Hi, I’m Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and this is my last meal. Every person has exactly two things in common. We all gotta eat, and we’re all gonna die. Today we’re joined by writer, actor, director, and former Cocoa Puff spokes-kid. He’s starring alongside Eddie Murphy in Netflix’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, welcome to the show. Hey, man, thanks. I haven’t been called a Cocoa Puffs spokes-kid before, but it’s appropriate, isn’t it? I do want to say that your performance in that commercial, when you went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, it was so visceral. Did you go Stanislavski or method for that? I hated acting in commercials when I was a kid because I didn’t know names like Stanislavski or whatever, because I never read books about acting, but I did, like, very passionately care about acting, even as a young person. And so commercials were always like an insult to my dignity. But it was funny, because so my parents never pressured me to do acting. I’ve been doing it since I was young, but they did sort of feel like, jeez, he has this kind of crazy opportunity to, like, pay for all of college, you know? So maybe we should at least make that incentive present for him. And they said, okay, if you do two commercials, you can buy anything you want. And so I did a Pop-Tarts commercial and a Cocoa Puffs commercial and then bought a Street Fighter Two arcade game, which I still have. That is literally like, out of a kids movie from the nineties. But your life is literally a kid’s movie from the nineties. I’m gonna buy an arcade game by Pop-Tart. I bought a real arcade game, then it came out on Super Nintendo, and I spent the rest of my childhood being like, yeah, but that’s. That’s not the real game. Have you thought about your last meal before? When you all asked me this question, hey, come on the show, and what would your last meal be? My mind went straight to a conversation that I had with my brother about this exact thing. Like, what happens if we are in some kind of situation where we get a last meal? Maybe we should know what each other wants. So in case you can provide it for each other? That was like. It could happen somehow. I don’t know. I don’t know what scenario. We didn’t think it through that far. Hanging by one hand off of a mountain. Like, dude, what do you want? It came down to cereal, actually. I view food as sort of any other art or I guess, any other, like, sensory sensation where to me, it’s not about the physicality of it. It’s like what emotions it triggers for you. And the fact that, you know, you had something so singularly driven. I think it actually makes it really powerful. Have you thought about death a lot before? Every day. Every day? How can you not think about death? Only a crazy. There’s a lot of people, you’d be surprised, that straight up insist that they don’t. Yeah. You know what? I was watching episodes of your show after, you know, you invited me on. And I saw a couple of people say, I don’t really think about it. And of course, all the respect in the world’s, all different people’s minds and how they do it. But that’s crazy. Yeah. It’s like it’s the only thing you should be thinking about. It’s at the end. And one day you’re gonna blink and you’re gonna be there. Well, it’s like trying to write a story and not thinking about the ending. Yeah. It’s not gonna be a very good story. Yeah. If you don’t think about the ending. I don’t imagine that I get to go to some kind of pearly gates. Or there’s gonna be some judgment where I get to go to heaven, hell or whatever. But I do totally buy that after I’m dead, there’s still the people that I made an impression on. I mean, I know this. I just mentioned my brothers and my brother died, sadly. It’s the most tragic thing in my life. My brother died fourteen years ago. And he’s still very much here in a way, like, and especially right now, because we’re talking about him. And we’re, like, doing this thing partially, like, in celebration of him. So, like, that to me, is life after death in a certain way that feels real. But yeah. Do I think about death? I think about it all the time. Oh, hey, man. The ending of the story isn’t here yet. Still being written. And boy, it’s being written in milk today. You ready to get to it? Let’s do it. Joe, for our first course, we have a bowl of Cheerios and Straus whole milk in a bowl with a spoon. Yeah. Beautiful. Spartan. It’s like this is the way that peasants ate gruel in the fifteenth century. Like a monk meditating, and so. Am I wrong in this? I heard that, like, Mister Kellogg, or something, had this idea. This will be a cheap way to feed a prisoners. No, it was people at what they called sanatoriums back then. Sanatorium. Which were some combination of, like, a spa, but also mental institution. And people for physical ailments. Okay. But you can sort of track all of this back to Sylvester Graham, who, the inventor of the graham cracker. And it had something to do with, like, the temperance movement. Then James Caleb Jackson, who was a sort of acolyte