Wondery 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. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Rather, and I'm joined by Modest Mouse.

Hi.

Hello there. Hello there. Jesse Eisenberg. This is a reunion for he and I, as you'll find out. We met 1 other time.

Yes.

I really enjoyed Jesse. I

enjoyed him so much.

Truly.

And when I was listening back, I was like, holy. This guy is great.

He's a special dude.

He is, and he's very quick. He's very funny.

Mhmm.

He was a a joy.

He is incredible. He's an Academy Award nominated actor, filmmaker. Did I say actor?

Is he a blessing?

He's a borderline blessing. Wow. And he's a playwright. The Social Network. Come on, guys.

Now you see me. There's 2, 3, 3rd coming maybe? Zombieland. Oh. Flash went in trouble.

Great show. When you finish saving the world. And his movie is out right now, A Real Pain, which is a bona fide great movie. I hope people check out this movie. It's so, so good.

It's so unique and honest and great. Please enjoy Jesse Eisenberg, The Blessing. The blessing. You don't watch, Christmas Vacation enough.

Oh, I don't.

Let's have, aunt so and so say grace. Grace? She's been dead for years. No. The tuxedo.

Why is it a point?

Because he's very old and he has a toupee and it catches on fire. A lot's going on on that. Please enjoy Jesse Eisenberg.

I'm Indravama, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Daphne Parc, the spy who killed the prime minister. As the Belgian Congo gains its independence, Mi 6 dispatches Officer Parc to build a spy network. Its aim, to thwart a communist land grab, promote African democracy, and prevent nuclear war. Along with field officer Larry Devlin, they work to be a part of what would be 1 of the darkest operations in Mi 6 and CIA history. History.

In order for Park to succeed, she needs to win the trust of Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, or remove him. Follow the Spy Who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can binge the full season of The Spy Who Killed the Prime Minister early and ad free with Wondery Plus.

I'm Colin Murray. And I'm Ennis James. And if you thought we'd already covered the wildest sporting stories on everything to play for, well, think again. Yes. We're bringing you weekly bonus episodes where we dive into the sporting stories that really connect to at least 1 of us.

So expect brilliant sporting stories and also tangents that nobody asked for. That's right. The things that we were reading about when we were very young that we've continued to read about. The stuff that really motivates at least 50% of this partnership. If you want more laughs, stories, and more of us going on script, be sure to follow Everything to Play For wherever you get your podcast.

Are yours gonna be all about Wales? Yes.

How are you? Hi. Welcome.

I'm sorry I'm late. Oh, that's okay. Thanks for having me here. Yeah. Oh, you smell delightful.

Oh, did you already

comment on that?

I did not.

Did you guys embrace?

We shook hands.

You shook hands.

I'm wearing perfume. Is it possible it's

me? Yeah. It's her. It's definitely not me.

No. No. Go smell him.

Only if it's allowed. Only if Yeah.

You can smell it, but I really smell it. You smell everywhere.

Yeah. You do smell that.

You smell fantastic.

You do.

You do.

This was just given to me.

By someone else?

By somebody else. Yeah.

Well, that person smells great.

So maybe she smells great. Yeah.

My compliments to the former owner of that as well. Oh, no. No.

She's a stylist, so perhaps she sprays everything before she gives it to me. Oh, yeah. She's being dressed

for the

next month.

That's a fun first question. Is most of your wardrobe comprised comprised of shit you've collected on sets? Only.

1 time, I had taken my clothes from a movie, and then we had to do promotion of the movie. And so I just changed out the clothes I had with the new version for the promotion. My lawyer called me, and she said, Sony called. You have to send back the new versions

Oh, no.

That you replaced. So there is a risk.

You can get caught.

That's a ding ding ding because my only really sad experience I ever had with wardrobe was Sony. Really? Because in this movie, The Third, they made this really cool astronaut's outfit for me. And, again, there were several. And I wanted it, and they said, no.

You can't have it. And I said, well, I'll pay for it. And they said, no. You can't pay for it. And then years years later, I know you're not on social media, but, like, 15 years later, someone sent me a link to it being sold on eBay for, like, $15 and it's sold.

Or something completely insignificant. Serious? Yes. The whole astronaut outfit. And I was like, those sons of bitches.

I would have given them more than $15. Dollars. Wait. Who was selling it? I imagine Sony just was like, we gotta get rid of

all this.

Bucks? We gotta get 15 bucks by Friday.

Oh my god.

We're gonna

be kicked out of these offices.

They maybe thought that it was gonna be such an enormous hit that it would be at the Smithsonian, and then it would end up being worth 1,000,000 and 1,000,000.

Yeah. Maybe we were both thinking the same thing. Yeah. And then it came out and just didn't Oh,

god. Didn't really eBay.

Yeah. I think it's eBay time.

It could

also be, you know, the company that made it. They could add duplicates. I don't even know. I don't wanna throw something out of it.

It as a Zethura branded thing?

Great question. I have forgotten. We'll have

the Zethura's free speech.

Maybe you

can have an intern.

Okay. This is always a stressful question to hear out loud, especially in public. But do you remember meeting me?

Uh-oh. I was actually wracking my brain trying to.

I'll paint a picture for you. Okay. I don't know the year. It would be between 2,008 and 2,013, because that's when I shot the show. But I was at Universal shooting parenthood, and I'm outside my trailer, And I see a young gentleman across the way in front of 1 of the bungalows, I think, having a cigarette.

Were you a smoker? No. You weren't a smoker. I could tell from a 100 yards. I'm like, that's just

Oh my god. Yes. I do remember.

I could tell you your body posture.

I just recall this. Yes. And I remember you were shooting there.

And I strolled across this great divide, like, 100 yards.

Exactly the date. Of course.

I just harangued

you. That's right. I was doing a reshoot for a movie, and you were shooting I remember exactly where it was. It was towards Jesus Christ. I don't know any of the names of the streets out here.

It was by whatever was closer to the street where you enter. Anyway, I totally remember that.

I mostly, out of curiosity, had to confirm, like, can I possibly be recognizing that's Jesse Eisenberg from this far away just by how he's standing?

Yes. There's no 1 with my that would possibly be in a movie. So yeah. Except me. I remember you were so sweet.

Yeah. I was there for 1 day doing reshoots.

Yeah. And I came over. I'm like, I could tell as you from and you're like, okay. Trying to take that in. Like, that's a weird icebreaker.

And then we had a nice 15, 20 minute chat. Yes. I don't know why I remember you smoking, but I sexed you up a little bit. Smoked,

and you were holding it.

Yeah. I was I was holding

it for him. Yeah. He just, like, asked me to hold it, I swear. That's interesting. Maybe I was.

Maybe I was going through a moment.

Did you ever smoke?

I've tried to smoke to relieve stress. I tried to take it up and thought, like, this will help my personality, and it just doesn't. I thought this will calm me. And it does that little trick of you're finally breathing for the first time where you're taking, like, deep breaths. I always thought if they can come up with a cigarette that didn't make me nauseous, I'd be a heavy smoker.

It's kinda poisonous. I mean, I'm addicted to nicotine greatly. But not cigarettes. I smoked for, I don't know, 15 years. And it's miserable the first, I don't know, 100 cigarettes.

You gotta really stick with it.

You do. Okay. I tried to, and then I also tried to smoke during a movie where I was just feeling so stressful. And then this young assistant prop woman, she was really nice, and we always used to talk because she was very friendly and nerdy, and she thought that we were kindred spirits. And then she saw me smoking 1 day, and she came over to me, and she just said, I thought you were different.

Oh. And I was felt such shame. You had betrayed Yes. Whatever thing happened. That she

had assumed. Because see, that was like a cool guy move.

She didn't know that I was feeling deep, genuine anxiety. I'm just trying to do anything to relieve myself. It was before I was taking, like, antidepressant. I was just trying anything To regulate. Exactly.

And it occurred to me after she said that that, oh, right. Maybe it doesn't work on me anyway. Well,

I don't want you to say that, but okay.

I do. I don't think you need to pick it back up or anything. Yeah.

But I like his encouragement more.

My over my overarching hunch is that you've convinced yourself there's a lot of things you can't pull off that you could.

Maybe that's true.

Yeah. So my gut's telling me you think you weren't pulling it off and

you probably You know what? That's very savvy of you. And as I get older, I start thinking more along those lines. Maybe I've kind of self defined in a way that's actually maybe not the most

Accurate.

Yeah. This is 1 of Monica and I's longest standing battles. I think she's cooler than she thinks she is. I encouraged her to shave.

Pretty cool, but he wants me to go extreme. He wants me to shave my hair.

No. No. Just the side. I thought she could really pull off, like, kind of a punk.

1 side. 1 side shape. Sure. I like that.

Right? Picture her in

that. I like it too. Does it look good? Others. It's not that I don't think I'm cool enough for that.

It's just not me.

Well, how do you know it's you until you try on some looks?

Well, that's true because speaking of cigarettes, for Halloween, I was Mary Kate and Ashley, 1 of them, current era. And so I was holding a cigarette the whole time. I've never smoked in my life. And so I wasn't smoking, but I was holding it, and I was like

She got it.

Is cool.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Gorgeous. Unfortunately. It's a

line in Manhattan where he goes, I don't smoke because it gives you cancer, but I look so incredibly handsome with a cigarette in my mouth. Yeah. Yeah.

It's true. You don't want it to be true, but it is true.

Have you ever bought a car and then you got in the car and you're like, oh, fuck. I don't think I can do this.

Yeah. I got an Airstream.

Oh, okay. I got a pull behind the trailer. Yeah. Exactly. I mean,

a truck. Yeah. Exactly. But I guess I feel that way anytime going in reverse. But also, just like you'd stop at these campsites, I'd travel with my family, and I would have to unhook the thing.

I would always be asking for help. I was always just like the campsite's little brother just asking for help, everybody. And can you show me how to use this tool that I carry around for some reason?

Well, you kinda answered the question. So that was my hobby as a kid. So I'm pretty mechanical, and we have a tour bus. And I say to my wife every time we're in it, because the entire time we're operating it, it's breaking. Like, it's breaking real time as fast as I can fix anything.

There's too much gadgetry on it.

Of course.

And I always say to Kristen, like, what is your normal person who's not a mechanic do with these recreational vehicles? Is yours in constant need of something?

A 100%. I mean, it flooded in Minnesota in the deep, deep winter, and, of course, the thing would freeze and break if I didn't do anything about it. And luckily, mechanics, they saw me in a movie. It was the only reason I got to get in there.

You think the big thing's buying the item? Oh, no, my friend. That's basically a down payment.

Exactly. I mean, there were just mice in the inside of the Airstream. Not on the inside of the Airstream. On the inside of the inside of the inside of the inside, like, within the 2 walls.

Yes. Did they eat any plumbing? Because mice ate plumbing in my bus, and it was so expensive. Because I have all this water. You know, I have 2 toilets and shit.

They fucking ate through the plastic hoses. We went on vacation. All the water dumped on all the electronics, short circuited everything in the bus, like, shades, the lights, everything. Found out later This was the work of mice. Oh, wow.

A coordinated effort by mice.

What's the solution here?

New fucking plumbing. But, I

mean, how do you get mice out of the bus?

How do you prevent the mice?

Well, first, I went on a mice killing spree, which was so I put traps out in the bus with yummy, yummy peanut butter. Those ones were ethical, and this fell on my sister, unfortunately. She had to go release them in Griffith Park. I assume they came right back.

The ones where it closes in the little box?

Yeah. It's like a little resting area before we take our next trip. Right. Right.

And they get the peanut butter.

What did you find? Just bits of foam chewed up everywhere and turds?

I took it into a place and they said, yes. They had eaten the entire inner foam lining of the thing.

Here's the other thing about mice. They love eating plastic.

Is that what it is? Are they actually eating it? They're eating it. And spitting it out.

Okay. Great point. I didn't see how much debris there was underneath. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, they love insulation and wood.

These things are not food.

No. But they thrive on it.

Yeah. They really do. We're currently trying to sell it.

Yeah. That sounds right.

Well, this is a great place to offer it. We've made a great pitch for the product. I think

My wife was just asking the school moms if anybody knows anybody, but this is a far wider reach.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Is there an

info at for a spouse ridden

Please, in the comments, what's year and the size?

2017, 16 foot Bambi sport. Beautiful. I would say good condition, but now you know.

Yeah. Riddled with mice. Yeah. I was gonna say I've

never had mice, but now you know. But I got it. I fixed it up.

It's mint condition. That's gorgeous.

So is it info at armchair expert.org?

Yes. That's exactly right. I just gave you a number.

I don't wanna have to start going through a whole thing. Yeah.

And you don't wanna be in a long term negotiation. Just throw

out your final number. I'm easy. We wanna sell.

Where the seller is very motivated. Exactly. Where do you keep this?

I live in New York, so I keep this on my mother's lawn in New Jersey. Okay.

And so when you guys wanna go on a trip, you drive. Do you rent a truck, or do you own a truck?

During the pandemic, I bought my very first car, which was just a Jeep Cherokee. I never had a car because I'm in New York. Then I gave it to my sister, so I don't have the car anymore either. So I have to go to my sister's to get the car. Right.

Then I have to drive to my mom. So it's a great way to visit your whole family.

Yes. Only to get 20 miles down the road and realize there's a major mechanic. Exactly. The trailer.

That's exactly it.

Are you confident driving even though you've never had a car until a couple years ago?

Oh, good question. It is

a good question. I'm confident. My dad was a taxi driver in New York right before I was born, and he taught me how to drive. And so I guess the word would be cocky.

Okay. Yeah. Not confident.

Arrogant driver, fearless to a dangerous degree. Okay. This is great. So cars can

be so healing because you're saying you feel very confident, and it sounds like you're aggressive in the car.

Oh, I see where you're going. Yes. Why don't I use that as the real me and smoke a cigarette out the window

of my Jeep? Spit tobacco out the windows. Yeah. Exactly. You have a piss jar like

in shaved head blowing in the wind.

Oh, fucking Exactly. Right on the roof.

1 side of

her head blowing in the wind,

the other side having a a sheer breeze. This

is a good movie. This is Monica and Jessica Go Go Wild.

Because I'm pretty tame as well.

But I do think the car so wait. Okay. You were brought home as a little tiny bambino to Queens? Wow. Yes.

Okay. But then when do we move to New Jersey?

Wow. Oak, this is the

tip of

the iceberg. Wow.

That's not so impressive. Very firstuary. I'll get deeper.

Are you serious? Yeah. Yeah.

I am. I have your physical from 10th grade.

Well, you're in luck because it's the same physical right now. Yeah. We went to New Jersey when I was 5 years old, and then I grew up in the suburbs. But I left when I was 18, so I got my license at 19. So this explains the driving situation here.

I was counting down the days till 16. I could not wait, but I grew up in a rural area of Michigan outside of Detroit. And in New Jersey, clearly, kids were driving. Right? You were probably anxious to get your permit and all that?

Not really. What happened was I was starting acting, and then I also was going to high school in New York City. And so I was taking the bus into New York City every day from New Jersey to go to high school, and I was around no 1 driving.

Okay.

Right. So, like, I was only around city kids. In fact, I had to use a fake address to be there. It was city public school.

This is the performance art senior year.

Yes. Yes. Every time you reference anything, I'm going to be in shock.

I want you to pace yourself, though.

I think I could sustain the same level of interest.

