#2425 - Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke is an actor, filmmaker, and author. He recently starred in the film “Blue Moon,” available on major streaming platforms and in select theaters, and the FX series “The Lowdown,” available for streaming on HULU.https://bluemoonfilm.com/home/www.fxnetworks.com/shows/the-lowdownhttps://linktr.ee/ethanhawke Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Get a free welcome kit with your first subscription of AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/joerogan Get Gameday Deals all season long only on Uber Eats. Order Now. 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Joe Rogan?

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  It's a long, it's a journey.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  Nice to meet you.

• 0:15Joe Rogan?

  Great to meet you, man. It's weird when you've seen someone in so many fucking movies and then you meet them in real life, like, okay, just a regular person, right there.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, staring me in the face, he just took a leak.

• 0:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Um, dude, you've been in some fucking banger movies, man. It's like, you've had an incredible career.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:35Joe Rogan?

  Pull that sucker, uh, pull that microphone.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Pull it towards me?

• 0:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  All right, very good. Yeah, it's been a long, strange trip.

• 0:41Joe Rogan?

  It's been a wild one, huh?

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:44Joe Rogan?

  When did you start acting? How old were you?

• 0:47Speaker 02

  All right, so, I'm like, 12 years old, I don't have a winter sport, my mother doesn't know what to do with me, and, uh, my next door neighbor, he lived like, four houses down, he took an acting class at the Paul Robeson Center of Performing Arts, and, so, my mother signed me up so that I could get picked up by his mom, you know, taken to acting class in the winter, and get dropped off, you know, and be at home. And, I went there, and, this head of a local theater company came by to teach an improv seminar, kind of thing, I'm 12 years old, right? And afterwards, in the parking lot, he said, um, "Hey, you wanna be in a play?" I said, "What do you mean?"

• 1:30Speaker 02

  He says, "I got a part of a guy who's a knight, gets to, you get to have a sword," and, I said, "Well, I have any lines?" He said, "You'll have one line." I said, "All right, cool," and I asked my mom, and she said, "Do I have to pay?" You know, and I said, "I don't think so, I think they're gonna pay me." So I went, and I did this play, and, it was George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan at the McCarter Theater in New Jersey, and...

• 1:52Joe Rogan?

  That was a real play?

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, it was a proper play.

• 1:55Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  And, it was an incredible experience, to be honest with you, because, my parents...

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Hated their jobs, you know, they would go to work and their life happened on the periphery of their employment. You know, my mom would take the train to New York and so she wouldn't get home till seven thirty, something she would leave at dawn. And she was miserable at work, I mean. And I went to this rehearsal and everyone was having, they were talking about whether or not God existed, they were talking about what they believed in, they would dress up in these crazy outfits and then we did the play and they got a standing ovation and it was, it was so much fun. And it was the first time I saw, I was like, you could do this for a living? You know, a lot of the actors aren't people you've heard of or anything like that, but

• 2:47Speaker 02

  they were real actors and they loved their job and the rehearsal room was so kind of thrilling, watching them figure out where people should stand and when, what was important and what was the scene about and what was the theme of the play and how could this scene fit in with the larger context? And I just decided that's what I wanted to do. And a lot of kids want to act, so that doesn't mean very much, but I, through this other friend of mine, I started hearing about open casting calls in New York. And I asked my mom if I could go on some of these big auditions. And again, she said, is it going to cost me any money? She said, if I paid for my own train fare, I could go to these auditions. And so I took some Polaroids and went on a few of these big auditions and I got one of them.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  And it was for this big, in 1984, it was a thirty million dollar movie directed by the guy who'd just done Gremlins, right, Joe Dante. And I thought I was a made man. I mean, it was just, it was, it was absolutely incredible to be sucked out of suburban America and brought to LA. My first scene partner was River Phoenix and all of a sudden, I'm in LA and. You know, my mom couldn't quit her job or anything. So my mom had a really turbulent relationship with her mother. But her mother, her mother and she didn't really know each other. And so her mother said she'd be my guardian. And my mom designed this as a way to maybe have a family healing.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  But my grandmother was a piece of work. And we lived together in Koreatown. That's what they called it. And it was wild. And she, I remember we drove into Paramount Studios. You know, you can picture it, the image from The Godfather and you had the big gates. And my grandmother had always wanted to be a movie star.

• 4:37Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  You know, and she had, she was from here. She's from Austin, Texas. Well, really Fort Worth. But, you know, she would talk about going to see Gone with the Wind at the Paramount here in Austin, you know. And she would, she would watch Gone with the Wind, you know, three times a week. And she had dreamed of being a movie star. And I remember we were in a big van driving me to set the first day. And we went through the gates of Paramount opening up. And she was smoking an Eve cigarette in the van, of course. It's 1984. And she's just like, my first time in Hollywood as a fucking guardian. Pff, you know. And so the whole child actor thing was a trip. And I finished the movie and there's a lot of drama involved in that.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  If I was to complete that story. But I finished it. The movie was a big turkey.

• 5:28Joe Rogan?

  How old were you at the time?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  14. River and I were both 14. We, yeah, yeah. But see, we looked so young in that picture, right? But you got to understand, you know, when you're that age, you think you're dying to be 18, dying to be 16. We went out, River and I stole a pack of Camel cigarettes because we both wanted to be like James Dean. And.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  And we had a, we had a lot of fun. That's the truth. But the movie came out and I remember River and I going to the bathroom at the premiere. And we'd grown a lot from the time we shot the movie to the time it came out. And nobody in the bathroom really recognized us. And they were all talking about what a turkey the movie was, how terrible it was. And I remember just looking in their eyes like, it wasn't the narrative we thought. You know, we'd bought into the dream that, you know, we were gonna be whatever teen icon we were thinking of at the time. And it died a quick and salty death, my dream. And I went back to high school and put away my dream of being an actor.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  It seemed like it was this isolated, almost like choose your own adventure book or something, where I got to see what Hollywood was like, but then have it denied. And it kind of like putting your hand in a flame. It was not a good feeling when it was over. And then, you know, four years or so went by. And I graduated high school and I was off at college. And I heard about these auditions for a movie called Dead Poets Society. And I hated college. I was miserable. And I thought, I'll take the bus in and I'll go on one of these open casting calls again. And if I get the part, this is what I decided.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  If I get the part, I'll do that. If I don't get the part, I'll join the Merchant Marines and be like Jack London. That was my fantasy at the time. I remember, I remember calling my sister and saying, all right, there's seven parts. This is how dumb I was. I was like, there's seven parts. If I don't get one of those, I must suck, you know? So, which is not true at all. But I ended up getting one of them. And I dropped out of college. And the success of Dead Poets Society sent me, you know, was like a trajectory. It shot me down a different course of water than I was on before.

• 7:55Joe Rogan?

  It's probably a much better path than the first film being successful. And you become a child star.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  I cannot tell you how grateful I am for that first experience. First of all, if for no other reason than in the success of Dead Poets Society, I didn't take it seriously at all. I didn't even realize that the movie was successful until a couple of years later, because I had so braced myself for failure.

• 8:21Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right. JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website, like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace.com/Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This episode is brought to you by the Apple Sports app. Guys, this is the ultimate best time of the year to be a sports fan.

• 9:05Joe Rogan?

  Football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer. The calendar is stacked, but it can also be hard to keep track of it all. And that is where the Apple Sports app comes into play. It is the fastest and easiest way to stay on top of all the action, with scores and play-by-play automatically showing up on your iPhone when the teams you follow are playing. That means you don't have to figure out when the games are on and how your team is doing, which is especially nice when you're following a bunch of teams and your friends are constantly blowing up the group chat. The Apple Sports app gives you all the important game details for your favorite sports teams, fast and simple.

• 9:48Joe Rogan?

  Download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone. This episode is brought to you by the Mosquito Bowl. Here's a story that's pretty incredible. After Pearl Harbor, four of the best college football players in America walk away from promising NFL careers to enlist in the Marines and fight in World War II. And the craziest part- It's a true story. These guys had their whole lives ahead of them, but traded the glory of the gridiron for the brutal reality of combat, where the stakes were life and death. Directed by Peter Berg, the guy behind Friday Night Lights, and starring Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, and Tom Francis.

• 10:32Joe Rogan?

  The Mosquito Bowl, now playing in theaters.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Expectation of failure, anyway, because of the first experience? Yeah, of course, everybody's saying, oh, the movie's so great. I'm like, yeah, they said this last time. It doesn't mean anything, you know? And so it kind of taught me at a really young age about to ask yourself why you're doing something. You know, like, are you doing it for the result of what happens? Or are you doing it to do it? And I, by coming back to acting a few years later, I was just fully braced for it not to go well, and it was still gonna be worth it. And, and so I think I, it gave me a slight bit of ballast to handle the success of Dead

• 11:13Joe Rogan?

  You went into it for the enjoyment of doing it, rather than thinking you were gonna be a star.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  I had no expectations, but I was certain I wasn't going to be a star. I was positive of it. I saw it as a way to make some money and maybe learn about writing and learn about film and a way to get out of college. Now, what happened is when I got there, I met all these other young men who were in love with acting. And that, I started watching movies with them and talking about movies with them and seeing the light in their eyes. And we'd go to set, and there was Robin Williams. You know, we had Peter Weir, who had just directed Witness, one of my favorite movies of all time at that point. And he was a master. I mean, he was not a lightweight human being. He was a heavyweight human being. And he would lead rehearsals, and he would talk about acting and performance in a way that I hadn't.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I heard people talk about it that way when we were doing St. John, when I was doing the, like, he talked about it like we were making art and like we were on a mission beyond success or failure. And it was, it was an invitation to a lifestyle, a life commitment. And what I didn't realize at the time, that's what that movie's about, too.

• 12:25Joe Rogan?

  Mm.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  You know, so the movie itself is a guided meditation on Carpe Diem, right? It's, it's a meditation on gather ye rosebuds all ye may, I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world. You know, this is the kind of stuff that I was getting inundated with in rehearsal. And so that was, I didn't, I wouldn't have told you that on the day I wrapped at Poets Society that my life had changed, but looking back, it had.

• 12:52Joe Rogan?

  It had planted the seeds.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:54Joe Rogan?

  I was thinking, I, I've never met a person who became famous at 14, who came out of it okay. I'm a yet to. I heard Jodie Foster's cool. Never met anybody that became famous very young.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  I read every interview she does for exactly that reason. I have, it's, it's so difficult. I tell parents all the time, like, children acting is a wonderful thing. Put them in the school play. It's so good for them. Get them singing lessons. It's so good for them. Sing in the church choir. It's so good for them. But to be a professional actor at a young age is, this, it, it's dangerous in extremely insidious ways that are very, very hard to perceive when it's happening.

• 13:42Joe Rogan?

  That's a great way to put it. Yeah, it's, it, I think it completely impedes your developmental process. The way I liken it to is like concrete. When you make concrete, there's a bunch of very specific ingredients. You put them with very specific mixture. Like, you have to have this amount of water, that amount of sand, this amount of rocks, all the- If it's off, it's never fixed. You can't add water after it's cured. It's done. It's fucked forever. This is bad concrete now. This is what happens to a lot of young human beings that become famous, whether it's through acting or singing.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's not just fame. That analogy works for all walks of life, really. You know, if you have a really, uh, something really traumatic happens in childhood, it's very hard to recover. It's a tremendous amount of work to recover. And I agree with you, like, I think celebrity is like, it's like a tiny drop of mercury, or it's poison. It's poison for your brain. Now, if you're mature, you can handle it. And if you get it in slow, like, I got it in slow increments. Dead Poets Society happened, I had a little taste of fame, but I wasn't, nobody knew my name. I was-

• 14:57Joe Rogan?

  You'd go to restaurants.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was that kid from Dead Poets Society. Oh, look at him, yeah, blah, blah, blah. And I got it in slow, I got to develop, what do you, what do you call it? When you, you get a little bit of poise, uh, like a-

• 15:08Joe Rogan?

  Resistance.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, resistance to it. And it, it, it came so slowly for me. I even think about people, I remember the weekend Pretty Woman came out, two days before, no one had ever heard of Julia Roberts. Two days afterwards, she was the most famous woman in America. I think that's a huge thing to absorb. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  And I know that my personality couldn't have handled it. I've, I've worked hard to handle it as poorly or wellly as I have, you know?

• 15:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It's, I think you going back to school and living a normal life, or, you know, five, six years, or whatever it was, before you left college, that's, I just think that's critical. That's the developmental process of the normal maturation of a person. When they go through adolescence, teenage years, into college, young adult, then you can kind of handle things. And then maybe you're also fortunate that, like you said, Dead Poets Society not, you know, you didn't get too huge from it, you just got some, some juice. A little bit of juice.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  A little bit of confidence. That was in the, you know, it's like-

• 16:18Joe Rogan?

  Something's happening.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Something's happening, but then I had the years after that.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Though, you know, I have to give some, a shout out to my mom, who was just so devastated that I dropped out of college. I mean, she just couldn't stop crying about it, you know. And it filled me with a

• 16:41Speaker 02

  desire to show her that I was taking responsibility for my own education, which is what I said I would do. And so I started a theater company and I, I worked really hard at a lot of different things, writing and reading and thinking and mostly with this theater company, where I met a lot of young people who were interested in what I was doing, but we weren't paid any money and we worked our asses off and we built sets and we, you know, it was fun, I don't want to lie, we had a great time. But it was a college experience that I gave myself through this theater company. And that changed me because I met a lot of people who were really excellent at what I do that weren't making a lot of money. I met a lot of people who loved it as much as I do,

• 17:24Speaker 02

  who weren't getting their picture taken, who weren't being told they were special. I knew how gifted they were. I could understand, I had a little bit of balance and a little bit of humility to go along with the superficial elements of, of my chosen field.

• 17:38Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, hmm. Do you ever think about like, what would have happened if that guy didn't invite you to do that play when you were 12? It's kind of crazy how there's these pivotal moments in your life.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  You know, he just died. Nagel Jackson was his name. And he's, he was a great theater director. I mean, I don't know if you feel this way. I don't know what, I have a sense often, and I know this just sounds really dopey to say, but I sometimes have a sense of a guardian angel of some kind of, why did this guy talk to me in the parking lot? And why was he such a kind, decent human being?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Throughout my life, I have had opportunities presented to me and I had enough intuition and enough intelligence maybe to follow it. But I do think about, I think about it all the time.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  All the ways that are imperceptible in the Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday that they happen, but where your life is kind of guided. And it doesn't really feel by your own doing.

• 18:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I know it sounds wacky to say, but I believe it too. I mean, I don't publicly profess it as the definite reason why everything happens. But there's a bunch of, I think, most people that have gotten anywhere in life, there's moments in their life where they're like, how did that happen? Like, what, why did this feel like it was a destined path? Like, why was I compelled to try this? What was the, what was the thought behind that? And what, am I being guided? Is there, is fate real?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  I wonder how other people feel, but I do think one of the keys, I think that probably everybody has a path that is there for them. And the trick about knowing yourself, the value, and taking time to like, be still with yourself, and listen to yourself, you know, that there's an expression, the voice of our spirit is extremely gentle, and it's difficult to hear it. It's quiet.

• 19:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  But if you can hear it, that thing, intuition, that thing, the path, idea of a guardian angel, whatever, you can see what's happening around you if you're in touch with yourself. And if you're not in touch with yourself, you keep tripping on the same, you're not seeing the angles and the roads that might be available to you. So I do think that part of the trick is taking time to actually get to know yourself so that you can see the light when it appears. Because I bet you everybody has it.

