Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Edward Norton Returns Again About this episode Edward Norton (The Invite, Fight Club, and American History X) is an Academy Award-nominated actor, filmmaker, and environmental entrepreneur. Edward joins the Armchair Expert to discuss growing up with a visionary city-planner grandfather, methodically living on $11,000 a year as a young actor in New York, and building a port-emissions company that sucks poison from cargo ships. Edward and Dax talk about the actor’s narcissistic brain, why he doesn’t treat film like a volume game, and the exhilarating trust Olivia Wilde created while directing The Invite. Edward explains the difference between iconic actors and shape-shifting actors, why uncertainty can be the gateway to deeper work, and how the things we absorb from the world become what we eventually give back through art.
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Transcript 24,556 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Norton.
0:04 Speaker 01 Hello.
0:05 Dax Shepard? Hello.
0:06 Speaker 01 It's not true. We're not married.
0:08 Dax Shepard? No, because he's married to my friend Shawna.
0:11 Speaker 01 To Shawna.
0:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. For people who don't know the backstory, Shawna, Edward's wife.
0:17 Speaker 01 That's right.
0:18 Dax Shepard? Producer extraordinaire.
0:19 Speaker 01 Yes.
0:20 Dax Shepard? Introduced Kristen and I.
0:21 Speaker 01 Yes.
0:21 Dax Shepard? And then you'll hear a funny story about when we had babies, which maybe you've already heard, but we revisit it.
0:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's true.
0:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, very serendipitous semi-moment happened.
0:31 Speaker 01 Because she had a dinner party. This is not the, if you miss it originally, Shawna had a dinner party where you two met.
0:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah, birthday dinner party for Jonah, I think.
0:42 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
0:44 Dax Shepard? There's only like eight of us.
0:44 Speaker 01 Do you remember which restaurant?
0:46 Dax Shepard? It was on Melrose. It's kind of a famous fancy restaurant on Melrose, but I can't think of the name of it.
0:53 Speaker 01 Like Jones, like Dantana?
0:54 Dax Shepard? It wasn't Jones or Dantana. More towards La Brea, like more in that pocket of Melrose.
0:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Or Beverly. Could also have been on Beverly. And that whole zone.
1:05 Speaker 01 Mocha.
1:06 Dax Shepard? No, further east. It doesn't matter, west.
1:09 Speaker 01 It's the greatest.
1:10 Dax Shepard? The point is Edward Norton is our guest today. He's an Academy Award nominated actor and filmmaker. Fight Club, America History X, Primal Fear, Birdman. He has a new movie out. We're continuing on with our Invite Week because we love the movie so much.
1:26 Speaker 01 Yes, so good.
1:28 Dax Shepard? So we're pushing on strong and hard. Let's talk more about the invite and to hear all good things from Edward Norton. Please enjoy. We get support from Quince.
1:39 Speaker 01 I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.
1:48 Dax Shepard? I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a t-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince. Because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters.
2:10 Dax Shepard? Starting at $60.
2:11 Speaker 01 $60. $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really shouldn't be real, but it is because they go straight to the factories. They skip the middlemen and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy. It's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.
2:28 Dax Shepard? The 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve McQueen, this man owned a couple of sweaters he wore all the time and he looks iconic.
2:38 Speaker 01 It's a uniform.
2:39 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
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3:33 Speaker 01 That's where your AG1 routine earns its spot. It's not fixing your sleep or your alarm time. It's giving your body what it needs. So the dark mornings don't tank you before you even start. One scoop cold water every morning before anything else.
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4:00 Speaker 01 That's the part people miss. It's not a one day fix. It's what happens when you stay consistent.
4:04 Dax Shepard? It's an easy everyday thing. I've added it to my morning routine and I'm going to tell you, I actually love the taste of it. It's like Pavlovian. I drink it and I know I'm going to get that little vitamin buzz.
4:14 Speaker 01 Well, that's also the thing. When you do it first thing in the morning, you already feel kind of self-esteem because you're like, I already. Did something good for myself.
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5:03 Speaker 02 I'm gonna do this after, because it's such a
5:05 Speaker 01 It's a
5:06 Dax Shepard? You got your tea, it's steeping, you have a cream top. Did you drive from Malibu or from Hollywood?
5:13 Speaker 02 I was in Santa Monica working and then I came here.
5:16 Dax Shepard? What are you working on?
5:17 Speaker 02 I am raising a lot of money right now.
5:19 Dax Shepard? Okay.
5:20 Speaker 02 For that.
5:20 Dax Shepard? Cargo company?
5:21 Speaker 02 Shipping, emission.
5:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, have you seen this thing?
5:24 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
5:25 Dax Shepard? He has a barge company, right?
5:27 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
5:27 Dax Shepard? And it has a 13 story crane on it.
5:31 Speaker 02 Fifteen.
5:31 Dax Shepard? Fifteen, sorry.
5:33 Speaker 01 Get it right.
5:33 Dax Shepard? Get it right. Imagine in the crane game, it's all about those stories.
5:37 Speaker 02 You know, this crane was originally, it was a construction site, concrete delivery.
5:42 Dax Shepard? Oh, right.
5:43 Speaker 02 It was for the delivery of concrete.
5:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
5:45 Speaker 02 Up into high stories of
5:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
5:47 Speaker 02 Construction sites.
5:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so they're built for a ton of weight, right? That concrete wants, you've got 13 stories of it in a tube.
5:54 Speaker 02 And all we're doing is bringing gas down.
5:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
5:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:57 Dax Shepard? So they, he has these barges and then there's a 15 story crane on top. And when a ship is in port, it hovers above the smokestack of the ship and sucks up all the carbon dioxide, or I'm not sure what it's getting.
6:08 Speaker 02 It's actually the poisons, it's the nitrous oxide, sulfurous dioxide and particulate matter.
6:15 Dax Shepard? All these diesel waste.
6:16 Speaker 02 We don't even actually deal with the CO2. Obviously, people have their opinions and there's a lot of debate about CO2 and atmospheric CO2 and all of it, right?
6:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
6:25 Speaker 02 But there are no regulations on CO2 right now.
6:28 Dax Shepard? For the ships?
6:29 Speaker 02 No. Just society. We don't make you be compliant with zero CO2. But we do have, this is super interesting because even the Trump EPA regulates nitrous dioxide, sulfurous dioxide, because it kills people. That's what gives you lung cancer. So you could call it the smog. That's the stuff that creates the smog. It's really, really bad for people. I think the stat I heard is that the emissions off the ports in California drive like six and a half billion of respiratory health costs in the state every year, like cancer, asthma.
6:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the number I heard you talking about, which is crazy, is that you've only been doing this for what, a year or something? How long has this been operational?
7:06 Speaker 02 Operational since 2023.
7:08 Dax Shepard? Okay, so for three years. But you were saying, maybe it was in the full duration of its deployment, but maybe you were just saying a year, that it was the equivalent of 65 million cars?
7:16 Speaker 02 Just last year.
7:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, okay, so in one year.
7:18 Speaker 01 Oh, my god.
7:19 Dax Shepard? It's sucking the equivalent of 65 million cars.
7:23 Speaker 02 Operating for a year.
7:24 Speaker 01 Wow.
7:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a lot.
7:26 Dax Shepard? Those things fucking billow poison, huh?
7:28 Speaker 02 The ships are really, really, I mean, you know a lot about cars, so you actually know what a catalytic converter is.
7:33 Dax Shepard? Yes.
7:34 Speaker 02 The catalyzer, it basically is taking things that are poisonous, like nitrous dioxide and sulfurous dioxide. If you catalyze nitrous dioxide into nitrogen and oxygen, then it's just air.
7:45 Dax Shepard? You're good.
7:45 Speaker 02 Which is wild when you think about it, that bonded, it's horrible for us.
7:49 Dax Shepard? Oh, chemistry's endlessly fascinating, right? It's like, oh, this shape is good, this shape plus this shape is you're dead.
7:55 Speaker 02 You're dead. I know. It's amazing. I don't even think people totally grasp what a good job we've done on cleaning up cars. Obviously, there's some stuff coming out, the pipe not as clean as an EV or something like that. But the average cars' emissions are just not even in the realm of what they were when we were kids.
8:12 Dax Shepard? Totally.
8:12 Speaker 02 You and I probably came to LA somewhere approximate to each other.
8:16 Dax Shepard? Ninety-five for me.
8:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, ninety-five is the first time I came to LA to shoot Primal Fear.
8:19 Dax Shepard? Oh, that's not here.
8:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, here in Chicago a little bit.
8:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I still have it in my head as being Chicago.
8:25 Speaker 01 Ninety-five was when you came?
8:27 Dax Shepard? Yes, ma'am. He was shooting Primal Fear. You were eight years old.
8:30 Speaker 01 I was eight years old.
8:32 Speaker 02 Oh, god, shut up.
8:33 Dax Shepard? She's eight years old.
8:34 Speaker 01 Crazy.
8:35 Speaker 02 Well, I was only eighteen when I did that.
8:36 Speaker 01 Sure. We were all young.
8:39 Speaker 02 You never saw the San Gabriel Mountains in the mid nineties.
8:42 Dax Shepard? People will even say, and it sounds hilarious, like I'll be traveling, people will be like, oh, there's a smog there. I'm like, dude, that's such an eighty, like, that's so eighties that you're thinking that, like, I don't ever see dirty air.
8:53 Speaker 02 Be quiet, Tom Hanks.
8:55 Dax Shepard? That's enough. You know, we've never talked about your grandfather. I got super interested in your grandfather today.
9:03 Speaker 01 Oh.
9:03 Dax Shepard? What's his last name?
9:04 Speaker 02 Rouse, Jim Rouse, yeah.
9:05 Dax Shepard? James Rouse?
9:06 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
9:07 Dax Shepard? I found this guy fascinating. He's World War II, yeah?
9:10 Speaker 02 He served in the Navy in Naval Strategic Command at Pearl Harbor.
9:14 Dax Shepard? And when did he get into city planning and all the civil engineering?
9:18 Speaker 02 It's funny you bring him up because I was just talking about him with someone. He's a very, very interesting person. He was like orphaned when he was in his early teens. And he and his brother, they lived this extremely like Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer-like existence. Kind of rootless and parentless on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. They had older sisters who they would bounce between, but often would just cut school and go off and live on an island crabbing and fishing. And he became extremely well-known and they teach classes about him at Harvard now and everything. You had to like live with him to know what an extremely eccentric person he was. He really did like to go out and trap muskrat and make a stew out of it.
9:59 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
10:00 Speaker 02 Among the many things he did, he gave Frank Gehry his first commissions.
10:04 Dax Shepard? Oh, really?
10:04 Speaker 02 Frank Gehry's first building that wasn't Dennis Hopper's house was my grandfather's. 1967.
10:09 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow, wow, wow.
10:10 Speaker 02 I have a photo of my granddad and Frank where Frank is so young and he has this unbelievable. He looks like Ron Jeremy.
10:18 Dax Shepard? Oh, perfect. Great, yeah. The hedgehog.
10:20 Speaker 02 Frank credited my granddad with his, if you go in Gehry Architects today, my granddad's office building, built 1967, is the one in the lobby. Anyway, Frank told me something that resonated with me, which is he came to think that he was colorblind because he had a great feeling for space and community spaces and open spaces and all these things he was known for. But Frank said he had the worst instincts about color. And the funny thing was, I always thought he was eccentric. He would wear like green pants and a modest jacket. And you might have thought it was preppy, but he was like the furthest thing from preppy. He parked cars and hustled pool to pay for night school, played really serious poker and never took his Navy pay because he won so much money playing poker.
11:03 Speaker 02 And he was one of those people who had an edgier life, I think, than the life that he became, you know, where he became respected.
11:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
11:09 Speaker 02 You know, he'd go to like a serious meeting and he'd have lures in his hat. And I think people thought he was sort of being intentionally folksy or homespun. And it really, really wasn't.
11:18 Dax Shepard? It was genuine.
11:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, he was a really, really funny person. But he was this incredibly accomplished kind of visionary. Thinker about cities. He was on the cover of Time Magazine in the 70s or early 80s for his ideas about cities, which is wild.
11:34 Dax Shepard? Monica, he invented the very first, are you ready for this? Food court in a mall.
11:39 Speaker 01 Oh.
11:40 Dax Shepard? So he built a ton of malls, right?
11:41 Speaker 02 Lots of malls.
11:42 Dax Shepard? And he built these like festival spaces or installations in cities that were supposed to bring people together.
11:48 Speaker 02 This is interesting digression. Who knows if there are more than 10 people interested in it, but we'll go there. In the 50s, he was on Eisenhower's Housing Commission and I am told he was one of the first people to predict that the interstate highway system, which was being built in the 50s, would encourage low density development outside the cities and that the middle class would sort of leave the cities for what became the suburbs and that this would lead to kind of an economic hollowing out of the cities. I don't know if it's true that he coined the phrase. He was an early user of the idea of suburban sprawl. And we all talk about suburban sprawl now. We grew up in it, right?
12:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
12:25 Speaker 02 But he talked about suburban sprawl. He kind of predicted the hollowing out of the cities. And in the 60s and 70s, when all the cities were going bankrupt, basically, because the middle class had kind of left for the bedroom communities, a lot of people were like, this guy is a visionary. Even in the 60s and 70s, he was arguing for the need for more city planning, the revitalization of urban downtowns to bring the middle class back to the town center. He talked a lot about like the European tradition of the town center and the marketplace and how we needed to find a way to both in our suburban planning, actually build communities, not just developments and strip malls. But then in the urban centers, downtown Boston, he did the Faneuil Hall, Quincy Market redevelopment.
13:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
13:09 Speaker 02 Baltimore, he completely redeveloped the Baltimore Inner Harbor.
13:12 Dax Shepard? He did the pier in New York?
13:13 Speaker 02 South Street Seaport.
13:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
13:15 Speaker 02 Which wasn't super successful.
13:16 Dax Shepard? Well, what I liked about reading about him is he went on to admit it didn't work in some cities.
13:21 Speaker 02 No.
13:21 Dax Shepard? Some of them, they were smash hits and they still stand. And then the others, the city didn't take to it, which is fascinating.
13:27 Speaker 01 Is that because in those cities, there wasn't as much suburban sprawl? Like people stayed.
13:31 Dax Shepard? I think the opposite, it was so depressed.
13:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, and also. Commercial real estate is always weird. What makes people want to return to a city center? And it's not just the commerce or the mall. It's sports and a lot of things go into it.
13:43 Dax Shepard? Restaurants.
13:44 Speaker 02 Museums and blah, blah.
13:45 Dax Shepard? Live entertainment. I bring him up because you have what seems to me, I don't claim to know you well enough to make this observation, but from the outside, it seems that you have among the loosest grasps of anyone I've ever met. With their career, you hold it so loosely from my perspective.
14:05 Speaker 02 You mean like creative life, like in films?
14:07 Dax Shepard? Like when you choose to work how you've navigated, as we just said, 95, so 30 years of doing this. Your seeming confidence to be patient, your willingness to wait to something that you want to do, your refusal to get more money. When you decide to not be in the Avengers, you're not dumb. You're like, okay, I'm gonna wave goodbye to like $40 million, right? Like, oh, there's 40 million bucks.
14:33 Speaker 02 Probably more than that. Look at how down he lives.
14:35 Dax Shepard? Seven or eight of them, yeah. Five hundreds of millions of dollars. So there's just all these moments I've just kind of observed over the years. It's such an enigma to me because I'm so different.
14:45 Speaker 02 Do you know what I think is so funny about this? Number one, I was just talking to someone we both know on the phone. I said I was coming over here.
14:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
14:51 Speaker 02 We were both admiringly talking about how good at this you are. Because you're such an autodidact. You're one of the people I know who I think most authentically avidly pursues more knowledge in all forms. You read as much as anyone I know.
15:07 Dax Shepard? Thank you.
15:07 Speaker 02 I was saying that I thought Sean and I will be going along. We listen to it a lot. I said this in the car coming over here. I was like, have you noticed one thing Dax does? Which is he seeks affinity with a lot of his guests. Even to the point, we laughed one time because there was one person, you kept saying, that's like this. And they were like, I don't think so.
15:26 Dax Shepard? Affinity meaning like a similarity?
15:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, finding.
15:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, to a fault.
15:30 Speaker 02 You have an instinct, I feel like, to connect.
15:33 Dax Shepard? Yes.
15:33 Speaker 02 Through shared.
15:35 Dax Shepard? I know we can find bedrock, right? Like in two people.
15:37 Speaker 02 And I come in and we actually know each other. I come in and you're like, we are so different. I'm like, hey, where's the affinity?
15:43 Dax Shepard? No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, there's so many things we're so similar to.
15:48 Speaker 02 No, I like to.
15:48 Dax Shepard? But of course, when there are things, especially if I think I'm similar to somebody, right? And then they have these behaviors that like, I can't personally imagine being confident enough to do, or just having the peace of mind. So when people do things that I do weirdly maybe feel similar to, that are so outside of how I operate, that's the nugget of like, great curiosity to me.
16:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:09 Dax Shepard? Like now I really, because I know we're the same, right? We're human beings, we want to be loved and adored, and we love our children. You know, like, we're all the same. So when there's these like splinters, I get so fascinated with, how are you somehow having this loose grip on all this? And I'm a strangleholding it.
16:25 Speaker 02 How we look out through the skin at other people and our inability to necessarily see ourselves.
16:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
16:31 Speaker 02 Is wild to me because I really might have said the same thing about you if I was talking to someone else, in the sense that we've known each other a pretty long time.
16:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, 20 years.
16:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, and in different phases. I know we've talked about both of us perceiving that the other didn't like each other. I was like, God, this guy really doesn't like this guy.
16:48 Dax Shepard? I'm so dumb.