of him in The Seventh-day Adventist Church, who invented granula, which turned into granola, and that’s in the eighteen sixties. And then you can take that to John Harvey Kellogg, in the eighteen nineties, at his Battle Creek sanatorium, where he invented Corn Flakes. But a lot of it had to do with early vegetarianism and how it can cure a lot of people, say, masturbatory urges. Vegetarianism can? Yeah, well, vegetarianism, not drinking alcohol. There was also, like, hydropathy that he believed in. He also believed in yogurt enemas. Not drinking alcohol goes completely counter to anti-masturbatory urges. Listen, you gotta take it up with this dude that died a hundred years ago, but please tell me about Cheerios, and why you like eating them. And thank you for telling me about the origins of the graham cracker and granola. You’re welcome. Because that’s. I’m genuinely fascinated, but why did I pick Cheerios first? Okay, so I picked all cereal for this thing. Yes, you did. And Cheerios is, like, where it kind of has to start. It’s like the blank canvas for me. They’re probably some of the earliest food memories. Like, I’ll give my baby Cheerios today. They’re easy to feed to a baby. It’s still delicious even though it doesn’t have any of the bells and whistles, you know, we’ll get there later in the day. Fascinating. Please. Would you like me to pour your milk in, like, if you’re going to Korean bar? I don’t know. It’s like, it’s a sign of. It’s a personal thing. It’s a personal thing. Like, do you fully submerge your cereal when you eat it? I do some, actually. I remember calling it something from when I was a kid. I would say I gotta tap it down. And that is part of it. Yeah, you gotta, like, tap down. I don’t really want dry cereal. No, me neither. That’s profane. This is divine. What are the memories flooding through your head right now? Saturday morning cartoons with my brother sitting in, on a couch. Like kind of a dark, brownish, reddish, probably secondhand leather or fake leather or some kind of couch, the room we would watch tv and cartoons in. My parents are lovely people in so many ways. I’m so grateful for them. Interior design is not their strength. I say that with all the love I possibly could. So when I think of that den, the room we used to eat cereal in and, like, watch Saturday morning cartoons in, it’s not, like, the prettiest visual memory. You seem to have designed your last meal to create a real narrative arc. And as you mentioned, thinking about death is like thinking about the end of a story. Do you think that there’s a little bit of a fallacy about thinking about decisions that you’re making in your life, calibrated by how you’ll think about them on your deathbed? I really love that question. It is actually one of the questions I ask myself when I’m making, really, any decision, but especially creative decisions. I’m lucky that I get to be an actor, that people send me scripts and then I read them and I decide if I want to maybe pursue them. One of the questions I ask myself is, is this a movie I’m gonna wanna watch when I’m old and almost dead? The other question I have to ask myself is like, hey, is this gonna be fun? Am I gonna enjoy myself going and doing it? Beverly Hills Cop is one of those, for sure. I think I’ll also watch it when I’m old. But. But it was definitely one where I was like, this is gonna be cool. This is gonna be fun to be sitting across from Eddie Murphy and riffing. This is just gonna be one of those experiences. I gotta do it. Who knows if the movie turns out good, I’m not in control of this one. Like, this is. I think, hopefully it’ll turn out good. But let’s be honest, and Eddie has said this to me. Beverly Hills Cop one, good. Two good, three not really very good. I still liked it when they were at the theme park. I don’t know. I thought it had charm. So I didn’t know if the movie was gonna be good or not. It turned out actually great. And I’m not just saying that, it actually turned out super good. It’s like, exactly what you want a Beverly Hill Cop movie to be. But I was gonna do it either way. Yeah. What are some specific moments on set that you think you’re gonna remember on your deathbed about shooting this? Shooting with Eddie about movies and music. He’s a huge Beatles fan, so I told him this story about how I was hanging out with my friends, stoned as hell. Food comes into this. I’ll bring in the food element because this is a food show. We were, like, stoned and eating. It was like something dipped in something. Like Cheetos dipped in bean dip or something. Like something a stoner would love, but that a sober person might think twice about. And we were listening to the White Album. For you kids out there who don’t know what the White Album is, it’s an album by the Beatles, but there’s a very weird. You can’t even really call it a song, like a sonic experiment towards the end of the White Album called Revolution Number Nine. And it’s just this weird collage of all kinds of weird sounds. Like if you look at core, core videos now on social media, like just weird, random all thrown