Nick Offerman

Welcome, welcome, welcome to arm chair turkey party. That was good. Oh, thank you. You know, I stole that from Aaron.

He cracked that impression. That's amazing. Yeah. I'm not surprised that he dedicated some time to that, just like his Steve Herkel.

Yes, similar dedication. Once you did have a fourth of July party and he would be drunk at like six AM and you'd hear him out in the yard acting like a turkey with the turkey. Oh, wow. And then the turkey would join in and they would communicate basically.

Oh, that's sweet. He's always had a connection with animals. You know, who else has a great connection with animals, maybe just their house, the outdoors nature. That's right.

Nick Offerman. And he has a new book out called Where the Deer in the Antelope Play, which is a tour of America's most beautiful places, as well as a mission statement about loving, protecting, and experiencing the outdoors. It's a good message. It's a great message.

And he's a beautiful person. I love him. He is a beautiful person. He's so awesome.

It's what I like about you. He's very competent. I love competence. He's very competent.

It seems he can do anything. And he has a kind of what you would think is a hard exterior, but a very soft inside. Yes, very Eminem like in warm weather. Oh, Eminem the candy.

Yeah, not the rapper. We don't know, I don't know enough about the rapper to be able to say. I don't either, but I'd like to find out. Eminem, if you're listening, get on here.

It's like this about Eminem. Well, how about this Eminem? You listen to Nick Offerman right now and tell me if you'd like to have a similar conversation. If so, hit me on IG, I guess.

Please enjoy Nick Offerman. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I feel like Spring always does this thing where you realize you've been thinking about something for a long time, and suddenly it feels like, okay, maybe I actually do something with it. Totally.

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That is nice. Yeah, you're not required to wake up when the earliest riser gets up. Not for me. I always start by checking out guest favorites.

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I'm ashamed to admit it, but I've just kind of crossed some threshold with it where I'm like, I'm relaxed, I get tested, and that's the end of how much I'm going to think about this anymore. I don't know. I'm sure that's unethical, but I'm just like, I'm doing the shit that I got to do, and I don't have any more space for this fucking experience. Oh my God!

It's just like the news over the last six, seven years. It's like, you reach a point where you listen to it every day and then you're like, oh, don't ever play it again. But it's just that thing of like going to the hospital or going to a film set where I'm like, yeah, do everything I can. I should drill down into this.

I guess I have some arrogance about it. Like I guess I think someone on the film set's going to get it, but I don't think it's going to be me because I don't fucking do anything. You know what I'm saying? I'm like, I'm at my house with my kids, and then I go to work, and really, this is my work.

So I don't know, how do you feel? You've changed, you've evolved quite a bit, I've noticed. I used to be, I was really scared of it at first. Well, I wasn't scared of it.

It was the same thing. I was just like, I can't live if I give it to somebody. But I have evolved, I've gotten much less strict. Having done all the protocols, I wear masks out and around.

But we were in England, and let me tell you, man, they don't wear anything. I mind you, they're highly vax, which is fantastic. But they're not wearing it, and I gotta say, we were there, and I'm like, I fucking love this, I missed this, and I got tested when I got home, and everything was kosher. I missed it.

It's either like lock ourselves in a bubble or roll the dice a little bit here and there. But at the same time, when it calls for it, then I'm like, come on, you guys, can't we err on the side of safety? Yeah, yeah. Like if we're getting in the subway car, like, yeah.

There's no fans in here, guys. Like we're riding a Ziploc gang. Does that occur to everyone? I'm gonna hold my breath all the way to Canal Street.

Yeah, we didn't do any, like, there was no getting on the tube. I wouldn't have enjoyed that. What a scare me. We had one moment where we were actually, we had stepped into a restaurant to request a table, and there was maybe four people in front of us, and the hallway was narrow, and the ceiling was very low, which as a tall person, I'm already kind of claustrophobic.

That was the only moment where I was like, well, if these people have it, whatever they have in their mouth is in my mouth for sure, but that was the only time. Oh my gosh, and do you guys know that people have fake vaccine cars? Oh yeah, and they're expensive. I mean, people pay good money, rather than get a free vaccine.

