Chris Pine - Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Dax Shepard
Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert. I'm Dan Rather, and I'm joined by Monica Monsoon. Hi, handsome. Actor alert. Big time trigger warning.

If you get horny too easy at work, don't listen to this one. You might need to wait. This was a great one. It was really, really fun. It really, really was.

Monica Padman
He's so interesting. He is insanely interesting. You'll hear about it. I thought he hated me. Maybe he was.

Dax Shepard
He. I love that he admitted he was judgmental of me. It was such music to my ears. To hear you hear that in a little bit of a way that isn't there is a little bit of a stress. Okay, that's fine.

I'll let the listener decide. Yes, exactly. But these are my favorite kind of interviews. They happen occasionally where it's like, I got a story about somebody, maybe they have a story about me, and then we chat, and we like each other so much. He's so smart.

Chris Pine. Very smart. Ran out of the gates. I'm like, Berkeley. Yeah.

Okay. Berkley. And then a story I would have never guessed and unraveled every story I ever. You really went nuts over a piece of this, which you'll hear. Yes, I unraveled.

Monica Padman
Yeah. In the best way. Oh, I love it. What you think about people is not always the truth. I'm so wrong.

Dax Shepard
It's insane. You would think I would learn to stop guessing, but no, no, you never stop guessing. Cause I get it right one in. Five times, and I'm like, and that's enough for you? That's enough.

I'll stick with those. Of course, Chris Pine was in Star Trek wish Wonder Woman, dungeons and dragons. As my kids now are very acutely aware of the princess diaries, he has a new movie out that he wrote and directed called Pool Man May 10. You'll hear all about that. Again, very impressive writing, directing job.

Very, very smart. Very quirky. Very interesting, very stylized. Very good. Please check it out and enjoy my new friend, who I might start sauna ing with.

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Chris Pine
Just talking to the sod expert. Yes. How are you? Welcome. I have a few sod experts.

Monica Padman
I'm Monica. Chris. Nice to meet you. You son of a bitch. Look what you just arrived in.

Dax Shepard
Is that. I heard you're 59 ish. What is. Jesus. It is indeed.

That is cool. Gorgeous. 13,000 original miles. How long have you had that in the green? I love the green.

Chris Pine
I've had it for, like, probably seven years. And then right before COVID hit, I got nearly t boned. I was working on this film, and this woman came through a red and at 45, almost basically killed me. But she clipped the back. Uh huh.

And they had to take it all apart. COVID hit the company, went out of business so that I didn't have it for two years. Oh, my God. So I just got it back and. Are you so happy?

Dax Shepard
What is it, four speed? No, it's a five speed. I don't have any old cool porsches. I had a 911 for a while. My buddy wanted it in Michigan.

I collect station wagons. Oh, I have one. You do? I have one. Jeep Wagoneer.

Oh, okay, great. Blue on wood panel. Wait, this has to be on air. You guys are talking too much. Monica's favorite topic.

Monica Padman
No views. We're attracting a lot of car guys these days. I know. Have you ever met Jonah Nolan? Very briefly.

Chris Pine
He and his wife. Is he a car guy, too? Yeah, we just interviewed him, and he rolled up in an aerial atom. One of those cars. Oh, my God.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, no roof. It was really cool. Yes. I'm a pretty basic dude when it comes to it. I have a 57 speedster that I wanted ever since I saw down 210 o.

Chris Pine
Yes, of course. Dylan drove it. Dylan drove it. I was like, I have to have it. I have a 280 sl.

Dax Shepard
The little convertible. That was on a show, too. Yeah, yeah, that's la law. But that's a 560. That could actually be a portion.

Chris Pine
I was thinking shampoo. Oh, sure, sure. Can I tell you right now, looking at you in the car you've arrived in, which is so gorgeous, and you're very stylish. I've been watching a lot of interviews with you. Thanks, man.

Dax Shepard
You have a lot of style. And I say it sincerely, fashion guy. If you don't already own a BMW 3.0 CSI. 3.0 CSI look forever. It screams you forever.

Chris Pine
I'm a huge fan. My first car, so everybody in my high school, I went to a very shishy high school here called Oakwood. And so everybody was getting their big fancy at that point. It was the Escalades Maxima. Oh, okay.

The new Supra prelude was big, but my grandmother left me a little cash. It was like $750. And I bought a 1972 2002, which is a beautiful car. What's that? Are you not so safe?

Monica Padman
There's so many numbers. Okay, so the BMW 2002 is, other than the 3.0, probably the coolest BMW. I think the 3.0 cs is Chica and kind of has that elegant line to it. More James Bondi. 100%.

Chris Pine
The 2002 is like the precursor to. The three series, but it had so much personality. And the reason why I got into it is because a guy on my street had an opinion version of it. Dried skirts. Oh.

I mean, just so cherry burgundy on black, with a tent. It was fire. I fell in love with it. So I went out to Sunland and found this guy, who's a former mathematician, that fell out of love with teaching and then opened up this 2002 junkyard. Basically, he's one of these real characters, and went out to his place in Sunland, near the cement factory out there off of deep, deep Lancashire.

Very well off, near the fire where. All my car work's done. And I think he ended up selling it about. I fucking dream of that car. And you got it for 750?

All told, it was probably $1,500. I had it all the way through college. I drove it up to Berkeley. I had it my first two or three years in LA. No air conditioning.

Hot summer. Stick shift, of course. Yes. Come on. Slow, so slow.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. But girls like that car, right? Yeah, it's got five. I mean, I'm a little embarrassed. I had a flip phone for many years, which I was very proud of.

Right? I just saw Dune and, you know, Stalin, Sarsgaard is that giant with tubes coming out of him, and he sits in a pile of oil. Does he need to stay damp? We need to get into that, but I'm trying to. Is he, like, have a moisture.

Chris Pine
How does it work? Yeah. I think to myself, this march of technology is essentially getting us to a place, either consciously or not, where that is what we become. Just people on a couch where everything's done for us. Wally goes back to WAlL E, goes back to idiocracy.

Frito. I've got everything I need. I'm sitting on a toilet. I have a flat tube in my mouth. Yeah.

So my point being, I like things that have a little bit of difficulty, even the simple difficulty of it's a little hard to start the car in the morning. And if it's a little hard, you gotta kinda spend some time with it, and you gotta warm it up. And if it's not moving, you gotta check the choke. Is my choke busted? You wanna be involved?

Yeah. I wanna have the tactility of life of, like, a bit more friction. Yeah. A little bit of inertia. I agree.

Dax Shepard
I want to have some ownership over the experience. If it just is delivered to my eyes and my ears, I don't have the pride in having participated in it. When I say this, I'm talking about the iPhone. You don't have a flip phone, but that also doesn't. No, it's just a little baby iPhone.

Oh, it's a baby iPhone. Okay. Even something as simple as Google maps, which I use all the time. But think about all of the magic, faded experiences that it's maybe denying us by just giving us the directions. So we're just looking at this whole thing rather than.

Chris Pine
You know what? I think I'm gonna cut down Spaulding. You'll like this. I just pitched to my eleven year old. We're gonna go to Europe.

Dax Shepard
And I was telling her, you know, what I used to love is I would go places and you'd leave your hotel, and you would just get lost. Cause you didn't really know. And then you might consult a map at some point. But that was so fun. And she goes, oh, that does sound really fun.

And I said, okay, well, let's commit. If the next time we go somewhere, let's leave the hotel and just turn left, right, left, right. And see if we can find our way back. Look, I have nothing against maps. Yeah, we don't hate maps, but an.

Chris Pine
Actual map is also kind of fun. And then trying to fold it back up in the way originally. You're an anxious person. You love Matt. I am completely an anxious person.

Monica Padman
You are. Oh, my God. Yeah. Getting lost sounds rough to me. That's part of the cognitive behavioral life discipline.

Chris Pine
Work of being an angsty person is, like, working through it and be like, we're gonna go get lost, and it's totally okay. And if we don't get to dinner at 715, that's fine, too. If we even lose the reservation, that's fine. We're gonna live. Yes.

Monica Padman
It took me six months to get the reservation, so I can't lose it. Sorry. So maybe we just do take the uber. That's right. You're right.

Dax Shepard
I don't have a lot of anxiety, and I'm quick to go, like, yeah, and then I'll be somewhere else. You've never had anxiety? I have it at night when I'm sleeping, I wake up and I obsess on things. Have you ever had performance anxiety getting on stage as a comedian? Doing stand up?

Yes. Not sketch comedy. That was fine. Cause I had friends, and if we. Ate, shared kind of a structure, well.

We would share in the embarrassment. And someone's there to help maybe, I guess, if things go sideways. But when I did start doing standup very late into this. So you didn't start out? No, I moved here to do stand up, and I was just too afraid, and I discovered the groundlings.

Oh, you can do it with other people. That's not as scary. And then I fell in love with that. But then at a certain age, I was like, you came here to do this thing, and you're gonna die having not done it. And so it was a new year's resolution, and then I did do it for two years, but the notion of walking up there.

Can I bore you for 1 second? This is taking up too much of your interview. I'm curious because I think it comes back around to having made this film. Is. It's a version of the naked vulnerability.

Chris Pine
I would imagine comedians much more so, and I've only done it once. Years ago, when I was at the Williamstown Theatre festival, I did a class with Lou Black, a stand up comedy class, and we prepped. But you only went on the stage. But you're an atheist. Is a one man show to stand.

Up on stage, and you are looking at everybody and you're registering energy. There is a level of courage there. And I also think a building up of thick skin that I admire so much. You just have to bowl through. I'm sure we admire the same thing.

Dax Shepard
It's specifically comedians that are on stage. Their pace is so calm and slow. Yeah, that's the ones where I'm like, oh, my God. You're not nervous at all. You're like, I know that this goes at this speed, and eventually everyone will be happy.

When at this speed is amazing. But my stupid anecdote was, there was a scene in this movie I directed, hit and run, and Kristen and I are in my off road car, and we have to drive through a barn door. This is all practical. On the other side of the barn door is two ramps, and then we're gonna jump two cars, and it's really Kristen and I. And the big challenge is, it's very dark in the barn.

They let you do that? Well, I directed it and got the money for it, so I let me do it. There you go. The challenge was inside the barn. It was dark.

And then the moment we break through the barn door, it's super bright out. And so my eyes are gonna have to adjust. I'm gonna see these two ramps. And so my stunt coordinator, Steve Vacastro, a great friend of mine, he leans into the car just before we're about to go, and he said, how are you doing? And I said, I'm good.

And he said, okay. How nervous are you? And this is my most sincere evaluation of stand up. I said, if stand up is a ten, I'm at, like, a five and a half. That's the comp for me.

Driving a race car through barn doors and jumping to other cars is half as scary as walking up onto a stage. And you've told them, yeah, I'm gonna entertain everyone for 15 minutes, just me. And then if it's not working out, I'll just have to stay that whole 15 minutes. I'm assuming you've been on stage when it hasn't worked. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Pine
What does that experience? Oh, my God, what an experience. What happens is you're like, well, this is terrible. I will continue. You're above yourself, listening to yourself go through the rest of it as you're just staring at the audience somehow in your third eye.

Monica Padman
Some people like it, though. They like to bomb. We've had a few people on who've said that there's something about the bombing that gets them revved up. I almost think they're the real comedian. Like, I think that's what they have that I don't.

Chris Pine
Unpack that a bit more. I don't totally understand. I don't really get it. Except I experienced it when I read a mean comment once on instagram where I was like, I think this is what they mean. You get so uncomfortable by people being mad that it almost makes you lean into them hating you and just being like, okay, you hate me.

Monica Padman
I'm gonna double down on this. Maybe a survival. I think that's a tricky cause. I've had a year to think about it. After I finished my film, which has brought up a lot of stuff, I have this vision of this samurai emotional ninja in my mind.

Chris Pine
There is no good. There is no bad. There just is. And that leaning into the negativity there is still invalidating of the other, saying, well, fuck you. I'm going to show you which disempowers yourself.

But that fuel is so sexy because it's righteous and it's, like, just as fake. It's nitrous. It's like addiction. It's that serotonin hit of, like, whoo. But there's that ninja samurai other thing of, like, that's cool, man.

I don't know how effective, impractical that is for the comedian on stage, but I think as, like, a life lesson. Anyway. Yeah, it's my best. Off into the weeds here. It's best case.

Dax Shepard
This happened to me. Vegas Grand Prix. So, six months ago, I did a live show with my Formula One podcast, and it was in front of this crazy, rowdy bar audience that had no idea who we were, had never heard the show, didn't like Formula one, and it was a disaster. People were actively coming up on stage and just grabbing pictures with me in the middle of the whole thing. It was the biggest disaster of my professional.

Chris Pine
Were you there? No, I'm not on the f one podcast. Our shows go great. We haven't experienced that. When we would do live shows.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, they go a lot better, but this was a humongous disaster. I don't know if I know the real kink of those comedians, but what did happen to me is I was like, this is unsalvageable, and we have committed to an hour. That's what we were hired to do. It's gonna be the longest next 55 minutes of my life. But I did have the presence of mind to go, you're gonna remember this.

Chris Pine
For life, for the memoir. Us four will be talking about this experience for the next five days. Like, if it had gone easy, you'd forget it 100%. So I did have that where I was like, oh, man, we've got a story to tell for the next couple weeks. There's definitely cachet there.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. I don't know if that's the ninja place to be, but there was some kind of, like, looking at the bigger picture, maybe in the moment. Well, there's a version of my emotional ninja samurai, which is. You just spin it a different way. The Viktor Frankl of it all.

Who's Viktor Frankl? When I was 15, my mom gave me this book, Viktor Frankl's man search for meaning. He was a holocaust survivor. This is obviously the extreme version of a bad situation, but it's all about reframing perspective. It's like, how can you be immersed and enmeshed in the absolute worst thing?

Chris Pine
And do you have the power to reframe it, to experience it differently? Yeah. Okay. Mom was an actress and then became a psychotherapist. Yeah.

My grandmother was an actress in the thirties and forties, and she was from Corpus Christi, Texas. She was a beauty queen. Redhead. Came out to Los Angeles in 32, maybe ended up becoming a scream queen in b movies at Republic Pictures, which is now CB's Radford. She did movies with Abbott Costello, Lon Chaney Junior.