together, if you like that kind of thing, listen to Revolution Number Nine by the Beatles. It’s like the sound version of that. And we were sitting there listening to it, and it’s super, like, all these sounds coming in and out, and it’s super repetitive. And we were listening and eating and stoned, and we were talking. We started talking about, like, it’s so crazy how some of it’s repetitive, but then some of it changes, and it’s repetition and deviation. It’s like, the Beatles are geniuses. And then we realized the record was skipping. Now, I’m not old enough to where we only listen to music on vinyl. I’m from the days of CDs. But we did listen to the White Album on vinyl, and the record was skipping. And when I told Eddie that story, he laughed just like that. And he goes, not only did he say, that’s a good story, he said, that’s a good high story, which is something I will remember on my deathbed. It’s like I told Eddie Murphy a good high story. You don’t have to repay me the favor. But my high story relating to Beverly Hills Cop is that my freshman year in college, talent show, I printed out pictures of Eddie Murphy’s face as Axel Foley, and I taped them to my nipples. And I did, like, the pec dance to the Beverly Hills theme. Beverly Hills Cop theme song. I didn’t know you were gonna do it. And, I was pretty zooted, and nobody found it funny or charming. And then I just walked back to my dorm and never addressed it. So you’ve had pecs this developed that long? This isn’t a recent thing? More developed, actually. I was like a real big kid. Big. The story I had in my head was like, this guy, he was a chef. And then he, like, got a little famous. He was like, I’m gonna work out. No? Opposite, athlete turned chef. And now just still very responsive titties. You look so pleased with yourself, Joe. For course number two, we have Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and then Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. Not Apple Jacks. Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. No, no, no, no. I don’t like Apple Jacks. So when I was a kid, my mom didn’t let us have sugary cereals. But for some reason, maybe because it had the word apple in it, because they were Cheerios, we would sometimes get the Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. Please pour yourself up. You actually asked, one, I have to say that I really respect the fact that you kind of wrote mini essays about all these cereals when you sent it to us. You mentioned that you feel like Cinnamon Toast Crunch is the sugariest cereal out there. Yeah. But then you said, I’m not going to look it up. So I did. But I actually had to calculate it by hand. I was hoping you would. And I adjusted everything to a one point five ounce serving size and found that these two have exactly the same amount of not only carbohydrates, but total added sugar as well, per one point five ounces. Wow. And that seems to be industry standard among every sugary cereal. And then every, like, unflavored, healthy cereal seems to have thirty-three grams of carbs and four grams of added sugar. So it’s about the same carbohydrate output, which starch converts to sugar in your body no matter what. Right. So all cereals are sort of the same nutritional value, but this has higher perceived sweetness because of the placement of the sugar. I wasn’t totally wrong that this has something to it that makes it sweeter. No, not at all. Like, I would have thought you’re correct that this is the sugary cereal. And then you actually crunch the numbers and you sort of, like, find that almost all cereals, it seems to be industry standard. Yeah. Wow. Okay. And I think Cheerios are, please eat, eat. I will, I will. We talked about cereals originally invented to quell masturbatory urges. You love cereal. Your directorial debut, Don Jon, he sees where this is going, is about a man who is addicted to online pornography and masturbating. Joseph, what are you trying to tell us? You know? Yeah. It’s about someone who’s addicted to watching porn online. Also, one of the things Don Jon does is it sort of tries to blur the lines between porn and other media, because the Scarlett Johansson character, she’s addicted to rom coms and media, has only become more and more addictive. And nowadays, literally the most expensive and sophisticated technology ever invented, the recommendation engines inside of Google, which owns YouTube and Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, etcetera, these are as expensive and coveted and well protected as any nuclear codes or anything, are these advertising algorithms, and they’re fully designed to addict people with media, we’re all gonna end up blissed out junkies. And I also say that as a parent concerned for my kids. There are laws about heroin. There are laws about cigarettes. There are laws about gambling, because we know that gambling is addictive. There need to be laws about addictive media technology. How much do you think we can actually trust the government to put those laws into place? Because you have a really interesting past with your