Matt Rife Talks New Netflix Special ‘Lucid’ & Challenges of Fame
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00:00I mean, first and foremost, it's super exciting to be the first to do something like this.
00:03I mean, Netflix is kind of king of comedy for the past decade, really.
00:08And I'm super happy to get to be working with them in any capacity, really.
00:11But to work with them in something that has been so...
00:16How do I say this?
00:18So natural and niche to me and to what I do, I think is really cool.
00:25I mean, there's, you know, 500 comedy specials on Netflix,
00:29including my last one, Natural Selection.
00:32But to get to do something that people kind of know and associate me with is really unique.
00:40Other comedians really would get the opportunity to do something like this
00:44or would make sense for them to do something like this.
00:46So I was really happy that Netflix wanted to take a chance on doing something new and unique
00:51that I've had, you know, such a past with over the last two to three years
00:58that I think we're bringing something in Netflix that people haven't really seen before.
01:02You know, people are used to seeing, you know, minute to four minute long clips on social media.
01:07We were able to craft all of those kind of experiences into one long story oriented show.
01:15Oh my God, it's gotten so much worse.
01:18There's no crash course on how to be famous at all.
01:21Nobody tells you that.
01:24You have to take on a bunch of new battles.
01:26You have to get used to people telling you things about yourself
01:31that only you thought negatively about yourself.
01:33And you go, oh my God, other people think this about me too.
01:36Is this actually a thing wrong with me or is this just who I am as a person?
01:40You have to learn to deflect so much negativity that's thrown at you
01:46when so many people don't understand the negativity you are to live with in your own head.
01:50The sleep issues drastically got worse.
01:54I talk pretty frequently about being a terrible sleeper and having horrific insomnia.
01:59So now being as busy as I am today, I don't get the opportunity to even sleep as much anymore.
02:05My brain's working a trillion miles per hour.
02:08I'm always thinking about something I need to get done or wish I was doing.
02:12So everything is just kind of times a hundred.
02:16Yeah.
02:17But at the same time, certain anxieties and certain depressions
02:22are also lifted by the success, I will say.
02:25There's a little less worry about what if, I suppose.
02:32Yeah.
02:33Because for the first 11 years of my career, I was like, is anything ever going to happen?
02:39Am I ever going to be even a portion of what I had always dreamed of being
02:43or reaching a certain level of success that I thought would make me happy?
02:47And I mean, six months before everything started to happen for me, I was moving to Austin, Texas.
02:53I was going to give myself one more year of comedy.
02:56So there was so much uncertainty for me that I'm sure was driving me subconsciously insane.
03:03So there's a little bit of that gone.
03:06You're like, OK, cool.
03:07I have X amount of money.
03:08I have X amount of fans.
03:10I have X amount of check marks on my resume of dreams I always hoped to have come true.
03:18But then directly after that, your brain goes to, OK, boy, OK, I made it.
03:23Now, how do I sustain this?