Josh Brolin Returns

Speaker 1 Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dak Shepard, and I'm joined by Monica Padman.

Speaker 1 Our good buddy is here today. Yeah.
He's wild. Josh Brolin, he is an award-winning actor.

Speaker 1 The Goonies, No Country for Old Men, Sicario, Dune, Milk, and a book I absolutely loved, which is out right now, called From Under the Truck. And

Speaker 1 we daringly asked him on the spot if he would read one of the stories. Cold Read.
Cold Read of my favorite story in the book. And he obliged that sweetheart that he is.

Speaker 2 Also, this episode's on video if people want to watch it.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes, yes, yes. This is on video.
Josh

Speaker 1 is so fucking handsome. To not watch the words come out of that gorgeous mug would be a

Speaker 1 travesty. So go over to YouTube and watch this.
Enjoy.

Speaker 1 We are supported by Nordic Naturals, the number one selling fish oil brand in the U.S. Something I take every evening before bed.

Speaker 1 So I saw this article the other day about nutrition, and there's this stat that completely caught me off guard. Apparently, 80% of Americans don't get enough omega-3s from their diet.

Speaker 1 But it turns out omega-3 fatty acids, EPA, and DHA are critical for cellular health.

Speaker 1 We're talking about stuff that affects your heart, brain, immune system, eyes, mood, basically everything that matters for feeling good day to day.

Speaker 1 Nordic Naturals is the number one selling omega-3 brand in the U.S. with products formulated to support your whole family, including kids and pets.

Speaker 1 Their ultimate Omega provides concentrated omega-3 support without any fishy aftertaste. Comes in soft gels, liquid, even zero-sugar gummies.
I love them. I eat them every night.

Speaker 1 My numbers have been great, which is so comforting. Use promo code DAX for 15% off your next order at Nordic.com and discover the power of Omega-3 for yourself.

Speaker 1 These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Speaker 1 We are supported by T-Mobile 5G Home Internet. Like everyone, home internet is our life, and there's nothing worse than when it slows down.

Speaker 2 Oh, I know, especially when you're doing something important like editing this show.

Speaker 1 Well, actually, there's one worse thing: waiting around all day for the cable guy to show up to install it.

Speaker 2 I want those five hours back.

Speaker 1 Fortunately, T-Mobile's got home internet. They have fast speeds, and it sets up easily in 15 minutes with just one cord.

Speaker 2 Anyone can do it, even me.

Speaker 1 Hey, we were first in on T-Mobile's home internet. We were using it up in the attic.
Yeah. If you recall.

Speaker 2 It powers this very show.

Speaker 1 Yes, it's so reliable. And when you've got a podcast full of valuable insights about human nature and poop jokes, you need that.

Speaker 2 We all need that.

Speaker 1 Oh, and the low price is guaranteed for five years.

Speaker 2 Five years? Gotta respect the LTR.

Speaker 1 Guarantees monthly price of fixed wireless 5G internet data. Exclusions like taxes and fees applies.
Service delivered via 5G network. Speeds vary due to factor affecting cellular networks.

Speaker 1 Check availability and guarantee exclusions and details at t-mobile.com/slash home internet.

Speaker 1 He's an uptrend.

Speaker 1 You were here three years ago, which kind of shocked me.

Speaker 2 That's crazy.

Speaker 1 As I listened this morning on my bike ride. Like the last time I saw you.
That's true. You pulled in the driveway because you did Ted's podcast.
That's right.

Speaker 1 It was after that when I thought I was having marital problems, but I wasn't. Oh, did you? Yeah, no, I fluctuated.

Speaker 1 I always share because I'm one of these guys, kind of like a book where you have to manifest it in order to get it out of you because you know the you that it's happening in is not perceiving it correctly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know enough to not trust your assessment of things. And that has nothing to do with a program thing.
I just know that.

Speaker 1 So what's tricky, though, is, and I think we do the same thing, is my wife, well, and Monica as well, because we talk so much. They're my two kind of check-ins.

Speaker 1 They'll say to me, you're crazy right now. That theory makes no sense.
I know you've convinced yourself that's what's happening.

Speaker 1 But what's tricky is if your kind of check system is the person you're having trouble with, where do you go? So where do you go? I have a specific person I go to. I usually go to Dak Shepard.

Speaker 1 Well, you're not checking out.

Speaker 1 I don't remember hearing any of your crazy people. I already filed.

Speaker 1 No, who do I go to? There's a couple of people. You have one person that you go to.
And ironically, it is your doppelganger. Matt Damon? No, Tom Hansen.
I don't know if we've discussed that.

Speaker 1 Yes, we have.

Speaker 1 Not that Matt Damon is my doppelgans.

Speaker 2 There is a Venn diagram there of you and Matt.

Speaker 1 Really? Tom Hanson. Tom Hanson.
Tom Hanson. Tom, it didn't actually end up happening, but you and I spoke about this.
Is that Tom kind of coerced me into his thing? We had a great conversation.

Speaker 1 We talked about surfing. We had everything in common that there was to have.
And apparently, which I never really saw, that we look like each other.

Speaker 1 So why he's not my lawyer doesn't make any sense other than Cliff Gilbert Laurie, who brought me in, which is how business works and you learn that later.

Speaker 1 They bring you in as a top dog and they go, you're amazing. We want to represent you and we've been trying to represent you since before you were born.

Speaker 1 They flatter you. And you go and they flatter the shit out of you.
Then you get in there and then you never see that person again.

Speaker 1 That's the big bait and switch. You meet the owner of the agency and then you never see them again.
Never see them again. And then they call you again when you're quitting.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What are you doing? Hey, why are you changing? We have been focusing. Do you know how much time we've put into you? I go, you don't even know my name, bro.
You had to look it up.

Speaker 1 I have to say this to finish that thought. Yeah.
Is the hand-me-downs that I've always gotten have been better than what could have been had I gone with the top dog. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Because those hand-me-downs turned into the top dogs.

Speaker 2 And they care. And they care.

Speaker 1 They give a shit. There's something very personal still.
Wendy Kirk is my lawyer and she is with JSSK.

Speaker 1 and what she has done, they even offered her a partnership when she changed and she said, no, I don't like what it does to me. Wow.

Speaker 1 And they forced her to be a partner. So she's a partner.
She works with Obama. I mean, she's a high-end.
There's a really great metaphor here, which is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the person under the owner, of course, wants to get in with you and they can have some ownership over the ride, which is what we all want, right? They want to collaborate in a sense.

Speaker 1 If they inherit Jack Nicholson, there's really no ownership. And I mostly just think, well, I should be with that person because that would prove I'm of value or I have status or something.

Speaker 1 And I would deny someone this great opportunity to help me and allowed myself to be helped. So back to Tom Hanson.

Speaker 1 So when you were saying you met with him, it was in a professional capacity, but it could very well just been in a sobriety capacity.

Speaker 1 I interviewed him and he's very open where we spoke openly about it. When you were saying,

Speaker 1 you know, no, he outed himself in the episode.

Speaker 2 That goes out the window.

Speaker 1 But even in the rooms, it's not anonymous. I never understood it.
Somebody goes, you want to share? And you go, yeah. So today, and they go, hey, what's your name? That's a big number.

Speaker 1 What's your name? And you go, why do I have to say my name? Because back in the day, the first hundred that the book is based on, you never had to say your name. You just had to say, I'm anonymous.

Speaker 1 I'm alcohol. That makes a little more sense.
So it doesn't make any sense, the hypocrisy of, hello, stay. Identify yourself.
And people take a certain pleasure out of going, who are you?

Speaker 1 Yeah, totally. And I'm usually the guy that says, shut the fuck up.
It's an anonymous program. And I start to.

Speaker 2 Are you getting fights in AA meetings?

Speaker 1 There's more. No, I don't.

Speaker 2 Well, I know you almost got in a fight once with Eric Dane. We talked about that.

Speaker 1 After a meeting? Yeah. At Tom Hansen's house.
Seriously? With the actor Eric Dane. Do you know Eric Dane? Yeah, of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 He and I walked out to Tom's driveway in the middle of a meeting. Because you got into it? Really? Yeah, I was sponsoring this kid and he yelled at this kid.

Speaker 1 And I already had an axe to grind with him. So I go, let's go, motherfucker.
Really? It's a low point.

Speaker 1 But anyways, when you were saying Tom Hanson was going to bring you in, it very well could have meant he was inviting you to the meeting. That's where my head went when you said

Speaker 1 that's your experience.

Speaker 1 My experience is purely on a professional capacity. But I was just with him and he does look like you guys and you guys are both blessed.
You're both very handsome.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I have, and I just texted you this the other day. You are in my algorithm.
on Instagram in a way that only Corey Feldman is. I see dual.
I understand the parallel.

Speaker 1 There's no connective Goonies tissue. No, I know.
I know that. Monica, really quick, just for a fun question.
What human is in your algorithm?

Speaker 1 You constantly see this person come up, and you know it has its moments where it's like this person will show up for this two months.

Speaker 2 Am I following them?

Speaker 1 Well, that's what's interesting. Probably.
I'm following Josh, but I'm not following Feldman. But I guess people who like the shit I like, cars or whatever, they like these Feldman videos.

Speaker 1 So it knows that I might like them. And I liked a couple, but then I didn't like them anymore.
It was really fun for like a month. Yeah, and then I don't don't like it at all.

Speaker 1 And you know what you did, which is what I did, is you forwarded them to other people. You were like, oh my God, look at this lead that he did.
By the way, I have nothing against Feldman.

Speaker 1 No, I don't know. It's his own.

Speaker 1 What I questioned the whole time was, does he know? And I think that's what drew everybody in. When you sit there and you're just going like this, do you know anything about this? Not really.

Speaker 2 He's not in my algorithm.

Speaker 1 Feldman. But you're a Goonies fan, right? I remember that from before.
No, you're not a Goonies fan. I mean, I...
That was a look of absolute, almost disgust. No, Pan was panic.

Speaker 2 I was panic because it was.

Speaker 2 I think I have to say yes, but that's a straight-up lie. I think maybe I've only half-seen it.

Speaker 1 Only half-seen it. Half.

Speaker 2 Oh, half-seen it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like. Whenever you're not in the movie, she fast-forwards.
No, but I kind of like the idea.

Speaker 1 I only have seen it, meaning I didn't react like everybody else. I just saw it.

Speaker 2 I didn't like or dislike it.

Speaker 1 I just saw it. Yeah, I just saw it.

Speaker 1 Plain and simple. So, no?

Speaker 2 No, you must be thinking of your doppelganger, Matt, Damon Goodwill, hunting. You're just confused.
But Corey Feldman, sorry, no, what's happening?

Speaker 1 So he tours. He's a musician and a lead singer and a guitar player.
And he's on tour, seemingly, many dates a year because the videos come hot and fast.

Speaker 2 Good for him.

Speaker 1 He does guitar solos and he sings, which he's been doing for a very long time. It's just recently he went on a tour.
He was opening for Fred Durst.

Speaker 1 And Fred Durst brilliantly created this whole thing called like the worst tour in the world. Oh,

Speaker 1 I can't remember. It's not called called that, but it's something like that.
So it's intentional. From Fred Durst's point of view.

Speaker 1 But I think he took, which was genius, Corey Feldman and said, you open for me, and then we're going to come out and do our bullshit. And Fred has a huge white beard now and comes out with.

Speaker 1 basically what he wore back in the day. And it's just fucking funny.

Speaker 1 But when you see Corey doing his thing, which is what he's always done, there's no difference in what he was doing during the Goonies back in that day and what he's doing now.

Speaker 1 There's just a seriousness to it

Speaker 1 that confuses.

Speaker 1 So, similar exact same thing. And I didn't forward to anybody.
I did immediately text my best friend Aaron and say, Are you seeing these felonies? He's like, It's all I'm seeing.

Speaker 1 And yes, the great curiosity, which by the way, not even to be political, that was always my great curiosity about Trump. That's what I'm most interested in.

Speaker 1 Is he in on any of this or is he not in on it? That's what I'm not sure about. He is.
But all to say, Brolin, for much different reasons, has just infiltrated my algorithm.

Speaker 2 That's exciting.

Speaker 1 I love it. And I texted him the other day and I'm like, I watch four or five interviews with you a day.

Speaker 1 A day. A day.
And I like every single one of them.

Speaker 2 How many interviews are you doing?

Speaker 1 By the point I'm getting.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. So first question.
Is this the most pressure you've ever done for anything? Let's start there. Yes.
To promote your book. Yes.

Speaker 1 I have whored myself out to this dog and pony like I never have before. Selfishly, when we have a guest coming up and I start seeing that the guest is everywhere, I just kind of go, ugh, I'm bummed.

Speaker 2 Like, what new are we going to get?

Speaker 1 Two things. Yeah.
What new are they going to say? And then are people just sick of this person? Because I know I've seen him six places. So I saw you everywhere.

Speaker 1 And my first thought was like, oh, bummer, like we're going to be less. But then my true belief in what you and I share, that we could also have something completely original and different.

