Breaking Bread with Judd Apatow

it's time for breaking bread with pop-pop hey don't you know hey it's our goal hey it's time for breaking bread with popeye don't you know hey it's also a show hey everybody welcome to another edition of breaking bread with tom papa i am tom papa i've got a good one for you today our guest today is the very talented connoisseur of comedy great filmmaker great stand-up comedian all around good guy judd apatow yes he has a new documentary coming out on hbo max all about george carlin called american dream and i watched it and for someone who knows everything about carlin it was a bunch of new stuff it was really really well done very excited to sit down and talk with judd today you are going to love it i also baked him a kick-ass bread and he got a little bit of my chi umbella my beautiful italian grandma lemon cake oh boy he should he should just he should put me in all movies from here on out just for the chambella i'd like to thank the good people at helix sleep for sponsoring today's show we love helix sleep they have made me a better sleeper with their beautiful mattress i took their two minute sleep quiz which you can do and they'll match you to a mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life i know some of you are sleeping on some saggy old mattresses at night you deserve better than that so give yourself an upgrade and find your perfect mattress at helix sleep.com papa also like to thank the good people at every plate every plate these people give you these amazing meals for just a dollar 79 per meal show up at your place go to easyplate.com enter the code 179 that's papa 179 because it's 1.79 per meal that's everyplate.com enter the code papa 179 for just 1.79 per meal that's up to a 104 dollar value good meals healthy stuff you're going to love having these people as a part of your life and we love having them as part of the podcast so judd apatow uh the great thing about judd is he loves comedy he i mean he's created all these amazing shows he's worked i mean you go through all the meaningful comedies in film and television and girls and talladega nights and i mean it's just the the list is so long and the great thing about him is that you he is a stand-up at heart and he just he has just dedicated his life to this stuff and just finds such joy in being around it and has done this great job of actually making things that if you're a comedy fan and new generations of comedy fans uh you're just we're just lucky to have him he created this did this great documentary with i'm gonna call him one of the loves of his life gary shandling and now he's doing this one or did this one with george carlin and these are two giants and to really dive in and tell the story it's a big responsibility you know to actually create pieces of art off of artists work you don't want to diminish it you don't want to make it smaller you want to and you you know that all these great people who are inspired by these types of people uh are going to digest it so there's only one person that could make this stuff and that is judd he for all the great stuff that he's done though he's such a great just great guy as you'll see in this conversation i mean he's just raised a great family he just loves hanging with other comics we did a couple shows at largo together where he was kind of finding his way back after the pandemic and was wondering what he's going to talk about on stage and didn't want to just go up there and just start babbling or he wasn't really sure what he wanted to do so the two of us would just go up and be involved in this conversation uh for for about i don't know 20 to 30 minutes and he's so easy to talk to and he's so funny there's there's definitely there's the combination of the everyman just kind of like cool guy but there's also a lot more at work he's always thinking of lines as you'll see in this conversation he doesn't let things go by without knowing that it's his responsibility to continue to be funny and uh i just can't i it's just one of those guys that you're just lucky to uh have in your life if you are in comedy and i'm glad that he came to the table and i was able to give him this great bread and this great chia bella and introduce them to all of you in hopefully a different way hopefully like the carling documentary uh introducing carlin and showing you things and maybe you didn't know maybe this podcast will show you some things you don't know about judd so let's get to it enjoy the conversation with judd apatow beautiful well thank you for being here i uh i was uh i know you came a long way and i was only kind of kidding that you should probably get a hotel yeah well you sometimes people give you the zoom option these days you're like you know what we can do it zoom and they give you that look like but it will suck on zoom i know and it's funny now because we're so used to like avoiding driving and going places i know and so we all did so many podcasts at home yeah and they were fine and now yeah you know like i'm gonna do whitney cummings podcast and like yeah it's in woodland hills and you're like so do you think i have to go to woodland hills to do this because that's not like a podcast that's half my day yeah that's the whole day [ __ ] to do and i thought about it for a long time like how much do i like whitney do i owe whitney anything what did she do for me i decided i liked her i decided i liked her i'm going to get it yeah yeah i haven't noticed a thing from doing our radio show all zoom like 90 since it's the troubles and when i run into people in real life they forget that they even did the thing like because we don't really connect that way it's just another screen as much as like you can get a good conversation going it's not it doesn't have that depth it's weird we're not really friends from our from our podcast yeah right exactly you get really intimate for an hour and you see him like a year later hey man what's up you told me things i know when were you telling me about your mom i had that with my book you know not to plug sick or in the head yes but you know you get you know you get your hour with lin manuel miran miranda and you're like this is a beautiful thing that will last our entire lives and then you know when you meet up again it doesn't it doesn't feel like it landed as much for them as for you i know they do 200 of them the book is so good here's the best part about the book is uh this is a fake book it's not it's not even the book it's just no it's not it's just the cover on a different book what is it a cover on is a good question what do you mean they just sent it to me to show me what the cover looked like oh that's awesome oh my god it's the ben rhodes book after the fall which is about hungary which is by the way i think a great book but it stunning in the is oh that's hilarious i've been on when i was on the road uh signing books after my shows uh a couple of the galley copies got through like we're in the piles people came back up to the line like um there's something wrong with this one it's like blank ages and x marks uh well first before we get into all the projects um this is the bread i baked you that's more important than that project it's a it's called a country brown and it's a whole wheat it looks beautiful it'll probably need some toasting this this bread lasts for like three four days and this i made it yesterday uh it's a it's gorgeous and when you make the bread yes for the show yeah are you excited to make the bread for the show or like is that a time for yourself or do you go like i gotta make another bread because we're doing the damn show no because i'm always baking bread i'm always messing around so then when i know like oh this is judd's bread yeah it it steps you up oh that's fantastic yeah you're like okay this has got to be good please don't be messed up don't be flat don't you think and then the big conflict this morning because uh i thought we were doing it yesterday and it ended up being today uh and yesterday i made one with walnuts in it and i was like that's i don't know yeah is that a walnut guy is he a nut in the bread guy you know what i don't think we know yet that might have determined it for the future because i've never sought it out but i have never rejected it right so i had um i make two at a time so i had two walnuts and two of the other ones and this morning for breakfast i taste tested both of them from my loaves and they're both really good but this one's better this one's better yeah and is making baking bread uh like a meditative thing a hundred percent see i this is what i'm realizing lately my wife gave me an article about hoarding and it was about oh no about how like hoarders have add because they look at all their [ __ ] and they're like i don't know where to put all this because they're having an 80d meltdown right right and i and she's like i think maybe this is why you're such a hoarder because i don't like throwing anything out and i hoard everything like i'll sit on the phone and look at articles on apple news and just save them furiously i've never like looked at the section that has the saved ones never go back i just for some reason just accumulating just to know they're there like one day maybe i'll get to it like a person who won't throw out like a 80 year old bird cage and so i'm realizing that i have a that i'm much more attention deficit than i thought which is why i don't do things like baking bread right because it needs to focus it doesn't need focus i used to play a little guitar terribly but i take out the old james taylor song book and like try to play stuff for an hour or two yeah and i realized like i don't think i've done that like consistently for 20 years because the 80d i think do you think the 80d is increased i think it's increased from like the phone and the social media and