Transcript of Edward Norton Returns Again

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Shepherd. I'm joined by Monica Norton.

Hello.

Hello.

It's not true. We're not married.

No, because he's married to my friend Shawna.

Shawna.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For people who don't know the backstory, Shawna, Edward's wife.

That's right.

Producer extraordinaire.

Yes.

Introduced Kristen and I.

Yes.

And then you'll hear a funny story about when we had babies, which maybe you've already heard, but we revisit it.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, very serendipitous semi-moment happened.

'Cause she had a dinner party. This is not the, if you miss it originally, Shauna had a dinner party where you two met.

Yeah, birthday dinner party for Jonah, I think.

Oh yeah. At a restaurant.

There was only like 8 of us.

Do you remember which restaurant?

It was on Melrose. It's kind of a famous fancy restaurant on Melrose, but I can't think of the name.

Like Jones, like Dantana?

It wasn't Jones or Dantana, more towards La Brea. Like more in that pocket of Melrose.

Yeah. Yeah.

Or Beverly. Could also have been on Beverly in that whole zone. No, further from East. It doesn't matter. West. The point is, Edward Norton is our guest today. He's an Academy Award-nominated actor and filmmaker. Fight Club, American History X, Primal Fear, Birdman. He has a new movie out. We're continuing on with our invite week because we love the movie so much.

Yes. So good.

So we're, we're pushing on strong and hard, uh, to talk more about The Invite and to hear all good things from Edward Norton. Please enjoy.

I'm gonna do this after because it's such a—

it's a treat.

You got your tea, it's steeping, you have a cream top. Did you drive from Malibu or from Hollywood?

I was in Santa Monica working and then I came here.

What are you working on?

I am raising a lot of money right now. Okay, for that cargo company, the shipping emission.

Yeah, have you seen this thing? He has a barge company, right? And it has a 13-story crane on it.

15.

15. Sorry.

Get it right.

Get it right. I imagine in the crane game, it's all about those stories.

You know what this crane was originally? It was a construction site concrete delivery. Oh, right. It was for the delivery of concrete up into high stories of construction sites.

Yeah. So they're built for a ton of weight, right? That concrete, once you've got 13 stories of it in a tube.

And all we're doing is bringing gas. Down. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he has these barges, and then there's a 15-story crane on top. And when a ship is in port, it hovers above the smokestack of the ship and sucks up all the carbon monoxide— or I'm not sure what it's getting.

It's actually the poisons. It's the nitrous oxide, sulfurous dioxide, and particulate matter.

All these diesel wastes.

We don't even actually deal with the CO2. Obviously, people have their opinions, and there's a lot of debate about CO2 and atmospheric CO2 and all of it, right?

Yeah.

But there are no regulations on CO2 right now.

For the ships?

No, for just society. We don't make you be compliant with zero CO2. But we do have— this is super interesting because even the Trump EPA regulates nitrous dioxide, sulfurous dioxide, because it kills people. That's what gives you lung cancer. So you could call it the smog. That's the stuff that creates the smog that's really, really bad for people. I think the stat I heard is that the emissions off the ports in California drive like $6.5 billion of respiratory health costs in the state every year, like cancer, asthma.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the number I heard you talking about, which is crazy, is that you've only been doing this for, what, a year or something? How long has this been operational?

Operational since 2023.

Okay, so for 3 years. But you were saying, maybe it was in the full duration of its deployment, but maybe you were just saying a year, that it was the equivalent of 65 million cars just last year. Yeah. Okay, so in one year— oh my God, it's sucking the equivalent of 65 million cars operating for a year.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah. It's a lot.

Those things fucking billow poison, huh?

The ships are really, really— I mean, you know a lot about cars.

Yeah.

So you actually know what a catalytic converter is?

Yes.

The catalyzer, it basically is taking things that are poisonous like nitrous dioxide and sulfur dioxide. If you catalyze nitrous dioxide into nitrogen and oxygen, then it's just air.

You're good.

Which is wild when you think about it, that bonded, it's horrible for us.

Oh, chemistry's endlessly fascinating, right? It's like, oh, this shape is good. This shape plus this shape is you're dead.

You're dead. I know, it's, it's amazing. I don't even think people totally grasp what a good job we've done on cleaning up cars. Obviously there's some stuff coming out the pipe not as clean as an EV or something like that, but the average car's emissions are just not even in the realm of what they were when we were kids.

Totally.

You and I probably came to LA somewhere approximate to each other in '95. For me, yeah, '95 was the first time I came to LA to shoot Primal Fear.

Oh, that shot here?

Yeah, here in, in Chicago a little bit.

Yeah, I still have it in my head as being Chicago.

'95 is when you came?

Yes, ma'am. He was shooting Primal Fear. You were 8 years old.

I was 8 years old.

Oh, God, shut up.

She's 8 years old.

Crazy.

Well, I was only 18.

Sure, we were all young.

You never saw the San Gabriel Mountains in the mid-'90s.

People will even say, and it sounds hilarious, like, I'll be traveling, people like, oh, there's a smog there. I'm like, dude, that's such an '80s— like, you— that's so '80s that you're thinking that. Like, I don't ever see dirty air.

Be quiet, Tom Hanks.

That's enough.

You know, we've never talked about your grandfather. I got super interested in your grandfather today. Oh, what's his last name?

Rouse. Jim Rouse.

Yeah, James Rouse. I found this guy fascinating. He's World War II.

Yeah, he served in the Navy in Naval Strategic Command at Pearl Harbor.

And when did he get into city planning and all the civil engineering?

It's funny you bring him up because I was just talking about him with someone. He's a very, very interesting person. He was like orphaned when he was in his early teens. And he and his brother, they lived this extremely, like, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer-like existence. Kind of rootless and parentless on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. They had older sisters who they would bounce between, but often would just cut school and go off and live on an island, crabbing and fishing. And he became extremely well known, and they teach classes about him at Harvard now and everything. You had to, like, live with him to know what an extremely eccentric, person he was. He really did like to go out and trap muskrat and make a stew out of it.

Oh, wow.

Among the many things he did, he gave Frank Gehry his first commissions.

Oh, really?

Frank Gehry's first building that wasn't Dennis Hopper's house was my grandfather's. 1967.

Oh, wow, wow, wow.

I have a photo of my granddad and Frank, where Frank is so young, and he has this unbelievable— He looks like Ron Jeremy.

Oh, perfect.

Great.

Yeah.

The hedgehog.

Frank credited my granddad with is— if you go in Gehry Architects today, my granddad's office building, built in 1967, is the one in the lobby. Anyway, Frank told me something that resonated with me, which is he came to think that he was colorblind because he had a great feeling for space and community spaces and open spaces and all these things he was known for. But Frank said he had the worst instincts about color. And the funny thing was, I always thought he was eccentric. He would wear, like, green pants and a Modris jacket. And you might have thought it was preppy, but he was, like, the furthest thing from preppy. He parked cars and hustled pool to pay for night school, played really serious poker, and never took his Navy pay because he won so much money playing poker. And he was one of those people who had an edgier life, I think, than the life that he became, you know, where he became respected.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, he'd go to, like, a serious meeting, and he'd have lures in his hat. And I think people thought he was sort of being— intentionally folksy or homespun, and it really, really wasn't.

It was genuine.

Yeah. He was a really, really funny person, but he was this incredibly accomplished kind of visionary thinker about cities. He was on the COVID of Time magazine in the '70s or early '80s for his ideas about cities, which is wild.

Monica, he invented the very first— are you ready for this— food court in a mall.

Oh, wow.

So he built a ton of malls, right?

Lots of malls.

And he built these, like, festival spaces or installations in cities that were supposed to bring people together.

This is an interesting digression. Who knows if there are more than 10 people interested in it, but we'll go there. In the '50s, he was on Eisenhower's Housing Commission, and I am told he was one of the first people to predict that the interstate highway system, which was being built in the '50s, would encourage low-density development outside the cities, and that the middle class would sort of leave the cities for what became the suburbs, and that this would lead to kind of an economic hollowing out of the cities. I don't know if it's true that he coined that, In the phrase, he was an early user of the idea of suburban sprawl. And we all talk about suburban sprawl now. We grew up in it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

But he talked about suburban sprawl. He kind of predicted the hollowing out of the cities. And in the '60s and '70s, when all the cities were going bankrupt, basically, because the middle class had kind of left for the bedroom communities, a lot of people were like, "This guy is a visionary." Even in the '60s and '70s, he was arguing for the need for more city planning, the revitalization of urban downtowns to bring the middle class back to the town center. He talked a lot about, like, the European tradition of the town center and the marketplace and how we needed to find a way to both, in our suburban planning, actually build communities, not just developments and strip malls. But then in the urban centers, downtown Boston, he did the Faneuil Hall, Quincy Market redevelopment.

Market, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Baltimore, he completely redeveloped the Baltimore Inner Harbor.

He did the pier in New York.

South Street Seaport.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which wasn't super successful.

Well, what I liked about reading about him is he went on to admit it didn't work in some cities. No, some of them, they were smash hits and they still stand. And then the others, the city didn't take to it, which is fascinating because in those cities there wasn't as much suburban sprawl.

Like, people stayed.

I think the opposite. It was so depressed.

Yeah. And also commercial real estate's always weird. What makes people want to return to a city center? And it's not just the commerce or the mall, it's sports. And a lot of things go into it—

restaurants, museums, and live entertainment. I bring him up because You have what seems to me— I don't claim to know you well enough to make this observation, but from the outside, it seems that you have among the loosest grasps of anyone I've ever met with their career. You hold it so loosely from my perspective.

You mean like creative life, like in films?

Like when you choose to work, how you've navigated, as we just said, '95. So 30 years of doing this, you're seeming confidence to be patient, your willingness to wait to something that you want to do, your refusal to get more money. When you decide to not be in The Avengers, you're not dumb. You're like, okay, I'm going to wave goodbye to like $40 million, right? Like, oh, there's $40 million bucks.

Probably more than that. Look at Downey lives.

7 or 8 of them. Yeah. Bye, hundreds of millions of dollars. So there's just all these moments I've just kind of observed over the years. It's such an enigma to me because I'm so different.

Do you know what I think is so funny about this? Number one, I was just talking to someone we both know on the phone. I said I was coming over here. Yeah, we were both admiringly talking about how good at this you are because you're such an autodidact. You're one of the people I know who I think most authentically avidly pursues more knowledge in all forms. You read as much as anyone I know.

Thank you.

I was saying that I thought Sean and I will be going along. We listen to it a lot. I said this In the car coming over here, I was like, have you noticed one thing Dax does, which is he seeks affinity with a lot of his guests, even to the point we laughed one time because there was one person you kept saying, that's like this. And they were like, I don't think so.

Affinity meaning like a similarity.

Yeah. Finding.

Yeah, yeah.

To a fault. You have an instinct, I feel like, to connect.

Yes.

Through shared.

I know we can find bedrock, right?

Like, and I come in and we actually know each other. I come in and you're like, we are so different. I'm like, hey, where's the affinity?

No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. There's so many things we're so similar to.

No, I like that.

But of course, when there are things, especially if I think I'm similar to somebody, right? And then they have these behaviors that, like, I can't personally imagine being confident enough to do or just having the peace of mind. So when people do things that I do weirdly maybe feel similar to that are so outside of how I operate, that's the nugget of, like, great curiosity to me. Yeah. Like, now I really— because I know we're the same, right? We're human beings. We want to be loved and adored, and we love our children. You know, like, we're all the same. So when there's these, like, splinters, I get so fascinated with how are you somehow having this loose grip on all this, and I'm strangleholding it.

How we look out through the skin at other people and our inability to necessarily see ourselves—

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

—is wild to me because I really might have said the same thing about you if I was talking to someone else in the sense that we've known each other a pretty long time. Yeah, yeah.

20 years.

Yeah. And in different phases. I know we've talked about both of us perceiving that the other didn't like each other. I was like, "God, this guy really doesn't like me." I'm so dumb. But I feel like you're on a journey that to me looks from the outside like enormously confident carving of your own path, defined entirely by the stuff that's so idiosyncratic and particular to you. Not only your passions and gifts and everything, but you've succeeded in multiple lanes. Maybe all of us in our mind are restless and self-critical and tend to not almost like tally the wins. We tally the dissatisfactions. Yeah. And we don't see what others see from the outside that looks like confident non-attachment or whatever you're saying. You say wear it lightly, right?

It's also complicated too, right? Like, are we talking about what snapshot of me and you? No, exactly. Right? Like, yes, today I agree with what you're saying and thank God it all landed nicely. But if I take a snapshot in 2000, I don't know, 14, I'm pretty panicked. What are we doing now?

