Hi, Ellen.
Hi, Josh.
Long time, no see.
I know, I know.
How are you, how have you been?
I've been great.
I've been, you know, surviving.
Yeah, that's all we can hope for at this point.
Right.
It's been an interesting year, but I've
been spending a lot of time out in the woods.
Yeah, I heard.
But you were also just in Mexico City where you shot a movie,
and COVID is, like, really bad there.
Yeah, apparently.
I mean, I wouldn't know I was locked in a hotel
the whole time.
How long were you there?
Four weeks.
It was the crew, it was the staff,
we were all one big, happy family.
And it was actually a lot of fun.
We had a little bar that we set up every Saturday night
and played Ping Pong and karaoke.
You know, you make do.
Yeah, that doesn't suck.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
It was actually kind of fun.
A bar and Ping Pong.
And then, like you said, you have a place in Minnesota,
right?
I do.
And so is it really, like, in the woods woods?
It's pretty deep in the woods, yeah.
Yeah?
What's the closest store?
The closest store is the Elbow Lake Store, which
is about seven miles away.
But that just has, like, hotdogs and matches
and that's about it.
Hotdogs and matches.
Well, that's all you need.
So you can cook them.
Yeah, really.
So you don't have to eat them raw.
You light a match and you just hold it and rotate it
with your fingers.
Just hold it and twist it and roll it around.
What do you do in the woods there?
So I mean, first of all, it was an amazing respite
from the craziness.
But it was, I don't know, I chop wood, I go fishing.
You chop wood?
I build fires, I roast marshmallows,
I ride an ATV around.
I've got a tractor.
Yeah, I build stuff.
I build stuff, see that?
What are you building right there?
So I watched this show called Alone, have you ever seen it?
I haven't but I know what it's about.
Oh my gosh, it is the coolest--
I mean, it's about the best reality show you could ever
watch, because they take ten people
and they put them out in the middle of nowhere
in really inclement places on the globe,
and they have to survive.
I think they get ten things they get to carry with them,
and they have to sort of see who survives the longest.
For how long?
Well, whoever stays the longest wins.
And so that chair that you just saw
is something that I saw on the show.
And I was like, you know what, I'm
going to try to build of those myself.
It's impressive.
Isn't that beautiful?
Yes, you did it.
But I also had power tools to build that, I had a Skil Saw,
I had a drill and everything else.
They don't have any of that stuff.
No.
Well look, and look at you sitting on it there, too.
That's my little beach that I built this year.
Isn't that cute?
You built a beach?
I did.
What, you brought sand next to a river or something?
No, I had this little spot that was overgrown
with thorny bushes and bugs and everything else,
so I built it up, put some stuff underneath it,
and made us a little beachfront there.
That's fantastic.
You gotta do what you gotta do during COVID, dammit!
Yeah, well, don't get mad at me.
I'm not mad at you, I'm just mad at COVID.
Yeah, we're all mad at COVID.
And then I understand you had an encounter with a wild animal
which caused some problems.
Well, like I said, you're deep in the woods out there,
so you never know if you're going
to run into a timberwolf or a bear, a squirrel.
So Bobcat gave me this little UTV
to run around with for the day, and of course I sink it
in a puddle the first ten minutes I have it.
Look how cute that little squirrel is.
I know, isn't that cute?
So you saw that squirrel, and then you ended up--
That's what I did.
That's where I ended up.
And then you filmed the squirrel after you went into the water?
My friend had a phone, he was having fun with this.
But at this time of the year, you
can see the leaves are all falling off the trees, so
all these little squirrels-- and they don't care,
at this point they're just prepping for winter.
So they'll run right up to you, take a nut out of your hand,
and run back up the tree.
That's cute.
Yeah, you know what it is?
It's like reconnecting-- for me, anyway-- it's
like reconnecting with nature, and I think it's important.
That's really what I got to do this year was get out
there and just sort of unplug.
I find that is the best thing whenever
I feel stressed or anything, just hiking,
just being in nature, and just walking and taking
deep breaths.
That helps everybody.
How is your son doing?
How old is he now?
He's great!
He's seven now, he is a little firecracker.
Awesome kid, loves to dance, loves his superheroes, loves--
He's adorable.
He's in school, he's reading now.
It just seems like yesterday he was a baby
and here he is now, talking back already.
Wait till he's 16, oh my God.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you wait, I don't have to wait for that.
No, he really is a great kid, I'm very lucky.
Oh, he's adorable!
Look at his little pajamas.
Let's talk about Buddy Games.
You wrote it, you directed it, you star in it.
And was that your first time taking on that many roles?
Yeah.
You know, it's something that I always wanted to do,
it was something I always felt like I could do.
I always sort of imagined how I would direct something
if I were doing it, and this was an opportunity for me
to do that.
We wrote this script based on this thing
that my buddies and I have done for the last 20 years--
we get together every third weekend of August,
and we have the Buddy Games.
And it's more or less the reason for the guys
to get together and reconnect.
A lot of these guys I've been friends
with since I was a kindergartner.
So we wrote this script based on this crazy thing
we do every year.
It goes from Ping Pong to, like, naked paintball.
And we write it, we get the funding for it,
they let me direct it, which was--
I don't know what the hell they were thinking.
But it's a wild, ruckus movie and we push the envelope.
The clip that you showed before is about as tame as the movie
gets.
I know, that's the only thing we could show.
All right, well, because it's called Buddy Games,
we're going to play a game after this.
We're going to take a break and play one of our fun games.
All right.
We'll be back.
I can't wait!
All right.