Speaker 1 That's for sure. Yeah.
I don't want to. be hyperbolic.
I want to make sure I'm being honest here, but I can't remember a book I've read that took me more through it personally.

Speaker 1 And I don't want to make this about myself, but why not? I am also writing something. I imagine we have some of the same fears about writing something.
And I'm just reading it.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, this could be my book. I could be writing this book.
I could see that. And I'm extra mean to you because I'm extra mean to me.
And I'm like, oh yeah, we have the same story.

Speaker 1 The fucking story. Like, I'm getting really mad at myself reading the book.
Oh. But in a glorious way.
No, but tell me why.

Speaker 1 The amount of things we had to do to be dangerous and scary so that no one would try to hurt us. How exhausting for everyone.
I'm like reading my own inventory. Oh, yeah.
Now I know what you mean.

Speaker 1 I'm also having great forgiveness for myself because I have great forgiveness for you because I just adore you. I agree.
It's very mutual. Thank you.

Speaker 1 But I'm reading it in a way that I don't read other books. It's because it feels so familiar to me.

Speaker 1 And I am constantly checking myself and going, really, you're just a fucking egomaniacal piece of shit. And I'm so mad at myself.

Speaker 1 Then I'm reading your book and I'm like, what the fuck else was this guy going to do? He grew up in a cage with a wolf. Like, what was this?

Speaker 2 With a chimp, right? Did you read all of them? By the way, no, I don't read the books on purpose.

Speaker 1 I love when people are honest. Like, I did Rogan.
I go, so where's the book? And he goes, I don't know. Where is the book?

Speaker 1 And I was like, fuck you mean, where is the book? We sent you the book. And he was like, yeah, where is it? I'm like, so you didn't read the book? Read the book.

Speaker 2 I read the goonies situation I was put into. No, No, no.
No, but I do it on purpose in case things get too esoteric for people who have not read it.

Speaker 1 It's actually by design. So I'll have read some crazy book on, you know, astrophysics.
And all of a sudden, me and the person, we've left the planet.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to say, hey, no one knows what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 Even this, like, I want to know specifically the why, the parts that you resonate with.

Speaker 1 Well, wait, let me interrupt you for a second. First of all, the fears in writing a book.
I didn't have a fear.

Speaker 1 I've told this story before, but there was only one moment where I kind of said, you need to be just a little bit more inspiring in order to be attractive to a wider audience.

Speaker 1 And I wrote probably 40,000 words with that in the back of my head, having told nobody. And then my lit agent, she read the first chapter and she said, first chapter is really good.

Speaker 1 You've smoothed it out. It's very clear.
You've simplified a lot of things. It's great.
What the fuck happened with chapter two? And that was the one you were going to protect yourself with?

Speaker 1 Not even protect myself, but just give it a little more positive oomph. Yeah.

Speaker 1 First of all, I fell in love with her at that moment because I was like, you see me, which I think that's the biggest thing. You see behind the tough and the thing and the guy and the meh.

Speaker 1 And she said, you need to go back and rewrite it. I said, the whole thing?

Speaker 1 And she goes, what part? Go back and be you. If you cheat or if there's an affectation or if you're trying to write for somebody else, it's never going to work.

Speaker 1 The other thing is the fear didn't come until I was two days into the audible. I speak well.
I speak in front of an audience well. I can read other people's books well.

Speaker 1 There was something about reading through my own book where I was tripping through every sentence. I was starting to shame spiral.

Speaker 1 And then within that shame spiral, I started to say, I wish that I could burn any evidence that this thing ever existed, even as an idea. I've done the dumbest thing.

Speaker 1 I should have just wrote, when I did the Goonies, me and Corey Feldman used to go to lunch together, and it was so fun.

Speaker 1 He was so smart and he was playing music then too.

Speaker 1 And there's some people that have reacted to it like, this is the fucking worst book I've ever read because wasn't he married for nine years? Where's that? Spoon fetus the shit, which I understand.

Speaker 1 There's a certain amount of that when you call it a memoir that you want. This is really more about children and parents.
That's what it is.

Speaker 1 To me, it's like surviving nurture to get to nature, trying to get rid of the habits that you acquired during nurture, and then confronting those and hopefully thriving within that nature, figuring out a way to thrive within that nature.

Speaker 1 So then children come in and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 And I've learned that through people's reaction because people's reaction is either really negative because of the form, because of how it's laid out, or super fucking personal and emotional. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Put me in the ladder. I know.
And that's kind of what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 I probably didn't do the headline correctly, but I'm just saying I'm judging you so unfairly and severely because I hear myself and I hate myself a lot of this. So you hate me, therefore.

Speaker 1 And I really relate to that reading your own thing out loud, because when you're writing it, you're really just broadcasting the way you do in life.

Speaker 1 I'm telling you my story, but when you're hearing it, you're actually now the audience. And now you're like, God, do I sound like that all the time? A, B, that's really tragic.

Speaker 1 What I'm acting like was no big deal. That to me is really the heartbreaking part.
And that's the stuff that I found like a a ton of compassion towards you. And I do this a lot.

Speaker 1 And I think for Monica and the people in my life, I have such a nonchalant way of going through all this stuff. And when I'm hearing your nonchalant version of it, I want to go, yeah,

Speaker 1 you were really scared. This was a very, very scary ride you were on.
You were a little person. You have little people.
I have little people.

Speaker 1 There's no way you weren't terrified. And there's no way I wasn't terrified.
I don't know. Your book has helped me kind of really embrace that part.

Speaker 1 Like, go ahead and acknowledge that, no, you were fucking terrified a lot of the time. And it's colorful and cool.
And it's my story now.

Speaker 1 But let's also be honest about the fact that you spent a lot of your life quite scared of everything going on around you. There is an indictment.
And Howard Stern brought this up.

Speaker 1 I think you two the most took it very personally. And he took it very personally because he had a paralleled thing with his mom.
And he was like, this is not fucking okay.

Speaker 1 I want to hear you admit that it's not okay. And you go, yes, of course there's an indictment.

Speaker 1 I can see it clearly, especially now in how I parent my kids, how I've always parented my kids, albeit messily. But how I feel

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 1 that time is it was a trauma or a tragedy or whatever it is because of this narcissistic vortex that I was living in. Are you unable to celebrate the child?

Speaker 1 If your child does a drawing for you on a post-it, are you going to put it on your chest and wear it around so the child can go, oh my God, that guy loves my drawing?

Speaker 1 Or I don't understand what this is. Well, can you make it more like this and more like this? Or can you dress more like this?

Speaker 1 So when a picture is taken with me and the child, it makes me look like, you know, that's all narcissistic bullshit.

Speaker 1 And it goes back to one image and that one image that my dad would say, my dad was very open about this.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he found it funny or if he just found it informational and just didn't care how it was perceived.

Speaker 1 But my dad used to say i remember when your mom was in the driver's seat you were in the passenger seat and you guys were arguing and my dad was in the back with his hands over his ears and you go that's a family tree and you go who's the husband the kid yeah the eight-year-old kid who's going man just drive Like, why do you got to stop the car and argue?

Speaker 1 Just drive, whatever. And then the dad's in the back with his hands over his ears.
And you go, okay, so that was how that whole thing was set up. And by the way, where's my brother?

Speaker 1 He's not even part of that diagram because he was a guy that didn't have the fight that you have, that I have. He just got lost in it.
He didn't have the fight.

Speaker 1 So he lives his life in a very, very simple way now.

Speaker 2 Just for people listening, I think that is a version of fighting. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 We had this conversation sort of recently, randomly, where we were at odds at how to handle a situation that affects both of us. And he was like, well, we're just different.
I'm a fighter.

Speaker 2 And I was like, I'm a fighter too, but I fight differently. differently.
There's just all ways of surviving. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. They're all just survival

Speaker 1 mechanisms.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And whatever works best.

Speaker 1 How do you fight, though? I'm curious.

Speaker 2 I mean, I do fight version also. Me and the issue.

Speaker 2 So that's why I also was like, what are you talking about? We yelled and screamed at each other last night.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think you'll fight with the people in your circle and I'll fight with strangers. I think maybe that's the diff.

Speaker 2 I think I learned early on being a marginalized person that wasn't going to work for me. Yelling and screaming, that would just remove me from this.
I was already on the cusp of getting removed.

Speaker 2 So that wasn't going to work.

Speaker 1 That's my wife.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's getting actually closer to those people.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. That's right.
That's right. That's right.
How funny is that? It is.

Speaker 1 It's a cultural thing, for sure. Yes.

Speaker 2 For sure. Getting close, understanding the person and figuring out what they need from you in order to stay.

Speaker 1 To move forward. Yeah.
I had some epiphanies reading it. So just to lay it out to people who haven't read it yet, I really really recommend it from the bottom of my heart.

Speaker 1 But also in your previous interview, we got a taste of the chaos, right? You were living in an animal life or an animal way station.

Speaker 1 Your mother collected these animals that were, by all accounts, wild. By all accounts.
By all accounts, wild. And she also was a very active drinker.

Speaker 1 She was sexually very active.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I found out more and more now.
People have come out

Speaker 1 of the woodworks. And maybe I shouldn't even say sexual, but she engaged men non-stop.
His sexuality was just as much psychic as it was everything.

Speaker 1 It was a mental game. It was a sexual game.
It was a physical game. It was a spiritual game.
You were regularly, though, at truck stops, at shitty hotels.

Speaker 1 She was a vagabond. She was dragging you guys around.

Speaker 1 God knows what she was looking for, but she was interacting with, again, this is where it's no matter what you think it is or when you tell it to people, she's going up to truck drivers and restaurants and going, that's a stupid hat.

Speaker 1 What's going on with with that hat? Her technique to engage people was to nag them and be aggressive and be fearless.

Speaker 1 And sure, there's some fun and excitement in watching her navigate that and land the plane safely every time.

Speaker 1 But also, as an eight-year-old, watching the scary dude in the corner that mom's getting in the face of also is terrifying to no answer.

Speaker 2 So unpredictable.

Speaker 1 But you don't know why because it's all you know. It's like a kid being beaten.
They know it hurts. They think it's standard.

Speaker 1 But some primitive part of you goes, there is an animal that's 300 pounds and there's another animal that's 105 pounds. And the one-third animal is shouting that, you know, there's a reality.

Speaker 1 The swings she was taking that had to be quite scary, even if you come to expect she would pull it off.

Speaker 1 I remember my mom being drunk and there was a church called Joshua's and Joshua's was turned into a bar. And I remember a bar on Pastor Obles, Joshua.
What a rebrand. I know, what a rebrand.

Speaker 1 And I remember my mom pulling somebody. Oh, it was James Lee Barrett, the writer.
And he was was a writer way back in the day. And I remember her pulling him across the table to give him a kiss.

Speaker 1 Right? Yeah. So my mom, who was tiny, had that superhuman drunk strength that you know and I know.

Speaker 1 But it was always a display. She couldn't just get up and go to the other side.
She had to pull him across the table. And I told somebody else this the other day and talk about fear.

Speaker 1 Not that I forgot about this, just there were so many things to write about. It's like, what do you land on? And the book starts starts to dictate itself.
And then what do you cut?

Speaker 1 I had at one point 450 pages or something and then knocked it down. But if you flipped my mom off on the freeway, you were done.

Speaker 1 She would actively run you off the road at 80 miles an hour.

Speaker 1 Or on the CB, she would call a bunch of truckers and you would see that car that had been identified now get boxed in and literally get run off the road by several truckers.

Speaker 1 But she would freak the fuck out. And when you're an eight-year-old in a car, it was wild.
And how ironic that she died hitting a tree with a car, chasing a dude. A lover 25 years for junior.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Monica's traumatized right now.
I just saw her

Speaker 1 peripherally.

Speaker 2 We talked about this. You get two people in life, if you're lucky, who are safe spots.

Speaker 2 And so if one or both are not safe, they're unpredictable. You have no choice, but your cortisol levels are at a, whatever.
Regardless.

Speaker 1 And it's just how you're moving through. That's exactly right.
But the whole point, I think, ultimately is like, do you feel that this was cathartic in some way?

Speaker 1 And I go, no, but now I can say, yes, it's starting to become cathartic because of people's reactions to it. To me, what's the point of me writing the book other than just loving writing?

Speaker 1 That's my first and foremost.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm going to go to Skylight after this because I used to be on the floor of Skylight reading Russian novels and reading Tolstoy and Turgenev and Gogol and Flaubert and fucking Guy du Montpesson and all that kind of shit when I was 18, 19, 20 years old.

Speaker 1 And now I'm going to go there and I'm going to see my book on the shelf, which is going to be amazing.

Speaker 1 But ultimately, how do you accept the chaos of what was and not live the rest of your life as a victim of it? That's the biggest thing.

Speaker 1 But again, I don't think you and I run the risk of seeing ourselves as a victim. I think we have the opposite complex.
Which is what? Which is, I think you need to acknowledge a little more yourself.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I don't think you need to be policing yourself about whether, poor me, I was a victim.
That's actually not the thing you need to be on high alert of.