The answer to your question is not that you need reassurance, but in a weird way, I don't think I have any lightness of hold on my aspirations, my ambitions, my endeavors. When you say, from the outside, it looks to you like I'm sort of confidently waiting, only doing the things I want to do—

Yeah, or not motivated by money.

This is not true. Okay. First of all, I think we have talked about this. No actor turns off the actor's narcissistic brain. The joke that, "How many actors does it take to screw in a light bulb?" 100, 1 to do it and 99 to say, "I could have done that so much better." Don't think for 10 seconds that I am capable of shutting off entirely the part of my brain that goes, "Why didn't I get sent that?" Well, that's reassuring. It is reassuring. I would have liked to have read that. Yeah. Or, I'm really excited that they're calling, but I can tell there's this urgency to it. And what that means is someone else dropped or couldn't show up. Okay, fuck it. I'll make it good. You know what I mean?

I'll show them. Also, Edward had success quite young, and that makes a difference. When there's a lot of struggle, it's going to cause a little bit more of like a tight, tight grasp. Right.

So I can't help but come up with hypotheses for this observation that may or may not be correct. But one is I thought Grandpa had a lot of money. Clearly, he was like a big deal in Maryland. Yes, he was very successful.

He was really wild. He didn't trust money at all. He had an Oldsmobile his entire life. Oh, he lived in a very small house and he gave away all of his money. He was an extremely, like, man of the people kind of guy. I would say the most significant financial thing he bequeathed to his grandchildren was he paid for us all to go to college. He made it so that none of us came out of college with debt, which is huge. But that, in his mind, was, that's the leg up I'm going to give you. That was pretty much it. He gave away almost all of his money to the Enterprise Community Partners, which was his low-income housing.

And that's why you were in Japan. You were working for that company? Yeah. Yeah. Because I kind of went to the Nick Kroll— I admired Nick Kroll in a similar way where it's like, like he seemingly has only been motivated by what makes him laugh the hardest. There hasn't seemed to be any dirty calculation of how he could get more money from the outside. But I interviewed him, I was like, his dad's— is a billionaire, right? Or close to it. But yeah, like, he went to school in the limousine. And he'll be the first to admit, he's like, yeah, money wasn't my issue. That wasn't something I had to go out and get. I think that liberated me in a lot of ways. I think that's fucking stupendous if someone can take that privileged childhood and turn it into just pursuing their creative interests.

I don't think I'm as relaxed about how things are going as you think I am.

Okay. Also, I'm not accusing you of having grown up with Kroll money.

People did, but not me. I remember in 1992, 1993 in New York, I had an actual, like, little financial ledger book, and I decided to go through the exercise of, like, if I want to be able to be an actor in New York and just wait tables or do temp jobs, I have to know exactly what it actually costs to be here. So I started this exercise of I wrote down every subway token, every muffin that I bought. I tallied every single thing so that I could understand how little can I live on.

Do you remember what the tally was in '93?

To live in New York in the way I was living, I needed to make about $11,000 a year. I had found an apartment that was $400 a month. Impossible. A rent-stabilized apartment was $400 a month. I mean, it was smaller than this studio. I worked out a system for myself. I thought, I can exist in New York City if I knew what my nut was and I knew what I had to make. Here's where we're similar.

That was my same strategy in LA. Yeah, like made $8,000 a year for 10 years because that's what it took.

By the way, the thing when I throw back on myself at that time was if I had to have a car and gas in that mix, I wouldn't have pulled it off. How could you get by on $8,000 if you were buying gas?

A Honda Civic and a Suzuki 600, like 50 miles a week. Also, gas wasn't as expensive.

It wasn't as crazy. The apartment would be less.

And I drove like 80 miles a week.

You know what's funny is on the highway the other day, on the 101, I turned to my right and I saw a Toyota Corolla FX16 GTS, which was my used car that I had. It's the weirdest— it's like a trapezoid. For no amount of money would I have said that any of those could still be operating on the road. Toyota. The memory drawer that opens though when you see the car you spent your late teens in.

Holy crap. I have debated getting a '91 Honda Civic DX and doing it up. Just because I lived in that car for 10 years and I'm like, I need to honor that fucking trusty little car.

It was probably your car that you saw. It was probably still—

It could have been.

Okay, so great. So there's not that. And then my other thought was simply, you're not going to be able to even comment on this observation, but Monica can. You're in the rarest situation where it's like your talent's fucking kind of undeniable. And it was undeniable right out of the gates. I do think that's gotta buy you some abatement of the anxiety. You know, you're just so validated, and you were just so obviously brilliant at this, that I don't think you were wrestling with what Monica and I were, where it's like, "Well, I'm not getting hired. Am I not good?" Like, how does one know if they're good or not? You're just going, and you hope it's not that you're not good, but you don't fucking know. And I think that is a big source of the anxiety too.

I also don't know if you're an actor like you are, which is at an elite level, I don't even know, and you can correct me, if you're thinking, "Am I good?" or "Do people think I'm good?" I think you think, like, "Am I portraying this character correctly? Am I embodying this?" Like, you're not really— It's not very external. It's more internal. And that's what makes him so good.

I relate to that. I can't remember if we've talked about this or not, but I've always felt there's only two categories of actors. I think some are iconic, and I'm not saying good or bad, but I think some people— have qualities that we enjoy so much. Clint Eastwood. Yeah. Harrison Ford. Terrific actor. We go to them again and again for a set of qualities that we need from them. They're almost like Greek mythology, right? They personify something that we want. And it can be dark, it can be light, it can be stalwart, it can be hilarious. And then there are people who are, in the Joseph Campbell sense, they're the shapeshifter. We need iconic performers because they represent something, they distill something for us. And then people who are— I don't even want to say character actors, but it's not them. They're a vessel for a thing that channels something else. And I have never had any conviction that I could function as anything other than someone who absorbs things. Sort of that shamanistic idea of the sucking up of something and finding the way to put it through yourself and express something with it, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're like a mother bird. You, like, go out and you eat, and then you come and puke it all back into our little baby's mouth. Yeah. That's a good way of looking at it.

What I enjoy most about it is this kind of the secret key that it represents. It's an excuse to go dive into Pete Seeger's world and learn banjo or whatever. It's an excuse to marinate in a thing, soak it up, find some way with the writing, whatever, find some way to get something across and sort of inhabit a thing without the consequences of making that your whole life. And in that sense, it's a joyride of diverse, weird, strange experiences. The other thing that it does, definitely to me, is I honest to God— It's not, "Am I good at it?" It's, at a certain point, you know, "I've worked within this magic trick." Not just the magic trick of acting, but the magic trick of how that interfaces with the larger magic trick of making a film that works, or that has something to say, or anything. But the way I like working on it tends to also translate into something that I actually enjoy, which is I don't feel that having done anything well earns me a sense of certainty that I'm gonna do it well on the next one, because I'm always like, "This one might be the one that I fuck up." Would I be right to imagine Pete Seeger, right?

Like, you're just dumping stuff in there, and I don't know what those things are, whether you're reading a biography, or you're watching video of him, or you're learning to play the banjo. And while you're dumping it in there, are you just kind of waiting for the magic click? Like, oh, there it is?

I often feel something close to a mounting sense of— maybe not panic, because I've learned to trust myself, but I will often feel a mounting feeling that I have not cracked it. Uh-huh. And that we are getting awfully close to the beginning of the thing. The blast-off. Yeah. And I do love if and when the moment happens that something slides over into this feeling of, "The suit fits. I've got it," right? Right, right, right. Sometimes I find it's a different mechanism with each thing. Pete, for sure, one of the things was just his voice. His vocal intonations and the rhythm. And for me, the way he spoke, and the way he sung, being thin, and Pete's teeth, his hair, his things, the clothes he wore. In a weird way, that's like— That's the easy stuff. We don't even have to invent it because we've got copious photographs, and that's like mechanical almost. Yeah. For me, there's something about the way the man used language and the rhythm of the way he spoke was a part of what made him seem like a druid to other people. Because he wasn't like their peer. He was this other thing.

He was like their druid. Impersonation is always a challenge or a tricky thing.

So what— one of your gifts is you're kind of a mimic.

I am a good mimic.

Yeah, you're like a mimic. So there's that aspect. But I watch a lot of mimics do things, and there's also now 3 other layers beyond the mimicry. But yeah, clearly that's just like one of the components. And Kristen can do this very well too, from her musical training. She hears voices, music, all of it in very compartmentalized pieces. She can see each component of it. She can hone in on one little tiny aspect that's actually defining the whole thing, but that I would miss. It's almost like the key to the mimicry, right?

I'll go even a little more technical, I think someone who's got a good ear like Kristin does, who can pretty much sing anyone, I have noticed that people who are good at that, and I've noticed that when I hear someone and I'm gonna try to slide into it, I kind of intuitively know what is happening mechanically. I know where Owen's voice is. Is it back here or is it up here? I know where Woody's is. I know where Bill Hertz is. And it is actually like a physical locating. Of what part of your face are you resonating. A lot of the way a person sounds has to do with how rooted they are in their breath or not, whether they're speaking from the forward part, the back. And I kind of think people who are good at it may just have— who knows why? It's not just the ear, because you hear the same things. It's like an instinct for how to shape the cavern of your mouth to make it sound—

Yeah, that's a great piece and makes so much sense because, right, Kristen, like, learned how to sing through her chest, through her head. Locating her voice in all these different areas to get a different outcome and being very aware of that. Everything you're talking about, like the machinery of making noise.

Yeah, they try to teach it to, like, in theater school. Like, I have voice class. I couldn't. I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean, put it up here? Like, I can't do that. Maybe it's genetic or something.

I will say too, though, when I was a kid, I didn't feel particularly interesting. But other people seemed really interesting to me. And if someone was interesting to me, or an actor or something, I used to just spend a lot of time imitating people that I thought were interesting. Yeah, because then you would be interesting, right?

In front of a mirror sometimes.

And I still, when I'm working on Pete Seeger, I have certain actor friends who I just trust, who I go all the way back with, who I know I can sit in a room and be really goofy and not feel self-conscious. Yeah, yeah. And I will work and work and work on a thing. I read Pete— my friend Peter Lewis is a terrific actor. I'll work with him work scenes with someone, and someone will go, "Oh, I heard it," and get it wrong and whatever. But I will do a lot of work in front of a mirror. Yeah, yeah. I was doing Death to Smoochie with Danny DeVito, and I had decided in my own mind who my source was for this character who wears a cowrie shell and a flannel shirt and won't give sugar to kids and is all these things. And I was doing it. We're on the first couple days of the movie, and I think I said— My voice is hoarse right now, but I think I looked at Catherine Keener and I said something like, I was like, "Hang on a second there, Nora, 'cause, you know, you're halt— Have you heard of HALT?

Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. That's you, and I'm not getting sucked into your negative energy." And Danny pops up behind the monitor and goes, "What is that?" And I was like, "It's gonna come to you." And he was like, "What is that? What are you doing?" He goes, "I love it, but, you know, it was just Woody Harrelson." And I just decided that Sheldon Mopes was Woody. It took Danny a couple of times Day 2, where he was like, "Oh my God! Oh my God!" Sometimes you do things without thinking about them, but when you talk about what is mimicry, and you realize it is the interface between ear and actual location of a thing in your body, right? It's like, how does Steph Curry hit the shots he hits? There's a lot of muscle training, muscle memory. And also, he just perceives the distance to a degree of perfection that we can't really even imagine in our minds. You know, to him, there's a clarity about how far he is from that, and it translates into— Motion, yeah. It's just unreal.

Well, and if he told you how it had happened, neurologists would say that probably can't happen. I remember that great chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's book where it's talking about the great hitters. How do they hit? They know the time frame between it leaving the hand to before it's crossing the plate, right? They know that duration. And the guy's like, "Oh, I can always tell if they drop their shoulder and they do blank, it's gonna be a fastball." Because they have to start swinging the second it's leaving their hand, virtually. Beyond belief.

Hitting the Major League fastball is—

is the most astonishing. I don't care what anybody says, that's the single most incredible interface between the brain and the body in sport. There's a million things that are hard, like Nordic skiing. Everything's hard. Even the F1 guys, I'm not sure anybody's processing information and making a physical decision to do something virtually impossible. Yeah, oh, it was in blink.

That makes sense. So what they found was if all the things the batter said were true, they can add that up. They know the duration of the cognition, right? They've measured it in an fMRI. And what they can what they conclude is none of that stuff's happening. There is not time for him to see the shoulder, compute it to here, move it to the frontal lobe, move it to the motor control, make this decision. They know that that's impossible. So it's what? The emotional center of their brain fires. That doesn't do any of that computation that the batter thinks is happening. They get an emotional intuition about that pitch. And the great hitters have a really good emotional intuition. And I bet Steph Curry would explain what's happening, but I bet there's something completely emotional that's happening that allows him to do that in some weird way.

