Brian Grazer reveals how weekly curiosity-driven talks—sparked by childhood dyslexia at Sherman Oaks’ Riverside Drive Elementary—shaped his life, from mentorship by his grandmother Sonia to producing A Beautiful Mind after meeting a torture survivor. His films like 8 Mile and Made in America stem from deep human insights, while The Joker’s success proves even dark narratives thrive with empathy. Both Grazer and Rogan critique modern digital habits, advocating for intentional presence—Grazer ditches phones in elevators, Rogan limits use to one hour daily—and praise disciplines like TM, intermittent fasting, and Rogan’s Sober October. Ultimately, their dialogue underscores how meaningful connection and creative counterpoint fuel both personal growth and groundbreaking storytelling. [Automatically generated summary]
And I think we're out in Woodland Hills, which was the fancy part of the valley.
I grew up in the flats of Sherman Oaks, actually as a little kid going to Riverside Drive Elementary School and then later to Nobel Junior High and then later Chatsworth High School.
And in elementary school, I couldn't read it all, and they didn't classify it as dyslexia.
It was just your...
Slow.
You're dumb.
Why can't you answer this?
And then you'd say, I can't read.
And then that didn't make sense.
None of those things computed, really, that somebody couldn't actually read a word.
And I really couldn't read a word.
So when you can't read a word, then you find ways to survive, cope, and not have the teacher look you in the eyes and say, okay, Brian, come to the board and answer this question because you're never – it's just going to produce more shame because you're not – you don't know the come to the board and answer this question because you're never It's not possible.
So I found that as that went on for quite a while, around the fourth, fifth, sixth grade, I really looked at people.
I really looked them in the eyes to learn.
And I found that by looking somebody in the eyes, you could engage – I didn't know this then, but you engage their heart if you're really – Doing it with sincerity and interest.
You can engage people and move them and evangelize things.
Get people to play on your team or you play on their team.
They pick you and stuff.
Good things happen, except the reading part.
But it enabled me to learn a lot just by looking at people and talking to people.
And I had this one mentor, this little grandmother.
Her name was Sonia.
And little Sonia, she was like...
Four, ten, I guess, you know.
And she would always say to me, she'd see me once a week, minimally, always once a week.
And she'd say, you're going all the way.
You're going to make it big.
Think big, be big.
And she had all these isms.
Because my mom's side of the family was Jewish.
My dad's side of the family is Catholic.
The Jewish side, the grandmother, was my mentor.
And the person that really...
Was the single person that I could kind of count on in life.
And she'd constantly tell me how things – I'd go great.
You have a gift for gab, she'd say.
And every time she said, you're going to go all the way, I'm thinking there's like absolutely no empirical evidence I'm going all the way anywhere, you know?
Except my parents were always arguing, let's put him back.
The teacher, Ms. Stegg, said, let's put him back.
So I just wasn't going anywhere, I didn't think.
So that gave rise to the fact that I thought, the way I can really learn a lot is have these kind of curiosity conversations.
And once I graduated college, I did this on a weekly basis, and I still do it to this day.
I started to learn – just create like an exercise, a discipline, where I could – like as in college, I was able to read – I could force myself to start on the left and go to the right.
There's a randomness to them because often you'd have to – it's not like getting on your show where everybody wants to be on the show – I say that with a compliment, of course, but I'm begging people because even though – To sit down with you.
I'm begging them to sit down with me and I'm groveling and I'm calling assistants directly.
I still – I have three assistants, but I make all of my own phone calls always because – You know why?
Because I have this discipline of getting to know assistants and going, hey, it's Brian, is Richard around?
That's so refreshing from a guy who's as successful as you are, because so many times when people get that successful, you insulate yourself with a bunch of other people who do all the calls for you and open all the doors for you, and you just kind of, you stay insulated and more aloof.
I mean, look, there are producers that are sort of – let's say we're in the same category, same ilk, that just do it differently.
I made a lot of deliberate choices through trial and error.
I went through the 80s where power guys had desks above the other chairs that are on the other side.
