The music video was directed by
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, a couple who have directed many other music videos for the band. The video was released on June 10, 2002. The video starts off with Kiedis calling for a taxi at the intersection of Echo Park Ave and Silver Lake Blvd. He gets in the taxi and the cabbie (played by
Dave Sheridan reprising his character of Doug Wilson from
Ghost World) realizes he has him as his passenger. To please him, the driver puts a copy of the "By the Way" single into the taxi CD player, making Kiedis smile slightly. Suddenly, the cabbie begins driving out of control as he lip-syncs the song while driving rambunctiously throughout the streets of Los Angeles. After he locks the car door, an uncomfortable and apprehensive Kiedis attempts to make a call on his cell phone, but the cabbie brakes so hard that Kiedis loses grip of it. The cabbie snatches the phone and throws it out the window, then drives the car in a cloud of dust and backs up under a bridge. While there, the cabbie pulls out flare sticks and begins to torture Kiedis through awkward dancing while the latter finally pages bassist
Flea and Frusciante (with a message reading, "Help! Been kidnapped."), who are having lunch in a cafe. At first, they think it's a hoax, so they ignore the first message. When Kiedis pages them for the second time, they set out on Flea's Ford Bronco to find him with the crazy cabbie in the taxi. A wild chase and road rage ensues. Kiedis soon sees Flea and Frusciante, breaks out of the taxi window, and jumps in Flea's truck with a sigh of relief as the three escape the cabbie. At the end of the video, drummer
Chad Smith flags down the taxi, with the cabbie realizing he is also a member of the band, so he lets him in and drives off with him. However, Chad is unaware that this is the same taxi man that kidnapped Kiedis and also ignores the broken glass. Kiedis said of the video: The fast and often jerky camera angles used in the high-speed chase sequences are based on the 2000 Mexican film
Amores Perros in which all the characters are linked by a car crash at the beginning of the film; before the crash is an almost identical high speed car chase sequence. ==Live performances==