Speaker 1: When I say your name, there's this kind of like
Speaker 1: starry eyed thing that they get, which I think is
Speaker 1: the confluence of having been educated and entertained like your film,
Speaker 1: and they're just like, oh my god, like you really
Speaker 1: whoa Like they have a very visceral response to you.
Speaker 2: That's a delight to hear the fact that the movie's
Speaker 2: sticking with people. To me, that's the testament of quality
Speaker 2: of how frequently I think of something after I've consumed it.
Speaker 2: So it's nice to hear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think it's a marker of something that
Speaker 1: is actually sustainable. I heard a great story about Bob
Speaker 1: Dylan remarking to his son as his son had sold
Speaker 1: I think six million records or something with a lot
Speaker 1: of records, maybe more than a Dylan record had sold.
Speaker 1: And Dylan's response was great, now do it for thirty years. Yeah, Hello,
Speaker 1: I'm mini driver.
Speaker 3: I've always loved Prust's questionnaire.
Speaker 1: It was originally in nineteenth century parlor game where players
Speaker 1: would ask each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing
Speaker 1: the other player's true nature. In asking different people the
Speaker 1: same set of questions, you can make observations about which
Speaker 1: truths appear to be universal, And it made me wonder,
Speaker 1: what if these questions were just a jumping off one,
Speaker 1: what greater depths would be revealed if I asked these
Speaker 1: questions as conversation starters. So I adapted Prus's questionnaire and
Speaker 1: I wrote my own seven questions that I personally think
Speaker 1: are pertinent to a person's story. They are when and
Speaker 1: where were you happiest? What is the quality you like
Speaker 1: least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love
Speaker 1: for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place,
Speaker 1: or experience has shaped you the most?
Speaker 3: What would be your last meal?
Speaker 1: And can you tell me something in your life that's
Speaker 1: grown out of a personal disaster? And I've gathered a
Speaker 1: group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored
Speaker 1: and humbled to have had the chance to engage with.
Speaker 1: You may not hear their answers to all seven of
Speaker 1: these questions. We've whittled it down to which questions felt
Speaker 1: closest to their experience or the most surprising, or created
Speaker 1: the most fertile ground to connect. My guest today is
Speaker 1: the Academy Award winning writer and director Cord Jefferson. Cord
Speaker 1: created the movie American fiction, the cracklingly smart film, which
Speaker 1: expands and updates Personval ever its two thousand and one
Speaker 1: novel Erasure. Now, if you listen to this show regularly,
Speaker 1: you'll know it's not really a setup for any kind
Speaker 1: of promo. But what it does offer, and what Cord
Speaker 1: so brilliantly explores in our chat, is the opportunity to
Speaker 1: investigate the way of the creative heart and to consciously
Speaker 1: reveal that, well, it ain't all roses. He introduced me
Speaker 1: to the idea of the third place problem, which observes
Speaker 1: that we are missing spaces outside of our home and
Speaker 1: places of work to interact with and build community. We
Speaker 1: also talked about a shared love of spectacle cuisine, which
Speaker 1: is a genre I've just created, And you're allowed me
Speaker 1: to tell a story about this guy who once used
Speaker 1: a live crab of a seafood tower to try and
Speaker 1: clip the end of his cigar. This is one of
Speaker 1: the most honest and raw conversations that I've had about life,
Speaker 1: the space we take up and are inherited, trauma, and
Speaker 1: the lives of our generationally distant parents. It was an
Speaker 1: honor and a privilege to talk.
Speaker 3: Where and when were you.
Speaker 2: Happiest right now, in this very moment. I'm in New
Speaker 2: York City in a hotel, and I think that I am.
Speaker 2: I'm the happiest now that I've ever been a happiest.
Speaker 2: Happiness has been a very elusive thing for me for
Speaker 2: a very long time. Yeah, I always assumed that contentment
Speaker 2: wasn't going to be a thing for me, that I
Speaker 2: was always going to be sort of like searching and struggling,
Speaker 2: and that was just that was just my temperament, I thought,
Speaker 2: And that was just going to be you know, other
Speaker 2: people could be happy and I was just not going
Speaker 2: to be one of those people. And I just kind
Speaker 2: of grinded it out like that for decades. And in
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen, I was thirty six, and it was the
Speaker 2: worst year of my life, truly, you know, shockingly, because
Speaker 2: on the surface, everything was going well. It was my
Speaker 2: career was flourishing, and I was making all this money,
Speaker 2: more money than I ever made before, and I was,
Speaker 2: you know, working on all these great projects. But you know,
Speaker 2: behind the scenes, I was just always miserable. I would
Speaker 2: cry in the shower and sort of like I have
Speaker 2: to pull all my car over to the side of
Speaker 2: the road because I was weeping, and I just generally
Speaker 2: felt miserable, and I felt like this is unsustainable. It
Speaker 2: felt like I can't keep living like this and being
Speaker 2: miserable like this, And you know, I knew that somehow
Speaker 2: I I was going to destroy my life if I
Speaker 2: didn't sort of get some help, and so I decided
Speaker 2: to go to therapy in twenty eighteen. I've basically been
Speaker 2: going to weekly therapy, if not more since since then,
Speaker 2: so it'll be seven years next year. And also when
Speaker 2: I turned forty on my fortieth birthday, my gift to
Speaker 2: myself was that I started taking zoloft. I started taking
Speaker 2: an antidepressant and anti anxiety medication, which has kind of
Speaker 2: changed my life in a very real way. And so
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, for the past year or so,
Speaker 2: I've taken a step back and realize, like, oh, is
Speaker 2: this Maybe this is what happiness feels like. I think
Speaker 2: that maybe I feel happy for the first time in
Speaker 2: my adult life. It's a strange feeling, because sometimes, you know,
Speaker 2: I wake up sort of I have this muscle memory of, well,
Speaker 2: it's time to wake up and realize why you're miserable today,
Speaker 2: and sort of that instinct I still have that sometimes,
Speaker 2: But then I sit there and I realized that, well,
Speaker 2: there's no reason to be miserable today, Like things are
Speaker 2: going pretty well, and yeah there's challenges here and there,
Speaker 2: of course, but it's no longer the kind of gloom
Speaker 2: that just kind of was hanging over me constantly. And
Speaker 2: so I think that at the age of yeah, at
Speaker 2: the age of forty two, I finally feel like I'm
Speaker 2: the happiest I've ever been, which is it's exciting to
Speaker 2: have finally reached this position because especially when I had
Speaker 2: sort of resigned myself to the idea that it would
Speaker 2: never happen for me.
