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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Sheppard, and I'm joined by the Duchess of Duluth.

Hi there.

Great sweater. You got a new sweater with two different colors, blue, very light on the sleeves. Thank you. Starry Night in the middle.

Do you think this is blue?

Yeah. What do you think it is?

Oh, no. It's purple for sure.

To be fair, I'll buy that.

It looks blue on the TV back here, too. What are you seeing? What color is my face to you?

Pure white. Wow. Like the driven snow. Our guest today is Tyler Perry, and I just got to say right out of the gates, this is a very mind-blowing experience. I don't know what I thought about Tyler Perry. I mean, as a person, Other than I had seen this incredible 60 Minute segment on him one time, and I knew he had a really incredible story that he overcame. So I knew that he was very honest and stuff. But just as a human, he was just a very powerful and special presence. My God, did we like this so much?

Really very, very special. I had an inkling before. It would have that extra sparkle on it, and it did. Yes.

Well, listen, Tyler Perry is a filmmaker, a playwright, an actor. Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Sisters, House of Pain, Madea's Family Reunion, Alex Cross, and his new movie, Out Now, which is doing really great. I've noticed it's always in the top couple there on Netflix, the 6888 with one of our favorites, Kerry Washington. This is a very, very special episode. Please enjoy Tyler Perry.

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. And to all a good night.

Alice and Matt here from British Scandal. Matt, if we had a bingo card, what What would be on there?

Compelling storytelling, egotistical white men, and dubious humor.

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He's an up Would you like a coffee or a diet No.

That coffee is for you.

Oh, that's a cream top.

It's a cream top.

It's very famous coffee.

Cream top? No, I'm not a coffee person.

You're not a coffee person.

Good for you.

I don't like some of the things I'm learning about you right away.

Tell me. You're early and you don't It's like coffee.

I love your chair, though, man. This is my size chair. Yeah.

It's a biggie.

You really should consider ordering one of these online because I didn't realize I was ordering a big and tall version because I'm a big guy. You can get two of me in here.

You can get your kids beside you. Yeah.

Yeah. My feet barely touch the ground if they do. Where does this come from? Online, lazyboy. Com. Lazyboy.

Com. Yeah. It's a lazyboy.

You got to get someone on that.

It's a lazyboy, yeah.

Do you own any Lazy Boys? I don't. You don't.

Because your style esthetic won't permit you or you're afraid of comfort?

I got a little bit of both. I got a little bit of both. I don't want to be too comfortable.

Can't get too comfortable. Did you like miniature things when you were a kid? This is a weird first question, but I can elaborate. Yeah, please. You would go to... Where would I see miniature stuff?

A doll house store.

No, I would never be in there. I like the idea of feeling like a giant.

Okay.

I would imagine you don't want to be a giant because you're already tall. It's surprising you still have it because you're Well, not to jump directly into trauma, but I feel like both of us probably desired to be 80 feet tall as kids.

For me, it was the opposite. I wanted to be smaller. I would always slouch and didn't want to be seen.

You want to be invisible.

Yeah.

But the notion of being the Hulk and you can defend yourself and no one can hurt you, that didn't enter the fray.

No, because the strong men for me in my life weren't good men. So I wanted to be the opposite. Being tall and being big, I was always at the end of the line and always, Don't hit him back. Listen, my cousin who was smaller than me and he would bully me. His mother with my house was like, You can't hit him back. You're too big to hit him back. Just don't hit him back. Just you're too big. You just got to take it. Yeah, just got to take it. Then one day I lost it and hung him on the clothes line in the backyard. Oh, mine. Yeah. I ran home, told my mother, I couldn't take it anymore. She said, What'd you do? She goes and get the kid down, and she's laughing all the way. But yeah, I wanted to be smaller.

They were right to tell you to not hit back because look what happened when you did.

Yeah, exactly right. But that's my thing. I am the most gentle guy in the world until I'm pushed way too far, then there's a whole other side.

Push to your limit.

Yeah. Takes a lot to get me there.

I was enormous for my size as a kid. In all the class photos, it looks like I flunked a few grades. Because you're so big. Yeah, it looks like he's in the wrong class. Did you stand out like that?

Oh, for sure. I was the tallest and the biggest and the smartest, and it was a lot.

And this in New Orleans? Yeah, New Orleans. Yeah. What were the virtues that were prized at that time? Obviously, not those things? No.

Growing up, my mother was a woman who completely gave a lot. It was all about giving and helping each other all the time. Because we didn't have much, but we had more than others in the neighborhood, we were always the place to come if you were in need. My mother was really, really great at that. I would wake up in the morning, sometimes on Saturday morning, step out of the bed, and I would step on somebody on the floor like, Who is this person? My mom would be like, They needed a place to stay. Be quiet. Don't embarrass them. Oh, really? Yeah, it was a lot of that for sure.

Was she finding these people at church or all over?

We She lived in New Orleans, which was the big city, and most of her family and the man that raised me's family were from the small country towns outside. When the two of them got married and moved to New Orleans, it was family members that took them in. It was always your door had to be open for somebody else.

Right. And siblings?

A brother and two sisters.

Older or younger?

Younger brother by 10 years and two sisters by five and six years.

Do you feel included at all, or do you have little brother complex?

My brother is 10 years younger than me, so we never were close. But with the sisters? With the sisters, no. There It was always something that was off for me in the family. I didn't feel like I belonged. I was never able to be extremely close to any of them. It was really, really strange.

Yeah, I got to tell you, I saw the 60 Minutes profile you did however many years ago. It had to be over 10 years ago, probably. It was insanely moving.

I appreciate that.

Thank you. Particularly when you're visiting that house, and I think we come upon the crawl space. It's not planned, clearly. You're just having a moment where you go like, Oh, yeah, I hid I spent so much time in this crawl space. That was heartbreaking.

Shantel, you told me this was light and happy. Where are we going? Okay, all right. All right, Dax. Okay, Monica. Okay. All right, I'm with you.

You told them light and happy, Ron Jones.

It was light and happy, No, no, no.

I'm light and happy while talking about my trauma.

We're going to need the weed. Yeah, to walk down the side of the house and see that crawl space, little cubby house where I would hide from the abuse. It was painted Robin egg blue. I remember the blue paint that I found somewhere in a rusted can and painted. It was such a beautiful light blue. I now realized that what that blue was for is that people would paint their ceilings or their porches blue so that wasp and other things wouldn't build nests because they thought it was the sky. Oh, really? Yes. Southern thing. Oh, wow. Now realizing that Robin egg blue was to represent the sky. It was a pretty painful and rough time. It was hard.

That's a real metaphor. Also, keep the wasps away.

Yeah, or keep looking to the sky. Keep looking up all around you.

All right, well, look, we can keep it light and fresh.

No, no, no, no, no, Let me tell you why I think it's important. The far-reaching effects, I don't know about what happened with you, but for me, having my abuser be a female, I just found out at 54 was rape. To be able to associate that with rape was weird because it was a female. And also the man of church. The far-reaching effects of the trauma of sexual abuse and the sexual confusion that children walk through and tried to figure that out, that I had to walk through was really profound. I worked so hard at trying to understand it. That was the most difficult part of my life, just trying to understand what had happened.

Why had it happened or why the people that perpetrated it could have done that?

Why it happened to me and why I couldn't shake what they did. As children, we'd have this ability to hold on to the pain of what it was and make it about our fault. Well, what was it in me that made that man do that or that woman do And growing up and coming into adulthood and trying to excise that, to get it out, to understand it was really, really challenging.

I had a very bizarre breakthrough with it that thus far as I share this, I've not heard a lot of people relate to, but the confusion for my perspective was like, yeah, it was man on man. So this opens up this hole, and especially where I grew up in Detroit, I guess now I'm gay. So there was this bad thing happened to me, and then I think this makes me gay, which is its own crisis at that time. And so then the notion I would ever tell anyone wasn't on the table because that would have been telling everyone I was gay. Again, in the '80s in Detroit, where that's not going to work. That's it. It is. Then hearing once I did say, Oh, it's not your fault. You were a kid. And that just didn't really alleviate For me, the work was I had to first acknowledge and own my part. This is what people don't like. But for me to get over it, it was my spidey senses were going off. I was in a place I knew I shouldn't be, and I didn't leave. I have that pit in my stomach. I can remember how that feels, and I didn't listen to my instincts.

I first had to go, Yeah, that part happened. I actually got to forgive myself for that. Once I was like, That all happened, you knew better, You should have gotten out. You felt those feelings. It's not like it came out of complete blue for me. And that's okay because you were eight years old and eight-year-olds choose poorly, and I did. For me, it was allowing myself to forgive the eight-year-old who didn't listen to a these senses.

It's powerful, but it's unfair. Let me tell you why.

That's what people say.

I didn't really fully understand it until I had a child. I could see my son at the age of the traumas that I was experiencing going, Look how innocent and beautiful and pure. And this innocent and beautiful, pure child does not have the ability to make those kinds of decisions. Exactly. For me, it wasn't feeling the sense of, Oh, what's happening? What's happening? Is this wrong? That's wrong? It was somebody sees me and appreciates me and is telling me I'm special. Someone was kind, and their agenda was about grooming rather than it being about kindness. And I tell anyone, any man, any woman who's been sexual abused as a child, if you don't If you don't have a child, if you don't have relatives, if you see a kid on the playground, watch, not creepily, but watch the innocence of that child, and then try and judge yourself through the innocence of that child. That's unfair.

It is. That's what I came to, but I first had to grapple with this guilt feeling I had. Just to hear that it wasn't my fault was not sufficient to make it go away. I needed to confront what was the darkness. The darkness was I felt like I should have known better and done something differently, and I just needed to explore that.

That's the man judging the child because the man or the teenager or the young man would clearly be like, What are you doing? This is crazy. Why are you here? But if you take away the innocence and the lens of the way the child saw it, then you're robbing yourself of it. Here's the most freeing part of it for me that I found at 54 in therapy for the first time in my life. There's something called an arousal template that I had no idea about, that from the age of three to seven, I could be wrong on the ages, but the therapist will tell you this, three to seven, your arousal template is set as a kid, even though you're not sexual. If someone comes along and interjects something into your arousal template, be it culturally, be it rape, molestation- Violence, I imagine. Violence, all of those things being put into your young child's brain becomes a part of your arousal template, especially for men. For me, being a little boy, the thing that gave me the most shame was when the molester would say, You liked it. Look, you're erect. That's the struggle. How can I be a heterosexual boy, know I like girls, and have this same-sex thought and desire.

That was hard to understand. But understanding that the arousal template in your brain sets that and has been hijacked. Also, this is the thing that blew my mind. Once it's set, it can't be taken away. For me, wrapping my mind and soul around all of that was very freeing.

Yeah. How did you handle it before you went to therapy? What were you telling yourself?

A lot of people would say, Oh, my God, you're so profound. Look how hard you work. Look how much you've done. A lot of the success that I've experienced in life was because I was a dealing. I was just working. I would work my way through it. And relationships wouldn't really work out because I would just work and work and work and work. And no matter how much work that I did when the work would stop, I'd be faced with, these things happen to you. What do you feel about it? Who are you? What are you? And I just got to a place in my life where it's like, I'm not going to live this way anymore. And at 55, I'm the freest and clearest version of myself that I've ever been.

Oh, that's wonderful. All of it's a sword, right?

So I would argue that part of your arousal template being set in the way it was does predispose you to be able to hand middle, what comes your way and results in the success.

So my thing is I thrive when shit's hit in the fan. And spent a lot of my life seeking those out. We set this thing at a 50 instead of a 10. So it's like, I'm asleep unless I really got to be aware of how to get out of this situation.

I'm sorry, man.

Yeah, same for you.

What I did know, because recently I've been doing all these tests. When I went to this session, they were like, Okay, let's test for you for autism, because there are certain things that you are doing that on the spectrum. So we went through all of these tests, and what we found is that a child like me having to live in that chaos and trauma constantly, I became hyper vigilant in everything. I trained my brain to me to watch, to protect myself in every way, which is where I work today. So for you to say that you were in a moment of chaos is where you thrived, it's what happened to the little boy and what he needed to be okay or to feel like he was loved. I've run into people like that, and it's one of the saddest things that I've seen because the more I try and say, Hey, this is what peace feels like, there's all of this resistance to it because it's scary. Yeah.