The power guys always had black lacquer furniture.
They did all these power things.
And I thought, I want artists to like me, relate to me, and I always did everything to create a democratic environment because not that I was such a cool guy, but more like you just get so much more out of a creative person by not intimidating them.
And I just saw...
My peers and often someone maybe a decade ahead of me – I'm so close to saying names – but just those sort of tough guys.
And I didn't think that was effective.
I just didn't think it was effective.
And I wasn't making these really hardcore action movies.
I was doing movies that were – they're designed to ignite emotion and feeling.
In fact, even when I do public speaking, I say, oh, Brian Graves or whatever they might say, but I go – I always say I'm in the feelings business.
I'm not a movie producer.
I'm just a – I'm in the feelings business because I feel like that's what we want out of a cinematic experience for me, for the movies I'm interested in doing or TV shows.
Because I grew up loving those movies of the 70s and I'm captivated by things that move me emotionally and elevate me emotionally.
It sounds like you have figured out the benefit that I've experienced from having podcasts and having these kind of conversations, one-on-one conversations, but you did it Just for your own personal edification.
I have gotten more out of talking to people like this, and it made me grow more as a person and made me understand more about communication and how to talk to people than anything I've ever done in my whole life.
Because you don't normally have this completely unfiltered.
It's one of the reasons why I like headsets as well, because it locks you in.
It's like your volume of you talking is the same level in my ears as it is in your ears.
We're all on this one.
It's not like there's distance between us.
We're in each other's ears.
And we're talking...
There's no phones.
There's no nothing.
We're sitting across from each other.
How would I ever organize this?
I thought about that with so many different people that I've had a chance to talk to.
Like, how would I ever get Sean Carroll, the astrophysicist, to sit down and just talk to me for three hours?
I would never get him to, hey, let's put headphones on and you just tell me about stuff.
Explain to me.
No one would ever do that.
But because of this thing called a podcast, because I can share it with all the other people that are listening, I've had this chance to have these kind of conversations.
And it sounds like you've done the same thing, but without an audience.
It's a brilliant way that you figured out that this is a great way to expand your own understanding of people by being one-on-one with these brilliant folks.
And I've even found that I've learned a lot from Uber drivers and baristas and stuff where I But I do reach out to meet people that have really committed to a really intense journey and often have triumphed in it.
No, I just thought like this guy, he's so committed to excellence.
And it made me, like as you were just saying, made me think about that as a premise, like just complete commitment to excellence.
Because I don't really think of it, you know, these sort of creative puzzles that way.
A creative puzzle would be like a movie or a TV show or a documentary.
I could go on.
Jay-Z asked me because I knew Jay-Z because he was very obsessed with wanting to do the soundtrack to a movie called American Gangster, which I produced.
So he wanted to do – after that, we got to know each other and then he said, hey, I'm going to do a festival, a festival with 22 different artists and all different types.
And it's going to be in Love Park and it's called – we're calling it Made in America.
Would you produce it?
And I said, yeah.
And I knew that Ron Howard could get a chance at directing it.
And I thought it'd be really good for Ron to be around Jay-Z. That's a good thing for him.
He's got a good aura and the right one for Ron.
And I thought, well, so we joined him.
I said, what is this about?
What's the premise?
And he said, it's about democratization of music itself.
There's no record stores anymore.
And the walls are down.
There's a crossover between hip-hop and trance music and all that stuff.
And I thought that was kind of cool.
And then I said, have you ever seen this movie called...
Because it didn't have a story, this concert.
Did you ever see Amadeus?
He goes, I've never seen Amadeus.
And I said, well, it's about genius.
And he asked about it and he goes, that's what the premise of this will be.
And he immediately thought, had this idea that it should be every artist, every human being has a little bit of genius in them.
And he made it very relatable.
And that became the thesis Of what this documentary became, and he only had that like a week before we were shooting.
And sometimes I do FaceTimes, and they allow me to, like Admiral William McRaven, who I really wanted to meet, you know, the Navy SEAL that created SEAL Team 6 and just recently sort of – doesn't speak out publicly, but had a point of view about the president and the whole Oval Office and stuff like that.