Speaker 3: Wow, was it a conscious thing?
Speaker 1: Like when you were younger, did you really have a
Speaker 1: kind of executive chat with yourself that was like, look,
Speaker 1: you and me called we're never going to be happy,
Speaker 1: and this is just how it is, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to do all this other stuff, but happiness is not
Speaker 1: anything I'm going to set my coordinates for. Like, was
Speaker 1: it that conscious?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we always think that we're hiding stuff from our parents,
Speaker 2: but it's kind of silly and sort of like when
Speaker 2: you get older to think that you could hide anything
Speaker 2: from your parents. Really, your parents know you so well,
Speaker 2: and when I was nineteen, my mother said to me,
Speaker 2: I think that you have clinical depression. And I said,
Speaker 2: I get out of bed, I go to school, I
Speaker 2: hold down a job, I exercise, Like all these things
Speaker 2: that I had been taught were sort of like hallmarks
Speaker 2: of a depressive. I was like, that doesn't bear any
Speaker 2: resemblance to my life, and so I think that you're
Speaker 2: you know, you're wrong. But what I did say was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think that I have a gloomy temperament from time
Speaker 2: to time, and I certainly think that I'm a cynic
Speaker 2: in many ways. But you know, to me, that was
Speaker 2: just I was just a young realist and this the
Speaker 2: world is hell and the world is pain, and I thought,
Speaker 2: you know, I really wanted to be in like a
Speaker 2: French new wave movie and like smoking cigarettes and kind
Speaker 2: of nihilistic, and I thought that that was kind of cool.
Speaker 2: And it was like, that's okay, if this is how
Speaker 2: it's going to be, because you know, you have an
Speaker 2: artistic temperament, we'll say, and kind of it's okay, you're
Speaker 2: kind of grumpy and you know, surly, I would say,
Speaker 2: but I thought that that was okay. I sort of
Speaker 2: had this foolish idea that I think a lot of
Speaker 2: young aspiring artists do, which is that you know, art
Speaker 2: comes from your pain and your misery. You know, that's
Speaker 2: where the good stuff comes from, is from being upset
Speaker 2: all the time, and that you know, happy art is
Speaker 2: boring art, and that kind of thing. And I think
Speaker 2: that it was okay to me because it felt like
Speaker 2: that was my heroes. My heroes were like Miles Davis,
Speaker 2: like these surly artists who were sort of like mean
Speaker 2: to people and self destructive, and it was like, that's
Speaker 2: who I want to be like. And so to me,
Speaker 2: it felt like it was a fair deal with myself
Speaker 2: that you're going to be unhappy, but you're also going
Speaker 2: to sort of live a creative life, and a lot
Speaker 2: of creative people are unhappy, and so that's okay. And
Speaker 2: so I did, actually, you know, have a conversation with
Speaker 2: myself and just think like that's okay, because I think
Speaker 2: that there's also this thing that like it means that
Speaker 2: you see something that other people don't. There's James Baldwin
Speaker 2: quote that I'm going to paraphrase where he says, to
Speaker 2: be black and halfway conscious in the United States is
Speaker 2: to be in a near constant state of rage. And
Speaker 2: I think that that was sort of like another thing
Speaker 2: that it just felt like, you know, ignorance is bliss,
Speaker 2: and so it felt like, you know, the stupid happy
Speaker 2: people were sort of like the ones that I didn't
Speaker 2: want to be like and that I wanted to separate
Speaker 2: myself from. And so I was somebody who was thoughtful
Speaker 2: and considered the world and paid attention, and so because
Speaker 2: of that, I was also destined to just be miserable
Speaker 2: all the time. And yeah, I was just a stupid kid,
Speaker 2: you know, you realize now and I'm forty two. I
Speaker 2: used to think that I didn't want to live to
Speaker 2: turn forty. I was like, you know, after fortyes boring,
Speaker 2: like you got to get the good stuff when you're young,
Speaker 2: Like who cares when you're forty five? Like how lame
Speaker 2: must life be when you're that age? And I think
Speaker 2: that now. The thing that I've realized when I finally
Speaker 2: sort of met this therapist to one of the things
Speaker 2: that I was dealing with in twenty eighteen was that
Speaker 2: my mother had died in twenty sixteen and I was
Speaker 2: still grieving her, and I wasn't really doing what I
Speaker 2: needed to do to process that grief. And so when
Speaker 2: I went and met my therapist, he told me, I
Speaker 2: think that you have clinical depression. That was the first
Speaker 2: thing that he said, Well, actually that's not It was
Speaker 2: very funny that he said that because my first session
Speaker 2: with him, I came in and I tried to explain
Speaker 2: why I wanted to meet him, and then I just
Speaker 2: started crying, and I cried as I spoke for about
Speaker 2: five to ten minutes, and then he goes, you know what,
Speaker 2: I think that you might be depressed, And it turned
Speaker 2: out that it was exactly right. Yeah, And I said
Speaker 2: the same thing that I said to my mother. You know,
Speaker 2: I exercise, I get out of bed. And he said,
Speaker 2: you know, the same way that there's highly functioning alcoholics,
Speaker 2: there's highly functioning drug addicts, like there's highly functioning depressives too.