• 20:26Joe Rogan?

  I bet they do too. I bet there's also...

• 20:31Joe Rogan?

  A real factor in recognizing the misery of your mother's life. What she was doing, where she didn't take these chances. She didn't, she had responsibility. She was-

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, but can I tell you something funny about that?

• 20:45Joe Rogan?

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• 21:29Joe Rogan?

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• 22:14Joe Rogan?

  or visit the link in the description to get started.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  So she was 18 when I was born, right? So that's, that's tough. You don't really have a childhood, right?

• 22:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  And, but in her mid-40s, she took it. She joined the Peace Corps in her mid-40s after, you know, once I was okay and it was right around the time my oldest Maya was born.

• 22:40Joe Rogan?

  Were you a single, single child?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think I was a big part of her-

• 22:48Speaker 02

  On her brain a lot worrying. It was a big, is this kid gonna be alright? Is this kid gonna be alright? It makes a lot of noise in your head.

• 22:55Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  And I was alright. And she looked around and I remember her saying that, you know, if, if an accident happened today, when they do happen, and I died, I would be extremely disappointed in myself. She was probably, I don't know, forty six or something when she said this, younger than I am now. And, and she said, I don't want to be disappointed in my life. So she joined the Peace Corps, which she wasn't all that impressed with, but they sent her to Romania. And she fell in love with Romania. And she fell in love with the people there.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  And she got obsessed with the racism against the gypsy culture, the Roma culture, I'm supposed to call it. And it reminded her a lot of growing up here in the sixties, and the racism she saw as a young girl. And she just decided to do something about it. She spent twenty five years there, and she got thousands of kids into school who wouldn't have gone to school. She just recently retired back to Fort Worth. And it's, she's a different woman than the woman I grew up with, which is, I think, a remarkable story. I loved both the women, the woman, the woman now and the woman I grew up with. I don't want to paint some portrait that she was miserable. She had so much, she just was miserable at work.

• 24:16Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  You know, she was not a miserable person to be with, the opposite. And she kept that fire in herself alive enough to, when the window presented itself, she took it, she took it hard. I mean, she disappeared for a quarter of a century to Romania, as a young woman born in Fort Worth, right? And that's a wild thing to do. And she made a huge impact. And I'm extremely proud of her and proud of the work that she's done. And so is everybody who knows her. And, and now she's in Fort Worth doing her thing and has a different sense of herself because she followed her own intuition and her own path.

• 24:55Joe Rogan?

  It just, she had to deal with the responsibility of raising a child for a long time.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, well, that, that develops a different kind of character, too.

• 25:07Joe Rogan?

  You know, the, the character of a woman trying to raise a child and also a boy. You know, I, I have all daughters.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  You do?

• 25:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  I have three daughters and one boy, yeah.

• 25:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, all my friends who have boys, like dude, it is so much harder. It's just that you're just trying to keep them from burning the house down.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a pain.

• 25:27Joe Rogan?

  Of course, of course. And if you're a single child, you know, but I, she must have gotten some inspiration from your path, from your choices.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  I wonder. You'd have to ask her. I think she had in her own way went for it because everybody told her not to have a baby and she wanted to and she didn't want to run with the pack. Now, she didn't, I think when you're 18, you don't understand the ramifications of the decision of having a child.

• 26:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  You know, how, you know, permanent, you know, I remember she told me when Maya was born, she was, well, congratulations, you now, you now have something to worry about the rest of your life.

• 26:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think it's a gift, though. It's, I mean, I, I certainly think it changes you as a human being in, in my case, the most positive ways possible. I could imagine being a single mother, though, it's a much more difficult position to be in.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  And there's a lot of pressure on women, you know.

• 26:37Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  You know, if, if, if you work, you're a bad mother. If you're just a stay at home mom, you're not a good, strong woman. You know, I mean, they're damned if they do, they're damned if they don't. That's the position they get put in.

• 26:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's, it, all those experiences, when, as an actor, I mean, one of the more fascinating things to me about watching people is how they can assume different identities. Like, and, and how critical is it to have had so many different people in your life and different life experiences to draw from, to try to understand things through their eyes? If you're a regular person running, if you're a stockbroker, you're running through the world thinking like a stockbroker. You're not, you're not thinking, what if you like to be a janitor? What is it like to be this guy who's trying to raise a family and he's got a... Drug dealer in his neighborhood that's causing problems and your life is this constant state of drama.

• 27:32Joe Rogan?

  Like you're drawing from all these different experiences. So having had like not, I mean, I wouldn't say it's, your life was complicated, but it sounds like you have a really good mom, but complicated like and not necessarily that stable in that way. You're young and you're, you know, you're trying this thing out and you're going off to Hollywood and then you're coming back and going to college, like having all these different bizarre interactions with people in life experiences. How much do you draw upon that when you're trying to like create a character?

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Well, that's a really big question.

• 28:11Joe Rogan?

  Is.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Well, I so I have to break it into parts.

• 28:15Joe Rogan?

  It started getting bigger as I was asking.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, cuz it's kind of two parts, but the first part about drawing on a character is touching on my favorite aspect of my life and my job. Most people, if you're an actuary, you're an actuary. You think in numbers, you think in this, this is, and it's your job, you have to. You know you. I have, I got to play a World War II vet, got taken out to basic training, I got to read World War II veterans' journals over and over again. I got to wear the clothes they wore. I was working on that movie for a few months, reading all kinds of books, watching documentaries about that, then that movie's over. Moving on.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Now I'm gonna get cast as a LA cop, gonna do ride arounds through Los Angeles in the backseat of a cop car, right when the crash unit thing was happening and, and I'm thinking like a cop. And I'm not, it's not, it's even, it's, it's different than being a journalist and writing about it. I'm really trying to imagine being them and I'm not looking at it from a judgmental point of view. I don't have an agenda about whether they're a good person or a bad person or whether this army sergeant should have made that decision or that one. I'm thinking, why did he make it? Why did he make it? Why did he do that?

• 29:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Right? I play a jazz musician, a drug addict, right? I'm not sitting there judging him what a bad person, you know, I'm thinking, why'd he do it? You know, it's a painkiller. Why is he taking it? Where's this music come from? Why is it so important to him? Why is he practicing 12 hours a day? What is that about? You know, all these characters are these invitations to,

• 30:03Speaker 02

  A, expand your own sense of what identity means. Like, who is Joe Rogan? Right? And who Joe Rogan is with his mom is a little different than he's watching the Super Bowl with his best friends. Who Joe Rogan is at 40 is different than he is at 20. We have inside of us so many aspects to ourselves. You know, when we're in love, you change. When you see your child for the first time, you change. Your biology, your chemicals start to shift a little bit. If you're in a violent situation, you know, your molecular structure alters a little bit. And you start to realize that that's not you, and that's not you, and that's not you. They're all you.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  And that's what performing is like. And you start to see society and see yourself and see a continuity that is really kind of exciting. I've had, if you don't get ruined by, oh, breaking your arm, patting yourself on the back or something like that, I've met a bunch of older actors who've lived really interesting lives that I've learned. It's like, I once had dinner with Vanessa Redgrave, this old English actress. She'd spent her life doing Shakespeare and Chekhov and Beckett and Tennessee Williams. She'd spent her life with some of the greatest minds of the last 50 years.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  And she carries that with her. She's a powerfully intelligent, powerfully humble woman. And it's like...

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Being next to somebody you really admire, you know, a master craftsman, doesn't matter what the craft is, when you take it to a high level, it has a lot to teach you. So, anyway, that was a multi-part question. The other thing, that part of your question is, how did I stay balanced? And a lot of it had to do with my father, who has, he doesn't care about celebrity, doesn't particularly think it's very interesting, and, not in a judgmental way, he really cares about integrity, and whether you're a good person, and whether you tell the truth. And it doesn't, it's not interesting to him how much money you make, that's not where his value system is placed, on whether, he's naturally suspicious of people who want too

• 32:26Speaker 02

  much attention, naturally suspicious of that in me, which was good for me.

• 32:31Joe Rogan?

  It's a good suspicion.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  It's a healthy suspicion.

• 32:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  He was very realistic about the chances I had of making a profession out of this. That's not a bad thing. You know, everybody says, it's so great to tell people to follow your dreams, and it is important to follow your dreams, but it's also important to be realistic, and have a plan, and take care of yourself, and when you say you're gonna do something, to do it, to show up when you're asked, to tell the truth, all these things that, so, whenever things would start to go well, I had this person in my life that's very important to me, who doesn't place a value on anything superficial. And when we talked about why it's so hard to meet young people in this profession who

• 33:20Speaker 02

  make it, what starts to happen, regardless of how good or not good your parents are or something, your circle can get infiltrated with a lot of people trying to make money off you, and, and that's dangerous.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Because they don't care about you.

• 33:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that is an issue. There's an issue of people trying to get you to take work that you really shouldn't take just because they're going to get a percentage of it.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Or it's going to be good for you in the next three years, but they don't have your long term.

• 33:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  You know, what is going to be good for the 65 year old version of you?

• 33:53Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  You know, is this, like you said, yeah, if I could have, if I could have decided my life, Explorers would have been a huge hit. It would have been ET big. And you know what? I wouldn't be here on this talk show today. You know, so I don't want to be in charge of my whole life in that way, you know?

• 34:07Joe Rogan?

  Maybe you would, but it would be different. You'd be coming out of rehab.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure.

• 34:10Joe Rogan?

  It'd be a Charlie Sheen story.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, I'd be on Marriage 18.

• 34:14Joe Rogan?

  Who, by the way, was a fantastic guy to talk to.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  I bet he was. Yeah, I listened to it. It was fantastic.

• 34:19Joe Rogan?

  Wonderful guy, like a sweetheart of a guy, a guy who went through the exact opposite of what I'm saying is good for you.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  If you survive.

• 34:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Anything is a learning tool.

• 34:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  I mean, some, you, you must have this. Some of the wisest people I know have been through the 12 step program.

• 34:40Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  And so addiction and misery can be an unbelievable teacher if you can, if you pull yourself out of it.

• 34:50Joe Rogan?

  If you survive.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  If you survive. It's not, I wouldn't wish it for my children. It's not a dare I want them to take. Oh, hey, one path to wisdom.

• 34:58Joe Rogan?

  Harrow.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of my friends died from it, but a couple of them are really wise from it. Read a book, okay?

• 35:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  I remember, it's funny even as you say that, I remember when I was about 24, starting to get successful, I met my friend, Richard Linkletter, and we were hanging out in New York and we met this really cool, this guy we really admired, fancy pants writer, really badass, you know, you're kind of just, and we were smoking cigarettes, well, Rick wasn't, of course, but we were shooting pool and this guy said to me, you know what, you're almost interesting, he said to me, you know, what you gotta do is you go, gotta, gotta go down to Mexico and disappear for a couple of years, you know, live life a little bit, then you'll be somebody. And the guy finally, when the night we were walking home with Rick, and Rick said, let me tell you what you don't need to do.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  What do you do? Read some William Burroughs. That might be a good idea. Read some Hunter S. Thompson. Skip the addiction path.

• 35:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  You know?

• 35:56Joe Rogan?

  You don't have to go to Mexico.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  You don't have to. You don't have to do it. You know? You don't need to. That's not the path to wisdom.

• 36:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  You know? It has worked for a handful of people. But most of us, you know, I keep coming back in this conversation to Jodie Foster much. I read her interviews because I admire her because I know what she's survived.

• 36:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  But she's wicked smart.

• 36:18Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  You know? You don't want to place your bet that you're as smart as she is.

• 36:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, she's smart and also wise. That's the odd thing of someone who's in, like, how old was she in Taxi Driver?

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Twelve, fourteen.

• 36:33Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  I know.

• 36:34Joe Rogan?

  Crazy. And it's a very bizarre movie for a young child to be sexualized in this very weird, psychotic movie.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  But what she took from it was this great mentor in Martin Scorsese. And she kind of understood she was making art. That's where the wisdom comes in. She's just naturally precociously wise that way. That she didn't get hung up on the

• 36:58Joe Rogan?

  Being human.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  The seedy aspects, the sexuality aspects of it. She got hung up on, who's this guy? Martin Scorsese? What is he doing? What is this movie saying? How could I be a part of that? You know? And that's

• 37:11Joe Rogan?

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• 37:53Speaker 03

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• 38:14Joe Rogan?

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• 38:59Joe Rogan?

  Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  I think she survived. But I don't know the woman, so I shouldn't speak.

• 39:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I don't know her either, but I do admire her when I hear her talk.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too.

• 39:20Joe Rogan?

  And that's why I always bring her up as the lone example that I've ever come across of someone who's been through childhood stardom that seems to be very well and put together.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and she's still really good at her job.

• 39:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  I know.

• 39:32Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  It's like, that to me is...

• 39:34Joe Rogan?

  She didn't become a caricature.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  That, to me, is really exciting. You know, see, if you're me, you're like... I look at Jeff Bridges a lot, too. So like, when Dead Poets Society came out, I went, I remember I went in this long talk with myself. I was like, it was like sunrise, and I'd been up all night. And it was New York, and I was about 19 or something. And I was just thinking about, who had gone through this that I actually admire? When I look at them and admire. And Jeff Bridges had starred in The Last Picture Show, which was one of my favorite movies, and he was amazing in it. And he just slowly got better and better and better and better. And I was like, all right, so it can be done.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  You know, this, you know, he's got an amazing wife. He's really super into Buddhism. I started getting like, what is it? He's really into photography. Like, he takes, I mean, I don't know him either, right? So I'm just, I'm talking like a fan here. It's not, I don't know these people. But I watched him from afar. I was like, OK, this race can be won. And I've always thought, I remember, I was so happy he won the Academy Award for True Grid, I guess it was. And I was like, damn, what a long, slow burn he had. And he just keeps getting better and more interesting. He comes out with these weird little books I love, and I read them. And he-

• 40:54Joe Rogan?

  He writes books?

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, he has this book with his, like, he has a mentor in Buddhism, and they kind of wrote a book together about the Tao of the Dude or something like that. But it's actually, you know, I don't know if you've read The Tao of Willie. I love all these kind of to-the-left versions of, sometimes I find it hard to read the, I want to read what Willie thinks about the dump out of more than I want to read the dump out of myself. Yeah, there it is, yeah. The Dude and the Zen Master. It's a great book, by the way. He has a mantra in it that I just love, which is, row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. And he talks about how valuable that song has been to him. I'm probably misquoting, but it meant a lot to me.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  And it's just like, one step at a time. One step at a time. Keep, keep a smile on your face, you know? Don't forget it's all a dream, you know? It's like, it's a great mantra.

• 41:51Joe Rogan?

  It is, and it's always great to have someone who has gone through it all and has come out fascinating, interesting, and wise. So you go, it can be, it can be done.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Did you ever meet Kris Kristofferson?

• 42:06Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  He was cool.

• 42:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I, my secret fantasy is, is your job, you know? I wrote a profile on Kris, I don't know, 15 years ago now, for Rolling Stone Magazine. And I made a documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. And I just finished a documentary about Merle Haggard. And I really enjoy studying other people. And, but Kris-

• 42:34Speaker 02

  You know, his, his life stories, you know what I mean? He was in the military and then he gave up everything, became a songwriter. It's kind of like, imagine if, you know, the equivalent is like, at the point of, height of his career, it's like imagining if Brad Pitt had also written a number one single for Amy Winehouse. You know what I mean?