And he's a really amazing guy.
But I said, can I FaceTime you?
Because that was the only way.
So if somebody can't meet with me, I now say, would you Skype with me or FaceTime?
Because it gives you a level of communication with human beings that it's very rare.
In this world, it's very rare that you get to sit down across from someone.
And sometimes I have these conversations with people where there's no one around.
Like, you know, the back bar at the Comedy Store.
Sitting down with a buddy and we'll just sit there.
No one's around.
He and I will just shoot the shit for an hour and a half, two hours.
No one around.
Just talking.
And those are rare moments where you're not distracted.
Where you could just talk about things, you have ideas, and someone brings something up and you consider it, and then you add your own thing and they consider that, and then you just go back and forth and you get a better understanding of each other.
I mean, see, we're both sounds like open-minded to – as long as we're kind of disrupting our comfort zone, I think, and being open-minded to that, you're then being open-minded to, like, the value of human error.
Because sometimes some of the – it's not exactly human error, but human error for sure, but it's often the thing you failed at or the ugly thing that happened that sticks in your head and makes a difference in your life, makes you better.
Because sometimes you think that's as far as – even if you feel like you've accrued all the facts, you've been able – sometimes you don't know that there's that – going back to Josh, there's this extra level of excellence that exists there.
There's still more room to go and you realize, oh, I could fill in those inches.
Well, something like what he did, chess and also jiu-jitsu, there's so many levels to it.
It's such a multifaceted discipline.
There's so many different possible moves with both activities, chess and jiu-jitsu.
And jiu-jitsu, there's the physical element as well, which is a big part of it.
physical fitness and then also mental conditioning and your ability to stay on task even though your body is physically exhausted and then the discipline to make sure that your body is conditioned so that it doesn't get physically exhausted as quickly or as easily right yeah I mean but there that's a very intellectual discipline that people don't consider they think of physical things as being like meathead things or grunt things right
But there's actually a lot of mental stress and strength that's involved in discipline that you need to have in order to get your body into a position where it can perform like Josh's can on the mats.
It's very, very hard mentally to do that because you have to have all these battles where you want to quit, you want to give up early, you want to take a break, you want to rest, you don't want to go today, but you know you should.
You know, all those things must be overcome in order to achieve the level of excellence that he's achieved.
You get very, very tired, and you really should be...
The more conditioned you are physically, like the more strength and conditioning routines you go through, the more your body is in shape, the more you can perform.
It's sort of like...
Racing, right, with a race car, but you can actually add horsepower to the race car through discipline, and you can add better tires, and you can add a more supple suspension through thought and activity.
Yeah, and through repetitive drills, you actually can hone your neuromuscular system to the point where these grooves are cut, so you know exactly how to turn and how to move when you're moving, and you're doing jujitsu, and everything sort of goes and flows automatically, and that requires extreme amounts of discipline.
um because she's she's uh she's a therapist she's a you know she's a psycho her name is sage grazer on the joe rogan show i mean everyone loves their kids right sure um and so that's so that's what she does she's an actual therapist with with you know like patients well i'm glad to hear that she recovered from that i've never heard of anybody having a stroke from that before that must be terrifying Yeah, it was.
Okay, so I really thought this guy, he's one of the most well-known and most accomplished police chiefs in America.
I think there were three of them, and he was one of the three in a century.
And then Daryl Gates, I knew, was one of the fundamental curator of SWAT. Which was bringing paramilitary tactics to the LA Police Department.
He started out as a bright-eyed, strong-minded, clean-cut guy working for the police department.
And because he was sharp, he was the driver to the police chief, which was Chief Parker.
And then Chief Parker, L.A., there was a riot called the Watts Riot.
Not the L.A. riots, but the Watts Riot.
And the police went in, and they were not qualified to be in that situation.
And they kind of failed at – they felt they failed at it.
And Daryl Gates was like by the chief's side the entire time.