Speaker 2: So it's not that you don't have this just because
Speaker 2: you're able to achieve those things. It means that imagine
Speaker 2: what you could achieve if you didn't have this thing
Speaker 2: hanging over your head all the time. That's how you
Speaker 2: should look at it. And so that was really eye
Speaker 2: opening for me. And then beyond that, I've realized like
Speaker 2: learning to sort of like get over my issues and
Speaker 2: taking the meds and doing the work in therapy. The
Speaker 2: work has gotten better because I'm happy, you know, like
Speaker 2: my creativity I feel like is skyrocketed now that I'm
Speaker 2: sort of not dealing with that stuff anymore, because you know,
Speaker 2: it opened up a world of new emotions to me, firstly,
Speaker 2: and then secondly, it's just made me more pleasant to
Speaker 2: be around, and it's made me more excited to be
Speaker 2: around other people, and it's made me more excited to
Speaker 2: talk to collaborators and to work in an environment in
Speaker 2: which I'm having a healthy creative relationship with a lot
Speaker 2: of different people. Like it's just if anything that's put
Speaker 2: my creativity I feel like on a high speed rail.
Speaker 2: And so it was just I'm really really happy that
Speaker 2: I didn't self destruct before I reached this point because
Speaker 2: it's been just so eye opening and so thrilling. It
Speaker 2: feels like I've been reborn in some ways and I
Speaker 2: have a second opportunity of life. It really does.
Speaker 3: Wow, I'm so glad that you're happiest now.
Speaker 2: Thanks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so interesting, Like you don't strike me as yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I love that he lives inside of you.
Speaker 2: But that's because I learned. I got really good at
Speaker 2: suppressing it. You know, I got really good at playing
Speaker 2: playing the game. I got really good being able to
Speaker 2: walk into a room and convince people that I was, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm the happiest guy in the room. That was like
Speaker 2: a real quality that I had. But that made it
Speaker 2: even worse, you know, because then nobody really knew how
Speaker 2: I felt. And that's why I would cry alone, is
Speaker 2: because I was never actually sharing my honest self with anybody.
Speaker 2: I was always hiding it, and so that just augmented
Speaker 2: the problems that I was already having.
Speaker 1: So what is the quality you like least about yourself
Speaker 1: if you've been kind of excavating them?
Speaker 3: How to access the happier bit.
Speaker 2: I'm very very self critical. I really am my own
Speaker 2: harshest critic. I find it difficult to appreciate myself. I
Speaker 2: find it difficult to accept my faults. I find it
Speaker 2: difficult to forgive myself for making mistakes. A large part
Speaker 2: of my therapy is spent going over my relationship with
Speaker 2: my father, and he looms so large in my life
Speaker 2: and so large in my psyche, and he was a
Speaker 2: very demanding figure. It's very hard on us high expectations.
Speaker 2: And I was sitting with a friend a couple of
Speaker 2: years ago, another friend who's going over sort of like
Speaker 2: dealing with her own issues with her parents. And I
Speaker 2: was telling her that I'm embarrassed at how much I
Speaker 2: criticized myself. And I said, you know, I have a problem.
Speaker 2: I've never been a person that can sort of like
Speaker 2: wake up and go back to sleep. Like that's rare
Speaker 2: for me, because when I wake up, there's always a
Speaker 2: voice in my head going, you better get your ass
Speaker 2: out of bed. You know, you better get to work,
Speaker 2: like you're lazy, You're not working hard enough. What's going on?
Speaker 2: What's wrong with you? Like everybody out there is going
Speaker 2: to sort of like beat you. And I told her this,
Speaker 2: and she said, you should ask yourself, why is that
Speaker 2: voice speaking to you in the second person. Why wouldn't
Speaker 2: you say I need to get out of bed. Why
Speaker 2: are you saying you need to get out of it right?
Speaker 2: Why is that kind of disembodied that way? And I realized, like, oh,
Speaker 2: because it's probably my father's voice. It's not me speaking
Speaker 2: to myself. It's sort of like me replicating the conversations
Speaker 2: I had with my father in my own head, and
Speaker 2: so I have adopted that criticism and sort of started
Speaker 2: criticizing myself, and it's frustrating, but it's also there's also
Speaker 2: part of me that's like, maybe it's useful I will
Speaker 2: distill my relationship with my father into this story that
Speaker 2: I had, actually I think like suppressed for a long time,
Speaker 2: but it's come up in the recent years and I
Speaker 2: think about it often. I used to play a lot
Speaker 2: of soccer when I was a kid, and my parents
Speaker 2: got me private coaching lessons with this guy on the weekends,
Speaker 2: and so on Saturdays I would go and sometimes there'd
Speaker 2: be two of us. Sometimes there'd be three or four
Speaker 2: of us, but at the end of every session you
Speaker 2: would have a scrimmage, and so if it was four
Speaker 2: of us, would be two on two. But that day
Speaker 2: there was just two of us, so we did one
Speaker 2: on one. And I'm from Arizona, so it's you know,
Speaker 2: one hundred and eleven degrees in the summertime. It's Saturday.
Speaker 2: I've been out here running like so hot, I'm so tired,
Speaker 2: and I'm playing against this kid. As he's dribbling the
Speaker 2: ball toward me, I hear this voice out of nowhere
Speaker 2: scream beat him, beat him, he's tired, beat him. And
Speaker 2: I look to the side and my father has shown
Speaker 2: up early and he's rooting for the other boy in
Speaker 2: the scrimmage, like my own dad has shown up to
Speaker 2: like cheer against me at this game. And so I
Speaker 2: can't even remember what happened, but you know, practice is over.
