Robin Williams is always learning from his kids

I’ve got a son who’s 24 and another who’s 15, a daughter who’s 17 going on 18 going on 30. You know it’s like all these things are like, ‘Oh dude!’ They hit you very hard but at the same time they’re great gifts. You know it’s pretty wonderful.

It’s like living with Mensa. He’s reading Flaubert. Everything is like, ‘Oh my God.’ And he has these debates about totally ridiculous subjects. He brought home a couch that he found on the street and we said, ‘You can’t, man. It’s full of…’ ‘No, but it’ll be great.’ ‘It will be great when all the creatures come out too. It’ll be like Planet Earth but in your bedroom.’ Then he said, ‘We’ll have to fumigate it.’ ‘Oh, like fumigate it. Put it in a bag and just dust the thing with chemicals that could kill things for the rest of the year.’ And it was interesting to have this debate and he was just debating because he could, just to piss me off. But that’s his job.

I thought, ‘Why? You have a degree in Linguistics. Why do you want to do that?’ [whispers] Because he can. [normal voice] But he found he wanted to do it and I went, ‘Okay, dude.’ It’s always things that for me are really interesting at this point in my life. For me, it’s great. Much more expensive than sea monkeys but you get to see amazing progress and see them grow and that for me is astonishing. And see them do things that you’re going, ‘Good luck.’ And I try and tell them the traps but they’ll learn them on their own.