just working and right so i feel like i'm ping-ponging in my brain way more and i need a really boring meditative thing well it's really interesting because the bread baking i equate the bread baking with peace in my life now because that means it's a three-day process so that means that i know i'm not on the road for like i have those days yeah and and everything's kind of and i'm not when i'm in town i'm not like banging around doing a whole bunch of stuff because you know it starts in the morning and then you've got to shape it and do stuff by the night yeah there's all these kind of things so i'll be like thinking well if i have a nine o'clock at the store i've got to shape it before eight so i can get in it's like having a puppy i gotta be home to walk the dog it totally is uh so yeah it it actually kind of kind of uh is like it's like a goal of calmness now the zen of baking bread yeah i need a thing like that but you've got bread so i needed to be like lasagna something that would be like a 80 level lasagna he just travels with lasagna all right and now this i brought you because it's morning yes and a favorite with a coffee and i made this this is a a chia bella i made this which is a lemon cake on mother's day i realized i didn't have any sweets for cynthia you could make lemon cakes at your house i didn't even think that was possible yeah that's a bakeable in-house thing it makes me so proud and it has like it's in like the bundt cake thing so it looks kind of like lumpy yeah it's a beautiful thing but let me say something that's my favorite thing in the world it is you ever go into starbucks and they have like the crap version of that yes and it has a little bit of frosting well not too much easy but there's no frosting at the time sometimes i'll buy it and just eat the frosting part it's just the top kit like an oreo and then you look at it it's like i'm i don't want to get sued by the starbucks people but i'm pretty sure it's like 800 calories like it's your whole day of food is this one thing but the fact that you can make like the great version at home this is the great version because uh the frosting for me is too much it's like too much of a sugar dump and there is definitely sugar in this but this is uh this is a little bit more of a this is a a cake your grandmother would give you without feeling too guilty that she's going to like she's not going to wreck your day and bring you back to your mom she might give you the entoments version right so yeah you can have that at any point right that you want uh but you said you're fasting well i went a little crazy on mother's day and ate you know everyone's i'll take an occasion that's meant to celebrate someone else yeah and i will use it to indulge like an addiction to food and pizza and cake like well we can have gelato it's your special day because my wife will indicate to me stop eating and you know hurrying your drive to the grave and she wants me to live does she monitor you she well it's not like she's monitoring it's you know it's looks but then you know we can tell when i'm out of control it used to be i would fight fight it like hey don't you don't worry what i eat uh-huh and then at some point like she's so correct you're just living in shame all the time and so during the pandemic we stopped eating red meat and then i lost like 16 pounds or something like that just from that well from that and just trying to not be an animal uh-huh and then started exercising walking mainly hours and hours a day right crazy person like two hour walks that's what sedaris did yes yeah but he picked some garbage yeah garbage rich i'm not doing anything to help anybody and but he does that as a probably like a meditation too he said that yeah he writes and he cleans up his neighborhood i mean the queen gave him a medal for this oh really maybe wrong i know if the queen herself but i know that the surprises got involved wow and uh then slowly gained it all back uh-huh and lost it again really and now i'm about halfway up and then i started getting a little crazy with the food because i had coved and i always remembered like when you when you have covet or you have any disease don't have sugar right it's really bad for your system it's just your sister out but then like three days in the cove and i'm like i think my covenant wants a pint of haggadahs and i went a little off the rails eating badly at the end of covid god i still got better it's amazing these extremes isn't it like i i'm the same way like i'll go all in and just devour every like i can't stop like handfuls of cheez-its as i'm cooking and it's just like kicking stuff and then the only way to do it is to say i'm eating nothing i need that now so it's a it's a preset there's this like food-assisted fast it's called prolong a little box it has like a little plastic bag with like four olives in it that's like your snack and a little bar for breakfast and then like a soup but it's really like a little bag of some sort of powder you put in water and boil it okay the thing that i like about it yeah i don't get that hungry i can handle like just eating the weird teeny amount but i love that i'm making a choice that i'm not allowed to choose what to eat right again the hoarding i'm a little out of control yeah so if you put a piece on the table in my head it has to be completed like if you have like two i might have six yeah four i'll have two if you have zero i'm gonna have six like i have a weird i do too you know how they say like get a small plate and if you make all your food on smaller plates yeah psychologically you just wanna finish and you're done but i got a big plate house and i i'd like them to be done we have big plates it's all big plates i always i was saying to somebody the other night that i don't have oh she was i was with kyra sultanovich we were doing a show and we went to eat after and uh i was like oh do you want this you want some more of this and she was like no i can't i just and i was like i don't have that like i don't like i don't have like if i will just keep eating yeah it's only the socially unacceptable part of it that people are gonna start looking at you like you're a weirdo or disgusting that's the only reason that i'll stop see where my head went as you said like the only socially unacceptable part to me the social unacceptable part is slowing down you know what it is i try to like trace it back like yeah food issues right one is my mom loved to just stuff me it was like a love thing my mom was very needy so if i indicated i was happier eating like a half of enterman's cake she would give it to me right like make me grilled cheese make me three hamburgers she would just she was all about giving yeah my parents got divorced and i learned how to cook shitty things like grilled cheese and hamburgers we had a little grill in the center island in my house and at like 11 i was so proud that i could make a hamburger and i would make hamburgers every day yeah i would make four patties two double hamburgers almost every day in grilled cheese and enterman's cake while i watch merv griffin yeah and then when my friends and i got jobs as dishwashers we had money let's go to beefsteak charlie's they have an all-you-can-eat ribs and as like 15 16 year olds we thought it was so adult and mammy yeah to go to like an all-you-can-eat restaurant a red lobster and it's some of my favorite memories is gorging myself on food so now if you were like 100 great i think you could eat a pizza right now the level of joy i get from eating the pizza yeah it's so much bigger than the shame afterwards i don't have enough shame no 100 my my wife has didn't grow up that way i grew up very similar to the way you do her my mom was making all this stuff and my father was i always remember going to white castle and him introducing me to white castle and the whole object was was to eat as many as you could yeah and we would sit in this car and stack them all on the dashboard and just plow and it was just so we were so you know we were bonding and just having i'm with my dad and yeah show me this thing and any all-you-can-eat thing the beef stick charlie really makes me laugh because i don't know was that an east coast well we couldn't believe it i mean it was funny because we really thought we were geniuses taking advantage of the system right by like not eating for the whole day and going to be charlie we're going to show them we're going to show them and the 15 600 is like the most hilarious thing would be to see how much you can max out an all-you-can-eat thing yeah and white castle i forgot which comedian it was i don't know if it was bobby collins yeah it's the person i think of but you might not have been who used to say yeah white castle it turns into a fart in your hands on long island it was all white castle jokes so many white castles so many beefsteak charlie was the logo was a big man with a handlebar mustache wasn't it yeah yeah it's shrimp or you could eat shrimp i remember when we realized that you could make shrimp yourself yeah this blew our mind you could go to a supermarket and buy shrimp and boil it we would buy like cocktail sauce and act like we were 50 years old when we were children so we're smoking cigars food is the best that's the worst part about it well yeah especially if you don't you know if you're not addicted to drugs or you're not addicted to women or alcohol it's like what else are we supposed to do like give us something there's no bad meal this is the thing where i i have the opposite of my wife where like if we go to a restaurant and it's terrible yeah she's kind of bummed out right she's like that was a wasted meal in the worst restaurant i'm so happy if i hated the meal i'm like that was still kind of fun i know yeah my wife will say oh the food wasn't very good i was like that's not the point we were