I was set on this trajectory. There's some parts of me I'm going to have to accept. I'm not going to erase the hard drive from the arousal format.

Which is very important to understand because you can make yourself insane trying to figure out what has happened, why it's affecting me in this way. I've had very few sexual partners at 55, and people go, Oh, my God, you're this huge guy, really. Is that sure you're all over the world? No, not me. I do believe that all things work together for your good, even though if they're awful and horrible, I have to believe that. Which put me in a wonderful position in running the studio, because when you have people coming to you with their dreams in their hands and they need a job or want to be on a show. If I had been another person, then maybe I would have been doing things that were horrible. But because of what I went through and because of how much I understand the pain of that, I would never I didn't flick that on anybody. It put me in this great position to help as many people as I could safely hit this next level in their lives, right? Yes. All of that is incredibly important to me.

What's interesting is I think you and I went almost in opposite directions based on similar things, which is fascinating.

Yeah, and that happens. I had a friend who had been sexually abused, and he had hundreds of partners. But at the same time, he was abandoned by his mother. You could give 10,000 females, and it wouldn't fulfill what he was looking for. Yeah. He and I finally sat down, had some real deep conversations about what's going on. I even hired a private detective to try to find the mother that abandoned him so that he could talk to her. I was thinking that hopefully that would help him.

Yeah, closure.

Yeah. There are people who go to these incredible extremes. You can go that way where everything is sex, and then you go the other way where for me, I didn't want to be thought of as sexy. Being tall was a problem because when people would see me, they'd think, Oh, this tall Black guy, the stereotype or whatever that is.

Well, you embody masculinity in our simplest definition or stereotype.

Yes. Carrying all of that and trying to walk through and work all of that out was a journey for sure.

When you would have sexual partners did you feel like... Sorry, this is so personal, but what did you feel after the fact? Were you like, I didn't like that, I don't like sex anymore, or I'm ruined, or I'm fraudulent. What were the feelings?

There was one woman who I was completely in love with. I was in my early 30s at the time. Because I wasn't very experienced, I felt less than, inadequate. And that was something that made me shy further away and back into myself of going, Okay, I don't want to be judged based on my lack of experience because of what I've been through.

Yeah, it's a weird cycle. Yeah.

At 54, this past summer, I've been thinking about it for a while. I was like, Okay, Tyler, you've worked this hard. You've got this beautiful kid. You've had this amazing life What happens when you're not working? Why aren't you happy when you're not working? Because the work became the drug and the adrenaline. To take that moment and stop the work and say, Okay, let's go and look inside and see what's happening and see the full effect. This program I did was so fantastic. Before you go in, there are thousands of questions that you answer. They have a clinical profile of who you are mentally walking in the door. For me to walk in and be confirmed in who I thought I was was so freeing. To have all of these therapists, I think it was nine that I saw in total, because it's a very intensive thing for seven days, 10 hours a day. Then you sit in the room and all the therapists talk about you and you listen. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. To hear them talking and affirming the good person that I know that I am and the issues and the way to work through them was very freeing for me.

This one woman I love, she would say to me every day I walk in, because when you go through these profiles, it's like, Do you drink? I have a drink on occasion. Have you ever done any drugs? No, I tried this pot when I was 40, didn't really like it. I have a gummy every now and then, but if I get too weird, I don't like feeling out of control. But they were fascinated because I'm not an addict.

That's shocking to me. You were like an 80% chance of being an addict.

That's exactly what they were saying to me. There were these group sessions. I'm going, I'm not going to be in these group sessions, man. I'm Tyler Perry. I don't know about this. She said to me, There have been people who've come here who were famous who did not do the sessions and came back to do the group sessions. I was in the group with these wonderful people who had shit they were dealing with. To sit in and hear their stories then made me find the commonality. There was a through line for all of us, and I think that for all of humanity meant. As much as I'm excited to be here talking to you, my hope is that by sharing this, somebody hears something goals. Maybe that's what I'm dealing with.

A thousand %, Tyler, because owning a studio is not very relatable. But the other stuff is, you read The Body Keeps a Score or any of these books, it's like 30%. I mean, it's huge numbers of us who have gone through this stuff, and you would I think you're the only one, at least when we grew up.

We grew up in a time where you could not talk about it. No. Because if you said anything, you're gay. Being gay at that time was a horrible taboo thing. I'm so glad we're at a place now where people can just be themselves. Yes. There was a kid recently, I don't know a lot of younger singers and performers, but he was singing on stage, and I saw him talking about his sexuality, trying to figure it out. My heart went out to him because he's so young. What I wanted to scream was, look into the arousal template, figure out what happened, walk it through so that you're clear in a sense of this is what happened. Also, there's so much shame. You have to chase the shame down of what that feels like. That's the thing that freed me, just to look at it like, I am ashamed of the why. Also understanding that was not my fault. I did not deserve that. They gave that to me, and it wasn't mine to carry. Here's the thing that I've been trying to work through the most. As long as I have been dealing with what they both gave me to carry, it has denied me the ability to love freely, openly, and be in a relationship that is healthy and whole for a very long period of time.

I have another friend on a guy's trip in Jackson. We're sitting around talking, and he's talking about how when he was six, his older brothers were making him have sex with these women. He's laughing and he's joking about it. He's laughing. Everybody around the table, they're all making jokes. And I'm quiet. And I'm just like, Guys, I'm sorry. I got to challenge you on this. He's like, No, no, no, no. When we got to a moment where we he could talk in private, he broke because I had him look at his child. I was like, Is that okay for your six-year-old? Then it's like, whoa, because you realize you've been judging the child that you are through the lens of your adult life.

It's so misleading.

For sure.

Can I ask really quick, how do you feel about men in general? I'm relieved to hear you were on a dudes trip in Jackson. I'm not expecting you to be excited to become friends with men.

Really? Why?

Well, given the dad, and that seems very scary, and that perhaps men in general- No, I've got great guy friends, great female friends. For me, most of that carnage was driven by dudes.

My mother was the balance for everything for me, and she wouldn't let me see things one way. She worked at a Jewish community center for most of my childhood. She would educate me about what Jewish people went through. My mother just would not let me see things one way. I wouldn't lean toward one group or one sex of a group. I always base people on, Are you a good person? I have a really good sense of people, which came from that childhood of being hyper vigilant. When I walk in, I'm like, Mmm.

Yeah. Are you skeptical when you walk in?

Are you like- I'm not skeptical. I'm immediate on what I feel. I don't talk myself out of what I feel.

Yeah. I think that's the gift that I've come to realize I'm grateful for, which is someone sits down in here, and I know within 30 seconds if they've had our childhood. Exactly right. I see how they look at the doors in the room. I see how they look over at Rob, and I just go, Oh, we're on the team here. Yeah.

Also the understanding of what we had to survive and how our brains taught us. It's like a deer drinking water. They're always looking up. They can't just drink the water and relax. I drove into my property the other day and there was one laying down. I had never seen a deer lay down. The deer was laying there and looked at me as I just rode by on my bike and never got up. I thought, what a great place to get to in life where you can just lay down in a green pasture and just be okay.

And not be fearful. Do you have a hard time sleeping?

No, I sleep well.

You always have, or is that post trip to this great place?

I don't know if I always have, but what I know I do is work myself to exhaustion, so the sleep is good. But I also do know how to stop and check in, see if I'm okay, go away, get quiet. I like to be alone. I'm a loner by nature. I could spend days and weeks and months in the mountains by myself.

You have to police yourself, I imagine, with isolation?

Of course, especially having a 10-year now. It's like, Hey, dad, hello. Soccer practice over here.

Real life's happening over here. Okay, so he's 10? Yeah. I have 10 and 11. It's so fucking fun.

Yeah, he's so good.

Okay, so at a certain point, again, it'd be shocking to people, I think, to learn that someone as smart as you… You didn't graduate high school.

I got put out of high school and had to go to PM high school to get my diploma. It was a high school that was at night after school for adults and people who got kicked out of school.

Right. Dudes who were smoking cigarettes in the parking lot.

Who wanted to go to school.

Then in your early 20s, you're watching Oprah. Yeah. Picture that, right? Yeah. You're watching Oprah. You learn about journaling as a way to process your thoughts, and you really decide to take that up.

Yeah. I was looking through some things recently, and I ran across one of my journals.

From that era?

The early 2000s. I opened it up and I started reading, and I just sat there. I was reading for hours. I called her up, I was like, Listen, go pull out your journals and read some of the stuff you were going through 20, 30 years It was so spiritual. I was in tears. It's like you had written your own Bible of the things that you had come through. To go back and look at them and see how far you've come was so beautiful to me. I would tell anybody, Journal, write, and then go back years later and see.

When you were reading the one from 20 years ago, what were you wrestling with that you now realize your past? Does it also give you a sense of humor about all the stuff you obsess about?

Yeah, I was just like, Oh, I hope the show works. I don't know how I'm going to pay this light bill is $3,000. I go back and look at those things and go on, Look at where you were. I'd come through being homeless. So I was writing it from the point of view of where I was and not where I was going. Understanding where you're going is so much more important. I've learned to build for where I'm going rather than where I am. And looking back on all of that stuff and reading all of those moments and those memories, it really was powerful for me.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

New Year, new everything for you.

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Okay, so you started at what age, do you think?

Eighteen or 19, I was watching the show and I started journaling. I didn't use my name because at that time, we wouldn't talk about the things that you and I just talked about. I would use these different characters, and a friend of mine found them and goes, Man, this is a really good play. I thought, Maybe it is a play. What I write about is this character went through this. I was talking about adult survivors of child abuse and rape and molestation. I moved to Atlanta.

Prior to that, did Did you ever fancy being a writer? I didn't. What was your rationale? You're clearly very bright. It's not working in school. It's not working at home. What were you thinking you were destined to do? Were you so confused?

I definitely wanted to be an architect. The man that raised me was a builder, and I wanted to build houses. But when I wrote this, I always loved entertainment, but I never thought, you can audition.

You're trying to be invisible, not center stage. Yeah.

Having my friend encourage me in doing that first play and seeing people, the 1,200 that I thought would show up, and only 30 Yeah. Having the 30 people's reaction to the show speak to me in my soul, I was like, whoa. That sparked something for me.

You went in this incredible journey. So you moved to Atlanta in 1990?

Yeah, early '90s.

And I think we got to do one second on it. It seems obvious to me, but why Atlanta from New Orleans?

Hurricane Katrina literally blew the roof off the poverty that was in New Orleans. Mardi Gras was amazing. And the tourists are on Bourbon Street in Saint Charles Avenue, and it's beautiful and it's amazing. But two blocks behind those mansions is where we were in the ghetto with drive-by shootings and police brutality and murders. It was just insane. Some friends of mine invited me to Freeknik, which is the Black Spring break. Black kids went to Atlanta, white kids went to the beach for spring break. I don't know what that is about. I got there, and while everybody's parting and dancing and drinking, and I'm realizing that I see Black people doing well.

I'm from Detroit, so I would go down to Atlanta, and I'd be like, this is a completely different version than I've ever seen. There's Black folks in Escalades, and they have nice houses. They're at the nice restaurant. This was unimaginable in Detroit in the '90s.

Yeah. I think I'm probably six years older than you. Five, yeah. So you get it. Being a Black person and never seeing a Black person be successful unless it was a pimp or a preacher to come to Atlanta and see their doctors, their lawyers, they're in suits.

A full middle class.

I'm home, so I loaded up my Hyundai and moved right to Atlanta.

You put up a play, and as you say, only 35 folks.

Yeah, 30. Okay. Don't give me the other five.

I'm going to give you $5. $12 a ticket. I would count. When you were in and out of the bathroom, you didn't count.

I would count, yeah. That's right.

You undertake from that moment something that is, I think, very rare in our business, which is you then take the next six years, I guess, to refine, to rewrite, to rework, to restage. No. Okay. Well, no wonder it was impossible to believe it.

I see you're doing your research. That's good. But no, it was the same show, and every year I would try to do it, it would fail. But there was somebody in the audience out of every show, that's what I call a ram in the bush, who wanted to invest in it every time. The most I saw was probably 1400 people in New Orleans in the theater that sat, 3000. But out of that, somebody said, Well, let's keep this going. Because during this time, there were a lot of plays, these black shows that were traveling the country and making lots of money for black people. It was on something that's affectionately called the Chitlin Circuit.