16:49 Speaker 02 But I feel like you're on a journey that to me looks from the outside, like enormously confident carving of your own path, defined entirely by the stuff that's so idiosyncratic and particular to you. Not only your passions and gifts and everything, but you've succeeded in multiple lanes. Maybe all of us in our mind are restless and self-critical, and tend to not almost like tally the wins. We tally the dissatisfactions.
17:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
17:20 Speaker 02 And we don't see what others see from the outside. That looks like confident, non-attachment, or whatever you're saying, you can say it lightly, right?
17:30 Dax Shepard? It's also complicated too, right? Like, are we talking about what snapshot of me and you?
17:34 Speaker 02 No, exactly.
17:34 Dax Shepard? Right? Like, yes, today I agree with what you're saying, and thank God it all landed nicely. But if I take a snapshot in 2000, I don't know, 14, I'm pretty panicked. What are we doing now?
17:46 Speaker 02 The answer to your question, not that you need a reassurance, but in a weird way, I don't think I have any lightness of hold on my aspirations, my ambitions, my endeavors. When you say from the outside, it looks to you like I'm sort of confidently waiting, only doing the things I want to do.
18:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah, or not motivated by money.
18:09 Speaker 02 This is not true.
18:09 Dax Shepard? Okay.
18:10 Speaker 02 First of all, I think we have talked about this. No actor turns off the actor's narcissistic brain. The joke that how many actors did it take to screw in a light bulb? A hundred. One to do it and 99 to say I could have done that so much better. Don't think for 10 seconds that I am capable of shutting off entirely the part of my brain that goes, why didn't I get sent that?
18:34 Dax Shepard? That's reassuring.
18:34 Speaker 01 It is reassuring.
18:35 Speaker 02 I would have liked to have read that.
18:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:38 Speaker 02 Or, I'm really excited that they're calling, but I can tell there's this urgency to it. And what that means is someone else dropped or couldn't show up. Okay, fuck it, I'll make it good. You know what I mean? I'll show them.
18:48 Speaker 01 Also, Edward had success quite young. And that makes a difference. When there's a lot of struggle, it's gonna cause a little bit more of like a tight, tight grasp.
18:59 Dax Shepard? Right, so I can't help but come up with hypothesis for this observation that may or may not be correct. But one is I thought grandpa had a lot of money, clearly. He was like a big deal in Maryland.
19:09 Speaker 02 Yes, he was very successful. He was really wild. He didn't trust money at all. He had an Oldsmobile his entire life. He lived in a very small house and he gave away all of his money. He was an extremely like man of the people kind of guy. I would say the most significant financial thing he bequeathed to his grandchildren was he paid for us all to go to college. He made it so that none of us came out of college with debt, which is huge. But that in his mind was that's the leg up I'm gonna give you. That was pretty much it. He gave away almost all of his money to the enterprise community partners, which was his low income housing.
19:41 Dax Shepard? And that's why you were in Japan? You were working for that company?
19:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, cuz I kinda went to Nick Kroll. I've admired Nick Kroll in a similar way where it's like he seemingly has only been motivated by what makes him laugh the hardest. There hasn't seemed to be. Be any dirty calculation of how he could get more money from the outside. But I interviewed him and was like, yeah, his dad's is a billionaire, right? Or close to it. But yeah, like he went to school in a limousine. And he'll be the first with me. He's like, yeah, money wasn't my issue. That wasn't something I had to go out and get. I think that liberated me in a lot of ways. I think that's fucking stupendous if someone can take that privileged childhood and turn it into just pursuing their creative interests.
20:19 Speaker 02 I don't think I'm as relaxed about how things are going as you think I am.
20:23 Dax Shepard? Okay, also I'm not accusing you of having grown up with Kroll money.
20:26 Speaker 02 People did, but not me. I remember in 1992, 1993 in New York, I had an actual like little financial ledger book. And I decided to go through the exercise of like, if I wanna be able to be an actor in New York and just wait tables or do temp jobs, I have to know exactly what it actually costs to be here. So I started this exercise of, I wrote down every subway token, every muffin that I bought. I tallied every single thing so that I could understand how little can I live on.
20:54 Dax Shepard? Do you remember what the tally was in 93?
20:56 Speaker 02 To live in New York in the way I was living, I needed to make about 11,000 bucks a year. I had found an apartment that was 400 bucks a month.
21:03 Dax Shepard? Impossible.
21:03 Speaker 02 A rent stabilized apartment was 400 bucks a month. I mean, it was smaller than this living room. I worked out a system for myself. I thought I can exist in New York City if I knew what my nut was and I knew what I had to make.
21:14 Dax Shepard? Here's where we're similar. That was my same strategy in LA. Like made eight grand a year for 10 years, because that's what it took.
21:20 Speaker 02 By the way, the thing when I throw back on myself at that time was if I had to have a car and gas in that mix, I wouldn't have pulled it off. How could you get by on eight grand if you were buying gas?
21:30 Dax Shepard? Uh, Honda Civic and Suzuki 600, like 50 miles.
21:34 Speaker 01 Also, gas wasn't as expensive.
21:37 Dax Shepard? It was not.
21:38 Speaker 01 And the apartment would be less.
21:39 Dax Shepard? And I drove like 80 miles a week.
21:41 Speaker 02 Do you know what's funny is on the highway the other day, on the 101, I turned to my right and I saw a Toyota Corolla FX16 GTS, which was my used car that I had. It's the weirdest, it's like a trapezoid. For no amount of money, what I have said, that any of those could still be operating on the road.
22:01 Dax Shepard? Toyota.
22:02 Speaker 02 The memory drawer that opens though, when you see the car you Spent your late teens in?
22:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:07 Speaker 02 Holy crap.
22:07 Dax Shepard? I have debated getting a 91 Honda Civic DX and doing it up.
22:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:12 Dax Shepard? Just because like I lived in that car for 10 years and I'm like, I need to honor that fucking trusty little gal.
22:17 Speaker 01 It was probably your car that you saw. It was probably still.
22:20 Speaker 02 Could have been.
22:21 Dax Shepard? Okay, so great. So there's not that. And then my other thought was simply, you're not going to be able to even comment on this observation, but Monica can. You're in the rarest situation where it's like, your talent's fucking kind of undeniable. And it was undeniable right out of the gates. I do think that's got to buy you some abatement of the anxiety. You know, you're just so validated and you were just so obviously brilliant at this that I don't think you were wrestling with what Monica and I were. It's like, well, I'm not getting hired. Am I not good? Like, how does one know if they're good or not?
22:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:53 Dax Shepard? You're just going and you hope it's not that you're not good, but you don't fucking know. And I think that is a big source of the anxiety too.
22:59 Speaker 01 I also don't know if you're an actor like you are, which is at an elite level. I don't even know, and you can correct me, if you're thinking, am I good? Or do people think I'm good? I think you think like, am I portraying this character correctly? Am I embodying this? Like, you're not really, it's not very external, it's more internal. And that's what makes him so good.
23:21 Speaker 02 I relate to that. I can't remember if we've talked about this or not, but I've always felt there's only two categories of actors. I think some are iconic, and I'm not saying good or bad, but I think some people have qualities that we enjoy so much.
23:34 Dax Shepard? Clint Eastwood.
23:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, Harrison Ford.
23:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
23:36 Speaker 02 Terrific actor. We go to them again and again for a set of qualities that we need from them. They're almost like Greek mythology, right? They personify something that we want. And it can be dark, it can be light, it can be stalwart, it can be hilarious. And then there are people who are, in the Joseph Campbell sense, they're the shapeshifter. We need iconic performers because they represent something, they distill something for us. And then people who are, I don't even want to say character actors, but it's not them. They're a vessel for a thing that channels something else. And I have never had any conviction that I could function. As anything other than someone who absorbs things, sort of that shamanistic idea of the sucking up of something
24:20 Speaker 02 and finding the way to put it through yourself and express something with it, right?
24:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. You're like a mother bird. You like go out and you eat and then you come and puke it all back into Arlo Baby's mouth.
24:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, looking at it. What I enjoy most about it is this kind of the secret key that it represents. It's an excuse to go dive into Pete Seeger's world and learn banjo or whatever. It's an excuse to marinate in a thing. Soak it up, find some way with the writing, whatever. Find some way to get something across and sort of inhabit a thing without the consequences of making that your whole life. And in that sense, it's a joyride of diverse, weird, strange experiences. The other thing that it does definitely to me is I honest to God, it's not am I good at it?
25:11 Speaker 02 It's at a certain point, you know, I've worked with in this magic trick, not just the magic trick of acting, but the magic trick of of how that interfaces with the larger magic trick of making a film that works or that has something to say or anything. But the way I like working on it tends to also translate into something that I actually enjoy, which is I don't feel that having done anything well earns me a sense of certainty that I'm going to do it well on the next one. Because I'm always like, this one might be the one that I fuck up.
25:52 Dax Shepard? Would I be right to imagine Pete Seeger, right? Like, you're just dumping stuff in there. And I don't know what those things are, whether you're reading a biography or you're watching video of him or you're learning to play the banjo. And while you're dumping it in there, are you just kind of waiting for the magic collect? Like, oh, there it is.
26:11 Speaker 02 I often feel something close to a mounting sense of maybe not panic, because I've learned to trust myself, but I will often feel a mounting feeling. That I have not cracked it.
26:25 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
26:26 Speaker 02 And that we are getting awfully close.
26:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:29 Speaker 02 To the beginning of the thing.
26:31 Dax Shepard? The blast off.
26:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I do love if and when the moment happens, that something slides over into this feeling of the suit fit. I've got it, right?
26:40 Dax Shepard? Right, right, right.
26:40 Speaker 02 Sometimes I find it's a different mechanism with each thing. Pete, for sure, one of the things was just his voice. His vocal intonations and the rhythm. And for me, the way he spoke and the way he sung, being thin and Pete's teeth, his hair, his things, the clothes he wore. In a weird way, that's like.
26:59 Dax Shepard? That's the easy stuff.
26:59 Speaker 02 We don't even have to invent it.
27:01 Dax Shepard? Right.
27:01 Speaker 02 Because we've got copious photographs and that's like mechanical almost.
27:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
27:05 Speaker 02 For me, there's something about the way the man used language and the rhythm of the way he spoke was a part of what made him seem like a druid to other people. Because he wasn't like their peer. He was this other thing. He was like their druid. Impersonation is always a challenge or a tricky thing.
27:23 Dax Shepard? So what one of your gifts is you're kind of a mimic.
27:25 Speaker 02 I am a good mimic.
27:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you're like a mimic. So there's that aspect. But I watch a lot of mimics do things. And there's also now three other layers beyond the mimicry. But yeah, clearly, that's just like one of the components. And Kristen can do this very well, too, from her musical training. She hears voices, music, all of it, in very compartmentalized pieces. She can see each component of it. She can hone in on one little tiny aspect that's actually defining the whole thing, but that I would miss. It's almost like the key to the mimicry, right?
27:54 Speaker 02 I'll go even a little more technical. I think someone who's got a good ear, like Kristen does, can pretty much sing anyone. I have noticed that people who are good at that, and I've noticed that when I hear someone and I'm going to try to slide into it, I kind of intuitively know what is happening in their mouth.
28:16 Dax Shepard? Mechanically, right.
28:16 Speaker 02 I know where Owen's voice is. Is it back here or is it up here? I know where Woody's is. I know where Bill Hertz is. And it is actually like a physical locating.
28:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
28:27 Speaker 02 Of what part of your face are you resonating.
28:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
28:31 Speaker 02 A lot of the way a person sounds has to do with how rooted they are in their breath or not, whether they're speaking from the forward part, the back.
28:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
28:38 Speaker 02 And I kind of think people who are good at it may just have. Who knows why? It's not just the ear, because you hear the same thing.
28:46 Dax Shepard? Right.
28:46 Speaker 02 It's like an instinct for how to shape the cavern of your mouth.
28:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's a great piece and it makes so much sense because, right, Kristen like learned how to sing through her chest, through her head, locating her voice in all these different areas to get a different outcome. And being very aware of that, everything you're talking about, like the machinery of making noise.
29:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, they tried to teach it too, like in theater school. Like I have voice class, I couldn't, I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean, put it up here? I was like, I can't do that. Maybe it's genetic or something.
29:18 Speaker 02 I will say too, though, when I was a kid, I didn't feel particularly interesting. But other people seemed really interesting to me. And if someone was interesting to me, or an actor or something, I used to just spend a lot of time imitating people that I thought were interesting.
29:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, because then you would be interesting, right?
29:36 Speaker 02 In front of a mirror sometimes. And I still, when I'm working on Pete, figure I have certain actor friends who I just trust, who I go all the way back with, who I know I can sit in a room and be really goofy and not feel self-conscious.
29:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
29:50 Speaker 02 And I will work and work and work on a thing. I read Pete, my friend, Peter Lewis, is a terrific actor. I'll work scenes with someone and someone who'll go, oh, I heard it, and get it wrong and whatever. But I will do a lot of work in front of a mirror.
30:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
30:03 Speaker 02 I was doing Death to Smoochy with Danny DeVito. And I had decided in my own mind who my source was for this character who wears a cowry shell and a flannel shirt and won't give sugar to kids and is all these things. And I was doing it, we're on the first couple of days of the movie. And I think I said, my voice is hoarse right now, but I think I looked at Catherine Keener and I said something like, hang on a second there, Nora, because, you know, you're halt, have you heard of halt, hungry, angry, lonely, tired? That's you and I'm not getting sucked into your negative energy. And Danny pops up behind the monitor and goes. What is that? And I was like, it's gonna come to you. And he was like, what is that? What are you doing?
30:47 Speaker 02 He goes, I love it, but you know, it was just Woody Harrelson. Yeah. And I just decided that Sheldon Mopes was Woody. It took Danny a couple of days too, where he was like, oh my God, oh my God. Sometimes you do things without thinking about them, but when you talk about what is mimicry and you realize it is the interface between ear and actual location of a thing in your body, right? It's like, how does Steph Curry hit the shots he hits? There's a lot of muscle training, muscle memory. And also, he just perceives the distance to a degree of perfection that we can't really even imagine in our brains. You know, to him, there's a clarity about how far he is from that. And it translates into.
31:28 Dax Shepard? Motion, yeah.
31:29 Speaker 02 It's just unreal.
31:30 Dax Shepard? Well, and if he told you how it had happened, neurologists would say that probably can't happen. I remember that great chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's book where it's talking about the great hitters. How do they hit? They know the timeframe between it leaving the hand before it's crossing the plate, right? They know that duration. And the guy's like, oh, I can always tell if they drop their shoulder and they do blank, it's gonna be a fastball. Because they have to start swinging the second it's leaving their hand, virtually.
31:53 Speaker 02 Beyond belief. Hitting the major league fastball is the most astonishing. I don't care what anybody says. That's the single most incredible interface between the brain and the body in sport. There's a million things that are hard, like Nordic skiing. Everything's hard. Even the F1 guys, I'm not sure anybody's processing information and making a physical decision to do something virtually impossible.
32:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, oh, it was in blink, that makes sense. So what they found was if all the things the batter said were true, they can add that up. They know the duration of the cognition, right? They've measured it in an FMRI. And what they can conclude is none of that stuff's happening. There is not time for him to see the shoulder, compute it to here, move it to the frontal lobe, move it to the motor control, make this decision. They know that that's impossible.
32:37 Speaker 02 So it's what?
32:37 Dax Shepard? The emotional center of their brain fires. That doesn't do any of that computation that the batter thinks is happening. They get an emotional intuition about that pitch. And the great hitters have a really good emotional intuition. And I bet Steph Curry would explain what's happening, but I bet there's something completely emotional that's happening that allows him to do that in some weird way.
32:59 Speaker 02 That's what we're talking about too, because at a certain point, anyone who uses. Their body and their voice as an instrument, whether it's mimicking someone or singing. I agree it's emotional. I mean, if I'm imitating someone, honestly, the feeling I have is it's not really analytical. It's joyful.
33:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
33:18 Speaker 02 Right? It's like an affinity or a, an empathy.
33:21 Dax Shepard? We both know we have to stop ourselves.
33:24 Speaker 02 Oh.
33:25 Dax Shepard? Like if I start talking like McConaughey, everyone will eventually leave the room if I don't stop.
33:29 Speaker 02 Except me.
33:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I could do it for six hours.
33:30 Speaker 02 Except me because I'm so jealous of yours. You're in the top three on that one. Like Damon is pretty great at McConaughey.
33:37 Dax Shepard? But the joy to sound like somebody you know. I don't know why that's so amusing to me.
33:44 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
33:49 Dax Shepard? We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking your gas gauge before hitting the road? You genuinely thought you could make it? You were wrong. It's a very long stretch of highway where you learned exactly how far fumes can take you. And it's not far enough. Yeah, checking first is an excellent plan. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need it, add an Allstate roadside plan today. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North American Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois. Roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club,
34:33 Dax Shepard? Incorporated and Allstate affiliate. We get support from our sponsor, Lilly. For adults with obesity or with excess weight and weight-related medical problems, it's time to find out about Foundo or for Gleepran. Foundo is a once daily prescription GLP-1 medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.
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35:58 Dax Shepard? We get support from Instagram teen accounts. So, we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?
36:15 Speaker 01 Which is a fair question.
36:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so Instagram has got something called teen accounts, and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So, anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age-appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10pm to 7am.
36:42 Speaker 01 Sleep mode is genius.
36:43 Dax Shepard? Right? And here's the thing, for anyone under 16, a parent has to give permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. The guardrails are on, and Instagram keeps building new safety features to create age-appropriate experiences for teens.
36:59 Speaker 01 I am really glad Instagram's helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts.
37:03 Dax Shepard? Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.
37:17 Speaker 02 On SNL, I did the Wes Anderson horror film. We made a horror film called The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders.
