Jonah Nolan (director & screenwriter)

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair, expert, experts on expert.

[1] I'm Dan Shepard, and I'm joined by Monica Padman.

[2] This was fun.

[3] Fuck, yes, this was fun.

[4] Right out of the gates, he arrived in the coolest car and an Ariel Adam in the off -road setup.

[5] And I was like, what the fuck is this?

[6] It was really cool.

[7] Yes, and I was a me like, okay, I see you, Jonah Nolan.

[8] I didn't know.

[9] I think of you as a very clever writer.

[10] Auteur.

[11] Probably smarter than me. He was very smart.

[12] He is smart.

[13] than me, but we had the car thing, so that that was helpful.

[14] But Jonah Nolan is a director, producer, an Academy Award -nominated screenwriter.

[15] He is famously brothers with Christopher Nolan, and they have done so many of your favorite things together, the prestige, interstellar, the dark night, memento.

[16] And then, of course, Jonah was the director of Westworld, which was one of my favorite shows ever.

[17] And he has a new series out now.

[18] I hope people can tell when I'm truly insanely passionate for a show?

[19] I hope they can't.

[20] This is my show of 2024.

[21] Fallout.

[22] Holy smokes.

[23] This show is so fucking awesome.

[24] Based off the video game.

[25] Also, we talked about this when he left.

[26] This is like with Phineas and Billy Elish.

[27] If I am the parents of these Nolan brothers.

[28] I know.

[29] Aren't you just...

[30] So proud.

[31] They got to write a book.

[32] The parents.

[33] Yes, on what to do.

[34] We need to get some of these parents together.

[35] Some of these parents need to get off their ass and write books.

[36] So please check out, I don't even have to tell you to.

[37] You're going to hear about it so much, but Fallout, which premieres on April 11th on Prime Video.

[38] Please enjoy Jonah Nolan.

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[42] your podcasts.

[43] That has to be for my benefit, is it?

[44] How are you?

[45] That's great to meet you, brother.

[46] But I thought you would appreciate it.

[47] Oh, my God.

[48] Of course.

[49] I walked out and I was like, well, he's clearly here.

[50] Is it a nomad?

[51] What's it called?

[52] It's a nomad, yeah.

[53] There was just one on bring a trailer.

[54] This week, do you go on bring a trailer and sniff around?

[55] I bought a car and bring a trailer two weeks ago.

[56] Oh, you did?

[57] What did you buy?

[58] I did.

[59] What did you buy?

[60] 9 -11 Gt3 tour.

[61] Oh, baby.

[62] What year?

[63] 2018.

[64] Oh, fuck.

[65] Slightly softer suspension.

[66] I bought it in Colorado.

[67] I paid too much money for it.

[68] Sure.

[69] I flew out and drove home on summer tires, which is a very bad idea.

[70] Did they even make it?

[71] Those tires only last like $3 ,000 of mine.

[72] I was going to say.

[73] Now, when I had to wake up every day and kind of look to see, I found an app that will tell you how cold it's going to be along your route.

[74] There's an app already for that.

[75] It's cool.

[76] how to get there or something like that.

[77] So you first get the car and you get in it and you're so excited to drive it.

[78] And then it's a long drive.

[79] I've done that drive a hundred times.

[80] It's 1 ,100 miles.

[81] Add it a little bit because I went down through the Ritone Pass.

[82] Okay.

[83] Which I'd never done before.

[84] I didn't have the guts to take it on summer tires over the Rockies.

[85] Okay.

[86] I went through Santa Fe, Los Alamos, down across the top of northern New Mexico, Flagstaff, and back that way.

[87] Oh, wow.

[88] So this is perfect because you're already hitting where this sounds reminiscent of i did a movie in new mexico i had been wanting to get a cobra replica forever i found one there that had the actual 68 fe big block i buy this car which one lone star okay so then i decide well not i decide i have to drive it home from this movie and albuquerque but i'm quite excited about it but again i drive out albuquerque very excited by the time i get into elevation i'm like huh these cars are not tuned for elevation and then they get down in the desert then starts raining there's no roof.

[89] There's no wipers.

[90] There's no windows.

[91] And by the time I pulled it into my place in Santa Monica, I was like, this was the biggest mistake of my life.

[92] Why the fuck did I do this?

[93] Did you have any moments?

[94] Well, I guess the touring is probably not as bumpy.

[95] It's pretty bumpy, but its steering is so dialed in so perfect.

[96] It's like driving a laser beam.

[97] Like you're enjoying the experience of driving it so much.

[98] Even though you're getting jostle around a fair bit, it's still great.

[99] And that manual transmission, six speed, one of the greatest engines ever made.

[100] I did not expect this from you.

[101] Okay, this is the point in the conversation.

[102] And Monica, I know you're a goodwill hunting fan.

[103] Yes.

[104] How do you know this?

[105] It's way to you?

[106] I listened to you guys talking to Damon.

[107] Oh, okay.

[108] It's the moment where Ben Affleck goes in his place to the job interview.

[109] And they're kind of like, this is.

[110] This is the moment where people start texting and are like, who the fuck is this guy?

[111] Sure.

[112] And why doesn't he have an English accent?

[113] That's right.

[114] That's right.

[115] How did this imposter?

[116] They're like, he's supposed to be posh.

[117] That has been this great allure of you guys.

[118] guys, because I've never met either of you.

[119] I'm friends with Downey, obviously, he just worked with your brother.

[120] So I got to hear Downey's impersonation.

[121] I think he might even have been done it when we interviewed him.

[122] Didn't you do his Christopher?

[123] Oh, dear.

[124] But I've heard that these two are brothers, but one grew up more in Chicago, one grew up more in England.

[125] One has an American.

[126] Like, you're so fucking Chicago -in.

[127] It's hysterical.

[128] That's what happens when you moved to Chicago, 11 years old, with an English accent.

[129] If I've been 18, fantastic.

[130] Girls would have loved it.

[131] Guys would have thought you were intriguing.

[132] amazing yeah 11 years old that's not how it works out yeah that's fifth grade in your pria 100 % two years my social interactions consisted of say my name is bond james bond oh oh my god and now go away now go away so he's shaking not stirred for us and then get the fuck out of here just get out of here but what's the age difference Chris is way older than I he's six years older we have some similarities so my brother is five years older than me we're reversed though he's a righty I'm a leftie oh Christopher's a lefty you're variety.

[133] That's right.

[134] And by the way, Jonah or Jonathan?

[135] Everyone calls me Jonah.

[136] I was traveling when Memento came out.

[137] Chris doesn't like nicknames.

[138] I came back.

[139] I was like, oh, okay.

[140] Birth names.

[141] No one ever called that dude Christopher.

[142] Like, okay, we're going with legal names.

[143] Like, I see.

[144] Okay.

[145] Then they published a short story in Esquire, which was super cool.

[146] And I said, can I go by Jonah in Esquire?

[147] And then the copy editor called me back two weeks later.

[148] And we'd like, we'd really rather that it matched the credits of that.

[149] And there it goes.

[150] Okay.

[151] When did you adopt, Jonah.

[152] God, I don't even know where to start in the story.

[153] It's so twosy turn.

[154] Also, I'm so distracted by how cute you look, Monica.

[155] This is quite a yellow ensemble.

[156] I am wearing a new outfit.

[157] And I was thinking, I was going off on my own journey when you were talking about cars because I can't follow at all.

[158] But I thought, man, what they're talking about is the way I feel about new outfits.

[159] There you go.

[160] Like, I can't wait to wear it.

[161] They're identical in that they become your identity.

[162] You infuse this thing.

[163] And it helps yourself.

[164] of esteem, you now feel like a laser beam driving suit.

[165] You're like, you have athleticism that you and your real life don't have.

[166] 100%.

[167] Yeah, it's a superpower.

[168] It's all armor.

[169] I feel a little judge there, Dex.

[170] I apply that to myself.

[171] Let's just say an RS3 is a world -class car.

[172] And even if you're athletic, you didn't play in the NFL.

[173] That's exactly right.

[174] It's funny, as you say, Monica, because my daughter was asking me the other day, I was getting dressed up to go to the Oscars.

[175] She said, Daddy, guys never get to wear anything interesting.

[176] I was like, it's true.

[177] It's getting a little better.

[178] but for the most part, we don't.

[179] So our car is like an outfit.

[180] It's true.

[181] You get to be a little flamboyant.

[182] You get to be a little fun.

[183] Shows your personality.

[184] Also, you can be cool.

[185] Yeah.

[186] I saved up when I got a 1984 Mustang GT in high school.

[187] And I'm a year older than you.

[188] I'm 75 or 76.

[189] Fox Body one.

[190] Fox Body one.

[191] Yep.

[192] Sorry, Monica.

[193] One more thing.

[194] It's okay.

[195] I'm in 1980 Zephyr with all the coyote motors, six speed, independent rear suspension.

[196] Okay.

[197] But that car, I fucking would peel out leaving high school.

[198] And Monica, you can't imagine what my self -image wasn't.

[199] It was delusional, but it worked for me. That was it.

[200] Dorky kid, English accent, trying as fast as I could to get rid of it.

[201] And I think the Chicago accent, Southern would have been tough, but Chicago is about as far a distance as you can travel.

[202] I mean, just look at the vowels, right?

[203] Like an English A to a Chicago A. It's so different.

[204] So years of that, and my dad at one point threatened to send me back to England for high school.

[205] He said, you go to Catholic school or you go to, you know.

[206] And I was like, I am not going back to England.

[207] I'm not doing this all over again.

[208] And then I got my driver's license.

[209] And that was it.

[210] New Jonas.

[211] 100%.

[212] And what was your first machine?

[213] First one was my grandmother's 79 Buick Skyhawk.

[214] It's a terrible car.

[215] Rear wheel drive, massive economy V6 in the front.

[216] Okay, so it's shitty.

[217] But when it snowed, you're in the Dukes of Hazard.

[218] Didn't even have to snow.

[219] In Chicago, in the summer.

[220] So summer after sophomore, I spent the whole summer waiting for my driver license to come.

[221] And then it turns out the driving school guy just hadn't filled in the paperwork.

[222] And it didn't show up until the end.

[223] So then I've got all this pent -up energy.

[224] I'm like, I'm going driving.

[225] And Chicago in the summer, when it rains, if it doesn't rain in a while, the oil, it's ice skating.

[226] And so I'm coming home.

[227] I've got a buddy in the car.

[228] I'm cool.

[229] Rear -wheel drive, getting the rear end out, a tiny little, as much as you can with that engine.

[230] And I come around a corner, and I start to lose it.

[231] And I remember to steer in the direction of this kid.

[232] But I don't remember that you've got to unsteer.

[233] Yeah.

[234] So I just fly off the road.

[235] Oh, my God.

[236] Into a ditch.

[237] A bunch of choke cherry trees, I think I hit eight or nine trees.

[238] Oh, boy.

[239] This is a seminal moment for every young aspiring Steve McQueen.

[240] It was a learning moment.

[241] You learn an overseer.

[242] Yeah.

[243] I never forgot.

[244] You learn quick when you throw a car into the ditch.

[245] You do.

[246] My parents made me dig it out.

[247] They're like, okay, you can get it back out.

[248] You guys don't look dissimilar.

[249] Are you realizing this?

[250] Yeah, there's a lot happening right now.

[251] This is crazy.

[252] I think we're the exact same size as well.

[253] Whoa, Sam.

[254] Our mutual friend was like, you guys are out and get along.

[255] it's going to be terrible.

[256] Pete, I love Peter.

[257] I've told you about Peter in the past.

[258] He's living down in Austin, but they're moving back.

[259] They're coming back.

[260] Wait, so his wife, you work with his wife somehow.

[261] Yeah, we're partners.

[262] Athena.

[263] Okay, wonderful.

[264] I've not ever met her.

[265] Really?

[266] Weirdly.

[267] And I've known Peter for, I guess, almost 20 years now.

[268] No, you would remember.

[269] Athena is amazing.

[270] Okay, great.

[271] And she is one of your producers?

[272] Yeah, we worked together since I started working in television.

[273] She was a bad robot.

[274] And then Athena myself and my wife Lisa Stole her.

[275] Started her own.

[276] Headhunted her.

[277] It's okay.

[278] Dax stole me. I stole her from my wife.

[279] I mean, I jeopardized everything.

[280] We started our own company, and we've been working again ever since.

[281] And you're at Amazon.

[282] You guys have a deal at Amazon now?

[283] Okay, great.

[284] Let's start at the beginning.

[285] You're a little boy in England.

[286] Yeah.

[287] So at one time, you did have a cute little English accent.

[288] Adorable.

[289] And you're one of three.

[290] Who's the second?

[291] Chris is our middle brother.

[292] I'm the baby.

[293] I was the happy accident.

[294] The whistlestop version of it is, my dad's an English guy.

[295] He's a madman.

[296] He's a copywriter.

[297] Ad executive.

[298] Win's a competition.

[299] And I think, and I'll get this all.

[300] wrong, my mom be so mad at me. I think he winds up an Ogilvy in New York, and he hates it because it's the show.

[301] Before he passed away, I got him to watch two episodes, he's like, it wasn't like that.

[302] But I'm like, well, it was enough like that.

[303] It was enough like that, that he hated it, and everyone in New York hated Chicago, and he was like, well, I hate you, and you hate Chicago.

[304] Yeah, an enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine.

[305] I'm going to try Chicago, where there was a healthy ad business, still a healthy ad business there.

[306] So he moved there.

[307] Somehow goes to play beach volleyball, which is a thing in Chicago.

[308] Not super English.

[309] This is out of his comfort zone, for sure.

[310] time he ever went to play beach volleyball, and the one time my mom ever went to play beach volleyball, and they happened to pick the same random day to go play beach volleyball, and they met each other.

[311] Okay, great.

[312] And she was at the time of flight attendant?

[313] You got it.

[314] For what?

[315] Delta?

[316] United.

[317] United.

[318] We just flew it.

[319] I still only fly United.

[320] Because loyalty.

[321] This is adorable.

[322] Okay, so they meet in Chicago.

[323] That was, I would have assumed the other way around.

[324] They met in Chicago, and about a month after they got married, he's like, we're going to move back to England.

[325] It was in the 60s.

[326] Late 60s, swing in London.

[327] Yeah.

[328] And my mom, who's from Ohio, moves to London and has three kids.

[329] And London was very different.

[330] You couldn't go shopping on the weekends.

[331] She'd go to the supermarket and get a bunch of stuff.

[332] The guy at the end is like, have you bought any bags, madam?

[333] Very, very good.

[334] Bring your own shopping cart.

[335] Kind of.

[336] They still haven't invented shopping cart.

[337] So it wasn't for her.

[338] Well, no. After my dad passed away, we're joking that she would move right back.

[339] And she's spent more of her life now, I think, in the UK than she has here.

[340] They argued for 42 happy years about where to live.

[341] And periodically, my mom would be like, I need a cheeseburger.

[342] Oh, so they didn't divorce?

[343] No. Wait a minute.

[344] So when you were living in Chicago, dad was still in England.

[345] So they would just have these long periods away?

[346] We'd move together because he worked in the ad business.

[347] He had his own company.

[348] He could dance around.

[349] So when you were 11 and your brother is now 17 or 18, you moved to Chicago, the whole family.

[350] Well, the whole family, at this point being the three of us.

[351] Chris is at boarding school.

[352] and I sort of had that weird thing of kind of being a younger brother but also kind of an only kid for a while.

[353] Right.

[354] Because of the boarding school things.

[355] Chris started going to boarding school when he was like 10.

[356] My mom had gotten fed up with England when I was like four years old.

[357] We moved to Chicago for like a year.

[358] And then Chris started going to boarding school.

[359] Right.

[360] Which is this weird thing where we grew up together but I think it's one of the reasons our relationship works is we had almost no points of comparison.

[361] Right.

[362] We didn't go to the same schools.

[363] He didn't take the SATs.

[364] I didn't take the O levels.

[365] He didn't apply to the college as I applied to.

[366] It was only when we got here that there was a suddenly point in comparison.

[367] Well, that the world is putting on you guys for sure.

[368] So then I guess you probably wouldn't have all of the isms I have from being a younger brother, five years younger.

[369] I would describe them as this, an insatiable hurry to prove I'm adult at all times.

[370] I wanted to show him I was worthy of hanging out, some weird complex that I'm bad at everything.

[371] And then I get around my peers and I'm like, oh, wait, I am kind of strong.

[372] I've just been wrestling him my whole life.

[373] 100%.

[374] Or stateboarding with him.

[375] And I sucked.

[376] But then I got to sixth grade.

[377] I'm like, they think I'm the greatest skateboard.

[378] Or all these weird juxtapositions of my experience in life.

[379] Did you have that stuff?

[380] I still have it.

[381] Because with directing, watching what he does.

[382] I'm like, I don't know if I could do what he does.

[383] And then I start working with other directors.

[384] I'm like, I know I can do with that guy.

[385] Right.

[386] But 100%.

[387] The little brother thing, even with him out of the house for a while, all the more maybe, you'd come back and be like, no, no, no. I want to hang out.

[388] I want to be part of the...

[389] Yes.

[390] Is it trippy to you that?

[391] He is so English.

[392] Yes.

[393] Because you're so fucking American.

[394] It's hilarious.

[395] On a memento, we work.

[396] worked together.

[397] I had written a story.

[398] What was it called?

[399] Memento Mori was the short story.

[400] I was still in college.

[401] I take some time off college because my mom had tried to convince me to get a real job.

[402] She's like, I got one shot left.

[403] Some of this family is going to have a real job.

[404] Dad at that point is self -employed.

[405] Chris always wanted to be a film director.

[406] And she's like, I got this guy.

[407] He's it.

[408] You got into Georgetown.

[409] I did.

[410] It's very promising.

[411] Very good school.

[412] Catholic high school is a bit of a feat or I had a bit of a boost.

[413] Earmark Cooper was there when you were there, I'm sure.

[414] Bradley Cooper and I rode together on the men's heavyweight crew team.

[415] No way.

[416] No. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[417] Oh, my goodness.

[418] There's too many things to talk about.

[419] Okay, I'm going to try to keep this linear.

[420] We were the smallest guys on the boat.

[421] You were not GT3 RS's.

[422] Exactly.

[423] The rest of the boat.

[424] You guys are doing just fine.

[425] You guys are doing just fine.

[426] Good in the straight line.

[427] Yes, entry level speed.

[428] Bradley and I met walking into the cafeteria first week of Georgetown.

[429] The coach, Dan Lyons, was recruiting.

[430] He'd come from Minneapolis, and he wanted to build a good team.

[431] He's literally just picking big guys.

[432] You have wide shoulders.

[433] Come this way.

[434] Come on down.

[435] I never rode in a boat in my life.

[436] And we wound up becoming friends.

[437] And it's been amazing.

[438] How do I not know this either?

[439] You don't know anything.

[440] I really am astounded with what little I know.

[441] Okay.

[442] So you're at Georgetown, and then you decide you're going to bail out of there for a year to get a job?

[443] I started at Georgetown in School of Foreign Service, which at the time, it had been Bill Clinton's alma mater.

[444] I thought I would work for the State Department.

[445] I think I was motivated to some degree.

[446] I had all the isms, the younger brother stuff.

[447] But I had this thing for my mom, who's lovely.

[448] and I supported my career the whole way through it.

[449] But in the beginning, it was like, how about you get a real job?

[450] So I thought, what's a more stable salary than the government salary?

[451] Yeah, you couldn't even do a bad job and stick around forever.

[452] 100%.

