Thrilling Tales Of Modern Men: Danny McBride On Ego, Grievance & The Stories Men Tell Themselves

**Rich Roll** (0:01)
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You're illuminating the foibles of the modern American man. Like, all right, Danny, so what's the solution?
This is your self-help guru moment, you know?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:31)
Danny McBride has come up with some of the funniest characters on television ever. He brought the mullet back.

**Danny McBride** (1:37)
Kenny Powers is a man. Kenny Powers is an athlete. Kenny Powers is a lover.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:43)
Now he's tapping into the spirit where his new book is called Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, the short story collection that forwards modern masculinity through a cast of characters.

**Danny McBride** (1:53)
There is this idea of, like, what it is to be a dude. Growing up in the 80s, you're watching Rambo or Chuck Norris or all this stuff. The reality of that comes crashing down, that it's like you're not gonna, you know, karate fight an army of men and win. Sometimes you just gotta take a desk job. There's something just about disappointment that I just don't find fertile for comedy.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:11)
Yeah.

**Rich Roll** (2:15)
Danny, thanks so much for doing this. You're the funniest fuck alive. I'm so grateful to be able to hold you hostage today. Talk to you, man. So thank you for coming all the way out here. It's awesome to be here.

**Danny McBride** (2:23)
Beautiful out here.

**Rich Roll** (2:25)
Congrats on the book. I'm curious around how this experience has been different from you. I mean, it's very much of a piece with everything that you have done over the last 30 years, but, you know, it is a different kind of offering.

**Danny McBride** (2:38)
Yeah. You know, I, like you said, I've been doing this for a really long time, and I wanted to see if I could translate what I had been doing in TV and film into just a completely different format, you know?
It's obviously getting, like, harder and harder to make TV and make movies, and so I felt like if I could somehow crack this space, it sort of offers unlimited potential creatively. If you can get out the middleman and it can just be you and the audience, you know, then you can kind of tell stories about whatever you want to.

**Rich Roll** (3:08)
Yeah. I mean, you're a master of the collaborative kind of art of film and television. You have your cohort of people that you've been working with since day one, but writing is a solitary affair, but there's the unfiltered, you know, Danny. I mean, did you rely upon some collaboration in this, or is this just directly from your imagination onto the page?

**Danny McBride** (3:30)
Yeah, it was directly from my imagination to the page, and that was kind of what I was looking forward to with it. You know, I love the collaboration. I love, I think that's one of the things I love the most about making a TV show or a movie is, you know, you have this idea and then the next journey is sort of, you know, stockpiling a bunch of cool artists that have their own points of view and then all kind of working together to elevate it. And that's such a fun thing, and it's so unique to, you know, to film and TV, you know, a lot of art forms are really independent. And so I've always enjoyed that. But, you know, with that comes, you know, you finish writing something and it's sort of like just the beginning of a negotiation. You know, then it's like, who am I going to get to be in this? Will they give me enough money to make this? Is it going to rain on the day that I planned this beautiful sunset?