And he kind of vowed to himself, I'm not going to let that happen again.
And when he had the opportunity, because he became later police chief, not much later, became police chief of Los Angeles Police Department, he instituted SWAT and other, you know, paramilitary tactics and a mind discipline that was pretty, you know, was like creating, you know, like martial law, people would argue.
And then we went – that kind of produced an environment that I think many think and I think myself helped – an environment that caused the LA riots because there was a lot of inequity, I think, human inequity felt.
I know I'm getting this kind of political.
And you should tell me what your point of view, please.
I mean, the reaction, first of all, the reaction to the video, the video was horrible, watching Rodney King getting beaten like that.
Then you also heard that they had been on a high-speed pursuit.
And that there was more to that video.
Like that was the end of their altercation.
Apparently there's much more physical altercation before that video.
And maybe if someone saw the full thing, they would understand, well, okay, you're dealing with a wild person who's on PCP and these cops are doing everything they can to detain him.
But there's a distrust of the police in these communities in the first place because they had seen so much police brutality.
So that reaction, that riot, was not just because of that one situation.
It was an accumulation of different events and different interactions that people had had with abusive police officers.
Ironically, the day of my meeting with him was the day of the L.A. riots.
So I thought, and it already happened, 2,000 buildings on fire and everything, and my office gets a phone call from Daryl Gates' office confirming my meeting with him.
I'm thinking, oh my god!
Parker Center is under siege.
It's like the whole city is under siege.
He still wanted to keep the meeting, a meeting that was on the books for 10 months.
I thought, that's really crazy.
So I went down.
I had a guy drive me, and I went down, and they zigzagged through like a security...
Clearance thing where no other cars could get through that was really bizarre, you know, like we see this now often.
But they initiated this kind of maze that the car would go through.
I get to the front door.
A couple of police chiefs – police officers – Escort me in.
They put me in a room.
I joke, they didn't give me a cavity search, but just about everything but.
So, and then I got upstairs, and he is sitting so calmly.
He'd already ordered two tuna fish sandwiches.
Very, you know, very utilitarian, the sandwiches.
And we had the potato chips, and he said, you want an iced tea?
I couldn't even swallow.
I couldn't eat my food, because it was...
I was so shocked by the whole thing that he had so much, he was impervious to everything that was going down and the city council was on his TV and on the TV out there and, you know, guys, police officers were running and go, Chief, you're on TV right now!
And they're yelling and he goes, he says to me and to them, ah, this is nothing, they'll never get me out of here.
He had so much hubris.
It was amazing.
And I thought, and he's so calm about it.
And of course, they did get him out.
I think the next day, actually, because the city council was really – had very liberal guys on that board, people on that board, rather.
Yeah, just have lunch and ask questions and try to not be nervous or upset about what's going on in the environment and the TVs flashing archival footage that they'd shot days before or the day of and buildings on fire and the Korean shop, market, somebody getting killed and all that stuff they were showing on television.
So anyway, I did think that my kids should know about all this stuff.
And actually, Charlie Rose, of all people, said, you should write a book.
And so it got on my mind and I mentioned it to a couple people and they said, oh yeah, you should write a book.
And so then I thought, okay, I'll write a book because I'm going to write notes on this anyway, these 35 years for my kids so that when I pass, they'll know this was a very big part of my life, beyond my career, but my life.
And so that's what the first book is about.
It synthesizes many of the important one-on-one conversations I had over the 30 years.
And then it connects the synthesis of those stories to narrative storytelling.
For example, in 1984, I met Sting, you know, the lead singer of The Police.
Because I thought, wow, he'd be fascinating to meet because he was like a school teacher in England, and now he's like a rock star?
I just thought that's kind of an interesting transition, like one of the biggest rock stars.
So I meet him, I get him to say yes.
It wasn't horribly hard.
And then a year after I met with him, He calls up in 1985 and he says, I'm having a barbecue at my house.
I think some interesting people will be here.
And that was right after the Amnesty tour.
And he took a woman named Veronica DeNegre in 1985, along with other superstars.
