Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1370 - Brian Grazer
Uploaded: 2019-10-24T19:00:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1370 - Brian Grazer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-10-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1370 - Brian Grazer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-10-24. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1370 - Brian Grazer

all right here we go what's up brian how are you hey good thanks for being here
man appreciate it
yeah i'm psyched about it i'm psyched about having you yeah i'm now adjusting
to the sound
uh oh in your ears yeah my ears and is it muffled it has it all sound perfect
all right good perfect
all right cool so we were just talking about your books and i tried let's save
it let's save it for
the podcast because i wanted it to sound fresh i want you to reset it so tell
me about you wrote
two books i wrote two books and you know as you know i'm a you know movie
writer and a movie and
television producer to say it mildly i mean you made some amazing movies wow
thanks thanks joe my
pleasure yeah and um uh in all this i i think you know my whole life and
whatever those stories are
the movies are and the successes i kind of think anyone that's really focused
can can do what i do
so that was kind of the end product of the first book which was it was called a
curious mind the
secret to a bigger life and um that book is really about i mean how much do you
want to know about
it everything everything you want to tell me okay so basically i couldn't read
it all in elementary
school and it caused a lot of trauma a lot of shame and then a lot of trauma
did you have dyslexia i had
dyslexia very very quite acute dyslexia 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 uh actually as a 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 you're slow you're dumb you uh why can't you answer this uh and then you'd
say i can't read and
then that didn't make sense it just didn't 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 uh survive cope um 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 answer it's not possible so i found that um as that went
on for a little while
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 you know get people to like
play on your team and
or you play on their team they pick you and stuff good things happen um except
the reading part um but
it it enabled me to learn a lot just by looking at people and talking to people
and my i had this one
mentor this little grandmother uh her name was sonia and little sonia she's
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 half 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 how
things i'd go great you have a gift for gab she'd say and and every time she
said you're gonna 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
miss stig said let's put
him back so i just wasn't going anywhere i didn't think so so that gave rise to
me give 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
once a week sometimes once every two weeks but never more than once every two
weeks i never
i'm pretty militant i'm extremely militant about it like how do you do it like
what do you mean
um well what i do is i think about it's often and i i know you do something
possibly similar to this
and and and but my system would be i bombard myself with now i can read of
course um and i was able to
start to read like in high school can you tell me how they fix that like they
couldn't fix it it's
not how it wasn't fixable how to dyslexia reverses words on you right uh versus
the way you view letters
and yeah well it's great initially as a kid it scrambles the letters then when
it gets better it reverses
the words and to this day i still start on the right and go to the left so it
takes
like really thoughtful discipline to make sure i'm always starting do you mean
with sentences or
the sentences with the sentences really so you'll start at the right end of the
you should read hebrew
or something isn't that chinese or something yeah different languages do that
right yeah i guess they
do um but incidentally when you have dyslexia it's very hard to learn other
languages
so i would imagine very very hard so um but i can read and i bombard myself so
how do you switch it
around like when when your your brain is making you read right to left yes um i
i started to learn just
create like just like an exercise a discipline where i could like in as in
college i was able to read i
could force myself to start on the left and go to the right is there a certain
mechanism that's causing
you to do right to left like do they know what the cause of this is not that i
know of not that i know
probably something neurological and certainly genetic i mean i have no genetic
trace but it has to be a
letter within your genome right to get having to guess so you learned how to
read you learned how
to figure it out and then you said you you have these conversations at least
once every two weeks
so how do you do this like what do you do you organize them they're structured
they're structured
they they they're they see there's a randomness to them because often you'd
have to i have to it's not
like getting on your show where everybody wants to be in the show i say that
with a compliment of course
but i i'm begging people because even though sit down with you i'm begging them
to sit down with me
and i'm groveling and uh i'm calling assistants directly i still i have three
assistants but i make
all of my own phone calls always you know why because i have this discipline of
getting to know
assistants and going hey it's brian is richard around or and i just like i do
that 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
yeah thank well thank you
thanks well i yeah they do people do i mean look there are producers that are
sort of that are you
know let's say we're in the same category same ilk um that just do it
differently i i made a lot of
deliberate choices through trial and error i saw i went through the 80s where
power guys had desks above
the other chairs that are on the other side i the power guys always had black
lacquer furniture and
they did all these power things and i thought i want to re 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 sure yeah and
i just saw you know my peers and sometimes often you know someone maybe a
decade ahead of me you know
i don't know i'm so close to saying names but but just those sort of tough guys
you know um and i i
didn't think that was an 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 uh do public speaking i say oh uh brian grazer dead or whatever they
might say but i goes i'm
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 for me sure for the
movies i'm interested in doing or tv shows is that so um because i i i grew up
loving those movies of the
70s and i'm captivated by things that move me emotionally and elevate me
emotionally so you make
these phone calls and you arrange these conversations so you arrange basically
a podcast that no one's
listening to that's exactly i never thought of it in those words that is really
funny you should
probably record them i so i've done it for say 35 years really and you didn't
record any of them the
first 15 years nothing i didn't write not really notes either and then the
second 10 years that was
you know i'd say 15 was nothing i just did it because i felt like that could
inhibit somebody or i
felt like i was trying to do these sort of down low in a way like i didn't want
to commodify them
you know like industrialize my conversations right and i had friends go like oh
can we be part of it
and i tried it once with a couple other guys it during my thing and it fractionalized
our my attention
yeah and it it what i found the great thing about the conversations the one-on-one
with no one else in
the room which that's all i do again i've i tried it different ways is it it
create your what you're
trying to do i'm trying to do is like create the best date that isaac asimov
ever had or or you
know or i mean i have so many people you know just margaret thatcher i'm trying
to like i'm i'm trying
to be have no idea of a time and space and i want them to have no idea of time
and space and because
that is like your best date yeah and i always think like what is my best date
with a girl at my very
from me brian because i uh my best date is i'm not even thinking about time and
it's just becomes
almost like a biochemical event it's just things are evolving yeah and i felt
like i could do this
with nobel with many noble laureates with sheldon glasgow who converted the
four forces of days of
nation uh of of nature to three and i brought his name up because uh well first
of all i knew that your
show you could you could do whatever you want and and with sheldon glasgow it's
like i usually do an
hour or two hours but i hung out with this guy shut up my whole day down for
six hours wow just
because i was so captivated by him and he talked about multiple subjects so
basically i i i'm always
got somebody that i'm really wanting to meet and it takes a year at least or
sometimes years to organize
this to get them to say yes or to be in the same city or be willing to say yes
and me fly to new york
or some other place 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 yeah yeah it's it's kind of amazing but it's i i have
gotten more out of talking
to people like this and it's 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 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 ta