They pay 500 bucks for a counterfeit vaccine card. Okay, so fucking we're talking about it. So I've been on here kind of vocal about the fact that I was one of these people that, by nature, I was like, the science isn't settled. Like there's a lot of marching orders, and there's a lot of questions.

And again, from my childhood, a lot of trustworthy people lied and had agendas, so I'm scarred by that. And I don't believe people, you know, whatever. I came into it with that baggage. I did all the right shit.

Like I did quarantine, I did everything that my wife and Monica would make them feel safe. So I'm a little bit sympathetic to other people who've had mass trauma who don't trust people. Like I get that part. Now the thing that fucking pisses me off is the first time I've broke my silence on social media about it was this notion that you're super brave if you don't get a vaccine.

That pisses me off because I have a bar for what bravery is. And don't you fucking dare call that being brave. No, for some reason, because of, through no fault of my own, some months ago, I was asked to speak to Congress. Oh my God.

Oh, wow. On woodworking? No, I'm in vaccination. No shit.

So basically they were like, we have scientists, we have leaders, what we need is a dipshit. Who are the people gonna listen to? Who knows how to drive a nail? And so I wrote up this five minute thing.

And the comforting thing was that all of the science that goes into it all was very reassuring. And the general science around this has been going on for decades. And so that made me feel confident in saying, okay, look, there's nothing dangerous here. You're absolutely right that we don't know, but we also don't know what's in so many things that we shove into our bodies.

How many fucking dudes are like, I ain't putting something in my body. Give me that straw. They're fucking banging rails back. With next to some stranger in the bathroom.

That's totally fine. But something FDA approved, yeah. It's just way too high risk. By the time you got there to talk to Congress, first of all, I have tons of questions about that, but had you had the data, because my thing now is like, you can't get around the fact that unvaccinated people are dying 11 to 1.

That's end of story for me. Whatever else you want to say about it. Okay, but they're dying at 11 to 1. That's open in shut.

Did you have that info by the time you got there? Sort of, not that concrete, but generally, yes. Like those numbers hadn't started coming in yet. But generally that was the sensibility of like, look, the dangers of not getting vaccinated is, there's a good chance you'll die of COVID.

If you get the dangers of getting vaccinated are so minuscule compared to anything without it. I've got a plaque hanging in my wood shop that my best friend made a long time ago that says my God given right to go to hell. And that's what I love and despise about us Americans. I trust you.

We're like, yeah, by God, we're the greatest. And at the same time, I feel like, I'm gonna shoot myself in the foot. You better stand back. Yeah, that's right.

I do believe in the right to self-destruct. To be honest, I generally would defend a one's individual right to self-destruct. Of course, it gets complicated in that you're gonna take some people down with you likely. That's where it gets murky.

But, and it's been fun to watch the American part. So like, there are national characters. We have one, we're a country of immigrants. We have a ton of dopamine.

We are bipolar. All these things. So we sucked at quarantine. We don't want to follow rules.

We sucked at masks. We sucked at all that. But by God, we got that fucking vaccine done in two seconds. And we distributed it and we passed everyone getting vaccinated.

I was like, all right, so it's all trade-offs. Now we're kicking ass. These other people that were super cautious. They can't even decide who's getting the vaccine.

So at all, to me, it's like, you can't just say one's good or bad. It's like, this comes with this. That comes with that. What are we gonna say?

To me, there is so much privilege here that there's even a choice. Like in these, so many other countries, they just don't have it. They don't have enough of it. And so, and they want it.

But we're like, oh, we have tons. But maybe I'll take it. I'll do it all the way. I'll do it.

I'll put it in every national conversation. Yeah, yeah. Everything has to be reduced to the length of a tweet. And so is it good or bad?

Right. Tell me who to vote for before I punch you. And it's like, hang on. There's actually anything involving more than one human, a whole bunch of boxes to check.