She did a lot of horror movies. She ended up at Universal. Huge pinup girl during World War Two, married a lawyer, Max Guilford, Ney Goldfarb, who came over with his parents from the Ukraine and ended up on Mott street and lower east side, and then ended up in Boyle Heights out here. When Boyle Heights was the largest jewish community in Los Angeles. In fact, it has the oldest jewish.

Dax Shepard
Cemetery in Los Angeles, which is now almost entirely latino. Exactly right. Nicotine toothpicks, 100%. I already clocked your lozenges. We gotta put a button on all this, which is like, I've come across you a couple times, and I really thought, I don't think this guy likes me.

And now with the Porsche and the nicotine, I'm feeling like, what a missed opportunity. Sure. Do you have friendship? It is. Why?

Chris Pine
Did you get the sense that I didn't like it? We'll get into that later. Sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure.

Monica Padman
Wait, never seen those toothpicks other than in your pocket. Yeah. The story about this is, I was making a movie, and I'm on hour 19 or whatever, and you're overdoing fucking wordle. When I have my 19 cigarette, I'm like, toothpicks, man. Nicotine.

Fucking toothpicks. Yeah. And I hopped right on the phone. I called my business manager. I was like, let's do this now.

Chris Pine
Let me just take a quick beat. Check Google if anything's after, those are. Twelve products in the market. Nicotine toothpicks. It was my tequila and I got.

Dax Shepard
Fucking another similar shot down. I do that too. I invent shit. And then I look and it's like. Anyway, they have my mom, and my mom grew up in Beverly Hills.

Max was successful as a lawyer. He was kind of on and off successful, I guess. He produced a couple things with my grandma. He ended up becoming the president of the Beverly Hills bar. And he died very young, so I don't really have any stories of him.

Chris Pine
But my mom grew up in this really interesting community in Beverly Hills in the fifties. She went to school with everyone. It was Hollywood glamour years when all the movie stars lived in LA. Yeah, they were all concentrated. Yeah, it was the studio system.

And then, yeah, she became an actress and worked at the Mark Taper forum when they had a repertory coming in the late sixties, early seventies, did a ton of television. And met my father in 64. And my father come out from Scarsdale, New York. My father's full name is Granville Whitelaw Pine. Wow.

Dax Shepard
Oh, my goodness. Granny. Granny. That's cute. No one ever calls it.

Chris Pine
They call him Robert or Buzz. Does he have grandkids? And do they call him Granny? Grandpa? Granny.

Dax Shepard
That would be good. Grandpa. Granny Grandpa Granny. No, Luca calls him pops. This is your sister's child?

Yeah. And then both my parents were actors and my mom, I think the last thing she did was master in 1984. She played Courtney Cox's mom. Oh, okay. Why did she choose to end that experience in going to psychotherapy?

Chris Pine
She quit acting, kind of, ostensibly. In 1980, when I was born, my father was doing very well. He was on a tv show called Chips and it was number one on NBC and never heard of it. It was a big part. You know, dereks did a remake of chips.

Oh, that's right. Oh, my God. That is fucking right. Oh, my God. Oh, wow.

Dax Shepard
No, but I learned something very painfully, what you just had to say. A very popular show named chips. I found that out the hard way, that people currently today don't know about chips. Oh, well, I mean, it's like now. 40 years ago, when we were recruiting people to go to the screens, they were like.

It was so literal. It's about potato chips. It's like, no, man. Come on. California Highway.

Chris Pine
Larry Wilcox. Erika Strava. How old are you? I'm five years older than you. So we're around the same time.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, certainly, if your father's on the show too, you're uniquely aware of it. Yeah. How long did that run? Less than I thought when I got into remaking.

Chris Pine
Five or six years, I think 76 or 77 to 81. So for me that was half of my whole childhood. So it seems like that show was on for ten years. Yeah, but times were good, I imagine, when dad was on that show. Yeah, I mean, I was like a guppy.

I don't really remember anything of those years other than we had a nice house and we lived, as my mom called it, south of the boulevard, which is a big deal in Los Angeles. South of Venture Boulevard had the Gelson's card, had the Neiman's card. It was the golden years of network television too. So it's like when you went to up front, they fly you first and they give you per diem and the limos and all that. These are just tales that my family have told each other.

So my mom was a very happy housewife. I think my father got his SAG card in 64. He was under contract at universal before the contract system ended. The last studio that did it, he got paid a weekly stipend to learn how to sing, to learn how to dance, to learn how to ride horses, to take elocution lessons. It's like a finishing school for actors.

Yeah. And that's what the studio system was like. You got paid to be under a contract at Universal and you were just kind of on call for their casting directors to call you up to say, go out for the Virginian, go out for Gunsmoke. And they did really well through the seventies and actually did a pilot with Michael Douglas called Streets of San Francisco. My mother saw them filming it while on a trip to San Francisco while I was in her belly.

Monica Padman
Whoa. She tells this story all the time and she saw Michael Douglas on a sidewalk and it's like the highlight of her life. Oh my God, dude, we have a lot of this missed opportunity. There's time. There's our fifth.

Yeah, exactly. Plenty of time. We waited till we were both gray. Let's go both gray. You have all your.

Dax Shepard
Well, listen, no, the sides are completely gray. And when this grows out, it just gets grayer and grayer. I'll grant you that. You're ahead of me. No, I don't buy it.

Okay. And then going into the eighties, it got rougher and rougher. My dad. The work got sparser and sparser. And then the real estate crash in 87 or 88 pretty much wiped my family out then it was some really rough years.

Chris Pine
And then my mom went back to school. I have so much respect for what she did. She went back to UCLA and got her ba. She went back and got her master's at Antioch. All the while, she worked four jobs.

She worked at an antique store. She did after school creative arts and taught kids animation, even though she had no idea about animation. She taught acting at UCLA extension. She taught acting to me and my friends. My dad was doing other jobs to try to make ends meet, so there was a period of time when it.

Dax Shepard
Was really rough, really quick, in a way. Your dad lives out this fear I walk around with, which would be, I would return to civilian life, but people would remember me. That's terrifying. You can't do it anonymously. You can't just, like, go, hey, I'm gonna take care of my family and go do this thing.

People are gonna be like, hey, you were the sergeant on chips. The kind of deep respect I have for my father now becoming a man. Cause I think I'm still becoming a man. To know what he had to do for his family, it requires a strength and a humility. I don't know if I would have that similar strength.

I think the majority of folks that found themselves in that situation just self destruct. They can't do it. They would crawl into a bottle. And my family, despite certain emotional fissures that 25 years of therapy I still probably deal with, they stuck together. They put two kids through college in private school, put my mother through school, paid off their debts.

It's deeply admirable. It is. It's beyond. I think I admire that version of humility almost more than anything else. That would be so hard for me.

Chris Pine
That would be painful for me. What I'm really thankful for in terms of the gift that it gave me is that I have a deep respect for the fickleness of the business. I have a deep understanding of how very quickly it can go, how very good it can be, and how very quickly people are not returning your phone calls. The idea of what's authentic and what's not and what's business and what's true friendship, my radar is keenly set to that. And also, I hope, a deep appreciation for I have a Porsche, because I remember my father in the good years, had this beautiful 65 365 essay.

It was this black topped bucket Porsche, and I remember the day that he had to give it up. And obviously, I understand these are Cadillac problems, but there's a sense of. It's almost like, for my father, oh. My God, I get it so much. I'm in many ways, living out my father's dream right now.

Dax Shepard
And I think of him. I remember he and I were watching blow. There's a moment where Johnny Depp invites his dad over to look at the house and the cars. And I was watching it with my dad, and my dad goes, there's about a million and a half dollars worth of cars right there. That Ac Cobra's worth this.

This bubble. Oh, it's worth it. You shared the car thing with your dad. Yeah. All this bullshit I have gives me x amount of pleasure.

I thought it would give me more, but I let my dad come in the gates and look around, and I go, no, we're gonna keep all this shit. Cause I want him to come in the gates and go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You want him to be proud. Yes. And I want to live out his fantasy and mine.

Chris Pine
But I think it's maybe something more than pride. There's deep sharing. There's like, you did good. This is for us boys and their dads. It doesn't get more primal than that, right?

Dax Shepard
Yeah. Boys and their moms, too, but it's all primal. And their dads and girls and their moms, it's all complex. It's all a complex, for sure. As your mother picked up these skills in psychotherapy, and she mastered that, did you?

A witness, an evolution in her and how she dealt with things and did it impact how your family operated? Like, she went out and got a pretty awesome skill set. I have to imagine the Annette Bening character in this movie is some, whether conscious or unconscious, nod to mom. It's very interesting thinking about coming on this podcast and thinking about doing these long form things. I promise you, this is a roundabout way of answering your question.

Monica Padman
We have all the time listen to. Your story about your addiction, specifically the moment, day seven. And I thought, that is a fucking courageous thing to do. That's a really tough thing to do. And as you said on the podcast, which I find very moving and very specifically to my point, it's one thing, just you two and Kristen, it's another thing to offer this as some sort of communal world social offering of watch me try to do the difficult thing, that maybe you can follow in my path and do the same thing.

Chris Pine
I couldn't do what you do. This kind of self revealing in such a huge way is really brave. I also find it terrifying. Is that too much? I think as an actor myself, someone who's not on social media, someone who tries very keenly to create a separation and a boundary.

So I think coming on these podcasts, these long forms that remind me very much of my favorite interviewer of all time, de Kavett. But even more so than Cavett, especially talking about very complex things, is obviously you're keenly aware of family units. We just talked about the complexes and all that. Also, everyone's alive. Yeah, everyone's alive.

So what's fair? What's respectful? What's your right to do that? How can you be authentic and have a true conversation? I've said I'd come on the show and bring my full self to bear in a way that I can live with.

But also. No, it's very tricky. It's very tricky. It is. I acknowledge that.

But my question for you, because I really am so curious, is, like, how did you make the decision to do that? Not specifically only day seven, but to be that open, essentially, from what I can gather, and I don't know you all, but 24/7 with many different facets of your life. I would say, first, just aa. So I've been going aa for 20 fucking years, coming up in September. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
And so I've gotten used to saying out loud these terrible things I did, thought or perpetrated on other people, expecting everyone there to shun me and exclude me and ostracize me, and actually seeing through practice looks of recognition, comfort, a calming, I guess, like immersion therapy. I had to do it over and over again. And then, lo and behold, opposite of my expectation. It's always been met with understanding. Even if someone didn't do that thing, it's very related to another failing.

Chris Pine
Sure, sure. And so there's no way I could do this show had I not been in aa for 20 years and practice just letting it all hang out and realizing people don't ultimately judge you that much. People judge when they smell. But I was gonna say, is one thing a community built on precisely what you've just described? The interweb and the noxious soup that that is.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, yeah. Is definitely not that. Or is it? I will say the day seven thing, and I want to again give credit to Bradley Cooper because I, of course, called him and said, hey, I relapsed. I have a new date.

And he said, what are you going to do about your show? Because you talk so much about being sober for at that time, 17 years or 1616. Yeah, I've old already inflated it. How embarrassing.

I think I was 23 years sober at the time of that relapse. No, but Bradley just said something that was undeniably true. He goes, if you're telling people that you're sober because you hope that it will be helpful and encouraging for someone else to try it. And that is your true goal, is to help people. You being sober for 16 years and being married to Kristen Bell is not very helpful to people.

You eating shit after 16 years of doing this is really helpful to people. Right. And so in conjunction with just knowing I had been honest enough up to that point that it would have felt like a real betrayal of the agreement between the listeners and the arm cherries. And then. But Koopa really articulating it in that way, which is you're basically full of shit if you don't share this.

Chris Pine
Wow. Which was true. But even with those marching orders and maybe some conviction about that, when we put it, I was like, but then it'll go into the dark chasm of the web, and people will say, I always knew he was this, but that didn't happen. And also, who fucking cares? It's also.

It's one of my favorite words, the solipsistic. All of a sudden, you're like, everybody's fucking talking about this. Yes. Fuck, man. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
When your movie doesn't open, like, you walk around the street and you're convinced everyone read the fucking Hollywood Reporter this morning. I remember going on a set at Parenthood, just thinking, every crew member feels so bad for me right now, and half of them didn't even know I had a movie that came out. That's pretty helpful. That makes a lot of sense. I want to let you off the hook, a.

This is what I do. So, like, whatever cost it may create on an acting front is no longer a concern of mine. You don't act anymore at all? I haven't for a couple years, and I don't intend to. I do this.

We do three episodes a week. I love it. I'm doing my favorite part of acting, which is shooting the shit with you at video village. Truly. I just don't have to go through makeup or have a wardrobe fitting.

I've got just the thing I love the most about it. That sounds pretty great, dude. I'll be honest with you. So, by no means do I expect anyone that comes on here to have the same level. No, but I read your mission statement.

Monica Padman
God, it's very old. The messiness of being human. We've cut that. We're a little embarrassed about it now, but I wouldn't be. You know how it is.

Chris Pine
Doing press for shit, frankly, sucks most of the time. If I read another GQ article about they tried to put them in a box, but then he showed them all. The different kind of saying, not anymore. There's always gotta be some statement you're making, shoot me. But I also don't wanna be that asshole that doesn't show up.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, you can't be above it. You gotta sell your stuff. It's not that you just wanna show up and be like, yeah, I'm gonna have a real legit conversation with you and not bar myself. Anyway, I've been in a whole meditative cycle about these podcasts. I've never done them before.

Chris Pine
And it's such a different art form as, you know, than doing bits on a talk show at night. What scares you? Is it the actors thing about if people know too much, then it's hard to transcend that in a role? Or is it just people will come from. No.

I mean, obviously. I think that's proven, obviously, to be not an issue in today's age where the oversharing of everything is owned by everybody on the planet. So it's like we're all in the soup together. It's a good question. I want to probe it a little bit.

Someone asked me, like, why did you become an actor? I never really had any desire to become an actor. I played sports, I wanted to play baseball. That was very clear at 15. Not gonna happen.

Went to college, was very insecure, low self esteem, very kind of introverted. Found acting. I was good at acting. People were like, you're handsome and talented. I was like, that feels good to hear.

I'm gonna do more of that. Give me more. So baseline fundamentals, like validation, right? Yes. So our art form can be, at least from my initial entry into it, built on that very toxic and not necessarily healthy thing.

