Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Tyler Perry

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Tyler Perry (The Six Triple Eight, I Can Do Bad All By Myself, Diary of A Mad Black Woman) is an actor, playwright, producer, and filmmaker. Tyler joins the Armchair Expert to discuss how he realized that his journal could be a play, his fear of comfort, and growing up to leave the door open for somebody else. Tyler and Dax talk about seeing a black middle class for the first time after relocating to Atlanta, the things children walk through, and moving storytelling into TV because it was a bigger arena. Tyler explains being a loner by nature, the unbelievable true story he wanted to tell with The Six Triple Eight, and learning to build toward where he’s going rather than from where he is.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by the Duchess of Duluth. Hi there. Great sweater.

You got a new sweater with two different colors, blue, very light on the sleeves. Thank you. Starry night in the middle. Oh, do you think this is blue? Yeah, what do you think it is? Oh no, it's purple for sure. To be fair, I'll buy that. It looks blue on the TV back here too.

What do you see? What color is my face to you? Pure white. Wow. Like the driven snow. Ha ha ha ha. Our guest today is Tyler Perry. And I just got to say right out of the gates,

this is a very mind blowing experience. I don't know what I thought about Tyler Perry. I mean, as a person, other than I had seen this incredible 60 minute segment on him one time, and I knew he had had a really incredible story that he overcame. So I knew that he was very honest and stuff,

but just as a human, he was just a very powerful and special presence. My God, did we like this so much. Really very, very special. I had an inkling before it would have that extra sparkle on it and it did. Yes. Well, listen, Tyler Perry is a filmmaker, a playwright, an actor, diary of a mad black

woman, sister's house of pain, Madea's family reunion, Alex cross, and his new movie out now, which is doing really great. I've noticed it's always in the top couple there on Netflix, the six triple eight with one of our favorites, Kerry Washington. This is a very, very special episode. Please enjoy Tyler Perry. And happy new year. And happy new year.

And to all a good night. Would you like a coffee or a diet coke? That coffee is for you. Oh, that's a cream top. It's a very famous coffee. Cream top? No, I'm not a coffee person. You're not a coffee person. Good for you. I don't like some of the things I'm learning about you right away.

Tell me. You're early and you don't like coffee. I love your chair though, man. This is my size chair. Yeah. It's a biggie. You really should consider ordering one of these online because I didn't realize I was ordering like a big and tall version because I'm a big guy and you can get two of me in here. You can get your kids beside you, yeah. Yeah, yeah. My feet barely touch the ground if they do. Where at this comfort? Online, lazyboy.com. Lazyboy.com. Yeah, yeah.

You gotta get someone on that. It's a lazy boy, yeah. Do you own any lazy boys? I don't. You don't. Because your style aesthetic won't permit you to or you're afraid of comfort. I've got a little bit of both.

A little bit of both, a little bit of both. A little bit of both. Don't wanna be too comfortable. Can't get too comfortable. Did you like miniature things when you were a kid? This is a weird first question, but I can elaborate. Yeah, please. Like you would go to, where would I see miniature stuff? A dollhouse store.

No, I would never be in there. I would like the idea of feeling like a giant. Okay. I would imagine you don't want to be a giant because you're already tall. It's surprising you still have it because you're tall. Well, not to jump directly into trauma, but I feel like both of us probably desired

to be 80 feet tall as kids. For me, it was the opposite. I wanted to be smaller. I would always slouch and didn't want to be seen. You want to be invisible. Yeah. But the notion of being like the Hulk and you can defend yourself and no one can hurt you,

that didn't enter the fray. No, because the strong men for me in my life weren't good men, so I wanted to be the opposite. And being tall and being big, I was always at the end of the line and always don't hit him back. And listen, my cousin who was smaller than me and he would bully me.

And his mother with my uncle said, you can't hit him back, you're too big to hit him back. Just don't hit him back, Listen, my cousin who was smaller than me and he would bully me. And his mother would say, you can't hit him back, you're too big to hit him back. Just don't hit him back. Just, you're too big. You just gotta take it. Yeah, just gotta take it. And then one day I lost it and hung him on the clothes line in the backyard.

Oh my. Yeah, and ran home and told my mother, I was like, I couldn't take it anymore. She said, what'd you do? So she goes and get the kid down and she's laughing all the way. But yeah, I wanted to be smaller. They were kind of right to tell you to not hit back

because look what happened when you did. Yeah, exactly right. But that's my thing. I am the most gentle guy in the world until I'm pushed way too far and then there's a whole other side. Pushed to your limit. Yeah, takes a lot to get me there.

So I was enormous for my size as a kid and in all the class photos, it looks like I flunked a few grades. Because you're so big. Yeah, it looks like he flunked a few grades. Because you're so big. Yeah. It looks like he's in the wrong class. Did you stand out like that? Oh, for sure. I was the tallest and the biggest and the smartest and it was a lot. And this is in New Orleans.

Yeah, New Orleans. Yeah. So what were the virtues that were prized at that time? Obviously not those things. No, growing up, my mother was a woman who completely gave a lot. So it was all about giving and helping each other all the time. And because we didn't have much, but we had more than others in the neighborhood, we were always the place to come if you were in need. And my mother was really, really great at that. I would wake up in the morning sometimes, Saturday morning, step out of the bed and I would step on somebody on the floor like,

who is this person? And my mom would be like, they needed a place to stay. Be quiet. Don't embarrass them. Oh, really? Yeah, they needed a place to stay. Be quiet. Don't embarrass them. Oh, really? Yeah, it was a lot of that for sure. And was she finding these people at church or all over? We lived in New Orleans, which was the big city. And most of her family and the man that raised me, his family were from the small country towns outside. And when the two of them got married and moved to New Orleans, it was family members that took them in.

So it's always your door had to be open for somebody else. Right. And siblings? A brother and two sisters. Older or younger? Younger brother by 10 years and two sisters by five and six years. So do you feel included at all or do you have little brother complex? My brother's 10 years younger than me so we never were close. What about the sisters?

With the sisters, no. There was always something that was off for me in the family. Like I didn't feel like I belonged. So I was never able to be extremely close to any of them. It was really, really strange. Yeah. I gotta tell you, I saw the 60 minutes profile you did, however many years ago, it had to be over 10 years ago, probably. And it was insanely moving. I appreciate that.

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

That was heartbreaking. Chantelle, you told me this was light and happy. Where are we going? Okay. All right. All right. Okay. Monica.

Okay. All right. I'm with you. You told them light and happy. Light and happy. But no, no, okay. All right, I'm with you. Well, you told them light and happy. They said, oh, it's light and happy, but no, no, no. I'm light and happy while talking about my trauma. We're gonna need the weed. Yeah, to walk down the side of the house and see that crawl space, little cubby house where I would hide from the abuse. And it was painted robin egg blue.

I remember the blue paint that I found somewhere in a rusted can and painted it with such a beautiful light blue. I now realize that what that blue was for is that people would paint their ceilings or their porches blue so that wasp and other things wouldn't build nests because they thought it was the sky. Oh, really? Yes.

Southern thing. Oh, wow. Now realizing that Robin Egg Blue was to represent the sky, it was a pretty painful and rough time. It was hard. That's a real metaphor also, like keep the wasps away. Yeah, or keep looking to the sky. Keep looking up all around you. All right, well look, we can keep it light and fresh.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I wanna go where you wanna go. Let's go, let's go, let's go. Well, cause I think you and I are among very few men that will say out loud, I got molested. Yeah. I think that's important. I'm sick of talking about it, but I think it's important. Let me tell you why I think that's important. I'm sick of talking about it, but I think it's

important. Let me tell you why I think it's important. The far-reaching effects, I don't know about what happened with you, but for me, having my abuser be a female, I just found out at 54 was rape. To be able to associate that with rape was weird because it was a female. Right. And also the man at church. So the far reaching effects of the trauma of sexual abuse and the sexual confusion that children walked through and tried to figure that out, that I had to walk through was really, really profound.

I worked so hard at trying to understand it. That was the most difficult part of my life, just trying to understand what had happened. Why had it happened or why the people that perpetrated it could have done that? Why it happened to me and why I couldn't shake what they did. And as children, we'd have this ability to hold on to the pain of what it was and make it about our fault. Well, what was it in me that made that man do that or that woman do that? And growing up and coming into adulthood and trying to excise that,

to get it out, to understand it was really, really challenging. I had a very bizarre breakthrough with it that thus far as I share this, I've not heard a lot of people relate to, but the confusion from my perspective is like, yeah, it was man on man. So this opens up this hole, and especially where I grew up in Detroit, I guess now I'm gay. So there was like this bad thing happened to me. And then I think this makes me gay, which is his own crisis at that time. And so then the notion I would ever tell anyone wasn't on the table, because that would have been telling everyone I was gay, again, in the 80s in Detroit, where that's not going to work. That's death. It is. Then hearing

once I did say it, oh, it's not your fault, you know, you were a kid. And that just didn't really alleviate any of the, and so for me, the work was, I had to first acknowledge and own my part. This is what people don't like. But for me to get over it, it was my spidey senses were going off.

I was in a place I knew I shouldn't be, and I didn't leave and I have that pit in my stomach. I can remember how that feels and I didn't listen to my instincts I first had to go yeah that part happened and I actually got to forgive myself for that and Once I was like that all happened you knew better you should have gotten out you felt those feelings It's not like it came out of complete blue for me. And that's okay, because you were like eight years old and eight year olds choose poorly, and I did.

For me, it was allowing myself to forgive the eight year old who didn't listen to his spidey senses. It's powerful, but it's unfair. Let me tell you why. That's what people say. I didn't really fully understand it until I had a child. And I could see my son at the age of the traumas that I was experiencing going, look how innocent and beautiful and

pure. And this innocent and beautiful, pure child does not have the ability to make those kinds of decisions. So for me, it wasn't feeling the sense of, oh, what's happening, what's happening, is this wrong, this wrong. It was somebody sees me and appreciates me and is telling me I'm special. Someone was kind and their agenda was about grooming rather than it being about kindness. And I tell anyone, any man, any woman who's been sexually abused as a child, if you don't have a child, if you don't have relatives, if you see a kid on the playground, watch, not creepily, but watch the innocence of that child and then try and judge yourself through the innocence of that child. That's unfair.

It is. And that's what I came to. But I first had to grapple with this guilt feeling I had. Just to hear that it wasn't my fault was not sufficient to make it go away. I needed to kind of confront what was the darkness. The darkness was I felt like I should have known better and done something differently and I just needed to explore that. That's the man judging the child because the man or the teenager or the young man would clearly be like, what are you doing? This is crazy.

Why are you here? But if you take away the innocence and the lens of the way the child saw it, then you're robbing yourself of it. Here is the most freeing part of it for me that I found at 54 in therapy for the first time in my life. There's something called an arousal template that I had no idea about that from the age of three to seven, I could be wrong on the ages, but the therapist will tell you this, three to seven, your arousal template is set as a kid, even though you're not sexual.

So if someone comes along and interjects something into your arousal template, be it culturally, be it rape and molestation, violence, all of those things being put into your young child brain becomes a part of your arousal template, especially for men and for me being a little boy. The thing that gave me the most shame was when the molester would say, you liked it, look, you're erect. That's the struggle. How can I be a heterosexual boy, know I like girls and have the same sex thought and desire?

That was hard to understand. But understanding that the arousal template in your brain sets that and has been hijacked. And also, this is the thing that blew my mind. Once it's set, it can't be taken away. And for me, wrapping my mind and soul around all of that was very freeing. Yeah. How did you handle it before you went to therapy? Like, what were you telling yourself? A lot of people say, Oh my God, you're so profound. Look how hard you work. Look how much you've done. A lot of the success that I've experienced in life was because I wasn't dealing. I was just working. I would work my way through it and relationships wouldn't really work out because I would just work and work and work and work and no matter how

much work that I did, when the work would stop, I'd be faced with these things happen to you. What do you feel about it? Who are you? What are you? And I just got to a place in my life where it's like, I'm not gonna live this way anymore. And at 55, I'm the freest and clearest version of myself that I've ever been. Oh, that's wonderful. All of it's a sword, right? So I would argue that part of your arousal template being set in the way it was does predispose you to be able to handle what comes your way and results in the success. So my thing is I thrive when shit's hitting the fan and spend a lot of my life seeking those out. We set this thing at a 50 instead of a 10.