sitting together we were gorging ourselves i ate something like i really am more about like the feeling the post like pass out exhaustion from eating too much like it almost doesn't matter how i got there yeah so what's a what's a a normal breakfast for you like when you're not fasting you're just feeling okay i you know while i was buying these this cereal like it's like uh you know what they call it like a cacao you know grains you know some form of a granola but really it's just all hidden sugar but still but it presents itself as a health food yeah and it doesn't quite taste like chocolate but it's in the universe of something like chocolate you know some sort of nibs or something cow and then i i would eat it and be like i'm eating healthy this must be good for me yeah and then one day i checked the label and i'm adding a thousand calorie breakfast with this little cereal right so i i've slowed that down but yeah you know a friend of mine had a friend that created this bagel store in connecticut called like pop-up bagels or something i think that is the name it was an article about it in the new york times yesterday my friend introduces me to him and he's like this guy makes the best bagels in the world he's like decided to make the best bagels wow and they were the best bagels and he was like having a thing where he was like cooking for people showing them what it was yeah at my friend's house and i sat there and ate three bagels just with butter yeah that's what i like bagels with like a pound of butter the butter's so good there's this french butter and i literally this is this is me being a bad host i wanted to get you this wheel of butter this french because it's kind of off sherman way yeah it's like this one place where you can get it there's two places in l.a where you can find it it's so good i'll i'll i'll still get it for you but you put that butter on it oh my god then you have to have three that's hot with bagels when you go to three three is really big it's like during the pandemic there was a day where i had two pints of ice cream i had never gone to the second pint uh-huh i never even thought that that was an option yeah and then one day i went to the second pint like i just started another one and finished the second pint and i thought that is a bad crossing over yeah that is are you back to red meat i haven't gone back to red meat yeah i went back to chicken i didn't eat chicken for about a year or so right and i i should reduce that but then whenever you try to eat healthy people are like you know when you chick and you're basically just eating like [ __ ] they just sit in their own [ __ ] they look like and then they like you would eat fish it's all you're just eating like tiny plastic like the whole fish is basically tiny plastic granules oh god you know when you're having lettuce it's just like uh it's rocket fuel because where they do it they have they fly the rocket so i know and then i just want to kill myself there's no there's no yeah there's no justice there's no there's no like guilt-free anything anymore then you just want to go to wendy's and have a chicken sandwich i know i would say i have this app on my phone that um that it's about bird id i think it's called and you literally open up the app when you have birds in your yard and there's you're here and you can you can either take pictures of them or you can just press record and it takes their songs and it shows you oh there's a house wren in your yard and there's a wow bluebird and they show you the thing and i was like this is so nice and i showed it to my wife and she's like yeah i wonder how many birds there were you know like 10 years ago i was like oh i thought he was i wonder how many russian bots are now tracking your movements because you showed them where you live yeah there's like right exactly there's either spies or there's global warming or there's just like can we just enjoy the house run for a second i mean not to slide it into a plug but i will anyway is it so i made this george carlin documentary and george carlin uh at the end of his life when he was doing standing yeah he switched his point of view to everything is falling apart so i'm just going to enjoy watching it yeah i'm going to root for it and it was a very weird point of view and at the time people were split about it i loved it but he just said very clearly we have [ __ ] up the world yeah we've [ __ ] up the earth we're being cruel to each other the human race is a [ __ ] show i think he said when you're born into the human race uh front you you get a ticket to the freak show and when you're born in america you get a front row seat right and his whole thing was i'm just going to love it and i think the bit i remember it's starting with this yeah when you go see like a like a car race how you like root for the crash that he's rooting for like the end of the human race yeah and he would do these long bits where he would explain how much he loves when things are on fire and accidents and uh and i have to say as i'm 54 i'm beginning to slide into that point of view because it is a result of we don't seem to be fixing anything and mentally i need a place to sit that's it that allows me to not be stressed all day long that's exactly it i i had the same thing i love the documentary by the way it's uh going to be on hbo max on the 20th 20th and it'll be on hbo thank you for sending it to me early it was i literally uh i'll get back to that point to the point we were making but i love carlin you know i've got a painting of him in my in my office and i was like uh yeah i know george's story i you know i yeah i'll watch it for judd but this is good and there's so much new footage and angles that i didn't know about and i really thought i knew everything about him so that kudos to you for that that was like no one knew anything because he never talked about his family on stage yeah and he didn't really talk about anything personal other than when he was a kid he talked about some stuff about being a kid and class clown but he didn't talk about raising his daughter kelly or his mom and it's intense stuff i mean it's real intense really intense stuff but even just the show business stuff i mean you uh you you really just mind the the hell out of it um that's the hoarding because if you're saying to me uh george carl had this incredible career hundreds of spots on tv yeah maybe a thousand geez as a hoarder part of me goes how do i get people to see it yeah like i feel bad that somewhere there's a tonight show from 1974 that's genius that no one will watch anymore like that's my psychological problem is it actually bothers me right so to be able to ex excavate it and go oh i gotta show you this clip of him and richard pryor on the john david summer show in the mid-60s where they're wearing sweaters telling the worst corny jokes before they figure themselves out like the joy to like offer that to you yeah yeah dinner is unavoidable in that it's something we plan around almost every day you're always thinking about what to make as we as you 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want to see the rest of this thing when he him and his wife when he's got that weird hair and him and his wife are actually on this panel you're at a morning show in l.a yeah and it's the early 70s and he had a very funny kind of almost like professor-like attitude in certain spaces yeah it was a little condescending i can't say i liked it like he had a gear that was like explaining what i do right here especially in the early 70s right and he's on his show and talking to these like kind of what seems like religious type morning show people i think they were yeah they did l.a morning show like yeah you know amla back then and he's just talking about how he does drugs at a time when no one said that yeah and also talked about that he thought it was okay for his daughter to smoke pot yeah and these people look like they were going to have a heart attack and his wife agrees with him right and then kelly said to me when we at what we found at his daughter yeah oh my mom is hammered on that show like she's drunk yeah and but he really wanted to say at a time when people really hadn't started saying it yet that big pharma once you attack uh wants you uh addicted to these drugs whether it's like diet pills or whatever yeah and the alcohol industry wants you addicted to this and they've just randomly decided that pot is bad when maybe it's better than all of that yeah and so you know 40 years before it got legalized he was telling the country this makes no sense yeah whatsoever he it was really it was really uh remarkable and that's what was so kind of upsetting i was one that was upset at the end when he's searching and searching and searching but he always had a little bit of hope and then at the end actually at the very end he kind of gave in a little bit yeah and showed a little hopefulness yeah it's a fascinating thing because he's so dark his act is so dark so dark and it's a diatribe against people for not making better choices about how they take care of each other how they take care of the earth yeah because he was an environmentalist from the late 60s he talked about it yeah and so he was kind of like ah [ __ ] it yeah about it his attitude and then roseanne has him on her talk show in the i guess it's in the 90s yeah and she says i think that you're positive and that this is a joke stance because you're disappointed in us and he admitted it yeah and she was relentless too she wasn't she didn't just like lob a question she really stated i'm not buying it you wouldn't you are you you do have hope you are yeah you're tricking us yeah and i always thought that that's what it was that he's basically saying who cares to get the audience to go like i care right that he he went so far as to push you back into the