Judd Apatow’s Guide to Failure and Success (Fail Better with David Duchovny)

Today, we’re sharing an episode from Fail Better with David Duchovny https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fail-better-with-david-duchovny/id1742253720, featuring filmmaker and writer Judd Apatow. Together, they trace the arc of Judd’s career, from Anchorman and Bridesmaids to Superbad and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, before diving into his new visual memoir, Comedy Nerd: A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/720819/comedy-nerd-by-judd-apatow/. Throughout their conversation, Judd reflects on what’s driven him all these years—not the need to prove he’s funny, but the desire to understand if he has anything to say in the first place. It’s something David relates to as a writer, and it runs through the pages of Judd’s new book: a collection of everything he’s made and gathered while trying to make sense of this life he’s made. They also talk about the sting of bad reviews, why they’ve both stopped Googling themselves, and how Judd’s documentary on Garry Shandling became a final act of friendship and legacy. Hear more episodes of Fail Better with David Duchovny wherever you get your podcasts, or head to https://lemonada.lnk.to/failbetterfd See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:13Sam Fragoso?

  Hey, everyone. Today, I want to share an episode of the podcast Fail Better with David Duchovny. It's an excellent series from our partners at Lemonada that charts how some of today's most creative and influential people think about failure, persistence, and what it takes to keep going. This talk features the legendary writer-director Judd Apatow. As some of you may recall, Apatow appeared on Talk Easy back in 2022. We talked then about how he found his footing in comedy, the mentorship he received from the late Gary Shandling, the legacy of freaks and geeks, and, well, just about everything else. But this fall, Judd came out with a brand-new book. It's a visual memoir called Comedy Nerd: A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures.

• 0:58Sam Fragoso?

  It's the springboard for this recent conversation he had with David. Throughout their conversation, Judd reflects on what's driven him all these years. Not the need to prove that he's funny, but the desire to understand if he has anything to say in the first place. A talk that winds his way through his own experiences with failure, hoarding memorabilia, and how he keeps on creating at a breakneck speed. And so, if you liked today's feed drop with David and Judd Apatow, you can find the show Fail Better wherever you are listening to this right now. You can also watch select episodes available on YouTube. So with that, we'll be back here on Sunday with a brand-new episode of Talk Easy.

• 1:39Sam Fragoso?

  Until then, here is Judd Apatow talking to David Duchovny on his show Fail Better.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  I'm David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Judd Apatow is a director, writer, and producer whose style and humor came to shape an entire generation of comedy films and TV. Judd's new book, Comedy Nerd, releases October 28. We chat about humor, honesty, and, of course, a whole lot of failure. Here's our conversation.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Judd, thanks for talking to me.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Happy to.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Although, you once told me, you're gonna regret this. You once said, "I say yes to every podcast."

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Even that rule, I had to, uh, I had to change because I didn't realize how many would come at you. And you don't even have to be a good guest. Everyone just needs guests desperately.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  It is a bit of a game. I wanted to read something from the new book.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Great.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  What's it called?

• 2:50Speaker 02

  It's called Comedy Nerd, which is, it's a scrapbook autobiography. So it's photos and memorabilia with little essays and it's, uh...

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things I found interesting, I didn't know about you, was you claimed to be a hoarder. You know, that you...

• 3:04Speaker 02

  I do have some hoarding tendencies.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that this, this book, because of all these pictures that you're using in the book, is kind of a... You're exfoliating, in a way. You're trying to exfoliate your soul here.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Well, I had about half a million photos.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Half a million photos that you had taken?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Or that was just inputted at some point. And so, and I have just saved everything since I was a kid. I have a photo in the book of my closet when I was a kid where I have all my little autographs and memorabilia and tons of pictures of the Who on the wall. And then, you know, I always say it's not hoarding if your shit's awesome. It's just having awesome shit.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Well, where does that, where do you think it comes from?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  I don't know, because it started really young of like treasuring things.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  So it's not just like a baseball card collection and...