The rename's weird, Urban...

There's a rename?

Yeah, they rebranded it.

I It's like, Auntie Mama, you have to rebrand it. I'm just going to call the shit what it is. The Chitlin Circuit is when Black performers could not perform in white establishment, they would travel all over the South into all of these different places and become famous among their own people. Here I am doing this play in the early '90s and hitting some of these spots where Black people were allowed to go everywhere. But the spirit of the Chitlin circuit was still there where Black people supported each other. For my play to not work all of those years, then in 1998, take off one night.

The play itself didn't change all that much.

It didn't change. You know what changed? The play was about adult survivors of child abuse who had forgiven their abuser because it was a happy ending. They all forgave the abuser, the woman who did all this stuff to him, and I hadn't forgiven my father. So It was hypocritical that I'm in this seat and I'm talking about forgiveness, and it hadn't happened for me. In '98, he and I got into a really heated argument, the man who raised me, and I forgave him. That is when the show changed. Oh, wow. It was spiritual for me. I went from nobody being in the audience to having eight sold-out shows after I forgave him. The forgiveness was such a scary thing for me because I didn't realize how powerful it was for me. It was my anchor. You're with me. What are you thinking? You got something on your mind to say?

Well, I'm dead with you. I'm thinking, resentment is drinking poison, hoping the other person dies. My own father, my resentments. I'm thinking of you being Christian, how it's probably compounded that you weren't able to achieve forgiveness in the context you were in.

But also anger is helpful. If you take away anger, you have to make room for compassion. That is very hard to do. It's much more gray.

The ripping away of my anger toward him, It was like a car that runs on gasoline. Then all of a sudden, you fill it with diesel and say, go be motivated. Because everything I was doing, every time I was trying to work, it was like, I'm going to make some money. I'm going to take care of my mother. I'm going to prove to you that I am something because you said I wouldn't shit. Once that was gone and I forgave him, it didn't matter anymore. I had no motivation to keep going, even though the purest sense of where I started was about making enough money to take care of my mother so she didn't have to be with him. So forgiving him ripped that from me. I had to figure out, okay, how do you operate now? I also found this out in therapy. I shifted from the anger to caregiving, and I did not know that my caregiving was a problem.

Is the caregiving still an attempt to be safe?

The caregiving is an attempt to save everybody else. But I hear what you're saying.

Yeah, I'm trying to find this crossover because I don't trust people. What's someone going to do? And then I have tactics. If you're a woman and you're in love with me, I feel safe because you're probably not going to hurt me if you love me. If you're a man and I think I can dominate you, you're going to know not to try to hurt me. If I can make everyone in this room laugh, I'm totally safe because people aren't swinging when they're laughing. I have these techniques, and I guess I would have just imagine that if you're the caretaker and you're benevolent, you would expect the reciprocity would be kindness.

That's exactly right. I would expect that if I'm kind to you'll be kind to me or you'll be kind to somebody else. However- It doesn't work that way. However, yes, I let all that go years ago. I gave up expectations, which was a problem.

You're not an AA, but you'd be great an AA. Is that right? Yeah. Expectations are resentments under construction. That's the same.

Wow. I gave I have expectations because I thought, if I'm good to this person, if I'm kind to this person, if I'm doing this, and they give me their ass to kiss or just become horrible, then I'm going to feel bad because they did that rather than going, I'm just going to be good to you, whether you do whatever you want to do or not. You do what works for you. I'm just going to be good to you.

For me.

For me. Because my entire life was based on the anger, and now I've shifted. So I've got to do this for me. But where it became a problem, and I could not wrap my brain around this when I first started talking to these folks, they were saying, Tyler, caregiving is a problem. I'm like, How is that a problem? It's such a good thing. It's a problem if you're using it to cover what you're dealing with. So I was caring for everybody else, so I wasn't dealing with what I was dealing with or going through.

You weren't caring for Well.

Yeah. That's like that classic codependent paradigm, too, right? And I imagine you probably collected folks that needed a lot of help, not intentionally.

I absolutely didn't think it was intentional, but as I look at my life now- It's a suspicious amount. It's beyond suspicious. I have a tremendous amount of people who need a lot of help.

Yeah.

I mean, you've come up multiple times on this show from people you've helped. We had Prince Harry on. You opened your doors to him. You are someone who extends yourself. And you said your mom did it, too. So I assume there's also a deep knowing because she did that as well. But you're known to be very generous.

That's incredibly kind. Thank you, Monica. I appreciate that. It's good when people will acknowledge it and say it. So it's really great. Thank you.

It's frustrating and confusing when it actually leads to their resentment. And understandably, once you unplug from the whole system, yeah, they feel shittier. And they weirdly resent you because you're helping. You're a reminder that they need help. And that's a very tricky dynamic to I set limits on how far I'm going to go.

I'm going to help you to this point, and you got to get up and be on your own because I'm not going to let you be dependent on me for everything. Then they get angry because of where you stop. I've seen that, of course. But listen, it's okay. It's not okay, but it's life. You keep moving, you deal with their anger, whatever way it comes. But I always know my intention. My intention is pure.

Monica, cut this out because I say it too often. But my mother said the best thing to me ever.

Why do you want to cut it out?

Because I say it too much. It just sounds redundant. But we can leave it if you want.

Yeah, because if you say it a lot, then somebody may hear it for the first time.

Okay, you can be the judge of it. It's like, Oh, my mom, I'm complaining about someone else asking me for money. And she's very generous and lets me go on and on, comforts me. And then she says, You know Dax, in life, you can either be the person calling for help or you can be the person that gets called for help. Who do you want to be? And I was like, Oh, definitely the person that gets called for help.

I know, but that's come to bite you a little bit. How so? Because you don't like calling anyone for help, and everyone needs to call someone for help every now and then.

That's true. But just given those options, it was very helpful for me to reframe my frustration with it, which is like, well, I could be in the other side of this equation.

There's another option there because I found this out because I was helping so many people and they just kept coming back, kept coming back. Oh, I need this. I need that. I was praying about it and I clearly hear this voice, which I believe inside of me, the voice of God is like, Stop. You are blocking a midnight. And I thought about that. I went back and looked at what represented in the Bible. Sometimes God designs midnights for people to go through. If you run and rescue them all the time, you're not making them better. You robbed them of the thing that would make them better.

That might change them.

Or be that thing that gets them up and gets them on their feet and gets them going. The catalyst. Yeah.

Okay, so you forgive your father. That's fascinating. People should know, not to make you go through it again, but you were born a junior, and at 16, you changed your name. Just to accentuate the stakes that were on this relationship, it was very strained.

From childhood, I knew this man was not my father.

It turned out to not be your father, which is crazy.

Oh, wow. You just knew it.

Did you talk to Kerry about this?

Yeah, Kerry Washington.

She had a son. She was on about her book and that estrangement from the family and not being able to put your finger on it and that fucking huge looming. What is going on? Yeah.

But I was a kid asking my mother. All of my life, I remember asking, Is he my father? Her answer would always be the same. I hate to tell you this, baby, but he's your father. I asked her on her deathbed, Is he my father? Same answer. I hate to tell you this, but he's your father. It's 15 years ago this week that I'm dealing with this. I'm a little emotional as I'm thinking about it. When she died, it didn't sit well with me. I did a DNA test with my brother and I. Dna test, come back, we don't have the same father. I'm like, okay, well.

One of us isn't dads.

Yeah, but I knew he was his. He is his spitting image, everything, his attitude, his voice. Then I do another test with the man himself, and I'm not his child. If I could wake my mother up for five minutes, I'd be like, Hey, can you just tell me? Because what I want her to know is that I wouldn't judge her. She was 24 years old. This man was beating the shit out of her. She was in misery. If there was a man that loved her, hooray for her. That makes me smile and happy to know that somebody loved her because of the way he was treating her.

Any moment of comfort you would want for her. Yeah.

But on the other hand, my mother was deathly afraid to be in the house by herself. There's a story of her being home alone with my two sisters. I wasn't born and she was screaming and banging on the wall. It was a double house for the neighbors to come over and help because somebody was trying to break in the house. That's all I know about the story. I don't feel that I'm the product of a rape, but because I have all of these looming questions that are out there, I wish she had just told me if she knew.

She might have believed this. Whether she knew or didn't know, you can start believing a story. I think we talked about that with Kari. In some ways, I think everyone just believed it.

That's right. My mother was extremely kind, giving, and loving woman, but she's also very, very private. So I want to give her the dignity of what she believed, but I knew it from childhood.

Isn't that weird? Yeah. And it wasn't because of physical resemblance.

No, it was just I could not understand how this man could look at me with such hate.

So you believe he knew as well?

Yeah. Then there were clues. I think I was probably in my late teens, early 20s. They were sitting out on the porch, and he said to her, Oh, that's where the boy gets those where my eyes are webbed in between. She tells me, she's like, he said, You have my eyes. I thought, you've been married to this man for 30 years, and he didn't know what your eyes looked like. Those moments that made me go, so you're wondering where my eyes came from, and you finally see her in there. It was a different time back then. Yeah.

Okay, so you find some forgiveness for him. Yeah.

Are you cool now? Oh, are you cold? Have you cooled off? Yeah, I have. All right, turn it off. Okay, great. It did turn it off. We didn't have to turn it off.

What a kind way to say it.

Are you cool now?

That could have meant so many things.

Cool.

No, no, no. I'm sorry because it blows right here.

Yeah, we just had Morgan Freeman on. He did not want it. He did not like the air.

But then conversely, we had Jeff Ritz on. He hated how hot it was. It's like, I don't know, what are you going to fucking pick? You can't trust anyone in that seat. That's right. So lo and behold, these plays become hugely successful. The amount of them you were doing is staggering. You're doing 300 a year.

Sometimes 360, 370 a year.

And not in one theater.

So you're It's all over the country. Eight or nine shows a week, sometimes 10.

It becomes impossibly successful.

If you look at Maxine's Baby, that's my mother's name on Prime Video, it lays out the whole story. It's pretty fascinating for people to see.

Okay, so there's a doc about that? Yeah. Oh.

The doc about my life that Armanne Ortiz and the mother of my child did because she was the only one I would trust to give that access to me. They followed me for 10 years, and it tells the whole story from when I started all the way up until the studio opening.

Oh, I'm definitely watching that. I'm ashamed that I don't know that yet. I spent all this time reading about you. It's her fault. Okay. The light and airy fun arm share. I don't want to embarrass you, but there's a point where at least minimally, Forbes goes, this show has generated $100 million. It's generated $20 million in merch. At that age, you must be more successful than you had ever even dreamt of.

Yeah, but it wasn't enough. I was scared.

Okay, that's my question. In my mind, all this was going to fix a lot of stuff.

I didn't think it would fix a lot of things. I was worried about it staying. How long is this going to stay? And I'll never forget telling my mother she could retire. She had diabetes. She was very ill working with the kids at the center. And I was saying, You should retire. And I hung up the phone just praying, God, please let this place to keep working so I can take care of her. I just worried every day that it was going to end.

It's a scary feeling.

All of a sudden, there's money, there's income, there's more than enough. My pathology wasn't more than enough. My pathology was you got money when you ran out of money because that's how it was. You had to wait to the next two weeks until you got your next check. So to To go from having nothing and being homeless and living on the street to the first year of making money, making $100,000, and getting to the end of the year and not having a dime to pay taxes because I had given it all away. Then the next year, making a million, and the next year, seven million. It was all of this learning in progress. I had no one to teach me or walk me through or talk to me about how this works or what this means. Nobody in my family had any money.

Were there not mentors available or you weren't good at avaling yourself to mentorship.

There weren't any available.

Yeah, I'm going to grant you that. Even in Atlanta.

Also, I didn't trust because if you told me this was going to work or to do this or to do that or invest in this, I just didn't trust it.

Okay, so I wouldn't trust it either. But mine would be, you want something if you're just going to be nice to me. There's no way I would trust a mentor. They must have an ulterior motive. That's my hang up with mentorship. Do you still feel that way? No, it's lessened. I mean, we're talking about stuff that's like 30 years old and 10 years old and 8 years old, but no, it's lessened. And I can ask people now.

Lessened, but it's still there.

Yeah. But yeah, that's how deep that fear is, I guess. Here's this man who's got status and wealth, and he likes me for some reason. My next thing is to have a dream where he wants to get sexual.