light yeah that's an interesting way to look because he said he goes you know beneath a cynic is a disappointed idealist yeah and yeah but i do think that's the end of your life you know when you get to be in like your 60s you start going well it's not going to get cleaned up while i'm around so i guess i don't give a [ __ ] well are you gonna do anything yeah i mean that's what you were saying before and and i i had the same thought when i was in my 30s i was watching that and i was like and i remember telling people there was that one special i'm like he didn't give us any hope in that one and that really that was really upsetting and now i i do know what you're saying like to be able to say [ __ ] it it's hilarious what's happening it's i hope the democrats and the republicans devour each other i hope that we run out of water because it's a cop-out because you're realizing i'm not going to be able to do it he puts it on you yeah and you accept it because it's it's more comforting than feeling guilty in your nice house thinking oh maybe we shouldn't fill the pool up but as a 30 year old do you think when you saw it that it made that made you take action but you think that your reaction was i don't like it like it got under your skin in a way that would lean you positive to wanting to fix something it definitely lingered it definitely made you think right now like him yeah i mean i wasn't running out to soup kitchens and like helping people out but it for someone who does care yeah it stuck it's to this day it was like oh man what was he doing like does that mean it worked it did work it did work that's how i look at it now when i watch it i think the world has gotten worse so all of his premises are correct i know because he was like you know we get the shitty politicians we vote for and he uh and he said you're letting people control you you're letting corporate forces control politics and yeah and then you go it didn't get better so i guess he wasn't dark enough yeah well what do you think about that part when when you're talking to jerry and that's a great and jerry jerry always has that stance of and vonnegut kind of went there also at a certain point who was kind of in between jerry and and george but jerry essentially was saying no one's mind gets changed from a joke uh jerry gear said that i'll think i'll i'll change what i think of that comedian because they were so good at being able to put that into a joke but no one you're not changing the world with comedy is basically what he was saying and it's in a great moment because other people are saying that he was yeah and then jerry is like no no jerry yeah right he's like i love it but i don't love it because of of the it's political he's i don't believe in the philosopher comedian yeah in the funny community and he was and he made me want to be a comedian and so he's like giving him praise but saying yeah that's not the thing i'm praising him about i think the material is incredible and funny yeah and uh because that's you know jerry's not trying to change people's minds he's the no growth he's a no learning guy right but there are people who are like no i want to change people's minds although in the book i interviewed a samantha bee and i asked her this question because she has her incredible show where she talks about politics every day and she said i don't think i'm changing anyone's mind i think i'm telling people who basically agree with me that they're not crazy and i think that's great she's like i'm uh lifting the spirits of the people who are fighting for ideas that i believe in and you're not losing those people yeah you're at least keeping them on the team you're the coach saying we can still do this one thing that we found when we were going through all of georgia's stuff was a letter from jerry to george just saying i i can't believe how great that special was and it was one of his darkest specials yeah and it was this beautiful letter from jerry just saying how everything was perfect jerry wrote his obituary or his uh for the new york times really he wrote yeah it's really good uh he wrote the op-ed um after george's passing and it's really well written and really respectful and the thing that i that i really remember from it was how we're all as comedians we're all thinking like what subjects can we get what what new what jokes can we tell what what what can we touch on what can we talk about and basically paraphrasing just know that george was already there before you like he had mine so much he covered all that covered all of it well he would seem to be the first person you really noticed was putting out a new hour what felt like every two or three years there was a new special yeah and as a young person who wanted to be a comedian they were people that you you saw that they never changed their act yeah their whole lives don rickles like it's the same act and then suddenly george carlin and and so lesser extent robert klein were putting out a lot of material yeah and it would seem so impressive like oh my god he writes a new set i mean no one wrote new sets that you knew of no god oh my god early 80s i mean it was the beginning of okay there's a second special from richard jenny or right or somebody yeah he was the first person richard jenny you're like oh he's incredible comedian and writer right and he can keep making these right yeah exactly but there wasn't the there wasn't the pressure to do it there wasn't and george just kind of put it on himself like now everybody can stream and everybody we see stuff and louie was a big part of it too and there was no leno's special back then right like that was also like his point of view which is why would i give my act out i want to do it and change it and have it grow but i don't want to put it yeah why would i burn my act he always says my act feeds me my heart pays me like why would i just give that away i remember him saying that to me on the set of the tonight show i was like what i thought that's what we're supposed to do is just keep putting stuff out there but it's an interesting arc with and this is another kind of cool thing from the special that i didn't really that was like a cool like new thing for someone who knew and knew everything about thought he knew everything about carlin was when you look at the scope like 40 years of him doing like we all know the story of oh he started out pretty straight and then he becomes hippie and then he but there's so many other arcs in it which of course for someone who cares it is going to dip because you couldn't keep like he he comes out and he changes and he's and the war is happening and all this stuff is so ripe for commentary if you're railing against the system it's all there but you can't keep that up yeah you've gotta and he has that kind of a thing which i would call maybe a dip in his career yeah for different reasons and there's like drugs and there's other stuff but i think more than anything he just had to hang around and gather up information about the landscape to understand it again it's not something you could comment every year he needed to take like a a beat and come back 15 years later with more potency and i think that he had to keep working so in these periods where he probably was running out of gas yeah if you put out like five albums yeah you could see that the sixth one would be scraping bottom for a little while of course and so he needs the money because he didn't pay his taxes for a few years it was vague as to what went wrong yeah you never could get to the bottom of it wasn't your choice was it a mistake he probably was just on a lot of drugs who knows maybe it was anti-government or at the time we couldn't get the answer i couldn't but the the interest was enormous you know it was like the days of willie nelson where like you know people would really get buried by having made mistakes with their taxes now no one pays taxes how broke was he did you know that part of it like was he it was he struggling for a long period it really just felt like he had to stay on the road to pay it off so he just wasn't home as much as he needed to be as a parent and a family person because it wasn't like now we're like somebody like jerry steinfeld can go out friday saturday right and you know do some big shows yep do really well yeah and then hang out with their kids yeah i mean back then you would go out for three weeks he was gone you know you're not flying you know you know in the easiest way and you were driving a lot and i think later on i think he's a commercial i think he did get a plan yeah he talks about being on the plane with the coke yeah doing cocaine alone on this plane because he didn't do coke with people yeah he did it alone it was like almost again like a ocd thing or an attention thing like he was self-medicating because i think his mind just raced and raced and he loved writing and he would sit alone and listen to music and write and uh it wasn't a social thing right it was to keep going yeah keep the engine going but i always think it's like a band it's like u2 or something you put out three or four great records and then you experiment and it either works or it doesn't and then maybe you have one that's you know not like one of the better ones and then out of the blue it explodes again yeah and you break you do octun baby or something and then you're searching again and when you have a 40 50 year career right you know it has to you have to have a fallow period and your fans stick with you it's like i'll watch any cone brothers film tarantino film because you're just you know they're they paid off you fell in love with them and you don't care if like what happens it's just like you're gonna go for the ride and he did have that following that like stayed with him but the cool part about him too is that he even up to the end was still getting