Speaker 1 It's the, yeah, and I walked through that shit and it made me this. I think that's more of a fucking thing to monitor.
But what is clear throughout this book is you absolutely love your mother.

Speaker 1 You're one of the few people that have said that. You admire her.
You've been kind of trying to. be her in some manageable way.
Totally. She made a fucking impression.

Speaker 1 No one ever met her and forgot they met her. There's like a lot of attractive stuff about her.

Speaker 1 I've never thought about the fact that if anyone, not just us, anyone that's the child of a divorce has witnessed that one of the parents left.

Speaker 1 That's an option.

Speaker 1 Truly, in the most simple fucking way, it's an option that these people can leave. You know it now.
You're down to one.

Speaker 1 You better fucking love and cherish and perform

Speaker 1 for that one person because you're down to one. I hold true that I love my mother more than anything and she is the greatest woman to ever be on planet Earth.

Speaker 1 Also, I don't know that I had a choice to feel otherwise. Absolutely.
That's what I was going to say. Do you have a choice? No.
Somebody leaves and you go, wait a second, if they leave, you can leave.

Speaker 1 That means you can leave, you can leave, you can leave, you can leave. Once you get outside of the family, then are you reacting to the potential of anybody leaving?

Speaker 1 I just think once you put a kid in a situation where they only have one parent left, I just don't know what else that kid could do other than A, be really grateful that one didn't leave.

Speaker 1 So there's this true gratitude. But you just said it performing.
Then you're performing. Then you're going, how do do I assure that I'm not down there?

Speaker 1 That never occurred to me when I was reading your book. Interesting.
Well, I was just like, huh, that's an element I need to, again, go through the fucking catalog and just apply that a little bit.

Speaker 2 Ironically, that's a version of the fight I was talking about earlier. That's you fighting in a different way to survive that.
And it's not fighting with yelling.

Speaker 2 It's fighting with love and affection and being the right thing for her and all of that. It's the same thing.

Speaker 1 You become less reactionary. And the thing with my mom, which didn't work in life, was my mom loved the high-octane volley.
So you had to be up here.

Speaker 1 I still deal with that because I like the high-octane volley. That's why I like Italy.
Italy.

Speaker 1 Because everybody, it's culturally, like what you said about Georgia, it's culturally at that place all the time.

Speaker 1 So when I get there, they're like, ah, and I'm like, hey.

Speaker 2 No one's getting their feelings hurt.

Speaker 1 No one's getting their feelings hurt. Whereas here, I may do something and people go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Right, relax. What's the problem?

Speaker 1 And then if I'm feeling surly or whatever, I go, why does everybody want to be fucking monotone all the time? Everybody wants to be in yawn mode. And I go, it's okay.
Let's wake up.

Speaker 1 And interestingly enough, and this is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. I have my 36-year-old Trevor, my 31-year-old Eden, my six-year-old Weslin, and my three-year-old Chapel.

Speaker 1 And I see it in my older kids. My son is a little more docile than what we're talking about.
My 31-year-old is the only person on this earth, probably, who scares me.

Speaker 1 All she has to do is give me a look, and I'm just like, You said she was born with your menacing look. She just has that brolin brow, I call it that kind of Neanderthal.
Pronounced brow ridge.

Speaker 1 My youngest daughter has it more pronounced than anybody. So you have the six-year-old, but I was listening to him this morning.

Speaker 1 I was trying to say something, and this is often because we're around our kids all the time. I'm a very present parent.
So I go, Hey, man, don't talk for 30 seconds.

Speaker 1 I need to say something to your mom. And they literally go, okay, Papa, go ahead.
And I go, okay. And they go, one,

Speaker 1 two,

Speaker 1 three.

Speaker 1 I'm like, you fucking, but I listen to their volley back and forth, and their volley is phenomenal to me. It's always on this level.
Yeah. And my wife is always trying to bring it down.

Speaker 1 And I'm always laughing because I go, that's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You guys are on a different.
So I'm still a proponent of that thing, just not destructively.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more armchair expert

Speaker 1 if you dare.

Speaker 1 We are supported by JCPenney.

Speaker 2 You know what's even better than getting compliments on your holiday outfit?

Speaker 1 Getting compliments on your holiday outfit that you got for way less than anyone would guess.

Speaker 2 Ding, ding, ding, exactly. I just hit up JCPenney for some holiday party looks, and let me tell you, the quality and style are great.

Speaker 2 I got this this really gorgeous velvet blazer that everyone thinks was designer, but it's not, but it really looks luxe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you're sitting there like, oh, this JCPenney.

Speaker 2 It is really fun to see the look on people's faces when you tell them. And it's not just clothes, their home stuff is perfect for hosting.

Speaker 1 Plus, they've got gifts for everyone on your list that look so much more expensive than they actually are.

Speaker 2 Because when it comes to holiday gifts, it's what they think you spent that counts.

Speaker 1 Shopjcpenny.com. Yes, JCPenney.

Speaker 1 We get support from AG1.

Speaker 1 I'm always looking for ways to simplify my wellness routine without cutting corners. That's why I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years.
I love the taste. I love the simplicity.

Speaker 1 I love how I feel after I have my glass of AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that's basically replaced my entire supplement cabinet.
75 plus vitamins, minerals, and whole food ingredients in one scoop.

Speaker 1 It supports gut health, gives me steady energy without crashes, and supports my immune health. Huge when I'm constantly around people for interviews.

Speaker 1 Less than three bucks a day doing the work of multiple supplements. With travel and holiday chaos, those antioxidants and functional mushrooms help my body stay resilient.

Speaker 1 You know, we had back-to-back Halloween, then I traveled to Palm Springs, hosted a birthday party, came back, and my first thought was like, oh, I got to totally recharge. Went straight to the AG1.

Speaker 1 Head to drinkag1.com/slash stacks to get a free welcome kit with an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 when you first subscribe. That's drinkag1.com slash stacks.

Speaker 1 We are supported by Peloton. You know how life gets especially chaotic this time of year? Work, kids, trying to remember what day it is.

Speaker 1 For me, finding time to move can feel impossible, but that's where Peloton comes in.

Speaker 1 Peloton has completely reimagined cross-training with the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ.

Speaker 1 It's Peloton's most elevated equipment yet, real-time guidance, endless ways to move, and it helps you get more done in less time.

Speaker 1 I like the time crunch aspect of it because sometimes I only got 20 minutes to squeeze something in. This is perfect.

Speaker 1 With Peloton IQ, you get personalized plans, form correction, and weight suggestions that help you train smarter and stay consistent no matter how busy life gets.

Speaker 1 Let yourself run, lift, sculpt, push, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus at onepeloton.com.

Speaker 1 We are supported by Allstate. You know what's smart? Checking Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds on car insurance.
You know what's not smart?

Speaker 1 Not checking your phone's volume before blasting your morning pump-up playlist in the office break room. Or not checking that your laptop camera's off before joining the meeting in your robe.

Speaker 1 Or something I'm a little too familiar with, not checking your grocery list before heading to the store and realizing you bought everything except what you needed yeah checking first is smart so check all state first for a quote that could save you hundreds you're in good hands with all state potential savings vary subject to terms condition and availability all state north american insurance co and affiliates northbrook illinois

Speaker 1 It's rough when your whole environment was in 11 and then you're interacting with people that that feels very uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 I get it that it feels uncomfortable. I wrote way too many notes.
I see. I love it.
We're on sentence one of 15 pages.

Speaker 1 But back to conceptually the book, I wanted to ask you, because you told me some people fucking hate it and some people absolutely love it. And I was wondering why people hated it.

Speaker 1 And then my hunch was, you've already alluded to it, that they wanted this to be your Hollywood stories.

Speaker 1 And so I imagine for you, it's probably hard to juggle that because that in itself is one of the most complicated things to understand. The Hollywood show business fame part of this equation.

Speaker 1 And so if it were me, I'd be like, that's not what I'm trying to share with you. Like, do you want to fucking know me or not? Cause it's not about that.

Speaker 1 But then on the outside, I would go, but also, it's so much of you. How could it not be? If somebody says, I didn't learn anything about him, they're saying something very specific.

Speaker 1 And they're saying, I didn't get spoon-fed the People Magazine shit that I was expecting. Some hot gossip.
Which is okay. Like I said, I don't have a judgment of that.

Speaker 1 That's not what this book is, and there is no juggling of it.

Speaker 1 I wanted to know, did you have to step over the hurdle of wanting the book to be as well-written as Cormac McCarthy, like that you want so bad for it to be the thing that you love so much?

Speaker 1 I think that's one of my continual hurdles when I write. Well, first of all, if you're writing, then you're one of...0001%

Speaker 1 people who are actually writing their own memoirs or writing their own books. When I found out how many people don't write their own memoirs, I go, but that's a biography

Speaker 1 that you got paid for. Right, right, right, right.
And the writer didn't. So that's a cheat.

Speaker 1 And I understand I had a great back and forth with Sharon Graham Norton, and I absolutely fucking adored her. She's kind of mom-esque.
Mischievous, but super honest, fearless, but vulnerable.

Speaker 1 Said something during and then was looking for me afterwards to say, I didn't mean to suggest this. So conscientious, 77, 78 years old.
I was like, that fucking broad is great.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, she's a gangster. But her book, Legendary Icon, so I do want to know what happened in those nine days that she was married to Greg Allman.
Like, what the fuck happened?

Speaker 1 Why was it only nine days?

Speaker 1 Take your time. I want to hear about it.

Speaker 1 Every day.

Speaker 1 Every hour. Absolutely.
Kind of thing.

Speaker 1 You journaled throughout the week. With this, I was in Austin, Texas, and people paid for a book signing and then a picture and all that.

Speaker 1 And some guy came up to me and like, of all the things he could have said, he said, you're too young to write a memoir.

Speaker 1 And then he left. I was like, who the fuck was that dude?

Speaker 1 How old was he? He was like 40 or something, 45. But he's right.
It's like, if I were to write a tell-all, I would at the end of my life in Hollywood.

Speaker 1 But going back to what you said, writing a good book that's well written meant everything to me. But it can be daunting.

Speaker 1 It can be incredibly daunting if you care about the writing style and you care about somebody who's written thousands and thousands and thousands of pages, me. I probably have 91 full journals now.

Speaker 1 I've written several books. I've written several books of poetry.
I've written a novella and I just put it in a corner. Way too long screenplays.
Never wrote a screenplay.

Speaker 1 Wait, I thought the submarine in the lake next to Florida. No, that was a joke.
That was always to break the silence and to create a discomfort that made me really happy.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, that's not even clear to me in the book. By the way, you got me.
Poorly written.

Speaker 2 Wait, so what's happening?

Speaker 1 This comes up multiple times. So to set the stage, the structure of the book is like two-page stories, four-page story.
It's not linear.

Speaker 1 We're bouncing back and forth from childhood to goonies to 2023 to this to that. It's all over the map.
As your memories do.

Speaker 1 And I think for people on the first approach, it probably is a little off-putting. It's not clicking into their normal format.

Speaker 1 But I will say, if you stick with it, I do think when I put it down last night, I'm like, I have the whole picture.

Speaker 1 It didn't come out in the way that I'm used to it coming out, but it's almost like a Nolan movie. I I tell people, don't try to figure it out.
It'll all of a sudden be clear to you.

Speaker 1 Enora takes you and it says, well, is it this or is it that? If you spent all your time watching Enora going, is it a comedy? Exactly. Or is it a satire? Or did this really happen?

Speaker 1 Is this based in truth? And you're looking at your phone. Just fucking follow it.
Right. Just lend yourself to the craziness and the messiness that life always seems to hand out.

Speaker 1 The thing is, is that we're always trying to get away from it.

Speaker 1 What if we just sit in it for a while it can be super funny it can be super absurd it can be super emotional well that's our desire to control i'm scared because i don't know what this is i can't enjoy this because i don't know what this is the submarine yeah oh yeah yeah so this comes up in many different things he's telling oliver stone about this idea he has the audacity to tell joel and ethan cohen about this that you have an idea for a script and he says the script is 357 pages long and it's about a russian submarine and he has a budget he doesn't know how much a russian sub i thought all this was real and i'm like how dare you tell the Coleman brothers about you?

Speaker 1 What are you? They only direct shit they write. Why are you even telling me?

Speaker 1 I know it's great now that I know it, but I didn't get the joke.

Speaker 1 I can admit I'm loud. I would sit there and they don't talk.
There's no small talk.

Speaker 1 I mean, now there is maybe because we're close and all that, but we would sit around and nobody would be saying anything. And what's the one thing that you don't say on set as an actor?

Speaker 1 I have a script.

Speaker 1 That's so great. Bam, Tarantino.
We could list the three worst people. So we would literally sit there saying nothing and I'd be like, I'm so fucking bored right now.

Speaker 1 And I'd go, hey, listen, I don't want to be inappropriate here.