That's the sad part of where we come from. Our trauma the things we've been through will automatically make our attention to go up and think, why are you being so nice to be? What's wrong with you? You've got wealth. You're after something. I used to work so hard to try and dispel that for people. No, this is just about somebody being kind to you because I know what that's like for somebody to be kind to me. I've given away cars and houses and paid for kids to go through college and did so much stuff for people that it got to a point where I was like, I don't want to meet them. I don't want to shake their hands. I want to just stand over here and see that they're doing well because I don't want them to have that mentality.

Probably.

They're like, yeah. Imagine somebody walking up to you and your car is broken down to give you a new car. What do you want? What is this going to cost rather than just understanding that there are people on the planet who are just kind.

Well, and let's add, now on the other side of it, which this state of mind was truly unimaginable for me growing up poor, which is like, the only joy I'm actually getting out of this thing that I thought was going to be so spectacular is giving people shit. I don't mean family members. I mean, tipping an obnoxious amount every time I eat a cheap meal. That's more fun than anything. That server doesn't need to worry that I'm a creep that wants to do something. Exactly.

What does that do for that person? What does this do your spirit, you as a person, and how do you pay it forward? That's what I always say. What can I do? Nothing. Pay it forward.

Find someone that's in a shitier spot than you are. Yeah. Okay, so then going into movies, there's a point where this show is incredible. It's generating a ton of money. You're working- Too hard. Which is your dream 24/7, no time to think about anything. Why get out of that?

We went from 2000 seat theaters to arenas and couldn't meet the demand. So I thought, okay, there's a hunger for this storytelling, so let me move into television. Got it.

It was just a bigger arena.

It was a bigger arena, and I didn't have to be everywhere at once. I could be on a screen in 2,000 locations. That's when I really began to understand this lack of representation for Black people in storytelling, and especially my storytelling for Black people, because there were lots of shows that were directed at Black people, but they weren't told from the point of view of a Black person who had experienced it. That's why I think shows as movies are still going to number I want is because I'm telling it from a point of view that we really get, no matter what critics say, no matter what anybody says.

Okay, weirdly, we've already laid the groundwork for this, and I was talking about it in the trauma aspect. I wanted to hear from you how you process that huge dissonance between what it's doing commercially and what it's doing critically. My own pet peeve about this is I think it's people removed from that situation, telling the people in the situation how they're supposed to process it and enjoy it and like There's something very condescending about that specific type of criticism.

I don't like metal music. Metal is not my thing. I can't relate to it, but I don't criticize it, and I don't judge it because it's not for me, it's not directed to me. It's not something that I can say, I like this music, so this music is crap. No, that's just not for me. It's the same way when I think about the work that I do, it is specific in nature and it speaks to a specific audience. To have a critic come along and say, Well, you have zero % on Rotten Tomato. Like, Fuck your tomatoes. Because when I was first starting out, I had two critics in my show at the Kodak Theater sit on the same role. I watched them make notes throughout the show, too. They reviewed the exact same show, they saw the exact same thing. I read both reviews. It's the last time I read reviews. One guy thought it was amazing, the other guy thought it was the worst thing he'd ever seen. So I thought, this is opinions. This is what people think. It doesn't really matter as long as I'm clear about the intention of what I'm doing.

Yeah, but I think there's something a little deeper going on with your work, particularly. So, yes, two people could watch the graduate, and they're going to have different opinions. But I'm going to argue, and this is something that's very burbling up all around us, and no one really wants to talk about it, which is there is an elitism. Yeah, for sure. It's condescending and it's judgmental, and people feel it, and they go out and vote in response to that. I think this particular thing reeks of elitism.

It reeks of We know better.

You should be doing this. You should be showing what should be not what you experience and recognize. There's something about it that feels very removed and judgmental. It doesn't feel like it's coming from the inside and being judgmental. I would agree. This happened to Sandler, too. Critics fucking hated him. Every movie is an enormous hit. A third of the country loves the movie. Now, I have different opinions than other people, and I might not like stuff or like stuff, but I like to think I don't get onto a soapbox of it's low brow or it's cheap or it's bad or mine's better or superior. It's just, all right, that audience likes this, this audience gets that, and audiences get what they want without the deep judgment of it all.

Completely true. Also, to layer that is the understanding of what it's make it for me to be able to be in this business and to have this many hits and this much success and have to fight tooth and nail to get a budget that's anywhere near a Sandler movie.

Despite all the success.

Despite all of it. Still. To this day. It's wild. With Paramount, I have these shows on BT that do huge numbers for my audience, but the budgets are far lower than any of the other shows that are on some of the other parts of Paramount.

With comparable audiences. For sure.

Then it's like, Oh, no, no, we have a formula for you, which is basically, you are Black. This is your box. Here's where you stay because your audience is going to do this much for us in returns. That has been since I've been in the business. I have found a way to navigate through that, to take what I've been given, to make sure the actors and actresses are paid well, and at the same time, figure out, how do I make this work and grow a business? It's been challenging because I would like to have one opportunity to have an even playing field for just one where it said, okay- Here's your track record.

If you can't do it. Who else? Yeah.

Okay.

Your string of movies that are gigantic hits, I'm going to add just for on. Do you know who Joy Brian is?

Yes.

Okay. She and I were married on a TV show together for six years. But when we saw each other every day at work, I would say, hello. And she'd go, Larch. It was talking about Larch? Oh, my God. It was our favorite. Our salutation for six years was, hello. What's she talking about? Larch. Nobody's talking about Larch.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Culturally, a world all her own.

I love it. Once you get into TV, I do have one logistical question. When you do House of Pain, First season, I'm presuming you just funded 10. You went out and made 10 episodes?

Yes, I did because I was talking to my agent and said, I want to do a sitcom. They're like, Oh, well, just do one. I was like, No, I feel like I need to do 10. They're like, Tyler, nobody does 10. That's not how it's done.

That's not how this works.

I was like, No, I want to do 10. They're like, Okay. So I went to Atlanta, filmed the first 10. They were awful. Okay. I put them in the can and nobody wanted them in Hollywood. Then the UPN and WB merged. I think they became the CW. At the time, they were about 10 or 12 Black shows on the air. Those shows all went away. So all the affiliates, this is during the world of syndication, were pissed. So they were calling around Hollywood, What do you have? What do you have? I was like, Well, I got this guy, Tyler Perry's got 10 episodes. And they're like, Tyler, you got 10 of the girl. They want them. I'm like, Okay. So they put them on in all these different affiliates. The ratings were higher than what was there before. Blew their minds.

So just explain the affiliate for people. So you've got in your town, Atlanta, you got your own news station. That's its own affiliate of see, but there's hours of the day where they don't have programming.

Yeah, exactly. They don't have the programming to put things in or after the prime-time hours, they wouldn't have the show to put in. So when they put this show in, it got these crazy numbers, and they all just went crazy. And they were like, Oh, Tyler, this is so great. We got a call from This network, they want to order 10 more. Another one said, Oh, we want 20. I was like, No, I want 100. I want 90 episodes.

Everybody's like, What are you talking about? Yeah, you keep timesing this by 10, and you shouldn't. You make one pilot, not 10, and then you get nine episodes with a back order.

Yeah. They told me, It's not going to happen. Nobody's going to do that. I was like, Well, I'm not doing it because I knew 100 meant syndication. I wanted somebody to commit to 100 episodes, and that was Turner, TBS.

Have you watched that doc by chance? No. Ted Turner on Max. You want to turn that back on, don't you? Go ahead. So bad, but I'll sit here. What's your heat level right now?

I'm with you. Turn it on.

You know what a solution would be is to actually use the thermostat on it and just not make it frigid.

That seems funny. Or just turn it on. Just freeze yourself.

Now watch this. I'm going to go up to 20.

It's also in Celsius. Okay, then we're all screwed.

Let's travel to Europe right now and enjoy some Celsius. Okay, because what I'm so confused about is when I go to the Wikipedia page, Four House of Pain. It says like, 336 episodes, which is impossible.

Yeah, I think we're at 400 something now.

Okay, and I go, no, and there's no show has 400 episodes. Then I'm looking at the breakdown of seasons, and yeah, it says season one is 10, and then it says season two, 100. How does that work. Were they airing twice a week?

I don't know how they were airing. All I know is I was working my ass off. It took me nine months to shoot all 100. I would shoot two or three episodes a day.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my Lord.

But all of that was because of the situation I was in.

Right. The economics demanded- How do I shoot this quickly?

Because they're not giving me the money. How do you make this work? Even now, when I'm doing movies, I'll shoot a movie in five days, seven days, 18 days. Oh, my God. Because when I'm talking to the DP, unless there are specific shots that we want at a specific time of day, I'm like, Listen, with all the digital stuff that we can do today with lighting, make this beautiful, and let's figure out how we do it. I've worked with some amazing DPRs who found the way to do it. Jazzman's Blues, which is on Netflix, was the first movie I ever wrote 28 years ago now. It is the first time I ever fell in love with filmmaking, and I just filmed it in '22.

Oh, wow. Okay, so you go on this impossible run. You have so many TV shows, you have so many movies. You open up the studio, you become friends with the Queen Bee, You then have shows. I had one question about... I've met the Queen Bee a few times, and boy, does she deliver.

Yeah, she's amazing.

The Queen B is tricky because it does sound like you're talking about Beyoncé.

I'm talking about Oprah, the original Queen B.

How is she, Queen B? Oh, you're talking about Oprah. Okay, got it.

Oh, you thought I was talking... See, you were right to point it out. I thought she was on Beyoncé.

Queen B is Beyoncé. Exactly.

That is fine.

I count her as a friend, too.

But, Oprah, I had one little question on that. So you end up, the haves and the have nots, you do eight seasons on own, and it's huge for them. It's a great success. Is it tricky at all to be friends with the owner of the network when you're making the stuff? Because those are inherently often at odds, those two roles.

It was tricky, but we were determined to prove that we could work together and make it happen and the friendship wouldn't suffer.

You had to keep that as a priority.

Definitely had to keep it as a priority. There were times when it got tough.

It's going to get tough. It's hard. You guys have opposing interests all the time.

Even with Oprah, yeah, it got tough. But what we realized and both understood is how important the friendship is to each of us.

Okay, Let's talk about the 6888. How does this come your way?

I got a call from Nicole Avante, who was coming off the tragedy of her mother being murdered. Here in LA, 80-something-year-old woman is at home in the evening and some gangbanger breaks into the house in Truesdale and shoots her.

In Truesdale? For people who don't know, it's like one of the fanciest neighborhoods in all of LA. Yeah.

And her father, Clarence Avon, who was known as the Godfather, he and Quincy Jones were such mentors.

Great doc on him. Yes. That his daughter made, who you're talking about.

That Nicole. She said, Tyler, I I really feel like you should do this movie, the 6888. My mother and I feel like you should do it. Our mother passed like, I feel like my mother wants you to do this. I thought, whoa, I've never heard this story. She sends me this sizzle reel from Kerry Selick and Peter Guber, executive producer on the show. I saw the sizzle reel about 855 Black women in World War II.

I'm like, who knew? Yeah, what 855?

Wait, 855 Black women were in Europe in World War II as a part of the war effort? I thought, you're kidding me, right? She's like, no, this is real. There are four or five surviving members. I said, Where? There were two that were really with it. There was one woman, her name is Lena King. She died this year. She was 99. I'm like, I'm getting on a plane. I'm going to see her right now because she's 99. I want to sit and talk to her before I start this script. I walk into her house. I don't know what to expect. She's 99. I'm thinking she's going to be in a wheelchair. What's her memory going to be like? This woman comes down the stairs, her lipstick done, her hair, makeup.

Oh my God.

Mr. Perry, it's a pleasure to meet you. She was still driving. She was still going out dancing with her friends. Oh, man. Her memory was as sharp as ever. Wow. I sit down and I ask her, I was like, I know you were a part of the sixth of 8. Tell me about it. What made you go? Emotion. Eyes welled up with water. Seventy-something years, she goes back and she tells me about a young Jewish boy named Abram, who was a very close friend.

The lead of your movie, which I watched last night, is the woman you interviewed. Yeah. The first one? Yeah. Oh, wow. Tell that story. It's so good.