I always say, just reduce it down to like a suburban full of kids. Just try and negotiate with that group. And you can't keep all those people happy. But even if we did miraculously, it's not gonna last, because it's still human beings.

So even if everyone's happy, everyone's napping, everyone has an ice cream. Man, that ice cream's gonna run out or they're gonna wake up. So you just said something really subtle that probably blew past a lot of people's head. And I think it might be the quintessential thing you'll say today, which is a suburban full of kids because that tells me every single thing I need to know about your childhood, who you are and everything.

You say a mini-man, you say, does it, but you understand what a life in a suburban is like. Yeah. Well, that is a big part of my persona. For 12 years, that suburban was a three-speed on the tree.

Oh, baby. Three on the tree. And three siblings. So you got mom and dad up front and then the back from the bench front seat back to the power window is a layer of coolers and luggage covered in sleeping pants.

Oh, wow. So the back of the suburban on the road trip is like a massive kid bed. Affords. Yeah, it's so fun.

Did you see Crazy Heart? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So to me, the moment I knew there was going to be a great movie, I wonder if you were late as he drove a suburban when he got up before he even activated the window.

He got his hands on that rear window because it doesn't come up and down. You're going to need to assist that. And I was like, you fucking took the time to learn this vehicle. I'm blown away just from that move.

That's what I don't do as an actor. Well, just a touch like that can make or break an entire film. One of the greatest actors of our day, Joaquin Phoenix, there was a movie called Signs. Joaquin was playing a kid.

And at some point he had to go out and use a shovel and then come back in from using a shovel and his jeans were so clean when he came back in. But you're out. I was like, the magic is gone. That's true.

That's so true. He has since made up for it. Yeah. He's like focused on the motions.

Like, let's let him focus on. I can't do the emotions he's doing. It's true. Yeah.

You and I would worry about the jeans and we miss the motions. The ultimate actors, can you check all those boxes? Now, it's funny to say when going to Congress, they have identified you as someone who might be able to speak to folks that they can't speak to. And I'll give Howard Stern credit for this.

I don't think there's ever been a gay activist who's done as much for the cause. It's Howard Stern because the gay activists were talking to other gay activists and other liberals like me. They weren't talking to the dad of the series. And Howard Stern, his fan base is solely almost what it is.

Yeah. Yeah. You're both among who I would count myself. You do.

I say that with affection. Yeah. I guess. Oh man, let's talk about going to Congress.

So you fly there and you read it. No, no, no, this is four or five months ago. So it's zoom. Oh, unfortunately.

Yeah. It's how many times we see movies where it's like the person goes there and they make some passes. Oh, I was so excited. I was like, this is going to fix everything.

You finally asked me for five minutes. Problem solved. Yeah. It'll be about vaccines, but you'll be able to map on the logic of this argument.

To hold the problem. The government solves everything. If I might swing over to cancer real quick. That's my biggest.

I'm going to tap dance around a little bit. No, it was in fact kind of a comedy because like we did an episode of Parks and Rec by zoom when the pandemic just started. Okay. So you got one of those screens with like 12 or 16 people or whatever and the congressional hearing was similar.

And so you got Congress people like in the back of a limo like, hello, look at their phone, you know, half paying attention. It had anyone in a peloton. And it felt like an episode of Parks and Rec. Yes.

Two absurd. I'm sorry. What were you saying? No, give me two hot sauce with a six piece.

No, go ahead. Go ahead. Oh, that's hysterical. You know what's funny?

The suburban if I had to say like my stereotype of the social studies teacher, it is a fucking suburban. It's either the orange and brown and white stripe in the middle of the tri tone. What color was dad? I assume it was his dad was social studies teacher.

I mean, that is like a bull's. I have what a social studies teacher should drive. Totally. That ex-farmer like grew up on a farm, the town star of like basketball and baseball and then become school teacher.

We never bought a new one. The first one was very used and it was fully gray. Who knows what color it started as? Yeah.