Speaker 1 I have an amazing script. I didn't want to bring it up, but I think now is the right time.
And then you'd hear,

Speaker 1 you'd hear like one clearing or throat. And then I would go off, literally, until we shot.

Speaker 2 That's hilarious.

Speaker 1 And Joel or Ethan, I don't know, said, like, yeah, the submarine part sounds scary. And he goes, exactly.
Think King Kong.

Speaker 2 It's like performance art. You're just doing this around town

Speaker 2 directors.

Speaker 1 That's exactly what I'm doing. I'm like kind of reanalyzing every single time I read that.
I'm like, God, he really thought this was a great thing. And it's the town next to Fargo.

Speaker 1 So the movie would be called Wichipapa or whatever. No, it was Walpenton,

Speaker 1 which is actually I had to look up. I was like, what's next to Fargo? Okay, but it's not Fargo, but it's the town next to Fargo.

Speaker 1 So dumb.

Speaker 1 It's like, how can you waste somebody's time, torturously waste somebody's time?

Speaker 1 Wait, but I do want to say this, that going back, there is a point in writing, had I just started writing, I think that it would have been affected by my need

Speaker 1 to be perceived like somebody else. And I wasn't, because there was some point in the trajectory of my writing that I found my voice.
And I know it's my voice.

Speaker 1 I gave this book while I was writing it to only two people. They're both in New York.
They're both Jewish. They're both neurotic.
Zev Borrow and Ethan Cohen.

Speaker 1 And they both were super fucking honest with me. And Zev said, if for nothing else, this book is 100% you.
That was the

Speaker 1 trying to be this. And somebody goes, oh, Bukowski, or so, oh, Hunter S.
Thompson. There were so many influences and people I tried to copy for years.
And you go, no, that's me. That's how I write.

Speaker 1 I think it's kind of actually a, well, there's two things. One of the things in the room is ego.
We'll keep that aside for a second.

Speaker 1 The other thing is a really beautiful and sweet part of us, which is like, I read Bukowski and I felt a connection and I felt being seen in a way that if I'm going to do this, I'll really want that for other people.

Speaker 1 So part of it's like a really kind of altruistic and beautiful attempt, which is like, if I'm going to do this, I want it to do the thing the things did to me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But now I have to think of those things that did that to me. That's in my mind.
And that can be really arresting. But that wasn't necessarily the case with me.

Speaker 1 The greatest exercise of this book was clarifying. There's a great story about Raymond Carver.
And Raymond Carver wrote, I think, Cathedral that he won the Pulitzer for and short stories.

Speaker 1 And he was a sober. He's my all-time favorite.
Just the best. And the most clear, you know, you think of Hemingway's short stories, same thing.
Very, very clear. But 100% them.

Speaker 1 And when his editor, he was writing and they were like, look, you know, you have sentences that are roughly 16-word sentences. Let's try to bring it down to 12.

Speaker 1 It was like, why the fuck are you trying to change my sentence? That's what I want to write. And he was like, yeah, but if we can just economize it and get it down to 12.

Speaker 1 And then in that volley, he finally said, get out of here. I don't want you as my editor anymore.
And a new editor came in and he said, okay, so look, roughly these sentences are 12 word sentences.

Speaker 1 Let's see if we can get it down to nine. Oh, my God.
And they were right.

Speaker 1 Because when you start slashing and when you start taking all the vividity of it and the colorizing and all that kind of shit, and you go, what am I trying to convey here?

Speaker 1 And try to do it in the clearest way possible. There's a story toward the beginning where it's a little four-year-old kid and all this chaos is going around.

Speaker 1 Mother's throwing cups through the window at the father and all that, but it's written like a Dr. Seuss story.
I took a picture and sent it to Monica of the book because you use Soucian.

Speaker 1 And the day before we were on the fact check and I said, one of my favorite terms is Sousian. And literally within 14 hours, I read in your book.
My favorite writer of all time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We were watching Grinch You Sold Christmas with the kids the other day. That's the greatest.

Speaker 1 And I go, this guy really needs to be held in the same regard as Salvador Dali or something for sure he's like one of the great thinkers of all time the great artists of all time the language the image everything he's an artist on a level of picasso in my opinion okay so my favorite there's some fun hollywood ones actually that i like the punchline of goonies is a really good one and i think people will know this lore of goonies which is the kids in goonies were not allowed hopefully this is the half of the goonies you saw

Speaker 1 i don't know if you remember there's a point where you threw out the one thing that you know but we interviewed interviewed him as our favorite interview.

Speaker 2 It was the best episode of the year by far.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's the only episode I've ever made my children listen to. He's so special.

Speaker 1 Fuck is he special? Oh my God. And then took off back to China for 20 years, 25 years doing fight coordinating and all this.

Speaker 1 He saw crazy rich Asians and said, well, maybe I should go back and try it again.

Speaker 1 What a story.

Speaker 1 Within a year, he was on a boat coming here as a refugee, and then he was on a first-class flight to Sri Lanka to work with Harrison Ford like crazy the worst luck in the history of mankind and the best luck and I was there in the beginning of that like literally his family would be on the side you know trying to understand what the fuck was happening

Speaker 1 in this country yeah okay so famously they built the whole pirate ship and they didn't want the kids to see it do you know this lore no

Speaker 1 oh you're the one

Speaker 1 they wanted when the kids came down the water slide and came out of the water and saw that pirate ship that they had built that they would get their real reactions that was the goal very very cool idea yeah great idea and so what happens okay so basically they kept us away from it a practically built ship on the biggest stage in all of hollywood which was on warner brothers filled with water 110 foot high long ship and they blindfolded us and they finally let us and we tried to see it and there was no way and there was security outside and they backed us in and then they said, look, we're going to put you underwater.

Speaker 1 We have speakers underwater, which didn't exist. It was like some high-tech thing.

Speaker 1 And then we went under and they said, we're going to say three, two, one. We want you guys to come up, turn around, and see the ship.
And we want that organic reaction.

Speaker 1 And finally, we went under and we go, three, two, one, go.

Speaker 1 And we all came up and turned around. And I saw it.
And I went, fuck.

Speaker 1 It was one of the other. I was like, holy shit.
Whatever I said, it was the most organic reaction.

Speaker 1 Think about the amount of work it took to get that first reaction.

Speaker 1 Basically, Brolin fucked up the motherfucking

Speaker 1 shot.

Speaker 1 Dick Donner was like, what?

Speaker 1 Do it again.

Speaker 2 Really funny.

Speaker 1 Okay, this is fun because Damon famously turned down Avatar and he was offered. 10% of gross.
This is now a really fun story about Matt Damon. Really? Yeah.
I turned down Avatar.

Speaker 1 That's why I bring it up. What? I never knew knew that Matt turned down Avatar.
How did you get it? With an on-the-phone call, 10%.

Speaker 1 10% of gross.

Speaker 1 So this is literally a hundreds of millions of dollars. Literally.
Literally.

Speaker 1 Few people can remember a time when they go, no, thank you. And that resulted in a $200 million

Speaker 1 loss of income. Maybe more.
That's crazy. Yeah, you didn't know that.
I did not know that. Oh, isn't that? And I love that.
Yes. And he has a great attitude about it because you don't know.

Speaker 1 You don't know.

Speaker 1 I mean, mean, one of the things that I look back at, like Keith Ledger was supposed to do no country and then dropped out at some point. And then they looked and looked and everybody wanted it.

Speaker 1 And they said, no, we have a very specific guy. And then I auditioned for it and I sent the video in and they said, who lit it? And all that kind of shit.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't until I got, who was it, Matt? Matt was supposed to do milk. He went and he had a scheduling conflict.

Speaker 1 And then Sean Penn, who I had just spent time with in Canada, said, what about Josh? Wow. So it's always, I was supposed to do Birdman.

Speaker 1 I pulled out a Birdman because I needed to go see my son, who was living in Thailand at the time. And then that ended up being Edward Norton.
Oh, my goodness. At Jurassic Park, Chris Pratt.

Speaker 1 Oh, I just talked to Pratt the other day. Walk me.

Speaker 2 Wait, you were going to be him?

Speaker 1 It wasn't I was going to be him. It was going to be me.
He was going to play Chris Pratt. He didn't know, but it was going to be me.

Speaker 1 Chris told me when we did Avengers together, we were sitting there talking to each other about whatever kids. And he goes, Yeah, when I showed up It was your face on all the drawings

Speaker 1 Which happened to me for Deadpool 2 which was supposed to be Brad Pitt at some point

Speaker 1 And I remember going and seeing all the drawings for Deadpool 2 and seeing all Brad's face and I was like

Speaker 1 sorry. Yeah.
I'm cheaper. How would you like the Brad Pitt and Michael version?

Speaker 2 Jesse Eisenberg was just talking about this with Adventureland because it was supposed to be Michael Sarah and he just spent the whole shoot being like, I'm not Michael Sarah, I'm not Michael Sarah.

Speaker 1 He was just panicking the whole time. They wanted Michael Sarah and they didn't get him, and now I'm here.

Speaker 1 Is that the one he directed?

Speaker 2 No, Adventureland was Greg Mattola.

Speaker 1 Oh, got it. Right, right, right, right, right.
The one he just directed is fantastic. Yeah, I heard it's fantastic.
Yeah, he's really, really good. It's really interesting and original.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Back to the book. Yeah, yeah.
So there is fun. My own selfish curiosity, and I'm glad you developed a relationship with him, but you have this funny beginning and end to Nick Nolte.

Speaker 1 Explain the first time you saw him to Monica. My editor, Noah Eker at HarperCollins, who has been really wonderful.
And he didn't suggest a lot during the writing.

Speaker 1 I thought there was going to be this whole, you need to change this and flip this into this, and there wasn't.

Speaker 1 But one suggestion he did make because I wrote the story about how I had gotten into a thing with my wife at the time.

Speaker 1 And I was going down Columbus Avenue with just pants on, no shoes, no shirt, kind of out of my mind.

Speaker 1 And I looked over and there was this guy sitting at this cafe and it turned out to be Nick Nolte, who I recognized. He had no reason to recognize me.
And we locked up. He hadn't seen Goonies.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. It was like Nick and Monica.

Speaker 1 But I remember a slight smile on his face, and it was almost like, get ready, kid.

Speaker 1 Like, it gets way too much. And you say, and I would have thought the same thing is like, he saw in this young shirtless man.
That looks familiar.

Speaker 1 Yes. I saw my future and he saw his past or whatever.
Whatever it was. So my editor said, is there a follow-up to that? And I go, there's actually several follow-ups to that.

Speaker 1 And then I chose the Night Watch story where I'm cutting off my thumb.

Speaker 1 Part of the reason that I chose that, it was because this guy who hadn't gone anywhere for a long time had these moments during that 22 years, Night Watch or Flirting with Disaster, where it could have been a big hit and then it wasn't necessarily.

Speaker 1 Flirting with Disaster was a really revered and is still a revered movie. It was in my top three comedies.
I list it all the time. But not a lot of people have seen it.

Speaker 2 Have you ever seen Flirting? I I have seen that.

Speaker 1 It is unbelievable. It's an unbelievable movie.
I watch it, maybe, and I loved it. Yeah, it was one of those things.

Speaker 1 Alan Walda, Mary Tyler Moore, George Siegel, Patty Arquette, Patricia Arquette, Ben Stiller, Taya Leone, Richard Jenkins. Richard Jenkins kind of steals.
He's your lover in the movie. He's my lover.

Speaker 1 He's my lover.

Speaker 1 And that was a moment, you know, it was like, I'm fucking acting with Nick Nulty. But you say, when you're in this scene with him, he wants to breathe with you.

Speaker 1 When that's happening, he's actually not Nick Nulty. The magic

Speaker 1 is real and when you're looking in somebody's eyes and you don't see them and that's whether it be the book whether it be acting even though i didn't grow up in hollywood my dad was an actor there was a celebrity thing in it because he went from total unknown to marcus wellbmd which was basically like the friends of its time so there was all this attention and how he dealt with that attention there was a lot of irritability and a lot of confusion and you know you have to go do this and you have to be this and you have to present your wife it was not great.

Speaker 1 Didn't come natural to him. So there was nothing about it in that way that was attractive to me.

Speaker 1 But behaviorally, and I think if you go back into this book, you go, oh, it was so behaviorally chaotic for me as a kid or my brother as a kid that, of course, I would be obsessed with why people do what they do.

Speaker 1 And what a great way to explore that in acting. That was the toe hold for you.
That was it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a version of a psychology toe hold.

Speaker 1 Totally. That's exactly what it is.

Speaker 1 It's like, would you become a psychologist just to be around people who are constantly talking about this thing that is endlessly interesting to me or experientially be inside of it and then you're with nick nolte and you're like this is crazy nick ended up saving my life later there was a whole relationship you ping-pong yeah well he's a ping-pongy kind of guy yeah i only know the lore never met him i've heard some the best almost impossible to believe stories about him i mean literally walk into his house and you go nick are you there and he goes

Speaker 1 and you go, I guess he's here. You know, and then you'd go, I'm in the back room.
Is he like an armchair chemist? He's like growing things. No, that's what I mean.