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Well, the beginning it was like, oh, I got the autographed Mets ball. I had like a Dave Kingman signed bat. And then I got some autographs. You know, I used to, I used to write every celebrity in the world to just see who would send me something.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  You did.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  And I would just spend hours alone in my room in like 4th, 5th grade, just writing Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas letters. And I remember I got Paul Lynn's autograph. And then I just, just thought, I'm gonna send him another letter, see if he does it again. And then suddenly I had like five Paul Lynn autographs. And people, you know, they'd auto pen you or every once in a while you'd get a real one. Like I had like a really good Andy Kaufman autograph photo. And on the back, he wrote a letter. Which was so weird because he signed the front and the back, he wrote, Dear John, thank you so much for writing this. You know, here's an autographed photo for you. Like, it was completely unnecessary.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  It must have been early, early in his career.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, taxi days.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I remember at the beginning of the X-Files, they used to send me fan letters and I would sit on the weekends and I would answer because there weren't, there weren't that many.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  You know, there were 25 or 100.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  And I'd sit there and I'd actually write them back. But I, what I think of when somebody is, is, is not hoarding, but like keeping those kinds of things. There's a, there's a great bit in a, in a, in a, in a book, I think a James Joyce book where he talks about, he says, Steven Dennis, such and such street, such and such city, the earth, the universe. It feels like you're trying to place yourself.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  It feels like you're trying to weigh yourself down with some kind of ballast, you know, is what I think. And as a kid, it's very moving to think of you that way.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  But you can't, you can't die if you still have magazines to read.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  So, I still have a 1992 Bono interview in Rolling Stone.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Gotta get to it.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  So I don't think God will take me before then.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  I'm sorry I'm keeping you from that. But yeah, it's, it's moving to me and I, and I, and, and, and that's why I found the book to be emotional in some, in some way.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  And I wanted to read this bit.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  It's probably the very, it's farewell. I've worked on this book for a few years. It's emotional getting to the end of this process. I've always been a hoarder. That's where I got it from. And I have hoped that completing this project will allow me to finally throw out 100 boxes of stuff that I always thought essential in case I might do something like this one day. What do I think when I look through the book? First, I think, man, that is a lot of stuff. What the hell is wrong with you? How insecure and needy and broken are you that the only way to deal with, with it is, was to create this mountain of work? So it's work in a way, too. So you knew at some point you were going to have to get through it.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Was it a healthy expression of your creativity or, as Gary used to say, shandling, the essence of your soul? So, so, so is it evidence of a pathology? Or is it evidence of a creativity? I think is what you're asking.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'm also talking about even just the projects, not just the book project, but all the projects. Is it just an expression of, you know, the deep hole you're trying to fill? Like, like, how much work do you have to do to feel better about yourself? And how much of it is pure expression and creativity and light? And how much of it is like from like a trauma response of some sort?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, walking through the office, it's my first time here. I was struck by the amount of work that you've done, you know? And I wonder if you're, if you ever just take stock of it that way.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  You've done a lot of shit, a lot. Not a lot of shit.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  You know what I'm saying?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Some shit.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  You've done a lot of shit, Judd. But I'm struck by the, the energy that it takes to have done that. And the wide ranging kind of interest from documentary to mentoring other people to do their work producing and also your own work. So you question it as either coming from a pathology or an insecurity or as coming from some kind of light creativity. And I wonder if you can ever really make that distinction? And can you make that distinction between work? So you go like later, you go, oh, fuck, that was the wrong place that that came from.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  I, I mean, I feel good about the fact that I always do things that I, that I assume will come out well or have the potential to. Like, I don't really do anything like to sell out for a job or for money. And I'm not even sure why, but that's just always been my way. That if I'm not really passionate about it, I won't do it. But, but it is, it is a lot of stuff. And it's almost comically too much stuff. It's comically too much stuff.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  That you've done.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there is no way to know about the motivations because I do think it is, it's always both. There's always a, a pure motivation and there's always a weird insecure motivation, you know, to just keep working. And, you know, you have moments where you feel good about what you do and confident. But for the most part, the reason that you work hard is you have just enough doubt to make you continue to work really hard.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And but isn't it also that you don't really know what that thing is that you're trying to make until you make it?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so weird.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just have this itch like, ah, I'm gonna do that thing. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe it's funny. Maybe I like that guy.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  But then you find out it's a different, a different cause, a different reason.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  I mean, I remember Jim Carrey used to talk about that he felt like these projects would come into his life because he was needing to think about this thing. And someone else, you know, said, you know, you write the movie to figure out why you're writing the movie.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  And there've been movies that I've made where like years after they're done, it occurs to me why I wanted to do it.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  And, and a lot of them are like, almost like letters to myself or letters to other people trying to explain something or work through something. And so at some point, I realized, oh, that must, that must be what's happening. And Gary, you know, Shelly was the first person that talked about any of this.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  To you?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, because when I started, I was just writing jokes. I didn't really think anything about story. But Gary talked about like mining his own neuroses and his own issues for stories and I just never heard it. I mean, I knew that, I guess, on another level, like I'd watched Diner and I knew it was personal and things were, Fras Times at Ridgemont High was based on Cameron Crowe going to high school and writing a book about it. But watching Gary do it and go, oh, Gary's conflicted about being famous and he has this TV show about this person who really wants to be a, a big star and the most successful host. And this conflict of is this healthy or not healthy consumes Gary enough to make six years of a TV show about it.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  And five years talking about it afterwards.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. And making DVDs and, and just going deeper.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  And disappearing into that world, yeah.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. So for me, I, it took me a while to try to figure out like, well, how would I do that? You know, in, in my work, you know, to, that it would become more personal. Because in the beginning, I just wrote for other people and I would try to think like Gary or try to like think like Roseanne. And it took a long time for me to go, okay, but what would I talk about?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  What was that, what was that first step? What was that?