family. Your grandfather was sort of blacklisted from Hollywood in the McCarthyist era, and then you also played Edward Snowden in a biopic and went to talk to him. So it almost seems, you specifically, talking about, we need laws. It’s like, well, how much of that can actually be effective? I love that question. So, while I was playing Edward Snowden, I read a book called Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier. He wrote it before the Snowden disclosures, but had a foreword about Edward Snowden. And so I read it with, you know, with interest about that. But most of the book is actually not about concern over government overreach. It’s concern about Facebook and Google, concern about a certain business model where we give you some software for free and let you use it, but what we’re really doing is conducting mass surveillance on you, collecting billions of data points on you, and then using that data, feeding it into an AI algorithm, a machine learning algorithm, and using it to manipulate you. And that business model will break the world. If we could all trust in human nature to just say, like, hey, everyone, put it down. You don’t need Instagram. He also wrote ten reasons why you should delete your social media, right? Yeah. Do you think that, ultimately, humans don’t have free will in that way? Well, so it comes down to addiction. I think addiction does mess with your free will. And I think that asking an individual to compete against a multi-billion, nearly trillion dollar force that’s hiring tens of thousands of the smartest people in the world to build a thing that will addict you, it’s a lot to expect just a normal individual person to be able to overcome that. And this is why we have laws. And, look, you’re a hundred percent right. Governments are not to be fully trusted. But just because something’s not perfect doesn’t mean that you don’t try to make use of it. It’s sort of the best we can do. We know that these companies are doing harm. Yep. Eat your Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Nice. It’s gonna get. Mine’s getting soggy. I poured it up. I don’t mind soggy Cinnamon Toast Crunch, actually. Oh, interesting. Cap’n Crunch, to me. To me, has the most, like, delightful sog factor to it. Cap’n Crunch gets the sogginess. That’s why it’s called Cap’n Crunch. It’s like Greenland being mostly ice and being called green and Iceland being mostly green and being called Iceland. Right. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite as a way to, like, move rocks out of quarries. Right? This is so good. Sorry. Talk about Nobel. At this point, who gives a? We’re talking about, like, the world ending here. So anyways, Alfred Nobel invents dynamite to move rocks out of quarries and was like, this is going to help people. It’s called Nobel safety powder. And then he was like, crap, they can also be used to destroy people. Starts the Nobel Peace Prize, which is to say, like, everything here is just a tool, and in the right hands, that then has a normative value of good or evil. Yep. Something great about social media and mass online communication, HitRecord. Ever heard of it? Absolutely. And YouTube is also great in many ways. And thank you for mentioning HitRecord. Sure. And I’m glad you provide that context because I’m, like, the biggest optimist about technology and the internet. And, you know, this show I watched on YouTube, there’s so much great stuff on YouTube. The idea of a website where anybody can post a video and anybody else can watch that video, that’s great. YouTube is great in that way. Or Facebook. The idea of a website or an online platform where people can connect with each other, that’s great. We should have that. The problem is the business models. Couldn’t we find a way to have the things that we like about YouTube or TikTok or any of the other ones, but that don’t have these damaging side effects? Or baiting people into thinking that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has died. Thanks for clicking. You ready to get to our next bowl of cereal? Joe, for our third course, we have Just Right cereal. We have quinoa puffs, and then these are going to be paired. We finally have a reprieve from the dairy. We have Calafia Farms organic unsweetened almond milk, and then we have Oatly, the original oat milk. Yep. Please tell me about it. This is my cereal world today. I eat this, like, once or twice a day, probably. It’s super good in the morning, but I also eat it probably more often at night. And there’s no sugar, there’s no anything. It’s just quinoa. Going from like, talking about you visiting Edward Snowden in Moscow and it’s just quinoa. This is a hell of a conversation. It’s actually. I find it delicious, though. It’s obviously, it’s not as flavorful as Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but if you’re a lover of the bowl of cereal, it totally, for me, scratches the itch and fulfills the experience. This is sort of, as we get to the midway point of this meal, this is like the maturation process of the artist. He finally sort of settles down, comes into