That's what we're talking about too, 'cause at a certain point, anyone who uses their body and their voice as an instrument, whether it's mimicking someone or singing, I agree it's emotional. I mean, if I'm imitating someone, honestly, the feeling I have, it's not really analytical, it's joyful. Yeah. Right? It's like an affinity or a— an empathy.

We both know we have to stop ourselves. Oh, like if I start talking like McConaughey, everyone will eventually leave the room if I don't stop. Yeah, I could do it for 6 hours.

Except me, because I'm so jealous of yours. You're in the top 3 on that one.

Like, Damon is pretty great, but the joy to sound like somebody you know— I don't know why that's so amusing to me. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking your gas gauge before hitting the road? You genuinely thought you could make it? You were wrong. That's a very long stretch of highway where you learned exactly how far fumes can take you. And it's not far enough. Yeah, checking first is an excellent plan. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need it, add an Allstate Roadside Plan on today. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North American Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois. Roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club Incorporated, an Allstate affiliate.

On SNL, I did the Wes Anderson horror film. We made a horror film called The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders. I do own it. Do you know, by the way, Seth Meyers came up with that title? I did text Wes and say, "If you did a horror film, what would it be called?" And in less than 2 seconds, he wrote, "The Cruelers in the Wispen." Okay, now—

Anyway. Back to what is inarguable, despite what it feels like on the inside. You have taken these pretty big breaks between projects. You mean films, in terms of doing— Yeah, the chronology. Archaeological record. The archaeological record would demonstrate that you've had these breaks. And so when I see you in something— and I'll cut right to The Invite, which we saw together. Loved it. We loved it so much, I immediately sent you a text.

You sent me a voice message.

There is a moment in the movie when we say what— that we just looked at each other right after and we're like, yeah, what are you gonna do? He's so good.

Yeah, we're like, yeah, was that the thing that made you good when you said it was like watching Valentino ride a motorcycle?

Yeah, I mean, there isn't a compliment higher than that.

No, no, you do.

Yeah. It should be universal.

I guess I would say it's like Mary-Kate and Ashley's show.

No, you'd have to do an Olympic gymnast.

No, I want to make it fashion. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm going to work on it.

But every time I see it— the last time you were here, you were promoting The Glass Onion. And every time you work, I have the exact same thoughts. I go like, God, why doesn't he do this more? Secondly, why this? How does one guess what you're going to do?

I've never looked at making films or acting as a volume game. For me, it's not selling widgets. And some of my great friends are huge, honkin' movie stars, and they work all the time. It's just the people who maybe inspired me to be an actor, or I modeled myself on, I never looked at them as the ones who were in the volume game. I want to do it when something that gets under my skin, interests me a lot, and that I think— gives me a little bit of a tickle of a feeling of I'm not exactly sure how one crushes that, or just how I'm gonna unlock that, or if I'm even the right one for it. But I want to say there's plenty of times I wish more such things showed up. You're not trying not to work. No, I'm not a resistor of a great thing, right, when it comes.

But if you're like the layperson, you're looking on the outside Birdman, I'm like, yeah, of course that director calls with that crazy concept. Clearly you're doing that, that makes sense. But then there's some other ones where I'm like, I'm not sure, was it script motivated, was it director motivated, was it cast motivated, was it conceptually, like you're saying, like I just got fucking obsessed with this notion and I just had to explore it. If you had to rank those motivations, are they all equal?

It can be very different, I guess.

Like a complete unknown's probably director motivated.

Yeah, I love Jim Mangold, I got on with him, but actually on that one, that was super interesting because I know Timothy. You knew him before the movie? Yeah, I knew him before the movie, and I knew he was considering doing that. And I had this feeling in my head that, like, this might be a bad idea. It's high risk. But it's also a huge personal overinvestment in Dylan.

Yeah, you moved to New York and he was the soundtrack.

I thought, you know, it was this kind of snotty— not snotty, it's sacred, it's untouchable. You shouldn't try to, like, do that. And when Jim brought it up to me, I went through a thing of thinking this whole thing could be inadvisable. It's great people. Uh-huh. But why would we attempt to be these particular people who are so iconic and everything I want to get out of it? Happily, Jim, who is an incredibly unpretentious guy and was the right person to not treat it like a sacred cow, but he also said to me, he was like, "You know, I think you gotta— sometimes you gotta really step back and get away from the mythology and look and realize there's a shit ton of people who don't know a thing about Bob Dylan and don't listen to his music." And he said, "And we're in a time when there's not a lot of artists leaning in the way those young people leaned in to what they saw going on around them that they were not happy about, that they didn't think was right. They took what they had, and they leaned in with everything they had.

And he said, "Just an examination of that makes it worth—" And I thought, "I'm in." Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's super true for your character. Do we think that's true about Dylan? My layperson's take on Bob Dylan is he's fucking cool. And when you try to make him more than just that, I think you're on a fool's errand. I don't think he's as smart as everyone thinks or had his overarching political agenda.

I think he's a very canny creator of mythology. Yeah, yeah. But by the way, unapologetically. And admittedly. And Joan Baez is famous for saying, "He was the most apolitical person that I've ever known." The fact that he channeled what he saw, to me, Jim was right. That the collision of a certain group of artists with the times they were living in was a really interesting thing to look at. Absolutely.

And then I went, "Okay, great." You have the right North Star.

For me, then it flipped all the way over into joy because I got to marinate in things that I love and that meant a lot to me. And I kind of almost like had to give myself permission.

You had to geek out.

The invite, which I don't want to be hyperbolic, but I will say, I will say it was one of the most pleasurable and creatively invigorating experiences.

That you've ever had?

I put it right with working with Miloš Forman, working with Spike Lee, who I revered and works in a very unique way, working with Iñárritu on Birdman. The way that Olivia Wilde ran the process on this film— I'm always hesitant to, like, unpack a thing before people see it. We should give full credit. There's a Spanish film called Sentimental. The People Upstairs? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sentimental in Spanish, and then The People Upstairs. It was written by this guy named Sesqué, who was a playwright and directed this film. And I saw it a number of years ago. Sean and I watched it. It put me on the floor. Like, I thought it was absolutely brilliant.

Same premise.

A couple from upstairs comes down to have cocktails with the couple downstairs, and all kinds of things ensue, right? Yeah. The actors were hysterical and brilliant. And I immediately thought to myself, "I would love to remake this." Yeah. And I thought to myself, "I'm gonna call Sean." Balsas or Carell, and I'm gonna be the guy upstairs, and I'm gonna direct it, and I'm not even gonna change much. And I thought to myself, we could shoot this in 15 days. And I went and tried to get the rights, and they had been picked up by someone already. Oh wow. And I called that producer and I said, here's to your point, like, hey, I would throw my hat in the ring to direct it and be in it. And he said, I think I'm gonna go another way. Oh wow. Like, literally, like, went off to some other directors who worked on it for a bit, tried to put it together with other cast, and this one did not go by me for a couple years. I went, ah, I was like the girl that got away. Yeah, I want— I really wanted to do that one.

Well, so then how did Olivia become attached to direct it?

Through whatever weird flow of things, I end up getting a text from Seth. My wife produced a lot of Seth's movies, and I've known Seth forever. You're in Sausage Party. I've done Sausage Party with him, and he said, do you know about The Invite? I didn't know the title. I was like, no. And he said, Olivia Wilde is gonna do it. Should we do this? And I was like, "Wait, we're not talking about the people upstairs, are we?" And I talked to Olivia, and she goes, "Would you really do this?" And I was like, "I've been wanting to do this for a couple years." Serendipity. I did get this feeling of like, "I'll be damned." The currents of the stream brought it back around, and I got to do it. I loved Olivia's two films. I love Booksmart. I love Don't Worry Darling. Just great science fiction. Thank you, darling.

That's what Dax kept calling it. "Thank you, darling." To Olivia.

Oh, sorry, I kept fucking up the title. I'm bonafide cheerleader for her. I saw Booksmart, I was like, this is a fucking great movie, sharp. But also, this is a genre of movies that I don't want to say is easy to make good, but there's something inherently enjoyable about a coming-of-age movie. But then I saw, um, Don't Worry Darling, and I was like, this This is a big undertaking.

The production design on that movie, yes, insane.

And the story they're telling, how abstract is— and will that work? They just disappear. Like, there's just a lot of shit.

But then it turns out it's real science fiction. Yeah, yeah.

Like, which one I love. I just was like, wow, she's fucking awesome.

Sharp.

Yeah, really, really good. Now what's interesting is none of the three are the same. They're also uniquely their own thing.

I will say, I watched it with Seth at Sundance, and he turned to me and goes, I don't know if I'm gonna be in a better movie than that. Really, I had this feeling watched it, I knew Mike Nichols, one of our greatest film directors. He was one of those people who was a mentor to many young people in New York, if you were a New Yorker. And so funny, so dry, so brilliant, such a great storyteller, but also great with advice.

And for people who don't know, he directed— well, first he was in this comedy duo that was impossible and groundbreaking. Yeah. And then he became a director of theater, and everything he touched turned to gold. And then he went into cinema, and he did Virginia Woolf first out of the gate. And that was first movie, Virginia Woolf.

Second second movie, The Graduate. Yeah, yeah. Third movie, Carnal Knowledge.

Is impossibly talented. Also smoking crack during lots of it. Addicted to halcyon and fucking up his finances. Yeah, that was later. Married to Diane Sawyer. I mean, this dude was juggling a lot of shit. Fucking alopecia. Came over on a ship at 8 years old. I love it. There's a biography on it. Yeah, incredible biography. Have you read it?

Yes. Mark Harris's, right? Yeah, I think so. Anyways, this dude's a legend.

So the fact that you knew him is kind of wild.

I watched the watched the film and thought either Mike Nichols came back from the grave and channeled himself through Olivia, or he's just smiling somewhere. Because I really thought she's done something with this film that was what I loved about it, which is like hit the high and the low. It's as funny as you could want a movie to be, but then it really gets down into the real shit.

I'm gonna add an element. There's like a good deal of sexuality in the film with a lot of confidence and not shying away from some things. So, like, the moment— Monica will tell you, I embarrassed her so much. Embarrassing. Yeah, we're in a screening at the Soho House with like a bunch of journalists. Some people probably know who we are. When Penelope invites him into the room, I, without my permission, let out this crazy noise, like guttural. I go like, oh yeah, like I was like, yes, let's fucking go to that room forever! That moment's not necessarily easy to go get on film. No, that's a moment, dude, where like I can't help but go, "Yes," out loud. Please.

Well, Penelope, I mean, it might be easy anytime she invites anyone.

I mean, she makes it easy. Yes. But it's constructed in a way, and it's the right shot.

And Seth's reaction. I mean, all of it.

You're just like, "Oh, fuck." Like, it works, you know? It's just like a powerful moment. So that's in the mix too.

Oh, yeah. When we made Birdman, I had moments where I was watching Alejandro and Chivo Lubezki, the great cinematographer, who had known each other since college. They went to college together. And there was times that they were working out those long shots, and sometimes Alejandro would have his hands on Chivo's shoulders and his face by his ear. They would move together with him whispering, and they would say funny things to each other and be laughing. And I thought, "These guys are in the zone." They're soulmates, they're having fun, but they're in a flow state. And sometimes you're watching someone else in a flow state. Yeah.

I remember you telling me that they would link arms and walk with each other around the set sometimes for hours.

Yeah, it was beautiful. I felt Olivia Wilde was in a kind of a flow state making this because it brought together for her not only everything she loves and is most interested in, but that played to a lot of what I even think she, as an actress and as a human being, hasn't even necessarily gotten to fully express. It's hard to overstate. You know well, I do too, The mind you're in directing and the state you have to be in acting are in direct opposition to each other. And she gives this performance in the film that's worthy of Gena Rowlands or Diane Keaton at their very, very best. Yeah. Full of anxiety and longing and physical comedy and anger. There's so much going on in it. And yet, she directed us and— She directed this compositionally beautiful film that's all in one apartment and never gets dull. She's guiding us collectively on how to find this thing on the fly, and even saying things to us like, "We're gonna stitch the parachute on the way down, but it's gonna open." And by that, I mean she not only encouraged, but actually kind of asked of us that we create our own characters.

