong tree. Like, this is just not me. I'm like, I'm looking at the footage and I'm freaking out. I'm like, oh, my God, I got onto the stage to be this opera singer and I opened my mouth and I croaked. I was like, this is just not, this feels so not me. Who am I? And I poured all this money into this. And right when I'm like, kind of freaking out about all the money I spent on this,

• 18:56Speaker 00

  that wasn't all my money and like, and then I put my own money into it. Neve calls me, or Rel calls me, I forget who it was. And it was like, we're shooting this pilot for that, that reality, that doc reality show, Catfish. And the guy that's supposed to be the filmmaker, friend of mine, just backed out. Like, he has a conflict and he can't be in the pilot. We're shooting on Monday. It's Friday.

• 19:24Rich Roll?

  Wow. And you're in this vulnerable state. So the timing lines up where you, you know, in a different world, if you were feeling super excited about your project, you might have said no to that.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  I almost totally would have said no to it. Except that it was like, I needed, I needed money. I was like, this, like, I'd also been living in LA for 10 years. And I'm like, oh, it's a pilot. Like, pilots don't get picked up. And this is like, definitely not going to get picked up. Like MTV, Catfish, like, this is just not, like, I'll do your pilot, fine. I'll do it. I'll get paid. I'll do the pilot and that'll be that.

• 20:03Rich Roll?

  But for people that don't know, when you do a pilot, the contract that you sign is basically, you know, a purchase on your life for sometimes, you know, a decade, right? You have to sign a contract that presumes this thing is going to go on forever.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a six-year contract.

• 20:22Rich Roll?

  You're locked in. Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  And I was locked in and we're shooting the pilot episode. And we have no money. I mean, they don't give you a lot of money to make a pilot. And so we're really doing it by the seat of our pants. But it was good. It was like the pilot was good. Like I was like, oh, fuck. I'm like, I'm, I'm in it. And I'm saying to myself, damn it. Like, this is actually good. And I'm gonna be locked into this thing now. What have I done? Is this good? Like, did I just sell myself out? Like, or is this a ride that I'm going to be? I just knew, we knew when we were shooting the pilot, because we were walking around, we were going through airports and stuff,

• 21:08Speaker 00

  and people kind of recognized Neve. And they would come up to us in the airports, and I saw the Catfish movie. That happened to my uncle. That happened to my sister. This is happening to my mom right now. Like, like, the magnet

• 21:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  was very strong. And so it was like, clear. I was like, oh, man.

• 21:25Rich Roll?

  But the other side of your brain wants to be Werner Herzog.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:30Rich Roll?

  Or you have this sort of art house aspirations. This is like the antithesis of that.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Well, welcome to my life.

• 21:39Rich Roll?

  This is like a metaphor for everything. Because when I, when I think about you, like, you came up in a very interesting time. You're the last generation to go to film school with dreams of becoming someone like Paul Thomas Anderson, where the feature film career was really the crown jewel that was the aspiration of every young person who fell in love with cinema.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 22:06Rich Roll?

  That is not the case today. But you came up right as everything was changing. And when you and Neve and Rel and Henry and Casey are all running around the streets of New York City, this is the exact moment when suddenly there are these tools that are commercially available to everybody in the form of camcorders and digital editing software that for the first time ever empowered people without any money, but with a creative sensibility to tell and share stories and distribute them. Which creates opportunity, but also confusion for someone like yourself, because you're old school. Like, you're a film school guy, right?

• 22:50Rich Roll?

  And so here you are, venturing into this Digital landscape, this new world that has yet to be trodden. But you have your other foot firmly anchored in the traditional Hollywood system. And I think this creates a lot of consternation and hand wringing for you. Like, which world should I be in?

• 23:12Speaker 00

  I mean, this is my life.

• 23:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  This is.

• 23:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  This is every day. This is every day of my life. Maybe you nailed it.

• 23:20Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  When I was 15, I had this awakening that like, oh my God, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to make films. This was also the like DVD, DVDs that just came out. It started coming out as a form different from VHS. Everyone was collecting DVDs. There was the Criterion Collection, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, like all these kind of auteurs, David Fincher, kind of late 90s cinema was so amazing. Fight Club, Truman Show. And yes, it was the apotheosis of the coolest thing you can be.

• 24:02Rich Roll?

  Right. Which began at Sundance in maybe 1990, 91.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Sex, Lies and Videotape.

• 24:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, premiered Sex, Lies and Videotape. And that was a seminal moment for, I mean, I'm a little older than you, but I remember when that happened. And that changed everything and made this world of independent film, this aspirational, you know, creative exploration for an entire generation of young people. Blue Velvet, like these movies that were so, you know, challenging. Like, I didn't know a movie could be that. It was an exciting time. And then Sundance just exploded as this platform for The Zeitgeist.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  Boys Don't Cry.

• 24:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, all of those movies, right.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Usual Suspects. All of these great movies that are now like cornerstones of filmmaking came out of, right, the Sundance Lab and the Sundance Film Festival. And that was the, that was the goal, right? To make. An indie auteur-driven thing that could cross over to make to make a film that's cheap, but also that can speak to a wider audience and then can kind of cross over into the into mass.

• 25:24Rich Roll?

  And that birthed all of these sublabels within the studio system, Fox Searchlight.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  Warner Independent.

• 25:32Rich Roll?

  Warner Independent, New Line, all of these departments started to crop up that were developing these lower-budget movies that had enough commercial potential that they could be in the cinemas and generate generate box office.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  That's right. Well, there was like a Morris Perot, 21 Grams, you know, Babel, right? And Aritu came up in in that in that too. And that was tremendously inspiring. So that was and still is kind of, to me, the the gold ring.

• 26:04Rich Roll?

  But that is no longer. I mean, Sundance still exists.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  It's hard to let.

• 26:08Rich Roll?

  It's a different animal now. And all of those those departments in the studios are no, I mean, now we have A24 and we have Neon, but it isn't the same moment.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  No, A24 and Neon, though, you're right. Like, that is kind of, they're now carrying the torch. But Participant also just went down.

• 26:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Participant Productions, they made for the last 20 years, they made kind of the most impactful, both independent but commercially viable films that had a social impact aspect to them. They, you know, Green Book, which is probably not the best example of of what that that is, but like Inconvenient Truth.

• 26:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  Even that was another documentary like Catfish that kind of exploded. Also, Michael Moore's movies, Fahrenheit 9/11, there was Borat, there was like Ali G, like all of these. Anyway, right, so.

• 27:04Rich Roll?

  And all of that talent now has been funneled into the development of limited series on the streaming platform. So there's a lot of opportunity and. And yet, less and less interesting feature films are getting made. But within all of that opportunity, like the real, there's no more music videos, like all, any kind of like creative flair and talent is going towards creating what I guess we would call television for the streaming platforms.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's, so, but all that became YouTube videos, like music videos for the 90s is now, became YouTube videos for the aughts and like the, and the teens. All the, like, you know, Spike Jones, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, right? They are now, they are now the establishment.

• 27:56Rich Roll?

  But, but they cut their teeth and, and develop their craft in commercials and music videos.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  Right, and that's why their stuff was so dope. Like, we grew up, Casey and I grew up like worshipping those guys. Soderbergh too, but Soderbergh is also an interesting, we'll, we'll come back to Soderbergh because he, he is a restless.

• 28:17Rich Roll?

  He plays in a lot of sandboxes in a very interesting way.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  And he likes to do it himself.

• 28:22Rich Roll?

  And you know what? He's a fan of Max Joseph. Your project made his list, right?

• 28:28Speaker 00

  It did.

• 28:29Rich Roll?

  Dix made his infamous annual list of the things that he loved.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  It was very, it was amazing.

• 28:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  And I've met, I've met him and he, it was, it's, it's a really, he's a, it was a really special meeting him and talking to him about films and stuff. And he's very, he very much is in the spirit of like, if that's, if that interests you, go and do it. Like, don't, don't think twice and shoot it yourself, like shoot it on an iPhone. He's so fearless in terms of just like adapting and grasping a new technology or a gap in the, exploiting any kind of technological gap in the system and subverting. So, but yes, so I kind of came up wanting to be this traditional filmmaker, but, but

• 29:18Speaker 00

  traditional in the kind of sense, in the 90s sense of, you know, arthouse filmmaking, which is now very much not, doesn't exist. To a small degree it does, like you said, 824 and, and those things, but, and I actually did achieve my goal.

• 29:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  I got there.

• 29:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  And I did it. This was not based on a book. I co-wrote this movie.

• 29:43Rich Roll?

  We are your friends.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:56Rich Roll?

  So let's get into it, because I love this story. I remember when this movie came out, I was like, wow, he made a feature with Zac Efron and who else was it? Emily Ratajkowski?

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Emily Ratajkowski.

• 30:08Rich Roll?

  I mean, this was a big movie and this was all set up to be your launchpad and your moment. And it wasn't like you were a hired gun, like you, this was the movie you wanted to make. Like, didn't you raise the money? Like, there was a lot that went into this and it was set up at New Line, right?

• 30:26Speaker 00

  So some of that is correct and some of that, I mean, I like the myth of some of that. But if I'm, if I'm being totally honest, it wasn't fully my idea. I basically, I was a web filmmaker. I was making content for a company called Good Magazine that my friend started, Ben Goldfish.

• 30:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, who's part of the Happiness.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  And he's in the Happiness thing. And, and off of that, I just got cut my teeth on making a lot of content, like web stuff, which was this really exciting world of like, oh my God, like YouTube, like what works here? And it's like, oh, information can be made to be exciting, like that can go viral. Educating people, bringing this kind of, these other interests I had in like geopolitics and social issues, like there's a place to make stuff here that can be really impactful. And man, was it powerful. Like the first, the first couple of videos I made for Good, one of them went to Sundance, which I didn't even think it would because I didn't even consider it a short film.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  I didn't even submit it to Sundance and it got in. So that was like, oh shit, like this can be considered a short film now? This is web content, which was even weird to say. It's like, what is this? I guess it's content, whatever that word meant at that time. And then the second thing I made for Good went bananas viral. And that was like my first taste of like that drug. It was called internet porn. And it was the it was the facts around the industry of internet porn. And we got a porn star and we wrote the facts on her body.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  And we had her undress and every time she undressed a piece of clothing, it revealed another fact. And it was this cheeky, kind of like, um, you know, mischievous playful video. And it was the first thing I actually filmed out of out of college after like I got in. I came to LA and it was like, it was it was I was really nervous. I'm I'm kind of like a computer guy, like I'm like, like I'm very comfortable behind a computer and like less comfortable in a film shoot situation, certainly then. And here here was this porn star and she came to my house. We shot it in my like West Hollywood apartment.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  I had a makeup person, I had a DP who was just a friend of mine that went to USC. And like, we were all really nervous because like here's a porn star and she's like just smoking a joint on my terrace. And like, then it's like time to like film her on my bed. Like with all these facts and like the DP was like really.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  My friend was like really like kind of. What is happening here? Yeah, he was like afraid. I was like, dude, get go like get on the bed like get the camera has to like travel up like. And he was like a little timid, so I I kind of took the camera and I shot a lot of it myself. And we put it online and in the first two days, it got five million views. And I was like checking my phone every every second, like I would just refresh and it would just jump up like a hundred thousand or something. And that was like, that was like welcome to the drug. Yeah. I didn't know that any that that could exist. I didn't know I had no precedence for that feeling. And it was crazy.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  And then it was like, well. Wow. We could, what a wave. Let's ride this thing. Like, let's make other, like, what else can we do? And so, I was doing that for a while. And, and Good Magazine's mission was to kind of like educate and make a social impact. So there's always kind of like a positive social aspect to everything we were doing. Versus like, let's say, collegehumor.com or like, you know, uh, any, anything that was, or Vice Guide.

