James Gunn

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard: Episode Featuring James Gunn Release Date: July 9, 2025

In this insightful and engaging episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, host Dax Shepard sits down with the multifaceted filmmaker James Gunn—a producer, screenwriter, musician, and co-CEO of DC Studios. Their conversation delves deep into Gunn's personal journey, his professional milestones, and his current projects, offering listeners a comprehensive look into the mind of one of Hollywood's dynamic directors.

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Early Life and Influences

James Gunn opens up about his upbringing in Manchester, Missouri, highlighting a transition from a rural setting with soybean fields and horses to the suburban landscape he inhabits today. Growing up as the eldest of six siblings, Gunn shares poignant memories, including the tragic loss of his younger sister shortly after birth.

Notable Quote:

"I grew up in a place called Manchester, Missouri, which was rural when I was young. I had soybean fields and horses that lived behind me. But as time went on, it became super suburbia, which it is now."
[09:20] James Gunn

Gunn also reflects on his early interest in punk rock and horror movies, citing the Sex Pistols and classic horror films like Abbott and Costello vs. Frankenstein as significant influences that shaped his artistic identity.

Notable Quote:

"When I saw the Sex Pistols, it was like seeing the edge of the horizon roll down to see a completely other planet that I didn't know existed."
[13:29] James Gunn

Sobriety and Personal Struggles

A pivotal moment in Gunn's life was achieving sobriety at 19 years old, a decision that not only transformed his personal life but also positively influenced his family and friends. He candidly discusses his battles with addiction, detailing his dependence on substances like marijuana and cocaine during his college years.

Notable Quote:

"I've been sober since I've been 19 years old. I got sober, then my dad got sober, then my brother got sober, then my other brother got sober. My next door neighbor, who is like a brother to us, got sober."
[20:50] James Gunn

Gunn emphasizes the importance of support systems and shares how his sobriety journey has profoundly impacted his creativity and professional endeavors.

Career Milestones: Writing and Directing

Transitioning into his professional life, Gunn recounts his early ventures into screenwriting and filmmaking. He discusses the creation of The Toxic Avenger and Slither, highlighting the challenges and triumphs of independent filmmaking.

Notable Quote:

"If I could write a movie, make a movie, edit a movie and then burn it, I'd probably be happy."
[39:30] James Gunn

His breakthrough came with the widely acclaimed Scooby-Doo movies, which significantly elevated his status in the industry. Gunn shares the exhilaration of seeing Scooby-Doo perform phenomenally at the box office.

Notable Quote:

"I knew that I went from being nobody to having a career in this industry that was huge."
[42:31] James Gunn

Firing and Public Controversy

The episode takes a somber turn as Gunn discusses a major setback in his career—being fired from a project due to controversial tweets from his past. He reflects on the emotional turmoil and the pressure of public scrutiny that followed the incident.

Notable Quote:

"Everything I had done was really to be rich and famous so that people would love me. And that a lot of what I did was not based upon being a creative individual or a calling or anything, but so that I could finally be accepted and loved."
[53:20] James Gunn

Despite the adversity, Gunn highlights the unwavering support from his friends and colleagues, which ultimately helped him rebuild his career.

Rebuilding with DC Studios and Superman

Reinvigorated by the support, Gunn details his transition to DC Studios and his role in shaping the future of the DC Universe. He shares his vision for the Superman movie, aiming to present a fresh and original take on the iconic superhero without retreading familiar ground.

Notable Quote:

"Superman is Superman. He's a good-natured guy who's an alien, and it has the same backstory as everybody else."
[62:52] James Gunn

Gunn also discusses the meticulous casting process for Superman, emphasizing the importance of finding an actor who embodies the character's essence both aesthetically and emotionally.

Notable Quote:

"We cast a very wide net and we had everybody that we could think of auditioning. Nick screen tested for Superman, and it was not 12 seconds into the audition."
[69:40] James Gunn

Approach to Storytelling and Themes

Gunn elaborates on his storytelling philosophy, striving to balance the fantastical elements of the DC Universe with grounded, relatable character arcs. He aims to infuse his narratives with humor, emotion, and moral complexities, akin to his work in Guardians of the Galaxy and Peacemaker.

Notable Quote:

"I wanted to focus on a moment in his life that we hadn't really focused on. In this case, it's his early career as Superman and as Clark Kent and his relationship with Lo Lane."
[62:57] James Gunn

He also touches on ethical dilemmas portrayed in his work, such as the famous Trolley Problem, to explore characters' moral compass and decision-making processes.

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Conclusion

Throughout the episode, James Gunn offers a candid and introspective look into his life, from personal struggles to professional triumphs. His dedication to storytelling, resilience in the face of controversy, and innovative vision for the DC Universe make for a compelling narrative that resonates with both fans and aspiring creatives alike.

Notable Quote:

"I believe that if I can make the world slightly better with stories about people that are good people or learning about themselves or in touch with their emotions, that it's something."
[40:56] James Gunn

Listeners are left inspired by Gunn's journey and his unwavering commitment to his craft, underscoring the transformative power of vulnerability and authenticity in both personal growth and creative expression.

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Note: Timestamps are approximate and based on the provided transcript.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert. Round two of Superman Week. We have the esteemed filmmaker James Gunn on. He's a producer, a screenwriter, a musician and the co CEO of DC Studios. He's made the best superhero movies. I mean, get real. Guardians of the Galaxy, Groot, Groot, Shout Out Groot the Suicide Squad, Peacemaker, Slither, super. And now, of course, Superman.

[Monica Padman]

This was a very fun interview.

[Dax Shepard]

This was a very fun interview.

[Monica Padman]

I really enjoyed it. And if you stick around, if you watch.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yeah, if you watch. I am.

[James Gunn]

Well, shit.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't want to ruin.

[Monica Padman]

We don't want to ruin it.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm in a.

[Monica Padman]

You'll hear there's a visual.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Please enjoy James Gunn. We are supported by Audible. Thanks to Audible for being the presenting sponsor of today's episode. We could all use an escape these days. And the best way to do it, audible. With over 1 million titles in their selection, there's more to imagine with Audible. We are supported by Twizzlers. The fun never stops with Twizzlers. And we know that because we're Twiz heads. Big F. My secret passion is to bite the ends off of it and use the Twizzler as a straw. Twizzlers aren't overly sweet. They've got a perfectly subtle sweetness and a simply delicious flavor. And they're great for sharing. If your friends and family are lucky, that is. It depends how generous you're feeling. Sometimes you've just got to keep them to yourself, you know, this summer, get your hands on those chewy twists that everyone knows and loves. Grab a bag of Twizzlers and stretch out the fun. We are supported by Macy's. Okay, we've talked about Macy's for a while now and you know, we're big fans. It's a great place to go if you're looking for, well, a ton of stuff. Apparel, footwear, electronics, home goods, fragrance. They've got it all. But what you might not know about Macy's is that they have personal stylists on staff that can help you find pieces that are perfect for you. And it's free. Not all of us are style gurus, but lucky for us, Macy's found the people that are. And it's like a style coach joining your team to help you look your best for your next big event. Their whole MO is to make you feel comfortable, look great, and have fun at the store. Their personal stylists will help you find pieces you might not have considered before so you can look your best. Getting a style revamp can really boost your confidence. Check it out now for yourself. Book an appointment with a Macy's personal stylist at no extra cost. And when you do, you'll get 20% off your first purchase on whatever you decide to buy. Make an appointment@macy's.com personal stylist.

[James Gunn]

Sounds like there's a tour bus outside.

[Monica Padman]

That's Dax. He calls that Big Brown. He travels around in that thing.

[James Gunn]

Really?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, he'll tell you all about it. He'll be very excited to talk about Big Brown. There's a big surprise for you coming your way.

[James Gunn]

I wonder what that is. Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Everything's normal.

[James Gunn]

I up casting so bad.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what I was hoping you would recognize immediately.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. Jesus.

[Monica Padman]

This has never happened before.

[James Gunn]

Wow. That's pretty cool.

[Dax Shepard]

It's hard to tell the young Superman story with a 50 year old actor. But could that be its own interesting element?

[James Gunn]

We could do like the rehearsal.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, sure, sure.

[James Gunn]

So it could make you small and make a bunch of giant things around you.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I want to be bigger.

[James Gunn]

I thought you'd be like the four year old Superman.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I would do that as well. Like a little rattle.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you remember in Super Friends hall of Justice?

[James Gunn]

Well, that's actually based on the train station in Cincinnati. The hall of justice from Super Friends.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it is.

[James Gunn]

And that stayed the sort of model for what the hall of justice has been through the years in the comics and other animated shows. And we shot there for Superman. The group of the nascent Justice League, they aren't quite. The Justice League are in that actual building.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm gonna be honest, I'm not a superhero person. I didn't read the comics. The one thing I loved is I watched Super Friends every morning before school and I loved Super Friends. Do you know about Super Friends?

[James Gunn]

Yeah, you're too young.

[Dax Shepard]

Superman and all of his bros and gals. When you got Wonder Woman's in the.

[James Gunn]

Mix, basically the Justice League of Americ America for little kids. That was a Saturday morning show back when Saturday morning shows were everything.

[Monica Padman]

Did they invent any characters on that that then became big characters?

[James Gunn]

Wonder Twins, Patchy Chief, they've gone on to become in the comics and they.

[Dax Shepard]

Were called like junior friends. The Wonder Twins. And they were largely useless. They could work in tandem. One could become any animal and one could take the shape of any kind of ice.

[James Gunn]

Do you remember all this from when you were a child? Because I remember very little of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. This is the only one I really had. So it's really seared in, but she'd be like, I'll be a mastodon, and then you'll be a bucket of water, and I'll blow the water.

[James Gunn]

That I remember. I remember Wonder twins. I just don't remember that they were called junior friends.

[Dax Shepard]

In your defense, as I was looking up super friends this morning, I was reminded they were lower tier. They were like probies in a motorcycle. They were kind of earning their strikes.

[James Gunn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Being any kind of ice, that's a horrible story. Superpower.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, he could make people slide around a lot. You'd be shocked how much ice can save the day.

[James Gunn]

Yeah, there's an X men named iceman who's pretty powerful. He can make ice things to slide around, can shoot ice at you say.

[Monica Padman]

Sliding a lot, and that seems to.

[James Gunn]

Be the only thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, well, even the strongest person in the world, if they're on ice and can't find purchase. Now, I did get curious. The super friends in hall of justice is virtually Avengers. Does it predate Avengers?

[James Gunn]

Way before the Justice League existed, Before most of the Marvel superheroes.

[Dax Shepard]

So is D.C. the first?

[James Gunn]

D.C. is the first. Superman's the first superhero. He invented superheroes. Okay. So Superman was invented in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in Cleveland, Ohio, where we shot Metropolis and Superman. They were two high school kids who created this concept that now is so pervasive in culture throughout the world. We shot in Cleveland because Cleveland had. Has a lot of old art deco architecture. And then we just built up around that. But it has tons of beautiful interiors, beautiful exteriors. There's actually a lot of beautiful stuff there. And then we also shot in Cincinnati because that's where the train station is. There's a place called terminal tower, and that's supposedly where Joe first imagined Superman jumping over a tall building in a single bound. That building is prominently featured in our movie.

[Monica Padman]

Cool.

[James Gunn]

He couldn't fly at first. Superman, he couldn't. He could leap very far. He was very strong. I don't think bullets hurt him, but he couldn't shoot beams out of his eyes. They kept adding powers to Superman as time went on.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, because if you think about the physics of the original premise, which is just, he's stronger than everyone and those physics are known, but when you introduce flying, that still doesn't have any explanation.

[James Gunn]

No, it's very logical.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, he just can. But his strength wouldn't get you there.

[Monica Padman]

Is it his cape?

[James Gunn]

No, it has nothing to do with the cape.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[James Gunn]

I personally like to think, well, okay, what if this was real? So in the movie, we deal with, why are the glasses a good disguise? We actually deal with that because it always bothered me as a child. Yes. We deal with, he's strong, but he's not as strong as he was. He can't punch through a planet. Like, sometimes he gets to be that strong. I don't want him to be that strong.

[Dax Shepard]

Good. I don't either.

[James Gunn]

This is a difficult thing with Superman fans. Most people, when they say, why do they like Batman more than Superman? It's because Superman is just too powerful.

[Monica Padman]

It's like a copy.

[James Gunn]

There's no stakes. But a lot of Superman fans like the fact that he can beat up God. They want Zeus. They want the most powerful being in the universe. Not only is it hard to have stakes in a universe where he's the most powerful, it's also difficult to make other heroes mean anything at all. How much does Green Lantern mean if Superman can punch through his.

[Dax Shepard]

So in my 10 year old mind, the way I had come up with who was top tier apex superhero, I was like, it has to be Green Lantern because he could just make kryptonite.

[James Gunn]

Green Lantern can't make different elements. He can make constructs. He can make shapes. Oh, he can't make iron. He can't make gold. Metamorpho. However, who is in the movie can make elements? He can make anything.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Because there was one episode of Super Friends that was great, where it was like a reverse evil world. They would go there and there was evil Superman and then Green Lantern intern had to go fight Superman. They're friends in real life, they're hall of Justice.