himself. We’re here. We need a palate cleanser. This is what’ll do it. And which milk goes with the, the oat milk? I eat the quinoa puffs with oat milk, generally, which. We’ll get to the almond milk later. This is like, if you want a plant based milk. I sound like a commercial. Sorry. But this stuff’s really good. It’s actually really good. You have to shake it. Okay. I find oat milk very strange. Really? Almond milk has been around since, I mean, literally, like the Middle Ages. You can find recipes cooked with almond milk. And they called it almond milk in like the twelve hundreds. Wow. I thought it came into existence in like two thousand and four. No, like a lot of people did. And then there was the whole thing about the drought and all that. Right, right, because almonds take a lot of water to farm. Right. Significantly less than milk. That was a psyop from the freaking dairy industry. Almonds are way less. The cows have to eat the grass and then they turn that into milk. And then also our government’s just paying dairy farmers to spray just millions of tons of milk into the dirt because of World War Two dairy subsidies. That’s amazing, that was. That whole almonds take a lot of water was something perpetrated by the dairy industry. They take a lot of water to grow. Sure. Significantly less than dairy milk. Wow. Which is fascinating. Listen, if the world’s broken. Wait, hold on. Let me eat this. I gotta get back to shouting soon. How do you like it? If I’m being honest, it. Tastes like quinoa? It’s really bumming me out, man. It tastes so much more like quinoa than I wish it tasted like. And it’s like it could be any grain. Like puffed rice is delightful. There’s something about the quinoa that is, it tastes like if you took any like, trash bin and just sort of licked the bottom of it, like a clean trash bin, but there’s something, like, dusty about it and. It’s still cereal, though. You got kids. They’re gonna be hurtling forth into the future. If you were to, say, write a dystopian Sci-Fi novel, what do you think the dystopian future is gonna look like? Brave New World’s actually a really good one. One of my favorite books is this book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, and the introduction makes a comparison between nineteen eighty-four, which is one of the great Sci-FI novels of all time, and Brave New World, which is another one of the great Sci-Fi novels of all time, and they’re both dystopian, but Brave New World, it’s a different kind of dystopia, where there’s not the kind of control. They don’t have to burn books because no one wants to read books. They’re all just blissed out on, like, on soma, like, drugs and media, basically. Yeah. And so it seems to me that our world is going much more in that direction. And even the authoritarians out there realize that the better way to control people is not through overt control like that, but through this sort of slick. Vladimir Putin-esque sort of propaganda. Entertain them, distract them, sort of make it so that it’s too hard to figure out what’s really true. Nothing’s really true. Let’s just forget it. The weird side effect of reading Brave New World when you’re fourteen is that the scene where they’re going into the pleasure pods, like the VR porn, as a fourteen year old, you’re kind of just like, wait, they can make those in the future? I want that. Like, hold up. Tell me about Just Right. Just Right is, like, what I remember. My mom used to get this in addition to the Cheerios, and it was sort of, like, the compromise because it’s, like, a little more, you know, sweet than the Cheerios, but, and then I used to find it when I first moved out of my parent’s house. I was, like, in my, you know, early twenties or whatever. I used to find Just Right in the bodegas in New York where I was living. And this is why I wanted to have almond milk, because I used to buy almond milk then, for no good reason, I just would buy the almond milk, and I don’t know why. I guess because I was, you know, a victim of the psyops by then. No, I was a reverse victim of the psyops by then. It’s all a psyop, man. Yeah, right. It is just right. It’s super good, right? It is just right. You said that your mom never put any value on fame, and that seems to have, like, transferred over to you, at least from my perspective. But how much of your career has been sort of intrinsically motivated via your art and creativity, or extrinsically motivated via, you know, eccentricity? You said it, man. You know, it’s a credit to my mom and dad and brother and the other people close to me that they never, like, got seduced by that. They were always like, we like you for who you are, and whether people know who you are or not will like you just the same. And I consider myself super lucky that the people in my life gave me that attitude, because as soon as you start chasing that fame, it’s just a recipe for unhappiness, because you can never get enough. It’s like an addiction. We were talking about addiction before, and there’s a reason there’s so many stories about people who get caught up chasing