A lot of work to kind of unpack that and figure it out and move through it. You add on top of that, then a whole other art form or thing, which is this divulgence of everything into the world and this intimacy, in quotes, with millions upon millions of people that then can interact with you in this way. For someone whose natural tendency is to seek that validation, I think the overwhelming cascade of that stimuli, it'd be too difficult to try to run away from. So then the relationship, another. My favorite words, the enmeshment in that, becomes like, I already have enough to unpack.

Dax Shepard
I love this. So this is the thing I still struggle with and police myself about and check in with all the time. That's why, like, day seven is something I don't like talking about weirdly, even though I put it out because I know me, it sounds like we're similar. I don't want it to become a story I tell and I've figured the beats out too. And I can deliver and entertain you you and get approval.

I don't want to dishonor it by making it that. And I don't want to make my life and my real fears and concerns and thoughts and the things I care about. I also don't want to commodify those and monetize those and exploit those that I relate to greatly. I'm already a gross pig and seeking the validation when I play, when I'm trying to be funny and make you laugh. And it would feel like a deep betrayal of myself to then do that with my own real life, that it would just be a sick path to go down.

Chris Pine
It's interesting too. I find for someone as myself who came into it so insecure, who didn't really want to be looked at, I hold both introvert and extrovert. Can I ask really quick, just so I understand that part a little bit more? You were super handsome in high school, weren't you? I was not.

I had awful cystic acne at 15, which for anyone out there that's ever experienced it, I think, you know, is horrific. Time to pop up. Yeah, not my time. Cystic acne. Yeah.

Monica Padman
I also fully. You get it. I still have big hormonal bouts. I froze my eggs a couple times and after that there was a big hormonal flux and I was like, I'm back to being that teenager and it sucks. I mean, it is crippling.

Chris Pine
Emotionally crippling.

Dax Shepard
Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. We are supported by Betterhelp. We've been busy. We've been very busy. How's your social battery right now?

Monica Padman
It's pretty low. Although I think I'm coming back. You're on the upswing. I'm on the upswing. But for a minute it was low.

Dax Shepard
And you just had therapy on Saturday. I saw you right after you had had it. Did I feel happy? Yeah. You felt level?

Monica Padman
Yeah, I felt it. I've been talking about that therapy session all week. I learned something really important in that therapy session and I have been sharing. It well again, it can be easy to ignore our social battery and spread ourselves thin, especially with social gatherings picking up after the winter. Whats the right amount of socializing for you and how do you recharge?

Dax Shepard
Maybe you thrive around people or maybe you need some time alone. Therapy can give you the self awareness to build a social life that doesnt drain your battery. And when you are feeling worn out from socializing, therapy can help give you the tools you need to take care of yourself and recharge, because a full battery is the key to a full life. If youre thinking of starting therapy, give betterhelp a try. It is entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule.

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Monica Padman
I. Find it odd that, you know, there's obviously talk about many things, people with problems with obesity or struggling with their sexuality. It seems like we're maybe turning a page in that, but no one ever talks about. I feel like it's considered a banal or a part of childhood or adolescence, but if you've dealt with a severe case of it or even a mild case of it, but there's no hiding at all. Nope.

Chris Pine
It's certainly crafted in great part the human I am. For me, it was like an emotional armoring. I had this great moment with this actor once, and I met him. Hi, how are you? God, man, I'm a big fan of your work.

I think you're a great actor. He's like, I'm not a great actor. I'm a great mimic. It blew my fucking hair back because what he said pointed to this very specific thing, which is that moment before you emotionally armor yourself as, like, I have got to get through the day. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
Like you're marching through a battlefield or something. Every social interaction is going to be brutal, and I'm going to be watching it the whole time, and I will mimic what it's like to be just another kid. And so the level of exhaustion then, that you have, I can only talk about my experience, but doubly so triply. So you feel like you've been flattened by an 18 wheeler at the end of the day. So to answer your question, I was not.

I think it's, like, comforting and shocking how many people feel that. Like, when I look back in high school, I'm like, is it a miracle anyone ever even showed up? Cause everyone had some weird thing. It seems like maybe these jocks seem to have it made. I don't know.

From my perspective, they look like they're having a good time, but what a cauldron. That high school experience, I wouldn't. You couldn't fucking pay me anything? Yeah, a billion dollars, pure. Like, you have a great time in high school.

Chris Pine
No. College. No. If you were this handsome in high school, you might not have gone to Berkeley. I was geared from a very young age to do well.

I was a really good boy. I behaved. And then I had my delayed adolescence at, like, 30 for a good ten years. Sure, sure. Which nearly took me down.

But I've studied. I love to read, because, again, I was part introvert, part extrovert. I had carried that introvert long before the acting. The acting just basically exploded it steroidally to a degree where if it was a matter of going out to lunch or finding the darkest corner to go to. To, like, study a sonnet or something, that's what I would do.

Monica Padman
But don't you think. Okay, so this is just tying back into the validation thing because someone told you you're handsome and talented to me, like a physical compliment is, unfortunately, I know, logically wrong, the highest compliment. No, you're probably right. So that was 15 on and off until I was about 22. But when I went to college and started acting, I was probably 19.

Chris Pine
So, yeah, that's four years. Cause again, the PTSD that I had was very real. So, yeah, that compliment was like, that's exactly what I needed. I've been needing. I've been dying for this.

Dax Shepard
I feel fraudulent. Cause I didn't have the cystic. But I'm telling you. Hold on. You know, we're doing this.

Chris Pine
There's still time. You know, we relate on this. I hate to say it, but, like, if someone was gonna say, either Dex is a genius, he's a great father, or he's hot. I would want to hear hot. And then great actor.

Monica Padman
What about cars? You gotta throw that in there. Great driveway. Yeah, man. It's so real, it's crazy.

It's crazy. What's fascinating, though, is I don't know any of that about you. I see you for the first time in Star Trek, and I'm like, this asshole. Yeah, I see. How dare this fucking guy I, like, immediately am angry.

Dax Shepard
God damn it. If I look like that, I feel like I could maybe be the lead of Star Trek. So my relationship with you. So then I'm curious, with that background, did you ever feel like you were playing the character of the handsome guy? Oh, my God, of course.

Oh, my God. This is crazy. No one's winning. I'm watching Star Trek. I'm like, this asshole.

He knows when he walks on the street, everyone's turning their head. Like, I'd kill for five minutes of that. You're up there and you're like, this is a fraud. When are they gonna call and go, like, we know about your act. Yeah.

Chris Pine
From my experience, my first job in a film was as a prince. Prince's diary, which is like, we're only less than ten years from what was so traumatic. And people are like, you're the handsome guy. And I'm like, are you high? Right?

Dax Shepard
You're the prince someone would dream of. There's no way I can live up to that. Cause I haven't lived up to that in my own sense of self. You know, the truth in quotes. So then when you're then introduced to the bombardment of them, people commenting and criticizing, and people are commenting on your acne scars or whatever, I conflate everything to being not good enough, which I'm already feeling inside anyway.

Chris Pine
So it's like, fuck all y'all. I didn't ask for this fucking thing, right? I was pretty convinced I was gonna be doing these character parts, so that cognitive dissonance was something I really had to wrestle with for a while. And then by virtue of time and just the hard edges wearing off, you're like, okay, fine. This is the trip I'm on.

Fucking, let's do this. And then you do it, and you get more inured to what people say. You get more inured to watching yourself on screen and being like, that's awful to sit in the joke of it a bit more. So now I'm thankfully 20 years into it, and I can be like, it is such a trip that this happened to the kid that had to go through what I went through and what a great gift to that kid to be like, look, man, is that fucking crazy? Well, that's it.

Dax Shepard
Did you watch the Phil Stutt's Jonah Hill doc? No. I am curious about it, though. Sounds like you've already done this work. But the part that just made me cry is he's bringing out a picture of Jonah as a young boy, very overweight, and they're discussing that the shadow's born there.

And Phil says, basically he wants you to invite him to where you guys have gone. That's why he's still battling you, because you haven't invited a man in the madness of four years of your life defining who you are. I was dyslexic, right? So I'm a dummy. So it doesn't matter how smart I am, what I do at UCLA, I just can't shake this fucking thing.

And at some point, I want to go like, hey, look where we're at. Come along. That's, like, the dream, right? Is to bring along the shy boy. Bring along the shy boy and just be like, isn't it a gas man?

Chris Pine
Ultimately, isn't it so fun? Because the fight has a lot to do with the boy and the shame and the self flagellation, the not enough and all of that stuff that we know. What happens in that circumstance, at least for me at 15, is the arm ring is rigid, and it was super helpful. It saved my life, I'm sure. But at some point, you gotta dissolve the armor a bit.

It's nice to loosen up. It's nice to smile a bit more. It's nice to invite joy in and not fight it so much and trust. The good stuff a little bit more. I don't know if I'm quite there yet, because that's its own separate form of childhood.

Complexes, which really was born from just seeing lack and the fear of lack and the disappearance of enough. So that's its own bag. Yeah. Waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time. I would say 1527, 30 and then 40 through 44 have been deep moments.

And I think this one right now is just a real reevaluation. And it's certainly Maslow's hierarchy. And I realize it's Cadillac problems. I feel like I need to preface it always with that. But like, is this what it is?

Dax Shepard
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The opening of the matrix. And I was trying to explain to someone, and I think it's a pretty good metaphor, whereas before life felt like you're in a huge ocean, but there are buoys everywhere. First job, first house, working with so and so. And they're focalizing and they are flow state and they are driven by a lot of righteous anger and shame and all these things that feel really good.

Chris Pine
Well, you burn through that and all of a sudden you wake up one day and you're just in a giant fucking ocean. Right? And that's it. So I love that we're talking. Cause I was in the exact same spot at the exact same age, virtually.

Dax Shepard
And I relate so deeply. It's like we need a whole new reason to do anything and that's terrifying. But I think in a bizarre way, of all the gifts it seems like we've been given the ultimate gift of excessive good luck is you ultimately do have to figure out, well, what really is this all about? Because the Porsche is awesome. And on the ride over it was great, but it's gonna do nothing for you tonight at 09:00 when you're at home by yourself, it will just have no power over you.

But weirdly, what a fucking gift. As I said, it's like Cadillac problems. But I think it's easy. My needs are deep met. Yeah, yeah, your needs and wants.

Chris Pine
My needs and wants for met. So it is a gift to be able to be like, I have an opportunity as a self artist now to shape things as I want. But that kind of breadth of choice is almost paralyzing because it's so much nicer to be like, I really want this film to do well. I could probably have said the same thing ten years ago and been probably as articulate about these things as I am now. But experientially, I think I could have deluded myself to say, no, I took the job because of X, Y and Z.

I really had themes that resonated with me and that's true. But deep fucking bass note is like, I think it's gonna do well. I think people are gonna like it and like me. Yes. Yes.

So to really get to a place where you're, like, separating the threads. Yes. And you also wanna hold onto them, I can get myself in a situation where it's like, I'm gonna transcend everything. And then I go, and then why am I here? That's the thing, too, is we gotta transcend the ego.

It's like, I don't fucking think you actually want to transcend the ego. Exactly. What's the point? Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons why it's there. Of course we're gonna want to be liked by people.

We're social creatures. And if you're on the fucking serengeti and you're not, like, guess who they're fucking leaving behind to starve? You're dead. It's not frivolous status. It's balance.

I have to pee, but that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. Oh, my God. I got to pee in front of all of you.

Dax Shepard
No, no. We'll step back. All good? Yeah. Are you interested in these?

Have you gotten into these at all? Oh, I love those. After many years of not drinking protein shakes, I think I'm. They'd start backing up big news that's raging. The gas.

Chris Pine
I just stopped because I stopped lifting. But now they're saying that. Yeah. Do you read out Liv? Yeah.

Monica Padman
He says, don't do it. Don't put on muscle because you're gonna decline at a predictable rate. They say to eat the same amount of grams of protein as you weigh poundage. It's ridiculous. It's hard.

Do you do it? I wanna say yes. Cause that is my goal. And I say probably four days a week. I do.

Dax Shepard
And then certainly three days a week like today, we're recording you. Then we're gonna record for 3 hours with arm cherries. I can't meet my protein needs if you're taking a four hour chunk out without eating. So then you gotta eat, like, 85 grams of protein in one setting or something. One egg is 8 grams of protein.

I know. You know what's a hack, though? Do you do the good culture? Cottage cheese. Uh uh.

That has 48 grams of protein in one tub. And I can definitely pound one of those effortlessly, and I love it. And then the other hack is chia seed overnight pudding. Oh, wow. And then put the scoop of 30 grams of protein chocolate in there, and it's delicious.

Chris Pine
Interesting. Yeah. So there's some ways I've figured out. It'S just a lot of work. But it is a lot of work.

It is? Yeah. And then you end up like me. You figure out what works, and you just can't deviate. So I eat the exact same thing every single day, seven days a week, virtually.

I don't know if I have that kind of discipline. This dog picture is driving me. Oh, great. This way. Thank you.

Dax Shepard
Oh, my God. In your eyes, you're the only person who's fixed it besides you. But people complain in the pictures. Fellow OCD people. And if I sit over there.

Yeah, it drives me nuts. Okay. I can also take it completely off the wall. No, I like. Okay.

I bump it with my lace boys. What happens? And then it gets askew. I just want to tell you how much I'm enjoying this. Yeah, it's a good talk.

I really, really like it. That's why I love hearing people's stories, because it's like, there's no way I would have imagined that. When I'm watching Star Trek and I'm like, yeah, of course. This guy has this movie. Most people think that way.

Chris Pine
That's wild, isn't it? Self perception versus witnessing and being witnessed, right? It's like a primary need. So it starts with kid at the breast with mom looking and being witnessed. But if you're not being witnessed, the way that you perceive yourself, and there is that cognitive dissonance, it's very difficult.

Monica Padman
Yeah. I hate to ask this question, because, again, I don't want to get you into too much self exposing, but I was wrestling with similar feelings as you talk about the armor you put on and the character I was playing. And then the first time I drank beer, I was like, I get it now. This is what we've been trying to feel like, the amount of relief, and I think as I've known so many addicts and feel like I understand it. I'll give you 1 second story that really sums it up.

Dax Shepard
My best friend, Aaron Weekly, his fucking childhood was so gnarly, it made mine look great. His was the gnarliest I've ever seen. And he got addicted to huffing gas. I don't know if you've ever huffed gas. It's the worst high on planet earth.