• 34:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Which kind of could be more nihilistic or snarky and, and that stuff. So we kind of like had to be good. All this to say, that I'd been working in the web, in kind of web one, YouTube videos 1.0, for like, a good five or so years, six years. I've done my, you know, I'm starting to do my 10,000 hours in basically making web content. Even though I still see it as like a...

• 35:04Rich Roll?

  You still, you, you, there's this sensibility that you're slumming it, right? Like, it doesn't matter how, you may get 10 million views, whatever, but still, this is not, you know, Paul Thomas Anderson would never do this.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  No.

• 35:16Rich Roll?

  Right? So, what am I actually doing here?

• 35:21Rich Roll?

  And that has, uh, that then, and, and perhaps even, maybe this is shifting with the Happiness series, but maybe not, like, like, has that sensibility changed? Or are you still hang, is there still a residue of that, that's preventing you from doing what I know Casey has urged you to do for a long time, which is to fucking let it go? And just go full into the digital space and just own it, right? Like, he learned his lesson, or, like, he, he worked with the Safeties, he went to Cannes, and then he was like, "This is not what I want," and he went full in a long time ago. But you still have one foot in each world. But anyway, we're interrupting the story, but...

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Did you talk to Casey before this?

• 36:05Rich Roll?

  I did, yeah, I did. I did. But...

• 36:08Speaker 00

  I've like walked into a trap.

• 36:09Rich Roll?

  But, um, but all of these things, you know, where I was like, this is my, like, sense of this? And he's like, "Look, I'm not gonna share anything that I wouldn't tell Max to his face, or I haven't said to him." So I was like, "I'm not asking you to betray any confidences, but is, you know, am I on the right wavelength with this?" And, yeah, so...

• 36:27Speaker 00

  I think probably... Every time Casey and I get together, this is a good 60%, 70% of what we're talking about. It's like this same issue.

• 36:40Rich Roll?

  What are you holding on to?

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Not just me, but like what these two worlds and how different they are. And Casey's played a little bit in, in, you know, the traditional filmmaking world too.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  But right, so, so let me, so let me keep on going with the story because I think, I think we'll get there.

• 37:01Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  So I-

• 37:02Rich Roll?

  You're the storyteller. Tell the story dude.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  But you can see how scattered, but my storytelling-

• 37:07Rich Roll?

  You might need an edit, you know?

• 37:09Speaker 00

  My storytelling is just as scattered as my-

• 37:12Rich Roll?

  So this is the, yeah, this is the rough assembly.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. This is right.

• 37:17Rich Roll?

  Keep going.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  So I've gotten good at creating web videos. They're not about me. They're about other things. I'm bringing kind of my proper filmmaking education to making these web videos about any, any cool thing, but it's like progressive and social and it's about kind of bettering the world. This is still in the Obama idealist, like I'm working at Good Magazine. Barack Obama's just been elected president. There's a lot of optimism and idealism and hope. And all of these things we're making are kind of serving that. And I kind of get into that rhythm a lot.

• 37:58Rich Roll?

  And it was a time when YouTube liked uplifting content.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 38:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  There was like, there was a billboard where they would select the thing, like it wasn't, not everyone had like a, their own curated, algorithmically custom thing for them. There was like a, the front page of YouTube where they chose things in different verticals. And everything, a lot of my videos would be on the nonprofits and activism like top thing. And they, they would go viral. One was about malaria and drinking water. One was about, um, uh-

• 38:33Speaker 00

  One was about malaria and drinking water, one was about internet porn, one was about nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation. And it was like, oh shit, all of these really kind of, we could take these dry things and turn them kind of Trojan horse style. We can teach, we can get messages out there and ideas out there that weren't sexy, but we can make them sexy and we can make them go viral and viral they went. It wasn't about me, though. You know, Casey, Casey's videos are very much about him. He's, he's talent. He's like in front of the camera talent. And so, so where I'm going with all this is that I was making these videos for a while

• 39:14Speaker 00

  and, and the goal was always to make them go viral, but they also were like positive for the world and, and I was also serving a brand. I was serving a company. And we were, every time we made a video, I made a video about alcohol and like who drinks the most alcohol around the world, alcohol. And I made this video and it was like, oh, we gotta get it to Ashton Kutcher to repost. Cause like-

• 39:40Rich Roll?

  That was the moment when he was the first guy to get a million followers-

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:44Rich Roll?

  -on Twitter and that was such a big deal at the time. So he was, he was like the most influential person in the social space.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  He and CNN were like in a, in a like this fun rivalry to hit one million followers on Twitter first. This is like 2000, 2009.

• 40:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  And, or 2008, 2009. And I remember like every video we made, it was like, who can we get? It started to become that question, well, who has so many followers that we can get to repost this? And Ashton Kutcher, by the way, did repost that video.

• 40:18Rich Roll?

  And that was a time where if somebody reposted something, that was meaningful. It didn't just get lost in a sea and then maybe some people see it or they don't. Like anybody who was on that platform, all one million of those people that followed him would see that.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  Right. It was, there was still kind of a monoculture-

• 40:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  -within the newly democratized social media world.

• 40:42Rich Roll?

  Because it was pre-algorithm.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  It was pre-algorithm. I mean, look, the celebrities still were the, the, the big cheeses, right? Like there weren't like micro celebrities and influencers. It was Ashton Kutcher. He was competing with CNN for, for views or for followers. So- When Catfish came around and Neve called me to be, to see if I would be in the pilot, a part of me was like, maybe if I'm on this show and maybe if the show does well, maybe I'll get a lot of followers. And then I won't have to be begging Ashton Kutcher to share my videos. Like, maybe I can become vertically integrated.

• 41:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  So that, so there was some calculus in there. And to some degree, that

• 41:34Rich Roll?

  That happened.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  That happened. And it, and it, and it has helped. Cause I don't need to like beg a lot of other people to, to share my videos now.

• 41:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you kind of, you made a TED Talk about that, like being kind of a mini celebrity, right?

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. If I had to go back again, though, I would, I would not have done my TED Talk about that.

• 41:55Rich Roll?

  You can do another one.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Casey told me what I, what I should have done my TED Talk about. And, and to some degree, I think he was right.

• 42:03Rich Roll?

  What's that?

• 42:04Speaker 00

  What happens when your first movie bombs?

• 42:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're getting to that.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  That'll be the, this'll be that TED Talk.

• 42:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  So then I've, I've now, I'm like, starting to see the future of, of web video. I'm like, this is actually a viable place. I love doing everything myself. Like, it's, it feels like alchemy. Like, oh, I can go and shoot something with, by myself or with a couple of friends and we can put it online and then it can go super viral. And like, you get that intoxicating feeling. It's like, oh, man, I want to just keep on doing this. This feels great. And I see what Casey's doing and, and I see what my friends are doing. But I'm still being pulled towards this, like, no, I want to be Paul Thomas Anderson.

• 42:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're conflicted.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'm, I, I don't, I normally don't edit for other people. I normally just edit my own stuff. But again, I was like, short on money because of this short film I poured on myself into. And my friends asked me to edit this film for them called, about John Baldassari, the artist. And I was really down on myself as a filmmaker. And I was really, I just tried to make this pretentious art house film, my Paul Thomas Anderson film. And I was like, ah. Man, I don't know if that's me. I might have barked up the wrong tree. And then I sit down to edit this thing for my friends and I'm like so depressed.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  I'm really in the one of the rawest states I've ever been in. Like, I'm really like at an existential nadir. And I'm like, what do you guys want? Like, what do you want? How? What do you want me to do here? And they're like, do what you do. I'm like, what do I do? Like, what is my thing? They're like, do your thing. I'm like, what is that? And they're like, I don't know, like, like, use graphics and music and like, make it fast and fun. I'm like, oh, is that my thing? And they're like, yeah. And Baldassari, they had filmed this interview with John Baldassari. He was this amazing artist. Sure. And he did not want to be interviewed.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  He was very, like, salty and antagonistic during the interview. And he gave these one-word answers, which is very bad when you're editing, like, an interview. Uh, cuz you're like, well, what am I supposed to do with this? There was supposed to be some voiceover in it. And like, while I was editing and starting to put it together, and my friends are like, you know, do what you do, do your thing. I'm like, okay. So I, I very much kind of like went the, as far in the extreme in the opposite direction as I could from the short film I made. I went like full-on, like, really fast, really internet-y. See say, like, not Paul Thomas Anderson.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  And we figured out that we could actually make the one-word answers he was giving, like, almost like the punchline to the narration. So set it up so that like, if he said yes or no, like, that was funny. Yeah. And we did that. And that's a whole nother story, that video. But it, that video has gone on to actually get me a lot of work. It's been copied a lot, like HBO, like the Game of Thrones guys copied it for something they made for HBO. Like, there's a long history of people copying that video. But that video for me was like a, a, a real milestone. Cause I like, I, something broke in me. And by the way, I was so depressed when I was making it that I was taking stress naps.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  I was trying not to smoke weed, which I normally relied on and, and when I was editing. And I was like, I was having multi, like, talking to my therapist a couple of times a week. Like, while I was editing it, it was just like, I was really at the bottom. I make this thing and it blows up. It, like, they showed it at this gala at, at LACMA, that the art, the art and film gala. And Clint Eastwood introduced it and Leonardo DiCaprio was there. And I didn't get to go because I just edited it.

• 46:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you are the author of that, right? Taking this thing and putting your imprimatur upon it. And in so doing, I guess what I'm, what I'm gathering from the story is that this, this was a vehicle for you, not only kind of discovering your voice, but owning it in a certain way. Like, oh, maybe this is my thing. Or when somebody says, "Do your thing," they don't know exactly how to put a label on that. But there is something about your approach to narrative that's unique to who you are. And to kind of venture into that editing process and figure out how to take this thing that's kind of inert and not working for anybody and turn it into gold is a cool discovery, right?