• 43:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, he wrote Me and Bobby McGee for Janis Joplin.

• 43:06Joe Rogan?

  He did?

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, oh, yeah.

• 43:08Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  And he was, you know, a helicopter pilot and he wrote songs for Johnny Cash and he was acting in Sam Peckinpah movies.

• 43:15Joe Rogan?

  He was in Blade.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was in Blade. But he was a real, he's a Rhodes Scholar and a boxer. You would like this guy. He would be right up your alley. A real free thinker and didn't trap himself in any way of thinking and really fought for individual rights. And he was a great, great guy. Got to interview him. And he, he actually starred in my first movie I directed too, so I got to know him.

• 43:44Joe Rogan?

  What was that?

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Still, movie called Chelsea Walls. I don't necessarily recommend you watch it. You can, if you want to. I learned a lot making it. I, I like it a lot, but I was learning, you know, I was learning a lot, but Chris, Chris was in it and he was amazing.

• 44:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, having known people like that is so beneficial in your life. They, they're not just like inspirational. It's like a mental fuel, a type of, a type of nutrient, almost. It's like having a person that you know exists, that's been through something, has come out of Amazing and it and is so not tied down to anyone's specific identity. Has varied interests, pursues them all with passion.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Having mentors.

• 44:34Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, how are you gonna be a Samurai if you don't know a Samurai?

• 44:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  You know, and you gotta see the way they tie their shoes. You gotta see the way they make dinner. You don't just gotta see the fancy swordplay. That stuff is hard earned and. And so I I'm not scared of that, you know, you don't, you don't have to hero worship people. You don't have to turn them into deities. They're human beings. But when you get to experience and see that people like, oh, um, you don't have to lie. I knew a guy once who didn't lie.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  You know, uh, you don't have to back down when somebody says that. I watched a person that back. You can be a good parent. You can have your parent, your children say, I love my dad. It's not gonna come easy, but it can be done. And and so I like heroes. I have no, I like, I also like seeing older people. You know, there's not, not the fixation on the 23 year old James Dean, you know, but a fixation on, you know, the 72 year old Chris Christopherson, you know, um, you know, pick whoever yours are. There's, you know, Muhammad Ali. I mean, there's so many amazing people that you can say like, wow, life was not always a picnic for them.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  How did they handle it? Um, and then you cannot be, you know, too upset when life's not a picnic for you. You can just ask yourself, how did you handle it?

• 45:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I I don't think there's anything wrong with really appreciating people. That concern of hero worship is legitimate. Because I think there are some people that will take a person and change who they are and make them not just extraordinary, but not even human.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a mistake.

• 46:16Joe Rogan?

  It is a mistake, but it doesn't mean you can't love and deeply appreciate who they actually are, flaws and all. Because that's what we all are. And when someone is extraordinary and they have gone through so much, or they have expressed so much and they do resonate with you so much, that's a valuable person. And you should treat them like they're a valuable person. It's not necessarily hero worship, it's just appreciation.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I'll tell you, I don't know why it just flashed through my brain. When I was making this film, Chelsea Walls, you have to understand, like, digital video, it just came out. This movie, The Celebrations, Danish film, amazing movie. Thomas Winterberg directed it. And it just kind of changed the rules. The camera was cheap. Like, movies were always so expensive to make. And now you could just... And I was like, alright, I want... I made this movie for a hundred thousand dollars in 2000. And I was like, alright, we're just gonna play with this new camera. And I talked Kris Kristofferson into being... He was my hero. And he can't... He agreed to do it. I couldn't believe it. He shows up on the set and I had this elaborate shot I had planned. I'd found this apartment that was amazing. I hope this isn't boring, but I think it's a funny story.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  So, it's my first day with Kris and I'm really trying to impress him. Like, I've ripped this shot off from this French film I've seen. It's amazing. You're gonna come into... You're gonna... His character orders a bottle of whiskey. And the guy delivers a bottle of whiskey to the room. And in my idea, from this apartment, you could walk from the living room into the bedroom. And from the bedroom to the bathroom. And then out of the bathroom into the kitchen. And then the kitchen opened back up into the living room. It was one of those New York City Square apartments in the Chelsea Hotel, right? And I showed him this path I wanted to take. And he was gonna turn on the lights in this room. And he was gonna put on a cowboy hat while he's talking on the phone. He's gonna look in the mirror and point the thing. And he's gonna walk in the bathroom and flick that light on. And then slam the mirror shut and then walk out. And then sit down in the kitchen, right where he was,

• 48:08Speaker 02

  pop open the whiskey and pour himself a glass, right as he says the last line of the monologue. And he looks at me and he goes, "Are you an alcoholic?"

• 48:19Speaker 02

  And I was like, uh, no, no, not really, no. He goes, I'm an alcoholic. I said, oh, okay. His character's name was Bud. He says, Bud's an alcoholic. I'm like, yeah. He goes, so you mean to tell me I order a bottle of whiskey, I'm about to fall off the wagon, and I don't open the fucker until I walk through this room, turn on a light, try on a cowboy hat, flip on a light, slam a mirror, and then sit down? I was like, well, I think it would be a great shot. And he's like, Ethan, there is no way in hell that I can remember all those lines and do all that that you're asking me. It'll, that shot will never work.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  So what I think is Bud's an alcoholic, and he's gonna get his bottle, he's gonna open it, and I'm gonna sit down, say my monologue, and drink my whiskey. Okay, great, let's do that.

• 49:16Joe Rogan?

  There's also the terror of someone you deeply admire not liking your idea.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is, your, your, your whole body just shrivels up, you know? You know, you didn't see the Gadar film. I don't give a shit about the Gadar film. There's no way I'm gonna remember those lines. But then, to, to finish it, I'll say, when he wrapped the movie, uh, he was getting, he'd, you know, said his goodbyes and everything, he was getting in the elevator to leave. And I ran out and I said to him, I said, hey, listen, you know, you've given so much this whole project, and I know that, but you know, this whole crew's working for free, right? And could I beg you, would you come in and sing one song for us, just like, just for the crew, for, for me? Is there any way you'd do that? And he said, yeah, you got a guitar? And I said, I do, I do.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  He said, all right. He sat down, and he proceeded to tell this elaborate story that I'm sure he's told a thousand times, but it was such a gift to the room. He sat and told the story about how he met Janis Joplin in the elevator of this very building, and we, and she fucked me about four minutes later.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  I played her this song, and he's, you know, busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train, I was feeling bad as fate, right? And the whole crew, everybody's crying, everybody's so happy. I mean, he was just, he was that giving.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  You know, to, to everybody and understood what it would mean to this group of young artists, you know, and so, but he wasn't perfect. He was a real dude with real issues and, you know, and I loved him.

• 50:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he was, I mean, you think about what he did and all the different songs that he performed and movies he was in and different things that he did. That was extraordinary live.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll stop in one second, but I think you'll love this. Apparently, the legend Johnny Cash used to say, that, you know that song, Sunday Morning Coming Down? I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head, that didn't hurt. And the beer I had for breakfast, it wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert. Great song. Okay, so Johnny Cash had a number one single out of this song. And Johnny Cash would tell the story how Chris was flying helicopters offshore oil and he landed in Johnny Cash's front yard with a beer in one hand and the song in the other on his helicopter and said, "Damn it, you gotta listen to my song." And I listened to it and went straight to number one. That's the story that, you know, Cash would tell. And I asked Chris about it and he said, "Have you ever flown a such and such chopper?"

• 51:55Speaker 02

  And I said, "No, I haven't." And he goes, "There ain't no way in hell you can fly that thing with beer in one hand and a cassette in the other." He said, "That story, I don't know where he came up with that story. He's just trying to help out my career and make a legend out of me too." But, but no, no, I just, I sent it to him via airmail.

• 52:16Joe Rogan?

  For a person that watches movies, I've done a small amount of acting, but I'm not good at it. For a person who watches movies, there's a thing that happens like a hypnosis when someone is a really good actor, where they become that person. And even though I know it's Ethan Hawke, I know it's, fill in the blank, Daniel Day-Lewis, I know, I know who it is, but it's not them at this moment. They're so good that they've convinced me that they're this other person.

• 52:51Joe Rogan?

  What is that? Because there are moments where I see a good actor and I say, I don't believe them. I don't, I think they're phoning it in. They're saying it the right way, but there's just something in the air. There's a missing connection. And it is the key to a great movie. The key to a great movie is everybody has to be in that fucking weird zone. That weird zone where you become a different person.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  You used the essential word in your first sentence, which is hypnosis. And I've spent my life studying what you just talked about. And when you're acting with Denzel Washington, the power and strength and completeness of his imagination is hypnotizing. And it's an invitation to join him. And a great film is a collective imaginative experience. When you watch The Godfather, you're not fucking thinking about Al Pacino or James Caan, or you're thinking about Michael and Sonny and Tom and, you know, Vito.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  I remember I watched The Godfather, I felt like I'd see those guys at the Knicks game tomorrow. That's how, that's how much, you're not thinking about the music, you're not thinking about the shots, you know, it's all one thing. All these disparate elements turn into one fist. You cannot do it alone, right? But the best people I've worked with, it's like, the easiest example to show, like, for anybody, when you go to a concert, every now and then it happens, the performer hypnotizes you and you disappear.

• 54:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  You're, you're inside those songs.

• 54:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  You know, you, you're not talking about those songs, you're not looking at them, you're not listening, you are inside the song. You're inside a dream. And bad acting for me is glib. Bad acting is commenting on the song. Bad acting is slightly, the feeling you're talking about is when somebody's slightly outside of it. It's very, very hard to do and a lot of people study it and work on it and voice and speech is a huge, I mean... This stuff is very, it's way more interesting to me than it would be to our audience here today, but it's like, all these elements of what creates hypnosis. If I, if you were, if we're talking about the violin, there are ways to practice the violin.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  And I'm not going to make somebody a virtuoso, but I can, if I'm an expert violinist, help you be better. And I think the same is true for acting. Acting is an art form, it's beautiful, it's some weird collage of where performance and writing and all these elements, music, it's all a part of it. And when it's happening, it's all effortless. And there's a lot of work you can do to inch it to being easier, and to inch your scene partner to being easier, and there are ways that they can help you, and there's ways that they can ruin it, they can break the dream. But when it's good, it is like diving into a dream. And it's

• 56:13Speaker 02

  a feeling that I got for the first time when I was 18 years old, acting in Dead Poets Society. And it is a feeling, it was seconds long. I mean, it was not much, but a feeling of disappearing. And that's the irony I always feel about acting, is that, you know, people think about actors and they see these pictures on the red carpet or something, they think that's what acting is, you know? What it really is, it's a life of, it's completely antithetical to that, of trying to disappear. It feels like the celebration of the self, the celebration of the personality, but when you're doing a scene with Philip Seymour

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Hoffman, you know, it's not Phil that's talking to you, you know, it's, it's...

• 57:05Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, in the cartoon when the eyes go all squirrely. And like, and then all of a sudden, I'm not me. And if I've done my work right, all of a sudden, I'm saying, what's coming out of my mouth is what I prepared. What's coming out of my pocket is what I prepared. The way I'm moving is what I'm prepared, because, and I'm not thinking about it. It's like watching a great athlete, when a great athlete is, makes a behind the back pass to the guy at the perfect second. He's not thinking, oh, I've got a cool idea. I'm gonna throw it behind my back and it'll catch him right as he's in stride. It's years of practice that have let them know that I know where he is. Because where else would he be?

• 57:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  You know? And things that are at first difficult become easy. And then you can even get better from there and get better from there. But that's the difference. People talk about, you know, I love Daniel Delois too. I think he's kind of the high watermark of my trade. And, you know, you hear these stories about what he does and people say, well, is that what you're supposed to do? And the thing about when people say method acting is they really don't fundamentally understand what the method is. The method is an invitation to find out for yourself what will unlock your imagination. And that might be going hungry for two weeks. That might be sleeping in a jail cell.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  It might be reading 25 books about it. It might be wearing a weird headpiece. It's not a rule. It's about how to unlock what's in here and bring it forward. That's what the greats do.

• 58:47Joe Rogan?

  And find that zone. This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. Every football season, the same thing happens. The game somehow makes everyone really hungry. Quarterback scrambles, clearly a sign it's time for breakfast burritos. Turnovers, suddenly dessert at 2 P M. doesn't sound so crazy. And wing formations, well, those can only mean buffalo wings, as if they're ever not in play. Even the goalposts start looking suspiciously like french fries. It's almost like football is sending the message to eat more food. The good news, Uber Eats makes those cravings easy to satisfy with game day deals all season long. From wings and pizza, to chips and drinks, even last minute grocery runs.

• 59:30Joe Rogan?

  You'll find savings on all your favorites delivered straight to your door. Order now on Uber Eats. And when you're watching a movie, it does the exact same feeling, like I'm there with you. Whatever you're experiencing when you are in that zone and you really are that person. I, I'm not just saying, oh, he really is that person. I'm with you. I'm with you in the moment. I feel your anxiety. The scene in the, god damn it, I forgot the name of it. The film you did with Julia Roberts, the dystopian end of civilization movie.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Now that you said it, it went out of my head, too.

• 1:00:09Joe Rogan?

  It's a great movie. All the Teslas crash.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, with Mahershala Ali and I. Leave the War Behind. Thank you. That's embarrassing for me. I'm supposed to know. But when, when you said you couldn't remember it, then all of a sudden it went out of my head.

• 1:00:20Joe Rogan?

  It's less embarrassing for me now that you didn't remember it. Cause I was like, shit, I gotta remember that name. The, the scene where you go up to the guy's house and he pulls a gun on you.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Joe Rogan?

  I'm right there with you. I'm like, oh shit. It was a great scene.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  It was Kevin Bacon, yeah.

• 1:00:36Joe Rogan?

  Phenomenal performance because I fucking believed you. I believed him, I believed you, I believed it was happening. And I was like, oh shit. It was, oh shit. Like, it wasn't like, oh, these guys are acting.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  That scene is exactly what I'm talking about.

• 1:00:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Because that's Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon, and myself in a very well-written scene. And those two guys are so easy to act with. They are so, they are, is so easy to disappear with them. We did that scene over and over and over again, 15,000 different ways and blah blah. And it was always, I always loved it. And, you know, I did, I had a temper tantrum that day on set. But I, because your body.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  You're winding your body up in such a way that it's like an emotional currency or something. You have this thing you're gonna spend, but you have, your body doesn't know it's fake. And if you do it right, you trick your body into believing that I'm begging for my child's life. I'm not acting. I'm begging Kevin Bacon for my child's life. And he's gonna decide whether or not my child gets to live, right? And if you can get that going, shit starts to happen to you, right? Things you don't plan. And if Kevin is good, which he is, and Herschel is good, then they're doing the same thing, right?