And since he's gotten sober and we've talked so much about it all, that. Was his primary thing. Well, just at a point in 9th grade, that's what he had access to all the time. He kept a fucking gas can in his locker in 9th grade and got thrown out of school. But the key thing about that, as I'm now older, and I look at that, that high was preferable to status quo.

Chris Pine
And that's saying sad, which says a lot. If you've ever huffed gas, it's miserable. The notion that that would be preferable. Because you're just basically cutting oxygen off to your brain to stop thinking and. Giving yourself a headache.

Dax Shepard
But even the headache's a better distraction than the other stuff, to me, really frames addiction, the relief aspect of it. And you can almost see how gnarly someone's life was by what they were even willing to get addicted to. The greatest thing I wrote about it was this woman wrote something. I forget the name of it, but she's like, the hardest thing about addiction is 05:00 p.m. Because at 05:00 p.m.

Chris Pine
There is no cocktail hour, and nothing is going to happen but 501 and 502. And just sitting in the boredom of riding the wave of your neurotransmitters, your brain just is, like, more serotonin and less for no fucking reason. Whereas that drink right there is guaranteed to give me a boost in seconds. And I know for a fact it works every time. It's the most dependable friend I have.

Dax Shepard
But I'm just curious. When you were young and you were dealing with all that, did you have that experience where you drank or you smoked weed or you did something and you were just like, oh, relief. I'm not, like, thinking of this. No. I was such a good boy.

Chris Pine
It was when I was 30. Looking back now, I was having a drink every night. Love scotch. And then 30 was really go time in Exploreville that hit a wall when I was about 39, and 39 to 44 had been a different time. Thank God.

Monica Padman
That's a good run. Nine years. You can get a lot in in nine years. This is very common, though, too. I got sober at 29, like, three months before I turned 30.

Dax Shepard
And it sounds like for you, 39. Like, there's something about approaching. You're like, okay, we're about to enter another. There's 39. It was also COVID, and the party was so long in the past.

Yeah. And then it was just me with a shovel. And when you admit to yourself, like, I'm also romantic and I'm telling a great story about myself and my life, and when you finally admit there's nothing new gonna happen in this direction, I'm gonna repeat, I'm gonna wake up next to somebody. I'm gonna do this. But I've already done it.

It has the appearance of new, but. It'S not also the shiny, blissful first hour of doing whatever you're doing. Even that blossom has fucking worn off. So really, the majority of the time is just the shame cycle of the next, however long. Self hatred.

Chris Pine
There's a version of that that I think is akin to what we're talking about in terms of the validation aspect. Getting back to that emotional samurai I was talking about is using in that way. The day begins. You're like, fuck. Hard day work.

But you know what? I'm gonna meet the guys at the 4100 and. Okay, so, yeah, all right, great. What's going on? What's going on?

Then it hits. And then you're having a great time. You're like, fuck it, man. It's only ten. And then it's like, one.

And then you're like, something should happen at one. And then you wake up at six for work and you're super hungry. Like, never again. Never. I know.

Ever again. Take all the american spirits and throw them away. And you're like, fuck it. And then maybe that night, no, but then Wednesday, and you're like, okay, I'm gonna meet the guy. Right?

But so essentially, you're constantly on a dive of expectation expectation, meeting high, high, high drop. Shame, shame, shame, expectation. Constantly. The roller coaster, which is all about this validation shame cycle. It's a similar experience of it.

Dax Shepard
And you learn to work. I went to UCLA and I was going through the groundlings. It became a part of how I knew how to do stuff. It's like, oh, my God, Monday through Thursday, we've got a lot to make up for. And so turbocharged ax is here.

I don't even know how to function. Either I'm absent or I'm turbo charged. There's no, like, moderate version of me. Plodding along, bringing back my metaphor, which I'm really into right now. What's it like just to be in the ocean?

Chris Pine
And what's it like to just sit at five? And the amount of then presence, you get to, all of it, because there's nothing left but to be deeply now, because what are you gonna do? The thing that I've in the past seven years is sauna ing. Did you read dopamine nation by chance? It sounds like you really have knowledge of that.

No. Why? Anna Lemke. Great book, Stanford. It's everything you're talking about.

Dax Shepard
The body will find homeostasis, period. You can't outsmart it, so you can dump all this shit in. But guess what you gotta return to. And it's like a four to one investment. So if you smoke a cigarette, it's great for four minutes.

You're gonna feel like shit for 20 minutes. If you cold blanch for ten minutes, guess what? You get good chemicals for 3 hours. Well, that, for me, during that COVID moment, I think it was the body shock. I don't have the discipline like you, so I'm not gonna go to the gym or jump rope.

Chris Pine
I'm gonna go burn myself in this fucking sauna, passively hurt myself, fucking get through it. And then after an hour and a half of that, I'm like, 05:00 p.m. Has passed. That's funny. That's my drug currently is sauna.

Dax Shepard
So we record in here. If it's a very long day, I step out feeling like, well, I deserve. A reward every day for me. Yeah. So then I go in there, and I'm, like, angsty and itchy, and I deserve something.

And then when I leave there, I'm like, okay, I'm out of everything. And this is tenable. I'll do that. Or I'll have some sugar. At that COVID moment, it was like the drink or Jenny's the drunk face fucking up plaintiff or whatever.

Okay, well, that was a party. Let's talk really quick, and then we're gonna talk about the movie. I promise you. So the two times that I know we've met, this is always a game of roulette to play. Cause sometimes people have met me too.

I just learned from a guest that I shoved somebody, and I did not know I did that, but I had been on set with you for maybe a night shoot on wet hot. I was in a scene, and you were there. And that was really my first time meeting you. And I'm friends with banks, and I saw that you and banks have a great relationship, really fun. And I remember trying to get a little something moving with you, like, just chatting you up a little bit.

I left that night, and I was like, I don't think he was terribly. Into it because I was so nervous. Dude, you think? I don't think I fucking know you. Talking about when I sang on the roof?

Yeah, I guess you did sing on the roof, but I thought you were brilliant. I'm like, well, this guy's not nervous. I learned the song in my trailer, and I was desperately trying to learn the song, and I had to perform in front of all of you. Yeah, I was nervous out of my mind. Life is a comedy, man.

I'm never right on what anyone's going through. Also, I mean, I'm just using this as an example. I'm not calling you out on this, but we do all think everything's about us. Nothing's about us ever. Even though I know that.

Chris Pine
Cause everything's about the other person. Yeah, it is. Everyone's in their own head dealing with their own stuff. Talk about one of those things, though, you know, intellectually. And then when it's happening, it can't see it that way.

Dax Shepard
There's no way I'm considering that you are dealing with something other than evaluating me as a person. You got up that day to figure out whether you liked me or not. Have we met other times? No, it was just that it was wet hot. Then I bumped into you coming in or out of the bathroom just a few months ago, and then I think I brought up wet hot, but I probably caught you off guard.

Chris Pine
I don't think you said anything about wet hot. You don't think so? I think I did. I think I. We met on.

Dax Shepard
Then I was like, he doesn't remember me on wet hot. He's dying to get out of his bathroom, this guy. Just. I'm not for him. That's fine.

Not everyone loves Diet coke. Oh, my God. Are you a Diet coke free? Oh, God. Can't drink enough of it.

Monica Padman
Loves it. Love it. You love it, too? No. Oh, that's the grossest thing.

Chris Pine
Diet Coke. When you have some friction coke, we need some friction. I'm with you on that. I like coke. It's cause it's what I grew up on.

Dax Shepard
My mom only drank, like, tab. Oh, tab. Yeah. Is this still around? I wish.

Once coke got, the big boys got into the scene, they were like, let me show you how to do a sugar free soda. Sorry. Tab. The string cheese is so good. Does anybody want some?

Monica Padman
I'm okay. Thank you, though. I do like a string cheese. So, yeah, I tallied both of those experience up to, like, this gentleman has zero interest in me, and I understand I wouldn't have much interest in myself either. And then when you rolled up today, I was like, I think I might be wrong.

Chris Pine
I'll be honest with you. I maybe have some preconceptions and judgments about people that willingly offer themselves a lot to the world. I definitely think I have judged you before. What, a jag off doing this. He's just talking about himself all the time and again.

The world could use a bit of this. And then you actually sit across from someone and, like, this guy's a very self reflective, curious. You're looking at me like you're interested in what I'm talking about. I'm terribly interested. Yeah, I've gained a lot of respect just sitting across from you and talking to you.

Dax Shepard
Now, do you find this. I'm glad you said that, by the way. I do, because that's my shadow. Says that same thing all the time. Like, if I were on the outside, I would hate this guy.

Shut up about yourself. Great. You're sober. You do therapy. There's the voice in the playground from Michigan that is saying that to me as well, all the time.

But do you also find that you tend to hate people that are like yourself the most? Yeah, I can own that. Maybe there's a potential resentment of someone that can offer themselves so freely in their vulnerability and own it, that I would have a great fear of doing. I definitely see that. But speak more to what you were suggesting.

Well, two things. Because now you just reminded me of another reason. I'll hate people. But in that same call with Cooper where he told me I had to come out, he also said, oh, duh. This is why you're so judgmental of so and so.

Because you had a big secret, and you knew they had a secret, and you fucking hated that you had this secret, and so you hated, hate seeing it in them. But it was just a throwaway. He's like, oh, that's why you're mad at so and so, a mutual friend. And I was like, oh, fuck, he's completely right. I had been looking at this other friend going, this motherfucker's such a fraud.

He tells these people he's this and he's that, and I know he's really fucking around. You know, I had all these judgments. And then in reality, I was currently living with this enormous lie. And so I can see it in everyone else who's living with it. And I fucking hate it about myself.

So then I hate it about them. But then there's another thing, too. Monica and I were just talking about this Timothy Charlemagne.

I'm proud of myself that I like him so much. You feel like it's a marker of growth. I really do. Because conventionally, I'm like, I can't compete. Women love that species, and I'm not that species, so I hate this person.

It's one of those two ways. Either, like, I really relate to them, or I think that somehow I won't be able to compete with them. What resonates with me there is in this, my year of reflection. Since I finished my film and whatever I'm going through. What is life, man?

Chris Pine
The times that my insecure ego pops out and I'm like, that motherfuckers film did so well. Fuck him. Or like, can't even watch the film. Cause it's like, I can't deal with it. I can't deal with it.

That part of me is still so alive. And I guess the only way that I can meet that is with a certain amount of levity. The other thing that I resonate with there is. It brings up a lot of what I've gone through with my film. Cause when the film came out at Toronto, it was fucking obliterated.

Dax Shepard
Oof. I didn't read any of the reviews, but I heard that they were pretty mean. Been there. But just thinking about when I can do the same fucking thing, that I can be the gossipy part of the gaggle in high school. What an ugly.

Chris Pine
I don't wanna be that person. I don't wanna be talking shit about person I don't even know. Even people that I have worked with, if there's one person in particular I have major reservations about. And I love any opportunity, sure, but how really gross in high school it is that I get caught up in doing that. We all do that.

No, I know, but it's just equality. That's not cool. I hate to make this whole episode about Cooper, but the other big pearl of wisdom he gave me is he goes, you know, when someone says something terrible about someone else, my first thought isn't about the other person that they're talking about, it's about them. And once he pointed that out, my own vanity was like, I gotta stop doing that. Cuz it's true.

Dax Shepard
It says way more, way more about you than this person I'm shitting on. Of course. But yeah, I did it. Recently, I saw a movie that everyone loved how it was directed. And I was like, yeah, their music budget was $6 million.

They had a needle drop every 30 seconds when their scene didn't work. I did find myself. But again, I don't have that insecurity much as an actor or comedian anymore, but as a director. Then a whole new avenue opened up to me of, well, that only worked because of this. Yeah, it's something I have to shed just a fucking.

I'm so disappointed in myself when I do. So am I. It's such a hangover. And the dichotomy of hating myself yet being righteously above these other people I'm shitting on is hysterical. We've got into some.

Monica Padman
Every time you bring up somebody else. Yep. Monica flags it. Yeah. I'm like, I don't think that's a good move, truthfully.

Dax Shepard
It's when I'm insecure, it's like when we're at a live show and it's just going, okay, and then it'll drop something. I shouldn't have dropped out loud. Cause I wanna lift it up a bit. I'll just go to it using someone or something. I'll shit on someone.

I know people like it. We love hearing that someone was an asshole. And occasionally I'll tell people who was an asshole. I never do it on here. But you're also speaking to people's capacity and desire.

Yeah, I'm giving them what they want. We love a stoning. Yeah, I know. We love a stoning. It's terrible.

Monica Padman
It's the worst part. It's the worst part of humans, of course. So if we can transcend that, we should. It's like, maybe don't go there. Also, for me, it's out of fear.

Like, what if that person is best friends with them? That's always my thing, is, you don't know who knows who. And especially in this industry, everyone needs to be very careful. Even I was listening to this podcast, and one of the hosts was talking about his favorite podcast, and there was another host there, and he said, you know, I also really like armchair expert. As soon as I heard it, I was like, oh, boy, where's this going?

And he said, it can be problematic, but I do think Dax is a good interviewer. And then the other person said, I tried that, and I couldn't stand it. And I'm listening to this. And if that person knew I was listening, they would never say that. And they would probably be like, your show's great.

Chris Pine
That's a great point. And it's classic mom aphorism. It's like, if you're not willing to say it to the person's face, don't say it at all. That's something I can live by. It's like, a good thing to remember.

That actually kind of reframes. Maybe I don't hold so much shame about some of this shit that I've talked about. Cause frankly, for certain situations, individuals, I think I would. You would say it? No, I know I would say it.

Dax Shepard
That's often my defense, too. So I'll go, like, yeah, I'd say this right to their face. Yeah, I don't know if we should. Anyway let ourselves out of jail. So quickly for that anyway.

Monica Padman
It's just interesting. No, I think, frankly, the lesson is just, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it. Yeah, yeah.

Dax Shepard
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Okay, how long had you been wanting to direct? And one thing I admire about your career, I just want to add before. Cause I was going through it and I'm sure you have your own assessment of your career. But from my perspective, the notion that you're in, like, multiple franchises, it's just nonstop. You've been in so much fucking shit that's worked.

It's, like, really a very low percentage career to have had that much success. I don't know what it feels like inside of it, but when I have to make this, I'm like, oh, my God, he was in that. That's another franchise he's in. And he stops all the time and does plays crazy to me. Well, I mean, the last time I did a play was ten years ago, I think.