She wasn't a superstar.
She was held in a Chilean prison and tortured every single day of her life for 18 months.
And she went on the Amnesty tour only for a few days as evidence of somebody that can survive, you know, like she was hopeful, you know, still.
Like most people don't survive torture either from the torture itself or they – sadly, they commit suicide because there's just so much trauma, so much PTSD. So it's just – so she survives.
I meet her and I say, how do you survive?
And she tells me that while she's being, she creates a story that she's living in the entire time.
So there's reality, and then there's an alternate reality.
The alternate reality is the story that she creates, that she can live in, that alleviates some of the pain and the unpredictable pain of torture.
So now, that's pretty fascinating to me, and I really sat with those insights.
Now, many things happened after that that I was able to use that.
Like I became, when I was stuck on A Beautiful Mind because it wasn't cinematic, I thought, well, how can I make it cinematic?
And I thought, Veronica denigrate.
She lived in an alternate reality.
Well, that's exactly, involuntarily, what a schizophrenic has to do.
They live in alternate realities.
So in the movie A Beautiful Mind, to make it really compelling, We started in an alternate reality and made it a thriller and realized, oh my god, there's this epiphany and you realize that was not even reality, right?
And that's what blew people's minds and that's why the movie kind of worked because it drew you in so deeply into this character that it became like this subjective experience that every audience, every audience member could feel like the pain of that and the insanity of what that must feel like.
Well, Ron and I realized that Ron Howard, who directed it, won an Oscar, and we realized that in order to make it really interesting, you have to see – you have to understand the mind of a schizophrenic.
How do you see somebody's mind other than just graphically, you know, or, you know, like through graphic design?
And we thought that's not very interesting, you know, like the insertion of graphic design or voiceover narration, that makes it kind of a documentary.
So, but we thought, like, but if you could have an entire story Kind of with the military and paranoia and all that.
That's exactly one of the dimensions or realities of a schizophrenic's mind.
So you get to film it with other actors and other people.
And that's why I mean when I say cinematic.
So basically when you're seeing the 25 minutes of living in this alternate reality with Ed Harris and all that stuff, craziness...
It blows your mind as an audience and then you reflect later like, wow, that wasn't even real and wow, is that guy really going to come back?
You make it seamlessly cinematic with the rest of the narrative of him trying to cope with schizophrenia itself.
It becomes the merging of an alternate reality and actual reality.
And the actual reality is when he's – you watch him in that level of pain and just trying to survive, like cope with meds and the wife.
And then we found the way to make it – You know, kind of worked triumphantly because it was love that was the most powerful force.
It was that one person decided to stay with this other one person.
So that's – so I found that all of these insights that we're referring to, the ones that you have when you're just getting off stage and you realize, wow, I could talk to my buddies or this new guy for a minute.
Those random moments that you get to talk to somebody can often produce a story or an insight, an emotional insight that you can transport to something else.
I found that all these conversations that I was having...
We're like, kind of like I see these stars behind you.
They were like stars or a constellation of dots, you know, and that you just have faith that they somehow inform you and make you better and smarter and that they connect someday.
Kill Tony is a great podcast that my friend Brian Redman and Tony Hinchcliffe do.
And this podcast involves comedians going up and doing one minute of material in front of these professional comics.
And the professional comics either say, hey, that was great, or they shit all over it, or everybody makes fun, there's a band, there's a bunch of chaos, and it's all done in front of a live crowd.
But as I was saying, when I watch you do stand-up, because I made a point to catch up on it, you're really, really good.
I'm watching you tell comedic stories.
You make them comedic.
And I think I can tell, and you tell me if I'm wrong, that sometimes you don't know all the answers to that story.
And I see that you're grabbing things that lived in – that you – experiences or insights that lived in the environment that you have or had.
Because I watched – A couple of scenes very closely, and I know you didn't have it figured out, and you got the bigger laugh from the thing that you pulled from some place, I thought.
There's a little bit of recreating that when you're doing that in stand-up, but...