She's telling me about this young man named Abram who died in war. He wanted to go and do something for the war, if in a fight, Hitler. She was so emotional because he'd only been there a few weeks. All of that emotion came back to her in that moment. I saw it in her eyes. I was like, this is the way in to the movie. This is the story. She's telling me what happened and how much she loved him.

Yeah. How do you anchor this huge story in this very intimate, personal one. In the movie, she's from Philadelphia. She's in love with this boy. He's in love with her. It's unrequited till he's about to leave, and then he's dead.

I would say about 80 or 90% of what you see in the movie is factual. I had to take some liberties. Of course. But a lot of it's factual. And things she was sharing with me. Her memory was sharp. You could look at her face and see that she could almost smell the moments and the memories that she was talking to me. Two weeks later, I had a script. I sent it to Nicole. I was like, Listen, here. They're like, You're kidding me. We read it, tweaked it, worked on it, and started filming.

There's so much stuff that immediately burbles up without you having to really shine a light on it. Even her story, she's very smart, she's very capable, and she doesn't want to go clean and cook for men. But going to school, which would be a very natural next step for her, is off the table. Too expensive.

Off the table.

What options are there left? That right there is telling. Then there's this other great moment where all these women enlist, and now they're taking a bus ride down to the south.

The train, yeah.

The train. They're going to go to boot camp, and two things are happening. One, some white dudes walk in and go, Let's get the white people out here. We got to segregate this train. We're like, Oh, wow. Yeah, 1944, that's where we were at. But I think even crazier to think about was like, all these women from the north are coming down, and they're like, What the fuck is going on? You could time travel still in 1944. You could transport to a much crazier place.

But also, women of that day were very aware of racism, no matter where they were.

Sure. Well, she was already experiencing it in Philadelphia. But just that level could happen on a train ride is also really stark.

Time travel across the Mason Dixon in a whole new world.

Right. Okay, so then we meet Kerry Washington, and she is the leader of this group of women. She's phenomenal as always. Your first time working with her? Second. Okay. What do we think of her? I'm in love with her. I think she's so fantastic.

I think that you're spot on. You love with her on and off camera. She's amazing. We worked on For Color Girls in 2010, and this was our second time working together because between that time, she had done so much. I wanted to find something worthy of her. This role, she's playing Charity Adams, who led these women who was 26 years old at the time.

She's 26?

She was 26 years old, leading 855 women. Carrie and I were rehearsing. All of these women, the spirit of them, were with us through the whole thing. When I was finding different sets, I would look at the pictures and look at the historic references. It's like, this is the exact place. It was like, It's weird. But she and I were rehearsing in a dressing room, and there's a knock on the door, and it is the transportation guy. He comes up, he says, I want to show you something. I got this trunk. I want you to see. We come out, and I have this on video. The transportation guy was a World War II buff, and he would go to these auctions and buy all these World War II materials. He brings this trunk and he puts it at our feet. It is Charity Adams' trunk. No. No, it's not.

What?

With her uniform in it, her tulip tree, a letter in it. We both got chills. Oh, my God. All these moments of these women letting us know that they were there and they wanted this to still be told.

That feels impossible.

That's so special, spiritual.

The transpo dude found it. Yeah. Wow. But then you see what she's up against. It's all these half steps. We had Malcolm Gladwell on talking recently about what do you actually need for representation in something, and you find that one woman on a board does nothing. She's a token and no one's going to listen to her. Two is like, she's got a friend.

That's not going to do much. They can condense already, but nothing really happens.

Then it's three. There's this magic number of three where now you get three women on a board of nine, and now they can be themselves and they can really enact some change. I was just thinking about Kerry's role. She's the leader of this one Black battalion, and she's the only one there. When she's meeting with these generals and stuff, they're placating her. They're just getting it. They got to do this thing. You realize like, oh, my God, to be in that situation and actually get anything done seems nearly impossible.

Yeah, and for them to do it and do it well. Another challenge was this story is about the male. How do you tell a story about the mail?

Thank you. If I'm you, I'm like, I don't know, man, where's the big explosion with the mail?

Exactly right. Kerry was the same way. She's like, How do you tell a story about the mail? But I think that we discount what the mail meant then because there was no email, there were no text messages. Mail was life. You You had all these soldiers fighting, and they hadn't gotten mail in months because of the battle of the Bolge and them moving around so much. So the morale was at an all-time low, and you had hangers full of 17 million pieces of mail that needed to get to the soldiers to boost their morale and take them through the end of the war.

Well, and also you do a good job at pointing out there's a mom, I'm sure this part might be artistic, but a woman waits at the gates of the White House, basically, to talk to- Eleanor Roosevelt. To say, I don't know if my son's dead or not. I haven't heard from my son in a year. Yes, morale, but I think more about all these people that were cut off, just assuming the worst for months and months and months at a time, and you can't call anyone to get an answer. Are they still alive? That must have been the most agonizing for those parents.

Of course. Can you imagine? No.

If I wave goodbye to my daughter, and I don't know for a year whether she lived or not. Yeah, awful. No one wants to deal with this situation. The army doesn't. They're like, Supplies, that's all we got to worry about. We can't be worrying about mail. They throw them a bone, and they intentionally give them six months to sort all this out. Thinking Well, that's impossible. They're going to fail.

It's impossible because of the vermin who had eaten through a lot of the package. You couldn't make out the names from the rain and the weather. The World War II of it all. The World War II of it all, yeah. And this impossible sorting task where they had just thrown all this mail into these fingers.

Where do you start with 17 million pieces of fucking mail? Exactly. And these gals, God bless them, they got the job done in 90 days. It's impossible.

Pretty amazing.

It's a great story.

Thank you. I'm excited about it.

Yeah, everyone's really good in it.

The Let me have you rephrase these gals, these women. Oh, yeah. These women got it done?

Yeah. So these women, they got it done in 90 days. Yeah. That's incredible. Help me out. Is gals offensive?

Yeah. In the movie, he says, Stepside Gal, and the gas from Black women in the theater was like, Yeah, gal is offensive. It's like, boy, calling a Black man a boy.

Oh, good, good. Good heads up. I didn't know gals.

Everyone's learning.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of it, I could sense you were shooting... Well, I know you have a Whitehouse. Yeah. So we're shooting at his Whitehouse. To be at your studio, I'm curious of the plays, the writing, the films, the TV show. Where does the studio rank in that as far as the amount of pride it gives you when you try to integrate the fact that you're on a studio?

I tell you the thing that warms my soul the most is the understanding that it was once a Confederate army base, where there were soldiers plotting and planning on how to keep 3.9 million Negroes enslaved. Now that land being owned by me, how great is this country that that could happen? If that could happen for me, I don't care who you are, where you come from. America is an incredible place to just be and dream and live and grow. As many problems as we have as a country, we are still a great nation that when we galvanize and come together, we can do anything.

I still want to be here more than any in their place.

Yeah, for sure. Nowhere else in the world.

But the fact that it's tangible, does that feel special?

It does. My father would build houses. It was a subcontractor, and he would get paid his $800, and he would be so happy, Oh, I got my money. But I watched the guy that he sold the house, usually a white man, sell the house for $80,000. I always wonder, why won't you do that? But looking at it from this point of view, I realized the burden of being the man who owns the house. I don't have any partners. I don't have shareholders. When that $100,000 light bill is due, I've got to pay it. That $180 plus million in payroll for all the actors and everybody, I've got to pay that every year. I understand the blessing of it. I also understand the burden of it, and I also understand the exhaustion of it all, but I'm grateful for it.

I just I feel like it's so tangible versus what we do, which is like, I write, then I make it, it gets seen, then it's gone, maybe it gets seen again. To have something that tangible. I feel like it would force me to experience what's happened. I feel like this visceral, real, tangible 3D space might force me to go, No, no, for real. You built this shit. This wasn't here, then you came along, now it's here.

It's like reading a diary in some ways. The journals, yeah.

And I get that. Every time I drive through the gates, I am reminded of how profound and wonderful this moment is, especially because there's so many people who wanted to do it. I can't tell you the last person who developed a studio of this magnitude. You think about Disney and Warner Brothers. To do it at this time and at this level has really, really been profound. But every time I drive in the case, this is God's Honest truth, when I'm tired, when I'm exhausted, when I'm just like, Okay, how much longer can you carry this? I'm reminded of all the people who wanted to do it. For some reason, it fell on me to do. Also, watching people come through the gates who had never had a shot in this business makes me go. You can go a little further. Yeah. Listen, at 55? Yeah. I'm going to be 70 soon. In two seconds. That's the way I look at it. Right. 55 came so quickly. I'm just like, what does the next 15 years look like while I'm still able to run up and down the stairs and enjoy my life, what does that look like?

And how much of this beautiful gift of the studio is going to be a blessing to that or a hindrance to it? Right.

What about Black Panther being shot there. That was pretty cool. I feel like that's a real moment where you're like, Oh, damn, this scamble also worked out.

One of the first things with Chadwick.

Oh, really? And would you pop in at all? Are you the studio owner?

No, I'm not that guy. I respect everybody's privacy and what they're doing. I wait. If I get invited by the director, like Ryan invited me on the last day to set, I thought that was really great.

Much different owner walking in. Yeah. Well, it's staggering. I guess my only thought is how do you figure out how to enjoy it all? I think that's the last hill to climb, isn't it? How do you really integrate it? How do How do you enjoy it? How do you accept it? How do you believe in it? How do you not fear?

I'm finally at a place where I've got the right team in place to run it so I can step back a lot. As soon as I got there and was like, Okay, great, we're good. Here comes AI. I was like, You might want to rethink everything you're thinking here. It was like, Here's a whole another challenge to deal with.

Yeah. Oh, I have one last question about this. Could you ever mentally be at a place where you go, I did it. It really happened, without feeling like you have to keep pursuing it.

I'm there now.

Oh, well, congratulations. Thank you.

That is huge. Yeah, I feel like I've done it. There's nothing else. If 6888 wouldn't have come along, Jazzman was like the pinnacle for me. 27 years to make it. I'm like, Okay, now what? So I'm there. Oh, good.

Contentment.

Yeah.

You got a little boy, so that really takes care of a lot of it. All right. Well, I hope everyone checks out the 6888. It's in theaters on December 6, and it's on Netflix, December 20th. I think this is going to be enormous. Are you still surprised when you have hits?

I'm thankful. Yeah, okay. I'm not that surprised as I am thankful every time.

That's a good answer.

I like that. But when it's a shitty movie, that hit, thank you. But 6888 is amazing.

Well, Tyler, this has been so fun. I don't think I ever thought we would meet Of course, like everyone else in America, I was very aware of you. I watched the 60 Minutes profile. I was very charmed and thought you were wonderful.

You're going to watch Maxine's Baby.

And I'm definitely going to watch Maxine's Baby.

And your wife, I know it always goes back to your wife.

Well, as it should.

Your wife, I was doing people's voice awards. Somebody was supposed to present the humanitarian award, and she stepped up to do it the last minute, and the teleprompter went out. Oh, sure. She was like, I don't need a teleprompter to talk about him. I'll just wink it. It was really great. Oh, great. I'll never forget that because she was Grace Under fire.

Well, wonderful meeting you. I hope everyone checks out the film, and I hope we get to do it again. Or maybe just bump into each other. Not working. That would be fun, too. Yeah, a lot of fun.

A lot of fun. I love it. All right. Take care. Thank you.

Stay tuned for more Armchair expert, if you dare.

I sure hope there weren't any mistakes in that episode, but we'll find out when my mom, Mrs..

Monica, comes in and tells us what was wrong.

Hi, Moni. Happy birthday. Oh, thank you. It's your birthday today. It's a birthday miracle today.

Oh, because you've been very... Okay, first of all, we're not together. You're in Mexico City.

I'm in Mexico City, I just want to start by saying, what a place. Everyone should come. It's incredible. This is a very, very special place. I've never been. So, yes, we were having the very best trip, and I'll tell you some of the details. But then Lincoln, three or four days ago, she started throwing up, and it was really rough, and she got really scary sick because I was like, do we need... You're trying to figure out, When did you go to the house?

When was she getting worse? Yeah, what point? Yeah.