young people like incredible it wasn't just an old crowd that aged with him he was why do you think that was why do you think young people were always into him yeah i don't know because like i i go to concerts of people that i liked 30 years ago right and the crowd is my age yeah and there's some younger people but they're not really replenishing there's a great steely dan book donald fagan wrote a diary of being on the road with steely dan about five years ago and what's hilarious is him just talking about how old the crowd is there's really hilarious entries like it looks like the crowd was on an iron lung today and he's really dark and hysterical about it but you do notice it i noticed it when i did carnegie hall i was like these people are all 50 years old right every single person yeah i have not alerted a 20 year old to this cardigan yeah and i was thinking about it like the he had the elements the things that i always loved about him and maybe this we'll see what you think of this he he was he would talk about weighty stuff but he would also be silly and you know in your in your documentary talk about he's doing this whole thing on farts and i'm always remember carnegie hall he's like you know doing something he's also being a crab walking across the across the stage but do you think another part of it is that he seemed dangerous like young people if you curse more if you like it it seems and maybe it's just the cursing it makes it seem for a 16 year old it makes it seem dangerous and so you want to lean into it do you think there's something to that and he's angry like a teenager he's pissed and he's doing something that a lot of people and a lot of like adults don't like he's troubling people right and i think that uh you know he's saying things that you're not supposed to say out loud i mean you know in the early 70s he's doing bits about you know going to church and just not believing anything they were saying yeah i mean he went very yeah you know anti uh god right and he has big bits about the dangers of people but being spiritual and believing god and then how it uh manipulates you and you know even if you disagree with him it's fascinating hardcore approach i mean there's that one joker he says you know the sacredness of life sacredness of life he goes religion is like the number one cause of death yeah i love the way he describes god like this magical man in the sky and he's like he hates you and he'll devour you and put you in hell if you if you're bad but he loves you you give him money he loves you he kisses his ass right he loves you and he needs money and in the last week or two you know because of all that's happening with roe versus wade yeah he has the the best bit about that amazing and it just goes around the internet he just captures the whole thing and it's all about uh yeah you know conservatives like you uh when you're uh in the womb and after that they don't give a [ __ ] [ __ ] you what does he say like when you're pre-born uh they like you and when you're preschool you're [ __ ] they don't want to pay for anything yeah no medicare no health care no welfare no nothing yeah he it's amazing because when the roe thing happened and you're like his take is like you you're thinking as a comedian like what is the take what is the thing and when he just comes out basically says no they're just against women they just don't like women they don't want women have power you're like yeah he he nailed it i mean that's still it hasn't changed and the environment the the thing about the earth just shrugging off the uh humans yes the earth will be fine that circulated like a couple years ago that circulated well he has that bit where he says what would the earth do if there was these people on it like herding it and he basically says it would create the earth would create aids yeah create like it can create viruses to like get rid of the thing that was the truth annoying it yeah and hurting it and yeah it's that was this whole thing the earth will be fine we're we're fox we're the ones who will disappear it's so funny and it's so dark and troubling you know yeah but he he had all these little post-it notes with lines and and one of them just said like i just want the audience to know what i'm thinking right you know which is a great way to look at it right now it's not like you don't have to agree with everything i'm just i'm thinking yeah i'm kicking it around and yeah there were all these other notes one said uh you know in america it's all about seduction and then betrayal you get seduced into believing something and then betrayed and i think you felt that way about a lot of politics wow what was it like what did he have like was it notebooks was it tons of handwritten stuff like what was around he seemed like he was one of those we'll write on anything people uh-huh so there's notebooks but a lot of post-it notes like chandling didn't really have a world of tons of post-it notes and index cards what was funny about going through all of gary shandling's stuff because you see like the history of him trying to figure out how to be a writer right and in the beginning he did try to write all his jokes on index cards right every joke was on a separate index card and he literally even had a little like a filing system i found like a little box yeah but you could tell he gave up on it in like two days like he spent the night writing it all out on different cards and then has the little dividers with the topics and then never looked at it again but uh i found uh on a wall on a cork board you know there was all these magazines and things and maybe things that inspired gary in his office yeah you know when you like you put things on a cork board and then you never do it again for the next 20 years but it just sits on his [ __ ] board yeah he's like stuck in time but he had this joke and it said a lot of people ask me where i was on 9 11 and i say which one i had 28 bad 911. and he never did that joke but it's just sitting there it's great what did you i was thinking about that on the way over because you take these you know you have you have a lot of comedy with both of your books and just all your interviews from a kid and you just always been a student of it and and dove into it uh i guess this is a two-part question you took deep dives though with with shandling and with carlin the first question is what is the differences because they're both geniuses what did you come away with like what was similar and what was what was different about them yeah because they are different but they there are more similarities than i thought uh-huh i mean gary was a real he was a real writer he also loved to discover things on stage he liked to play with the audience and he could write on his feet and he was really trying to get to the truth of himself and george carlin was not george carlin wasn't going on stage discussing how george carlin feels why he's behaving the way he behaves yeah he was a social commentator and he was fascinated by language and behavior but not his behavior right so he has some there's some random things here and there but a shockingly small amount of self-exploration yeah but gary was all self-exploration right but they had similar moms just in the sense that gary had your classic smothering controlling kind of neurotic uh and at the end pretty toxic mom right you know gary wanted to marry him yeah that was his joke uh you know he had that great joker he said you know his mom said she wanted to marry him and that he said this therapist the therapist just went like did the expression that the blackjack dealers do um gary had a great joke where he said i want to uh you know usually it's like you know mrs uh gary chandling but he always said he wants to get a woman to change her first name and her last name so you could say this is my wife gary sheppard but um so george carlin's dad was really abusive so when george holland was one the mom like ran away with george and his older brother patrick who he was already abusing who was a pisser by the way what a great guy that was hysterical the coolest guy you just passed away a few weeks ago oh so funny man it's like if carlin never left a trailer park like if george carlin just stayed there and and just was complaining from his chair and he sold cars and i think he wrote on the george crown store like did you know he did everything yeah the end of his life lived in woodstock and uh yeah but i think he also was amused for him his attitude his older brother yeah keep the new yorker keep the righty bro when he brought him on the tv show yeah he said what does my what do you want me to do george he said keep me keep the new yorker true or something like yeah he knew like he would tell me if i had slipped yeah i gave an la guy when he did a show but uh so the mom takes them and they they leave they run away just to raise them alone but she's a very strong uh i guess drove him crazy being controlling and everything you know there were some parents back then especially who were like what you do is a reflection on me and it's all about their enjoyment of it or them feeling good about it yeah and that was certainly a relationship that was uh difficult for him yeah and gary had a similar situation with a very controlling jewish mom right didn't want him to talk about his brother dying we found this incredible video where the dad started telling the story about how gary did well in spite of the fact that his brother passed when he was a kid from cystic fibrosis and as he's telling it to some interviewer who's doing a piece about gary his mom says no we don't want to talk about that here and you can tell that's what the house was like we don't want to grieve we just want to never talk about it ordinary people yeah yeah and then uh there's an amazing thing in the documentary where george carlin