It was like primer with a gloss coat on it. And then we traded that in in 82, I want to say, for blue with like the silver middle stripe and that had power windows. Oh, baby. And that was like we're now upper middle class.

We have power windows. Yeah, big time. It was a little bit of a diesel. It was an automatic.

It was not a diesel. So here's another thing I think you and I share. And now I want to say that what I understand about your woodworking is it's actually pretty damn good. But again, it could be average, but because you're the only actor I know who does it, I think you've been elevated to like master craftsmen.

And I just want to say similarly, I can work on cars. I'm not a fucking fabricator. I'm not great, but in Hollywood, I am a unicorn and people seem to be really perplexed and intrigued by the whole thing. And I think we probably share that.

That's a great point. Yeah. And the word mastery is what jumps out at me because I often get introduced as actor, writer, master woodwork. Oh my God.

Where did you ever get that? Because he made a table. He's a master. Yeah, yeah.

And so I am friends with master woodworkers. And the reason they're masters is because they spend their lives pursuing mastery. Whereas I spend my life doing a podcast with you too, writing a book, doing a TV show. I'm a very competent woodworker and I'm really proud of my work and I've done some beautiful stuff.

But I can name a hundred off the top of my head that are way better than me because that's what they do. Yes. Yes. And their performance in the crucible is John Proctor doesn't hold up to mine.

That's the real reason. Yeah. Wait, what's that? What's the piece you're most proud of?

What do you like built a house? I don't know the way the. He makes kenu. He's made a ukulele.

Wow. Those I'm very proud of probably my canoe, my first canoe, like to build a canoe out of wood and then paddle it. I foolishly launched it in New York Harbor. I built it in Brooklyn and quickly learned you don't want a little open boat out on that big of water.

Yeah. And there's also gigantic vessels passing that are creating huge waves you weren't anticipating. Yeah, it was the wake of the water taxi that changed my tune real quick. But then eventually I've been on a bunch of rivers with my canoe and with paddles that I've made as well and that sensibility of like turning wood into water craft and touching the part of our ancestry that's like, oh, I can get across the water.

Yeah. If the shit goes down, I can get across the water. I agree. I couldn't agree more.

These little things happen all the time. So right where we're sitting in the corner of the yard, we have this huge tree that had died and an end of it was cut off at the point is it goes all the way up probably 10 feet in the air and then it's just cut off and our dog has recently been getting his ass up there. I'll look out the back window and the dog looks like it's a levitating like 12 feet in the air and then it jumps into the neighbor's house. Nobody lives there.

So if I got a jump offense, it's a pain in the ass. So I had friends over yesterday and I got that motherfucker goes up there again and we're playing cards and I go, I need five minutes. I go to the chainsaw for my sisters. I go grab my chainsaw.

I come out there, get rid of that fucking log already. I come back in and it's if I turn water into wine because we're in LA. Oh, yeah. And I love it.

Like in Michigan, I'm very average at all quote manly tasks. Just competent as you would say. I have two sisters and a brother and my sisters by that measure are so much more manly than me. Like I'm the family member who's had two semesters of ballet.

Like they have, I guarantee they've split more firewood in the last year. I'm a soft ass actor, you know, living in Los Angeles. Sure, sure. And yes, I can use a chainsaw but it's so good my mom.

Another electric now too. I was trying to tell him like anyone you could have went out there and I mean, watch where the log's going to fall. You find that out the hard way when you're younger. But other than that, you just pull the trigger and what's party.

The one thing if anybody starts messing with the chainsaw, just understand the weight of your material and what's going to pinch the blade. Yeah. That's what will really hurt your feelings. Great point.

You cut down the tree. I thought you took the chainsaw to the dog. I would have loved my wife's in England for six weeks and I keep fantasizing if a boy's his dog could be peacefully passed on and it would be a plausible story. But I just haven't come up with one yet.

Let's workshop that. But Joliet, right? I was born in Joliet. That's the city near our farm town of Manuka.

Okay. Now, so I shot in Joliet for a bit with our net. Yeah. Let's escape prisons.