This is it's kinda like an acting exercise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

This is your greatest day of your life. So no matter what that would be an acting exercise. Yeah. This is the greatest day of your life, no matter what information you hear. And then I would say, thank you for coming in, mister Eisenberg.

We just got your lab results back, and, unfortunately, you are showing a very large tumor in your neck. You've got a couple months left.

Right. Wait. Sorry. What's happening?

It's the greatest day of your life despite the information I give you. Yeah.

This is the wait. You mean it's, like, the greatest day and then I go to the doctor?

No. The acting exercises, this is the greatest day of your life despite whatever information.

I get it. So okay. Got it.

Mister Eisenberg. Yeah. Yeah.

Sure. Take this back.

We'll try it. We'll work for a second. Did you cut, Rob?

Yeah. You cut. Okay.

Wait. Let's cut. Don't ever cut. Wait till I yell cut. Yes.

We did get your sonogram back of your chest, and you have a very large mass.

How large are we talking here?

8 to 12 inches, it seems like, on the skin. So virtually your full left lobe of your lung.

So my whole lung is this other thing. Yes. This is incredible. You know, because I have not seen an episode of The Wire, and I keep promising myself. If I ever find myself bedridden, if I get the flu, or in this case, obviously, it's something much more long term, I'll finally Oh

my god. Well, congratulations. You're gonna love it. It's a great show. Be patient of the first 3 episodes.

Okay. It takes a minute for the writing to set in.

That's fine. Obviously, I have the time. And is the right lung okay? Because I've also not done Breaking Bad.

It's not great, but it'll make it through, I think, both series. Really? Yes. Oh, this is great.

The left is that bad?

The left is not great.

Okay. Great. Yes. Great. Can I hear the old sitcoms?

You know, 10 years of 20 episodes of perfect strangers?

You're probably not gonna get through Cheers.

Okay. Okay. You're not gonna make it through Cheers?

That's right.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, what a great show to go out watch. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Okay.

This is great.

This is a fantastic cast. Yeah. You did a really good job. If I'm your teacher, I'm listening.

I thought it was so good that at first, I was like, he still doesn't get it, but he really got it.

He got it.

I was playing. I need

to do a few minutes on mom and dad because they both have very, very colorful, interesting background. So as you said, your father was a taxi driver, but he also worked at hospital, and he also became a college professor of sociology. This doesn't seem like a possible trajectory. That sounds like an immigrant story.

Oh, yeah. His dad worked at a cafeteria, and then my dad was the first 1 to go to college in the family. Now he's a college teacher.

So he's a bright guy?

Yeah. Really smart.

How long was he driving a cab and working at the hospital?

A few years in Queens. Oh, no. He worked at the hospital after that. When I was a kid, he worked in hospital administration, and then the hospital merged with another hospital. And so, yeah, he started teaching.

Where does he teach?

He teaches through the SUNY system at a school called Empire State. It's part of, like, the State University of

New York system. SUNY as in opposed to Shiite?

That's right. Okay. And which is weird because my mom is Shia.

Oh, wow.

That's complicated.

And I was raised Jewish.

That's, Conan too. Neutral now.

Yeah. The 2 fronts met in the middle.

That's something we can both agree on. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And then mom was a choreographer in a high school.

Oh my god. That's not even on the She

was also a clown by the name of Kalana what was her name?

Bonabini. Bonabini. Wait. So that's on the Internet?

Or I got your mom's number. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is also on the Internet.

Leading to the number.

Can we take 1 second to recognize that we've interviewed 800 people? No one's mother was a clown. I mean, you gotta acknowledge a really very

novel thing. Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, she was not Bozo or, like, Barnum and Bailey Circus. She was doing birthday parties in the tristate area of New Jersey.

I guess I never perceived it as my mom the clown because people didn't know. It wasn't like, wow. Your mom's that clown. It was more like this is her job on the weekends.

You never had a friend over that had this eerie feeling he or she had met your mother before. And then hours later went, oh my god. Did your mother do my 4th grade?

Could you just put on tons of makeup for a second? Real quick, blow up a 100 balloons. You know what's actually funny? Now that people know me, people do come up to me and said, your mom did my birthday party because they've linked it somehow. But she was really great.

So every Saturday Sunday, she would basically wake up 6 in the morning, tune her guitar, blow up a 100 balloons, And so there was discipline for a really silly performance.

She was a business owner. She was a husband.

Yeah. Actually, I didn't think of it that way.

Yeah. That's like a good model to have as a mom, I think.

And as a performer because I work with a lot of performers who I still have to get over the hump of thinking this is so silly what I do.

You know

what I mean? The embarrassment. And I just never really had that because I saw somebody who took it so seriously. My mom never said so weird today. I was in makeup.

It was just like, yeah. This was my job. This is what I'm doing, and I took it really seriously.

Yes. So now I guess this is common knowledge. I didn't know this before researching you. But when I told my wife excitedly from the bedroom, you're not gonna believe who Jesse Eisenberg's little sister is. Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Did she know?

She knew immediately. But do you know Monica? His little sister is the Pepsi girl, the Pepsi girl, the 1 you're thinking of.

I love her. Everyone

loved her. She was universally loved.

And so she was working at the same time you were before?

She's 10 years younger, but she was through a series of weird, fluky things. Was in movies and very popular commercials when, yeah, I was, like, 14.

But you were already acting. Right? Because your first you were an understudy at 12 years old for a Tennessee Williams play. Exactly. That's pretty nuts.

How do we get to I was doing children's theater in New Jersey. And, again, is

this something I'm just putting you in?

No. She put my older sister who was shy, and I just wanted to be with my older sister. I didn't really like performing. Because on the weekends, children's theater every Saturday Sunday. And then I had troubles in school, and so I just wanted to do anything to have an outlet from school.

So I started doing community theater. It's, like, nonprofessional, but with adults in same towns. And it was an amazing outlet for me. And then an agent from New York have come, seen something, and asked me if I would go on an audition for this play. It was Summer in Smoke, this Tennessee Williams play.

So 12 was your first Yeah. Professional audition. And you got it. Well, Well,

I got, like, the understudy.

Well, that's a lot more than I've gotten on Broadway.

Well, sure. But it was a really weird job to get at 12 because it was like, oh, you know how you like doing that acting thing? You're not gonna get to do that at all.

You're gonna get to watch a lot of

acting. Exactly. And then you're gonna play poker and smoke cigarettes backstage with all the other people who are kind of waiting for somebody else to get sick.

Praying for an injury. Exactly that. Yes. So do you have to go there every night if you're an understudy?

You go there every night. Again, for me, this was just a dream come true because, man, I get to go to New York City every night. I didn't have to, like, interact with people at school because I had this other thing, and I couldn't have friends anyway because I was leaving. I got to miss Wednesdays in school because I do the day shows in Broadway. It was just great.

Do you remember how much you were making?

I think I do. Or at least I can figure it out because it was the roundabout theater on Broadway, which they had these special contracts where you can make something like $220

a week. It wasn't 1,000.

Gosh. No. No. No. No.

No.

Because if I was 12 and you were paying me a couple grand a week to come hang and play poker

Oh god. No. There's, like, no economy for that kind of thing. I made money when I was just just about to turn 16, and I got on a TV series, Get Real, this Fox show. That's when I made money, and we were all just in a state of bewilderment.

Yes. I bet. Even though at that point, little sister had also generated a bunch of money accidentally.

Started making money at, like, like, 5 years old, and it was crazy. My parents are wonderful, wonderful people. And this is not a but this. This is an end this. And when my sister made money when she was younger, it was just like a weight off the shoulders of my house.

Yeah. You just felt it. And they didn't even wanna take her money. You know, there's the rules. It was just for the first time, the lid went off the pot.

And, again, this is all for her for college. But there's a safety net

Yeah.

Somewhere in the mess. Somebody loses a leg. Yeah. It was, like, amazing. And then I got on this TV show.

And then since that moment, it all just feels like a joke to me. Getting money for acting, the whole thing just feels like a joke to me and my family and my wife. It all just feels like this is ridiculous. I can't believe no one's telling them they don't have to do this. Why?

That we would all be here anyway.

Yes. Yes. We would. Would we go promote? That's the question.

I've been told that's what you get paid to do is go promote. Unless it's a podcast, then you would do that for free as well.

God. Well, it's a pleasure. It's the armchair expert. I mean, can I pay? Even the promoting thing I just got back from Poland promoting the movie that I filmed in Poland.

And being there to promote it, I was staying at literally the nicest hotel in Warsaw, and it was the hotel that we would pass every day as we went to our bad apartments.

Yeah.

And it's so funny because I'm like, oh my god. This is what it feels like to promote a thing versus when you're making a thing, and there's a small budget for making an independent film, and there's no money for any of that stuff.

Yeah. No 1 asked for this, but I think the finances of this would interest people who are not in show business. So if you think about a studio has a budget to promote the movie, and they're trying to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. And so they have many options. They can buy a TV commercial, and a 30 second spot's gonna cost however many tens or 100 of 1,000 of dollars versus we send you to Camel, we show a clip of it, and you talk about the movie.

We can count that as basically 2 ad spots. So by their math, they just saved $200,000. So if they're gonna send you out there, my god, they'll spend $5 on your hotel room. Don't give a shit, and they'll pay for you to get a massage, and it's a big savings for them. So it's the best we ever live.

You have just explained something that I have tried to articulate for a long time because it sounds like a little inside baseball y of the movie industry. But what you just described is the very strange economy of promoting a movie. Yeah.

And they have a set budget. They're like, we're gonna spend 30,000,000 marketing this or 5,000,000, whatever it is.

So you doing that 1 magazine thing is the equivalent of them buying an ad in that same magazine, which would cost way more than your $150 hotel room. But for us, the trickle down just ripple effect of it is you feel like this is crazy. It's

the only time you feel like a movie star.

Exactly. And the movie I made was $3,000,000, which, again, this sounds a little insider y baseball, but it's, like, very, very little money to make, like, a real movie that requires tons of sets, etcetera. Absolutely.

Speaking of when you just said it's the only time you feel like a movie star, do you like feeling like a movie star?

I just literally came from a hotel where I asked them to put me in a smaller room because it makes me uncomfortable. I don't know if that's the New York thing. I just don't like Oh, too much space. Yeah. My bags are currently at the front desk because they're getting the smaller room ready.

I feel a little out of sorts. Yeah.

I feel

a little weird. I feel like it's also wasteful. Like, if there's a room that I'm not gonna be in a lot, I don't want it to exist, you know?

Sure.

It's also like New York living, though. You would never get an extra anything in New York. You'd never get an extra closet in New York. You would put a friend there.

You don't like attention would be my guess also?

Yeah. I mean, I guess I like

it and hate it. Gangly hillbilly crosses the parking lot to say, hey. I could tell you, Jesse Eisenberg, might be what you're saying. That was

the parking lot of Universal Studios where you were filming a major popular show. Yeah.

I already got through 1 round of security, I suppose. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So you were already on that trajectory.

You've said a couple times, school is miserable. What version? I mean, I guess I have hunches.

Oh, I really had a very bad

Were you shy and nervous? No.

No. No. No. No. I was hysterically crying when I was 4 4 years old.

Like, I kicked out of preschool because I couldn't leave my mom. I guess I maybe thought of it as separation anxiety or something. Yeah. But it was just I was crazy. I mean, I went to a mental institution when I was 13 because I went crazy and left school for a year.

You did? I was, like, a very troubled kid. I don't know exactly what anxiety. Yeah. Severe anxiety and all this stuff.

OCD? Yeah. OCD, but it was more just like I couldn't go to school. It just killed me. When I was in 1st grade, I cried every day.

So it's kind of like a funny story, but it's also sad, whatever, if you were me.

Those are the best kind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was,

like, sad if you were me, funny if you're basically anybody else. But I cried every day of 1st grade to the point where if I didn't cry on the bus ride Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, on Friday, the bus driver would give everybody Tootsie Roll Pops. And so I tried to not cry on the bus.

So that everyone could get their Tootsie.

And then on Friday, literally on Friday, you'd hear down my block, don't cry, Jesse. People chanting at the bus because they would get Tootsie Roll Pops. So I would be holding it in until I got to school, then I was allowed to cry. Oh.

0, this is heart breaking.

Now here's my hope, is that it was so endearing that it got you out of getting bullied for it.

You know what's so weird? I always wanted to be bullied because I thought it would give me a reason. Yeah. For some reason, I wasn't.

Well, that's really kind of life affirming, to be honest, because I do think even shitty kids have some critical mass of suffering. Okay. He's already too fucked up. Oh, maybe that's it.

They'll push

push push, and then there's a moment where their actual conscious kicks in, I think.

That's a really good point.

So that's weirdly kinda hopeful that you were crying that much, and they were just going, don't cry. Don't cry. Not like, if you cry, you fucking baby. That's really weird.

I actually never considered why. Maybe that's what it was. I think so. I was in 6th grade this 1 time. It was right before I left school.

This kid, I'd never talked to him ever. And he picked up some wood chips and he threw them, and it was kind of in my direction, but it wasn't at me at all. I promise you because I didn't know this person. I promise you guys. Honestly, you're not gonna believe me.

I was so desperate for them to hit me so I could have a reason for my misery. So I can pin it on something. So I can tell my mom. No. I'm crying because this kid and I even knew his name because I was trying to concoct the story in my head where this kid was my torturer and that's why school was hard for me.

Yes. But it wasn't and it wasn't even at me. And that's in some way, like, the saddest thing of all. I couldn't have a place for it.

Yeah. Wow.

What parent do you think it was harder on? I mean, it's hardest on you. Let me say that first. As a parent, that would be absolutely heartbreaking for me to know my kid kid gets on the bus and cries the whole way to school, everything. Yeah.

But I weirdly guess that dad would be in a very big panic that this world's gonna be too hard for a boy and that he somehow has got to toughen you up. And how does he do it?

That's exactly what happened, but I didn't think of it

that way. Probably so overcome with fear. Oh, this poor boy is gonna get destroyed.

That's exactly what happened. So he would, like, push me back to school. And then when I got out of the institution, it was basically, like, if I don't go to school, then I go back to this place, which was terrible. He was doing tough love

Out of his fear, I'm sure, that you're gonna suffer your whole life.

And also the fact that he was probably right, which is that if I just did it and committed to it and didn't have the option to not do it, I would probably learn to be okay. What was the institution like? It was genuinely terrifying.

Do you mean any sexy alley, shitty types that were, like, misunderstood? Have a fantasy about falling in love at 1 of these places. Oh, yeah. Does that make any sense?

I don't recall thinking this is a great opportunity for me.

You can see the movie in your head. Right? The teenagers that go to the derelict center, and then she's really hot and misunderstood. And she just needs to talk about her dad to you, and everything will be fine.

Very vulnerable. I'm sensing we were different 13 year old boys. I didn't go in there thinking, like, I can clean up, you know, every cloud.

I would be thinking cohabitation with other teenagers. What might happen?

Okay. That's probably why you didn't have to go there.

Yeah. Exactly. Because you were doing that in school, and everybody thought you were awesome. No. I remember asking this 1 kid for his shoelaces so I can kill myself, and then I was brought into a soft room with a deflated volleyball.

Oh. 0 my god. No. And I remember he was the coolest kid. I don't know what that means at the time.

He was the Jack Nicholson character.