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Um, probably. I mean, and weird rate happens in steps like heavyweights was like a silly summer camp for overweight, you know, boys movie, but it was the beginning of talking about like feeling like a weird kid.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  And wanting respect in some way. And then when I worked with Paul Feig on Freaks and Geeks, we all kind of mined all of our childhood traumas.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  And would just put them into different episodes. Like watching Paul do it, because Paul was amazing, because he remembered every detail of childhood, every terrible thing that ever happened to him. He had total recall.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Really?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Of it. And he would tell some story and it would be so humiliating. And it was always the same afterwards. We would say, and how old were you when that happened? Like 13? And he would always go, 18. He was always much older than we thought in the story. And so like his courage to write about it, to see that up close, this is right after Larry Sanders, was also a big inspiration because he really opened up. And then the staff started opening up about all their problems in high school.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And the kids too, the actors in it.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  I got such a great feeling about that set. It seems like it was a great set to be on.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  It was. It definitely was. I mean, because Paul was an actor. And so a lot of it was about treating everyone the way people, the way Paul wished people treated him.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  So he was, you know, a journeyman, supporting actor, who had a lot of experiences that were fun and not fun. And so I think like, we made a point of like treating everyone great.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Had you ever been interested in acting?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  I, you know, I never really pursued it. I, I joined like the school play. And then my grandfather died in the middle and I had to go to California to like deal with it. So then I didn't do that.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  You died in the middle of the actual play?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  No, in California, he died while, you know, we were like rehearsing this play. And then I, I was going to join the Groundlings.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  You were.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  But I was doing stand up and they said, well, you have to be here, you know, for three months or four months to take the class. And I hadn't been offered to go on the road at all the improvs around the country. And I thought, well, I've been working for years to get the improv to let me do this. And so I didn't do that. And then at one point, I had a commercial agent.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  You did?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  And so I went out for commercials. And I was such a bad actor that once I was going out for a Jack in the Box commercial and I'm supposed to do this monologue about this cheeseburger and I just kept pointing. I'm just I kept like pointing the whole time and the guy's like, okay, do it again. Don't point. And then I halfway through I just I couldn't help but point. And then he took out a big thing, a duct tape, and he taped my hand to my leg so that I wouldn't point. And then I never went out on an audition ever again. Like, I laughed at the time, but I think I was like, fully just humiliated, like, oh, you're the worst actor in the world.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  It's a horrible experience.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Have you ever duct taped an actor's hand?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  I have, like, you know, it works for me.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  I'm happy that you never duct taped me. You know, looking around at all your posters, I was like, fuck, you know, we just didn't, we didn't do enough. No, honestly, I always, I had always wanted to. And then when we, we did the bubble, because I did TV set where I portrayed you. I don't think people know.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that you portrayed a version of me.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  It's really a biopic.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  It might be like a little Mike White, a little Jake in there, but there was definitely a lot of Judd in there.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Mostly Judd, but the weird thing was, is that we did, I, you may not remember this, but we did the table read for the TV set. And that night was the premiere of The Forty Year Old Virgin.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  So you actually, that was a pivotal day in your life. So I went from basically playing Judd that nobody knows.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  To you becoming agitival, appetovian, you know, like, almost overnight.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  And I would, I would have played it differently. If I'd known you were gonna get so.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Well, you had the bad back.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  I had the bad back.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  You had Justin Bateman as a wife.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  I had a beard, I had a bad thing.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  That movie was really good. We should hunt that down at TV set.

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• 18:28Speaker 01

  You know, you mentioned Gary and he's a big influence in both of our lives, obviously. And there's something about the man that, that is sustaining even to this day, you know? And he was a Buddhist, I guess you'd call him. And I wonder how you both square. You know, I don't associate Buddhism with hilarity, you know? And I wonder if there was ever a fear for you as I'm going down this road with Gary, you know, into Buddhism. And I don't know what your, the extent of your involvement with Buddhism is, or meditation, or anything like that. But I wonder if there was that sense of, oh, if I get, if I get clear on this, if I start feeling good, am I gonna be funny anymore?

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Am I gonna, am I gonna be able to do my shit?

• 19:15Speaker 02

  I never really thought about that because I always feel so far away from that level of calm.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  And it's just so far away that even if I can get like a moment of calm, it's a big deal.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  But the, the baseline.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Buddhism doesn't work.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  It doesn't, not the way I'm, not the way I'm running it. Like I went on my, I have like an app, I've, literally, I'll get every single app for meditation.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  I'll have the calm app and the 10% happier app and the wake it up app. I mean, I have so many of them. And I went on one of the apps and it like, you could hit a button, it'll tell you like all the times you've used it.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  To meditate. And it was literally like three times in the last six years.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  On this one app, I'm like, yeah, I'm really not walking the, walking the walk.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  I've kind of, I've kind of been delinquent recently because I'll, I'll save my meditation for when I'm lying down to go to sleep.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  It's actually my sleep app.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  You're supposed to be straight up and focused.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  But, um, yeah, I don't, I do have that fear of not being funny because I think the thing about not being funny is when you become unfunny, you don't know it.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Really?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  And that to me, like when you think of like the scariest thoughts you can have, that's like a really scary thought.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  What would, what would cause you to be unfunny? Would culture changed or something like that? Do you, do you see yourself as, do you see funny as being tied to any kind of decade or culture, cultural moment?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Well, you could look at it as like a youthful thing or like the perspective of like, what's it like to be 20 right now versus 57? And maybe you're just not picking up on some sort of sea change of culture.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Well, sure, but do you want to write what's funny for 20 year olds? Or do you want to write what's funny for 57 year olds at this point in their life?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  I, yeah, I guess I try not to think about it too much because I still want to work with, you know, people who are much younger than me.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Sorry for the question.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  You know, in stand up, I've been doing this joke where I say, you know, this is a worse age to be a comedian because you can only talk about DK. So all your jokes are like, you know, you know, don't you hate it when your girlfriends from high school start dying of natural causes? You know, like, it's like the most unfun age to, to write about. So you want to still. Have younger people to collaborate with.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but but in terms of like your soul questions, the the kind of impulses that you mentioned drive you to certain things. I would think that that changes. I mean, I understand wanting an audience, but I also think like your concerns change and your your your self conception changes and what your what your soul needs and the work changes. So there's got to be some kind of a give and take.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Well, no matter what happens, you slowly start writing like old Bob Dylan. You know, like, like you don't want to, but before you know it, all your everything you're thinking about is like, I'm walking through streets that are dead.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  You just start, you know, you're headed into like your your old guy writing, you have to kind of like push against it, you know. I always love about Louden Wainwright, who, you know, he was undeclared and he scored Knocked Up and genius folk singer, but he's been writing songs about dying since he was like forty five years old.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  You know, it's like, it's been so long he's been in that period of obsessing on mortality. So you do want to not just feel like, OK, I wrote about high school, I wrote about college, I wrote about young marriage, I wrote about longer marriage, but that you can go back and visit different periods.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you you can see it in like musicians when they when they kind of mature their their work, like.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  The Stones are never, they're always going to write about making out in a car.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  You know, and they're eighty five.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  But somebody like Springsteen, and I think the people that you gravitate towards musically, which is a big part of your life, I think you do, you don't ask them to stay in the same spot.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, like that.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  You like when they're changing.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  I love that Springsteen wrote about, you know, his first band and that everyone in his first band had died. He realized he was the last man standing and he wrote an album about that.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  So that was his joke. Doesn't it suck when your bandmates start dying of natural causes?