37:25 Speaker 02 I do Owen. Do you know, by the way, Seth Meyers came up with that title. I did text Wes and say, if you did a horror film, what would it be called? And in less than two seconds, he wrote, "The Cruelers in the Wispen."
37:40 Dax Shepard? Okay, now.
37:41 Speaker 02 Anyway.
37:42 Dax Shepard? Back to what is inarguable, despite what it feels like on the inside. You have taken these pretty big breaks between projects.
37:51 Speaker 02 You mean films in terms of.
37:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the chronological record. The archaeological record would demonstrate that you've had these breaks. And so when I see you in something, and I'll cut right to the invite, which we saw together.
38:04 Speaker 01 Loved it.
38:05 Dax Shepard? We loved it so much, I immediately sent you a text.
38:08 Speaker 02 You sent me a voice message.
38:09 Speaker 01 There is a moment in the movie, we won't say what, that we just looked at each other right after and we're like.
38:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what are you gonna do?
38:14 Speaker 01 He's so good.
38:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we're like.
38:16 Speaker 02 Was that the thing that made you?
38:17 Speaker 01 Good.
38:18 Speaker 02 When you said it was like watching.
38:19 Dax Shepard? Valentino ride a motorcycle.
38:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:21 Dax Shepard? I mean, there isn't a compliment higher than that.
38:23 Speaker 02 No, no.
38:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it should be universal.
38:26 Speaker 01 I guess I would say it's like Mary-Kate Nashley's.
38:29 Speaker 02 No, you'd have to do it in your Olympic gymnast.
38:32 Speaker 01 No, I want to make it fashion.
38:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay, okay, okay.
38:34 Speaker 01 I'm gonna work on it.
38:35 Dax Shepard? But every time I see it, the last time you were here, you were promoting The Glass Onion. And every time you work, I have the exact same thoughts. I go like, God, why doesn't he do this more? Secondly, why this? How does one guess what you're going to do?
38:51 Speaker 02 I've never looked at making films or acting as a volume game. For me, it's not selling widgets and some of my great friends are huge honkin' movie stars and they work all the time. It's just the people who maybe inspired me to be an actor or I model myself on. I never looked at them as the ones who were in the volume game. I want to do it when something that gets under my skin, interests me a lot and that I think gives me a little bit of a tickle of a feeling of I'm not exactly sure how one crushes that or just how I'm gonna unlock that or if I'm even the right one for it. But I want to say, there's plenty of times I wish more such things.
39:36 Speaker 02 Showed up.
39:37 Dax Shepard? You're not trying not to work.
39:39 Speaker 02 No, I'm not a resister of a great thing.
39:43 Dax Shepard? Right.
39:43 Speaker 02 When it comes.
39:44 Dax Shepard? But if you're like the layperson, you're looking on the outside. Birdman, I'm like, yeah, of course, that director calls with that crazy concept.
39:51 Speaker 02 Said unseen.
39:51 Dax Shepard? Clearly, you're doing that. That makes sense. But then there's some other ones where I'm like, I'm not sure. Was it script motivated? Was it director motivated? Was it cast motivated? Was it conceptually, like you're saying, like, I just got fucking obsessed with this notion? And I just had to explore it. If you had to rank those motivations, are they all equal?
40:08 Speaker 02 It can be very different, I guess.
40:10 Dax Shepard? Like, A Complete Unknown is probably director motivated.
40:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, I loved Jim Mangold. I got on with him. But actually, on that one, that was super interesting because I know Timothy.
40:17 Dax Shepard? You knew him before the movie?
40:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, I knew him before the movie and I knew he was considering doing that. And I had this feeling in my head that, like, this might be a bad idea.
40:25 Dax Shepard? It's high risk.
40:26 Speaker 02 But it's also a huge personal overinvestment in Dylan.
40:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you moved to New York and he was the soundtrack.
40:32 Speaker 02 I thought, you know, it was this kind of snotty, not snotty, it's sacred, it's untouchable. You shouldn't try to, like, do that. And when Jim brought it up to me, I went through a thing of thinking this whole thing could be inadvisable. It's great people.
40:45 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
40:45 Speaker 02 But why would we attempt to be these particular people who are so iconic and everything and what to get out of it? Happily, Jim, who is an incredibly unpretentious guy and was the right person to not treat it like a sacred cow. But he also said to me, he was like, you know, I think you gotta, sometimes you gotta really step back and get away from the mythology and look and realize there's a shit ton of people who don't know a thing about Bob Dylan and don't listen to his music. And he said, and we're in a time when there's not a lot of artists leaning in the way those young people leaned in to what they saw going on around them that they were not happy about, that they didn't think was right. They took what they had and they leaned in with everything they had.
41:29 Speaker 02 And he said, just an examination of that makes it worth. And I thought, I'm in.
41:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's super true for your character. Do we think that's true about Dylan? My layperson's take on Bob Dylan is he's fucking cool.
41:45 Dax Shepard? And when you try to make him more than just that, I think you're on a fool's errand. I don't think he's as smart as everyone thinks, or had his overarching political agenda.
41:54 Speaker 02 I think he's a very canny creator of mythology.
41:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
41:58 Speaker 02 But by the way, unapologetically.
41:59 Dax Shepard? Inadmittedly.
42:00 Speaker 02 And Joe Mbe is famous for saying he was the most apolitical person that I've ever known. The fact that he channeled what he saw, to me, Jim was right. That the collision of a certain group of artists with the times they were living in was a really interesting thing to look at.
42:17 Dax Shepard? Absolutely.
42:18 Speaker 02 And then I went, okay, great.
42:21 Dax Shepard? You have the right North Star.
42:22 Speaker 02 For me, then it flipped all the way over into joy because I got to marinate in things that I love, and that meant a lot to me, and I kind of almost like got to give myself permission.
42:32 Dax Shepard? You had to geek out.
42:33 Speaker 02 The invite, which I don't want to be hyperbolic, but I will say it was one of the most pleasurable and creatively invigorating experiences.
42:45 Dax Shepard? That you've ever had.
42:46 Speaker 02 I put it right with working with Milos Forman, working with Spike Lee, who I revered and works in a very unique way, working with Inuriduan Birdman. The way that Olivia Wilde ran the process on this film, I'm always hesitant to like unpack a thing before people see it. We should give full credit. There's a Spanish film called Sentimental.
43:07 Dax Shepard? The People Upstairs?
43:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sentimental in Spanish, and then The People Upstairs. It was written by this guy named Seske, who was a playwright and directed this film. And I saw it a number of years ago, Sean and I watched it. It put me on the floor. Like, I thought it was absolutely brilliant.
43:22 Dax Shepard? Same premise.
43:23 Speaker 02 A couple from upstairs comes down to have cocktails with the couple downstairs, and all kinds of things ensue, right? The actors were hysterical and brilliant, and I immediately thought to myself, I would love to remake this. And I thought to myself, I'm gonna call Seth or Correll, and I'm gonna be the guy upstairs, and I'm gonna direct it, and I'm not even gonna change much. And I thought to myself, we could shoot this in 15 days. And I went and tried to get the rights, and they'd been picked up by someone already.
43:49 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
43:49 Speaker 02 And I called that producer and I said, here's to your point, like, hey, I would throw my hat in the ring to direct it and be in it. And he said, I think I'm gonna go another way.
43:56 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
43:58 Speaker 02 Like, literally, like, went off to some other directors who worked on it for a bit, tried to put it together with other cast, and this one did not go by me. For a couple of years, I went, ah, I was like the girl that got away.
44:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:13 Speaker 02 I want, I really wanted to do that one.
44:15 Dax Shepard? Wow. So then how did Olivia become attached to direct it?
44:19 Speaker 02 Through whatever weird flow of things, I end up getting a text from Seth. My wife produced a lot of Seth's movies and I've known Seth forever.
44:27 Dax Shepard? You're in Sausage Party?
44:28 Speaker 02 I've done Sausage Party with him and he said, do you know about the invite? I didn't know the title. I was like, no. And he said, Olivia Wilde is gonna do it. Should we do this? And I was like, wait, we're not talking about
44:38 Dax Shepard? The same.
44:39 Speaker 02 The people upstairs.
44:39 Speaker 01 Wow.
44:40 Speaker 02 And I talked to Olivia and she goes, would you really do this? And I was like, I've been wanting to do this for a couple of years.
44:47 Dax Shepard? Serendipity.
44:48 Speaker 02 I did get this feeling of like, I'll be damned. The currents of the stream.
44:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:53 Dax Shepard? You were patient.
44:54 Speaker 02 Brought it back around and I got to it. I loved Olivia's two films.
44:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
44:59 Speaker 02 I love Booksmart. I love Don't Worry Darling. Just great science fiction.
45:03 Dax Shepard? Thank you darling.
45:03 Speaker 01 That's what Dex kept calling it. Thank you darling to Olivia.
45:06 Dax Shepard? Or sorry. He kept fucking up the title. I'm bona fide cheerleader for her. I saw Booksmart. I was like, this is a fucking great movie.
45:15 Speaker 02 Sharp.
45:15 Dax Shepard? But also this is a genre of movies that I don't want to say is easy to make good, but there's something inherently enjoyable about a coming of age movie. But then I saw, um.
45:28 Speaker 01 Don't Worry Darling.
45:29 Dax Shepard? Don't Worry Darling. And I was like, this is a big undertaking.
45:34 Speaker 02 The production design on that movie?
45:35 Dax Shepard? Yes.
45:35 Speaker 02 It was insane.
45:36 Dax Shepard? And the story they're telling, how abstract is and will that work? They just disappear. Like, there's just a lot of shit.
45:41 Speaker 02 But then it turns out it's real science fiction.
45:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
45:43 Speaker 02 Like, which well I love.
45:44 Dax Shepard? I just was like, wow, she's fucking awesome.
45:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, sharp.
45:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
45:49 Speaker 02 Really, really, really good.
45:50 Dax Shepard? Now, what's interesting is none of the three are the same. They're also uniquely their own thing.
45:56 Speaker 02 I will say, I watched it with Seth at Sundance and he turned to me and goes, I don't know if I'm gonna be in a better movie than that. Really, I had this feeling. I watched it. I knew Mike Nichols, one of our greatest film directors. He was one of those people who was a mentor to many young people in New York. If you were a New Yorker and so funny, so dry, so brilliant, such a great storyteller, but also great with advice.
46:18 Dax Shepard? And for people who don't know, he directed Well, first he was in this comedy duo that was impossible and groundbreaking.
46:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:23 Dax Shepard? And then he became a director of theater and everything he touched turned to gold. And then he went into cinema and he did Virginia Woolf first out of the gates.
46:29 Speaker 02 First movie.
46:30 Dax Shepard? And that was fucking brilliant.
46:31 Speaker 02 Virginia Woolf, second movie, The Graduate.
46:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
46:34 Speaker 02 Third movie, Colonel Knowledge.
46:35 Dax Shepard? He is impossibly talented. Also, smoking crack during lots of it. Addicted to halcyon and fucking up his finances.
46:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, that was later.
46:43 Dax Shepard? Married to Diane Sore. I mean, this dude was juggling a lot of shit. Fucking alopecia came over on a ship at eight years old with his little brother. He's in charge.
46:51 Speaker 01 There's a biography on it.
46:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, incredible biography. Have you read it?
46:54 Speaker 02 Yes, Mark Harris's, right?
46:55 Dax Shepard? I wouldn't know, but. Anyways, this dude's a legend. So the fact that you knew him is kind of wild.
46:59 Speaker 02 I watched the film and thought either Mike Nichols came back from the grave and channeled himself through Olivia or he's just smiling somewhere because I really thought she's done something with this film that was what I loved about. Which is like hit the high and the low. It's as funny as you could want a movie to be. But then it really gets down into the real shit.
47:20 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna add an element.
47:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:22 Dax Shepard? There's like a good deal of sexuality in the film with a lot of confidence and not shying away from some things. So like the moment, Monica will tell you, I embarrassed her so much.
47:32 Speaker 01 Oh, it was so embarrassing.
47:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we're in a screening at the Soho House with like a bunch of journalists. Some people probably know who we are. When Penelope invites him into the room, I, without my permission, let out this crazy noise.
47:46 Speaker 01 Like guttural.
47:47 Dax Shepard? I go like, oh, yeah. Like, I was like, yes, let's fucking go to that room forever. That moment's not necessarily easy to go get on film.
47:59 Speaker 02 No.
47:59 Dax Shepard? That's a moment, dude, where like, I can't help but go, yes, out loud, please.
48:05 Speaker 01 Well, Penelope, I mean, it might be easy anytime she invites anyone to her room.
48:08 Dax Shepard? I mean, she makes it easy.
48:10 Speaker 01 Yes, yes.
48:10 Dax Shepard? But it's constructed in a way and it's the right shot.
48:14 Speaker 01 And Seth's reaction. I mean, all of it.
48:16 Dax Shepard? You're just like, oh, fuck. Like, it works, you know? It's just like a powerful moment. So that's in the mix too.
48:23 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. When we made Birdman, I had moments where I was watching Alejandro and. Chivo Lubetsky, the great cinematographer, who had known each other since college. They went to college together. And there was times that they were working out those long shots. And sometimes Alejandro would have his hands on Chivo's shoulders and his face by his ear. They would move together with him whispering, and they would say funny things to each other and be laughing. And I thought, these guys are in the zone. They're soulmates, they're having fun, but they're in a flow state. And sometimes you're watching someone else in a flow state.
48:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I remember you telling me they would link arms and walk with each other around the set sometimes for hours.
49:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was beautiful. I felt Olivia Wilde was in a kind of a flow state making this because it brought together for her not only everything she loves and is most interested in, but that played to a lot of what I even think she as an actress and as a human being hasn't even necessarily gotten to fully express. It's hard to overstate, you know well, I do too. The mind you're in directing and the state you have to be in acting are in direct opposition to each other. And she gives this performance in the film that's worthy of Jenna Rollins or Diane Keaton at their very, very best.
49:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
49:41 Speaker 02 Full of anxiety and longing and physical comedy and anger. There's so much going on in it. And yet, she directed us and she directed this compositionally beautiful film. It's all in one apartment and never gets dull. She's guiding us collectively on how to find this thing on the fly and even saying things to us like, "We're gonna stitch the parachute on the way down, but it's gonna open." And by that, I mean, she not only encouraged, but actually kind of asked of us that we create our own characters.
50:20 Speaker 02 In many dimensions, Penelope's character wasn't Spanish. Penelope brought in her interest in menopause and hormones and the Esther Perel of it all.
50:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
50:29 Speaker 02 Brings that all in and creates this character, Pina, that is so striking and so dynamic and forceful and aspirational. And Olivia said to me, like, my character's name is literally specific to a friend of mine, his story. There's a lot of things that my friend Julian Sands, the actor who died a few years ago, the stuff about the rugs and the carpets, those are things he said to me when he walked into my apartment one time. And it wasn't just that Olivia didn't tighten up, it was that she did something I've never done, which is she shot the film in page order.
51:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, I love that.
51:03 Speaker 02 And basically said, I don't think we're gonna end up in the same place that's on the page. I think we're gonna end up in a deeper place, but we're not gonna know what it is or even how we're gonna get there until we march through these beats. But if we do them in order, each one will feed into the next and we will keep discovering how much this can bear as we go. Now, that all sounds super creatively sexy, but when you're making a film and hundreds of people are standing around and you're saying as a director, we're gonna kinda make this up as we go, and I mean really make it up as we go, to stay in a state of not
51:45 Speaker 02 just equanimity, but one in which you're relishing it so much that you're giving that performance while allowing for that much uncertainty, it is like right up there with the most impressive things that I've seen a director do. I will throw down and say, in 30 years making films, I haven't experienced a director investing trust in the cast at this level ever.
52:12 Dax Shepard? Yes, to me, the ultimate signal of her competence is that takes so much confidence to let everyone be so collaborative. As beautiful as that sounds on the outside, like, yeah, it'd be great if every, no, it's not great if every actor has an opinion. They don't have an understanding of the global story. That's being told. It's not just good to let actor. That's why we have writers and why we have directors. So to trust and to encourage that and not have any fear that I'm going to lose complete control, because ultimately it does have to be the director's vision. The fact that she was able to stay confident and not rattled in that encouraging to me is like, it's always impossible.
52:50 Speaker 02 No, almost impossible. I agree.
52:52 Dax Shepard? And she won for it. It all works.
52:54 Speaker 02 You can only imagine the freak out that was going on in the margin.
52:58 Dax Shepard? Oh, I can't imagine if I was paying for the movie.
53:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. Especially when Seth and Olivia, in particular, they became convinced that the end of the film should drop into a frequency that was not entirely light. The decision to actually let it go there on Olivia's part, but then on the fly to figure out the mechanisms of how do you get out of a lot of high jinks and a lot of laughter and a lot of everything and over into a place where this film goes is mechanistically actually tricky. And one of the more amazing things a director has ever asked of me, but trusted me in, she basically said, I sort of think that maybe something between you and Seth has to uncork. I kind of think we need a hinge.
53:45 Dax Shepard? Let me brag for you. So the movie is great beginning 10. It's so entertaining. It's so funny and it is touching on someone. Anyone who's been in a long-term relationship, you're going to recognize everything, right? It's just like your partner becomes the explanation for everything you don't like about living. Virtually. If there's a single scene that makes the whole movie work, it is your turn. You've presented as this guy. We don't really know you. You just seem really confident and open-minded. And then to find out where that really came from was a real moment that had the ability to anchor the entire movie. You're waiting for a big turn, or as you say, uncorking or something, and it's definitely that monologue.
54:28 Dax Shepard? That thing ends and you're like, whoa, I'm kind of fucked up over that.
54:32 Speaker 01 And she told us that you did not share it with her beforehand to get a real reaction.