Yeah, so that was really rough, and that was going on. She had been completely lifeless and zero energy for like 48 hours. And then New Year's Eve was fine. And then New Year's morning at around nine in the morning, I was like, I got something sneaky going on, but I wasn't panicked. And I'm not going to spare you the details. But then I went to the bathroom, and then I had, I mean, really just the most violent throwing up I've ever had. And that went on for eight hours, and I was certain I gave myself a hernia. But the throwing up and the other stuff, I won't mention, duty stuff, was truly nothing compared to the laying in bed, shivering like crazy, all of my muscles cramped. I really, I mean, kicking opiates, Alex. This was the single worst I've ever felt in my whole life for eight hours. I was like... And I had it in my head like, Oh, my God, if this is for 48 hours, or Lincoln at that point was on 50, I was like, I don't think I could make it. Why doesn't my body just stop letting me experience this?

Because it's way too much. It was just torture. Then Kristin brought me a Zofran, and in a leave about eight hours into it. I took that. I was able to sleep. I slept for four hours. Then I woke up last night around, I don't know, 8:00 PM, and I was like, I was okay. It passed. Then Linky was starting to come out of it Two. So everyone else did fun stuff, and she and I just hung out, went to the hot tub to soak our achy bodies. That was fine. We did about 10 minutes. That was our big adventure. And then we laid in bed and watched Little Women, the Greta Gerwig one.

That's a great movie. Have you You're seeing that? Yeah.

Okay. This trip for me has been a total revelation about Greta Gerwig. I knew Barbie, but I hadn't seen Lady Bird.

Oh, what a movie. It's such a good movie.

What a movie. Do you know I didn't see it because I thought it was a period piece. The cover and the title, I for some reason thought it was a period piece. Not a high school coming-of-age movie.

Yeah, but then Little Woman is a period piece.

But now I just love Greta. I would watch, I don't know, Name or worse. I'd watch a horror film that she made at this point. So now I became obsessed with Greta Gerwig. And then last time, I was like, Let's watch Little Women. Well, that's an incredible, perfect movie, too.

It is. She's so good.

Then I did research on her, Monica, like I was going to interview her. I did like an hour of research on Greta Gerwig just for my own edification and fun. I had no idea she was a hugely successful actor before she was our best I didn't know she was married to Noah Bomback?

Yeah, they've done stuff together.

You know all this stuff? I didn't know any of this.

I know it all.

You are a know-it-all. So anyways, all to say, I woke up this morning and I actually feel really fantastic.

I'm so happy to hear it. I was very scared for all of you guys, and we came up with a plan B in case I figured there was no way.

There was no way yesterday at 7:00 AM. But then I heard you had an idea that I almost felt like I wanted to stay sick, so you would have to do it.

Yeah. I thought we were on it. Rob and I were on a text, and we were trying to figure out, I guess we'll just come on and say Happy New Year and tell people you're sick, and you'll be back. But then I thought- Dead in Mexico? Yeah. So then I thought maybe I would do 50 facts about Dax.

That's a lot. For your birthday. Were you intimidated? That's a lot to commit to, 50 facts?

I can do it. I can do it. I know I can do it. But maybe I'll save that for another day.

That was a very thoughtful idea.

It's 50.

How do you feel? Yesterday, I was like, Oh, wow, I'm not going to make it. Oh, my gosh. I Yeah. Yesterday, I was like, Oh, my God, I'm going to not make it. I thought for sure I was going to outlive my dad for so long. I was like, Oh, no, we're going to come in 13 years before. Oh, no.

Apart from health, how are you feeling about your-Second half of a century that I'm entering? Yeah.

I think I'm mostly thinking about...

The thing that's tripping me out is like, Okay, wow, I'm a half of 100 years old.

I just watched Little Women. That was only set 150 years ago. That seems like a million years ago. Yes. In fact, we were watching the movie, and there's these beautiful mansions in the movie. And I said to Lincoln, You realize none of those mansions have toilets inside? Like, as fancy as this looks and as how much you'd want to live there, all these people in their fancy dresses are going across the yard to shit in a wooden box.

Yeah. And they aren't brushing teeth.

Nothing is good. It looks pretty. But so then when I think, Well, that's not terribly long ago.

Two more of my life's ago?

Yeah. It starts to put time in a weird... Or it's like all these things that feel so far away, they're not that far away. And then, of course, I think, well, life's really short. But mostly, I'm happy and I feel good. And I'm very excited to see you because I haven't seen you in a long time. So I think we to rewind all the way to your Christmas at home.

Okay. I went home for Christmas.

To Duluth, Georgia.

That's also a weird thing. This was the first trip. I didn't refer to it as going home.

Oh, what did you refer to it as?

I'm going to Georgia to visit my family.

Oh, I don't know about that.

I mean, home is where the heart is, but also, I think... We've talked about this before, but every time I land here in LA, I'm home here.

You're an LA boy.

Yeah, I'm a Cookie boy and an LA boy. And I visit my parents in Georgia.

That's interesting because I still, when I go home, when I go to Michigan, I think it's home.

God, yeah. Now I feel sacrilegious. It's still a huge part of me, but I guess I'm coming up. Not coming up, I guess, because let's see. This year, I will have been here 15 years.

Right. So not half your life yet.

Not half my life, but I was in Georgia for 22 years. In seven years, I'm going to have reached the same point.

Yes. I'm at 60 % as of today.

Your life.

Yeah, because I moved it when I was 20. And so for 30 years, I've been in California. Well, exactly. And 20 hours in Michigan.

So you have lived in California longer than I've lived in Michigan. Isn't that weird?

Yeah, by like 50 % longer.

Yes, it's very weird. You love percentages today. I love it. Because it's your birthday. I love that. Fast math.

I'm going to still do fast math when I'm 50. You went to your In your parents house, not home.

It was lovely. I'm always trying to figure out the right amount of days where I am enjoying myself. It's relaxing. I'm getting time in with the family, with friends, but I don't overstay into the point where I become...

Cranky?

Quanky. Quanky. I did pretty good. I think it was a day and a half of quankiness.

You ever get toothpaste, R-R?

Hour. So the last day and a half or the first day and a half?

No, the first days are great. That's the thing. And I feel so and everyone's so happy. It feels like, Oh, I could live here again, probably in this house. Then five days is I'm starting to turn. I'm starting to call it my parents' house. Things are changing. My mom got me this necklace from my gift guide. It's a shark.

Oh. You probably can't see it. Well, that worked out absolutely perfect. Perfectly because I bought you the same necklace and it got lost.

Yes. And so you got me a different one.

When I reordered, I changed my mind on the reorder. I mean, truly, that's a blessing from above because you would have two shark necklaces. You don't need that.

I would have to return one and And that would be a really crisis of conscience.

Whose you return? Well, you got to return mine. And have Nerming deserves to have this- I know, but I send her links So it's not like she came up with...

Although in some ways, you just got it off the gate. I did.

That's right. I mean, you also, in a subversive way, told me what to get you as well. Yeah, that's true.

But anyway, I got the shark. I love it. And I was wearing it, and my mom said... She was like, Oh, it looks so nice. Why did you pick a shark? And I said, Oh, because I'm a shark. I'm a shark when it comes down to it. And I said, In business. She said, With your parents, do sometimes.

Oh, wow.

Then I just looked at her like this.

Like a shark?

Yeah.

You should have bit her. You should have lunged at her and snapped your- You want to see a shark? Jaws at her. You want to see a shark? I'll show you a shark. You know what I think is really gross about sharks is that their upper teeth move to...

You know that? No. What?

Our top teeth are fixed. They don't go anywhere. Just the bottom mandible up and down. The top teeth aren't coming up and down. They're just stationary.

Right.

And those fucking sharks, the top comes down, too.

It comes down or up? Well, I guess both.

Yeah, it does the same thing as the bottom. That's so cool. To better to nash you I don't like how it looks when they lunge at a seal or something, you see the top teeth descend. It just makes it that much more terrifying.

That's a New Year's resolution for me.

It's one step away from the whole set of teeth just turning into a vortex and eviscerating the prey.

Oh, eviscerating the prey. That's me. That's me in 2025. Do you have any resolutions?

I do. This year, I tried to break it into different categories. Professional, physical, spiritual. There's another one. It's probably the most important one. Professionally, I really want to finish my memoir this year. Physically, and this has been a little bit influenced by watching Sprint Season 2 over the break. I need to do... It's out? It's been out for a while, Monty.

Oh, no.

It's so good. Yeah, I didn't know that either, but Molly had already seen it. Oh, wow. Yeah. So sprinting. Biking is my new thing, but I'm going to try to this year do biking and sprinting. So that's a physical goal. And then, spiritually, is finding my way back professionally. This is spiritual professional.

Yeah.

To focus on what I love about work and not the outcome, I guess. I get a really, really hunker back down into that.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah.

What are your resolutions?

I also have different buckets, but I also have very tangible ones. I think tangible ones are the ones that are best The highest level of succeeding. Max's resolution is to learn how to do a split.

I think it's too late for Max. I once read, If boys don't do that by the time they're 10, they can't physiologically do it.

Really?

He was pretty flex. He should do a little research.

We said that was a great resolution, and he was surprisingly flexible.

Max is my archnemesis. The notion that his thighs are that much bigger than mine, and he can do the splits, I feel like he has too much muscle to do this once because I certainly- And he's a little taller than you?

Well, I don't know.

Not on your birthday. Today is not. Today is not.

It depends how you quantify it, I guess. If you use inches, yeah, sure, he's taller. Sure, sure. He's taller. Sure. Oh, I forgot to. Medically, I'm seeing allergies this year. I got to stop blowing my nose all day.

Oh, that's a good one.

And then I have a vanity one, too.

Okay.

I want to start getting facials.

That's a great one. That also feels It just feels really nice and luxurious.

Yeah, well, I'm 50, and sometimes I look at my nose in the mirror, and I'm like, it looks like a catcher's mitt. I think I need to pull a couple of layers off of the skin or something. It's starting to look really leathery.

It's not, but you could do a peel, a light peel.

Yeah, a couple of times a week, maybe. Get down to that.

Oh, God.

That youthful skin underneath.

You just have bright red, your muscle shows.

I keep fluctuating. I keep going... Half the time, probably even more than the half the time. About 80% of the time, I go like, Yeah, let's get this face all leathery and fucked up. There's something charming about that in an older man. And then one day, I look at my face, I go, Baloney, I can get facials. I live in a city with a lot of good facials. I should make my skin look rosy and youthful.

It's such a good encapsulation of you in general. You're like, I'm this masculine Midwestern guy, and I'm leathery, but really, you're I'm not.

I'm fane, and I live in Hollywood, and I'm an actress. Who are we kidding?

Yeah, just own it. I have a skin one, too. It's to restore the skin barrier on my legs, and that means to lotion every day.

Oh, okay. Skin barrier is what it is technically.

Yeah, because the skin barrier on my legs are a bit rough.

Listen, this is working perfectly with my New Year's resolution because we haven't recorded in eight days, and I'm having as much fun right now as I have on a roller coaster.

Again, it's just the first five days, it feels so freeing. It's like, Oh, I don't have to think about that. And then start feeling itchy, and you need it.

Yeah. You need it. And I want to add about your skin, Delta and I. So on New Year's Eve here, before I got sick, which was great, the whole Hotel nearly set itself on fire. It was launching all these fireworks from the roof, and we're on the top floor. So about 14 inches from our window is where the fireworks were being set off from. And I'm going to send you a video. I'm talking a lot of fireworks, where our whole room filled up with smoke because we had the windows open watching them. And then they were playing music in the courtyard and everything. So there's no way we were going to go to bed before 2:00 AM. So Delta and I were in bed together, and it was about 1:00, and the music was really loud, and we couldn't sleep. So we watched the Christmas special, and numerous times during the Christmas special on the close-ups of you, I thought, well, I don't know what more she would want out of skin. It looks absolutely flawless and beautiful. And I'm just not sure what Monica is aiming for, if not what she has in the Christmas episode.

Well, that's very nice. I mean, it's been a journey. When I was looking, I looked through all my pictures from 2024 to do a post. And the beginning of the year was bad, really bad, really, really, really bad skin. Okay, I guess I'll shout this out. So people know about my witch, but I feel guilty, but I got to be honest. I have a new person, and she's not a witch. She's a real woman.

Right.

No powers. She doesn't have powers. She has skill. The place is called Corrective Skincare.

But is it all the way on the west side?

Santa Monica. Exactly.

See, this is where I go to the 80%, let's just stay leathery. Because I'm like, Yeah, I want whatever you got going because it's certainly working.