Exactly that. And I remember asking him for the shoelaces thinking like, oh, he's gonna think I'm cool. You know, I don't know what the equivalent is like going up to the biggest guy on the jail yard and punching him in the face.

You know, I was doing, I guess, the but it was I

was also punished for it.

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Okay. So we're laughing about it, but were you terrified? Were you thinking at that point, there's something fundamentally broken with me, and I'm not gonna be able to function on this planet. Were you scared?

That's how it felt. But, I mean, I still have that same weird dread underlying, but I'm on, like, antidepressants now, so it helps a lot. But, yeah, just that weird dread of the bottom is gonna constantly drop out. It's weird. I'm doing this press tour, and I just keep waiting for the bad thing to happen.

We got good reviews. I was like, okay. That's good. And then the movie did well on the opening weekend. It made more money than they thought.

I was that's good. So now something really terrible is gonna happen to me. So I thought it was gonna be the movie, but now it's like, no. I'm gonna get hit by the car. It's not even get hit by the car.

It's more like existential. Like, people are gonna realize I'm a terrible something. I live with this dread. I assume it helps me in some way.

Well, I've heard you talk about harnessing it in a positive direction. I think that's virtually the only option you have on the table is you gotta learn to work with your character defects and exploit them for the good side and try to mitigate the downside.

Yes. I guess so. You have no choice.

I wrestle with this too. I write from a place of you're a lazy piece of shit. You're a failure if you don't accomplish this. Everything is negatively motivated. And so I relate to it.

When I hear you speak about it, I'm like, oh, yeah. I do a very similar thing. And then feeling guilt that I have to be motivated that way by self loathing and all this. And then hopefully, some compassion and forgiveness and acceptance. You're that way, and, okay, here we go.

Yeah. And I do so enjoy my work. I feel like I just won the lottery that I get to be able to do something I genuinely like. So that's really helpful. And also my work is emotionally cathartic because it's an emotional job.

And so that's really helpful too. All the stuff around it is really kind of unnerving. In terms of the negative motivation thing, we're in the arts and no one's really asking us. Now you have an incredibly popular show, but probably at the beginning, no 1 was begging you to do this. No 1 was begging you to be on parody.

You know, all the stuff we're doing has to be self motivating because no 1 cares. Like, oh, can you write a script today? No. No. Who gives a shit?

Right. Right? Yeah.

And so, like, I wonder if we, in some ways, are looking for some kind of motivation because there is no external demand to do the thing. It's not like you have to punch in. Like, you guys created this from nothing, and it's turned into this thing. Now forcing yourself to think in these weird ways to motivate yourself.

It's hard.

It is. Because I sit down. I write a script a year. My background's playwriting, but I don't really need to do that because I make money from acting. But I feel like I'm going to be a failure if I don't do it.

And so I live with this dread of failure. And when I step back, sometimes I think, oh, maybe that's just the thing I create in my head to force myself to do the thing I like. Yeah. Is that possible?

No. I think it's possible. I also think it's fascinating that you can have or in my case, it's like this split confidence. There's no self esteem at all in imposter syndrome and all this stuff. And then also this, you're a failure, which has, innately in it, some idea that I'm supposed to be special and super prolific and good.

Yes. Yes. Yes. That's fascinating.

This dichotomy of I'm unworthy and I'm a fraud and also you're supposed to be doing great things. They're kinda incompatible.

That's very true. And I'm not acting. My days look like this. I wake up in the morning. I'm depressed, but I'm so happy.

I get to take my kids to school, and I love my wife. I mean, that's not like an active thing. It's just something underlying the relationship.

I'm sure some days you have to think it.

Yes. Some days there's an active loving my wife, and some days there's just a passive, I love you, honey, and keep that in your mind. And then I just go into a real funk until the library opens at 10:30, which is where I go right up until 10:30, a miserable, stupid failure. I can't believe I have the posture that Dax Shepard could recognize from 30 feet away. No other person would ever be in a movie studio with my posture.

And then the library opens, and then I go and I start writing, and I'm sitting there laughing at my own jokes, like the most arrogant guy in the world, and then I'm crying because I just wrote a monolog. I'm crying about the monolog and everything. And then I finish the thing and I go back home, and I'm just such a loser, such a loser. My wife's gonna leave me. I'm such a loser.

Oh my.

My kid thinks I'm a bad role model. And it's so weird. But while I'm doing the thing, in some ways, I guess I think I'm amazing. I guess Yeah. Right.

Because I'm

sitting there writing it.

Well, you've been validated there too.

Yeah. But my wife validates me as a person too. And my kid loves me.

Work can be validated externally, but you cannot be validated externally.

Oh, wow. That's a good distinction.

You as a person and your character, that's gotta come from you. So it doesn't matter what your wife says. That's the juxtaposition.

I know this thing that I'm outputting, which is not exactly me, is gonna be okay.

Yeah. I picked this up in AA, and it's been kinda helpful in me governing how bad the self loathing can be. Because in there, it says that self pity is this other side of the coin is self aggrandizement. You've still elevated yourself to some level where the universe cares is against you, or you have bad luck coming your way. Right?

Like, today, you know something bad's coming. You're not that important to warrant this bad luck or the rightsizing of the justice.

The piece of shit at the center of the universe.

Yes. It's another great AA Yeah. Thing we say a lot. Or, I'm not much, but I'm all I think about.

That's really funny. Yeah.

Yeah. And sometimes I'll be in that kind of self pity or it's self pity adjacent. Right? Right. Right.

And I'll go, this is so indulgent. This is as indulgent of being a megalomaniac, which I would not tolerate from myself. So if I can turn that same ire onto the self loathing part and go, like, it's still you feeling way too important.

That is brilliant. So you're saying you'd be so ashamed to be the arrogant person that you should also be ashamed to be this person who's, like, self loathing as though you've committed some great You should.

You can imagine someone going, get over yourself. You're not fucking so important, and you're not suffering any more than anyone else.

But then don't you feel like, oh my god. Now I feel bad because I was a narcissist. I'm the worst narcissist in the world. Yes.

Why do you think

I'm the

worst single narcissist? Yes. But I think it starts dissipating every 1 of these steps you take. So then it becomes a little manageable that your ego got away from you. I don't know for me.

This crossover to AA because drinking is trying to solve those problems.

We have this weird dichotomy of being so important and then also 0 self esteem.

That's very relatable to most people that

It seems to be very universal in AA. In AA. My hunch is it's probably universal to humans. But we have, for whatever reason, determined that was 1 of the main driving forces of the self obliteration.

Yes. That's really interesting.

Have you ever struggled with any addiction stuff?

No. I can't. I've tried

You've given it a go? Like, the cigarettes?

The cigarettes, I've tried to really commit myself to being a stoner. This is gonna probably sum up my entire personality, the following sentence. I've even experimented with coffee. Sometimes I'm like, I'm gonna be a coffee drinker, and so I'll drink it 4 days in a row, and then I'll just start to feel queasy and fall asleep. And so maybe, like, my body is kind of like a lightweight.

I can barely drink.

I don't

know why. Or I'm just really wired at a certain level that all that stuff is just not necessary.

It is quite obvious to me talking to you how Woody Allen would have been such an appealing figure when you were young.

Yeah.

Because here's the guy that seems to have the outward same grab bag of anxiety and is processing it through art, and it's hysterical. Right. And so this is a time for a really great and weird story, which is you wrote something for Woody Allen.

Yeah. When I was 16, I got exposed to his movies, which maybe is a little late if you're gonna be somebody like me. I could have used them

a long time. Earlier. Yeah. They could have Yeah.

Shown it at the a communal TV room at the institution would have been a great help. I would have gotten all the shoelaces. But, basically, I was writing a lot at the time. So the first screenplay I wrote was about Woody Allen changing his name to Woody at 16 years old, which he actually did, but I said it in modern day and in my life and situation. And people liked it, and it got sent around to various people and ultimately wound up at his lawyer who sent me a cease and desist letter.

What?

That's so flattering.

Well, at the time, it really was. My dad came into the room. I was living at home. I was 16. He goes, I have good news and bad news.

I was like, what is it? What's going on? He's like, we heard back from Woody Allen. And I was like, there can't be any bad news after that. And he was like, it's a cease and desist letter from his lawyer.

His lawyer, incidentally, who was his producer, I got to know. Of course, the guy never knew. I'm sure it was somebody sending this letter 10 times a day to various people.

Yeah.

And it's so funny that you picked up on that and what you described was exactly like that for me. It's like somebody who's outwardly nervous and paranoid about all sorts of things, but who makes life work for him.

Did you hit him with that story on a first meeting, or did you wait till you were filming for a while before you told him?

He's just not interested in, like, people. Kinda. Yeah. That kinda thing. Like, hey.

You get this? Wow. A coincidence about me. He's somebody who's been so fetishized by culture. So I think he's just so uninterested in people telling him, hey.

I got a brother who looks like you. I never told him ever. I knew he wouldn't care or think about it. And then we were on a panel for a press for a movie, and somebody, like, was a French journalist said, did Jesse ever tell you, you know, you did this thing? I looked over at him going, this is just gonna be a waste of a time frame.

He's not gonna care. And he go, oh, interesting. No. I never knew that. And we never talked about it again.

That's exactly what he did.

Exactly. He just has no interest. Maybe in me I mean, 1 time he asked me because he had met my parents at a play that he saw of mine, then we worked together again. And the only personal question he ever asked me was, do you still have the same parents?

Oh, wow.

It was like a joke, but also indicating that there's nothing we're gonna be talking about.

Do you chalk up the anxiety to just baseline biochemical, or do you think any of it is nurture?

Oh, yeah. I had some weird things in my life occur. Probably a lot of it was circumstantial,

but I

do really have great parents. But, yeah, I had some really weird stuff when I was a kid. And I'm maybe wired this way, but it's weird because my parents are, like, actually comfortable, happy, normal child.

Feel great in their own

skin. So there's deep depression and paranoia in the family, but not for my parents. So, yeah, I think there was a series of weird things that happened when I was younger that probably accounted for all of my great personality problems. Okay.

Well, they got a I don't see

them as problems. Yeah. Exactly. I find you very interesting to watch endlessly, so keep processing in public a couple of years ago.

I think people are gonna really enjoy that.

Yeah. Okay. So back to now this radical flip floppiness. No wonder you're waiting for the shoe to always drop. So you're in a mental institution, and then click of a fingers, and you're on a TV show in high school.

Yeah. So after that period, I started auditioning more for things. I went back to school. I was slowly integrating back into regular life while still auditioning and basically desperate to get a part because it meant I got to leave. And then I auditioned for a TV show.

I was mostly auditioning for, like, off Broadway shows, which is what I was doing. And then there was an audition for this show Get Real on Fox, and I got the part. It was just crazy. I mean, it sounds almost maybe arrogant to say, I didn't know I was funny because I was doing off Broadway dramas like Tennessee Williams. I didn't know I was, like, a funny person.

Right.

And then the TV show was funny, and my character is funny, and he was the character who was narrating the show. So it was like a kind of comic voice. And I was auditioning, and the people were laughing at audition. These are, like, professional people. They had big shows on.

And I remember thinking, like, oh, I could be funny. I was partly doing an impression of a kid I met who was really funny and wry and stuff. And so then it was like, oh, I have kind of a voice. And the show was basically asking me to do my voice. It wasn't asking me, like, in a Tennessee Williams play.

You're like, I'm doing a southern accent, but I'm a Jewish kid from New Jersey.

Right. I'm fixing to go to the synagogue. Yes.

And swim at the water hole later on.

I was gonna do a mikvah a little later.

Is that correct? Well, very good.

Thank you. Oh, that's

a great character. Southern religious Jew. Yeah.

Tommy Shlomi, the best dramatic director in television history. Yes. He's a Texas Jew. Oh, is

he really?

With the name Shlomi.

Yeah. It's not helpful. Does he have, like, an accent?

No. But he's so special. He was the West

Wing guy.

Right? He did West Wing. Yeah. Yeah.

I've always seen that name and wondered, why not change

it? Yeah. He did the pilot of Parenthood, and I said, just hearing that name, it's 1 that would make you or break you, and I see it's made you. Yes. Like, he's so confident and cool.

True you live or die. Yes. Anyways, I was on the show for a year, and it kind of went under the radar

and got canceled. Anne Hathaway, did she already done a bunch of stuff? No.

I think it was both of our first jobs.

Oh,

really? Oh, she was on it

as well.

Yes. We played siblings. Oh, wow. She was, like, I think a year older

than me. And would you be in scenes with your sister thinking you've got to table your attraction to this person because you're playing

I guess maybe my brain was just like, you never talked to that person. Okay.

Not on your radar.

Yeah. Maybe. I really was not.

I bet that's charming to gals. I bet over the years, you've had something that would appear to be confidence because you've already just written it off as not an option. Yes. Like an aloofness. That's so funny.

Might seem really attractive.

Was my first date, and she is so cool and beautiful and amazing, and she was older than me. So I just went up to her, like, almost as a joke. I was like, would you ever go out with me? And I never said that to a person ever. Oh, wow.

Would you go out with me?

Would you ever go out with me?

It was a joke.

Is she Australian?

No. But she could be. She's so pretty. She's as pretty as an Australian as that. Oh my god.

She could be. She's so pretty. It's so easy.

Swear she was from Australia. Yeah. Yeah. Go look at her.

Yeah. Go 1 look. My wife and I actually dated for, like, 10 years, and we broke up, and I did date an Australian.

That's what I'm

thinking. That was my other girlfriend.

Okay. A blonde Australian. Yes. That's its own interesting really story I wanna earmark. But, yeah, 5 year break that ends in marriage is incredible and unconventional.

Oh, yeah. That's true. She was my first date. My wife wouldn't date me when I was 17. She waited until I was of age.

There were, like, 3 year period where I couldn't go to a bar, and she could go to a bar, you know, since I was 18, 19, 20. But I think I had the confidence to ask her because

it seemed so absurd. She was

like, yes. I will go out with you. No. She said absolutely not. No.

But then she was an assistant to a producer for a few years before she started teaching. And the producer wanted to read my screenplays. I was writing screenplays a lot. And so Anna, my wife, was the intermediary, so she would have to read these things. And so she thought I was funny, and I reminded her of her father who was, like, funny Jewish

Oh, this is like Sorrento. She kinda, like, fell in love with your words. Is that the name of the play?

Sorrento. Oh,

Cirno. Cirno.

Cirno. Yes. Yes. Since you gave it the, Parmesan cheese version of Cirno.

Well, I'm always straddling the line between Philistine and know what I'm talking about. Right. Exactly. Like bullseyed.

The references are very clear if you add a t.

Or an s depending.

That's right. So then we dated for 10 years. It was great, and now we're married.

Yeah. It's a good story.

Story.

You were gonna go to NYU, but instead, you did a movie. And then you ended up at The New School, and you dabbled in anthro?

I've graduated in anthropology.

I have an anthro degree.

Wow. Can I ask why?

That's exactly why I was gonna ask you.

I did because it was my wife's degree prior to me. What about you?

Through my own childhood, I just always felt outcasty. I didn't feel like I agreed with the vibe that was existing around me. I thought there had to be other ways. And Antwer was like, oh, not only are there other ways, there's, like, very exotic, interesting other ways.

Oh, you mean to just live?

Yeah. Culturally. Realizing how many versions are out there to try begs the question, are we even close to what version we'll be ultimately living in?