54:38 Dax Shepard? And very generously had them film their side first.
54:41 Speaker 01 Or multiple cameras or something?
54:43 Dax Shepard? Well, Seth and her.
54:44 Speaker 01 Oh, Seth and Olivia. Yeah.
54:45 Speaker 02 She was puzzling over, how do we get through this gateway? I can't remember exactly what the conversations were that led to it, but I'll always.
54:56 Speaker 02 Do what we all learn to do in acting classes. And I'll always write out for myself something that I think is the secret, whether it's in the movie or not. I'll always write out my own deeper idea of someone's backstory. Most of the times, that doesn't make it into anything. Interestingly, like when you talk about Complete Unknown, I had found this thing that Pete Seeger wrote about believing that the world is like a teaspoon brigade. And when we got to this final scene with him and Dylan in the end, and Jim wasn't happy with it, I said, Jim, I found this thing. I've been carrying this thing like my mantra. And he goes, that's the scene.
55:33 Dax Shepard? Ah.
55:33 Speaker 02 So that's in the film. And sometimes that happens.
55:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
55:36 Speaker 02 In this case, I said to Olivia, you know, I have this idea about what happened with him. She goes, is it good? Will it get us there?
55:43 Dax Shepard? Ah.
55:44 Speaker 02 And I said, I think it is.
55:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
55:46 Speaker 02 And I remember, I think I said to her at one point, I was like, I can say this, that if I say it to myself, I'm gonna lose it.
55:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
55:53 Speaker 02 I can't get through it myself without be moved by it, right?
55:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
55:57 Speaker 02 And she was like, don't tell me what it is. And she set up on her and Seth so that she could film them hearing it for the first time. In the movie, her reaction is her hearing it for the first time, which is the ballsiest thing that I've ever had a director do emotionally on a film. She literally said, I want to film myself hearing it for the first time.
56:21 Dax Shepard? I'll be the test strip.
56:22 Speaker 02 I can't really come up with a way in which a director could give me more trust, respect, ever.
56:28 Speaker 01 But she was so smart to do it. She cast you, Seth, people who aren't only great actors, but great storytellers, directors, people who do know that you need a payoff at the end, that it's not just like,
56:40 Dax Shepard? You know you're at the end of the second act. I don't know that a lot of actors know they're at the end of this.
56:45 Speaker 01 Exactly.
56:45 Dax Shepard? Get at you like something happened.
56:47 Speaker 02 I want to say, do like, I don't want to ruin it or get in people's heads that are watching it. But so much then uncorked. Seth's reaction, Seth, who had not heard it either. Seth, I think, very much respects me. And we've done many things together, and he loves me and everything. I know for sure. That when I first did it, Seth thought it's too long and too serious.
57:12 Dax Shepard? By the way, that's exactly what his character was.
57:14 Speaker 02 His reaction, that unbelievably rude thing that he says to me, he made up on the spot. I think it was one of the funniest improvisations.
57:26 Dax Shepard? Well, it's so real. When you're a dude and another dude just got attention from the ladies for being vulnerable, you're like, fuck this dude.
57:33 Speaker 02 But it's so magnificently rude that I had to turn around because it put me on the floor. It was a moment. But I think there is a shot of me bursting out laughing because you just can't believe anybody would be that big a tool.
57:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
57:49 Speaker 02 But it was so good that it pinballed into Penelope. Her reaction to his reaction became a thing that leads to a fight between us.
57:59 Speaker 01 Right.
57:59 Speaker 02 And none of this was anything we had planned.
58:02 Speaker 01 Wow.
58:03 Speaker 02 And I think that the fact that Olivia just sat there letting these things cascade off of each other was so unprecedented to me.
58:12 Speaker 01 It's theater rehearsal.
58:14 Speaker 02 And we had all sat, the four of us, plus with Will McCormick and Rashida Jones, who are great writers and great interpolators of, we have the Spanish film, they have the four of us, and we're Cuisinarting this all together. And I honestly think everybody else was more anxious about the uncertainties than Olivia, which is a bizarre inversion.
58:34 Dax Shepard? Not really. You want to look at your leader and go, oh, they know exactly what they want. That feels safer. But if they're like, I'm open to be surprised.
58:44 Speaker 02 Yes, but when you've been doing it as long as you've been doing it, and you know that there's consequence to something you're supposed to get done in a certain number of days, and there's people standing around with a certain measure of, do these guys know what they're doing? To operate as a director, to say to everybody involved, this parachute is gonna open.
59:01 Dax Shepard? It's powerful.
59:02 Speaker 02 It's amazing. All my respect to her. And then in the end, she just edited and put together this.
59:09 Dax Shepard? It's so good. It's so fucking, it's so good. Yeah, yeah. Tell me about, you're friends with Esther Perel, yeah? You and Sean, I know Sean has been like on vacation with her.
59:18 Speaker 02 I was talking at a conference that Esther was talking at as well, and there was like social time. And you know what's the funniest thing is, I'm sure like all of us.
59:29 Speaker 02 Even as I was sort of starstruck and thrilled and turned on.
59:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, she's so sexy.
59:36 Speaker 02 She is such a force.
59:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
59:38 Speaker 02 And so vibrant and alive and everything she says about.
59:42 Dax Shepard? Erotic.
59:42 Speaker 02 What is erotic, that's Astaire, you know? But it's the funniest thing to both be thrilled to be meeting and talking to someone and to have this voice in your head that goes, if we proceed down this path, she can't be my therapist.
59:58 Speaker 02 Like, I was like, I'm sacrificing the chance to have her as a therapist.
1:00:05 Dax Shepard? Well, no, you could do one of your characters and you could call into Made in captivity, yeah, as one of your characters.
1:00:10 Speaker 02 You've had her on here.
1:00:11 Dax Shepard? Oh, I adore her.
1:00:12 Speaker 02 She's just so provocative.
1:00:14 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:00:14 Speaker 01 Because she's honest.
1:00:15 Speaker 02 I was at a thing where she was speaking and it was some tech thing and too many people were talking about AI and all these things and Astaire gets up and goes, all this talk about AI and no one's talking about the AI that matters in tech, which is artificial intimacy. And she just goes on this tear. I'm a super fan of hers and honestly, you know what's funny is like, there comes a point, I think Penelope said this and I really agree with her, it's kind of what you were getting at. It's not that you're not trying to prove anything anymore, but at a certain point in this kind of work, I find a lot of satisfaction, not only in watching other people, like watching Olivia be in flow state is so great, you're like, I'm here to serve, whatever you need.
1:00:55 Speaker 02 But this other thing happens too, which Penelope, I think, affected, which is you get to take the world and what you've taken out of it and you get to like pull it into the work and kind of communicate it in another way. There are people who don't know who Mary Claire Haver is, there are people who don't know who Astaire is. Like, if you see the invite and you look at Penelope's performance, she pulled a bunch of shit together and put it out.
1:01:18 Dax Shepard? Oh, it's very.
1:01:19 Speaker 02 In this way, and I think that's really cool.
1:01:21 Dax Shepard? It's just occurring to me now, I didn't have this feeling when I left, but I'm now having this thought, which is the only thing the movie maybe didn't do, and I want to know what the conversations were like among the four of you. So your neighbors from upstairs, Penelope and you, sorry, you're the neighbor, they're in this very progressive sexual arrangement, they go to orgies, they're out there, they're communicating about it. What kind of conversations were going on about that?
1:01:51 Speaker 01 About open relationships?
1:01:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, open relationships, like I guess I was curious if the position at all or if it's even talked about, it's like. Do the neighbors upstairs have a viable thing? Do we buy that it's gonna work out? What do we think about that? Was this being discussed? You also have four cast members with different, like, Sessman with the same girl his entire life? I think it was Olivia told us something about, he was like, what do you mean? Someone doesn't have sex every week? Or something that was revealing that they are fucked.
1:02:18 Speaker 02 No, I think at the time, either Olivia or Rashida turned and was like, you're the only person here without children.
1:02:27 Dax Shepard? Well, there's that, yeah, yeah. And then there's just nature.
1:02:30 Speaker 01 Well, they were fighting too. I think he said something like, who would be...
1:02:34 Speaker 02 Who would ever speak this way?
1:02:35 Speaker 01 Exactly. Who would ever be in a relationship like this? I think people were like, yeah, a lot of us.
1:02:41 Dax Shepard? A 90% of relationships.
1:02:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02:44 Dax Shepard? But did you guys discuss that much or no? You just take it at face value?
1:02:48 Speaker 02 I think one of the things that was discussed and then, and I think especially by Penelope, very successfully laced very subtly through, is how new it is that they've only been together for a year. And you can see how thrilled he is about it.
1:03:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:03:04 Speaker 02 You can see in her very subtle commentary that like, she knows that it's easy because it's early. She's not naive. And I think, it's funny when you do this kind of stuff because the rehearsal, such as it was, was just six people sitting around a table.
1:03:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:03:19 Speaker 02 The four of us and Will and Rashida.
1:03:21 Dax Shepard? And probably going, how much am I gonna reveal about my own relationship right now?
1:03:24 Speaker 02 By the way, Olivia, again, you know, like the general who says, I'll never ask of anyone something I won't do myself. She just like plowed in. She was just in the bubble with the six of us. Let's be real. Because if we can be real here and all of us throw it against the board together, let's look at what ends up on the board and we go, ooh, that should be in there.
1:03:44 Speaker 01 But then when you go home that night to Shauna, is she like, yeah, I need you to be done with this movie. Like, all I'm thinking is thinking about relationships and marriage and Esther.
1:03:54 Speaker 02 Honestly, Shauna was the one who said, when we saw the first Spanish film, she was like, you have to do that and you're going to do that.
1:04:00 Speaker 01 Oh, she's just the coolest.
1:04:02 Speaker 02 She was gonna happen. She cast Seth in his first film. I mean, literally, and I think, I love doing a... Film with Seth, he's so good. There's such a reputation around Seth because of houseplant and he smokes weed and ha ha. Seth probably has the most incredible work ethic of anybody I know. He works so hard.
1:04:20 Dax Shepard? Well, it's the writing.
1:04:21 Speaker 02 Oh, he's the guy. It's defeat. I mean, if something's not working, the computer comes up and he sits down and he's quiet.
1:04:27 Dax Shepard? He's written thousands of things.
1:04:28 Speaker 02 Works and works and works. Yes, he's the best improviser imaginable. And he'll make up a line like, next time you're in there, check the rings. On the older partner. This stuff that puts you on the floor, but you also realize, but you also realize that actually there's a white piece of paper sitting over on the side that's full of his brainstorming and his lines and what feels like improvisation often is, but is often the mind of a pro at work.
1:04:56 Dax Shepard? Whether are you writing in this moment? Are you writing 30 seconds before? Are you writing eight seconds before? What does it matter?
1:05:01 Speaker 02 That guy is an absolute machine.
1:05:02 Dax Shepard? Well, no, the studio just, he's also like a cinephile. He's like an encyclopedic film nerd on top of everything else.
1:05:09 Speaker 02 In this, for me, and I think Shauna watching it, it was like, the studio wasn't enough. If you ever needed more proof, he is such a mature, real, deep wounded human being in this film. There's pain, there's sourness, there's anger not inflected by comedy. I think of things like Kramer versus Kramer or Richard Dreyfuss in the Goodbye Girl. I loved watching him work in his gear. Like, I loved.
1:05:35 Speaker 01 Oh, Shauna probably liked my boys all grown up.
1:05:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, I loved, I loved it.
1:05:39 Dax Shepard? Well, he's mogul. He's a fucking literal mogul.
1:05:41 Speaker 02 I do think there's some colors and some depth. Olivia got him to go some places. Don't you think that you should see this movie with another couple? Like, if you're in a relationship, I feel like this is a double date. You should go with another couple.
1:05:55 Dax Shepard? And then swing afterwards. And then go straight to the red roof.
1:05:59 Speaker 02 And go have a real discussion, eat a light dinner.
1:06:17 Speaker 02 Did you see the Swedish film Force Majeure?
1:06:19 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:06:20 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, but the guy doesn't go.
1:06:21 Speaker 02 Yes, I mean, one of the most provocative. I've never had better conversations with other couples than after that film.
1:06:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, if people don't know, an avalanche is coming and he gets up and pushes his own family out of the way and runs.
1:06:35 Speaker 02 He grabs his cellphone.
1:06:36 Dax Shepard? And runs, yeah, and then everyone's fine, the avalanche is fine. And she just can't see him the same afterwards.
1:06:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, everyone survives and he has to just be with his family.
1:06:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, he now thinks he's a coward.
1:06:44 Speaker 02 I remember a lunch of a couple of couples after we saw that film. And we went around the table and literally one lady said, I thought the whole thing was a little bit like, what's the big deal? Like, would it really pinwheel like this? And we were all like, wait, so if this happened? She'd be like, I'd roll my eyes. It came around to me and I was like, if I did that, I would just keep running.
1:07:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:07:06 Dax Shepard? Would return to the table.
1:07:07 Speaker 02 I would never return to the table.
1:07:09 Dax Shepard? Type her new family.
1:07:10 Speaker 02 Because there would be no, there would be no recovery.
1:07:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:07:15 Speaker 02 With my.
1:07:15 Dax Shepard? And it strikes our deepest fear that maybe we will be that way in this situation. Because you don't know until the avalanche comes. You think you know, it's like Mike Tyson, you have a game plan until.
1:07:24 Speaker 01 You wouldn't.
1:07:25 Dax Shepard? I like that.
1:07:26 Speaker 01 Well, no, you grab your phone, you go, I can stop the avalanche.
1:07:29 Dax Shepard? I've been in a few avalanche situations, so I've found out. But yes, we all think we'll be one way.
1:07:34 Speaker 02 Dax is just lucky that all three of the girls in his family can fit inside him. They would survive in the frozen, concave shell of his enormity.
1:07:47 Dax Shepard? Now, this goes back to my original thing. The thing I left out about my overarching theories on you, I was thinking, maybe meeting Richard Gere on that first movie and having him, and I don't know if he was or not, I know you have his apartment, so I'm imagining you guys were close, but if he was a mentor at all, he too was a guy who had a real healthy grasp on the career. Was he a mentory guy to you or no?
1:08:14 Speaker 02 Richard was great to me. He was kind, he was supportive, he levitated me. I still see him and we have enormous affection for each other just because of that experience.
1:08:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:08:24 Speaker 02 And I ended up living in a place that he built.
1:08:26 Dax Shepard? And kept it the same.
1:08:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's some weird, we have something.
1:08:29 Speaker 01 Connection.
1:08:30 Speaker 02 We have commonalities and connections and we have this. Often distant, but some spool of thread, a memory I love with him was that I was so totally unsure whether that was a fluke and was gonna be the last gig I ever did.
1:08:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:08:44 Speaker 02 While we were doing it, that back in those days, I think you got either fifty or seventy-five dollars a day per diem, and I was taking that and putting it in an envelope and literally keeping it under the mattress at my crappy little efficiency apartment that I had near the Sunset Marquis. And at some point, Richard's this phenomenal guitar player, and every day in his trailer, he had a different amazing guitar, and I love guitars, and I was playing. He had a ridiculous guitar collection.
1:09:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:09:06 Speaker 02 It was later sold at Sotheby's for millions and millions of dollars.
1:09:09 Dax Shepard? Wow.
1:09:09 Speaker 02 Probably one of the biggest private guitar collections in the world at the time. And he said, "What do you got?" I said, "I don't have anything," you know? And he was like, "What? We're going guitar shopping." He took me to this place called Voltage Guitars off Sunset, and I found this 1969 Martin D35 from the year I was born, and it worked. And I looked at it, and I always remember it was thirteen hundred and ninety-five dollars, and that wasn't even considerable to me at the time. And Richard, he was like, "I like that." He goes, "That's the one." And I was like, "Oh, man, I can't do that." And he goes, "Are you taking your per diem and keeping it in an envelope?" And I said, "Yeah." And he goes, "I'm gonna buy this. You're gonna bring me that envelope of cash tomorrow and give it to me, because you only live once." And he was like, "And you're gonna get this guitar."
1:09:54 Speaker 02 And it sounds silly, it sounds materialistic and everything. It was a nice thing. It was like him saying like, "A, you're gonna be fine."
1:10:01 Dax Shepard? Trust yourself.
1:10:01 Speaker 02 He said something to me like, "This won't be your last gig." Also, he was like, "What are you saving it for? Rent money? Get this thing. There's gonna be a lot of joy in it." It's my favorite guitar I've ever bought, still. And I look at it, and I'm like, he like, launched me into something.
1:10:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:10:15 Speaker 02 I can't, I can't explain it.
1:10:16 Dax Shepard? No, I can. He said, "That phase of your life is over."
1:10:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:10:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:10:20 Dax Shepard? Walk into your new phase and walk with your shoulders back.
1:10:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, I love that.
1:10:24 Speaker 01 Me too. This new phase has abundance.
1:10:27 Dax Shepard? Okay, my last question. This started with interviewing Gabor Maté. I was walking him out, he's an expert on ADHD. I'm walking to Anuma's car and he said, "Have you ever been tested for ADHD?" And I just was like, "Well, that's an interesting question for an ADHD expert to ask."
1:10:44 Speaker 02 Did he say what qualities in you?
1:10:46 Dax Shepard? He didn't. He just asked, "Have you been diagnosed with ADHD?" And I said, "No, I never have."
1:10:51 Speaker 02 You weren't like a Ritalin kid, you didn't?
1:10:53 Dax Shepard? I wasn't on Ritalin.
1:10:54 Speaker 02 Me neither, no.