In many dimensions, Penelope's character wasn't Spanish. Penelope brought in her interest in— menopause and hormones, and the Esther Perel of it all— Yeah. —brings that all in and creates this character, Pina, that is so striking and so dynamic and forceful and aspirational. And Olivia said to me, like, "My character's name is literally specific to a friend of mine, his story." There's a lot of things that my friend Julian Sands, the actor who died a few years ago, the stuff about the rugs and the carpets, those were things he said to me when he walked into my apartment one time, And it wasn't just that Olivia didn't tighten up, it was that she did something I've never done, which is she shot the film in page order. Right? And basically said, "I don't think we're gonna end up in the same place that's on the page. I think we're gonna end up in a deeper place, but we're not gonna know what it is, or even how we're gonna get there, until we march through these beats. But if we do 'em in order, each one will feed into the next, and we will keep discovering..." "how much this can bear as we go." Now, that all sounds super creatively sexy, but when you're making a film, and hundreds of people are standing around, and you're saying, as a director, "We're gonna kinda make this up as we go," and I mean really make it up as we go, to stay in a state of not just equanimity, but one in which you're relishing it so much that you're giving that performance while allowing for that much uncertainty, it is, like, right up there with the most impressive things that I've seen a director do.

I will throw down and say, in 30 years making films, I haven't experienced a director investing trust in the cast at this level ever.

Yes. To me, the ultimate signal of her competence is that takes so much confidence to let everyone be so collaborative. It's beautiful. Beautiful as that sounds on the outside, like, yeah, it'd be great if every— no, it's not great if every actor has an opinion. They don't have an understanding of the global story that's being told. It's not just good to let actors— that's why we have writers and why we have directors. So to trust and to encourage that and not have any fear that I'm going to lose complete control, because ultimately it does have to be the director's vision— the fact that she was able to stay confident and not rattled in that encouraging, to me is like, it's almost impossible.

No, almost impossible.

I agree. She won for it. It all works.

You can only imagine the freakout that was going on in the margins.

Oh, I can't imagine if I was paying for the movie as well.

Yeah, exactly. Especially when Seth and Olivia, in particular, they became convinced that the end of the film should drop into a frequency that was not entirely light. The decision to actually let it go there, on Olivia's part, but then, on the fly, to figure out the mechanisms of how do you get out of of a lot of hijinks and a lot of laughter and a lot of everything, and over into a place where this film goes, is mechanistically actually tricky. And one of the more amazing things a director has ever asked of me, but trusted me in, she basically said, "I sort of think that maybe something between you and Seth has to uncork.

I kind of think we need a hinge." Let me brag for you. So, The movie is great beginning to end. It's so entertaining, it's so funny, and it is touching on— so anyone who's been in a long-term relationship, you're gonna recognize everything, right? It's just like your partner becomes the explanation for everything you don't like about living, virtually. If there's a single scene that makes the whole movie work, it is your turn. You've presented as this guy, we don't really know you, just seem really confident and open-minded, and then to find out where that really came from was a real moment that had the ability to anchor the entire movie. You're waiting for a big turn, or as you say, uncorking or something, and it's definitely that monologue.

That thing ends and you're like, "Whoa, I'm kind of fucked up over that." And she told us that you did not share it with her beforehand to get a real reaction.

And very generously had them film their side first.

Or multiple cameras or something.

Well, Seth and Olivia.

Seth and Olivia, yeah. She was puzzling over How do we get through this gateway? I can't remember exactly what the conversations were that led to it, but I'll always do what we all learned to do in acting classes, and I'll always write out for myself something that I think is the secret, whether it's in the movie or not. I'll always write out my own deeper idea of someone's backstory. Most of the times, that doesn't make it into anything, Interesting, like, when you talk about a complete unknown, I had found this thing that Pete Seeger wrote about believing that the world is like a teaspoon brigade. And when we got to this final scene with him and Dylan in the end, and Jim wasn't happy with it, I said, "Jim, I found this thing. I've been carrying this thing like my mantra." And he goes, "That's the scene." So that's in the film. And sometimes that happens. In this case, I said to Olivia, you know, "I have this idea about what happened with him." She goes, "What?" She goes, "Is it good? Will it get us there?" And I said, "I think it is." And I remember, I think I said to her at one point, I was like, "I can say this, that if I say it to myself, I'm gonna lose it." Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

"I can't get through it myself without being moved by it, right?" Yeah. And she was like, "Don't tell me what it is." And she set up on her and Seth so that she could film them hearing it for the first time. In the movie, her reaction is her hearing it for the first time, which is the ballsiest thing that I've ever had a director do emotionally on a film. She literally said, "I wanna film myself hearing it for the first time." Yeah. "I'll be the test strip." I can't really come up with a way in which a director could give me more trust, respect, ever. But she was so smart to do it.

She cast you, Seth, people who aren't only great actors, but great storytellers— directors, people who do know that you need a payoff at the end, It's not just like, "Let's just do it one more time." You know you're at the end of the second act.

I don't know that a lot of actors know they're at the end of the second act. And then, "Fuck you!" Something happens.

I wanna say this too, like, I don't wanna ruin it or get in people's heads that are watching it, but so much then uncorked Seth's reaction. Seth, who had not heard it either. Seth, I think, very much respects me, and we've done many things together, and he loves me and everything. I know for sure, I'm sure that when I first did it, Seth thought, "It's too long and too serious." By the way, that's exactly what his character would think. His reaction, that unbelievably rude thing that he says to me, he made up on the spot. Uh-huh. I think it was one of the funniest improvisations.

Well, it's so real. When you're a dude and another dude just got attention from the ladies for being vulnerable, you're like, Fuck this dude.

But it's so magnificently rude that I had to turn around 'cause it put me on the floor. Uh-huh. In a social moment. But I think there is a shot of me bursting out laughing because you just can't believe anybody would be that big a tool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was so good that it pinballed into Penelope. Her reaction to his reaction became a thing that leads to a fight between us. And none of this was anything we had planned. None of it. And I think— I think that the fact that Olivia just sat there letting these things cascade off of each other was so unprecedented to me. That's theater rehearsal. And we had all sat, the four of us, plus with Will McCormick and Rashida Jones, who are great writers and great interpolators of— We had the Spanish film, they had the four of us, and we're Cuisinarting this all together. And I honestly think everybody else was more anxious about the uncertainties than Olivia, which is a bizarre inversion. Not really.

You want to look at your leader and go, "Oh, they know exactly what they want." That feels safer.

But if they're like, "I'm open to be surprised..." Yes, but when you've been doing it as long as you've been doing it, and you know that there's consequence to something you're supposed to get done in a certain number of days, and there's people standing around with a certain measure of, "Do these guys know what they're doing?" To operate as a director, to say to everybody involved, "This parachute is gonna open." It's powerful. It's amazing. All my respect to her. And then in the end, she just edited and put together this— it's so good. It's so fucking—

it's so good. Yeah, yeah. Tell me about— you're friends with Esther Perel? Yeah, you and Sean. I know Sean has been like on vacation with her.

I was talking at a conference that Esther was talking at as well, and there was like social time. And you know what's the funniest thing is, I'm sure like all of Even as I was sort of starstruck and thrilled and turned on.

Yeah, yeah. She's so sexy. She is such a force.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so vibrant and alive, and everything she says about— Erotic. —what is erotic. That's Esther, you know? But it's the funniest thing to both be thrilled to be meeting and talking to someone, and to have this voice in your head that goes, "If we proceed down this path, she can't be my therapist." Like, I was like— I'm sacrificing the chance to have her as the host.

Well, no, you could do one of your characters, and you could call into Mating in Captivia as one of your characters.

You've had her on here. Oh, I adore her. She's just so provocative. Yes.

Because she's honest.

I was at a thing where she was speaking, and it was some tech thing, and too many people were talking about AI and all these things. And Esther gets up and goes, "All this talk about AI, and no one's talking about the AI that matters in tech, which is artificial intimacy." And she just goes on this tear. I'm a super fan of hers. And honestly, you know what's funny is, like, there comes a point— I think Penélope said this, and I really agree with her. It's kind of what you were getting at. It's not that you're not trying to prove anything anymore, but at a certain point in this kind of work, I find a lot of satisfaction not only in watching other people— like, watching Olivia be in flow state is so great. You're like, "I'm here to serve. Whatever you need me to do." But this other thing happens too, which Penelope, I think, affected, which is you get to take the world and what you've taken out of it, and you get to pull it into the work and kind of communicate it in another way. There are people who don't know who Marie Claire Haver is.

There are people who don't know who Esther is. Like, if you see The Invite and you look at Penelope's performance, she pulled a bunch of shit together and put it out—

Oh, it's very Esther.

—in this way. And I think that's really cool. It's just occurring to me now.

I didn't have this feeling when I left, but I'm now having this thought, which is the— The only thing the movie maybe didn't do, and I want to know what the conversations were like among the four of you. So your neighbors from upstairs, Penelope, and you— sorry, you're the neighbor— they're in this very progressive sexual arrangement. They go to orgies, they're out there, they're communicating about it. What kind of conversations were going on about that? But open— yeah, open relationships. Like, I, I guess I was curious if the position at all, or if it's even talked about is like, do the neighbors upstairs have a viable thing? Do we buy that it's gonna work out? What do we think about that? Was this being discussed? You also have 4 cast members with different— like, Seth's been with the same girl his entire life. I think it was Olivia told us something about— he was like, what do you mean someone doesn't have sex every week? Or something that was revealing that they are fucked up.

I think at the time either Olivia or Rashida turned and was like, you're the only person here without children. Well, there's that. There's that.

Yeah, yeah. And then there's just nature.

What they were fighting too, I think he said something like, who would ever speak this way? Exactly. Who would ever be in a relationship like this? I think people are like, yeah, a lot of us.

90% of relationships. Yeah. But did you guys discuss that much or no? You just take it at face value?

I think one of the things that was discussed, and then, and I think especially by Penelope, very successfully laced very subtly through, is how new it is that they've only been together for a year. And you can see how thrilled he is about it. You can see in her very subtle commentary that, like, she knows that it's easy because it's early. She's not naive. And I think it's funny when you do this kind of stuff because the rehearsal, such as it was, was just 6 people sitting around a table. The 4 of us and Will and Rashida. And probably going, "How much am I gonna reveal about my own relationship right now?" By the way, Olivia, again, you know, like the general who says, "I'll never ask of anyone something I won't do myself," she just plowed in. She was just in the bubble with the 6 of us. "Let's be real, because if we can be real here, and all of us throw it against the board together, let's look at what ends up on the board, and we go, 'Ooh, that should be in there.'" But then when you go home that night to Sean, Shawna, is she like, "I need you to be done with this movie.

All you're doing is thinking about relationships and marriage and Esther." Shawna was the one who said, when we saw the first Spanish film, she was like, "You have to do that, and you're going to do that." She's just the coolest. She was gonna happen. She cast Seth in his first film. I mean, literally. And I think I love doing a film with Seth. He's so good. There's such a reputation around Seth because of Houseplant, and he smokes weed. Haha. Seth probably has the most incredible work ethic of anybody I know. He works so hard.

Well, it's the writing. I mean, he does the other work.

Oh, this guy is just a fiend. I mean, if something's not working, the computer comes up, and he sits down, and he's quiet, and he sits.

He's written thousands of things.

He works and works and works. Yes, he's the best improviser imaginable, and he'll make up a line like, "Next time you're in there, check the rings," on the older partner. Just stuff that puts you on the floor. But you also realize— And then you realize that actually, there's a white piece of paper sitting over on the side that's full of his brainstorming and his lines. And what feels like improvisation often is, but is often the mind of a pro at work. Whether—

are you writing in this moment, or are you writing 30 seconds before, or are you writing 8 seconds before?

What does it matter? That guy is an absolute machine. Well, no, the studio just—

He's also like a cinephile. He's like an encyclopedic film nerd on top of everything else.

But in this, in this, for me, me, and I think Shawna watching it, it was like the studio wasn't enough. If you ever needed more proof, he is such a mature, real, deep-wounded human being in this film. There's pain, there's sourness, there's anger not inflected by comedy. I think of things like Kramer vs. Kramer or Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl. I loved watching him work in this gear. Like, I love—

He's probably like, "My boy's all grown up." Yeah, yeah.

I loved it.

He's a fucking literal mogul.

I do think there's some colors and some depth. Olivia got him to go some places. Don't you think that you should see this movie with another couple? Like, if you're in a relationship, I feel like this is a double date. You should go with another couple, and then you should go after— That's one after work.

And go straight to the Red Room.

Go have a real discussion. Eat a light dinner.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Did you see the Swedish film Force Majeure?

Yes.

Oh yeah, where the guy doesn't go— Yes. One of the most provocative— I've never had better conversations with other couples than after that film.

Yeah, for people who don't know, an avalanche is coming and he gets up and pushes his own family out of the way. Right. He runs. Yeah. And then everyone's fine. The avalanche is fine. And she just can't see him the same after that.

Yeah. Everyone survives. Then he has to just be with his family.

Yeah. And now thinks he's a coward.

