Patton Oswalt
speaker
1,066 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 8 Jun
Patton Oswalt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
genuine pain and loss and turbulence that some things now that people take as life-ending, some massive onage on the internet or people attacking them, I'm like, that's just electrons. I just want to do what I think is right and what I feel is the right decision. And if people are either happy with it or not, but if they're not, it's just electrons. It doesn't matter.
The thing that I'm telling you right now, this perspective is maybe a week old. And a week later, there'll be an even better perspective. I'm at that stage now where there aren't gigantic epiphanies. There are awarenesses. And then there are the... Oh, I can choose to react to this awareness, but all this other stuff about me is never going to totally go away. You just have to learn to manage it.
You just have to learn to manage it. One of the most important movies that I think that came out in 1999 and for a long time is the movie The Sixth Sense because – At the end of the movie, the kid is not cured of seeing dead people. What he learns is, this is never going away. This will be here. How can you manage it?
Bruce Willis' character says, what do you think these people are trying to say to you? And the kid is like, maybe this has nothing to do with me. Maybe it has to do with them and I can actually help them and I can actually go live a life. So he's still, he's living a better life at the end. He's still seeing these people. I feel like I'm living a better life. I still get resentful.
I still get jealous. I still get wracked with self-doubt. That stuff will continue to happen, but it won't own me. It'll be a thing that's there. I'm like, oh, there you are again. Okay, what's going on? All right, we're going to do this then.
It took me so, so long to separate myself from, oh, my God, if I have this thought, then that must be who I am. No, you're allowed any thought. You know, that's the thing. And again, so many great works. Do you think Thomas Harris created one of the most horrifying serial killers ever, fake, but still horrifying, Hannibal Lecter. But when he thought of him, was he like, do I want to kill people?
No, but your mind is allowed to imagine horrible things without it being you. I mean, that's the basis of all creativity. But so many people, and I think we've been so poisoned with social media, which is like everything that you tweet, that's who you are. Or if you retweet it, that's who you are. People forget at the very beginning of especially Twitter,
You could retweet somebody saying something ridiculous. And it was understood that you're just holding this up like, can you fucking believe this? You weren't endorsing it. And then somewhere along the line, it shifted. And people are like, you are obviously, that's how you feel.
So, and I got in some trouble with that because there was a guy, I think his name is like Steve Saylor, total white supremacist dude. And he said something about like... something like political correctness is a war on noticing. Like something, it was so ridiculous. And I just tweeted that, but it was, I was still in the mind of like, look at this fucking idiot.
And then people were like, oh, so I guess you, you know, so like, oh. something shifted and I didn't realize I was too slow to see that, you know, you can't do, we were, look, we were way too slow to see that the pointing out racism by being ironically racist or being like, that doesn't work anymore. There's no, there's no abstract thought left in anybody.
So you have to actually either point out that something sucks, but you can't personify it the way that like a Ricky Gervais or an Albert Brooks used to do, or even a Don Rickles used
you know i think the people when people forget about don rickles it was so brilliant about him and he never explained it because he didn't have to was he's a jewish guy in showbiz he has seen racism you can't even imagine so he would always personify the worst of these people that he saw, but he didn't bother to add that, and you know this is terrible.
He would just say that with the assumption that, you know this, I'm saying the dumbest shit imaginable, and also this guy never wins. He always loses. He always gets the, people get the better of me. That's what I'm making fun of here.
You know, but and then things again, we lost abstract thought and then near the end of their lives, people like Joan Rivers, who laid across the fucking barbed wire for people to cross and get to do dangerous comedy, started attacking her. It's like she did that. She's the one did. Anyway, sorry. Man, we went way off topic. We were talking about dolphin fishing. What are we talking about?
Yeah, 720 films in cinemas.
It was a kid who was... always loved movies growing up, but lived in, had very limited access to them or had them only on videotape. There weren't a lot of rep theaters in Northern Virginia. There were in D.C., but it was hard to get into D.C.
I couldn't, I had to like, you know, sometimes I would, a couple times I did skip school, I would fake an illness and then sneak into the city and go to the Janus or the Biograph and, you know, if it was like a Kuro Kurosawa film. But that wasn't, but now I'm in L.A. and there are, at the time, in the 95, it was
rep theaters everywhere, you know, Tales Cafe, New Beverly, it was just, it was all over the place, and I could just go and consume these movies, and not just watch movies, but I could watch them with an audience, that's what was the important thing, was watching what still landed with people, and what didn't anymore, and that was something I had never really gotten
to experience the way that I wanted to. And I just got really, really addicted to that thrill, to being wired into that mind. And this was before the internet, where that's where you went to really be wired into the zeitgeist. And I couldn't get enough of it.
Yeah, I mean, one of the ways it really, really affected me creatively was there were always moments in... films where they would cut off and I'm like, no, show the show that part. Why aren't you showing that part? That should be the start of a movie. And then that kind of became how I wrote a lot of my comedy was about these weird I was also very much influenced by Brian Regan.
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