• 47:09Speaker 00

  In your book, you talk about like a song. The song that, you know, your song. And I've, and it's funny because I always think about that Bono "You Too" line, like a song that I can sing, my own melody. And I've thought about that a lot for a long time. And working on that John Baldassari video like cracked open what my song might be. It like gave me a very large insight into like a flash of like, oh my God, like this feels right. It, it felt as right as working on that other short film felt wrong. And I was like, this, there is something here and there's so much more here to mine.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  And Casey saw that video. And it was that video that Casey was like, oh, man, I want, I like, he reached out to me and I'd reached out to Casey for some other stuff before and he totally like slopped me off like he, he like, he didn't even respond. Like, I was like, oh, fuck that guy. Like, maybe, yeah, maybe Casey thinks he's like, hot shit and he's not gonna respond to me. And then he saw that video and he was like, hey, I'm doing, it was the first time he ever reached out to me, it was in email. And he was like, hey, I'm doing these videos for Nike. Can you edit? Do you wanna edit them with me? And I was like, sure. I was like, I was honored. I was

• 48:35Speaker 00

  like flattered that this guy had previously like, who I knew of. And he was like a celebrity, a mini celebrity at the time. And he asked me to edit those videos and I, it was my first time I came to the studio. I like, I got introduced to the whole Casey world, his whole universe, which is very interesting. And, and then I like, lived inside of it for a while. And the third video we made together, and we became fast friends, but the third video we made together was Make It Count. And so we made these first two videos and it was grueling and it was fun and it was like, I was, we were both getting to kinda know each other. And then it was my 30th birthday, I was here in LA, I get

• 49:20Speaker 00

  a call from Casey saying, what are you doing like on Monday?

• 49:25Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. That's classic.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I'm like, ah dude, I'm, I'm here in LA. He's like, I, I wanna make this third video for Nike. I, we're gonna go all around the world. I want you to start plotting out like places we could go to. And I'm like, okay. I was like, I, at that point, I was like, I'm gonna say yes to anything Casey says. And we, I flew to New York, like I had, I had a notebook with some ideas of like where, cool places we should go to. I get there, I spend an hour or two at his studio and then we just go to the plane.

• 50:04Rich Roll?

  Right to the airport.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I'm like, he's kidnapped me, kind of. And I'm like now strapped to this insane person. And here we are going around the world. I have no idea how long we're really gonna go for. We're talking about going to Egypt. There was just the up, there was just the revolution there. So I'm like nervous about some of the places we're going to. I'm a lot more neurotic and nervous and fear oriented than Casey. But I've had a lot of friends like Casey throughout my life. Like I've become friends with people who are the opposite of that kind of fear oriented thing. So Casey is like one in a long line of like friends that pushed me out of my comfort zone.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  And we're, throughout that whole trip, we're talking about what the potential for web filmmaking can be. And what this world that's opening up before us can be. And it's very exciting because I have all my thoughts from coming from Good Magazine and making all these videos and having done Baldassari. And it's like, oh, my God, there's like a whole new vocabulary. Like these kids who are coming up, they can do the music. They can do the special effects. Like they don't, this is gonna be a problem for unions. This is like, this is going to be-

• 51:16Rich Roll?

  Every paradigm is broken and all the gatekeepers are removed.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  And we are just psyching each other up about the future of web video. I've, I've kind of coming at it from my own perspective, having lived in it for a while. And Casey's coming at it from his perspective. And we're both aware that this video that we're making, Make Account, like is his launchpad video. It's like, inside of this is the DNA for like the, the bright future of web filmmaking that we are both psyching each other up about. And while, I remember, we were in Victoria Falls. We had just come out of Victoria Falls and like he had done a handstand like right near the, you know, the precipice.

• 52:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  And something in me kind of like, I have this like, this terrible realization. But it's also like an inspirational moment. I was like, fuck, there's this song that I've been sitting on, as I tend to do. I've been sitting on this song and it's gonna be the end song of my first feature. But fuck, it's perfect for this video. It's the right feeling, I'm like, I'm feeling it. And I played it for him. And I was like, but you can't have it. And I played it for him.

• 52:40Rich Roll?

  It's a tiesto, right?

• 52:42Speaker 00

  No, no, it's Tiga.

• 52:43Rich Roll?

  Tiga.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  Far from home.

• 52:45Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  It's a, it's, it's a, yeah, it's a re, it's a DFA remix.

• 52:50Rich Roll?

  I mean, I know, yeah, I'm recalling it now.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  And I'm like, oh, man. I'm gonna give this to you, but I'm gonna hate you for it. And we come back from the trip. But I'm like, really excited. I'm like, oh, here it is. Like, my life has led me to this point. Like, it is web video. This is the future. Everyone behind us are gonna be able to do all these things. I've seen the industry. It's a tidal wave. It's a tsunami that is going to crush the industry. And there's no way that it's not. And here, and this video is going, is like the fight song. And I spend a couple of months editing it. It's only a three-minute video, but I'm editing it like feverishly. I'm so excited about it.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  I show it to a few friends and they go nuts when they see it. Like, it's like a, it's like a motivation bomb. It's like an energy bomb. And we rele, we shot it in February. We released it in, I think, April or May. And like, the internet.

• 53:52Rich Roll?

  It was, it fulfilled that promise. It really was an indelible moment in, in YouTube history. And it did set Casey up in a new and different way.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  And he knew that.

• 54:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  He, he, to his credit, like, he knew that that was his plan.

• 54:07Rich Roll?

  Well, he, I mean, that's a superpower of his. He's, he's always able to kind of foresee what's coming and, and approach it with a level of certainty. But for people who don't know, who haven't seen the, the, the video that we're talking about, basically, Casey was hired by Nike to make a commercial. And there was a whole... Idea and a lot of meetings about what this commercial was gonna be. And instead, Casey took the entire budget and said, fuck it. We're just gonna travel around the world and use it however we want. And we'll figure something out, which was this sort of revolutionary act of independence and free spiritedness.

• 54:48Rich Roll?

  And the result, this film that you guys did together was, I mean, it's lodged in my brain forever, you know? It really is quite a spectacular thing.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Thanks. It's one of those things, and there've been a few of these projects where while I'm editing it, I'm feeling the energy of it. And it's just more exciting every time. When you edit something, you have to watch something and listen to something a kajillion times, which is why working on that kind of bad Paul Thomas Anderson movie was like killing my soul, because I had to keep on rewatching and re-feeling the disappointment in myself. Whereas like watching this and feeling this, I was like, wow. Like, it's like a steel rod that's like heating up. And I can, and if I'm feeling it this strongly, then I think other, I think other people are gonna feel it that strongly. And then when they did, it was like, holy fuck.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  Like, what, what did we just release? And it, now here's the irony, we're getting to We Are Your Friends.

• 55:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  So that video goes bananas. And I'm also now making Catfish. That video comes out while I'm making the pilot. No, Catfish has already been picked up. That video comes out while we're shooting the very first episode of Catfish, where I'm locked now into making Catfish. And that video comes out, and it's going crazy. So now, in the span of like, a couple months, I, I'm making this new show on MTV. I have this crazy viral video that I made with Casey. I get another video off of that called Follow the Frog, which, that also does really well.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Like, and I use a lot of kind of the things I learned from, from Casey to make that video. And then off of that, all of that cumulative momentum, I get a phone call from Working Title. Who is an amazing prestigious production company. They did, they done like almost all the Coen Brothers movies. They did Fargo, they did Big Lebowski, they did, they also did like Four Weddings and a Funeral. They did Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz. I mean, I get a call from, from an executive there who's a little younger than me saying, "Hey, this is, and I'm taking the call, I'm in Miami and we're shooting the last episode

• 57:18Speaker 00

  of season one of Catfish." Just to give you a sense of timing, episode one of Catfish, Make It Count comes out. Last episode of Catfish of season one, I'm getting this call from Working Title saying, "Hey, we want to make a movie that's set in the world of electronic music. You know, we have a, we have a story and a script, but we kind of want to rethink it. Would you be interested in like, in writing and directing it?"

• 57:46Rich Roll?

  And all of that unbridled enthusiasm and all in sensibility in this digital landscape immediately evaporates the minute you get this call, right?

• 58:00Rich Roll?

  Forget about all that.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  No, it wasn't forget about all that. I wasn't that dumb. It was like, "I see what we've unleashed here. I'm going to bring it. I'm going to bring all of that."

• 58:15Rich Roll?

  Bring that energy into, so it's like a hybridization.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 58:18Rich Roll?

  Like, everything was, was unidirectional going from cinema into the digital space and now you're going to point that arrow in the other direction. Like, I, I mean, listen, who wouldn't be excited to get that call?

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Well, I knew why I was getting the call. I was getting the call because of Make It Count and because of these ideas and this energy and stuff that, that, you know, I had worked on with Casey and with Rel and Henry and I saw how Rel and Henry brought, you know, their own very lo-fi DIY filmmaking and how that became Catfish. So I'm thinking, "Oh, great. I'm going to take these lessons from, from, from here and I'm going to translate them and adapt them and scale them up to here."

• 59:02Rich Roll?

  And reinvent cinema.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 59:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  And reinvent cinema I did.

• 59:07Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 59:17Rich Roll?

  So this movie gets set up, I'm sure there's a long history of development here, but eventually it finds its way to New Line, right?

• 59:24Speaker 00

  No.

• 59:25Rich Roll?

  No?

• 59:25Speaker 00

  No. New Line was not, New Line was not involved. But Warner Brothers, which owns New Line, is involved. No, there's no New Line.

• 59:34Rich Roll?

  I got you.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  So working title is kind of-

• 59:36Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  The working title is The New Line.

• 59:38Rich Roll?

  Got it.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  So all of a sudden now I'm developing this script for this very prestigious company, and that made some of my favorite movies of all time. And I'm writing it and, and, and planning it and strategizing of it in the same way that I worked on Make Account and all these other things. So again, I'm trying to take, there's that great White Stripes song like, you know, when you're in your little room and you're working on something good, but if it's really good, you're gonna need a bigger room. But when you're in the bigger room and you might not know what to do, you might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room.

• 1:00:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna take what's in my little room, and I'm now gonna blow it up into this movie. And we're gonna make it in this very guerrilla kind of way. I'm gonna make it with small cameras. I'm not gonna go Paul Thomas Anderson on it. I love how we're using Paul Thomas Anderson, like until today.

• 1:00:31Rich Roll?

  Poor Paul.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Poor Paul, he's one of the most genius filmmakers of all time. I wish I could be like him. And so, I wanna make it in this new style. I literally wanna, the process, I want it to be as loose and fun and explorative as Make Account was. And, and we did that. I brought Zack to like a, a music festival, and we shot in this music fest- he, he had never been to a music festival like that, because he had no bodyguards, he had no, like, we, we did all this guerrilla shit. We broke all these rules. We did all these things that people, you couldn't do in feature filmmaking.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Like, we were using all sorts of like shitty lo-fi video. I'm shooting some of, there's some parts of We're Your Friends that I did shoot on- My like catfish camera on purpose. So we we got away with making it in this way and we got away with it because there was all this momentum and excitement around the internet, around internet filmmaking, around what we could do. Emily was just the kind of star of this giant viral music video, kind of maybe the last giant viral music video, Blurred Lines. Zach had just been in Neighbors and just kind of like subverted his high school musical thing. It was a weird mix of people, like me, Zach and Emily, like, and Working Title.

• 1:01:59Rich Roll?

  Everybody in some sort of transitionary phase with their career.