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. See, we're all, we can't help but do it. Like, although I remember Norman Lear used to always say to me, I feel like I'm the age of the person I'm with. And I always thought that that was a great way to to look at it.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Delusional, but great.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. It kept his spirit hot.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I want to finish this quote, though.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  OK.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Where is it?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Where was I?

• 23:38Speaker 02

  You were.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Or was it a desperate cry for help from a person that never feels whole, whose pain and trauma never eases, and who needs to numb himself with busyness and accomplishment? Well, I think we covered that.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  I think it is all of that. And does the answer to that question really matter? I never felt like I had another choice. I still don't. Because underneath all the healthy and unhealthy reasons for working and expressing myself is a love for comedy and the people who make it. I feel blessed that I got to create and have fun with so many amazing people, and I hope that continues going forward, at least in a slightly less neurotic way. What would that mean, a slightly less neurotic way?

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Well, I'm always interested, you know, can I access my creativity without all the stages of, oh, here we go, we gotta, we gotta write now, right? So like, it might take me a while to like, sit down to write, because there's that part of your brain that's like, what if it's not there today? What if it never comes back? Like, to have less of that kind of anxiety and neuroses around it, where you could just kind of plug in and just kind of get there and not really think about the stakes. Because the stakes are all in your head and it's all kind of probably just some misfiring.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  What are the stakes?

• 24:53Speaker 02

  I mean, the stakes are...

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Big ones gonna laugh?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the stakes are whatever. It doesn't work, people don't like it, public humiliation, you cost someone a lot of money that invested in you. Maybe they won't let you make the next one at some point. But I always had that theory that you need three really bad bombs in a row to be kicked out of the business. You know, you need, you need the first bomb, then they give you another one. And then if that bombs, they might give you another one with a lower budget.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Three in a row?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Three in a row?

• 25:16Speaker 02

  I think you need three big ones in a row, and then you're probably, you're probably done. Although every once in a while, someone has a movie that's bad in such a weird way that people lose complete faith in that person and they sometimes don't work.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Just one, they just got one.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Just one, but it's, it's so weird that they don't believe you'll ever get back on the track.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  You know, so I don't have an example of a person that had that, but I have seen that.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Because they've been forgotten.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have their...

• 25:42Speaker 01

  They're gone.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  They're G E L E, or whatever it is. That people go like, how did he ever even think that could work? You know, but you have to do things that are risky, or you're, you know, you're doing the same thing every time. So that's a weird thing with old comedy is, nothing about it, nothing about working has a better chance of succeeding because the last one succeeded. Each one is such, each one, each thing you do is such an experiment that the last one working has absolutely nothing to do in helping you make this one work.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  So success is some kind of an illusion. I mean, I get back to like what we talk about on this podcast all the time. It's like, success is the worst thing that can happen to you in many ways.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. In terms of just being

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Creativity.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Loose, you have to make a real conscious choice to be like Neil Young and go, I don't give a shit. I'm gonna go, I'm doing electronic right now, or I'm not gonna let you define me. I'm gonna keep going where my imagination takes me.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Have you ever felt yourself at that point? Have you ever done something in that vein?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I don't think so. I mean, I think I'm really careful about, all right, do you really want to think about this for two, three years? Cause every time you do it, it's a multi-year commitment. So, uh, I'm, I usually, you know, if anything, I'm not doing things because I'm afraid it's going to be like something that I've done before or too easy. Not easy, easy and just like a premise I think might work. You know, I, it has to be like something deeper wants to be talked about. Even the bubble, which is like silly, but during COVID, me and my friend Brent Foster, we would take walks in Malibu and we were like, let's just outline movies just for the hell of it because we're bored.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Really?

• 27:21Speaker 02

  And it kept, they kept coming up this like, the nervous breakdown everyone was gonna have from COVID about their success and their egos and what do you do and like all the things that make you feel like you have value are just gone and no one cares at all about them. So even that, which is like a, like a silly movie meant to be watched like when you're just high or something, that was like the thing below it. Like, oh, everyone's ego is being messed with because they're just like stuck in this building.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you, do you have a, a, a kind of personal criteria about success and failure? Is it just your gut? You, oh, I'm, I'm watching this movie and I'm laughing at it, this movie that I made?