Because anthropology teaches you that cultures are not superior, inferior to each other.

Cultural relativism. We just gotta learn why it functions the way it does, not whether that's good or bad. I find that very liberating.

Me too. Especially because you're trying to constantly be a good version of this society, but that in some ways, it's a little randomized.

Yeah. And I'm feeling like it's unacceptable how I'd like to be doing this. Oh, there isn't a right or wrong. That's comforting.

Yes. That's a really good point. My wife, specifically, she grew up living in different places in Central America and Europe, and she just lives life totally different than anybody I know. She's an activist, and she's politically minded, but she's just uninterested in, like we just had a presidential election. She's uninterested in all of the numbers of the presidential election.

She just kind of feels like they're helping people in need. She just doesn't have the sense of the rat race of modern life.

Is she less inclined to levy a verdict?

She's uncynical. She's never criticized people. She's never I mean, in 20 years with her, she's never looked over at me and rolled her eyes at something somebody said. And I'll ask her, like, wasn't that

so stupid what that person said?

She's like, no. I mean, they're going through a hard time.

It probably makes sense within their little sphere of culture.

Exactly. And this is the way they exist. It's okay. They have trouble making friends. Just let them say that stuff to you.

It's okay.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of compassion.

Exactly. She's never once uttered the phrase. That was weird. And partly that's, I guess, why I was also able to ask her out. She seems very unjudgmental.

She would think, like, wow. No. You're ugly. She'll just take it at face value.

And then cultural pluralism is also 1 of your focuses.

Yes. That's because I graduated with a weird degree. The New School has these kind of eccentric degrees. So it's democracy and cultural pluralism, which was basically an anthropology degree.

Yeah. Interesting. And then you're doing a bunch of acting while you're at the New Schools.

Yeah. I would leave every other semester.

And is that where Lipson was the New School?

Oh, wow. Yes.

James Lipton. Lipson. Lipson. That's you. I'm on the front

of the Sorento side of Yeah. Yeah. That was

I was never in acting classes there, but, yeah, he ran

Inside the actor studio? Yeah.

Yeah. That's what it was.

But that was a new school presentation, somehow.

It was.

Did you ever go to any of those weird lectures and ask questions?

I didn't. I knew them really more from the Will Ferrell parody of them. Do you remember those? Yes. I guess you're

young enough that it already been parodied.

Like, it was hard to take that kind of thing seriously. And I was working with actors who are occasionally so pretentious that I was so turned off to that thing.

Yeah. What's the word? That you you know,

just this kind of self important, sanctimonious version of actors.

I hated it too, but if I do some soul searching, I think it's probably because I thought maybe they were better than me, that I haven't studied enough.

Oh, yeah. Now I could understand feeling that way.

You have the opposite. You've been working for so long, and you were on Broadway. You're like, I've really done it.

But now I could see it having also the effect of, oh, wow. This is the real deal. This is the way you're supposed to talk about things. To me, it just seems like self important pretense as though your job is, like, more important than any other job in

the world. Okay. So you come onto my radar in the squid and the whale. Oh. Which is such an incredible movie.

Is that Noah Baumbach's first directing?

I think he had directed other movies that hadn't gotten the same amount of attention.

I saw that movie, and I absolutely loved it. I love Jeff Daniels like crazy. I think he's 1 of the most unsung him in newsroom. Yeah. So I saw that, and I thought you were incredible.

And I thought that movie was absolutely incredible. Is that mark kind of I already know the answer, I think, which is you don't ever feel safe. But did it feel like, okay, the right people are noticing this. I have my foot in the door firmly.

I don't know how to describe it other than to say so briefly. It's like the kind of thing I've been in things that are popular and been in things that are unpopular, and there's always a little period after the popular things come out where you do have yes. I would just call it exactly what you said, a feeling of security. Oh, I know if I wanted a job in the next 6 months, I could definitely get 1. Yes.

I don't

know that it would be great or that I would love it, but I've been involved in so many of these things where something is really liked briefly, and then you go back to the same thing 6 months later. It's always the case.

The cycle.

Well, you have 4 years between Squid and the Whale and then Zombieland, which, unless I'm mistaken, Zombieland's then the next big kind of thing.

Yeah. It was like a big movie.

So in those 4 years, where are we at mentally? Also, is there anyone you've isolated as I'm emulating that career or I would like that career? Were you thinking of what kind of actor you were aspiring to be?

No. I mean, if anything, like, I grew up really liking Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler movies, probably like every other kid on my block and every block in the world. Yeah. I guess I saw in Ben Stiller maybe before I noticed Woody Allen. Maybe a Kindred thing.

Like, oh, I could be in movies as a good role in movies and not have to change too much about myself. But, no, I never thought, like, I'm gonna do that because as actors, you know, you'd have no control over anything. And, also, weirdly, I was really just getting cast in dramas. Zombieland was a comedy, but all the auditions were very dramatic auditions. I was really not getting cast in those comedy things anyway.

Even this movie I did right before Zombieland Adventureland was a comedy, but the director wanted to make his bittersweet coming of age story. He didn't wanna make a broad comedy.

Mottola. Right? Greg Mottola. Follow-up to Superbad.

Well, that's the thing. It really wasn't. It was like Greg's life story in the eighties and this bittersweet thing, but because they build it as exactly what you just said, people were disappointed in it because they thought it would be really funny, like Superbad. It's interesting that you

asked this, and I haven't thought about this

in, like, 20 years. But what you just described was I actually thought 1 thing might happen to me, and that's not the thing that happened. I thought I could be in a Long King Polly or something like that. Uh-huh. And I was just not cast in those roles.

Zombie Lane to me was so fucking incredible. I don't like zombie movies. I was like, who's Ruben Fleischer? This guy can fucking direct. There was a Metallica song in the movie, which there almost never is.

Yeah. You're right.

When you were shooting Zombieland, did you have any sense while it was happening, like, oh, yeah. This is pretty mega. This is gonna be fucking awesome.

That's the movie I've started smoking on that I was told by the prop woman. It was a really nice person in film that she couldn't believe that I had transgressed so badly in her eyes. But probably what's happening in the back of my mind, I thought this thing is good and that I'm ruining it. And I would have panic attacks all the time. In fact, anytime I had to do a scene that was 1 of my audition scenes, I just froze up and I would start saying other lines.

And then they told me, we just got Bill Murray to sign on for a day in the movie. Yeah. And I walked away and had another panic attack. So I was like, now people are gonna see it, and I'm so bad. And I know that Reuben wanted Michael Cera to be in the movie.

Reuben is a good friend of mine, so I could say this comfortably, has no filter, and didn't realize that him telling me that he wanted Michael Cera to be in it would make me feel uncomfortable.

Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

And also didn't realize that sending me videos of Michael Cera while we were No. Shooting at night. So I'd be on my computer.

Oh my god.

And an email with the subject line, Michael Cera funny video, would be sent to all the cast.

This is

cool. Obsessed with Michael Cera, it sounds like.

He was obsessed with Michael Cera. I'm sure who turned down the movie. I'm sure that's why I got to audition for it in the first place. And so every day, I was just thinking of, oh, of course, you wanted Michael Cera. And I could read the part with Michael's voice in

the part

way more than I could read it with my own voice.

So I

just felt like I was every day letting down the movie, and this was just like a failure because of me. And then I just started having these weird fantasy. Of course, I'm gonna go home to visit my wife on a weekend, and Michael's gonna be there in bed with her. Like, hey. Too late, buddy.

And I've since met him. It's funny that he's, like, the nicest person.

He's impossible to dislike.

But just at the time, I was getting recognized on the street as him all the time to the point where when I said to the people, no. I'm a different person. They was like, yeah. Fuck you. You're him.

It was a weird thing.

I I think it's more common to have that than not because mine was Zach Braff. The whole early ride

Thank you for saying that. It is more common than not. Yeah. Every time I talk to an actor, it's always, oh, yeah. Mine is this person, and I was this for Michael too.

And it takes a while to get comfortable with it. Now and I've talked to Zach about it as well. It's like, I'm happy to pose in a picture, and you think it's Zach, and that's great. I don't need to correct anyone. You were great in Garden City.

Thank you.

I've signed a hot rod. This is an Andy Samberg headshot.

Oh. 0, my god. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But that's the part that you don't think in the moment that it's happening to him. Everyone thinks I'm Michael Cera, and everyone thinks he's Jesse Eisenberg.

You can't even

get that piece.

And he had, I think, told a story publicly about getting recognized at me at a bar or something. And I remember thinking like

That was a fluke.

Exactly. Whereas for me, I mean, literally, I got cornered in an ATM by somebody aggressive saying, like, yes, you are. Yes, you are. And I was like, okay. Fine.

Fine. Fine. I am. I am. And it's just like the weirdest existential crisis to be stuck in this vestibule going, I am the other person.

I am the other person. Let's take a picture. 1 time, my sister's friend said, do you look like the guy in that movie? I mean, you're obviously, like, a better looking version of him, but, like, you look like him. And I remember thinking, oh, that's so interesting.

So the objective opinion is that I'm ugly to the point where she apologized for making that comparison.

Oh. Justine, that happened to me while I was presenting on stage with this singer. We're midway through 1 of these award shows. Like, this season's blah blah blah. And she just looks at me, and she goes, you're so much better looking in real life.

And I was really delighted and also, like, but hold on now. She thinks I'm rough.

Like, that that's the objective truth.

Yeah. As opposed to what she thought before, which is why is this guy in movies, which I would have related to her on.

Right. Of course. Of course.

We could have talked all day about that.

Yeah. I was surprised that my sister's friend even complimented me in the moment.

Okay. Now, The Social Network comes along. I guess I just wanna know a little bit about how you came to be in that movie, and what's it like? Do you go meet Fincher first? Do you audition?

Was it written with you in mind? How's all that work? I remember

I was sent, like, 3 scripts that same day, and 2 things were bad, but I auditioned for those too. You know, it's like the nature of being an actor. You just get the parts you get. And I remember that script was, oh my god. This is a great thing to read.

And then I just made the tape on my couch in New York, and then they gave me the part.

And you got the part on the self submission?

Yeah. It was like a whole thing. It felt like it was, like, being sent to the CIA because my agent called and they were, like, they liked your tape and they're gonna watch it again. I was

like, okay. Okay.

Well, it's like me.

For the update.

Yeah. Exactly. They called me out to California, and then I met with him for 1 hour. And David Finchert speaks in a very interesting way. I was there just waiting for him to say, you got in the movie or you didn't get in the movie.

But it was said he was, like, just telling stories about old Hollywood and I didn't know what they meant for me because you're sitting there. You're, like, 27 year old actor. Like, did I get the job? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Then they called me later and said, yeah. Yeah. You got the part.

So it's a weird thing. You know, it's so strange. Like, I've auditioned for things that I haven't gotten into and you auditioned for them, like, 10 times, and then they meet you. You read with this person and then read with that person, and then they'll straighten my hair and make me read again. This happens to me a few times.

Straighten my hair so I can see what I look like as a gentile. And then you don't get those parts. And then that thing like this comes along, and it was just I made a tape at home with my little sister, and they cast

me. Wow. Did the repeated takes let me ask you this. Are you prone to insecurity on set? It sounds like you were having a lot of insecurity on Zombieland.

Yeah. No. This, I didn't. I felt like I was just in the shoes of this person. The anxiety in Zombieland was really I'm an interloper here.

They tried to cast somebody else who's definitely funnier than me. I still think definitely funnier than me. And he didn't wanna do it, and everybody's disappointed that I show up every day. The Social Network, it just felt like I was prepared for it in a different way. The character was so interesting and socially aloof and cryptic and angry, and this is my comfort zone.

And is having this Sorkin dialog put you immediately halfway there?

Yeah. It's so helpful because you know the scene's gonna be good either way. You didn't feel like you had to do some heavy lifting. So it felt like, oh, I could just play in my character.

Yeah. So often, it's not on the page, the thing that we all know everyone's trying to get that day.

Exactly. It requires the actors to do some work that they shouldn't be doing. For example, like, making certain emotional transitions seem logical when actually they're not in the script. I mean, if you're working with great scripts like that, a great director, my experience was, oh, it's easy to be good in this. You get a bunch of takes.

The script is amazing. You can't fail.

A no brainer.

Yeah. Kinda like that.

And you famously had no experience on Facebook. You joined for 30 seconds or something in this big story. Yeah. I joined for 30 seconds to see what it was about. Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah. I joined for 30 seconds to see what it was about.

I joined for, like, 12 days once. And I looked at everyone I went to junior high with. And when that was over, I was like, I don't know why I'm on here anymore.

The thing you just described is the exact reason I'd be curious. I'm so curious to see what people look like.

Just like, what do people grow into?

It's so fascinating to think about.

Well, my conclusion was everyone I looked at, like, oh, they're old. Oh, they got families. You can only do that so long before you go. I mean, clearly, I am too because

Right. Right.

We're all the same age. Whatever I am looking at them with, I have to acknowledge it's happening for me too.

I love that movie. I rewatched it recently. It's still so great.

You did just rewatch it,

didn't you? Yeah. I was obsessed with it. I would just watch it over and over again for a while.

1 of your movies.

I have a handful of movies that I end up just watching every night

sort of

movie during the pandemic. Contagion.

I still haven't seen that. Is it great?

It's so

good. I'm so curious.

It's such a good movie.

Okay. Yeah.

Devil Wears Prada, Social Network.

7. We love 7. 7. The real interest got 2 on the list from

our side.

Yeah. Goodwill Hunting is my number 1. That was the original.

Is it the kind of thing you could say every line to?

I wouldn't wanna be put to the test right now because it's been a minute, but at 1 point, I could recite the whole movie.

She would sit in class and watch the movie.

In my head, I would watch it and then rewind it and watch

it again. Class at MIT?

I wish. No. Because I was too busy watching movies in my head.

Yeah. Yeah.

But Social Network is so good. You're so good in it. Everyone's so good in it.

Well, thank you.

You already had your taste of it all with Zombieland, but that's an enormous moment. You get nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe and Academy Award. That prick Colin Firth had done King's Speech, so I'm no 1 got a chance now. Yeah. What was that whirlwind like?

Hard, fun? Weird and exhausting. And when I would complain to my dad, my dad would just always say the same thing. It was like, if you have 1 of these in your life, if you're, like, in the arts, be so happy. Why are you complaining?

And Obama was president at the time, and I was like,

I have to go to

a weird dinner. My dad was like, do you know the president of the United States probably has 17 things a day that he has to do that are not the thing he likes doing?

You should be just so grateful that somebody's given you free dinner and everything. And I

remember I was thinking, oh, I shouldn't go to the Academy Awards because awards are stupid. My dad called me and he was like, are

you an idiot? This industry has given you so much.

Of course. Go to these things. Yeah. These award shows are basically ways for the industry to celebrate itself and to promote itself. So just go there and be grateful.

Now I'm a little more grateful about things rather than trying to resist.

Well, just you know you're gonna feel uncomfortable in all these places you go.

Yeah. But also, I think in a bubble, they're strange why they pit artists against each other. This kind of teenage poetry thought, you grow out of that stuff.

And isn't it all a lie too? Which part? The story about why you're not drawn to it. If I were you, I'd be like, I don't belong there. Those people belong there.

That's the real feeling in my heart that I might not wanna look at.