[453] You're like, 10 years from the second you sign your employment contract.

[454] 100%.

[455] So I was like, I'm going to work for the State Department.

[456] Maybe I'll work for the CIA.

[457] I'll do the Marine Corps for a couple years after this.

[458] I went to a Marine Corps recruiting office.

[459] They knew.

[460] They're like, you're not a Marine.

[461] You're too artistic.

[462] I had long hair.

[463] They were like, no. And they let me sit there for a while.

[464] I lived in D .C. for five years in the end.

[465] One of the requirements for getting that degree was competency in a foreign language.

[466] I like to describe my relationship with the English language as monogamous.

[467] Failed Japanese, failed Spanish.

[468] Okay.

[469] Now we're really similar, yeah.

[470] Not my wife's version of failure, which is a B plus, like an actual F. I was like, this isn't working.

[471] I'm not doing well.

[472] I'm flunking out of classes.

[473] I had a scholarship.

[474] I lost it.

[475] What was the scholarship for?

[476] National Merit Scholarship through United.

[477] No wonder you're flying United.

[478] You got it.

[479] They brought you to the dance.

[480] You got to dance with him The whole dance I was fighting I felt like the English degree Was the family curse And I'm like I think I'm The one thing I always had The one thing that always bailed me out Of not doing my homework Not reading the book Was I could make it look pretty I could dress up my bullshit This is like perfect training for Hollywood Yeah yeah of course Director Dress up my bullshit In pretty language And do okay And I thought maybe it's the actual Writing of the thing Is the thing that I'm actually talented at At what age 20 Okay So two years and I just want to relate to you so much.

[481] Multiple choice were fucked.

[482] You give me any opportunity to answer a question in writing.

[483] I've got a shot.

[484] Exactly.

[485] I'm going to dress it up with, look over here, silly bullshit, and maybe I got a shot.

[486] So I realized I was not heading the right direction.

[487] It wasn't working.

[488] A lot of folks that I knew took a semester off, the girl I was dating, took a semester abroad.

[489] My grades were not good enough for a semester abroad.

[490] So I took a sabbatical.

[491] We had recently gotten back in touch with the whole side of the family that had left the UK after World War II and settled in New Zealand.

[492] So I went down to New Zealand.

[493] Oh, wonderful.

[494] What part?

[495] The Northland.

[496] So north of Auckland.

[497] Do you know it?

[498] Well, I shot a movie down there, my very first movie.

[499] We were based in Wellington, but we traveled for half of the movie through, like, Rotorua.

[500] The rotten egg smell.

[501] Yes, yes.

[502] From the sulfur coming out of the geothermal pools.

[503] First time I ever hitchhiked anywhere, it was out of Rotorua.

[504] Great country to do that in.

[505] It was.

[506] This is 20 plus years ago.

[507] But I worked on, my cousins had a dairy farm north of Auckland, 800 head of dairy cattle, thousand acres, grass -fed.

[508] We had gone down with my dad and kind of reconnected with them the previous year and so I reached out and I was like, can I just come live on the farm and help out?

[509] And so I did that for four months and it was amazing.

[510] A lot of time to think and on a farm every day you wake up and it's a different job.

[511] So you'd be a cowboy one day, you're digging ditches the next day.

[512] All the regulations are different.

[513] This is one of the craziest things I remember from the time there.

[514] Butchew will come to the farm in a white coat with a mobile butchery.

[515] In the States, you can't do any of this stuff.

[516] They show up in a truck and I swear to God, hide behind the barn with a gun.

[517] Oh, my God.

[518] It's like a mob move.

[519] The farmer would lead the cow over the hill, and the guy steps out and shoots the cleaner.

[520] Because this feels more humane or something, that they're not scared before they get killed.

[521] Exactly.

[522] Sort of makes a certain amount of sense.

[523] Sure.

[524] Although when a guy steps out with a lab coat from behind a van, I'd rather have a guy in a hockey mask with a chainsaw.

[525] Because some twisted shit's about to happen if a guy to laugh.

[526] Getting some genocide vibes.

[527] I'm still not a fan of drinking.

[528] milk.

[529] In the farmhouse, they had one of those great classic libraries.

[530] Like, when you send off and they send you a different book every month.

[531] And every time I pull a book out, the spine would crack.

[532] Like, no one had ever read any of these things.

[533] And one of them was Moby Dick.

[534] And I'm like, that's a book that you're supposed to read.

[535] And I actually was so bored, pre -internet, pre -smart, you're just literally in the middle of nowhere, northern New Zealand.

[536] And I read it.

[537] And it was unbelievably cinematic.

[538] The other thing occurred to me reading it, because I'm not a real American.

[539] I'm kind of a fake American.

[540] I always feel like imposter's never like not a real American.

[541] And trying to understand what America is, and it occurred to me reading the Moby Dick.

[542] One of our favorite stories is Americans.

[543] One of the kind of essential stories is revenge.

[544] There's a country's kind of like, you know, we stuck it to the British.

[545] There's also that Scottish, Irish culture of pride, way of life, harder, all that shit is in the mix.

[546] It started kicking around in my head.

[547] That book is so filled with incredibly indelible images.

[548] I'm so embarrassed I haven't read Moby Dick.

[549] Have you?

[550] I even wear a shirt.

[551] I couldn't do it.

[552] I did read Old Man in the Sea.

[553] I hated old man in the scene.

[554] Yeah, I bet you did.

[555] Gales don't love Hemingway as much as boys, too.

[556] Yeah, I wonder.

[557] It's a pretty gendered author.

[558] Yeah, it's like Lukowski.

[559] A little bit.

[560] It feels indulgent or something.

[561] I don't know.

[562] Too masculine.

[563] Yeah, a little bit.

[564] My daughter is very precocious reader and has been reading ahead a little bit.

[565] So at least he gave her a copy of Great Gatsby.

[566] That's a great book.

[567] She's 10.

[568] It's a little early, but you're reading it in high school.

[569] We both have 10 -year -olds.

[570] Yeah.

[571] Wow.

[572] What is happening?

[573] It's a rip and a slice.

[574] We might just want to set the microphones aside and just walk a No, I actually want to walk towards you in fuse.

[575] I feel like maybe we could walk at each other and just fuse.

[576] Imagine how powerful we could be.

[577] Do you have any tattoos?

[578] Sadly, no, I was going to get one during Memento.

[579] My sister -in -law and I were going to get one, and then we just kind of chicken out.

[580] Leave them to me. I've got that covered.

[581] I actually think we've got to be greater than the sum of our parts.

[582] I like that.

[583] Okay, so you read Moby Dick.

[584] And you become obsessed with revenge.

[585] Yeah.

[586] And so I started writing a short story.

[587] I wrote the first draft of Memento on an airplane vomit bag.

[588] Because I just got it stuck in my head.

[589] I was like, well, what if memory kind of serves as a bomb for everything?

[590] And time, rather.

[591] Like, you spend enough time, you can kind of deal with anything.

[592] You can forgive anything.

[593] You can move on from it.

[594] And I had taken a psych class the last semester before I took my little time off.

[595] And I gotten stuck on this idea of enter great amnesia.

[596] I got stuck on this idea of not the amnesia that works backwards, but the amnesia that essentially sticks with you.

[597] You can't hold on anything forever.

[598] People have that?

[599] One of the crazy experience of that movie was that we go to festivals.

[600] Eventually, we managed to get it out in the world.

[601] And almost every time we went to a festival, I would meet someone who knew someone or had had a motorcycle accident or could dramatic device.

[602] So many different things can cause it.

[603] Oh, yeah.

[604] I've had like 19 different script ideas based on starting with amnesia.

[605] Someone gave me a book once, and I was just sort of vaguely offended, but it made a lot of sense.

[606] They're like first time writers start with amnesia because it reflects their blank page.

[607] Where do I start?

[608] Oh, interesting.

[609] They don't have any experience to draw on, i .e. they have no memory.

[610] Exactly.

[611] I had it for 14 hours from a head injury.

[612] Oh, wow.

[613] I mean, it is the most memorable.

[614] kind of experience my life ironically yes what did i feel like well i'll try to do the four -second version because this is your interview and other people have heard it but i had already fucked up my shoulder was waiting to get surgery so i'm wakeboarding with one arm i'm in michigan i fall pretty hard but nothing crazy my friend dean pulls the boat around he goes well that was a big hit i just feel like i got punched in the face really hard he's like okay so i get in the boat he has brought another dude that i had met that morning dean starts wakeboarding the buddy's now driving and at some point i say to the guy where am i oh wow Because I live in California, but I'm visiting Michigan.

[615] He's like, what do you mean?

[616] I'm like, what fucking lake?

[617] There's no lakes in California.

[618] Who are you?

[619] And he realizes quickly like, oh shit.

[620] So he stops the boat.

[621] Dean gets in the boat.

[622] He realizes this is bad.

[623] He takes me to shore.

[624] My mother and my then girlfriend, Bree, are there.

[625] They say, he hit his head.

[626] They take me to the hospital.

[627] On the ride to the hospital, I said, why am I Michigan?

[628] And my mom goes, well, it's my birthday.

[629] You came home for my birthday.

[630] I said, why can't I remember that?

[631] Well, you were wakeboarding and you hit your head, but we're on the way to the hospital.

[632] And then I say, okay, so it's just like that episode of Gilgians Island, I just need to get hit in the head with a coconut again.

[633] I make this joke, right?

[634] And then it's crickets.

[635] And I'm like, that's worthy of a chuckle.

[636] I knew intuitively that was worthy of a chuggler.

[637] At least a sympathy chuckle while you're hurt.

[638] And it was just dead silent.

[639] And then there's a long beat.

[640] And I go, have I said that before?

[641] And my mom goes, yes, honey, about 20 times.

[642] And I was like, and then I just started bawling.

[643] Because I'm like, oh, I broke my brain.

[644] Fuck, that's the thing you can't break.

[645] I'm crying and I go, I'm just so glad that monsters are taking care of me. Balling, bawling, bawling, look up, see another lake and go, why am I in Michigan?

[646] And I was on this fucking two -minute loop for 14 hours.

[647] But you remember that?

[648] Once my brain unswelled, I think a lot of that short -term memories on the hour.

[649] outside.

[650] So it's just pressure on there.

[651] This surprised me. I was recording all that.

[652] So once the brain unsweld, I remembered all these loops.

[653] I have to tell you just one funny punchline of it.

[654] This happened exactly in 2002 or three.

[655] And when we were checking into the hospital, the nurse said to us three, where do you work?

[656] And I go, oh, I don't have a job.

[657] And my mom goes, no, no, he works at MTV.

[658] And I go, I work at MTV.

[659] And she goes, yeah, you have a show on MTV called.

[660] punk.

[661] And I turn to Brie and I go, I have a fucking show on MTV.

[662] And then I go, what happened at the groundlings?

[663] And my girlfriend goes, you're in the Sunday company.

[664] And I'm like, I'm in the Sunday company.

[665] And then I asked about UCLA and found it.

[666] So I got to learn the three best things that had ever happened to me all in a minute.

[667] And I was ecstatic.

[668] But how'd you know Bree?

[669] Because I'd been with her for eight years.

[670] It kind of washed two years back.

[671] Wow.

[672] It was very weird.

[673] We're so fragile.

[674] Like, what we are is so...

[675] Oh, my God, you're right.

[676] It's absolutely terrifying.

[677] What we are is so fucking fragile.

[678] It's just this tiny little hallucination and anything can kind of knock it out.

[679] And that was my experience.

[680] Writing on that movie was talking to people that had an experience like yours and starting to understand that whether something is coming from the limbic system, it could be cancer, it could be alcohol withdrawal, it could be a head injury.

[681] There's so many different things that can basically knock you off of the little tiny construct.

[682] The precarious identity, yeah.

[683] You've got your blanket, and you've got your food, and you're sitting there, and that's you.

[684] And then the wind comes and blows it away, and it's like, wait, what am I again?

[685] I know.

[686] We think it's so concrete and foundational, and then you end up in a different group of people as a social animal, and all of a sudden, you're not that person or you can no longer be that person.

[687] Yeah, it's so fragile.

[688] Well, if you're a showrunner, director, and you're outside of your milieu, no one laughs at your jokes.

[689] You're like, maybe I'm not that funny.

[690] We talk about this all the time.

[691] We're talking about that all the time.

[692] When we're around, like, billionaires.

[693] Yeah, people's...

[694] I just want to add, not bill.

[695] Bill is great.

[696] But we've been around some billionaires, tech founders.

[697] And people, obviously, around them inflate their egos.

[698] It's not their fault.

[699] They have no way of knowing.

[700] You kind of can't help yourself.

[701] There's no way.

[702] How are they supposed to correct for this?

[703] Oh, it's so corrosive and weird.

[704] I think this is one of the key things that you can do as a brother.

[705] Chris is having a good run.

[706] He just wants someone in your life who remembers you when your shit did stink and can call you on it.

[707] And you need a partner, probably, who's not too blown away with you.

[708] 100%.

[709] Yeah, very.

[710] very helpful.

[711] Critical.

[712] Okay, so what shocks me about your story is that you give this short story and or pitch it to Christopher.

[713] You're six years younger.

[714] You're a fucking cowherder.

[715] I don't know that my brother would have read the thing.

[716] That's to me the big first shocker in your story, is that he actually took you seriously.

[717] What was interesting is because we had all this time apart, being in different countries, boarding school, all of it.

[718] I remember quite distinctly at one point, and it was when I was fairly young.

[719] It was before high school.

[720] He came back and he realized that I was funny.

[721] We shared a sense of humor.

[722] We shared this kind of sharp, slightly rascally sense of humor and a little bit of a bond formed there, which was great.

[723] You weren't around enough to have annoyed him.

[724] That's helpful.

[725] A little bit.

[726] I was pretty annoying.

[727] I got annoying fast enough.

[728] You caught up.

[729] I watched this with my kids now where I'm like, you don't understand later, you're going to think he's great.

[730] Yeah.

[731] But I think there was just enough distance that he would actually listen to my shit.

[732] So I get to the end of my run.

[733] I get to the summer.

[734] I get to the summer.

[735] I know I'm going to go back to school.

[736] I transfer colleges within Georgetown.

[737] Family curse, English degree.

[738] Here we go.

[739] I don't know what I'm going to do with it.

[740] I don't know why I fought this, but let's go.

[741] Why did I find?

[742] He's an embrace.

[743] The hell would it.

[744] And I write up my notes for the story.

[745] And then I've got our dad's old Honda prelude.

[746] Favorite, favorite course.

[747] Yeah, lovely car.

[748] And it's completely destroyed at this point.

[749] I've had it in D .C. It gets towed once every two weeks.

[750] But it'll never stop running.

[751] Never.

[752] It's still running somewhere.

[753] Sadly, it did.

[754] That was my fault.

[755] Was it interference four cylinder.

[756] I never changed.

[757] the timing bell, and it blew all the valves out.

[758] But we got it to California first.

[759] So Chris grew up dual national, so America was always an option for him as well.

[760] And him and his girlfriend, now wife, Emma, we're trying to figure out we want to do this movie thing.

[761] And he's directed one feature.

[762] Self -financed, tiny feature that I was a grip on, friends and family coming in.

[763] I think he made it for about $5 ,000.

[764] And Chris never were trying to figure out if they could make a go of it in L .A. She was working an assistant at a production company that head office in L .A. And I'm trying to make a leap.

[765] And I always saying to Chris, I'm like, look, if you're going to do it, one, you should do it.

[766] Two, you're going to take dad's car because I keep getting parking tickets with this thing.

[767] And I don't need it in D .C., and I think you're going to need, I've heard that you need a car to get around L .A. Cars come in handy in L .A. Apparently, quite important.

[768] Jonah, the only advice I give to young actors when they ask me is I say buy a Honda so that it'll run forever and you don't have to pour money into it.

[769] We still have the same mechanic, Stacey, down on Melrose, affordable care.

[770] They only work on Hondas.

[771] It was not only the car, but the mechanic.

[772] That's a good tip.

[773] Get a Honda.

[774] You'll be okay.

[775] You'll be okay.

[776] You can weather the storm.

[777] Chris still has a Honda.

[778] He has this 85 white Honda Civic DX.

[779] Sadly not the prelude because I didn't change the time belt.

[780] And he still drives it.

[781] Oh, that's great.

[782] He's kind of fulfilling my fantasy.

[783] I had a 91 DX that I have thought about chasing down and buying.

[784] It was so reliable through the lean years, which there were eight of.

[785] You can't help but bond with that car.

[786] It's the horse that never leaves your side.

[787] Especially in L .A., all the PA jobs, all the craziness.

[788] I had an accord that wasn't quite as reliable, but they're amazing.

[789] And we did so much went driving together, back when I was an addict, and somehow it was such a boring car.

[790] I never got pulled over.

[791] Kept you alive.

[792] 100%.

[793] Okay.

[794] So Chris eventually decides make the leap, and I drive from D .C., pick him up in Chicago, and we drive from Chicago to L .A. and we go the Northern Way.

[795] We went up Black Hills, South Dakota.

[796] Did you stop at Mount Rushmore?

[797] Mount Rushmore?

[798] We did.

[799] Got a couple pictures there.

[800] And then looped down through Salt Lake City and across.

[801] It was my first time at Bonneville.

[802] I made Chris stop.

[803] He's like, what is this place?

[804] I'm like, it's important.

[805] All the land speed records.

[806] here, everything.

[807] Mecca.

[808] We got to Minnesota pulling out of Chicago, and as brothers do, ran out of shit to say.

[809] I had a Chris Isaac cassette tape that got stuck.

[810] Hunter's a great, but got stuck.

[811] So we're listening to Wicked Game.

[812] I think it was a Kisingle.

[813] It was like 2 ,000 miles with Wicked Game playing over and over.

[814] For a few hundred miles, yeah.

[815] And I was like, well, I have this idea.

[816] He'd made one movie, and he was talking about his ideas for the next movie, which I can't describe in case he ever wants to get back to them.

[817] They were very different.

[818] One of them was a comedy.

[819] Unexpected.

[820] Well, this thing about the guy, his public persona is so kind of this.

[821] But he's such a goofball.

[822] Odd for me to resolve the public version with the guy.

[823] Of course.

[824] I can only imagine my brother was in public and I had to watch and put on his show.

[825] Arodite.

[826] Yeah, there's a persona for sure.

[827] He'd get very mad at this.

[828] I used to get fed up with having to answer why my accent was different.

[829] I'm like, we're in America.

[830] I'm not the unusual sounding one.

[831] It's true.

[832] So I would say we'd both grown up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but he knew that he'd get more work as a director, if he affected, sure.

[833] And he would get mad, because that's the kind of thing that sticks.

[834] People hold on to you.

[835] Like, did you know that he actually, it's a fake?

[836] No. It's a totally real accent.

[837] Even I'm like, ooh, it sounds so good.

[838] Yeah, yeah.

[839] Like, when the argument is 50 -50, moral high ground logic -wise, and he's got that accent, it's going to tip.

[840] That's a little smarter.

[841] So you pitch him, I'm assuming.

[842] To this day, I'll read his stuff.

[843] He reads mine.

[844] And you just get that unvarnished feedback.

[845] He knows if it's like, and I know.

[846] And I know.

[847] I had him because he got really quiet.

[848] And I was like, hey, he's got this guy and he can't remember anything, but he's figured out, you can tattoo the information.

[849] And that was like, oh, I got him.

[850] Well, he was such a visual component.

[851] I think that's why it's so sticky.

[852] That was the thing.

[853] I'm like, this idea came to the wrong brother.