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  Totally. And I had been, hmm, let me back up for a second. The writing process goes well. We work with this great, I said to them, I didn't want to write it by myself because I know that I'm a better editor than I am like a writer, but I can edit someone else's writing and then kind of add to it the way, again, I'm kind of working at it from using, playing to my strengths. So we kind of cast a writer and we find this great writer, Megan Oppenheimer. She now is like the showrunner on Tell Me Lies. She's super young at this point, though. I think she's like in her late twenties. And she and I work together and we write the script that we're really excited about.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  And has a lot of voiceover in it. And Working Title reads, they're liking it, liking it, liking it, but then we get to a certain point and they're like, this opening, like, it's really, this is on the script level, like, this opening, it's, there's too much voiceover. Why are, why is the voiceover talking about all these non sequitur things? The voiceover needs to be, like, if it's not giving us exposition, then it shouldn't be there, right? This is kind of classic filmmaking. And I've now done enough in the web space to be like, no, no, no, this is going to work, trust me. But no matter how many times I said that to them, they were like, no, we've made films, we've made your favorite films, like, we know what we're talking about. So I was like,

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  All right, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna mock up the first four minutes of the movie, cuz I can. So I took parts of Make It Count. I did the voiceover myself and I mocked it up. And I showed it to them. I was like, this is what I mean. And they were like, that's awesome. Can the whole movie be like that? And I was like, yes. And not only that, but that little sample I made also got sent out with the script to all these actors. And Zac saw that. And Emily saw that. And it immediately, even that little video went viral, but it went viral in like the the agency.

• 1:04:16Rich Roll?

  In a closed loop within Hollywood.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  So all of a sudden, all these great actors, young actors and stuff, wanted to be in it. And I didn't want Zac. Zac was still, you know, to me, it was like, oh my god, if we make this cool movie about music and stuff, but it has Zac Efron in it, people are gonna be like, oh, fuck this movie.

• 1:04:36Rich Roll?

  You wanted a little darkness, a little edge.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Right. But then Zac was in Neighbors, and he was also the only star of that age that could get the movie financed. There was no other, you know, we came very close with some other people, but they weren't big enough value-wise to get the movie financed. And you need a star to get the movie financed.

• 1:04:59Rich Roll?

  Like a Robert Pattinson.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:05:02Rich Roll?

  Or someone like that.

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  Sure. And, but Zac loved this thing I made. And he really liked the script. And he was like, running at the movie. And then I met with him. And I watched all of his other films that weren't like Neighbors or High School Musical. And he was like, he's a really good actor.

• 1:05:22Rich Roll?

  He's insanely talented.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  I mean, like, people are like, you know, they see Iron Claw and they're like, Zac Efron. I was like, I know.

• 1:05:29Rich Roll?

  It's an incredible performance in that movie.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  He's amazing. And so I see that he's amazing and I meet with him. And I want him to play Mason. I'm like, I still am trying to like, not cast him as the main character. Like, I'm like, why don't you play the best friend? Like, he's gonna steal the show anyway. That's the role you want. And he was like, no. Like, he didn't want that role. He wanted the main role. And I was like, but the main role's not supposed to be this like, super good-looking guy. Like DJs are kind of like, They're a little like more awkward socially and they're not good looking. They're a little scrawny and like they're the awkward person at the party. That's why they became DJs. So they can like be at the party and do their thing and.

• 1:06:09Rich Roll?

  But not really have to interact with anyone.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Right. So I was like, fine, Zach, if you, if we do this, like you're gonna have to lose a lot of weight and we're gonna have to like dim you down a little bit. Of course, he's still like super handsome and great.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  And, and so we, we get to making the movie and everything's going well. Everything's going well. We, we, we hit our marks. We, we make our, you know, Emily's really.

• 1:06:34Rich Roll?

  You make the movie you wanna make.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  Very much so. There were some, there were, my wings got clipped a little here and there. We made it independently. And then after we made it, I made like a trailer for it that went to like AFM, which is like American Film Market. And, and Warner Brothers bought it off the trailer. A24 and Warner Brothers were both jockeying for the movie.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  This is a little movie. We made it for five and a half million dollars. That is, it's not like a big Hollywood movie, but we made it with stars. And because it looked, because it looked good and had good music. And because it was edited in this fun, cool way, there was a lot of like, oh my God, we made it for so little money and, and now there's all this potential that we can release this wide. It was my dream. It was like the, the.

• 1:07:22Rich Roll?

  All the stars are aligning.

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I ended up like really editing it myself too, in a lot of ways.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  And we can talk about how hard the making of it was, but I'm gonna skip that for a second. We ended up with a movie that everyone was really excited about. And I'm still editing it and like we're down to the wire with the editing as I constantly am. And this is, the movie's gonna come out August 28th. It is now July and the trailer comes out.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  And the trailer goes viral, but not necessarily for the right reasons.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  People think the movie looks good and exciting, but the whole DJ sphere is like, fuck this movie. Zac Efron as a DJ, fuck him. Fuck Hollywood, who thinks they can kind of co-opt our subculture.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  And we had a lot of music, we're cutting, I cut to music, right? A lot of these scenes, the movie is kind of a musical. And we have all these scenes that are cut to songs. A lot of those songs are from Ausla. Ausla is Skrillex's label. I've met Skrillex briefly, but I met the people at his label. They were like, we had all this music, we had a song from Avicii in the movie and all that stuff.

• 1:08:48Rich Roll?

  So you thought you had buy-in from that community?

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  Yes. And also, I had just made a documentary before this about DFA Records. I make documentaries about musician people. I went out of my way to make sure that the movie was like authentic and accurate. I had, I went to the nth degree to make sure that we were authentic to the world and that it was all these things.

• 1:09:12Rich Roll?

  This wasn't some cosplay situation?

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  No, and I like went to the nth degree to make sure of that. And then the trailer comes out and everyone, like all the people in the DJ world shit on it. Ausla and Avicii pull all their music out of the movie. This is like, we're, we're finishing the movie.

• 1:09:37Rich Roll?

  You just, you didn't have signed license deals with them yet?

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  I don't, I mean, I don't know what was signed or not, but, but they can do that.

• 1:09:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  And so, and then there were actually, there's still some songs in the movie that people tried to take out, but they couldn't because they didn't own them outright, or like, so all of a sudden I'm in this hostile situation, but that I totally foresaw. They wanted me to cast Zac Efron. I didn't want to cast Zac because my initial inclination was, oh, God, like, High School Musical is going to invalidate this movie. We want kind of someone a little more unknown or a little more indie. But then I was like, oh, but Zac's a great actor, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now here we are. The trailer comes out, people see it, and they're like, fuck this. Now I've got to re-edit scenes and like, we're up against this crazy tight deadline.

• 1:10:24Rich Roll?

  New music?

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  New music. It's only a five and a half million dollar movie, so it's not like I have like tons of cavalry to like, help recut everything. It's like a bare bones crew. We're making now, we're backing, we're making this indie movie, but it's going to be pumped out and put through the machine of a giant studio. We didn't go to a festival, there was no word of mouth. It's just going to be released everywhere.

• 1:10:50Rich Roll?

  How many, how many theaters?

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  Thirty-two hundred.

• 1:10:53Rich Roll?

  For a five and a half million dollar movie?

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  Around, around the world. And there's this hope that it's going to be like Project X or even Blair Witch, that we made it for so little money and it's got this big movie star and it's about this youth culture thing and that everyone's going to see it. Now Warner Brothers, in all their infinite wisdom, decides that, that August 28th is the best day to release this.

• 1:11:18Rich Roll?

  Is that the weekend before back to school? I mean, traditionally, August, it's back to school, and it's, and it's on the heels of, you know, the worst time of the year to release a movie, which is the doldrums of August. That's where they dump all the garbage.

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  Right. So, right. That's where they dump all the garbage. And on August like 14th or something, that's when Straight Outta Compton came out, right? Which is another music movie that also is like, but it's about, and it's, it crushes. And then two weeks later, and by the way, I'm like so far out of my league in terms of what's going on. Less than a year ago, I'm like making movies in my bedroom, you know, putting them out on YouTube. And now I'm sitting at like the conference table at Warner Brothers and they're saying, you know, there's, they're- 20 people in the room. And I'm like, it's like I'm in Disneyland. I'm like walking on the Warner Brothers set. I'm eating at the cafeteria.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  I'm mixing with like the guy, you know.

• 1:12:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And it's everything that you had imagined.

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:12:22Rich Roll?

  When you were that kid with the Hollywood dream.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  I'm 32. I'm like, I can't believe this is happening. This is amazing. I'm, I'm here. I'm doing it. I've, I've made it. And, um, and they say, they say, you know, one day I get a call from working titles saying, you know, we're gonna go with Warner Brothers instead of A24. And at that point, A24 wasn't really A24.

• 1:12:46Rich Roll?

  It wasn't what it is now. But in retrospect, you could have been an A24, bro.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  Right. There's a sliding doors thing, which is like, fuck. I kind of, anyway.

• 1:12:56Rich Roll?

  Cause that's the shingle that knows how to handle a project like this.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Right. But I didn't know.

• 1:13:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 1:13:01Speaker 00

  I didn't know the difference between shingles.

• 1:13:03Rich Roll?

  And you're gonna be deferential. You don't know, you're, this is your first movie. You're surrounded by all these people that have made all these great movies. They know what they're talking about.

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  Right. And now I'm in Warner, Warner Brothers. These people, again, they made my favorite movies of all time. I'm like, I didn't even, I'd never even went to a film festival with a feature film. So I've, I have no experience in terms of rollout and like marketing or any of that stuff. In my mind, making the best movie is the best marketing tool, right? Make the best movie and people will find it. So now I'm in this crazy pressure cooker where I need to finish the movie. All the music, like a lot of the music just got yanked out. The public kinda hates it. Even, you know, like, or the people who I wanted to love it already are like pointing their middle fingers at it.

• 1:13:47Rich Roll?

  But that's such a tiny subset of a film that has breakout potential. It's people who don't care about whatever that subculture has to say.

• 1:13:57Speaker 00

  It hurts my heart a little bit, but I'm still like, oh, this movie is, I believe in it. And it delivers on its emotional, it delivers an emotional payload. I'm, and by the way, the song from Make It Count would have been the last, like the final song of, of, of We Are Your Friends.

• 1:14:14Rich Roll?

  You could, you could, you could have reused it. I don't think anybody would have, would have, you know. Cast aspersions on you for that.

• 1:14:22Speaker 00

  I have a story, I actually, so there's a ancillary story that's poetic in the sense that I end up using the original song that I was gonna start We Are Your Friends with for another Casey Neistat viral video that I made with him called Do What You Can, which totally rips off the beginning of We Are Your Friends.

• 1:14:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, those, well, and do what you can't and make a counter of a piece. Like, those are very interrelated.

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  As is.

• 1:14:50Rich Roll?