1:10:55 Dax Shepard? But then I have since been inundated with the ADHD algorithm on Instagram. And we've now had a couple ADHD experts on. And I have not been formally diagnosed, but I am certain he was dead right to ask that question. And so I have really kind of embraced it. I kind of dig it. I like thinking about the deficits, things I need to work on that are standard for ADHD. And then like these super gifts I get from it, like improv-ing quickly and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, the dyslexia, the ADHD, it occurred to me, "Do you think you're neurodivergent at all?"
1:11:29 Speaker 02 Not in a claimable, nameable way. This is a pet peeve. I may not be right about this. But I feel like Silicon Valley has done a lot of cool things and a lot of really negative things to our society. One of the ones that I find kind of aggravating is what I would call the romanticization of the idea of being on the spectrum.
1:11:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:11:50 Speaker 02 You get all these people who are just basically assholes, wanting to credit that to them being on the spectrum. It's like, "You're not on the spectrum. Shut up. Stop it." Don't casually try to claim as a superpower, a thing that for a lot of people is a real thing.
1:12:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:12:07 Speaker 01 I'm on your side about this. I expressed that opinion a lot.
1:12:10 Speaker 02 You did, yeah.
1:12:11 Dax Shepard? Also, I think there's a problem with just pathologizing. I'll get to the end road, which is like, to me, they're not actually pathologies. They are words we invented like 25 years ago and we added them to the DSM. And we're acting like it means bipedal, like it's a real thing we could measure and observe. I don't think it's that. I think we're getting more and more good at recognizing patterns of behavior in humans.
1:12:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:12:36 Dax Shepard? And it doesn't have to be a pathology or an ism or some kind of disease, but I do think it's true that there are a lot of different patterns of human behavior. And when people express these certain patterns, we can kind of predict some of the pitfalls ahead for them and predict probably some of the things that'll come easier than them. It's like, that's all okay to just go like, I trend towards this and yeah, that makes sense. And it's like, I don't need treatment. I'm not making an excuse for anything. It's just like, oh, I think I'm in this pattern of people.
1:13:03 Speaker 02 I tend to agree. That's how I'd describe myself. I wouldn't even go near calling myself neurodivergent at all. Watching something like Love on the Spectrum, the most beautiful, wonderful show.
1:13:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:13 Speaker 02 I love it. I love the celebration of it. I love that while both observing people with real diversions, real conditions, whatever, just saying the universality of, of love, of relationships.
1:13:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:25 Speaker 02 It's just so great. When I hear someone like the one guy named Dylan, who he'll say things and he just says per se a lot at the end.
1:13:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:13:33 Speaker 02 For the next week, my family was like, shut up.
1:13:37 Dax Shepard? Enough per se.
1:13:38 Speaker 02 Stop saying per se. It was funny the first five times.
1:13:40 Dax Shepard? You have the mimic thing, but you also have some savant-like qualities. I watched you recite the Walt Whitman poem on Colbert.
1:13:47 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:13:48 Dax Shepard? Which was incredible.
1:13:49 Speaker 02 Oh, thanks.
1:13:49 Dax Shepard? Very low percentage of the population can do something like that.
1:13:54 Speaker 02 That's a funny observation.
1:13:55 Dax Shepard? I'll depersonalize it really quick. I'm friends with Phineas now. Do you know Phineas?
1:13:59 Speaker 02 Billy Osh's?
1:13:59 Dax Shepard? Brother.
1:14:00 Speaker 02 Brother, yeah.
1:14:01 Dax Shepard? He's one of the most special guys in the world. You would fall in love with him. He's 28. And I'm like, how is this guy not 51? He's definitely 51, maybe 58. He's definitely wiser than me. He's smarter. I'll bring up a thing and he'll just go like, oh yeah, that was October 20th. And I go, uh huh. And you know, people can't do that, right? People don't know what date you did mundane things on.
1:14:21 Speaker 01 We just had Jack McBrayer on. Oh my God. He can name the dates of
1:14:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:14:25 Speaker 01 Anything that happened. He's like, oh yeah.
1:14:27 Dax Shepard? Damn. Again, not to pathologize it, but I saw on 60 Minutes that people with super memory are also really high trending for OCD and they all had really organized closets. So I say to Jack McBrayer with this, he's displaying this impossible memory. And I said, what's your closet look like? And he goes, oh my God, you would love it. It's a dream. Everything's color coordinated. Right? It's just like, yeah, that's a pattern of. Human behavior, that's fascinating.
1:14:49 Speaker 02 You had someone talking about obsessive compulsive disorder and how poorly people understand what it really even means. I thought that was great because I think OCD is another thing lots of people just like to say. Throw out.
1:15:00 Dax Shepard? I'm a neat freak, yeah.
1:15:01 Speaker 02 I'm a neat freak, yeah, etc. I think there is an interesting connection between hyper retentive memory, which I definitely have, but by the way, so does my dad. I don't want to credit it as something. I have a very strong and precise memory to the point where I can say most of the lines of the movies I've been in.
1:15:23 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:15:24 Speaker 02 And if I watch a film with a lot of focus, if there's a film I loved and I've watched it with focus, I have a lot of it locked in. The thing I've been interested in, to your point, never tested for in any way, is I know for sure with me, a photographic memory is eidetic. I think it's called being eidetic.
1:15:41 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:15:42 Speaker 02 With me, it's completely auditory. If I hear something with focus, music or words, I have it or I'm pretty close to have it. When I learn lines, I learn them by saying them out loud. Once I've said them out loud, I've pretty much got it. There's an interesting connection for me between the auditory and the memory retention.
1:16:02 Dax Shepard? Now, I would imagine that could create tension in relationships. I have it to a lesser degree than you, but I-
1:16:09 Speaker 02 Because my memory of things is right.
1:16:10 Dax Shepard? Exactly. I don't have it to the degree to which you have it, but I also have a very high degree as well. You're arguing with your wife and you're like, "Yeah, we weren't at the grocery..." It's kind of maddening and then you have to really zoom back and go like, "Oh, right, we're not arguing about whether or not it was at the grocery store or what was this sentence."
1:16:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, this is not an-
1:16:29 Dax Shepard? We're talking about an emotion she has that I have the ability to potentially alleviate or help. But I have to step over a lot of, "No, we weren't even in Michigan when that..." You know?
1:16:42 Speaker 01 Well, she has no memory. Kristin has zero memory.
1:16:45 Dax Shepard? Here's the spectrum. It's like she's on the far left. I'm like two thirds and you're at the far right.
1:16:50 Speaker 02 Shauna, if you're listening, you know what's great about that is that Kristin acknowledges that she has.
1:16:54 Speaker 01 She does, she does, she does.
1:16:58 Speaker 02 No, I'm kidding.
1:16:59 Dax Shepard? But if you had to learn, I've had to learn, oh, right, that's not what's important right now when we're talking.
1:17:05 Speaker 02 The impulse to correct because your brain says that's asynchronous with what I know to be my memory of the truth. But in the invite, the thing that Penelope says that was provoked by Seth's improvisation, right?
1:17:19 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:17:20 Speaker 02 That thing, which is Penelope and I have known each other a long time and Penelope and Salma Hayek and we all go way back. And the thing where I correct her English.
1:17:30 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:17:31 Speaker 02 Penelope and I had talked about in her life and relationships. And when she did, I was like, what if we put that in? Like, you know what I mean? We put that in. I love the moment where I correct her.
1:17:43 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:17:43 Speaker 02 And step into such deep.
1:17:45 Dax Shepard? A minefield, yeah.
1:17:46 Speaker 02 The look on her face, didn't your whole body go, oh, he's done it now?
1:17:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. But back to the question you don't want to answer. Have you had to learn to go, oh, that's not what's important right now? I think that takes some practice.
1:18:00 Speaker 02 Sure. Oh, my God, yeah. I mean, my father was a litigator. My father was a US attorney. I grew up sitting in the back of courtrooms, listening to my dad cross-examine and dissect people. And I'm really good at it. So someone who doesn't just think, but does remember things perfectly.
1:18:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:18:20 Speaker 02 Combined with the litigator's thing is awful. Yeah, Esther has definitely given me some tips.
1:18:26 Dax Shepard? How to function more peacefully in your life. I think kids help teach you that really well.
1:18:30 Speaker 02 For sure. Yours and mine are moving into teen.
1:18:33 Dax Shepard? I do need to say this out loud. We probably already have, but it's probably like one of the cutest things that's ever happened to us is we, either you invited us to lunch or we invite you to lunch at this vegan restaurant. And we've both hidden our ultrasound photos in our menu.
1:18:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:46 Dax Shepard? That's impossible.
1:18:46 Speaker 01 I know. It's such a good story.
1:18:47 Dax Shepard? To announce to each other.
1:18:48 Speaker 02 The same due date.
1:18:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah, same due day.
1:18:51 Speaker 02 Due date.
1:18:51 Dax Shepard? That was an out of body experience.
1:18:53 Speaker 02 And let's remind people that Shauna introduced you and Kristin.
1:18:56 Dax Shepard? Yes, right.
1:18:57 Speaker 02 Set you guys up.
1:18:57 Dax Shepard? Yep.
1:18:58 Speaker 02 So we felt invested in you guys.
1:19:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:19:00 Speaker 02 You put the ultrasound in the menu and you said, you know, we really like this place and I think we're going to have this. And you turned it around and we went, oh, that's funny. We're ordering. And we turned ours around.
1:19:14 Dax Shepard? This is an impossible moment. I'm not even sure it happened.
1:19:16 Speaker 02 You screamed. I remember you going, no, you were like, fuck, you're getting me.
1:19:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it feels like the sim broke.
1:19:22 Speaker 02 But then remember, we looked at the due date and the due dates were the same.
1:19:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:19:25 Speaker 01 That is so crazy.
1:19:27 Dax Shepard? We don't give that enough credit. That was an otherworldly occurrence that happened.
1:19:32 Speaker 02 I think so much so that you and I just wanted to go out and get a burger.
1:19:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were like, fuck out of this fucking restaurant.
1:19:38 Speaker 02 We were like, let's get a burger and an ice cream.
1:19:39 Dax Shepard? We've got children on the way.
1:19:40 Speaker 02 Exactly. When I think about things that like, I know you've talked about this a lot, like your dad, down to you, and I don't know if it's a cultural shift or psychological shift or whatever, but I do feel this thing that's really been landing for me lately is the thing you can do for a kid is actually just model for them what it looks like to be an adult who listens, who asks a lot of questions and has control of their own emotions. It's not that there's no boundaries, it's not anything, but that whole idea of just modeling more than telling is
1:20:13 Dax Shepard? A thousand.
1:20:13 Speaker 02 revelatory to me.
1:20:14 Dax Shepard? We grew up in a generation where it's like, the parents were saying one thing and you were observing them actively doing the opposite as they were telling you, and it just didn't mean anything.
1:20:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's really wild, but it all circles back to some of what we're talking about, about creativity, about a great process with Olivia. Penelope and Seth and me and Olivia have all been doing this a pretty long time. And one of the things I think maybe allowed that to work like that was getting to this place where you go, I'm gonna make myself available. I'm not gonna come in with a predisposition and I'm not gonna try to over control or direct with my determinations or my instincts or my certainties, the way this is gonna go. And that the lighter I hold it and the more available I make myself to something someone else says
1:21:05 Speaker 02 or to, okay, that's not what I thought was coming, but what do I do with what came? In a weird way, the happier you are.
1:21:13 Dax Shepard? This is like aging, right? I'm young and I read the Fountainhead and I'm like, yeah, I wanna be like Howard Rourke. Just whatever opinion I have, I wanna believe in it. I don't care what anyone says and I'm gonna execute. And that was so appealing as a young man. And now as an older man. I think I used to get horny for conviction and now I'm like so horny for humility. Humility is like the most powerful crazy thing. It's not appealing when you're a young man. But I think as you get older, it gets more and more appealing. And like all you're saying about that process is you like you walk in with the humility that maybe someone else has a better grasp of this. Or maybe someone else has a different angle that's also valid that might be more interesting.
1:21:52 Speaker 02 Or even that none of you know. And that the collision is gonna reveal that the uncertainty is a state in which something interesting and true might happen. And that if it does, and you make yourself available to it, all these other things will rise up that are better than your predispositions toward something. It's all sounds corny, but what you're describing is youthful creativity is often a flex.
1:22:24 Dax Shepard? Well, you're trying to define yourself.
1:22:25 Speaker 02 And maybe if you're lucky and you get to keep being creative, you get to the place where it's more discovery than it is flex.
1:22:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you said something that's really beautiful and profound. And it is that you were kind of asked about happiness. I can't remember the specifics of the question, but you were basically like, I try not to actually think about or pursue happiness. I'm more interested in just expansion. I would replace happiness with expansion and I would replace sadness or unhappiness with constriction. And I think those are great things to swap out.
1:22:57 Speaker 02 When you're younger too, it's in some weird way. You feel like if someone has a different idea, it feels like you're not getting an A on your homework.
1:23:03 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:23:05 Speaker 02 And you end up probably with more people who you leave each other feeling a little bruised instead of leaving each other feeling like you lifted each other higher.
1:23:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you both went somewhere you had not been before.
1:23:18 Speaker 02 It's nice to arrive in that place, for sure.
1:23:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, you don't have much of an ego. I've noticed that over all the times we've had you, especially for someone as. Talented and could walk around with like, I have all the answers because you've proven to in a lot of spaces. And you're doing all these other cool things like the barge. You could, but you don't walk in with that air, which is very impressive, I will say. Oh, thanks. It doesn't appear you have much of an ego, anyway.
1:23:45 Speaker 02 It's hard not to have, and that's humility, but I mean, I just think the scale of what's taking place in the world right now, the scale of the challenges, the scale of the assault of, you know, the awareness and information about cataclysm and violence and brutality.
1:23:59 Dax Shepard? In every corner.
1:24:00 Speaker 02 I think we're in a very brutal age right now.
1:24:02 Dax Shepard? We're overwhelmed.
1:24:03 Speaker 01 Sure, it can put you in your place.
1:24:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, in me, it sounds really trite, but it's like, how can you have Gaza being livestreamed? And then get off on your achievements?
1:24:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, self-importance.
1:24:14 Speaker 02 You know what I mean?
1:24:15 Dax Shepard? But also, you see the Gaza thing and then you swipe up and then it's a guy jumping an old car over a river. And then you're laughing and then you go to the next page and it's like some heartfelt reunion with a soul.
1:24:24 Speaker 02 Oh, my God.
1:24:25 Dax Shepard? I mean, the ride you're on is insane for your nervousness.
1:24:28 Speaker 02 It's so schizophrenic. I often rely on the things you send me about someone in a powerboat doing something stupid.
1:24:35 Dax Shepard? I'm curating that for you.
1:24:36 Speaker 02 So that I can go to bed on that versus the rest of it. Keep them coming.
1:24:41 Dax Shepard? Well, Edward, this has been lovely. The invite is fucking phenomenal. I hope it takes the world by storm. You guys are also good. Again, I'll just repeat it. It's Valentino on a motorcycle, watching Edward do this monologue.
1:24:52 Speaker 02 Date movie of the summer.
1:24:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah, could end in a lot of different ways. So, June 26th, everyone check out The Invite. I adore you and I can't wait to do it again.
1:25:02 Speaker 02 Love it.
1:25:05 Speaker 05 Stay tuned for the fact check. It's where the party's at.
1:25:13 Speaker 01 Last banter for the summer.
1:25:18 Dax Shepard? Last banter. Uh oh. Careful, little girl. I know you think you're out for school.
1:25:25 Speaker 01 Listen, my arms, I woke up this morning and I was like, why am I sore?
1:25:31 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:25:31 Speaker 01 Did something happen in the night?
1:25:33 Dax Shepard? What happened?
1:25:34 Speaker 01 I tried to lift you up yesterday.
1:25:36 Dax Shepard? Oh my God, your arms were sore from that?
1:25:38 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:25:39 Dax Shepard? Oh no, that's not a great sign.
1:25:42 Speaker 01 I know.
1:25:42 Dax Shepard? Wow.
1:25:44 Speaker 01 I know.
1:25:45 Dax Shepard? What if that is your new workout routine? You had to try to lift me up three times?
1:25:49 Speaker 01 I mean, that's easy. That only-
1:25:50 Dax Shepard? Three sets.
1:25:51 Speaker 01 It only took, it only took a couple of minutes.
1:25:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it was a quick workout to get the burn the next day.
1:25:57 Speaker 01 It was.
1:25:57 Dax Shepard? I do not say this in a boo hoo way.
1:26:00 Speaker 01 No, we're not gonna complain.
1:26:01 Dax Shepard? I'm not complaining. I'm just gonna say that we have been trucking through, but yesterday, we finished and I was getting out of the hot tub and I kept like, my eye was getting blurry on the right side. And I kept going like, why is my eye blurry on the right side? And I would wipe it, I would wipe it and then it would get like, kinda better. And I'm like, mm, I'm gonna go upstairs and look in the magnifying mirror. And so I went and looked in the magnifying mirror and when I pulled my eyelid down, Monica, there was this dye in there the size of like, what's the biggest kinda pea? Is it a snow pea?
1:26:34 Speaker 01 Well-
1:26:34 Dax Shepard? Snap pea?
1:26:35 Speaker 02 Like an edamame pea?
1:26:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:26:37 Dax Shepard? Edamame pea? Yeah. It was edamame pea. I don't know how I wasn't feeling it and it was just hemorrhaging.
1:26:46 Speaker 01 Ooh.
1:26:47 Dax Shepard? It was nasty. It was just-
1:26:50 Speaker 01 Oozing?
1:26:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I know, it's terrible to say.
1:26:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, no one wants to hear about that in the summer.
1:26:55 Dax Shepard? No, it's terrible. But I was like, oh, this is, well, that's a sign.
1:26:59 Speaker 01 It's a Stein.
1:27:00 Dax Shepard? It's a Stein. I'm just so curious why styes are such a direct stress-related.