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  If he gives me this thing that I need, he's putting his wife at risk. You're not gonna do it. I don't care about your kid, you know? And then Herschel's got his character in his head. And then, then all of a sudden, people are actually behaving. They're not reciting lines. They're not... It's like I did one of my earlier movies with a wolf, right? It was the best acting teacher I ever had, this wolf. Because there was this movie called White Fang, right? Little Disney kids movie, right? But it was a great teacher. Because I had to do these scenes with this half-breed wolf. And if I'm, if you're the wolf, all right, and we're doing a scene together, and what I'm really thinking about is the camera, you know, the wolf turns around and looks at the camera. Mmm.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  You know? You know, when you meet somebody, and you know they're self-conscious, right? You know, why she's, why she's so tense? You don't, you just, we're non-verbal, we can communicate with each other. Animals pick up on it instantly. If I'm actually talking to the dog, the wolf, if I'm actually in, if I'm present with this animal, the animal interacts with me.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  And.

• 1:03:18Joe Rogan?

  Especially a wolf.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Especially a wolf.

• 1:03:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  Damn thing bit me, bit me that day.

• 1:03:24Joe Rogan?

  Did it really?

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Joe Rogan?

  Hard?

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Joe Rogan?

  Why'd it bite you?

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  All right, this is one of the best days of filming in my life, no kidding, all right? Which is that amazing animal trainer, Clint Rowell was his name. And we wanted to, it was a scene where I'm getting the wolf to trust me. And, uh, and it's gonna eat out of my hand for the first time. And so Clint had this amazing idea, it's like, what if, you can see from, even from that shot, how far, that's a long lens, that thing. Put me on a little tiny island where two, you know, like some, two rivers, fork. And so there's a little island of land, right there. And so we put, see this, the wolf's surrounded by water, right? And, and I, this is flame, this isn't the, the animal that I knew really well.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  But which, the way to get it to look like it is, we have to not know each other. And I spent all day out there with this wolf. And whenever the cameras started thinking I might have a chance of getting to pet him, they would start rolling. And I just talked to the wolf and I'd walk around and play and I just had to try to be real with him. And he started to like me, I was, it's not boring. And this, I'm, I'm getting close, cause he's starting to like me, we've been playing a lot. And comes over and, okay, you'll see, he, he, you'll see him bite me if you want. But, uh, amazing, amazing animal, but the point I'm trying to say is, I, we, I sat out there for 11 hours with this starving wolf.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  Right, trying to get him to eat.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  Ready, ready, and.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Ouch, okay.

• 1:05:08Joe Rogan?

  That wasn't that bad.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Wasn't that bad, well, it bled, Joe.

• 1:05:10Joe Rogan?

  Did it really?

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Joe Rogan?

  Sharp teeth. But it didn't look he was trying to hurt you.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  No, no, he wasn't, he wasn't, that's what I mean, he, he wasn't, he was.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  And so, and by the end of the day, check this out, man. I mean, it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. I know it's a corny kids movie or whatever, but, but.

• 1:05:30Joe Rogan?

  But it's a real wolf and he doesn't know he's acting.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he doesn't know he's acting.

• 1:05:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Right? And so, I gotta be real. And, I mean, I wept when that dog died, you know? Cause, and I think about that scene if, when I'm doing anything. You know, about being present.

• 1:05:51Joe Rogan?

  Right, and that's a.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  If I'm trying to get the shot, the dog is not gonna eat out of my hand. If I actually wanna say, hey, oh, you can trust me.

• 1:05:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  You know, I'd have to give up for hours. You know, and just sit there and, we didn't have a phone. I'd just sit there and whittle or something and walk over there, toss rocks for a little bit until he got, you know, it was, it was such a fascinating experience.

• 1:06:14Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Well, that's, yeah, you can't act, right?

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  And you never can. You never can.

• 1:06:21Joe Rogan?

  You never can.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  You never can.

• 1:06:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  And one of the things about, you know, there's a handful. Laurie Metcalf comes to the line, Denzel Washington, Sally Hawkins, Laura Linney, there's a handful. I mean, I could, a bunch of them, Philip Seymour Hoffman, there's a lot of great actors I've worked with in my life. And what's so wonderful about them is if you start acting. What are you doing? It's just this kind of, kind of sense, why?

• 1:06:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  Something smells weird.

• 1:06:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  Phil was the best at it, cause it wasn't, it wouldn't just be about you. Phil was amazing. You'd sit down to do a scene with him and you'd be running it and stuff and he just. What is it? Something smells bad. What is it? Is it you or is it me? I don't know, man. Is it the cup? Is the cup wrong? Maybe, should I be sitting over there? What smells wrong? Something's fake. What is it? What's fake? Pace it up. Let's try pacing it up. Nah, that's not it. It's still bad. All right, let me, let me try this. And then boom, next day, he'd scream at you or something. And everything would shift.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  And, you know, the smell would change in the room.

• 1:07:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  And it was like, he, it's like, we're just shaking out what is self-conscious. Something is self-conscious here. Somebody's posing. Is it me? Is it you? Is it the fucking prop? Is the table wrong? I don't, I don't believe this scene. And what it means is, when you're watching the movie, you, the paying audience, aren't gonna be able to disappear. Something, you know, haven't, haven't you ever see, you see a movie sometime, and you're like, why is she wearing that red jacket? Who thought that was a good idea? And, and all you're thinking about is a red jacket. It's just wrong. I don't know why it's wrong, but everybody knows it. It's like hitting the wrong note.

• 1:08:10Joe Rogan?

  I don't necessarily notice with clothes, because I'm not very clothes-conscious. But I do notice what you're saying about self-consciousness, and I don't understand what it is. It's like this untouchable, unweighable, unmeasurable element that just exists. And we know it. We know it's real.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  Don't you, don't you feel it in here?

• 1:08:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  When somebody's being funny with you?

• 1:08:32Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  If somebody has a big agenda about what they want to accomplish on your show or something like that.

• 1:08:36Joe Rogan?

  Oh, for sure. Especially political people or people that have some sort of a controversial technology that really probably should be regu- regulated.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  I think what we're going to be able to do is amazing things for humanity.

• 1:08:51Joe Rogan?

  And they get that tone in their voice, that, that Charlie Brown, wah, wah, wah. There's just a air of bullshit. And I don't know what that is. And I, I, it's, but it exists in acting. It certainly exists in comedy, too. I always say that when I watch a great comic on stage, they, they take me on a ride. Like, I let them think for me. I'm sitting down, think for me. You're thinking for me. And when someone's thinking for you, it's just like you're, you're, you're free to explore their mind. And it's...

• 1:09:21Joe Rogan?

  If they're self-conscious, you'll feel it. Like, I see someone tense, like, I have a club, and a comedy club in town, and when new people audition there or perform there, you fucking feel the nerves. You feel the nerves, and I'm always like, just give him a few minutes, let him shake it out. Just let him shake that. It's so hard, when so much is on the line, to not be self-conscious, to be present.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  But you're smart to give him space. That's always what I feel. Just, give me space, give me space, give me space to be bad.

• 1:09:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  I need, I need space to be bad, and it's kind of like, in basketball, you gotta touch the ball. Let me touch the ball. Let me, let me make the...

• 1:09:59Joe Rogan?

  Well, we've all been bad, so it doesn't mean he can't be good. When I see someone on stage and they're, they're self-conscious and clunky, I'm like, this is a process. This is not, this is not like a rocket, that when you screw in the last rivets, you're ready to light the fuse.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  I love watching an actor I admire be bad.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  I, I love it. I love it, because it's, it's not, it's not a science.

• 1:10:26Joe Rogan?

  Right, it's not a science.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  Sometimes you gotta take a shot, and sometimes you miss.

• 1:10:30Joe Rogan?

  Well, and sometimes you're going through a divorce, or you got a fucking drug problem, or this is that.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  Or the director's an asshole, or the, you know, or they changed the script the other day, or, or you hate the DP.

• 1:10:41Joe Rogan?

  The producer's a douchebag.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  And, but what I was, I always tell my kids who are really interested in my profession, or any young actor, is like, I call that permission to fail. Is I don't, I don't give anybody my, I don't have permission to fail. You know, you, I don't care if you don't like the first AD, I don't care if you don't like this, this, cannot give them that ability. I still fail. I'm not saying that, but I, I don't want to cede it.

• 1:11:08Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  You know, it's, then, and, but that takes time. I, I spent the first fifteen years of my career saying I didn't do a good job because that guy was a jerk, or I didn't do a good job because they changed the script, or I didn't do a good job because of this, that, and the other thing. And then you see people, like, back to our hero thing, you know, then you see people who are really good, and they don't, they don't, Robert De Niro doesn't give somebody the ability to screw up his workday. They don't have that power. He, he takes responsibility for that power.

• 1:11:40Joe Rogan?

  Is that a learned thing? Or is that, you could certainly learn some of it from watching other people, but is that just an experience thing?

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  I think it's the right manifestation of confidence, right? Young people have to fake confidence. They just have to. When you watch a young person in your club, they gotta fake it. Of course, they're gonna have to burn through their nerves. They're gonna have to. But, once you have experience, you can have real confidence. Because you fought this battle before. I know, I have a certain, if I'm overwhelmed with, if my nervous system is at war with myself, I have a certain process I can, I've walked these woods before. You know, I know why I'm lost, and I know what I need to do.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  And, it doesn't mean I'll always work through it, but I'm much more likely to than I was 20 years ago.

• 1:12:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It's knowing that it's this process when you watch younger people do it. Do you ever, like, are you ever working with a young person and it's not clicking somehow? And you're trying to figure out how to help them? Like, is there a thing you could say to them? This episode is brought to you by Quince. Putting together a good wardrobe isn't actually that hard. You just need the right pieces, and that's where Quince comes in. Quince is all about creating quality, versatile clothing with premium materials. Like 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters from just $60.

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• 1:14:01Joe Rogan?

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• 1:14:44Joe Rogan?

  If you want a high-quality supplement made with the right stuff, AG1 Pro is a no-brainer. Go to drinkag1.com/joe for a limited time. Get a free immune support bundle, including a bottle of omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D tossed in with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro, backed by a 90-day money-back guarantee. That's drinkag1.com/joe. Can you just do it by example only?

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  Well, example's the best. The best teacher's example. Unasked-for advice is never heard from. The problem with young people is they don't often ask for advice.

• 1:15:28Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  They think they're trying so hard to pretend like they know everything that they feel like to ask advice.

• 1:15:33Joe Rogan?

  I kind of feel like that's a generalization, though, because I do know a lot of young people that do ask advice.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  All right, well, one of my things is I cannot believe the amount of young people who show up on set with their phone.

• 1:15:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:46Speaker 02

  And what you were saying about hypnosis, let me tell you what's a destroyer of collective imagination.

• 1:15:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  Is our phones.

• 1:15:54Joe Rogan?

  I was reading an article today, and I think it was Psychology Today, about a study that they've done recently on the impact of social media on cognitive function for children, and that it's just fucking nuking their brain.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  How old are your kids?

• 1:16:11Joe Rogan?

  I have a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old and a 28-year-old.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  So what is your, like, because my wife and I go through this all the They want it so bad. And you, as a parent, you want them to be happy. And all their friends have Instagram. I know it destroys my brain. How could it not hurt theirs? I find my own powers of concentration are suffering. I'll be reading a book, which I used to do all the time. And every 10 pages, I take a break to look at my phone. What's happening? Why am I doing this?

• 1:16:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  You know, what, what? So, but they want it so bad. And I want them to be, how do you handle that?

• 1:16:49Joe Rogan?

  I do not put restrictions on my children's use of social media, but we do have discussions about it because I think it is an inexorable part of modern society. And I think there is a social ostracization that comes from eliminating social media, telling your kid they can't have a phone. I see it in other kids. I don't think that's the solution.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  My daughter is loving you right now. She is just like, see, because she says, let me be, teach me to be responsible for it myself. Help me do that.

• 1:17:20Joe Rogan?

  That's what I believe.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  And, and you know, when we were thinking about what restrictions we were going to do, we went on this walk with this really good friend of mine, Richard Linkladder, who's an amazing person. And they tried to, my daughters hit him up of what he thinks. He said, I don't know. All I know is that the most important thing is to be your own best friend. And that this is a slight obstacle to it. That boredom, boredom and sitting still with yourself is a membrane you kind of have to pass through. And if you can make best friends with yourself, then your best friend is always with you. And so that's been my solution too, is to say, all right, let's all, there aren't limitations,

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  but let's all sit down and look at, I'll, I'll show you how much, I looked at it. How much did you look at it? How are we doing? Do you feel, is it helping? Is it hurting? Because what you're 1,000% right about is it's part of the social structure of their lives.

• 1:18:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  And to isolate them from it is to, has, has, you can't pretend that doesn't have negative side effects.

• 1:18:28Joe Rogan?

  Well, one of my children, well, both of my children, my young children are very. Very disciplined and one of them just opted out, just decided she's not gonna get on social media anymore. And she got this app, and this is, nobody forced her to do this. She got this app that locks you out. And it shows you how many days you've been off of Instagram, sort of incentivize you, you know, to stay off of it. You know, the last time she checked, she'd been off like ninety-nine days or something like that. No Instagram, no nothing. But it is addictive and but there's a lot of things in life that are addictive. And so the question is like, how addictive is it? Like, what is calling you to get nothing?

• 1:19:12Joe Rogan?

  Cause that's what you get. You get nothing. You get these like tiny dopamine hits, like staring at something for a few seconds. Like, that's provocative, or that's crazy. Like, why is he saying that? Or why is that happening? Oh, my god, they're gonna die. You know, like, what? I have this terrible text thread between me and my friend Tom Segura, where we send each other the absolute worst things that we find online every day. Like, every day, it's guy got run over by a train, car accidents, gunshots, South American assassinations. It's just all, every day, it's all the worst things you could possibly find on the internet. There's no good in that, you know? We do that to fuck with each other, cause it's kind of funny, cause he's a comedian too, and we just fuck with each other. It's just like silly, like, oh, boy, like, he sends me things and I send him things.

• 1:19:56Joe Rogan?

  But for the most part, I get nothing. It's mostly nothing. Occasionally, I say it's like, as a, I make this excuse, like, as a comic, oh, I need to be up on the zeitgeist. Need to be paying attention to what people are paying attention to. But you kind of get it anyway. You kind of get it anyway just through life, and it's better that way, because then you only get the real significant things. You don't get the, you don't have to sift through everything. It's like you have, you have a filter. Society acts as your filter to get you the most pertinent information.

• 1:20:29Joe Rogan?

  But I think leading by example with kids is the best way with everything. My kids are both very disciplined. They get a lot of things done and they work really hard, which I'm very proud of. They're also really nice, which I'm also very proud of. I think that's like the hardest fucking thing to do is to just be nice, to be a kind person. The worst thing for kindness is social media. Children in particular are so fucking mean to each other on social media. They're so mean to each other in comments and they talk about how one of their friends is getting bullied and this person is doing this and they're leaving comments on this and from a rival high school and a this and a that and like it's like.

• 1:21:13Joe Rogan?

  But I also think that that process of understanding that this, there is this bizarre social interaction that's not real, that is a part of life and that you have to develop a resilience to this.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  Getting tough is important. Like I think one of the, one of the things kids are experiencing now is what I experienced with the first blush of celebrity. I mean, you want to talk about negative comments, try being an actor. Everybody's got an opinion about you, what a fake you are, what a phony you are. This is sucks about you, you're, this is dumb, this is what you're like. You know, it's, I have lost unbelievable ridiculous amount of hours to, my mother will send me a really nice review of something, something positive about me, right? I'll look at it and my brain goes, what are the comments?

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  Nasty, I mean, just the nastiest things and you can't believe that some, but I don't want to, you know, give it too much time, but I actually think it really makes you stronger to realize, of course, people don't like you.