I remember a lunch of a couple of couples after we saw that film, and we went around the table, and literally one lady said, I thought the whole thing was a little bit like, what's the big deal? Like, would it really pinwheel like this? And we were all like, wait, so if this happened, she'd be like, I'd roll my eyes. It came around to me and And I was like, if I did that, I would just keep running. Yeah, I would never return to the table because there would be no— there would be no recovery from that. Yeah.

And it strikes our deepest fear that maybe we will be that way in the situation, because you don't know until the avalanche comes. You think you know, it's like Mike Tyson, you have a game plan until—

I don't know, I can stop the avalanche.

I've been in a few avalanche situations, so I found But yes, we all think we'll be one way.

Dax is just lucky that all three of the girls in his family can fit inside him. They would survive in the frozen, concave shell of his enormity.

Now, this goes back to my original thing. The thing I left out about my overarching theories on you, I was thinking maybe meeting Richard Gere on that first movie. Movie and having him— and I don't know if he was or not, I know you have his apartment, so I'm imagining you guys were close— but if he was a mentor at all, he too was a guy who had a real healthy grasp on the career. Was he a mentor guy to you or no?

Richard was great to me. He was kind, he was supportive, he levitated me. I still see him and we have enormous affection for each other just because of that experience. Yeah, yeah. And I ended up living in a place that he built and kept it the same. Yeah, there's We have something— Connection. We have commonalities and connections, and we have this often distant, but some spool of thread. A memory I love with him was that I was so totally unsure whether that was a fluke and was going to be the last gig I ever did while we were doing it, that back in those days, I think you got either $50 or $75 a day per diem. And I was taking that and putting it in an envelope and literally keeping it under the mattress at my crappy little efficiency apartment that I had near the Sunset Marquee. And at some point, At some point, Richard's this phenomenal guitar player, and every day in his trailer, he had a different amazing guitar. And I love guitars, and I was playing. He had a ridiculous guitar collection. Yeah, it was later sold at Sotheby's for millions and millions of dollars.

Wow. Probably one of the biggest private guitar collections in the world at the time. And he said, "What do you got?" I said, "I don't have anything," you know. And he was like, "What? We're going guitar shopping." He took me to this place called Voltage Guitars off Sunset, and I found this 1969 Martin D-35 from the year I was born, and it worked. And I looked at it, and I always remember I remember it was $1,395, and that was even considerable to me at the time. And Richard, he was like, "I like that." He goes, "That's the one." And I was like, "Oh, man, I can't do that." And he goes, "Are you taking your per diem and keeping it in an envelope?" And I said, "Yeah." And he goes, "I'm gonna buy this. You're gonna bring me that envelope of cash tomorrow and give it to me because you only live once." And he was like, "And you're gonna get this guitar." And it sounds silly, it sounds materialistic, everything. It was a nice thing. It was like him saying like, hey, you're going to be fine. Trust yourself. He said something to me like, this won't be your last gig.

Also, he was like, what are you saving it for, rent money? Get this thing. There's going to be a lot of joy in it. It's my favorite guitar I've ever bought still. And I look at it and I'm like, he like launched me into something.

I can't, I can't explain it. No, I can. He said, that phase of your life is over. Yeah, walk into your new phase and walk with your shoulders back. Yeah, I love that.

Me too. Like, this new phase has a abundance.

Okay, my last question. This started with interviewing Gabor Mate. I was walking him out. He's an expert on ADHD. I'm walking to him in his car, and he said, have you ever been tested for ADHD? And I just was like, well, that's an interesting question for an ADHD expert to ask.

Did he say what qualities in you? He didn't.

He just asked, have you been diagnosed with ADHD? And I said, no, I never have.

You weren't like a Ritalin kid?

You didn't— I wasn't on Ritalin. Me neither. Very nice. But then I have since been inundated with the ADHD algorithm on Instagram, and we've now had a couple ADHD experts on, and I have not been formally diagnosed, but I am certain he was dead right to ask that question. And so I have really kind of embraced it. I kind of dig it. I like thinking about the deficits, things I need to work on that are standard for ADHD, and then like these super gifts I get from it, like improving quickly and all that And so, yeah, the dyslexia, the ADHD. It occurred to me, do you think you're neurodivergent at all?

Not in a claimable, nameable way. This is a pet peeve. I may not be right about this, but I feel like Silicon Valley has done a lot of cool things and a lot of really negative things to our society. One of the ones that I find kind of aggravating is what I would call the romanticization of the idea of being on the spectrum. Oh, yeah. You get all these people who are just basically assholes wanting to credit that to them being on the spectrum. It's like, you're not on the spectrum. Shut up. Stop it. Don't casually try to claim as a superpower a thing that for a lot of people is a real thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm on your side about this.

I express that opinion a lot. You do? Yeah.

Also, I think there's a problem with just pathologizing. I'll get to the end road, which is like, to me, they're not actually pathologies. They are words we invented like 25 years ago and we added them to the DSM and we're acting like it means bipedal, like it's a real thing we could measure and observe. I don't think it's that. I think we are getting more and more good at recognizing patterns of behavior in humans. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be a pathology or an ism or some kind of disease. But I do think it's true that there are a lot of different patterns of human behavior. And when people express these certain patterns, we can kind of predict some of the pitfalls ahead for them. Them and predict probably some of the things that'll come easy to them. It's like, that's all okay to just go like, I trend towards this, and yeah, that makes sense. And it's like, I don't need treatment. I'm not making an excuse for anything. I'm just like, oh, I think I'm in this pattern of people.

I tend to agree. That's how I would describe myself. I wouldn't even go near calling myself neurodivergent at all. Watching something like Love on the Spectrum, the most beautiful, wonderful show. Yeah, I love it. I love the celebration of it. I love that while both observe serving people with real divergence, real conditions, whatever, just saying the universality of love, of relationships. It's just so great. When I hear someone like the one guy named Dylan, who he'll say things and he just says "per se" a lot at the end. For the next week, my family was like, "Shut up. Stop saying 'per se.'" It was funny the first 5 times.

You have the mimic thing, but you also have some savant-like qualities. I watched you recite the Walt Whitman poem on Colbert. Yes. Which was incredible. No thanks. Very low percentage of the population can do something like that.

That's a funny observation.

I'll depersonalize it really quick. I'm friends with Phineas now. Do you know Phineas? Billie Eilish's brother?

Brother?

Yeah. He's one of the most special guys in the world. You would fall in love with him. He's 28, and I'm like, how is this guy not 51? He's definitely 51, maybe 58. He's definitely wiser than me. He's smarter. I'll bring up a thing and he'll just go like, oh yeah, that was October 20th. And I go, Uh-huh. And you know people can't do that, right? Like, people don't know what date you did mundane things on.

We just had Jack McBrayer on. Oh my God, he can name the dates of anything that happened. He's like, oh yeah, March 12th.

Again, not to pathologize it, but I saw on 60 Minutes that people with super memory are also really high trending for OCD, and they all had really organized closets. So I say to Jack McBrayer, with this— he's displaying this impossible memory. And I said, what's your closet look like? And he goes, oh my God, you would love it. It's a dream. Everything's color coordinated, right? It's just like, yeah, that's a pattern of human behavior that's fascinating.

You had someone talking about obsessive compulsive disorder and how poorly people understand what it really even means. I thought that was great because I think OCD is another thing lots of people just like to say, throw out.

I'm a neat freak.

Yeah, I'm a neat freak. Yeah, etc. I think there is an interesting connection between between hyper-retentive memory, which I definitely have. But by the way, so does my dad. I don't want to credit it as something. I have a very strong and precise memory to the point where I can say most of the lines of the movies I've been in. Right. And if I watch a film with a lot of focus, if there's a film I loved and I've watched it with focus, I have a lot of it. A lot locked in. The thing I've been interested in, to your point, never tested for in any way, is I know for sure with me a photographic memory is eidetic. I think it's called being eidetic. With me, it's completely auditory. If I hear something— yeah, with focus, music or words— I have it, or I pretty close to have it. When I learn lines, I learn them by saying them out loud. Once I've said them out loud, I've pretty much got it. There's an interesting connection for me between the auditory and the memory retention.

Now, I would imagine that could create tension in relationships. I have it to a lesser degree than you, but I also—

memory of things is right.

I don't have it to the degree to which you have it, but I also have a very high degree as well. You're arguing with your wife and you're like, yeah, we weren't at the grocery— it's kind of maddening. And then you have to really zoom back and go like, oh right, we're not arguing about whether or not it was at the grocery store or what was this sentence. This is not— we're talking about an emotion she has that I have the ability to potentially alleviate or help. But I have to step over a lot of— no, we weren't even in Michigan when that— you know, no memory. Yes, here's the spectrum. It's like she's on the far left, I'm like two-thirds, and you're at the far right.

Shawna, if you're listening, you know what's great about that is that Kristen acknowledges that she has— she does, she does, she does. No, I'm kidding.

But have you had to learn? I've had to learn, oh, right, that's not what's important right now when we're talking.

The impulse to correct because your brain says, that's asynchronous with what I know to be my memory of the truth. But in The Invite, the thing that Penelope says that was provoked by Seth's improvisation, right? Uh-huh. Led to this thing, which is, Penelope and I have known each other a long time. And Penelope and Salma Hayek, and we all go way back. And the thing where I correct her English. Oh, yeah. Penelope and I had talked about, in her life and relationships, and when she did, I was like, "What if we put that in?" Like, you know what I mean? We put that in. I love the moment where I correct her and step into such deep shame.

A minefield, yeah.

The look on her face. Didn't your whole body go, "Oh, he's done it now." Yeah, yeah.

But back to the question you were asking. That's a great one. Have you had to learn to go, "Oh, that's not what's important right now"? I think that takes some practice.

Sure. Oh my God, yeah. I mean, my father was a litigator. My father was a US attorney. I grew up sitting in the back of courtrooms listening to my dad cross-examine and dissect people, and I'm really good at it. You know what I mean? So someone who doesn't just think, but does remember things perfectly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Combined with the litigator. Gators thing is awful. Yeah, Esther has definitely given me some tips how to function more peacefully in your life.

I think kids help teach you that really well, for sure.

Yours and mine are moving into teen.

I do need to say this out loud, we probably already have, but it's probably like one of the cutest things that's ever happened to us, is we— either you invited us to lunch or we invited you to lunch at this vegan restaurant, and we've both hidden our ultrasound photos in our menu. Yeah, that's impossible to announce to each other. We're same due date. Yeah, same due date. Due date. That was an out-of-body experience.

And let's remind people that Shauna introduced you and Kristen. Yes, right. Set you guys up. Yep. So we felt invested in you guys. Yeah. You put the ultrasound in the menu and you said, you know, we really like this place and I think we're gonna have this. Uh, and you turned it around and we went, oh, that's funny, we're ordering the same thing. And we turned ours around. This is an impossible moment. I remember you going, no, you were like, fucking kidding me.

Yeah, it feels like Simbro.

But then remember we looked at the due date, the— and the due dates were the same. Yeah, that is so—

I know, crazy. We don't give that enough credit. That was an otherworldly occurrence that happened.

I think so much so that you and I just wanted to go out and get a burger. Yeah, yeah, I think we were like, fuck out of this vegan restaurant. We were like, let's get a burger. We've got children on the way. Exactly. When And I think about things that, like, I know you've talked about this a lot, like your dad down to you, and I don't know if it's cultural shift or psychological shift or whatever, but I do feel this thing that's really been landing for me lately is the thing you can do for a kid is actually just model for them what it looks like to be an adult who listens, who asks a lot of questions, and has control of their own emotions. It's not that there's no boundaries, it's not anything, but that whole idea of of just modeling more than telling is revelatory to me.

We grew up in a generation where it's like the parents were saying one thing, and you were observing them actively doing the opposite as they were telling you, and it just didn't mean anything.

Yeah. It's really wild, but it all circles back to some of what we're talking about, about creativity, about a great process with Olivia. Penelope and Seth and me and Olivia have all been doing this a pretty long time. And one of the things I think makes maybe allowed that to work like that was getting to this place where you go, "I'm gonna make myself available. I'm not gonna come in with a predisposition, and I'm not gonna try to overcontrol or direct with my determinations or my instincts or my certainties the way this is gonna go." And that the lighter I hold it and the more available available, I make myself to something someone else says, or to, "Okay, that's not what I thought was coming, but what do I do with what came?" In a weird way, the happier you are—

This is like aging, right? I'm young and I read The Fountainhead, and I'm like, "Yeah, I wanna be like Howard Roark." Mm-hmm. Just whatever opinion I have, I wanna believe in it. I don't care what anyone says, and I'm gonna execute. And that was so appealing as a young man. And now as an older man, older man, I think I used to get horny for conviction, and now I'm like so horny for humility. Humility is like the most powerful, crazy thing. It's not appealing when you're a young man, but I think as you get older, it gets more and more appealing. And like, all you're saying about that process is you, like, you walk in with the humility that maybe someone else has a better grasp of this, or maybe someone else has a different angle that's also valid that might be more interesting, or even that none of you know, and that the collision is gonna reveal that the uncertainty is a state in which something interesting and true might happen.