[854] He's going to make a good short story.

[855] And I think it is a good short story.

[856] But I knew it would make a great movie.

[857] So I was like, I've got to kind of pass this along.

[858] That's big of you.

[859] I mean, it would be hard.

[860] It worked out okay in the end.

[861] He did a good job.

[862] He called me at one point.

[863] He's like, I figured out, because one of the challenges was, how the hell do you tell that story?

[864] his addition was going backwards right he calls me up but he says i figured out it going backwards and i was like that's the dumbest idea i heard i wanted to tell the story as a deck of cards you shuffle it and you just get fragments yeah yeah but you can't do that with a movie it's linear that's it left to right and i thought it was a terrible idea and then i read the script that he wrote and i was like no that works uh -huh just my first of all the movies i don't need to tell you it's so mind -blowing there's a handful of movies i don't ever forget seeing and just going like yeah that broke all of my previous paradigms yeah yeah this is so out there And he's so great in it, too, a guy.

[865] Wow.

[866] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[867] We've all been there.

[868] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[869] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing.

[870] But for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrified medical mystery.

[871] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[872] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[873] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[874] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[875] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[876] Prime members can listen early and add free on Amazon music.

[877] What's up, guys?

[878] It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's too good, and I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[879] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation, and I don't mean just friends, I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kel Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on.

[880] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[881] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcast.

[882] But then this starts a partnership.

[883] You guys go on to write.

[884] And I'm not saying this because you're here.

[885] If you were to go through all the 700 episodes, I've probably said this on here a dozen times.

[886] Prestige for me. It's kind of tied with Michael Clayton is my favorite movie post -90s.

[887] I wrote prestige.

[888] I did.

[889] That was my first paid gig.

[890] Oh, my God.

[891] I love that movie.

[892] It's so good.

[893] Thank you.

[894] I never read the book.

[895] Is the book similar?

[896] Book is super cool.

[897] You know, it's one of these books.

[898] We've tried a couple of them that's sort of unadaptable.

[899] It had made the rounds.

[900] Oh, right.

[901] People could see that there was a potential there.

[902] It's a terrific book.

[903] It's quite different from the movie.

[904] It's wrapped in this contemporary framing mechanism, grandchildren of the magicians trying to piece together what happened, which is super cool.

[905] And for a while, I tried to hold on to it.

[906] So we made memento.

[907] We put it out.

[908] At first, no one wanted to release it.

[909] We got six months into it.

[910] I graduated school, worked slinging barbecue in D .C. for a summer.

[911] Moved to California.

[912] We shot the movie.

[913] I worked as a PA on the movie.

[914] No one knew we were related for the movie.

[915] the first two weeks.

[916] Of course not.

[917] If you guys were sitting here, I don't think I would know what you told me. When I showed up late to work one day with the entire cruise radios and I didn't get fired, people were like, wait a second.

[918] We make the movie.

[919] Chris cuts the movie and we're like, it was easy.

[920] We showed up.

[921] We had a good script.

[922] We cast good people.

[923] Why did people complain about this being hard?

[924] And then we tried to sell it.

[925] It turns out great.

[926] And no one wanted to buy it.

[927] Everyone was like, this is great.

[928] We love this movie.

[929] It's terrific.

[930] We have no clue how to market this.

[931] The line was maybe more angry than that.

[932] People are too dumb.

[933] We get it.

[934] Bingo.

[935] That was it.

[936] That was a preventer rule.

[937] People won't get it.

[938] Your audience won't get it.

[939] I don't really think of myself, well, I'm talking to you.

[940] You're pretty dumb.

[941] That is the hilarious thing about that note is like everyone excuses themselves from that.

[942] Yeah.

[943] Well, I get it, but I can't imagine.

[944] And I was like, why do you guys consistently underestimate the audience?

[945] Our whole career at first was based on the premise that there was a part of the audience that was bored and that wanted more complicated, weirder, challenging stuff.

[946] This thread carries through to fall out, by the way.

[947] It's going to be one of the compliments I gave you.

[948] Truly.

[949] You're almost uniquely comfortable letting us ask a bazillion questions and giving us other stuff that is satisfying story -wise, but just really dropping questions all over.

[950] I love it as a viewer.

[951] It's so stimulating.

[952] Thank you.

[953] So this starts at the beginning, basically.

[954] I'm not sure we set out, but once that became the challenge, once that was like, no, your movie's good, but we're never going to release it because we think the audience is dumb.

[955] At that point, we'd made one movie.

[956] We were fans.

[957] We were the audience.

[958] We're like, no, we're not dumb.

[959] And then when it worked, it kind of felt like we found a niche.

[960] Yeah, they made it for $4 .5 million and made $40 million.

[961] It's nuts.

[962] On video, those are the house -end days of DVD.

[963] Were you a 2x your box office?

[964] Yeah.

[965] There was a year in which we made a movie and no one released the movie.

[966] And I was like, I'm going to get a job.

[967] And then it worked.

[968] And then Chris started talking to me about this book that someone had sent him about these magicians.

[969] So that was my first paid gig.

[970] I wrote it for Guild Minimum, took two years.

[971] So I got paid $14 ,000 a year for two years, eating jack in the box the whole time.

[972] Yummy tacos.

[973] Oh, they're so nice.

[974] They're so nice.

[975] They're so greasy.

[976] They're so greasy.

[977] You could read the newspaper through the taco.

[978] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[979] They're like deep fried or something.

[980] They're just ridiculous.

[981] They're great when you were drunk.

[982] That Honda Civic had thousands of those in there.

[983] We might be the same person.

[984] Certainly the same nutritional composition.

[985] Yeah, yeah.

[986] What a movie, though.

[987] I love that movie.

[988] Yeah, so that's 2005.

[989] So you're right.

[990] So you guys make Momento in 2000.

[991] The prestige doesn't get made until 2005.

[992] Five years in a 20 -something -year -old's life is an eternity.

[993] It was a stress.

[994] So we were going to make it in 2003 with Jude Law.

[995] I think it was the original cast.

[996] And then Warner's had hired Chris to reboot the Batman franchise.

[997] And the stories that led to that were the most crazy kind of Hollywood stories ever.

[998] But it works out of the end.

[999] So he's on the Batman franchise.

[1000] You're not going to like that to bring this up, but I think it's so amusing.

[1001] When they cast Jude Law, David O. Russell was mad because Jude dropped out of another thing and put Chris in a headlock.

[1002] Oh, my God.

[1003] I wasn't there.

[1004] I owe David a headlock at some point.

[1005] He has a cool.

[1006] So I'm a look out.

[1007] Don't mess with my brother.

[1008] By the way, as the younger brother, you're living to protect your older brother.

[1009] This is like the dream of all dreams.

[1010] Oh, if I'd been, it was like a dinner party.

[1011] The journalist there.

[1012] The whole thing was crazy.

[1013] One of many, David O' Russell, dust -dusts.

[1014] If I've been there, it would have been the end of my career.

[1015] Do you like to fight?

[1016] In general?

[1017] Well, Dax wants to beat people up who hurt people in his life.

[1018] Do you have that same instinct?

[1019] Complex.

[1020] That impulse is there.

[1021] They grew up in Chicago.

[1022] I'm presuming there were a lot of fights in school.

[1023] I learned how to talk like a Yankee, and I learned how to defend myself a little bit.

[1024] But two older brothers, too, you know, you're going to figure this out.

[1025] You're scrapping all the time.

[1026] Suffice to say David would have got probably knocked out that night.

[1027] Yeah, okay.

[1028] Good thing you weren't there.

[1029] I'm not very good at fighting.

[1030] You're probably better than David.

[1031] Potentially.

[1032] We don't know.

[1033] We're not going to start anything.

[1034] I love David.

[1035] Brilliant filmmaker.

[1036] I don't know if he's much of a wrestler.

[1037] Exactly.

[1038] In a history of these hilarious dust -ups.

[1039] All this leaked footage of him screaming at actors and them screaming at him.

[1040] I mean, it's wonderful.

[1041] How he was getting so boring.

[1042] It had gotten a little boring.

[1043] Yeah.

[1044] I kind of love Tarantino, hunched out Don Simpson or Murphy, one of the Don, you know, all this crazy shit that happened.

[1045] I love it.

[1046] The good old days.

[1047] So in that five years, though...

[1048] It's supposed to be Jude.

[1049] We're going to make the prestige.

[1050] I'm like, here we go.

[1051] Amazing.

[1052] And then Warner's got nervous about Batman.

[1053] And they thought, it's not just a movie.

[1054] You've got to build the car, the suit, the cave.

[1055] There's all this stuff that comes along.

[1056] Jeff Robinoff was running Warner's at the time.

[1057] And he was right.

[1058] He was the best there was in that role, don't you think?

[1059] Incredible.

[1060] The formative part of our career was his belief.

[1061] I didn't realize until later I learned more about Warner Brothers.

[1062] I was 20 -something.

[1063] I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

[1064] That there was sort of an ancestral philosophy at Warner's that you would hire filmmakers and trust them and let them do things.

[1065] And keep them forever.

[1066] Clint Eastwood.

[1067] When I finally got a parking spot on the Warner's lot, it came out of Eastwood's allotment.

[1068] Oh, wow.

[1069] And it took five years.

[1070] I had to write a billion -dollar grossing movie before I was like, give the kid a parking spot.

[1071] Yeah, yeah.

[1072] So Chris starts doing Batman Begins.

[1073] And at a certain point in there, Robinoff said, well, you like writing with your brother.

[1074] Why don't we put him on the picture, too, and he can help.

[1075] I had just moved to, Boston with my girlfriend, now wife, who was getting a law degree.

[1076] And we moved into the apartment and I took a phone call and I was like, I'm going to go away.

[1077] I didn't come back for like six more months.

[1078] Moved to England and I was gone.

[1079] So we got pulled into the bat universe and stayed there for 10 years.

[1080] Wow.

[1081] Yes.

[1082] So the first one's great and it makes a great deal of money, totally resets the tone of all those movies.

[1083] Do you have writing credit on the first one?

[1084] I know you on the second one.

[1085] I don't.

[1086] I was a consultant.

[1087] Okay.

[1088] And the second one you do, and that one hits a billion dollars and it becomes the biggest superhero movie ever, only to be surpassed by Dark Night Rising.

[1089] You have to acknowledge this happens to 20 writers in the history of Hollywood.

[1090] Like this kind of franchise with the critical response, all of it, it's very storybooky.

[1091] I don't know where we go from here.

[1092] Television.

[1093] Yes.

[1094] Yeah.

[1095] I worked on Batman Begins in this kind of slightly arm's length capacity, but it was the one comic book my brother had ever given me as a kid, Batman Year 1 for my 14th birthday.

[1096] It was also on TV when we were kids.

[1097] 100%.

[1098] And 10 years later, I was on the set working with him.

[1099] I was like, this is nuts.

[1100] You have a good role in the sim.

[1101] Yeah, yeah.

[1102] Congratulations.

[1103] Well, we try to curry favor with AI as much as possible.

[1104] Okay.

[1105] If it's the AI running the SIM, then that's why.

[1106] You want me on their good side.

[1107] 100%.

[1108] They have a good side.

[1109] Most of my career is just trying to make sure that when they take over.

[1110] Yeah, you're picked.

[1111] Unless they have already taken over, to your point.

[1112] Oh, really quick.

[1113] What is the mechanical process when you guys write something together?

[1114] Is it basically you write a draft and he looks at it and he makes changes and then it goes back to you?

[1115] Do you guys ever sit together?

[1116] This period, it felt slow as hell because it was in my 20s.

[1117] We look back at it now as this incredibly productive period for us.

[1118] It was kind of a movie every couple of years.

[1119] Famine begins 2005, The Prestige, 2006.

[1120] The Dark Night, 2008.

[1121] He made Inception 2010.

[1122] Pulled this old script out of a drawer.

[1123] And I was like, well, it'd be better if I had co -written it, but it's pretty good.

[1124] And then the Dark Night Rises and then Interstellar.

[1125] And it was just kind of like, boom, boom, boom.

[1126] And to me, that felt normal, right?

[1127] I was like, oh, this is what we're doing.

[1128] but it's Chris's incredible ability.

[1129] The way it worked in that time was, with some of these movies, I was able to write the next one while he was shooting the last one.

[1130] Right.

[1131] And it worked really nicely.

[1132] So we would sit and talk about the story and figure things out.

[1133] And then he would go away and go shoot the last one.

[1134] And I would be stuck alone with this thing on the Warner's lot.

[1135] And I felt like the ghost haunted Warner Brothers.

[1136] You know, I'd go and talk for an inappropriate amount of time with the folks, the Starbucks.

[1137] Please talk to me. Yes.

[1138] I'm trapped in this tiny office with the script.

[1139] I know.

[1140] I don't understand.

[1141] It's just me and Batman.

[1142] And I'm a fraud.

[1143] I'm not good at this.

[1144] And I would crack away at it, and it was good, but I missed being on set.

[1145] Both Batman Begins, The Dark Night, we shot in Chicago.

[1146] The Dark Night, Chris was on the fence about making another one.

[1147] I think he didn't want to become a superhero movie director.

[1148] And he was very proud of Batman Begins.

[1149] To me, it was like we built a Fox Body wagon.

[1150] We built this amazing sports car.

[1151] And I'm like, let's take it for a drive.

[1152] Don't you want to make one more?

[1153] Like, we made all this stuff.

[1154] You did all the hard work.

[1155] You've established everything.

[1156] You've got the tone.

[1157] He's been an hour doing the origin story.

[1158] And it's great.

[1159] But it's like, what can we do with this?

[1160] And can we take the same characters and shift ever so slightly into a different genre?

[1161] Can we go from an adventure film to a crime film, to a mob movie?

[1162] Bring that feeling into it.

[1163] So I was, I mean, literally sitting with Chuck Rovin and Chris and being like, dude, don't be a chicken ship.

[1164] Let's do this.

[1165] And I knew with the script, and he developed the story with David Goyer with a little bit of input for me, and it was like, first act, pretty detailed, second act, somewhat detailed, third act, duh, he rides away at the end.

[1166] Okay, once we had the script on, I was like, this is going to be great.

[1167] This is exciting.

[1168] We've got to make this movie.

[1169] And eventually he came around, he did manage to avoid being pigeonholed.

[1170] But we went to go make that movie in Chicago, and they were there all summer.

[1171] And this was the moment of my life I started to realize as a screenwriter.

[1172] Great job.

[1173] And I'm lucky to be here.

[1174] But it's a little like being a chef where you have to write the recipe in a bubble.

[1175] And they never let you touch the ingredients.

[1176] And you never actually get to cook the meal.

[1177] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1178] With Chris and with Emma, there's such a unit, they do their thing.

[1179] There was nothing for me to do.

[1180] I didn't need to go back to set.

[1181] It's a very solitary endeavor.

[1182] Painful.

[1183] It's brutal.

[1184] And I'm a little more extroverted than Chris.

[1185] say you don't seem like the type that's just super happy being really bad fit i want to crawl out my skin and then if i do three days of that then i start to work do you collect funny sayings about writing i like to collect them one is lawrence casdins writers are people who have agreed to do homework for the rest of their lives there's so many times where i had like three different things that were sold places and i owed rewrites we'll be on vacation i'm like yes she's on vacation i'm never free oh i'm kidding angina just thinking about yeah we're going to high school buddy's wedding in wine country.

[1186] I was running my first TV show.

[1187] So basically, we get through a series of different things.

[1188] Spielberg hired me to write Interstellar.

[1189] I'm writing The Dark Night Rises at the same time.

[1190] And then Stephen leaves Paramount and the script was a Paramount.

[1191] And I'd spent three years going to Caltech trying to learn relativity with Kip.

[1192] Kipp Thorne.

[1193] One of the greatest human beings.

[1194] He won the Nobel after all this.

[1195] He did.

[1196] He wins a Nobel after it's all setting down.

[1197] But he basically invented the field of gravitational astronomy.

[1198] So me and Kip go up to Hanford, Washington, and fly in a tiny Cessna, he shows me this crazy thing he's built down in the desert, the two vacuum tubes that measure vibrations in space time itself.

[1199] Wow.

[1200] This is how we look at black holes.

[1201] Amazing project, but Spielberg leaves, and I'm holding the bag.

[1202] I've been a script that I've spent three years on.

[1203] I'm sort of sitting there saying, I can't put three years of my life into this thing and not make it.

[1204] Well, I know a director, so I'm going to get going on that.

[1205] But do you think that's going to be a hard pitch?

[1206] Because no one really loves taking over a project that another director had worked on, especially Especially if the person, Spielberg, I don't think that helps.

[1207] 100%.

[1208] But I was in Chicago tech scouting with Chris on the Dark Night when I got the call that I had the gig with Stephen.

[1209] And we had a glass of champagne together.

[1210] I was like, that's a big deal.

[1211] I would try out some of the ideas with him.

[1212] So he was kind of with me through the development of it.

[1213] I would, like, pitch it to Chris before pitching it to Stephen, just get a sense for like to sound good.

[1214] You know, that was the process.

[1215] We pitch each other's stuff.

[1216] So I started trying to inveigle Chris into the script because I'm like, no, I want to make this movie.

[1217] But at the same time, I was watching my wife's experience in television.

[1218] Back in the early 2000s, there was this kind of TV versus movie, this kind of snobbery about like, well, if you're writing movies.

[1219] Yeah, it didn't have cachet quite yet.

[1220] We only had Sopranos at that point.

[1221] That was it.

[1222] Just the one thing.

[1223] I remember when the exactives of Warner's was like, why are you working in television?

[1224] I was like, because it's good and it's fun.

[1225] And it's immediate.

[1226] And you can tell much longer stories.

[1227] There's so many things.

[1228] And you're not going to spend three years learning relativity and then have nothing to show for it.

[1229] You might make a pilot and have nothing to show for it.

[1230] And that was terrifying.

[1231] But I got lucky there, too.

[1232] I went in to meet with JJ Abrams.

[1233] We were at the same agency for about four minutes, and they put us together.

[1234] And we have one of those conversations where you just immediately like, oh, building and building and building, immediately got along with each other.

[1235] He was trying to get me to write a movie.

[1236] And at the end of it, I was like, well, you're a terrific TV producer.

[1237] I have an idea for a show, person of interest, and away we win.

[1238] Well, let's also add, in film, the writer is the red -headed stepchild.

[1239] They're the shitty dog you kick and then you send away, and this sucks.

[1240] No one said that a month ago.

[1241] In television, the writer decides everything.

[1242] The directors are guests that come in and execute the right.

[1243] writer's vision down to the letter of the law.

[1244] So there's also a humongous power shift as a writer in television.

[1245] I like to say it's irrational because if you think of movies, big screen, short story, TV, small screen, big story, right?

[1246] So it makes sense.

[1247] Okay, my career plan, brilliant.

[1248] I was a writer in a director's medium, and now I'm a director.

[1249] It's very curious.

[1250] I enjoy the directing television, no one cares.

[1251] I love it.

[1252] But yeah, that was it.

[1253] I was like, I want to be back on set.

[1254] I missed set.

[1255] Chris Ham would be like, come hang out and said if you want to.

[1256] I'm like, I have nothing to do to it.

[1257] The Dark Night was a script where I wrote what I was like, this is what I think a Batman movie should be.

[1258] Chris took a pass and we went and shot it.

[1259] And I kept waiting for them and be like, you can't put a bomb in a guy's stomach.

[1260] You get all these things.

[1261] I was like, they were not going to let us do any of these things.

[1262] And it gave us no notes as a movie that has no notes.