Yeah. So it's like I'm asleep asleep unless I really gotta be aware of how to get out of this situation. I'm sorry, man. Yeah, same for you. What I did know, because recently I've been doing all these tests, when I went to this session, they were like, okay, let's test for you for autism,

because there are certain things that you are doing that are on the spectrum. So we went through all of these tests, and what we found is that a child like me having to live in that kind of chaos and trauma constantly, I became hyper vigilant in everything. I trained my brain to see, to watch, to protect myself in every way, which is where I work today. So for you to say that you were in a moment of chaos is where you've thrived, it's what happened to the little boy and what he needed to be okay or to feel like he was loved.

And I've run into people like that and it's one of the saddest things that I've seen because the more I try and say, hey, this is what peace feels like, there's all of this resistance to it because it's scary. Yeah. I was set on this trajectory. There's some parts of me I'm gonna have to accept. I'm not gonna erase the hard drive from the arousal format. Which is very important to understand

because you can make yourself insane trying to figure out what has happened, why is affecting me in this way. I've had very few sexual partners at 55 and people go, oh my God, you're this huge guy, really successful, sure, you're all over the world. No, not me. I do believe that all things work together for you good, my God, you're this huge guy, really success. Sure. You're all over the world. No, not me. I do believe that all things work together for you good, even though if

they're awful and horrible, I have to believe that which put me in a wonderful position and running the studio, because when you have people coming to you with their dreams in their hands and they need a job or want to be on a show, if I had been another person, then maybe I would have been doing things that were horrible. But because of what I went through and because of how much I understand the pain of that, I would never inflict that on anybody. So it put me in this great position to help as many people as I could safely hit this next level in their lives, right? Yes. So all of that is incredibly important to me.

What's interesting is I think you and I went almost in opposite directions based on similar things, which is kind of fascinating. Yeah, and that happens. I had a friend who had been sexually abused and he had hundreds of partners. Yeah. Well, at the same time, he was abandoned by his mother. So you could give him 10,000 females and it wouldn't fulfill what he was looking for. Yeah.

And he and I finally sat down, had some real deep conversations about what's going on. I even hired a private detective to try to find the mother that abandoned him. Oh. So that he could talk to her. I was thinking that hopefully that would help him. Yeah, closure. Yeah. There are people who go to these incredible extremes.

You can go that way where everything is sex and then you go the other way where for me, I didn't want to be thought of as sexy being tall was a problem because when people would see me they go this Tall black guy the stereotype or whatever that is. Well, you embody masculinity in our simplest definition or stereotype Yes, so carrying all of that and trying to walk through and work all of that out was a journey for sure When you would have sexual partners, did you feel like, sorry, this is so personal, but what did you feel after the fact? Were you like, I didn't like that,

I don't like sex anymore, or I'm ruined, or I'm fraudulent. What were the feelings? There was one woman who I was completely in love with. I was in my early thirties at the time. Because I wasn't very experienced, I felt less than. Inadequate. Yeah, inadequate.

And that was something that made me shy further away and back into myself of going, okay, I don't wanna be judged based on my lack of experience because of what I've been through. Yeah, it's a weird cycle. Yeah. So at 54, this past summer, I've been thinking about it for a while.

I was like, okay, Tyler, you've worked this hard. You've got this beautiful kid. You've had this amazing life. What happens when you're not working? Why aren't you happy when you're not working? Because the work became the drug and the adrenaline. So to take that moment and stop the work and say, okay, let's go and look inside and see what's happening and see the full effect.

This program I did was so fantastic. Before you go in, there are thousands of questions that you answer. So they have a clinical profile of who you are mentally walking in the door. For me to walk in and be confirmed in who I thought I was, was so freeing to have all of these therapists. I think it was nine that I saw in total, because it's a very intensive thing for seven days, 10 hours a day. And then you sit in the room and all the therapists talk about you and you listen.

Oh, wow. Oh, wow. And to hear them talking and affirming the good person that I know that I am and the issues and the way to work through them was very freeing for me. This one woman I love, she would say to me every day I walk in, because when you go through these profiles, it's like, do you drink? I'm sick, I have a drink on occasion. Have you ever done any drugs? And they're like, no, I tried this pot when I was 40,

didn't really like it. I have a gummy every now and then, but if I get too weird, I don't like feeling out of control. But they were fascinated because I'm not an addict. That's shocking to me. It is. You have like an 80% chance of being an addict. And that's exactly what they were saying to me.

And there were these group sessions. I'm going, I'm not going to be in these group sessions. I'm Tyler Perry. I don't know about this. And she said to me, there have been people who've come here who were famous who did not do the sessions and came back to do the group sessions. So I was in the group with these wonderful people

who had shit that they were dealing with. To sit in and hear their stories and made me find the commonality. There was a through line for all of us and I think that for all of humanity, man. As much as I'm excited to be here talking to you, my hope is that by sharing this, somebody hears something and goes, maybe that's what I'm dealing with. But the other stuff is you read The Body Keeps a Score on any of these books. It's like 30%. I mean, it's huge numbers of us who have gone through this stuff and you would think you're

the only one, at least when we grew up. And we grew up in a time where you could not talk about it. No. Because if you said anything, you're gay. And being gay at that time was a horrible taboo thing. I'm so glad we're at a place now where people can just be themselves. Yes. There was a kid recently,

I don't know a lot of younger singers and performers, but he was singing on stage and I saw him talking about his sexuality, trying to figure it out. And my heart went out to him because he's so young. And what I wanted to scream was, look into the arousal template, figure out what happened,

walk it through so that you're clear in a sense of, this is what happened. And also there's so much shame, you have to chase the shame down of what that feels like. And that's the thing that freed me just to look at it like I am ashamed of the why. And also understanding that was not my fault. I did not deserve that. They gave that to me and it wasn't mine to carry. Here's the thing that I've been trying to work through the most, as long as I have been dealing with

what they both gave me to carry, it has denied me the ability to love freely, openly, and be in a relationship that is healthy and whole for a very long period of time. Yeah. I have another friend on a guy's trip in Jackson, we're sitting around talking, and he's talking about how when he was six, his older brothers

were making him have sex with these women and he's laughing and he's joking about it. He's laughing at everybody around the table. They're all making jokes and I'm quiet and I'm just a guy's, I'm sorry, I got to challenge you on this. He's like, no, no, no, no. So when we got to a moment where we could talk in private, he broke. Because I had him look at his child. I was like, is that okay for your six year old?

And then it's like, whoa, because you realize you've been judging the child that you are through the lens of your adult life. It's so misleading. For sure. Can I ask really quick, how do you feel about men in general? I'm kind of relieved to hear you were on a dude's trip

in Jackson. I'm not expecting you to be excited to become friends with men. Really? Why? Well, given the dad and that seems very scary and that perhaps men in general. No, no, I've got great guy friends, great female friends. For me, most of that carnage was driven by dudes. My mother was the balance for everything for me and she wouldn't let me see things one way. She worked at a Jewish community center for most of my childhood. She would educate

me about what Jewish people went through. My mother just would not let me see things one way. So I wouldn't lean toward one group or one sex of a group. I always base people on, are you a good person? And I have a really good sense of people, which came from that childhood of being hypervigilant. When I walk in, I'm like, hmm. Yeah. Are you skeptical when you walk in? Are you like... I'm not skeptical.

I'm immediate on what I feel. I don't talk myself out of what I feel. Yeah. So I think that's the gift that I've come to realize I'm grateful for, which is someone sits down in here and I know within 30 seconds if they've had our childhood. Exactly right. I see how they look at the doors in the room. I see how they look over at Rob and I just go, oh, we're on the same team here.

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

pasture and just be okay. And not be fearful. Do you have a hard time sleeping? No, I sleep well. And you always have or is that post trip to this great place? I don't know if I always have, but what I know I do is work myself to exhaustion. So the sleep is good, but I also do know how to stop and check in, see if I'm okay, go away, get quiet. I like to be alone. I'm a loner by nature. I could spend days and weeks and months in the mountains

by myself. You have to police yourself, I imagine, with isolation? Of course, especially having a 10-year-old now. It's like, hey, dad, hello. Soccer practice over here. Real life's happening over here. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so he's 10. Yeah.

I have 10 and 11. It's so fucking fun. Yeah, he's so good. Okay, so at a certain point, again, it'd be shocking to people, I think, to learn that someone as smart as you, you didn't graduate high school. I got put out of high school and had to go to PM high school to get my diploma. It was a high school that was at night after school for adults and people who got kicked out of school. Right. Dudes who were smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. Who wanted to go to school. And then in your early twenties,

you're watching Oprah. Yeah, picture that, right? Yeah. You're watching Oprah. You learn about journaling as a way to process your thoughts, and you really decide to take that up. Yeah, I was looking through some things recently, and I ran across one of my old journals.

From that era? Early 2000s. And I opened it up, and I started reading, and I just sat there. I was reading for hours. I called Oprah up. I was like and I just sat there was reading for hours I called Oprah up I was like listen go pull out your journals and read some of the stuff you were going through 20 30 years ago It was so spiritual. I was in tears

It's like you had written your own Bible of the things that you had come through and to go back and look at them And see how far you've come was so beautiful to me So I would tell anybody journal right and then go back years later and. When you were reading the one from 20 years ago, what were you wrestling with that you now realize your past? Does it also give you a sense of humor about all the stuff you obsess about? Yeah, I was just like, oh, I hope the show works. I don't know how I'm going to pay this light bill's $3,000. I go back and look at those things and go on, look at where you were. I'd come through being homeless so I was writing it from the

point of view of where I was and not where I was going. Understanding where you're going is so much more important. I've learned to build for where I'm going rather than where I am and looking back on all of that stuff and reading all of those moments and those memories that really was powerful for me. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Okay so you started at what age do you think? 18 or 19. I was watching the show and I started journaling and I didn't use my name because

at that time we wouldn't talk about the things that you and I just talked about. Right, right. I would use these different characters and a friend of mine found them and goes, man, this is a really good play. And I thought, hmm, maybe it is a play. What I write about is this character went through this. I was talking about adult survivors of child abuse and rape and molestation. So I moved to Atlanta.

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

The man that raised me was a builder, and I wanted to build houses. But when I wrote this, I always loved entertainment, but I never thought you can audition. Yeah, you're trying to be invisible, not center stage. Yeah. So having my friend encourage me and doing that first play and seeing people, the 1200 that I thought would show up and only 30 did.

Yeah. Having the 30 people's reaction to the show speak to me in my soul, I was like, whoa. So that sparked something for me. And you went in this incredible journey. So you moved to Atlanta in 1990? Yeah, early 90s. And I think we got to do one second on, it seems obvious to me, but why Atlanta from New Orleans?

Hurricane Katrina literally blew the roof off the poverty that was in New Orleans. Mardi Gras was amazing and the tourists are on Bourbon Street and St. Charles Avenue and it's beautiful and it's amazing. But two blocks behind those mansions is where we were in the ghetto. We're drive by shootings and police brutality and murders and it was just insane.

So some friends of mine invited me to Freaknik, which is the black spring break. Black kids went to Atlanta, white kids went to the beach for spring break. I don't know what that's about, but I got there and while everybody's partying and dancing and drinking, and I'm realizing that I see black people doing well.

I'm from Detroit. So I would go down to Atlanta and I'd be like, this is a completely different version than I've ever seen. There's black folks in Escalades and they have nice houses. They're at the nice restaurant. This was unimaginable in Detroit in the 90s. Yeah. And I think I'm probably six years older than you. Five, yeah. So you get it. And being a black person and never seeing a black person be successful unless it was a pimp or a preacher, to come to Atlanta and see their doctors, their lawyers, they're in suits.

A full middle class. I'm home. So I loaded up my Hyundai and moved right to Atlanta. You put up a play and as you say, only 35 folks. Yeah, 30. Okay. Don't give me the other five. I'm going to give you five. only 35 folks. Yeah, 30. Okay. Don't give me the other five. I'm going to give you five.

$12 a ticket. I'm counting. If you were in and out of the bathroom, you didn't count. I would count that, yeah. That's right. You undertake from that moment something that is I think very rare in our business, which is you then take the next six years, I guess, to refine, to rewrite, to rework, to restage. No. Okay. Well, to restage. No.

Okay. Well, no wonder it was impossible to believe. I see you're doing your research, that's good. But no, it was the same show, and every year I would try to do it, it would fail. But there was somebody in the audience out of every show, that's what I call a ram in a bush, who wanted to invest in it every time.

The most I saw was probably 1,400 people in New Orleans in a theater that sat 3,000. But out of that, somebody said, well, let's keep this going. Because during this time, there were a lot of plays, these black shows that were traveling the country and making lots of money for black people. It was on something that's affectionately called the Chitlin circuit. The rename's weird, urban. There's a rename?