Speaker 2: I remember sitting in the car next to him and
Speaker 2: we're like driving in silence. I'm so mad at him,
Speaker 2: I'm embarrassed, I'm angry, and we're driving along in silence,
Speaker 2: and at a certain point he turns to me and
Speaker 2: he said, nobody in life is going to be harder
Speaker 2: on you than I am, and that's going to make
Speaker 2: you strong. That's going to make you resilient, and it's
Speaker 2: going to make you strong. And looking back on that,
Speaker 2: I am incredibly resilient. I know.
Speaker 3: But perhaps does he get to take the credit.
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to say that this is like a
Speaker 2: rosy story that I look back on fondly. It's certainly
Speaker 2: a painful story in some ways. But what I'm saying
Speaker 2: is I do believe that there was something in there
Speaker 2: that has helped me. You know, you have to injure
Speaker 2: your muscles for your muscles to grow, so like you
Speaker 2: have to go through pain in order to sort of
Speaker 2: get stronger in some ways. And it is a quality
Speaker 2: that I think every artist needs to have, especially like
Speaker 2: you really need to have just an undefeatable resilience. You
Speaker 2: just need to wake up every day and say, like,
Speaker 2: I don't care if all of these people said no
Speaker 2: to me. I'm going to keep going. And so look,
Speaker 2: I think that there's probably other healthier ways to learn
Speaker 2: that lesson, but I developed it in the way that
Speaker 2: I developed it. And so you know, as much as
Speaker 2: I look at those moments and I'm like I wish
Speaker 2: that we would have gone about that differently, I can't
Speaker 2: look at it and say that it hasn't helped me
Speaker 2: in some way. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3: It does.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There was a dark night of the soul with my father,
Speaker 1: who said a lot of stuff as fathers to, but
Speaker 1: I do remember on one agonizing occasion, well, I again
Speaker 1: just didn't really want to hear this particular thing was he.
Speaker 3: Said, It's all a gift. It's all this agony.
Speaker 1: All of this failure, all of this self pity, all
Speaker 1: of this heartbreak, it is all a gift and all
Speaker 1: your job is is to calibrate yourself to be able
Speaker 1: to take that gift and turn into something else. And
Speaker 1: it's brutal, but it was true. I think there was
Speaker 1: a kind of way. I think it's often with our parents.
Speaker 1: It could have been more kindly offered, but it is
Speaker 1: all a gift.
Speaker 2: I agree with that. I think that you have to
Speaker 2: be able to.
Speaker 1: Adapt what relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you.
Speaker 2: Have you ever seen a film Cold War? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Cold War for me is the love story that I
Speaker 2: think is the one that struck me as being the
Speaker 2: one that I find like most romantic, despite the fact
Speaker 2: that it's incredibly dark and sad. In case people haven't
Speaker 2: seen Cold War, it's a Polish film about the Cold
Speaker 2: War from the forties to the sixties, and it's this couple.
Speaker 2: They sort of fall in love and I believe that
Speaker 2: he's a bandleader and she's a singer, or maybe he's
Speaker 2: just a musician and she's a singer. I don't remember,
Speaker 2: but they fall in love and they decide one day
Speaker 2: that they're going to run away to West Berlin and
Speaker 2: I think they're doing a show in East Berlin, and
Speaker 2: they decide they're going to flee to West Berlin, and
Speaker 2: that night when he decides to flee, she doesn't show up,
Speaker 2: and so he tries to go by himself, and I
Speaker 2: believe he gets conn I can't remember. But anyway, circumstance
Speaker 2: and time takes them apart and they come back together,
Speaker 2: and then time takes them apart again when they find
Speaker 2: each other another time. You know, they are both in relationships.
Speaker 2: She's now married, he's got a new woman that he's dating.
Speaker 2: But then they meet each other my hamp and stance
Speaker 2: again and it's like he says to her, you are
Speaker 2: the woman of my life. And despite the fact that
Speaker 2: they haven't seen each other in like seven or eight years,
Speaker 2: he's like, I still love you. And then they're taking
Speaker 2: a part again. And I just think that that, to
Speaker 2: me is like the endurance of that part of that
Speaker 2: is appealing to me, because you know, I think that
Speaker 2: when you join this industry that we are in, you
Speaker 2: kind of almost literally are joining the circus. You know,
Speaker 2: it's like you're on the road, you're traveling all the time,
Speaker 2: you're not in one place for a very long and
Speaker 2: so you really need to sort of know that the
Speaker 2: people in your life are going to still love you
Speaker 2: even if you're gone for six months or two years,
Speaker 2: Like you can come back and feel like, you know,
Speaker 2: you haven't forgotten about me, and I haven't forgotten about you,
Speaker 2: and like the love that we had still endures, and
Speaker 2: the feelings that I had about you still endure. And
Speaker 2: I think that that, to me has always felt like
Speaker 2: the most beautiful love story is that sort of like
Speaker 2: time and circumstance can come in and take you away
Speaker 2: from each other, but despite the fact, like there's still
Speaker 2: a flame there. I just think that that's so beautiful.
Speaker 1: I think it's Harboca something like that. I remember going
Speaker 1: to see his movies as a kid in London and
Speaker 1: Harville Pavlakowski.
Speaker 2: Public Cloud Pavlakowski.
Speaker 1: Okay, butchering the Polish. Yeah, I love that. Love is
Speaker 1: so why I love the vendors as well. The love
Speaker 1: that exists out of time, the love that exists out
Speaker 1: of temporal restraint conditions, the idea truly what the meaning
Speaker 1: for me of love is love it exists outside of
Speaker 1: everything else or the conditions of the world.
Speaker 3: I think that's really beautiful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree with that, even though it is it
Speaker 1: is impractical to not be married to the person that
Speaker 1: you love.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I think that that's the perfect summation of
Speaker 2: it is that I think that's love is just impractical.