Okay, but you were doing plays post Star Trek, where I'm a greedy little pickup. What's next? I have this opportunity. I gotta go. I loved doing theater, and I had a great time the last time I did it.

Chris Pine
And then I got offered something at Williamstown Theater festival. It was a Sam Sheppard play, and I was memorizing as a two hander, and I was, like, three pages in. I was like, I don't really like this play. I love even that process of looking at a 70 page play and memorizing the whole thing. There's something really satisfying about it.

Dax Shepard
Anyway. And that was the last time to do something. Eight shows a week. I think you have to have a real hard on to explore something in there because it's a grind. You did fat pig.

I wish I would have seen that. Cause I saw it in New York. Kristen took me to it. What a rad play, though. Dark, nasty, labut.

Love. Labute people, politics stuff. Shows you stuff you don't want to look at. I like his stuff a lot, too. Yeah.

I almost feel guilty that I like it so much. Was the movie friends and neighbors? Jason Patrick's in there. He's all of a sudden saying that he raped this kid, and you're like, whoa, fuck. But it felt so real.

Like, I think that's some dude's story. How good is Jason Patrick? Oh, what a beast. Rush. Oh, baby.

Chris Pine
Wow. I haven't revisited Jennifer. Jason Lee. Ding, ding, ding. Yeah, that's where I kind of fell in love with her for me.

Hudsucker proxy. Oh, yeah. She is a joy. Like a real artist just marching to the beat of her own drum in a beautiful way. She's radical.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. Did you see season five? Fargo have. Not yet. She's so awesome.

Really? Oh, my gosh. She's so awesome. That is the best season of television I've ever seen. I can't wait.

Okay, so how long through the process before you started going, like, I want to direct. I never wanted to direct at all. I really had no desire to do it much like acting. And then I had this idea for this film, and it started with the title and the name of the character, and it made me giggle, and I couldn't stop. And then a year passed, and I was still thinking about it.

Chris Pine
And then I tried to hire a writer and met with a writer a couple times, and that never worked out. And then COVID just hit. We were in quarantine and I was losing my mind and some personal stuff was happening. And then I just was like, fuck it, man. Let's do it, and sat down and wrote it with a pal and ended up rewriting it.

25 times. Yeah. Is the co author a friend? I've known him for 25 years. He's my producing partner.

And he also. So we're producing now. I never wanted to produce either. And he was making a career switch, and he's like, why don't we produce together? I was like, not a chance.

He's like, give me two years to shadow and bring you some stuff. And he started bringing me stuff. And he'd always had a really good eye and was always someone I'd send scripts to for the real. And all the stuff he was giving me were written by this group of friends we've all had since we were 21 from Berkeley. I didn't really leave Berkeley with many friends, but I came back here and ended up in this crew of kids that had gone to USC and this large group of friends from in the theater department there.

And now they've been my closest friends for 20 some odd years. So he was bringing me all this stuff for my friends, and I was like, you know what? This is kind of fun. If we do a production company, I get to work with my best friend and try to get work for all of my friends. That's a cool modus operandi, by the way.

Dax Shepard
That's the buoy that's left in the ocean. That's fun. And now to look back, we've gotten jobs for tons of people and sold shows and really learned we're a little baby production company that had to start from zero. I felt like to learn the ropes of what it's like to get shit done in this town, which is a miracle anything gets done. So he's the guy that I corrode it with.

I didn't recognize right away. Matthew Jensen. I probably should. So Matt did both Wonder Woman's. He did I am the night.

Chris Pine
This limited series that I did every time I've worked with him, he shot on film, and I wanted to shoot on film. He's a brilliant cinematographer. It's outrageously beautiful. It's Matte, man. It's shockingly beautiful.

For a while, we shot in 21 days on film. Five locations. It makes you fall in love with LA. Some of them. I'm like, where the fuck is that?

Dax Shepard
How did they find it? I would imagine your location scouting process was so stressful, brutal. When you have no money, there you go. You know all about it. Knowing how the sausage is made, I'm like, hey, this looks way too good.

It's like overachieving from frame. One of you coming out of your trailer, and then the locations, I was like, how did they get these? Where are they? And then you got the location, but then you gotta dress it and you got no money. The production design was off the charts.

Talk about Hudsucker. Proxy has very art deco vibes. Erin McGill that did it. I'd seen a movie that she did. Erin's a genius.

Chris Pine
No money, no time. And it's stunning. Even the hallway you're eating nuts in. Talk about OCD. You were looking at this picture.

Dax Shepard
I'm like, okay, I understand getting the miracle of that location, but you're looking at a door and stuff's gonna happen out the door. But then we have a stucco wall behind there. And I'm like, what were the odds that stucco wall wasn't all fucking piss stained and shitty? Oh, man. I, like, found myself so distracted with how impressed I was with the stucco wall.

Chris Pine
We had to move into that hallway 16 hours before we shot there. Cause we lost the other location. Oh, my lord. All sorts of fun. Independence, though.

Monica Padman
Let's get a premise for the listener. Yes. The short is that it's a screwball comedy about a pool man that uncovers corruption in the city of Los Angeles, only to go on this incredibly absurd Detective Hunt, which reveals more about himself than it does the actual crime. It's kind of filmed noiri. A smidge, yeah.

Dax Shepard
It's very Lebowski esque. Definite shades of. I didn't know if that would trigger you or not. It is what it is. But then there's also all this Chinatown stuff.

Water in LA? You're referencing Chinatown? There's this deep love for LA. When I was watching it, I'm thinking, like, why does he land on this story? What is it?

And then I'm trying to backfill what I think you're all about. And then I'm like, he grew up here in the eighties. And let me add, too, at a lA geography class at UCLA. Wasn't my major, but maybe my favorite class I ever took. We learned about all the booms and busts.

Chris Pine
So you read city of Quartz? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, like, annexing these big swaths of land and the orchards and all that. It's one of the more fascinating cities in America. Oh, my God.

Self created out of absolutely nothing. And so I'm like, okay, this is cool. You have, like, a deep love. Your character, he's maybe crazy. I mean, the simplest terms, he's a little delusional.

Dax Shepard
He writes a letter to Aaron Brockovich every single day. He sees himself as this warrior defending the city from, I guess, gentrification and other things. And then I was thinking, how much of this knowledge did Chris have? And then how much of it did you have to go and study? Cause it's so dense.

Chris Pine
The film is totally dense, they say, right? About what? You know, I grew up in Los Angeles, and so there was a lot of conversation about making it more accessible to non Angelenos. And I was like, look, man, if I make one fucking film in my life, I'm just gonna go balls out with just everything I wanna do. The obsession of the characters with what food places have been shut down is so L.

Dax Shepard
A. I love and hate. I hate this city so much. I mean, I don't even know where to start. How close are you to here?

Chris Pine
I am a minute and a half. And you grow grapes in your yard? I grow grapes in my yard. How many grapes do you yield? I know you make a wine Sauvignon blanc for six years.

There were Cabernet Sauvignon on my property before. And that was the whole reason why I decided to replant. Cause I was like, oh, my God, they're so pretty. We get about twelve cases. That's cool.

That is cool. And when people come over, you're like, would you like a glass of wine out of my yard? I send it as Christmas gifts and have honey on my property. Lucky. I have about an acre and a half up in the hills.

I have a very small house, which I love, so most of it's land. I'm surprised I've never bumped into you in the neighborhood. Monica, have you ever seen crisp strolling around? I haven't. Do you eat at all time or any of that stuff?

I love all time. Atwater. There's a new restaurant called Spina that I love that's opened up by a guy that used to be a waiter at Angelini Ostria, which is one of my favorites. It's this little hole in the wall. He's from Sardinia.

He's cooking great stuff over there. Your life's, like, in awesome art form. I kind of. I feel, like, unartistic. What are you talking about?

Dax Shepard
Well, the Porsche and you know these restaurants so well and your appreciation for the joists in the ceiling. I'm just feeling like I need to up my game a little bit. I would like you to have some wine here. I would like. I should have brought wine.

Monica Padman
Oh, that would have been amazing. Monica's a wine, though. We need a rebrand for that word. A connoisseur. Yeah, I'm a wine connoisseur.

Dax Shepard
A Samoye. Armchair Samoye. Yeah. Okay. Other compliments I want to give you.

Let's geek out for a second on Annette Benning. For me, if I had to do a top ten list of all time, I think her and american beauty, of course, when she's slapping herself in front. Of that door wall, she's a force of nature. And then she marries. That's part of it.

Chris Pine
Royalty of Hollywood. She is magical. I had no time, and I'm working with combined, I don't know how many Oscar nominations it wins between her and Devito and Jennifer, you have to come and play. And I'm directing too, and I'm in every scene. And, you know, it's dense, and there's a lot of words you just kind of have.

And what I'd say about Annette, it's like working with a Ferrari. You give her one little adjustment, and all of a sudden you just watch her go off. It's so much fun to work with someone like that. Her and Devito are great. And then you have Devito.

And DeVito comes from comedy, so Devito can do whatever you want. You just have to corral the Danny, you know? Yeah, I was trying to get him to learn this fucking modeling. He just wouldn't learn the modeling. He's like, I got some stories I wanted to tell you.

So he's telling me these stories. I'm like, this is great. Danny say that. He's like, how? I can't say that.

Then he sends me four different monologues. Just stories. And so on the day, we just had him fucking talk, do his four different monologues. And the one that we chose was the story about doing children's theater in Massachusetts, then ending up at Cape Cod and smoking a bit of hash. Yeah, but that's the end.

So he's a completely different type of actor than Annette. And then you have Jennifer, and Jennifer very quiet and has so much going on. But her comedic sensibility is so on point, and she's just this beautiful animal. I didn't do much directing. The movie's kind of like a tonal smorgasbord of.

There's big acting, there's small acting, there's all sorts of stuff. So it was just me kind of doing volume control more than anything else. I loved my script supervisor. She's the saving grace between her and my editor. The saving grace of my life on this film.

And I loved her and I trusted her. Julia Schachter, she'd just done. And everywhere, all at once in my film, there's a lot happening. And so talk about being able to handle a lot all at once. No, that's probably the most masterful edit I've ever seen of any movie in my life.

Dax Shepard
I don't know how they juggled that. You're outrageously good. I mean, you're so. It's back to the comedian thing. You have a pace that is so frenetic, yet very relaxed.

I've seen you in a lot of things. I feel like this is really up there for you. Thank you. It's the best thing you've ever done. You're so funny.

Chris Pine
It's been a hard thing trying to describe the film. Like, I wouldn't even describe it as a comedy. I call it a giggle or it's hopefully a delight. I think it's a vibe. It's like a state of mind.

First of all, you're either gonna lean into this film or you're not. If you're on the wavelength and you go for the ride and just wanna chill with these people being absolute fucking lunatics, I think you're gonna have a great time, and if not, it's not gonna be your cup of tea. And it's all good. But the best moments I've seen from people coming out of it, experiencing it the way that I want them to, it's just like a lightness. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
It's very playful. I think there's also a bottle rocket quality. There's a bottle rocket, and I think. Darren, the character that I play, did you pick that up? Is that all right?

No, it's totally fine. We've never not been in construction since we started. So have I. Yeah. 15 years, 14 years.

Chris Pine
I have a guy at my house that's basically like the guy from Murphy Brown. So his spirituals are like Peter Sellers and Peter O'Toole. It's like the bombacity of Peter O'Toole where if you watch Peter O'Toole, there's no normal acting happening. It's just giant, impassioned acting. And then you have Peter Sellers, whether it's Pink Panther, which I think is maybe for me one of the best comedies of all time, or being there, which is really my north star for this.

There's a centeredness. I'm happy you say that because I was trying to capture an acting style, so to speak, that was large and very grounded at the same time. That was, like, really expansive and pushing the limits and going into, like, screwball kind of slapstick and very centered. The film is, for me, a laugh and hopefully a cathartic moment at the end for people that resonate it and feel it. But for me, it's a lot about listening.

This is a movie, really about people not oftentimes really listening to one another. And it reminded me a lot of growing up, quite honestly. I was trying to capture a spirit of what it was like to live in a particular kind of household sometimes where the dropping in of being actually relational is what you're searching for. But there's all of this other plate spinning. So it is a state of mind, really.

Another influence was certainly David O. Russell and how he captures the neuroses of being alive, where people. I mean, in this case, we're talking about steaks and lobsters, and it's like, what are we talking about? That's the frustration, really, of this character who ultimately is looking to be loved and to love is looking to find connection in a very kaleidoscopic sort of way. That's truly the story about a kid trying to become a man.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll tell you this. My wife was coming in and out of the room, and I was watching it in bed, and she came in and she goes, okay, great, now he's gonna try to be funny too. He's coming for us. And then she sat down, and then she was laughing out loud.

And I go, I know, it sucks. He's kind of great at it, huh? And she's like, yeah, he's really, really funny. I appreciate that. Yeah, there were tons and tons of laughing out loud.

Chris Pine
I mean, it's so interesting now to have it out. 100 people have seen it. So to talk to a newbie, to feel the energy and what you took away from it is very nice. And we could do 3 hours on the experience, which is like, I know exactly where you're at. I've been through the whole experience.

Here's what I'll say about the experience. So joyful. Amongst all of the insane, getting the financing, billionaires that didn't exist, people wanting to pull the plug. All this stuff for my memoir, which I can't wait to, right. Never joyful flow state for probably a year, never not thinking about it.

People all told me that shooting it was gonna be terrifying. I fucking had an absolute ball. Could not have had more fun. Same stressful, but it's like, whatever. We don't have the orange stick, then get our fucking red stick.

So much fun. Making all the choices, solving problems as. They come up, solving problems. People were like, people are gonna want a leader on set. And then I was all nervous that I was gonna be able to make decisions.

All of a sudden you get in a this great thing of being like, I don't know if it's red, but my mind said red. So we're gonna fucking go red stick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Trusting the gut, trusting the instinct, and fucking rocking and rolling. I called following the giggle.

It's like if it tickled my brain, we're going with it. Yes. And. And I knew on an analytical level, in my brain, not my heart, that I was like, I'm setting myself up here for, am I truly ready to put this thing out in the world and let it potentially be beaten with a heavy bat? And I would think about it and then just immediately have a red stick, orange stick problem to think about.