Yeah, they rebranded it. Well, kind of like Aunt Jemima, you have to rebrand it. I'm just gonna call this shit what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Chittlin' Circus is when black performers could not perform in white establishments, they would travel all over the South into all of these different places and become famous among their own people. So here I am doing this play in the early 90s and hitting some of these spots where black people were allowed to go everywhere.

But the spirit of the Chittlin' Circus was still there where black people were allowed to go everywhere. But the spirit of the Chitlin Circle was still there where black people supported each other. And for my play to not work all of those years, then in 1998, take off one night. So the play itself didn't change all that much? It didn't change. You know what changed? The play was about adult survivors of child abuse who had forgiven their abuser because it was a happy ending. They all forgave their abuser, the woman who did all this stuff to them.

And I hadn't forgiven my father. So it was hypocritical that I'm in this seat and I'm talking about forgiveness, and it hadn't happened for me. So in 98, he and I got into a really heated argument, the man who raised me. And I forgave him. And that is when the show changed.

Oh, wow. It was spiritual for me. I went from nobody being in the audience to having eight sold out shows after I forgave him and that is when the show changed. Oh wow. It was spiritual for me. I went from nobody being in the audience to having eight sold out shows after I forgave him. And the forgiveness was such a scary thing for me because I didn't realize how powerful it was for me. It was my anchoring.

You're with me, what are you thinking? You got something on your mind to say? Well, I'm dead with you. A, I'm thinking resentment is drinking poison, hoping the other person dies. My own father, my resentments. I'm thinking of you being Christian, hoping the other person dies. My own father, my resentments. I'm thinking of you being Christian, how it's probably compounded that you weren't able to achieve forgiveness in the context you were in.

Yeah. But also anger is helpful. If you take away anger, you have to make room for compassion. And that is very hard to do. It's much more gray. The ripping away of my anger toward him was like a car that kind of runs on gasoline. Then all of a sudden you fill it with diesel and say, go be motivated. Because everything I was doing, every time I was trying to work, it was like, I'm going to make some money.

I'm going to take care of my mother. I'm going to prove to you that I am something because you said I wasn't shit. Once that was gone and I forgave him, it didn't matter anymore. I had no motivation to keep going. Even though the purest sense of where I started was about making enough money to take care of my mother so she didn't have to be with him. So forgiving him ripped that from me.

I had to figure out, okay, how do you operate now? I also found this out in therapy. I shifted from the anger to caregiving and I did not know that my caregiving was a problem. Is the caregiving still an attempt to be safe? The caregiving is an attempt to save everybody else. But I hear what you're saying. Yeah, I'm trying to find this crossover because I don't trust people. What's someone going to do? And then I have tactics. So if you're a woman and you're in love with me, I feel safe because you're probably not going to hurt me if you love me. If you're a man and I think I can dominate you,

you're going to know not to try to hurt me. If I can make everyone in love with me, I feel safe, because you're probably not gonna hurt me if you love me. If you're a man and I think I can dominate you, you're gonna know not to try to hurt me. If I can make everyone in this room laugh, I'm totally safe, because people aren't swinging when they're laughing. So I have these techniques, and I guess I would have just imagined that if you're the caretaker and you're benevolent, you would expect the reciprocity would be kindness.

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

Is that right? Expectations are resentments under construction. That's the same. Wow. I gave up expectations because I thought if I'm good to this person, if I'm kind to this person, if I'm doing this, and they give me their ass to kiss or just become horrible, then I'm gonna feel bad because they did that rather than going, I'm

just going to be good to you whether you do whatever you want to do or not. You do what works for you. I'm just going to be good to you. Right. For me. For me, because my entire life was based on the anger and now I've shifted. So I've got to do this for me. But where it became a problem, and I could not wrap my brain around this when I first started talking to these folks, they were saying, Tyler, caregiving is a problem. I'm like, how is that a problem?

It's such a good thing. It's a problem if you're using it to cover what you're dealing with. So I was caring for everybody else, so I wasn't dealing with what I was dealing with or going through. You weren't caring for yourself. Yeah.

Yeah, that's kind of like that classic codependent paradigm too, right? And I imagine you probably collected folks that needed a lot of help, not intentionally. I absolutely didn't think it was intentional, but as I look at my life now. It's a suspicious amount. This is beyond suspicious.

I have a tremendous amount of people who need a lot of help. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you've come up multiple times on this show from people you've helped. We had Prince Harry on, you opened your doors to him. You are someone who extends yourself and you said your mom did it too. So I assume there's also a deep knowing

because she did that as well. But you're known to be very generous. That's incredibly kind. Thank you, Monica, I appreciate that. It's true. It's good when people will acknowledge it and say it. That's really great. Thank you. It's frustrating and confusing when it actually leads to their resentment.

And understandably, once you unplug from the whole system, yeah, they feel shittier and they weirdly resent you because you're helping and you're sort of a reminder that they need help. And that's a very tricky dynamic to navigate. I set limits on how far I'm going to go. I'm going to help you to this point. And you've got to get up and be on your own because I'm not going to let you be dependent on me for everything. And then they get angry because of where you stop.

I've seen that, of course. But listen, it's okay. It's not okay, but it's life. You keep moving, you deal with their anger, whatever way it comes. But I always know my intention. My intention is pure. Yeah. Monica, cut this out because I say it's life. You keep moving, you deal with their anger, whatever way it comes, but I always know my intention. My intention is pure. Yeah. Monica, cut this out, because I say it too often, but my mother said the best thing to me ever.

Why do you want to cut it out? Because I say it too much, it just sounds redundant, but we can leave it if you want. Yeah, because if you say it a lot, then somebody may hear it for the first time. Okay, you can be the judge of it. So I call my mom, I'm complaining about someone else asking me for money, and she's very generous and lets me go on and on,

comforts me. And then she says, you know, Dax, in life, you can either be the person calling for help, or you can be the person that gets called for help. Who do you wanna be? And I was like, oh, definitely the person that gets called for help. I know, but that's come to bite you a little bit.

Oh, so? Because you don't like calling anyone for help, and everyone needs to call someone for help every now and then. That's true. That's true. But just given those options, it was very helpful for me to reframe my frustration with it, which is like, well, I could be in the other side of this equation. There's another option there because I found this out because I was helping so many people and they just kept coming back, kept coming back. Well, I need this. I need that. I was praying about it. I clearly hear this voice, which I believe inside of me to be the voice of God. It's like, stop. You are

blocking a midnight. And I thought about that. I went back and looked at what midnight represented in the Bible. Sometimes God designs midnights for people to go through. And if you run and rescue them all the time, you're not making them better. You rob them of the thing that would make them better. That might change them. Or be that thing that gets them up and gets them on their feet and gets them going. The catalyst. Yeah. Okay, so you forgive your father, that's fascinating.

People should know, not to make you go through it again, but you were born a junior, and at 16 you changed your name. So just to accentuate the stakes that were on this relationship, but it was very strained. From childhood, I knew this man was not my father. And it turned out to not be your father, which is crazy is crazy. Wow you just knew it. Did you talk to Carrie

about this? Carrie Washington. She was on about her book and that estrangement from the family and not being able to put your finger on it and that fucking huge looming. What is going on? Yeah but I was a kid asking my mother all of my life for a member asking is he my father? Her answer would always be the same I hate to tell you this baby, but he's your father. I asked her on her deathbed, is he my father? Same answer, I hate to tell you this, but he's your father. It's 15 years ago this week that I'm dealing with this.

So I'm a little emotional as I'm thinking about it. When she died, it didn't sit well with me. So I did a DNA test with my brother and I. DNA tests come back, we don't have the same father So I'm like, okay. Well one of us isn't dads. Yeah, but I knew he was his he is his spitting image Everything is attitude his voice. So then I do another test with the man himself and I'm not his child and If I could wake my mother up for five minutes I'd be like, hey, can just tell me? Because what I want her to know is that I wouldn't judge her.

She was 24 years old. This man was beating the shit out of her. She was in misery. And if there was a man that loved her, hooray for her. That makes me smile and happy to know that somebody loved her because of the way he was treating her. Yeah, any moment of comfort you would want for her. Yeah.

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

that are out there, I wish she had just told me if she knew. She might have believed this. Whether she knew or didn't know, you can start believing a story. I think we talked about that with Carrie. In some ways, I think everyone just believed it. That's right. My mother was an extremely kind, giving and loving woman, but she's also very, very private. So I want to give her the dignity of what she believed, but I knew it from childhood.

Isn't that weird? Yeah. And it wasn't as a physical resemblance. No, it was just, I could not understand how this man could look at me with such hate. So you believe he knew as well. Yeah. And then there were clues. I think I was probably in my late teens, early twenties, they were sitting out on the porch and he said to her, oh, that's where the boy gets those eyes from. My eyes are kind of webbed in between.

And she tells me, she said, he said, you have my eyes. And I thought you've been married to this man for 30 years and he didn't know what your eyes looked like. So those kinds of moments that made me go, go, so you're wondering where my eyes came from and you finally see her in there. So it was a different time back then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you find some forgiveness for him.

Yeah, are you cool now? Oh, you cold? You ever cooled off? Yeah, I have. All right, turn it off. Okay, you're right, you're right. Okay, okay, okay. You didn't turn it off.

We didn't have to turn it off. What a kind way to say it. Are you cool, are you cool now? Yeah. That could have meant so many it. Are you cool now? Bro. That could have meant so many things. Yeah. Cool. No, no, no. I'm sorry.

Cause it blows right here. Yeah. We just had Morgan screaming on and he did not want it. He did not like the air. But then conversely, we had Jeff Ridges on. He hated how hot it was. So it's like, I don't know. What are you going to fucking pick?

You can't trust anyone in that, Z. That's right. That's right. So lo and behold, these plays become hugely successful. The amount of them you were doing is staggering. You're doing 300 a year. Sometimes 360, 370 a year. And not in one theater. So you're traveling. It's all over the country. Eight to nine shows a week, sometimes 10. It becomes impossibly successful. Yeah. If you look at Maxine's Baby, that's my mother's name on Prime Video, it kind of lays out the whole story. It's pretty fascinating for people to see. Okay so there's a doc about that? Yeah. Oh! A

documentary about my life that Armani Ortiz and the mother of my child did because she was the only one I would trust to give that kind of access to me. They followed me for 10 years and it tells the whole story from when I started all the way up until the studio opening. Oh I'm definitely watching that. I'm ashamed that I don't know that yet. I spent all this time reading about you. It's her fault. Okay. Yeah. The light and airy fun armchair.

I don't want to embarrass you, but there's a point where at least minimally Forbes goes, this show has generated $100 million. It's generated 20 million in merch. At that age, you must be more successful than you had ever even dreamt of. Yeah, but it wasn't enough. I was scared.

Well, okay, that's my question. So in my mind, all this was going to fix a lot of stuff. I didn't think it would fix a lot of things. I was worried about it staying. How long is this going to stay? And I'll never forget telling my mother she could retire. She had diabetes and she was very ill working with the kids at the center. And I was saying, you should retire.

And I hung up the phone just praying, God, please let these place to keep working so I can take care of her. I just worried every day that it was going to end. Yeah, it's a scary feeling. All of a sudden, there's money, there's income, there's more than enough. My pathology wasn't more than enough. My pathology was you got money when you ran out of money because that's how it was. You had to wait to the next two weeks to get your next check. So to go from having nothing and being homeless and living on the street to the first year of making money, making a hundred and something thousand dollars and getting to the end of the year and not having a dime to pay taxes because I had given it all away. And then the next year making a million and

the next year, seven million, it was all of this learning in progress. And I had no one to teach me or walk me through or talk to me about how this works or what this means. Nobody in my family had any money. Were there not mentors available or you weren't good at availing yourself to mentorship? There weren't any available. Yeah, I'm gonna grant you that. Even in Atlanta. Right. And also I didn't trust because if you told me this was gonna work or to do this or to do that or invest in this, I just didn't trust it. Okay, so I wouldn't trust it either, but mine would be you want something if you're

just going to be nice to me. There's no way I would trust a mentor. They must have an ulterior motive. That's my hang up with mentorship. You still feel that way? No, it's lessened. I mean, we're talking about stuff that's like 30 years old and 10 years old and eight years old, but no, it's lessened and I can ask people now.

Lessened, but it's still there. Yeah. But yeah, that's how deep that fear is, I guess. Here's this man who's got status and wealth, and he likes me for some reason. And my next thing is to have a dream where he wants to get sexual. That's the sad part of where we come from.