Speaker 2: And I think that a lot of you know, the
Speaker 2: reasons that sort of like people get in relationships or
Speaker 2: marriages so frequently are practical. It's like, well, this makes sense.
Speaker 2: You know, this person is in close proximity to me,
Speaker 2: we live in the same town, we go to the
Speaker 2: same church.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 2: I just think that there's a lot of sort of
Speaker 2: like calculations that people do where they're like, yeah, this
Speaker 2: makes sense, and this is why I'm going to get
Speaker 2: married to this person. And I think that for me,
Speaker 2: sort of real love as I define it, is about impracticality.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, I know that that doesn't make sense
Speaker 2: that I'm married to this person, but I still love
Speaker 2: my boyfriend from eight years ago, right, But you know
Speaker 2: that's because love is confusing and mysterious and impractical.
Speaker 3: I agree. I agree.
Speaker 1: I fell in love with Addison while completely and utterly
Speaker 1: heartbroken and shredded and ruined so much that I didn't
Speaker 1: think that it was love until later, and then I
Speaker 1: realized that's exactly what it was the most impossible, the
Speaker 1: most impractical, the most implausible version of actually loving someone.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: God, I want to go back and watch that film there.
Speaker 2: It's amazing. Highly recommend it. Yeah, it's so beautiful.
Speaker 3: What question would you most like answered?
Speaker 2: That's a good one. What do people say to this one?
Speaker 3: I'll tell you. I'll tell you a couple of things.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: A lot of people want to know what happens when
Speaker 1: you die, and they want to know of the people
Speaker 1: that they love if they will see them again. That's
Speaker 1: probably the number one. The second is Aliens m h.
Speaker 1: And my absolute favorite of all time is Jamila Jamil,
Speaker 1: who said, does anybody really enjoy reverse Cowgirl?
Speaker 2: I've worked with Jamila that sounds like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a good place together. It made me laugh so hard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I feel the way about having sex in
Speaker 2: the shower. I don't think anybody actually.
Speaker 1: By the way, I said that on a list of
Speaker 1: things that I love and things that I hate, and
Speaker 1: I was like, the idea of sex in the shower
Speaker 1: versus sex in the.
Speaker 3: Shower, Yeah, exactly fucking rotten. I got a harsh response.
Speaker 3: But it's a way to do it's.
Speaker 2: Not fun, it's not and you think it's going to be,
Speaker 2: but it's not.
Speaker 3: It sounds fun. Well, you don't have to I know.
Speaker 2: I'm going to answer it. I was worried that everybody
Speaker 2: just must say the same thing, so I would, I think,
Speaker 2: alter the what happens when we die? And this is
Speaker 2: going to be unfair because it's going to be two questions.
Speaker 2: It is is God real? And if so, what does
Speaker 2: God want from us? I just think that there's just
Speaker 2: so much tumultuousness these days, and I think that we're
Speaker 2: in a crisis right now as human beings. I think
Speaker 2: we're in a crisis of meaning. Do you know the
Speaker 2: third place problem? Have you? Have you heard about this?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: What is it?
Speaker 2: So? The third place problem is the world used to
Speaker 2: be filled with all these third places, right And I
Speaker 2: think that England beats America this way because I think
Speaker 2: you still have like pub culture, you know, which is
Speaker 2: sort of like a very real thing still there. But
Speaker 2: in America the third place was like, well, your first
Speaker 2: place is home, your second places work, and then the
Speaker 2: third place used to be like church or your bowling league,
Speaker 2: Like what are these places that you're going to to
Speaker 2: actually commune with other people that have nothing to do?
Speaker 2: With your family life at home or your work life.
Speaker 2: And there used to be sort of like all of
Speaker 2: these things that people participated in. They used to go
Speaker 2: to church a lot, They used to be part of
Speaker 2: these social groups.
Speaker 3: Yeah, be part of a community exactly.
Speaker 2: And so now we're seeing all of these kinds of
Speaker 2: social groups contract. Church attendance's way down. People don't even
Speaker 2: really go into the office anymore. So like the first
Speaker 2: and second place, it's just one. Your home is your office,
Speaker 2: So you're not even getting out to go hang out
Speaker 2: in an office with your coworkers anymore. And so we're
Speaker 2: in this place where I think people have really lost
Speaker 2: faith and institutions, they've lost hope in the future. Young
Speaker 2: people are seeing like the world literally melt. I just
Speaker 2: think that we've reached this place where people have lost
Speaker 2: faith in everything and lost meaning. There's no meaning for
Speaker 2: people and things anymore. And so I think that once
Speaker 2: we have that, especially in America, people don't even believe
Speaker 2: in America anymore. It's like what even is that, Like
Speaker 2: we don't even believe in the country as a sort
Speaker 2: of like whole anymore. And we look at people as
Speaker 2: saying like, well, we've started dividing it into like red
Speaker 2: states and blue states as opposed to just sort of
Speaker 2: like an entire continuous nation. And so I think that
Speaker 2: for me, it's like I just really want something to
Speaker 2: give people meaning again. I'm hopeful that we can find
Speaker 2: some sort of semblance of national or sort of like
Speaker 2: global meaning and global sort of like hope.
Speaker 1: Is that why you'd like to know if God Israel?
Speaker 1: Because God could potentially be that meaning?
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I'm just like, what do you want from us?
Speaker 2: Man or woman? What are you really trying to do here?
Speaker 2: Even if it's just like, well, it's just an experiment
Speaker 2: to see if you guys can get along, Like even
Speaker 2: that is a semblance of a way forward.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting is that idea of like, without cultural splicity,
Speaker 1: you lose meaning that when you literally filay out a
Speaker 1: version of coming together, whether that's literal or figurative, you
Speaker 1: do you lose meaning.
Speaker 3: The center will not hold absolutely.