So it was great. I had a lot to free myself from the burden of thinking of that. And then once we picture locked and it was done, and that wave hit me of like, oh, my God. And then settling in for the weight of that experience, of putting it out, I never really understood how hard that would be, the vulnerability of that experience. And it's not one dinner you had.

Dax Shepard
It's a year or three of your life. I always say, if I could live in production as a director, sign me up. I would never look back 100%. It's the only thing in the world I've found that's identical to cocaine. That's not cocaine.

Like, I am on fire when I'm there, and I want to do it for 20 hours a day. Are you going to do more? I think also the grief that I've been feeling this past year is because, as you know, writing is the lonely job. I mean, I have an idea, and it couldn't be be any different from this, which I'm excited about, but totally bitten going back and having watched a lot of the silence to prep for it and watching Buster and watching Charlie and watching Harold Lloyd, watching all these guys that did all of it. There's a magic to knowing that it's his art also to watch Buster do what he does.

Buster's my hero. He's my hero. I'm obsessed with him. Unbelievable. The kind of physical comedy he was doing.

It's Jackie Chan times three. And you know about his process. So he had his own studio. They'd shoot bits until they ran out ideas and they broke and either played baseball. He had a baseball diamond on his lot.

Chris Pine
I didn't know that. Or they broke and played Pinochle and they just played baseball or pinochle and shot the shit until they thought of another bit to film or how to add to the bit. So his life was just being on that lot with gag guys filming until they ran out, ideas, fucking around, coming up with more ideas and then going and filming them. I'm like, that would be. You have to read the oral history of Hollywood.

Dax Shepard
Oh, I haven't. It's all of these AFI interviews that they did. I don't know, starting in maybe the seventies to now. It's a compilation book starting with the birth of cinema, with all of the players talking first person accounts all the way through Spielberg to Nolan. But you get a sense of precisely what it was like in the early baby days of it and how they rolled and how these guys were coming up with gags all of the time and how the gag men then turned into guys that were being brought into the talkies.

Chris Pine
And it's very, very cool. It is. Well, Chris, this was delightful. Pool man is out May 10 theaters. Or streaming in theaters.

Yes, indeed, in theaters. We got the premiere at the Vista, which is an east sider I'm fucking super stoked about. Yeah. And will you show a film print of it there? They can do that.

My 35? Yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh. My canisters of film. One of the most exciting moments of my life.

Dax Shepard
I love it. This has been such a delight. I was 100% wrong about you on every assumption. Wrong about you, Dan.

Chris Pine
The bromance begins. And do you race cars or do you race motorcycles? So I did race cars, and currently I just do a lot of track days on the motorcycle. I'm going to kota two weeks. What?

Yeah, I was just at Willow Springs. No, on a motorcycle. Yeah, Willow Springs. Then I was in Vegas. I just started, but, yeah.

Dax Shepard
What are you doing after GP? Are you going to Moto GP. I'm going to Moto GP. Yeah, I'm trying to go. And then the day after, there's an Aprilia Albert Alpine star day, private day at Coda.

And I can. Oh, so you know, he. Why don't you come to that? I'm going to that. I just shipped my leathers down.

Chris Pine
How long have you been motorcycle race? 20 years. Oh, you're deep into it. I'm so into it. Oh, my God.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. It's pretty much my religion. It's what replaced snorting cocaine. And I've only had one on. Do you ride motorcycles around town?

Chris Pine
No, I kind of stopped doing that. I'll do an early, early morning on a Sunday or something. Yeah, you should come to get to ride that Koda. I've, like, never ridden it. I am just starting out by now.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. It doesn't fucking matter. Just know that that's an option for you. I'm definitely thinking about that. Have you been out?

Chris Pine
No, Kyle, it is. There's nothing like it. Nothing. I explained it on here is like you want to be in a state of presence. There's nothing on the planet that can.

Force you thank God for it. You can't even, on a straightaway, think about what's coming tomorrow or yesterday. You have to be second by second the whole time. And then when you carve that great line, like, it's just delicious. It's just delicious.

Monica Padman
Well, it sounds like you guys have a lot to do together. This is very exciting. And next time you hang out, bring some wine. Absolutely. All right, Chris, this is a party.

Chris Pine
Such a pleasure. Thank you. Everyone see Pullman, may 10? That's the one. Hi there.

Dax Shepard
This is Hermione Permian. You like that? You're gonna love the fact that. Welcome back to Miss Monica.

Monica Padman
Okay, I want to be honest about something. Don't you think that's a very scary thing to hear as a starter for anything? Mm hmm. Yeah. Can we talk?

Dax Shepard
Oof. Yeah. That was terrified. Scary. Yeah.

And I want to be honest. Yeah, I know. Uh oh. I'm booking an appointment. Okay.

Monica Padman
With a dermatologist. But I just don't know what's gonna happen when I go, and I just wanna be honest about that. What does that mean? I don't know. Dermatologists aren't plastic surgeons.

Dax Shepard
Or are they? Well, this one does stuff. This one is. This is a hybrid. It's not a plastic surgeon.

Monica Padman
Sorry. I'm gonna let you open that. Okay? This is super important, honest moment. Okay.

If I'm gonna get anything, I wanna do it via dermatologist. And one was recommended. Recommended. What are we thinking we're gonna do? I don't know.

And I'm probably not gonna do any. Is this all in? Yeah. Oh, great. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
I applaud you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I'd be too self conscious of doing something and then not addressing it. Yeah.

Monica Padman
If I got an eye transplant. And then I never addressed it, and people were like, whoa, her eyes are looking. It's weird that they're purple. Yeah. And then I was like, they've always been purple.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. And no, I'm not on Rose. Empty. Right. Exactly.

Monica Padman
That. I'm like, just be honest. It's fine. It's all fine. People's decisions.

Dax Shepard
But you also have in mind something. Is it neck related? Yeah. Okay, so I hate my neck. We all know this age, time.

Monica Padman
Tail is old as time. Since I was that small. I have neck problems. Can I pause you for 1 second? No.

I have neck problems. In that oil painting? No, the baby. The baby in the photo is the most perfect little being that's ever existed. The baby has a neck issue.

Dax Shepard
Nope. Okay. I just want to pause you to say I love our job so much. Me too. I love our job so much.

Monica Padman
But that is. No, but I'm really feeling it today. Oh, good. I love you too. We did back to back interviews, and now we're getting to the fact check.

Dax Shepard
And this is my favorite thing to do. And I love it. And I love the job. And I love you. And I love you, Robbie.

And I'm so grateful. And we get to do ads after this. Oh, now I don't love. Now I hate rob, but, yes, I agree. Lots of gratitude.

Yeah. Okay, so back to your. Except not for my neck. I don't. That's one place I don't.

Monica Padman
Well, okay. I guess I have gratitude that I have a neck. Certainly. I can start there. Yep.

Okay. I know someone without a neck. You do? Yeah. Okay.

So standing by my gratitude that I have a neck. Mm hmm. And my neck is. Knock on wood. Knock on wood.

My neck is in good shape. Like it's. It's doing what it should do as a neck. It functions. Yes, but I do not like it aesthetically.

Dax Shepard
And what options are out there? There are some options. Do they pull? They do like a. Not a lift.

Monica Padman
Not doing a lift. No, but that is an option, right? I think you could do a. I don't know. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
Imagine they could, like, cut the back of your neck, skin a chunk out, then pull it tight and suture. It. And that would tighten up the front of your neck. Wouldn't that be. That's logical?

Monica Padman
Probably, but that seems very invasive, and there's less invasive ways. Okay. So there's a procedure called I might cut that. I might cut that. Cause I don't want people specifically, like, getting into shit.

Dax Shepard
And then they'll find, like, the two. The problems. Yeah, exactly. So there is a procedure that's a neck procedure. It's not a procedure.

Monica Padman
It's an injection. Okay. So it's non surgical. We're not doing anything surgical. Okay.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, baby steps. No, I'm really, like, I don't even think I'm gonna go through with any of this because I'm so scared of it. Yeah. And I'm particularly scared of this procedure. Cause I have heard, like, you know, you hear one bad story, and I can't unhear that bad story.

Uh huh. But I do know some people who've had this. Oh, great. Personally. Yeah.

Oh, great. They like it. And so what does it do? So it kind of just, like, melts. It's supposed to, like, melt the fat around here?

Yeah. The extra fat in your neck and tighten it. How can I tighten it without cutting some of the skin out? No, it, like, the skin can free. You can, like.

Monica Padman
That's what botox could, like, tightens everything. And it kind of lifts it. And I might get that. I don't know, in your neck or your face. Well, if they say they can put that in my neck, that's best case, I trust.

But I've never had it. Although if you had Botox in your neck, you probably couldn't swallow. People do get. People get botox in their jaws a lot. And so if they say, that's good enough, like, that will just, like, make it a little more defined.

Yeah, that's great. Okay. I just am going to go in for a consultation, see what she has to say about my neck options, and then maybe I might try Botox. But I don't. I really actually don't think I need Botox.

Dax Shepard
No, you have no wrinkles. But continue. I don't need wrinkles. Yeah, zero. But then someone said it's more than just wrinkles.

Monica Padman
That it. Like, someone said, listen, I'm not a doctor, but someone said that doctor Liz. We were all talking about this, and she was like, you don't need it. She's like, but if you had it, you would look like a supermodel. And now I can't unhear them.

Dax Shepard
Listen, I don't think it tightens your skin. Here's my understanding of Botox. Right. It is botulism. That's what it is.

Botox. Yeah. You put it in and it paralyzes the muscles it's been injected into. Now, those muscles can't move the skin in the way that creates the creases. Exactly.

So it's really just freedom of the repetition of the wrinkles. Right. So I'm not sure how it would make your dermis tighter, but certainly the lack of moving the muscles that create the wrinkles is what happens. And then that's, well, for sure, that's how it started. But now it feels like there's all kinds of new stuff and new things, but like I said, I'm just putting that out there.

Monica Padman
Cause I wanna be honest with the arm cherries. I'm gonna. I'm gonna contradict myself. I'm gonna be both things. I support you.

Dax Shepard
I'm all for it. I'm not gonna talk you out of it. Great. The only thing that gives me pause is the notion that you went to a dentist and they convinced you that you could have better teeth than you have. That's the only thing that scares me is you have such spectacular teeth.

And whatever picture they showed you, you were like, yeah, yeah. That's the only thing that scares me. Does that make sense? Yes. Thank you.

Fuck you. No, no, no. My teeth. You're wrong, though, in that it wasn't like I went to the dentist, my great dentist that I love, appa dentist. I do need a new dentist.

Monica Padman
They're really good. For real. They are really good. They'll give you a face. Look, they'll probably try to get you to have veneers, but maybe you want that.

So. I have always wanted that. I don't understand. I know, but just, I've always wanted it. So it wasn't that they showed me a picture or they said, you know, it was confirming what I already thought.

Dax Shepard
Okay. And then this is gonna be the same if it's a neck, if they say, well, look, I hate my nose. Right. But I'm not gonna touch. Okay, go ahead.

Your nose is great. I hate my nose, but I've learned that that's my nose. Uh huh. And so they might say, you know, we could put a little, like, tiny bit of filler here, we could do a little something here, and it will, but I'm not doing that to my nose. But if they can make it so that I don't look at 90% of pictures and cringe at my neck.

Uh huh. I would love that. Yeah, I want that for you. Yeah. So we're gonna see.

I want that for you. But I also wanna. I am also gonna be careful. And I am nervous that this procedure. I'm nervous it could go bad.

Well, I'll tell you something. That kind of spooked me a little bit, because I'm willy nilly. You know me. Yeah. I'm totally willy nilly.

But then I was watching that models documentary, which I loved so much. The supermodels one. And was it Evangelion? What's her name? Linda Evangelista.

Chris Pine
Yeah. We're not being mean. She talks about it in the documentary. Linda Evangelista had some interesting freezing. Like, it was.

Monica Padman
I'm talking about. That's what it is. She had the one that went bad. Oh, yeah. So.

Dax Shepard
Fuck, man. I saw that, and that really scared the shit. I almost think I thought of you when that happened. Yes. Because I probably was like, I want that.

Monica Padman
It's called Kybella. Oh, my God. Is it crazy for them to test a little part on your hip to see how your body responds to this? That's not a bad idea. Like, let's not start with some visible back.

Dax Shepard
Your thigh somewhere that you think you don't mind having. I mean, like, better find out there. Yeah. Your butt or my butt? A butt lump.

Butthole. Cause, you know, the expectations aren't gonna be high. But I have a nice butthole, so. Okay, well, then don't mess that up. Listen, bottom of your foot.

Monica Padman
I think maybe there's been some advancements. Yeah. How long does it take? Ten minutes. Oh, wow.

It's not. They just inject. You know, they pull it and they inject stuff. Okay. But I am scared.

But I do want. It says that it's generally considered to be safe. Well, that's the word you're looking for. Trust me. I've read everything on it.

Dax Shepard
And damage is temporary is what it says in most cases. Oh. If it. If the lump happens, that's why I was like. Cause some of the other things, like filler, they can dissolve it quickly.

Monica Padman
Yeah, but this. I don't think you can. Yeah, it looks like nerve damage is really the main thing that it could cause. You don't need your neck nerves. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
I knock on wood colored wood. You got to be more specific now you gotta say wood colored wood. I will. Well, thanks for letting us in on that. I just want to let people know, and I'm gonna.

Monica Padman
If I get it, I'm gonna tell people. You're gonna own it. Yeah. Because also, if I like it. And other people wanna.

I'm not gonna endorse. I'm not gonna say, like, everybody. Well, then what if we're doing a live show and some gal comes up to you with a huge lumps all over her neck and she's like, Monica, I trusted you. I mean, I don't think you should advise anyone, regardless of your outcome. I am not ever gonna advise, but.

But I want people to look at pictures of themselves and like it. Is it. How much is it? $800. You think that's a lot?

Dax Shepard
No, it's nothing. I know this thing must be nothing. You don't even need to think about it. Go in and get it. You think?

Yes. If I get a lump, what are you gonna do? Cut it out? I'll use my technique. I thought, I've cut the back of your neck and I'll take out a section and then we'll cinch it up.

Monica Padman
Yeah. Especially now that the staples are on the table. Like, now people get sutured up with staples. Surely I can do some staples. God.