Our traumas, the things we've been through, will automatically make our antennas go up and think, why are you being so nice to me? What's wrong with you? You've got wealth, you're after something. I used to work so hard to try and dispel that for people. Like, no, this is just about somebody being kind to you because I know what that's like

for somebody to be kind to me. I've given away cars and houses and paid for kids to go through college and did so much stuff for people that it got to a point where I was like, I don't wanna meet them. I don't wanna shake their hands. I wanna just stand over here

and see that they're doing well because I don't want them to have that mentality. You know, probably they're like, yeah. Imagine somebody walking up to you and your car is broken down, they give you a new car. What do you want? What is this gonna cost me rather than just understanding

that there are people on the planet who are just kind? Well, and let's add now on the other side of it, which this state of mind was truly unimaginable for me growing up poor Which is like well the only joy I'm actually getting out of this thing that I thought was gonna be so spectacular is giving people shit I don't mean like family members I mean tipping an obnoxious amount every time I eat a cheap meal That's more fun than anything that server doesn't need to worry that I'm a creep that wants to do something exactly What does that do for that person? What does this do for your spirit? You as a person and how do you pay it forward?

That's why we say what can I do nothing pay it forward? Yeah find someone's you need me in shittier spot than you are Yeah, okay, so then Going into movies There's a point where this show's incredible, it's generating a ton of money, you're working too hard, which is your dream 24-7, no time to think about anything. Why get out of that? We went from 2000 seat theaters to arenas and couldn't meet the demand.

So I thought, okay, there's a hunger for this kind of storytelling. So let me move into television. Got it. It was just a bigger arena. It was a bigger arena and I didn't have to be everywhere at once. I could be on a screen in 2,000 locations. And that's when I really began to understand this lack of representation for black people in storytelling and especially my kind of storytelling for black people because there were lots of shows that were directed at black people but they weren't told from the point of view of a

black person who had experienced it. So that's why I think shows and movies are still going to number one is because I'm telling it from a point of view that we really get no matter what critics say no matter what anybody says. Okay weirdly we've already laid the groundwork for this and I was talking about it in the trauma aspect. So I wanted to hear from you how you process that huge dissonance between what it's doing commercially and what it's doing critically. And so my own pet peeve about this is,

I think it's people removed from that situation, telling the people in the situation how they're supposed to process it and enjoy it and like it. There's something very condescending about that specific type of criticism. I don't like metal music. Metal is not my thing. I can't relate to it, but I don't criticize it and I don't judge it because it's not for me, it's not directed to me, it's not something that I can say I like this music so this music's crap. No, that's just not for me. And it's the same way when I think about the work that I do, it is specific in nature and it speaks to a specific audience. And to have

a critic come along and say, well, you have 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Like, fuck your tomatoes. When I was first starting out, I had two critics in my show at the Kodak theater sit on the same row. I watched them make notes throughout the show too. They reviewed the exact same show. They saw the exact same thing. I read both reviews. So last time I read reviews and one guy thought it was amazing.

The other guy thought it was the worst thing he'd ever seen. So I thought, hmm, this is opinions. This is what people think. And it doesn't really matter as long as I'm clear about the intention of what I'm doing. Yeah, but you know, I think there's something a little deeper going on with your work, particularly. So yes, two people could watch The Graduate and they're going to have different opinions.

But I'm going to argue, and this is something that's very burbling up all around us, and no one really wants to talk about it, which is there is an elitism. Yeah, for sure. And it's condescending and it's judgmental and people feel it and they go out and vote in response to that. And I think this particular thing reeks of elitism. It reeks of, we know better, you should be doing this, you should be showing what should be, not what you experience and recognize. There's something about it that feels very removed and judgmental. It doesn't feel like it's coming from the inside and being judgmental.

I would agree. This happened to Sandler too. Critics fucking hated him. Every movie's an enormous hit. A third of the country loves the movie. Now I have different opinions than other people, and I might not like stuff or like stuff, but I like to think I don't get onto a soapbox

of it's low brow or it's cheap or it's bad or mine's better or superior. It's just, all right, that audience likes this, this audience gets that, and audiences get what they want. Without the deep judgment of it all. Completely true. Also, to layer that is the understanding of what it's taken for me to be able to be in this business and to have this many hits and this much success and have to fight tooth and nail to get a budget

that's anywhere near a Sandler movie. Despite all the success. Despite all of it. Still. To this day. Wild. With Paramount, I have these shows on BT that do huge numbers for my audience,

but the budgets are far lower than any of the other shows that are on some of the other parts of Paramount. With comparable audiences. For sure. And then it's like, oh, no, no, we have a formula for you, which is basically you are black. This is your box. Here's where you stay because your audience is going to do this much for us in returns.

And that has been since I've been in the business. So I've found a way to navigate through that, to take what I've been given to make sure the actors and actresses are paid well, and at the same time figure out how do I make this work and grow a business. It's been challenging. Yeah. Because I would like to have one opportunity to have an even playing field. Just one where it said, okay, here's track record. And if you can't do it, who else? Yeah. Ugh. Okay, your string of movies that are gigantic hits,

I'm gonna add just for fun, do you know who Joy Bryan is? Yes. Okay, she and I were married on TV show together for six years. But when we saw each other every day at work, I would say, hello. And she'd go, Larch, who's talking about Larch?

Oh my God. And it was our favorite, our salutation for six years was, hello, what you talking about, lunch? Nobody's talking about lunch. Oh my God. Yeah, culturally, a world all her own. I love it. So once you get into TV, I do have one logistical question.

When you do House of Pain, first season, I'm presuming you just funded 10, you went out and made 10 episodes? Yes, I did, because I was talking to my agent and said I wanted to do a sitcom. And they're like, oh, well, just do one. I was like, no, no, no, I feel like I need to do 10. They're like, Tyler, nobody does 10.

That's not how it's done. That's not how this works. I was like, no, no, no, I want to do 10. They're like, okay. So I went to Atlanta, filmed the first 10. They were awful. Okay. And I put them in the can and nobody wanted them in Hollywood.

Then the UPN and WB merged. I think they became the CW. And at the time there were about 10 or 12 black shows on the air. Those shows all went away. So all the affiliates, this is during the world of syndication were pissed. So they were calling around Hollywood. What do you have? What do you have?

It was like, well, I got this guy, Tyler Perry's got 10 episodes. And they're like, Tyler, you got those 10? They're like, yeah, they want them. Like, okay, so they put them on and all these different affiliates. The ratings were higher than what was there before. Blew their minds. So just explain the affiliate for people.

So you've got in your town, Atlanta, you got your own news station. That's its own affiliate of NBC, but there's hours of the day where they don't have programming. Yeah, exactly. They don't have programming. Yeah, exactly. They don't have the programming to put things in or after the prime time hours, they wouldn't have the show to put in.

So when they put this show in, it got these crazy numbers and they all just went crazy and they're like, Oh, Tyler's is so great. We got a call from this network. They want to order 10 more. Another one said, Oh, we want 20. I was like, no, I want 100. I want 90 episodes. Everybody's like, what are you talking about?

Yeah, you keep timesing this by 10 and you shouldn't. You make one pilot, not 10, and then you get nine episodes with a back order. Yeah, and they told me it's not gonna happen. Nobody's gonna do that. I was like, well, I'm not doing it because I knew 100 meant syndication. So I wanted somebody to commit to 100 episodes

and that was Turner TBS. Have you watched that doc by chance? No. Ted Turner on Macs. You want to turn that back on, don't you? Yeah. Go ahead. So bad, but I'll sit here.

What's your heat level right now? I'm with you, turn it on. Okay, okay. Okay, okay. You know what a solution would be is to actually use the thermostat on it and just not make it frigid. That seems right.

Or just turn it on, just freeze yourself. Now watch this, I'm gonna go up to 20, it's also in Celsius. Okay, then we're all screwed. Let's travel to Europe right now and enjoy some Celsius. Yeah. Okay, because what I'm so confused about is when I go to the Wikipedia page for House of Pain, it says like 336 episodes, which is impossible. Yeah, I think we're at 400 something now.

Okay, and I go, no, there's no show has 400 episodes. And then I'm looking at the breakdown of seasons and yeah, it says season one is impossible. Yeah, I think we're at 400 something now. Okay, and I go, no, there's no show has 400 episodes. And then I'm looking at the breakdown of seasons and yeah, it says season one is 10, and then it says season two, 100. How does that work? Were they airing twice a week? I don't know how they were airing. All I know is I was working my ass off.

It took me nine months to shoot all 100. I would shoot two or three episodes a day. Oh my God. Oh my lord. But all of that was because of the situation I was in. Right, the economics demanded... How do I shoot this quickly? Because they're not giving me the money. How do you make this work? Even now when I'm doing movies, I'll shoot a movie in five days, seven days, 18 days. Oh my god. Because when I'm talking to the DP, unless there are specific shots

that we want at a specific time of day, I'd be like, listen, with all the digital stuff that we can do today with lighting, make this beautiful and let's figure out how we do it. I've worked with some amazing DP's who have found the way to do it. Jazz Men's Blues, which is on Netflix, was the first movie I ever wrote 28 years ago now.

It is the first time I ever fell in love with filmmaking and I just filmed it in 22. Oh wow. Okay, so you go on this impossible run. You have so many TV shows, you have so many movies. You open up the studio, you become friends with the Queen B. You then have shows. I had one question about, I've met the Queen B a few times

and boy does she deliver. Yeah, yeah, she's amazing. The Queen B is tricky because it does sound like you're talking about Beyonce. I'm talking about Oprah, the original Queen B. How is she Queen B? Oh, you're talking about Oprah, okay, got it. Oh, you thought I was talking, see, you were right to point that out. Beyonce is Beyonce. I'm talking about Oprah, the original Queen B. How is she Queen B? Oh, you're talking about Oprah, okay, got it. Oh, you thought I was talking,

see you were right to point that out. I thought she was Beyonce, Queen B is Beyonce. Exactly. Yeah, it is, fuck. I count her as a friend too. Yeah. But Oprah, I had one little question on that.

So you end up, the haves and the have nots, you do eight seasons on OWN, and it's huge for them. It's a great success. Is it tricky at all to be friends with the owner of the network when you're making the stuff? Because those are kind of inherently often at odds those two roles. It was tricky but we were determined to prove that we could work together and make it happen and the friendship wouldn't suffer. You had to keep that as a priority. Definitely had to keep it as a priority and there were times when it got tough.

It's gonna get tough! You guys have opposing interests all the time. Even with Oprah, yeah it got tough. It's gonna get tough. It's hard. You guys have opposing interests all the time. Even with Oprah, yeah, it got tough. Right. But what we realized and both understood is how important the friendship is to each of us. Okay, let's talk about the 6888. How does this come your way? I got a call from Nicole Avant, who was coming off the tragedy of her mother being murdered

here in LA. 80-something year old woman is at home in the evening and some gangbanger breaks into the house in Truesdale and shoots her. Brent Durkowski In Truesdale? For people who don't know, it's like one of the fanciest neighborhoods in all of LA. Darrell Bock Yeah. And her father, Clarence Avon, who was known as the Godfather, he and Quincy Jones were such mentors. Brent Durkowski Great doc on him. Darrell Bock Yes.

Brent Durkowski That is daughter made. Who you're talking about? Darrell Bock That Nicole. She said, Tyler, I really feel like you should do this movie, the 6888. My mother and I feel like you should do it. Our mother passed, like I feel like my mother wants you to do this. And I thought, whoa, I've never heard this story. So she sends me this sizzle reel from Carrie Selig

and Peter Goober, executive producer on the show. And I saw the sizzle reel about 855 black women in World War II. I'm like, who knew? Yeah, yeah. What 855? Wait, 855 black women were in Europe in World War II as a part of the war effort? I thought, you're kidding me, right? She's like, no, this is real.

And there are four or five surviving members. I said, where? So there were two that were really with it. There was one woman, her name is Lena King. She died this year. She was 99. I'm like, I'm getting on a plane. I'm going to see her right now because she's 99. I want to sit and talk to her before I start this script. And I walk into her house. I don't know what to expect. She's 99.

I'm thinking she's going to be in a wheelchair. What's her memory going to be like? This woman comes down the stairs, her lipstick done, her hair, makeup. Oh my God. She says, Mr. Perry, it's a pleasure to meet you. She was still driving. She was still going out dancing with her friends.

Her memory was as sharp as ever. Wow. So I sit down and I ask her, I said, so I know you were part of the 6 AAA, tell me about it. What made you go? And emotion, eyes welled up with water. 77 years, she goes back and she tells me about a young Jewish boy named Abram, who was a very close friend.