• 1:22:19Joe Rogan?

  Over time it will make you stronger.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  It's fine they don't like you. Guess what? Half the people every party you went to didn't like you, okay? But they're also not thinking very much about you. They're thinking about themselves. And you start to realize that this is just people talking at the barber shop. People have been gossiping their whole, throughout the history of mankind. Now you can read it if you want, but it's, it has no. Venom in it. It's not real.

• 1:22:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  And the sooner you learn that other people's opinions don't have to affect you, I think the better off you are. So in that way, eh, it hurt me. I've seen it happen to actors, especially if you're doing stage. I'm sure with comics, it's, when you're doing a play, and you have to do it every night, and you start reading a lot of bad things that people say about you.

• 1:23:06Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 1:23:08Speaker 02

  It is demolishing to your confidence. You know, I mean, I had this actor friend of mine, we shared a dressing room, and one day he came in, and he was great in the show, and he came in and just, his whole energy was dark. I was like, "You're all right." He's, "I went down the rabbit hole last night. I just read what people are saying about me on the internet, and everybody thinks I'm terrible in this play." And I'm like, "They don't like your character." You know, like, people are not so brilliant, you know? There's no geniuses out there chiming in on what a jerk you are at 3:00 in the morning.

• 1:23:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  Okay?

• 1:23:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  So you don't have to take it seriously. But, you know, it took him weeks to get his mojo back. Because he would step out on stage just imagining this chorus of hate.

• 1:23:59Joe Rogan?

  I had the exact same conversation last night with a famous comedian friend of mine.

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:24:03Joe Rogan?

  I won't say his name, but he went down a Reddit rabbit hole the other night.

• 1:24:06Speaker 02

  I don't do it anymore. I don't do it.

• 1:24:08Joe Rogan?

  He goes, "I fucked up, and I went down this rabbit hole."

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  Don't do it. Don't do it. No good comes from it.

• 1:24:13Joe Rogan?

  And he was like, "They fucking hate me." I go, "No, no, no. They hate themselves. They hate everything." There's no, like, Michael Jordan's not leaving Reddit comments. You know what I'm saying? Like, these aren't winners. These are fucking people that are not doing what they want to be doing. And they want to hate on everybody that's out there, that's out there in the public eye. And some of it is valid. You know, really, the scary hate is when you get hate, like, from Quentin Tarantino, where he's going off on that guy from There Will Be Blood.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  But you know, that's a great lesson. It is, actually. There's a great lesson. You know what? I don't think Paul Dano ever knew that so many people loved him.

• 1:24:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Here's just out of nowhere.

• 1:24:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Out of nowhere. Paul Dano's just going about his life. He's got to wake up one morning and find out this director's just went off on him and saying these hateful things. But anybody that knows Quentin knows he just talks, talks, talks, talks, talks, talks, right? Anybody that knows Paul knows he's a great world-class human being and, you know, and all this love for Paul's coming out. And it's a great lesson in that, that you don't have to worry about the negativity that people

• 1:25:16Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  send you away. You don't have to worry about it at all.

• 1:25:18Joe Rogan?

  Even from one of the greatest actors or one of the greatest directors of all time.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's okay. And guess what? Every, you know, I'm positive, positive. There are great directors that think I suck. I'm positive. Quentin, he says the, you know, he just says whatever comes into his mind. I remember once I met, I met some director, and I won't say his name, at a bar. It was this dive bar in New York. He's a really famous, big shot director. He's sitting there. And he'd just seen my most recent movie. He's like, you know,

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  you were pretty good in that one. And in the comment was, the subtitle

• 1:25:57Joe Rogan?

  That one.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  underneath it was, "I have hated you for 27 years." That's, it was so clear, you know?

• 1:26:05Joe Rogan?

  The hypnosis came through.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it was so clear. I was like, wow, wow. Well, no wonder you've never offered me a movie. And directors have opinions, right? They have super strong opinions. What do they have a strong opinions about? Acting, right? And, you know, he's talking about the movie he would have directed.

• 1:26:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  Okay, he's not talking about Paul Dano. He's talking about something else. He's, like you said about the thing, they're talking about themselves. Obviously, whenever anybody says something hateful, they're talking about themselves.

• 1:26:31Joe Rogan?

  100%.

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  That's not, that's who they're talking. And, and, and the punchline to this whole thing is, you know, I, I've worked with Paul a couple of different times, and I love the guy. And I'm so happy for him. Immediately, every, every other, every other comment, everywhere, somebody's saying something great about Paul Dano.

• 1:26:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, the majority, the vast majority of comments were really positive about him. And I went and re-watched the scene because of it. And he was fucking great in it.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  Oh, he's a great actor.

• 1:26:57Joe Rogan?

  Played the, a great, like, that guy.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  It's not up for debate. It's, you know, it's not up for debate. I'm sure if you were alone drinking with Steven Spielberg, he'd shock you with some opinion. He, you know, he hates

• 1:27:11Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Orson Welles or something like that. You know what I mean? I mean,

• 1:27:14Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  We wouldn't be a good director if he wasn't opinionated.

• 1:27:17Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  You know, it doesn't mean he's the truth.

• 1:27:19Joe Rogan?

  Of course. It's just the opening up your vulnerability to the masses. And in the most trivial and flippant ways of commenting, which is like leaving a comment on a YouTube video or something like that. It's just not wise. It's not, it's not good, especially if you actually let it get into your psyche and you take it in as real. Because we are designed to recognize threats, danger, negativity, because it's important, like.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  That's, sorry to cut you off, but that's the truth. The reason why it hurts me when it comes is exactly what you, I'm worried they're gonna take my career away. I love what I do. If I do a big movie and I really work hard and the New York Times or the LA Times says that he sucks, I don't really care about that critic's opinion.

• 1:28:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  I care, is this gonna stop me from doing what I love? Because I know it's fragile. I know that there are a million talented people, right? I, I, I know that. I know that I'm lucky. I know that I'm fortunate. So it is scary. It is a threat, right? I mean, but it is, but you gotta, you gotta get tough. I'm sorry I cut you off and I didn't really have a good point.

• 1:28:37Joe Rogan?

  No, no, it's fine.

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  But you know what I mean?

• 1:28:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you do. And, I mean, I don't wanna be cruel, but also, this is how I feel. Critics in particular, I do not think they want to be critics. And I feel like most people who become critics, become critics because they don't have anything to contribute. They're not great writers, they, or they never developed the ability to be a great writer, or they never pursued it, or whatever it is. They don't, they're not great actors, they're not, they're just criticizing. Criticizing, like criticizing from Quentin Tarantino is. Very different thing than a criticism that comes from a person that's just a critic. And I remember I had this, there was this moment when Fear Factor came out. Like Fear Factor is a fucking completely idiotic show.

• 1:29:25Joe Rogan?

  It's just, that's all it is, is just escapism, it's chaos, people doing stupid shit for money. This is crazy, this is nuts, oh my god, are they really gonna do this? Ah, and maybe you get something out of the end, like that guy pulled it out, or she did it, she didn't wanna do it. She faced the snakes. Yeah, but it's really usually like, you know, the end thing is like something physical, but.

• 1:29:46Joe Rogan?

  Fear Factor came out right after nine eleven. That's when it came out. And one of the criticisms was, do you really think America needs to be facing fear after we just experienced September eleventh terrorist attack? And I got this question in an interview, and you know, my, my perspective on Fear Factor in the beginning was, I'm only doing this because I think it's gonna get cancelled. I'm like, I'll get some material out of this. I'm like, they're gonna sic dogs on people and make them eat animal dicks? I'm in. I'm like, this is gonna, this is gonna get cancelled in like fucking three weeks, and I'm gonna have a bit on how fucking stupid this show was. And it wound up doing like a hundred and sixty-eight episodes, it was ridiculous.

• 1:30:27Joe Rogan?

  And I said, and I got upset in this interview, I go, that's, this is ridiculous. Like, they were questioning me whether or not America needs to be scared after nine eleven. I'm like, it's not fucking scary. And I'm like, what are you, you're, you're making something into something it's not, just so that you can write an article. This is nonsense. And I go, that kind of criticism is the type of criticism from a person where I'm not interested in your opinion. I don't think you're a particularly unique thinker, and you're saying something that's nonsense. It's nonsense, it's a stupid show. I'll tell you it's a stupid show, and it's my fucking show, I don't care. It's just entertainment, that's all it is. And I think the people that write this are writing this in that way because you don't have anything to contribute.

• 1:31:12Joe Rogan?

  And I met that person at a party. There was one of those, you know, they have like, if you're on a television show, they have those NBC things where you go and it's like, there's all these different reporters and all the actors from all the shows are there. And the guy was like, you know, I gotta tell you, that really pissed me off. I go, why? Because it's accurate? I go, what pissed you off? I go, you say horrible, hurtful things about all these different people and the course of their career is dependent upon your opinions in, to a certain extent. You could shape other people's narratives about who this actor is, about who this person is, and you just do it because you don't have anything else to contribute. And so when I said you don't have anything else to contribute, that hurt your feelings. That's why it pissed you off. It didn't piss you off because I wasn't accurate.

• 1:31:57Joe Rogan?

  And we had this like weird moment, you know, where he was like taking into consideration what I was saying. And he was like, okay. And I go, I'm not a bad guy. I don't think you're a bad guy, but you have to realize there's weight to your words and I've realized there's weight to my words. That's why I lashed out like that. I think this is stupid. I'll tell you this show's stupid. It's a stupid show. We're not making fucking Shakespeare in the Park, bro. We're making people like line up coffin filled with rats. It's retarded, but it's okay. It's okay to have dumb shit. It's okay to have burgers. It's okay to have, you know, filet mignon in a fine restaurant.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:32:33Joe Rogan?

  All these things are okay. Like, call it what it is. If you want to say it's a dumb show, I'm right there with you. But if you want to say like, this is bad for America because America just got attacked by, and it's called Fear Factor. Like, shut up. Just shut up. And I just think he didn't like the fact that I was.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  That you were criticizing him?

• 1:32:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, well.

• 1:32:51Joe Rogan?

  I was willing to do what he does to him without fear because I had already checked out of acting. I did five years on news radio and I decided I'm done acting. I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. I only did it for money in the first place. I never wanted to be an actor. The only reason why I ever got on a, I got on a sitcom with zero acting experience. Zero. I mean, I had none.

• 1:33:10Speaker 02

  How did it go?

• 1:33:11Joe Rogan?

  I did, I did MTV Half Hour Comedy Hour, um, which was this comedy show that used to be on MTV. I did like a 10 minute set and I got a development deal. I was like, what? Like all of a sudden they gave me money. I was poor my whole life and then all of a sudden I had a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I'm like, this is crazy. I have money? Like it was nuts and my manager actually thought I had a gambling problem because I was spending so much money. And he was like, what are you spending money? I'm like, eating lobster every night. I was so dumb. I thought I was just gonna run out and then I'd go back to being poor again. But all of a sudden, I'm on this show and I'm acting. And I realized at the end of five years, it was a wonderful job with an amazing, incredible group of talented people, but I don't want to do it again. It's not my thing. I don't like it.

• 1:33:54Joe Rogan?

  So when Fear Factor came up, I'm like, ooh, this is a way to make a lot of money without doing anything that's acting. Okay, I'll do it. And so, dealing with these people that I'd seen the impact of their words on all the people that I worked with. Like, we used to, we used to sit around, you know, you have the table reads and then people would start reading Variety. And they'd start reading The Hollywood Reporter and all this different thing. And, and they would all be super bummed out. And I, and I would call it the devil's rag. So I'd go there, "Oh, you guys are reading the devil's rag again?" I go, "Fucking throw that away." It was like the early versions of Don't Read the Comments. I go, "You guys are reading the devil's rag. Don't fucking read that." Because then they would be all bummed out, like, "Oh, they think we suck." No, they, they suck! We're trying to make a good sitcom. Let's just try hard.

• 1:34:39Joe Rogan?

  The best way to not make a good sitcom is to read shitty things about you. Definitely. It's a sure as firewood. You're gonna go in and be really bummed out. And this constant process of dealing with other people's opinions, and especially negative opinions from people that you don't really like in the first place. They're not happy people. It is- This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact: research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra-processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist, and trust me, I know.

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• 1:36:53Joe Rogan?

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• 1:37:28Speaker 02

  Well, and that's why we're talking about the same thing with the internet is figuring out a way to give it no space in your mind. Because, you know, people are gonna do what they're gonna do, and you're not in charge of them. That's what I feel like, the, when you absorb too much of that hate and take it on yourself, you're forgetting that...

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  Somebody writes something hateful about somebody else, whether it's Quentin, or whether it's this person, or that person, or whatever. Most people hear it and think, wow, I wonder why he said that? What's wrong with him? They don't think something... So when, a lot of times, I might take really personally something that somebody hateful writes about me, but it's not like the world believes it.

• 1:38:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:38:09Speaker 02

  The world has people... Michael Jordan, who's not writing comments, might come across that and think, God, that writer's an asshole. That's what he's... He's not thinking, you're an asshole, or I... You know?

• 1:38:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:38:19Speaker 02

  If you're not saying something substantive, other people have a brain in their head, and they know it. And so you can just ignore... I feel you can just ignore it. I've never gained anything, except perhaps, the value of a thick skin, from all that.

• 1:38:33Joe Rogan?

  The value of a thick skin is important, though. And there is some... There's some value to being hurt, to taking it in, and then realize it's dangerous to take it in.

• 1:38:43Speaker 02

  And you must know, like with your show, I imagine, I don't really understand really how this works, but there's people who finance it and distribute it. There's people you have to work with, and they all have opinions. And, like, I'm doing this show right now, The Lowdown, with FX. Right? It's the first time I've ever done a television show. And I'm having a great experience with it. But you have to figure out, you're working with a lot of different people. You got FX has got their opinions about how the show is, and they're gonna distribute it on Hulu, and they're owned by Disney, and everybody... And you have to learn how to take criticism, go, alright, and also how to stand up for yourself, when you know what... You know your aim is true.

• 1:39:27Speaker 02

  And you have to be humble enough to tell the difference, because anybody who thinks they're always right is an asshole.

• 1:39:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:39:32Speaker 02

  Right? So sometimes you need their help.

• 1:39:34Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:39:35Speaker 02

  And you have things to be taught.

• 1:39:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  And sometimes you have to stand up for yourself, and say, this is the kind of art I want to make, and I'm living and dying on this. But... Actually, what you're saying actually could help me do what I'm doing. And no, it's the same thing with directors. If you can't, when you were talking about advice for young people, the first thing that popped in my head is something one of my first directors said to me, which was, he said, what, I was 21, I was doing my first, I was making my Broadway debut, and this director said, what have you done? And I said, well, I did Explorers, you know, when I was a kid, and I did this movie Dead Poets Society, and I acted in this school play. I played Tom in Glass Menagerie my senior year, and, you know, and this director looked

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  at me and said, so you've done nothing? And I was, I took offense at that, you know, I said, I have done some things. And he said, I need you to say, I've done nothing. I need you to say, I don't know. And if you can say, I don't know, I can teach you. And if you can't say, I don't know, then I really can't teach you. And it was, my 21-year-old ego, like, was just buckling, you know? I do know what I do, I do know what I'm doing. And, and, and he said, you've never been on Broadway before, you've never done Chekhov before, and you can't say, I don't know what I'm doing?

