Do What You Love | Phil Rosenthal | TEDxMarin

[Music] [Applause] at the end of our first season of everybody loves raymond i asked raymond where he was going on his hiatus the little vacation that you get between seasons one and two if you're lucky enough to have a season two and i said where you going and he said i'm going to the jersey shore and i said oh that that's nice uh have you ever been to europe and he said nah i said why not and he goes uh i'm not really interested in other cultures even his own even his own culture italy and then a light bulb went off and i thought we got to do that episode we gotta send him over there with that attitude and send him back with mine someone who's excited about travel in italy the food in italy and the scenery and the people and the experience of travel and i wanted him to have that feeling that i had when i was 23 years old i i had never been anywhere until that point where our family didn't have a lot of money i think we went to atlanta for a bar mitzvah once when i was nine and maybe went into a condo in miami from a relative when i was 12. that was it and those were great uh but when i was 23 i got a cheap flight to paris a courier flight and uh i had a few magical days there it blew my mind and then i took an overnight train to florence and in that train ride overnight was this young italian couple about my age also about 23 they were dating this young couple and they worked in the bakery in florence and they gave me places to go when i would when i would come to florence we stayed up all night in that train car and we were drinking and having fun and they said visit the bakery so of course the very next day i didn't know anybody in florence except them my new friends and so i went and i'll never forget danya her that was the the girl's name her dad ran the bakery and he looked at me and he said america john wayne 1983 uh he then sat me down and proceeded to feed me he gave me every pastry in the shop and because i was american imagine this everyone else on the block the lady with the sandwiches the lady who had the the the pizza place a chocolatier came they sat me outside the shop and they started bringing pasta and stuff it was mind-blowing dania and daario and i became friends and then later i brought monica to italy and introduced her and then later they came to new york with their whole family the parents and their little new baby because they had been married her name was geneva they all stayed in my one bedroom apartment it was crowded but we're friends for life so that's what can happen i wanted raymond to understand just a little of that because i think the world would be better if we all could experience a little bit of someone else's experience it took about five years to convince him to get on a plane but when we did it what i saw happen to the character that i wrote you know ray gets woke in the show happened to the person i saw it happen to him he was ricocheting around piazza's going phil did you try this pizza it's unbelievable oh look at this gelato have you had the lemon it's unbelievable yes yes grave had it and that got in very deep to see your friend get turned on to this great part of life i think we all do what we do because we like turning people on to the stuff we like that's how you know that's what friends are right so that got in very deep now i didn't know that a show for me could come out of that we had another four years to run on raymond lasted nine years and after that i thought well everybody else wants me to do another sitcom because that's where the money is so i tried to do another sitcom uh but the business had changed in the nine-year bubble i was in doing raymond and it wasn't so welcome anymore this type of show meaning a family show with uh jokes that were not so blunt or uh rough uh but it turned out that people now wanted the hip and edgy type of shows and that's not really my wheelhouse as i guess you could tell by looking at me and to be fair i didn't really want the kind of shows that they were doing either so i kept striking out and it wasn't for lack of trying i kept trying but in the back of my head was this was this idea what if i could do the travel show what if i could do the travel show now i wrote a book in the meanwhile about how to make a sitcom i wrote about my travels in that book because everything in raymond came from something that happened to us in real life and i also made a movie during that time i made a movie because the russians called this is true they asked me if i wanted to turn my sitcom into everybody loves custa yes and so i agreed to do this if i could film the whole thing and now this would be the first time that i personally would be on camera and i enjoyed it i wasn't acting or anything i just enjoyed editing it i enjoyed the story of what was happening to that guy who i understood to be a character a kind of schlemiel that stuff happens to and people noticed and uh i started to get a little traction from my other idea which was this food and travel show with maybe me as the host because it had worked in russia and i even skyped with my parents from russia which would become a big part of the travel show as well now the agents when you come to them after having created and run a sitcom that was successful you come to them and say i would now like to host a travel show they're not jumping up and down they're not excited there's no real money in that but they said if you're gonna do it let's go first to the travel channel that's that they have the most money so let's go so we