The lead of your movie, which I watched last night, is the woman you interviewed. The first one? Oh wow, tell that story. It's so good. She's telling me about this young man named Abram who died in war. He wanted to go and do something for the war and fight Hitler. She was so emotional because he'd only been there a few weeks. And all of that emotion came back to her in that moment.

I saw it in her eyes. I was like, this is the way in to the movie. This is the story. She's telling me what happened and how much she loved him. Yeah. How do you anchor this huge story in this very intimate personal one? And in the movie, she's from Philadelphia. She's kind of in love with this boy. He's in love with her. It's unrequited until he's about to leave and then he's dead. I would say about 80 or 90% of what you see in the movie is factual. I had to take some

liberties. Of course. But a lot of it's factual. Wow. The things she was sharing with me and her memory was sharp. Like you could look at her face and see that she could almost smell the moments and the memories that she was talking to me. Two weeks later, I had a script.

I sent it to Nicole. I was like, listen here. And they're like, you're kidding me. We read it, tweaked it, worked on it and started filming. And there's so much stuff that immediately burbles up without you having to really shine a light on it. Even her story, she's very smart, she's very capable, and she doesn't want to go clean and cook for men.

But going to school, which would be a very natural next step for her, is off the table. What options are there left? So that right there is kind of telling. Then there's this other great moment where all these women enlist and now they're taking a bus ride down to the South. The train, yeah. Oh, the train. They're going to go to boot camp and two things are happening.

One, some white dudes walk in and go, let's get the white people out here. We got to segregate this train. And you're like, oh wow, yeah, 1944. That's where we were at. But I think even crazier to think about was like, all these women from the North are coming down, and they're like, what the fuck is going on? You could time travel still in 1944. You could teleport to a much crazier place.

But also, women of that day were very aware of racism, no matter where they were. Sure, well she was already experiencing it in Philadelphia. Right. But just that level could happen on a train ride is also really stark. Time travel, across the Mason-Dixon and you had a whole new world.

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

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

who led these women, who was 26 years old at the time. She's 26? She's 26 years old, leading 855 women. Carrie and I were rehearsing. All of these women, the spirit of them were with us through the whole thing. When I was finding different sets, I would look at the pictures and look at the historic references. Like this is the exact place. It was like so weird.

But she and I were rehearsing in a dressing room and there's a knock on the door and it is the transportation guy. And he comes up, he says, I want to show you something. I got this trunk I want you to see so we come out and I have this on video the transportation guy was a World War II buff and he would go to these auctions and buy all these World War II materials so he brings this trunk and he puts it at our feet it is charity Adams trunk no it's not yeah with her uniform in it her tulip tree a letter in it we both got chills.

Oh my God. All these moments of these women letting us know that they were there and they wanted to see us. That feels impossible. That's so special, spiritual. And the transpo dude found it. Yeah. Wow.

But then you see what she's up against. It's all these half steps. We had Malcolm Gladwell on talking recently about what do you actually need for representation and something? And you find that like one woman on a board does nothing. She's a token and no one's going to listen to her. Two is like, she's got a friend. That's not going to do much. Yeah.

But nothing really happens. And then it's three. There's this like magic number of three where now you get three women on a board of nine and now they can be themselves and they can really enact some change. And I was just thinking about Carrie's role is like, she's the leader of this one black battalion and she's the only one there. And when she's meeting with these generals and stuff, they're placating her.

They're just getting through it. They got to do this thing. And you realize like, oh my God, to be in that situation and actually get anything done seems nearly impossible. Yeah. And for them to do it and do it well. Another challenge was the stories about the mail. Like, how do you tell a story about the mail? Thank you. If I'm you, I'm like, I don't know, man. Where's the big explosion with the mail? Exactly right. And Kerry was the same way. It's

like, how do you tell a story about the mail? But I think that we discount what the mail meant then, because there was no email, there were no text messages. Mail was life. And you had all these soldiers fighting and they hadn't gotten male in months because of the Battle of the Bulge and the moving around so much. So the morale was at an all time low and you had hangars full of 17 million pieces of male that needed to get to the soldiers to boost their morale and take them through the end of the war. Well, and also you do a good job at pointing out there's a mom, I'm sure this part might

be artistic, but a woman waits at the gates of the White House, basically, to talk to- Eleanor Roosevelt. To say like, I don't know if my son's dead or not. I haven't heard from my son in a year. Yes, morale, but I think more about all these people that were cut off, just assuming the worst, for months and months and months at a time, and you can't call anyone to get an answer,

are they still alive? That must've been the most agonizing for those parents. Of course, can you imagine? No, if I wave goodbye to my daughter, and I don't know for a year whether she lived or not. Yeah, awful. So, no one wants to deal with this situation. The army doesn't. They're like, supplies. That's all we got to worry about. We can't be worrying about mail.

And so they throw them a bone and they intentionally give them six months to sort all this out. Yeah. Thinking, well, that's impossible. They're gonna fail. It's impossible because of the vermin who had eaten through a lot of the package. You couldn't make out the names from the rain and the weather. The World War II of it all. World War II of it all. Yeah. And this impossible sorting task where they had just thrown all this mail into

these hangers. Yeah. Where do you start with 17 million pieces of fucking mail? Exactly. And these gals, God bless them. They got the job done in 90 days. Yeah. It's kind of impossible. Pretty amazing amazing it's a great story thank you I'm excited about it yeah yeah everyone's really really good in it let me have you rephrase these gals these women oh yeah yeah yeah these women got it done yeah yeah so these women they got it done in 90 days yeah help me out is gals

offensive yeah in the movie he says step step aside gal. And the gas from black women in the theater was like, ooh, so yeah, gal is offensive. It's like boy calling a black man a boy. Oh, good, good, good heads up. I didn't know gals. Everyone's learning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot of it, I could sense you were shooting,

well, I know you have a White House. Somebody were shooting at his White House. So to be at your studio, I was curious of the plays, the writing, the films, the TV show. Where does the studio rank in that as far as the amount of pride it gives you when you try to integrate the fact that you own a studio? I tell you the thing that warms my soul the most is the understanding that it was once a Confederate army base where there were soldiers plotting and planning on how to keep 3.9 million Negroes enslaved. And now that land being owned by me, how great is this country that that could

happen? So if that could happen for me, I don't care who you are, where you come from, America is an incredible place to just be and dream and live and grow. And as many problems as we have as a country, we are still a great nation that when we galvanize and come together, we can do anything. I still want to be here more than any other place. Yeah, for sure. Nowhere else in the world. But the fact that it's tangible, does that feel special?

It does. My father would build houses. It was a subcontractor and he would get paid his $800 and he would be so happy, oh, I got my money. But I watched a guy that he sold the house, usually a white man, sell the house for $80,000. And I always wondered why won't you do that? But looking at it from this point of view, I realized the burden of being the man who owns the house.

Yeah. I don't have any partners. I don't have shareholders. So when that $100,000 light bill is due, I've got to pay it. That $180 plus million in payroll for all the actors and everybody, I've got to pay that every year. So I understand the blessing of it. I also understand the burden of it.

And I also understand the exhaustion of it all, but I'm grateful for it. I just feel like it's so tangible versus what we do, which is like, I write, then I make it. It gets seen, then it's kind of gone. Maybe it gets seen again. So have something that tangible. I feel like it would force me to experience what's happened.

I feel like this visceral, real, tangible 3D space might force me to go, no, no, for real, you built this shit. This wasn't here, then you came along, now it's here. That's real. It's like reading the diary in some ways, every day. The journals, yeah. And I get that, and every time I drive through the gates, I am reminded of how profound and wonderful this moment is,

especially because there's so many people who wanted to do it. I can't tell you the last person who developed a studio of this magnitude. You think about Disney and Warner Brothers. So to do it at this time and at this level has really, really been profound. But every time I drive in the gates, this is God's honest truth, when I'm tired, when I'm exhausted, when I'm just like, okay, how much longer can you carry this? I'm reminded of all the people who wanted to do it. For some reason, it fell on me to do. And also watching people come through the gates who had never had a shot in this business makes me go. You can go a little further.

Yeah. Listen, at 55? Yeah. I'm gonna be 70 soon. In two seconds. That's the way I look at it at it right 55 came so quickly I'm just like what does the next 15 years look like while I'm still able to run up and down the stairs and enjoy my life What does that look like and how much of this? Beautiful gift of the studio is going to be a blessing to that or a hindrance to it, right?

What about Black Panther being shot there? That was pretty cool I feel like that's a real moment where you're like, oh damn, this gamble also worked out. One of the first things with Chadwick. Oh really? And would you pop in at all? Are you the studio owner? No, no, I'm not that guy. I respect everybody's privacy and what they're doing. I'll wait. If I get invited by the director, like Ryan invited me on the last day to set, I thought that was really great. Much different owner walking in. Yeah. Well it's staggering. I guess my only thought is how do you figure out how to enjoy it all?

I think that's the last kind of hill to climb, isn't it? How do you really integrate it? How do you enjoy it? How do you accept it? How do you believe in it? How do you not fear? I'm finally at a place where I've got the right team in place to run it so I can step back a lot.

And as soon as I got there and was like, OK, great. We're good. here comes AI. And it's like, you might wanna rethink everything you're thinking here. So it's like, here's a whole nother challenge to deal with. Yeah. Oh, I have one last question about this. Could you ever mentally be at a place where you go,

I did it, it really happened, without feeling like you have to keep pursuing it? I'm there now. Oh, well, congratulations. Thank you. That is huge. Yeah, I feel have to keep pursuing it. I'm there now. Oh, well, congratulations. Thank you. Yeah. I feel like I've done it. There's nothing else.

If six triple eight wouldn't have come along. Jazz band was like the pinnacle for me. 27 years to make it. I'm like, okay, now what? So I'm there. Oh, good. Contentment. Yeah.

And you got a little boy. So that really takes care of a lot of it. Yeah. All right. Well, I hope everyone checks out the six triple eight. It's in theaters on December 6th, and it's on Netflix December 20th. I think this is gonna be enormous.

Are you still surprised when you have hits? I'm thankful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. I'm not as surprised as I am thankful every time. That's a good answer, I like that. But when it's a shitty movie, that hit, thank you. But 6888 is amazing. Well, Tyler, this has been so fun. I don't think I ever thought we would meet. Of course, like everyone else in America, I was very aware of you. But 6888 is amazing. Well, Tyler, this has been so fun.

I don't think I ever thought we would meet. Of course, like everyone else in America, I was very aware of you. I watched the 60 Minutes profile. I was very charmed and thought you were wonderful. And you're going to watch Maxine's baby. And I'm definitely going to watch Maxine's baby. And your wife, I know it always goes back to your wife. Well, as it should.

Your wife, I was doing People's Choice Awards, and somebody was supposed to present the humanitarian award, and she stepped up to do it at the last minute, and the teleprompter went out. Oh, sure. And she was like, I don't need a teleprompter to talk about him. I'll just wink it. And it was really great.

Oh, great. I'll never forget that, because she was grace under fire. Well, wonderful meeting you. I hope everyone checks out the film, and I hope we get to do it again. Or maybe just bump into each other. Not working, that would be fun too.

Yeah, a lot of fun, a lot of fun. I love it. All right, take care. Thank you. Thank you. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. I sure hope there weren't any mistakes in that episode, but we'll find out when my mom, Mrs. Monica,

comes in and tells us what was wrong. Hi, Monnie. Happy birthday. Oh, thank you. It's your birthday today. It's a birthday miracle today. Oh, because you've been very, okay, first of all, we're not together.

You're in Mexico City. I'm in Mexico City, and I just want to start by saying, what a place. Everyone should come. It's incredible This is a very very special place. I've never been so yes We were having the very best trip and I'll tell you some of the details, but then Lincoln three or four days ago. She started throwing up and it was really rough and She got Really kind of scary sick.

I was like, do we need, you know, you're trying to figure out like, when did you go to the hospital? What's getting worse? Yeah. Yeah, so that was really rough. And that was going on. She had been completely lifeless

and zero energy for like 48 hours. And then New Year's Eve was fine. And then New Year's morning at around nine in the morning, I was like, oh, I got something sneaky going on, but I didn't, I wasn't panicked. And then I, and I'm going to spare you the details, but then I went to the bathroom and then I had, I mean, really just the most violent throwing up

I've ever had. And that went on for eight hours. And I was certain I gave myself a hernia, but the throwing up and the other stuff I won't mention, duty stuff, was truly nothing compared to the laying in bed, shivering like crazy, all of my muscles cramped. I really, I mean, kicking opiates, motorcycle accidents, this was the single worst I've ever felt in my whole life for eight hours. I was like, and I had it in my head, like, oh my God, if this is for 48 hour,

or Lincoln at that point was on 50, I was like, I don't think I could make it. Like, why isn't my body just stop letting me experience this? Because it's way too much. And it was just torture. And then Kristen brought me a Zofran and then a leave about eight hours into it. I took that, I was able to sleep, I slept for four hours, and then I woke up last night around, I don't know, 8 p.m., and I was like, I was okay. It kind of passed. Wow.