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  I said, I can say that, I don't know what I'm doing. See, it's not that hard. You know? Because if you can say that, I remember this, like, the first time going out surfing once, like, somebody's trying to teach me how to surfing, and I was like 16, I kept saying, I know how to do it, I know, I know how to do it. I didn't know how to do it, but I couldn't, my ego couldn't buck. And if you can get to that Zen Tabula Rasa no place, the beginner's mind, see, now, at 55, I always say, I don't know what I'm doing. It's so easy for me to say it. You know? It is so easy, you know, one lifetime is not enough to know what you're doing. There are so many more rooms, there's so many more layers, you know?

• 1:41:49Speaker 02

  And so, that's, the, the advice I have for young people is to be humble, and admit because you've done a handful of things, doesn't mean you know what you're doing. And even though I might have even had some success, I didn't know why it was successful.

• 1:42:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:42:08Joe Rogan?

  That's a great, the beginner's mind is a great point to start. Because even if you're really good at something, like say you're a good piano player and you want to learn how to play tennis, you, you, you start from a beginner's mind. You have to. And if you go into that tennis lesson going, do you know how fucking good I am at piano? Like, don't talk to me like that. Like, no, you don't know how to play tennis. Let me show you how to play tennis. Like, everyone is a beginner at a thing they don't know. And to take on as many things as you don't know as possible to keep that beginner's mind is actually immensely beneficial. For your ego, for your objectivity, for everything.

• 1:42:46Speaker 02

  For everything, could see with somebody like you, who's had a lot of transitions in your life, about different career paths and different things that you're, that's always forcing you into a beginner's mind. And that's, I think, I've done the same thing to myself, you know, like, what keeps me excited is like, alright, God, I don't know, I'm gonna write a graphic novel. I'm gonna work with this guy Greg Ruth, he's a brilliant illustrator, I'm gonna make a graphic novel. Now, I've never done that before. I have no idea how a graphic novel works. I know I've loved them my whole life, but I've never made one. Greg has, right? We work together, he teaches Sterling Harjo with the show The Lowdown. Boom, I've never done a show. He made Reservation Dogs. He's done this. I don't know this landscape and I love that feeling. Cause I don't lose all the value of the things I do know about. It's all there for me.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  It's all there for me. I don't have to announce it over everybody. It's not going anywhere.

• 1:43:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  But if I can orient myself into learning, I like making these documentaries, cause I'm not a professional documentarian. But what's weird about it is if I do that and I get in this real kind of open space and then I come back to acting, that beginner's mind channel is open. And I'm available to learn something from somebody else that maybe I might, cause one of the things I thought when I was young is I thought there was a right way to be an actor. And I was obsessed with somebody doing it wrong. This director is a fucking moron and he's ruining my work. You know? And then slowly I really realized, it's so obvious, there isn't a right way to make art.

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  There are successful ways and unsuccessful ways, but I wanted everybody to be Peter Weir. That's what I wanted. Peter Weir had made Dead Poets Society, and that's what rehearsal is supposed to be like. That's what the set is supposed to be like. That's how you're supposed to talk to other people. I didn't know, my mentor was a card-carrying, awesome human being, and I was having unrealistic expectations about other people on their path. They haven't done all that Peter's done. They don't know it all. And I just, it would anger me that they weren't, you know, and then if you can get in a kind of a more open mind, then you can really listen to people and absorb where they're at in their journey.

• 1:45:05Speaker 02

  And you're not gonna change them, you know, you're not, this idea that, especially in a film shoot, three minutes, you're not gonna change the way they think, you know. You gotta try to do your thing, lead by example. You know, and try to let them not negatively impact you, but maybe you can be open and learn something from them.

• 1:45:24Joe Rogan?

  And then that whole beginner's mindset is just immensely beneficial. Like you were saying how you carry it over to your acting. I would recommend that with anybody who does anything. Find another thing that you're not good at at all, and get into that, because that will help you with the thing that you're good at.

• 1:45:41Speaker 02

  And even if it was like, I took, it happens so often that it's funny. Like, I take my son out to teach him how to shoot, right? First ski thing, you just blast it right out of the air. Second one, blast it right out of the air, right? You know, you teach somebody to shoot a bow or something, first air they fly, hits the target, then they don't hit the target again. You know, you start thinking too much. You know, I hear, I don't know anything about golf, but I hear the same thing that's true with golf. Young people are often great actors. It's adolescence in life that makes it harder to get back to that childlike place. You know? And so, I think, I've even been talking to my wife a lot about, I want to start trying to take piano lessons, just to do something I've never done.

• 1:46:24Speaker 02

  Because I know, I know it rattles my brain.

• 1:46:27Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  And makes my brain see things differently.

• 1:46:29Joe Rogan?

  Take a new language on, learn how to play chess, do something, yeah. It's hugely beneficial to be a beginner. I think a person that only does one thing, there's something very valuable in that too. But do one thing, immerse yourself in that one thing, and do it the best you can.

• 1:46:43Speaker 02

  It's true, it's true.

• 1:46:45Joe Rogan?

  The term kaizen, it's a Japanese ...term for refining something over and over and over and over again for decades.

• 1:46:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Joe Rogan?

  Until you absolutely have it perfected.

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  And I, I believe in that entirely, but I also believe that to master a craft, you have to apprentice three or four. That it's, it's good for like, I, I'm an actor and I'm gonna die an actor and this is what I'm gonna do. And I, and I have met older actors who are amazing, who I know I'm not as good as. And it kind of thrills me. It, it, it, it thrills me. How do, there's little nuances of conversation that I don't quite understand yet, but I know that they do and I know that they're right and I wanna understand more deeply. And I, I just feel that, I don't know, I lost my train of thought about that. I don't know.

• 1:47:42Speaker 02

  I just totally, my computer just shut down and I forgot what I was talking about.

• 1:47:45Joe Rogan?

  It's okay. It's, I think more people need, I, I think the problem is when you're really good at something, you find identity in it.

• 1:47:53Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, that's what I was saying is like, I, I know I want to excel at this one craft, but I know that when I direct something, when I write something, if I make a graphic novel, a documentary, I'm, I'm learning about things that are adjacent to my specialty. And by doing that, when I go, when I go to set and I'm talking to a writer, I know how hard he worked on the script.

• 1:48:17Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:48:18Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna willy nilly change his lines because I'm not in the mood or I don't like the way my hair looks or something like that. I'm not gonna do that. I, I have respect for what he did. And because I have that respect, I can offer him my thoughts. And we can probably get involved in a really mutually beneficial conversation. Because I've directed, I don't look at some director and think, well, what, like I did when I was younger, he's stopping me. I'm thinking, I know this guy sweat this. I know this guy picked this location for a reason. I know this guy has a tenuous relationship with a cinematographer. I know the producers are breathing down his neck. I know he's got a lot of headaches. I'm gonna help him and I'm gonna try to find an app. You know what I mean?

• 1:48:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:59Speaker 02

  So, so these ancillary, I, I do wanna have a specialty, but I do think learning the piano might help me be a better actor. Like, I don't know why. I don't, I don't know the logic behind it.

• 1:49:10Joe Rogan?

  I think in particular, in acting, that would be true because acting is you becoming someone else.

• 1:49:19Joe Rogan?

  Who's in life? And life involves a lot of different aspects. There's a lot of different things that go on in a human being's mind. The more you can introduce to your mind, the more that would help you become a variety of different people that you're performing as.

• 1:49:37Speaker 02

  See, I mean, wouldn't it be phenomenal? It'd be very weird. But like, so you and I have been talking. And I would venture to say, we're doing pretty well. Three quarters of the time, we're completely immersed in what we're talking about. And then my brain, why my computer shut down is I started thinking about this actor that I love, Richard Easton, and I started thinking about how I'm still not as good as he is and people, he's not even famous, right? And then I, I couldn't remember what I was gonna say.

• 1:50:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  Right? And you're talking to me about your kids or some, in your, there's no way your mind doesn't drift to something going on in your life.

• 1:50:08Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  And, and mine does too. Right? And, and, and so that's what real life is like. And the actor's job is to figure out the text, that the text be so clear and in there that then you can figure out all the other wavelengths. You know, when you're watching somebody grade, there's all these other wavelengths that are happening. They have nothing, they, it's not that they have nothing to do with the script, but it's like, it's like the difference between a sketch and an oil painting. You know, the script is kind of a beautiful sketch, and the actor's job, director's job, production design, so we're turning that into an oil painting. And, and so anyway, I'm, I'm just saying, wouldn't it, if I could put a subtitle under everything we're really thinking while we're talking?

• 1:50:52Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:50:53Speaker 02

  How different would it be? And how much more would I learn about you if I knew what, you know, what your guys' relationship is really like? Does he get on your nerves? Do you hate it, you know, that he wears a black cap? Do you wish you wore the red one? Does, do you know, you know, you know, you know what I'm saying? I got, there's so much about, when I'm in your space, so much I don't know about what's going on today and what you guys are doing later today.

• 1:51:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:14Speaker 02

  Or how you cut the show, or what's important to you about the show, or...

• 1:51:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, I forget about things I'm talking about all the time because I'm trying to lock into the other person's brain. And sometimes I forget what I wanna say. Because I'm trying to like, I'm trying to think like you. I'm trying to like, completely be in the moment and think like you. That's what I try to do. When I'm doing, when I'm having a conversation with a person, I try to be as completely locked in as possible, so much so that sometimes I forget people's names that I know really well. I forget all kinds of things.

• 1:51:48Speaker 02

  That's cool.

• 1:51:48Joe Rogan?

  Because I'm not thinking about anything else other than the, what that person's thinking and saying. And trying to like decipher it and trying to like, trying to like, you know, guide the conversation in some sort of an interesting way. But I, I, I forget all kinds of things. I for, I'll forget important people's phone numbers, birthdays. I, I don't remember anything. Like so many times I'll, I'll ask Jamie a question like, who's that fucking, what, what is his fucking name? And then I, I can't believe I can't remember. It's because I'm not there. I'm lost in what this person is saying. So I'm, I, I have to like, sit down and open up my files and go, oh, there's all the information again, but I'm not there, so I can't do that.

• 1:52:32Joe Rogan?

  So I gotta go, let me go back to my desk and I'll open up my files and now I have my information, but when I'm talking to you, I'm not at my desk.

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  That's what it's like for me to, to have a great role.

• 1:52:42Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:44Speaker 02

  My brain disappears.

• 1:52:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:47Speaker 02

  Into that other psyche. And I can kinda do some of the normal stuff of life. Drive my kids to school and do some things, but this part of me is floating over here, imagining, was this the right way to, how should I wear the jacket? Oh, would he drive a car? What kind of car would he drive? Is that the right car? Is that the right, like, you know, and just my imagination when it's really cooking, takes me away, my, my favorite things about it is I don't think about my phone. I don't think about the emails I didn't return. I didn't think about whether I forgot so and so's birthday. For this period of time, this job is so important to me that I'm willing to say.

• 1:53:34Speaker 02

  Nothing else matters. But I, but doing as good as I can in this moment. Obviously, it's going to matter again when I leave the dressing room and when I, when I do this. Obviously, I'm trying to be a good adult and father and husband and citizen, all that stuff. But it gives me a space where everything else can disappear. Everything else.

• 1:53:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:55Speaker 02

  And that's what's so fun about a big, a big ensemble movie. Like, I don't, people may like the movie or not like the movie, but I did this remake of Magnificent Seven. Right? And when you have a big cast and everybody's in period costume, you know, and everybody's on their horse. And your jacket's from 1876 and their shirt is from, you know, from the Civil War or something like that. And it's all real and there's these old taverns built and there's dogs on the set and horses peeing. And you know what I mean? It's all so real and my life is gone.

• 1:54:33Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:34Speaker 02

  And I'm just good night, Robo Show.

• 1:54:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:36Speaker 02

  And, you know, and I gotta worry about how many bullets I have left in my thing. And you know, and it's, it, you're, it's a, it's a, back to hypnosis. And it's a wonderful relaxation. And that's the strange thing about it is it's like, you know, when you're a kid and you first look at the stars of the ocean or something and you feel powerfully your own insignificance. And your intellectual brain would think that that would feel bad. Oh, you're, if somebody told you, hey, you're insignificant, that feels bad. But when you look at the stars, it feels great.

• 1:55:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:09Speaker 02

  And it's, it's the same feeling of like, why would disappearing feel so good? I, I did, um, when I was young, I did this play with Steve Zahn, great actor. Have you had Steve on your show?

• 1:55:21Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:55:21Speaker 02

  Oh, he's a genius and he's so funny. And we were doing a play together and, um, and I would say to him, I said, tonight's show went really good. Do you think, do you think it went well? And he'd go, yeah, I thought it went really well. Yeah, that was right. And then the next night I'd come back, so, ah, tonight sucked, didn't it suck? He goes, oh, I thought it went really well. You know, and you always think it goes really well. And he goes, I never remember.

• 1:55:46Speaker 02

  And the truth is, he's so zen, he's so in the moment, what you're talking about when you do comedy or when you do your interviews, he is so in, he's so present that he honestly doesn't remember. And that's the trick, cause he doesn't have this huge opinion.

• 1:56:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:02Speaker 02

  Cause the opinion gets in your way all the time.

• 1:56:04Joe Rogan?

  Yes, it really can. Yeah, and I think the ultimate in the moment for a person that doesn't have a craft or a thing is staring at the stars. Cause you realize you are a part of everything and you are in this infinite soup of existence that all of your troubles and your, it seems so insignificant in comparison to the vastness of what's in front of you.

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  And that lets your shoulders lighten up.

• 1:56:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:35Speaker 02

  And then you can handle what you can handle.

• 1:56:37Joe Rogan?

  I've talked about this before, but I'll tell you, when I was younger, when my oldest daughter was, I think she was only like five or six, we went to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. And I don't know if you've ever been there, it's on the Big Island. But they told us, it's like an hour and a half drive, they told us when you're driving up there, go, you're, you know, you're gonna go to the top and hopefully there won't be any clouds, so you get a clear vision of the sky. So as we're driving up, there's all these fucking clouds. I'm like, oh, this sucks. This is gonna suck. We're driving all this, we're not gonna see any stars. We drive through the clouds, cause it's really high. And you get up to the top and you're

• 1:57:17Joe Rogan?

  above the clouds. And we got out of the car and my fucking jaw dropped. It was nuts. It was the craziest image. And I've been there three times since, never recreated it. There's always been cloud cover that's higher up. I just caught it the first time I went there at the absolute perfect. It changed my life. It changed my perspective on the universe itself, because it felt like I was, it felt psychedelic. It felt like it was in a spaceship. Like a convertible spaceship and I was looking through the windshield and we were flying through the cosmos and there was an impossible amount of stars in the sky. There wasn't a spot in the sky that wasn't filled with stars. The Milky Way was clear as day. It was fucking bananas. That's what it looked like.

• 1:58:02Speaker 02

  You didn't feel like you were on a spaceship. You are on one.

• 1:58:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you're on an organic spaceship.

• 1:58:09Speaker 02

  And you realized it. Yeah. Look at that. That's it?

• 1:58:11Joe Rogan?

  That's, well, that's what it kind of looks like, but it was actually even more profound than that. But that is the Keck Observatory.