Oftentimes, it's a combination of all those things.
It's a combination of actually improvising in the moment and figuring it out in the moment and then figuring it out in the moment and recreating it again and recreating it again the same way you did before.
But being in the moment and being able to bring it into someone's attention...
As if you're recreating it or give them the feeling that it's being recreated so that they can experience it.
That's what stand-up is.
There's revelations that you repeat.
And then I'm like, wait!
What the fuck is that about?
But you have to be able to recreate that over and over and over again.
And so any great comic, whether it's Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle or whoever it is, when they're on stage and they're killing, you are allowing them to think for you.
So they're trying to take you on an organic journey of understanding whatever the fuck they're talking about and explaining it to you in a way that's going to resonate.
Like, this is how you would notice it.
And I'm like, hold up.
Who the fuck brought the baby?
And then that kind of stuff is like in that moment, it has to feel like you're really realizing that somebody brought a fucking baby to a gun range or whatever it is, whatever you're joking around about.
So apparently she worked at our house for like almost three months.
And my wife, she says to my wife, I really like Brian a lot.
And my wife said, well, have you talked to him much?
She said, well, I haven't talked to him very much, but every time he speaks to me, He always looks me directly in my eyes and it makes me feel like a human being.
And I thought of the simplicity of that.
I thought, wow!
Just by looking at somebody directly in the eyes, not looking behind them or just looking at them, it immediately is an equalizer.
It says we're both equal.
We're both species on this planet, the same species on this planet.
And it makes me feel like a human being.
It gives me dignity.
And then I thought, that's pretty powerful.
I mean, this is only like two years ago.
And then I retrofitted back all of those conversations I was alluding to, like 35 years of every week a curiosity conversation.
And I thought, well, the only reason these conversations were good is I must have been really looking at these people in the eyes and we were really dialed in.
Otherwise, they wouldn't share these private things or these insights.
They wouldn't share their heart with me.
If they didn't feel I was present with them.
And so that became kind of the thesis of this book and that's why it's just called Face to Face the Art of Human Connection.
Because then I set all of this I thought to myself, we're living right now in the loneliest time in our generation.
All statistics point, millennials will admit that One quarter of them will admit that they're incredibly lonely, like where they can't almost cope with their loneliness.
And when you feel people's feelings and you meet them and demystify whatever you think you heard about them, you tend to like them more for the most part and you tend to love as opposed to have war.
So it really is important in our lives from multiple levels, like just looking at people and going out of your way to connect.
But that digital connection, the connection to you're missing, you're missing this connection to other people.
And also, there's a certain amount of anxiety attached to it where people are constantly checking their social media and checking their emails and their mentions and going back and forth with this and that and looking at this and that.
And it's like you're not in the real world.
You're only living on this little tiny device, this little rectangular device.
The people that, like, what you've done, you've practiced this idea of sitting down and talking to people on a regular basis, looking them in the eye and having meaningful conversations.
You've made a choice.
You've made a concerted effort to do that, and that's not common.
And most people don't have good people skills.
I mean, I've learned how to not interrupt people.
I've learned how to not talk so much.
I've learned how to listen.
I've learned how to interact.
And I've also learned when people are not good at it.
You know, some people, you're talking to them and they're not even listening to you.
If you went to a doctor right now, if you went to the right doctor and said, I just feel listless, I'm having a hard time connecting, I'm having a hard time getting motivated...
A lot of writers, a lot of journalists, a lot of people that have deadlines and they have to push and they run out of energy.
A lot of them are on Adderall.
Extremely, extremely common.
Extremely common with very productive people, very ambitious people, business people, people that do a lot of meetings, people that work 12 hours a day, 13 hours a day.
I've had people in real life tell me they've taken Adderall.
I mean, I've had people justify it.
I've had people talk about it with a little bit of shame that they would like to not be on it, but they're on it because it helps them be productive and they've got to do what they've got to do.
But the real revelation was I have a friend who's a journalist and he was talking to me about how many journalists are on it.