[1263] They were like, it's cool, go.

[1264] Which is incredible.

[1265] That doesn't happen.

[1266] Never happens.

[1267] Now you must acknowledge your brother is part of a lot of maybe even apocryful stories, Hollywood stories.

[1268] Like, I remember I was doing chips at Warner Brothers, and I was going through a process that is what I deserve to go through.

[1269] Endless, you've got to get Brad Pitt as the bad guy, or we won't green light.

[1270] You know, just preposterous hurdles.

[1271] And at that time, he had brought in, oh, fuck, what movie would it have been?

[1272] But basically, he told them, I'm bringing the script down.

[1273] You guys have three hours to sit in a room and read it.

[1274] And then I'm taking the script away.

[1275] Everyone showed up.

[1276] And then at the end of the meeting, again, this is all rumored what I've heard.

[1277] they've read it he goes i need this budget i'll take the scripts now and then he leaves and that's how it is now i'm not talented enough to do that i don't deserve that but wow what a fantasy that's still how he doesn't look for him i mean he's earned it like but what was cool about it was even before he earned it that's how he did it i look at this if you're like is it dax yeah how's he getting away with this i'm not getting away with the shit that happened while i was fighting to get a green light i was just like god this couldn't be a more different experience Don't remember going in with him at one point.

[1278] We went in to do, I can't remember which project it was.

[1279] We go in, and it was a studio head and assorted muckety mucks, and someone starts asking a question.

[1280] He's like, let's just be clear.

[1281] We're not pitching you here.

[1282] We're just going to explain what we're going to do.

[1283] Here's the product you have an opportunity to make.

[1284] I was like, you can't say that.

[1285] Man, you can.

[1286] It turns out.

[1287] You can.

[1288] Okay, Interstellar.

[1289] Let's stop in on it for a second.

[1290] What a movie.

[1291] It's so, I mean, talking about the audience isn't going to understand.

[1292] I don't know that there's a better example of a movie that, like, God bless everyone for taking the leap.

[1293] Yeah.

[1294] It's so complicated.

[1295] I think of myself as pretty savvy in this space.

[1296] Like astronomy was one of my favorite classes in college.

[1297] I really think I understand how it's going.

[1298] And of course, even with what I already think is a pretty good grasp of it, there's a good 30 minutes of the movie where I just have to tell myself, this will somehow through osmosis to start making sense.

[1299] And I have to let go of chasing down every logic twist.

[1300] But what makes the movie work, what's so powerful, about it.

[1301] Why I ended up crying in that movie is it's anchored to the notion of a father missing his child's entire life.

[1302] And I just had these little girls.

[1303] And then I was like, oh, fuck.

[1304] Now forget all the X's and Y's of it all.

[1305] That's the notion I need to give the stakes in an emotional resonance.

[1306] And it's so powerful.

[1307] I'm just curious at what point that was a part of the story.

[1308] Right out of the gate.

[1309] It was part of the first pitch to Spielberg.

[1310] And here's why.

[1311] He got fascinated by Einstein.

[1312] One of the things about Einstein is he didn't use any instruments.

[1313] He didn't even do a lot of math.

[1314] He had a chalkboard.

[1315] He would sit and think about things.

[1316] And so it would take years.

[1317] I remember they had to wait because of World War I to prove the theory of special relativity because they needed to go out and observe the transit of Mercury, the transitive of a planet in front of another astral body.

[1318] They watched gravity warp light.

[1319] Bingo.

[1320] There were limited opportunities.

[1321] Yeah, they were going to go up to the North Polish area.

[1322] They went down to Sub -Saharan Africa.

[1323] They had to wait for hostilities to end.

[1324] So there's this amazing newspaper, 1918, that's like, he was right, you know, basically.

[1325] He's right.

[1326] But one of the things I loved about Einstein is, in a lot of his thought experiments, there would be twin brothers, weird family relationship.

[1327] You'd send one twin off around the sun at the speed of light and come back.

[1328] Maybe three minutes older.

[1329] There's this human drama at the center of all these thought experiments.

[1330] Yeah, he was very smart at anchoring these analogies.

[1331] There's a woman on a train, and she's looking backwards on the train.

[1332] Yeah.

[1333] And I kept thinking about the woman on the train.

[1334] I kept thinking of the brother in space.

[1335] I was like, no, that's it.

[1336] It's about the distance between these people.

[1337] It only matters if it's affecting humans.

[1338] That's the only lens we have in these events.

[1339] So I write the movie, and the kid is called Murph, because in my version, it was a son.

[1340] Chris is firstborn as daughter.

[1341] He goes off and takes the script, starts doing his thing with it.

[1342] I'm in TV land.

[1343] And in the interim, we have our first child, and it's a daughter.

[1344] And he changes the kid to a little girl, and I watch the movie, and I'm crying in my own movie.

[1345] I'm so angry.

[1346] How could you do this to me?

[1347] You ambushed me. Also feels indulgent, right?

[1348] To cry at your own movie.

[1349] I did this to myself.

[1350] Oh, what a movie.

[1351] What a fucking movie.

[1352] Okay, so you do person of interest and you do that for five seasons.

[1353] Yeah.

[1354] Now, I did not see that, but the first directing of yours I see is Westworld.

[1355] And I can't tell you, I wish my wife was here to confirm this.

[1356] I bet you once a month, sincerely, I say out loud, I wish we could watch the first season of Westworld for the first time.

[1357] I miss the world so much.

[1358] I miss the tone.

[1359] I miss that show more than any other.

[1360] Or I just want to have that experience again.

[1361] The experience of making the show.

[1362] We've had so much fun.

[1363] I've been so lucky and worked on so many amazing projects.

[1364] That one was very special.

[1365] It was the first collaboration that my wife and I did together.

[1366] We wrote the pilot together.

[1367] We produced it.

[1368] I directed the pilot.

[1369] She directed on subsequent seasons.

[1370] And the cast that we put together.

[1371] Oh, it's preposterous.

[1372] I had to, like, write it down to it.

[1373] Ed Harris.

[1374] All of these actors.

[1375] Evan, Hopkins, James, Tanyway, Jeffrey, Ed.

[1376] We got our first choice with every role.

[1377] And it was that moment, we cast the pilot in 2014.

[1378] And it was the point where TV was that it's absolute most powerful.

[1379] Breaking Bad was already out.

[1380] Mad Men was already out.

[1381] Game of Thrones.

[1382] We're very close with Dan and Dave, lovely guys.

[1383] The reason why we felt comfortable trying to make Westworld was Game of Thrones.

[1384] And they were shooting in all the same places that we had shot things like Batman Begins.

[1385] I was like, oh, HBO is going for it.

[1386] Yes.

[1387] They're not just doing complicated storytelling.

[1388] They're doing filmmaking.

[1389] They're doing the real thing.

[1390] Yeah, they have $200 million budgets.

[1391] Not at first.

[1392] Dan and Dave, very wisely from the beginning, fought for on location, practical photography.

[1393] They knew how to make these things really well.

[1394] And I think in 2014, when we look back at it, all of my friends in TV, we always joke about all the golden ages of televisions have been like six of them.

[1395] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1396] There was the ER golden age of television.

[1397] There was a Hill Street Blues golden age of television.

[1398] It's like a durable medium.

[1399] It's been around for a while.

[1400] But 2014 was probably the moment in which it powers.

[1401] The eclipsed movies up.

[1402] that point, in my opinion.

[1403] For a couple of years, and my brother was pissed about it.

[1404] We had these arguments.

[1405] Sure, sure, sure.

[1406] Yeah.

[1407] And when we went out to Hopkins, people literally were like, why even bother?

[1408] Let's move on.

[1409] And I was like, no, no, no, he's going to say yes.

[1410] Because I've been watching interviews with him.

[1411] We talk about being on these movies where they make him sit in his trailer for 14 hours because they were doing green screenshots.

[1412] And they weren't ready for him.

[1413] And I'm like, that is an actor who's being wasted in movies right now.

[1414] He loved Breaking Bad.

[1415] And I said, we're going to go out to him.

[1416] He's going to say yes.

[1417] In the show like Westworld, you're making 10 movies in the time span of two features.

[1418] Totally bonkers.

[1419] Yeah.

[1420] So if you like to act, you're doing it at probably 5X.

[1421] First day with Hopkins was him and Jeffrey on set.

[1422] And these are two actors that I absolutely adored.

[1423] These are two greats.

[1424] We put them on set together, give them a six -page scene where they're talking about how coding is kind of like an incantation, how it's summoning things to life with words.

[1425] And here's all this stuff that Lisa and I have written.

[1426] And here are these two masters just crushing it with a bunch of crazy robots in the background moving around.

[1427] A guy programmer trying to keep up with the acting.

[1428] The experience of making that show, we knew we were blessed in the moment.

[1429] Sometimes you have this feeling, and I don't know if you ever have this feeling.

[1430] When you're doing a project, you're like, oh, the stars are all aligning right here.

[1431] It's going my way.

[1432] Now, it wasn't always the case.

[1433] That show got extremely difficult.

[1434] The rest of the first season was an absolute combat.

[1435] It was insane.

[1436] What were the challenges?

[1437] HBO had never made science fiction before, and they lost faith.

[1438] About halfway through the season.

[1439] They started getting scared.

[1440] Well, they started giving a note is hard.

[1441] But the best notes are the ones where they figure out what's the movie that the filmmaker is trying to make and let's give them notes in line with that.

[1442] Let's not try to make the movie I would make as a producer as an executive.

[1443] That's a key distinction to be able to look past the movie you would make.

[1444] By the way, when you pitched it, what was your comp?

[1445] Did you use some comps?

[1446] It's a very good question.

[1447] Yeah, well, the western part, JJ called us about the project.

[1448] And it's a Crichton book?

[1449] Weirdly, it was an original screenplay that he directed himself.

[1450] It was the first thing he ever directed.

[1451] And the original movie is bonkers.

[1452] It's great.

[1453] I've never seen it.

[1454] It's got some flaws.

[1455] Namely, Crichton was brilliant.

[1456] The guy understood everything.

[1457] And he's trying to cram all of that into 92 minutes.

[1458] Everything he knows.

[1459] Breathless.

[1460] Yeah.

[1461] But there's a couple moments in there that haunted me that we tried to weave into the show that I still hold on to.

[1462] So there's one moment the robots start to malfunction in the movie.

[1463] The head scientist became the sort of the Hopkins character in the show.

[1464] He's trying to figure out what's going on.

[1465] He's looking at them.

[1466] He's like, it's spreading from one of the other, almost like a sickness or an illness.

[1467] And I'm like, or a virus.

[1468] You know, it's one of those clunky moments.

[1469] were like, computer virus.

[1470] Then I got curious and I looked it up.

[1471] The first computer virus appeared in the wild the year after the movie came out.

[1472] Oh, wow.

[1473] So he had predicted that.

[1474] He had intuited it.

[1475] And in that same scene, he goes on to say, in some cases, these machines have been designed by other machines and we don't really know how they work.

[1476] And that's the moment we're in right now.

[1477] Yes, AI building coding.

[1478] GPT code, LLM based coding.

[1479] We're fully there.

[1480] We'll never understand our world.

[1481] From this point on.

[1482] Ever again.

[1483] Yeah, exactly.

[1484] That's right.

[1485] They talk about like, who was the last man in history who fully understood his world.

[1486] Well, in what year did humans become the second smartest thing on planet earth is a fascinating time six months for now we're it we're the generation in history yeah we'll watch that will be the last of the smartest primates to occupy it's so fucking wild it's a wild moment i wind up kind of obsessed with it and a lot of the projects then start west world and person of interest and interstellar the ai is there's sort of more in the star wars role of kind of supporting figures but that's where it kind of started for me i was like this is the story of our age you know if you're around during the 15th century of the age of exploration this is the story of our age.

[1487] This is what we're going to witness that is distinct and different from everything else at any other generation.

[1488] This is an inflection point.

[1489] With Hopkins, they took too long to make his deal and he started to get cold feet about it and I'd write him a letter.

[1490] Can I ask you a quick question as a sidebar?

[1491] Do you fear that you present not as smart as you are because I think this is another thing we might share in common.

[1492] I'm kind of picturing Hopkins looking at you and going, can this guy have really written interstellar?

[1493] Who is this guy?

[1494] Why does he not have an English accent?

[1495] He's not wearing a suit.

[1496] Yeah.

[1497] Where's his three pieces?

[1498] Do you feel like that at all?

[1499] A little bit.

[1500] I was telling Monica this the other day.

[1501] I even wrote under a pen name Darren Wolf because I thought, well, that'll shake this Dax Shepherd dumb comedian and idiography.

[1502] Big dude.

[1503] I mean, 100 % big dumb, dumb, big dumb, dumb.

[1504] You played a lot of dumbdums.

[1505] Right.

[1506] And so that gets confusing.

[1507] You're not in that same position.

[1508] But also, he just looks like a regular old dude.

[1509] You do.

[1510] You look like a handsome, a handsome regular guy.

[1511] We play softball on the weekends.

[1512] But then it's much better.

[1513] when you show that you're smart when you also seem regular.

[1514] A little bit of will hunting vibe.

[1515] Exactly.

[1516] I think it's a good combination.

[1517] I just got restruck by the outfit, by the way.

[1518] Oh, thank you.

[1519] Yeah, I was like, I was listening, listening.

[1520] I was like, it really is a dynamite outfit.

[1521] Thank you.

[1522] It's like a terrific outfit.

[1523] I'm struggling a little with the color because, like my brother, I'm colorblind.

[1524] Oh, you are?

[1525] Red green colorblind.

[1526] What do you think she's in?

[1527] Like, if I hadn't said yellow banana, what do you see over here?

[1528] Chartreuth?

[1529] You're reading more green than it is.

[1530] Is Chartreuse green?

[1531] Yeah, it's like a yellow.

[1532] Halfway between yellow and green.

[1533] How about this?

[1534] Does she match that chair right there?

[1535] Oh, that's a salmon.

[1536] That's...

[1537] Oh, my God.

[1538] Oh, my God.

[1539] I do think there's something here.

[1540] I want to make too much of a meal of this, but I do think me being dyslexic is helpful.

[1541] It does something.

[1542] 100%.

[1543] No, I'm obsessed with color.

[1544] The main, yes.

[1545] And I think if you're seeing everything wrong, yes, you're in a different reality than other people, and it kind of opens up a whole different point of view.

[1546] Yeah, I had therapy this morning.

[1547] Oh, we're talking about India.

[1548] We've just gone to India with Bill Gates.

[1549] I'm going tonight.

[1550] Oh, my God.

[1551] Going tonight.

[1552] What?

[1553] I'm going to Delhi tonight and Mumbai next week.

[1554] What?

[1555] I haven't been in 20 years.

[1556] I'm excited and I'm also a little nervous.

[1557] Are you staying at the Oberon?

[1558] Oberoi?

[1559] Oberoi?

[1560] I don't think so.

[1561] Meeting a buddy in Delhi, who's an architect and he's very specific about where we stay.

[1562] Oh, I bet you'll stay somewhere great.

[1563] I hope.

[1564] Something like that.

[1565] You already have a guide?

[1566] No, not yet.

[1567] And if you have a recommendation, please.

[1568] Listen, this is the guy the Gates team uses for anyone who comes.

[1569] This woman is Indian.

[1570] She's a historian.

[1571] She has a master's in history.

[1572] And we learned so...

[1573] And she's so fun.

[1574] She's so cool.

[1575] Wait, we'll definitely give you her information.

[1576] She's phenomenal.

[1577] No, my last trip to Delhi, I was in my mid -20s, airline Brett.

[1578] And I was going to lose my tickets when I turned 25.

[1579] Oh.

[1580] United at the time had flight number one, which went this way, and flight number two, which went this way, all the way around the world.

[1581] And you're doing counterclockwise and clockwise.

[1582] Exactly.

[1583] So I went to Delhi in the middle of the summer by myself.

[1584] I don't recommend it.

[1585] Yeah.

[1586] They're like 110 degrees and humid like Chicago.

[1587] And 20 years ago, which is also a different deli.

[1588] I've heard.

[1589] My wife went last year.

[1590] She's heard for years my stories about my brief time in India.

[1591] I was like, you've got to take a friend.

[1592] You need to be able to talk to someone with the experience you're having.

[1593] She gets there and she's like, I'm at the Starbucks.

[1594] I'm like, oh, it's gone.

[1595] I was stuck in a traffic jam because there was a monkey riding an ox.

[1596] And I was like, and no one's going anywhere.

[1597] We stumbled upon a monkey.

[1598] We're like in a shopping district and we turn a corner and there's this monkey.

[1599] Yeah.

[1600] We're kind of like, is this isn't going to, jump up at us and scratch us.

[1601] That's exciting to me, though, because it means there's still a little bit sure.

[1602] There's some activity, especially you'll go to Old Delhi on this tour and you get into Rickshaw, like there's dudes cleaning each other's ears out.

[1603] Yeah, there's still like a ton of poverty, a ton of stuff, but it's vibrant.

[1604] It's very, very cool.

[1605] But anyway, we went and we were discussing on the trip.

[1606] Dax and I, we were having different experiences, obviously.

[1607] I'm an Indian person going to India for essentially the first time.

[1608] Oh, wow.

[1609] And I have a lot of baggage with Growing up in a white world.

[1610] Yes, I have a lot of stuff with it.

[1611] So, of course, it's going to be different.

[1612] And my therapist was like, yeah, you guys obviously are going to have different experiences, like you do always.

[1613] Every, she's like, it was just extra apparent when you're there because it's so heightened and you can really see it.

[1614] She's like, that's always, always you two are having different experiences.

[1615] Everyone is.

[1616] That's astute.

[1617] It was so smart.

[1618] Yeah, it said it was very on display in India.

[1619] Yeah, we couldn't ignore it.

[1620] things.

[1621] How was it?

[1622] It was incredible.

[1623] I feel like it was so helpful for me. It was life -changing for me. I'll tell you the moment I cried.

[1624] It was a very privileged trip because we're with Bill Gates.

[1625] We're going to meetings with billionaires and presidents of states and all this stuff.

[1626] And we're there and we don't know why we're there.

[1627] We look ridiculous.

[1628] It says podcasts are on our name placard and we're like, oh my God, it's so embarrassing.

[1629] We left this meeting and Monica goes, you know, that's the first time I've ever been in a room with the majority were brown people and they had the power, and she goes, I'm so proud to be from India.

[1630] I was like, oh, buddy, I want that for you so bad.

[1631] That's so cool.

[1632] It was the first time I've ever felt it growing up here.

[1633] It's always reversed.

[1634] It's always I'm the only brown person at the table and to have to Axby the only white person.

[1635] Like, it was so bizarre.

[1636] It was so interesting.

[1637] And I didn't have the power.

[1638] I mean, I could have beat anyone's ass in there.

[1639] Let's make no mistakes.

[1640] I don't watch some Hollywood movies.

[1641] I got moves.

[1642] I had appointed myself Bill's security.

[1643] Because I'm like, this is the only thing that justifies me sitting here.

[1644] I'm in a suit.

[1645] What am I doing next to him?

[1646] I do this with Chris sometimes what I'm out and about.

[1647] I'll take the picture.

[1648] Oh, that's great.

[1649] It's good.

[1650] You feel useful.

[1651] Yeah, sure.

[1652] Anyway, sorry.

[1653] What a sidebar.

[1654] It's going to get me every fucking time, Monica.

[1655] It's going to get me every time.

[1656] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[1657] Do you cry a lot more now that you're getting older?

[1658] Oh, God, it's terrible.