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Well, I remember a long time ago, I read an interview with Alec Baldwin and he, he was saying, you know, you have to have your own personal compass on whether or not a project was successful. And that was the first time I ever really heard someone explain it in that way. And once I remember Warren Beatty was with Chandler and he said to me, you really don't know if what you've done is good for about 10 years after, where you see if it survived in the culture and did anyone care about it and just how was it holding up? And that's really revealed itself to be true, where there were things in the moment. Where we would take a beating, like the Cable Guy or something. And then suddenly it would be, you know, thirty years later, like people are still talking about it. And you realize like people really like it.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  But those few reviewers or the box office that devastated you, where you really took a year to recover from it, was just wrong, that, that, oh, we did pull that off. At least, you know, for a certain amount of people who appreciated it. And that's happened a bunch of times where, you know, something like the movie Walk Hard or like Parody of Ray and Walk the Line, where, I mean, it made like two point nine million opening weekend. And so it was like, you didn't even know that was possible.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  And then.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I know.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  And then suddenly it's like ten, fifteen years later and like, oh, people watch that all the time. People are always walking up to me. They still write articles about it. And so now, as a result of that, I don't get as affected when things come out because I understand they have a weird life where they kind of bop around the world and.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  And they develop some kind of reputation or not.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Well, it happened with Zoolander for sure.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it just didn't do well when it came out now.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  It was a few weeks after nine eleven.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  It was not.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Tough spot.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  It was, uh, it was like weird for a comedy to come out.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Even that there was a comedy and it was like, can you like?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Are we ready to like laugh at all at anything?

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Apparently not.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Well, your scenes held up. You had the hand, the whole thing.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  The serious scenes.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like people talk about Zoolander now as part of the canon of great things and.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  The canon of great things. I like that.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  I like, that should be your next book.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  The Canon of Great Things.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  And you see that now, like you'd look at whatever the last, you know, whatever thirty, forty years where we've been doing things like, oh, here are the ones that people care about.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  And it didn't even matter if Zoolander opened. It's like people watch it now like it was made this week and love it and it holds up. And I always say like they become like the Wizard of Oz.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  They're just these things that like, oh, those are the survivors.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Has, uh, has any criticism ever cut you in a way that was longstanding to you? Or did you ever learn anything from a perceived failure or a perceived criticism?

• 30:45Speaker 02

  I was so mad at Siskel and Ebert for not liking heavyweights.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  You were?

• 30:49Speaker 02

  My first like bad reviews where you're like, oh, God. And then the Cable Guy reviews, I really thought they would be raves because I thought, oh, they're gonna be so psyched. Jim's doing something different, taking a risk and then. As I was like getting in the car to go to the premiere, someone handed me two faxes.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. Who's that person?

• 31:07Speaker 02

  With the time in Newsweek reviews and they were both brutal. I'm like,

• 31:12Speaker 02

  wha- what? Like, I thought it was gonna be like amazing.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Where were you going?

• 31:16Speaker 02

  To the premiere. And then I was just like in a fog, the whole premiere, like,

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Oh, no, this is all gonna go really badly.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Totally bifurcated.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  And every time, every once in a while, someone writes something in a review that just like, they just find the thing that hurts you the most. When we did This Is Forty, I remember there was a review in like one of the trades and they were just mad that they lived in a nice house. You know, and I was like, oh, we'll do like a Nancy Meyers house. People love when people have like, kind of like a pretty house. And it's like, uh, the problems of a couple in a family. And they were just so offended. It was the beginning of like white people problems. Of like entitlements, like we don't like, like, like they're not allowed to have problems.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  You were in the Vanguard.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  I was, I was like, I was the first person.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  To deal with.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  You were exposing it.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  And I was like shocked by it because I never really even considered it like,

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Oh, if you live in that house.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Because you have white people problems.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  You, you shouldn't care about the people in that house.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  And I was just really thrown by it like, well, what do I do? Because I kind of live in a house like that. So can I not write about like what happens to me?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I remember I got this, this review for Playing God, which was one of the first movies I did after The X-Files where it said that I was like the tofu of actors and that.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  What's that mean?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  I was, I could fill up space.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  But tofu is really good for you. See, that's all interpretation. That's what you put in so you don't have the meats.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Was like, I could fill up space, but I, I, I needed like the flavorings of other, of other vegetables and spices.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Can't have it alone.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  I was just bland all on my own. And, and obviously that, that stays with me in some weird way. And I'm.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. They all do.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  They do. And you, I don't know if you remember any of the good ones. I mean, I don't. I don't believe them anyway.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Every time there's been like a good thing, like I remember there was like an article in like Time Magazine. It was like the best, it was like, I wrote it about myself. And I remember afterwards, it was really long. It was like six pages in Time Magazine.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Was it on you or was it on a movie?