  Film.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  As is We Are Your Friends. Like, We Are Your Friends is as much a part of those two movies as a feature film can. So, so let's skip ahead a little bit. So, August 28th is the day. I don't even know that, how bad a date that is, but I'm just kinda like, it's either August 28th or it's like the following year, cuz that's how big Warner Brothers' like, calendar is filled up. And, and if we have to wait a year, then all the music gets stale, and we have to replace everything, like, and, and there's a fear that maybe we're gonna miss out, like, the fever around electronic music and EDM or

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  something is going to die down. Like, we, no, we need to get this out soon. So, it's August 28th. It's coming out all over the world on the same day. There is no releasing on Netflix yet. It's literally probably the last year that that happened. And...

• 1:15:49Rich Roll?

  Big premiere.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  It's Thursday, yeah. We have, we have a premiere, we have a marketing tour, we open, we have a premiere in London, we have a premiere in Chicago, we have a premiere in LA at the Mann Chinese Movie Theater. There, and then, and then in San Francisco. But there I am, I'm at the Mann Chinese Movie Theater.

• 1:16:05Rich Roll?

  This is it.

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  This is it. The poster's there. I'm being interviewed on the red carpet. My, the stars of the movie are there, the head of Warner Brothers is, is there. It's like, my parents are there, like, this is it. I'm 32. We're having this big premiere. Like, I, I did it. I like, I touched, I touched the top of the pinnacle. And then, so that was like, let's say, like, Monday or something. That was August 20th. The movie comes out August 28th. So, it comes out, and, so I'm like, I'm euphoric. I'm in this crazy, like, I can't believe I've done it. I'm patting myself on the back, but I'm also super excited. Thursday rolls around, some movies come out on Friday here, right?

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  Thursday rolls around, I'm on the phone. There are all these meetings I'm supposed to have the following week with all of these executives, like who have heard about the movie and want to talk to me about my next project, everything like that. Meanwhile, by the way, while I'm doing, while I'm making this movie and while I'm in this press tour, Casey has started vlogging every day. And his vlog has totally caught fire. I mean, and so we've very much gone down these totally different paths. And I'm calling him intermittently, being like, dude, I'm inside of the machine. I can't wait to tell you about what it's like inside of the machine.

• 1:17:27Rich Roll?

  And he's like, I have no time for the machine.

• 1:17:29Speaker 00

  No, I mean, like, I was like, you're, you're breaking the, you're breaking paradigms on your own. And I'm like, I'm like the inside man. And like, I want to like, we can, we can.

• 1:17:38Rich Roll?

  The mole.

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, we can like, figure this out, like a way to do this and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  Thursday rolls around and I get a call from one of the guys from Warner Brothers. And he goes, I'm real, I'm, I'm sorry. It's like he called me to say that someone, like as if someone were dying. He's like, I'm really sorry, but you know, the returns came in from Australia and they're really low. And I'm like, so what? It's Thursday, like low, low returns from Australia, but like.

• 1:18:11Rich Roll?

  It's like, what you don't realize is they know within hours before it's even, even the first screening in the United States, whether it's going to be a hit or a dud.

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  Totally. It's like, it's like when you post something on Instagram and like, it only gets like 10 likes within the first five minutes or something, you're like, something's up. But I don't know that. And I'm like, oh, these guys, they don't know, they don't know the power of the internet. They don't know the way that this is all going to. Friday.

• 1:18:48Rich Roll?

  Friday, Friday, 10 a.m.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  Friday, the reviews come out.

• 1:18:55Rich Roll?

  Oh, no.

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  They're pretty bad. Some are great. We did get like some like three and a half stars like, you know, Vulture, I know exactly who liked it and who did it and I will remember it for the rest of my life. But it's getting like a 48% on Rotten Tomatoes and I'm like, oof, that hurts and was not expected. And a lot of it is about, a lot of it is about the narrative of Hollywood co-opting. They kind of took the mantle from like the anti Zac Efron Hollywood co-opting the subculture thing and, you know, Skrillex and Avicii, you know, disavowing

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  their role in the movie from the trailer. And so that hurts and was unexpected. And then, of course, like, and then Saturday is like the box office disaster. Zac Efron movie makes no friends. Biggest box office bomb since 1984. You know, every headline about this giant movie that Warner, and no one, none of these-

• 1:20:09Rich Roll?

  But the thing is, it wasn't a giant movie. It was a $5 million movie.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  But the optics, they didn't play that up.

• 1:20:16Rich Roll?

  Big movie stars, lots of theaters.

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  It wasn't like Paranormal Activity where part of the narrative was like, oh, they made this movie for nothing and here and now we're bringing it to you big. That was hidden. The fact that we made it for nothing was hidden because they wanted everyone to think that it was a big Warner Brothers movie.

• 1:20:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I always thought it was like a 30, 35 million dollar movie.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  Five and a half million dollar movie, made in L.A. Which, so $5.5 million made in L.A. Like, doesn't, like, it's more like a $3 million movie because a lot of that money goes to other things. So-

• 1:20:50Speaker 00

  And so that's Saturday. And it's so hyperbolic. It's so extreme and over the top that it's like, it's funny at first to me. I'm like going through the seven stages of grief. Like, at first, it's like funny. And it's, and I've, but I've been on the phone with Warner Brothers and like, surrounded by all these people. And so part of me, it's like, it doesn't feel, it's like, okay, so it doesn't have the biggest box office, whatever. Like, there are plenty of movies I love that didn't open well. I mean, Office Space is a movie that like bombed at the box office, but went on. And then Monday rolls around and all those meetings that I was supposed to have with all those executives from all those other companies get pushed.

• 1:21:35Speaker 00

  And slowly I start to realize that like I've been dropped. Like a hot potato. Like the, the bad, the-

• 1:21:47Rich Roll?

  Do not pass go, go directly to director jail.

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. The narrative in the industry world, thankfully, this is like a small consolation, was that Warner Brothers mishandled the marketing of the movie, that they didn't know how to market a movie like this. And that they really screwed up. At least that's what-

• 1:22:10Rich Roll?

  That plays into, into the Sliding Doors A24 fantasy.

• 1:22:15Speaker 00

  It certainly does. And it also plays into the, you know, the, the release date being wrong and all that stuff. But, but it's cold comfort. And, and now I've got a, and then it took a while. It took like a week or two or three, or maybe even a month for it to like, to really hit me. Cause it was so surreal. I was, I was, I was up, I was up here.

• 1:22:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:45Speaker 00

  I did it. I was there at the Man Chinese Movie Theater, like two weeks later.

• 1:22:51Rich Roll?

  Phone's not ringing.

• 1:22:52Speaker 00

  Phone's not ringing.

• 1:22:53Rich Roll?

  Call's not getting returned.

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  No, I'm-

• 1:22:55Rich Roll?

  Meetings canceled.

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  I mean, you don't like-

• 1:22:58Rich Roll?

  You just, you go from hero to zero, like in a, in a, in a, yeah, a blink of an eye.

• 1:23:04Speaker 00

  And then- There's like a podcast in New Zealand that pops up. That's called The Worst Idea Ever, where they play a terrible movie for like a year that they watch the two guys like live.

• 1:23:19Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:23:20Speaker 00

  You know, there was the honest movie trailer version of We Are Your Friends. Then comes all like the ridicule. So it's like, it's not just that it opens badly and that there are bad headlines and that like, you know, the executives that I was supposed to have meetings with producers like. Then there's like the public ridicule, right? Like, um, so these two guys in New Zealand watch the movie once a week and like just talk about how bad it is. Here at the, at the silent movie theater, they had a night where they invited comedians to come and, and basically live, like do stand up live while the movie is, is rolling.

• 1:24:01Rich Roll?

  Oh no, I didn't know that.

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  Oh yeah.

• 1:24:03Rich Roll?

  Oh my god.

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  It catches fire in the like, the social media, it goes viral. The badness of the movie.

• 1:24:11Rich Roll?

  For all the wrong reasons.

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  Goes viral on top of all of that, which maybe hurt more than, than the industry stuff.

• 1:24:19Rich Roll?

  Did you, did you get any, did you win any Razzies?

• 1:24:24Speaker 00

  No Razzies.

• 1:24:24Rich Roll?

  No Razzies.

• 1:24:25Speaker 00

  No, because a lot of the people, everyone who liked the movie, and there, there were a lot of people at the beginning that liked the movie. I was proud of the movie.

• 1:24:33Rich Roll?

  But here's the thing, the movie's good, right? It's good. It's a really good movie and it's developed this cult following. There is a significant audience that absolutely loves this movie and it, and it, and it still breathes life.

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  And I'm so grateful and thankful, like when people come up to me on the street and they say, oh, we love you from Catfish. It's like, it makes me feel like this good. When people say, I loved We Are Your Friends, it's like, I will be like, do you, what do you, do you, what do you want? Do you want, you want a poster? Like, yeah, yeah, like, what can I, what can I give you?

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  And, but yeah, it, it was bad. And then I was like forced to be like, am I, maybe I'm, maybe I'm not a good filmmaker. Maybe I'm bad. Maybe what I think is good is not considered good by other people. You start to real, everyone who's made a bomb hopes that it becomes a cult classic. That's like the only place you have left to go. It's like, oh, well, I

• 1:25:42Rich Roll?

  Unless you're the, like, who's the guy, the, the, the true cult filmmaker who made the worst movie of all time?

• 1:25:49Speaker 00

  Oh, Tommy Wiseau.

• 1:25:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Tommy Wiseau. Who just, you know, he's created his counter narrative around that and just relishes the fact that it's bad and still has some weird argument about why it's good. But anyway, that's the true last stop.

• 1:26:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. You're like, yes, I mean, but I'm telling you, I'm sure in the mind of every filmmaker who's made a bomb, like, they're like, maybe

• 1:26:13Rich Roll?

  Someday, yeah, someday it will be rediscovered, it will be unearthed and appreciated.

• 1:26:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's the only place you have to go.

• 1:26:22Rich Roll?

  But that has happened.

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  Amazingly, it, it has, and I, I think it has. But I've learned a couple of things along the way. One, when everyone, even the people who liked it, were tweeting about it. And you can, by the way, if you want to like pour salt in the wound when you have a bomb, like just go on Twitter and just type in the name of the movie and you will just see what everyone is saying about it.

• 1:26:48Speaker 00

  And, but a lot of people who liked it, even now,

• 1:26:53Speaker 00

  what they say, and I haven't looked on Twitter in a while, which is a good, it's like a good mental health check that I haven't, because I was doing it for a long time, looking at what people were saying about it and like using it to flagellate myself. But They'll say, "Oh, you know that, it wasn't that bad. It wasn't so bad." Or like, I, it's always qualified as like, "I know everyone says this movie sucks, but it's okay." Like, that's how everyone talks about a movie that gets reviewed negatively, or like, has some bad juju around it. And now, of course, people who watch it, none of that, there's no baggage to it. They're not feeling that kind of stuff.

• 1:27:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they're discovering it without the halo of that narrative hanging over it.

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:27:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so they can go to it with fresh eyes.

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  And look, if it, if it came out on Netflix, it would have been a totally, and by the way, that's why-

• 1:27:50Rich Roll?

  Or if Netflix today just acquired it and decided to put it on their homepage.

• 1:27:56Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:27:56Rich Roll?

  I'm sure it would do incredibly well.