1:27:06 Speaker 01 Not for me. I've never had one.
1:27:07 Dax Shepard? You've never gotten them?
1:27:08 Speaker 01 Mm-mm.
1:27:08 Dax Shepard? Do you get them while? No, not really. Lucky you guys.
1:27:12 Speaker 01 We don't get styes.
1:27:13 Dax Shepard? My mom used to say, I remember when she's a kid, when I was a kid, she would have to get hers lanced. It'd be like a big ordeal. And she is famous for saying, if she just sees somebody with a stye, she'll get one.
1:27:26 Speaker 01 Oh, that seems.
1:27:29 Dax Shepard? Curious.
1:27:31 Speaker 01 Ooh, you know.
1:27:32 Dax Shepard? We don't call Laura a liar, but.
1:27:33 Speaker 01 I'm not gonna call her anything.
1:27:35 Dax Shepard? But we must acknowledge.
1:27:37 Speaker 01 She is much of it.
1:27:37 Dax Shepard? She exaggerates.
1:27:39 Speaker 01 Listen, speaking of munchausen's.
1:27:41 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:27:42 Speaker 01 I watched.
1:27:43 Dax Shepard? We weren't speaking of munchausen's, but continue.
1:27:44 Speaker 01 I just said it.
1:27:46 Dax Shepard? You just go munchausen, speaking of munchausen.
1:27:47 Speaker 01 No, I didn't. I said she has it. I was kidding.
1:27:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:27:50 Speaker 01 Don't hurt me. I watched that doc last night.
1:27:53 Dax Shepard? Oh, you did?
1:27:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:54 Dax Shepard? Okay. What's it called, mother?
1:27:56 Speaker 01 It's called maternal instincts or something.
1:27:59 Dax Shepard? That's a.
1:28:00 Speaker 01 It's a hor- it's like a good name and a horrible name. Guys, like, I hate to say watch it, but I think, like, watch it.
1:28:09 Dax Shepard? Even though it's disturbing, yeah.
1:28:10 Speaker 01 It's so disturbing.
1:28:12 Dax Shepard? It is.
1:28:12 Speaker 01 You know what I liked about it? It was short.
1:28:16 Dax Shepard? Of course.
1:28:17 Speaker 01 I loved that about it.
1:28:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you know, that's the first criteria. Yeah, yeah, the shorter the better. Are you excited? Like, the moment I normally feel screwed, are you excited? Like, you'll be watching a show. It's a comedy, so generally the episodes are gonna be like thirty minutes-ish. And then you turn on the episode and you see it's like nineteen or twenty minutes. And you're like, I'm like, fuck you. You can't give me an eighteen minute episode. Are you like, ooh, this is gonna be a good one?
1:28:45 Speaker 01 Like, oh, it's like three minutes too long.
1:28:47 Dax Shepard? Okay, fifteen is ideal.
1:28:49 Speaker 01 No.
1:28:49 Dax Shepard? Well, you must love short content on, maybe that's what's happening on Instagram.
1:28:53 Speaker 01 It's not. I, I like a full-size show or movie, but if it's a twenty-something minute show, like, nobody wants this has short episodes. And I like that, cause then I can just keep going.
1:29:04 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:29:05 Speaker 01 I can watch it all in one, one sitting, which I enjoy doing.
1:29:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah, which is.
1:29:10 Speaker 01 I've been meaning to bring something up for a while, all year.
1:29:13 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:29:14 Speaker 01 Not all year, a couple of months, okay? Have you noticed I've been wearing this necklace a lot?
1:29:19 Dax Shepard? Uh huh, yeah.
1:29:20 Speaker 01 For the listener, it is a gold necklace. It has like, they look like rice shapes.
1:29:26 Dax Shepard? They do.
1:29:27 Speaker 01 Um, they're diamond, in an oval, diamond, oh, diamond in a diamond shape, rice shape. Um, there's 11 of them. This necklace was sent to me. It is called an 1111 necklace.
1:29:40 Dax Shepard? Oh, and someone gifted that to you because you love 1111?
1:29:43 Speaker 01 Yes, because I'm obsessed with 1111 and it stands for 11 wishes. So I don't really have to look out for 1111 anymore because I already have it at all times.
1:29:54 Dax Shepard? So, did you model out how many years left you have on planet Earth and try to figure out what your schedule for wishes will be? If you have 11, let's say you have 60 years left, that would be one every six years.
1:30:07 Speaker 01 No, I didn't do that.
1:30:08 Dax Shepard? Or if you had 66 years left.
1:30:09 Speaker 01 This just means I always have wishes.
1:30:11 Dax Shepard? Okay, so you're just not using them, you're kind of stockpiling them, waiting for emergency?
1:30:14 Speaker 01 No, it's like this whole thing represents abundant wishes.
1:30:20 Dax Shepard? Not 11?
1:30:21 Speaker 01 Like, it just, it's just, it's just like, good luck.
1:30:24 Dax Shepard? Okay, okay.
1:30:25 Speaker 01 You know, it's just good luck. And the jeweler is called Devon Wood Hill Jewelry.
1:30:29 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:30:30 Speaker 01 And I really love it. It's very dainty, which I like dainty jewelry.
1:30:33 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:30:34 Speaker 01 And you're just walking around with good luck.
1:30:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and have you felt like your luck has improved since you started wearing it?
1:30:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah, big time?
1:30:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, a lot of great luck?
1:30:44 Speaker 01 I still look at, I still just see 1111 all the time. It's so cool.
1:30:49 Dax Shepard? But now how do you feel since you don't need it anymore?
1:30:51 Speaker 01 I still love it.
1:30:52 Dax Shepard? You still love it, okay.
1:30:52 Speaker 01 And I feel like-
1:30:53 Dax Shepard? Because I wouldn't want this necklace to end in an arrow.
1:30:56 Speaker 01 It doesn't, it just adds. It didn't end, it adds.
1:31:00 Dax Shepard? Okay, now if you had 11 wishes.
1:31:02 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:31:03 Dax Shepard? What would be your approach?
1:31:05 Speaker 01 My strategy?
1:31:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah, cuz I might think, okay, I have fifty years left.
1:31:10 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:31:10 Dax Shepard? Um, so I get to use one every nine years or whatever it would be.
1:31:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:31:16 Dax Shepard? But I'm a, I'm a hoarder by nature.
1:31:20 Speaker 01 Right.
1:31:20 Dax Shepard? Like, you know, you get points when you use your American Express.
1:31:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:31:24 Dax Shepard? I've never spent a single one of the points. It drives everyone in my life crazy.
1:31:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:31:29 Dax Shepard? Um, and I'm just like, yeah, if I have no other money ever, I'll at least have some of those points I can cash in.
1:31:36 Speaker 01 That's such a ding ding ding. I, for the first time, used points.
1:31:42 Dax Shepard? You did?
1:31:43 Speaker 01 Actually, not American Express. I used.
1:31:47 Dax Shepard? Delta miles?
1:31:48 Speaker 01 Delta points.
1:31:49 Dax Shepard? Okay, and was it, did you get a free ticket out of it?
1:31:52 Speaker 01 Uh, yeah.
1:31:56 Dax Shepard? I've had underwhelming experiences.
1:31:58 Speaker 01 It took.
1:31:59 Dax Shepard? Not Delta specifically, but when I've tried to cash in airline points.
1:32:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:32:03 Dax Shepard? I remember back in the day when I traveled nonstop for car shows.
1:32:05 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:32:06 Dax Shepard? And I had a lot of points and, and they told you like, oh yeah, twenty thousand points, you get a flight. Well, every single time I ever tried to book a flight was like, oh, it's blackout. So it's really forty thousand or it's sixty thousand. And a couple of times I use them, it was like, it was five X of what they tell you it's gonna be.
1:32:19 Speaker 01 It's a lot of points. It's a lot of points, but it's a lot of money.
1:32:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:23 Speaker 01 So, uh, it saved me a lot of money.
1:32:26 Dax Shepard? So you got, you did points plus add?
1:32:28 Speaker 01 I think I did. I think I did.
1:32:30 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:32:31 Speaker 01 I don't know. Julie helped me.
1:32:33 Dax Shepard? Okay. I don't know Julie.
1:32:35 Speaker 01 Julie is Max's mom. Shout out Max's mom. Julie, she does listen to this show often.
1:32:40 Dax Shepard? Is she a travel agent?
1:32:42 Speaker 01 She is.
1:32:42 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow. And you're using a travel agent?
1:32:44 Speaker 01 Well, I, she helps me sometimes and it's really nice because like, I don't know how to do any of this. I don't know how to use points. That's part of why I don't use them, right?
1:32:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think that's what they're counting on.
1:32:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, nope. I mean, Julie knows.
1:32:58 Dax Shepard? Do you imagine those first, so they bring in an expert certainly, and then they pitch the board or whatever the higher ups are and they go, okay, we're, here's what we're here to pitch. We'd like to start this, this points program.
1:33:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:09 Dax Shepard? And every twenty thousand points, people get a free plane ticket. And then the people there go like, well, shit, if you divide that up, we're gonna be given a, and they go, well, here's the good news. Twenty one percent of these people will hoard them and die with the points.
1:33:21 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:33:22 Dax Shepard? The Dax Shepard types.
1:33:23 Speaker 01 I think it's more than twenty one.
1:33:24 Dax Shepard? Probably. I'm just, this is the number.
1:33:26 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:33:26 Dax Shepard? And then they go, and then thirty six percent of people will never be able to figure out how to use the points.
1:33:31 Speaker 01 Oh, the Monica Padman.
1:33:32 Dax Shepard? So now we're down to, like, you know this was a part of their initial pitch. So like, what we've modeled out is really only about eleven percent of people will be actually cashing these in.
1:33:41 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:33:41 Dax Shepard? So that's why it's this.
1:33:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, but they need to watch out for like the, so we've discussed the Dax Shepard types, the Monica Padman types. But then there's also the Elizabeth Lame types. She's totally hacked points. She's like, she knows how to do it.
1:33:59 Dax Shepard? Kristen too.
1:34:00 Speaker 01 She is like, she pays zero dollars.
1:34:02 Dax Shepard? Yep.
1:34:02 Speaker 01 It's crazy.
1:34:03 Dax Shepard? Kristen too, it's like you convert these points into those points and then on this month you convert those points to these points and then there's, yeah. So yeah, there's some people have mastered it. I mean, I don't even know, I cancel flights sometimes. And they don't refund the money, they give me a credit. And I don't know how to ever re, they don't give you like, here's a number to type in that will activate your credit. It's just like you have a credit, good luck figuring out how to cash it in.
1:34:25 Speaker 01 No, if you go to your, your app, it's there.
1:34:28 Dax Shepard? My app? You have an app for all your airlines?
1:34:31 Speaker 01 Just Delta. Delta's my, my, my main.
1:34:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, because of Delta One.
1:34:35 Speaker 02 But those expire too.
1:34:36 Speaker 01 Because of Delta, your daughter.
1:34:37 Dax Shepard? They expire when?
1:34:38 Speaker 02 Credit, credits usually expire within like a year or two.
1:34:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like a year, two years or something.
1:34:43 Dax Shepard? Your airline points expire now?
1:34:44 Speaker 01 No, no, no.
1:34:45 Speaker 02 Your credit's from a canceled flight.
1:34:46 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, which I did, I don't know how to use.
1:34:48 Speaker 01 That's why you need to go get your Delta app, put your thingy in, your number. And it'll, it'll, it's actually very easy to use on that. You can just like, say like, pay with credit.
1:34:59 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
1:34:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's cool. I have done that.
1:35:01 Dax Shepard? Great.
1:35:02 Speaker 01 I mean, your daughter's named after the dang airline.
1:35:05 Dax Shepard? And every time she flies in, I'm waiting to see, because a hundred percent of the times we fly, when we check in and they read the things, they always comment on that it's the same name as the airline.
1:35:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:35:17 Dax Shepard? And she has liked that a lot as a kid. It's exciting, it's more attention.
1:35:21 Speaker 01 Of course.
1:35:21 Dax Shepard? But she's getting older and I know it'll, it won't be fun. Like when she's twenty four and they're like, oh, you're flying. And then she'll be like, yeah, man, I've heard this every time I've flown since I was. So.
1:35:32 Speaker 01 Do you think she's gonna start going by DD?
1:35:34 Dax Shepard? Or what if she just refused to fly Delta so they can't?
1:35:36 Speaker 01 No.
1:35:37 Dax Shepard? But then what if she was checking in at American Airlines and like, wouldn't you be more comfortable on Delta? And she's like, fuck man, okay, I'm gonna go back to Delta.
1:35:43 Speaker 01 Oh shit, there's a lot.
1:35:44 Dax Shepard? There's a lot to think about. But I am wa- I'm waiting, it hasn't happened, thank God, but I know it's coming, we'll, it'll, it'll change from excitement for the attention to annoyed.
1:35:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:35:53 Dax Shepard? And I'm, I'm just clocking that.
1:35:55 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:35:56 Dax Shepard? And who knows, we have some flights coming up, this could be the time.
1:35:58 Speaker 01 Let me know.
1:35:59 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:36:00 Speaker 01 Um, but you won't be able to let me know, I, we gotta, you, you, you have to, you have to write it down and save it for later because as a reminder, we don't have fact checks for the next little bit, guys. Get excited, it's rerun time, it's block party summer. Um, do you remember block party summer?
1:36:19 Dax Shepard? No, tell me about it.
1:36:20 Speaker 01 It was on Nickelodeon.
1:36:21 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:36:21 Speaker 01 Um, I used to, when I, uh, stayed with my grandparents in Savannah, there was block party summer on Nickelodeon. So Mondays was Bewitched, and then it would be all night.
1:36:31 Dax Shepard? Marathon.
1:36:32 Speaker 01 Bewitched marathon, then it was I Dream of Jeannie, and it was Mary Tyler Moore Show. And I watched all of it and I loved it.
1:36:40 Dax Shepard? Do you wish you were a kid again?
1:36:42 Speaker 01 Hmm.
1:36:46 Speaker 01 Do I wish?
1:36:47 Dax Shepard? You were just, you were just watching the children play in the backyard last week and you had great envy of the carefree nature of their play.
1:36:55 Speaker 01 Well, there are.
1:36:56 Dax Shepard? And then this story, and this the way, there's a look on your face when you talk about being a little kid.
1:37:00 Speaker 01 I'm a nostalgic gal.
1:37:02 Dax Shepard? I know, but would you like to be a little kid again?
1:37:04 Speaker 01 I don't think so, because there are a lot of things I like a lot about being an adult.
1:37:09 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:37:09 Speaker 01 I don't wanna give those up.
1:37:11 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:37:11 Speaker 01 And it, it's one or the other, you don't get both. Well, we, you just told me that someone, some human, the first human is trying the epigenome.
1:37:23 Dax Shepard? Anti-aging.
1:37:24 Speaker 01 Anti-aging treatment.
1:37:27 Dax Shepard? Protocol.
1:37:28 Speaker 01 Protocol.
1:37:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:28 Speaker 01 And so we were discussing this, what age would we go back to?
1:37:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:33 Speaker 01 And then we said, maybe it'd be fun if I went back to being like, four.
1:37:37 Dax Shepard? Right, but you still have the same position, and just a higher voice.
1:37:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:41 Dax Shepard? But your same brain.
1:37:42 Speaker 01 My same brain and, uh, my same knowledge, but I was a little four-year-old looking girl.
1:37:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah. It would probably. It would reduce stress between us.
1:37:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, cuz you would never be able to get mad at me.
1:37:56 Dax Shepard? It would be impossible. And I would just like, I would chalk up you, whatever you're doing to like, oh, she's a kid. The way I'm able to write off insane behavior in my house. Because I'm like, yeah, they're kids.
1:38:05 Speaker 01 But that actually, okay, that's gonna get complicated cuz I'm gonna be like, I am not, stop treating me like a child.
1:38:11 Dax Shepard? Well, but you are a child.
1:38:12 Speaker 01 No, I'm not.
1:38:13 Dax Shepard? I gotta help you into this car, and I gotta pick you up, and I gotta grab everything for you.
1:38:16 Speaker 01 I only look for, but I am thirty eight.
1:38:21 Dax Shepard? All this stuff kids can't do. You can't get your mittens on.
1:38:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think you.
1:38:27 Dax Shepard? Oh, my god. We're gonna have to go over every morning and fucking get you ready for your job.
1:38:32 Speaker 01 But I'm also gonna be texting you, why are you late?
1:38:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:38:35 Speaker 01 We need to start the day. Come get my clothes on.
1:38:39 Dax Shepard? Now. And you can't reach, you can't cook yourself eggs. You know, you would need a caretaker.
1:38:46 Speaker 01 Oh, and who, like, maybe Josh O'Connor could do it.
1:38:49 Dax Shepard? Steps and stools everywhere around your house.
1:38:51 Speaker 01 Okay, now this will get tricky sexually.
1:38:54 Dax Shepard? Tell me, yeah.
1:38:55 Speaker 01 Cuz like, anyone I wanna have sex with is not a pedophile.
1:38:59 Dax Shepard? They have to be a pedophile. Like, on your, on your dating app, you have who you're looking for. Handsome, financially secure pedophile.
1:39:08 Speaker 01 Funny.
1:39:09 Dax Shepard? Smart.
1:39:10 Speaker 01 No, listen, it's not, it's not a laughing matter.
1:39:12 Dax Shepard? It's a laughing joke when we think about your miniature and four.
1:39:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, because.
1:39:16 Dax Shepard? And still wanna date Sean Penn.
1:39:18 Speaker 01 But minute, miniature.
1:39:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you have your same mental needs.
1:39:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I have my, and I have physical needs, like, I need met and.
1:39:26 Dax Shepard? You need food.