And then Linky was starting to come out of it too, so everyone else did fun stuff, and she and I just hung out, went to the hot tub to soak our achy bodies. That was fine, we did about 10 minutes. That was our big adventure. And then we laid in bed and watched Little Women, the Greta Gerwig one. That's a great movie.

Yeah. Okay. This trip for me has been a total revelation about Greta Gerwig. I knew Barbie, but I hadn't seen Lady Bird. Oh, what a movie. It's such a good movie. What a movie. Do you know I didn't see it because I thought it was a period piece.

Like the cover and the title, I for some reason thought it was a period piece, not a high school coming of age movie. Yeah, but then Little Woman is a period piece. But now I just love Greta. I would watch, I don't know, Name Your Words. I'd watch a horror film that she made at this point. So now I became obsessed with Greta Gerwig.

And then last time I was like, let's watch Little Women. Well, that's an incredible, perfect movie too. It is. She's so good. Then I did research on her, Monica, like I was gonna interview her. I did like an hour of research on Greta Gerwig just for my own edification and fun.

I had no idea she was like a hugely successful actor before she was our best director. And I didn't know she was married to Noah Baumbach. Yeah, they've done stuff together. You know all this stuff. I didn't know any of this. Oh yeah, I know it all. You are a know it all.

So anyways, all to say I woke up this morning and I actually feel really fantastic. Oh, I'm so happy to hear it. I was very scared for all of you guys. And we came up with the plan B in case I figured there's no way. There was no way yesterday at 7 p.m. But then I heard you had an idea that I almost felt like I wanted to stay sick

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

That's a lot. For your birthday. Were you intimidated? That's a lot to commit to, 50 facts? I can do it. I can do it. I know I can do it. But so maybe I'll save that for another day.

That was a very thoughtful idea. It's 50. How do you feel? Yesterday I was like, oh wow, I'm not gonna make it. Oh my God. Yeah, yesterday I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna not make it. I thought for sure I was gonna outlive my dad for so long. I was like, oh no, we're gonna come in 13 years before.

Oh no. Apart from health, how are you feeling about your- Second half of a century that I'm entering? Yeah. I think I'm mostly thinking about the thing that's tripping me out is like, okay, wow, I'm a half of a hundred years old. I just watched Little Women.

That was only set 150 years ago. Right. That seems like a million years ago. Yes. In fact, we were watching the movie and there's these beautiful mansions in the movie. And I said to Lincoln, you realize none of those mansions have toilets inside?

Like as fancy as this looks and as how much you'd wanna live there, all these people in their fancy dresses are going across the yard to shit in a wooden box. Yeah, and they aren't brushing teeth. Nothing is good. It looks pretty, but so then when I think, well, that's not terribly long ago,

two more of my lives ago. Yeah. It starts to put time in a weird, or it's like all these things that feel so far away, they're not that far away. And then of course I think, well, life's really short. Yeah. But mostly I'm happy and I feel good.

And I'm very excited to see you, because I haven't seen you in a long time. I know. So I think we should rewind all the way to your Christmas at home. Okay. I went home. Okay. I went home for Christmas. To Duluth, Georgia?

You know, that's also a weird thing. This was sort of the first trip. I didn't refer to it as going home. Oh, what did you refer to it as? Like I'm going to Georgia to visit my family? Oh, I don't know about that I mean home is where the heart is but Also, I think Like I just we talked about this before but every time I land here in LA

Yeah, I I'm home here. You're an LA boy. Yeah, I'm a cookie boy and an LA boy. And I visit my parents in Georgia. Huh, that's interesting. Cause I still, when I go home, when I go to Michigan, I think it's home. God, yeah, now I feel sacrilegious. Like it's not, it's still a huge part of me, but I guess I'm sort of coming up, not coming up, I guess,

cause what's the, this year, this year I will have been here 15 years. Right, right. So not half your life yet. Not half my life, but I was in Georgia for 22 years. So I mean, I'm about like in seven years, in Georgia for 22 years. So I mean, I'm about like in seven years, I'm gonna have reached the same point. Yes, yes.

I'm at 60% as of today. Your life. Yeah, cause I moved in when I was 20. And so for 30 years, I've been in California. Exactly. And 20 I was in Michigan. So you have lived in California longer than you I was in Michigan. So you have lived in California longer than you've lived in Michigan.

Isn't that weird? Yeah, by like 50% longer. Yes, it's very weird. You love percentages today. I love it, fast math. Because it's your birthday. I'm gonna still do fast math when I'm 50. You went to your parents' house, not home.

And it was lovely. You know, it's, you're, I'm always trying to figure out the right amount of days. Yeah. Where I am enjoying myself. It's relaxing. I'm getting time in with the family, with friends, but I don't overstay into the point where I become. Cranky, quanky, quanky.

And I did pretty good. Uh, I think it was like, I think it was like a day and a half of, of quankiness. You ever get toothpaste, Aroar? Aroar? So, oh wait, the last day and a half or the first day and a half? No, the first days are great.

Like that's the thing. And then I feel so good and everyone's so happy. And it feels like, oh, I could, I could like live here again, probably in this house. And then five days is, I'm starting to turn, I'm starting to call it my parents' house. You know, things are changing. Yeah, cause so I, my mom got me this necklace

from my gift guide. It's a shark. Oh! You probably can't see it. Well, that worked out absolutely perfectly because I bought you the same necklace and it got lost. Yes, and so you got me a different one. When I reordered, I changed my mind on the reorder.

I mean, truly, that's a blessing from above because you would have two shark necklaces. You don't need that. Yeah, I would have to return one and then that would be a really crisis of conscience. Whose you return? Well, you gotta return mine. And have Nermeen deserves to keep

have those caps. I know, but I send her links. So it's not like she came up with it. Although in some ways you just got it off the gate. That's right. I mean, you also in a subversive way told me what to get you as well. Yeah, that's true.

But anyway, I got the shark. I love it. And I was wearing it and my mom said, she was like, oh, it looks so nice. Why'd you pick a shark? And I said, oh, cause I'm a shark. I'm a shark when it comes down to it. And I said, in business.

And she said, with your parents too sometimes. Oh! Oh wow. And then I just looked at her like this. Like a shark. Yeah. You should have bit her. You should have ran, you should have lunged at her and snapped your jaws at her like this. Like a shark. Yeah. You should have bit her. You should have ran, you should have lunged at her

and snapped your jaws at her. You wanna see a shark? You wanna see a shark? I'll show you a shark. You know what I think is really gross about sharks is that their upper teeth move to, you know that? No, what? You know, like our top teeth are fixed.

They don't go anywhere. Just the bottom mandible moves up and down. The top teeth aren't coming up and down. They're just stationary. Right. Those fucking sharks, the top comes down too. It comes down or up? Well, I guess both.

Yeah, yeah, it does the same thing as the bottom. Whoa, that's so cool. The better to mash you with. I don't like how it looks when they lunge at a seal or something. You see the top teeth descend. It just makes it that much more terrifying. That's a new year's resolution for me.

It's one step away from the whole set of teeth just turning into a vortex in like, you know, eviscerating the prey. Ooh, eviscerating the prey. That's me, that's me in 2025. What are your, do you have any resolutions? I do. This year I tried to break it into different categories. Like professional, you know, physical, spiritual.

I like that. There's another one. It's probably the most important one. Professionally, I really want to finish my memoir this year. Physically, and this has been a little bit influenced by watching Sprint season two over the break. I need to do- It's out?

I need to, it's been out for a while, Monty. Whoa, no. It's so good. Yeah, I didn't know that either, but Molly had already seen it. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. So sprinting, I really, I not, biking's my new thing,

but I'm gonna try to this year do biking and sprinting. So that's a physical goal. And then spiritually is finding my way back professionally. This is spiritual professional. Yeah. To focus on what I love about work and not the outcome, I guess. I get to really, really hunker back down into that.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, what are your resolutions? I also have sort of different buckets, but I also have very tangible ones. I think tangible ones are the ones that are best, like the highest level of succeeding. Like Max's resolution is to learn how to do a split. Ooh, I think it's too late for Max.

I once read if boys don't do that by the time they're 10, they can't physiologically do it. Really? He was pretty flexible. He should do a little research. We said that was a great resolution and he was surprisingly kind of like sort of flexible. Max is my arch nemesis.

The notion that his thighs are that much bigger than mine and he can do the splits. I feel like he has too much muscle to do the splits. And he's a little taller than you? Well, I don't know. Not on your birthday. Today is not, today is not. Depends how you quantify it, I guess.

If you use inches, yeah, sure, you taller. Sure, sure. Oh, I forgot to, medically I wanna, I'm seeing allergies this year. I gotta stop blowing my nose all day. Oh, that's a good one. And then I have a vanity one too. Uh-huh, okay.

I wanna start getting facials. Oh, that's a great one. That also feels, it just feels really nice and luxurious. Yeah, well I'm 50 and sometimes I look at my, my nose in the mirror and I'm like, it looks like a catcher's mitt. Like I think I need to pull a couple layers off of the skin or something.

It's starting to look really leathery. It's not, but you could do a peel, a light peel. Yeah, a couple times a week maybe. Get down to that fresh, that youthful skin underneath. You just have bright red, like your muscle shows. I keep fluctuating, I keep going like half the time, probably even more than half the time, about 80% of the time I go like,

yeah, let's get this face all leathery and fucked up. There's something charming about that in an older man. And then one day I look at my face and I go, baloney, I can get facials. I live in a city with a lot of good facials. I should make my skin look rosy and youthful. It's such a good encapsulation of you in general. You're like, I'm this masculine Midwestern guy

and I'm leathery, but really you're not. You- I'm Fane and I live in Hollywood and I'm an actress. Yeah. Who are we kidding? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah, just own it. Yeah.

I have a skin one too. It's to restore the skin barrier on my legs. And that means to lotion every day. Oh, okay. Skin barrier is what it is technically. Because the skin barrier on my legs are a bit rough. Listen, this is working perfectly with my New Year's resolution because we haven't recorded in like eight days

and I'm having as much fun right now as I have on a roller coaster. Again, it's just like the first five days, it feels so freeing. It's like, oh, I don't have to think about that. And then start feeling itchy and you need it. Yeah. You need it. And I wanna add about your skin, Delta and I,

so on New Year's Eve here, before I got sick, which was great, the hotel nearly set itself on fire. It was launching all these fireworks from the roof and we're on the top floor. So about 14 inches from our window is where the fireworks were being set off from. And I'm gonna send you a video. It's the, like, I'm talking a lot of fireworks

where our whole room filled up with smoke because we had the windows open watching them. So, and then they were playing music in the courtyard and everything. So there's no way we were gonna go to bed before 2 a.m. So Delta and I were in bed together and it was about 1 and the music was really loud and we couldn't sleep. So we watched the Christmas special

and numerous times during the Christmas special on the closeups of you, I thought, well, I don't know what more she would want out of skin. It looks absolutely flawless and beautiful. And I'm just not sure what Monica's aiming for, if not what she has in the Christmas episode. Well, that's very nice. I mean, it's been a journey.

When I was looking, I looked through all my pictures from 2024 to do a post and I can, like the beginning of the year was bad, really bad, really, really, really bad skin. Okay, I guess I'll shout this out. So people know about my witch, but I have an, I feel guilty, but I gotta be honest. I have a new person and she's not a witch. She's a real woman.

Right. And she doesn't have powers, she has skill. Right, right, yeah. The place is called Corrective Skincare. But is it all the way on the west side? Santa Monica, exactly. See, this is where I go to the 80%, let's just stay leathery.

Cause I'm like, yeah, I want whatever you got going cause it's certainly working. I know, but you don't have adult acne. I hate that phrase. I do too. I know, but it's almost an onomatopoeia. There is something really, there's something about it, yeah. I know, but it's almost an onomatopoeia. There is something really, there's something about it, yeah.

Well, wait, you have, I would now have geriatric acne is what they'd have to call it. Oh no, oh no, I'm gonna be dealing, I'm gonna have that. But no, so you don't, you have different issues. I don't, I think she is really amazing. Corrective skincare is very, very amazing at clearing AA. And then also making like, she does light peels and stuff. Anyway, she has changed my face for sure and helped it so much.