Anyway, it is. This is a slippery slope in general for people. It is. And I really am highly aware of that. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
Tattoos are very similar. Yeah. It's like the hurdle to do it once is one thing, and then once you get it, you're like, oh, yeah, I liked that. So I would like more of that. I know.

So, you know you're fucking covered. Tattoos. Neck tattoos, which you've threatened. Yeah. Yeah.

You get Kybella. I'm getting a neck tattoo. No. Anywho, so that's where I'm at in my journey. Great.

When do you think this will happen? This week. There's an appointment available on Saturday. Oh, my God. So maybe the next time I see you, you'll have a completely different neck.

Monica Padman
There's no downtime. Where else? You can only get it on your neck. Kybella. Yeah, that.

It's just a neck thing. There's other things you can get. Don't get stuff. See, this feels hypocritical, I know, but I want everyone to do what they want to do. Yeah.

But even sometimes I see pictures of people and I think it's great if they like it. Great. Mm hmm. But it's pictures and they look presented as. It's so natural.

Dax Shepard
Mm hmm. And yet I don't think so, you know? Well, that is a curious. We will never know. But there is a version of this where you did it, didn't say anything, no one's looking for it, and probably no one ever thinks anything.

Monica Padman
Okay. Because no one is even. I hate to say this because I want you to get your cabela. No one is looking. She's Monday.

I know. Oh, my God. Just in time. It's a sign. You should do it.

Dax Shepard
Oh, my God. And you can say to her, I got a cabela for you. But hers is Cabello, so she might. She won't know the difference. Okay.

She'll think you pronounce it weird.

Well, now I've lost my train. Sorry. This is what I was gonna say. And this is not to tell you not to get it, get it, get it. You're not gonna like.

No one. No one. No one thinks you have a bad night. No, no one looks at your neck and has had any thoughts about. I've never noticed it.

And I look. Yeah. I mean, truly, that is 200 photos. I still want you to get it because it doesn't matter what other people think. It matters how you feel, and I'm supportive of it.

But also, no one. No one looks at your neck. Nobody. Okay, first of all, people look at things and they notice my neck. You might not and you might not.

Monica Padman
And that's crazy to me. But I've had validate. Like, I've mentioned this to people in my life who love me very much. And they are like, you could get, like. They aren't.

They're not. Like, oh, my God, you need it so bad. Would you start crying? Say to me, I'm someone you've not told us to. Okay, so I'm considering getting blank.

Chris Pine
No. About time. Yeah. Would you start crying? Probably, yeah.

Dax Shepard
That's rough. It's so mean. I even think, I wonder what kind of. What kind of role like Eric might like. If Eric had thought that, he would say it.

Like, you gotta be careful. I'm gonna try it around. No, you know what you should do? You've told. Well, fuck.

Eric could listen to this because what would be more interesting? And it would be disheartening and nice, which is, you get it and don't tell anyone. No one. But how? They're not gonna say.

Monica Padman
Even if they do notice. They're not gonna say, Monica, your neck looks. But you know what they would say? They would go, oh, you look so good. Now it's a moot point, because I'm saying it and I'll say if I get it.

Dax Shepard
Well, if anything, now we're gonna find out which of our friends listens to the show. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, fair weather friends. That's. That's.

Monica Padman
That's that. On. On my cosmetic surgery? Yeah. Non surgical.

Non surgical stuff. Well, I'm excited for you. Thanks. Yeah, I hope it's. I hope it.

We'll see if I go through with. It, but if you go through with it, I hope it turns out to be exactly what you want. Well, me too. Yeah. I hope it's not long.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. Oh, my God. Who's this for? This is for Chris Pine. Oh, wonderful.

Monica Padman
Yeah. Super fun. Super fun. Really cool. Smart.

Really smart. Do you think you stereotype anything about actors? I don't, but when other people bring stuff up about actors, I tend to agree. Interesting. Like, it's not top of mind for me.

You know, a lot of people say, like, I would never date an actor. Dating actors is bad, and I never think about that. But. But there are some through lines that can happen. Sure.

Dax Shepard
There's some over indexing. Yeah. I don't have any stereotype or no preconceived notion that they're not gonna be small, but I do think. I assume actors aren't educated. Oh, like that they didn't go to.

College and get a degree in something substantial. Yeah. I imagine they studied theater, which is great. It's still substantial. It's not.

Monica Padman
It's all a spectrum. It depends on who you're asking. Cause a lot of people would say not to offend you. People who do like organic chemistry probably don't think anthropology's all that like. I don't think so.

Okay. Yeah. You can get a b's in anthropology. You can go to med school. Right.

Dax Shepard
From anthropology. You can go to med school from anything, if you take the right prereqs. Sure. Then you'd have a bachelor's of science. Sure.

But, like, there's labs and, you know, I'm just. I'm saying it's a liberal art. Okay. I don't agree. But I'm telling you, because you are doing that to another.

Well, one is learning how to express yourself, and one's, like, learning the history and evolution of mankind. There's a lot of history in theater. Well, if you're that. If you're, like, an art history major and, you know, like, every single period of art and all the participants, and it's a history. You are a historian at that point.

But generally, when you go to school for theater, you're not, like, becoming an expert on plays, are you? There's tons. Yeah. There's playwriting classes you have to take. There's tons of history classes you have to take.

Monica Padman
You have to read all of Shakespeare. There's a lot. Okay. I'm not trying to offend anyone. I've also interviewed a bunch of people who majored in theater, and they'll be the first to say, like, yeah, I didn't take any of those classes.

Dax Shepard
Like, I don't know anything about Western Civ. I don't know anything. Tisch, people, they don't have to take anything at NYU. You don't have to. I don't think.

Monica Padman
Yeah, most other schools require a lot. Of something else if that's what they want to do. I'm actually not judgmental, but I guess I just don't think of most actors have. Having focused on something conventionally majored in. Yeah.

I agree that when I hear that someone. I mean, this is bad. This is gross. But when I hear that, like, someone. Has an engineering degree, that's an actor, you're like, oh, wow, that's kind of unique.

That's surprising. But I was gonna say, even regardless of what they majored in, when I heard Reese Witherspoon went to Stanford, I was shocked. I was surprised. Yeah, it's kind of cool and it's very cool and. But then.

Really? Cause why? Who cares? I shouldn't care either. A little bit stupid.

Dax Shepard
But I do know almost all. I think I know all of the actors who ever gone to Ivy League schools. Yeah. You know, we know Natalie went to Harvard. Exactly.

We know Ben and Matt. Yeah. Yeah, we know. Yeah. I don't know if I knew Reese went to Stanford, but maybe I did.

Monica Padman
Yeah. A bunch of people went to Yale. Drama. Yeah. Edward Norton went to Yale.

Uh huh. Yeah. There's some yallies. Bradley went to Georgetown. That's a good school.

Great school. Paul Giamatti went to Yale. Yeah. So, you know, and maybe it's the. Exact same percentage as everyone else.

It's just more surprising. Cause a lot of actors decide not to go to school. Cause you don't have to. No. It's not beneficial at all in the acting world to know about King George or anything.

Well, it can be because you can pull, like, the more you know, in general, I think the better of an actor you are. Yeah. Unless you're playing Frito. Then you gotta forget everything you know. But you have to know at first to know to forget it.

Dax Shepard
I was in the pants. God. Because he doesn't know, but he wants to get in there so bad. What's in there? Oh, okay.

Monica Padman
Is he gone? Yeah, he's gone. Okay. It's sort of a ding ding ding because we talk about Neil Labute. Oh, right.

And I didn't chime in here. Cause I didn't want to slow down the flow. But I love Neil la Butte, and it. I did a lot of Neil abutte reading in theater. I'm delighted to hear that.

Yeah. Because a lot of. It's very mean. Well, it's. And you have a.

Dax Shepard
You have a mean trigger. It didn't feel mean to me. It felt harshly real. Well, that's the thing. Like.

And again, this kind of becomes a debate we won't have. But, like, I think there's a lot of people that want to see what should be in movies and not what is in movies. And a lot of the world is mean as fuck and dark as fucking sadistic. And so his stuff represents what is, I think, very much the reality of a lot of life. Yeah, but it's.

Some of. It's harsh. Yeah. But if a lot of plays, when you're really reading, like, tons of plays all the time, a lot of them are dark and twisted and not musical. Cruel, though.

Like, he seems to have a comfort level with airing a lot of the cruel things people say about each other. To each other. Yeah. And what's interesting is, like, two things are. It's like.

It's shocking because you don't hear that in plays or in movies. And then also commercial. Commercial plays. And then second, you're going like, yeah, that's what I heard on my playground. Like, people are fucking cruel and mean.

Monica Padman
Yeah. The shape of things was my favorite play throughout college. I don't think I've seen that or read that. What's that about? It's about this guy who ends up in this relationship.

He is ugly. Like, he. And he ends up in this relationship. And the woman starts. Oh, my God.

Ding, ding, ding. Starts, like, giving him plastic surgery. Not really. I think he actually maybe does end up in plastic surgery. I don't remember very.

I don't remember all the specifics, but, like, changing things about him and making him more attractive. But then there's an affair that happens. I don't know. It's like this group of four people, and it's twisted and odd and they made a movie about it, but I never saw it. Paul Ryan.

Dax Shepard
Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd and Rachel Weiss. Maybe. I saw it playing. He was playing ugly.

Monica Padman
That's. Yeah. He had plastic surgery to fix his large nose. Okay. Yeah.

Oh, my God. It all circles back. But, yeah, I loved that. Some girls also. Now I'm looking at his page.

There were a lot. I read a lot of them at the time. I used to love, I still have a ton of plays, and I loved the feeling of just rifling through a play. There's some really, not again. Sorry.

I'm not a musical fan. Right. I don't like musicals, but I do love plays. Yeah. And you loved it.

Yeah, that was a musical. I did love it. Oh. I was invited, and so I went to the opening night of suffs, which was great. But I thought to my, I was like, is this gonna be a musical?

Dax Shepard
Oh, you didn't know going in. I didn't know and I didn't want to know. Right. Because then you would have really not wanted to be there. Yes.

Monica Padman
And then it was a musical, but it was very good. You know what's funny is I would say I don't like musicals either. But what's really funny is I've only probably seen four and two of them I really liked. So it's kind of like, I don't even know if it's a really legit. I've seen a lot of them.

Yeah. If you only go and see Hamilton in the Book of Mormon. You like musicals. Musicals are great. Yeah, exactly.

So, Chris. Okay, one thing. Why is the dune guy in oil? Baron. Oh, yes.

Dax Shepard
What is happening? Is he drying out? No, the imagery of Baron. How do you say the last thing? Harkonnen.

Monica Padman
Harkonnen. Thank you. Harkonnen. Bathing in oil is another unsettling aspect of the character and one that doesn't appear in the books. The substance is actually healing mud bath, which was inspired by a dream in which Baron Harkonnen emerges from underneath oily liquid.

Like a hippopotamus. Yeah, that's what it looked like when he came out of that thing. Yeah, hippopotami. Yeah. I do not like him.

Dax Shepard
I learned something weird today while I was researching our guests, which is not only were we shook the other day when we found out there was two, there was hippocampi. Yeah. Do you know there's amygdala? Oh, there's more than, yeah, there's two. They're in both.

Monica Padman
What? Yes. Both hemispheres have an amygdala. We just don't know. We just keep learning.

Dax Shepard
We don't know. Yeah. Mineral rich concoction to aid in recovery and healthy. Okay. Yeah, he looked very unhealthy.

Monica Padman
He's not healthy. No. I don't want to shame him, but he also doesn't look healthy. I don't mind shaming him. He's bad.

Yeah. I'm back. Yeah, I'll shame him. He said one of his favorite words is solopistic, which means it says someone who's solopistic is so focused on their own wants and needs that they don't think about other people at all. We already had that word, selfish.

Well, right. You could also call it solopistic person selfish or self centered. Okay. But it's a cooler word. Yeah.

Dax Shepard
Hard. I'm not. I'm afraid to even try to say it out loud. It's hard. Solopistic.

Monica Padman
You did it. Whoa. Don't try it. Don't do it. I'm not gonna ever try to do it again.

Dax Shepard
First and last time ever saying it. Okay. Is tab still around? Yeah, you can get it on Amazon. Really?

Monica Padman
Yeah, I saw, I see. It says currently unavailable. Yeah. Since 1987. It says, we don't know when or if this item will be packing.

Dax Shepard
Discontinued in 2020. Fuck. You just missed it by four years. Now we have to find it on eBay. They'll be so old.

Monica Padman
I know. Yeah. Once in a blue million. Because we buy Diet Coke in such quantity that occasionally you'll grab a twelve pack and it's been in there for a few years and it can start to taste like the aluminum can. And it's too.

That's bad. You gotta. There's no way this tab wouldn't be tasting like you put a mouthful of pennies in your mouth. We said that I'm a wine connoisseur. Yeah, well, if you said wine O and I said, that needs a rebranding.

And then we went with wine connoisseur, I just, again, circling back, I want to be honest, I'm not a wine connoisseur. I don't know that much about it, though. That is a goal. It is. Before I maybe one day, eventually become sober, maybe I want to.

I want to learn about wine. I loved that show. The show I didn't really like, but I liked a lot. There was a show I didn't like, but I. Japanese.

Dax Shepard
Half japanese, half japanese. French and american. Okay. Okay. I guess I'll just say it drops of God.

Yeah, there we go. It's a show I really enjoyed, and yet I didn't like it. So it's weird. I kind of like those shows. I have a few of those, too.

Monica Padman
Yeah. It's more novel. It's interesting. Yeah, I blew through it. I watched the whole thing and it was really good at keeping your attention.

Dax Shepard
There was one, I'm not remembering the series, but there was this series where it was like, I didn't like the episode at all ever. And the ending was always a perfect cliffhanger ending where I had lupin you didn't like. That's the only show I've ever admitted out loud on here that I didn't like. And that was mostly. And that's, like, not a bad enough show.

And I. It's not a bad show. It's not even a yes. I love that. The writing was very convenient.

I'm particularly allergic to. Very convenient. So anyway, that world, the wine world, and she smells it, and then she can do pear and moss and frankincense, and I want to do that. And our friend, mutual friend. Audra.

Yeah. She's a, I think, level two psalm sommelier. Oh. What, there's levels? Yeah, it's, I think, three or four levels.

So she's halfway to the top, and it's really hard. It starts to get, like, the top level. There's, like, a hundred of them. Right. Like, you need some kind of genetic advantage at some point.