It highlights all the flaws that I find in my own personality, in my own life, whatever things I've done that I'm not proud of or that I think are mistakes.
It highlights them, and it makes me think more diligently.
And then the next year we had a crazy fitness challenge.
That got a little out of hand, so we decided not to compete with each other anymore because we were literally going five, six, seven hours a day of working out.
Well, the motivation for a lot of it was our friend Bert, who drinks way too much.
And he's calmed down quite a bit, apparently, because of...
Doing that first podcast where we did go sober for the whole month because we didn't think he could do it.
Because even during the weight loss challenge, Tom, who won the weight loss challenge, Tom didn't drink anything but water the entire month and worked out like crazy and lost a ton of weight.
Bert kept drinking the entire month and also worked out like crazy and tried to lose weight.
Now there's this new, I guess, nutritional exercise or weight loss, I don't want to only call it that, of like, what is it, 16 hours, I don't know, is it 10 hours on, 10 hours off?
It's about losing weight, but it's also about feeling better and raising your ketone levels, which is one thing that does happen when you go long periods of time and you get your body accustomed to this period of time where you're not eating.
You know, this timed eating or whatever they call it.
What is the term they refer to it as?
It's not just intermittent fasting.
There's...
Time-restricted eating?
Yeah.
Okay.
There's some benefit on your digestive system as well.
So your body's not eating 10 hours a day, 15 hours a day, or even more with some people.
Some people are just eating constantly throughout the day.
Instead of this, you have a four-hour window, or a six-hour window, or an eight-hour window, whatever you decide it is.
And during that time, you can eat.
But after that, it's over.
And then you cannot eat for X amount of hours, whether it's 10 or 12 or 14. Yeah.
See, my goal, because I don't know if I could – I'm sure you could prove me wrong, but I'm not sure I could do any of those really strict disciplines of any type almost.
So I've always thought if I do everything with moderation – I might not have to do one of these things that I might find to be too hard.
Well, it's a very controversial thought because some people think that fat shaming is terrible and that you shouldn't do it to people.
It works for me.
And other people say that fat...
It's true, it does work on certain people, but it makes people feel bad, and some people think you should protect people from feeling bad, whereas other people think you should tell them that they're fat so they feel bad, so they act on it.
But I mean, if things like CRISPR and genetic manipulation and things they're working on now, that's probably one of the first things they're going to work on.
Physically, well, okay, so I get in there and I do an elliptical, you know, for me, I do it as high, as hard as you could possibly do it for 20 minutes.
So it gets everything kind of going and I tore my rotary cuff so it lubes that up a little bit and I have some injuries.
But there's a lot of different treatments that they can do now for soft tissue tears, things like rotator cuffs and muscle tears and things along those lines.
Sometimes I go, I have to leave a few minutes early, but like 5 to 9 or 3 minutes to 9. So you run right from the gym straight over to tennis, so no missing time at all?
Sometimes things are fulfilling initially, but then they lose their luster.
But for you, as many movies as you made, as long as you've been in the game, that you're still getting up at 5 in the morning, pumped up, excited for the day.
Bob Roth is the founder of the David Lynch Meditation Center.
And he's a very good guy.
You'll tell me.
No, we're good.
And so we do that.
And sometimes we get Bob Roth on the phone because he lives in New York and we'll just do it in the backyard and we'll have him on speaker and we'll...
He'll talk through the framework of it, and then he's quiet and we're quiet and we meditate.
The Float Labs, the most advanced ones, and they have a place in Westwood and in Venice.
They have a place where you can go and rent it for an hour.
But the best thing that I found was inside the tank was to just concentrate on breathing.
Breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth, and in through the nose and out through the mouth.
And that's all I would concentrate on is breathing in and breathing out, breathing in and breathing out.
And then I would kind of go into this trance when I was inside the tank.
And so then, when I didn't have access to the tank, I started utilizing that outside of the tank.
If something's bothering me, if I've got something that...
Because I'm an obsessive person, so I get a thought in my head about something I'm working on or something I'm trying to fix, and I just start rolling over in my head to the point where I can't get it away.