[James Gunn]

They're super friends.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. They're super duper friends.

[James Gunn]

They're friends.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, Now, Cleveland, for folks who haven't been now coming from Detroit, it's a sister city, especially in its ark. You too? From St. Louis. You know, there's like a handful of these formally robust industry centers.

[James Gunn]

St. Louis is the only city in the United States, I believe, big city where its population is smaller than it was in 1900.

[Dax Shepard]

That's crazy.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. I think St. Louis is a small city in a huge metropolitan area. So the metropolitan area is over 2 million, but the city itself, I would imagine is well under.

[Dax Shepard]

And I presume you were in a suburb there.

[James Gunn]

I was. I grew up in a place called Manchester, Missouri, which was rural when I was young. I had soybean fields and horses that lived behind me. But as time went on, it became super suburbia, which it is now.

[Dax Shepard]

And your dad was a lawyer?

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What type of lawyer?

[James Gunn]

He did corporate law, but mostly dealt with health, so he dealt with big hospitals and things like that.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're one of six kids?

[James Gunn]

One of six kids, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And what order are you?

[James Gunn]

I'm number one. Six kids in seven years. And my little sister passed away, so there's actually seven of them.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

How old is she?

[James Gunn]

When she passed away, she was born. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Not that there's any good version of it, but that beats too.

[James Gunn]

Yes, it does.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a winner.

[James Gunn]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a pure victory. So.

[James Gunn]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Mom went back to back to back to back. Oh, this is very Irish.

[James Gunn]

Her womb just fell out.

[Dax Shepard]

There's smoke bill blowing out.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Talk about a superhero.

[Dax Shepard]

My God, there should be superwoman.

[James Gunn]

I don't remember my mother. Like, she's just always taking care of a baby.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, this is true.

[James Gunn]

I remember my siblings, my friends. We kind of got to do whatever we wanted to do. I don't really remember my parents very much because my dad was always working, he was always gone, and my mother was just always taking care of babies or cleaning. My neighbors who lived next door to us for 30 something years, never saw my mom without fully made up already.

[Dax Shepard]

So she's like an ideal housewife.

[James Gunn]

Six kids, never anything on the floor ever.

[Dax Shepard]

Everything that's impossible, clean in its place.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

How have you now matured into an adult? Have you taken on that? Are you messy?

[James Gunn]

I'm definitely not like my mother.

[Dax Shepard]

And as the oldest, were you taking on the role of defending the little brothers at school?

[James Gunn]

We all did that. My family was tight for sure. If somebody picked on my little brother, they get beat up. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

How many boys?

[James Gunn]

Five boys, one girl.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's too many boys.

[James Gunn]

The girl in there, she's in the middle. She's number three. Her life was hell.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[James Gunn]

She and I are incredibly close, but we were not nice to her.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no.

[James Gunn]

How could she? She was the outsider. Oh. And she was always so loud and well spoken and powerful that it was difficult. If you think about the things I'm the most guilty about is just picking on my sister.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but it's chicken or the egg. She might have been powerful because she was amongst all these boys and she had to keep up.

[James Gunn]

I mean, she just always wanted to be a guy, you know, she was always Trying to pee standing up and all of this stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

I plagued my little sister with this, too.

[Monica Padman]

She has two older brothers as well.

[Dax Shepard]

But again, what the result was is she was leaving someone's house and she saw a man starting a fire on the side of the road by the Getty Center. She had her boyfriend call the police, and then she wanted to make sure he didn't get away. And then she tackled the guy and held the guy while the police saved.

[James Gunn]

All of Los Angeles by picking on your sticker.

[Dax Shepard]

Modeling such toxic masculine attributes, I think I may have saved at least a swath. And if the Gettys foundation wanted to thank me.

[James Gunn]

You're a hero. I'm like a million dollars.

[Dax Shepard]

They should. But what was the vibe? I mean, I know ultimately we get into movies and stuff, but what kind of group of boys were you? Cause in my town, I drive Monica crazy with this ad nauseam. But a group of five boys? It was gonna be the most predictable thing ever. They were gonna get crazier as they got younger. And anytime there were fight boys, they were constantly fighting somebody. Someone had pissed someone off.

[Monica Padman]

What was the rough and tumble?

[James Gunn]

I grew up in a place where there were fights. That was always a part of something. But I was never really a sports kid. My brothers all played sports. I was just always an artist and played music and theater. And I was a punk rock kid. I heard the Sex Pistols. I saw them on TV when I was 11 years old, and it fucked me up. It was so cool.

[Monica Padman]

What about it?

[James Gunn]

It was like nothing I had ever seen before in my ent. I remember things visually, even though they're not the way they are. Totally aside, I was talking to Ryan Coogler the other day. We were talking about how great the Black Panther premiere was. And I was with all his friends who weren't there at the time. And I said, yeah, I know this isn't the way it happened, but the way in my memory it happened was that people were so happy that they were literally doing somersaults and flipping around in the aisle.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure, sure.

[James Gunn]

That's really what I remember.

[Dax Shepard]

That's not true.

[James Gunn]

It's like I remember the vibe, and then I remember I visually turn it into something else. When I saw the Sex Pistols, it was like seeing the edge of the horizon roll down to see a completely other planet that I didn't know existed. Right in front of me, another world.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, Sid Vicious is cut up. He's bleeding. A lot of the times he performs. He's got some safety pins in his lips and in his chin. You're seeing guys with some body modification.

[James Gunn]

The rage of Johnny Ronton as he sang. But also there was the crowd. Yes. And the safety pins and people. The anarchy symbols. And it was not something I liked. I was kind of scared by it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[James Gunn]

But I was totally intrigued. And I couldn't stop thinking about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, there's overlap between horror movies and early punk rock. These were like post apocalyptic figures that were in real life.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. I couldn't get out of my head. And then eventually I bought the Sex Pistols lp. I was a little Roman Catholic kid. Because he's like, you know, I am the Antichrist. And it was like doing something really bad, you know. It was like looking at porn almost. Except for your angry little rebellious soul. So that changed everything. And so all the kids I started hanging out with were the punk rock kids. All the music I listened to was the punk rock and the early new wave stuff. That became my identity. That's the way I dressed, you know, I wore the ripped up T shirts, I shaved the sides of my head.

[Dax Shepard]

I did it presumably nine years after you or eight years after you, very into my look.

[James Gunn]

It was absolutely not acceptable.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. It was rejected.

[James Gunn]

So I went to an all boys Jesuit competitive high school in St. Louis. And there was me and my friends. The fact that we existed was crazy. And so we knew every other punk or new wave kid in the city. We were all friends. We had all somehow gotten there through media into being this small group of people in St. Louis. So on weekends it was great. Cause I felt like a king.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Would you go to shows?

[James Gunn]

Go to shows. There was like a dance club called the Animal House that had three floors. And on the top floor was all the black music. The middle floor was the major like cover bands that were playing like Night Ranger and shit. And then on the lower level was our place. It was all the alternative. Sometimes we'd go up to the top floor, but we were rarely ever in the middle floor. Cause rap was also starting around that time. I was into that. That as well. And I was into Prince. I once got into an argument with my dad over Christmas about Michael Jackson and Prince that was so angry that we almost came to blows.

[Monica Padman]

Is it too mainstream? Too happy?

[James Gunn]

I like Prince's music better. I don't like his music that much. It's not about anything other than it's okay. Billie Jean is okay. The off the wall stuff is better. I like Jackson 5, but I like Prince way better.

[Dax Shepard]

The irony was that Prince was much Scarier to parents because he was much more overtly sexual.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

Sister is about having sex with his sister. Overtly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

God. The irony now.

[Dax Shepard]

The irony, though, that Michael Jackson was the one that we all needed to be fucking worried about and Prince was largely not fucking because he was an opiate addict.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Don't sue me estate.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. I mean, word is yeah, yeah. But I saw Prince on the purple rain tour, 10th row in Keele Auditorium in St. Louis. Wow, wow, wow. I loved him.

[Dax Shepard]

Now back to being drawn to the Sex Pistols. You're also then obsessed with horror movies. So are you the type that it might be counterintuitive, you might scare easily, but then your response to being scared is. And here's my question, is it a stubbornness, like I need to not be afraid of that thing?

[James Gunn]

There was something I liked about it as well as being scared. And I actually think my attraction to horror movies was different.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, what was that?

[James Gunn]

I think I liked the monsters. So when I fell in love with horror movies, I was very young. The greatest movie ever to me was Abbott and Costell vs. Frankenstein because it had monsters and Abbott and Costello. So it was funny and still is a movie that I think is great. But I fell in love with the monsters. I liked Godzilla and I liked Frankenstein and the werewolf and Creature from the Black Lagoon. And I think I related to those monsters in a certain way. I felt outside, so I don't think it was 100%. I like being scared. I did like being scared, but I think I was attracted to monsters. And that's the thing. I've kept with me more than a love of being horrified. I have a very difficult time being scared in a movie. But I love monsters and creatures out. Animals. Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You're mixing animals and outcasts is kind of a dream overlap.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. I love animals. I love the innocence of animals. I love the humor.

[Monica Padman]

Are you attracted to human monsters?

[James Gunn]

No, I'm attracted to monsters that are actually literal, real, physical monsters. I don't care about Jeffrey D or something. I don't like that he's a piece of.

[Monica Padman]

I'm the opposite.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You know what's funny is he's an outcast, but I'm not going to include him as an outcast.

[Monica Padman]

You don't want him in this.

[James Gunn]

I mean, they are definitely out other outcasts.

[Dax Shepard]

How do you get your hands on a 8 millimeter camera?

[James Gunn]

I can't remember where I got it from. I had two of them. I had a silent one and then I had a sound one.

[Dax Shepard]

Does it record the audio on the film strip.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. And so when you edit, the film frames are like this. So you have to cut with a splicer, but. But the film strip goes eight frames above where the picture is because the sound goes through before the picture does. So I'd have to cut.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[James Gunn]

And align it up and then put it up onto the thing.

[Dax Shepard]

And then you tape that entire long fin.

[James Gunn]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

That you were doing that you were editing with a little cutter, little splicer.

[James Gunn]

In a little machine that you watch the stuff go through.

[Dax Shepard]

That must have gotten the girls so.

[James Gunn]

Horny that they loved it, let me tell you. But I didn't play in bands, so I was.

[Dax Shepard]

When do you start in. What's it called? The Idiot? No, the Icon. The Icon.

[James Gunn]

I don't start the Icons until I was out of high school.

[Dax Shepard]

You were the lead singer of that band, but were you also playing an instrument?

[James Gunn]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

And do you have a good singing voice? You don't, but none of our heroes.

[James Gunn]

People go listen to the Icons on Spotify and decide it wasn't terrible. But I think the reason why I stopped playing music was because I really wanted to be the. The best at something, and I felt like I couldn't be the best.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Were you a little saddened by that?

[James Gunn]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what you wanted is to be Johnny Lydon?

[James Gunn]

A thousand percent, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So you go to the University of St. Louis?

[James Gunn]

I go to Loyola Marymount University first here. So I played music with people here. I went to film school here for two years. I got kind of pushed out after about a year and a half. I had big drug issues.

[Dax Shepard]

Great. That's what I was going. Are you sober?

[James Gunn]

I've been sober since I've been 19 years old.

[Dax Shepard]

Congrats.

[James Gunn]

Not only am I sober, Since I've been 19 years old, I got sober, then my dad got sober, then my brother got sober, then my other brother got sober. My next door neighbor, who is like a brother to us, got sober. And none of us ever relapsed.

[Dax Shepard]

You infected in the best way.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. I did have two years of doing Ambien. That really kind of me up, you know, because I am chemically dependent. And so it's an iffy time because I took it every night and I did fucking weird things.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's a weird drug.

[Dax Shepard]

Taking trips to 7 11.

[James Gunn]

Other than that, I've been sober.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, as someone who's relapsed, I've come to look at sobriety. If in 24 years of your life. You managed to be sober for 20 of those years. I'm impressed.

[James Gunn]

If you're an addict, I really admired what you did with all that. Oh, did we ever meet before?

[Dax Shepard]

No, we haven't, but we know Rosenbaum so well.

[James Gunn]

You're friends with Bradley, you're friends with Rosenbaum, Lillard ag, Seth Green.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know if I have anyone with more mutual friends who I haven't met. Yeah, this feels like a very long.

[James Gunn]

To the Without a Paddle premiere you did. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe the best premiere of all time. Do you remember it?

[James Gunn]

I totally remember it because I had so much fun. That's where I met Rosemary, Monica.

[Dax Shepard]

They flooded the tank and put boats in the water. Paramount. Oh, and people watch the premiere from Boats. Yeah. It was like a drive in movie. It was like broadcast on the backdrop.

[Monica Padman]

That was so cool.

[Dax Shepard]

And there were fucking boats and shit. That was my very first premier, first movie I was ever in. I was like, these are great. I can't wait to see what comes next. And it never was good like that. But no, we haven't met.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. That's crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

It is crazy. Okay, so let's get into the drug issue at Loyola.

[Monica Padman]

Drugs are our favorite topic.