brings his mom out on the mike douglas show and his mom is so happy and so confident and starts telling a story about george and she kills yeah and he looks like he is in so much pain i know watching it and his mom even like starts the thing off by saying how she loves michael douglas like and not george and not george yeah [Laughter] that's right so they had that connection and also i think in his life landed in a philosophy that was similar to gary's which was i don't know if it's buddhism or just a sense of that we're all connected and we have to lift each other up and i think george talked about it almost like we're all part of the big electron we're all and i think his daughter kelly said that from taking acid he had that feeling of we're all one and that is where gary was at the end of his life so even though their exploration was different they both uh believed that right yeah it was interesting because george had these moments like it was only in interviews though where he would almost choke up like he would talk about you know how much he loves people or who loves running into people doesn't like groups doesn't like groups yeah i love people on an individual basis what a great life yeah yeah and then he's like when you have a group sooner or later they they start wearing hats which is funny because the trump thing is all the hat right yeah he's like pretty soon they're wearing hats they're pretty wearing hats yeah and visiting you in the night or something like that uh but it's interesting like i wonder why george didn't want to talk about it on stage ever like there was never that like he never really did there was never i wonder if it's because he really had a serious drug problem for a long time his wife had a serious alcohol problem a lot of it from being left alone while he was on the road and not having a sense of her own purpose and then she found it later in life and maybe he was just ashamed of what he was as a parent because he didn't want to explore what was happening and maybe it wasn't something that he felt like he could talk about truthfully without self-examination that would be difficult for someone who was addicted yeah as a comedian and a good dad do you think he could have been george carlin if he had been like no i'm just gonna i'm gonna focus on my family more probably i mean i don't know if people knew how to do that back then right i think that they didn't uncharted well i think the comedians have figured out so many ways to make the life work yeah like this you have a podcast so you don't have to be on the road constantly you have something else that you do yeah you can make films you can make films you can act you can you know host things you can like we've all found like tons of ways to make a living and he did you know he had books and he would act but i don't think that the system was built yet because there were comedy clubs which he did not do right and they were theaters and he felt the need to be on tv a lot to keep his exposure high so that people would buy the tickets because when if he put his show on sale it was a couple of thousand yeah when you don't sell you're really screwed and i think i think he was stuck in a cycle of very hard work that's a great point he didn't figure out the hustle yeah that allowed him to do it less because it didn't exist yet he was kind of one of the first yeah guys touring that way like we were all privy to all the information and how it works and what you can do and like when you heard she wasn't moving the murder yeah he wasn't he never merged guy right exactly he wasn't selling stuff online and also he probably didn't make that much money on his specials yeah and it just it wasn't like crazy lucrative as it has become for some people now right right for the people at his level like like he would be you know bill burr right now right you know right but i don't think he ever really got to that like madison square garden place no you know i think he was in those whatever one to six thousand seaters yeah for most of his his life and it was probably hard to move move those tickets all the time oh god yeah hustling and going and doing press and just when she talked about and kelly talked about him being so tired he was just so tired at that point then he gets the tv show and he's working harder than he ever he thought that was the easy road it was the sick um fighting with uh sam simon who created the simpsons yeah uh and he realized oh this is a completely different war yeah and it was 14 hour days there it's like i'm not getting on a plane but still he got chandling's life which was right it buries you yeah it takes everything from you i mean he's a great line from seinfeld when he's talking to gary uh i think it's in the documentary where he says you know when you do these tv shows you know it's a it's it's you're in a fight with your show and the show always wins like you quit yeah like it's one way or another you get defeated by your show i always remember jerry would say uh tv eats people yeah it does i think people really understand how much work it takes mental work yeah like when you think about seinfeld how many episodes that him and larry made right and had to figure out and think through and perform and edit each one you can take a year off of your life god now what do you what's your been your experience in the balance of your life and your you know you have a successful family but also a successful career the balance of film and and your life well i'm always thinking about that that's all that's all i i think about and i i have to say i do look back now that my kids are out of the house like freshly out of the house and i think leslie i made big sacrifices to be around and to build it around them and i think i think we did pretty good yeah you know we were we were around and we still found a way to do projects like you know during the pandemic you know we were all in the house and we had a nervous breakdown and we knew like we needed to get out of the house like really it was bad and i had this idea for the bubble and i thought maybe i could get somebody to let me make a movie about what's happening and it'd be small and like it's a small cast and contained and me and leslie and iris can do it together yeah and still support each other during a difficult time but while working and not just stuck in the house yeah how to make pizza and stuff and bread and so we always thought about that that's what this is 40 is that's what working together and funny people and knocked up is how can we have our lives connect right and not all the time we go almost uh you know five years not doing it it wasn't constant but it was recurring yeah that we would say how do we shoot in the valley how do we shoot a movie in brentwood right yeah you know there was one time where we bought a house and we were shooting this is 40 and we literally moved down the street from the house in the movie where we shot and i would just walk like 800 yards to the house like that was the ultimate setup we were going for yeah i watched this great and i'm it was great it was on turner classic it was about um harold he was a storyboarder and his wife who was a researcher for film um this is embarrassing that i'm forgetting their names it was a documentary done like in the 80s maybe in the 90s and it was about this couple and she was an orphan and he had his own thing and they built the life together and they were very success i mean they worked on everything she was this researcher like in paramount like tons of books and getting all the stuff for all these great films and he was doing all the stuff for the graduate and i mean all these amazing and working with all these great people and the one thing that from the documentary that stuck out which is in line with what you're talking about how you succeeded was that they realized he was they couldn't survive a marriage if he was often budapest working for eight months yeah and she was in la in the research library and not having some commonality in their life you're now living two separate lives you needed to share you have to have common experience and how do we do that how do we bring these two things together otherwise what is a marriage yeah especially in this business yeah it's hard you do have to find a way to to be present and so much of what we enjoy is going on the road right and and you know making a movie yeah and so if i make a movie i'm like okay i gotta live there right if it's not in l.a i'm like okay i'm going to new york for three and a half months yeah four months you know and we only did it once where we moved somewhere like the family moved yeah when we did talladega nights it was the whole family and we moved to charlotte and of course it ends and then we're we're all like should we just stay here forever we love it here yeah you always want to stay there forever yeah but it was a great experience my kids went to school there yeah for a semester yeah into like the school like in the system yeah and we were like oh this is what it would be like if we just stayed here not circus people lived with normal nice people right this would this is what that life would look like it was hard to then go back to crazy l.a yeah and and every once in a while when my kids when they would be acting out or we'd be having a real problem you know that's when the conversation would be like we never should have left charlotte people were normal there ours is new jersey because all our families in new jersey people are just normal there just act like normal kids they don't need this giant thing for a party [Laughter] so what is your is it your is it your in your self analysis is it your add or is it your love of comedy that keeps you cranking out all of this stuff i mean you're always you're always always making stuff showing up as a stand-up like that