Speaker 2: And I think that that, to me has become one
Speaker 2: of our primary difficulties as a species these days, is
Speaker 2: just I agree, total lack of meaning.
Speaker 1: I agree, And you know what my little microcosmic observance,
Speaker 1: I mean, from where I live, moving into a place
Speaker 1: that has community. You've been to where I live in California,
Speaker 1: and that that little enclave, the way in which we
Speaker 1: check in on each other, and you do your elderly
Speaker 1: neighbors shopping, and there are kids who are the naughty
Speaker 1: kids and the people that drive too fast, and everybody
Speaker 1: connects around these things, good, bad and different, annoying, happy, joyful.
Speaker 1: The weddings, the funerals, the memorial the walks, the sadness,
Speaker 1: the seeing somebody crying in the street, all of that
Speaker 1: stuff has refashioned me. Just my being in that community
Speaker 1: for the twenty four years that I've lived there. It
Speaker 1: radically changed the way that I interacted with the rest
Speaker 1: of the world. It radically changed the way that I
Speaker 1: was alone in a hotel room in a foreign city,
Speaker 1: which has always been sort of overwhelming and other and strange.
Speaker 1: And I've long since thought that community building is the
Speaker 1: way in which we get back that, not dismantling communities
Speaker 1: because of our differences, but rather the commonality of living
Speaker 1: next door to someone, even if you don't agree with
Speaker 1: their politics. There is something I don't know. I chat
Speaker 1: with my neighbor who's a Trump supporter, about our kids
Speaker 1: and swimming and how cold the ocean is and the
Speaker 1: weather and wather they'll be waves, and we have a
Speaker 1: really cordial relationship that makes me feel like there is
Speaker 1: a way of communicating that we've just forgotten about.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and there's purpose in that. You found purpose in
Speaker 2: building a community and taking care of others and seeing
Speaker 2: the good and sort of like your neighbor. I think
Speaker 2: that that, to me, that's all we really need. You know,
Speaker 2: it's not like curing cancer. It's like that's all just
Speaker 2: like just a small semblance of something that's like, you
Speaker 2: know what, here's what you can do in your life
Speaker 2: that takes you out of your own head, that forces
Speaker 2: you to think about others for a second, that forces
Speaker 2: you to sort of like leave your home and sort
Speaker 2: of like participate in something that to me is all
Speaker 2: it's just small adjustments. But we've all become so addicted
Speaker 2: to the internet and so closed off from the rest
Speaker 2: of the world that it becomes difficult to see outside
Speaker 2: of your own brain sometimes.
Speaker 1: And yet it actually is actionable, like so much is
Speaker 1: not shit that we can change, and that actually it
Speaker 1: actually is something that you can go, Yeah, maybe I'm
Speaker 1: going to go and I don't know, knock on my
Speaker 1: neighbor's door. I think there's kind of incremental ways.
Speaker 3: Yeah, out of the isolation.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me what person, place, or experience most
Speaker 1: altered your life.
Speaker 2: My father, hands down. He's still alive, he's still with us,
Speaker 2: and he has by far had the most profound impact
Speaker 2: on me, as I've in great ways in ways that
Speaker 2: I really dislike about myself. And you know, much of
Speaker 2: what I've been trying to undo in therapy is lessons
Speaker 2: than my father taught me, not just sort of like
Speaker 2: the self criticism and stuff and the demanding nature that
Speaker 2: he had over us, but also the way that I
Speaker 2: learned to be a man from my father was my
Speaker 2: dad was very you know, being a man meant being
Speaker 2: very stoic, very emotionally distant. You never let anybody see
Speaker 2: you cry, You never let anybody see that you're having
Speaker 2: a bad day. Nobody wants to hear you complain, like
Speaker 2: suffer in silence and move forward. And my dad was
Speaker 2: a Vietnam veteran, and so you know, he did two
Speaker 2: tours in Vietnam and came back with pretty bad pe PTSD.
Speaker 2: But they didn't really have a vocabulary for PTSD. Then
Speaker 2: nobody even really knew what that was. They called it
Speaker 2: shell shock, you know, And so he came back and
Speaker 2: just white knuckled it for decades. And so growing up
Speaker 2: I just there was a real emotional distance with my
Speaker 2: father and I never saw him cry. He never spoke
Speaker 2: about his emotions. Really, it was always closed off. And
Speaker 2: so I that sort of led to me growing up
Speaker 2: that way, and I, as I said earlier, I was
Speaker 2: just very emotionally shut off, tamped everything down until it
Speaker 2: would explode sometimes in sort of like bouts of rage.
Speaker 2: And that to me has been the sort of like
Speaker 2: biggest unburdening of my life is when I learned to
Speaker 2: be open and honest with people and just sort of
Speaker 2: tell people how I was actually feeling. Like the hardest
Speaker 2: thing in the world for me, a thing that I
Speaker 2: could have never said ever, even five years ago, was
Speaker 2: you hurt my feelings, Like saying to somebody like you
Speaker 2: hurt saying something as simple as like that hurt my feelings,
Speaker 2: because I would have been like, a man doesn't say that.
Speaker 2: Man says you hurt my feelings, because that's expressing some
Speaker 2: sense of vulnerability.