Speaker 1 So you'd go in the back room or whatever past the living room and he'd be sitting there looking into a microscope and studying his blood.

Speaker 1 You see like six bands on his arm. And you go, amen.
And by the way, not on drugs. Not.
No, sobered. Okay, but he has also partaken in drugs.
He has. Yeah, because I've heard some fantastic stories.

Speaker 1 He has. I got left with a few questions.
Then I want to touch in on my absolute favorite zone you get into in these many different stories. I have a favorite story in the book.
Oh, great.

Speaker 1 Buy a landslide. I'd be so interested to know.

Speaker 1 Mull over whether you have a guess before we get to that. I do have a guess.
Okay. You're raised on this crazy ranch.
Life's nuts. You guys moved to Santa Barbara.

Speaker 1 This is where you get involved with the Ceto Rats. We know about that.
We talked about that the last time. Created the Ceto Rats.
I'm sorry. Created the proprietary recipe of Ceto Rats.

Speaker 1 But mom was involved. You say she was like one of the lead people in a pyramid scheme that was just kind of raining money.
Yeah. But I need more info.
What was the do you know the pyramid scheme?

Speaker 1 I know what the 70s. What the pyramid scheme is? Well, there was the pyramid scheme of the 70s.
What was that? And it was the beginning. It was the first one.

Speaker 1 And what you do is if you have the ability to kind of, whether you'd say manipulate, but she was so good at cold calling people and saying, hey, if you give $5,000 to this pyramid scheme, so if you have eight people on the bottom that works itself to six people, four people two people one person and then once you get more people on the bottom you get whatever money has been accumulated in that pyramid and then you start a new pyramid she would have 20 pyramids going at once she could call a hundred two hundred people a day and get people involved yeah so she was getting that money one bag after another dumping bags of money on the table she would come in with literally grocery bags full of money and then she'd dump it i can see it right now it was right on the side of her bed and she'd dump it and she'd say, count.

Speaker 1 So I counted. I'd count 50 grand.
And then at some point, she was put on a hit list. Ultimately, she found out she was the third person on the list.

Speaker 1 And the first two people had not been killed, but had been severely beaten.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 And those are the people who didn't get their money back. Also, simply because I'm obsessed with money, it's like the whole time I'm reading the book, I'm like, what is mom doing for a living?

Speaker 1 It's like, where does this ranch come from? My dad. Your dad.
Okay. And then this pyramid.
So then a windfall of money, which is fascinating.

Speaker 1 And then you're stealing a good deal of it, maybe six grand of it you found.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 While you were counting, you were.

Speaker 1 And so I knew it was around there somewhere. And when you're a 13-year-old kid, you're not even 13, 12-year-old kid who has this pension for addictions

Speaker 1 that you don't even know about yet. And then you're taking each piece of furniture, saying there's got to be a hollow spot in the floor or whatever.

Speaker 1 And then finally, hearing that chunk chunk or a piece of wood goes rock hard

Speaker 1 and falls out. And you're like, yes.

Speaker 1 And I paid her back. You did? After I did Goody's, I gave her a check for six grand.
And she didn't know what it was for. She didn't know it was gone because she had money coming in and out.

Speaker 1 It's like these cartel people. They lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

Speaker 1 It's a whole different dude. She was a drug dealer.
Yes. She was a kingpin.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I just can't imagine anything more exciting than being 12 years old and having access to six grand and how much fun me and my friends would have had. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Mike Herbert, who's still one of my closest friends, he looked older. So he would go to the drum shop or he had a mustache.
He had a mustache. The herb estate.
The herb estate. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, so the times I like the book the most is when you're telling on yourself. That makes sense.
It's crazy how that's the most beautiful part of people.

Speaker 1 It is the most beautiful part of accountability. It's just so counterintuitive.
To some, most people, not all. Yeah, I guess, A, was that stuff hard to write? Or has our...

Speaker 1 30 years in AA helped us get to a point where we know we'll be loved on the other side of that. Was it hard?

Speaker 1 It's hard after you do it and you put it out there and somebody says, This is the worst book I've ever read in my life. And you go, huh?

Speaker 1 But ultimately, it's even better because then you start to realize the thing that you've learned early on in the program is that has everything to do with them and not about me.

Speaker 1 They're like, I don't want you to reveal shit, man. That means I have to reveal shit.
Exactly. And if I have to reveal shit, I don't want to do that.
We just talked about this.

Speaker 1 Or the story I've been telling myself, which is no one will love me if I tell these things, might be incorrect because you're doing it and people love you and so it's very threatening to the core story they've been telling power of example within massive discomfort i love the idea of anybody even with acting you know you're like hey you got a scene coming up where you have to cry So I think about my dead grandmother.

Speaker 1 Never made me cry. So crisis mode puts me in a different place.
Now, if I think of a mother lifting a car off her kid, like even when I say it, forget it. Same, same, same.
That's it. I'm done.

Speaker 1 If I think of people who go beyond this design of themselves that they feel that they have to adhere to the betterment of humanity, I lose it.

Speaker 1 Me too. So, the tragedy that makes most people cry to me feels very expected.
Of course, that person died. And of course, this happened.
Life sucks and it's going to get worse.

Speaker 1 When people are

Speaker 1 genuine. No, I get it.
When they're genuine and earnest and sincere in the face of how risky it is to be, I lose it. Bro, I lose my shit.

Speaker 1 When someone's sincere and earnest and they do it out loud, I'm like, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 Dean, being fucking earnest and beautiful in this world where people are going to call you all kinds of things for being that way is, oh, that's it. My daughter had, you know, whatever fears.

Speaker 1 She did it last night. We went to the ice cream shop.
I said, go ask for another spoon.

Speaker 1 She dropped her spoon and she was looking back and I could see building up the whole, oh my God, I'm going to have to go in there. What if it doesn't come out right? And I said, don't think, just go.

Speaker 1 And then finally, she went and she did it. And she came back with a smile on her face, dude.

Speaker 1 Forget it. Bravery.
Just bravery.

Speaker 2 Yes. Okay.

Speaker 1 So the part of the book I don't relate to you on, and I've really been spared this. And it's the thing that really probably gave me the most compassion for your story.
Is

Speaker 1 I never was out there in the

Speaker 1 bowels of my addiction with kids i had my mom as my voice right like i would be at the depths of some deplorable you don't have kids yeah but i would think of mom forget it i would have been a dead god if my mom saw me buying this crack right now and you know like oh my god what would my mom think i think

Speaker 1 i know what shame i've carried around but so many of your stories when it is crazy and you're in your craziness and you're getting stabbed in costa rica of course you're like i have kids I have a son I love.

Speaker 1 I have a daughter. Why aren't I with them? That layer of disappointment in yourself and the shame of that, I have been spared and I'm just so compassionate to.

Speaker 1 It must have been so fucking painful to be in those states just thinking, why aren't I with my kids?

Speaker 1 I was 19 years old when Debbie got pregnant and we were living at 2020 Beechwood Villa, just the worst apartment down here on Beachwood Canyon.

Speaker 1 And then, by the way, when I got off the freeway at Vine, then we moved from 2020 villa once we found out we were going to have trevor went to hollywood towers yeah and then we went over to kinwood in los felos you know we just didn't have any money and that was a really shitty part of town just like gunshots all the time and all that stuff but i was looking at 14 years in prison and i had fought six cops so six felonies basically thought i was bruce lee and they taught me a big yep i told you that story it's just the dumbest story literally most embarrassing story ever but great.

Speaker 1 So again, you're in the habit of you get sober and then you're like, okay, it's okay. And then you're responsible.
And then you go back and go, God, this sobriety feels like a ball and chain.

Speaker 1 I want to have fun my life. I'm 23 years old.
I should be having fun. You convince yourself in all those ways.
And then you go back out and it doesn't get worse. It just gets gnarly.

Speaker 1 It was always gnarly. But I will have been a parent from 20 years old.
And my youngest right now will graduate when I'm 70. Wow.
So I will have been a parent my entire adult life.

Speaker 1 So I don't know life without kids. Right.

Speaker 1 So whether it's me going off in whatever this messy trajectory is of a human being, which we're all messy, and you just have to accept these moments, not that they're okay.

Speaker 1 It's like people saying they needed to relapse in order to find out. I don't agree necessarily.
I relapsed and did I learn anything else?

Speaker 1 No, but I chose to do it and I take full accountability for it. There's stuff that I haven't written in the book that my family and I talk about everything.
So it's all open and it's all out there.

Speaker 1 But there's things that I've done that really put my family in jeopardy. And I always tried to keep it separate.
I tried to live this life and then I tried to live that life.

Speaker 1 You have that goal, but obviously the thing is more powerful than you. When it would cross over and bleed over and things would happen, you just go, this is awful.

Speaker 1 But no matter what I did, whether it was involving addiction, because it wasn't always, there's a story in the book where I go to Portland, Oregon to be discovered.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, this is for my own private Idaho. My own private Idaho.
I stayed in a flop house. I mean, I stayed in a true whorehouse.

Speaker 1 There were like hookers going in and out, and I'm reading Rembeau at the time, trying to be a real-time, too. It's a Gus Van Sant movie about male prostitutes.
River Phoenix and Counter Reed.

Speaker 1 Beautiful movie. So he's like, I don't know what it's like to be a male prostitute.
Maybe I should go figure it out. I can't get an audition for this thing.

Speaker 1 Okay, I have enough money to fly to Portland, Oregon, and I'm going to walk around Boys Town in Portland, Oregon. And Gus Van Sant obviously hangs out in Boys Town.

Speaker 1 He's probably scouting for the reality. He's probably scouting for the movie.
This is your intro.

Speaker 1 And he's going to see me and he's going to go, holy shit. Wait a minute.
Have you ever thought about acting? Yeah. Oh, yeah.
And I go, I have actually. I'm doing a movie right now.
No way.

Speaker 1 I'm totally available. And by the way, I have to provide for a wife and child right now.
So anyway,

Speaker 1 I ended up, yeah, but not like this. You end up in the adult booths and you got glory holes.
Big dicks come through the wall. I went full into it, freaking out and then also thinking, what am I doing?

Speaker 1 You have the right ratio of delusion and reality. So it's like you're delusional enough to go up there, but you're also there going, I'm a fucking fraud.
I don't know what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 This isn't accomplishing anything. I suck.
I have a kid. Why aren't I at home? That's it.
And by the way, that's not the first time I did it. I did it with Oliver Stone for the doors.

Speaker 1 And then I heard Val Kilmer got it, but I was walking around looking like Jim Morrison

Speaker 1 in Tucson, Arizona. Like I thought somehow it would get it.
It's so sad that the irony is, and I think what the book suggests is you never know, man, if you keep putting yourself out there.

Speaker 1 You don't know what your life has in store. You just have to keep doing that.
You keep having to lift the car off the child.

Speaker 1 You have to keep being brave.

Speaker 1 You have to be willing to go through the meat grinder and get ground and ground and ground and ground and ground because you don't know what's going to be sculpted out of it.

Speaker 1 So the only time I get nominated so far, Gus Van Sant. Wow.
I ended up doing W with Oliver Stone. Yeah.
How fucking crazy.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's insane. Do you tell Oliver, hey, man, I was like wandering around acting like Jim Morrison.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 he didn't care. No, he doesn't care.
And I loved working with him and I love him. And I don't say that just to say it, but great working relationship.

Speaker 1 I think he was slightly afraid of me, which was probably a good thing. Yeah, it takes a lot to scare him.
It takes a lot to scare him. And he's usually this guy that's creating

Speaker 1 chaos. Talk about creating a vortex that he controls.
There was a great, can I tell you this quick story?

Speaker 1 Okay, during W, there was a thing and Richard Dreyfus, and I don't know what Richard was going through. I don't know if he was sober or not sober.
I think he was sober.

Speaker 1 But we had a seven-page scene and we chose to eat sandwiches. We chose along the lines of doing this movie.
We thought, I think he uses his hands a lot.

Speaker 1 So he's eating potato chips or eating sandwiches or always popping a candy or whatever. We had a scene between me and Dreyfus and it was just seven pages of going back and forth informationally.

Speaker 1 And I'm eating a sandwich during the time. And I'd say my first line, I go, you know, so vice, what's today hold? And he goes,

Speaker 1 and I go,

Speaker 1 this is literally the first line. And he goes, what?

Speaker 1 I go, it's your line, man. And he goes, what do you mean? What do you mean? And dude, it was just that over and over every time we did the take, he would stare at me.
And then Oliver comes in.

Speaker 1 He goes, what's the problem? I go, I don't fucking know. I don't know what's happening.
I'm studying my ass off of the scene. I don't know what's happening.
And the driver was still sitting there.

Speaker 1 And he goes, what?

Speaker 1 And I go, what do you mean, what, dude? You don't understand what?

Speaker 1 We have a dialogue. It's not a monologue.
There's a dialogue. I'll hold the shit up so you can read it.

Speaker 1 He was like, why would you do that? I go, so you can speak.