Let's have fun in prison. Let's go to Mike Shannon's hands often made. I actually, when I was a kid, one of the Johns I had was on a blacktop crew and we put a basketball court in that prison. When it was still fun to stay filled.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so there's the old one, the Blues Brothers one, we were shooting that and then there's a fancy one down the road that we also visited, which was quite an experience. And then we were up in Bowling Brook.

So is it the other direction from Bowling Brook? Is it? I guess that Bowling Brook's north of Joliet maybe? It is.

It's northeast. It's on your way to Chicago. Right. And your town was...

We're southwest of there. Southwest. I think we went bowling there. Or about that area.

You may have gone to Shanahan, which is... Yeah. I love Shanahan. We're like, if we were Minneapolis and St.

Paul. Okay. We're twin cities. And so they're the white socks to my cubs.

So I have to give them a hard time. Sure. But yeah. Shanahan's got the bowling alley.

So they do have that. I want to say it was just under 200 in my class. That's okay. So I was like 800 folks.

Yeah. And that's combining Manuka, Shanahan and Shorewood. What was the vibe there? Because I grew up in a suburb of Detroit where it was literally the one where just beyond us was cornfields.

So it was great because it was like half-hillbilly, but then you could go to the city as well. And the vibe was what you'd expect. Very blue color. It was quite violent.

People were sorting things out physically all the time. And I wonder if it was similar. Ours was really stuck in the 50s. It reminded me not religiously per se, but of the high school in Foothos.

Oh, yeah. Like real corn pwn, kind of crisp and line dancing vibe. The city did not reach Manuka. And in fact, when my cousin and I discovered break dancing in the mid 80s, we had to go over to Shanahan to the skating rink, which was right next to the bowling alley.

Yeah. So now that I'm thinking about it, Shanahan is really shaping up. It's a big place to be. Yeah, yeah.

Wait, but just to make it, so it was three cities for one high school. Mm-hmm. Yeah, three towns. So we were like, oh, 200, that's actually not that small.

That is extremely small when you think how many places. Well, that's not how our high school is, too. Really? Yeah, it pulled from Milford, from Highland, from White Lake.

There were three smaller towns of 10,000 people that all funneled into the white high school. Oh, wow. And then had its own, even the Maya's way went to, well, like Central was like, it's pulling from four or five different little towns. Yeah, we had like three high schools within a five mile radius.

She's a Georgian. I think that might interest you. Yeah. In the context of what we're talking about, I would have had to go probably 30 to 45 minutes closer to Chicago to get where I felt like I had one side urban, one side cornfield.

Yeah, right, right. We were just, couldn't have been more homogenous. Wow. And we had A Mcdonald's.

Do you have more than one fast food place or no fast food? No fast food, no traffic light. No traffic light. So now the suburbs have reached Manuka.

Like when I was there, it was sleepy, farm town. Everybody knew everybody. Now it's people commuting from the city. And so now we have fast food and four or five traffic lights.

It's exponentially bigger. Wow. And now there's like a more like that. There's three high schools, there's five junior highs and that kind of thing.

That kind of sounds like what Bowling Brook was because Arnett and I every night would be like, you want Applebee's chilies or, you know, they had like the five staples. They're not one independent. You could tell like it all happened in five seconds. Yeah.

And your role in high school, like how did you, because what's really of course intriguing about you is you have all these, I got a call now. I know it's not cool to say anymore, but you know all these masculine tropes, but you're super artsy and as you said, you'd ballet. So where did that put you in the niche? I'm Sissy AF.

It was very interesting in high school. I was an athlete. I ended up being one of the three captains of the football team senior year. I was a defensive back.

So I was fast and I was good to hitter. And then like basketball, I was like number five or six guy baseball. I started at third base, but I bat like six. I was decent and had a lot of fun.

I was a good student, but I like, I was real sharp. Sharp enough that I would get ninety threes. So I made sure I'd get the A's, but only just. Yeah, good for you.