[1659] I know.

[1660] Especially watching bad movies on planes.

[1661] Like too much oxygen.

[1662] I think about my kids is the line that we gave Damon and Interstellar, where it's the last thing you'd see before you die is your children, you know?

[1663] I've held on to that more than anything.

[1664] Yeah, your life is a total success if you get to look at your kids as you die.

[1665] But they've enfeebled me. I'm now an emotional wreck.

[1666] They're wonderful.

[1667] They're the best thing they ever happen to me, but.

[1668] Yeah, you guys needed it.

[1669] I'm glad it happened to both of you.

[1670] It's bonkers.

[1671] We just had Cooper on two who I've known forever, and now we know you know them as well.

[1672] And, yeah, half the interviews I was talking about, like, how frequently we're crying now and how we're crying differently.

[1673] It's getting embarrassing.

[1674] Like, I'm not able to do the job a lot of the time.

[1675] Like, you're doing it on purpose, but you're not.

[1676] And I hate sentimentality.

[1677] I can't stand it.

[1678] Like, I'm all about irreverence.

[1679] And now here I am.

[1680] I'm like, so sentimental.

[1681] Oh, embarrassingly, publicly crying.

[1682] Oscar Sunday night and the director of 20 days in Mario Poll says, I'm the first Ukrainian to ever get an Oscar.

[1683] And I wish I didn't get it.

[1684] And I, you could hear.

[1685] It's really terrible.

[1686] I do the thing where you hit audible choke.

[1687] Yeah.

[1688] Like that?

[1689] And the seat filter is next to me turn like, what's going on?

[1690] Okay?

[1691] And my mom was next to me and she felt it too and it was like, I know exactly what he's about to say and I cannot handle this right now.

[1692] Like I cannot do this right now.

[1693] And I just had to summon all of my, you know.

[1694] I didn't watch it.

[1695] What are he saying?

[1696] His documentary is about the siege of Mario Poll and it's rough, but it's incredible.

[1697] And he's like, I wish I'd never had to make this movie.

[1698] I wish I wasn't here accepting this award.

[1699] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[1700] Because I wish this had never.

[1701] happened.

[1702] Tough moment.

[1703] Amazing movie.

[1704] Wow.

[1705] Okay.

[1706] Fallout.

[1707] So full, full transparency disclosure.

[1708] I often have to watch stuff before I interview somebody.

[1709] And my wife and I are on a viewing schedule.

[1710] So what am I interrupting?

[1711] Interrupting something that we're kind of into right now.

[1712] Love on the spectrum.

[1713] We're watching that with the kids.

[1714] I was going to say, if it's Love Island, I might have a shot.

[1715] If it's something great.

[1716] Oh, I know.

[1717] Murder at the end of the earth.

[1718] We're supposed to be terrific.

[1719] It's really good.

[1720] And we're only two in, and we're like, we're pretty smitten with it.

[1721] So Monday night, I go, I got to watch something.

[1722] And she's like, okay, I go, but it's no one.

[1723] So this could be good.

[1724] And she's like, okay, I was looking forward to murder at the end of the earth.

[1725] And this is the honest of God's truth.

[1726] Seven minutes in, she goes, holy fuck.

[1727] And I go, I know, this might be the best pilot I've ever seen in my life.

[1728] Oh, you're very kind.

[1729] I wish she was here, the fucking superlatives we've been using.

[1730] three days.

[1731] A, all day, Tuesday, I got a text on her.

[1732] I'm like, cannot wait to get home and watch episode two.

[1733] Me too.

[1734] I got to get through this day, so watch episode two.

[1735] It's so fucking good.

[1736] It's insane how much stuff is going on in this show.

[1737] A, I didn't know it was a video game.

[1738] I've never seen the video game.

[1739] But weirdly Goggins character does trigger some image I've had without the nose.

[1740] Goals.

[1741] Yeah, they're characters in all the games.

[1742] These are the folks who are super irradiated.

[1743] It's the game's way of dealing with otherness and the idea that you have this community sort of post -human and they don't get along very well with the normies with the smoothies as they call so i was having a hard time parsing now what's you and what's this video game but what i love immediately is and i don't think i'm spoiling too much but the show opens and we're at a birthday party and we're at a house and we're at a very prototypical hollywood house and the cities in the background we're up high and inside they're watching like a 50s tv and the little boys are all obsessed with cowboys.

[1744] It's all 50s, but in the deep background, we can see LA is a super futuristic city.

[1745] And I loved it immediately.

[1746] I loved the juxtaposition.

[1747] And then the music is 50s.

[1748] To me, it felt very similar to the Westworld tone.

[1749] I felt that weird mix of futuristic and retroness, which then I assumed, oh, this is kind of Jonah's vibe.

[1750] But then I learned the game also had some retro futuristic, vibe.

[1751] Very much.

[1752] It makes me so happy because we're now in the place we're just starting to show it to people, and we've been working on this for a couple of years.

[1753] I mean, there were 4 ,000 Viz -Effects shots in the season.

[1754] We've been sitting on it for a minute, trying to get it all done.

[1755] So it's super exciting to be talking to you about it.

[1756] No, it's going to be a fucking blockbuster.

[1757] This show's going to make Amazon.

[1758] We're super excited.

[1759] So the tone, that was my experience of the game.

[1760] So it was right around, I think, Fallout 3.

[1761] Fallout had been a series, six or seven games.

[1762] When did it start?

[1763] In the late 90s?

[1764] From the beginning, the game could have been written by ad busters.

[1765] It's so political.

[1766] It has such a point of view.

[1767] And I started to notice in the late 2000s that games were getting a little braver than film, especially politically.

[1768] And you don't expect that from games at all.

[1769] You play something like Bioshock or you play something like, oh, you play something like, oh, this is doing things that movies are scared to do.

[1770] Lisa was not a gamer.

[1771] So when we were researching Westworld, we played a lot of games.

[1772] Game and mechanic is a big part of how the park works.

[1773] You had to figure out how does this work.

[1774] So we played a bunch of games as research.

[1775] She'd be like, oh, we're doing research again.

[1776] Yeah.

[1777] Yeah.

[1778] So it was a Catan?

[1779] Oh, love it.

[1780] Oh, what a game.

[1781] Or ruin the best friendships ever.

[1782] Oh, it's true.

[1783] No friendship's strong enough to stand.

[1784] We just stop playing with the kids because I'm like, it's going to fracture the family.

[1785] We're going to be careful now.

[1786] We just taught ours.

[1787] But somewhere in late 2000s, I think I was in between the Dark Night Dark Night, Dark Night Rise, is video games for a while before our kids would be like the brain cleanse.

[1788] I'm going to get the whole movie out of my head.

[1789] I'm going to play Halo for four days.

[1790] And someone recommended Fallout 3, which is the first one under the supervision of Todd Howard, who is the creative director, essentially the showrunner of all of these games.

[1791] And incredible.

[1792] Lovely, lovely human being.

[1793] And it was the first game that Todd had worked on, and I knew nothing about it other than it would highly recommend it by people I like.

[1794] And I put it in, and I started playing it.

[1795] I'm like, what is this?

[1796] What is the tone of this thing?

[1797] What is happening here?

[1798] It's dark, it's emotional, it's funny, it's subversive, it's political.

[1799] Right out of the gate, this is all about not our America, but a version of America that's kind of this Eisenhower era America that never has a water gate, never has a Vietnam, never has a moment of national reflection, just swagger's on for another hundred years.

[1800] That opening scene is in 2077, but it looks like the 1950s, nuclear power toasters.

[1801] It was like the dream, the Jetsonian America.

[1802] And then it ends.

[1803] Yeah, we got to say it's a bummer because it's such an impactful scene, but I think it's prerequisite to then talk about all the different dynamics of the show.

[1804] But at this birthday party, they're looking out over the city and just one after another atomic bomb starts falling.

[1805] Yeah.

[1806] I would hasten to point out that I had a conversation with Todd Howard in 2019.

[1807] We started developing the show in 2019.

[1808] my brother started developing Oppenheimer the next year.

[1809] Oh!

[1810] But he works quickly, and so I got to watch his movie where you have this moment.

[1811] It was one of the things I was struck by looking at all the testing footage because we knew we had to show the world beforehand and we knew we had to show the bombs dropping.

[1812] And we looked at all the test footage.

[1813] The thing I was struck by, most of them don't have sound.

[1814] And we eventually found a couple that do have sound and the shocking thing about it is.

[1815] This whole thing plays out, and you hear nothing.

[1816] Of course, because speed of light is 86 ,000 miles per second, and speed of sound is 700 miles.

[1817] Yeah.

[1818] And so you get, we timed it.

[1819] We watched the foot at two minutes to watch the world end.

[1820] This is now my deepest heart is that I'm with my kids in this happen.

[1821] So we wrote it in.

[1822] Also kind of maybe a blessing because you get to turn and say, I love you so much.

[1823] That's right.

[1824] Your kids would hear you as you explain to them how you felt before it's over.

[1825] And you'd watch the blast wave come towards you.

[1826] So then Chris gets to put in his movie first.

[1827] But yours is better.

[1828] I'm sorry.

[1829] Oh, boy.

[1830] I said it.

[1831] That moment is much more emotional.

[1832] It's emotional in Oppenheimer.

[1833] It's a brilliant moment in Oppenheimer.

[1834] But it's emotional and it's emotional.

[1835] Because it's, again, family.

[1836] But here's what you're uniquely great at.

[1837] You pack in, because things come really rapid in this show.

[1838] So it's like, we meet this guy with his daughter.

[1839] We already know he's somehow been besmirched by his peers.

[1840] He's got a history.

[1841] We don't really know what.

[1842] I love it again.

[1843] Leave a lot of questions.

[1844] But when that goes off, within the first two -minute opening, I'm heartbroken.

[1845] This is happening to this man and his daughter.

[1846] We fast forward 200 years.

[1847] And now we meet a whole new group of people.

[1848] And they're living subterranean.

[1849] And this now becomes the metaphor between the wealth and income inequality.

[1850] We started in 2019 and then every year the project got more relevant.

[1851] And then when Russia invaded Ukraine, I was like, okay, you can be less relevant.

[1852] Right.

[1853] This is helpful to a point, enough relevance.

[1854] But yeah, we meet these people and they're kind of in an idealic situation.

[1855] It's 200 years later.

[1856] They're waiting out the radiation that's above ground.

[1857] And then again, we meet another hero.

[1858] We meet another father -daughter relationship.

[1859] We establish all this stuff so quickly.

[1860] And then there's upheaval there.

[1861] And now we go and we go to this military base.

[1862] No one ever happy in any of the projects at work.

[1863] I want to do one product.

[1864] No, no, keep going.

[1865] Keep killing all the people we just met.

[1866] I think that was Game of Thrones big proprietary thing.

[1867] It's like just getting you to fall in a lot of people and then fucking murdering them.

[1868] And you watch with such unease forever because you know everyone's fair game.

[1869] Everyone is fair game.

[1870] That was what was revelatory about that show.

[1871] It really was.

[1872] Because you can say as a writer, the hardest thing to do really is to establish people.

[1873] to get you to care about them.

[1874] Interstellar.

[1875] I love the movie.

[1876] But when I watched the first hour, I'm struggling because it was the three -year struggle of how on earth am I packing all this in?

[1877] Always feels too long.

[1878] Yes.

[1879] Not on Chris's finished movie.

[1880] I think he did a masterful job pulling it all together, but I just feel the three years of how are we going to build this world and how these relationships matter.

[1881] But what's Titanic about what you tackled is we are in three completely different shows.

[1882] Our new bit is how we're going to explain this show to people.

[1883] It's kind of like Westworld and the Last of Us.

[1884] And it's all happening.

[1885] You could live in any one of them as their own show.

[1886] You know, you quickly establish these different groups of people.

[1887] They all need the same thing.

[1888] And we're off to the races.

[1889] I mean, it's an incredible...

[1890] I mean, again, I'm going to get in big trouble for this.

[1891] If I had to pick...

[1892] You don't have to pick.

[1893] I want to.

[1894] Because I need to make it relative to something.

[1895] If on my death, but they said you either have to erase your memory of seeing Oppenheimer or erase your memory of seeing the first episode of Fallout, I'm picking Fallout.

[1896] Wow.

[1897] I'm picking fun.

[1898] You don't have to comment?

[1899] And I read American Prometheus.

[1900] I'm obsessed.

[1901] Yeah, you're not allowed to see a thing.

[1902] It could be a headline.

[1903] No, forget that.

[1904] I'm the younger brother.

[1905] Exactly.

[1906] Come on.

[1907] Yeah, you're allowed to enjoy that.

[1908] Crushed it.

[1909] I'm so excited to see it.

[1910] I was saying to Jonah before I was like, waiting until this is over.

[1911] But you can tell him I was raving to you yesterday, right?

[1912] So on fire for it.

[1913] And last night I was like, oh, I want to watch that, but I shouldn't.

[1914] I have seen Oppenheimer at this point like four or five times because I watched it on the plane.

[1915] It's your new.

[1916] It's your new.

[1917] it.

[1918] Then I watched it on the plane a couple of times.

[1919] It's such a good movie.

[1920] It's a masterpiece.

[1921] And I was sort of like, I don't think I'm going to like it in this Barbenheimer world.

[1922] Oh my gosh, just this feminist movie.

[1923] And then there's this movie about men making bombs.

[1924] I'm probably not going to like that.

[1925] And then I love it.

[1926] It's so good.

[1927] You have now watched Oppenheimer as many times as I have watched Barbie.

[1928] This is a really funny reversal.

[1929] I'm on like viewing four of Barbie.

[1930] I can not get enough of that movie.

[1931] As the Barbenheimer thing was happening last summer, I was excited because I knew that it would help.

[1932] That movie was a big risk for Chris.

[1933] It's physicists talking about physics, but it's made like an action movie and he puts it out in the summer.

[1934] My sole contribution to that movie was just encouraging Chris to the degree he needed encouragement.

[1935] Looking at that, look at other projects, looking at that, that, that look at other projects.

[1936] Looking at that, look at other projects.

[1937] And with a gun to their head, it's very uniquely biblical.

[1938] That's where we're at with AIME and Los Alamos in that Promethean moment.

[1939] And referenced it in other projects.

[1940] How many two or three -year periods and groups of people can you point to and say they change the whole world?

[1941] And with a gun to their head.

[1942] It's very uniquely biblical.

[1943] That's where we're at with AI.

[1944] I mean, we're also at that.

[1945] Sure.

[1946] We don't have the option to sit this out.

[1947] There's a lot to the analogy there in terms of the thoughtfulness with which we've approached nuclear fission and the recklessness with which we've approached AI, frankly.

[1948] But you have to redefine what big commercial movie is.

[1949] I've made a billion dollars.

[1950] Like, what can a big commercial movie do?

[1951] But it was more in that.

[1952] There's a little smaller mode of storytelling.

[1953] And I just wanted him to see it make it because I didn't imagine Chris would ever make a biopic, but he'd written a script about Howard Hughes 20 years ago.

[1954] Yes, that he was going to make and then Aviator.

[1955] I think he said public.

[1956] that he just took too long to write.

[1957] That script's one of the best scripts I've ever read.

[1958] We're due.

[1959] There's been enough time.

[1960] Well, some of the storytelling Brio went into Ophanheimer.

[1961] Frankly, Howard Hughes is a fascinating subject.

[1962] But Oppenheimer's life was more consequential and just as fascinating as Hughes.

[1963] And I think more of an impact on history.

[1964] Although here's a deep irony.

[1965] So I was obsessed with Howard Hughes in college.

[1966] I wrote a paper on him.

[1967] What he was accused of is he had tried to sell a certain airplane to the Air Force that they rejected.

[1968] Rumor has it.

[1969] The Mitsubishi's that bombed Pearl Harbor.

[1970] were his design that he sold it to the Japanese.

[1971] So, weirdly, the bombing is a result as his history.

[1972] It's all traceable.

[1973] I never thought Chris would make a movie about a person because real people's lives don't tend to be dramatic.

[1974] They don't tend to have that satisfying or it's hard to find someone whose life is worthy of that treatment or will be entertaining that way.

[1975] Some are Blockbuster.

[1976] And I thought with Oppenheimer, Chris plus that subject.

[1977] No, Chris is occupying a space that nobody occupies, which is he doesn't do existing IP.

[1978] and yet he has blockbusters.

[1979] We did it with Batman a little bit.

[1980] That was as close as we got to it.

[1981] Post -Batman to do Inception, that's a huge blockbuster.

[1982] That shouldn't work.

[1983] Interstellar should not work.

[1984] We tended to do for a while sort of 50 -50, right, or for my career.

[1985] Adaptation can be fun, but making original things is really fun too.

[1986] The ability to kind of bounce back and forth.

[1987] It's a different kind of writing.

[1988] He's just one of the few people that a studio is going to give a couple hundred million dollars to do that doesn't have an existing IP.

[1989] We all need to treasure the fact that your brother is on planet Earth, Because without him, yeah, I don't know who they trust that to.

[1990] It's one of the reasons I was drawn to television is that when I started in television, there was very little IP.

[1991] I'm very proud of what we made with Fallout.

[1992] I love the games.

[1993] It's exciting.

[1994] But one of the things I loved about TV from the beginning was all the broadcasts by it was very seldom based on anything.

[1995] It was you had a pitch.

[1996] Person of interest was a pitch.

[1997] It was about AI.

[1998] It was about a vigilante.

[1999] And I was sort of not quite done with the dark night stuff.

[2000] So we found a venue to do that.

[2001] And I miss those days.

[2002] So this show is tackling.

[2003] There's some metaphors there.

[2004] Obviously the one I just mentioned, which is there's these.

[2005] underground dwellers, and people pretty much hate them, the vault people.

[2006] Yes.

[2007] Because they're up at E. They're made.

[2008] They're in a gated community.

[2009] By the time we were done into pandemic, and Geneva and Graham are showrunners, amazing, thoughtful, brilliant.

[2010] He is from the comedy world.

[2011] He cut his teeth in America television on the office, worked on Silicon Valley, Portlandia.

[2012] She wrote Marvel movies, the combination of the two of them, incredible.

[2013] And they were able to capture this gonzo tone of, and one of the things we like from the beginning is hilarious to watch people now arguing online about.

[2014] Like, they made it woke.

[2015] And then someone who actually knows the game is like, Like, are you a fucking idiot from the beginning?

[2016] It was woke.

[2017] Like, what are you talking about?

[2018] The politics were seated into this thing from the beginning.

[2019] But in a way that I love, it's less about being didactic about the things that I believe.

[2020] This is a circular firing squad.

[2021] Everyone comes in for a beating on this one.

[2022] Whether it's the blue state in essential folks who sat home and had other people deliver their food.

[2023] Us.

[2024] Or whether it's the red state folks.

[2025] Everyone who are hearkening back to a knighthood and a brotherhood and some of these kind of relic concepts that no one really knows how they worked.

[2026] This is why I loved about the project is that playing the game the first time, you're there, post -apocalyptic, you know, I love the George Miller Mad Max, and I think they're brilliant, not a world I want to live in.

[2027] You can live in those movies.

[2028] There's the difference between a movie and a TV show.

[2029] Movie is like a one -night stand, right?

[2030] You can do anything for two hours.

[2031] TV shows like an extended family.

[2032] I'd have these conversations with the DPs.

[2033] I've been lucky to work with some incredibly talented people often come in and we try out look and they'd go for like a skip bleach look.

[2034] It's beautiful.

[2035] But the reason why Westworld wasn't skip bleach, it was saturated, beautiful color.