Monica Padman
Well, that's what we need. Super smeller, super taster. Yeah, but you can train it. So that's. So she's gonna help me.

Dax Shepard
Okay. We're gonna do classes. Oh, and you start with. You just start smelling the smells themselves alone. So you can build the memory of that's cherry on its own.

Monica Padman
Yeah. And then you're able to do it. And then you can say, 1962 Pinot noir, french valley Bordeaux. This is something I'm so judgmental of. You already know this about.

I know and I don't. I want you to get, you know. My few really judgmental things. You need to. One of them is like.

Dax Shepard
Like, just admit you're drunk. Stop trying. Not you. Not you. Not you, not you.

Monica Padman
No, that's. These people who's, like, their whole lives dedicated, their wine cellar in this bottle, and every time they open it, they're acting like they're doing something super special. You're just getting drunk. You're just getting drunk. You're trying to.

Dax Shepard
You're trying to make it really elevated, Dex. Yeah. Okay, stop. That's not true. Okay?

Monica Padman
Real psalms for the most part, they spit it out. Oh, I'm not talking about psalms. I'm talking about drunks who get super into their wine collection. And they're using it as this, like they're doing something super cultured and elevated. They're just getting drunk, and they.

Dax Shepard
Because they've made it this very cultured, elevated experience, they don't have to recognize that they're just getting hammered every night on wine. That's one of my judgments. Two of it. Of course. It's a class thing.

Monica Padman
I know, but, like. Like, at some point. Yeah. When you own ten cars, 100%. Yeah.

You have to be a bird's eye view about this. Yeah, it's hypocritical, and then you come. Off hypocritical, which is the worst thing. But what if you're acknowledging you're hypocritical? No, it's still bad.

It's like if you're acknowledging it, but you refuse to take steps to overcome that or fix that. If I dug really deep and I maybe got more honest, maybe it would be that. I don't think I could ever tell the difference, so I feel excluded by it. But you don't have to. Like, I can't look at.

Like, you look at. It's literally the exact same thing. You looked at Chris's car. You knew immediately. You knew the year.

You knew the thing. That's what psalms do, and it's rare, and it's cool. I have no problem with psalms. I know, but I'm just saying, I don't watch you do that and think, like, I don't know how to do that. So do you think, though, that's weird.

Dax Shepard
You know, the power of the brain? And do you think it is possible, though, that people do change their experience with it because they've learned it's the perfect vineyard? They know it's rare. They know it's from this year. Once all those details, don't you think the experience itself changes?

Like, here's my great suspicion. I think you could take a pretty normal, mid level wine and present it to people as something, and I'm pretty certain those people be like, oh, my God, it's so good. Maybe. Whereas the car thing is quantifiable. It's like it has this horsepower goes, but it does this lap time at.

Monica Padman
This track that no one's using. I'm just saying it's all real. It can't be tricked. You couldn't go like, hey, this is the fastest car from 1966. Drive it.

Dax Shepard
And then it goes zero to 60 and 12 seconds. You can't really trick that. Well, you can't trick someone. Who knows? But you could trick me.

Monica Padman
You could tell me, this goes, this does this, this does. And I'd be like, great. I totally believe it. I would think, oh, that's cool. That's elevated.

Same with wine. If people who really do know if things are good or bad. Yeah. By the way, I think this happens outside of wine, too. I think this happens with meat.

Dax Shepard
Now, meat is something I'm super into, and I think people have such a fucking boner for Wagyu and a 13 wagyu and all this stuff. And I've had the samplers, and then I have a ribeye right next to it, and I'm like, I think you guys are all smelling each other's farts. Like, I don't think this isn't. Do you have any thoughts on Wagyu, Rob? I'm not big on just steak alone.

Yeah. Like, I like more complexities, and it. Yeah, I just. I do think some of these things can become like, oh, here's ten kinds of caviar. This one is the rarest in the world.

There's only ten cans of it. People are. It's going to taste better to them. I do think there's. I do think there's a mental aspect to it, for sure, but there is a actual process in winemaking, and it's.

Monica Padman
Sorry, Trader Joe's. But Charles Shaw is. Is not processed in the same way that some nice wines are. Also. I apologize to everyone who loves wine, and it feels like I just shit on their hobby.

Dax Shepard
I'm. I am sorry. This is all my. It's fun, and I. I mean, I don't think I could.

Monica Padman
Well, hopefully I will one day, but I can't taste the difference between $100 bottle of wine and a $70 or a $6,000. I probably couldn't. Right. But I do think if someone told you this is a $6,000 bottle of wine, it would taste different. Maybe.

But there is a taste difference between a $15 bottle of wine and a $75 bottle of wine, and there's a hangover difference. There's a lot. I believe that. Yeah. There's just, like, a threshold of it that I think it gets kind of silly.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So I'm gonna learn it. Okay. And I'm gonna get Kybella.

Dax Shepard
Okay. It's all gonna happen. Okay, great. Next time I see you, you're gonna be.

You're gonna try to pair my egg and rice dish from squirrel with something perfect. I want to be able to pair like that. That's fun. I had the same chip on my shoulder when I drank, which is, like, there isn't a better whiskey than Jack Daniels. Sorry, y'all.

That's, like, maker's Mark and all these people. I'm like, you guys have just convinced yourself from the packaging and the price point that this is better than Jack Daniels, and it is not that it. That is you. You're being so objective about things that are subjective to you. Jack Daniels tasted the best.

Monica Padman
I disagree. I like four roses, and that's not fancy. Okay, great. I accept that, then. Well, I also actually.

I like Woodford. Or what's the other one? I like that Jess likes Jenny Walker. I think it's all packaging. No, it's not.

Dax Shepard
Okay, okay, okay, okay. Because you were drinking it to get drunk. No. Well, also, I wanted. I can drink anyone, so I'm drinking the one that tastes the best to me additionally.

Monica Padman
No, you weren't at the time wanting to drink, like, something fancier, though. I wanted to taste the very best thing. I wanted to drink the thing that tastes the very best to me. The best at a price point, though. You weren't gonna Blanton's.

You weren't gonna spend, like, money on Blanton's to drink all one night. The end of my drinking. Yes. I had plenty of money to buy whatever I wanted at 29. When I quit, I could have bought anything.

Would you? Yeah, that's true. And I was in Hawaii with Dean, and I'm drinking Jack daniels. I can get anything. I know.

I just think it's different. Yeah, I'm probably different. I think it's different also. Why do I care? Now, what you could say that is the same to me.

Dax Shepard
You want to really skewer me. I don't think cars is a great example just because there are all these numbers associated with it. There's ways to evaluate it. Clothes is preposterous, and I'm all in on the clothes. Clothes?

Monica Padman
Clothes is not preposterous. Oh, my God. Like, certainly someone who's wearing, like, a polo sweater is, like, this is made of wool, and it's a very great sweater. There's no way your Gucci sweater is better. No, I don't.

Dax Shepard
I think there's a lot of merit to that, but I'm in. Like, I want the Burberry sweater that you got me. Yeah. And you can't argue that Jordans are better. You don't perform better playing basketball.

Jordans. There's better craft, though, in some of this stuff. Like, those shoes are made better than some of it, but I don't know. It's not proportional at all. Sure.

Yeah. Not at the price point. Well, depending on what we're talking about. But, yes, there's fit. There's so many things that are different from a fast fashion place.

Yeah. That's why I said polo. That's not fast fashion. It's like, that is polo is like, it's great quality. Everything.

Monica Padman
I don't know enough about their practice. I don't either. I mean, they make go after them. Yeah. I don't know what's going on with that, but I know, like, a place I have some stuff from.

Dax Shepard
Okay. The Roe, the row. I'm not saying it just like. I'm not saying capella. Beep.

Monica Padman
So it's like. It's manufactured in Italy. The stuff's made there. Yeah. It's not fast fashion, right?

Fast fashion's bad. That's what they say. It is bad. I know, but there. Listen, there's a.

Dax Shepard
No, there's a proletariat. No. Shockingly, no one's that pissed about sunscreen. I think I've just worn everyone down at this point. Everyone's quarantine.

My wife and my family. He's talking again, but we don't need to listen. Okay. My problem with shaming fast fashion is you're gonna hate this. Well, I'll tell you why.

Monica Padman
Okay? Cause you're shaming people who can't afford the other stuff. It's like, okay, so what? We're like, somehow the elites have decided that their fashion, which costs a ton of money, is moral. And this entry level, shitty, disposable stuff, like, those people want to look cute, too, just like the rich people, and they can't afford the other thing.

Dax Shepard
And now we're shaming them like, they're ruining the planet. I'm shaming the people buying it. Okay? I'm shaming the companies that are doing it. That way.

Monica Padman
They don't have to. They don't have to create at that level. It's, like, so mass produced. It's so much shit that's unnecessary. They don't have to do that, but they're doing it for profit and commercial appeals, so it's not the people.

I agree. Yeah. Like, everyone wants to look cute. Of course. You buy what you can afford.

It's the companies, though. Now these people have to look, turn on the news, and it's like, great. Where I shop is amoral. I don't want them to think that, but I do want them to start shopping at the rug. I'm kidding.

Chris Pine
I'm kidding. I'm kidding. We didn't hear about the. I'm kidding. It was a joke.

Dax Shepard
Buy the sunscreen. But we might hear about that. Okay. Because I actually think this is interesting because the right. Conservatives.

Monica Padman
Conservatives. Yeah. Or, you know, a portion of this country is very eye rolly about, oh, my God. Now we can't say this. Now we can't say that.

Now we can't. And I'm gonna say, I'm like, we can't shame fast fashion. Like, I don't think you can, because. But it's like, people don't have an. Option to buy anything but fast fashion.

Well, people don't have an option but feel hurt by racism either. I guess we're all just feeling sort of like, what can we do? This is great. We all have our pet projects. Anyway, one thing that is a ding ding ding to my psalm days.

Dax Shepard
Yeah. He says he grows his own wine. Well, he grows his own wine. That's true. But he, he said the hardest thing about addiction, which I think he sort of meant sobriety, is 05:00 p.m..

Monica Padman
Oh. Uh huh. Because at 05:00 p.m. There's nowhere to go. You just have to, like, get through till morning.

Yeah. And I've been thinking about that so much. Did that resonate? Yeah, that time when you. When it hits five, it's time for a drink.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, it's. It's. It is funny when somebody puts something on your radar and then, well, it's kind of beter mind off, I guess it's like. Yeah, then you just see it. You see it all of a sudden.

Like, once you're aware of it, you're like, oh, my God, it was there this whole time, and I'm so aware of it now. Yeah. Because I think, like, you go through the day thinking, oh, I'm not gonna drink today. There's no reason. But then five comes, and all of a sudden there's, like, a reason.

Monica Padman
There's not a reason, but it's like, it's 05:00 and I wanna, like, hang out now. Yeah. Really. It's the separation between the work day and the night. See, I think it's what you really want, because I have now done it.

Dax Shepard
I have it really deeply with the sauna. I need to transition from that zone. Exactly. If I go in my house and act like I do on this podcast, my family's gonna go bananas. You know, I gotta, like, transition.

Monica Padman
Yeah. Like, for me, it's like, if I just go home right now, then I'm gonna work. Uh huh. And I'd rather not, like, I'd rather have a break between this work and that work and a hang. Sounds like a fun way to do that.

Dax Shepard
Yeah, for sure. But I need something else, probably. What, do. We don't have saunas. I mean, talk about shame.

Monica Padman
I was. No, I thought that during this episode, I was like, this is gonna be eye rolly for some people. Yeah, of course. Because. And I get it.

It's like, okay, what about the people who don't have these options? What do they do? Well, I'll tell you. And I was just about to suggest this to you. You won't do it, but if you went for a 20 minutes jog after this, after each day of work, I really think it would be the exact same thing.

Well, I've been. I have been jogging. Back to jogging. Yeah, I've seen phineas. Two out of three, actually.

Three out of three. But he didn't see me on one of them. Did you flag him now, though? Yeah, now we talk. I saw him this morning out and about.

And I met Claudia. How is she? She's very, very sweet. Yeah. It's really funny for his episodes, when I was reading the comments, it was nice to see how much people love her.

Dax Shepard
So many of the comments were about Claudia. That's cool. She's great. So I know her brother very well. Oh, you do?

Yeah, I was his roommate and, oh, when I was, like, 18. Are they from Chicago? Yeah. Oh, that makes sense. The Chicago contingency is strong.

Yeah, definitely more guests and callers. Lots of Chicago. But jogging, I think if you jog, I think it's just like there's a restlessness at the end of something, and then I think if you, like, just kind of exert yourself in some way for a half hour. I know, but it's also, like, that's an annoying thing to do. Yeah.

Unless you start really associating it with the post. I like the feeling after. Yeah, I know. Like, for me, when I walk into the sauna, I don't even think about that. It's gonna be hot, right?

Or uncomfortable. I don't. I so associate it with, like, a kind of placid, calm feeling after that, that's all I really experience. Yeah. I don't know how am I gonna.

But I was. I didn't drink for 17 full years without a sauna, so I don't feel too bad. I know, I know. Did Spina stay in the edit? Yeah.

Monica Padman
And I wanna try it. Oh, you went. So I went after this interview. Yeah, you went that night to the restaurant that Chris mentioned. It was insane.

Oh, I want that. I wanna go. But nothing's gluten free, right? No, it's all, like, homemade pasta. We've gone twice since the.

I want that so bad. Oh, what are you doing tonight? Maybe getting it. Oh, my God. We'll see.

That's it. Okay, wonderful. That's all we learned a lot. Loved Chris. I really, really, really liked him.

Dax Shepard
We do have hats from his movie set. Hats. Those are cute. This is a cute hat. Corduroy hat.

Monica Padman
Yes. This is a cute hat. He's very fashionable, so I'm not surprised that this extremely. If I didn't make too fine of a point on it, his aesthetic in life is really top notch. The whole car thing is ideal.

Yeah. I'm pretty proud of myself that I got 1969 on the button on that one. I know. If you're proud of yourself for that, you should be proud of all the psalms. Okay, I am.

Okay. My free hat to you songs. All right. Love you. Love.

Dax Shepard
Love.

Chris Pine - Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

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1: Opening Thoughts

2: Personal Reflections

3: Career and Passions

4: Philosophical Insights

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