Because that other seven points, like that's fun time, but I like a thousand percent. To me, this is the telling thing about me in high school. Me and someone else close to me would go out and like spray graffiti on the football field or we would use herbicide, the contentious herbicide roundup because I hate to put this out there, but you can use that herbicide to write shit on your football field overnight. And then the next day, I was president of the student council, would form a committee to go clean up.

Oh my okay. So I was horribly duplicitous. A horribly duplicitous. A duality jerk.

Like artful dodger. Always figuring out what can I get away with like pushing the envelope. And I'm happy to say by the time I started college, and I was like experimenting with shoplifting and lying about shit and just like how slick am I or not? Yeah.

Can I just ask really quick? Was there some element of it because I had this a bit was like, I want to test my wits against everything. It's like, I don't even know if I was intrigued by the actual crime itself. It's just like, can I help Fox somebody?

Or yeah, exactly. I didn't need or want the shit. I was stealing. It was like how far like what is fun?

What can I get away with? And I learned pretty quickly and because I'm a straight white kid, I went to jail. I got arrested in a Kmart and ended up with like community service. Yeah, like an animal shelter.

You know, and then making you a better person. Eventually, I mean, like inner city friends that they're like, no, my dad's still in jail because you know, I'm a dead state. Yeah. Yeah, my thing in that capacity was like drugs.

The fact that I never went to prison, I was raging drug. I got to go with carrying drugs. It finally occurred to me like, Oh, yeah, I would have been right. Anyone that has any question about white privilege.

It's like, yeah, think about some of the things. It's bonkers stories. You'll tell where you got out of this or you confronted this guy or you stood up to that. Yeah.

But thankfully, by the time I got to college and I called my mom and dad who are literally, there's the salt of the earth and I said, a sorry about the last four or five years. Things are real clear. Suddenly I'm out on my own and B, thank you so much for the three things like the lessons you just you had so much patience and said, all you got to do is be honest. All you got to do is work your hardest and nobody can ever fall you.

But if you never tell a lie, then you don't have to remember anything. Yeah. And once that clicked in, then I was like, okay, thank you, mom and dad. I love you.

Now this is ground zero. And I'll spend my adulthood trying to make up for the misgivings of my youth. Well, so yeah, I can relate in that I had a burdensome conscience. So I would do shit, but then it really ate up, right?

And there was some level that I bailed out. It's like, yeah, I'll throw apples at cars. Yeah, I'll do this. But then my friends started like smashing mailboxes.

I just pictured my mother, my single mother having a replacement. I was like, I can't do that. I can't like, vandalize someone's store. I imagine again, my mom only.

So it was weird. I would want to play with it. But then I also would really feel terrible about some of the stuff. It's a wonderful point.

I mean, that's at the heart of fucking message of empathy worldwide is like, that's somebody's mailbox. Those foreigners that you bombed, that's somebody's family. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, et cetera.

Yeah. Thankfully, at least in our case, we lean towards Sissy AF and became artists and storytellers. And so I would just take a moment to say, please don't vandalize your high school. We've given so many tips.

How do you use a chainsaw? How to vandalize your high school? This is more of a tutorial than an interview actually. Yeah, which was expected.

Yeah. There are groundskeepers and janitorial staff who's hearts you will break if you vandalize your school. You were the captain of the football team vandalizing your own football field. It's so funny.

Like, normally that's the rebel who hates the football guys. No, here's the thing though, the graffiti was against the opposing team coming in the next day. Then the cover up was there was a bunch of extra graffiti with the palms blaming the cheerleaders and the cheerleaders blaming the palms. So we threw up smokescreen like a motherfucker.

You were testing your wits. You thought about every step. The principal called me and was like, so what do you think of this as the palms? The cheerleaders.

I said, I don't know. Let's get a few of them in here and ask some questions. That's C-H looks like the same handbrakeller. Oh my God.

This was Kaiser Sose in high school. Well, as soon as you told that story, it reminded me of one of my favorite things I've heard in AA Share which was some guy said, look man, I was a fucking scumbag. I'd steal your wallet and then I'd help you look for it. Oh my God, that's so great.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare. Now, I've not read anything to confirm this but I'm going to guess some bands that are in the mix in this era if that's okay. Sure.