[2036] And this is me and Paul Cameron going back and forth.

[2037] about how this thing should look is because you want to live in it.

[2038] You're going to spend a lot of time now.

[2039] I wanted desperately to go to Westworld.

[2040] Yeah, me too.

[2041] A little bit of a love affair with film because we shot Fallout on film, Westworld on film.

[2042] I didn't know that.

[2043] Yeah, we have actors sometimes come on set and after a take, we're like, what's wrong with the camera?

[2044] It's a real camera.

[2045] Like, it's making a funny noise.

[2046] It's a mechanical.

[2047] It's a real camera.

[2048] Yeah, yeah.

[2049] This thing.

[2050] Yeah.

[2051] When they hit both sides of the mag to get it to shut up.

[2052] Oh, all the time.

[2053] It's a bit of a secret weapon for us.

[2054] I mean, Chris is out there talking about it all the time.

[2055] When we shot the pilot for Westworld, that was the year when the factory in New York was going to close.

[2056] Chris and Spielberg and JJ and Tarantino had to get all the studios to commit to buy the film because it was going to be done.

[2057] Wow.

[2058] And we were the only pilot that year that shot on film.

[2059] Wow.

[2060] And you're still shooting on film?

[2061] Still shooting on film.

[2062] Does that complicate your digital stuff?

[2063] No. Everyone loves our set.

[2064] Like Chris, everyone leaves her cell phone in the trailer.

[2065] For me, it's a safety thing.

[2066] I'm obsessed with the safety of the crew.

[2067] This is where we differ.

[2068] So we found it one thing.

[2069] My motto is safety third.

[2070] Oh, my God.

[2071] If I can do the stunts, you can do the stunts.

[2072] Well, we want to do wild shit.

[2073] The scene in Philly in episode two, and if you got there, you know, where the power armor flies down.

[2074] I remember saying the lion producer, he laughed.

[2075] And I was like, no, I'm dead serious.

[2076] We got a guy with a jet pack to come out and do the stunt.

[2077] Because I'm like, well, the CG, the suit, it's hard metal, shiny surface.

[2078] That's easy.

[2079] But the particulate dust blowing off the ground.

[2080] The physics.

[2081] That's super hard.

[2082] The contact points.

[2083] Where it touches the ground, what interacts with, it's hard.

[2084] And when shit's got to move in the laws of physics, we actually intuitively know.

[2085] That's where it breaks down.

[2086] Exactly.

[2087] So I'd seen this guy demonstrate this jetpack, new design, very Iron Man. It's on the arm instead of the back.

[2088] Yeah.

[2089] And a few tense conversations with a line producer figured out how to get him there and we'd dangle them from a crane so there's no way he could fall on our set.

[2090] He's like, I'm going to jetpack.

[2091] I'm like, yeah, let's just bear with me. You're in a prototype, jetpack.

[2092] Good point.

[2093] They wouldn't let me flat.

[2094] Yeah, exactly.

[2095] Something I learned with Chris coming up was if you can do it for real, with a video game adaptation, I was saying it taught them.

[2096] Like most adaptations you're adding things.

[2097] With a video game, moving things.

[2098] We're moving freedom, interactivity, moral choices, all these things that games can do.

[2099] They're incredible.

[2100] What I felt like we could add is reality.

[2101] Yeah, yeah.

[2102] So from the beginning, we said, we're going to do the stunts for real.

[2103] We're going to go down to Namibia.

[2104] I'd seen this incredible location when we were doing Westworld, this mining town on the skeleton coast, Namibia.

[2105] And we'd set the pictures aside because Mason reconstruction, which didn't fit in the West.

[2106] There's no brick construction in the West until the 20th century.

[2107] So I'd just filed it away.

[2108] And I had this lunch with Todd, and we decided we were going to make show.

[2109] And on the drive home, I was like, well, I got nothing, but I got one location.

[2110] Right.

[2111] So we dragged the crew down to Luteritz.

[2112] And so, you always feel like a bit of a chump when you've asked people to fly 30 hours.

[2113] You fly to Johannesburg and then back to Luteritz.

[2114] And then we went down to this abandoned diamond factory.

[2115] It was one of those places where they don't want you to film there.

[2116] We had to consent to a body cavity search on behalf of the entire crew because there are still loose diamonds on the sand.

[2117] Oh, wow.

[2118] Talk about getting the intimacy coach involved.

[2119] Yeah, no, 100%.

[2120] There's this weird shed that you had to walk in and out of.

[2121] Carol, are you ready?

[2122] They need to check your rectum here after this shot.

[2123] As these things do, it made its way to the crew that there were loose diamonds on the set.

[2124] So I would call action and turn around and you just see everyone else in the crew is bent over and looking at rocks.

[2125] Of course.

[2126] Don't do it, guys.

[2127] Don't do it.

[2128] Trust me. You don't want to walk back through that shed on the way out.

[2129] But we had this moment the second day we were shooting down there.

[2130] You feel like a bit of an asshole dragging him around there.

[2131] And then you get there.

[2132] As with Castle Valley and Utah for Westworld, gets the Skeleton Coast and the actors show.

[2133] And these are great actors.

[2134] Walton and Ella and Aaron, and you can put them in front of green screen and they do just great.

[2135] But if you can bring them somewhere spectacular, you're making their lives easier.

[2136] The awe is real.

[2137] We do this kind of slightly asshole thing of leaving them in the trailer and they haven't seen it yet.

[2138] We'd roll the camera and bring them out.

[2139] The look in her face when she gets the outside world, you know, it's pretty real.

[2140] It's very real.

[2141] I said out loud, oh, she's enjoying being outside.

[2142] You can feel that.

[2143] Yeah, you're remembering she's not been outside.

[2144] We've brought them to set with bags over their head.

[2145] Not quite that level of sadism.

[2146] But we went and scattered for the first time.

[2147] I'm looking at it.

[2148] I'm like, it's the Santa Monica Harbor.

[2149] It's exactly the same.

[2150] That drone shot of the outside of the vault is 90 % real.

[2151] The only thing we've added is the Ferris wheel for the Santa Monica Pier and the mountains in background.

[2152] We were shooting there for the second day and so wandered over to me. An experience I'd never had.

[2153] They wandered over and said, no one's ever shot here.

[2154] Ever.

[2155] Yeah, that's rare.

[2156] We shoot in New York, I literally one day accidentally ate in the gossip girl commissary.

[2157] Walk the wrong direction coming out.

[2158] I said to be in a place where no one had ever shot.

[2159] and they resumed diamond mining operas the day after we left, no one will ever shoot there again.

[2160] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[2161] That's cool.

[2162] It's so lucky.

[2163] Oh, well, Jonah, this has been a goddamn blast.

[2164] Yeah, thanks for joining us.

[2165] I mean, I could not be more excited for you about this show.

[2166] It's just going to be so massive.

[2167] It's so fucking good.

[2168] Cannot wait for today to be over so I can watch episode three.

[2169] Go home, go away.

[2170] I think they only sent four.

[2171] We could fix it.

[2172] Well, this has been a blast.

[2173] I hope you had a good time.

[2174] I had a fantastic time.

[2175] Thank you guys so much.

[2176] Fallout is on Prime Video, April 11th, and all eight come out at once.

[2177] First time we're binging.

[2178] I'm a little scared.

[2179] Oh, that would be great.

[2180] It's so the way to do it.

[2181] I would have shot myself if I had seen that first episode and didn't think I could watch another one the following night.

[2182] There was a hell to pay in our house.

[2183] All right, well, thanks for coming.

[2184] This was a blast and good luck with everything.

[2185] Thank you so much.

[2186] Stay tuned for the fact check so you can hear all the facts that were wrong.

[2187] Welcome home.

[2188] Thank you.

[2189] You're on vacation.

[2190] I was.

[2191] How was it?

[2192] It was great.

[2193] We went to Nashville for three days and looked at the progress on the house, which was outrageously exciting.

[2194] Oh, so fun.

[2195] Had dinner at my favorite sparries on Friday night, home of my favorite salad bar.

[2196] And it's that blue cheese dressing with the red oil all over it.

[2197] I don't know what's going on with it.

[2198] Wow.

[2199] But is it so good.

[2200] In fact, I bumped it.

[2201] into a guy at the salad bar who lives in Nashville and he said oh my god i can't believe you're here i've heard you talk about sparries on the podcast and i said oh is this your favorite and he goes no this is my first time and i go where are you visiting from and he said no i live here and then i told him let me give you the shortcut that's the dressing ignore all those other dressings he never did report back whether or not he enjoyed it as much as but i basically forced him to use that which is risky uh -huh but i swear by it not everyone's a blue cheese person in fact i I'd say it's fairly polarizing.

[2202] Well, I think if you hate blue cheese, you'd be like, well, I hate blue cheese.

[2203] There's two different blue cheeses there.

[2204] If you're open to blue cheese, then you must go with this red -oily one.

[2205] I think if he is there because you recommended to come and then you're there and you're saying you have to eat this, he's going to, even if he hates blue cheese.

[2206] Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't think me. I mean, that's on him if he doesn't listen to his heart.

[2207] I like to think more that he was like, oh, man, this is the greatest blue cheese.

[2208] And I probably wouldn't have picked it unless he was standing there.

[2209] I'm so grateful.

[2210] I'd way rather that be the outcome.

[2211] Well, sure, we want what we want.

[2212] Yeah, that's what I hope happened.

[2213] And then had a cookout at Huey and Hayes' house Saturday night.

[2214] Huey night teamed up on that grill.

[2215] I did the ribbyes.

[2216] He did the filets.

[2217] Really good.

[2218] Their whole family came over.

[2219] And then Sunday morning, we went over to Huey and Hayes.

[2220] Well, Hayes, Mother, Rhonda, and Doug.

[2221] And again, we did this two years ago, as you may remember.

[2222] Egg hunt.

[2223] Beautiful spread, plates made with people's names on them.

[2224] It's the nicest Southern Easter, you can imagine.

[2225] Southern Christian gals.

[2226] Yeah, and once again, Huey thanked the Lord for bringing these wayward heathens into their fold so they can educate us.

[2227] Uh -huh.

[2228] That was, again, he had another spin on it, but it was great.

[2229] and how do I say this without hurting my family's feelings?

[2230] Family's so fun when you're not triggered.

[2231] Does that make sense?

[2232] Yeah, of course.

[2233] Like, Chris and I were enjoying ourselves so much at this family Easter.

[2234] And it was so much fun and gaiety and inside jokes and laughing and just having a blast.

[2235] And I'm like, yeah, these family holidays are so lovely.

[2236] But I know I would be like, I'd be rubbed the wrong way by this, I'd be nervous about that interaction.

[2237] Of course.

[2238] So maybe every once you just kind of hopscotch, you should rotate through other families on the big day.

[2239] I mean, that's what a lot of kids do.

[2240] That's why they go to sleepovers.

[2241] Right.

[2242] And they love the family dinner at their sleepover.

[2243] And then their own family dinner, they're like, oh, dad, stop.

[2244] Well, that's good.

[2245] Did Kristen get the golden egg again?

[2246] She did not.

[2247] Did you?

[2248] I did not.

[2249] I barely collect them.

[2250] I myself came away with $11, though, which I was delighted about.

[2251] Yeah, that's great.

[2252] What is the Scrooge equivalent to Easter?

[2253] Devil, because it's a Jesus holiday.

[2254] It's the ultimate.

[2255] Right.

[2256] I don't know what the, like, a bumbug Easter person is.

[2257] Yeah.

[2258] I don't know.

[2259] I'm that.

[2260] You've never had a good time at an Easter party.

[2261] I wore this outfit yesterday.

[2262] All black.

[2263] I'm wearing all black.

[2264] Okay.

[2265] You're mad at Easter.

[2266] I'm not mad at it at all.

[2267] I love anything that people are happy in, you know.

[2268] But you know how I get around holidays.

[2269] I love holidays.

[2270] I love events.

[2271] Yeah.

[2272] I love.

[2273] Christmas.

[2274] Thanksgiving, I love.

[2275] Yeah.

[2276] Pig Day.

[2277] What's pig day?

[2278] Pig day is the Friday after Thanksgiving.

[2279] We're just and I get my tree.

[2280] Oh, that's your own holiday.

[2281] Yeah, yeah.

[2282] Yeah, I made it.

[2283] Yeah.

[2284] All of it, but sorry, guys, I don't get Easter.

[2285] It's because I didn't grow up with it.

[2286] My parents didn't do it.

[2287] They didn't know about it, I guess, early.

[2288] And then they kept up that.

[2289] Like, there was no Easter baskets.

[2290] Right.

[2291] You never went to an egg hunt or anything?

[2292] No. I mean, at my, like, daycare.

[2293] Yeah.

[2294] There was egg.

[2295] A little white egg hunting.

[2296] Yeah, but it never appeared.

[2297] Your parents never got you an Easter basket or your.

[2298] or your grandparents.

[2299] We got one.

[2300] My mother got us an Easter basket.

[2301] It was very fun.

[2302] It was only the second time in the year.

[2303] You got candy at Halloween, like candy bar, chocolate.

[2304] Right.

[2305] You got it at Halloween and then Sionara suck ass all the way till April.

[2306] What about Valentine's Day?

[2307] She didn't get you old.

[2308] Oh, she did.

[2309] You're right.

[2310] Good, good, good.

[2311] You've definitely poked a hole in it.

[2312] And what am I talking about?

[2313] It's not like we never had chocolate.

[2314] But let's just say this is a chocolate holiday.

[2315] It's like Halloween.

[2316] Interesting.

[2317] Very fun.

[2318] very colorful coloring eggs is really fun my mom was just here right before we left for Nashville and she colored eggs with the girls brought a little machine you can do like a lathe um what's that mean you know a lathe is what you put a chunk of wood on it spins and then you carve it into like a you know a leg of a table this is you put the egg on a spinner and then you can take like a marker and make very specific oh that's cool they're in the um i think they're on the island inside you should take a look they're very beautiful wow And it's a whole contraption.

[2319] And that was fun for them.

[2320] I like contraptions.

[2321] Listen, Easter egg hunts is second to trick -or -treating in that.

[2322] It's an activity where you're on the prowl.

[2323] You're looking everywhere.

[2324] It's active.

[2325] Kids are running around.

[2326] I got out of our life.

[2327] You know.

[2328] Yeah.

[2329] Maybe the competition, actually, now that you're saying that.

[2330] No. Oh.

[2331] Well, actually, you're right.

[2332] That seems more like my personality.

[2333] But I bet as a kid, that stressed me out.

[2334] Mm -hmm.

[2335] One time I went to a girls' birthday party.

[2336] It was a, like, sleepover fifth grade, I think.

[2337] So the girls were kind of, you know, at that, like...

[2338] Starting to get catty?

[2339] Yeah.

[2340] Uh -huh.

[2341] And the mom had set up, like, a little store in the basement.

[2342] Oh.

[2343] Which was really my dream.

[2344] Like, she set up a little mall.

[2345] And then we got to, like, take a couple things.

[2346] Oh, my God.

[2347] And so I took this necklace, and then the necklace became a devil.

[2348] necklace like it everyone wanted it yes and and then i was bad because i got it okay this is a theme this is like the white elephant party i know this resurfaces the white elephant though is different at that age i didn't have a leg up no but it is a pattern of i'm going to get myself excluded by picking a thing that i should pick i know yeah i just picked it because i liked it turned out everyone.

[2349] Now, do you believe we manifest patterns to confirm our narrative?

[2350] In some ways, yes, but I don't think in this case.

[2351] Right, right.

[2352] I mean, yeah, I think emotionally we do.

[2353] Well, this could be the inciting incident.

[2354] This could be the genesis of the whole story.

[2355] Narratives, you just kind of, you kind of get stuck in something that happens.

[2356] You can.

[2357] I'm not suggesting that's what's going.

[2358] Well, I am suggesting it, but it's a 1%.

[2359] It could be.

[2360] I mean, I don't think in general, though, well, okay, so with the necklace, it blew up.

[2361] I was, like, in a group of four or five girls, they turned on me. And they were really mean.

[2362] Like, then I couldn't sit with them at lunch.

[2363] Like, very...

[2364] They carried on way past the sleepover.

[2365] Yes.

[2366] And they would look at me and talk to each other on per...

[2367] Like, stare at me so that I would know they were talking about, like, really...

[2368] Mean girls stuff.

[2369] Mean girl shit.

[2370] Yeah.

[2371] And I was so...

[2372] distraught because the new thing was that the birthday girl wanted it but she didn't but then she did I guess once they decided that that's what had happened so then I tried to give it to her okay and and the didn't work I don't know it didn't work they were still all mad I wrote individual letters to all these bitches oh no money like really had to get them back you had to apologize oh yeah I'm so bad and I can't believe I did that.

[2373] No wonder you have a fucking chip on your shoulder, just like me. Yeah, and it worked.

[2374] Like, they eventually let me back in.

[2375] Is that Cali was the birthday girl?

[2376] No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, this was so bad.

[2377] And it did scar me. It was like you have to let everyone else have what they want.

[2378] Like, you can't take from anyone.

[2379] We're not entitled to any of the stuff.

[2380] But then I got over that, I guess, and I took the money at White Elephant.

[2381] And look it.

[2382] Look at me now.

[2383] A beautiful black outfit, huh?

[2384] But Easter, you hate it?

[2385] Oh, I don't, I don't want to say that.

[2386] I don't want to say hate it.

[2387] I'm just the scrooge of it.

[2388] I'm the, I'm the Easter devil.

[2389] Right, right.

[2390] Easter devil.

[2391] Well, maybe we should pick something that eats rabbits, like Easter fox.

[2392] Oh.

[2393] Because that's not as blatant.

[2394] Easter foxes are sexy.

[2395] Oh, and they're witty and clever.

[2396] They're known for their cleverness.

[2397] And I was supposed to go to an Easter thing yesterday, and I was feeling antisocial, so I didn't go.

[2398] Oh, no. Who had an Easter thing?

[2399] The Hansen's.

[2400] Oh, okay.

[2401] And he was making yummy food.

[2402] And in theory, like, it would have been so fun.

[2403] It was sunny out yesterday.

[2404] It was nice.

[2405] Oh, my God.

[2406] Kind of.

[2407] Didn't it rain yesterday?

[2408] Yeah, I just remember that.

[2409] When I landed the ground, it was pretty wet.

[2410] It was cloudy.

[2411] But I just couldn't.

[2412] I couldn't do it.

[2413] I talked about this in therapy.

[2414] I'm keeping an eye out.

[2415] I'm wondering if I'm, like, a tiny bit depressed.

[2416] Mm -hmm.

[2417] Oh, my God.

[2418] So I'm just, I'm just keeping an eye out.

[2419] And right now, I'm about to start my period now.

[2420] Oh, Jesus Christ, this thing's going to blow.

[2421] Listen, you're wearing all black.

[2422] You didn't go to the Easter party.

[2423] I'm feeling a little reclusive.

[2424] Uh -huh.

[2425] Yeah, sweetie, you're a little depressed, I think.

[2426] Well, wait, I should never have to.

[2427] Why?

[2428] Because now you're going to think everything is that.

[2429] No, just you're wearing black eye shadow and you're in a full black outfit.

[2430] And you didn't go to the Easter party yesterday and you.

[2431] I'm not wearing black eye shadow.

[2432] I'm wearing mascara regular.

[2433] Okay.

[2434] Your goth era.

[2435] Oh, what if I'm becoming gong?

[2436] It looks like you're into screamo a little bit right now.

[2437] I also look like a row model.

[2438] This is what they look like.