is an obsession like more than anyone else like everybody has their things but you devour and and you you're thankfully for all of us you're cultivating all of this stuff i mean just to have these two books in my office i mean really just to flip open you know is an amazing thing what is it what part of you is do you think it started as add and morphed into love of comedy i don't know it's a good question because another 80d thing that happened was when i was a kid i would sit in my room and i had this chair this was a weird metal chair and i would lean back against my armoire i would watch like mike douglas and dinosaur every day she was like i don't know like two hours they would be on and then i watched live at five with sue simmons and chad cafferty with some ribs from beefsteak charlie's did i watch all like with his sitcoms and cheers or whatever and then i'd watch carson letterman but all i'd like leaning back in this chair and i used to i had this weird ocd thing or i don't know what it is i thought it was like an obsessive compulsive thing where i would tap along with what them talking and count their syllables and having and i'd have to end on a even and then i would start it again and do it for a while and then have that on the even and i would just do it the whole time almost not even knowing i'm doing it right i've done it my whole life my wife started noticing i was doing with my toes like flicking my toes while i'm watching tv no and then one day i like went online and just happened to stumble into some article that said yeah it's some form of calming yourself like like they now they teach like tapping is the thing that calms you down right whatever it is it was some weird human instinct that i don't even know if it connects the two sides of your brain but the tapping and the counting is grounding in some way so lately i've i've been thinking i don't know what the hell my brain is doing yeah i don't really quite understand because it is racing and running and wanting to think and wanting to work but lately it's also exhausted and it's just like why don't you stop right so i would go to hawaii for a week and i after two or three days like i'll find the other gear non-work gear right and i get happy in it can you stay in it no yeah i mean i could if i just didn't leave but in la as soon as it starts so much of my drive is don't [ __ ] it up so if i'm making a george carlin documentary the entire time for two years in my head i'm like seriously you can't [ __ ] it up i mean every comedian in the world would think you're the biggest idiot ever if you make the shitty george carlin documentary yeah i hope this isn't bad because it's going to be everywhere and it's almost like that terror of failure or humiliation yeah is such a driver but it feels bad and so i've tried to get rid of it but it's just that critical voice and it it does keep me on my toes working but it's so unhealthy is it though i mean depending on how loud you let it get right yeah well yeah and also you've been successful so it should quiet down at some point but it doesn't it right exactly because then you just start thinking like am i like getting older and lame you know yeah it doesn't matter how well you do there's always the voice going like yeah but you don't know what the [ __ ] going on anymore kids are into different [ __ ] you're not in sync with anybody and then it goes well and then it's like yeah but the next one won't make sense but you know what have you ever met anyone that i mean you meet so many people that are successful and have you ever met a really good artist who is content like with their work i mean i think that you just you know it's everything is an experiment it's like writing a joke you write a joke at home and we try it tonight we have no idea if it will work right and and the fact that a thousand other jokes have worked does not increase the chances that we're correct right i mean there's been so many jokes i'm just so cocky to get out there and like there's no noise at all from the audience and you're like wow in my head i i felt the rhythm of how this would play and they don't even recognize it as a joke yeah i think you're still doing the setup and that i think is why we like it is the cons you're always on your toes yeah always no matter how good you are and i guess we like it i just would like to you know the the thing i've been thinking about lately is a lot this buddhist idea that you have to become comfortable with how uncomfortable you are that you're always uncomfortable and it's okay to live in that yeah and then you just kind of settle into it right like yeah groundlessness yeah like you know everything is shifting all the time and you just go it's it's fine and that's what comedy is every moment on stage you have no idea you could be killing and go like this thing could totally fall apart at any second you could just lose rhythm or sometimes you just you're performing and you realize you don't even feel anything you're saying right like sometimes you're in the moment and like you're really like telling a friend and other times like you're just like saying it and then the crowd feels it and it just starts getting quieter and quieter same words almost said the same way i know but there's nothing behind it yeah like he's left he's not here anymore he started thinking about dinner he got tired you ever get a set like you're the seller and it's a 15-minute set and like you're doing really well like eight minutes in you like you feel your body go i'm tired right exactly i do this thing lately where you start leaning on the stool where you're just like a couple figures and it's like this is really just purely out of out of energy energy loss like i'm going to the comedy seller next week because i i haven't really written any new jokes since the pandemic really was busy on the the bubble and the carlin thing and i couldn't really figure out what my attitude should be now like am i happy am i cynical my melancholy my reflective i don't know and so i haven't really been doing a lot of stand-up just at some largo shows where i mainly talk to people yeah i convinced jim carrey to come in one night we just talked on stage was really amazing but i said damn it i gotta figure this out so i called in for like eight zillion sets of the seller next week oh what just for that and now i'm so scared to have nothing to say that i'm writing because i'm really nervous oh but it's so but after one set there the great because they're not long and you just kind of get up and it's just oh by the you're gonna get so much work done you can always bail in eight minutes yeah the next comic's happy you got off yeah and you and i did the same thing at largo yeah where a couple times and yeah i you were definitely searching you were definitely kind of feeling it out and we would always naturally come back to our family exactly and then every once in a while i'm like should i talk about that or the fact that they left the house does that mean it's over mm-hmm but then i realized no there's there's a funny thing happening now yeah post them leaving yeah which is about how do you create what this new relationship is where you're not in charge you know and you're i i was trying to write something about how you become like their advisor and they don't have to listen so you have to be a trusted advisor and you can't get mad when they don't take the advice yeah so you're trying to find a little pocket for yourself in their lives where they will check in with you yeah because the best thing ever that happened in all my parenting was one day out of the blue mud just said to me maybe she wasn't like her she was like 20 or something she's like i always remember that time you said to me and i thought she remembered a piece of advice and she said remember you told me that michael j fox said in his book you shouldn't worry about things bad things happening because then if they do happen you just suffered twice and she quoted my quote of michael j fox that's great it was the only time in my whole life i thought yeah i saw the a be like something stuck yeah like something stuck that wasn't just you doing something stupid in the kitchen [Laughter] dad's an idiot yeah because you think as a parent all the time like how do i give them the little wisdom that i found and yeah that's amazing that actually stuck i haven't gotten there yet where they're like you know well they're honest with you afterwards right so like when they move out and they realize like you can't control them anymore so they tell you what they were thinking and what they did so you have this i was trying to find a way to write about this uh where just out of the blue they'll just be like oh yeah i was stoned that whole year and you're like what you know and they they tell you the story so that's what really happened that night yeah it's like suddenly like oh i thought that happened no that's not what happened here's what really happened and they just tell you all these like incidents you never heard about oh i couldn't tell you i had to call an ambulance i remember telling my parents things 20 years later yeah about and they didn't like it they didn't like hearing it because it ruins your perception as a parent of what you were doing and how in control you were and how what a good job you were doing we're kind of the opposite we're so happy they're telling us that oh yeah we're just so happy that they would tell us now i know and and oh completely that goo well that's a again that's that's a sign of success in the family that they're you know but they will hang out with you at all like we're gonna go on vacation and they're coming with us and yeah the idea of going on vacation like as an adult right with my parents would not be something i would have considered it just wasn't like how everything worked in our