Take a swing. Yeah, I'm going to say talking heads. Not yet. Oh fuck.

Okay. I graduated 93. This is 88. 88 was my graduating year.

Yeah. The Colts not out yet. I don't know. Okay.

What were they? I can ramp it up. I can do nothing good. I grew up in such a cultural vacuum to this day if it wasn't for my cool friends who I met in college and they handed me things like the talking heads.

Right, right, right. A pretty narrow field. Talking heads, they might be giants. Yeah.

Lori Anderson. Are you friends with someone from they might be imagining something? I have befriended the Johns if they might be giants crazily. Yeah.

And I did a music video for them. That's why I know that. I blew my mind because when we were in college, we made a couple of videos, a couple of their songs and desperately tried to send them to them for years. And then 20 years later, they're like, Hey, would you be?

That's Sam. You've got to see our particle man from the cemetery. Yeah. That is a simulation moment.

Well, this is super crazy. I grew up in such a cultural vacuum where it was just the popular, whatever the radio station was or what was on TV. And I had nobody cool. I had no one with any taste.

Right. I mean, my older sister has pretty cool taste. She turned me on to like Queen and Wham UK. And that was enough in hindsight that I was like, those were much better choice.

Like we went to Duran Duran. That was all better than if I just had the Eagles or whatever. So I guess I would have assumed prior to reading about you that I knew you and polar have been friends for a long time as I'm a friend of hers as well. And I just fucking adore her being unbelief.

I hope you still feel that way better. Yeah. I mean, she's like, well, live to a ripe old age. And when we do, she'll be a bright shining luminary in our lifetimes.

Yeah. I mean, she's simply a leader. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And generous and benevolent. Yeah.

Yeah. All those things. Yeah. You're right.

She's like, when you think about what a world with many more female leaders could look like, I kind of think a her in a way like, oh, yeah, that's the blueprint. And I still work with her making our show making it. Right. And three seasons or something.

We have done three seasons and it's kind of sporadic. We're hoping for a fourth. We're always waiting to hear. I don't know if you're familiar with television networks, but the only thing I know about is it's highly predictable.

You can pretty much, you can do a four year crop rotation. You can really plan. Yeah. Yeah.

Every time we do it, she and the other three executive producers in her company are just these smart kick ass powerful ladies who I've never felt any kind of envy or competition with. All I feel is respect. Just immediately like, oh, I hope you're my boss. Yeah.

Like I hope you're in charge of everything because you're smart and you have all this experience and I'm just a guy. Well, I got to be honest, like if all things are equal, I mean a dude that's an eight out of 10 on all those factors and then I mean a woman that's eight out of 10, all those factors. Another woman also climbed over a much bigger hurdle. So like I have a built in respect for someone that's like competent and doing that job knowing and then that could be any minority group to be honest where I'm like fuck, you're all these things.

And then also it was probably three times as hard as it was for me to get here. That's a very salient point. And to put it in physical terms, when you think about being out in the wild as it were, we straight white men are just required to have much less vision. The periphery of apex predators, we've got it down.

But all the other classifications are much more susceptible to the tigers of history. Yes. And so the eight out of 10 women is like, yes, we just have a much better chances of surviving with you watching out for the predators. Yeah, because I like beer more than you.

Also, I'm way more concerned the predators than element to be honest. All I want is Nick to think I'm radical fighting the thing. I actually, all the others that was secondary to the make goal at all times, is like, you think I'm a bad ass. Exactly.

Oh my God. They have the perspicacity to be like, okay guys, soon as you're done. You're going to need groceries. Well, I never finished my point.

I would have assumed that because of the polar background that you were probably like Second City or maybe Improv Olympic or any of these things, but you were more of like a just a straight actor. Is that fair to say? 100%. Yeah.