Yes. So

I build on top of it a very defendable reason why Which

is which is that awards are bullshit.

Pitying artists and all this stuff. The brain quickly fills in a plausible excuse that doesn't require you to own your fear or your vulnerability.

Yeah. Yeah. That's so intuitive. I even call my mom sometimes or my wife. What's the difference?

I'm 1 of those 2 people tells me, last time you had a good time, and you've met a friend of yours there, and you were funny.

Yeah. That's And you actually leave going like, no. I actually belong in this group of people, which I can't convince myself. Yeah.

Actually I should be there alone.

I don't know why they invited DiCaprio. Yeah. He's a great actor, but he's not as fun as me at a party.

Yeah. There's a charm missing. It's that x factor.

So how was hosting SNL in the wake of that?

That was so funny. It was, like, the exact same thing you're describing. I had turned it down 10 times because I did not wanna be somebody who had hosted Saturday Night Live. I just felt so embarrassed. I was like, I'm gonna be a person who did it and who would never be asked back.

So I was just like, I don't wanna have done it. Feels so embarrassing. And then I did the exact same thing that you just said. So instead, I justified it by, like, no. No.

No. No. Because I want people to know me as an actor, not as caricature stuff. So I don't wanna do it. So that's why I justified it.

And then I was really pressured to do it. And I was a fan of the show, obviously. I mean, everybody is.

And it's an insanely unique experience to have on planet Earth for a week.

Yeah. In fact, I don't even really remember lots of it. When you're doing the show, you're being dragged around by this sweet woman Donna who's changing her costume. You literally have no autonomy. You're being just taken around to various things, and the hours are weird.

Yeah. You're kind of in a fever dream the whole week, and then it ends. Right? And you try to process it afterwards. That's exactly it.

Yeah.

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Oh, I did wanna mention 1 thing because it seems relevant for a real pain, which is Emma Stone, of course, was in zombie lands. Is that the first time you meet her? Yeah. You guys become pals, obviously, because she's a producer on both the movies you directed.

Yeah. Exactly.

I think she is so talented. I think she's so sparkly, and I thought, poor thing, she was off the charts great in. I find her to be a real unicorn. I'm very intrigued by her.

Oh, she's a a total unicorn. I mean, she's funnier than almost anybody I've ever met and great dramatic actress. And I will say knowing her now as a producer, she's so savvy with in the film industry. We're, like, on marketing calls with the studio, and there's people who've been doing that job for 20 years, and they're all amazing. But she just holds court, and we're all just sitting there taking notes.

And she's somebody who's never marketed a movie. She's just so savvy at every aspect from giving me a note on my script to then marketing to production, everything. It's hard to describe what the thing is because I haven't seen it in somebody else. It's hard to articulate it. She just seems always right is what it feels like.

Everything she says to me is always, oh, yeah. That seems better than what I was thinking.

You're right. There's a hyperintelligence too. I should have listed that in the mix. Yeah. But so often you go on a movie and you really bond with somebody, but then there's no legs to it afterwards.

You both go to different sides of the planet and do another movie for 3 months. How did you guys end up maintaining that friendship and just broke through that?

I think everybody who meets her has that same feeling, and I think everybody who meets her feels like they have that bond. Yeah. And I was very, very aware of that when we were working together. I was like, I'm her best friend, but also I think probably everybody feels that way. It's because she's so genuine.

You have the sense in her presence like, oh, this is my new best friend. Wow.

My hunch is she makes you feel incredibly comfortable to talk to.

Yes. Exactly. And so for

a lot of people, she's the most comfortable person they get to talk to. And so they are in the level of intimacy that they can feel comfortable sharing.

Yeah. That's exactly it. They feel in her presence like this is the most comfortable I've been.

Because I could also see you convincing yourself to not stay in touch with her.

Oh, no. I did. I basically I didn't reach out.

My hunch is that she probably pursued you as a friend.

She did. I only say this because I didn't wanna bother her because I think of her as on another planet. She's also a very busy person. Yeah. But she would send me text messages, like, I had put out a book the next year.

She'd send me text messages of lines in the book. She would come to all the plays I wrote. She was just very supportive. I think what it is is that she's like a comedy nerd. And so I was writing comedy essays.

She would send me a picture of 1 of my short stories or something, and she would say, this is my whole life. And she's genuine.

Breams give me hiccups?

Yeah. Breams gives me hiccups. It's a collection of short stories that I published in there and elsewhere, and she would just send me pages from it. And no 1 was doing that to me. It's so sweet and flattering.

I think she's just like a comedy nerd in addition to being also, like, a goddess. And so I think that's what it was. So she became interested in the stuff I was writing. And so she would always be the only 1 who would read my stuff, I mean, more than any other friend. Yes.

He believes in you creatively.

Yeah. And so she got my first movie script, and she was thinking of starting a production company. And she asked if she can produce this as her first movie.

Wow. That is when you finish saving the world.

Yeah. Exactly.

Okay. You do the Now You See Me's. Those are huge hits. John's a friend of ours for part 2, John Chu.

Oh, really?

You gotta see Wicked. He fucking slayed it. It's past.

I can't wait to

see it. It's insane. Okay. It makes a ton of sense. You've written a bunch of plays that have been produced.

You've been writing forever in your acting, so obviously, directing is not a big leap. But for you, did it feel like a big declaration?

Not really. I just was feeling like I wasn't getting good movie parts for a while. I was always writing plays because I was doing movies that I really liked.

You were living also in a subset of Hollywood that got largely diminished. You were in a lot of 20 to $60,000,000 movies, quirky comedies, those went away. The actual sweet spot you were living in has only just deflated over the last 10 years because that's TV now.

That is so interesting. God. I just blamed myself. But I'm

sure you're at home going, like, yeah. No 1 likes me anymore. Forget the fact that they haven't made a $35,000,000 dramedy in 8 years.

You know, it literally never crossed my mind. But so I've had this happy thing where I was acting movies I really liked, which you're saying went away. I guess that's true.

Yeah.

And then I was doing plays, and it felt great. And then it had been a few years since I've been in a movie that people really like. So I just thought I have to take the thing I've been doing in theater and just move it to movies where I can kind of take control of it a little more. I had written a book for Audible, and instead of turning it into a play, which I was going to do, I turned it into a screenplay because I just thought then I could just get in movies. And it truthfully was helpful.

Like, I was working with a 24, produced it, and it was basically like, I'm in with the cool kids again in the movies. And I engineered it myself, and now I acted in my second movie. So now it even helps me as an actor. But it was kind of like, I guess, taking a backdoor back to the table that I felt I wasn't sitting at anymore.

Right. And had you convinced yourself that the ride was over even to the degree where you were trying to transition into gratitude for having been at the party? That's funny. You're talking about the

the memoir phase of the career. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, the processing of the experience.

Exactly. Now you're opening the car dealership based on the sitcom that you're in.

Mine is I'm doing Ace True Value hardware commercials regionally in Michigan, and I go, no. You didn't get punked. We do have garden hoses on the

Exactly. Now watch out for those zombies with this new ring. Now you see these cars. Now you don't. Yes.

God, where was I? All now I could think of. Where are we?

I just Directing.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, this

is what

I was gonna say. Basically, you joke that I was in the gratitude phase. I was not in the gratitude phase. I moved to Indiana. I was in the I moved to Indiana phase.

Bloomington, Indiana? I moved to Bloomington.

Yeah. What is that? Bloomington is a city, and cities are groups of people.

Yeah.

And you know this from your anthropology that those people can be different. But basically, my wife grew up there.

Okay.

My mother-in-law tragically got sick, and she was running a domestic violence shelter there. And we went to help out with the shelter and to take care of her. And in terms of professional stuff, because that's kind stuff, because that's kind of what we're talking about, it was, like, just a total 2 feet out the door of this thing. You know, it's a weird industry. It feels so unstable.

You feel like, oh, the thing's gonna spit me out tomorrow. Being in Indiana, I was just around none of it, which was great. Paradoxically, it was weird because I was the only actor there, and so people were like, hey. Are you still acting?

Sure. Which is not a question you wanna be asked.

What year was this?

This is probably 2016, 17, 18, 19

Pre pandemic.

Yeah.

No. And then in the pandemic, we were there all the time. We moved to Indiana.

You left, basically.

Exactly. And it was a relief, but you're running away from something Yeah. Too. I was running away from not feeling like I'm pounding the pavement in New York. Also, I was in this Batman movie, and the Batman movie was so poorly received, and I was so poorly received.

I've never said this before, and it's kind of embarrassing to admit, but I genuinely think it actually hurt my career in a real way. Really? Because I was poorly received in something so public. I've been in poorly received things that just don't see the light of day. For the most part, no 1 knows.

But this was so public, and I don't read notices or reviews or movie press or anything. So I was unaware of how poorly it was received.

But I don't even know what you're talking about, and that's another thousand. Reality. This is another thing that we figured out.

Know that either until I was reading about you today.

Yeah. We think everybody knows about it. Sure you think we know what you're talking about, the movie, and then you were poorly like, I didn't know that until you just said it.

Oh, yeah. But in the industry, if you're in a huge, huge movie and not seen as good, the people who are choosing who to put next in their movie are just not gonna select you.

You.

Yeah. You're just, like, associated with something. I loved my role, and I loved the movie doing it, everything. So I feel just myself to blame. I'm not like they did me wrong.

No. I'm like, oh, I guess I did something wrong there. And so it did feel like I had to climb out again. Yeah. But you were really depressed

after that.

I was depressing, but I'm depressed all the time. In some ways, it's just like, oh, yeah. Of course. I had this great opportunity. Of course, it didn't go well.

Just pessimism.

Okay. Great. So here's this other great irony, which is constant fear of the future. But when terrible shit's happening to me, I'm kinda good in terrible shit.

I'm fine.

Which begs the question, why am I so afraid of the future? Because every time I'm in the shitty thing, I do just fine.

Oh, no. It's exactly what I expect. My main trouble comes when a good thing is happening because I think now is the really bad thing, and it's that anticipation that's really troubling. Yes. My mother-in-law was very sick.

And while we were taking care of her, it's such a self centered way to view something, but I remember I just had never anxiety because I never had a thought about myself. It made me feel so good to be able to help somebody who needed it. During the pandemic, there was no work, obviously. I couldn't go to set, so I was working in this domestic violence shelter. I was just volunteering, and I'd never been happier in my life.

It was just getting outside of

yourself. Now I heard you talk about directing. I thought this was a cool thing to acknowledge because I say this kinda publicly. This is a wild business. The most creative person isn't the best director.

You have to also lead a 120 people in a direction. That's its own skill set, and it's almost bears no relation to the other part of the job. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like you're general manager of a store.

Yeah. It's very interesting. You think, oh, if you're creative, you're a writer, and you're in your room by yourself, and if you're a good enough writer, eventually they'll go, do you wanna direct? And you're like, why sit in a room by myself? This is gonna be a different experience altogether.

I liked hearing how you, a, owned that. Like, I'm not the kind of guy that can be shouting on set. We're losing the light. But you found your own way through it. What is it that you landed on that made you comfortable in that role?

Oh, that's so nice to ask. The directors I've loved working with are not those people either. They're people like me, and they are great because they're real people who so appreciate everybody who's on that set. They appreciate the actors who are exposing themselves, discounting their own vanity even though their face is gonna be blown up to a 1000000 feet. And I just walk in so lucky and happy that this production designer, this cinematographer, this art director is here working.

They're far more talented at their job than I am at my job. This is my first or second movie. This is their 100th. These actors, same kind of thing. So I just feel really lucky, and the 2 movies I've made are very specific to my voice.

And so I'm very confident in the creative part of it. I know where I'm not confident in, and I'm so happy that I have people working with me who are. When I think about it that way, it's pretty easy. My new movie I'm acting in as well, and I never had a chance, for example, to watch the playback of me in the scene. I never had an opportunity.

We were moving too quickly for me to go and put my headphones on and watch me act. It was basically I could either do that or do another take. It would take the same amount of time, so I'd just do another take. I was too busy to second guess myself or my hair. I just finished doing now you see me 3, and it's an ensemble movie, and the part doesn't require me to, like, dig deep and get still.

I was so nervous all the time. This is my shot on this movie, and this is the important scene in this movie. When I'm doing my own thing, I just don't have that there's no buildup.

I think I'm best in the things I've directed because, yeah, I'm so distracted by the much bigger issue at hand. So you're unselfconscious? Yeah. There's no time for it. I gotta get these lines out I wrote.

That's my job.

But what does it tell you then about the nervousness from the other thing? Does it tell you that's just fantastical stuff that you're creating to fill your mind?

It gives me an example that I can do the same job without all the bullshit. I don't have to be fearful. Right? And I don't have to be nervous. It's almost like immersion therapy for you or I where you get results, and then you have to acknowledge, oh, I didn't need all that rack yet.

I just found it so much waiting in movies to fill your head with crazy stuff. Again, I just finished this movie. Ruben Fleischer actually directed. It's a big movie, and you could not go wrong in this movie. It's now you see me through.

And yet you spend the 6 hours in your trailer waiting to do the thing. And so by the time you get to do the thing and the line is basically just like, I got him right here. You know? Something like that. Yeah.

And so you're in the trailer, and you're like, I got him right here. I I got him right here because you're thinking this requires so much because I'm here in this trailer. Yeah.

It must require so much if there's all this crap around and all these people around me.

Exactly. So then you overinflate the importance, and then you screw yourself up a little bit because it actually is better if you don't think about it. It.

Yeah. Well, I watched The Real Pain last night, and I've really, really enjoyed it. And in fact, I was watching it, my 11 year old, who was just trying to get out of going to bed, which is a great technique. She kinda joined me. She was laying on the floor watching with me.

And she goes, this movie's hard to watch, but I really like it. And I'm like, yeah. That's like a whole genre of movies, hon. We take for granted all 3 of us grew up watching certain kinds of movies, and now kids grew up watching, like, kids movies or tentpole movies. This whole strata.

Oh. Right? Of, like, an emotionally taxing, talk heavy it's not in the marketplace. It was cool. This is uncomfortable.

You can feel what these guys are going through, and that in itself is very intriguing and pleasurable to consume.

But what you're saying is that's unique. My finger's off the pulse.

Yeah. If you're 11 look. We took them to the mall Friday night because I found out there's a Dairy Queen in the Burbank Mall. Once we got there, it was, oh, we've never been to the mall with the kids. They think this is spectacular.

We're in Macy's. They're on every bed, every couch, every chair, and I'm like, oh, right. This was my entire childhood going to the mall.

They never been there just because mall culture is not the same thing.

Well, we don't shop at the mall. We shop online. And this particular mall, the Burbank Mall, shout out, it's a time warp. It's the eighties. This is the same terrible things at the food court.

It was just 1 of these dumb things where I was like, oh, right. I spent every weekend of my life at a mall. This is their first time to a mall at 11 years old. In that way, this movie was weirdly refreshing because this movie could've been mall of movies. Yeah.

Yeah. Could've been what director do I wanna say? Not Hal Ashby, but there's a seventies vibe to this movie.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's character based, you know, walk and talk characters that you don't necessarily fall in love with right away.

Every scene you set up for, you probably were gonna get through 4 or 5 pages of dialog.

Yeah. Wait. Did your kid not find Kieran to be really funny? Because Kieran's antics are funny in the movie.