Speaker 1: Just being able to do it differently, whether it's recognizing
Speaker 1: that the voice in your head is your father's voice
Speaker 1: and allowing that to peter out, or being able to
Speaker 1: say to someone that hurt my feelings. Do you feel
Speaker 1: triumphants the wrong word? But do you feel that you
Speaker 1: have carved a different pathway?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Oh yeah. And again I'm really happy that I
Speaker 2: did it when I did, because I think that it
Speaker 2: could have gone very poorly. It could have gone the
Speaker 2: other way if I didn't learn that. Like I said,
Speaker 2: I really do think that I was going to explode
Speaker 2: my life in some way. Yeah. I feel of every
Speaker 2: professional accomplishment I've had in the past six years, nothing
Speaker 2: is more valuable to me than the emotional strides that
Speaker 2: I've made. It's the biggest growth and most important growth
Speaker 2: I've ever had in my life. And yeah, I would
Speaker 2: say triumphant is the right word. It does feel like
Speaker 2: because you know, people can't get out of their own
Speaker 2: way sometimes. And I will say, the thing that I
Speaker 2: think is one of the most impressive things about my
Speaker 2: father is that, at the age of eighty one, last year,
Speaker 2: I finally got him to start going to therapy.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: And so he now goes to therapy as an eighty
Speaker 2: two year old man and is trying to work through
Speaker 2: the stuff that he didn't work through for the previous
Speaker 2: sixty years of his life. And I think that it's
Speaker 2: so hard. It is so hard to admit that you
Speaker 2: are going through some stuff and that you need some help.
Speaker 2: That is a very very difficult to admit. It's very
Speaker 2: difficult to admit, especially for men. It's especially difficult for
Speaker 2: black men to admit this. And it's especially if difficult
Speaker 2: for a black man born in the nineteen forties to say, like,
Speaker 2: I need some emotional help and I'm not doing well.
Speaker 2: And so I am just so incredibly proud of him,
Speaker 2: and he's told me that it's helping him, and so
Speaker 2: it does feel triumphant. I think that it is. It's
Speaker 2: a triumphant thing for somebody to be able to do that.
Speaker 3: I agree.
Speaker 1: And at eighty two, like my mom had started a
Speaker 1: new business a couple of weeks before she died, Like
Speaker 1: I think the idea of time running out, there's always time.
Speaker 1: There's always time, absolutely till that very last moment.
Speaker 3: Okay, what would be your last meal?
Speaker 2: Martini? Two glasses, that should be a Caesar salad, and
Speaker 2: a seafood tower.
Speaker 1: Now do you like the grandiosity of the Seafood Tower
Speaker 1: as much as the seafood because.
Speaker 2: I do, yes. I think that more more is more.
Speaker 2: I think there should be more spectacle in our food,
Speaker 2: in our di I like a table side caesar where
Speaker 2: they make the dressing in front of you with the
Speaker 2: egg and the thing. I like when they flombay things
Speaker 2: next to the table and they fire like. I like that.
Speaker 1: I like it when they roll trolleys and it clackety
Speaker 1: can't the restaurant and there's gonna be a show exactly.
Speaker 2: That is my favorite thing. And so I like the
Speaker 2: grandiosity of the Seafood Tower while also just sort of
Speaker 2: like really loving seafood. There's like a decadence to it.
Speaker 2: It's both elegant but also you're tearing tails off with
Speaker 2: your bare hands and stuff, so it gets kind of messy,
Speaker 2: and like it's just it's a good meal to share.
Speaker 2: I think that every meal it's really fun to be
Speaker 2: there with a group of people and be sharing that.
Speaker 2: That's my go to God.
Speaker 3: That's so good.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to tell you here in London they're
Speaker 1: not afraid of a spectacle. Eye witnessed the Seafood Tower
Speaker 1: the other day, complete with dripping seaweed and like it was.
Speaker 1: It was immense, and there was a tear that had
Speaker 1: two live crabs on it and they had rubber bands
Speaker 1: on that.
Speaker 3: It just was awful. It was like the circus at.
Speaker 1: The table, and I wanted to free the crabs and
Speaker 1: I wanted to grab them, get them down the toilet
Speaker 1: out into the world. And this now felt like I
Speaker 1: was back in Dekenzie in London with this guy. He
Speaker 1: got out a cigar and he took the rubber band
Speaker 1: off the crab claw, and I think he wanted His
Speaker 1: idea was that the crab was going to cut the
Speaker 1: cigar for him, but the crab just took the cigar.
Speaker 1: And so now you've got a crab with a cigar,
Speaker 1: and now the guy's trying to light the cigar in
Speaker 1: the restaurant with all the people and like the weight.
Speaker 1: Now people are looking, oh no, this is going very bad.
Speaker 3: What's going to happen?
Speaker 1: And it was so funny because the waiters and the
Speaker 1: staff who'd been all with the pomp and the s
Speaker 1: arema and the whole thing, they literally had to come
Speaker 1: and kind of confiscate everything off this guy, like no
Speaker 1: cigar get rid of the light up, put the rubber band,
Speaker 1: no crabs for you, goodbye?
Speaker 3: They shut it down.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 3: It was for about thirty seconds. It was absolutely mayhem.
Speaker 2: That may have been my father. Actually I should check
Speaker 2: and see if he's dad.
Speaker 3: Were you in London?
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I could see him doing that.
Speaker 3: In your life.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me something that has grown out of
Speaker 1: a personal disaster?
Speaker 2: Yes, So in my film. There's a scene in the
Speaker 2: film in American Fiction where two brothers are speaking and
Speaker 2: one of them tells his older brother, you know, this
Speaker 2: brother has just come out of the closet is gay.
Speaker 2: He's in his mid forties, he's married with children, and
Speaker 2: he's finally decided to come out as a gay man.
Speaker 2: And so he's really exploring his new life. And their
Speaker 2: father has died about seven years prior, and so he
Speaker 2: says to his brother, I've been thinking of a lot
Speaker 2: about how dad died not knowing that I'm gay, and
Speaker 2: it makes me really sad that he never knew the
Speaker 2: sort of fullness of me. And his brother says, well,
Speaker 2: what if he had known and rejected you for it?
Speaker 2: And he says, well, I wouldn't have cared, because he
Speaker 2: would at least know me. And that's what's important and
Speaker 2: that I put in there, because that is a speech
Speaker 2: that I wish I would have given myself about my mother.