fame and end up with, you know, sad outcomes. Yep. Are you afraid that you are potentially the last generation of actors, at least for the foreseeable future, that has the, let’s say, luxury to do that? Because now, especially talking to a bunch of friends who are actors, you won’t even get a callback unless you have X amount of Instagram followers. It’s almost like you have to first chase fame to then become an actor, as opposed to becoming an actor to then get famous. So I would say to anybody out there who feels drawn to be creative, to be an artist, to be an actor or a writer or a musician or a filmmaker or whatever it is that you’re inspired to do, just really try to stay aware of how much fame is driving you, because if you let it drive you too much, you will end up unhappy. And if you’re starting your idea, and one of the first things you think about is, will that get a lot of likes? Maybe think twice about that. Maybe think like, oh, it’s too deep in. This has become too big a part of my creative process, and I need to have. I need my creativity to exist within myself, maybe my friends or my collaborators, but maybe not Mark Zuckerberg and his advertising business. Time is a flat circle, Joe. We got our fourth course here. We got Cocoa Krispies, and then we got Kix, and if you look at the shape of the Kix, but the flavor of the Cocoa Krispies were right back at the intro talking about your Cocoa Puffs. That’s true. I don’t like Cocoa Puffs. They kind of suck, right? Yeah, and it’s not just cause of the commercial. I didn’t like Cocoa Puffs before I did that commercial. Tell me about the cereals. So, the conversation I mentioned where I had. Where my brother and I were talking about last meals, and we said cereal. I said Cheerios. He said Kix. Your brother was right, by the way. You think so? You like Kix better than Cheerios? Yeah. Cheerios kind of tastes like eggs in a weird way, and I don’t know why. But Kix are like. They’re also sort of. They have some of that same blank canvas quality of Cheerios, but they’re a little sweeter. Yeah. They have a bit more flavor. It’s that little bit more, like, corn syrupy kind of section there. Do they have more sugar than Cheerios? Corn would have a higher glycemic index, which means it converts starch to sugar quicker. I don’t think it’s meaningful for health, but it converts starch to sugar more quickly than something like oats, which Cheerios are made out of. There is that corn flavor to Kix that is kind of what does it, right. Corn is just bread to be basically easily convertible to sugar. Talk to me about your brother. You said that, I mean, he was, like, a superhero growing up, and then you lost him in twenty ten. What specifically about your brother’s life would you most want to celebrate? He was just determined to be super, super optimistic. When he was younger, he was always really introverted. He was a software engineer. He was really good at school. Never very, like, outgoing, and at a certain point in his life, when he was in his late twenties, he just made this very conscious decision that he wanted to start becoming more outgoing and extroverted, and he did it. It’s not that common that you see somebody say, I want to change a big, fundamental thing about myself and make it very different, and then go about actually doing it. It’s really admirable. And he did. And it’s funny, when I talk to people who knew him later in life, they’ll say, like, he was shy? What? He’s the least shy person I know. And I think that maybe because he had managed to do that, he was optimistic about the ability of people to change or the world to change, or. So I try to keep that. I try to keep that alive in myself, too. It’s beautiful going from what we first started talking about with life after death, not necessarily being literal, but the impact you had on people and then us for about, I don’t know, forty-five minutes, eating cereal and talking about how your children are going to grow up in a Brave New World where they’re addicted to soma and the government, they’re going to take it. And then seeing your eyes light up immediately when you talked about your brother’s optimism. It’s like, that’s him here now. That is right. That’s exactly what it means to be alive after your last meal. Yeah. Truly. His last meal, his real last meal was Thai food. And after he was dead, there were leftovers in the fridge, and I went and ate it. It was panang tofu. Nice. He was a vegetarian. That’s incredible. You’ve talked about generally wanting to be a more proactive person in terms of being judged for, like, your art, and not wanting to put, especially your kids, who, like, can’t consent to any of that through any of that stuff. How much of that do you think is natural versus a reaction to the types of experiences you had seen in a YouTube video from eighteen years ago called Pictures of Assholes? I think still your best directorial work today. Yeah, I submitted that video to Sundance, back before there was YouTube, where, like, if you had a short film, really all you could do was submit it to a film festival, and