Yeah. She liked Kirin, but Kirin is also making everyone very, very uncomfortable around him.

Unpredictable.

Yeah. It's unpredictable.

Alright. So let's set up the movie, and then I wanna hear your own history in going into it. The thing I wanna applaud the most is just as a writer, it's such a different story by the conceit of it. So you and your cousin, who are very close as kids, who are separated in adulthood, geographically and socioeconomically and all these things, you shared a grandma. She lived in Poland, World War 2.

And she died, and she left you guys money to go visit where she's from. And you guys join a tour Yeah. With a really fun group of different people with different reasons to be on the tour. And now we're just on this tour through Poland, and it's a holocaust tour. And there's these cousins trying to come to terms with how different their lives have turned out.

I'm sure the implicit guilt in your character's mind and he's Karen, so he's the dude from Succession. He's impossibly charismatic, can get away with saying anything. Yeah. And it's really fun to watch. What's your I know you have some similar bit of history with Poland in your your aunt.

Yeah. The house that the guys go to at the end is my family's house.

Oh, really?

And my wife and I went to all these cities in 2008 when we were just traveling through Poland, so I knew these places quite well. And then my aunt Doris was born and raised in that house. My cousin Maria survived the war through a series of miracles as we say in the movie. So it was kind of like a combination of these 2 people. And then I'd been on some of these tours, not in Poland, but first time my wife and I went way together was to Venezuela.

She's, like, an interested person in the world. She took me when I was 18 to Venezuela, and we went on this tour. And it was so funny because you're with these other Americans or British people, whatever. It's an English speaking tour, and you're not having any local experiences. You're in another place, but you're kind of in this bubble.

I thought it was so kind of funny and ironic. So I wanted to kind of present that world. Also, would be, I thought, really interesting to just to have it set on, like, a holocaust or so, basically, the kind of humor of the movie and of the characters can just be offset and against the backdrop of something quite big. Where do you get that relationship? I've written about characters like these for a while.

Kieran's character is Benjie. I played a character named Ben in a play where called The Spoils, which was about a similar kind of character. I'm fascinated by people like that. So if you haven't seen the movie, the character that Kieran plays is this incredibly charming, charismatic, live wire firecracker, but can also be very manipulative, antagonistic, intimidating, but also lovable, and then also ultimately very broken. Something is very disturbed.

For lack of better verbiage, he seems kinda bipolar. You don't know what you're gonna get on what day. Is he gonna be really high in ramping up everyone else around him, or is he gonna be in the pits and drag everyone down with him?

Yeah. Exactly. And I guess I've found people like that just to be initially very enviable. Like, I wish I had that kind of outward charm. I wish I could say what was on my mind.

I wish I felt comfortable enough in my own skin to even say, hey, I'm feeling really bad now. He gives people the greatest moment in their lives, but he also when he's not feeling good, he decides he has to turn everybody's world sour. I always thought that's, like, the version of me that I don't present.

Well, that's what I was gonna ask. They're 2 different characters, but are they you? I mean, are they your superego and your id? You're the first person to put it in those Freudian terms, but

that's what it is. So Kieran's like the id. My character is David. Everything David is feeling and all the things that are coursing through his unconscious come to life, and that's Kieran's character. And there's something unsustainable about Kieran's character.

So that's why there's a kind of broken, bittersweet quality to him because he doesn't have a sustainable life. He can't keep jobs or friends or girlfriends. You meet him in the beginning at the airport, and you leave him at the end at the airport. He's a person who kind of exists in this transient liminal space. Just a purgatory of his own troubles.

There's also all this great exploration of what the 3rd generation Jewish experience is, but it brings up different things that you could potentially be dealing with with that family history that's shared by so many. 1 of them I found was fascinating, I had never really considered was in your great moment of frustration with your cousin, you say the notion that he's living in the basement of his parents' home, knowing what his own grandmother went through and survived, is like somehow this cosmic disappointment. Exactly. It never occurred to me that people would feel that way, but of course, they probably would. That might be an actual thought people have who feel like they're underachieving.

Which, of course, would just bring them down even further. There's, like, a quote in every culture that has the following thing. Japanese culture, it's like rice patties to rice patties in 3 generations. There's another quote, which is, like, 1st generation builds the house, 2nd generation lives in the house, 3rd generation burns it down. Italian is like shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations.

And I say it in the movie, the first generation does some menial job, but they work themselves up into the middle class. 2nd generation maybe moves themselves up a little further, and the 3rd generation burns the house down. And I think that 3rd generation, if I were to analyze it maybe on a mass level, I would say something along the lines of there is a guilt that their lives are comfortable, and they're lacking meaning that the first generation had.

Yeah. You inherit it's more than the immigrant story. It's the survivor immigrant story. And, yeah, I think about my own self flagellation. And if I could add in there that my papa Bob, he was orphaned.

He adopted all of his younger brothers and sisters and supported them. I think what that man went through. And then I'm like, yeah, I didn't get x movie to y actor. Isn't that weird? What a shameful place I'm occupying in my head right now.

That's exactly what the movie is talking about. I don't know how to reconcile it. I've written 4 plays about this exact idea because all my plays are about usually an American modern American creation, like the what you're just describing, in touch with somebody whose life is somehow just more fraught. The play that I like the most is called the spoils, and my character is, like, Kieran's character, and his roommate is a Nepalese immigrant who's based on my friend. We both met at NYU, but my roommate is getting a business degree, and I think business degrees are ridiculous because capitalism is bullshit.

And he's like an upwardly mobile immigrant, and it's just this clash of cultures. And so my life is just completely stifled because everything seems like bullshit because I have the comfort to have that It's

a love story. Yeah.

Exactly. You get self hating. And then if you're telling yourself this story of, god, I can't believe my grandfather, what you just told me now, and you're worried about your role, it just adds to the self hating cycle.

Yeah. It's just all more fuel. And then, again, the story he's telling, like, yeah, just an outward rejection of all wealth because he doesn't have it. Also, these stories that he's telling himself, Kieran Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Rich people are fucking idiots.

Which helps dissipate some of the shame.

It's the thing you said earlier about not going to the award show and then creating a thing in your head. Yeah. Because award shows are bullshit. You know? Yeah.

Yeah. You have to if your life is not working out in certain areas, the quicker thing to do is not try to fix it or blame yourself or try to fix yourself. The quicker thing to do is create some really well reasoned, logical sounding argument of why the thing that you didn't get is bullshit.

Yes. And why the thing you're doing is the natural and right thing to be doing. Yeah.

I say this a lot about our current hatred of billionaires. I don't have that hatred. I'm like, poor people don't hate billionaires. It's a certain class of people that is actually pretty privileged that has the luxury of saying that's bad, and capitalism is bad, and x y z is bad. It's like, if you're actually disenfranchised, you don't think that.

Oh, that's so interesting.

Weird cycle that happens with privilege where you start picking apart the way to get

I think this is some of the great angst with economically disenfranchised people is they're hearing rich people talk about that they should care about the planet. Right? And they're like, yeah. Let me handle dinner in rent, and I might join you in this existential crisis that's a 1000 years away. There is some reality, like, when your full bandwidth is made up of surviving, a lot of these other concerns are trivial.

The idea of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is that once you fulfill food and air, then you have shelter. And if you're worried about your movie role, I suppose that's not even on the pyramid. And if it was on the pyramid, it'd be the star on top the Christmas tree of the pyramid.

Yeah. Yeah. The tip of the flag.

And Maslow would punch you in

the face. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's a similar thing. It's like the cultural if your parents left the country to come here so that you could have the opportunity to make a ton of money, you're not gonna be like, I think money is bad. You're like, that's literally the whole purpose

of the life raft.

Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. That's what the movie is doing, and that's what the characters in their own different ways are trying to go back to connect to it in some ways. My character is kind of a yuppie and has all the feelings of OCD. It makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I don't wanna tell anybody about it because I'm grandson of survivors.

Right.

Right.

Were the places you were filming actual Yeah.

We filmed at a concentration camp. We filmed at 1 called Majdanek, which is 5 minutes from where my family lived, not the house that's in the movie, but my second cousins lived nonetheless. We filmed at this place Majdanek. It was really difficult to film there. They don't want movies filming there for obvious reasons.

I mean, most movies that are about the Holocaust take place during the Holocaust. These places that are hallowed grounds don't want extras and Nazi uniforms running through. So I took 8 months to get in touch with these people to finally express to them what I wanted to do, which was I wanted to take these characters on a tour through this place, which is now kind of called a museum, the way that they, as a museum, are hoping to get people to come into. The movie was serving the same purpose as the place and important to go. I've been to a few of these genocide museums in Rwanda and Cambodia, and I visited several of the concentration camps.

Every time I talk about these places, I just have the thought, which is like, god. Everybody has to see this. And it's hard to say exactly why. I guess, you know, it'll make you more empathic.

All of it's overwhelming, and so I don't like thinking about it. And my best course of action is to explain why. It's just to basically fall on Nietzsche. To have kind of a Nellis takeaway is your only recourse to not suffer in thinking about it. I'll go, yeah.

Bad shit happens on planet Earth. People are tribal, and that's the facts of life. It's all an attempt so I don't actually have to feel how miserable that might

be. Oh, I see.

I got a little compartment in my head, and it's like, yeah. The earth's gnarly. We do gnarly shit. People are susceptible to cults of personality, and we're social animals. I understand it, quote, and therefore, I don't have to feel it.

But I think going there, I go, it matters a ton, and it's real, and it's palpable. And there's nothing I can do to really think my way out of this.

That's right. I mean and I guess it speaks to the thought that 1 death is a tragedy and a genocide is data. So when you go there, you realize, oh, actually, there's something real here. It's not something to just write off as a data point

of something

that occurred.

To understand intellectually. Exactly. 1 detail that I absolutely love that you had in the movie only because I just read this book, When We Cease to Understand the World. Have you read that book? Oh, no.

You must read this book because you show the Prussian Blue on the gas chambers.

It's the greatest book of all time. The first chapter

is Yes.

Is the Prussian Blue. It's called Prussian Blue. Sorry. I forgot the title. That is the single greatest book I've ever read.

But I read it, like, 5 years ago, and I just bought it for everybody. I know.

Did you read Maniac yet? His next

book? Oh, he did he write another thing. You must write it.

He's, like, from 10 different countries. French is his first language, but he might be in Argentina writing.

Oh, that's exactly what it was.

Is that why

he's living in South America with That Prussian blue chapter is the eeriest thing I've ever read

in my life. And so to tell people people.

Yeah.

Prussian blue only exists as a byproduct of the poisonous gas that was used.

Wait. What is that? Sorry.

So Prussian blue is just this beautiful color in a palette of painters, and it was discovered in some year. I forget which year. And when you create that compound that's in cyanide or you say it in the movie. We say Zyklon b. Yeah.

Those chemicals create the color Prussian blue, which is so beautiful. And all of the gas chambers had Prussian blue all over. Like, the gas just would seep out of the doors where they would open it. So surrounding the door going in And

so now, like, 80 years later, the stains are still on

the wall. And there are these clouds of the prettiest blue you've ever seen. It's so weird. There's something

so weird about that. Also the name of a girl band. Do you know about this?

Oh, no. Prussian Blue?

White supremacist, 2 sisters. Oh, 1 of them. Ladies. Ladies.

The wrong use of Prussian Blue.

Yeah. Also the wrong use of your life.

What are you doing? I

mean, they purposely named that because they're white supremacists.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh. Fascinating?

It's a fantastic movie. You did a fucking great job. It's really, really good and refreshing and new and interesting and a cool story. And Kieran's phenomenal, and you're phenomenal. Thank you so much.

I appreciate you saying that. Yeah. And I'm delighted that you accomplished so much in such short time and on such little money. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We just had someone on. Who was this here talking about? Oh, maybe Anna Kendrick. When you make a movie for such a low budget, you want 2 things.

You want America to think it costs a 100,000,000, but you want everyone to know you only have 3,000,000.

Oh, that's brilliant.

I want the credit of having made a big movie for a very little amount of

money, but I want everyone to think it costs a 100,000,000. I was

told to stop saying it

for exactly

that reason. Yeah. You're exactly right. Why is that? Because America doesn't wanna go to a movie I want

my cake and eat it too.

But what's the appeal?

Well, they want you wanna watch it and be like, holy shit. This movie's incredible. It must cost a $100,000,000.

I see. I see.

I see.

Big movie.

There are occasionally movies that the story of the thing is $50,000, and they did this. But that's, I guess, few and far between.

Right. Right. Right. Puffy chair. We can name them, probably.

Yeah. Well, Jesse, this has been wonderful. I've enjoyed this so much. I hope everyone checks out a real pain. It's so so good.

What's interesting is Searchlight this all makes sense. Because I watched on Disney debut, which is their, like, screening platform. But, of course, Disney owns Fox and Fox Searchlight. Yeah. Will it make its way to Disney then?

Disney plus. I think it's the only comes on. Yes. Oh, okay. Great.

Imagine it's the only holocaust movie on Disney plus.

Just type in holocaust on Disney Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. What if it said, I don't like to talk about that? Yeah.

We don't like to talk about that. Yeah. We don't like to talk about that. Yeah. We don't like to talk about that.

Yeah. We don't like to talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Maybe you'd enjoy Dumbo. Or you wanna feel like

shit maimy. See that. Yeah.

All other saddest movies come up. We don't have that title, but we have Bambi.

Lion King.

You know, all these movies, the parents die in the beginning.

All of them.

That's the formula.

Yeah. Isn't that just bizarre?

It is. And when it's pointed out to you, you're like, oh, it's

that simple. Sense. So it's the only way to get kids to care immediately. That's the only thing they know and could understand as painful.

You know what ChachiPT told me? Because I asked, is this exploiting kids psychology? And it said, no. This is a way to safely teach kids about emotions. So it's not real, but you're dealing with emotions.

They're playing out their biggest fear. They'd lose mom and dad.

That's right.

They're doing what we do.

Few years later, it's Texas chainsaw.

Yeah. Exactly. Next stop.

6 more years.

Alright. Well, I enjoyed meeting you on the lot some so fun. 12 years ago, and now this has been even better. I hope everyone watches a real pain, and we would love for you to come back when you're doing it again.

That would be great. Thank you so much. This was so nice.

I sure hope there weren't any mistakes in that episode, but we'll find out when my mom, missus Monica, comes in and tells us what was wrong. I wanna give a public shout out to the number 1 bunny in America, the number 1 rabbit, Carly Barton, my little sister. She got out all 1500 sweaters

Wow.

Carly.

In, like, 2 days.

Incredible.

She had

to borrow the truck, multiple trips to the, post office

Thank you, Carly.

But she cranked. That little gal can work. I think I can always call her a little girl. It's not disrespectful on a feminine standpoint because it's my little sister. And she'll always be a little girl.

I think she likes being a little sister.

I'm sure she does. Yeah.

I like being a little brother. I mean, I hated being a little brother, but now I like being a little brother.

I could see that. Yeah. You have little brother energy.

You wish. I got big brother energy. Oh, here's something that I wanted to bring up because I always talk about things I love that I've seen. And I know you're never gonna watch this, which really breaks my heart. But do you know about the Yacht Rock documentary?

Mm-mm. On Max? My god, is it good.

What's what's the deal?

First of all, Simmons produced it.

Oh, cool. He's doing a lot of docs.