And that if it does, and you make yourself available to it, all these other things will rise up that are better than your predispositions toward something. It all sounds corny, but what you're describing is youthful creativity is often a flex.

Well, you're trying to define yourself.

And maybe if you're lucky and you get to keep being creative, you get to the place where it's more discovery than it is flex.

Yeah, you said something that's really beautiful and profound, and it is that you were kind of asked about happiness. I can't remember the specifics of the question, but you were basically like, I try not to actually think about or pursue happiness. I'm more interested interested in just expansion. I would replace happiness with expansion, and I would replace sadness or unhappiness with constriction. And I think those are great things to swap out.

When you're younger too, it's in some weird way, you feel like if someone has a different idea, it feels like you're not getting an A on your homework. Mm-hmm. And you end up probably with more people who you leave each other feeling a little bruised instead of leaving each other feeling feeling like you lifted each other higher.

Yeah, you both went somewhere you'd not been before.

It's nice to arrive in that place, for sure. Yeah, you don't have much of an ego.

I've noticed that over all the times we've had you, especially for someone as talented and could walk around with, like, "I have all the answers," 'cause you've proven to in a lot of spaces. And you're doing all these other cool things, like The Barge. You could, but you don't walk in with that air. Air, which is very impressive, I will say. It doesn't appear you have much of an ego anyway.

It's hard not to have— and that's humility, but I mean, I just think the scale of what's taking place in the world right now, the scale of the challenges, the scale of the assault of, you know, the awareness and information about cataclysm and violence and brutality in every corner— I think we're in a very brutal age right now. We're overwhelmed.

Sure, we can put you in your place.

Yeah, in me it sounds really trite, but it's like, how when you have Gaza being livestreamed and then get off on your achievements.

Yeah, self-important, you know what I mean? But also you see the Gaza thing and then you swipe up and then it's a guy jumping an old car over a river and then you're laughing and then you go to the next page and it's like some heartfelt reunion with a soul. Oh my God. I mean, the ride you're on is insane for your nervous system. It's so schizophrenic and unhealthy.

I often rely on the things you send me about someone in a powerboat doing something stupid. Sure, I'm curating that so that I can go to bed on that versus the rest. Keep them coming.

Oh, well, Edward, this has been lovely. The Invite is fucking phenomenal. I hope it takes the world by storm. You guys are also good. Again, I'll just repeat it, it's Valentino on a motorcycle watching Edward do this monologue. Date movie of the summer. Yeah, could end in a lot of different ways. So June 26th, everyone check out The Thank you for the invite. I adore you. Thank you. And I can't wait to do it again. Love it.

Stay tuned for the Fact Check.

It's where the party's at.

Last banter for the summer.

Last banter. Uh-oh. Careful, little girl. I know you think you're out for school.

Listen, my arms— I woke up this morning and I was like, why am I sore? Oh, did something happen in the night? What happened? I tried to lift you up yesterday.

Oh my God, your arms are sore from that? Yes. Oh no, that's not a great sign.

I know. Wow. I know.

What if that is your new workout routine? You had to try to lift me up 3 times.

I mean, that's easy. That only 3 sets. It only took— only took a couple.

Yeah, it was a quick workout to get the burn the next day. It was. I do not say this in a boohoo way. No, we're not going to complain. I'm not complaining. I'm just going to say that we have been trucking through, but yesterday we finished and I was getting out of the hot tub and I kept like— my eye was getting blurry on the right side and I kept going like, why is my eye blurry on the right side? And I would wipe it, I would wipe it, and then it would get like kind of better. And I'm like, I'm gonna go upstairs and look in the magnifying mirror. And so I went and looked in the magnifying mirror, and when I pulled my eyelid down, Monica, there was this dye in there the size of like— what's the biggest kind of pea? Is it a snow pea? Like an edamame pea? Yeah, edamame pea. Yeah, it was edamame pea. I don't know how I wasn't feeling it, and it was just just hemorrhaging. It was nasty. It was just oozing. Yeah, I know, it's terrible to say. Yeah, no one wants to hear about that.

No, it's terrible. But I was like, oh, this is— well, that's a sign.

It's a sign.

I'm just so curious why styes are such a direct stress-related— not for me. I've never had one. I've never gotten them. Do you get them, Wop? No, not really. Lucky you guys, we don't get styes. My mom used to say— I remember when she was a When I was a kid, she would have to get hers lanced. It'd be like a big ordeal. And she is famous for saying if she just sees somebody with a stye, she'll get one. Oh, that seems curious.

Seems a little— oh, you know what, we don't call Laura a liar, but I'm not going to call her anything.

But we must acknowledge she is Munchausen.

She exaggerates. Listen, speaking of Munchausen, Okay, I watched—

we weren't speaking of Munchausen's, but we were. I just said it. You just go, Munchausen's, speaking of Munchausen's.

No, I didn't. I said she has it. I was kidding. Yeah, don't hurt me. I watched that doc last night. Oh, you did? Yeah.

Okay, what's it called? Mother—

it's called Maternal Instincts or something. That's a— it's a horror— it's a good name and a horrible name, guys. Like, I hate to say watch it, but I think like watch it. Even though it's disturbing. It's so disturbing. It is. You know what I liked about it? It was short. Of course. I really loved that about it.

Yeah, you know, that's the first criteria. Yeah, yeah, the shorter the better. Are you excited? Like, the moment I normally feel screwed— are you excited? Like, you'll be watching a show, it's a comedy, so generally the episodes are going to be like 30 minutes-ish, and then you turn on the episode and you see you see it's like 19 or 20 minutes and you're like— I'm like, fuck you, you can't give me an 18-minute episode. Are you like, oh, this is gonna be a good one? Like, oh, it's like 3 minutes too long.

Okay, 15 is ideal.

No, well, you must love short content, and maybe that's what's happening.

No, no, it's not. I, I like a full-size show or movie, but if it's a 20-something minute show, like, Nobody Wants This has short episodes, and I like that because then I just keep going. Okay, just watch it all in one, one sitting, which I enjoy doing. Yeah, which is— I've been meaning to bring something up for a while, all year. Okay, not all year, a couple months. Okay, have you noticed I've been wearing this necklace a lot?

Uh-huh.

Yeah, for the listener, it is a gold necklace. It has like— they look like rice shapes. They do. Um, they're diamonds diamond in an oval— diamond— oh, diamond in a diamond shape, rice shape. Um, there's 11 of them. This necklace was sent to me. It is called an 11:11 necklace.

Oh, because someone gifted that to you because you love 11?

Yes, because I'm obsessed with 11:11, and it stands for 11 wishes. So I don't really have to look out for 11:11 anymore because I already have it at all times.

So did you model out how many years left you you have on planet Earth and try to figure out what your schedule for wishes will be. If you have 11, let's say you have 60 years left, that would be one every 6 years. No, I didn't do that. Or if you had 66—

this means I always have wishes.

Okay, so you're just not using them, you're kind of stockpiling them, waiting for emergency?

No, it's like this whole thing represents abundant wishes, not 11. Like, it just It's just like good luck. Okay, I got you. You know, it's just good luck. And the jeweler is called Devin Woodhill Jewelry. Okay. And I really love it. It's very dainty, which I like dainty jewelry. Uh-huh. And you're just walking around with good luck.

Yeah, and have you felt like your luck has improved since you started wearing it? Yeah. Yeah, big time? Yeah. Yeah, a lot of great luck?

I still look at, I still just see 11:11 all the time. It's so crazy. Cool.

But now how do you feel since you don't need it anymore?

I still love it.

You still love it? Okay, good. And I feel like— because I wouldn't want this necklace to end an era over— it doesn't.

It just adds. It didn't end, it adds.

Okay, now if you had 11 wishes, uh-huh, what would be your approach? My strategy? Yeah, cuz I might think, okay, I have 50 years left, uh-huh, um, so I get to use one every 9 years or whatever it would be. Yeah, but I'm a hoarder by nature. Right. Like, you know, you get points when you use your American Express. Yeah. I've never spent a single one of the points. It drives everyone in my life crazy. Yeah. And I'm just like, yeah, if I have no other money ever, I'll at least have some of those points I can cash in.

That's such a ding, ding, ding. I, for the first time, used points.

You did? For your flights?

Actually, not American Express. American Express, I used Delta miles, Delta points.

Okay. And was it— how did you get a free ticket out of it? Uh, yeah, I've had underwhelming experiences, not Delta specifically, but when I've tried to cash in airline points. Yeah, I remember back in the day when I traveled nonstop for car shows and I had a lot of points, and they told you like, oh yeah, 20,000 points, you get flight. Well, every single time I ever tried to book a flight, it was like, oh, it's blackout, so it's really 40,000 or it's 60,000. And a couple times I used them, it was like, it was 5x of what they tell you it's going to be.

It's a lot of points. It's a lot of points, but it's a lot of money. Yeah. So, uh, it saved me a lot of money. So you got—

you did points plus add? I think I did.

I think I did. Okay.

I don't know. Julie helped me. Okay. I don't know Julie.

Julie is Max's mom. Shout out Max's mom Julie. She does listen to this show often. Um, is she a traveler? Travel agent? She is.

Oh wow. And you're using a travel agent?

Well, I— she helps me sometimes and it's really nice because like I don't know how to do any of this. I don't know how to use points. That's part of why I don't use them, right?

Yeah. I think that's what they're counting on.

Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, nope. I mean, Julie knows.

Do you imagine those first— so they bring in an expert certainly, and then they pitch the board or whatever the higher-ups are and they go, okay, we're— here's what we're here to pitch. We'd like to start this this points program. Yeah. And every 20,000 points, people get a free plane ticket. And then the people there go like, well, shit, if you divide that up, we're going to be given around. And they go, well, here's the good news. 21% of these people will hoard them and die with the points. That's right. That Ax Shepherd types. I think it's more than 21%. Probably. I'm just— this is the number. Sure. And then they go, and then 36% of people will never be able to figure out how to use the points. Oh, the moniker. So now we're down to like, you know, this was a part of their initial pitch. So like what we've modeled out is really only about 11%. Of people will be actually cashing these in. Yes. So that's why it's this.

Yeah, but they need to watch out for like the— so we've discussed the Dax Shepard types, the Monica Padman types, but then there's also the Elizabeth Lame types. She's totally hacked points. She's like, she knows how to do it. Kristen Wilde, she is like, she pays $0.

It's crazy. Kristen too, it's like you convert these points into those points, and then on this month you convert those points to these these points and there's— yeah, so yeah, there's some people have mastered it. I mean, I don't even know. I cancel flights sometimes and they don't refund the money, they give me a credit, and I don't know how to ever re— they don't give you like, here's a number to type in that will activate your credit. It's just like, you have a credit, good luck figuring out how to cash it in.

No, if you go to your, your app, it's there.

My app? You have an app for all your airlines?

Just Delta. Delta is my, my, my Maine.

Yeah, because of Delta One.

But those expire too.

Because of Delta, your daughter—

they expire when? Credits usually expire within like a year or two.

Yeah, it's like a year, 2 years or something.

Your airline points expire now?

No, no, no, your credits from a canceled flight.

Oh yeah, which I did with— I don't know how to use this.

That's why you need to go get your Delta app, put your thingy in, your number, and, um, it'll, it'll— it's actually very easy to use on the app. You can just like say like pay with credit. Oh wow. Yeah, it's cool. I have have done that.

Great. I mean, your daughter's named after the dang airline, and every time she flies in, I'm waiting to see, because 100% of the times we fly, when we check in and they read the things, they always comment on that it's the same name as the airline. Yeah. And she has liked that a lot as a kid. It's exciting. It's more attention. Of course. But she's getting older, and I know it'll— it won't be fun, like when she's 24 and they're like, oh, you're flying, and She'll be like, yeah, man, I've heard this every time I've flown since I was—

so do you think she's going to start going by Dee Dee?

Or what if she just refused to fly Delta so they can't? But then what if she was checking in at American Airlines and like, wouldn't you be more comfortable on Delta? And she's like, fuck, man. Okay, I'm going to go back to Delta. Oh, shit.

There's a lot.

There's a lot to think about. But I'm waiting. It hasn't happened, thank God. But I know it's coming where it'll change from excitement for the attention to annoyed. Yeah. And I'm just clocking that. Okay. And who knows, we have some flights coming up. This could be the time.