And I have a routine and I use a couple of her products and I also ice my face morning and night. That's a pro tip. Oh, wow. Wow, wow, wow. And I think that's helped a lot. Okay, let me ask you this. Does she like the East Side?

Like, are there any favorite restaurants she has? Could we get her like five clients on the East Side and then buy her lunch and she'd come out, no. No, because you know why? She lives in Orange County. And now she only is there one day a week, even in Santa Monica. So it's getting, it's like, I should, I'm afraid to say.

What if we put her up at Kara once a month? We'll pay for, I would love that. I would love that. But I- Yeah, we get like four or five East side clients, put her up at Kara, and now we got something. We really got something. Although I, you know, a resolution I had once was to be more positive and I think I've done that.

And I look at going to Santa Monica as an adventure. It's like going on vacation, but like a bad, like kind of a bad one, like the one you're on. And- Well, people should know too, they're probably thinking like in LA, how far could this be? And if you look at a map, it'll be very, very deceptive. I mean, it's, it's sincerely,

it can be 90 minutes both directions. It is, it is 90. It, if you go- It's the same distance to go to Santa Barbara to get a facial. Yeah. So, but I plan it well where I plan a dinner with our only friend who lives on the West side.

Sometimes she can't do it, which is rude. Then on my own, I'll go to dinner if that's the case, or I'll go work somewhere. I will say that when I had my Tonka, that was that was me. I don't want to give too much details, but I was in Santa Monica. You're trying to get home from Santa Monica. That's yeah, that's enough.

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

Ooh, exciting. Okay, so I have to restore the skin barrier on my legs with lotion. I realize I do have a kind of tick, like I pick at my legs a lot. And so they're kind of really messed up I pick at my legs a lot. Oh, okay. And so they're kind of really messed up. So I gotta restore that.

And then I want to, I've journaled two days now. Oh, you have? Yes. That wasn't, it wasn't even a resolution. I didn't write it down, but I found a notebook and I've done it for two days. Oh, good. So. The journal's a great place.

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

And you did it. Congratulations. Yeah. And so And you did it. Congratulations. Yeah. And so on my journal, you know, I see a what? 365 days without, and then you get a little encouragement to stick with it that day. So if you, I don't know your icing or whatever thing you'd want to be consistent about, if you keep a little tally in your journal, you get to see that climb and it's very encouraging. I like that. I'm impressed that you, knowing you,

that you aren't paranoid about your journals. Like I am so, I wanna lock on it. It doesn't have one, because it's like a nice journal, but I'm afraid somebody's gonna open it and start reading it. I live by myself. Yeah. So the risk is low, but I am like,

I'm kind of consumed by that. I thought, should I rip the, should I write it and then destroy it? No. Well. Okay. Let me hit you with, like, I write in it with an even much deeper knowledge that I'm going to die

and I don't presume my kids will ever have the interest of doing this, but if my kids choose, there is a daily account of my life for the last 20 years, should they ever wanna read it. And it's all in there. And that's at one time scary, and then at another time, kind of comforting the notion that they're gonna struggle in life, for sure, it's the ride, and they're gonna be ashamed of themselves, and they're going to struggle in life for sure. It's the ride and

they're going to be ashamed of themselves and they're going to make mistakes. And I have this, if they're so inclined, I have 20 years of huge mistakes and still keep going and keep trying. And so I write in it knowing there's a possibility that my children will read. Do you censor yourself because of that or no? I don't, I know. Wow. I think the more I've learned of my parents' struggles, it did nothing but comfort me

and make me less self-loathing and you know, I think. But you're really only comfortable with them doing it after you die though, right? I don't know, you've been around me. I tell them pretty much everything already. That's true. You don't have any deepest, darkest secrets that you don't want anyone to ever know.

I do. Well, now I wanna know them. I'm gonna break into your apartment- No, see, no. Okay, my new plan is the next morning I'm gonna rip the old page out and light it on fire. No, can't you get us safe at least? Don't do that.

Well. Cause you might wanna write a memoir one day and our memories are complete fabrications. Yeah. As we know. So like even right now, this memoir I'm currently writing really is only gonna to take me to

like adulthood, right? And then I'll have the gap between moving to LA and being an addict and then getting sober and starting to work. That'll probably be a second one. But I mean, this sounds so indulgent, but regardless, in my mind, there's three. And what's exciting to me is the third one, there'll be no, I'll be able to read. Like anytime I tell an event in my life or the story, I can go read that day and actually know what happened.

It'll, the third one will probably be the only one that's approaching accurate of reality. It'll be the most boring one. Probably. Well, yeah, all the other ones all have been the victim. And the last one you'll realize, I'm the perpetrator. Oh, wow. That's a twist.

The twist in the series is kind of cool. But don't burn it, Monty. I'm burning it. Because I think for me, the purpose of the journal is potentially different than yours. One is just to get back in the purpose of the journal is potentially different than yours. One is just to get back in the habit of writing.

Yeah. And two, it's to release. It's not to document. It's more emotion. It's more about feelings than what is happening. So I think I'm kind of okay with burning it because it's just like I'm giving that up to the universe. I'm releasing that.

I don't wanna reread it. Okay, and by the way, I don't really ever go back and read my journal. Yeah. But I have on a couple of occasions and one thing that's very useful about it, as I've already said on here many times, is when you can see a pattern you've been stuck in

for a very long time and you see it in writing, there is something very powerful about seeing that and going like, well, it's up to me. I'm gonna continue to, like, this isn't a new feeling I have. This isn't a new reaction. This is the same fucking thing I do all the time. And it's in black and white.

And I have a choice to continue it or to stop it. And that's where I think it's useful. What if you put it in some second location and you don't have your name on it. So if someone found it, they'd have no fucking clue who's secrets they're reading. I think it's gonna be obvious. Oh, you do.

What I'm like. The one be obvious. Oh, you do. What I'm like- The one thing I really agree with you on- At work at Armchair Expert. Yeah, with every, yeah, I guess if every entry has to do with someone famous you interviewed that day. They'll go, well, it's either Rob's, Monica's or Dax's.

Yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. The one thing I do think is incredibly powerful, and I think this is what I use it for more than anything now, is there is, in the documenting part, it's not like I'm documenting it for posterity or I think I've even ever been writing in it thinking I'd consult it for something.

It's that I wake up and the day often feels insurmountable and I am pessimistic and I think I can barely get out of bed and nothing will happen. But the act of having to say everything that happened yesterday, I see, oh no, yesterday you felt that way and look all these things you did. The more important thing that's happening now is like I wake up with a rumination

and I'm committed to putting down the rumination. And once I get it in writing, the absurdity of it generally cuts it in half or even more sometimes. The whole, that realization I had about Bradley's movie where it's like, I saw it, I hated it. I got to interview him that day. I don't know what I'm gonna say.

I'm now writing about that. In the writing of it, I realized, oh, I hate it because this movie's about me. Or the part of me I hate the most. And then what clarity that gives me. And then I ended up loving it. So, yeah. Yeah. I probably, I end up loving it. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I probably, I'm probably just gonna burn it, but I think it's good. I actually, I think it's more like making the bed, which I don't do, but now I kind of see the value. It's, you've, in the morning, you've accomplished something. You did something, you wrote some stuff down and like if that's a goal to write some stuff down every day, then you've already done something positive for yourself

and you can like, whatever happens the rest of the day, one thing, you accomplish one thing. Moni, erase everything I just said, yes. I think that's the number one thing of all of it. Yeah, a couple. Which is like like you just, what you've shown is you have a commitment to yourself and you did it.

And so you feel, yeah, you feel good. It's like exercising. You're like, all right, I did things I didn't wanna do to make myself better. And that implicitly feels great. Yeah, definitely. Do you wanna know one of the sickest parts of myself? What?

I always make my bed. I would anyways, but I also, there is a part of me that like, I make my side of the bed. Because often Kristen's still in it. Oh, okay, okay. But even if she's not in it, I'll just make my side. Okay. And this is really a disgusting part of me.

But part of me goes, well, there's the evidence. Like I made my side of the bed. I'm committed to keeping this room clean. So there could also, once you have lived with someone, you might start making your side of the bed just to shame them. Oh no, I think that should be a resolution for you that you make her side of the bed too as a generous act.

I'm overselling that a little bit for comedic value, but it does happen. Yeah, I understand. I understand where it comes from. Well, here's really what I don't, I'm not making it thinking I'll shame her, but occasionally I'll see my sides made and hers is messy. And I do think, I hope she notices

that I've made my side of the bed. Oh my God. Oh my God. The only time I make my bed is if I am leaving for out of town. I make it. And that I only started doing that because Callie once told me,

we were in high school, we were young. And I think we were going somewhere and she made her bed. And she was like, yeah, I like to, if I'm going on vacation, I have to clean my room and make my bed and everything in case I die. Oh, that's not where I thought we were going. I thought she wants to return to a clean slate. I know, that would have been the normal answer.

But yeah, in case she dies and then people like, you know, are coming in there, she, it's like, it's a clean. I have the complete opposite. If I thought I was gonna die on vacation, I would set my room on fire before I left. I know. Like I wouldn't give a fuck.

It's more for like what will happen for the people. Like they'll come in her room. It needs to be in order for them. Yeah. So she's the type that would have killed herself at the colonial motor in to not make a mess for anyone. What's that? So my grandma Midge would have found her.

Oh no. Okay. No, that's really bad. Knock on wood. Okay. Hold on, knock on wood. Okay. Okay, one more thing. Christmas was great. Knock on wood. Okay, okay. Hold on, I'm gonna knock on wood. Okay, okay. Okay, one more thing.

Christmas was great. We had a great Christmas. Yeah. Really, really fun. Titi and Bear came over in the morning and that's Carly and Yertie. And then we left on the 26th to come here and I committed us to a hot air balloon ride.

Oh. Yeah. And you had to wake up really early, like five in the morning on vacation to go and I was a tough cell and, um, our drive there. And that was the day before Lincoln got sick. So Lincoln couldn't come and mom couldn't come. So it really was like on the fence. What are we going to do?

We can still do this thing. And It's so early. We went anyways. Delta was so afraid. The whole ride there, watching them inflate the hot air balloon, getting into the basket was almost impossible. She just almost was like, fuck this, I'm not doing it. I coaxed her into the basket. There's pictures of me holding her before it takes off.

And I had said in the car, Delta, I would bet all of my money that at the end of this, you're really gonna wanna do it again. Like I feel that confident about it. I would probably bet everything. And she goes, well, you are gonna lose everything. That's what she said.

The balloon took off, Monica. I promise you, we weren't even 15 feet in the air. And Delta goes, daddy, you're gonna win that bet. This is my favorite thing I've ever done. Oh, wow. And it was, it was among the greatest things I've ever done. This is, this was so incredible. There were so many hot air balloons. Maybe I'll post a picture, um,

on this episode. There was probably 50 or 60 hot air balloons all up in you hover above the pyramids. And you just float around for like an hour going up and down. And there's all these beautiful hot air balloons. And it was Molly and Dahlia and Lily and Eric and Delty and I, and it was about as cool of an experience that we ever had.

And then the dude set it down. We were touching the tops of the trees as we floated in. He put it on this little, like the size of your yard of your current new house. Over power lines, like a foot over it, brings it down and landed it on the fucking trailer of the truck where it gets transported in. It was, this guy was such a top gun.

Oh my goodness. That's so cool. It was spectacular. Oh, I love that. Well, I'm proud of her, but also I'm proud and shocked and impressed and shocked that you are comfortable in that environment. Letting someone, exactly.

Letting someone steer you above earth really and yeah, so that's good. This guy was great and you should know all I did half, about half of the time I watched him operate it in preparation if he passed out. Okay, so you were aware. I started clocking like, okay, wow, So when he gives a gas, he had like three different throttles to put heat into the balloon. But when he would put that in, there was about a 45 second delay before the actual elevation would change or not.

So I was like, okay, wow. If I know if we're coming at a tree, I got to predict 45 seconds from now we need to go. So I was really, I was monitoring like a hawk thinking I might have to land. And Eric goes, after we landed, he goes, yeah, I don't think you could have done that. I think you could have flown us around,

but I don't think you could have made that landing. And I'm like, I don't think so either, but I certainly would have given it a shot. Yeah, you would have. Wow, okay, great. Well, that sounds wonderful. I'm glad you guys got to do that. That was a big time once in a lifetime experience.