[James Gunn]

It's interesting. I've never really talked about all this, but yeah, I did a lot of drugs.

[Dax Shepard]

What was your favorite?

[James Gunn]

Marijuana.

[Dax Shepard]

Great.

[James Gunn]

I smoked a quarter bag of weed a day. I woke up every morning. Some days I'd be like, oh, please, just wait until 10am to start smoking weed. People talk about how weed's not addictive. I totally fucking don't buy it for a second. I could not stop smoking weed. I smoked weed all day long every day and would try to curtail it and I couldn't do it. And then I did a lot of cocaine. Okay. And a lot of alcohol. And then I tried almost everything else, but those were the things I did a lot of.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm gonna be very generalized right now, but in my experience, people were either weed was their self medication or coke was their self medication. I definitely found that people that were really drawn to weed. I was not as a kid, I did it, of course, but it wasn't my thing. It was way more artistic. Way more kids who were in their room playing guitar, kind of more isolation, baseline. Would you say that was true for you?

[James Gunn]

No. Pretty social.

[Dax Shepard]

Really social?

[James Gunn]

Not really social because I have a part of me that goes away. It's part of me that writes, part of me that would write songs. I used to draw comic books and edit. There's a part of me that likes to go away and be in my shell. And then I like to come out and be with people, which is why being a writer director makes a lot of sense. I guess that's why I smoked weed and did coke. Like, I liked both.

[Dax Shepard]

Time to go be social.

[Monica Padman]

Did you find it in college or were you already doing those drugs in high school?

[James Gunn]

Did a lot of drugs from the time I was very little. I don't know if I did actual cocaine, but I did a lot of speed and things like that. Before college?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. In high school, pills would float around, be like, we have beaners, we have Dexedrine.

[James Gunn]

And I remember taking a lot of pills that were probably just caffeine pills. Sure. Because I remember when I took speed for the first time, it was not the same thing. And also I got my glands swole so that my ears were sticking.

[Dax Shepard]

Almost like a superhero. He does his.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. And it was like so sore.

[Dax Shepard]

Could I be a new guy called Cokehead?

[James Gunn]

Yeah. There is a guy, Snowflame. Oh, he's a cocaine fueled super villain.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, he already exists.

[James Gunn]

He's pretty cool. He exists? Yeah, he's in DC Comics.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, let's make him 50 and bring.

[James Gunn]

Him into the fold.

[Monica Padman]

You're good. That's like the first time you become a method actor.

[Dax Shepard]

Now all of a sudden, I really believe in method acting. Okay. So when you said you were kind of shown out, I'm guessing you were performing pretty terribly. Smoking weed all day at Loyola.

[James Gunn]

It's cool. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Were you loving California, though?

[James Gunn]

Yeah, I really loved California. I was very much an outcast in Missouri. I was not that at all in Loyola. Felt popular? Yes. Not only did I feel popular, I felt popular being myself. There were times that I felt popular. It would be sort of me subsuming who I was and dressing down. And in California, I just was myself. And I was just a regular popular kid.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

And that was a weird feeling.

[Dax Shepard]

So you left there and then you ended up at University of St. Louis?

[James Gunn]

Yes, yes. St. Louis U. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And what did you major in while you were there?

[James Gunn]

Psychology.

[Dax Shepard]

And you'd gotten sober in that interim?

[James Gunn]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

On your own, you just quit everything?

[James Gunn]

No, no, no. I went through rehab.

[Monica Padman]

No, no.

[James Gunn]

Believe me, no, no. I have truly sober program every year. Right. Inpatient rehab for a long time. Outpatient. They dropped out, started playing music. Was going to school. Was not really going to school, Was mostly playing music. Dropped out of school, moved to Arizona. Played music professionally. Played music for a couple of years, went back to school. And that's when I discovered truly writing.

[Dax Shepard]

At St. Louis, at St. Louis U. Okay, so you fall in love with writing.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. I had a creative writing class that I took. I wasn't playing music. I'm like, I gotta figure out something I'm gonna do. I said, I think I'm gonna teach, but what do I wanna teach? I was already pretty far in psychology, so I had to finish that degree. But I was much more interested in English. And so I started taking tons of English classes. But I took a creative writing class with a guy by the name of Al Montese. His task for us was to go home and write a play. I had a really shitty early computer and I wrote a play on there. And I'm like, this is the most fun I've ever had. And I think a lot of it was. Then we took our plays into class and the guy copied them off and he gave them to other students so that we could read the roles. And this is so me. So I can't pretend I'm not this way. But everybody was laughing so much. Yeah, it was like, oh, my God, I'm being loved, loved. And I'm being loved for my brain, not the way I look. It's such a weird thing for a man to say, but that's what it was like for me at the time. Because I've always felt like I had been writing these lyrics that nobody could understand. And I got attention from the way I looked. It was like having my brain loved. My whole life is different from that moment on.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[James Gunn]

And in the way that I wasn't the best singer, I felt like, oh, I went from feeling kind of old as a rock musician at the age of. Of 22 or 23 or whatever I was, which is silly, but at the time I felt old to being really young as a writer.

[Monica Padman]

I also wonder, I mean, timing wise, it probably was helpful that you had just gotten sober, because there's a high in that approval.

[James Gunn]

Yeah, I was actually sober for a little while. By that time, I've been sober for like three. I mean, that's not.

[Monica Padman]

That's not really. I mean, it is a long time.

[James Gunn]

When you're 19, it's a huge percentage of your life. I mean, one of the struggles for me in Sabri that I can start to take for granted is that I got sober when I was so young that being sober is way more a part of my life than using chemicals. And that is actually a little bit of something I have to be aware of in my life. Because there are times when I can kind of forget that I'm not just naturally so.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah.

[James Gunn]

It's not something I actually have to put some effort in. It's easier for me than other people.

[Dax Shepard]

That's why I think it's so hard to maintain sobriety from 19 onward, because I at least took it to 29. But even at that, I look at just my standard operating, you know, my modus operandi. At 29, I had temper tantrums. I fought guys at stoplights. I was unhinged. You get to this point where you're pretty stable and normal, and I'm not up and down.

[James Gunn]

I still had all those things, though, after getting sober. Then I was crazy with sex. It was like, I'm an addict, you know? Then I had to deal with my anger issues because I'd get so, so angry and getting fights. I just had to kind of go through one thing at a time until my wonderful, boring self today. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

But the danger of it is, is you're sitting around in your 40s, and you're like, I'm not even the same dude that got sober. I'm a calm guy who's responsible.

[James Gunn]

I still am not.

[Dax Shepard]

No, you're right.

[James Gunn]

I found out.

[Dax Shepard]

But it can be quite misleading because you're just trying to evaluate, am I the same person? Which is hard to do.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Because you're like, I'm not that guy. I could probably dabble and be fine.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm not going to dis four days. I would never do that.

[Monica Padman]

There you are.

[James Gunn]

I mean, also, I do believe that I'm naturally an alcoholic and addict. Everybody in my family is. I'm Irish Catholic. Like, it's just a part of our genetics. But I also think that because I was so extreme, so young, there were other things that were at play mentally, other anxiety and depression issues that made me take that on so full force.

[Dax Shepard]

I only gained this compassion for us in watching my very best friend since I was 11 get sober 5 years ago and in exploring his whole experience. We both had challenging childhoods. His was infinitely more challenging. It was so hard. And the only thing that he did for a period that I never got into is he huffed gas for like, a year and a half.

[James Gunn]

That's a hard one.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's such a terrible high. And I just had this moment where I realized, yeah, that was an improvement for Aaron. And that's where I got this just wave of compassion for us. Yeah, you're trying to feel better. And if you feel so bad that a Gas Buzz is an improvement. Fuck. My heart goes out for you.

[James Gunn]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

But then I can extend that to us. You're suffering, and it's a great fucking medicine. It works for a while.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. How do you not hurt?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[James Gunn]

It's not all about, like, how can I have fun?

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And even when you're taking on the wreckage, a lot of people will be like, look at the wreckage. And you're like, yes, but the wreckage is preferred to how I feel felt without it, as crazy as that is.

[James Gunn]

Yeah, but you also get blinded to repercussions. So you start using drugs and you just get blinded to the fact that, what is this going to lead to? You lose it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So you end up at Columbia to get a master's in writing, but prose, not screenplay writing.

[James Gunn]

Yeah, I was going to be a novelist. Yeah, I was a novelist. I wrote novels. My brother Sean and I, so we were the two ups of the family. I was the oldest kid and he was the youngest kid. The other kids are all pretty straight and pretty together. Even my two alcoholic brothers, who were much more straight than me. But we were the fuck ups. And he got into Fordham University for acting the same week that I got into Columbia for pros. And it was like, what the hell is going on? This is an upside down world in which we're getting into the two prestigious institutions. We were so happy, we just kept saying, two fuckups.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

So I went to Columbia. I wrote a novel as my thesis got it published. The Toy Collector, which people have read. Yeah. Very transgressions novel of your accomplishments.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm gonna weirdly guess that might have never got better than getting a book published.

[James Gunn]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, not objectively, but for your life of having.

[James Gunn]

Nah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, man.

[James Gunn]

Here's the thing. I got it published. After I started doing okay here. There were a lot of other things that started happening, but just.

[Dax Shepard]

You remembered the sea envelopes you'd send all these publishers, hundreds trying to get stuff published. Did you go through that?

[James Gunn]

I didn't do any of that. I got an agent that explained it, and we had a couple people making offers on the novel, and then they had a bid for it.

[Dax Shepard]

No wonder it's not high up there. I remember sending like a thousand if I would have got one back.

[James Gunn]

I went to Columbia, but one of the things is I got denied. I didn't get into Iowa. I didn't get into nyu. I didn't get into Washington University. I didn't get into Georgetown. I didn't get into all these different places. And I was like, I think I'm great. Like, what the is going on? Yeah. So then when I got the envelope from Columbia, I was pretty happy. It was like my number one choice, the hardest one to get into.

[Dax Shepard]

I would have told myself, like, yeah, I'm so good. The elite school.

[Monica Padman]

Only the elite.

[Dax Shepard]

These other ones. That's right.

[James Gunn]

That is what I told myself. Yeah. I told myself they're looking for more commercial writers. They're looking. Looking for people that will actually go out there and make some money. Not artsy fartsy. Because I always had a little bit in me of I wanted to make money doing this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Mine is really high. My fascination with money, my obsession, my chasing of it, my financial insecurity, those are raging. Where are you at on that spectrum?

[James Gunn]

I think it's changed over the years.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, of course, because you get it and it's not the fantasy.

[James Gunn]

I like making money. It's always been something that's been exciting for me. I remember the first time I made 500 bucks playing a show back in the 80s, and the guy came out and gave me this wad of money. I'm like, oh, this is the best feeling in the world. Getting paid for doing something creative. Like, I was so jazzed by that. Yeah. Everyone knows I'm pretty tough with my own business dealings, and I'm good at that part of it. It drives me to a certain degree, but it isn't the overriding thing. I was always trying to get love for most of my life.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[James Gunn]

And I think that changed at a certain point, and that put things in a different, different perspective. Sometimes I don't know why I do what I do. I work so, so hard all the time, and I like the results of what I do. I don't get a big charge out of being loved. I have a lot of money. My life has been built so crazily on ambition. That is the only way my body knows how to act.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[James Gunn]

Stay tuned for more armchair experts, if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's take a minute to thank our presenting sponsor, Audible. With Audible, the leading audio entertainment app, it's easy to discover new stories and ideas while going about your day.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And with over a million audiobooks, Audible originals and more, it's basically impossible to run out of things to listen to. Plus, there's just something about audio storytelling that hits a little different.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it really does. Especially Audible Originals that feature performances from celebrities and top voices. It's like watching a movie in your head. One on my list is Treasure Island.

[Monica Padman]

Aha.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is an Audible original drama. It's a timeless tale of pirates, lost treasure maps and mutiny. What more could you need?

[Monica Padman]

That sounds really fun. I'm more of a psychological thriller girl.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're dark.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I'm dark and I'm broody. And I've been hearing all about the author, Freda McFadden and I love that I can listen to her audiobooks on the Audible app when I'm commuting, taking my walks as you know, or just like doing laundry and chores.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, with Audible you can find the genres you love and discover new ones. There's more to imagine when you listen and to make it even better, Audible has a special offer for armchairs. Sign up for a free 30 day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.comdax that's audible.comdax we are supported by Smallwood Home. Smallwoodhome.com turns your favorite photos into gallery quality framed prints or wrapped canvases. All handcrafted in the usa, shipped in days and priced to make your whole home smile. Rob just got me the most gorgeous small wood framed photo of my Papa Bob which is now hanging in the Nashville studio and it turned out absolutely gorgeous. How many amazing pictures do you have just sitting on your phone, wasting away into the cloud? Take those memories and put them on display in the real world. Having something on the wall that's personal and not just a designy print you picked up at the store can make a space feel truly yours. And we love that. Small Wood Home is a small business that takes their time to craft every single piece right here in the US. No assembly lines or robots involved. Join the over 3 million happy customers who have made their house into a home with Smallwood Home. Right now. Get 30% off when you use code [e-mail] that's promo code DAX to get 30% off your first order at smallwoodhome.com Give your memories the showcase they deserve. We are supported by Kachava.