Let me know. Okay. But you won't be able to let me know. We gotta, you have to, you have to write it down and save it for later because as a reminder, we don't have fact checks for the next little bit, guys. Get excited. It's rerun time. It's Block Party Summer. Do you remember Block Party Summer?

No, tell me about it.

It was on Nickelodeon. Okay. Okay, um, I used to— when I, uh, stayed with my grandparents in Savannah, there was Block Party Summer on Nickelodeon. So Mondays was Bewitched, and then it would be all night Bewitched marathon. Then it was I Dream of Jeannie, and it was Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I watched all of it and I loved it.

Do you wish you were a kid again?

Do I wish? You were just—

you were just watching watching the children play in the backyard last week, and you had great envy of the carefree nature of their play. Well, and then this story, and just the way— there's a look on your face when you talk about being a little kid. I'm a nostalgic gal. I know, but would you like to be a little kid again?

I don't think so, because there are a lot of things I like a lot about being an adult. I don't want to give those up, right? And it's one or the other. You don't get both. Well, We— you just told me that someone, some human, the first human is trying the epigenome anti-aging, anti-aging treatment protocol. Protocol. Yeah. And so we were discussing this. What age would we go back to? Yeah. And then we said maybe it'd be fun if I went back to being like 4.

Right. But you still have the same position and just a higher voice. Yeah.

Same brain, my same brain, and, um, my same knowledge, but I was a little 4-year-old looking girl.

Yeah, it would probably— it would reduce stress between us.

Yeah, cuz you would never be able to get mad at me.

It would be impossible. And I would just like— I would chalk up whatever you're doing, like, oh, she's a kid, the way I'm able to write off insane behavior in my house because I'm like, yeah, they're kids.

But that actually— okay, that's going to get complicated because I'm going to be like, I am not— stop treating me like a child. Well, but you are a child.

I got to help you into this car, and I got to pick you up, then I got to grab everything for you.

I only look 4, but I am 38.

All this stuff kids can't do. You can't get your mittens on.

Yeah, I think—

oh my God, we're going to have to go over every morning and fucking get you ready for your job.

But I'm also going to be texting you, why are you late. We need to start the day. Come get my clothes on now.

And you can't reach, you can't cook yourself eggs, you know, you would need a caretaker.

Oh, and who?

Like, maybe Joshua or Connor could do— steps and stools everywhere around your house.

Okay, now this would get tricky sexually. Tell me. Yeah, cuz like, anyone I want to have sex with is not a pedophile.

They have to be a pedophile. Like, on your, on your dating you have who you're looking for. Handsome, financially secure pedophile. Funny. Smart.

No, listen, it's not a laughing matter.

It's a laughing joke when we think about your miniature in 4 and still want to date Sean Penn.

I'm just me, but miniature.

Yeah, you have your same mental needs.

Yeah, and I have my— and I have physical needs, like I need met. You need food. No, no, I mean like— sexually. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I'm still attracted to the same people I'm attracted to, but they're not pedophiles. So this is gonna get complex because even if they're attracted to my brain, how will they, like, they can't have sex with a 4-year-old body. No.

Yeah. They just can't. They can't. It's a, it's a, if you thought the dating scene was challenging currently with you being 4, it's gonna really be impossible. 4-year-old body.

Let's I don't want to say I'm 4 because I'm not 4.

Yeah, I think a more, a more blurry hypothetical.

You don't think this one's blurry? No, this is black and white because they just can't.

You're 4. What if you go to 17?

Oh no, that's even worse for some reason.

Well, that's why I'm— yeah, steering our vessel into those choppy waters because that's way more complicated.

No, but you know what's interesting? So it's a 17-year-old body Yeah, 40-year-old mind. But so what, what, unless I'm wrong, but I don't think I'm wrong based on my life experience, I don't look my current age. Right. I look younger.

Okay. Yeah.

So if I just looked 17, I mean, it'd just be like if I currently looked 17 instead of whatever everyone thinks I look like, which often is young.

Yeah.

Quite young. Yeah. Um, so I think that would be fine because I am 38 in this scenario, right? Is that what happens?

It's 1,000% fine because the entire spirit and intention of these laws is that a young mind that doesn't understand what they're getting into or how they're being manipulated would be taken advantage of. Exactly. And a non-sexual being would be asked to participate in sexuality with an older person. That's power dynamic. But that's 100% about the brain. Exactly. Yeah. Your body can handle it long before we acknowledge you can handle it mentally. So we already know what the goal is. So, yes, there's nothing at risk. There's no victimization on the table. Yeah. So, but the man who's able to be aroused by a 4-year-old is sick. It immediately takes it back to the zone. So what's 8.

See, this is tricky.

That's why I was trying to steer us into 17.

17 feels— if I looked like I looked when I was 17, but it's me now, yeah, um, that's fine for— to me. I also get to decide.

What about the guy though? What's about how— because we know how we feel about the guy that was able to perform with a 4-year-old. That's, that's a non-starter.

Actually, you could trap— you could like rap.

They would on those hard copy shows and stuff. That's what they would do.

I'm going to do that when I get 4.

Okay, weird use of your— I think it's helpful.

It's like doing good. Okay. Okay.

Now, what do we think of the guy who's willing to be with 17-year-old body, you with 38-year-old brain? I think that's—

I think they're fine. Yeah, I looked really good. I looked good. I don't I don't look that different than I looked when I was 17.

We had a version of this hypothetical. It was very similar to a hypothetical we had years ago, which is this thing I thought of, which is when I was in high school, my girlfriends and I had some nude photos in high school.

You mean exchanging? What do you mean you had nude photos?

Yeah, we had like taken photos.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't do that, kids. Just especially in this digital age, do not do do that.

Well, they're gonna do exactly what they're gonna—

No, you can say like, that's— you can say be careful. Oh sure, sure, because these things get out. I'm just not naive. I think, I think a lot of kids these days know not to do that.

I'm just saying we were doing it with really shitty technology and the risk of having to go get them developed in the town pharmacy, you know. You had to go drop your film off.

Yeah, fucking— I know, but that's way, way easier to keep wrapped up than the digital age sending.

Obviously there's an infinite distribution of the other cloud. What I'm saying though is there was a bunch of hurdles and risky hurdles. Yeah, but we still did it because we wanted to do it so much. So I'm only being— I think I'm trying to be realistic about whether or not people take that warning, but that doesn't matter. The hypothetical is, so let's say I have these photos, and let's say Kristen had taken photos with her boyfriend when she was 16. Oh yeah, we're both just chatting about this, and then we both have photos of each other when we were minors. Is it—

is it bad?

What do we feel about each person wanting to see those? Well, how old are you? Let's say I'm— let's say 15 and 15, because that's below age of consent everywhere.

Yeah, and 15 to me is— we know children who are older than that. Yeah.

I'm just— it's so curious because again, there can't be a victim because that person's now free. We can't say can't because—

because I can't be a victim, um, because I'm now 51.

That boy that could have been a victim doesn't even exist.

Well, it's— it still can be violating if a pedophile is using your pictures from when you were young to like get off.

That's right, a pedophile would be concerning and we would No, like, there's not an ethical debate there, right?

That— but I'm saying you can still be a victim.

Two consenting adults who— I go, no, I don't care at all if you look at the picture of me when I was 15 naked. So you have my consent, and I'm the person in the photo, and the person in the photo is no longer a minor and can't be victimized, right? So there's— there can't be a victim in this scenario. Okay, what are the— yeah, what's the morality of that?

Doesn't mean that there's not going to be judgment of the person who wants to see a 15-year-old sexually.

Like, so what makes I think this situation good is like, we know each other as adults and we make— the two adults make a decision. So this guy knows you're 38, you're dating. This guy knows that you, Monica, are 38 from your brain. Yes. But you've made your body 17, right? But he knows he's talking to a 38-year-old with full autonomy.

But that's different because then he does get the full me. He gets a 38-year-old conversation and interaction and brain. If it's just a picture, that's not— they are, they are getting off on a child.

Uh, well, not a their wife as a child or their husband as a child.

That's still a child. Like, the picture is, is what they're looking at and liking. And so yeah, that is— I, I would be creeped out for sure if anyone that liked— I thought it was— that was jacking off to a picture of me, your husband, when I was a kid. Yeah, yeah, I would, I would be like, that's a, that's a kid though. Like, it's clearly a kid. And I'm 17. And I—

and this is so predictably gendered— I would be flattered. Like, it would only— it would only— I'd only like it. Yeah, that's just—

it might not be gendered because we also know men who've been— who don't— who— it's you, you. We all— we can speak for is you and me.

Yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'm saying, um, but I want to be clear, I'm saying If my partner was enjoying looking at me. Yeah, yeah. I would be flattered by that. I know.

I'm just saying you're speaking for you, Dax. I'm speaking for me, Monica, of what I would find creepy and what you would find creepy. Anyway, so I, I think it's a fine line of age.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. The only reason that this conversation isn't just shockingly, um, indulgent— this is actually a weird possibility. Yeah, this isn't totally— so just, I'm gonna explain it for one second. Yeah. Okay, so, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna make some mistakes here. I'm gonna do the best I can though. I'm sure that some geneticists will hit me in the comments. But in general, what's confusing about aging is your DNA stays unchanged. Your DNA is your DNA, right? And then your DNA, your cells replicate through mitosis and they make an identical copy to the strand of DNA that it originated as. And so the question is, if it's making identical copies all the time, how on earth does aging even happen? Why do your cells look so different at 70 than they did at 30. So what the scientists— the— oh, it's called the Yakamura property, whatever. Um, the scientists discovered that in mice, what really is going on with aging is that although your DNA stays identical the whole time, your epigenome on top, the layer on top that's deciding which of, uh, the genes it wants to turn on and off of the DNA strand, they accumulate all kinds of damage along the way.

And that, that's actually what aging is, is the epigenome accumulating all these different errors that then start turning your DNA on and off in a different way than they did when you were younger. So they have figured out in these mice how to cut out the epigenome back, prune it back to before the errors occurred. And when they first did it, they took the epigenome back so far that the mice died because they immediately got young and then their organs continued to grow as if they were in infants. So then they had to fine-tune just cutting off the right amount of the epigenome. And then they, they've done that. They, they can take a mouse and take it to whatever age they decide, which is—

it's wild.

It's mind-blowing. And so they have just now started the first human trial. So it is sincerely conceivable that people at some point in the not too distant future will be picking what physiological age they want to be.

Yeah. But I just, I also don't see how you, if you're going back though, how, why you wouldn't also go back to like, your brain wouldn't be as developed either though, right? Like if you're literally going back.

But your brain doesn't go through mitosis. That's what's unique about your gray cells that are in your brain is they are just, you have them and then they're dying, but they're not going through that same process. So that's why they're not accumulating. Accumulating the same issues. But yeah, so your brain would— wouldn't be affected by your cells going back. You're not losing memories or identity or any of that stuff. This is fucking wild.

It's wild. You're gonna see me out there as a little 4-year-old.

So when you see two 18-year-olds together, they might be 71 and 73.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's crazy.

It's crazy. I mean, so that's the thing. I guess the point is, if you go back to 17, the dude you like is also going to go back to 17. So now he's got two 17-year-olds with 40-year-old brains that are fucking. There's really nothing to think about, right?

That's true. Or I don't think a lot of guys should go back to 17, if I'm being honest.

No, I look way worse.

I gotta really think the best age for a lot of men.

But no, you have your frontal lobe. 18, uh, 17 with a frontal lobe.

No, I'm saying physically. Oh yeah. Um, yeah, it'll be interesting. And then it'll be tricky in some relationships because they'll be like, could you just go back to being— could you like please be 18 or 20? Just love the way you were when you were 20 and the way you looked. And then and they're like, fuck you. Yeah.

Well, you could see people the same way that, like, plastic surgery is a slippery slope. Slippery. It's a very, very slippery slope. Everyone knows this. You could go like, I'm going to go back to 29. And you go back to 29 and you're like, I don't feel as good as I thought I was going to feel.

Blah, blah, blah.

I got it wrong. I should go to 27. And you can see someone just getting caught in the game.

That's how you end up as a 4-year-old. Yeah. That's how you end up. You know, if I— no, I would go back to being the baby in the picture.

Picture? Uh-huh.

She's how old? One? Yeah.

Can she talk?

See, this is where—

oh yeah, that would be— that's actually horrifying. No, I think you would be able to because you've already created all the circuitry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you would be able to talk. I mean, that's what would be so freaky is if you went back to 6 months old and you were like, where's my— where's my microphone? Lift me up! And I'm telling you, I've— you're going to want to use those things. Like, I've already designed how you guys are going to get me over there.

Yeah, if I was the age— or too bad you can't do it for just like a day, you know, because then it's like be a baby for a day. Yeah, just for a day you get to like— I want— or do you want someone to feel bad for you? You just be a baby.

