That was my dad's sense of, you know, laughing at himself, laughing at existence, the universe, all of it and not being too serious about what we do with because at the end of the day if you're here it's a blessing. It's you know life is hard. Life is hard for everybody at some point, but it's those who are able to laugh at it and laugh with it and roll with it that ultimately I think live the fulfilling lives that we're all trying to do. You know, and big step there is to not take yourself too seriously from the start.

It's always an interesting question of what was it like as Norman Mailer's son because I could easily turn it back and say what's it like not to. I didn't always realize my dad was Norman Mailer. I always knew he was Dad, and then I forget the exact age when it dawned on me that, you know, he is actually someone who affects the public consciousness of the time. It was amazing. I mean he was a rock star and brilliant and kind and funny and generous and scary when he needed to be and, you know, hard as a father.

I think that Anderson Cooper does a great job of staying with stories and pushing them. New Orleans he really... He was there and he pushed it past the point where his producers were saying, "Listen, you've got to stop because people are tuning out now. You know, we're on to another disaster." You know, what do you worry about, Haiti, Chile, Turkey? What? You know where do you put your attention and your focus? So for one person to really be able to cover all that ground would be tough.

Ten years ago when I started out I was kind of told I was insane for trying to pursue multiple fields at once because in five years everyone who just did one would have five times the resume I would if I was lucky, but I took that gamble because I just my gut told me it was the right thing to do and you know as an actor there is so much downtime you want to fill it with something else and as a writer you know sometimes you're doing a passion project, sometimes it's a paid gig, sometimes there is nothing, so you can do a journalistic piece.

Really there's different scales of stories. Sometimes you want to tell one that 20, 30, 40, 50 million people will want to see and hear. Sometimes you do one that you know 150 will want to see on one night. As long as you're telling the right story for the right audience and they're getting something out of it it's essentially the same feeling to me.

I think that you know you have experts in fields who spend their life studying one thing. When an event goes on that chances are they're going to want that specific expert who has done it to be on the show talking about it, not a writer or an artist of any sort, which I think is a mistake because you know we don't have... I mean we have them, but there is certainly not you know in strong force public philosophers anymore.

Having a mother who has had cancer and fought through it and at times used cannabis to you know fight off nausea and whatnot. I mean it's not really her thing, but there were times when she needed it and the idea that you can't have it because it's an illegal drug, but OxyContin is legal. That's you know that's just insane to a level that I think most people understand.