Oh, yeah. Because he did the

I think he did the McMahon 1.

Yes.

That's awesome.

He's crushing that doc space.

Yeah. I've

removed my shoes for comfort.

I see.

Those are

my socks.

Thank you. It's really good. And, you know, I consider myself a student of yacht rock. As you know, since you've known me, yacht rock was my thing.

Mhmm.

It gives you the origin of yacht rock. It was a comedy sketch by these guys in the nineties. They they coined the term yacht rock.

Okay.

I knew all the players, of course, and you know my love for Steely Dan. But I gotta be honest, I don't think I knew how much Steely Dan is the hub of all that music. I mean, it's you can trace all of it so perfectly to all just them being the nucleus. And you know, Celia is my absolute favorite. I force people to talk about it all the time, especially when we have musicians.

Mhmm. So what a delight for me to hear that that was the glue that held all that together.

Did you talk to best boy Jimmy Kimmel about it?

Of course.

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Since he loves Yacht Rock as well.

He and I well, Molly sent me the best video ever. If she says to her, Alexa or whatever device she has, hey, Alexa. Play good music. She did a video of this. It'll go, playing Dax's, playlist.

Like, the playlist that Jimmy made for me is what Alexa thinks is good music.

That's so cute. He made you a playlist.

There's a few bands I guess that's where the debate is. Like, where does the line like, Hall and Oates is not Yaraq, but that's so

Why?

Right. A lot

of people would say why.

I think it is.

And then there are people like Kenny Loggins is 1 of, he'd be on the Mount Rushmore of yacht rock. But he also danced in all the genres. He also had a lot of rock and a lot of pop and then all these seminal yacht rock jams.

Carly Simon, Steely Dan, James Taylor.

These aren't that's the neither of those are James Taylor is not yacht rock.

I mean, I think so.

You think so?

Yeah. Who gets to decide?

Well, if you watch the doc, they give you a pretty good

Oh, really?

Framework for what it is. So the band that's at the hub is, of course, Steely Dan, but then the individual that's the common connective tissue is Michael McDonald. He's in every single 1 of these things in some capacity.

Oh my god. Yeah. I wonder what Simmons is gonna do next because he's a little old.

I can't make 1 for you.

That would be fantastic. Speaking of, I got a lot of really sweet reach outs from people in my life, like old people in my life when I was in middle school and high school, and they were so happy for me that we got to have Lisa on.

100% of the comments are about you.

That's very sweet.

Yeah. People's enthusiasm and excitement for you.

It was like people who I don't talk to really

Uh-huh.

But were there for when it was really

When Friends was the salve?

Yes. And so they were all very it was very heartwarming and sweet that they were like, oh my gosh.

That is nice.

For you. Yeah. And then Anthony, who also was there Yeah. He texted me

Not a blast from the past.

Well, not a blast from the past, but a

Long standing friendship.

Yeah. He was in the past, and he was a part of it, and he's also a huge Friends fan. And he said, I almost commented, Lisa Kudrow, this is how I find out. I had forgotten to tell.

You hadn't even tell him.

Yeah. I'd forgotten. And then I said, oh, some people reached out, which was really sweet, and he said, yeah. You really created strong brand awareness even back in the day.

So You didn't tell anyone was coming up? Because when I did Toto, I couldn't when I was with the boys, I'm like, oh, dude, Toto said this, Toto said that.

People Toto.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. I told people about Lisa Kudrow. I guess I just forgot to tell the most important person.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

So sorry, Anthony. This is a public apology.

I need you to be brutally honest. So I was gonna wear a hat because, as you know, I am involved engaged in a 2 front war with the thickness of my hair. Okay. And so I have a product that I have to use in the morning and at night, and it makes my hair terrible. I have an eye dropper, a drop drop drop drop drop.

I just want it on my scalp. That's what I'm hoping. And then I try to get my fingers in there and just rub the scalp, but, of course, it gets all over the hair. Okay. And then it's a pharmaceutical, so it's not like a hair product you'd wanna use.

Mhmm. And so my hair just always looks bad, basically, because I'm putting it on in the morning and then at night. So take your pick. It's gonna look bad. So I'm wearing a lot of hats lately because I don't I don't wanna deal with it.

Oh, I did notice I'm wearing a lot of hats.

Or maybe I won't put in that product. I'll just I'll I'll give up some, some territory in this war. Oh. I might lose the battle today, but worth it so that I don't have to wear a hat at work.

Okay.

And then so I was that was all happening. I just exercised, went in there, cleaned up. What are we gonna do here? Wear a hat. And I go, I'm not gonna wear a hat.

And now I'm here, and then it just crossed my mind because my hair looked crazy.

Well, did you put the stuff on it?

Yeah. I got to.

Well, you just told me you decided you might not do that.

On a day I'm not gonna wear a hat, I would forego the treatment so that my hair doesn't look all goopy. Right. So I was gonna wear a hat today. Okay. But then I decided at the last minute when I came down, no.

I'm not gonna.

Okay. Got it. You see the confusion. It looks fine.

Okay. Great. It doesn't look insane.

What do you what means what's insane to you?

Like, a big block of plastic on half my hair and then normal hair everywhere else.

Oh, no. Okay. Have that. But I have an idea.

Tell me.

You know those scalp things? They're like

That tickle your scalp? Yeah. They

have little, like, sticks on them. You could do the thing and then use the scalp thing to get it all over, and then it would you wouldn't be using your hands to get it all over.

It's a great idea, but I think if you'd used the product, you would you would know why that's not gonna be an option for me because I do the eye dropper. Well, inevitably, it wants to start running down my forehead, and I don't think I can get it in my eyes. So I can't I just gotta immediately stop it. Oh. Yeah.

It's like, you've spilled something on the counter, and it's making its way towards the the edge, and it's gonna go down to the floor. You gotta really quick get involved.

Oh, okay. So because you definitely wanna get you, like, you have to put it up here.

Well, that's front number 1 of the war. It's 2 front war. I'm fighting in the front and in the back. The middle were fine. I don't really need Oh, okay.

So most of my drops are all along the front, and then it wants to, because of gravity, come down my face.

Okay. I have another idea. What about q tips? What about if you put it on a q tip and then you dab, dab, dab?

So I almost think I tried that method. The problem is is, like, I've got an eye dropper, and I don't know in milliliters, but it's a considerable amount of fluid. If I was gonna douse a q tip, we would be in there for, like, 45 minutes to to get enough of that fluid on the q tip, get that then transferred to the scalp, then go back because the Q tip doesn't absorb all that much. And you're supposed to do 2 of

the eye drops. Oh, you have 2 full

eye drops. Of fluid.

Alright. Well

a hat, I think, is the solution.

Just keep wearing a hat.

Yeah.

Alright. Well, it's almost Christmas time. Are there any Christmas updates? I got a new tablescape, so that was exciting.

Tell me about a, tablescape.

New table cloth. This is from Heather Taylor Home.

Oh, we love Heather. As a human, I mean, I don't know much about the products, but she's

Amazing products.

Wonderful woman.

My tree is 35, but she's still my baby just like Harley is always your little girl. Girl.

Yeah.

Her skirt is pink and green.

Okay.

So now I'm I'm deciding to do pink and green.

As a theme Mhmm. Across the board in your home?

Yeah.

Okay. That's the wicked colors?

Oh god. I guess that's the

Because Kristen did a wicked tree, and it's pink and green.

Nothing against wicked, but that wasn't

You wanted to be more original. Original.

I just wanted to match the beautiful skirt. The skirt's so cute. It doesn't look wickety.

Okay.

I don't think people would think it. I'll ask. I'll ask everyone.

Well, in full honesty, when I look at our our wicked tree, I don't think wickety. Really? No. I mean, green obviously is very embedded into the wicked

Yeah.

Esthetic. Yeah. But I don't know about pink. Does that represent her?

Because, yeah, I think she wears pink stuff.

What's her name? Glenda. Glenda or Glenda?

Yeah. Glenda. Glenda. She wears pink. I forgot that.

I only think green when I think Wicked, but you're right. Pink is a color.

Yeah. Apparently, it's it's, an essential part of the sauce. Speaking of Ariana Grande

Oh, yeah.

Did I already say this on here? No. Oh, my sweetest little Delty.

Yeah. You told me he's so cute.

She has her first star, Sheila. Oh. 0 my god, you guys. I love it so much. It's, it's her version of Lincoln's Taylor Swift.

She finally has her girl, and it's Ariana Grande. And she has printed up she goes on the Internet and finds she types in Ariana Grande color shit. It's in my phone as a search, which is problematic, but, because she uses my phone sometimes. Sure. It's like a drawing outline, and then she prints up all these little things, and then she colors them all day long.

Oh. And then she's now telling me a lot of facts about Ariana Grande, and she wants to know when we're gonna interview her.

I know. Now we have to.

Well, of course, I'll die. I'll die getting her. Yeah. Because my little girl anyways, it is so

You have 2 big gets, Taylor and Aria.

I know. My gales did not, shoot low.

They had good taste.

They went right for the stars. But, boy, do I like it. And I really like it's just so cute when you love something when you're little and you start gathering all the facts. And she's telling me about her vocal range and why she's special in this way, in that way. Cute.

Oh, I love it.

It's a pure time.

It's pure.

Mhmm. You told me this a little bit ago, and so then some videos have been popping up about her. I mean, I get so many wick Wicked videos, which is kind of weird.

Okay.

Maybe they know about my tree, and they're confused. I look, I loved the movie. I love the movie, but I'm not like, some people are die hard wicked. They've seen it multiple times, and they

They're sing alongs.

Exactly. It's a whole it's

So fun.

A whole thing. It's so fun. That's not really me.

Mhmm.

So I guess I'm I'm inter it's interesting that I'm being targeted in that way.

Do you remember Adam Mosier? We interviewed him.

Instagram?

Instagram CEO, head of c head of Instagram. I don't know what the title is, But I follow him. And do you know there is a feature on Instagram where you can wipe your algorithm?

Really?

Yeah. It's like if you're starting to see stuff too often that you don't like and maybe you watch in my case, it would be like, I watched a fight video.

Uh-huh.

Because there are certain fight videos I love. If it's like a little guy that was getting bullied by a big guy in a car situation, he gets out and he happens to knock the guy out, I love that.

Sure.

But then they think I like every kind of fight. And then I just and then it's sticky. I kinda it's hard for me to resist looking watching fights, and I don't wanna watch a bunch of fights. Yeah. So, like, that's a case I might go in there and and, like, just wipe it and then start fresh.

But that's a feature now.

That's cool. Yeah. I like that.

He's a very thoughtful, mindful person that's trying to make that thing the best version of it. There's, like, a real commitment. Remember when he was here? There's a They were gonna hide likes.

Yeah. Yeah. They tested that. They beta tested that.

And I don't think the consumer wanted that. Yeah. But they tried Mhmm. Which, you know, I think in theory was a really kind of good idea.

Yeah. I agree.

But I do appreciate there seems to be a lot of effort being made to keep it a kind of positive place.

Yeah. They have, I think they have whole divisions at Meta that are fully ethics based.

Right. Right. Right. Right.

A lot of the things have to run through that.

Trying to dial down the polarization and stuff. Mhmm. Yeah.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

I've also gotten a lot of videos about her.

Okay.

And I sometimes think to send them to you to show Delta. Would you do that? Or are you, like, probably not videos?

Yeah. Like, I love that she's drawing pictures of her. I don't mind going on the Internet and getting the little things, but I don't really want her just mindlessly ingesting a bunch of videos. Yeah. IE fights in parking lots.

Right. Yeah. I get that. But how is she learning about, like, her vocal range and stuff?

Probably at school. That's where you learn everything. Right?

Well, quite

a bit of a difference. 1 thing and they add to the thing. The other friend's like, I heard she owns a chihuahua. And you're like, yeah. You know, I don't think she owns I don't even know if she owns a dog.

That was just an example, a theoretical example. Sure. Yeah.

Can you see if she owns a dog wrong?

Yeah. I'm googling it already. Right. She has several dogs. Myron.

A pit bull mix, that was left behind by rapper Mac Miller.

Oh. Myron.

Alright. Do you have any what have you watched any more Christmas movies?

The last 1 was Charlie Brown Christmas and then Half of Frosty. Have you watched any?

Yeah. I watched The Holiday. I mainly just have it on in the background. The Holiday, Home Alone, Love Actually.

Again, I just think it'd be so trippy to be in 1 of those movies where, like, every single year, everyone's reminded of you. It's like a hit song. Yeah. You don't get that with movies. People aren't, like, making time to watch.

Yeah. It's Hurt

Locker, which was an incredible movie Right. But in in large part, it'll never be seen again.

Yeah.

So it's kind of a gift. It's a blessing to end up in 1 of these.

It's a blessing. It's almost like what we do sort of, like, how podcasts are so intimate. They they become part of the your fabric, like, your daily fabric. Christmas movies have that. They become part of your traditions.

They're good triggers.

Yeah. And, like, when we had Jude Law on, we talked a little bit about the holiday. Yeah. He's like part of my year.

Yes. Always.

Always. And Jack Black too. I I forgot that he was also

in his role

in in his role.

But it was almost mine for a minute Yeah. When he had a scheduling conflict. Then they worked it out. Yeah.

You could've been you could've been I

could've been in 1 of those where everyone remembers.

That would be cool.

They should re release without a paddle and just give it a ton of Christmas songs. Maybe that'll you can trick.

Well, you're really lucky if you're, like, die I haven't seen it. But Die Hard, which is a

Christmas movie?

Movie, but it's not. Right?

It's funny you would say that. Well, no. It's just set during Christmas. You know, I tried to do this with chips, and I was a bit heartbroken because I love that just in the background of LA in lethal weapon was Christmas because it's so especially if you're from Michigan. It's weird that California has Christmas.

Like, how are they doing it? They don't have a fucking snow or anything. I guess. There's something really neat about it.

Yeah.

So I have this great scene between Michael Rosenbaum and Vincent D'Onofrio. And he pulls over, Michael. And where we shot it is right at the 101 where you get off at Vine. So in the background was the Capitol Records building. Oh.

And they always put this enormous Christmas light tree. It's like a shape of a tree on the roof, and it's so iconic. And every shot, I kind of built around making sure that was behind an Oforio. Uh-huh. And it was so great.

And it was the opening scene, and you I was like, oh, it's great. It's gonna have a Christmas time. And we have other Christmas stuff. But when that 1 went away, that scene didn't make the movie. It was a great scene on its own, but it didn't really service the movie all that well, so that scene got left entirely unseen.

And then it really took out the momentum of the Christmas aspect.

Dang.

Yeah. But I was trying to do that.

That would have been cool.

Yeah. Because I love a little pop of Christmas in the movie. Too. Everyone says triggers in a negative way, but there's really positive triggers.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I think we think it because guns.

Oh, yeah. Well, I think we think it because everyone says I was triggered Right. Every 4th sentence

Yeah.

In popular culture, myself guilty of it too. And it's never a good thing at the end of it. Sure.

Yeah. But I I guess my point is I think it that originated just even that colloquial term originated from a gun trigger.

Yeah. Or a crossbow, probably. Oh, okay. Okay.

Rob, is the Home Alone House in Chicago, like, immortalized at Christmas?

Yeah. I used to work not far from it, and I'd sometimes just drive over there and eat lunch on the street.

Oh my god. Just, like, outside?