I know, but you don't have adult acne. I hate that phrase.

I do, too.

I know, because it's It's almost an onomatopia.

There is something, really. There's something about it. Yeah. Well, wait, I would now have geriatric acne, is what they'd have to call it.

Oh, no. I'm going to be dealing. I'm going to have that. But no. You have different issues. I think she is really amazing. Corrective Skincare is very, very amazing at clearing AA. And then also making... She does light peels and stuff. Anyway, she has changed my face for sure and helped it so much. And I have a routine, and I use a couple of her products, and I also ice my face morning and night. That's a pro tip.

Oh, wow.

And I think that's helped a lot.

Okay, let me ask you this. Does she like the East Side? Are there any favorite restaurant she has? Could we get her five clients on East Side and then buy her lunch and she'd come out?

No. No, because you know why? She lives in Orange County, and now she only is there one day a week, even in Santa Monica. So it's getting... It's like, I'm afraid to say.

What if we put her up at Kara once a month.

We'll pay for... I would love that. I would love that.

We get four or five East Side clients, put her up at car, and now we got something.

We really got something. Although a resolution I had once was to be more positive, and I think I've done that. And I look at going to Santa Monica as an adventure. It's like going on vacation, but a bad one, like the one you're on.

Well, People should know, too. They're probably thinking like, In LA, how far could this be? And if you look at a map, it'll be very, very deceptive. I mean, it's, sincerely, it can be 90 minutes, both directions.

It is. It is 90.

If you go- It's the same distance to go to Santa Barbara to get a facial.

Yeah. But I plan it well, where I plan a dinner with our only friend who lives on the West Side. Sometimes she can't do it, which is rude. Then on my own, I'll go to dinner, if that's the case, or I'll go work somewhere. I will say that when I had my Tonka, that was me I don't want to give too much details, but I was in Santa Monica.

You were trying to get home from Santa Monica.

Okay. Yeah, that's enough.

Okay. I also have a Tonka-adjacent story, but because I already had this poisoning yesterday, I don't want to- You want to wait? Overwhelm the audience. I'll wait. But on the departure of this trip, had a real emotional and Tonka-like experience. You did. But I I cannot fill the first episode of the year with double whammy on that. Okay. So Easter egg.

Oh, exciting. Okay, so I have to restore the skin barrier on my legs with lotion. I realize I do have a tick. I pick at my legs a lot. Oh, okay. And so they're really messed up. So I got to restore that. And then I want I've journaled two days now. Oh, you have? Yes. It wasn't even a resolution. I didn't write it down, but I found a notebook, and I've done it for two days.

Oh, good. The journal is a great place. You don't really have any resolutions of quitting anything, but I think the journal is the best place to put your numbers on the corner because you see them piling up. I just hit 365 days without dip because last year's resolution was no more chewy tobacco.

Yeah. Wow. And you did it. Congratulations.

Yeah. And so on my journal, I see, what, 365 days? And then you get a little encouragement to stick with it that day. So if you, I don't know, your icing or whatever thing you want to be consistent about, if you keep a little tally in your journal, you get to see that climb, and it's very encouraging.

I like that. I'm impressed that you, knowing you, that you aren't paranoid about your journals. It's like, I am so... I want to lock on it. It doesn't have one because it's a nice journal, but I'm afraid somebody's going to open it and start reading it. I live by myself.

Yeah.

So the risk is low, but I am like, I'm consumed by that. I thought, should I write it and then destroy it?

No. Well, okay. Let me hit you with... I write in it with an even much deeper knowledge that I'm going to die, and I don't presume my kids will ever have the interest of doing this, but if my kids choose, there is a daily account of my life for the last 20 years. Should they ever want to read it? And it's all in there. And that's at one time scary, and then at another time comforting the notion that they're going to struggle in life for sure. It's the ride, and they're going to be ashamed of themselves, and they're going to make mistakes. And I have this, if they're so inclined, I have 20 years of huge mistakes and still keep going and keep trying. And so I write in it knowing there's a possibility that my children will read.

Do you sense answer yourself because of that or no?

I don't.

I know. Wow.

I think the more I've learned of my parents struggles, it did nothing but comfort me and make me less self-loathing.

But you're You're the only comfortable with them doing it after you die, though, right?

I don't know. You've been around me. I tell them pretty much everything already.

That's true. You don't have any deepest, darkest secrets that you don't want anyone to ever know. I do.

Well, now I want to know them. I'm going to break into your apartment research.

No, see, no. Okay. My new plan is the next morning, I'm going to rip the old page out and light it on fire.

No, can't you get us safe, at least? Don't do that. Well. Because you You might want to write a memoir one day, and our memories are complete fabrications, as we know. So even right now, this memoir I'm currently writing really is only going to take me to adulthood, right? And Then I'll have the gap between moving to LA and being an addict and then getting sober and starting to work. That'll probably be a second one. But I mean, this sounds so indulgent. But regardless, in my mind, there's three. And what's exciting to me is the third one, I'll be able to read. Anytime I tell an event in my life or the story, I can go read that day and actually know what happened. The third one will probably be the only one that's approaching accurate of reality.

It'll be the most boring one.

Probably. Well, yeah, all the other ones all have been the victim. And the last one, you'll realize I'm the perpetrator of all my misery.

Oh, wow. That's a twist. It's a twist in the series is cool. But don't burn it, Moni.

I'm burning it.

Don't. Because I think, for me, the purpose of the journal is potentially different than yours. One is just to get back in the habit of writing.

Yeah.

And two, it's to release. It's not to document. It's more about feelings than what is happening. So I think I'm okay with burning it because it's just like I'm giving that up to the universe. I'm releasing that. I don't want to reread it. Okay.

And by the way, I don't really ever go back and read my journal.

Yeah.

But I have on a couple of occasions. And one thing that's very useful about it, as I've already said on here many times, is when you can see a pattern you've been stuck in for a very long time and you see it in writing, there is something very powerful about seeing that and going like, well, it's up to me. I'm going to continue. This isn't a new feeling I have. This isn't a new reaction. This is the same fucking thing I do all the time, and it's in black and white, and I have a choice to continue it or to stop it. And that's where I think it's useful. What if you put it in some second location and you don't have your name on it? So if someone found it, they'd have no fucking clue whose secrets they're reading.

I think it's going to be obvious.

Oh, you do.

The one thing I really agree with you on- At work, an armchair expert.

Yeah, I guess if every entry has to do with someone famous you interviewed that day. They'll go, Well, it's either Rob's, Monica's, or Dax's.

Yeah.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

The one thing I do think is incredibly powerful, and I think this is what I use it for more than anything now, is there is...

In the documenting part, it's not like I'm documenting it for posterity, or I think I've even ever been writing in it thinking I'd consult it for something. It's that I wake up and the day often feels insurmountable, and I am pessimistic, and I think I can barely get out of bed and nothing will happen. But the act of having to say everything that happened Yesterday, I see, Oh, no. Yesterday, you felt that way. And look all these things you did. The more important thing that's happening now is I wake up with a rumination, and I'm committed to putting down the rumination. And once I get it in writing, the absurdity of it generally cuts it in half or even more sometimes. That realization I had about Bradley's movie where it's like, I saw it, I hated it. I got to interview him that day. I don't know what I'm going to say. I'm not writing about that. In In the writing of it, I realized, Oh, I hate it because this movie is about me, or the part of me I hate the most. And then what clarity that gives me, and then I end up loving it.

Yeah.

I'm probably just going to burn I'm not going to put it in it, but I think it's good. I think it's more making the bed, which I don't do, but now I see the value. In the morning, you've accomplish something. You did something. You wrote some stuff down, and if that's a goal to write some stuff down every day, then you've already done something positive for yourself. And you can... Whatever happens the rest of the day, one You accomplished one thing.

Moni, erase everything I just said, yes. I think that's the number one thing of all of it, which is like, what you've shown is you have a commitment to yourself, and you did it. And so you feel It's like exercising. You're like, All right, I did things I didn't want to do to make myself better, and that implicitly feels great.

Yeah, definitely.

Do you want to know one of the sickest parts of myself? What? I always make my bed. I would anyways, but there's a part of me that I make my side of the bed because often, Kristin's still in it.

Oh, okay.

But even if she's not in it, I'll just make my side.

Okay.

And this This is really a disgusting part of me, but part of me goes, well, there's the evidence. I made my side of the bed. I'm committed to keeping this room clean. So once you live with someone, you might start making your side of the bed just to shame them.

Oh, no. I think that should be a... No, I think that should be a resolution for you that you make her side of the bed, too, as a generous act.

I'm overselling that a little for communic value, but it does happen.

Yeah, I understand. I understand where it comes from.

Well, here's really what. I'm not making it thinking I'll shame her, but occasionally I'll see my sides made and hers is messy. And I do think, I hope she notices that I've made my second.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. The only time I make my bed is if I am leaving for out of town I make it. And I only started doing that because Calleigh once told me... We were in high school. We were very young. And I think we were going somewhere, and she made her bed, and she was like, Yeah, I like to... If I'm going on vacation, I have to clean my room and make my bed and everything in case I die.

Oh, that's not where I thought we were going. I thought she wants to return to a clean slate.

I know. That would have been the normal answer. In case she dies? But yeah, in case she dies and then people are coming in there, it's a clean...

I have the complete opposite. If I thought I was going to die on vacation, I would set my room on fire before I left.

I know. I wouldn't give a fuck.

It's more for what will happen for the people. They'll come in her room, it needs to be in order for them.

She's the type that would have killed herself at the Colonial Motor Inn to not make a mess for anyone.

What's that?

So my grandma Midge would have found her.

Oh, no. Okay. That's really bad. Knock on wood. Okay. Hold on. I'm not knock on wood.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I have one more thing. Christmas was great. We had a great Christmas. Yeah. Really, really fun. Tt and Bear came over in the morning, and that's Carly and Yurdi. Then we left on the 26th to come here, and I committed us to a hot air balloon ride. Oh.

Yeah.

And you had to wake up really early, like 5:00 in the morning on vacation to go. It was a tough sell. Our drive there, And that was the day before Lincoln got sick. So Lincoln couldn't come, and mom couldn't come. So it really was on the fence. What are we going to do? We're going to still do this thing, and it's so early. We went anyways. Delta was so afraid the whole ride there, watching them inflate the hot air balloon. Getting into the basket was almost impossible. She just almost was like, Fuck this. I'm not doing it. I coaxed her into the basket. There's pictures of me holding her before it takes off. And I had said in the car, Delta, I would bet all of my money that at the end of this, you're really going to want to do it again. I feel that confident about it. I would probably bet everything. And she goes, Well, you are going to lose everything. That's what she said. The balloon took off, Monica. I promise you, we weren't even 15 feet in the air. And Delta goes, Daddy, you're going to win that back. This is my favorite thing I've ever done.

Oh, wow. It was among the greatest things I've ever done. This was so incredible. There were so many hot air balloons. Maybe I'll post a picture on this episode. There was probably 50 or 60 hot air balloons all up, and you hover above the pyramids. Oh, wow. And you just float around for an hour going up and down, and there's all these beautiful hot air balloons. It was Molly and Dalia and Lily and Eric and Delti and I. It was about as cool of an experience as we ever had. Then the dude set it down. We were touching the tops of the trees as we floated in. He put it on this little... Like the size of your yard of your current new house. Over power lines, like a foot over it, brings it down and landed it on the fucking trailer of the truck where it gets transported in. This guy was such a top gun.

Oh, my goodness. That's so cool.

It was spectacular.

Oh, I love that. Well, I'm proud of her, but also I'm proud and shocked and impressed and shocked that you are comfortable in that environment, letting Exactly. Letting someone steer you above Earth, really. Yeah. So that's good.

This guy was great. And you should know, all I did, about half of the time I watched him operate it in preparation if he passed out.

Okay. So you were aware.

I started clocking like, okay, wow. So when he gives a gas, he had three different throttles to put heat into the balloon. But when he would put that in, there was about a 45 second delay before or the actual elevation would change or not. So I was like, okay, wow, if I know if we're coming at a tree, I got to predict 45 seconds from now we need to go. So I was monitoring like a Hawk thinking, I might have to land. And Eric goes after we landed, he goes, Yeah, I don't think you could have done that. I think you could have flown us around, but I don't think you could have made that landing. And I'm like, I don't think so either. But I certainly would have given it a shot.