• 1:27:59Speaker 00

  You know, I do get residuals from it. So some, so people somewhere are watching it. But I definitely went into a multi-year-long tailspin about it. That I've like, I've, I've come out of, but not like, that long ago. And it was bad. You know, you, you've spoken on the show about, you know, we all have stories we tell ourselves about ourself. And that is very much, you know, what, who we think we are. And when you, when your whole life and your whole identity is built around being this filmmaker, you know, literally, everyone I've ever met from, from 15 years old on, that, that's who I am.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm a filmmaker. And I finally made this first movie. And it was very public. It was a huge public failure. It wasn't like some small art movie that went to a festival. It was like, shot out of a cannon and was publicly derided and ridiculed. And so, everyone saw, everyone saw how bad it, it was received. And then you're like, you start to question everything and every decision and, and am I just wrong? Am I, like, what was me? What was them? I still think the movie is good, does that? There are other people who make shitty movies and they know they're shitty.

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  And then they get good reviews and that's a whole different, like, that's a different mindfuck. So why did this thing, why does this thing work so well on the internet? And then I got here and then it was like hated widely? Like where did I go wrong? Did I not listen to people?

• 1:29:44Speaker 00

  Is it the industry? Is it me? Did it get watered down by the process? Like, and it was bad. It was really bad. And dicks came out of that. Part of that questioning was, am I just a bad leader? Like, maybe I got tripped up by wanting to appease all the powers that be. And I, you know, I, oh my God, these dick directors, they're dicks because they have to protect their vision. They create, maybe they're doing the dick thing on purpose. Maybe they create this dick reputation for themselves so that like when executives or whatever try to like mess with-

• 1:30:23Rich Roll?

  Weedle with it. They're protecting the sanctity of the creative work. But you, being somebody who is so enamored with Hollywood, you're coming into it with a much more deferential disposition, right? Like, you're gonna say yes because you're thinking, I want these people to like me and I want to have a career here. And I'm gonna be agreeable because, you know, I want to have these people in my life and be champions of what I'm trying to do. And that ends up kicking you in the ass and slingshoting in the reverse direction.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  And, but also to add to that, it wasn't just that, oh, I want them to like me. It's like, these people have made great films. I hired it, I hired people-

• 1:31:04Rich Roll?

  And you're new, like, yeah.

• 1:31:06Speaker 00

  I want to learn, I can learn from them.

• 1:31:08Rich Roll?

  If they're saying, this is what works and we know it works, you're gonna say, okay, you have done, this is my first movie.

• 1:31:15Speaker 00

  And I come from documentary filmmaking where I think that everyone has something to offer. And these people who've made these great films, it's like, oh, teach me the wisdom that led in small part to your contribution to that film. And so I'm listening to them and I'm trying to, like, I want to be a democratic leader who's like, best idea wins. Like, that's how I'm approaching, that's how I approached We Are Your Friends.

• 1:31:39Rich Roll?

  Right, but- But great creative works are rarely the product of a committee, right?

• 1:31:46Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:31:47Rich Roll?

  And so the takeaway is what?

• 1:31:49Speaker 00

  Well, so I'm asking myself, like, was I too, did I try to appease too much? Did I play ball too much just because I was so, I put them on a pedestal? Did I put too many people on a pedestal? Did I try to, did I do this to myself? Was it death by a million cuts? Did I try to, anyway? And so that's, that was also part of what went into dicks. It was just like, it wasn't just like, oh, how do I manage people? It's like, how do I protect the sanctity of the vision? You know? And that, and making dicks, to be honest, like, went, was very helpful. Cause it was a crash course in leadership.

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  And it was a crash course in how to, how to embark on a creative endeavor in a way that threads the needle. Like, not, you know, where I came out, where I netted out with dicks is, and I think about dicks all the time, like, every day. And I think about the cuts, the parts that I cut out of it. The, like, the great lines that didn't make it into the final cut, but I still reference. And the books that I read, I'm still rereading. Like, you know, everyone has their own style. It's just who you are. And if you're not a dick, you can't fake it. You can't just be a dick if that's just not your inner, you know, dicks.

• 1:33:12Speaker 00

  If you're born a dick and you, and you're creative, then like, great, congrats. Like, you are maybe going to be able to protect your vision and make your, you know, authorial, auteurial work. But you might have other problems in your life. Like, you might have problems with your relationships.

• 1:33:29Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:33:30Speaker 00

  And your kids, and like...

• 1:33:31Rich Roll?

  You can, you can set a firm, healthy boundary without being an asshole.

• 1:33:35Speaker 00

  And there are ways to do that. You can work on yourself, which I definitely have. I've learned not to do certain things that are in my nature to do. And I'm trying to get better at second nature, aspects of that. Then there's also like partnering, right? Like, you don't have to be a dick if you hire a dick to like protect you. And that's why so many of these, like you meet Spike Jonze and he's like the nicest, sweetest guy. But like, I'm sure he has a team of people-

• 1:34:03Rich Roll?

  Surrounded by a phalanx of people that protect him.

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:34:05Rich Roll?

  Who have the harder conversations.

• 1:34:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:34:08Rich Roll?

  That's always the case.

• 1:34:10Speaker 00

  Well, sometimes it's not though. Sometimes you have Kubrick or like Michael Bay, who are just come in with a hard hand and they're like, this is, it's my way or the highway. This is how it's gonna be. And we, we like to lionize those people, we used to, as being like, oh, like the military, kind of the general paradigm of being a leader. Versus, you know, you could be a coach, you could be a teacher, you could be a conductor of an orchestra. Like there are these other metaphors that work maybe better. But you have to be true to like your nature.

• 1:34:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. I understand that. Yeah, I get that. I still think that, I know that in the aftermath, like the immediate aftermath of that experience, you know, Monday morning and, you know, everything that that wrought over the coming days and weeks, where you were sinking, you know, deep into a dark hole. I know that Casey's advice to you was, you need to immediately start making something else. And that thing should be the lived experience of what happens when your movie bombs.

• 1:35:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:35:18Rich Roll?

  And I think, in fairness to you, that would probably be, you know, you were so emotionally distraught at that, at that time that, you know, maybe that wasn't possible for you. But I think that would have been something that would have connected with a lot of people. Because nobody wants to hear about somebody whose movie, you know, kicks ass. But everybody can relate to somebody who has a dream and falls short and has to weather, you know, the experience and the aftermath of that.

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was really paranoid that that this failure was gonna define me. It was so extreme and hyperbolic that like, I was really afraid that this was gonna be a permanent mark on who I am and I didn't at the time want to be the my movie bombed guy.

• 1:36:09Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:10Speaker 00

  I like didn't want to lead with that. I didn't want to project.

• 1:36:14Rich Roll?

  But unlike so many other feature film directors, you have this whole other world that you know extremely well, and it's a land of golden opportunity that these other filmmakers know nothing about. Maybe they're not interested in it, but they have no experience there.

• 1:36:33Speaker 00

  But Hollywood doesn't give a shit about web filmmaking and how like how well your your films are looked at and how highly you're considered there. They don't they don't give a fuck about how great a commercial director you are, even if you're making commercials at the Super Bowl. They don't care if you've made the best documentary in the world. Like...

• 1:37:00Rich Roll?

  That's not necessarily true.

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  You can maybe parlay...

• 1:37:03Rich Roll?

  I mean, you can look at Johann Rank or you can look at Brian Fogle who made Icarus and now is making, you know, like there are people that...

• 1:37:10Speaker 00

  They need to re...

• 1:37:11Rich Roll?

  And the reason that you were in the position to make that movie was because they did notice what you had done there.

• 1:37:17Speaker 00

  It's true, but I didn't have a mark against me at that point. But I would but all those guys, anyone who's jumped vertical to play in a different sandbox has to kind of start at the bottom of that. Like, yes, if you win the Academy Award for a documentary, then you'll have a shot to direct a narrative.

• 1:37:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:37:39Speaker 00

  But like these...

• 1:37:40Rich Roll?

  Like Jimmy Chin and Nia.

• 1:37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:43Speaker 00

  Or like the guy who directed Man on Wire. You know, he directed Theory of Everything.

• 1:37:46Rich Roll?

  But you're gonna be, there's gonna be a babysitter.

• 1:37:49Speaker 00

  There's gonna be a babysitter and everyone, and they're gonna be like...

• 1:37:52Rich Roll?

  Second guessing.

• 1:37:53Speaker 00

  Was he able to convert it? Like, did he convert? Did he not convert? And that also, the We Are Your Friends fiasco, which again, I'm so, I'm still so confused about it. Cause again, I feel like I made a good film and I'm not confused about that. So I'm confused about how... Look, is it, is it the greatest film of all time? No. Is it the best I could have done at that time, given the, the circumstances? Definitely. And so I'm still confused how to talk about it. Cause it's like, not like I want to say, ah, yeah, I just like, I don't know what I was thinking. It was just really bad and I like fucked up and like, I told the actors to do all the wrong things. Like, cause I don't believe that.

• 1:38:37Rich Roll?

  I don't think that's true. It's all about context. It's a five million, if it, if it had premiered at a certain festival or a different, it, it, you know, it's, it came out at a weird time, whatever. There's a million reasons you can spend your lifetime like trying to, you know, forensically deconstruct it. The question that I have, and I think it's the, you know, the main one for you is, did that experience disabuse you of all the romance of Hollywood that you've, you know, kind of harbored in your imagination? Is it an experience that then allows you to step into the digital landscape and kind of own your space there without reservation?

• 1:39:16Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:39:17Rich Roll?

  Or are you still somebody who's trying to straddle these worlds equally on unsure footing about where you actually want to, want to stand?

• 1:39:29Speaker 00

  Well, the answer is it didn't disabuse me of my reaching for the gold ring. It certainly sucked and it, and it, it definitely illuminated all the ways in which the industry can like, all the bad aspects of it that I was already chafing against when I was making it. We didn't talk about the, the making process, but like, making a movie like that, even if it's a $5 million movie, which is like, you have a little more kind of flexibility and stuff. Cause you're like, it's more, you're more nimble. Like, it's nowhere near as fun as going out and making a web video. It's like the difference between riding a bike and driving like a tractor trailer. Like, you just don't.

• 1:40:14Speaker 00

  You know, a lot of European directors, like Vim Venders was talking about, or I think it was in the documentary about his DP, like, the way they made their films in Europe, like, they'd see something on the side of the road while they were driving in the car, and they'd be like, "Oh, there's a great, there's something great here. Let's get out and shoot like a scene here." You can't do that here in the US because you got the trucks and the, and like, the catering and all that stuff. And so, that was already like, kind of a level of like, "Oh, this is not as fun as like making, going out and just making a web video." And then, of course, the reception of the movie and that whole distribution aspect of it was really not fun, too.

• 1:40:59Speaker 00

  And then I was kind of turned around for a while, and I made Dicks. And Dicks ended up doing like, really well on YouTube.

• 1:41:06Rich Roll?

  You're constantly rewarded on YouTube. And you're, you had this, you know, you know, really insane experience in Hollywood. So when you, when you map it out, Max...