Sundance rejected it, but. Bring it back, Sundance. I used to walk around with a video camera before everyone had video cameras in their phones. I walked around with, like, this little MiniDV cassette camera, and, yeah, at one point, these paparazzi photographers started taking my picture, and they were being kind of rude, and I had my camera, and I started just recording them, and they ended up just hanging themselves. I mean, I was surprised without all the things they said to me. And, yeah, goes to show, again, fame culture. Maybe not all it’s cracked up to be. It wasn’t until we did an episode with one of my favorite comedians of all time, Maria Bamford, who I, like, really opened up about my own life and experience with death. With my, you know, mom taking her own life. Oh, is that what happened? I’m sorry. Happens. That’s what I say to people, I go happens, when they say that. Instead of thank you. Yeah. But we were actually talking off camera, and I didn’t even realize that, you know, we’re sort of still rolling. And afterwards in the edit, we were like, we should put this in. But it was this moment where, like, I gave up more of myself than I thought I would want to. And then the response to it, not just online, but we were talking about my daddy bracelet, if we can get an insert shot of that, because we were just on a live tour and, like, talking about the meat is important. This person came up to me, and they said that Last Meals was the only reason that they were able to actually understand what it meant to grieve when their father passed. And we just, like, held each other and cried, meet and greet. And again, it’s a weird facsimile of a human interaction because it’s one minute, you get paid for it. But just to, like, hold somebody as they share these emotions, and saying that your sort of empathy and openness allowed me to have that was a really trippy experience for me. You have such an intimate connection, especially with, like, the HitRecord community. Is there part of you that wants to sort of open up more and give more to yourself? Or are you happy to do that only via your art? First of all, thank you for telling me the story. That’s really lovely. But the goal of any artist, I think, and certainly for me, is to try to put yourself out there in a way that other people can connect with and not feel alone. Whether it’s from watching a movie or reading a book or listening to a record or whatever it is. I’ve had so many deeply, deeply meaningful moments and feelings and experiences with an artist that wasn’t physically there. Yeah. For me, I need some boundary, or I feel I’ll go insane. If I felt like, you know, in my house, when I’m just having my normal life together with my family, etcetera, I could be performing. It would really impact my happiness. I would have trouble staying in the moment and being genuine in my connection with the people close to me in my life and with myself. and I think my mind would just kind of spin out. When you first started getting famous, did you notice that you interacted with, let’s say, like, a store cashier in a different way than you would have because you think that they might know who you are? When I was younger, when I was, like, a teenager, I was on a sitcom on tv, and if people would recognize me, I would just flat out lie. So, like, they would say, aren’t you the guy from, and I’d be like. Me? I would put on this, like, really convincing performance about how I wasn’t who they thought I was. And rather than just what would have been a lot easier, have been like, yep, cool. Nice to meet you. Which is what I do now. Yeah. But I think I still have some vestigial habits from those old days when I was really kind of neurotically scared of fame. Can we talk about Cocoa Krispies? This is the greatest thing I’ve ever. This is the greatest thing I’ve ever tasted. No, really. Wait, hold on. This is incredible. I haven’t had a bowl of these in so long. I knew I wanted to do a chocolate one. The milk turns chocolatey. I mean, it’s so good. But I also, I do love Rice Krispies. I’ll eat Rice Krispies plain. I didn’t put those on the list, but this would be a real contender for, like, the most pleasant, I think, cereal eating experience. Joe, for the final course of your final meal, we are back to where we started. We’re gonna start in diapers, we’re gonna end in diapers. We’re starting with Cheerios, we’re ending in Cheerios. But Crispix has also entered the chat. Please tell me about this. At the end of the story, you’ve got to kind of return to where you started, but with a difference. That’s the hero’s journey. I like mixing cereals. Do you mix cereals? I do, yeah. And I feel pretty passionately about it. So, this is obviously one of the biggest hits ever. Everyone knows Cheerios. Had you ever heard of this before? I had, yeah, yeah. I’ve eaten it. I really like it. It’s like. Oh, really? It’s like a two toned cereal., right? Because usually when I bring this up, people don’t know what this is. I don’t know why I remember Crispix so strongly, but I do. Crispix is great. And it’s sort of