Yeah, you would have. Wow. Okay, great. Well, that sounds wonderful. I'm glad you guys got to do that.

That was a big time once in a lifetime experience. Cool. Yeah, it was really special. And my littlest buddy, we just had so much fun in that basket together. I've been having the best time with Delti on this trip. My God. That's so sweet. Just couldn't be more in love with her.

Yeah, she's pretty perfect. Okay, I have a couple of facts.

Okay, before you get into those facts, I just want to say about Tyler Perry. I thought about him so much after this interview. Really, I got to say, tied with anyone else we've ever interviewed. All week, I kept thinking about him, and he might be one of the most unique people I've ever met in my life. He had such a softness and kindness and also this firmness with his boundaries and beliefs. It was this really unique combo of just beautifulness and also self-assuredness and not going to be led anywhere he doesn't want to go. Yeah. Something about him, I felt, was just so magical.

I do, too. I mean, he's just the walking representation of glass half full. He really turned some very dramatic events into something he could be proud of.

It's incredible. His bravery talking about those topics fully exceeded mine. And I just thought I thought that was really a real privilege. I love, too, that he was like, Wait, you told me this was going to be fun to do as a publicist?

I know.

Then I said, Well, it could be fun. We can do a fun version. He's like, No, no, no. Actually, let's go. Yeah, let's do the real thing.

I thought that was so rad. Yeah, me too. Yeah, he's really special. When I was home, I drove past his studios. Well, the exit for his studios. You did? Yeah. I'm sorry. Oh, my God, I did it. I said, Home. Wow.

Oh, you're back.

I'm back. Okay, good. Okay, it turns out it's just where I'm not.

You can have a couple of homes.

Okay. That's nice. All right. Okay. Now, he mentioned the arousal template. He said that's set from around 3:00 to 7:00, ages 3:00 to 7:00. Yeah, so there's a belief that each of us has a sexual arousal template, a map in the brain of what we find sexually appealing. Although researchers do not fully understand how or why the various things to which we're attracted appear in our arousal template, it is clear that by the time we are 4:00 to 6:00, our arousal template is largely in place, even though we are not yet sexual. It is also clear that as we age, elements can be added to our sexual arousal template, but not eliminated.

You can just throw in more kinks, I guess. I guess so.

Yeah. But it makes sense. It's like why one person is interested in one thing and others are not.

Yeah, I I had a little realization on this, or not a realization. I launched a new theory on this trip. I was listening to Nate Silver's most recent book, and he was in a very respectful and smart way. He was poking holes in effective altruism, our good boy MacCaskill, who we had on, and utilitarianism. He had a couple of really good pushbacks for all of it, and they're very solid, as I also believe that Peter Singer and MacCaskill's points of view are very, very solid. My conclusion was, everything's already been flushed out. These theories and philosophies in life, they've been explored since Greece and probably before. They're all here for us. And I think we are just biologically unique. And I guess our childhoods and our zip code and our socioeconomic And there's just an offering for us that will feel most correct. I don't think any of them are necessarily superior. I just think there's a lot of really good fleshed out ones, and you'll just be pulled to one. And the notion that yours is the one or someone else's is the one isn't really it. There's just these offerings, and you have some predisposition and some bias, and certain ones will just appeal to you more than others.

And I think you're just born that way, that you'll be drawn to these certain ones. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. I don't know if you're biologically drawn so much as what you're exposed to becomes your default. We're all trying to be as safe and happy as we can be. So whatever is giving us individually that feeling, we're going to chase. And yeah, that's not the same thing for everyone.

Yeah, I think most of my life I've thought, well, one argument will have the most merit, somehow if you can quantify it. Even that was a part of utilitarianism. He said, you know the reason utilitarian is very tempting as a philosophy is it is our innate desire to quantify things. If we can say, oh, four people died versus 12 people, that's very simple. It's 12 versus 4. Well, were those 12 Nazi Party members and the other four were Mother Teresa and her pails? No, actually, that's not necessarily true. But the appeal of quantifying and being able to compare two numbers is very attractive to a lot of us. Yeah. And biologically, we have such different dopamine levels, naturally. There's such a variety of how much dopamine you have or depression you have. And I think we're all applying. It's also what Payne was saying, Keith Payne, about, Isn't it interesting that although you've thought through the arguments and you're sure the conclusion is correct, isn't it weird I could have predicted what conclusion you would have come to before you were born based on your ethnicity your zip code. That theory still, I think, is what I'm getting at.

It's like, yeah, there's just a lot of really good, well-thought-out theories and philosophies, and those ones will just appeal to us for whatever reason, and others won't.

Yeah, I agree. Okay. Cities where Black people are thriving, because we were talking about Atlanta, my home.

My number one home, my only home.

According to the Atlanta Atlanta Journal Constitution, the top 10 are Washington, DC, Austin, Texas.

Is this in order?

Or is this just- Yeah, this is in order. This is ranked. Number one is DC. More than Atlanta? Should I go 10 to one?

Wow, too late now.

Damn it.

I'm Rusty. Wait, those are above Atlanta?

Yeah. Atlanta is number five.

Okay, hit me. So DC.

Dc, Austin, number two. Number 3, Provo, Utah. Shocker. Number 3 is Poughkeepsie, New York.

Well, that's got to be 4, right?

You've already read 3. Hold on. No, sorry. 3, and they're tied. They're tied. Okay. Provo and Poughkeepsie are tied for three and four. Atlanta is five.

Okay.

6 is Oxnard, California.

That's where our boy Anderson packs from.

Oh, no way.

Yeah.

Oh, cool. 7 is San Antonio, Texas. 8 is Raleigh, North Carolina. 9 is Baltimore, Maryland. And 10 is Ogden, Utah. Utah has two.

Okay. I got to imagine if you Google least amount of Black people in any state, Utah has got to be number one, right?

No. Well, Rob will look.

So if they interviewed the 12 people that live in Provo and they're thriving like crazy?

I don't know. No. But this is- Is there a threshold, minimum amount of Black folks to count? Well, hold on. This is broken down into median household income among Black residents, percentage of Black households that make $100,000 or more a year, % of Black residents with a bachelor's degree or higher, homeownership rate among Black residents, unemployment rate among Black residents. So that's the factor. Yeah, it doesn't give population.

Those are good metrics.

Right. In 2020, there were 40,000 in Utah.

Oh, come on, guys. But that's not the lowest.

That's not the lowest, though. What's the lowest?

Oh, well, hold on. Hold on. I want to read this.

Why is it so shaky?

Oh, sorry. I was kicking the table at my computer. I'm going to go back. Maybe North Dakota and Montana.

Like, Minnesota, probably? You got two that are lower.

The lowest is Wyoming.

Okay.

Then Montana, Vermont, Idaho, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, North Dakota, Utah.

It's 11. Okay, so I'm wrong on that. But 40,000 in the whole state, that's not- Yeah, that's not a lot.

Wyoming is 5,200. Wow.

Well, this Atlanta Journal Constitution is really a newspaper because there's also this really cool map. I'm impressed, and I'm proud of my home. Okay, now, what's the Chitland Circuit rebrand name? You were like, it's rebranded to something, and you're right. It's in theater circuit. Sure. He didn't like that.

Good for him. I'm not allowed to have that opinion, but I agree with him.

Yeah, sure. We'll agree with whatever he will. Do whatever he wants.

Can I bring up a scary one? Because I actually had to discuss with Delta on this trip.

Yeah.

I accidentally... She was sitting on this swinging net chair in a park, and she and Dalia were both trying to get on it at the same time. And it was clear to me that the only way they are going to be able to do that is if they both sat crisscross applesauce. And I accidentally said Indian style.

Sure.

And then Delti said, What's Indian style? And I go, Oh, you know I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. That's what we used to call Criscross applesauce. And then she said, Oh, okay, why is it bad? And I said, You no doubt that this is one of the few that I'm not quite sure because obviously people saw Indians meditating sitting that way, and they called sitting that way Indian style. And it's not derogatory in any way. If you invent a way of sitting, I think why is that negative? So I just want your two cents on that.

I'm not sure why that's bad. We talked about this with Bobby Lee. So go back in the archives, and you, Dax, you go back in the archives and listen to that episode.

Even if it's just for a minute?

Yeah. Well, actually, I think I actually cut a lot of the crisscross applesauce talk out, which I'll probably have to do again right now. No, I won't. I understand the conundrum because I agree with you. There's nothing inherently negative about sitting that way.

Yeah, and you're not saying it to marginalize anyone or even... Yeah, I'm just There's a lot of things different cultures have invented, or at least that's the first time people writing about history saw it. Obviously, people probably sat that way from the beginning.

Yeah, they did.

But regardless. Let's say this. Let's say that the French were marginalized in the country, and you could no longer say French kissing. I was like, well, there's nothing really bad about French kissing. It just means you use your tongue. And apparently, English people, that was the first time they saw that. I don't know. But yeah, French kissing, that's a fine thing to say. They can own kissing for the rest of time.

Yeah. I guess it's just a way to make a group that already feels different, even feel more different.

You would be proud of me because I said my point, and she said, yeah, that doesn't make much sense. And I said, but you know what Monica would say is that would be fine if half the country were Indian, but because there were so few Indians and they're already marginalized, it's just another way to make them feel different. So I think that's what Monica would say, and that's a good point. Oh, look at that. That all happened. You can ask her to confirm that.

The internet says it's usually because of lack of cultural knowledge that the phrases are offensive.

But that one, specifically or just in general?

It's under this one, yeah.

Well, also because I actually do think if you were really meditating correctly, I'm not sure if that's how you sit. I think you're supposed to sit not crossed like that, necessarily. Your legs are doing something.

Cross, but not applesauce.

Yeah, they're cross, but they're not Chris.

I guess I'm gently asking if that might be an overcorrection, just that one.

Sure. I mean, I think there are overcorrections all over the place. For me, it's just, why would you do anything that might make someone feel a little bit awkward or like they are standing out in a way they don't really want to when there's another option?

That's really relevant. But yeah, if American Indians feel bad when they hear that, then yeah, of course, forget it.

And they might not. Well, look, I don't now, but I bet when I was seven and we were in class and the teacher said, Everyone sit down Indian style. I'm sure I wasn't like, Oh, that's really rude. They don't understand the culture.

What if they all just looked at you to see how you were sitting, and they thought everyone was supposed to copy how you were sitting.

That's the actual thing underneath. Feeling. Yeah, that's the feeling is, oh, they're talking about my thing that I somehow have to own, but I don't even know what this is either. Yeah. So now House of Pain episodes. So there was 254, but then they revamped it in 2020, and now there's 362 episodes.

Which is just wild. That's about twice as many as cheers.

Absolutely wild. And that's it.

That's everything. Well, I'm telling you, this has made me so excited to come home and resume working. Me, too. My favorite job I've ever had.

I know. We're so lucky. Eat, and we're so appreciative to all the armcherries who've stuck with us and are going to continue to stick with us this year, we hope. We're going to bring a lot of fun to the table this year. We didn't tell people, which I regret, but we did a Bingo. We have another day of Bingo. It's tomorrow, but by this time, it'll pass. But we did a fun game on Instagram that was a scavenger hunt Bingo, and we're going to do more fun things like that this year and more like community building.

How does it work, the Bingo Scavenger hunt?

You have to find the timestamp of a Bingo card, basically. Hold on. I'll pull one up.

Yeah, there's a three by three Bingo card, and you got to make a row.

But it's like for experts, which guests did Dax appoint himself as part of the guest personal security team? So you have the answer and the time stamp.

Oh, so you go back to Bill Gates and figure out when that was said?

Exactly.

Oh, I like it. That's a fun game.

So fun.

We have a new member of our team that put this together, right?

Yes. She designed it. Her name is Sophia. She is interning for us. And she was recommended- She's a prodigy. She is. She was recommended to us by Adam Grant, and she's at Wharton, and we don't really deserve her, but we're going to take her.

That's right. We both read the letter she sent us, and we were intimidated by her intelligence in of over qualification, and we thought, well, there's no way she should be an intern for us. We should be an intern for her. But here we are.

Here we are. And I put her on some fun tasks, and I think we're going to have a lot of fun this year.

Yeah. So welcome to her. All right. Well, I love you. I love you. And I'll see you in 36 hours.

Yay.

Yay.

Bye.

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