• 33:19Speaker 02

  It was just about me.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  And I-

• 33:21Speaker 01

  You weren't involved in the making of the article?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  No, I did an interview for it and I think I was supposed to be on the cover. And at the last second, they switched it to Obamacare.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  And so, there's a picture of Obama like dressed as a doctor.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  White people problems.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  And so, so and then the article came out and I was like, oh, this is great. I have never met one person who's ever read that article.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  And then I realized like, oh, no one reads almost any of this. Or, you know, all the things that like, you're so bothered by.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Except like back in the day, if you got just filleted by the New York Times, people were like, hey, sorry, man. That was like, really, really rough when they would go hard at you.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Oh, I remember the newspaper hitting the, the door. Cause often I'd be like somewhere else in a hotel. And okay, there's the, there's the Times. Just hit the door till I get out of bed.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Oh, going down to the newsstand to see what it was. Now, no one cares about any of it. No one, it's not the same.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Not only that, but you can go online and really get filleted in ways that are, are pretty interesting and, and powerful.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  You could have a 14 year old destroy you on Letterboxd. You could never recover the rest of your life. And, you know, we talked about this, like, I talk about it with my kids. Like, how do you do your creative work?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Be bold and take chances.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Keep your own counsel.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  And even in the best of times, there's a 20, 30% that's gonna hate it, hate all of it.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Even if you completely nailed it, certain people just don't like it. Just like, you know, ever have like, something win the Oscar for Best Picture and you just go, I hate that movie. Right? So there's always people who hate everything.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  And so you have to develop these, these weird blinders where you let in some stuff. You kind of want to learn some stuff, but if you, if you want to dip in and destroy yourself, it's there.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Like, it takes me five minutes to, to find something that'll keep me in bed for a month, if I would let it.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  What, what would you, what would you type in for like, the most pain? Apatow, suck?

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Apatow, Jewish schlub.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  That's not gonna go for the movies. That's not what you really care about.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  I mean, it could be, I mean, it could be anything. And you can, you sometimes you stumble into it like you're looking at something else.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Oh shit.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  And like your name is brought, like, why are you talking about me?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Why did Duchovny stop acting? What? What? It's like, it's like third on the list. It's like, how the fuck did that?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  I went on YouTube once and it was like, uh, like a video. It was like, why the Judd Apatow era ended. Someone made a documentary about it. I was too scared to click on it.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  They didn't ask you to be in the doc?

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. Where did it all go wrong? The movie with like an AI Judd face.

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• 37:51Speaker 01

  Since you're not on set acting, I'm wondering about the consciousness of the writer. Because it took me, and even sometimes still, that voice will get into my head when I'm on set.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Tofu, tofu, tofu.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Not really. I haven't thought of it till just this moment. So I don't think of it that often. But I wonder, and it's not, it's not a good thing. It's not like, it's not like, hey, Michael Jordan, I'm gonna take that fucking.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  I need the anger to play well.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I don't. I shrivel. So I wonder, like, as a writer, which obviously the moment is extended. You don't have to deliver, like, when they say action. But I wonder, do you ever get inhibited that way for any, any period of time by perceived negativity or remembered negativity or failures and things like that?

• 38:39Speaker 02

  I mean, you could just get a general, like, why do I think I know anything? Like, just, almost just like a.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Still?

• 38:45Speaker 02

  A blanket over your whole thing of like, do I know what's good?

• 38:49Speaker 01

  So much of your life is acting like you know a lot.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to. And but you also know that you're just winging it.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, your life.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. You're pretending that you know what you're doing. Because you've had that in your career, right? Where you like, you've told a studio or someone like, this is gonna be big, and it's gonna work because of this. And then, like, you're in a preview, and everything you've said for the last two years has been proven wrong in 90 minutes. And then you just feel ridiculous. And, and the good executives go, yeah, because in movies, if somebody has one hit out of three, it's like a baseball player. Like, they're doing great. I mean, most people, like in Scorsese's movies, like, how many of them work? How many of them don't? Like, you can't succeed every time, but you have to believe in yourself every time to have any, any shot.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  It's hard work to make a bad movie. It's hard work. It's just as hard to make a bad one as a good one. But one thing about you that I respect is that, and I don't know this for a fact, but I think, I think I know this about you. Is that when you're at that point at that screening, when this sucks, you don't give up on it. You you'll go and reshoot and you'll go, you'll.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  I'll grind hard.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Well, you'll you'll adjust.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  And me, sometimes I think I'll just curl up and say, ah, fuck it. I hate all of you anyway. It's like, I'm I'm done. I I tried, whatever. But I that's commendable, I think, for you to be that kind of a person that would just go that keeps grinding at it.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  And also is it it shows that you believed in that original vision or whatever, or you're smart enough to pivot. I don't know which it is.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Well, it's just I'm just so terrified of at the end of it going, oh, that wasn't good. Like, I can't even tolerate it. So like, my worst fear is I'm just going down DirecTV scrolling like we did in the old days before streaming. And I'll just see one of my movies and be really ashamed that anyone's watching it. Like, that's the worst feeling in the world. Like, oh, no, is that that thing's still around? I never want that to to happen. I mean, when I shoot, you know, as you know, like, I shoot so much footage. And so I usually don't do reshoots because I've I've literally shot what I think the reshoot would be while I'm shooting the movie.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not just it's I mean, I worked with Ivan Reitman and he shot, he's covered like a tent. That was his line. So but that's not you. You're not covering like a tent, but you you're shooting a lot of footage because that footage is often different.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Because you're you're you're auditioning lines, you're throwing shit out, you're improvising. So it's not it's not that you're shooting from all different sides.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  And and because you don't know how you're going to cut it.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  But you don't know what's going to be in it.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  So I imagine when you have a screening that doesn't go well, you've got like five more jokes that you know that you had on that day that you're going to come back to.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that in editing, if one joke doesn't work, there is something to try. Because my fear is I'm going to find out my joke didn't work and then I and I'll go, is there another joke in the footage to try? And they'll go, no. And then you're just writing jokes in the back of people's heads.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  I don't think that's true, though. I don't think you've ever gotten to there, have you?