• 1:41:20Speaker 00

  Are you trying, like, is this an intervention?

• 1:41:22Rich Roll?

  No, I'm not. It's not for me. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. No. It's not for me to, it's not for me to tell you what to do. And I have no judgment on it. Like, I feel for you, man. I'm like, you know, empathetic. Like, I understand that. Like, you know, I live in LA. I know what that dream is. And, and even being older than you, it's probably more calcified in somebody like me than it is for somebody of your generation. So like, I totally get it. But there's so much opportunity, and the lights are nothing but green when you step into that space. And I think there is something energetically about

• 1:42:03Rich Roll?

  trying to straddle two worlds where you're not really committed to either, that is holding you back. And when you finally decide, like, "I'm gonna go all in on this", things start to happen in a new and different way. And maybe that other thing comes around, but it only comes around when you have completely let go of it. And you're holding on, you're holding on tightly to... Different reigns and it's creating, I think it's creating dissonance and confusion. That's, that's like mucking up the gears and fucking up your whole deal.

• 1:42:34Speaker 00

  To your credit, you've done a great job at putting your finger on what has been a very central point of anxiety and ambivalence in my life. And, which is all to say that very recently, I have been able to reconcile these two things. You asked, you know, in, in the wake of We Are Your Friends, like, did that disabuse me of my desire? It didn't. It, it, I was scarred and hurt and I took to YouTube and I went back to Catfish for a while and I was just like, I need to, I need to rebuild myself.

• 1:43:18Speaker 00

  And I've now thrown a lot against the wall in a lot of different.

• 1:43:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Part of. There's something scattershot about it. Well. And to, not to put words in your mouth, I think, and the reason I reached out to you is because you're on the cusp of releasing this series around happiness and you've made the decision to do this on YouTube. And I don't know whether HBO said no, or you even thought about that, but I think it presents this fresh start and this new opportunity for you to redefine your mission or refine your mission and commit to this as a path. Like, I think it's really cool and interesting that you're going to release an entire series on YouTube.

• 1:44:09Rich Roll?

  I'm sure there are streamers or, you know, Peacock or Tubi or whatever, there's so many other places where you could drop something like this. And the decision to do this, I think to me, is a statement that you're making about.

• 1:44:24Rich Roll?

  You know, the career that you want to pursue. Or maybe you're just throwing another thing up against the wall. I don't know.

• 1:44:29Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:44:30Rich Roll?

  But.

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  I'm not.

• 1:44:31Rich Roll?

  How does that land? I hope you're not.

• 1:44:33Speaker 00

  I'm not. I actually, purposefully, didn't even pitch this around to anyone. I didn't want to. I didn't want to go through the two months of getting kicked in the balls by people like poking.

• 1:44:47Rich Roll?

  You don't need a gatekeeper. You don't need anyone to say, Max, this is good. Or, Max, we love you. You have everything you need and people love what you have to say. And the way in which you say what you want to say is beloved. Like, I think this is a really exciting moment. And I guess what I would say is my hope for you is that you are honoring it in that spirit. And, you know, you allowed me to see the first two episodes of it. I think it's fucking fantastic. You're talking about things that are really important, that you're struggling with and trying to learn about in real time.

• 1:45:27Rich Roll?

  And there's something, you know, really, really vital and endearing and important and connective about that. That you don't get when it's a... There's a separation when it's on a television network or on a movie screen. But there's something about YouTube that feels very personal. You know, it's a direct communication to the people who love what you do.

• 1:45:57Speaker 00

  I've, yeah, I've definitely thrown a lot at the wall over the last 20 years. And the thing that has come back to me the most in spades is the YouTube stuff. It just, that's where people connect with it. That's where the conversation can kind of keep going. You know, I have a lot of ideas and I I'm I fall in love with the person. You know, like I fall in love with the idea. And sometimes that idea is a YouTube video. Sometimes that idea is a TV show that needs to be on a streamer.

• 1:46:31Rich Roll?

  And that's the Soderbergh thing.

• 1:46:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I and I'm very true to that. And like, once I get an idea in my head, I can't shake it. And it like, it reveals where it should be. This happiness thing. And all of these kind of, you know, they kind of fit into this little category. I like to think of as neurotica. Like, these personal issues that I have that I know are probably universal. That if I go down the rabbit hole and they really help me out. Like, you know, it's not too different than the podcast. Like, I know that if I go down the happiness rabbit hole, I'll come out the other side, understanding a lot more about happiness and maybe even being happier. And that has certainly been the case on this.

• 1:47:12Speaker 00

  But I also know that the place for that is YouTube and the Internet. And I have taken, like, I just moved to New York. I left LA for various different reasons. But it this, I I feel way more resolved about the direction I'm going in. And I'm just, it feels so much better and more liberating to embrace like this thing. Again, I was there with Casey at the, you know, at the genesis of his online, you know, dominance or conquering, or those are both very combative words that I wish I would choose another word.

• 1:47:57Speaker 00

  But and I kind of still try to straddle both worlds. And I this YouTube web filmmaking world is my, it's my world. Yeah. It's been the world that I've been in.

• 1:48:11Rich Roll?

  It is your world. And that doesn't mean that there may not come a day where you're going to make a feature or, you know, a documentary that gets released theatrically. But I think, you know, on the subject of happiness, I can imagine a world in which That feature film crushed it and was everything you hoped it would be. And the aftermath of that was not looking at Metacritic and people criticizing you, but staring at your navel and trying to make sense of why it didn't deliver on the promise of happiness that you were convinced it would. And you would still find yourself in this place, making a series on happiness as a result.

• 1:48:57Speaker 00

  I made this thing for, with HBO Max. That was my, that was very much my idea. I made it with, well, mine and Monica Lewinsky's. Like, we did this thing on public shaming. I was very passionate about that subject. Social media, public shaming, like, the kind of complicated tangle that that is. And we spent three years making HBO Max. We did, you know, like, made a, made a, and I made it the exact same way I made Dick's or bookstores. It's the same, I used all the same people I used before. I made it. And we got to, we, we, like, we got to a place where everyone loved it. We got to the marketing meeting with HBO Max. And we're like, so, what are you thinking?

• 1:49:41Speaker 00

  How are we gonna get this out to the world? And they're like, well, we're thinking, really, that you and Monica should post a lot about it.

• 1:49:52Speaker 00

  Monica's already doing, Monica's already doing press for American Crime Story, so she's gonna go on all those shows. She'll, she'll be able to talk about this a little.

• 1:50:01Rich Roll?

  That's what I would do if I didn't have HBO. That's what you're supposed, that's the whole, like, value proposition of working. This is, this is the same thing with book publishing, too. It's the same thing.

• 1:50:13Speaker 00

  And I don't own it.

• 1:50:14Rich Roll?

  It's still on you. You still have to take responsi-- yeah.

• 1:50:17Speaker 00

  And then I don't own it. So after that, I was like--

• 1:50:22Speaker 00

  Well, fuck. Like, that was right. That's the whole value proposition is that you guys make sure people see it.

• 1:50:29Rich Roll?

  You take care of that part, yeah.

• 1:50:31Speaker 00

  And if you want to make an impact, if you want people to see your work, at least me, I'm just talking, like, if I want people to see my work, if I want to make an impact, if I want to connect with other people, it's pretty clear where that place is. And, you know, and I am, you know, I am much more resolved now. And this happiness thing has been incredible. Like, we dropped the trailer. And, you know, no marketing people, no, no marketing teams, no, you know, it's just like all just me and, you know, a couple people. And it seems to resonate. And it's the right place for it.

• 1:51:16Speaker 00

  It's the right avenue for it, the right platform. And yeah, I mean, that I definitely do feel much better about where everything is going and, and just my, you know, where I'm going.

• 1:51:29Rich Roll?

  I have a million questions, but I guess I would, I'd like to end it with how the experience of making this series changed you. Like, what stayed with you? Like, has it impacted your decisions and your behavior?

• 1:51:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, you don't kind of immerse yourself in happiness for two and a half years without, like, coming out the other side, you know, thinking differently about the world. The thing that I think sticks with me the most is kind of circling what happiness is. Like, we all spend a lot of time kind of unpacking and dissecting our unhappiness and like analyzing, like, why, why don't I feel good, blah, blah, blah? But, but not really focusing on what feeling good and being happy actually is. And it's complicated. It's not just one thing. And then there's like, is it joy? Is it like just contentment? Is it like just feeling satisfied?

• 1:52:32Speaker 00

  Is it the happiness of having climbed a mountain that was really hard and then looking down on it? Or is it more of like an everyday, like, you know, the taking in, you know, smelling the flowers kind of thing? And Where you, where it really all nets out and it kind of all, they, all the happiness stuff leads to the exact same place. Which is friends, family, community. It's, it's community, it's basically like. What real happiness is, and I, I wish, yeah, there's so much to say about it, but.

• 1:53:07Speaker 00

  If you're not, when you hang out with friends and you laugh, that's happiness. Like that's, that's about as good as it gets. When you, when you hang out with your family and you're having a meal and your friends are there and, and, and a romantic partner is there and you've got, you've got romance. Friends, family, love, like, and, and you, maybe you say something funny and people laugh with you. Like, there's.

• 1:53:34Rich Roll?

  That is truly as good as it gets.

• 1:53:36Speaker 00

  That's as good as it gets. You don't, you don't get better than that. Like that is, that's it. And, and kind of understanding. That that's what happiness is really helps. You re-prioritize your life around the things that really matter. It's not just family. Right? And it's not just friends and it's not just job.

• 1:53:59Rich Roll?

  But it, but that connection and friendship piece is the one we kind of under-index in the Western world the most.

• 1:54:08Speaker 00

  And it's generally like filled with alcohol and, and other substances that can, that, that undercut the, the actual joy. That that stuff is too.

• 1:54:20Rich Roll?

  And it's something we wedge in when it's convenient and doesn't interrupt. What we delude ourselves is the true path to happiness, which is achievements, success, accomplishments, striving, all the like, right?

• 1:54:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, that there, you know, scientifically, there is a ceiling on those things. Like you can't be so.

• 1:54:43Speaker 00

  Successful in your career that it makes up for all the other ways deficits you have that would make you happy. You can't be, you can't make so much money that, that it just makes you happy. You need to have friendships, family, love, like you, you need to serve all of these.

• 1:55:02Rich Roll?

  You have to have all of those six neurotransmitters in balance, right? I'm not going to spoil it, but that's an important piece that gets revealed in the first episode.

• 1:55:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. And knowing that, even just keeping that metaphor in my mind, like definitely has really helped me be, become way more reconciled with myself and, and, and just resolved to live in a, in a better, more balanced way. But balance is such a vague, like overused term that like, I don't even want to like say balance. It's, there are six, I mean, according to this, there are like-

• 1:55:45Rich Roll?

  You could think of them as buckets or values that need nourishment.

• 1:55:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's this guy that we, that I interviewed, this neuroscientist Axel Bouchon, who is really on the cutting edge of, of kind of proving what happiness is in the brain, like from a scientific fMRI.

• 1:56:06Rich Roll?