[2439] Yes, yes.

[2440] Hair and cheek, depressed.

[2441] I think there is a type of guy who wants a sexy girl who's always crying.

[2442] Are you sure they do?

[2443] Yeah, I think that, well, look, you know, I don't know the percentage, but men want to fix a broken bird just like women want to fix a broken bird.

[2444] I mean, I think it's natural.

[2445] I think especially if you get a mom who needed a lot of caretaking and stuff.

[2446] Yeah.

[2447] Yeah, I've had lots of friends.

[2448] They are deeply attracted to people who clearly are very sad and depressed a lot.

[2449] No, everything's great.

[2450] I am, like, I have depression.

[2451] So I take an antidepressant.

[2452] I know who I am when I'm depressed.

[2453] Yeah.

[2454] Yeah.

[2455] And I can just feel small pieces of it, mainly the feeling sort of reclusive and not the makeup.

[2456] That's a fun hobby.

[2457] Oh, good.

[2458] Do you find, because again, I don't have, I don't have depression.

[2459] I have had it, but I don't have it.

[2460] But I get sad.

[2461] Yeah, that's different.

[2462] And I get moody.

[2463] And I have spells where I'm really pessimistic and I have a lot of anxiety.

[2464] but A, there's generally things, real material things surrounding those, the not being able to enjoy anything.

[2465] Yeah.

[2466] That to me is what depression is.

[2467] For me, that's when I've been like, huh, this is really weird.

[2468] I'm watching my children play.

[2469] That's the example I always give.

[2470] I'm watching them play very kindly to one another.

[2471] That generally makes me so happy and I don't care.

[2472] Yeah.

[2473] Ooh, that's so scary to me. So how do you delineate between when, like, I'm in a bad mood or I have anxiety?

[2474] about the same versus I am in a depressive phase right now.

[2475] Yeah, for me, everything's a bit dulled.

[2476] Are you a little disassociated?

[2477] Because that was the thing my mom's last spell where she, I observed it as very clear to me. And she didn't tell me. She's like, she feels like she's at places with people, but she's in a bubble.

[2478] They're all participating and she's watching it.

[2479] But it's having none of the mere neurony effects for her.

[2480] Sure.

[2481] I think that's common.

[2482] I think that's very common.

[2483] And I, yeah, I can relate to that a little bit as probably being part of mine.

[2484] Also, mine manifests a lot.

[2485] And I just stopped caring at all about anything.

[2486] Something like good is happening.

[2487] And I can, I understand it's good.

[2488] Right.

[2489] But I don't care.

[2490] But I don't feel it.

[2491] Yeah.

[2492] And there's been some overwhel.

[2493] You know, my therapist was saying you've also been really bit.

[2494] Maybe you're just recharging.

[2495] I think, okay.

[2496] So.

[2497] So I am sick.

[2498] Oh, no. Delta got me. We snuggle like crazy snuggle bugs, which is totally worth it.

[2499] It did occur to me this last week.

[2500] So this last week, I too have been kind of just a little under the weather, a little sad, a little anxiety ridden.

[2501] And I did have to acknowledge, like, you and I were on this incredible tornado of stimuli.

[2502] We were, yeah.

[2503] Like fucking India straight into Austin, like so fun.

[2504] Yes.

[2505] Part of me was like, you were up for like two weeks.

[2506] Totally.

[2507] And the body is like searching for homeostasis.

[2508] Yeah.

[2509] So it's dropped you a bit.

[2510] And you're just going to have to weather this and then it'll level off.

[2511] So part of me thinks that's what's going out with me. Yeah, that probably is right.

[2512] And there's stressors.

[2513] There's real stressors right now.

[2514] So, you know, I, yeah.

[2515] So I fucking skipped Easter, okay, sue me. Yeah, so sue me. So sue me. I also.

[2516] I don't think.

[2517] I want to say.

[2518] Good.

[2519] I don't want to say, because everyone jumps on this when I say, and I don't like it.

[2520] Okay.

[2521] I do feel like I'm self -medicating a little bit.

[2522] With booze?

[2523] Yes.

[2524] Uh -huh.

[2525] So.

[2526] Yeah.

[2527] So, yeah.

[2528] Yeah.

[2529] So it's probably time for me to, like, when I am going to New York, I plan that trip, and I kind of feel like when I get back from that, I need, like, yeah, I need a break.

[2530] Okay, so similarly, I've been having way more caffeine than I should.

[2531] Oh.

[2532] Which, of course, then fucks up my sleep even worse.

[2533] Yeah.

[2534] So then it becomes the same probably cycle urine just on the opposite.

[2535] Exactly.

[2536] Then I'm tired, so then I drink more caffeine.

[2537] Yeah.

[2538] I drink it later.

[2539] And then I wake up 12 times in the night.

[2540] Yeah.

[2541] And then the next day, yes.

[2542] So I weirdly flying home yesterday, I was like, okay, you're going to have one diet Coke on that airplane.

[2543] And then we're done for the day.

[2544] Did you do it?

[2545] Yeah, I succeeded at that, but then today I went, I've already gone nuts.

[2546] Yeah.

[2547] It's hard.

[2548] Oh, God.

[2549] What if this whole thing was an April Fool's joke?

[2550] Oh, that'd be great.

[2551] And what if we were like?

[2552] We're just kidding.

[2553] We're so happy.

[2554] Anyway, so money was at the Easter party.

[2555] She found the golden egg.

[2556] No one got mad.

[2557] No. Yeah, it's fine.

[2558] It's life.

[2559] There's ups and downs.

[2560] Yeah.

[2561] That's the way it is.

[2562] Nothing bad is happening.

[2563] When you get some highs, you get some lows.

[2564] Anywho.

[2565] So I, this weekend, went to Anthony and Allison's.

[2566] Well, and then this is why I don't think I'm that depressed because I did not really want to go because I was feeling reclusive.

[2567] Grouchy?

[2568] I wasn't grouchy.

[2569] I was just like.

[2570] Lethargic?

[2571] What it is is it takes so much mental.

[2572] energy for me to do a thing that normally I want to do.

[2573] Right, right.

[2574] So, and yeah, Anthony, Allison, Rachel, our friend Brooks, it was so fun.

[2575] We were laughing so hard.

[2576] We played this game, new game.

[2577] Well, I don't think it's new, but it's called like MTV something.

[2578] Okay.

[2579] And you have cards with artists on them, song artists, musical artists.

[2580] us, yeah, musicians.

[2581] And you have to, like, put them in categories and get your team to guess.

[2582] Kind of like humdinger on the Ellen game, on your back game.

[2583] But one of them is, like, one word, one is you say the lyrics.

[2584] Okay.

[2585] And then the other is humming.

[2586] Anyway, it was so funny.

[2587] I did an actual spit take.

[2588] You did.

[2589] But it wasn't really a spit take.

[2590] It was more like I had to just spit the water on the floor.

[2591] Okay.

[2592] Because it was, I mean, it was going to be a big spray.

[2593] Yes, it was like happening, but I just like opened my mouth in the water for a out.

[2594] It was more of a spit drool.

[2595] Yeah.

[2596] Or a drool take.

[2597] But.

[2598] What was the joke?

[2599] It was.

[2600] Someone's performance.

[2601] Yes.

[2602] And in, but it was so, what a weird sensation to know you can't swallow the water.

[2603] Have you ever peed your pants laughing?

[2604] No. I know.

[2605] I envy that.

[2606] Yeah.

[2607] I bet it's a similar thing.

[2608] Yeah.

[2609] Where you're shocked it's happening.

[2610] My mom will pee your pants.

[2611] once or twice a year laughing and how much pee oh boy I didn't ask oh yeah I don't know if it's some spotting or if it's a full incontinence like a little comes out or a full urination like like a pint glass I bet it's more like a full because it's no control so it's just flooding look and I I've pooped my pants a hundred times at this point in my life and that would for whatever reason that feels so familiar to me like the notion of peeing like a pint glass in my pants seems crazy.

[2612] Like, I think I'd rather poop my pants.

[2613] How about you, Rob?

[2614] No, I don't pee.

[2615] No, what would you rather do?

[2616] Is he in public?

[2617] He's mowing the grass, I guess.

[2618] I think I'd rather pee still.

[2619] Okay.

[2620] Yeah, it's less toxins.

[2621] Actually, probably not.

[2622] But it's just, everyone knows it's less gross.

[2623] It's less of a cleanup.

[2624] Yeah.

[2625] But kind of not really.

[2626] You'll wash your pants.

[2627] You'll change your pants either way.

[2628] It's so visible.

[2629] out the underwear.

[2630] It's so visible, though.

[2631] The whole front is just...

[2632] I'd like I might pick putty.

[2633] Although you got smell to contend with.

[2634] Yeah, absolutely not.

[2635] Full pint is a lot, though.

[2636] It's a lot, yeah.

[2637] But I don't pee a full pint.

[2638] Oh, my God.

[2639] I hate to put her on blast, but I sat next to Lincoln on the airplane.

[2640] Something, the moon.

[2641] Aries is in Pisces, something.

[2642] This started going to Disneyland on her birthday on Wednesday.

[2643] She has been spilling water several times a day on herself.

[2644] And not intentionally.

[2645] She's just become butterfingers.

[2646] But she is Pisces.

[2647] Is she?

[2648] Oh, I don't know.

[2649] I was just teasing.

[2650] Mercury is about to be in retrograde or is, I forget.

[2651] Okay.

[2652] She spilled on the plane ride yesterday.

[2653] She spilled a Diet Coke all over me of the brand new one, ice everything.

[2654] I'm wearing Searsucker pants and a white shirt.

[2655] Oh my God.

[2656] So I'm just covered in brown Diet Coke.

[2657] She then spilled three waters on herself.

[2658] What?

[2659] She also went to the bathroom nine times.

[2660] I think she's doing Coke.

[2661] No, no. You know what it is.

[2662] Hormones.

[2663] I was like, what is going?

[2664] I had to get up so many times to let her out to go to the bathroom, plus all the spilling.

[2665] Oh, my God.

[2666] It was a wild ride home.

[2667] It was wild.

[2668] It is that because clumsiness can happen before periods.

[2669] Oh, boy.

[2670] Maybe she's about to start a period.

[2671] Don't.

[2672] You hate that?

[2673] I feel like it's early.

[2674] I started.

[2675] I'm not weirded out by her having her period, obviously.

[2676] But from what I can hear from every woman I know, they don't enjoy their period.

[2677] Oh, that's not fun, no. I would, of course, wish for her for it to happen as late as possible.

[2678] But you also don't want to be.

[2679] I mean, you can be whatever you want.

[2680] You can, well, you can't actually.

[2681] You can't pick this.

[2682] But whenever it happens is great, I do think people who start so late, they have a ton of anxiety they get self -conscious yes yeah so then the middle for her you want 12 or 13 yeah eighth grade maybe yeah 13 14 okay obviously when you go into high school i feel like that would be the bigger deal socially she'll be going to an all -girls school so even more you think yeah okay because then it's like all you have are the girls in their periods and you have to be like and everyone's talking about your tampon even though you don't need it people have their tampons and their desks they're changing tampons in the classroom yeah At all girls school, they do that.

[2683] Yes, it's the freedom of it.

[2684] I would say, I think something's brewing.

[2685] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[2686] That's fun.

[2687] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[2688] She did give me a tiny bit of attitude in there.

[2689] I actually thought it.

[2690] You clocked it.

[2691] Uh -huh.

[2692] And I was like, oh, Lincoln has a little bit of an attitude today.

[2693] But I met her with a little bit of a two back, so it was fine.

[2694] Okay, great.

[2695] She and I were in an interesting phase.

[2696] It's really challenging.

[2697] Because we're so similar And maybe this though Like she's probably getting angsty Yeah It's so heartbreaking It really bums me out Linkland it's just so easy For so long your best friends And then and I get it I was so unforgiving of my dad Because we were so similar And when you put two people Who's reaction to being overwhelmed By emotions the same Like retreat I just want to get out of here It's just a bad combo And I'm like, how do I not be my dad in this situation?

[2698] But I get hurt.

[2699] I actually get hurt.

[2700] It's getting to it.

[2701] Which is new.

[2702] I know.

[2703] I didn't have that when they were little, but I'm starting to have it where you'm hurt.

[2704] I know.

[2705] And I understand.

[2706] Like, I really, really do understand.

[2707] And you got to be an adult.

[2708] I think you are going to have to adjust your expectation.

[2709] I know.

[2710] I know, like, by day three of this.

[2711] I'm like starting to really consider fuck man she's gonna write me off just like I wrote my dad off like that we're gonna have this unavoidable thing my dad and I had and I guess are getting really depressed about that and then after three days of thinking that way I to your point I was like you're gonna have to grow one of you's gonna have to do something miraculous in the situation in year 49 so it's gonna be you and in a weird way that's one thing that everyone else isn't doing.

[2712] She's doing exactly what everyone her age is doing.

[2713] I'm not at all angry at her.

[2714] No, no. I'm just hurt by the dynamic.

[2715] I think I'm just trying to ease your, it's not like.

[2716] I shouldn't take a person.

[2717] Exactly.

[2718] It's not that she's going to write you off at all.

[2719] She's just being a normal preteen.

[2720] Yes.

[2721] And it just so happens that she and Kristen have a very good symbiotic geometry to their personality types that really works christen's the perfect fit for that as christian is so good with me when i'm starting to retreat because my reaction is when i get overwhelmed i just will disappear i'll be like you know what i'll be happier sitting by myself in a room sound canceling headphones yeah so two people that that's their nature is just it's it's tricky it is but also can you try to reframe it in that you know sometimes you have to wear a sound cancelling headphones and two days later you're fine yes maybe just let her do that because she'll come out of it the way you do yeah yeah so i'm going to have to i guess maybe you get to an age where and i don't think this i don't think i'm perfect i think i have a lot of stuff to work on but the same time you do get to, 49, I'm like, I've figured out most of my big demons.

[2722] Yeah.

[2723] I know how to be at peace with most people pretty easily now, and I'm not having to call and apologize when I leave parties the next day.

[2724] You know, whatever.

[2725] I had not anticipated.

[2726] We still have another big, we're going to have to change yet again pretty profoundly.

[2727] Yeah.

[2728] And I'm going to have to do that, and I have to learn how to do that.

[2729] And it's interesting.

[2730] But you will.

[2731] And I will do it for her, just like you would do it for anyone you love yeah you will so it's probably a good thing yeah i also think i'm it's made me go back and play out some of these things i had with my dad over the years you know big blowouts we had or because we he and i had periods where we didn't talk for a year when i was an adult yeah and um even like i lived with him in ninth and 10th grade and then we got in this huge fight midway through 10th grade and then i moved out and i didn't talk to him for maybe a year in 10th grade like but going back in my mind, I'm starting to imagine, well, A, I'm starting to realize I was way more difficult than I think I acknowledged, and that he was way more patient for some duration.

[2732] I think he was kind of patient with me. And then he just reached a point like I do, where I get so hurt that I go, well, then fuck you and fuck everyone.

[2733] Like, you're hurting me too much.

[2734] So now I'm going to go myself.

[2735] And I just, it's interesting.

[2736] I'm now kind of replaying a lot of these memories I have that were so cut and dry, clear for me that he was an asshole and I was in the right.

[2737] And now I think, no, he and I are both very sensitive.

[2738] Yeah.

[2739] And the way we would feel hurt was very similar.

[2740] And in so many ways we - But you do wish, I mean, maybe you don't, but I do when I hear this story.

[2741] It's sad that his feelings were hurt and that he is hypersensitive.

[2742] but I wish he could have been a dad then.

[2743] And like being a dad is not just being fun.

[2744] It's, well, I don't care if you're mad.

[2745] I'm your dad.

[2746] I'm not like, that's it.

[2747] And I'm not going to speak for her.

[2748] But for me, I think the reality, this is terrible.

[2749] The reality of how hard it is for me to not get my way or do things the way I think they're supposed to.

[2750] be done.

[2751] Yeah.

[2752] It's so embarrassing.

[2753] And you mean you think it's embarrassing to her?

[2754] For me, I'm just saying when I go through my life, she's just showing me a lot about myself.

[2755] Oh, oh, okay.

[2756] And it's really important to me that people think my ideas are good.

[2757] Right.

[2758] And then I'm adult and I'm grown up.

[2759] And I, and then I'm not thinking back on all the times.

[2760] And I think like, yeah, I think when I didn't get my way or things didn't, I think I was like.

[2761] tough yeah yeah yeah i think and i think i still am yeah yeah we all have our things i know you just think you do the fourth step in the program you think you get a handle on all your character defects you know here they are and always got to work on these and then no as life goes on you're like no i have more yeah yeah i mean it's it's good to be aware of it and not give up on not like i'm old so who cares right also i got in horrific fights with my mom and i have no i've like we were just talking about one unsinked that i like just sort of barely remember like you don't remember yeah unless i mean i think the parent is the defining factor in whether or not that's lasting yep yes i agree as we just we just said, like, I'm going to have to figure this out.

[2762] I can't do what my dad didn't allow years to go by sometimes without talking to Lincoln.

[2763] That would be.

[2764] But also, there's just, like, it's so weird to be a grown -up and know that we're grown -ups are just actually just kids.

[2765] Like, it's so scary.

[2766] I know.

[2767] But all to say, I think you guys are going to be just fine.

[2768] We had a beautiful hard -to -heart in the middle of the trip.

[2769] Also, yeah, you're such a good, you guys are such good communicators.

[2770] I don't think anyone is going to have big problems.

[2771] What does Chris do?

[2772] Well, she's got a lot on her place.

[2773] Well, I know.

[2774] That's what I'm saying.

[2775] How does she handle it?

[2776] Oh, my God.

[2777] I feel so bad for her.

[2778] Yeah, she's got these two people that like, they've hurt each other's feelings, and they both are the type to then just retreat for good.

[2779] And we're both so defensive and sensitive that she's got to gently tell Lincoln how to do better and she's got to gently tell me how to do better and not and not make everyone defense yeah she's pretty masterful god bless her yeah but so yeah she comes in at some point she's like you know i talk to lincoln and this and this and i think you know perhaps you should both you know she just kind of gently lays out and then i get defensive and then um she leaves and then about a half hour later i hear what she said yeah and then i acknowledge that yeah that's true.

[2780] Yeah.

[2781] And then I've got to like, but it is, it's back to that super communicators book, Do Higg, I'm in a zone of my brain that has nothing to do with logic.

[2782] I know.

[2783] I'm like in an emotionally hurt.

[2784] I know.

[2785] It's hard.

[2786] I struggle with how to think about this because I think like you want your kids to understand that their words, actions have repercussions.

[2787] Right.

[2788] You want them to know that when they are saying something, doing something horrible to you, that it hurts.

[2789] Yeah.

[2790] So they shouldn't do that.

[2791] But also, I'm a very strong believer in kids should never, ever, ever have to regulate their parents' emotions.

[2792] Agreed.

[2793] So it's this, it's strange.

[2794] I don't even know how, I don't know.

[2795] Well, I think it is the tightrope that all these things are, which is they're not black or white.

[2796] It's not that the parent has to be stoic and not human.

[2797] I don't, I don't know that that's either great.

[2798] I know.

[2799] And you're right, children shouldn't be regulating adults.

[2800] Yeah.

[2801] So there's some zone in there that you're like aiming for, and you fuck up.

[2802] You like go on one side of the line and then, you know.

[2803] Yeah, it's hard.

[2804] It is.

[2805] Okay, couple facts for Jonah.

[2806] Jonah, Nolan, my favorite show.