• 42:00Speaker 02

  Sometimes you get to the place where you have to do an ADR joke, like just audio on the back of someone's head.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  ADR jokes, I don't think.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  They do work. They do.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Really?

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  They do. Watch Model Rocket. There's a lot of great ADR jokes that Wes Anderson and Owen wrote.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Then you'd notice it if you really watch it, like, oh, they really grinded some funny lines.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  If you know what ADR is, yeah.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  But it's a, it's an interesting way that, that you work because obviously you, you work hard. You're seven months out. You just told me when we sat down, you're, you're punching up a script.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  But when you get there, how many times are you gonna go through that script before you go to new lines?

• 42:36Speaker 02

  And I'll, yeah, and, and, but I'll rehearse it and.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  How many times do you think?

• 42:40Speaker 02

  I mean, just a gazillion. And, and a lot of times, like, on the day, the whole thing gets tossed.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  You just think of something better on the day. So you're kind of preparing a script and you're trying to make it perfect.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  But then on the day, you're, you're willing to, like, shoot it once or twice and go, all right. Now that we're here, it feels completely different than what was in my head. But I always feel like the actors are gonna do something that I would never think of, the way they speak, the way they, with the way they're reacting to each other. And that I learned from Gary, because I would watch the rehearsals. Gary would rehearse for three days, then shoot Larry Sanders Show in two days. And he kept.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  He rehearsed for three days?

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he would keep, well, he would do a table, yeah, sometimes a table read on Monday. And then he would let the rehearsals be loose. And that's where, if anyone wanted to change anything, they could experiment. And I just thought, yeah, that's where, like, he's letting some magic happen. And then he had to lock it back down. But I thought, oh, I could just shoot what's basically the rehearsals and see what people will do.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Right. And that's, you found that out early? Or you just found, you found that out by watching Gary?

• 43:43Speaker 02

  I found that out, uh, I'm trying to think, the first time I saw someone do it was Stiller on The Ben Stiller Show, when we would do sketches. And I remember Ben was playing Tony Robbins. And he just talked like Tony Robbins for like 45 minutes. Like, we needed like a three-minute sketch, and he just was laughing. And we were throwing him lines, and he was just improvising. And he would do that in every situation.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  He, he just knew, because he had edited some short films, and he had his MTV show before our show. And he just knew, oh, it's all for the editing room.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Let's just talk about documentaries for a minute. I don't want to take up too much of your time.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  I've got nothing to do.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so we'll keep going.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  We talked a little bit before, when, you know, you asked me how the podcast is going. And I said, well, I thought I was interested in people, but it turns out I'm not that interested in people. Because it's, and one of the things I've found is, like, I want to ask stupid questions because I'm tired of asking smart questions because smart questions have an answer implicit in them.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to shake it up to get to a new thing.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  And I'm wondering, because you've done documentaries and you've done podcasts, but mostly the documentaries, you have an idea of what your documentary is about, maybe, or you're making the documentary to find out what it's about. How do you go about figuring out the kind of questioner you want to be? Because you're on that side, the other guy's on camera, and you're directing him with your questions, but you also don't want to direct too hard because you want to get the truth.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Well, it's, yeah, I mean, it's very instinctual. I just, I'm finishing up a documentary that I'm directing with Michael Bonfiglio, who did the George Carlin documentary with me. And so I had to do 10 hours with Mel Brooks. And so I thought, you know, I've seen a lot of documentaries with him, but the thing that I haven't seen too much is him talking about his emotional life. So I've seen like a lot of the funny stories and all that classic stuff, but how can I get him to just tell me how it felt? Like, what did it feel like to fight in World War II? How did it feel to be on your show of shows and be the young guy in that staff of all these geniuses? And so, you know, I had like an intention with him, like, how much can we see Mel Brooks'

• 46:05Speaker 02

  heart? And as a way of showing him be reflective.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Did you tell him that?

• 46:13Speaker 02

  I don't think that I did that explicitly.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  But I think I did tell him I wanted to tell his story and to have it be a more personal documentary. But I felt like, you know, he's 99 now. He has a lot of wisdom. I mean, he's lived through so many different eras. You know, he's had to deal with, you know, the loss of his wife and, you know, Anne Bancroft and Carl Reiner and that there's a lot to learn from his experience. And so I approached it like I'm basically a copycat of Mel Brooks. And so the documentary is me asking him things.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  You feel you're.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  That I wanted to.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  You feel like you're a copycat of Mel Brooks.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Of course, because when I was a kid, it was just Mel Brooks and Woody Allen and Blake Edwards or like a few people that made comedies. And, you know, you would see Mel Brooks and it's just like, kind of like this odd little genius who is crazy confident.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  And I think, you know, I have that Stiller and Sandler in the movie. Like, we all looked at him like, oh, could you do that? Is that a job? Like, he seemed like the coolest, most amazing, hilarious guy in the world.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  And so, but now as me being older and him being older, to go, oh, tell me about your ride. What was it like?

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Do you feel like that's, this is part of you coming out as well? Are you reaching for more? Not that your movies aren't emotional, but are you, are you finding yourself responding to that more as you get older?