So then the way I can cleanse that and put my brain back on a good cycle is to just concentrate on breathing.
So I use the same method that I would use inside the tank, and I use it outside the tank.
But I want to try TM. I'm gonna try to do it this month while we're doing these different classes this month.
But he made – Without saying take it seriously, he describes it in a way that I understood what it was, and he has some authority in him that made me take it seriously, whereas the other times I didn't take it quite as seriously.
It's kind of important who introduces it to you, I think.
Yeah, I mean, it's like what you were talking about earlier about people that are really enthusiastic about something and really committed and disciplined about it, that it's very contagious.
What I've found in my life, for me, the foundational creative ingredients to a creative equation, like making a movie or a TV show or painting, is counterpoint.
So I have found that I'm dreamy enough myself, you know, like I – you know, and I've read, of course, all Joseph Campbell stuff, so I kind of understand formats of myths and the herewith a thousand faces and – And I particularly like underdog stories.
There's so many types of underdog stories that it's – so anyway, so I have that basic knowledge.
And then when I learn a subject, let's say I learn the subject of architecture or physics or a little bit of chemistry or whatever the – it's all like from an archaeological perspective because it's all new to me.
So I found, for example, when I produced the movie 8 Mile, which is about hip-hop, right?
It's about battles in Detroit.
First, I thought – I could even go back further.
I'll do this quickly, though.
I thought I should get like the hottest, you know, video director, the coolest guy.
And I won't say those names, but there were the guys that were very visible at being the best at those hot videos.
And then it occurred to me, I should get somebody that approaches it, again, archaeologically, where everything is a discovery.
So I hired someone that knew nothing about hip-hop, but was passionate about wanting to do the movie.
And he was named Curtis Hanson.
He's deceased right now, but he won, I think, two Oscars for LA Confidential.
So he was kind of a classic American filmmaker.
That looked at everything with sort of a discovery lens.
And that's why you're able to...
See, if I pick the video guy that thinks he knows everything about hip-hop, then all the little nuances that are new to the audience's eyes would have never been shot because he'd think, oh, everybody knows that stuff.
That's the good stuff, you know?
And so sometimes authority on top of authority doesn't work out well.
And I found that And my career, all I did was write and produce comedies for the first 17 years of my movie career, starting with Night Shift and then Splash and Parenthood and Nutty Professor and Liar Liar and a lot of comedies, a lot of 5 Eddie Murphy things, Jim Carrey three times.
And what I found was Jewish writers...
Christian actors.
In the Jewish words, they go, Jew writers, goyim actor.
And goyim is like when Jewish people say, it's the Christian, you know, the Catholic guy.
It's always – I made eight movies, I think, with Tom Hanks, but he's like the Gary Cooper or he's the Christian guy with the Jewish writers.
Only one Jew on Jew kind of worked in the last Woody Allen.
And they weren't meteoric hits.
He was just like, you know, he was sort of dominated the ethos, you know, of comedy in the 70s and 80s.
But it just didn't work.
You can't really, but I could name, I mean, Judd Apatow, talented Jewish writer, director, usually he's got these guys that are like, they're just not that.
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They're Catholic Christian guys, you know, like girls.
But there was a point like at the end of these 17 years of like, you know, there's a point where I definitely made a lot of, you know, did well financially at making these movies and I enjoy it because when you're around comedy, you're I'm happy.
You're laughing.
I mean, that's the whole vibe of the thing.
But I thought, you cannot get enough respect just doing comedy.
So I thought, I'm going to have to try to just do dramas.
Because I've come close.
I got nominated.
But that's as close as I got.
There was no way on Splash they were going to pick.
And the writers are the funny guys over there!
They picked Robert Benton, you know, like the guy that wrote A Place in the Heart, you know, or Places in the Heart.
And Bonnie and Clyde, like they picked that guy, the classy guys.
So I felt like if I want to join the classy guys, I better start doing dramas.
And then I did Apollo 13 and Ransom and a bunch of dramas.