have a meeting with the head of the travel channel at this time and he says to me i gotta be honest with you uh we've done some research and we found that our audience really isn't into travel i said oh my what are you going to do he said well we're going to do shows that are travel adjacent i said well what the hell does that mean and they said well an example would be a show like pimp my rv meaning we take an rv and we pimp it out meaning decorated inside and we don't we don't go anywhere so it's travel adjacent i said ha okay well thanks anyway and he said oh and we've done some research and the only food that people are interested in is barbecue good to know thank you uh can i go now to pbs maybe because i think they might be interested in this type of show i'd like to do the travel show with a food focus because that's my main interest when i travel and i'd love to do it uh no first you're gonna go to the food network then if you're interested in food oh okay i go to the food network meet with the head of the food network i am not making any of this up and the head of the food network says we're kind of getting away from the food thing really yeah we're doing shows that are more food adjacent yes everybody's doing things that are next to something they're not actually doing anything uh they do competition shows now they're not really interested in the food and by the way if the if they are interested in food the only food that americans are interested in said don't tell me barbecue they said that's right how did you know because i met with the travel channel which is the same owners as the food channel now can i go to pbs yes i can go to pbs i go to pbs i tell them my idea they say well what would the show be like and i said well it would be me going around trying to get people to travel by showing them the best places in the world to eat and and you what do you bring to it i said well i would say i'm exactly like anthony bourdain if he was afraid of everything and that worked they got it they understood they said they've been looking for a show a food and travel show with humor for years so after 10 years of trying to do this of banging my head against this particular spot in the show business wall you know i just picked the spot that i really really liked after striking out with sitcoms i got through and i called my brother why my brother because he was already a producer for facebook videos so he had some experience producing things he also was a producer on the network side of of comedy central and he his his shows had already won some emmys so he was qualified and i wanted to work with him and i said quit your job and come to this show with me because what show they're gonna see pbs is gonna be six episodes on the air of going around the world and eating he said really you got that show i said yes he goes what are they gonna call this show the lucky bastard i said quit your job and come with me and produce the show with me and we'll call our production company lucky bastards and that's what we did and we did i'll have what phil's having for pbs we went to paris and barcelona and italy and tokyo and hong kong i considered it you know earth's greatest hits i was trying to get mr and mrs america two-thirds of the of us don't even have a passport so i wanted to start with popular tourist attractions tourist site and it seemed to go very well and then guess what pbs didn't pick up the show even though it had worked very well and was a hit for them i think they couldn't raise the money i don't know why but here comes netflix and then i got to do somebody feed phil and it's been the joy of my life to work with my brother to travel around to meet these people to meet new friends and to make new friends over the internet and over social media right and and just have the the time of my life i really think there's no more mind expanding thing we can do in life than travel and the reason i use food is because food is the great connector and for me laughs are the cement and i'm using food and hopefully my stupid sense of humor just to get you to think about traveling you know take that little baby step off the couch and go it's going to make your life better listen if somebody gave you a house would you spend your whole life in one room of the house no you'd want to check it out so we only go through once people i want you to see the whole house i'm taking everything i learned about how to make a show and it's in the service of everything i love in life family friends food travel and laughs these are the values this is what i like now i wish for you what i had doing something you love with people you love and i'm gonna leave you with this little bit of advice the best advice i ever got it was from a showrunner named ed weinberger and when i was writing the pilot for raymond he told me this do the show you want to do because in the end they're going to cancel you anyway this is a very good philosophy of life do the show you want to do because we all get canceled one day so live your life now i know it's a crazy time full of uncertainty and maybe we're not traveling so soon but i'm very confident that we will i think as soon as there's a vaccine that we trust we're going to be out there again and the world's going to be waiting so if it's all a crap shoot anyway live your life you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 64,054

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Culture, Entertainment, Food, Psychology

Id: dJeZTKzifEI

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020