Speaker 1 And I didn't know. I thought it was like one of those Alan Font things where I was like, like, I'm definitely being pumped.
Yeah, I wouldn't know if he was trying to get control over me.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't know. Did he not was lying? And you never know with actors because that goes on all the time.
I got mad. And then Oliver was like, No, I can't have you getting mad.

Speaker 1 I can't have you getting emotional. You can't get emotional.
Go over there. And then they're yelling at each other.

Speaker 1 I didn't know what was happening.

Speaker 1 I did not. I still, to this day, don't know what's happening.
It's either Dreyfus is a genius or something was going on. Sure.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert

Speaker 1 if you dare.

Speaker 1 We are supported by ServiceNow. You know what I love? Not having to do boring, repetitive stuff.

Speaker 1 I want to focus on the interesting conversations, the creative work, the things that really matter to me. And apparently, that's exactly what ServiceNow does for entire organizations.

Speaker 1 AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. Here's the thing.
ServiceNow has basically become the operating system of AI.

Speaker 1 Instead of Frankensteining together different tools, ServiceNow unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business.

Speaker 1 That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform. We're talking HR, customer service, every department you can think of.
And here's what's cool.

Speaker 1 They got Idris Elba as their brand ambassador. I mean, come on, if you're going to have someone represent your company, might as well be the guy who's basically the CEO everyone wants to be, right?

Speaker 1 With AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.

Speaker 1 We are supported by Quince.

Speaker 1 So I'm standing in my closet the other day and I realize I'm reaching for the same three things over and over again.

Speaker 1 And they're all coming from Quince, which got me thinking, when did I become that guy who actually cares about where his clothes come from? I'll tell you when, when I discovered Quince.

Speaker 2 Exactly. I was at a happy hour a couple of days ago with a very cool woman named Margo, very chic.
And I was like, ooh, I love your pants. I love your sweater.
And she said, Quince. Boom.

Speaker 2 And I was like, I should have known.

Speaker 1 Should have known. Turns out Quince cracked the code on something I didn't even know was broken.
They partnered directly with these ethical factories, cut out the middlemen.

Speaker 1 So you get the same Mongolian cashmere that costs 200 bucks elsewhere, 450. Same quality, none of the markup.

Speaker 1 Perfect timing too, because holiday shopping is coming and I actually have good answers for once. Not just clothes either.
They've got home stuff, travel gear, all of it.

Speaker 1 Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince. Go to quince.com/slash DAX for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.
Now available in Canada, too.

Speaker 1 That's q-u-in-ce-e.com slash dax. Free shipping and 365-day returns.
Quince.com/slash dax.

Speaker 1 We are supported by Credelio Quattro. Every dog deserves to enjoy the outdoors and be protected from dog parasites.

Speaker 1 Credelio Quattro offers the broadest parasite protection of its kind by covering six types of parasites in one monthly flavored chewable tablet, fighting ticks, fleas, heartworm disease, roundworms, hookworms, and tapeworms.

Speaker 1 Woof. Other products say they're all in one, but Credelio Quattro is the only monthly chewable tablet of its kind that covers three species of tapeworms.

Speaker 1 And it's flavored, which means your dog might actually like it. Whether you're going on a hike or just in the backyard, you can help protect your best buddy.

Speaker 1 Talk to your vet if your dog has a history of seizures or neurological disorders. Visit quattrodog.com for more info.
Ask your vet about Credelio Quattro. That's quattrodog.com to learn more.

Speaker 1 For full safety information, side effects, and warnings, visit CredelioQuatrolabel.com. Consult your vet or call 1-888-545-5973.

Speaker 1 This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop.

Speaker 1 This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop.

Speaker 1 Apply for Apple Card in the wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes.

Speaker 1 Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at applecard.com

Speaker 1 again back to my favorite part is always when you're telling on yourself this is a story that could happen to me any given day and it would be a fucking bummer your sheep story i knew it you did it's such a beautiful story i read it out loud to my girls last night and my wife was listening and she said wow i can't believe what a great writer he is i totally want to read that book.

Speaker 1 Wow. It's such a great story.
Super cool. And I would love for you to read it.
And if you don't want to read it, I'll read it. Oh, man.

Speaker 1 I want people to hear this story because I think it would make them want to read this book.

Speaker 2 It's a good cover, too.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The cover was Joey Feldman, who's a sober buddy of mine.
Okay. Dang.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 This is great because you didn't know you were going to have to do this.

Speaker 1 No. And by the way, I never wrote down the story.
And I did take my younger kids to this very place where this happened. We revisited at the Kerrang.
Let's see if I can pronounce this stuff right.

Speaker 1 When I was reading out loud, I was like, Munga's going to flub this. They won't know.
I'll probably flub this too. 1999, 2000.
My girlfriend was getting minor surgery.

Speaker 1 I had my 11-year-old and my seven-year-old with me. We were visiting her in England.
She kept pushing that we should travel, so we eventually came up with Scotland.

Speaker 1 I've always had a thing for Ireland, but Scotland never really came up before then. The Isle of Skye is a paradise.

Speaker 1 I would learn later that most of our ancestry comes from the highlands of the Isle of Sky, Clan Ross and Clan Reed. Maybe that would explain the feeling we had when we were there.

Speaker 1 The kids and I had a banter. Where are we going to sleep tonight? I'd yell, to which they'd reply in equal decibels.
We don't care.

Speaker 1 We didn't care. We were carefree and happy.
We were Clan Brolin. We were a unit.

Speaker 1 One day, about five days into a very nomadic vacation, we came across the Kerrang, a landslip on the northernmost part of Trotternish, Isle of Skye, Scotland.

Speaker 1 There was no car park at that time, but for a little soggy dirt lot along the edge of the road. Everything was new to us there.
Everything was a discovery.

Speaker 1 Clan Brolin just rolling along with whatever came along. A trail was barely visible in the distance, and from it overlooked a stunning portrait of the valley below.

Speaker 1 We decided to trek and make use of our whimsy. No water bottle, no idea how long it was, we took off, Eden, my seven-year-old, holding my hand and Trevor bringing up the rear.

Speaker 1 The walk was precarious at times. Right from the trail's edge, shot down hundreds of feet, it seemed in moments.
I questioned myself and my abilities as a parent. What am I doing up here?

Speaker 1 Why do I do this with little kids? What about a typical playground? Why don't you do what is already set up for children?

Speaker 1 The trail would even out with the pitch of landscape, and we'd be back freely being our lively selves.

Speaker 1 Sheep are in high population in Scotland. They are everywhere, and here was no exception.
Blue dots on white-riddled parts of the mountainside, red dots on others.

Speaker 1 I surmised the colors sprayed onto their thick wool represented ownership, farmer blue and farmer red. Fine.
I like sheep. So do my kids.
We've had sheep. They are funny.
Cartoon funny. Bah!

Speaker 1 I suddenly ran toward a flock of them, my arms flailing. I thought it'd make my kids chuckle, watching them run down a hill, then up another.
The sheep were scared, but no harm, no foul.

Speaker 1 My children laughed more at me than at them. Our papa's crazy and I loved living up to the legend I imagined myself to be in their minds.
We love crazy papa.

Speaker 1 As I stopped running and waving my hands and just started to turn around toward my kids, I heard a snap. I didn't know what it was.

Speaker 1 Then as I refocused on the herd beyond, now running up a hillside, there was one whose legs were dragging behind it, the front paws desperately scooting the body forward in fits and starts.

Speaker 1 Poppy, what happened to that one? I jogged down to where the flock had been, and the lamb was still there, struggling frenetically.

Speaker 1 The closer I got, the more it tried to scamper away, but it couldn't. Something wasn't working in its body.
I hoped it was in shock because of the sudden change in pitch.

Speaker 1 I hoped that maybe the sheep's body had temporarily spasmed and frozen. I put one hand on the back of its neck to try to calm it, and the other I slowly pulled down the length of its spine.

Speaker 1 Vertebra, vertebra, vertebra, vertebra. The sheep let out a yell.
It was a screech of pain. We were two miles away from the car.
That part of its back had collapsed. It moved.
Something is broken.

Speaker 1 I've been raised with wild animals my whole life. Bobcats bit my cheek until it bled, and I've cleaned the cages of wolves, mountain lions, and bobcats since I can remember.

Speaker 1 I know how to deal with crisis. I would have been a good soldier.
I'm calm under copious amounts of stress. I looked over my shoulder to my kids.

Speaker 1 They were staring at me, waiting for a sign of how to react. Stay there, I told them.
Please stay there. I don't know what to do.
I was kidding. I was making a joke.
This goddamn sheep's back broke.

Speaker 1 How the fuck did that happen? It was only meant as a joke. What do I do? But I kept a face on.
I looked around for anyone else on the trail. Nobody.

Speaker 1 I looked up to the peaks of the kerang, how the fog was just caressing caressing the tips of them, and I suddenly felt the cold front of death enter my body.

Speaker 1 The sheep scooted slightly farther forward and bleeded. I grabbed its body and attempted to swing it onto my shoulders.
I couldn't. It was too heavy.

Speaker 1 I wanted to be that parent who could lift cars to save their child, but no matter how hard I tried to hoist it, it failed. I looked back to my kids, who looked sad and anxious, but stoic.

Speaker 1 They had in them that ranch kid grit that didn't allow for an instant reaction. They knew it was going to get worse, and to react now would be premature.
Turn your heads. They did.

Speaker 1 I could break its neck, I thought to myself, one startling snap, and it would be out of its misery and pain. What if I waited? Would it be better? Where is everyone? I avoided it as long as I could.

Speaker 1 The sun was getting lower in the sky, and all I knew was that I was going to have to kill this innocent animal.

Speaker 1 I grabbed its muzzle with my left hand, then brought my right hand over the left side of its head, leveraging my left. I'm going to pull as hard and as fast as I can, and it'll go out like a light.

Speaker 1 One, two, turn your heads, cover your ears. They did.
One, two,

Speaker 1 three.

Speaker 1 I pulled as every organ in my body fell into this hell of my own making. Bah!

Speaker 1 The screaming. The sheep kept screaming.
Its back legs were splayed out, and it just screamed and screamed as it kept reaching forward away from me. It knew, it knew I was here to murder it.

Speaker 1 There was no sign of physical trauma, none. Can we look? My son yelled over his shoulder.
Not yet. I didn't know what to do.
My kids were watching me. This was a seminal moment.

Speaker 1 There was no pride in trying to kill the sheep. There was nothing but shame and inadequacy.
I didn't know what I was doing. I should know.
I was 31 years old. I grew up on a ranch.

Speaker 1 I grew up around wild animals. I had to assist in the deaths of animals all the time in our house.
Cancer, age, trauma. I wrapped my hand around the nape of its neck.
I told it I was sorry.

Speaker 1 I was sorry. I didn't know what to do.
I had killed wounded animals before, a stork on a beach with a broken neck, birds flying into windows who could never fly away again.

Speaker 1 I put my dog down when he was riddled with cancer. I should know how to do this.
We were fifty feet from the edge of the cliff. I could throw it off, but what if it survived?

Speaker 1 I don't know what's down there. What if there's hay or a soft bog? I looked up and the other sheep were watching me from afar.
My daughter was crying by now.

Speaker 1 It was a soft cry, a silent cry, just tears. My son put his arm around her, ranch kids consoling each other through each of nature's traumas.
But this was because of me.

Speaker 1 Do they think if I kill this sheep that I would kill them? Not now, but at any point in their lives? If I do this, will it always be living somewhere under their skin, itching at them?

Speaker 1 I dragged the sheep up the hill while it continued to bleat and try and hold its ground with its front hooves. There was a loose rock.

Speaker 1 It was an old rock with a layer of mica and a slight fur of moss covering it. I picked it up, and there were two sharp edges visible.
I ran my hand over them. They were as sharp as they looked.

Speaker 1 I imagined the sheep telling me to put it out of its misery, but I knew that wasn't the case. It had no say in the matter.
It was all in my head.

Speaker 1 The truth is, we were all dying on that landslip, but soon one of us would be dead. My aim had to be right on.
Turn your heads, cover your ears.

Speaker 1 My daughter wiped away the tears on her face with the backside of her hand, then put the palms of her hands over her ears. My son followed suit.
I lifted the rock above my head.

Speaker 1 One eye stared up at me from near my feet. The grass along the trail was a deep green.
I imagined blood on it. I tried to prepare myself.
I am a killer. I kill innocent beings.
I'm not funny.

Speaker 1 There is nothing funny about me. Don't think.
Aim. Save this animal from the pain I caused it.
Aim. Please, God.
Please let me get it right. I stand tall, the rock suspended above me.
Thunk.

Speaker 1 A dull sound.

Speaker 1 It's moving. Please, God.

Speaker 1 Keep your heads turned. Small bursts of wind came.
Lift, thunk, lift,

Speaker 1 thunk,

Speaker 1 lift,

Speaker 1 crack.

Speaker 1 Silence.