similar to Cheerios. It’s like a very subtle flavor. This is too much. Can I, please. Please, brother. this is your show, man. And. Because if I put that much in and then put the Crispix in with the milk, it would be too full. So. Could have had A five Wagyu, caviar, you know, lobster thermidor. Could have. Yeah, this is. This is way better, man. Yeah. So, Crispix. I love Crispix, but this is, this is very nostalgic for me, the mixing of Cheerios and Crispix. This is like when I talked about sitting in that den, Saturday morning cartoons. Crispix is as nostalgic as Cheerios for me. But the mix in particular, I don’t know. That’s just what we used to do. There’s a great book called The Sacred and The Profane by Mircea Eliade, where they talk about how, like, any site where a miracle occurred, whether it happened or not doesn’t matter because it imbues it with a certain sense of sacrality, and I. There’s a miracle in this bowl right now, and I can’t explain it. I almost don’t want to eat it. It’s the opposite of your brother’s Thai food in the fridge. Right. Crispix, take a while to tap down. Okay, we can. You had an acting coach growing up named Kevin McDermott. He taught you about the magic if, as in what if I was actually going through what this character is going through. Yeah. And you’ve talked about acting as ultimately a form of empathy. You played a character with cancer in the movie Fifty fifty. What did that teach you about your reaction to what it’s eventually going to be like to die? First thing that comes to mind is when I made that movie, I thought a lot about my friend who died of cancer, Adam. And in fact, his initials are in the credits, A-Y-V. He died when he was nineteen. I was eighteen. We were in a band together. You know, he was a good friend. And then all of a sudden he just. Well, it wasn’t that sudden. It took like a year or something. Most of the time we were like, it’s gonna be okay, and then it wasn’t, so I had that to draw on. But, yeah. What’s it gonna be like to die? No one knows. Right? I have a theory, though. I don’t mean, I don’t want your cereal to get soggy. My theory is when you die or what I hope happens, and what I sort of think might happen is that time spreads out and spreads out and spreads out and spreads out. So you never. You never get the sensation of, like, lights out. It’s over. It just spreads and spreads and spreads to the point where, and I have had an experience on psychedelic drugs. I shouldn’t be ashamed. I’ve had an experience on psychedelic drugs. Legalize it. You can just buy them on. Yeah. Nowhere, actually. This drug called DMT, which I don’t endorse. I’ve never heard of Dimethyltryptamine, the waking dream drug, where you go to hyperspace and time slows down. I’ve never heard of that. Never heard of that, okay. Crazy. Don’t go do that unless you do it extremely carefully and you have a guide and you make sure it’s the right thing and be very careful about how you do this. But I had this experience, and they say also, besides what you just said, waking dream, they say that it actually has some commonality with a chemical that gets released in your brain when you die. The experience itself lasts, objectively, like a couple minutes or something, but what I remember was something closer to infinity. It’s just you and me eating cereal, playing Street Fighter Two until infinity for another Five Hundred Days of Summer. More like infinity days of summer. Am I right? You ready to get into the lightning round? Oh, there’s a lightning round? Okay. Okay. There’s a lightning round. This one’s quick. One person, dead or alive, you’d want to share your actual last meal with. Dan. Does the top fall at the end of Inception? There’s no quick answer to that. You shouldn’t put that question. It’s like, it’s a yes or no. Does the top fall? So, like, binary. What song do you want to be played at your funeral? Are You Sleeping? By Harry Nilsson. What’s your biggest fear? Dying. It’s a good one. When are you playing Robin in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Batman and Robin? Never! Take that. What’s your greatest regret in life? Vanity. How about that? And finally, are you happy? Yeah, yeah. Super happy. So grateful. Filled up with cereal. I’m incredibly happy. And I’m incredibly happy that you took the time to do this, man. I had a rad conversation. Thanks, dude. This is super good. Bravo. I appreciate you. If you want to deliver your last words to that camera right there. My last words? God, just, no, that was surely Meissner, right? That comes from the camp. For real, man. Thank you so much, and everybody, make sure to check out Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F on Netflix. And then also watch his entire category of movies with me on my deathbed. I’ll be live streaming it for micro-payments directly into my account. Not watching Angels in the Outfield, though. You can’t get it on streaming. Hasn’t the government taken enough from us? Now Angels in the Outfield? Face the reality of mortality head on with our new Last Meals hat and tee, available now at mythical.com