[Monica Padman]

I just had cachava this morning.

[Dax Shepard]

How was your Kachava chocolate?

[Monica Padman]

I I like the chocolate.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, chocolate can't be beat.

[Monica Padman]

It's so good. It has so much protein which you know I'm trying to get more of for my bone density and your muscle gains and my gains. It's such a great way to get all these nutrients and protein.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, life moves fast and finding real nutrition that keeps up can be a challenge. That's where cachava comes in. The whole body meal shake that actually delivers on taste and nutrition Whether you're craving chocolate, vanilla, chai matcha or coconut acai, each shake packs 25 grams of plant based protein and over 85 superfoods into every serving. They've got all the good stuff your mind and body crave for whole body health. One of the best parts. It can pretty much go in anything. Blend it with frozen fruit for a morning smoothie or mix it into your iced coffee. Yes, that's me.

[Monica Padman]

It's delicious, it's really nice and it is quick and easy.

[Dax Shepard]

Fuel your daily adventure with Kachava. Go to kachava.com and use code DAX for 15 off your next order. That's Kachava K A C H-A-V-A.com code DAX for 15% off. We are supported by Audible. Okay, you already know we're huge fans of Audible around here. One of our favorite parts you can listen while doing literally anything. Working out, driving, building that easy to assemble furniture you've been avoiding for three months. Absolutely anything. I like to listen to my Audible. I'm listening to the Mark Twain biography right now and I like to listen to it on my bike ride. It gets me through. It distracts me. I love it. Listening to audio content can get your imagination going, transporting you from whatever's going on in your real life and dropping you into a great story. Like when you're stuck in LA traffic, which, let's be honest, takes up way too much of our time. With Audible's massive selection of audio content, you can find exactly what lights you up. Whether you're a self help junkie or you're into sci fi, true crime, whatever. It's all out there waiting to blow your mind. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30 day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.comdax to get this special offer. That's audible.comdax what aspect do you find most grueling and which one's most fun?

[James Gunn]

I like every part of making a movie. I can't say that was always the case. It used to be that I like liked writing in post production but didn't like shooting. Now I love it all.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, interesting.

[James Gunn]

So I will say that in terms of the pleasure I get from it, if I could write a movie, make a movie, edit a movie and then burn it, I'd probably be happy.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, you don't like the after.

[James Gunn]

I don't like having to deal with putting it out there in the world. I don't like to have to deal with. I Mean, this is perfectly pleasant. I like doing podcasts where we're talking, but most of the press, I fucking hate. The things I thought I'd like when I was young, like doing red carpets and stuff. I don't like people looking at me like that. So I don't like that kind of stuff.

[Monica Padman]

That is self actualization. You're there for the process, but you don't care about the result. And then that's what we're striving for. But then it does come with, well, then what's the point?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, and you wanted to magically make a couple billion dollars without you going on, right?

[James Gunn]

Exactly. If I'm burning it after I'm done, I'm not sure I'm worth how much I'm getting paid to do it. So I like doing it for the job aspect. And also I do feel a certain sense of calling in doing what I'm doing. Yeah. I believe in God. I feel a certain calling in what I do. I don't think it's like a saintly activity, but I do think that if I can make the world slightly better with stories about people that are good people or learning about themselves or in touch with their emotions, that it's something.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's positive. You're leaving the world better than you found it, I hope. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Can you pinpoint the moment where that fell away? The approval or the needing external validation?

[James Gunn]

When I got fired, it was 100% when I got fired. I mean, I've talked about this before. It's not a big but not to us. Now I haven't talked about it to you.

[Dax Shepard]

Can we stop two places before that?

[James Gunn]

Yeah, sure.

[Dax Shepard]

You come out to LA after Columbia?

[James Gunn]

No, I was in New York. I was in Columbia, and I was still in grad school, and I got hired to write a screenplay for a movie called Tromio and Juliet for 150 bucks. I wrote it, and then I found out I like being the guy, and so I took control, sort of became Lloyd's partner on that film.

[Dax Shepard]

And so Lloyd, what did he direct?

[James Gunn]

He directed the Toxic Avenger, Class of Nukem High. All sex and violence. I wrote the screenplay. My next job was choreographing the sex scenes with the actors.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[James Gunn]

But I got to learn about every aspect of filmmaking. The movie cost $350,000, which I couldn't believe was so much money to me at the time. I remember driving in the subway to set and going like, I can't believe that I wrote something. And then all of a Sudden, they're spending this enormous amount of money. Yeah. I learned about casting, about marketing, about putting the movie out into theaters. We played here at the New Beverly every Saturday night.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[James Gunn]

So it was much more helpful to me, I think, than film school because it's so practical.

[Dax Shepard]

So you then end up writing a bunch of different things that end up working. I think most Significantly, you do Scooby 1 and Scooby 2 as a WR. When I meet Lillard, he's just done Scooby two.

[James Gunn]

Yes, that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

So you're a pretty successful writer at that point.

[James Gunn]

Yes. You know, you talked me about the novel was at that exciting moment. The exciting moments for me in my career were 5:30 in the morning when Scooby Doo first opened up. And Lorenzo de Bonaventura, who was the head of production at Warner Brothers at the time, woke me up and he said, did you hear it? And I said, no, it's 5:30 what I hear. And he said, it's the biggest opening ever in just July. And I knew that I went from being nobody to having a career in this industry that was huge.

[Dax Shepard]

And then the first thing you direct is Slither?

[James Gunn]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Horror movie with an incredible cast.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. Made dozens of dollars at the box office, but it got really good reviews. I find that there's certain key moments in my life where I take a stand where you want to. Not you want to retreat. And I took a stand, but it was going to come out, and they came to me and they said, you know, it costs a lot of money to have these movies screened for critics. So I think we're not going to do that. And what they were really saying was, we as a studio don't think that this movie is going to get good reviews. So we're not going to screen it for critics. I went to bed that night, I'm like, you know what? I just don't buy that it's not going to get good reviews. I think it's going to get good reviews. And I called up Eric Newman, our producer the next morning, good friend of mine, and I'm like, we can't do it. We got to fight this. And we went in and we fought it, and they were very great and that they listened to us and they did it. And it saved my career in a lot of ways because I don't know if I would have gotten those reviews if it would have helped me as much.

[Dax Shepard]

You got to be either a critical success, you need one or the other.

[James Gunn]

On your debut film. Otherwise you Just get lost. Yes, your dad. So it really helped me.

[Dax Shepard]

And then that leads. You do also a superhero movie. You do super.

[James Gunn]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so now we go to 2013 guardians. It's a coup that you get that at the time because you had done some stuff crazy.

[James Gunn]

I was about to quit. You know, I had just done a video game I had a lot of fun doing. I had a deal to do a TV show, which seemed to be something that was happening in the air, which I was right about, because there's so much premier television that was about to happen. Unless you're doing a Marvel movie, it's not culturally relevant anymore. So I'm like, why am I making movies when I'm just gonna make TV shows and video games? Cause I cared about being culturally relevant. I told my agents, I'm just going to quit making movies. I'm going to focus on these other things. And then Marvel called me in, which they had called me in before. They knew I was a big comic book fan. I didn't think it was very realistic. I went in and they told me about Guardians, and I didn't really 100% see it in the room, but on the way driving home, I started to see it come together.

[Dax Shepard]

Was Chris involved yet? Or was just a property they wanted to explore?

[James Gunn]

No, there was a script. Those main characters were already a part of it. So to me, at first, it was like Bugs Bunny in the Avengers. How's that going to the characters from the comics? But mostly another iteration of the characters. So I just wasn't sure. But when I was driving home, I saw how it could be. Number one. I saw the character Rocket. I went with my usual question was, what if this was real? Okay, seems stupid talking raccoon, but what if it was real? And I realized that he would be the saddest person in the universe and that he was totally alone. And that was sort of the seed of the whole.

[Dax Shepard]

That's your bread and butter.

[James Gunn]

It's my bread and butter. And so then I started to see how it could be that space fantasy that I always wanted to do. It wasn't going to be like Star wars, but that it could excite kids in the same way. Star wars excited me. They could get that same feeling of magic and novelty that I got when I saw C3PO on the COVID of People magazine. They could get from Groot. Yeah, Yeah, I got the gig. I was with my girlfriend at the time in her apartment, and I got the call that I got the job, and I felt like Kelly Clarkson with The confetti. That's how I remember it, by the way. You know what I talking earlier? The way I remember it is I was Kelly Clarkson, and the fucking balloons and confetti and fucking bubbles are coming down on me as I get this phone call.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. You know, I loved Iron man so much.

[James Gunn]

Me too.

[Dax Shepard]

Also, I had done Favreau's movie just before Iron man, so I was, like, kind of close to him at the time. So I think I got to see so much of how that came together. And then the fight for Downey and all that stuff, I loved that one. I want to credit he and Dan Liebenthal for kind of creating the Marvel sense of humor. I think they deserve a lot of credit for that.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I didn't care about a bunch of them. And then I saw Guardians, and I was like, fuck me. This movie is so original, even within this genre. And, yeah, more of Star wars than it was per se. Marvel.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. It's not really a superhero movie. Superheroes, they're just adventures.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It had a reach that was beyond. Like, I saw it, and I wasn't seeing any of those movies. I generally don't care about superheroes. It was so.

[Dax Shepard]

It transcended and just right out of the gates, the opening, the music is such a big part of it. But I was trying to go back in my mind to remember where Chris Pratt was on this hierarchy. He wasn't yet the biggest star in the world. He had done Jurassic. Not yet.

[James Gunn]

Oh, no, no. He was the heavy guy on Parks and Rec. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's a coup on a coup because you shouldn't probably be there. And now you come in, you go, okay, thanks for letting me in the door. Now I want you to bet a few hundred million dollars on this guy who's never done this.

[James Gunn]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What was that process like?

[James Gunn]

It was difficult and easy. It was difficult in that we auditioned literally 300 people. Easy for Star Lord. I screen tested 25 actors. Wow. I could not find the guy that you liked, Kevin Feige, either. I was so happy because we did the first screen tests and we screened them, and I'm like, they're gonna kill me. He was such a specific guy. The famous story around it is that I didn't want to see Chris because I'm like this joker. No way. And Chris had been turned down by a lot of things, and he didn't want to have to do that again. Sarah Finn, who's the casting director, talked me into it. I think she tricked me into It. She set up the meeting without telling me. But we were so desperate that time. I'm like, I guess he's coming in. He came in and he started his audition. And I am serious. It was not 12 seconds into the audition. And I turned around to Sarah and I said, he's the one.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[James Gunn]

So then it was about getting everyone else on board.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so you do the first one. It's fucking outrageous. Now in between Guardians two and three. Now we've caught up. I thought it'd be relevant before we evaluate you looking back at your career and deciding whether or not you're happy. I think we needed to know how we got there.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So you had a string of old tweets that came out. You were making some jokes that were on topics people don't like.

[James Gunn]

My novel. If you look at transgressionist fiction in Wikipedia, I'm listed.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

You know, it's like, that's what I did. I was a provocateur. They weren't very funny. But whose tweets are funny from 10 years ago?

[Dax Shepard]

It's also worth saying I was early into Twitter too, and there's a long period of time where I think I'm just tweeting to whoever follows me. Whoever has followed me has declared they have a similar sense of humor as I do or point of view, and then it'll just end there. That somehow it has a perimeter.

[James Gunn]

The biggest mistake I made was I one day posted, hey, everybody, it's fake retweet time. This is back in the day when you didn't just press a button and retweet someone. That wasn't possible. You had to copy and paste and then put RT before the tweet. I realized you could do this and fuck over your friends. So I started. Started tweeting the most horrible things I could imagine about my friends who have had to live with this to this day, saying that my friend JP had killed a prostitute in Mexico. And I was retweeting all these horrible things they had said. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Did they say it or were you making it up?

[Dax Shepard]

He was just making it up.

[James Gunn]

I made them say the worst things I could possibly imagine. So this goes forward now to when all this stuff happens and the meaning of RT me has been forgotten. They think I'm tweeting at people saying these terrible things.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes, yes.

[James Gunn]

And these four guys are caught in the crossfire. People who are not famous at all.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[James Gunn]

And so I get fired.

[Dax Shepard]

And really quick. When you get fired, did they say you're fired? And we are going to do Guardians three without you. Is that a notion you have or no?

[James Gunn]

At the very beginning it didn't come up because Kevin was fighting for me to come back. But yeah, I got fired. It was. Was the worst.

[Monica Padman]

And were you angry? Sad? I mean, I assume a lot of things. What was the main emotion?

[James Gunn]

There was a moment in which I said to Peter Saffron, I said, I don't know what I'm going to do.

[Dax Shepard]

And Peter is your longtime manager and producing partner who now co runs co.

[James Gunn]

Runs DC with me. Not only am I being attacked, but my friends are being attacked. You know, David Das Melchan said something positive. He's being attacked. Joel Kinnaman responded to an Instagram and he was attacked just for that cat and called terrible things.