Speaker 1 The wind is picking up. My children are cold.
I am cold. The world is cold.

Speaker 1 I feel my children inside me. I see their pain through me.
I feel for the pulse of the animal. Silence except for the winds.
None of us move. I am looking down.
My children are looking away.

Speaker 1 The sheep is dead. We stand for a long, long time.

Speaker 1 We stand there to this day. Oh, my.

Speaker 2 That's beautiful.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's tragic, but it's beautiful.

Speaker 1 Oh, man, that's like fucking carve-esque, my friend. What a story.
For me, of course, I'm always walking this tightrope of trying to give everyone the most spectacular experience.

Speaker 1 That's exactly right. And I'm irresponsible and it goes wrong.

Speaker 1 It's so selfish of me that I do things and it goes wrong. I mean, I'm reading that.
Kristen and I were in Africa. I see this huge herd of giraffe.
I'll have it on video. It's part of our video.

Speaker 1 It worked out. I ran at the giraffes and they all started running and it was great.
One could have tripped. If I'd have killed a fucking giraffe trying to entertain this gal.

Speaker 1 And that's with them for the rest of their life. And that's the kind of things I play with.
And it's irresponsible. And sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't.

Speaker 1 I got to live with the fact that, you know, it doesn't.

Speaker 1 That one fucking hit me because that's really a metaphor for how I've been living my whole life. That's it.
Watch me jump off this thing. Watch this.
We talked it in the beginning.

Speaker 1 It's like when you said when one parent leaves and then you're sitting there and you're having to perform, and then there's always this performative sense of self, like you're the funny guy, you're the crazy guy, you know, especially while drinking.

Speaker 1 I went out with a guy once. He was from Canada, but we were in LA and we had a certain relationship where I was in my craziest phase.

Speaker 1 And he brought somebody from Canada and flew her down and said, hey, I'm going to take you out with Josh. And you'll buckle up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And I, for some reason, I wasn't drinking at that moment. Had a day, maybe three days before.
And I was like, okay, I'm going to stay off the sauce for a while.

Speaker 1 And we went to one of the few times I've been there to the Viper room. And he said, what do you have to drink? And I go, I'm just going to have water.
And he goes, what do you mean?

Speaker 1 And I go, I'm not not going to drink tonight. And he said, dude, I brought my friend down from Canada.
It's time for the Josh. And I was like, holy shit, I'm your clown.
Yeah. I'm the jester.

Speaker 1 And I think that's what my mom was. And it was only toward the end of her life that she started to come to terms.
She had thought of a really great story for a series.

Speaker 1 And she wasn't involved in Hollywood at all, but it had to do with chimps and people. And ironically, this series is out now.
I call chimpanzee.

Speaker 1 Literally.

Speaker 1 And she had thought of that story. And somebody said, I love that idea.
Let's develop it. And I remember my mom in the kitchen really profusely crying, which she never did.
And I said, what's up?

Speaker 1 And she said, I've never been taken seriously in my life.

Speaker 1 So you have the bleedover of that, which is me, some masculine form of that, who's doing that same song and dance, who realizes on his own terms, luckily younger, and says, you know what?

Speaker 1 I don't want to be this jester all the time. I don't want to be the one that people are happy to escape, but they're happy that exists because they're living life, some version of chaos through me.

Speaker 1 You're living out their fears.

Speaker 1 Whatever. Yeah, you're the horror movie they go to.
I'm the horror movie that they go to. That's it.
Yes. And then under all that is, could we love you just because you exist? That's it.

Speaker 1 You don't think so. No.
I don't think so. I've gotten the same thing from, I understood people who are obese and you go, hey, we can do this or we can do gastrosurgery.
We can do this. We do that.

Speaker 1 And they go, no. And there's this reticence to work out and all this.
And then I got it because I paralleled it with the drinking. Oh, without your extra weight, you don't exist.

Speaker 1 It's the thing that people are always talking about. At least it's something.
Without it, you disappear, maybe. You're invisible.
And I always felt that about drinking.

Speaker 1 Whereas I'd go out and it was like, you know what you did last night? I go, no, tell me.

Speaker 1 And they go, you were nuts. It was so much fun.
But then you did this thing and we climbed the building and then you jumped and you thought you had a parachute on, but you didn't.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I lived off that for years.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, it's the power of identity that we put on ourselves.
Like the whole story where you like being the crazy dad.

Speaker 2 And then in one second, you're not the crazy dad.

Speaker 1 You're a person. That's exactly.

Speaker 2 And that's all we really are.

Speaker 1 You're just another person. That's it.
And can you

Speaker 1 find something? It's just terrifying.

Speaker 1 You get to that place eventually where you can say, i'm okay just with what i have around me my family the few friends i don't have to charm everybody not everybody has to like me it's okay i'm gonna go write a book

Speaker 1 this has been incredible i guess the only thing i wanted from the book and maybe it'll come in another book is your mom deserves an explanation why is she that i was wondering that too

Speaker 1 yeah something happened to her i used to talk to her about it because my mom was was in Camarillo State Hospital.

Speaker 1 She wasn't there for very long, but her sister was in and out of Bellevue for 30 years, severely alcoholic, really crazy. And I got to know her sister later.

Speaker 1 But I would ask her, and she said, my parents were amazing. She was down in Texas at Corpus Christi.
Corpus Christi, Texas. And she said, I'd sneak out my window and my parents would come back.

Speaker 1 They'd be so worried about me. I would yell at them for waiting up for me.
She said, I was the chaos. And she very readily admitted that.
But do I believe it?

Speaker 1 A thousand percent? Right.

Speaker 1 Because, again, her whole thing was she couldn't be vulnerable. So she had power over that story if it was just her.
But I don't know. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I don't know. Maybe.

Speaker 1 We may never know. Well, I fucking adore you.
I adore you. Yeah, I'm so glad.
Thank you for taking this for your 1 millionth interview. I got everything I wanted.
I'm telling you,

Speaker 1 it's not like the others. All right.
I love you. I love you.
We'll do this again. Yeah, thanks for coming.
Thank you. So lovely.

Speaker 1 He is an arm care expert, but he makes mistakes all the time. They got Monica's here.
She's got to let him have the facts.

Speaker 1 We are coming to you live from an apocalypse.

Speaker 2 Not live. Five days late.
But five days ago. Yes.
We were in the midst of an apocalypse.

Speaker 1 Wild sky this morning.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I got up really, really early.

Speaker 1 You know, part of this resolutions biz is I gotta wake up so early to get the things done. Oh, now that I'm back to writing again in the memoir after the journal.
Got it. So I woke up super early.

Speaker 1 I checked my emails to see if Delta's school was closed. There was no emails.
She was also incredibly excited to go to school.

Speaker 1 She was out sick the day before, but she could not get there fast enough today because she bought Freddie in Mexico City a fidget spinner with grenades on it.

Speaker 2 That's thoughtful.

Speaker 1 And the cutest thing was when we were walking down the street with all these little tiny market stands with selling different stuff.

Speaker 1 Of course, I'm checked out, right? I can't stand shopping. So I'm just kind of like standing.
And then she ran over to me and she's like, dad, I need your help. What would a boy like?

Speaker 1 So I went over, we looked at this thing, and her conclusion after playing with it the whole trip was it's the best fidget spinner she had ever uh performance-wise. She spun it.

Speaker 1 Watch how long this thing spins. Anyways, we drive to school right away.
Even when the sun came up, because I watched the sun come up and I was like, that is the eeriest sky I've ever seen in LA.

Speaker 1 It's like dark as hell. We get to school.
We were, we were early. We were out of the house on time.
And I was like, oh, I love getting here early. Parking's a breeze.
Wow. Parking's really easy.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Walk up to the school.

Speaker 2 It's closed. I would have been surprised if it was open.

Speaker 1 Opened my phone 7.20 a.m. That cancellation came in.
So I was 20 minutes early. So then we drove up to Freddie's at eight in the morning and gave him that present, which was really, really fun.
Cute.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then got home and we have a couple different groups staying at the house who have been evacuated.

Speaker 2 Yeah, people. Yeah.
So

Speaker 2 yesterday at like, I guess, two, I guess, or one early, a fire started in the Palisades, which is on the west side, so far from us. Normally these fires happen in Malibu.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Palisades, that's the first for me.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Palisades was new and closer, more inland.
And it just kept going and going and going. And everyone there had to evacuate and it's gone.
The Palisades is gone.

Speaker 2 The Palisades village is completely gone.

Speaker 1 All the stores? Yes. Wow.
I was watching late last night and the high school was on fire. I was like, whoa.
But the winds were... They were insane.
They were insane.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And

Speaker 2 that's why the fires got really out of control.

Speaker 1 And apparently they were, that Palisades fire was moving at five football fields a a minute wow okay so five football fields 500 yards that's a quarter mile a minute crazy yeah the winds were blowing 60 miles an hour the embers were like just yeah i don't know if you saw like the the female newscaster was giving a thing and she just gets engulfed in embers and she's oh my god appropriately so panicking yeah i was having a moment watching that this woman is in the pit of hell.

Speaker 1 She is standing across the street from the high school that's on fire and then the other side of the street is on fire and there's embers whipping around everywhere and she's breathing in a tremendous amount of smoke and of course everyone else is scurrying to get out of there right and she is there i know and i was like this is the greatest example of like when you have a goal and you want to do something like she wants to be a reporter on the ground when the shit's hitting the fan yeah so for her it's one experience

Speaker 1 and it's and it just it illuminated for or illustrated perfectly what your mindset does to your experience in a situation.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I a lot of journalists have a

Speaker 2 they chase that. Like that's that's a part of their personality.
Um, I feel like when we had Anderson Cooper on, we talked a little bit about that, that it's

Speaker 2 in some ways it's like an addict's brain. Like there's some element of

Speaker 2 chasing a chaos.

Speaker 1 I guess what I'm my conclusion was you think a situation is objectively a a thing but really

Speaker 1 if you want to be there

Speaker 1 it's one experience and if you don't want to be there it's a completely different experience the context is identical it's like i said if you're if you're on a football team and you want to tackle the person you're completely oblivious to the amount of pain you incur because you've chosen to run as fast as you can and tackle the person if you're sitting on the sidewalk and you're having an ice cream and you're that's not what you want you don't expect it and you get hit with the same velocity it hurts right it doesn't doesn't hurt when you want it.

Speaker 1 And it hurts when you don't want it. And it's just so interesting, the power of our brain.
So if you want to be in that situation, you're where you want to be, and it's all tolerable.

Speaker 1 And if it's just came up on you out of nowhere, it is a nightmare.

Speaker 2 Lights on fire.

Speaker 1 She said something like,

Speaker 1 okay.

Speaker 1 Like it was this self-talk of like, okay, we're in the shit now.

Speaker 1 It was the attitude of someone that wanted to be there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think if you get out, you can then reflect back and have that opinion.

Speaker 1 But if you're in the hospital, but even experientially in the inferno.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's fascinating to me.

Speaker 2 So that happened. And then

Speaker 2 there was a lot of warnings that likely more fires would start popping up in the night because it was supposed to get much worse. The winds were supposed to increase between 10 p.m.
and 4 a.m.

Speaker 2 and hit like 100 miles per hour.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, everyone's started like getting these warnings and stuff. I had this app, and yeah, I'm just like staring at the map of LA and just like watching them just pop up all over the place.

Speaker 1 Well, then it became a two-front war because on the west side of us, it was that, and then Altadena. Exactly.
And Bree lives in Altadena.

Speaker 2 Yeah, did she have to back up? So I was like,

Speaker 1 come over if you need to. She's like, oh, we got a hotel, shockingly.
Okay, good. And I'm like, I'm watching that thing.
I'm like, where are all these people going?

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more armchair expert

Speaker 1 if you dare.

Speaker 1 We are supported by Empower.

Speaker 1 See, you've always wanted to take that bucketless safari trip where you hop in a jeep at sunrise and cruise the Serengeti. Here's the thing.
If you invest well, you could do things like that.

Speaker 1 With Empower, you can get your money working for you so you can go out and live a little. Isn't that why we work so hard to splurge at certain moments?

Speaker 1 Maybe it's those concert seats that don't require binoculars or taking that trip to Athens in Greece, not Georgian, no disrespect, money.

Speaker 1 So use Empower to help you get good at money so you can be a little bad. Join their 19 million customers today at empower.com.
Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

Speaker 2 Looking at all of this, I was so confused. I was just like, I don't know fires.
Like, I don't understand them. I don't know where you're supposed to go.

Speaker 2 If there's a fire on all sides, how do you get anywhere?

Speaker 2 How early are you supposed to leave? Should I be going somewhere now just in case? Because yes, this Altadina one is on one side of us.

Speaker 2 And at this point, it's moving into Glendale, which is very close to us.

Speaker 2 And it's like, I just felt like I have no idea what to do.

Speaker 1 You were scared. Very.

Speaker 2 You were very scared. Yeah.
I was up till three staring at this thing.

Speaker 1 Boring.