• 47:40Speaker 02

  I think so. That's why I like documentaries, because I, I like that there's just a lot there with any, any human experience, if you go deep with anybody. It's so rich and emotional and it's, it's like, it's almost too powerful to talk about, you know, like, what was this life that this person had? Like, how do you sum up Gary Shandling's life? Like, his joys, his creativity, his struggles, his pain? And to try to figure out, you know, can you get it across that it's, that it's in the universe of accurate to something and to like, to feel him? Like, I like the Gary Shandling documentary, Zen Diaries of Gary Shandling on HBO Max,

• 48:25Speaker 02

  because I think at the end, you did get to know Gary and you do get to feel Gary.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  And so that part is, you know, it's moving. And I like the idea of Gary being known. You know, I hate the idea that Gary's gone and is he just gonna be forgotten? And he was so special and so fascinating. And so now there's like a way for people to access it in some way.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Were you surprised by anything in the making of that documentary about Gary?

• 48:54Speaker 02

  I mean,

• 48:56Speaker 02

  I was very surprised that Gary had no photographs in his house that were personal. He didn't have pictures of his family, of his brother, of his childhood, of his career. He just kind of had nothing out. He had a lot of Buddhist statues and things like that. And then, you know, I opened up a closet and like, he had saved everything. And how interesting that is.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Closet again, for you.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that he's in the closet and he has everything in there. And, uh, and that he was sentimental in some way because he kept it all. And there was a real story in those photos. They were videos from his childhood and that there was this really sad story about like a kid whose brother was very sick with cystic fibrosis. And he died and then no one would talk about him. And Gary was not able to process that loss. And that it just seemed to affect his relationships throughout his life. And then at the very end of the doc, I found this letter he had written to his brother near the end of Gary's life. I don't know if a therapist told him to do it, to process it, but,

• 50:10Speaker 02

  and it really was everything that I thought it was. You know, so like my guess of what had affected him so much, Gary had fully written out.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  You know?

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  That the loss was so profound for him and that this was like his best friend in the world. And that he never like fully recovered from it.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yes, I remember. I remember that in the doc. Yeah. Where he was, he didn't go to the funeral, right? He wasn't allowed to go.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  They didn't acknowledge it.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  They didn't acknowledge the loss.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, they didn't bring him to the funeral because his mom didn't want Gary to see her cry. And then they just didn't talk about him.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  And it's funny because Gary never talked about it. I mean, maybe like once in all the time I, I knew him.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  I'm gonna finish up by reading the end of this letter.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Okay. They better close strong, if you want to close her.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  You feel blessed. Life is so wonderful, but also so mysterious, dark and strange. We all need a language to try to understand and get through it. This is mine. This being filmmaking or comedy?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Comedy, I think.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. Last year I took ayahuasca.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  We all have at this point.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  And at the end of a long trip, I saw an image of Jesus on the cross, which was strange since I am Jewish. Instantly, I understood what it meant. We're all supposed to be there for each other. Love, brotherhood, sacrifice. It's as simple as that. I'm not converting, but I did feel the need to buy the New Testament. Did you?

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Well, I got it on Audible. Johnny Cash.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I bought it on Audible. Johnny Cash reads it. I haven't listened yet. No, you haven't listened yet. I've got to finish this book first.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  It's so boring. I mean, it's just so boring, but I'm gonna try. But man is the Old Testament boring.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Well, the Old Testament's pretty violent. The New Testament's a little boring.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  I know.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  It's the same story four times.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  See, I still don't even know the difference between the two. But I will, I will get to it. I'm gonna get to it. At least I'll have ChatGPT explain it to me.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  But I think it's admirable, your sincerity there, even though you're joking at the end, you know. But I feel you reaching for a sincerity, and I feel you reaching for it, you know, more and more. And I look forward to seeing more of how you stitch that together with being so fucking funny as well. All right, man. Thank you so much.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you. That was fun.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  That's all I got?

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's all you needed to give.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  That's a kneel in thing. That's all I got. That's all I got.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  You gave all you had.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Thanks, guys.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Just a memo about sitting down with Judd Apatow. I didn't bring up what I'd wanted to bring up is, he told me that, or no, he didn't tell me, but in his book, he had written early on, I think in his early twenties, he wrote a script for The Symptons, The Simpsons, The Simpsons, The Simpsons. And they repurposed it, or they rewrote it recently, or within the last five or 10 years. And Judd speaks about it as it's like a dream come true, you know, his childhood dream, or early career dream of writing a Simpsons episode comes true 30 years later. That is quite amazing.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  And talk about stairway thoughts, the French word for ponce de escalier, escalator thoughts? I wish that I'd brought it up, but I didn't bring it up. Thanks so much for listening to Fail Better. If you haven't subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now's the perfect time because, guess what? You can listen completely ad-free. Plus, you'll unlock exclusive bonus content like the full version of my post-interview thoughts that you won't hear anywhere else. That's more of my recaps on interviews with guests like Chris Carter and Emily Deschanel.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Just tap that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to lemonadapremium.com to subscribe on any other app. That's lemonadapremium.com. Don't miss out. Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Keegan Zema, Ari Abraachi, and Donny Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of Weekly is Steve Nelson. Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Kupinski, and Brad Davidson. The show is executive produced by Stephanie Whittleswax, Jessica Cordova-Cramer, and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan, and Sebastian Modak.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  You can find us online at Lemonada Media and you can find me at David Duchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime Membership.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed,

• 56:12Speaker 03

  avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S dot com slash R-C for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.

• 56:51Speaker 04

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 56:59Speaker 05

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 57:04Speaker 05

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 57:07Speaker 04

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 57:13Speaker 04

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.