1:39:28 Speaker 01 No, no, I mean, like, sexually.
1:39:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:39:30 Speaker 01 So I, I'm still attracted to the same people I'm attracted to, but they're not pedophiles, so this is gonna get complex. Because even if they're attracted to my brain, how will they, like, they can't have sex with a four-year-old body.
1:39:45 Dax Shepard? No, no.
1:39:46 Speaker 01 They just can't.
1:39:46 Dax Shepard? They can't. It's a, it's a, if you thought the dating scene was challenging currently, with you being four, it's gonna really be impossible.
1:39:55 Speaker 01 Four-year-old body. Let's not say I'm four, cuz I'm not four.
1:39:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think a more.
1:40:02 Dax Shepard? A more blurry hypothetical.
1:40:04 Speaker 01 You don't think this one's blurry?
1:40:06 Dax Shepard? No, this is black and white.
1:40:07 Speaker 01 Oh, because they just can't.
1:40:08 Dax Shepard? You're four.
1:40:10 Speaker 01 Four bodies.
1:40:11 Dax Shepard? What if you go to seventeen?
1:40:13 Speaker 01 Oh, no, that's even worse for some reason.
1:40:15 Dax Shepard? Well, that's why I'm
1:40:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:17 Dax Shepard? steering our vessel into those choppy waters. Because that's way more complicated.
1:40:23 Speaker 01 No, but you know what's interesting? So it's a seventeen year old body.
1:40:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Forty year old mind.
1:40:28 Speaker 01 But so what, what, unless I'm wrong, but I don't think I'm wrong based on my life experience. I don't look my current age.
1:40:36 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:40:37 Speaker 01 I look younger.
1:40:38 Dax Shepard? Okay, yeah.
1:40:39 Speaker 01 So if I just looked seventeen, I mean, it'd just be like if I currently looked seventeen
1:40:46 Dax Shepard? That's right.
1:40:47 Speaker 01 instead of whatever everyone thinks I look like, which often is young.
1:40:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:51 Speaker 01 Quite young.
1:40:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:52 Speaker 01 Um, so I think that would be fine because I am thirty eight in this scenario, right? Is that what happens when you do it?
1:40:59 Dax Shepard? It's a thousand percent fine because the entire spirit and intention of these laws is that
1:41:06 Speaker 01 Protect.
1:41:07 Dax Shepard? a young mind that doesn't understand what they're getting into or how they're being manipulated would be taken advantage of.
1:41:14 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:41:14 Dax Shepard? And a non-sexual being would be asked to participate in sexuality with an older person.
1:41:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, power dynamic.
1:41:20 Dax Shepard? But that's one hundred percent about the brain.
1:41:22 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:41:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Your body can handle it long before we acknowledge you can handle it mentally. So we already know what the goal is. So yes, there's nothing at risk. There's no victimization on the table.
1:41:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, so.
1:41:37 Dax Shepard? But the man who's able to be aroused
1:41:41 Speaker 01 By a four year old?
1:41:42 Dax Shepard? is
1:41:42 Speaker 01 Is sick.
1:41:43 Dax Shepard? It immediately
1:41:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:41:45 Dax Shepard? takes it back to the zone.
1:41:46 Speaker 01 So what's the eight? See, this is tricky.
1:41:49 Dax Shepard? That's why I was trying to steer us into seventeen.
1:41:51 Speaker 01 Seventeen feels, if I looked like I looked when I was seventeen, but it's me now.
1:41:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:56 Speaker 01 Um, that's fine. For, to me, I also get to decide.
1:42:01 Dax Shepard? What about the guy, though? The what's about how, because we know how we feel about the guy that was able to perform.
1:42:08 Dax Shepard? Well, the four-year-old, that's a non-starter.
1:42:11 Speaker 01 Actually, you could trap, you could like trap pedophiles.
1:42:14 Dax Shepard? They would on those hard copy shows and stuff, that's what they would do.
1:42:17 Speaker 01 I'm gonna do that when I get four.
1:42:20 Dax Shepard? Weird use of your skills.
1:42:22 Speaker 01 I think it's helpful, it's like doing good.
1:42:24 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:42:24 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:42:25 Dax Shepard? Now, what do we think of the guy who's willing to be with seventeen-year-old body, you with thirty-eight-year-old brain?
1:42:33 Speaker 01 I think that's, I think they're fine. Yeah, I looked really good. I looked good. I don't look that different than I looked when I was seventeen.
1:42:44 Dax Shepard? We had a version of this hypothetical, it was very similar to a hypothetical we had years ago. Which is this thing I thought of, which is when I was in high school, my girlfriends and I had some nude photos in high school.
1:43:00 Speaker 01 You mean exchanging? What do you mean, you had nude photos?
1:43:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we had like taken photos.
1:43:04 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Don't do that, kids, just especially in this digital age, do not do that.
1:43:09 Dax Shepard? Well, they're gonna do exactly what they're gonna do.
1:43:12 Speaker 01 No, you can say like that's, you can say, be careful.
1:43:16 Dax Shepard? Oh, sure, sure, sure.
1:43:17 Speaker 01 Cause these things get out these days. I think a lot of kids these days know not to do that.
1:43:23 Dax Shepard? I'm just saying, we were doing it with really shitty technology and the risk of having to go get them developed in the town pharmacy. You know, you had to go drop your film off at fucking the equivalent of a ride day.
1:43:35 Speaker 01 Way, way easier to keep wrapped up than the digital age sending.
1:43:39 Dax Shepard? Obviously, there's an infinite distribution of the other.
1:43:42 Speaker 01 The cloud.
1:43:42 Dax Shepard? What I'm saying though is there was a bunch of hurdles and risky hurdles.
1:43:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:43:48 Dax Shepard? But we still did it because we wanted to do it so much. So I'm only be, I think I'm trying to be realistic about whether or not people take that warning. But that doesn't matter, the hypothetical is, so let's say I have these photos. And let's say Kristen had taken photos with her boyfriend when she was sixteen. And we're both just chatting about this, and then we both have photos of each other when we were minors.
1:44:12 Speaker 01 Is it, is it bad if you look?
1:44:14 Dax Shepard? What do we feel about each person wanting to see those?
1:44:16 Speaker 01 Well, how old are you?
1:44:17 Dax Shepard? Let's say I'm, let's say fifteen and fifteen, because that's below age of consent everywhere.
1:44:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. And fifteen to me is...
1:44:28 Speaker 01 We know children.
1:44:29 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:44:30 Speaker 01 Who are older than that.
1:44:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm just, it's so curious, cuz again, there can't be a victim cuz that person's now fifty.
1:44:37 Speaker 01 We can't say can't because, because.
1:44:40 Dax Shepard? I can't be a victim, um, because I'm now fifty-one. That boy that could have been a victim doesn't even exist.
1:44:47 Speaker 01 Well, it's, it still can be violating if a pedophile is using your pictures from when you were young to like, get off.
1:44:55 Dax Shepard? That's right. A pedophile would be concerning and we would know, but like, there's not an ethical debate there.
1:45:01 Speaker 01 Right, but I'm saying you can still be a victim of that.
1:45:03 Dax Shepard? Two consenting, two consenting adults. Who I go, no, I don't care at all if you look at the picture of me when I was fifteen, naked. So you have my consent, and I'm the person in the photo, and the person in the photo is no longer a minor and can't be victimized.
1:45:20 Speaker 01 Right.
1:45:20 Dax Shepard? So, there's, there can't be a victim in this scenario.
1:45:24 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:45:25 Dax Shepard? What are the, yeah, what's the morality of that?
1:45:27 Speaker 01 Doesn't mean that there's not gonna be judgment of the person who wants to see a fifteen-year-old sexually. Like, may, so there's.
1:45:35 Dax Shepard? But what makes, I think, this situation good is like, we know each other as adults, and we make, the two adults make a decision, so this guy knows you're thirty-eight. You're dating. This guy knows that you, Monica, are thirty-eight.
1:45:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:45:48 Dax Shepard? From your brain.
1:45:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:45:50 Dax Shepard? But you're, you've made your body seventeen.
1:45:51 Speaker 01 Right.
1:45:52 Dax Shepard? But he knows he's talking to a thirty-eight-year-old with full autonomy.
1:45:57 Speaker 01 But that's different, cuz then he does get the full me. He gets a thirty-eight-year-old conversation and interaction and brain. If it's just a picture, that's not. They are, they are getting off on a child.
1:46:14 Dax Shepard? Uh huh. Well, not a child, their wife is a child or their husband is a child.
1:46:20 Speaker 01 That's still a child. Like, the picture is, is what they're looking at and liking.
1:46:26 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:46:27 Speaker 01 And so, yeah, that is, I, I would be creeped out for sure if my.
1:46:36 Dax Shepard? Anyone that liked.
1:46:37 Speaker 01 That thought it was, that was jacking off to a picture of me.
1:46:42 Dax Shepard? If your husband was.
1:46:43 Speaker 01 When I was a kid.
1:46:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:46:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would, I would be like, that's a, that's a kid, though. Like, it's clearly a kid.
1:46:49 Dax Shepard? And I.
1:46:50 Speaker 01 Seventeen.
1:46:51 Dax Shepard? And I, and this is so predictably gendered. I would be flattered. Like it would only, I would only, I'd only like it.
1:46:58 Speaker 01 Yeah. That's just, it might not be gendered because we also know men who've been, who don't, who, it's you, you, all we can speak for is you and me.
1:47:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'm saying, um, but I want to be clear. I'm saying if my partner was enjoying looking at pictures of me. Yeah, yeah, I would be flattered by that.
1:47:16 Speaker 01 I know. I'm just saying, you're speaking for you, Dax. I'm speaking for me, Monica, of what I would find creepy and what you would find creepy. Anyway, so I, I think it's a fine line of age.
1:47:32 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
1:47:44 Dax Shepard? The only reason that this conversation isn't just shockingly, um, indulgent, this is actually a weird possibility.
1:47:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:56 Dax Shepard? This isn't totally, so just, I'm gonna explain it for one second?
1:47:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:48:00 Dax Shepard? Okay, so, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna make some mistakes here. I'm gonna do the best I can, though. I'm sure that some geneticists will, will hit me in the comments. But, in general, what's confusing about aging is your DNA stays unchanged. Your DNA is your DNA, right? And then your DNA, your cells replicate through mitosis and they make an identical copy to the strand of DNA that it originated as. And so the question is, if it's making identical copies all the time, how on earth does aging even happen? Why do your cells look so different at 70 than they did at 30? So, what the scientists, that, oh, it's called the Yacomura property, whatever.
1:48:41 Dax Shepard? Um, the scientists discovered that in mice, what really is going on with aging is that although your DNA stays identical the whole time, your epigenome on top, the layer on top that's deciding which of, uh, The genes it wants to turn on and off of the DNA strand, they accumulate all kinds of damage along the way. And that that's actually what aging is, is the epigenome accumulating all these different errors that then start turning your DNA on and off in a different way than they did when you were younger. So they have figured out in these mice how to cut out the epigenome, back prune it back to before the errors occurred.
1:49:22 Dax Shepard? And when they first did it, they took the epigenome back so far that the mice died because they immediately got young and then their organs continued to grow as if they were infants. So then they had to fine tune just cutting off the right amount of the epigenome. And then they they've done that. They they can take a mouse and take it to whatever age they decide. Which is
1:49:47 Speaker 01 It's wild.
1:49:48 Dax Shepard? It's mind blowing. And so they have just now started the first human trial. So it is sincerely conceivable that people at some point in the not too distant future will be picking what physiological age they want to be.
1:50:04 Speaker 01 Yeah. But I just, I also don't see how you, if you're going back though, how, why you wouldn't also go back to, like your brain wouldn't be as developed either though, right? Like if you're
1:50:15 Dax Shepard? But your brain doesn't go through mitosis. That's what's unique about your gray cells that are in your brain is they are just, you have them and then they're dying, but they're not going through that same process. So that's why they're not accumulating the same issues. But yeah, so your brain would wouldn't be affected by your cells going back. You're not losing memories or identity or any of that stuff. This is fucking wild.
1:50:43 Speaker 01 It's wild.
1:50:45 Speaker 01 You're gonna see me out there as a little four year old.
1:50:47 Dax Shepard? So when you see two 18 year olds together, they might be 71 and 73.
1:50:54 Speaker 01 Yeah. I know, it's crazy. It's crazy.
1:50:59 Dax Shepard? I mean, so that's the thing. I guess the point is if you go back to seventeen, the dude you like is also gonna go back to seventeen. So now he's got two seventeen year olds with four year old brains that are fucking, there's really nothing to think about.
1:51:12 Speaker 01 Right, that's true. Or I don't think a lot of guys should go back to seventeen if I'm being honest.
1:51:19 Dax Shepard? No, I look way worse.
1:51:21 Speaker 01 Seventeen isn't the best age for a lot of men.
1:51:25 Dax Shepard? But no, you have your frontal lobe. Eighteen, uh seventeen with a frontal lobe.
1:51:30 Speaker 01 No, I'm saying physically.
1:51:31 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:51:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, it'll be interesting. And then it'll be tricky in some relationships because they'll be like, could you just go back to being, could you like, please be eighteen or twenty? Just love the way you were when you were twenty and the way you looked. And then they're like, fuck you.
1:51:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah, well, you can see people the same way that like, plastic surgery is, is a slippery slope.
1:51:57 Speaker 01 Slippery.
1:51:58 Dax Shepard? It's a very, very slippery slope. Everyone knows this. You could go like, I'm gonna go back to twenty nine. And you go back to twenty nine, and you're like, I don't feel as good as I thought I was gonna feel, blah, blah, blah. I got it wrong, I better, I should go to twenty seven. And you can see someone just getting caught into getting younger and younger.
1:52:12 Speaker 01 That's how you end up as a four year old.
1:52:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:52:14 Speaker 01 That's how you end up. You know, if I, no, I would go back to being the baby in the picture.
1:52:19 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:52:20 Speaker 01 She's how old? One?
1:52:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Eighteen months.
1:52:24 Speaker 01 Can she talk?
1:52:25 Dax Shepard? No.
1:52:26 Speaker 01 See, this is where
1:52:27 Dax Shepard? Oh yeah, that would be frustrating.
1:52:29 Speaker 01 That's actually horrifying.
1:52:31 Dax Shepard? No, I think you would be able to, because you've already created all the circuitry.
1:52:35 Speaker 01 Motor skills though?
1:52:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you would be able to talk to me. That's what would be so freaky is if you went back to six months old and you were like, where's my, where's my microphone? But lift me up and I'm telling you, you're gonna wanna use those things. Like, I've already designed how you guys are gonna get me over there.
1:52:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, if I was the age, or, too bad you can't do it for just like a day, you know, because then it's like
1:52:56 Dax Shepard? Be a baby for a day.
1:52:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, just for a day, you get to like, or if you want someone to feel bad for you, you just be a baby.
1:53:03 Dax Shepard? I think Erin and I would love to take the little girl in the dress out for some ice cream.
1:53:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. But I still like sushi, like, I, I'm still gonna like,
1:53:12 Dax Shepard? Sushi.
1:53:12 Speaker 01 I'm still gonna like
1:53:14 Dax Shepard? Put you get in a boat.
1:53:15 Speaker 01 My thirty eight year old ta, oh no, probably though, my taste buds will not have been developed.
1:53:19 Dax Shepard? You won't be able to drink.
1:53:21 Speaker 01 Why?
1:53:22 Dax Shepard? Cause how do they know if you're really 21?
1:53:24 Speaker 01 Well, you know, I'd have to have it. There'd have to be a way to prove. Well, then I'm not doing it.
1:53:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you would never go before 21.
1:53:31 Speaker 01 No, no, you, in this world, you're able to prove your age, right?
1:53:35 Dax Shepard? Well, that's tricky of your old license, right? And then you hold it up and it's like, that's what, that, that's you in 35 years? Like, gosh, you're trying to like.
1:53:45 Speaker 01 No, I think they know based on my conversation with them.
1:53:48 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:53:49 Speaker 01 Cause I'll be speaking like this.
1:53:50 Dax Shepard? Ask me what happened in 1991.
1:53:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I'm only one year old.
1:53:56 Dax Shepard? You're right. There'll, there'll have to be some kind of really sophisticated age system where you can demonstrate your age.
1:54:02 Speaker 01 Your actual age.
1:54:03 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:54:03 Speaker 01 But then.
1:54:04 Dax Shepard? Cause again, we don't want a 16 year old.
1:54:06 Speaker 01 I know.
1:54:06 Dax Shepard? Who can't prove she's not 40.
1:54:09 Speaker 01 Exactly. That's why things are, this is gonna be hard, but I, I, I actually wouldn't like sushi because my taste buds wouldn't have been developed yet. Like, my brain would be developed, but not my taste buds, right?
1:54:23 Dax Shepard? I don't know. Could just, do you think, I know for me, I know what it'd be like taking a sheet off of my face. Like, I know my eyesight was so much better.
1:54:31 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:54:32 Dax Shepard? The first thing I would notice is like, oh, damn, we can see. And I wonder like how much of my hearing I would notice is back in my taste buds?
1:54:41 Speaker 01 Right.
1:54:41 Dax Shepard? Cause they definitely taste way less than I did.
1:54:44 Speaker 01 Oh, wait. Taste buds begin forming in the womb around week eight of pregnancy and are fully developed and connected to the brain by week 16?
1:54:53 Speaker 01 Oh, so you get your full taste buds before you're even born?
1:54:56 Dax Shepard? You get most everything. Then he's gotta figure out how to use it all.
1:55:00 Speaker 01 Oh, God. In middle age, around 40 years old, the regeneration rate begins to slow, leading to a gradual decline in the sense of taste over time.
1:55:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm 11 years into that journey, Monica.
1:55:10 Speaker 01 Now, do you think it would be unethical when I'm one, looking?