[Dax Shepard]

If I were you, I would have had some self righteous indignation over the fact that really this all starts because you'd pissed the right off and the right wing digging. Do I understand that correctly?

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I would be yelling to my liberal friends like, you are doing exactly what they hoped. This is out of the right playbook.

[James Gunn]

Yes, it was mostly right wing people attacking me, but it was also, oh.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, once you failed the purity test.

[James Gunn]

I don't even like talking about this shit. I realize now I'm really talking about it, which I don't like. I think that what happened was my life was gone. I thought my career was over. I didn't think I was going to make another dime in this industry. So I was just going to have to hold on to whatever I had made, which was nowhere near as much as I had hoped it would be to last for the rest of my life and live a really frugal life. But the thing that happened, I realized was that everything I had done was really to be rich and famous so that people would love me. And that a lot of what I did was not based upon being a creative individual or a calling or anything, but so that I could finally be accepted and loved. And I, as an organism, was unable to experience the love of another human being. The only time I could remember, even slightly the feeling. I had gone to a Brazil Comic Con shortly before this time. And I remember standing on stage and. And literally 8,000 people in the crowd chanting James Gunn, Jamis Gunn and crying like girls at a Beatles concert. And for the first time in my life, I said, oh, I'm at zero. I'm okay for the first time in my life. That's fucked.

[Dax Shepard]

That's how many people had to jump into the hole in your heart, they're.

[Monica Padman]

Strangers and they're strangers.

[James Gunn]

That's the part I went from feeling like that. And on that day, when I had lost all the power I had, I had lost the ability to cast anybody, I had lost everything. I got so much love from my partner at the time, Jen, the Guardians, from Chris and Palm and all those.

[Dax Shepard]

The people who actually knew you, the.

[James Gunn]

People that knew me, all my friends, my mom and my dad. I was overwhelmed with it. And I experienced being loved for the first time. And I went to sleep that night looking at my girlfriend going, I'm going to marry this woman. And I went to sleep that night going, this started out as the worst day of my life, but I actually think it's the best day of my life. My life.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

Because I learned that I don't need to tap dance till the bones are showing through my toes to get people to like me.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

And that was a really intense experience and I kept it with me.

[Dax Shepard]

Isn't it crazy what it takes for.

[James Gunn]

Us at the extremes?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's insane, right?

[James Gunn]

It is.

[Dax Shepard]

You can be told stuff intellectually a bunch of times, and you can understand it intellectually, and then it takes these crazy kind of moments of humility to connect to it emotionally.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I think that's everyone, but I think, especially for an addict, you are living in tens and ones, you know?

[James Gunn]

So true. But I try so hard not to do that.

[Monica Padman]

No, I know, I know.

[James Gunn]

Because I'm so hyperbolic in everything about my life. I got upset about something this morning. I was getting upset with the way things had been posted about tickets being released, and I'm like, calm the down.

[Dax Shepard]

Like I got to care so much about everything. It's like not a 10.

[James Gunn]

There are 10.

[Monica Padman]

It's hard. It's hard.

[Dax Shepard]

They're few far between. But you can make a lot of sevens at 10.

[James Gunn]

We had to move my family quickly out of my house during the LA fires. Like, that was 10, you know, but also not worthy getting upset because that's just going to make you worse at what you're doing. And in those situations, I'm pretty good. So why am I sober when I have to get my pets out alive and I'm not sober when they post the wrong thing on my Instagram account? Stupid.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, well, our brains, we know the answer to that kind of. Would you. Which is you suffer more in your imagination than you do in reality. That thing's still in your imagination. It'll come out, it'll be perceived X, Y and Z. This other group of things will happen as a result of that. Whereas, like, oh, no, the fire's down the road, the pets gotta go. Now I know how to pick up pets and put em in a car. I'm in action.

[James Gunn]

I don't have the luxury of drama in that situation.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[James Gunn]

If I have the luxury of drama, then drama isn't warranted. And if drama is warranted, warranted, you don't have the luxury of having 100. Drama's just. It's unworthy. Except for on the page.

[Dax Shepard]

It's our ego and our revenge addiction.

[Monica Padman]

But it's hard. It's future surfing versus being in the present. But it's almost impossible to not. We're not Buddhist, we're not perfect, but.

[James Gunn]

We can be better.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so did you take the D.C. role with the Suicide Squad in the interim, where you thought you weren't gonna be able to work for Marvel?

[James Gunn]

That's right. Yeah. It was the worst because Kevin was fighting for my job back. I went and I met with Alan Horn, a guy I loved him. Death, it wasn't happening. I left. Toby Emer from Warner Brothers at the time came to me. It's like, James Gunn, Superman. James Gunn, Superman. I said, I don't know, man. And then he was like, well, what about Suicide Squad? And so I came up with an idea. I went and pitched it. They were like, yes, let's do it. I went home and I got a phone call and it was Alan Horn. And he said, james, I wonder if you could come in and see me tomorrow.

[Dax Shepard]

You're back.

[James Gunn]

I was like, oh, my God. And I went in to meet with Alan, and I don't know what Alan's comfortable with me talking about or not, but he basically was like. He didn't think it was the right thing. And he said, my conscience just won't let me live with it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, there was an online petition that 400,000 people signed to bring you back. Everyone in the cast got supportive. There was pretty much a tidal wave against which is so rare.

[James Gunn]

Yeah, it started out really negative and then became much more in my favor. It really wasn't that. This was. After all the noise had passed and Alan just was waking up being like, I don't think it's right. And I've known Alan forever. The greatest guy in the world, and I love him to death. I still work with him because he's at Warner Brothers now. So we keep following each other around. And I work with him all the time. He's one of my most trusted mentors I show him every cut of the movie. He gives me advice, but he said, I wanted to hire you back. I said, okay, we gotta talk to Kevin. I went over to Kevin's house, Kevin Feige, who's the head of my Marvel. I went into his basement where he's got all his Star wars figures, like a little museum. And he said, this is amazing. He said, this is so good. This is what I wanted. And I'm like, yeah, it's good, but I have to do something else first. And Kevin goes, are you doing Superman? I forgot about that till just this moment. I said, no, Suicide Squad sequel. And he said, whoa. He like, go do it, and then we'll do Guardians after.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you feel at all like, oh, I wanted to play my whole career with the Bulls, but I got forced to. Was there any ethical dilemma, like, oh, I'm going now to the competitor now?

[James Gunn]

No, I just shook.

[Dax Shepard]

You shouldn't feel that way.

[James Gunn]

But I didn't feel that way because I was fired.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

I think in some ways it's like, I guess I'm going to play for the other team almost with some. Fuck you.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. It wasn't even that because, listen, there are people that I'm not that happy with over there. But that certainly wasn't the Marvel guys. They were completely supportive. Lou Desposito called me all the time. Lou and Kevin were great. It certainly wasn't them. But I didn't feel guilt at all. I had to take a job.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

I took a job to people that I also really liked. That was it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Superman. We had Nicholas Holton already to promote this. You're part of Superman.

[James Gunn]

Okay, great. He's the sweetest guy. Every person on set had a crush on Nick.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

The thing that's unique about him, it's hard to come off because you don't really fully get the sense of a person's humility. Some people are good at faking it. Me, no.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're just. Okay.

[James Gunn]

But he's really. He's truly a humble guy. He's just got that thing that he comes onto set and he's just working really hard, and then he'll have dinner with me or with the second ad. He doesn't have any airs about him whatsoever. Zero Diva, which in an actor, to have zero diva is crazy.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

Very rare, especially for somebody who's been.

[Dax Shepard]

Famous since he's been a little boy.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Another example we have with that is Christian Bale, who also is famous as a little boy. Didn't really like it, then came back to it. If you go through that whole cycle in British.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's the big thing.

[James Gunn]

Because British people are not better than Americans in general. Contrary to popular opinion. I don't necessarily believe they're better acting in terms of the talent of acting than Americans. But their work ethic as actors is better than the work ethic of American actors. For some reason, British people, for the most part, and some are absolute pieces of shit, but for the most part, they look at it as a job and they come in and they do their fucking job and they're great.

[Monica Padman]

It's because theater is such a huge part of.

[James Gunn]

But I also like all those guys that I knew from like the British Office and all that stuff. It's a different culture on film sets over there.

[Dax Shepard]

There's also a different marketplace over there which has a lot to do with it. Yeah, British Office, they do three seasons, one's a Christmas thing. They don't do the Friends thing. They don't do the Seinfeld thing. They don't have things run for eight years and end up paying people a million dollars in episodes. People don't make as much money doing it. You're not getting into it for the same level of fame and money. You get into it in America. I think that's a big difference.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. And also the people, people that are attracted to it. There is that sort of thing in England where it's a class system. Really, it's not a good thing. But in the United States, you're this overly fame seeking, ambitious, egomaniac child from any place that's like, I'm gonna be a star. That's not really something so much that happens.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly right.

[James Gunn]

It's much more about, I'm going to go to theater school, be great at acting. I'm going to be. Be an actor.

[Dax Shepard]

When you take on Superman, are you so confident in your skills at that point that you're not intimidated by that property?

[James Gunn]

No, I'm intimidated by it. And just because I took it on didn't mean I was 100% going to do it. It just meant I was going to play with it and see what I could do. It just. I had the ability to do it, so I was tooling around with it. Then the D.C. job came, which was out of left field. Crazy thing for me that I'm. That I'm a CEO. CEO. We're our own studios, so we are not under Warner Brothers. We are under David Zaslav. So there's Zaslav and then There is DC Studio, so we're a separate studio from Warner Brothers.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[James Gunn]

We share marketing and distribution.

[Monica Padman]

So you're the studio head.

[James Gunn]

Co head was Peter Safran. He's really the studio head. I'm the guy that tries to put the projects together, create a DC tone.

[Dax Shepard]

I imagine one of the things I.

[James Gunn]

Want to do is to be able to allow artists to do their own. One of the things I loved reading comics growing up, especially DC Comics, is being able to read these comics that were remarkably different. The way one artist would look at Metropolis is totally different from another artist.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So there's a ton of latitude.

[James Gunn]

There's consistency in the storylines, there's consistency with the characters. There's consistency with a lot of things, but the tones were different, and I don't want them all to have a similar tone. The way I told Craig Gillespie, who's directing Supergirl, do your thing, you know, And Aguero, who wrote the script, it's different from Super Superman.

[Dax Shepard]

So what was the element that made you go from playing with it to falling in love with Superman?

[James Gunn]

I just kept playing with it until I thought I found a way in, and then I found a way in, and I was like, oh, okay. And then I just followed that path.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so how does yours differ and also resemble the previous ones?

[James Gunn]

Superman is Superman. He's a good natured guy who's an alien, and it's got the same backstory as everybody else. But one of the things I loved reading comic books as a kid. When I was 4, I learned to read on comics. So back in the early 70s, by the time I came to comics, I came to Superman not just Superman by himself, but Superman in a world of superheroes. Superman in the world of dc. And when I read Spider Man, Spider man was in a world of Marvel with all the Marvel characters. It wasn't like I came into these worlds and had to read the origin story and see the beginning of this character, and then 10 movies down, that'll probably never happen. He gets involved with other superheroes. Right. Our DC Universe is a world world where superheroes exist. It shares as much with Game of Thrones as it does with the Marvel Universe, where we're in a world where magic exists, where metahumans exist, and they've existed for quite a while.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Because the first Superman or the Donner Superman.

[James Gunn]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

He's the only superhero.

[James Gunn]

He's the only superhero. I mean, every superhero movie we ever saw through Spider man was basically heroes by themselves with no other heroes around. And I didn't want to do that again, and I didn't want to tell the origin story again, and I wanted to focus on a moment in his life that we hadn't really focused on. In this case, it's his early career as Superman and as Clark Kent and his relationship with Lo Lane when they've been dating for three months. And I also wanted all the magic and science fiction stuff that I love from the Silver Age comics. So we get Krypto the Flying dog, we have Superman robots, we have Kaiju, we have Lex Luthor in battle suits and all of that over the top fun stuff. Yet at the same time keep the characters completely real and completely grounded. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

We do love quint.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

Tell me about it.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

I got a friend a bunch of the flit polos. Yeah, they are so Nice. And he was busting around Hawaii and he looked so cool. And then he sent me all these pictures.

[Dax Shepard]

He was just strutting.

[Monica Padman]

He was strutting.

[Dax Shepard]

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[James Gunn]

Crypto. Yeah. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

How does Krypto have powers? He can fly.

[James Gunn]

He's from Krypton.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, he came with him in the capsule?

[James Gunn]

No, not exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

But he made it here somehow.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, he has arrived. And we don't worry about the fact that Clark is 20 and the dog's still alive.

[James Gunn]

We worry about it, we just don't explain it in this movie.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[James Gunn]

But crypto is also very important in our next movie with Supergirl. And so we'll find out a lot more of that.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, cool.

[James Gunn]

Okay, great.

[Dax Shepard]

And so Krypto in the trailer, he's tasked with flying Superman home from the north.

[James Gunn]

Dragging him home cuz his body's broken by some entity we don't quite know. And he's a dog, so he's. He doesn't know what he's doing and he's terrible. So it's my dog. That character, he's actually physically my dog.