• 1:58:16Speaker 02

  You know when I was telling you about White Fang? My experience with it. So I was out there, so this is 1989, right? I'm in Haynes, Alaska, which is about 100 miles north of Juneau. There's no internet. The mail comes once a week on Monday. If it's bad weather, the mail doesn't come till the next week, right? I'm there for six months. 19 years old, there's nobody to talk to. I mean, there's no co-star.

• 1:58:44Joe Rogan?

  Were you the only 19-year-old there?

• 1:58:46Speaker 02

  Listen, the guy who was the production, you know, the production manager or whatever, he was hyper AA, right? And there's one bar in town and he told the manager, if I was seen in there, he would shut it down. There was nowhere else to go.

• 1:59:04Joe Rogan?

  What a dick.

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  I was like, I told the guy, I said, "Look, I'm not gonna drink. I got it, like, the stuntmen are hanging in there, all the other actors are hanging out in there." And I had nothing to do, because I couldn't go in the one frickin' bar, right? And for the first three months I was there, it was always dark, right? And then the second three months, it was always light. And it was just, but anyway, the point is, I went on this long walk and I saw the Aurora Borealis by myself, you know? And I'd see it night after night. So I'd just see the sky rippling. And it was like what you're talking about. It was like, it actually made me laugh.

• 1:59:43Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:59:44Speaker 02

  Do you know, it just seemed, it was funny. It was like the cosmos was teasing you going, "Oh, you think all this is real."

• 1:59:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:52Speaker 02

  I was like, "I do, I do think it matters whether White Fang is a good movie." And then I'd just giggle, you know, and I was like, "Oh, you have no idea what's going on." And it was, it was some, like you're talking, something you don't unsee.

• 2:00:06Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:06Speaker 02

  You know, I still have over my desk, I have a little postcard from Haynes, Alaska, and it still comes to me in my dreams all the time. I'm back there.

• 2:00:15Joe Rogan?

  Wow. I think we're being robbed of that because of cities. Light pollution has robbed us of what I think all of our ancestors always inherently observed. When nighttime came around, everybody realized, "Well, you're, you're a part of the infinite cosmos, and there's magic to the universe." Which is why there were so many people, you know, hundreds if not thousands of years ago, that had these whimsical tales and these ideas of the importance of life and existence when they're in the most brutal moments of history. They're in the most brutal moments of, of life, life or death, hunter-gatherers, warring tribes.

• 2:00:57Joe Rogan?

  But yet at night, you're presented with this impossible majesty of the cosmos above your head every night. Now, today, we have fucking social media. This is your sun. This is your star. You're staring at a stupid fucking screen, and when you look up, you just see nothing but blackness because there's all these city skyscrapers and all these streetlights. Exactly. It's blinded out the one thing that is like, one of the most important humbling, like grounding experiences, peering at the cosmos.

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  Isn't it weird? It's so hard to be in a bad mood when you're looking at the stars. It's so hard to be in a bad mood when you're riding a bicycle and you feel the wind and you're... It's just, it's funny, it's such a simple little thing, a stupid little invention, this bicycle. But you get in, you ride around, it's very hard to stay in a bad mood if you spend two hours on a bicycle.

• 2:01:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:47Speaker 02

  And there's so many things like that that we rob ourselves of. You know, I don't know... Even like I find when I'm in nature, exercise. When I run outside and I'm running through the trees and I see a hawk and I see the wind blowing through and I pass a farm with sheep and I, it's like, I come back from a long run, hi, and I feel like I like myself.

• 2:02:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:13Speaker 02

  And in the city, I go to the gym and I got on one thing, highlights of all my sports teams that I love and they're blinking up and down and then I got the world is ending on all the news channels blinking up and down and I got guys who are in better shape than me walking by and girls who are super hot walking by that I'm trying not to look at and be a good person and I walk out of the damn gym and I hate myself. You know what I mean? I mean, I've got some exercise, but it wasn't, I longed for the country and I longed, but anyway.

• 2:02:45Joe Rogan?

  It's certainly a different experience. Yeah, doing it outside is certainly way better.

• 2:02:49Speaker 02

  Was that too much information?

• 2:02:50Joe Rogan?

  No, that's us, that's me, that's everybody and, you know, and the, the thing is, like the gym wants to keep you occupied because then you'll, you'll show up more often. It won't be incredibly boring if you go to a dank dungeon of a gym with nothing on the walls other than a small mirror that's covered with other people's spit, you know?

• 2:03:08Speaker 02

  I think that's what we all liked in Rocky when he like goes, goes out to the barn.

• 2:03:13Joe Rogan?

  Especially Rocky IV when he goes to Siberia.

• 2:03:15Speaker 02

  That's the one I'm thinking of, when the barn is freezing out and it's just him and the.

• 2:03:18Joe Rogan?

  He's carrying the log, ugh! Yeah, it's hilarious.

• 2:03:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we liked the idea and, and I was gonna bring that up earlier when you were talking about immersing yourself in a role and preparing for a thing, is one of the more romantic things to me about fighting, when, when I know that like when, like this past weekend, there was a big UFC, when a fighter goes into a camp, they go off somewhere, they leave their family behind often for like two months at a time and they just completely immerse themselves in preparation for this one thing that's going to happen and every little thing that distracts you, robs you away from the potential of that one possible

• 2:04:03Speaker 02

  majestic performance, that one career-defining performance which they're all chasing after. And for a championship-level fighter, it's like the immense pressure and then this thing, this.

• 2:04:20Joe Rogan?

  You call it romantic, because it is kind of romantic, this romantic task.

• 2:04:26Speaker 02

  Oh, it's dedication to excellence.

• 2:04:28Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:29Speaker 02

  It's this.

• 2:04:29Joe Rogan?

  Full dedication.

• 2:04:30Speaker 02

  Full, complete dedication. The way that you're even talking about trying to do your interviews, or trying to do your comedy, you're trying to be insane. But to have something so, I mean, I envy that when I read about fighters and the dedication. I really kind of long for that experience, that idea of going away. And I think there's something about, I've always, I don't know if you think this, but whenever I pass by a monastery, a convent or some of these people who are dedicated to their spiritual calling so completely that they've isolated out all the noise of life.

• 2:05:05Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:05:06Speaker 02

  I'm like, I'm really glad they exist. I'm glad, in the same way I feel about fighters, I feel like, I mean, with fighters, I really envy it, because we all would like to test ourselves. How much could I dedicate myself? How could I, could I go to the next level? How far could I go?

• 2:05:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:25Speaker 02

  And I think that, oh, just singularity of focus, it feels really good. And there is something, I think I love stories about fighters and for just that, just, and the fact that it all rests on these X amount of minutes.

• 2:05:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and chaos, and just.

• 2:05:46Speaker 02

  What was it like?

• 2:05:48Joe Rogan?

  Was it like watching?

• 2:05:49Speaker 02

  Fighting.

• 2:05:49Joe Rogan?

  Oh, fighting? Terrifying. Yeah.

• 2:05:53Speaker 02

  Did you ever, would you ever get to a place of, would you ever get to the place where you're walking into the ring and you weren't afraid?

• 2:05:59Joe Rogan?

  No. If I did, I didn't perform well. There was a few times where I was overconfident, and I didn't perform well, because I tricked myself into not being scared. So, because I wasn't scared, because I didn't like being nervous, so I tricked myself into thinking, I'm so good, I don't have To be nervous and then I'd fought so many times like the problem is complacency. So if I probably when I was competing, I probably had.

• 2:06:24Joe Rogan?

  Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred fights in martial arts. And so I did nothing but that from age fifteen to twenty one, just traveled around the country. And there was times where I did it so much that I was not nervous. And then I would go there and I wouldn't fight well. And then I would go, why is I why did I missed opportunities? Even if I won, I was like hypercritical, even if I won, I just didn't like. I got hit when I shouldn't have got hit like something was off, I didn't perform that well. And I realized somewhere along the line, I think right around I was like probably nineteen or twenty when I really started to figure it out. I was like, oh, you have to be scared. That thing that you're you don't like, that's critical. It's critical to your performance because it keeps you on edge. You have to be nervous, you have to be.

• 2:07:08Joe Rogan?

  Mike Tyson talked about it. There's a fantastic video of Mike Tyson. Um, from his documentary where he's talking about his mindset, leading to him getting into the ring. And that, you know, he he talks about. See if you can find that, Jamie. It's fucking excellent. Because this was Mike Tyson when he was Mike Tyson, when he was the most terrifying heavyweight boxer that ever walked the face of the earth. There was a period of time over like two or three years where I don't think anybody has ever come close to Mike Tyson.

• 2:07:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know that's true.

• 2:07:41Joe Rogan?

  He was just supreme. He was so good and so different than anybody before him. But it was also his mindset. He's a great scholar of history. You know, I had a fantastic conversation with him about Genghis Khan. And when we started talking about it, he knew Genghis Khan's real name, his real name is Temujin. He knew his history that you know.

• 2:08:02Speaker 02

  Such an interesting person. I love to watch all his interviews.

• 2:08:05Joe Rogan?

  He knew that Genghis Khan's mother had been kidnapped by uh on her wedding day. Been kidnapped by a rival man and taken away and impregnated. And the man that she was supposed to marry, she never saw again. And then that Genghis Khan was born with a blood clot in his hand. He was holding on to a blood clot as you as he was a young boy. And it was like a sign that he was going to be a great conqueror and a warrior. But listen, listen to this.

• 2:08:32Speaker 04

  I might have supreme confidence, but I'm scared to death. I'm totally afraid. I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid of losing. I'm afraid of being humiliated. The closer I get to the ring, the more confident I get. The closer, the more confident I get. All during my training, I've been afraid of this, man. But the closer I get to the ring, I'm more confident. Once I'm in the ring, I'm a god. No one could beat me.

• 2:08:55Joe Rogan?

  That's an abbreviated version of it. It's different in the film. It's like a little bit more drawn out. Somebody edited that down for Instagram, but it's this thing where you would think, how could that guy be afraid?

• 2:09:07Speaker 05

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• 2:09:38Joe Rogan?

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• 2:10:19Joe Rogan?

  way to bank. Go to chime.com/rogan. Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. Is he afraid? He's Mike Tyson. And this is Mike Tyson in his prime. But you have to be afraid. You've got to be nervous. If you're not nervous, you're not going to perform well.

• 2:10:46Speaker 02

  Well, it makes me think about earlier in our conversation when I was talking about, oh, You know, when I think about when I was young and I'd be really nervous and pretending I wasn't nervous, and that was the problem, and that now I said to you, I still experience it, I just know what to do. Yeah. You remember like that, we were talking like that? Yes. What I was, what I know what to do is not to pretend that I'm not nervous. Right. That's, it's as simple as that. When he's saying, I'm afraid, that's very powerful. It's kind of the same, a different spin on what I'm saying about it. It's okay to say, I don't know. Yeah. You know? I am afraid, and there's, there's a great Sarah Bernhardt story about this young actress

• 2:11:30Speaker 02

  comes up to Sarah Bernhardt, she's this great actress from the previous, you know, a long time ago, but this, before Sarah Bernhardt was about to go on stage, this young actress asked her to sign her program. Sarah Bernhardt took it and her hands were shaking, and this young actress said, why are your hands shaking? And she was, I'm nervous. She, and the young person said, I'm never nervous when I act. Sarah Bernhardt, when you know what you're doing, you will be. That's great. And, and it's a part of like what you're talking about with your fighting, knowing that there's nothing wrong with anxiety and with nerves. They can be your friend. They are there, they are here to warn you, prepare you, make you train a little harder,

• 2:12:15Speaker 02

  make you think a little sharper. Yeah. Treating it like, I'm embarrassed, I'm ashamed of being nervous. You know, Bill Russell apparently would like, be sick to his stomach before every game. This is the most winning basketball player in history, he was still, and that's why he won so much. Right. You know? You have to care. You have to care. And then strangely, what that Tyson clip gets hit, if you can say that, the closer you get to game moment, now you're not pretending, and you realize, oh, for me, it's, it's just a scene, it's just a play, it's just a, I can handle. This is, you remember that Jaguar par, Paul in Apocalypto, when he has that moment, he's

• 2:12:57Speaker 02

  running through the woods and he's so afraid, and he realizes, this is my forest. You know, he's like, I don't, I don't have to be afraid in my forest. You know, I'll fight these guys, I don't, I'm gonna stop running. It's a great moment in that movie. Yeah. And, and I feel that way. When before I'm doing something, this last movie I did, Blue Moon, really, really challenging part, I had so much confidence when we were talking about making the movie, then all of a sudden it was greenlit and sort of, but like when I flew to the location and I saw the set and was like, oh, it was the weekend before we started. I got so nervous, I got sick.

• 2:13:35Speaker 02

  You know, I woke up in the middle of the night just in pools of sweat and it, in my body was just like going, Ethan, this is gonna, are you ready? Are you ready?

• 2:13:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:49Speaker 02

  You know, and I would wake up, ah, I had to get up so early to go to work. I'd wake up an hour and a half before. I was supposed, like, I gotta go over these lines again. I gotta go over this, how is this character walking? What is he doing? What is he saying? Is this part ready? Is this thing ready? Do they know what they're doing in that shot? Does the cigar's ready? All the things, what are the things that are gonna be that screw today up? I guess, how much can I see the day?

• 2:14:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:11Speaker 02

  So that none of these things that might screw it up are gonna screw it up. And so, I kinda know what he means when it comes to, you've passed through the fire. So when it comes to fighting, well, he's either gonna win or lose, it's gonna be okay. But, you know, there's something powerful, that anxiety can be a great friend.

• 2:14:31Joe Rogan?

  His mentor, Customato.

• 2:14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, amazing guy.

• 2:14:34Joe Rogan?

  Who was also a hypnotist.

• 2:14:35Speaker 02

  Really?

• 2:14:36Joe Rogan?

  Yes. He was a psychologist.

• 2:14:38Speaker 02

  That I did not know.

• 2:14:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he's a completely fascinating guy. He started hypnotizing Mike when he was 13. One of the things that he told Mike, he said, fear is like a fire. It can cook your food or it can burn your house down.

• 2:14:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:53Joe Rogan?

  It depends on how you control it.

• 2:14:55Speaker 02

  I feel the same way about money, feel the same way about ego.

• 2:14:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:00Speaker 02

  It can be the fuel of a healthy life, but it has to be, um...

• 2:15:06Joe Rogan?

  Has to be managed.

• 2:15:06Speaker 02

  Has to be managed really well, and it's sadly daily.

• 2:15:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, daily.

• 2:15:12Speaker 02

  It's not like you, I'm sure we're both old enough to know, it's not like you have some breakthrough when you're thirty-three. I've had breakthroughs, I feel like, oh, I get it, I get it, I get it.

• 2:15:20Joe Rogan?

  And then the next day, you don't get it.

• 2:15:21Speaker 02

  Gosh, it's gone.

• 2:15:24Speaker 02

  You know, and it happens to you over and over again, and, and I, that's life, I think.

• 2:15:29Joe Rogan?

  Yes, that is life, yeah. And that's, that's great for young people to hear, because they think that there's gonna come a point in time where they made it, where there's no fear. And I'm, I'm here to tell you, you don't want that. You don't want it. It's never gonna come, and even if it did come, you don't want it. It's, it'll rob you of the exciting part of life.

• 2:15:48Speaker 02

  You ever hear that Jim Carrey bit always makes you laugh? He's like, he wins the Golden Globe, and he goes to bed at night, he goes, like, gosh, I'm a Golden Globe winner. What if I could be a two-time Golden Globe winner? What if I could be a three, you know, the brain?