Speaker 2: And I'm not gay, but my mother died not knowing
Speaker 2: the fullness of me. There was stuff that I kept
Speaker 2: from her. I have tattoos, and my mother didn't know
Speaker 2: that I had tattoos until about three or four months
Speaker 2: before she died, because I was so nervous because I
Speaker 2: knew that she would disapprove and she didn't love tattoos,
Speaker 2: and so I was so nervous about showing her that
Speaker 2: I had tattoos. And I finally showed her, and you know,
Speaker 2: she didn't care. Of course she didn't care. She's unconditional love.
Speaker 2: Because my mother was disowned by her family for marrying
Speaker 2: my father because he's black, and so I never met
Speaker 2: my grandparents. My mother didn't speak to her father until
Speaker 2: he was on his deathbed, and she said to me once,
Speaker 2: she said, I've tried to think of something that you
Speaker 2: could do that would make me not want to talk
Speaker 2: to you anymore. She said, I've thought of you murdering people,
Speaker 2: and like the idea of like you doing even the
Speaker 2: world things in the world. There was still no way
Speaker 2: that I could ever stop talking to you or stop
Speaker 2: loving you, she said, even in that, and she said,
Speaker 2: especially not for marrying somebody with a different skin color
Speaker 2: than you. But that didn't penetrate. And I still hit
Speaker 2: a lot of myself from my mom, because I hit
Speaker 2: a lot of things from everybody. As I said, I
Speaker 2: was a stoic and I didn't talk about my emotions
Speaker 2: and I sort of like never actually grappled with my feelings,
Speaker 2: and so that to me, you know, it took me
Speaker 2: a while. She died in twenty sixteen. I started really
Speaker 2: taking care of my mental health in twenty eighteen, and
Speaker 2: one of the things that I thought about was the
Speaker 2: fact that I was encountering all these new emotions and
Speaker 2: I was learning all this stuff about myself and learning
Speaker 2: why I did the things that I did, like what
Speaker 2: made me feel the way that I felt. And it
Speaker 2: was like wonderful because I was like, oh my God,
Speaker 2: like I said, it's like a renaissance. Like I'm like,
Speaker 2: my mind is open to all these new things about
Speaker 2: myself that I'd never considered before. My relationship with my father,
Speaker 2: my relationship with my siblings, like all of this stuff
Speaker 2: was sort of all of a sudden, It felt like
Speaker 2: I was firing on all cylinders and learning all this
Speaker 2: stuff about myself, and it was exciting. But then I
Speaker 2: remember being overwhelmed at this moment in time where I realized, like,
Speaker 2: but my mom's never going to know this version of me.
Speaker 2: She's only going to know the guy that was like
Speaker 2: emotionally closed off and withholding, and she's never going to
Speaker 2: know me at my fullest. And that made me so sad.
Speaker 2: It made me so sad that I hadn't done the
Speaker 2: work early enough to let her see me at my best,
Speaker 2: to allow her to see me at a time when
Speaker 2: I feel like I've finally become the person that I've
Speaker 2: been trying to be my whole life, you know, and
Speaker 2: it took me forty two years to get here. But
Speaker 2: she's never going to see it, and it makes me sad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know what as a mother, As a mother,
Speaker 1: I can say, without a shadow of debt, the fact
Speaker 1: that you did it at all is all that matters.
Speaker 1: She would not want you burdened with the idea that
Speaker 1: she had to know that you did that. Yeah, she
Speaker 1: would just want you to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the best way to look at it. And
Speaker 2: I obviously get very emotional about it, but you know what,
Speaker 2: the thing that you're saying is true because it is like, yeah,
Speaker 2: as I said, I've never felt happier, I've never felt better.
Speaker 2: And it makes sense that you know that she was
Speaker 2: the catalyst for that because it's what she always wanted
Speaker 2: for me. You know. It's like looking back, like I said,
Speaker 2: like she told me when I was nineteen, I think
Speaker 2: you have depression, and eventually I sort of really forced
Speaker 2: myself to deal with that and encounter that. So she
Speaker 2: was the catalyst in many ways, and so it was
Speaker 2: tragedy but it led to triumph.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, well what a place to wind up.
Speaker 2: I love this. This is great.
Speaker 1: I can't thank you enough for your your candor and
Speaker 1: your kindness.
Speaker 2: It's such an honor, it's such an honestly.
Speaker 1: It's it's so brilliant to hear it, like I always
Speaker 1: feel that, like to feel the shared space with someone
Speaker 1: that you're speaking to, like the overlaps. Like Addison loves
Speaker 1: these ven diagrams. He's always making ven diagrams of our relationship.
Speaker 3: What is him and what is me?
Speaker 1: And what is our overlap, but it's so amazing when
Speaker 1: talking to people like you who trigger thoughts that I
Speaker 1: know I'll be thinking about this for a while. I
Speaker 1: know I'll revisit it and ponder things that you've said,
Speaker 1: and it's so amazing.
Speaker 3: So thank you, so so much.
Speaker 2: It's a true one. It's been a real delight to
Speaker 2: speak with you. You're one of my favorite people that
Speaker 2: I've met in recent years. You're very thoughtful and honest,
Speaker 2: and I could just talk to you all day.
Speaker 3: So thank you, Thank you. Courd.
Speaker 1: Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver,
Speaker 1: Executive produced by Me and Aaron Kaufman, with production support
Speaker 1: from Jennifer Bassett, Zoe Denkler and Ali Perry. The theme
Speaker 1: music is also by Me and additional music by Aaron Kaufman.
Speaker 1: Special banks to Jim Nikolay Addison, O'Day, Henry Driver, Lisa Castello,
Speaker 1: Annik Oppenheim, a, Nique Muller and Annette Wolfe, A W
Speaker 1: K p R. Will Pearson, Nikki Etor, Morgan Levoy and
Speaker 1: Mangesh her Ticke Adore