[2807] So fun.

[2808] Favorite show, truly.

[2809] I only got four and I'm like dying to get the other four.

[2810] He told me he was going to get me the other four, and then he went to India.

[2811] He got busy.

[2812] Yeah.

[2813] He was, I liked him so much.

[2814] Me too.

[2815] So funny how different.

[2816] Well, we don't know, Chris.

[2817] So maybe they aren't different, but their personas are so different.

[2818] Yes, their exteriors.

[2819] Okay, let's see.

[2820] So the Mitsubishi that bombed Pearl Harbor, the Zero Fighter, there is, as you said, there's a rumor that it's Howard Hughes's design.

[2821] There's a lot saying that's not true.

[2822] Oh, really?

[2823] Yeah.

[2824] Okay.

[2825] But it is a rumor.

[2826] Okay.

[2827] I read it in a Howard Hughes book.

[2828] I'm seeing a lot that says that's not true.

[2829] And that there's also an English plane that also says was the zero.

[2830] Oh, okay.

[2831] There's a few that take credit for it.

[2832] Okay.

[2833] Anywho.

[2834] So, okay, we were talking about when you had short -term amnesia.

[2835] And you said you think short -term is in a different area than long -term.

[2836] I think the short term is in the hippocampus, I'm pretty sure.

[2837] Okay.

[2838] And then, wait, now, this says short -term working memory relies mostly on the prefrontal cortex.

[2839] Which to me would make sense, because my theory was just like the brain swells, that's part of the concussion.

[2840] And now it's pushing up against your cranium.

[2841] Yeah.

[2842] And so my thought is just like whatever's on the exterior, the posterior most part of your brain is getting like pushed and manipulated.

[2843] So maybe, as opposed to if your short term is like in the middle of your brain.

[2844] Right.

[2845] Now, this says the emotional aspects of memories are stored separately in the amygdala.

[2846] That's the problem.

[2847] Memories are like, they're drawing from a bunch of different locations, I think.

[2848] I should know this insight now because that book I'm reading.

[2849] Oh, yeah.

[2850] They're talking about it.

[2851] It's just so fascinating why and how we're intelligent.

[2852] I know.

[2853] I do want to read it.

[2854] That wasn't great, factually.

[2855] But the prefrontal cortex is at the front, so I guess that would make sense.

[2856] And I hit the front of my face is where the concussion stemmed from.

[2857] Yeah.

[2858] It's just so weird that it was only, that it was like long enough.

[2859] A few years.

[2860] Yeah.

[2861] I know.

[2862] It's really weird.

[2863] And yet I knew some things.

[2864] That might go to the point of like the memories are emotional.

[2865] So like the weird part of that story to me, the most inexplicable part, is that I didn't know I had graduated, UCLA, got into the Sunday company, or was on punked.

[2866] But I knew that I was supposed to be sober.

[2867] Oh, really?

[2868] Yeah, like, I had at that point had quit drinking for a year, but I was doing drugs.

[2869] But I knew I shouldn't drink.

[2870] So I had this big thing I shouldn't drink.

[2871] And I kept trying to get Bree's attention separately from my mom who was driving.

[2872] And I'm like, did I drink?

[2873] I'm trying to find out if I drank.

[2874] And that's why my brain's fucked up.

[2875] so so i i don't isn't that weird like i knew i wasn't supposed to drink and my assumption was this was drinking related yet i hadn't tried to quit drinking back two years before or whatever yeah although i guess i i started really trying to quit drinking my senior year of college in 2000 i didn't drink my last semester and then i drank just when i went to Italy with Aaron and those guys.

[2876] Well, also maybe just because drinking had been in your life.

[2877] And I already knew it was no good for me. Right.

[2878] You knew you were drinking excessively.

[2879] Yeah, and I got hurt a lot when I drank.

[2880] But I knew I wasn't, like, I knew I had quit.

[2881] It was so weird.

[2882] But one time, are you sure you knew you had quit because Jess tells the story of you guys early days where you told him like, well, no, I'm going to have to quit this.

[2883] at some point.

[2884] Like, you had already known for a long time, but way before you decided to get sober, that sobriety was going to be in your future.

[2885] For sure.

[2886] But what I'm saying is I knew in that amnesia that I was sober.

[2887] Yeah.

[2888] Not that I was going to get sober.

[2889] I knew I, like, when I was asking, I was like, did I drink again?

[2890] Like, did I break my sobriety?

[2891] It's weird.

[2892] It's very weird.

[2893] Okay, one thing I thought was fun is that Christopher Nolan, has said the line in the dark night you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain he says he's plagued by that because he didn't write it because jonah wrote it oh really yeah oh that's cute that he gives him credit for that yeah um i guess he gets enough credit isn't he i mean he should get credit if he wrote the the big line from the movie oh yeah yeah i'm just saying i was saying it was very generous to say go out in public and just clear that up yeah Yeah, for sure.

[2894] But then I was remembering that Christopher Nolan gets quite a bit of praise.

[2895] He does.

[2896] Yeah.

[2897] His cup's probably full.

[2898] That's true.

[2899] I've certainly gotten more generous as my cup has gotten fuller.

[2900] Yeah, me too.

[2901] Okay.

[2902] Oppenheimer, we said changed the world.

[2903] Then I was looking at who else.

[2904] Who else could we say change the world?

[2905] And there's a list of 100.

[2906] Oh, wow.

[2907] I don't know if.

[2908] Wanted to the top 10?

[2909] Sure.

[2910] But I don't think they're in order.

[2911] Hmm.

[2912] Would they alphabetical?

[2913] They're just random.

[2914] But Johann Gutenberg.

[2915] Oh, the Bible.

[2916] Printing the Bible.

[2917] Printing Newton.

[2918] Isaac Newton.

[2919] Mm -hmm.

[2920] Physics.

[2921] Martin Luther.

[2922] Which one?

[2923] Martin Luther.

[2924] Okay.

[2925] Protestant Reformation.

[2926] Darwin.

[2927] Uh -huh.

[2928] Okay, sure.

[2929] Bill.

[2930] Columbus.

[2931] Christopher Columbus.

[2932] Discovering the new world.

[2933] Mm -hmm.

[2934] Asterix.

[2935] Exactly.

[2936] Um, Carl Marks, which that's interesting that he's on here.

[2937] I mean, he did.

[2938] Big time.

[2939] The whole Cold War is a result of one book.

[2940] Yeah, that's nuts.

[2941] Did you watch the octopus murders conspiracy show on Netflix?

[2942] Anyone watch that?

[2943] My octopus teacher?

[2944] Nope, but that is also on Netflix.

[2945] This is, I think there's maybe even a series called American Conspiracies and this is the Octopus Murders.

[2946] No, what is it?

[2947] It's four parts, and it's a great demonstration of how tricky this stuff is because some of it's true and some of it's not.

[2948] Like these really complex conspiracy theories where there is a lot of it that's true.

[2949] And then figuring out what parts are not true.

[2950] It's driven a couple different journalists mad, this case.

[2951] What is it?

[2952] So it starts with a man, Bill something who created software, and he was going to digitize.

[2953] Bill something that created software.

[2954] not Gates.

[2955] He created this software that was going to allow some law enforcement agency to digitize all their records.

[2956] And then they were going to be able to cross -reference stuff.

[2957] Okay.

[2958] And it was a three -year contract.

[2959] And a year into it, the Department of Defense stopped paying him.

[2960] So they owed him like $3 million.

[2961] He sued to get the money.

[2962] They would not pay.

[2963] There were many court cases.

[2964] Then some conspiracy theories.

[2965] Then some people came out and said, that software that he created was actually stolen by the Department of Defense given to this other company because it was great software and they figured out how to make a back door to it and they sold it to all the people around the world, the governments.

[2966] Now, again, this stuff is totally substantiated and there's records of Israel running this software, both allies and enemies so that when they digitized everything, the CIA would be able to, you know, to go in through this back door and read all of their records.

[2967] So that makes total sense why they stopped paying him.

[2968] And then they actually won the court case.

[2969] The judge awarded them $6 .8 million.

[2970] Then that's just, that's like episode one.

[2971] And then you come to find out the person who ended up owning that software was good friends with Ronald Reagan.

[2972] And they were trying to get this backdoor into all their Cold War enemy.

[2973] And then, well, then it was called an Indian reservation, Cabazon, here in California, where because they have immunity, the CIA was running all these programs out of there with gangsters, with drugs, the Contra affair, selling guns to fighters against all these communist regimes.

[2974] And then so this thing that starts with just the software thing grows into this enormous octopus theory and all these different people that were killed and all these different things that were happening in the 80s for the Cold War.

[2975] As a result of that.

[2976] Yes, but of course some of it is bullshit and some of it's real.

[2977] And the journalist ends up dying.

[2978] Spoiler.

[2979] That's right away.

[2980] You find that out.

[2981] And really you're trying to figure out throughout the whole thing, did this point?

[2982] person really kill themselves as the police said or were they murdered as they were getting close it's so wild and i was thinking how tricky these things are when you get really into them they do change your worldview so like for some of them on the outside i'm looking at it going like that's completely implausible then the other stuff i'm like wow wow they definitely did that and of course they did it when they thought that the future depended on them beating the communists of course they would do anything and in some weird way they should um no not anything there was so much panic around communism well i don't think it was panic if you look at all these regimes the kemer russ Stalin Stalin killed 80 million people a lot of it's real and it was obviously like macartheism and all that it was so that was so crazy even in oppenheimer ding ding ding yeah the problem is is inherent in a marxist system or a communist system you have centralized control of all things yeah right and when you have centralized control of all things yeah right and when you have of all things you have people with enormous power sure they control the media and we in just unfortunately we don't have a successful example of a communist experiment that's been running yeah i'm not saying we should adopt that but i think the fear around we were righteous in fighting that because all it did is empower very few people and they became increasingly less democratic most of them all became totalitarian regimes so i think we were right to fight it and it was it was an existential threat And so when you're talking about, like, someone has a decision to kill 10 people, let's just say, to prevent this thing that's spreading around the world and we'll end in a totalitarian regime, like, I can see where you're like, yeah, some nasty work has to be done for the greater good.

[2983] But you don't think that about preventing Trump from becoming president.

[2984] Well, what I think is that, yeah, this is where you and I disagree.

[2985] little bit, which is like, I believe in democracy.

[2986] That's my highest principle.

[2987] And I can also acknowledge that I'm not always going to be in the majority of a democracy, but I think a democracy is the best option, and it has to be pure.

[2988] So I think, unfortunate for me, if the majority of the country wants a president, I don't want, I don't think I should be able to cheat to prevent that from happening.

[2989] I think it's a democracy.

[2990] You can't say that.

[2991] There is an excessive.

[2992] existential crisis when it's him.

[2993] Well, we had them for four years and it didn't.

[2994] And do you want to go back to that?

[2995] It was a fucking nightmare every day, every day.

[2996] And this would be worse.

[2997] All I'm saying is I believe in democracy above all my own personal things.

[2998] And unfortunately, if the majority of the people want a certain person to be president, I respect that.

[2999] I don't like it, but I respect it.

[3000] And I don't think you can dismantle a democracy because you disagree.

[3001] with the outcome.

[3002] That's where you and I differ a little bit.

[3003] Because I remember the last election.

[3004] I said, if you can cheat, would you?

[3005] And you said, yeah, which I'm not judgmental of.

[3006] You and I have different priorities of our principles.

[3007] I would never cheat the election.

[3008] I would respect what the majority of people think.

[3009] I think that's how a democracy has to work.

[3010] Even if that person is a threat to the democracy, you still.

[3011] Yeah.

[3012] I think if the majority of the people vote for somebody that has to be honored.

[3013] We also don't have a system where it's about the majority.

[3014] I'm just saying forget all, forget the specifics that were mired in.

[3015] I'm saying I believe in democracy and I believe when the majority votes that that has to be honored, whether I hate the person or not.

[3016] But I, the specifics matter here.

[3017] It's not the majority of people voting that create the outcome.

[3018] So cheating, quote, cheating.

[3019] If it mirrors the actual majority of people, right.

[3020] Is that a problem?

[3021] Well, we're getting into.

[3022] the Electoral College versus the popular vote.

[3023] So do I think that system's flawed?

[3024] Absolutely.

[3025] I don't think we had the technology at the beginning of the formation of this country to do a direct vote, but we do now.

[3026] So I think it should be a direct vote.

[3027] But what I'm saying is that in come November, if 65 % of the people who live in America vote for a person, I honor that.

[3028] Right.

[3029] And it might not be my person, but I believe in democracy more than I believe in any of my other principles.

[3030] I know, I hear you.

[3031] And then it's on me. If I want to live somewhere where I'm a part of the majority, then I got to go there.

[3032] Because the people that were storming the Capitol, they were saying what you're saying, which is like, I don't really care about that vote.

[3033] I reject it.

[3034] I don't believe it because I know that he's chosen for him to not win would be an existential threat to the country.

[3035] And so they have the exact same principle at work.

[3036] And what I'm saying is that those people need to move to a country that's not a democracy.

[3037] No, but that's when the popular vote in the electoral college, that's when this is an actual problem.

[3038] Because Biden won the popular vote and the electoral college.

[3039] He did.

[3040] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[3041] But Hillary won the popular vote.

[3042] And not the electoral college.

[3043] So we ended up with a president who did not reflect the majority of this country.

[3044] Right.

[3045] When I'm saying, we should cheat.

[3046] in order to represent the actual majority.

[3047] I'm not saying if, if, let's say, if, and this might happen, the popular vote goes to Trump, I'm with you.

[3048] It's like, look, this is the way the country is right now.

[3049] Yeah, and whether I want to live in a place where this is the majority of the country, that's on me to decide.

[3050] Yeah, yeah.

[3051] But that wasn't the case in 2016.

[3052] And in 2020, it was both.

[3053] So I'm just, I'm only pointing out that there were some people that thought it was time to reject the popular vote on January 6th.

[3054] Those people were rejecting the popular vote.

[3055] But I'm not saying that.

[3056] Right.

[3057] So it's, I don't like, the comparison is not the same.

[3058] If we won, let's just say that your candidate won the electoral college and not the popular vote, you'd be totally fine with.

[3059] Yeah.

[3060] So I'm only asking that everyone play it the same way on both sides.

[3061] Like, we have to grant our opponent the same rules we play by.

[3062] So if we would have no reservation and accepting an electoral college victory, even though we lost the popular vote, which we wouldn't have a problem with, I don't think we can be critical of them for doing the same thing.

[3063] But they lost both.

[3064] And I know.

[3065] We're talking, we're dipping in and out of a lot of stuff.

[3066] So your first issue is with Hillary.

[3067] Yeah.

[3068] And so I'm addressing that one.

[3069] But I didn't.

[3070] She won the popular vote and not the electoral college.

[3071] Yeah.

[3072] Yeah, which I think is a big problem.

[3073] It is a problem.

[3074] But again, if the reverse was true and she had won the electoral college and not the popular, we would be delighted that she had become president.

[3075] So because we're not outraged when it happens and benefits us, we can't be outraged when it benefits them.

[3076] I just think it's a little murky.

[3077] Never happened.

[3078] It hasn't happened.

[3079] You're right.

[3080] Yeah.

[3081] But we wouldn't care.

[3082] We can acknowledge we wouldn't care.

[3083] So I don't think we can be holier than now and say that they somehow lack morals because they won the electoral college vote and not the point.

[3084] No, I'm not saying they lack morals because they're upset or not upset about the president.

[3085] You lack morals when you storm a capital.

[3086] So tabling Hillary and Trump 16 now going to rewind to the conversation of would you cheat or would you reject something?

[3087] And you said if it poses an existential threat to democracy itself, you would reject it.

[3088] I don't think killing people to prevent him is appropriate.

[3089] I'm not for that.

[3090] Yes, I'm only saying.

[3091] that you said, which is fine, I totally respected that.

[3092] If the person who, one, poses an existential threat to democracy in itself, you would have no problem cheating.

[3093] Yeah.

[3094] And so those people on January 6th, I just want to acknowledge that, they had that exact same feeling.

[3095] But do you think cheating and killing people are the same thing?

[3096] No. I don't think anyone should kill anyone.

[3097] I'm only trying to latch on to the conviction.

[3098] But my conviction is not the same as theirs.

[3099] But you would betray fairness if you thought the person posed an existential threat to democracy.

[3100] And you would betray fairness.

[3101] Sure, you would betray fairness.

[3102] Yes.

[3103] So those people, too, decided to betray fairness.

[3104] We're going to reject these results.

[3105] We're not going to accept these results.

[3106] And I think what they did is completely wrong.

[3107] But I also think it would be completely wrong for our side.

[3108] to cheat in any manner whatsoever because we decided that person was an existential threat.

[3109] I don't think anyone has the right to determine who's an existential threat and then circumnavigate the system that's been working for 300 years.

[3110] Well, do you think it's cheating to gerrymander and do you think it's cheating to prevent black people from voting?

[3111] I do.

[3112] I mean, they're doing all of it.

[3113] Yeah, and we fight those.

[3114] We try.

[3115] And we're on total moral high ground to do so because it's actually cheating the laws of our democracy.

[3116] I guess what I say, it's above my left -rightness.

[3117] I get it.

[3118] But when I say I would cheat in a practical example of this person, it's in context, it's not theory, right?

[3119] Yeah, yeah.

[3120] It's a very real question about a specific person and the world we live in where they are cheating.

[3121] They are cheating.

[3122] Uh -huh.

[3123] So, yeah, I'm okay to cheat in an environment where I feel like maybe we have no shot because other people are cheating.

[3124] It's like the steroid, Lance Armstrong.

[3125] If everyone is doping, I'm going to have to.

[3126] Right.

[3127] Yeah, I don't know.

[3128] It's very depressing.

[3129] Anyway, okay, back to the list.

[3130] Einstein, Copernicus, and Galileo.

[3131] Those were, and Da Vinci's honorable mention, 11.

[3132] But there's 100 on here.

[3133] There's some good ones.

[3134] People can look it up.

[3135] Oh, the Beatles are on here.

[3136] Oh.

[3137] This is from.

[3138] I think Western Michigan University, but it's A &E Biography's 100 most influential people of the millennium.

[3139] Of the millennium.

[3140] Oh, so I guess it was, it's not up to date.

[3141] 1 ,000 to 2 ,000?

[3142] Yeah, not up to date.

[3143] In the last 20 years, has there been anyone, I would say, changed the world, Obama?

[3144] I think you'd have to say Mark Zuckerberg.

[3145] Yeah, because I think Facebook is a foundational beginning to the polarization of the country.

[3146] And just socially, a hundred percent he is.

[3147] Yeah.

[3148] Bills on it, obviously.

[3149] Oh, yes.

[3150] Yeah.

[3151] Okay, I'm going to see Dune 2 now.

[3152] Oh, you are?

[3153] Are you going to see it today?

[3154] IMAX?

[3155] I think regs.

[3156] I think regs, but good sound.

[3157] David said it has good sound.

[3158] Where are you seeing it at?

[3159] Americana.

[3160] Why not a man's Chinese?

[3161] You just don't like the area.

[3162] I don't like the area.

[3163] The area is rough.

[3164] Yeah.

[3165] The Americana is so cozy.

[3166] see.

[3167] Yeah, and there's other shopping to do.

[3168] I can go to Sephora.

[3169] Yeah.

[3170] Okay, well, have a blast.

[3171] It's such a good movie.

[3172] I'm so excited for you.

[3173] I'm excited.

[3174] All right.

[3175] I love you.

[3176] Bye, love you.

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