In my car.

Do people and, like, I

don't They don't love that people, hang out there.

Oh, because someone lives there.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

They should

They wouldn't like yeah.

Warner I mean, whoever, Columbia should have bought it. Well I think. And they made it a museum.

But you can't put a museum in the middle of someone's neighborhood. That does remind me last thing. Lincoln and Delta and I, on Sunday, we went into Altadena. I think a bit because you and I had shot a commercial there.

Yeah. Well, that's also funny because all time, the restaurant that we I love, you love, we all love, they just opened a new restaurant in Altadena.

And you went?

And I went the day before we shot the commercial, and it was so weird because I

Yeah.

I never go to Altadena.

Same.

Yeah.

So we were shooting a commercial there. And then I kinda remembered, I think they have a street here that's super Christmassy Uh-huh. Known around town. So then I hit up Bree because she lives adjacent to Altadena. Yeah.

And I said, isn't there a strange oh, yeah. You gotta go Christmas Tree Lane. It's right by the public library, blah blah blah. So and she said, we let the kids hang hang out the sunroof because you drive really slow. And I was like, okay, great.

I got great tips. I'm gonna bring the Raptor because it's got a huge sunroof. So Lincoln and Delta and I, went up to Christmas Tree Lane, and we spent 2 hours just crawling through all the neighborhoods looking at all of the houses that were decorated, and there are some doozies. Oh. I'm so I'm so proud of those people that put in that effort.

Me too. Some of these displays, some that was a week of installation for sure. There was, there was a full Christmas vacation house

Oh, wow.

With, like, the characters there. There was, someone had the lamp from, Christmas story. You know, the dad wins that stupid lamp. It's a sexy leg with a with a with a stocking on it and then a lampshade. And then the dogs break it, and he's so upset.

My lamp. My lamp. And he and he spends his whole time gluing it back together, and it looks insane. Someone had 1 of the actual things in their window.

Wow.

Someone put up this huge it's like you're standing inside of a Christmas photo. They put a big border with Merry Christmas, and it's lit so you can get out and step behind it. So I got the girls standing behind it.

Let people, like, come out and walk around.

Oh, there's signs from the city. No no parking during this time. It's like it it's designated as an attraction, and you just coast through.

Wow.

And people walk.

That's so cool.

We hung out the sunroof. Not weed them.

Yeah. Cute.

I can't reach the pedals.

You have cruise control.

Fuck. You're right, Rob. I should've set the cruise on 6 miles an hour. Maybe ghost ride it. It just got on walk next to it.

That sounds really lovely.

Yeah. It was really, really fun. And then we made the mistake of going to the In N Out in Altadena. Mhmm. And it was it was a record waiting.

It was a record.

How are they doing this? It's there's always I've never been in my entire life, and there's not been a line. At random times, it's pretty cool.

Good for them.

Because they don't

a com they don't build out for it.

And they don't, market. Like, I've never seen a commercial for In N Out.

Well, Brie and I used to see those commercials because we would sing that was our love song.

What was it?

The song was, In N Out, That's what a hamburger's all about. But we would say what made it our love song is we would say, In N Out. That's what a hamburger's all about. Oh. We would say Handin' Burger.

That's what made it a love song.

Oh, I thought you I like that because I thought you were gonna make it gross.

Dirty like a well, that would be a sex song.

Right.

1 more thing about In N Out. My mother went to California when I was a kid, when I was a skateboarder. We couldn't believe she was going to California, USA. We had never been. Yeah.

And we

never even met people that went to California.

Yeah.

When she came back, which she had seen while she was out there, this is what a good mom she was, she had seen other skateboarders, and they had the In N Out sticker on their skateboards. It would say In N Out Burger.

Uh-huh.

And the skateboarders would cut off the b and the r. So it said In N Out Urge. Oh. And she brought back a stack of the stickers for David and I, and she showed us how to cut off the thing.

Cute. Yeah. And where where people like, that's so cool, man. Yeah.

People thought it was really cool. It's California.

Like, oh my god. The land of fruit nuts. I told you my my friend's mom said that.

Yeah. Were you did was California like a a crazy fantasy as well for you?

No. It was a fantasy that I wanted to go live there.

But just as a place, long before, like, I wanted to be in show business. It was just like, oh, they surf out there. They skateboard out there. There's palm trees out there.

Yeah. I can

infected with the fantasy of it.

I was infected with the fantasy of Hollywood.

Okay.

And I knew that was there. We went on a family vacation when I was 11.

Oh, see. Okay. Well, then that Maybe? Yeah. Then it's a real place.

So, of course, you wouldn't have that.

Yeah. We did the tour.

The first time I went, I think my mom took me when I was maybe 14 or 15 to do legwork for a car show. So we were working.

Yeah.

But we flew in, and we went to Riverside. That's where the car show was, the Riverway Speedway. What a no disrespect to Riverside folks, not the fantasy of California. Sure. Like a land you're 50 miles from the ocean.

Yeah.

It's industrial. Yeah. It's sprawling. I was like, this is California?

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

But then we went to San Francisco because we had leg work up there, and then and then we rode the trolley. Yeah. And I was like, well, this is a fantasy land.

Definitely. Yeah. We we

did Chinatown.

Too, and we went to San Diego, went to the zoo.

You did? Mhmm. Your parents are good good parents.

Yeah. Very.

Took their little girl all over.

Yeah. They show

her the world.

Yeah. That bit them in the butt.

Because you split.

She left.

Yeah. They shouldn't have shown you this place.

No. We sit right by the airport, and you can hear the the planes the whole time.

That's my Riverside experience.

Anyway okay. So this so Jesse, ding ding ding. He lives in Hollywood. Actually, he doesn't.

I think he lives in

New York. He doesn't even live in.

Damn it.

But he has done a lot of work here in Hollywood.

Yeah. I feel bad because when you talked about Jesse's sister, I was, like, I was it was new information, and I reacted as such. And then, like, 4 seconds later, I was like, oh, I did know that.

Oh, you already knew that.

But I forgot. And when you said it, it sounded new. Yeah. And then I felt fraudulent.

I didn't know. I'm wondering what percentage of the audience will know immediately who I'm talking about. Because as soon as I heard Pepsi Girl, I could see her in my head, the spirally curls.

Let's bring up a picture of her

on the TV show. Search bicycles in Paris.

On the TV show.

Where is the I think that's Austria.

Oh.

That's what I think.

I think it

God, is it beautiful?

Think it might be Ireland. There she

is. Look how

cute she is.

Oh, she loves her Pepsi's.

And you know what else?

Look at her little teeth.

I know.

She looks like him. Yeah. Like, they definitely have a family resemblance.

Yeah.

Oh my god. I wonder if he thinks she's so cute. He didn't say so in the interview.

Well, in the yeah. Of course not. It's his sister.

Well, you think your sister's so cute?

My sister is cute.

You talk about it all the time.

I don't talk about how cute my sister is all the time. I'm just kidding.

But if your sister is known as being, like, the cutest girl in America

I wonder if I

would hate it. Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah.

Even if it was your little sister?

No. If it were her, I'd like it. I want the best for her. I always have. Well, that's great.

I love her dimples.

They're dimples. Dimples are a thing. Dimps.

If and when science is, good enough, which it it will be, I'm gonna pick dimples for my kid.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I I don't know if people with dimples like dimples even though we all like their dimples.

Well, that's they're crazy.

Lincoln was just telling me that there are now a trend on social media is there's like a freckle filter. People put freckles on themselves. And what of what a turn of events. Everyone freckles and want them.

Yeah.

And I was trying to explain to her, look. Here's how it goes, Link. Whatever you don't have, you want. I wanted curly black hair.

Sure.

Everyone with curly black hair wanted straight blonde hair.

Yeah. Exactly.

I had a ton of freckles. It was like a fart cloud on my face. And, of course, I didn't want freckles.

Right. But what happened to your freckles? I don't see any.

You don't? Uh-uh. There's probably too much skin like sun damage under I bet if we if I got good if I got, like, acidy facials, maybe it would reveal. Oh, interesting. But, you know, my arms are freckled to high heaven.

Right.

It's almost like I'm almost turning a person of color just on the arms. If you just saw my arms

Maybe with age, also freckles dissipate on the face. Just this, I would say, the sun exposure, but that also seems counterintuitive because sun also brings out freckles. A lot of people in the summer, their freckles come out.

In the park. Yeah. On the summer, my freckles were on fire. Yeah. Link's got freckles for a lot of freckles.

Freckles are so cute.

They are cute.

Oh, yes. So I'm gonna pick dimples

Okay.

For my kid.

When you get your designer kid?

Yes.

A girl with dimples. Oh, can

you imagine? She's gonna be so cute.

It's a cute name too for what it is. It's on them on a page.

Dimples. It is.

Yeah. Yeah.

Do you think if I go to my face guy, if I tell him I

want dimples, he could do it. Easiest thing for them to do

for me. Just carve out

No. I I don't know if I understand how it works, but I do believe there's some kind of a face lift you can get with strings where they put string in your in your face somehow. So clearly, they could just put the string in and then suck that part of the string in. And if they haven't invented that, that's mine.

They do a

dimpleplasty. Oh, blast. Incision in your cheek, remove a small amount of muscle and fat, and it creates a dimple.

Okay. That's not what I

That's what I what I said. I said carve something out.

You're right.

Wow.

I want string involved.

It's only $1500.

Oh, that sounds way too cheap for facial surgery. That's pooch. I don't want this is not where you wanna save a buck. I would have come back

in the new year.

You have 6 dimples.

Oh, you have multiple dimples. Do you think

if you like

Some 1 went wrong, so I did another 1.

Well, just if you like 2 dimples, why wouldn't you like 4?

When I design my kid, she's gonna have 1 each on each side.

Okay. I guess I have

to figure out exactly where. And then she's gonna have curly hair.

Okay. I don't

think I have to design. I think she's gonna have naturally curly hair

Yeah.

Like me. Well, I guess depends on who her dad is. Right. Okay. But a naturally curly

hair with, Caucasoid lowers your chance.

Exactly. But remember I saw that mixed girl at, mixed late woman?

Yeah. That you're obsessed with and turned out her parent 1 of her parents was Indian?

Yeah. She was so pretty.

Yeah. Look, have a kid with carrot top or something.

Oh, that's a good idea.

Oh, curly. Okay. I like that.

Yeah. Red curly hair. Dimples. And then

I'm gonna give her

Are there any Indians with red hair?

I've never seen 1. Yeah. Well, that's natural. People dyed

their hair. Right. Right. Sure. Sure.

That's a recessive gene that I don't think has made its way to dominance. Alright. Anyway, Jesse. Jesse Jesse has sort of red hair.

Does he?

I'm not sure.

Okay. There's those crickets.

Yep.

Cricket? Okay. What is going on what is going on in LA with crickets? Because this happened when I was recording something else in a different location.

And We

had to stop.

Because cricket infestation. Yeah. I don't know what's going on because there's they're here in the studio, and then when I'm in the hot tub at night, there's it's so loud behind my head, the crickets. It's interesting because in the summertime in Michigan, I love the sound of crickets.

Yeah.

In the hot tub at night or when we're recording, I hate it. Again, we had this moment last week where the guest was becoming very emotional, and it was a very sweet moment. And it, like, it almost like someone queued the like, there was a second crickets. Crickets. Crickets.

Oh, god.

The PA was like, just cue the crickets. Mhmm. Also, another crickets were so loud in there, and I was like, oh my god. This is it was so embarrassing. You didn't hear that?

It because it was a big enough it was a sweet enough moment that I think you're in it. But, I mean, this is, like, not good for sound.

Well, they're they're invested in the garage rubber.

Because when we

Oh, we do.

When that new couch came, Carly and I opened the garage to move it in, and probably 400 crickets came out.

So we need to get some cricket poison.

Yeah. I read you can do peppermint tea.

Brew a pot of peppermint tea and slice it everywhere.

They don't like peppermint tea.

Okay.

And, some other aroma therapies.

Okay.

Okay. Speaking of, do mice another, unwanted pest Yeah. Unless you're talking about me Yeah. Love eating plastic.

Oh, yeah. They they

Yeah. They eat plastic. They do.

They ain't my boss.

And they chew right through it to keep their incisors from growing too long.

What if I took that mouse to court, like a, small claims court Uh-huh. And I said, look. It's $35100 worth of damage here on my bus, And the mouse is standing there. Maybe the mouse has a lawyer. I'm not sure.

Oh. But the mouse is just there. But and they're, what do you say about this? And he's just like and you go, oh, he loves plastic. That's what he's saying.

Yeah. Well, he loves plastic. Okay. So eBay's Athora astronaut costume, not there anymore. Yes.

People snatched them up.

As they should. They were like $15.

Right. You can buy spacesuits though on there.

You can?

Mhmm. If you want. They're 1,000 of dollars.

Yeah. I don't have such an interest in, aeronautics or

Sure.

It's just more I had an interest in keeping my costume.

In nostalgia. Yeah. Alright. Was Squid and the Whale Noah Baumbach's first movie? No.

It was called Kicking and Screaming in 1995. That was his first movie.

That's different than the Will Ferrell Kicking and Screaming, though? I think it is.

It's different. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. This is about 4 young men who graduate from college and refuse to move on with their lives. Okay. When we cease to understand the world, author, is he French, 10 different he's from 10 different countries. He was born in the Netherlands.

He spent his childhood in Buenos Aires and Lima, and then he moved to Santiago at the age of 14.

So a lot of countries.

Lot of countries. And if you type in, is Benjamin Labattu, French, It says no. Oh. No. He is Chilean, not French.

But do they mean his nationality or his ethnicity?

Yeah. It says nationality. He is a Chilean author, birthplace, childhood. It just it doesn't say. No.

It doesn't say, like, his dad is from it doesn't say that.

Okay. I sent it to Kutcher the other day. Mhmm. Because I don't know if I've already recommended this book or not. Send him the link on Audible, and then he said, I'm pretty sure I'm the 1 who recommended this to you.

Oh, no.

Which is possible. I don't I can't remember how it came across my desk. Take it off your chest. Get it off my desk.

Oh, man.

That's your Ariana Grande.

Yeah. My Ariana Grande is friends, I guess. Like, that I set that pure time.

Yeah. Who was did you love any singers?

Britney.

Yeah. Mhmm.

Good for you. It's Britney Bridge.

I know. Except I didn't really. Okay. You know? No.

I did. I did, but I was not like I liked friends or Yeah. Nothing. I wasn't owning it in the way that

Probably more just to be involved in the group. Yeah.

Yeah. Definitely. I was more into yacht rock.

You don't know shit about yacht rock.

I was actually because my dad would play music in his car. Soft rock.

Soft rock.

The soft rock station is the yacht rock station.

So that's like yeah. Carly Simons goes in there, James Taylor. Soft rock for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Rock is a subset of soft rock.

Alright. Yeah. Okay. That's fine. Okay.

Well, I'm I think I said this already, but I am planning on reading this book over the Christmas break.

Oh, good.

Yes. I'm excited to read it.

It's a goodie. Yeah. 1 of my faves. I'm relistening to it right now.

And I'll read the Maniac, and I'm gonna read 3 more books.

You're writing a lot of checks, but I don't know that your little buns are gonna cash. We'll see. Alright.

Alright. Happy holidays.

Happy holidays. Love you.

Love you.

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