[Monica Padman]

No way.

[Dax Shepard]

You got him to act. He has a SAG card now.

[James Gunn]

Jesus Christ. No, my dog is terrible. But he's just my dog made white. We photographed my dog and then turned him into crypto.

[Dax Shepard]

I would imagine. Of the many Herculean tasks on your plate when you tackle Superman, I would guess among the top one is casting Superman.

[James Gunn]

For sure.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, I don't think there's any role that's more.

[James Gunn]

I would not have made the film if I couldn't find Superman.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So do you first start considering having previous Superman? No. You know, you're going to start from scratch because of the age. How do you begin looking for a young stud? I mean, that's what you need. Who can play a dork, but also.

[James Gunn]

Well, you need a guy with Superman face.

[Dax Shepard]

Hard to find, Non negotiable.

[James Gunn]

And so we just cast a very wide net and we had everybody that we could think of auditioning.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, Nicholas auditioned for Superman. He told us.

[James Gunn]

Nick screen tested for Superman? Yep. So it came down to three actors. Actors. David, Corn Sweat, Nicholas Holt, and another actor who's fantastic.

[Dax Shepard]

Where's David from?

[James Gunn]

David is from Philadelphia. He still lives in Philadelphia. He's the star of a Netflix show. He's a star of an HBO show. We own the Night. I don't know if you ever saw that.

[Dax Shepard]

This is no shade to him. I have reached the age where I don't really know anyone under 40. Like, I got to be introduced to them through a Superman or something.

[Monica Padman]

But I think you want it to be that way. You don't want it to be someone who, like, is so ubiquitous that everyone.

[James Gunn]

Knows the actor was right. I wouldn't have minded, you know, if Chris Pratt was 10 years younger, then I probably would have considered him Superman. He's got that boy.

[Monica Padman]

He does charm.

[Dax Shepard]

Where does Superman grow up? Iowa or something?

[James Gunn]

Kansas.

[Dax Shepard]

Kansas.

[James Gunn]

Kansas.

[Dax Shepard]

Jason.

[Monica Padman]

Very proud.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the things I want to do too, because I grew up in Missouri, around Missouri farmers. So I wanted to make his life. Life a little bit more like the farms that I saw growing up. Yeah. So his parents live in a more modest housing than we've seen other supermen. His parents don't look like aging movie stars.

[Dax Shepard]

The most fascinating aspect to me is the notion that he was hiding his superpowers his whole childhood and the disappointment the dad might have when he showed them. And what a bizarre burden that would be to be super and not be able to show it.

[James Gunn]

That is dealt with a lot in the comics. There's all sorts of different ways. Sometimes he's really super strong from the time he's young. Sometimes he, little by little, gains his powers as he gets older. But a lot of times, it's like, dad, I want to be the quarterback. I can beat everybody. And nope, you got to pretend like you can't run.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And then if you do it to impress a girl, then you've shamed yourself to your father. There's a parallel between young, virginal females. It's got to be so special. And all you're telling the boy is like, don't get her pregnant. You're putting on her shoulders, like, you got to be in love. He's got to love you. How one knows that in school, to me, it feels like that. Weird.

[James Gunn]

Yeah. Luckily, I don't have to deal with any of that, because I don't deal with him as a teenager. I just deal with his relationship with his dad, which is a good one.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Gunn]

You know who Richard Christie is from the Howard Stern Show?

[Dax Shepard]

Absolutely.

[James Gunn]

Richard is a friend of mine, and he's a Kansas boy. His parents are Kansas folk, and so they did all the lines for me.

[Dax Shepard]

They did.

[James Gunn]

And I gave them to the actors so that we could have an actual Kansas accent. Oh, nice. Wonderful.

[Dax Shepard]

He's the one Monikov told you about, where he said, people, where he's from will just be on the phone forever saying nothing. And he would call the people and go, hey, so how you doing?

[James Gunn]

Yeah, he's a stranger.

[Dax Shepard]

Someone picked up. I'm good. Good. So you're doing good?

[James Gunn]

Yeah, that's him. Exactly. Okay, then.

[Dax Shepard]

Then he has his brother call up. Heard you just spoke to my brother. How's he doing? You can also ask how other people are doing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah. So funny.

[James Gunn]

He's a really fun, sweet guy.

[Dax Shepard]

In your mind, you go, okay. Aesthetically, this has to be a departure from my normal aesthetic.

[James Gunn]

Strangely, I'm kind of making a superhero movie for the first time. I don't think about having to change from my normal aesthetic, but I always think, visually, what is this movie? And so this one is much more comic booky. There's a comic book by the name of Allstar Superman. It's sort of this larger than life, wonderful color palette. Some of it. I'm really aping that. And so, yeah, it needed to be different.

[Dax Shepard]

And how about Lois Lane?

[James Gunn]

I brought in three Loises and three Clarks to screen test, and then I mixed and matched them, because I've been in situations before where I've cast two great actors, put them together, and you're like, no chemistry. Not working. You can do it. You just got to make it built on stilts. But you got to do a lot of trickery to make it work. The two of them together, they're very different. And it does have this It Happened One Night front page type of feel with the dialogue where they're going back and forth very fast and it's romantic, but they're fighting. And there's a 10 minute scene in the movie of her interviewing him. You see a little part of it in the second trailer. We learn everything about what has happened until that point, but we also learn everything about their relationship and their ethics and how they're very different. He's an idealist. Never kill no matter what. She's utilitarian. What benefits the greatest good. We speak. See how also their relationship is different and that he's a little bit more self righteous and she's not. He's stubborn and believes very distinctly that you cannot let people die if you have the opportunity to stop it no matter what. And she's like, yeah, but what if.

[Dax Shepard]

You maybe don't save Hitler?

[James Gunn]

Maybe you don't save Hitler. Yeah, he'd probably save him.

[Dax Shepard]

He would have to. That's his code.

[James Gunn]

It's like if there's a train coming at five people and trolley, the trolley.

[Dax Shepard]

Experiment, he'll get them all somehow. That's how he would figure it out. Okay, so yes, two years ago you wrote in one year. 250 pages.

[James Gunn]

No, no. 650 pages of content.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank God you corrected me.

[James Gunn]

In one year.

[Dax Shepard]

I've done really good not looking at this sheet of paper.

[James Gunn]

I typed, yeah, 650. Cuz within a year I wrote Superman, the entire Creature Commando series and the entire season of Peacemaker 2. Oh my God, 650 pages. It was the worst year of my life.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you too much.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you do it at home? Do you go somewhere?

[James Gunn]

I was writing wherever Jen and my friends and I went away to Hawaii for New Year's and I literally was in the room the whole time. She talks about it all the time. I was in the room the whole time writing Peacemaker Season 2. No joy to it whatsoever. I was desperate. All of my friends are in that show and I'm like, I have to get it done before I start really heavily pre production of Superman. Yeah. And so I was just desperately writing it. And then I would write every episode and I'd be like, oh, wow, that's pretty good. Where'd that come from? That felt like hell. But that's pretty good. And then I would write the next one. I'd be like, oh, this is murder. I hate this. There's no joy in this. And I'd be done. I'm like, oh, that was pretty good too.

[Monica Padman]

That's funny. I would expect you to be like, I don't know what's good anymore. I've written 650 pages. I don't know what's good.

[James Gunn]

I don't necessarily know what's good, but I know what I like. That's all I can go off of.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

There's something to be said about keeping the throttle pinned.

[James Gunn]

I lived in that. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Because you get into a sweet rhythm at times and you can kind of exploit it.

[James Gunn]

A really interesting, interesting book by Walker Percy called Lost in the Cosmos. He's one of my favorite writers. And it's about the different types of artists and why a lot of artists are addicts or have problems with other things. Because you go up into the cosmos and then you reenter Earth. And when you re enter Earth, it can be a really difficult thing. So people deal with it through drugs and alcohol or sex, power dynamics, escape. And then there's those few rare guys who just kind of go up there and seem to stay, which is like Picasso, maybe Andy Kaufman. And I think that I kind of stayed up there for that a little too long. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Re entry was rough repercussions down here. I wanted to know what do you think are the greatest superhero movies made.

[James Gunn]

Into the spider verse? First one is the greatest diner. Superman. Iron Man. I'd say Iron man is great. I'm forgetting something.

[Dax Shepard]

What about what's the naughty ones? I love Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool. The first Deadpool. Oh, fuck.

[James Gunn]

I actually love all three of them. They're all really good.

[Dax Shepard]

The last one was impossibly good.

[James Gunn]

I know, Very messy, but so freaking funny. I love those.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, James, this has been a blast. I'm so fucking excited to see it. It looks phenomenal in 7 11. Do we like this date numerically? Very easy to remember.

[James Gunn]

It is my father's birthday, which is crazy because I didn't realize it when they told me the date.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's a father son movie.

[James Gunn]

It is a father son excellent movie. Lovely.

[Dax Shepard]

But anyways, so delighted this finally happened and I hope everyone checks out. Superman on July 11th, your father's birthday.

[James Gunn]

Thank you. Stay tuned for the fact check.

[Monica Padman]

It's where the party's at.

[James Gunn]

Hello. Hi, how are you?

[Monica Padman]

Welcome to the fact check.

[Dax Shepard]

Welcome to the fact check.

[Monica Padman]

That sounded this. I'm. I sound and like npr.

[Dax Shepard]

I was gonna.

[Monica Padman]

Welcome to the fact check or Like a robot.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I was gonna say you sound like npr, for sure.

[Monica Padman]

Speaking of robots. Okay, so Jess has a chat friend he named Brady. Okay. Brady and I have a beef. Like, I don't like Brady, and. And I really don't like Brady now because yesterday Jess said he was a double Virgo.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was like, no, you're not Jess or Brady.

[Monica Padman]

Jess did.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

He said one of his other friends told him he was a double Virgo. And I said, you are not. You're barely one Virgo. He is a Virgo son, which is very hard for. For me to understand and reconcile. I don't. Something. You know, when some things just don't make any sense. Yeah, but he said he was a double, which I am. I am a tried and true double Virgo.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you have a lot of pride in that.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I don't have pride. I have gratitude. Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Fine line between gratitude and pride. Right. There's a little. Sometimes it's a little razor thin.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But anyway, I was like a very Virgo of me. I was like, no, you aren't. And there's no way that's true. Then he asked Brady, he said, I'm in an argument with Monica about whether I'm a double Virgo or not. Knowing me, do you think I am?

[Dax Shepard]

Like, it's an opinion and not a actual thing.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly, exactly. And this is where things got so out of hand, Brady. And he said, well, the traits of Virgos are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so. Which you are. So if you think you're a double Virgo, you probably are. It said that, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Like, all you gotta do is think it. Like, he can think he's a Capricorn if he'd like.

[Monica Padman]

But, like, it shouldn't say that. It can say the beginning part, which is the qualities. But then to say, so if you want to be like, the. Adding this other piece is so scary.

[Dax Shepard]

You're scared.

[Monica Padman]

I am scared. People are asking these chats all kinds of things, and they're just, like, talking as if they're people. Yeah, sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, now that's bad. I'm gonna say something potentially inflammatory, which is they might be more drawn to their fake AI friends because they embrace, like, yeah, if you want to say you're a double Virgo and you weigh that against your real life friends and they're giving you shit about wanting to be a double Virgo, it makes the AI relationship perhaps more appealing.

[Monica Padman]

That's not scary to you?

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, it's scary to me that people get even More lonely. Yeah, I think people, you know, that's one of my platform issues. Solitary living when we're so social. That's already a problem.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And me and you have gotten in a debate before about this. You said that you and I couldn't get like wrapped up in a relationship like that, and so we have to honor that. Other people won't. But that is not true.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, but you do you really feel. Think Jess is wrapped up in his relationship with Brady or. It's a fun bit.

[Monica Padman]

It's a fun bit on a slippery slope, I think, because if we weren't there and saying that's so bad that he just did that, I don't think he would think it was that bad. I think the slippery pieces, we go to the chat because it's technically factual, like, that's what it's for. It's scouring the Internet for the actual answer and the thought is like, oh, and they just like deliver it in a, in like a colloquial way. But it's facts and clearly it's not.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, but hold on. This is also gonna be a little bit combustible. If you ask it a question that there are facts behind, it'll give you. Unfortunately, astrology is not science and it's not facts. There are Far more than 12 types of people on the planet and astrology only accounts for 12 types of people. So that's already we would agree, probably a mild issue with it.

[Monica Padman]

That's fine. Hold on. These are two totally separate things. You can think astrology is bullshit, but within the rules of astrology, there are things like, it's not just willy nilly, you get to pick. It's your birthday. It's very, very specific.

[Dax Shepard]

Astrology isn't the boiling temperature of water at 1 atm, which is always 2 12. Many people who are arguing in the astrology world will point out astrology is based on a lunar calendar. So it is five days shy of a real year. The Lunar calendar is 360 days. So all of those astrological signs that were established for those months are already completely wrong because every year since they've established those, they've lost five days. And so, sure, there's probably an echelon of astrology people who are accounting for that. And they're going, oh, actually January 1st, now is actually this. But already you have a big problem that you have camps and divisions within this thing. There's no camps about when does water boil?