I think Aaron and I would love to take the little girl in the dress out for some ice cream.

Yeah, exactly. But I still like sushi. Like, I, I'm still gonna like sushi. I'm still gonna like—

could you get enough of it? 38-year-old—

oh no, No, probably though. My taste buds will not have been developed. You won't be able to drink. Why?

Because how do they know if you're really 21? Well, you know, I'd have to have—

there'd have to be a way to prove. Well, then I'm not doing it.

Yeah, you would never go before 21.

No, no, you— in this world, you're able to prove your age, right?

Well, that's the trick. You have your old license, right? And then you hold it up and it's like, that's what— that, that's you in 35 years? Like, yes, you're trying to like—

no, I think they know based on my conversation with them. Okay, because I'll be speaking— ask me what happened in 1991.

Yeah, and I'm only 1 year old. You're right, they'll have to be some kind of really sophisticated age system where you can demonstrate your age, your actual age. Yes, but then again, we don't want a 16-year-old— I know— who can't prove she's not 40.

Exactly. That's why things are— this is going to be hard, but I I, I actually wouldn't like sushi because my taste buds wouldn't have been developed yet. Like, my brain would be developed but not my taste buds, right?

I don't know, just do you think— I know for me, I know it'll be like taking a sheet off of my face. Like, I know my eyesight was so much better. The first thing I would notice is like, oh damn, we can see! And I wonder like how much of my hearing I would notice is back, and my taste buds, right? They definitely taste way less than I did.

Oh wait, taste buds begin forming in the womb around week 8 of pregnancy and are fully developed and connected to the brain by week 16. Oh, so you get your full taste buds before you're even born?

You get most everything, then you just gotta figure out how to use it all. Oh God.

In middle age, around 40 years old, the regeneration rate begins to slow, leading to a gradual decline kind of the sense of taste over time.

Yeah, I'm 11 years into that journey, Monica.

Now, do you think it would be unethical when I'm one looking— um, one looking— one looking— that I would get an egg retrieval? Because I'm actually 38 in my brain.

Yeah, but you no longer need egg retrieval. Oh boy. No, I wonder if the eggs more in line with the brain. I don't know if you're— they would go back. I just think it's whatever cells are reproducing, start reproducing into those. Yeah. Huh, interesting. Yeah, that's the weird—

do you think it would be unethical to get, um, to freeze a 1-year-old's eggs?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, quite, quite unethical and unnecessary. Because they're not—

well, I wish I had my 1-year-old eggs now.

You could have waited— well, waiting— you could have waited until 18.

Those eggs would be just fine. I just— the 1-year-old is when you have the— you have so many. Yep. And like, you can spare a lot. Yeah. When you're 1. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's because they don't have the choice.

I mean, look, I'm in a tricky situation where I guess— I guess there were news articles when I said that I would get my daughter's eggs retrieved.

You would pay is what you said. That's the thing. You weren't saying you're making them.

But no, yeah, I didn't say I was making them. And also, when they're an adult, the people inferred I meant as children. And I just want to be— that's why I want to be dreadfully clear that I don't believe in harvesting eggs in minors.

I don't know if I agree.

And that's great. I You shouldn't.

You have the freedom to not. I'm not saying that I, I'm not saying yes or no, but I think there's more to think about being on, being at the age where I like did it twice. It wasn't great. I desperately wish I had just like 80 eggs. Mm-hmm. Um, that were young and mature.

Ooh, young and mature.

That's how, that's what we're talking about. Ding, ding, ding.

That's what we're talking about. Young and mature.

Wow. It's true. I would definitely go back and do it, do it at age 1 and get 80, and no one would even— I wouldn't even notice, right? Only in this scenario because I'm a 38-year-old giving consent. That's the ish. A 1-year-old can't give consent. They can't. That's why it needs to be 18 or above. I agree, I agree. Ethically, yeah.

Um, but if you could time travel, you would kidnap yourself for a day, get all the eggs out when I was one, and return her to her bassinet. Yeah, no one, none the wiser. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just goes to illustrate how tiny the eggs are when you think all of them can be in a baby and it's not like protruding out of their stomach, you know? You know, it's also like, how tiny are these damn eggs? Because I'm thinking the immediate issue with your plan is the instruments, right? Everything that's involved with egg retrieval is not going to work with a 1-year-old. But then I was thinking, but those eggs— it's crazy, those eggs are the same size.

They are. I know. Well, they would just use a smaller speculum. Yeah, I don't love the idea. No, it's not a good thought. Here's the thing, the things you would do to your own body— this is also fascinating— like, the things I would do to my own 1-year-old body— yes— is obviously I would never— like, yeah, the idea of any other 1-year-old having like a tiny, tiny speck. Like, no. Yeah.

And I feel great about anyone looking at photos of me as a minor, but that's someone else. Um, but I wouldn't say that for anyone else. No, I'm bonding with you right now. I know, but I'm— so I have that opinion for me, but that's not my policy for everyone else. Well, that's different.

But, um, it's not though, because that involves— this only— the whole thing is me. Yeah. 1-year-old me, 38-year-old me, it's all me.

No Doctors that have to get involved. Oh, they're also one. Oh, Jesus. Okay, then nope. So it's not like a procedure thrown up.

Well, look, I mean, also doctors perform stuff on babies. I know. And like hard stuff if they have to do it.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not saying it couldn't be done. I'm just saying currently—

and I would have little Valentino and Liberty next to me for the procedure. I would get so many eggs. Yeah, my current 38-year-old self would feel so free. Yeah, so free. Yeah. Huh, interesting, interesting. All right, well, wow, great last Fact Check before summer break. Cancelable almost, perhaps.

Now it'll go like, no wonder they took a break, they were in a nosedive. They were gonna definitely get canceled.

No, no, we're, we're doing great. We just want a little break, so we're taking a little one.

But we are a little slap happy as well. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.

Um, episodes will continue. Oh yeah, uninterrupted. New episodes, new guests. It's just the fact checks will be reruns. And I do hope you'll re-listen to some of these oldies but goodies.

Yeah, me too.

But they won't be on YouTube, so, um, you'll need to listen audio only. Okay. Um, okay, let's do some facts. Great. Okay, Edward Facts.

Edward P. P. Norton. What does the P stand for? That's not his middle name.

Oh, I could see his middle name being Peter because of Alex P.

Keaton is why it makes sense to me, because Alex P. Keaton was so intelligent. If you remember, you didn't— did you ever watch Alex P.? Do you know what that is?

It's from Family Ties. There we go. I knew.

Yeah, and Michael J. Fox.

I know he was a young Republican.

He wore like sweater vests to school and stuff, and he was just very smart.

Precocious and smart. Yes. Whoa, Edward's middle name is Harrison. Harrison, that's a good middle name.

I wonder after Harrison, um, George Harrison or Harrison Ford's. Probably not Harrison. Oh, he's old enough for Harrison Ford's.

That would be—

that's how people in Michigan would pronounce his last name.

It would be. I know.

Have you seen the new Harrison Ford's movie?

Oh my God, his birthday's around my birthday time. Yes, he the 21st.

Okay, Harrison was his maternal grandmother's last name.

Oh shit, I should know that.

Betty Kent Harrison.

Okay, when's his birthday, Monica?

The 18th. Oh okay, yeah, 6 days, 3 days off on my guess. Sure. Do emissions off California ports drive $6.5 billion in respiratory health costs for California each year? Believe that the stat he's referring to is a 2011 climate change study by Kim Knowlton, Miriam Rotkin-Elman, Linda gave a lot of people. However, this was a national stat, not a California-specific stat. The stat reads the total health costs associated with ozone pollution is $6.5 billion nationwide. I did find a California stat that states the diesel death zones such as West Long Beach, San Pedro, and Wilmington is where residents face localized asthma hospitalization rates up to 8 times higher than the county average and life expectancies up to 8 years lower. Ew. Fuck, dude. That's not good at all.

Can you imagine knowing— I remember reading seen that. It's not great how close we are to the 101. I know, like, that radiates out in a very predictable way too. If you're like in a, you know, yeah, an eighth of a mile, a tenth of a mile. I don't really think about it. Yeah, it's best not to.

Yeah. Okay, average car emissions in past few decades. Okay, the real-world fuel efficiency by manufacturer. Tesla is the highest, 120.6 mpg. PG. Uh-huh. Then we got Honda. Okay, okay. 28.3. Hyundai— this is not in order, actually. Okay, 41. Hyundai, 29.8. Kia, 30.4. Let's look at Mercedes, 27.5. Okay, okay. All right, that's good.

No American ones are on that list.

Oh, let's see. Tesla, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, BMW— German, right?

But Ford, GM, or Nissan, Toyota, Subaru, Mazda, VW, Mercedes, Ford.

What's— oh, Ford. Ford is, um, 23.2.

Yeah, what sandbags those numbers for Ford and GM and Chrysler is their main business is trucks, right?

Right.

That's what they— their bread and butter is. Nobody's buying Tesla trucks. They're not buying— I've seen very few Honda trucks. Yeah, no VW trucks.

GM is 22.4. What is Stellantis?

Stellantis is an Italian company that owns Chrysler currently. Oh God, Chrysler's passed through some different ownership over the years, and currently Stellantis Lantis, who also owns Fiat and some other— got it— Dodge, Maserati. Dodge, Maserati, that's part of Chrysler.

Yeah, we had a Dodge Caravan.

Yeah, quite a while. We had a Pacifica, remember? It was purple, fucking gorgeous, black on black. Yeah, that was great.

I love that vehicle. Okay, how much has Robert Downey Jr. made in Marvel? Oh wow. According to Comic Book Resources, his reported MCU total salary ranges from 3—

took your breath away—

$386 to $421 million.

All in?

Yeah, I assume. Alleged salary by movie. Alleged. Original Iron Man, $2 million. Iron Man 2, $10 million. Avengers, $50 million. Iron Man 3, $50 million. Avengers: Age of Ultron, $50 to $80 $60 million. Captain America: Civil War, $64 million. Spider-Man: Homecoming, $10 to $15 million. Avengers: Infinity War, $75 million. Avengers: Endgame, $75 million. This does not include many cameos in other Marvel movies.

Goddamn, son. The last one that was reported was, I think, to start the new one, it's $100. Oh, I just wish— but then have you also heard this thing about Johnny that, which is fucking fascinating. During the Amber Heard dust-up, Disney kind of went on record and took— well, I want to be careful, I don't know specifically. He— what he interpreted is that they had shamed him publicly during that thing. And then after he was kind of vindicated, or at least not found liable for any of that stuff, um, he was asked if he would do another Pirates, and he said, I wouldn't do another Pirates for $300 million. $300 million because of the way they treated me. Wow. And I read 2 weeks ago that Disney just offered him $301 million to do— is he doing it? I don't know. See if you can find an update on that, Rob. But I was like, $300 million to go for one movie? Yeah. And guess what? He's worth it. They wouldn't be offering him that if that wasn't worth it.

How much do they think they're gonna make on that?

A billion and a half dollars. $500 million.

But it costs so much to make them.

Yeah, but if it costs $500 million— let's say they spend $400 million on it, they pay him $300 million, there's $700 million. They make $1.5 billion. They're gonna keep of that $850 million. That's just the release of it. That's not any VOD, any streaming rights, any merchandising. So if they can come out—

thought about the other—

if they can turn a key and make $150 million by paying him $300. Any company should do that.

It's in development, and Johnny Depp's involvement will depend on if he likes the way the part's written.

Good for him. Good for him. We'll offer you $301. Yeah, let me see how it turns out.

Can you imagine? No. Um, who wrote the Mike Nichols biography? Was it Mark Harris? Yes, Mike Nichols: A Life was written by Mark Harris and published in 2021.

Beautiful biography.

I've read some of it as well. I like it. I mean, I really like it. I just, you know, I don't finish books.

Yeah, you start books.

That's your thing. That's kind of my thing. You're a book starter. I hate that about myself. Not a fire starter. But you know what, it's better I decided it's better to read some of a book than none of a book and to be reading, just to be reading. Yep.

Another study that just came out, 30,000 athletes study by university. They look into everything— reps, sets, hours in the gym. And what they found is that the chasm between doing nothing and doing a little bit is fucking enormous. And the chasm between between doing a moderate amount and a ton of heavy training is very small. Yeah, that makes sense. So your immediate gains and rewards are very soon. Yeah, grab— everyone should do it.

Do it. Just read. Yeah, just do it.

That's the same. Is that all the facts?

Uh, that— yeah. Oh wait, is it? Hold on.

Who knows? Yeah, yeah, yeah, she does good stuff.

Yeah, just good stuff. All right, I love you. Love you.