I went to theater school at the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana, which sounds funny, but they have a great theater school. You're not the first person we've interviewed that's gone there and studied acting. Yeah. They give you a great set of fundamentals.

I was just about as bad when I left there as when I got there. I threw no fault to their own just because I was not waking up. I had not opened my eyes yet. What wasn't clicking?

I didn't get the value of myself in my art. I devalued myself from the get go and all of these cool kids from the city or all of these like movie stars my age. I was like, oh, I have to try hard to be cool like them. When I bring the table, who cares?

Boring. And so the whole time I was like, try and wait too hard to be fucking cool when I would do my stuff. They'd be like, why don't you just talk normal? Well, I'm going to read you.

I love that you're saying this because I was going to read you like the very last thing I was probably going to say to you, which is I don't know if it was fortitude or unconscious, but to see someone stay true to who they are and not try to bend themselves into what you thought might work. Because from the outside, I look at you getting on Parks and Rec at 39, I'm thinking, God bless this guy for not trying to do what everyone else did. And then the time arose where his unique set of everything is celebrated. That ain't easy.

No, it takes stubbornness. I mean, depending on who you talk to or which of my landlords you talk to, it takes stupidity or rudeness. But stubbornness and tenacity, I found out you could get paid to be in plays in Chicago. And so that was my, I was like, great, life solved.

Yeah. And I went to Chicago and said about doing that. And I also got paid to build scenery for companies and I was a fight choreographer. And I met Amy because one of my best friends lived in a house with Matt Besser, one of her upright citizens, Brigade Guys.

And so we met and it was pretty weird, like, especially looking back on it at what happened to us. It was like 93 or four. And we just kind of recognized, I don't know, a sibling energy. I remember she would punch me in the arm and be like, what's up, offerman?

And she got a kick out of me for whatever reason because I was a particular brand of stupid. It wasn't until years later that it even occurred to me, A, that you could get to SNL from Second City in Improv Olympic. So when I met Amy, she was like, oh yeah, I do improv. And I was like, what?

You work at a zoo? Like I couldn't have been more alien. And I was like, you get the straight, you make shit up in a bar. Okay.

I perform works of literature upon the stage. Good luck with you and your friends making funny faces. And like, it is funny. If you've been in this bubble for long enough, some of the people you've petied.

And you feel like, oh, fuck it. I missed the boat on that one. But I do appreciate, I think if there's anything looking at my track record or whatever, it is that it's like, it wasn't through wisdom or cognizance. It was just through common sense.

Like I knew in my gut that I wasn't going to be slick. I knew that I was never going to have X-Factor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm not going to do it, but yeah, I know what you're saying.

You would only have X-Factor as you. Right. But I didn't realize that that was the case. I instead equated it with like, what other successful people are doing, that must be X-Factor.

Yeah. And what I'm doing and not succeeding is stupid. But I can't think of anything else to do. So I'm going to keep talking slow and growing whiskers somewhere out there.

Some day. Some day. One day they'll have a need. This is a good looking for a slow talking mustache.

Yeah. You know what it is? The script came in real light. It's one of the 22 pages.

And of course, it should be 34. So do we have any actors that can make one of these two minutes? Seems like 70 minutes? That would be ideal.

But was Parks written like that? Like where you're like, oh, I'm perfect for this or they tailored it. No, no. It's one of those things where pretty quickly with all the cast, it's interesting.

They cast Rashida and Aziz and Aubrey and even Amy before they had anything written. I remember this. This is when I was kind of around her a lot. And what I heard is like, oh, some folks from the office, she's going to do a show with them.

It's dreamt. But we're not even sure what the show is. It was going to be almost a spinoff. Yeah, it was a spinoff.

But then it wasn't. Yeah. And so when Mike Sher and Greg Daniels were creating the show, they met somebody in Burbank. It was a woman, I believe, who worked in the government.

She may have worked for the Parks Department, who was a libertarian, who wanted to bring down the government. So that was the spark of Leslie's boss. And I think it was a little crazy. I initially read for another part and then they decided that didn't work and they tried to put me on Ron.