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

Okay, I have a couple of facts. Okay, before you get into those facts, I just wanna say about Tyler Perry. I thought about him so much after this interview. Really, I gotta say, tied with anyone else we've ever interviewed. I just, all week I kept thinking about him. And he might be one of the most unique people

I've ever met in my life. He has such a softness and kindness and also this firmness with his boundaries and beliefs. It was like this really unique combo of this beautifulness and also self-assuredness and not going to be led anywhere he doesn't wanna go. Something about him I felt was just so magical. I do too.

I mean, he's just like the walking representation of glass half full. Like he turned, he really turned his, some very traumatic events into something he could be proud of. And it's incredible. And his bravery talking about those topics fully exceeded mine. And I just thought that was really,

yeah, a real privilege to, yeah. I loved too that he was like, wait, you told me this was gonna be fun to do as a publicist. I know. And then I said, well, it could be fun. We can do a fun version. And he's like, no, no, no, actually let's do, let's go.

Yeah, let's do the real thing. I thought that was so rad. Yeah, me too. Me too. Yeah, he's really special. When I was home, I drove past his studios. Well, the exit from his studios. You did?

Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh my God, I did it. I set him home. Wow. Oh, you're back. I'm back. Okay, good. Okay, turns out it's just where I'm not. I set him home. Wow. Oh, you're back. I'm back. Okay, turns out it's just where I'm not.

You can have a couple homes. Okay. That's nice. All right. Okay. Now he mentioned the arousal template. He said that's set from around three to seven, ages three to seven.

Yeah, so there's a belief that each of us has a sexual arousal template, a map in the brain of what we find sexually appealing. Although researchers do not fully understand how or why the various things to which we're attracted appear in our arousal template, it is clear that by the time we are four to six, our arousal template is largely in place,

even though we are not yet sexual. It is also clear that as we age, elements can be added to our sexual arousal template, but not eliminated. Ah, you can just throw in more kinks, I guess. I guess so. Yeah, but it makes sense. It's like why one person is interested in one thing

and others are not. Yeah, I had a little realization on this, or not a realization. I launched a new theory on this trip. I was listening to Nate Silver's most recent book, and he was in a very respectful and smart way. He was poking holes in effective altruism. Oh. Our good boy, MacAskill, who we had on and utilitarianism.

He had a couple of really good pushbacks for all of it. And they're very solid as I also believe that Peter Singer and McCaskill's points of view are very, very solid. And my conclusion was, you know, everything's already been fleshed out. These theories and philosophies in life, they've been explored since Greece and probably before. They're all here for us. And I think we are just biologically unique.

And I guess our childhoods and our zip code and our socioeconomic, and there's just an offering for us that'll feel most correct. I don't think any of them are necessarily superior. I just think there's a lot of really good fleshed out ones and you'll just be pulled to one. And the notion that yours is the one

or someone else's is the one isn't really it. There's just these offerings and you have some predisposition and some bias and certain ones will just appeal to you more than others. And I think you're just born that way that you'll be drawn to these certain ones. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. I don't know if you're biologically like drawn so much as what you're exposed to kind of becomes your default. We're all trying to be as safe and happy as we can be. So whatever is giving us individually that feeling,

we're gonna chase. And yeah, that's not the same thing for everyone. Yeah, I think most of my life I've thought, well, one argument will have the most merit. Like somehow if you can quantify it. And even that was a part of utilitarian merit. Like somehow if you can quantify it. And even that was a part of utilitarianism. He said, you know, the reason utilitarian is very tempting as a philosophy is it is

our innate desire to quantify things. So if we can say, oh, four people died versus 12 people, that's very simple. It's 12 versus four. Well, were those 12 Nazi party members and the other four were Mother Teresa and her pals? Like, no, actually that's not necessarily true, but the appeal of quantifying and being able to compare two numbers is very attractive to a lot of us. Yeah.

And biologically, like, we have such different dopamine levels naturally, you know, like there's such a variety of how much dopamine you have or depression you have. And I think we're all inclined. It's also kind of what, um, um, pain was saying, Keith pain about, isn't it interesting that although you've thought through the arguments and you're sure the conclusion is correct, isn't it weird? I could have predicted what conclusion you would have come to before you were

born based on your ethnicity and your zip code. Like that kind of, that theory still, I think is what I'm getting at is like, yeah, there's just a lot of really good, well thought out theories and philosophies and those ones will just appeal to us for whatever reason and others won't. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

Okay, cities where black people are thriving, cause we were talking about Atlanta, my home. My number one home, my only home. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the top 10 are Washington DC, Austin, Texas. Is this in order or is this just- Yeah, this is in order. This is ranked number one is DC.

More than Atlanta? Should I go 10 to one? Wow, too late now. Damn it. I'm rusty. Those are above Atlanta? Yeah. Atlanta's number five.

Okay, hit me. So DC. DC, Austin, number two. Number three, Provo, Utah. Shocker. Number three is Poughkeepsie, New York. Well, that's gotta be four, right? Oh, hold on. No, sorry.

Three and they're tied. They're tied. Okay. Provo and Poughkeepsie are tied for three and four. Correct. Atlanta is five. Okay. Six is Oxnard, California.

That's where our boy Anderson Peck's from. Oh, no way. Okay. Six is Oxnard, California. That's where our boy Anderson Peck's from. Oh, no way. Yeah. Oh, cool. Seven is San Antonio, Texas. Eight is Raleigh, North Carolina. Nine is Baltimore, Maryland. And 10 is Ogden, Utah.

Utah has two. Okay, I'mden, Utah. Utah has two. Okay, I'm good. Okay, I gotta imagine if you Google least amount of black people in any state, Utah's gotta be number one, right? No, well, Rob will love. So have they interviewed the 12 people that live in Provo and they're thriving like crazy?

I don't know. But this, no, this is- Is there a threshold, like minimum amount of black folks to count? I don't know. But this, no, this is- Is there a threshold, like minimum amount of black folks that to count? Well, hold on. This is broken down into median household income among black residents, percentage of black households

that make a hundred thousand dollars or more a year, percent of black residents with a bachelor, with a bachelor's degree or higher, home ownership rate among black residents, unemployment rate among black residents. So that's the factor. Yeah, it doesn't give population. Those are good metrics.

Right, in 2020, there were 40,000 in Utah. Oh, come on guys. There's that many. But that's not the lowest. That's not the lowest though. What's the lowest? Oh, well, well, hold on, hold on. I want to read.

Why is it yours? Wyoming so shaky? Oh, sorry, I was kicking the table at my computer. I'm going to go back. Maybe North Dakota and and Montana, Minnesota, probably. You got two that are lower.

So the lowest is Wyoming. Okay. And then Montana, Vermont, Idaho, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, North Dakota, Utah. It's 11th. Okay, so I'm kind of wrong on that. But 40,000 in the whole state, that's not. Yeah, that's not a lot.

Wyoming is 5,200. Wow. Well, that's not a lot. Wyoming is 5200. Wow. Well, it also, this, this Atlanta Journal of Constitution is really a newspaper because there's also this really cool map. I'm impressed and I'm proud of my home. Okay, now what's the Chitlin Circuit rebrand name? You were like, it's rebranded to something.

And you're right, urban theater circuit. Sure. He didn't like that. Good for him. I'm not allowed to have that opinion, but I agree with him. Yeah, well, sure. We'll agree with whatever he, we'll do whatever he wants.

Oh, can I bring up a scary one? Because I actually had to discuss this with Delta on this trip. Yeah. I accidentally, she was sitting on this swinging net chair in a park and she and Dahlia were both trying to get on it at the same time.

And it was clear to me that the only way they are gonna be able to do that is if they both sat crisscross applesauce. Mm-hmm. And I accidentally said Indian style. Sure. be able to do that is if they both sat crisscross applesauce. And I accidentally said Indian style. And then Delta said, what's Indian style? And I go, oh, you know what? I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. That's what we used to call crisscross applesauce. And then she said, oh, okay, why is it bad?

And I said, you know, Delta, this is one of the few that I'm not quite sure because obviously people saw Indians meditating sitting that way I thought that this is one of the few that I'm not quite sure because obviously people saw Indians meditating, sitting that way, and they called sitting that way Indian style. And it's not derogatory in any way. If you invent a way of sitting, I think why is that negative?

So I just want your two cents on that. Cause that- We've talked about this with Bobby Lee. So go back in the archives and you Dax, So go back in the archives and you, Dax, you go back in the archives and listen to that episode. Even if it's just for a minute? Yeah, well, actually, I think I actually cut a lot of the crisscross applesauce talk out,

which I'll probably have to do again right now. No, I won't. I understand the conundrum because I agree with you, there's nothing inherently negative about sitting that way. Yeah. And you're not saying it to like marginalize anyone or even, yeah, I'm just like, it's, if there's a lot of things, different cultures have invented, or at least that's the first time people writing about history saw it.

Obviously people probably sat that way from the beginning. But regardless, like French, let's say this, let's say that the French were marginalized in the country and you could no longer say French kissing. Well, it's like, well, there's nothing really bad about French kissing. It just means you use your tongue. And I apparently English people,

that was the first time they saw that. Right. I don't know. But like, yeah, French kissing, that's a fine thing to say. They can own kissing for the rest of time. Yeah. I guess it's just a way to make a group that already feels different, even feel more different. You would be proud of me,

because I said my point and she said, yeah, that doesn't make much sense. And I said, but you know what Monica would say is that would be fine if half the country were Indian, but because there's, there were so few Indians and they're already marginalized, it's just another way to make them feel different. So I think that's what Monica would say.

And that's a good point. Oh, look at that. That all happened. You can ask her to confirm that. The internet says it's usually because of lack of cultural knowledge that the phrases are offensive. But that one specifically or just in general? It's under this one, yeah.

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

Yeah, they're crossed but but they're not Chris. I guess I just, I'm gently asking if that might be an overcorrection, just that one. Sure, I mean, I think there are overcorrections all over the place. For me, it's just, why would you do anything that might make someone feel a little bit awkward or like they are standing out in a way they don't really want to

when there's another option? That's really relevant. But yeah, if American Indians feel bad when they hear that, then yeah, of course, forget it. And they might not. Like I don't, well, look, I don't now, but I bet, I bet when I was like seven and we were in class and the teacher said, everyone sit down Indian style,

I'm sure I wasn't like, oh, that's really rude and doesn't, they don't understand the culture. What if they all just looked at you to see how you were sitting and they thought you were, everyone's supposed to copy how you were sitting. That's the actual thing underneath. Feeling.

Yeah, that's the feeling is, oh, they're talking about my thing that I somehow have to own, but I don't even know what this is either. Yeah. So. Yeah. Now House of Pain episodes.

So there was 254, but then they revamped it in 2020 and now there's 362 episodes. So there was 254, but then they revamped it in 2020 and now there's 362 episodes. Which is just wild. That's about twice as many as cheers. Absolutely wild. And that's it. That's everything. Mm-hmm.

Well, I'm telling you, this has made me so excited to come home and resume working. Me too. On my favorite job I've ever had. I know, we're so lucky and we're so appreciative to all the Armchairs who've stuck with us and are gonna continue to stick with us this year, we hope. We're gonna bring a lot of fun to the table this year.

We didn't tell people, which I regret, but we did a bingo. We have another day of bingo, it's tomorrow, but by this time it'll pass. But we did a bingo. We have another day of bingo, it's tomorrow, but by this time it'll pass. But we did a fun game on Instagram that was a scavenger hunt bingo. And we're gonna do more fun things like that this year and more like community building.

How did it, how does it work, the bingo scavenger hunt? You have to find the timestamp of three, like a bingo card, basically. Like, hold on, I'll pull one up. Yeah, there's a three by three bingo card and you've got to make a row. But it's like for experts, which guest did Dax appoint himself

as part of the guest personal security team? So you like have the answer and the timestamp. Oh, so you would go back to Bill Gates and figure out when that was said? Exactly. Oh, I like it. That's a fun game. So fun.

We have a new member of our team that put this together, right? Yes, she designed it. Her name is Sophia. She is interning for us. And she was recommended. She's a prodigy. She is, she was recommended to us by Adam Grant and she was recommended. She's a prodigy. She is.

She was recommended to us by Adam Grant and she's at Wharton and we don't really deserve her but we're gonna take her. That's right. We both read the letter she sent us and we were intimidated by her intelligence and her overqualification and we thought, well, there's no way she should be an intern for us.

We should be an intern for her. But here we are. Here we are. And I've put her on some fun tasks and I think we're gonna have a lot of fun this year. Yeah. So welcome to her. Yeah.

All right. Well, I love you. Love you. And I'll see you in 36 hours. Yay. Yay. Bye. Bye. me.

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