Speaker 2 And then I lost power and then i lost cell and internet and i couldn't communicate with anyone and it was scary yeah

Speaker 1 sorry you were scared that's okay yeah um

Speaker 2 sometimes it's hard to be by yourself

Speaker 2 but it was fine obviously we're fine here thank god we're so lucky to be in a place that we did not have to evacuate um we know people well one of our friends in the palisades house burned exactly yep we know people whose houses have burned down many people who've had to leave.

Speaker 1 I found myself on hour two of watching the coverage myself

Speaker 1 getting annoyed

Speaker 1 with human nature.

Speaker 1 People must be thinking this all over the country, which is like, how many times do we spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the wake of it and continue to put almost nothing into prevention?

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 1 I don't understand. Like, is at some point the governor going to go like, we got to cut the shit and get fucking serious about preventing this stuff?

Speaker 1 Because, I mean, and it'll be expensive, but these start because the winds blow the power lines down. They start a fire.
Exactly. We got to get the power lines underground.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 That's step one. Power lines shouldn't, but that's going to cost a fortune, but there's no way it's going to cost as much as

Speaker 1 those houses that were burning, the Palisades, those are like $40 million houses. The bill on that

Speaker 1 Palisades thing is going to, it's just going to be gargantuan.

Speaker 2 gargantuan across the board it's like when we think about where talent and energy is being spent when the the city is on fire you really start evaluating like what is the point of all this other extra accountrement when we can't even get a fire under it's still like i think the altadena fire is still at zero percent containment yeah like Yeah, it's wild.

Speaker 2 Even military, I'm like, why, why?

Speaker 1 No one could fly in it last night. The winds were way too bad to fly.
Like, I think they're doing a great job.

Speaker 1 In fact, I was watching it and I was seeing that, like, already Arizona had deployed a bunch of firefighters, towns north of us had deployed. They had, you know, they're coordinating all this stuff.

Speaker 1 And I was like, when you're at a bar saying you hate the fucking government, that's the government. Somebody comes to help.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 Fucking God.

Speaker 1 There's this huge system in place. They don't have their hands on it now.
They're gonna.

Speaker 1 Without them, the entire city would burn to the ground. You'd have no city.
And you'd go, yeah, good. No government.
What the fuck?

Speaker 2 And then no one repairing it either. Like, exactly.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like you hate the government.

Speaker 1 That's who's come to rescue.

Speaker 2 Firefighters. And then also even today, just all the landscape workers.
Like, there's so many people out there, like, trying to clear out.

Speaker 2 There's a huge tree that huge that fell on those fields and Commonwealth. So that whole intersection is completely blocked by a tree.
And like you see these guys out there like trying to get it out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's

Speaker 2 it's wild. It is wild.
It felt very end of days.

Speaker 1 It's funny because we had done an episode of Armchair Anonymous. Yesterday.
Yesterday. And we interviewed a nurse who was telling us there was a bomb threat.

Speaker 2 Yes, I thought about that.

Speaker 1 And so there was a nursing home that they had to

Speaker 1 evacuate in Glendale. And there's footage of it, and there's just all these old people in wheelchairs and on beds.
And I'm like, again, thank God there's nurses

Speaker 1 infrastructure.

Speaker 1 Yes, I know.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 I agree. I fully agree.

Speaker 1 That must be part of the reason they build prisons out in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Maybe.
Because what would you do if you had to release all the prisoners?

Speaker 2 So scary. That's probably also maybe if they escape, then it's

Speaker 2 more time to find them before they like hit a community. Maybe it's part of also why they're remote.

Speaker 1 Sure, sure, sure. Well, and they're looking for cheap land and no one gives a shit.
They don't, yeah. I mean, there's a numerous reasons, but I was thinking, like, yeah, what happens if

Speaker 1 there's a bomb threat at the prison? Do they just go like, oh, tough shit, we're going to ride this out? The guards are going to leave. Like, what happens at prison? You can't just let inmates out.

Speaker 1 I know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I wonder if that's ever happened. We can't.
Sounds like a movie.

Speaker 2 Yeah. We don't have internet here, so we can't do any searches.

Speaker 1 This is about doing the podcast in 1994.

Speaker 2 Regular radio.

Speaker 1 Yeah. On 4K cameras.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ignore that part.

Speaker 2 But yeah, anyway, it's been, it's been a wild 24 hours. Very eventful.
Very eventful 24 hours in Los Angeles. Oh, and for people who will probably ask, because in today's episode,

Speaker 2 we reference that we did a commercial and that it's out, but it's not out yet. We did postpone putting it or the company

Speaker 2 decided to probably rightfully postpone.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 just as

Speaker 2 nothing else, I mean, what else has happened since?

Speaker 1 Yeah, nothing really compares.

Speaker 2 That, really.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Josh Brolin, I think, lived in Malibu. So that's a ding, ding, ding.

Speaker 1 He did live in Malibu, but I think he relocated. okay yeah still journaling yep still journaling what are we at

Speaker 2 eight for eight yeah today's the eighth right is it seventh eighth today's the eighth so eight days

Speaker 2 eight days of journaling and i'm also

Speaker 1 day of journaling i wrote down a secret yeah now i have to burn but i can't because if i oh shit it would be insensitive to burn my journal and it was interesting because

Speaker 2 you know people were like make sure you have your stuff ready in case you got to go fast.

Speaker 2 And I was just sort of like looking around my apartment and I was like, what do I, oh my god, what should I take? Like, what is important to me?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 all I took was my passport and my medication.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I didn't put anything in there.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I remember I was shooting baby mama in 2005 or 206.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Griffith Park was on fire and they evacuated all the houses on Los Felos Boulevard, one of them being mine.

Speaker 1 And so Carly called me and said, hey, they're evacuating your thing. You want me to go?

Speaker 1 What do you want me to grab from the house? Oh. And I was like,

Speaker 1 everything I've written is on the computer. Grab that.
I don't want to lose everything I've written. Yeah.
What about that? And I'm like, no, just grab that and get the fuck out of there.

Speaker 1 Did your power go out? It's out currently. It's out currently.

Speaker 2 Rob's went out. Yeah, we've been out much earlier last night.

Speaker 1 Seven yesterday, 7 p.m. 7 p.m.
Yep. What did you guys, did you light candles and stuff we did and then our neighbor's window flew out of the frame and shattered in the side of our house wow

Speaker 2 the winds were so yeah they're crazy

Speaker 1 yeah and you could hear it like so loudly as if it was like a thunderstorm yeah fires are observable and they're predictable you know where they're at you know which way the wind's blowing there's some prediction that can be made The wind's like, where did that come from?

Speaker 1 Why now? When's the next one? You don't know. And they're, yeah, they're like 60, 70 mile an hour guests.

Speaker 2 But, okay, but so this is for Josh Brolin, our friend.

Speaker 1 I love him.

Speaker 2 Just that was lovely. I'm so happy he read his book for us.
That was so kind.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Him to do.

Speaker 1 Someone had heard it on the early release, and they said that they cried during that.

Speaker 1 That was nice.

Speaker 2 That's very nice. Yeah, it was very touching and

Speaker 2 moving. Okay, so the Fred Durst Corey Feldman tour is called Loserville, which we don't like.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we don't love the name of that.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm not blaming them for calling it a bad name, but it makes me feel sad that they called it that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, what I think is happening is Fred Durst, who I don't know personally, I've never met him. I seem, I follow him on Instagram because he loves station wagons.
That's my full extent.

Speaker 1 But he seems to be a pretty self-aware person. And I think he's very aware of that doc, Woodstock, and the fact that they were,

Speaker 1 at least in that documentary,

Speaker 1 kind of credited with this terrible toxic masculinity, all the gnarly stuff that happened at that festival. I think he's aware that people are associating him with all that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think he's probably not that as a whatever age guy he is. And I think he's trying to figure out how to own it and continue on being a musician.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think he's in an interesting situation.

Speaker 2 I think this was probably the best attempt at that well this says the wild mostly sold out summer tour that brought together two pop culture icons who know exactly what you think of them

Speaker 2 in the description yeah and then

Speaker 2 he talks about skylight books which is down the street from us you love skylight books i love skylight books it's a great bookstore how often do you find yourself in there sometimes i like to just go on walks and uh that's a nice destination for the walk because it's a good amount of distance Yeah, but it and then it has a nice little ending.

Speaker 2 It's cute. It's really cute to walk around there.

Speaker 1 I did my sprints yesterday. How'd they go? Yeah, that was part of my res.
Uh-huh. Do sprints once or twice a week.

Speaker 1 I think they're the worst workout you can do. They're hard, yeah.
I think they might be the very

Speaker 1 something worse that I just haven't done it yet. Yeah.
Because biking up the mountain is really terrible. But the sprints are worse.

Speaker 1 But I did them. And then today I'm a little little tall what does a spring workout look like i did

Speaker 1 one half pace well i start at the um gate and i run to the far end of the property i think that's probably about 75 yards

Speaker 1 and i do a half pace one first then a three quarters pace one second to loosen and warm my tendons and muscles up. And then it's as fast as I can humanly come out of my blocks and run to the end.

Speaker 1 And then I'm allowed to walk back to regain my breath, which I barely do. And the second I'm back there, I have to turn and I'm using your clicker finally.
Oh, nice. Yes.

Speaker 1 You got me very early on for my birthday an usher's clicker. Yeah.
Because I always wanted to operate one.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I have had it and really not had any great use for it. I don't tear tickets often in life.

Speaker 1 But in the past, when I did sprints, I'd have like a pile of rocks I moved every time.

Speaker 1 Because you've got to lose track.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So this time it was like, walk back, the second I'm at the gate, I have to turn, drop, click, sprint. Nice.
And so I did 11 sprints. Nice.
Yeah, at full pace.

Speaker 2 Well, the wind probably didn't help.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I wasn't noticing it too much

Speaker 1 at that time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it could have been rough. Could have been rough.

Speaker 1 The good thing about sprints is they are over quickly.

Speaker 1 You can't do sprints for an hour. No, God.
At least the way I'm doing them, where it's just they're back-to-back to back.

Speaker 2 Now, we've talked about this many times, but

Speaker 2 I always feel like it's not correct. So I always check it about Matt Damon and 10% of Avatar.

Speaker 2 It's correct.

Speaker 1 It's still correct.

Speaker 2 Yep, it's still correct. It'll always be correct.
It's still correct. 10%.

Speaker 1 Of Avatar. There's, what are we at? There's three of them?

Speaker 2 There's two of them. Now, that's the part I haven't reconfirmed.

Speaker 1 Let me see what the the grand

Speaker 1 of those movies.

Speaker 1 Worldwide Avatar number one in 2009 is $2.923 billion. We can call that $3 billion.

Speaker 1 So that's $300 million.

Speaker 1 And let's see, Avatar 2.

Speaker 1 Oh, we're at 300 million.

Speaker 1 Let's see. The Way of the Water.
We got a grand total on that bad boy of 2.3 billion. It's another 230.
So we're looking at 530 million

Speaker 1 half a billion dollars wow

Speaker 1 oh thank god he's doing it for the right reason he is he that doesn't seem to hurt him at all that would he just laughs that would be yeah yeah i almost made a half i guess that's what you have to do also and he's made plenty he's done great he's done great it's a lot of row it is by the company that they would never sell it

Speaker 2 never too much integrity but what were they just valued at 600 million um no a billion.

Speaker 1 Oh, at a billion? Yeah. Okay.
So you buy half of it. Controlling interest.

Speaker 1 And part of your stipulations were that

Speaker 1 the girls had to go out for wine with you a lot to pitch you the new product lines. Oh, that sounds great.
Can you imagine sitting with wine and they were showing you sketches?

Speaker 1 I wonder if they're wine girls.

Speaker 2 I don't think so. Okay.
They might be more martini girls.

Speaker 2 I would put them more in the martini category. Sophisticated.

Speaker 1 They're too cool. They're cool.
Wine's too pedestrian.

Speaker 2 A little. I love it.

Speaker 2 I love it. But I'm pedestrian.
What can you do?

Speaker 2 All right. That's it for Josh.

Speaker 1 Those are all the facts. Love you.
Love you.

Speaker 1 Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert Early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondry.com slash survey.

Speaker 3 Hey, basketball fans, Steve Nash here. Ready to elevate your basketball IQ?

Speaker 3 I'm teaming up with LeBron James to bring you the latest season of Mind the Game. And we're about to take you deeper into basketball than you've ever gone before.

Speaker 3 We're breaking down the real game, the X's and O's that actually matter.

Speaker 3 And every episode, we'll share elite level strategy, dive into career-defining moments, and explain the why behind plays that changed a game, a team, or a championship.

Speaker 3 LeBron and I have lived this game at the highest level for decades.

Speaker 3 We've been in those pressure moments and made those game-changing decisions and learned from the greatest basketball minds in history.

Speaker 3 Now we're pulling back the curtain and sharing that knowledge with you. Time to go beyond the highlights and get into the real heart of basketball.

Speaker 3 Watch Mind the Game Now on YouTube, Prime Video, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.