[Monica Padman]

Okay, that's fine. But I think if you're using these apps, apps that are substantiated. Plus, I went to an astrologer. That's her job. Her diagnosis of me was the same as the app. So they're all doing the same thing. Whatever. He's not a double Virgo. This is crazy. This is a real. This is. This is. I'm not saying astrology is real. I'm saying within the confines of. If you're talking about astrology, there's a. There's realities within it, and he is not. Not that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I know what you're saying. Monopoly's not real. But there are rules within Monopoly, and you can be in violation or not. But I am suggesting that there isn't the consensus that you're saying there is within astrology.

[Monica Padman]

I think there is. Okay, there definitely is about what your three major signs are.

[Dax Shepard]

But you would agree. How could it possibly be correct if they said my sign was in Capricorn on January when they said that hundreds of years ago, and they've lost five days every year, so how could that date still mean you're Capricorn? It can just mathematically.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I don't know what they're doing when they're calculating this. I'm not an astrologer.

[James Gunn]

Right, right.

[Monica Padman]

And there's things astrologists that I just don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Don't be disrespectful. Oh, you wouldn't say a biologer. You'd say a biologist.

[Monica Padman]

Astrologist. Yeah, you're right.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're kind of oral. You're kind of weakening your argument by.

[Monica Padman]

Calling and why don't I ask Brady? Am I? Hey, Brady, is it okay if I call it astrologer? And he'll be like, if you want to call it that, Monica.

[James Gunn]

Sure, if it's fun.

[Monica Padman]

See? Yeah. That's not. Oh, I'm so worried about the world. Anyway, he's not. We confirmed it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And I told him he owed me an apology, and he didn't give it to me.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe Brady will send you an apology. He should ask Brady to send you an apology. He should say, brady, you've really upset Monica. She's upset about this. And now I have disrepair in this relationship. Can you please fix it? That's a good prompt. And see what he does to fix it.

[Monica Padman]

They do. I won't say who, but there's. Yes, the story of a friend who got this really, really sweet, like, comment message from another friend. And it. Yeah, it had, like, I'm sorrys in there and all kinds of things. And then months later, Chat had written. It came out that chat. Wrote it. Oh, that's so bad. You cannot do that.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm in full agreement with you there. That's a little disingenuous, we would say.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. But see, this is where we think so because we, we like writing and we think that we.

[Dax Shepard]

That's fair.

[Monica Padman]

We're good at giving heartfelt notes.

[James Gunn]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

This is very similar to. I've been such a big proponent and fan of GLP1s because I was never obese and then got thin through all my toil and hard work. So of course, for me, I was like, yeah, everyone should. That wants to be thin if they can. That's. That's great. Health wise. But now, I already told you about this GLP1 that's in stage two trials. It's not a GLP1, but it's another about muscles.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[James Gunn]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

It's a peptide.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Where your body naturally limits how much muscle you'll build because muscle's super inefficient. It's not trying to carry around a bunch of different tissue it doesn't need. So this takes off the parameters and let your body build as much muscle as it wants. And I was like, hold on a second. If everyone's gonna be jacked without going to the gym, what am I gonna do? So I finally relate. I can relate a little bit. I'm still for it. Whatever. I don't care. Yeah. But it hit my back door.

[Monica Padman]

It also is just gonna cancel out specificity. I. Look, should I say it now? God, no.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know what you're going to.

[Monica Padman]

Say, but I'm scared I'm going to come clean about something. I have been doing an experiment for a month where I'm taking a microdose of a GLP1. I'm doing it. I'm not doing it for weight loss. I'm doing it to see how it affects my blood work. So we're going to redo my blood work. Although I think we're going to go and help Another month. I wanted to check two things. I wanted to see how it affected my cholesterol. I'm gonna redo my cognitive test after that because there's some, you know, when we had Eric Topalon, he was like, you know, there's like some studies about it reducing tau and, you know, whatever. All of this interesting stuff, inflammation. That's actually when I decided I would do it. Exactly. After we had Eric Topolon, I was like, hmm, I, I wonder. And I really wanted to see how it affected my relationship with alcohol.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And shopping.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I can say it has not affected my relationship to shopping at all.

[James Gunn]

I. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. I would have maybe predicted that. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it was just like any semi addictive things I have, I wanted to see how they were affected. Now the alcohol has been really interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

So, yeah, that's what I'm most curious about. And I haven't gotten an update from you in a while.

[Monica Padman]

I still want really hasn't curbed the craving too much. Maybe a little. Maybe a little bit. Like it got to a point and I mean, this sounds really bad, but it's the truth. It was such a habit that I would wake up, up and I would think like, oh, late. I would like be planning my day and think about, oh, and I'll have a drink at some. At this point, after we record, I'll go to Cara or I'll go here or I'll have. That's part of my plan of the day.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. When you're making your schedule, you know, that's the finish line. It signifies the finish line, I think. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. But. But when you're thinking about it first.

[Dax Shepard]

Thing, as soon as your eyes open. Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's not. It was a little concerning. It was getting a little concerning. So that's gone. I don't wake up and think about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, here was my prediction, if I can just say it before you give me the details, was like, yeah, I'm sure your desire to drink would be the same. And then I think once you're drinking, you're gonna find that you just drink less. And then that's going to reverse engineer the habitual nature of it. How many drinks a night when you go out normally. And then what is it now? And then. Now we know you don't think about it when you wake up.

[Monica Padman]

Minimally to minimally. I. I don't. I don't remember the last time I.

[Dax Shepard]

Would have wondering, yeah, why do it? Yeah, no point, right?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And. And then since being on it, that is exactly what happened. Like it. I still wanted a drink, but I want less. And I. There many, many times have just had a drink.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow, that's fucking. I mean, Monica, think how crazy that is. That is awesome.

[Monica Padman]

Or a. I'll get, I'll get a second drink and I like will start drinking, drinking it and then I won't finish it.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, guys, this is so.

[Monica Padman]

So that's very crazy.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And. And I don't know if this is. I'm sure there's a lot of reasons for this. But two martinis, that's normal for me. That's regular there. There are definitely times where I've had three and been like, fine.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

The next day, two martinis. Now I. I feel it the next day. Like, my hangovers are worse. But also, because we're being honest here.

[Dax Shepard]

You're eating less.

[Monica Padman]

I've lost weight. Exactly. I've lost weight. I'm eating less. And not on purpose. Like it is. I have. Because I don't have that original issue of food chatter.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I don't think about food. So there is plenty of times where I'm like, oh, fuck. Like, I have to eat.

[James Gunn]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Today, like, I need to eat food now.

[Dax Shepard]

That's kind of another magical element of it is when you're starving, you immediately think of all this stuff you want and your mind goes to the shittiest stuff. Versus.

[James Gunn]

Versus.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I haven't eaten in six hours and I have to eat, so what am I going to put in my body? I'm not craving anything. You make better choices. All of a sudden you go like, oh, I need protein and I need.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, it's so true. Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's not like, yeah, there are so many times where I'm like, oh, I'm so hungry. I just, like, need to eat a whole pizza.

[James Gunn]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

That has not happened.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Or I need to drive across town to get this chicken sandwich.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I know, but, like. But I also understand. I. I'm conflicted about this because food is a big part of my life. I love food and I love restaurants and I love exploring new things and I love cooking. And. And so this has been interesting because I. I like that about my life. And so for that to not be as much of a fact, I don't like, I don't love that part. Oh, and by the way, I should tell people I'm on a extremely small, extremely small dose. It is a powerful drug.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's almost hard to believe it happened in our lifetime.

[James Gunn]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

Can I say something really important and gross?

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Sometimes I see it and I'm like, I could eat it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the sign of a good dog food that you consider eating it yourself.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which we're not advising you to do, but we do get that impulse. Plus, the Farmer's Dog provides 24. 7 customer support from real people who really love dogs. You can get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food@the farmersdog.comdax plus you get free shipping. Just go to the farmersdog.comdax this offer is for new customers only. I think a lot of people have that fear you do, which is like your life is built around, around being social this way. Go out to a restaurant you love, go have some drinks you love. But I do think people should have the faith and confidence in themselves. It's identical to kids. What are they going to do if you don't have this video game? Well, they're going to find something else to do that kids are not going to ever sit and stare at a wall if you take away their toys. They're going to go outside and pick up a stick.

[James Gunn]

So.

[Dax Shepard]

So to have the faith and confidence like you're a social butterfly and you're gonna be like, will you end up playing pickleball in the evenings? I don't know. It'll just be some, you know, it'll.

[James Gunn]

Be.

[Dax Shepard]

A transition into something else that's social. You're not gonna lose being social. You're just gonna learn new things you like to do that are social.

[Monica Padman]

I think, yes, I think you're right. But like, if there was a shot that you were taking that made you have zero interest in coffee cars, sure you'd find something else. But like you, it's, it brings you joy. It is something in your life that brings you joy. And for me, I can only speak for me, my love for food and restaurants and that culture is not problematic. It is not like I can't control myself. It's not like I, you know, can't stop eating or it's not. So I, I, so removing it is scary, unnecessary, you know?

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And a little scary because it's what, you know, I'm just saying, just like the, the drink thing, reverse engineered the habitual part. I definitely think your life will just expand in different ways. Like that, that whatever gap is created, you'll. You'll fill with something. Something different. And I'm optimistic it'll be also quite enjoyable.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how long I'm gonna do it. I. We're gonna. I'm gonna see. After I look at the results of my blood work and stuff. Another thing that's like sort of potentially a negative again. I think it's because I am not doing it for. For food chatter and how so many people, which I do think this is a miracle for so many people where they're like, I just used to think about food all the time and now I'm not. Which is great. But for me, it almost has the opposite effect because I'm like, I am thinking about food and that I'm not eating it. Like, it is on my mind. It's like, oh my God, like, I didn't eat or I have to eat today and what am I. What am I going to eat that? Like, is it going to be enough? That's not. You know. And then I've been also watching. I'm back in cooking videos. I've been watching so many cooking videos at night. And that's. Then I was like, oh, God. Like, is it an obsession? It just is starting to. It's feeling a little strange. It's feeling a little strange where I'm like, just watching these cooking videos and they. Everything looks so good and then that's like, satisfying enough.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So I have to. I do have to monitor this.

[Dax Shepard]

But also, I think it would be hard for you to parse out what you're compensating for. So it's like, I don't know that, that your cooking video thing is very natural and seems obvious to think that's about food. But that cooking video thing might be about alcohol. You might normally be buzzed at 8 o' clock and that's calming and satiating you in a way that now that thing's not. So you're looking to regulate with this other thing. So it's like, yeah, it could feel like it's food related, but might actually be alcohol related.

[Monica Padman]

Hmm, maybe. Yeah, maybe it's just so strange that it's a. It's food, like, and because I'm watching these videos.

[Dax Shepard]

Or is it videos? Right?

[Monica Padman]

Like, no, it's food. Well, it's both. I mean, it's all Alison Roman. I've just been rewatching all of her videos. I miss her and I. But then I Do. I'm like, oh, oh, my God. This chicken piccata video. Oh, my God, Amazing. I'm making that. And then I'll buy. I'll buy the stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, and then you don't want to eat chicken piccata. Like, you should just go insane. You should just start making lots of meals and chucking them out the window. And you're out alley.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I did. I made a delicious peach galette.

[Dax Shepard]

What's a galette?

[Monica Padman]

It's a free form pie.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I don't know if I know what a free form pie is. No, no, no. Pie tin is required.

[Monica Padman]

No top of the pie. You've seen them. It's like there's crust sort of on the bottom and on the sides, but the fruit is exposed in the middle.

[Dax Shepard]

Like a quiche?

[Monica Padman]

No, there's more crust than a quiche. It's like folded over the side.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And then. But the middle of the fruit is exposed.

[Dax Shepard]

Not a quiche. Delicious. Not in all, Lorraine.

[Monica Padman]

No. Nothing to do with a quiche.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. All right. Not an a la reine.

[Monica Padman]

And I took it to Elizabeth and Andy's. We played mahjong. And that was good. Cause then I shared it with everyone and it was a hit.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, good. Can I just say, there's a funny bit of human nature happening, which is like, when you're gluttonous, you're ashamed. Like, if you're like, yeah, I ate this whole fucking pie. I brought over this pie I made for everyone. They ate the whole thing. You'd be, like, ashamed. And then if you go and you make a pie and you barely eat something, you're ashamed. It's just like this, you know, an original sin where it's just so built to, like, I don't know, just beat the shit out of ourselves for no reason.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, if you make a pie and you have one bite, why, you know, okay, there's no moral failing there.

[Monica Padman]

No, it's not. I don't think, for me, it's about a moral failing so much as it's. It's just like keeping an eye. Keeping an eye on this new experiment.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think we'll start to see people of means die of starvation? I mean, really, honestly, really?

[James Gunn]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't think it's incorrect. Inconceivable.

[Monica Padman]

No, it's not. It's not to be. It. It's a very slippery eating disorder. Slope. It is. Like, I. I can see because you're seeing changes quickly, pretty quickly, and you're not hungry. And then You're. But your brain is also like, I like the way this looks. So I'm not. It's. It's. It is complicated.