family right and i think for most families i don't know that but like yeah we're just like come hang out with us we'll make sure you know that it's fun yeah well yeah that's one thing that i keep banking on is well they're going to be poor for a while so if they want to do anything that's all you have at some point yeah like you know first class i used to do this joke right you know like uh where i would i always flew my kids first class from when they were little kids i'm like i worked my whole life to get into first class i'm not going to fly coach just to teach you values [Laughter] how do you how do you figure out where you're going to put your focus because like now you've got this idea for for i've got to get back on my stand up and and take care of that but i know without you telling me that there's a film percolating there's probably another book percolating probably another comedy compilation of some port yeah in the mix how do you how do you allocate your timing do you feel like do you ever crave giving all of your time to one thing yeah well i did that once i wrote a movie with owen wilson in the 90s and i spent like a couple few years on it because i thought well that's how like james brooks does he spends like four years right writing a script i'll do it that way yes try to make a masterpiece and then like we finished it and no one would make it and so i'm like okay it's all about back burners how many burners let's go get these plates squirreling up here people will just say no right right and uh so yeah it's a it is a tough decision because you want to be able to be pulled you know by the undertow in a way yeah so if i meet lena dunham and she has a great idea right and her and jenny connor want me to help out on girls it might change the next six years of my life like okay i'm gonna give a a pretty big hunk of my bandwidth to this right and so in the era of girls i'd made very few movies right but i thought this is like really fun and it's working and i love it and yeah and it's not burying me they're working way harder than me but i'm writing you know i'm reading all the scripts i'm giving them notes i'm a great like outside uh voice to track how everything's going but i still can be with my kids i don't have to sit on the set and it made life work for a long time right right and then at a certain point you know it's like making the bubble you just go what is life like right now and where should we be and now like i will think when is maude doing euphoria again okay so she's not going to talk to me then and you know what's leslie doing and where's iris going to be and then i i try to figure out should we do something together oh there's a little hole there where i probably it would be good to be busy then and not at this other time right so much of it is just a time management yes you know when i make a movie you think oh i have to go away for three months it's not that it's the hard part it's the six-month tale of editing right and and so then if everyone wants to have a little freedom to do something yeah if i'm like well i can't leave town for six months because i'm editing it it becomes like a year of dad can't be flexible in any way right right which obviously is a great problem to have but if i decide in that year to go i'll just do stand up here and there then i can have fun be less stressed right and then if they get a job i can go live in the city where they're working yeah so that's i'm always on my toes wondering you know do i strike and make something now or just sit around and work on the book like oh i can work on the book from anywhere and yeah so it's so it's more of organizing how the projects are going to fit in your life than what's going to turn you on creatively well both and then you know something will demand right do it so right with the king of staten island you know i felt like oh okay there's this window of time if i made a move with pete it will be in a year in that summer right you know he's running from snl we'll do it that summer so i need to get the script with him and dave cyrus ready for that right and then i'm very passionate about it because i really liked that it was about him sharing his experience and about the sacrifice of firefighters and i i really loved meeting all those people a story like that out there right exactly so then it just pulls me in like okay that's worth yeah this huge hunk of energy yeah right and then it ends and you're like okay i just interviewed people for a book for a year so i can recover um i hope you like the bread thank you sir i will like to help you i'm going to eat it you have to break the fast with the bread do you have a good serrated knife yes all right good have these knives toast it put some butter on it and they they i mean i take the pictures i mean that's where i'll cheat on my fast this is good i mean this is this is a grown-up lemon thing the only reason why i'm fasting is there is a moment where you put on a suit and you just go it doesn't look good that's the only reason i would ever lose it like i'm on total bear next week and it's just if the gut is it was out wide enough that the whole suit coolness disappears and i look like mel blanc or something right exactly i always want to be i always want to be carrie grant and i know i'm just like a used car salesman jacoby one last question you're making all of this stuff and you're also a student of comedy and the carlin part of it and everything uh we're all we all touch on similar stuff right we're all kind of there's definitely like like jerry talking about george like george was there first he's like we're all mining really a lot of stuff in your films and the books everything what is the what do you what is the purpose of it all do you think what is the purpose of us all going out is it merely just are we in entertaining distraction for people or are we continuing a conversation into the future that people artists started before us it's it's funny because there's so much stuff out there there's so much content that it's very easy to go is the point of doing any of this and i can get in that headspace of why do it does it matter if there's 500 tv shows why would i make one right that's why i always like to go to areas where other people aren't like the documentaries about comedians right the books of interviews because there's not a ton of them right right and um but then everyone saw you meet somebody and they just say that what you did touched them in some way or made them happy or yeah um you know i ran into uh this woman and she just told me this beautiful story about that she used to watch knocked up with her dad and her dad died and she watched she saw it the other day and i needed to think about her dad and you realize oh that's happening all the time yeah i just don't know it yeah i usually won't bump into that person right and that i always quote this thing that i heard somewhere the the best gift you can give people is your story and that's how you feel connected to people and i think about what's been important to me like when i was a kid and i saw say anything you know or broadcast news yeah and so whenever i'm insecure i don't know the purpose of it i just think of how much a movie meant to me and to create one that could mean something to someone else it's like a song like what would life be like without warren zivan albums like how much it's changed my life yeah just making that connection and even if it's in a club which i like i like the idea that there's 200 people there and it's just gone and it was that moment and it was really intimate yeah and connected and then it's gone and it's not judged it's not reviewed it's just that is all life is and that's the essence of life which is it's fleeting and it's a collection of these rights right but it's contagious yes like that that one little show there's people walking out and carrying it and then making something or changing my life or it is kind of this ongoing thing really great well you're the best what's that cup i didn't even notice that cup this is a cup i got from the kelly clarkson show i filled it with hot tea and i didn't know that this is the kind of cup that makes the tea never cool down so i was in the car and after like 15 minutes thinking it cooled down i took a big swig and just burnt the hell out of my mouth and that is kelly clarkson's revenge for us using her as a reference in the 40 old virgin well thanks for being here thanks for the books and thanks for the carlin documentary it really is uh it really is good people are going to love it thank you yeah well done all right aaron we got it all right everybody that was our big conversation with judd apatow i hope you learned a lot of neat things i did very thoughtful very smart who doesn't love judd apatow go check out the documentary on hbo max starting on the 20th also revisit the shandling documentary and get the book sicker in the head it all the money goes to charity and um this is a sticker in the head part two both books uh go for good causes and uh and they're just great to have around to thumb through if you just want to read some great stuff about some of your favorite comedians that's it thank you for joining us at the table we'll see you next time enjoy your life

Channel: Tom Papa

Views: 5,636

Keywords: tom papa stand up, tom papa comedian, tom papa comedy, bread, homemade bread, bread baking, comedy, tom papa, home baking, diy sourdough, home bread making, how to make bread, foodie, breaking bread podcast tom papa, breaking bread podcast, breaking bread with tom papa podcast, tom papa podcast, food podcast, talk show, interviews, comedian interviews, food talk show, food talk, all things comedy, judd apatow, judd, apatow, superbad, producer, hollywood, director, knocked up

Id: pXZ8xhTvTew

Length: 86min 16sec (5176 seconds)

Published: Tue May 17 2022