• 2:16:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:03Speaker 02

  Brain always wants more.

• 2:16:04Joe Rogan?

  Always.

• 2:16:05Speaker 02

  It's just, it can't stop.

• 2:16:06Joe Rogan?

  That's why billionaires still work.

• 2:16:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Why are they so miserable?

• 2:16:12Joe Rogan?

  Because it's just chasing numbers. You're chasing numbers all the time.

• 2:16:15Speaker 02

  One of the thing about, in the rooms that I've been in with a lot of money, compared to the rooms I've been in where there isn't a lot of money, if you compare the laughter.

• 2:16:26Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah.

• 2:16:28Speaker 02

  It's no contest.

• 2:16:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's so much pressure involved in that kind of way of life.

• 2:16:33Speaker 02

  So why would you want a house with no laughter, you know?

• 2:16:36Joe Rogan?

  I don't think they have options at that point. I think they're so locked into what they do.

• 2:16:41Speaker 02

  And it's, it gets so competitive.

• 2:16:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:43Speaker 02

  They get, I've seen guys like that who get so happy about a, a deal gone right. Yeah, that's, it's fascinating to me. I mean, it's like, I, wow, I didn't, I didn't, but, well, because, because the inverse is true. If that makes you so happy,

• 2:16:59Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:17:00Speaker 02

  what happens if you lose that?

• 2:17:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:17:02Speaker 02

  Million bucks or whatever, twenty million.

• 2:17:04Joe Rogan?

  And it makes you happy for a brief amount of time, because the reality is, once you're wealthy, everything else is, my friend Brian said something to me a long time ago, he goes, oh, the only amount of money you want is where you can go to a restaurant and not worry what the bill costs. Everything else is bullshit.

• 2:17:18Speaker 02

  Well, I, I liken it to... What happens if you get in a fender bender? You know, I don't want to get in a fender bender and have a lot of trouble.

• 2:17:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:17:28Speaker 02

  Like, I want that to be taken care of.

• 2:17:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:17:30Speaker 02

  You don't, you don't want to not be able to pay your rent because you got a fender bender. You don't want your kid not to get their medicine because you got a fender bender. You know, like, you need to have room, a little, a little padding to, like, I've never, there's no vacation. An expensive vacation with my kids is not better than any vacation with my kids.

• 2:17:53Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 2:17:55Speaker 02

  You know, a romantic, same thing.

• 2:17:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:58Speaker 02

  I don't, you know, you can spend a fortune on a romantic weekend. It's not as great as it is to get stuck in a car when it's a blizzard out.

• 2:18:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:18:05Speaker 02

  And you listen to a great record and she looks beautiful and says something funny and you both laugh. That's, you can't buy that.

• 2:18:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:18:14Speaker 02

  And, and, and, but there's this feeling like you could.

• 2:18:18Joe Rogan?

  Well, our society puts so much emphasis on ultimate success. Like, who's the richest man in the world? Well, do you think the richest man in the world is happier than the 30th richest man in the world? They're all rich as fuck. Like, everything is available to them. It's all nonsense after that, after a certain point. Like, what are you doing? Why are you still working? Why are you still chasing zeros and ones? Like, what is the point?

• 2:18:43Speaker 02

  What are you chasing?

• 2:18:45Joe Rogan?

  Me?

• 2:18:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:46Joe Rogan?

  I don't. I don't think I'm chasing anything. I try not to be. I just enjoy what I do.

• 2:18:51Speaker 02

  See, that's, I don't relate to it because that's, that's what led me to the question. It's like, I'm like, what am I chasing? You know what I'm chasing? What I said earlier, like, I, um, the last thing I shot, we had a couple moments of grace. You know, just weird, like, I can tell the crew's losing their lunch and everybody's so happy with the take that we got. And it's kind of moving and, oh, it was perfect. And the light came through the window at the right time. And then Peter Dinklage said this hysterical thing and he wasn't supposed to say it, but it worked out perfect because then the other actress, then she responded in that way. And then my hat fell off and everybody's, and it's just, it's high and I drive home

• 2:19:35Speaker 02

  and I want to tell everybody and I can't wait for the world to see it. You know, I am chasing that, like, could that happen again?

• 2:19:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:43Speaker 02

  You know, but it's not something I control. It's not something. That it's a feeling I'm chasing.

• 2:19:50Joe Rogan?

  But it's a tangible thing. It's not status or money. It's you're chasing, you're doing, you know, for lack of a better word, art. You know, and art has a sort of a pretentious air to it. A lot of people, you know, there's there's certain words that have been sort of co-opted. But the art of creation, the art of doing something.

• 2:20:12Speaker 02

  You would never, you would never. I mean, I know you're exactly right. And it happens to me all the time and it bothers me that what what people think is pretentious and what people, if I say to you, you know, I really want to make a hundred million dollars. Nobody says I'm pretentious.

• 2:20:25Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 2:20:25Speaker 02

  If I say, you know, I'd really like to make something, to make something beautiful. It really moves people. What a pretentious ass.

• 2:20:32Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 2:20:33Speaker 02

  Why is it? What I was gonna say was, well, you go first.

• 2:20:36Joe Rogan?

  It's sincerity, because some people say that and they don't mean it. And that's most of the people that say that. That's the problem.

• 2:20:42Speaker 02

  What I was gonna say is like, if you're, you say fifteen, fourteen, your daughter, your youngest?

• 2:20:47Joe Rogan?

  Fifteen, yeah.

• 2:20:49Speaker 02

  If you came home today and she had made this crazy collage and it was combining pictures of her friends from high school and this beautiful watercolor that she did around it and she sprinkled glue on it and dropped sparkles on it and put it in a weird wood frame that her mother had given her that she'd like, and she said, isn't it beautiful, Dad? You would, would you ever say that's pretentious?

• 2:21:15Joe Rogan?

  Of course not.

• 2:21:15Speaker 02

  Of course not. But the goal, what I've, when somebody says the word art to me, I don't hear pretentious. I hear the solar system. I hear like human creativity inside of us, man. It is inside me and it's inside you. And when I see a great movie, or when I hear Jimi Hendrix rip a killer solo, then my whole body vibrates, oh, hey, we're alive.

• 2:21:40Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:21:40Speaker 02

  You know, when Johnny Cash comes out with a sound you've never heard before, when it's a great rap song, you're like, I gotta hear that again.

• 2:21:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:47Speaker 02

  I feel my heartbeat with that. That's art. It's not pretentious. It's, it's, it's real. And so I feel that way very strongly. And that makes me want to go to set and that makes me not care whether the movie makes a billion dollars or makes two cents. There's a great, one of the great old English actor, Paul Schofield, I'm gonna destroy this quote, but it was in his obituary. And he was in this great movie when I was a kid, Man for All Seasons, and he was in Redford's quiz show. And he was a great English actor. And when he died, in his obituary, there was an interview with him. He said, "You were performing King Lear at your local church. Why weren't you doing it on the West End? You know, because you were healthy enough." They were asking, "Why are you doing..."

• 2:22:32Speaker 02

  He was doing a play at a local church. And he said, "I really like walking to work. And I've realized that I really have always only performed for whoever it was that made me. And I can do that anywhere. I can do it on Broadway. I can do it in a Robert Redford movie. And I can do it in my local theater. It's the same action, and it's taken me a lifetime to realize that it doesn't... I just love to do it." And he's like, "And I'd like to walk to work, so I'm not going to the West End." And I thought, "I love this guy!"

• 2:23:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Well, that is real purity. Yeah. When you're not chasing any prestige, you're only doing it for the thing.

• 2:23:15Speaker 02

  And I bet there are people that he loved there.

• 2:23:19Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 2:23:20Speaker 02

  Other people you're doing it for.

• 2:23:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, of course, yeah. And it's probably more purity to it, knowing that it's not going to be reviewed in the New York Times. It's like, you're doing something that you're only doing it for the love of it.

• 2:23:34Speaker 02

  And if you want to be, if you want to play pro ball, you know, there's certain things, you know, if you're, you know, the Augie, the great, he used to coach for UT baseball. His great thing that he'd say that, why he didn't coach the Yankees or the Red Sox, because he won five NCAA championships. See, the problem is with pro ball, the object of the game is to win. And in college sports, my job is to develop young men.

• 2:24:06Speaker 02

  And if I do that right, we will win. But it's, I like the priority. And I feel like if the priority is my own development, you know,

• 2:24:17Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:18Speaker 02

  Then more times than not, something good will happen. If my priority is to win, make cash, be a big shot, blah, blah, blah.

• 2:24:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:24:27Speaker 02

  I've kind of lost why you should play the game.

• 2:24:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:30Speaker 02

  You know?

• 2:24:31Joe Rogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:24:32Speaker 02

  And the trick for me is, well, I do want to be a professional actor. I like, I like being relevant. I like making relevant art. I like talking to people and communicating with people. So you have to figure out that balance of like, all right, this is how I pay my bills. This is, you know, what facilitates all my whole life. So I have to be a little attentive to the professional part of my brain and not let it diminish the kid in me.

• 2:24:59Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:25:00Speaker 02

  You know? And to keep them both in some kind of balance.

• 2:25:04Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:25:05Speaker 02

  And that's, for me, been my adult life.

• 2:25:07Joe Rogan?

  The term developing men or developing people, developing young people. My martial arts instructor, when I was a young boy, he, there was like a pamphlet that they had released explaining what the classes were all about. And in it, one of the quotes that always stuck with me forever is martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential.

• 2:25:28Speaker 02

  So is acting.

• 2:25:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so is anything. So is playing chess.

• 2:25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:34Joe Rogan?

  So is playing music.

• 2:25:35Speaker 02

  So is carpentry, if you do it right.

• 2:25:36Joe Rogan?

  Everything.

• 2:25:37Speaker 02

  Everything.

• 2:25:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Miyamoto Musashi, the famous samurai, had a great quote, "Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things." Yeah. I carry that around.

• 2:25:47Speaker 02

  Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, that's the same idea.

• 2:25:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. There's, it's the, the real, the real beauty of it all is concentrating on the development of the thing. And in that thing, you will grow as a human.

• 2:26:01Speaker 02

  And that's the thing where we're talking about boxing or fighting or acting or whatever, that the thing about the 100% focus is it, it's kind of...

• 2:26:14Speaker 02

  By shedding everything, there's a discipline to that about seeing all the little details. I find, for example, in acting, they always talk about this, is he a good listener? Like, one of the things, like, are you responding naturally like a human being? Can you listen? And in the art of teaching myself about acting, about how to be present with my scene partner, I've learned how to be present with you, with my kids, when I'm at a baseball game with my friends.

• 2:26:44Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 2:26:45Speaker 02

  It actually, like, it's meaning, I'm taking the same idea that if you train to do a fight well, and you really feel what excellence at that level is like, you can feel it in other things. It can translate. You know what sloppy thinking is. If you've been relaxed while you're doing something hard, you know what it's like when you're tense, because you're not having that feeling that you had in that fight where you were really great. That's the same with my, I've done performances where it goes up all by itself, and it's an amazing feeling. And a lot of work and preparation is to go into that feeling of disappearing. But now I know when it's not happening.

• 2:27:27Speaker 02

  And it doesn't mean I can make it happen, but at least an awareness that it's not happening is a great starting place to go, why is it not happening?

• 2:27:35Joe Rogan?

  Right, something smells.

• 2:27:36Speaker 02

  Something smells, like Phil would say.

• 2:27:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I want to talk to you about, because Jamie brought this up yesterday, Denzel Washington, when you're doing Training Day, like, so much, apparently, Jamie was saying, of the dialogue that you guys had was completely improvised by Denzel?

• 2:27:53Speaker 02

  He is an astonishing, I mean, it's like, yes, the short answer to your question is, it was, we would be doing ride arounds, you know, in the back of these cop cars, watching these arrests, or talking to some of these people who really lived the life that we were doing. And they would say something really funny, you know? And I would just see, Denzel would like glance at me, and I realized, oh, shit, that just went in the computer. You know? And then it would come out, you know, in a scene, two months later, that line that that guy said, exactly, it would come out. It was a great script. I don't want to, David Ayer wrote the script, it's a phenomenal script.

• 2:28:37Speaker 02

  I mean, when I read that script, I- I wanted that part so badly. Denzel's one of my favorite actors. He is probably my favorite actor. I think, you know, Malcolm X and Raging Bull are two towering, maybe Nicholson, One Flew the Cuckoo's Nest, like, live as like the three great performances of my lifetime. And, but his, he's always listening, always listening, talking, asking, thinking, curious. So present, so commanding. And if you take responsibility for your own work,

• 2:29:22Speaker 02

  you can, you can have a great experience. And if you don't, he'll run you over.

• 2:29:29Joe Rogan?

  Like, I heard, like, King Kong ain't got shit on me. That was all just completely improvised.

• 2:29:33Speaker 02

  So it's like towards the last day of the shoot. And I had been, when people say improvised, they think, oh, just some magic lightning bolt happened. It's months of work. It was improvised. He's just supposed to yell, fuck you, or something as I'm walking away. And this monologue flew out of his mouth. You know, y'all gonna be playing for the Pelican Bay All-Stars. This is my neighborhood. You all just live here. King Kong ain't got nothing on me. Just all this stuff was, and it was, it was the last day of shooting, or third to last day or something. And it was all his prep. Just, he's just, this is, here's, here's a line that didn't make the movie. Here's another line that didn't make the movie. Here's another thing I wanted to say.

• 2:30:18Speaker 02

  Here's another thing. And he just started throwing them all out there. And I shit you not, man. The shots, it's on me. I'm walking out of the, you know, walking away from me, screaming, all this stuff. And that's when I say I'm chasing a feeling. Like, that's one of the, I mean, to just be there that day. You know, to watch, you know, a great, somebody's working on a different level than everybody else.

• 2:30:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:45Speaker 02

  He's, he, you know, he makes all of us look like we're mastering checkers, you know, and, and he's, and to, but to be there and be part of the magic, and I knew, I'd heard him audition some of those lines, other places, you know. We'd run lines together and he'd try this, he was, he was amazing, amazing. That's what I mean about the power of his imagination. He was Alonso. And anything that he would pick up or hear would go into the computer. And then it would, he would look for the ways that he could help the script. Look, look for ways, you know, he wasn't, you know, he wasn't putting, selfishly tearing the sale up to make it about him. He was always looking to help. I even remember he came to the set the day, I have the scene that he's not in with the

• 2:31:30Speaker 02

  Cholo gang, you know, and they're, we're playing cards and, you know, here I had your shit pushed in, that scene, you know, where they put me in the bathtub. And Denzel came to set and he watched the scene, he was like, damn. I'm like, what? This is gonna be the best scene in the movie and I'm not in it. Hate this scene. And it's funny, he walked away. But it was very gracious, I mean, he was all in that movie.

• 2:31:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Ethan, thank you very much, man. This was a really fun conversation. I really enjoyed it.

• 2:32:03Speaker 02

  I'm really glad you had me.

• 2:32:04Joe Rogan?

  Thank you. And thank you for all the movies, man. I enjoyed the shit out of your career.

• 2:32:07Speaker 02

  If you can't tell, it's been my pleasure.

• 2:32:09Joe Rogan?

  Thank you. And mine as well. Thank you. Bye, everybody.