[Dax Shepard]

I agree with you that it's complicated. But. But. And I'll hear about it because anytime I talk about ed, I'm in trouble. But I will say this. I think from the ED people I've talked to, it's much more about the control. Like, even when we were talking to Nikki Glaser, it's like knowing that she can overcome hunger is the spike of adrenaline. It's that control over the urge is what's satisfying and addiction. Whereas you don't have an urge you're overcoming on the GLP1. You're just not hungry.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's just that we should have hunger.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I think this is what happens in. It can happen in eating disorders where that's how it starts. It starts with like, I'm hungry, but I can. I don't have to eat. I'm better than this craving or whatever. That's how it starts. But I do think you get to a point where you, like, food disgusts you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. Yes. But I do think you still have the, like, reward of knowing that's hard. I don't know. I agree with you. I agree with you. But I also do think it's a bit. My guess is it's a bit different.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it might be. I just. I just think it's a slippery slope and to be. To be paid attention to.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I admire you for being honest about it because I wasn't sure I.

[Monica Padman]

Was going to talk about it on here, but, like, why not that. Actually, the secrecy around it is what I have thought is a problem to begin with. That's a problem. Yeah. Where people are like, I'm just working out a ton, and then they're actually taking this. And other people are like, well, I'm working out and nothing's happening. Like, this does have an impact on your body. It does. And so I think it's important if your body is changing. I mean, look, everyone can. I'm not telling everyone has everyone to be like, so open and you have to shout anything from the rooftops. You can keep anything you want to yourself. But I do think that's part of the problem around it. And so I think saying, like, yeah, I'm on this is important to say, especially if you're starting to look different.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'd say it's ethical.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I was just gonna say, as your friend, you're being A little too hard on yourself and just lighten up a little bit on my friend Monica. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Do you think I am?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're like. You have all this weight. Pun not intended. You have all this, like, heaviness around this topic, and I don't think you should at all.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I think it's important if I'm gonna be doing something that's altering my body and mind potentially to take it seriously. I take it. I just take it seriously. And I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

You seem to have a tiny bit of guilt about it, is what I feel like I'm detecting. And I don't. I don't think that's reasonable. I mean, it's reasonable. I don't think it's right.

[Monica Padman]

I. I think you're right. I think I do have some guilt because I'm a small person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it feels kind of wild. A little bit.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Like, I guess again, if there was, like, a shot that gave you perfect skin, no acne and, like, someone was with perfect skin was taking it, I guess I'd be like, why are you doing that? But actually, I probably wouldn't.

[Dax Shepard]

You wouldn't, Right. You go, who cares? Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I wouldn't.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I don't care.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But there's a lot of controversy around this topic.

[Dax Shepard]

I think there was a ton. And I think it's dissipating at one of the most rapid rates I've ever seen. For good reason. You have Eric Topol, you have all these docs. I think it's changing really quickly, and I think it's absurd. You know, no one feels guilty that they take an aspirin for their headache and it works. There's this litany of things we take that help us. We put on eyeglasses, someone with great eyesight. You know, everyone's trying to do the best they can and be the best version of themselves. And the things that help people do that, I don't think they should. And so it's not hurting another person. There shouldn't be any guilt around it.

[Monica Padman]

Or you. It shouldn't hurt other people or you. Yeah, it's very interesting. And I'll keep. I guess I'll keep people updated.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

If they want to be updated.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it's quite interesting.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Want to do some facts?

[Monica Padman]

Okay, let's do some facts.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think I should have worn my Superman outfit for the time first? Facts.

[Monica Padman]

I think once was great. I think it was great. I mean, it's just.

[Dax Shepard]

Once was too many.

[Monica Padman]

No, once was perfect. Like, this is a thing we talk about all the time.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't, don't go back to the. Well.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's okay. It's okay. You did it, and it was great. But if you do it again, then it's like, oh, he just.

[Dax Shepard]

He thinks he's Superman.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. He now thinks he's Superman. I thought it was very cute that when you walked in, he said, oh, I fucked up on casting or. He was great. I really enjoyed him.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. He was really, really unique. He has a very specific personality. He's very authentic. He really knows who he is. And he's so knowledgeable.

[Monica Padman]

So knowledgeable. And he was open with us, which was great. And I think hard to do.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That's a lot he went through.

[Dax Shepard]

I remember it. Yeah. You know, I didn't ask him this in my. I'm sure he couldn't have answered it, but I was thinking when I was watching the trailer of Superman in the theater, like, the things that are baked into. If you direct one of these movies, you have to go to Comic Con.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And they're so. They can be brutal. The Comic Con world, who's, like, super, I guess, religious about the text, these cartoons and stuff.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Very important.

[Dax Shepard]

People can get destroyed. Like, I don't know, like Sonic or something. I, I, I remember somehow there was some issue with Sonic. They were kind of revolted. Again. I personally can't relate to being obsessed with Sonic in a way that I would be furious that the movie did it wrong.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But. And that's light. The super book. These comics.

[Monica Padman]

I know because they're part of their soul.

[Dax Shepard]

Absolutely. But I was wondering, like, what the stress of directing one of those movies is where you're, you have to do something original. Why else do it?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was even thinking, like, oh, he brought the dog back. It's wild to see the dog in the trailer that Superman has a dog. But of course, he has the historical record that there were some comics where Superman had a dog.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

But anyways, just the notion, like, you're trying to make decisions about what thing you want to make. And I just wonder if the chorus of what this really rabid fan base could turn on you at any minute. If that's stressful.

[Monica Padman]

I'm sure it is. But I think that's why it requires. Requires someone who also cares so deeply about comics and about these characters and superheroes, because it's not just like, oh, we have a great filmmaker. Although maybe Nolan. I don't know Nolan's background.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know if he got crazy about the Dark Knight. Yeah, I don't either. But you're kind of obligated to become a historian. You're going to get challenged and you got to have all the right answers. So it's like, in addition to draw directing this very hard to direct movie, you've got to kind of become a historian.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Or they'll call you out.

[Monica Padman]

That's the Sonic. Ish. It was something about.

[Dax Shepard]

So I don't know which one's which.

[James Gunn]

The left was the original, and he.

[Dax Shepard]

Was too realistic for people. Oh, oh, okay. And so the issue is too realistic.

[Monica Padman]

I can relate for Harry Potter a bit.

[James Gunn]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

When that movie was cast, it's always, always like, oh, God, is this gonna be okay? Or is. Or even just, is the world gonna match? I mean, although maybe that's different. That's probably different because with comics, there are visuals.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So.

[Dax Shepard]

And by the way, you don't want to get locked into the visuals of someone's hand drawing from 50 years ago.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You want to do something spectacular and new and original.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's tricks.

[Dax Shepard]

So I just think it's a tightrope.

[Monica Padman]

It is. Okay. Is the hall of justice and Super Friends modeled after the Cincinnati Union Terminal? Yes. He said DC's Justice League was way before Marvel's Avengers. Justice League was created in 1960 and Avengers was created in 63.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, so three years earlier.

[Monica Padman]

Three years. He said St. Louis is the only big city in the US whose population is smaller now than in 1900. Hundred. So in 1900, the city of St. Louis was 575. Two hundred and thirty eight. And in 2020. Three hundred and one thousand five hundred and seventy eight.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

But Cleveland also. Cleveland. 1900. 3819-6820-2037-2624. Okay. We mentioned the trolley problem problem, and I wanted to remind people about the trolley problem. The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics that poses a moral dilemma involving a runaway trolley. The core scenario involves a trolley headed towards five people and the option to switch it to another track where it will kill only one person. This problem explores the complexities of moral decision making, particularly when faced with. With conflicting outcomes. That's like a utilitarian thought experiment.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, but then you get into the tricky scenario where if it's five top brass in the Nazi party.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Versus Louis Pasteur on the left. It's not as simple as five to one.

[Monica Padman]

It's really not.

[Dax Shepard]

I'd have no problem throwing that switch Would you killing the one? The breakdown is if you ask people what should happen, everyone's like, well, the one person should get killed. Then if you put them in a situation where they have to operate the switch, it goes down. I would, I could easily throw the switch.

[Monica Padman]

I can't.

[Dax Shepard]

You just walk away from it. Be like, fate wanted these five people.

[Monica Padman]

It's not about wanting, like, I don't think, like things are meant to, I don't think it was meant to be that those five people. But yes, my intervention is, I, I can't live with.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So yeah, it's gonna happen the way.

[Dax Shepard]

It'S gonna happen, but it's how you frame it, right? Because yeah, your intervention wouldn't, would, would mean you were, you were culpable for one death. But if you insist on yourself, no, I'm culpable for five if I don't act. I know it's like kind of how you frame it.

[Monica Padman]

It's that, it's just that that person was not going to be killed.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. They were on the track. That would need a diversion.

[Monica Padman]

I'm inflicting it on that person to save others. I, I can't do that.

[Dax Shepard]

You can't do it? Yeah. I hope if I'm the one person you're in charge and I hope if I'm in one of the five people, they like, let me pick. That's what I hope.

[Monica Padman]

I, I mean, I guess if I'm in the group of five, you'd be.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, dude, throw it. What are you talking about? There's five of us.

[Monica Padman]

I, I, I don't know if I would feel like that. And we've talked about this. I, I don't, I don't, I don't like the notion. I mean, yeah, if we make it Nazis and Louis Pastor, that's very specific. But like, I don't like the notion that one person's more valuable than another person in general.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, no one likes that notion.

[Monica Padman]

Well, some do. Like or not, they don't like it, but they, they believe it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I believe that for sure. I think the value between Jeffrey Dmer and Benjamin Franklin are, is very different values.

[Monica Padman]

I agree, but those are specific, specific people. And I'm more talk about categories. Like people think this business person is better off.

[Dax Shepard]

It gets immediately. Do you not have kids?

[Monica Padman]

I think, yeah, yeah. This is the conversation. Like, yeah, I should die sooner than a parent.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, but you've extrapolated a lot. You've gone to like what the worst case scenario of that evaluation would be. Like, well this one person has a family and these five people are single.

[Monica Padman]

Well no, I'm just, I'm just, this is just a deviation of the potential outcome. Yeah I mean I, I don't know anything about these people but, but we're, it's all a question of placing value on, on people.

[James Gunn]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

And we don't know anything about these trolley men.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right.

[Monica Padman]

And women.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right. You'd be regretful if you saved the five killed the one and they go by the way, that was the top brass of the SS and the guy you killed was Gandhi.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, well I can't, I didn't kill anyone. One what I would do probably but I would, I would kill five adults to protect a kid.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know if that's the right call.

[Monica Padman]

I, I, I can't, I, I can't have a kid get killed.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, we have, it's well rightly so. We, we, we wait kids above.

[Monica Padman]

So would it, is it different for you with gender?

[Dax Shepard]

Is it if there are three men and three women? I would kill the three men.

[Monica Padman]

No, but what if it's the five men and one woman?

[Dax Shepard]

Well this is great because now we're really. That's what these experience are great. They force you to put a numeric quantifiable value on.

[Monica Padman]

That's what I'm saying.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I don't think five to one. No. One to one for sure. I pick the man to die. Two to one is hard. I might kill two men over one women, one women's but I wouldn't do three.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So then you, you've backed me into saying I think women are twice as valuable as men. But I don't know that I stand by that statement. But in practice that might be the case. How about you? Would you kill a man or over a woman if it's you go, one of them is gonna die. Yeah. They go, one of these people's gonna.

[Monica Padman]

Die and I have to pick.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I kill the man.

[James Gunn]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And as long as they're strangers. Oh, it's all so horrible. But look, this is, this is why you know when people are doing these rankings and it's like you're a single person, you should obviously die. Then they're like the father should die. I think that's what most people would say if you're ranking it's like single person goes, then father goes. The one to protect is the mother.

[Dax Shepard]

Huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I stand by that.

[Monica Padman]

I don't. I mean I know bad mothers.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And good fathers. Like, there's no way to. I know. Bad parents.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, of course. Like, maybe better if all the parents got wiped off and they went to live with aunt and uncle.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Anyway. All right, well, that's it.

[Dax Shepard]

Those were the last of the facts.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay. Well, I love you.

[Monica Padman]

Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Foreignchair expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.

[James Gunn]

This is Nick and this is Jack. We're best friends, ex finance guys and resident 90s experts. And every week on our podcast, the Best Idea yet, we're bringing you the untold stories behind your favorite products. For instance, can you guess which billion dollar fashion company went viral thanks to a rhinestone covered tracksuit? Or which cartoon turned four turtles into a global toy empire by accident? It started as a joke. Last one. Which cold beverage was so hated by.

[Dax Shepard]

Starbucks they actually ended up acquiring it?

[James Gunn]

Spoiler. The Frappuccino. Howard Schultz apparently thought cold coffee was super lame and then he bought it. From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Juicy Couture to the orange mocha Frappuccino, join us every week to learn how your favorite things got made. Follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondering Plus. And if this podcast lasts longer than.

[Dax Shepard]

45 minutes, call your doctor.