  Neurochemical.

• 1:56:07Speaker 00

  From a neurochemical perspective. He comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Uh, and this is a, this is a way to access that without drugs, without, you know, psychopharmaceutical drugs. And I think that there's a lot of, I think that there's a lot of value to it.

• 1:56:26Rich Roll?

  And I love that guy. Never heard like that way of explaining happiness before. I thought it was super interesting. How many episodes are there?

• 1:56:34Speaker 00

  There are six.

• 1:56:35Rich Roll?

  Six.

• 1:56:35Speaker 00

  But it's kind of open-ended. I kind of, I want it to keep on going.

• 1:56:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:40Speaker 00

  Um, and that's again, what's so great about YouTube is that you can do that.

• 1:56:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Speaker 00

  Right? There's, one episode is about the neuroscience. One episode is about kind of the philosophies, the different philosophies of happiness. One is about the, you know, Scandinavia. And

• 1:57:00Rich Roll?

  The Higa?

• 1:57:00Speaker 00

  Higa?

• 1:57:01Rich Roll?

  Huga.

• 1:57:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, Denmark. But what?

• 1:57:04Rich Roll?

  You go, you go, you go to all these places. You go to Denmark. You're with the people. You're trying to understand what makes these Scandinavian countries different. Why are they always on the top of the list when it comes to the happiest people in the world?

• 1:57:18Speaker 00

  Right. It's like, what is the whole deal with Scandinavia? And like,

• 1:57:21Rich Roll?

  You're like, it's cold. They don't look that happy. What's going on here?

• 1:57:25Speaker 00

  It's not, it's not joy.

• 1:57:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:27Speaker 00

  It's the absence of misery. It's, it's like, uh, there is a

• 1:57:32Rich Roll?

  And the Higa is about valuing those moments of connection, like prioritizing it and making it like part of the flow of life.

• 1:57:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:57:42Rich Roll?

  As opposed to something you do on the weekend.

• 1:57:45Speaker 00

  Well, it was really interesting that it didn't make it into the cut. But like when we were in Scandinavia, like, we couldn't go to a restaurant because you have to make reservations so far in advance. They're, they're huge social planners. So the idea of like spontaneity, like, oh, I'm gonna just duck into this restaurant. Like, they, they make reservations and they plan their social events like weeks in advance. And then they look forward to them. And they like, it's like, oh, I can't wait for this to happen. And, and then when they're there, oh, now it's happening. And then after it happens, it's like, oh, wasn't it great when that, when we all got together and happened? Like, there's

• 1:58:22Rich Roll?

  We're like, oh, God, I gotta go to that thing tonight? Like, it's dread.

• 1:58:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:26Rich Roll?

  Why did I say yeah? I gotta drive.

• 1:58:30Speaker 00

  And it's like, maybe I'll go, maybe I won't. But I'm gonna like drive myself crazy thinking about it up until the last possible second. And then I'm gonna jump and decide in the air, you know?

• 1:58:39Rich Roll?

  Like, we approach those things as impediments to happiness.

• 1:58:43Speaker 00

  Right. Cause we think that liberty, that being free to make any decision and move in any direction we want at any point in time is, is that liberty and freedom is what happiness is. And maybe it's not. I'm not, I'm still a

• 1:59:00Rich Roll?

  Well, well, that, what that gets at is like the primacy of the self. Like, what's important is how I feel and what I wanna do.

• 1:59:08Speaker 00

  Well, so, one episode I didn't send you was about, is the philosophy episode, which, you know, goes from Plato, Aristotle, Maslow, like, and, and talks about, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that stuff. And in basically all the Western literature about happiness, it's very individual-based. It's all about the individual. Self-actualization is the height.

• 1:59:40Rich Roll?

  That's the peak of Maslow's hierarchy.

• 1:59:42Speaker 00

  Self-actualization, right? It's not about like mutual actualization if you're in a couple, or group actualization in a community. It's about self-actualization, which obviously dovetails really well with, you know, capitalism and rugged individualism. But it's also maybe why America and a lot of the other Western capitalist countries are at the bottom of the mental health survey index. Despite our GDP and all of the money and products and stuff we have, we are very mentally unhappy and unhealthy. So, you know, community, others, making sure.

• 2:00:27Speaker 00

  It's like it's communal actualization.

• 2:00:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, connection, connection. I just got back from India, and I had the opportunity to go to Dharamshala. I was invited by Arthur Brooks, the happiness guy himself, right? He brought a small group to go spend two days with the Dalai Lama. And Arthur hosted it and, you know, kind of conducted this ongoing conversation with the Dalai Lama. But the theme, of course, was happiness. And the foundational question is like, why are we unhappy? Or what is it that, you know, will drive greater happiness? And no matter what question was posed by Arthur or any of the other people that we were with,

• 2:01:15Rich Roll?

  his answer was essentially always the same. He kept going back to the same thing, which is love. Like more love, more love. If you're having trouble connecting with love, look to the mother's love for a child. Or look in the animal kingdom and see how the mother cares for the child. And try to engender or channel more of that into your life as a means of being more charitable, of being more forgiving, of cultivating gratitude and creating more connection with people.

• 2:01:52Rich Roll?

  That is the path. And it's so anathema to our way of life and this bill of goods that we've been sold about, about what drives happiness, that even in the face of watching your series, or reading Arthur's books, or having all of these experiences, we still hold on to this idea that, yeah, I get it. But the happiness that I'm looking for, I'm telling you, it's just over that hill. And I'm going to get there and I'm going to do it by getting this and doing that. And, you know, people are going to say this and then I'm going to arrive. And disabusing ourselves of that delusion is a very difficult task.

• 2:02:34Speaker 00

  Well, that's what we've been talking about this whole time.

• 2:02:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:36Speaker 00

  I mean, the, the kind of quest for that Paul Thomas Anderson level.

• 2:02:41Rich Roll?

  And then you'll be happy.

• 2:02:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:02:43Rich Roll?

  So from that lens, and I think this is how we're going to have to end this. Your movie, Not Doing Well, was actually a gift. Perhaps you were spared of a longer tail to learning this lesson and arriving in this place where you're realizing you could use a little more happiness and you want to actually understand what it is. Because if you had been successful, maybe you would be up in a house up in the hills over here and you would be, you know, you would be one of those dicks, you know? And it would be 20 more years until, you know, everybody's retreated from you and you realize like I've, I've basically created this entire life on a lie.

• 2:03:25Rich Roll?

  And that lie, like that, that, that promise of happiness not being delivered and realizing that it's a lie would only then, you know, in your dying years, send you down the rabbit hole and off to Denmark to try to understand what happiness is. So you have been spared, my friend, and I think it's a beautiful thing that you've gone on this exploration and that you're, you're using your craft and your art to, you know, share what you discover with others. I think that's a real public service and I think you're an incredibly gifted person and I hope you just continue to do more of this.

• 2:04:01Speaker 00

  Thanks, man. I appreciate this. This has been a gift. Can I say one, one thing? It won't take very long. I do feel like there's something that the world wants from you.

• 2:04:13Speaker 00

  You know, you talk about service a lot, you know, but the world, you might think that the world wants this thing from you, or you might want to give the world this thing. But the world might want something else from you, and it'll tell you. You know, if you, if you throw a lot against a wall, the thing that'll come back to you is the thing that the world wants from you. And listening to that is really important. Like, like, instead of just insisting, "No, no, no, this is what I want to give." That's still, that's still the I.

• 2:04:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:47Speaker 00

  But listening to what the world is asking from you and rewarding you for is really kind of, I mean, you get to be around 40 and you, you've been around and you've, you've put enough feelers out to see what's coming back. And I don't know, I, I think that there is something to that, right? Like, it's not just about how can I, how, how can I find my way to serve the world? But it's more like, what is the world asking me to serve it?

• 2:05:18Rich Roll?

  Hmm, mhm.

• 2:05:19Speaker 00

  I think that there's something in there.

• 2:05:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:24Rich Roll?

  I could do with a little reflection on that idea myself.

• 2:05:28Speaker 00

  Well, haven't you kind of, I mean, hasn't the world kind of told you that?

• 2:05:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but I think you can also, you can create a little bit of a gilded cage around that as well. And, and things can become a little bit static. And, you know, I, you know, I think it's, it, listen, at this point, like, this thing works, I could do this, I love doing it. But is there something else out there? Is there another way to bring expression to the ideas that I care about, that I think, you know, are important? And, you know, I'm, I'm writing a book this year, it's the first one I've written in a long time. So I am spreading my wings in a, in a new and different way and trying to extend my, or expand, you know, kind of the character of this thing that we do here. And we'll see, I don't know, but.

• 2:06:15Speaker 00

  But those, that's like, you know, negative capability, you gotta.

• 2:06:18Rich Roll?

  What do you mean?

• 2:06:20Speaker 00

  That's like the, um, Keats, Keats's notion of, you know, being comfortable in the discomfort of, you know.

• 2:06:31Speaker 00

  If you shouldn't be complacent, right? Like, you need to like constantly be okay living inside of the uncertainty.

• 2:06:39Rich Roll?

  This has become so comfortable that it's uncomfortable.

• 2:06:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:06:42Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? Because I know that I should be testing other things and trying new things. And, you know, the creative person inside of me has a yearning to express. But this has, I've created this whole thing to be this massive, you know, excuse or distraction so that I don't have to pay attention to that other thing that's calling me, right?

• 2:07:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like this. Let's turn the tables around. Let's talk about your high-class problem.

• 2:07:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a very high-class problem. You can come back and then you can host me if you want. You can be a guest, a guest host, interview me, maybe.

• 2:07:20Speaker 00

  Sounds good.

• 2:07:21Rich Roll?

  All right, dude. So if you want to learn more about Max, I guess, go to your YouTube channel. These episodes, are you going to drop them like weekly or all at once?

• 2:07:30Speaker 00

  Weekly.

• 2:07:30Rich Roll?

  Weekly? Right on. Anywhere else you want to direct people to see your stuff? We'll link up, you know, a bunch of the work that you've done. But your YouTube channel, right?

• 2:07:39Speaker 00

  No, look for me at the Man Chinese Movie Theater.

• 2:07:43Rich Roll?

  You'll be at the 10 a.m. screening of, you know, whatever show and you're going to get up in front of everybody.

• 2:07:51Speaker 00

  No, follow me on social media and on my YouTube channel, I guess, to see, to see all these great things that are going to come out. But thank you for your time and thank you for this kind of like de facto therapy session.

• 2:08:06Rich Roll?

  You feel all right? It was good.

• 2:08:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I feel like very, I feel like vulnerable. I feel like quite, quite opened up. Yeah, I feel, I feel cut open and exposed, but that's, but that's good.

• 2:08:19Rich Roll?

  Right on, man. Well, best of luck with all this stuff.

• 2:08:22Speaker 00

  Thanks, man.

• 2:08:22Rich Roll?

  Cheers, buddy.

• 2:08:33Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors,

• 2:09:16Rich Roll?

  who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis.

• 2:09:59Rich Roll?

  And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.

• 2:10:14Speaker 00

  Namaste.