1:55:16 Dax Shepard? One looking?
1:55:19 Speaker 01 One looking that I would get an egg retrieval. Cause I'm actually thirty eight in my brain.
1:55:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but you no longer need egg retrieval. Although, boy, no, I wonder if the eggs are more in line with the brain. I don't know if you're, they would go back. I just think it's whatever cells are reproducing.
1:55:43 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, you don't get more, so. Huh, interesting.
1:55:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's the weird.
1:55:50 Speaker 01 Do you think it would be unethical to get, um, to freeze a one year old's eggs?
1:55:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, quite, quite unethical and unnecessary.
1:56:00 Speaker 01 Well, not necessarily. I wish I had my one year old eggs now.
1:56:04 Dax Shepard? Wait, well, wait, you could have waited until eighteen. Those eggs would be just fine.
1:56:10 Speaker 01 I just, the one year old is when you have the, you have so many.
1:56:13 Dax Shepard? Yep.
1:56:14 Speaker 01 And like, you can spare a lot.
1:56:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:56:17 Speaker 01 When you're one.
1:56:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:56:19 Speaker 01 I, it's because they don't have the choice.
1:56:22 Dax Shepard? I mean, look, I'm in a tricky situation. I guess, I guess there were news articles when I said that I would get my daughter's eggs retrieved.
1:56:30 Speaker 01 Pay is what you said. That's the, you weren't saying you're making them.
1:56:33 Dax Shepard? But no, yeah, I didn't say I was making them. And also when they're an adult, the people inferred I meant as children. And I just want to be, that's why I want to be dreadfully clear that I don't believe in harvesting eggs in minors.
1:56:51 Speaker 01 I don't know if I agree.
1:56:52 Dax Shepard? And that's great. I, you shouldn't. You have the freedom to not.
1:56:56 Speaker 01 Saying that I, I'm not saying yes or no, but I think there's more to think about. Being on, being at the age where I like, did it twice. It wasn't great. I desperately wish I had just like eighty eggs.
1:57:11 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:57:12 Speaker 01 Um, that were young and mature.
1:57:16 Dax Shepard? Young and mature.
1:57:17 Speaker 01 That's how, that's what they're called.
1:57:18 Dax Shepard? Ding ding ding, that's what we're talking about, young and mature.
1:57:20 Speaker 01 Oh wow, it's true. I would definitely go back and do it. Do it at age one and get eighty. And no one would even, I wouldn't even notice.
1:57:33 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:57:33 Speaker 01 Only in this scenario because I'm a thirty-eight-year-old giving consent. That's the ish. A one-year-old can't give consent.
1:57:41 Dax Shepard? They can't, that's why it needs to be eighteen.
1:57:42 Speaker 01 Eighteen or above. I agree, I agree ethically.
1:57:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:57:46 Speaker 01 Um.
1:57:47 Dax Shepard? But if you could time travel, you would kidnap yourself for a day, get all the eggs out.
1:57:52 Speaker 01 When I was one.
1:57:53 Dax Shepard? And return her to her bassinet.
1:57:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:57:55 Dax Shepard? No one, none the wiser.
1:57:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:57:57 Dax Shepard? No.
1:57:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:57:58 Dax Shepard? It just goes to illustrate how tiny the eggs are when you think all of them can be in a baby and it's not protruding out of their stomach, you know?
1:58:07 Speaker 01 You know what's also crazy?
1:58:07 Dax Shepard? Like, how tiny are these damn eggs? Because I'm thinking, the immediate issue with your plan is the instruments, right? Everything that's involved with egg retrieval is not going to work with a one-year-old. But then I was thinking, but those eggs, it's crazy, those eggs are the same size.
1:58:22 Speaker 01 They are, I know.
1:58:23 Dax Shepard? I know.
1:58:24 Speaker 01 Well, they would just use a smaller speculum. Yeah, I don't love the idea.
1:58:29 Dax Shepard? No, it's not a good thought.
1:58:30 Speaker 01 Look, the idea though, see, here's the thing. The things you would do to your own boi-, this is also fascinating. Like, the things I would do to my own one-year-old body.
1:58:38 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:58:39 Speaker 01 Is, obviously I would never, like, yeah, the idea of any other one-year-old having like a tiny, tiny spec-, like, no.
1:58:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I feel great about anyone looking at photos of me as a minor.
1:58:50 Speaker 01 But that's somebody else.
1:58:52 Dax Shepard? Um, but I wouldn't say that for anyone else. No, I'm bonding with you right now.
1:58:56 Speaker 01 I know, but I'm saying.
1:58:57 Dax Shepard? So I have that opinion for me.
1:58:58 Speaker 01 That's different, though.
1:58:59 Dax Shepard? But that's not my policy for everyone else.
1:59:01 Speaker 01 Well, that's different, but, um, I just.
1:59:03 Dax Shepard? I feel very similar.
1:59:03 Speaker 01 It's not, though, because that involv-, this only, the whole thing is me.
1:59:07 Dax Shepard? Yep.
1:59:08 Speaker 01 One-year-old me, thirty-eight-year-old me, it's all me, no one is.
1:59:12 Dax Shepard? All the doctors that have to get involved.
1:59:14 Speaker 01 Oh, they're also one.
1:59:16 Dax Shepard? Oh, Jesus. Okay.
1:59:20 Dax Shepard? The no problem. It's gonna be a great procedure.
1:59:24 Speaker 01 Grown up. Well, look, I mean, also, doctors perform stuff on babies.
1:59:29 Dax Shepard? I know.
1:59:29 Speaker 01 And like, hard stuff if they have to do it.
1:59:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not saying it couldn't be done. I'm just saying currently.
1:59:35 Speaker 01 And I would have little Valentino and LaBarre tea next to me for the procedure.
1:59:44 Speaker 01 I would get so many eggs.
1:59:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:59:46 Speaker 01 My current thirty-eight-year-old self would feel so free.
1:59:50 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
1:59:52 Speaker 01 So free.
1:59:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:59:54 Speaker 01 Huh. Interesting.
1:59:55 Dax Shepard? Interesting.
1:59:57 Speaker 01 All right. Well, wow. Great last fact check before summer break.
2:00:01 Dax Shepard? Cancelable, almost.
2:00:03 Speaker 01 Perhaps.
2:00:03 Dax Shepard? Now they'll go like, no wonder they took a break. They were in a nosedive. They were gonna definitely get canceled.
2:00:08 Speaker 01 No, no, we're doing great. We just want a little break. So, we're taking a little one.
2:00:13 Dax Shepard? But we are a little slap-happy.
2:00:14 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, of course.
2:00:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
2:00:17 Speaker 01 Episodes will continue.
2:00:19 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah. Uninterrupted. New guests.
2:00:21 Speaker 01 Episodes, new guests. It's just the fact checks will be reruns. And I do hope you'll re-listen to some of these oldies but goodies.
2:00:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, me too.
2:00:28 Speaker 01 But they won't be on YouTube, so you'll need to listen audio-only. Okay.
2:00:32 Dax Shepard? Okay, let's do some facts.
2:00:34 Speaker 01 Great. Okay, Edward Fax.
2:00:37 Dax Shepard? Edward P. Norton.
2:00:39 Speaker 01 What does the P. stand for?
2:00:40 Dax Shepard? That's not his middle name, is it?
2:00:42 Speaker 01 I could see his middle name being Peter.
2:00:44 Dax Shepard? Because of Alex P. Keaton is why it makes sense to me. Because Alex P. Keaton was so intelligent, if you remember. You didn't, did you ever watch Alex P. Keaton? Do you know what that is?
2:00:52 Speaker 01 It's from Family Ties?
2:00:54 Dax Shepard? There we go.
2:00:54 Speaker 01 I knew.
2:00:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, Michael J. Fox.
2:00:57 Speaker 01 I know.
2:00:57 Dax Shepard? He was a young Republican. He wore like sweater vests to school and stuff, and he was just very smart.
2:01:04 Speaker 01 Like precocious and smart?
2:01:05 Dax Shepard? Yes.
2:01:05 Speaker 01 Whoa, Edward's middle name is Harrison.
2:01:08 Dax Shepard? Harrison.
2:01:09 Speaker 01 That's a good middle name.
2:01:10 Dax Shepard? I wonder after Harrison, George Harrison, or Harrison Fords?
2:01:16 Dax Shepard? Probably not Harrison. Oh, he's old enough for Harrison Ford's.
2:01:20 Speaker 01 That would be.
2:01:21 Dax Shepard? That's how people in Michigan would pronounce his last name.
2:01:23 Speaker 01 It would be, I know.
2:01:24 Dax Shepard? Have you seen the new Harrison Ford's movie?
2:01:26 Speaker 01 Oh my god. His birthday's around my birthday time.
2:01:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, is he the 21st?
2:01:32 Speaker 01 Uh-uh.
2:01:33 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:01:33 Speaker 06 Harrison was his maternal grandmother's last name.
2:01:36 Dax Shepard? Oh shit, I should know that.
2:01:38 Speaker 06 Betty Kent Harrison.
2:01:40 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:01:40 Dax Shepard? When's his birthday, Monica?
2:01:41 Speaker 01 The 18th.
2:01:42 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
2:01:44 Speaker 01 Six days.
2:01:46 Dax Shepard? Three days off, I'm like, yes.
2:01:47 Speaker 01 Sure. Do emissions off California ports drive $6.5 billion in respiratory health costs for California each year? Believe that the stat he's referring to is a 2011 climate change study by Kim Knowlton, Miriam Rotkin-Elman, Lynda Gabe, a lot of people. However, this was a national stat, not a California-specific stat. The stat reads the total health costs associated with ozone pollution is $6.5 billion nationwide. I did find a California stat that states the diesel death zones, such as West Long Beach, San Pedro, and Wilmington, is where residents face localized asthma hospitalization rates up to eight times higher than the county average and life expectancy's up to eight years lower. Eee.
2:02:29 Dax Shepard? Fuck dude.
2:02:29 Speaker 01 That's not good at all.
2:02:30 Dax Shepard? Can you imagine knowing? I remember reading that. It's not great how close we are to the 101.
2:02:36 Speaker 01 I know.
2:02:36 Dax Shepard? Like, that radiates out in a very predictable way, too, if you're like in a, you know,
2:02:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:02:41 Dax Shepard? an eighth of a mile, a tenth of a mile.
2:02:44 Speaker 01 I don't really think about it.
2:02:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's best not to.
2:02:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. Okay, average car emissions in past few decades. Okay, the real-world fuel efficiency by manufacturer. Tesla's the highest, 120.6 MPG.
2:02:59 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
2:02:59 Speaker 01 Then we got Honda.
2:03:01 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:03:01 Speaker 01 Okay? 28.3. Hyundai.
2:03:07 Speaker 01 This is not in order, actually.
2:03:09 Dax Shepard? Okay, forty-one.
2:03:10 Speaker 01 Hyundai, twenty-nine point eight. Kia, thirty point four. Let's look at Mercedes. Twenty-seven point five.
2:03:21 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:03:22 Speaker 01 Okay, alright, that's good.
2:03:24 Dax Shepard? No American ones are on that list?
2:03:26 Speaker 01 Uh, let's see, Tesla, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, BMW, German, right?
2:03:31 Dax Shepard? But Ford, GM, or Dodge?
2:03:33 Speaker 01 Nissan, Toyota, Subaru, Mazda, VW, Mercedes, Ford.
2:03:38 Dax Shepard? Ford, what's Ford?
2:03:39 Speaker 01 Oh, Ford. Ford is, um, twenty-three point two.
2:03:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what sandbags those numbers for Ford and GM and Chrysler is their main business is trucks.
2:03:49 Speaker 01 Right.
2:03:51 Dax Shepard? That's what they, their bread and butter is. Nobody's buying Tesla trucks, they're not buying.
2:03:57 Speaker 01 I've seen some.
2:03:58 Dax Shepard? Very, very few Honda trucks.
2:04:00 Speaker 01 Love it.
2:04:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, no VW trucks.
2:04:03 Speaker 01 GM is twenty-two point four. What is Stellantis?
2:04:07 Dax Shepard? Stellantis is an Italian company that owns Chrysler currently.
2:04:11 Speaker 01 Oh, got it.
2:04:12 Dax Shepard? Chrysler's passed through some different ownership over the years, and currently, Stellantis, who also owns Fiat and some other.
2:04:20 Speaker 01 Got it.
2:04:21 Speaker 06 Dodge, Maserati.
2:04:22 Dax Shepard? Dodge, Maserati. That's part of Chrysler?
2:04:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, we had a Dodge Caravan.
2:04:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:04:28 Speaker 01 Quite a long time.
2:04:28 Dax Shepard? We had a Pacifica, remember?
2:04:29 Speaker 01 It was purple.
2:04:30 Dax Shepard? Fucking gorgeous, black on black and black.
2:04:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was great, yeah.
2:04:32 Dax Shepard? I love that vehicle.
2:04:33 Speaker 01 Okay, how much has Robert Downey Jr. made in Marvel?
2:04:37 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
2:04:39 Speaker 01 According to Comic Book Resources, his reported MCU total salary ranges from three-
2:04:46 Dax Shepard? Took your breath away.
2:04:47 Speaker 01 Three hundred and eighty-six to four hundred and twenty-one million.
2:04:51 Dax Shepard? All in?
2:04:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, I assume. Alleged salary by movie, alleged. Original Iron Man, two million. Iron Man Two, ten million. Avengers, fifty million. Iron Man Three, fifty million.
2:05:06 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
2:05:07 Speaker 01 Avengers: Age of Ultron, fifty to eighty million. Captain America: Civil War, sixty-four million.
2:05:13 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
2:05:14 Speaker 01 Spider-Man: Homecoming, ten to fifteen million.
2:05:17 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
2:05:17 Speaker 01 Avengers: Infinity War, seventy-five million. Avengers: Endgame, seventy-five million. This does not include many cameos and other Marvel movies.
2:05:25 Dax Shepard? Goddamn, son.
2:05:27 Speaker 01 Wahahaha.
2:05:28 Dax Shepard? The last one that was reported was, I think to start the new one, is a hundred.
2:05:33 Speaker 01 I just wish.
2:05:33 Dax Shepard? But then have you also heard this thing about Johnny Depp, which is fucking fascinating?
2:05:37 Speaker 01 Uh-uh.
2:05:38 Dax Shepard? During the Amber Heard dust up, Disney kinda went on record and took, well, I wanna be careful. I don't know specifically, he, what he interpreted is that they had shamed him publicly during that thing. And then after he was kind of vindicated, or at least not found liable for any of that stuff, um, he was asked if he would do another Pirates, and he said, "I wouldn't do another Pirates for $300 million because of the way they treated me."
2:06:05 Speaker 01 Wow.
2:06:06 Dax Shepard? And I read two weeks ago that Disney just offered him $301 million to do.
2:06:11 Speaker 01 Is he doing it?
2:06:12 Dax Shepard? I don't know. See if you can find an update on that, Rob.
2:06:17 Dax Shepard? But I was like, $300 million to go.
2:06:22 Speaker 01 For one movie?
2:06:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah. And guess what? He's worth it. They wouldn't be offering him that if that wasn't worth it.
2:06:26 Speaker 01 How much do they think they're gonna make on that movie?
2:06:28 Dax Shepard? A billion and a half dollars.
2:06:30 Speaker 01 But it's cost so much to make though.
2:06:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but if it costs five, let's say they spend 400 million, they pay him 300 million, there's 700 million, they make 1.5 billion, they're gonna keep of that 850 million. That's just the release of it. That's not any VOD, any streaming rights, any merchandising. So if they can come out.
2:06:51 Speaker 01 Thought about the other actors.
2:06:52 Dax Shepard? If they can turn a key and make 150 million dollars by paying him 300, any company should do that.
2:06:57 Speaker 06 It's in development, and Johnny Depp's involvement will depend on if he likes the way the part's written.
2:07:03 Dax Shepard? Good for him.
2:07:04 Speaker 01 Good for him.
2:07:05 Dax Shepard? Well, I'll offer you $301. You know, let me see how it turns out. Can you imagine?
2:07:08 Speaker 01 No. Um, who wrote the Mike Nichols biography? Was it Mark Harris? Yes, Mike Nichols: A Life was written by Mark Harris and published in 2021.
2:07:16 Dax Shepard? Beautiful biography.
2:07:17 Speaker 01 I've read some of it as well. I like it. I mean, I really like it. I just, you know, I don't finish books these days.
2:07:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you start books. That's your thing.
2:07:23 Speaker 01 That's kinda my thing.
2:07:24 Dax Shepard? You're a book starter.
2:07:24 Speaker 01 I hate that about myself.
2:07:25 Dax Shepard? Not a fire starter.
2:07:26 Speaker 01 But you know what? It's better, I decided it's better to read some of a book than none of a book. And to be reading, just to be reading.
2:07:33 Dax Shepard? Yep. Another story that just came out, 30,000 athletes studied by university.
2:07:40 Dax Shepard? They look into everything, reps, sets, hours in the gym. And what they found is that the chasm between doing nothing and doing a little bit is fucking enormous. And the chasm between doing a moderate amount and a ton of heavy training is very small.
2:07:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, that makes sense.
2:07:59 Dax Shepard? So your immediate gains and rewards are very soon for you to grab. Everyone should do it.
2:08:05 Speaker 01 Do it. Just read.
2:08:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah, just do it. That's the thing. Is that all the facts?
2:08:11 Speaker 01 Uh, that, yeah. Oh, wait, is it? Hold on.
2:08:13 Dax Shepard? Who knows?
2:08:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:08:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:08:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:08:17 Dax Shepard? She does good stuff.
2:08:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. She does good stuff.
2:08:24 Dax Shepard? All right, love you.
2:08:25 Speaker 01 Love you.
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