Ben Stiller: Facing His Past

Ben Stiller spent the last few years going through boxes of photos, letters, and recordings that his parents, the famous comedy duo known as "Stiller and Meara," left behind. He shares with Anderson the parallels he discovered between his parents and himself and how it has made him re-think his past and his own parenting. Join the community to share your story and watch Anderson's weekly streaming show All There Is Live at cnn.com/allthereis. Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams Associate Producer: Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome to All There Is. I've been listening to voicemails and videos we've received over the last few weeks. They're deeply moving and I'll be putting together a special episode of the podcast soon, which is made up of them. You can record a video and email it to us if you want. The address is [email protected]. You can also message the videos to us on Instagram at @allthereis and you can leave us voicemails at 404-827-1805. We'd love to hear from you. I want to play you a message I heard just this morning.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  My name is Grace. One thing I've learned in my grief, now being almost five years since my mom died by suicide, I've learned, especially as we're approaching the holidays, that the best place to be on a holiday for me is where there's no expectations of me and where I don't put expectations on myself because I think I have to make a good impression or I think I'm bringing the mood down. And it took me a four and a half year since I found it, but I did. She was my high school chemistry teacher and I've been babysitting her kids and I go to birthday parties and I go to Thanksgivings and Christmases and if I want to talk about my mom, they listen. And if I want to cancel at the last minute,

• 1:18Speaker 01

  I won't hurt anyone's feelings. By choosing you and your grief on holidays, you may ruffle feathers, like I do, with my blood family. That's for me on holidays. I feel like those are the days where I let myself just pick me. One thing I'm going to ask though, someone told me yesterday that they read a book that said the fifth year of grief is hardest. And I responded by telling them every year, at least one person has told me that the year I'm in is the hardest year. The first year is the hardest, the second year is the hardest, the third year is the hardest. And I asked them, what year is the easiest? When will I have the easiest year? And I really hope I haven't already had it because living without my mom for five years is just too many. And I know one day I'll surpass

• 2:02Speaker 01

  her in age and I'll surpass the time that I had with her and I don't want to think about that and I don't know what to do. Yeah, so if anyone's left a voicemail telling you what year is the easiest, I'd love to know.

• 2:18Anderson Cooper?

  It can be hard when you hear others put a timetable on grief or opine on how you should feel or what you should do. I'd never say it gets easy, but it can and does change. It can and does get easier. I think about what Nick Cave said on last week's podcast about the transformation he underwent after his 15-year-old son, Arthur, died.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  There was some years, or a year at least, of absolute devastating, incapacitating sorrow. At the time, you think that it's simply unbearable. And you learn ultimately that actually it's not. You can bear it. And all sorts of extraordinary things happen within this thing that we call grief. That way of thinking is something that comes through time. It's not some sort of failure if you're not feeling that way. It takes a long time. It takes a long time, but beautiful things often do, you could say.

• 3:24Anderson Cooper?

  We'll be right back with actor, director, writer Ben Stiller, who spent the last few years going through the things his parents left behind.

• 3:32Speaker 03

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• 4:06Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome back. My guest today is actor, writer, and director Ben Stiller. His mom, Anne Mira, died in 2015, and his dad, Jerry Stiller, in 2020. They were a famous comedy duo. And Ben has spent the last several years going through and making a film about all the things they left behind. It's called "Stiller and Mira: Nothing is Lost", and is playing now on Apple TV.

• 4:30Anderson Cooper?

  Thank you so much for doing this.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, it's great.

• 4:32Anderson Cooper?

  Really appreciate it. You and I have something in common, which is we both went through our parents' stuff. Did you wait a while to start going through stuff?

• 4:43Speaker 04

  No, when my dad died.

• 4:46Anderson Cooper?

  He died in 2020.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  In May of 2020, and like a week or two after that, I started going through stuff. I kind of got this like weird sort of like panic. It was the apartment I grew up in, it was the place we always went back to, and it just, it's home, it felt like home base. So then to think about it not being in our family, and that was because they were leaving the apartment to my sister, and I knew she wanted to sell it. It was kind of like this knee jerk reaction of like, I just, I'm not going to remember this place fully, I want to just film it.

• 5:19Anderson Cooper?

  You want to document it.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was the instinct. I really am like a very visual person, so like just to have those visuals of the place, you know, to be able to look at it and study it and kind of like just remember it, or if I was ever thinking of it, that was the main impetus. But then it was also, then of course, all this stuff of theirs.

• 5:36Anderson Cooper?

  Did you know that your dad had made cassette recordings of conversations? Do you know you had this library?

• 5:42Speaker 04

  I didn't know we had all of these hundreds of hours of tapes that were a combination of cassette recordings, everything from my dad having like a little mini cassette recorder to record my, my kids, you know, as a grandparent, to going back to these reel to reel tapes that, that he would record their improvisation sessions that they would do to write their sketches.

• 6:05Anderson Cooper?

  I did this by myself, going through these boxes, and I found it, this is the reason I started this podcast, because I found it to be such a kind of lonely and fraught process.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  It's so heavy.

• 6:17Anderson Cooper?

  Of opening up these boxes.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Even talking about it, it's like, I start thinking about it, it's just, it's just, there's so much stuff there that, like every single piece, whether it's a photograph, or a cuff link, or, you know, these like little like tchotchkes and things that like just ended up in like the drawer by my mom's bedside table, every single one of them would kind of take you down, could take you down like a whole avenue of, of memory, or.

• 6:45Anderson Cooper?

  Everything is infused with memory.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, that sort of feeling, like a piece of them, or a connection, I'm like trying on some, some glasses, and they're actually. They're my mother's father's glasses. And that suitcase that we have is my mom's father's suitcase that she had saved, that I'd never looked at before. But the glasses, I find, very personal. Because that's something that someone wore every day.

• 7:10Anderson Cooper?

  And their eyes looked through that into your eyes?

• 7:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And then they become these artifacts. They're like, they're part of your parents. I don't know, there's something just very heavy about that, too.

• 7:20Anderson Cooper?

  My basement is still full of these boxes and I just have not, I just can't do it.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Well, it's kind of a cra- yeah, it's kind of like a crazy Sisyphean type of thing.

• 7:30Anderson Cooper?

  Yes, yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Because you're like, always, I like go through stuff and then it's like, okay, I'm gonna put this stuff over here and this stuff over here. But then it's also like, then what? What am I gonna do with that? And then, like, how do you dig into that stuff, too? How do you start that process? Because when you start to listen to a tape, that's like an hour of my parents improvising and talking.

• 7:49Anderson Cooper?

  I mean, there must be thousands of hours of recording.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  I know there's hundreds that we found. And that really takes you down the rabbit hole. It's something fascinating to me about hearing just the sounds of the apartment and the phone ringing in the background or things like that, that make it feel so real and in the moment.

• 8:06Anderson Cooper?

  Well, also seeing those old Super 8 films that your dad shot. I mean, it's so New York circa 1972, 73. I had the same jacket you wore. Like, there was snow on the streets and snow days and

• 8:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:22Anderson Cooper?

  just funky sneakers and

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Snow days were exciting.

• 8:25Anderson Cooper?

  Hair, big hair and just messiness. You know, we watched Wonderama.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, we watched, I went to Wonderama.

• 8:33Anderson Cooper?

  I want, I, every kid who would go to Wonderama would get like a glazed bagel with their name on it, on a necklace.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:39Anderson Cooper?

  And they would always wear it to school and they'd be like, oh yeah, no, yeah, I was at Wonderama.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:43Anderson Cooper?

  And I never got to go to Wonderama. I was like, whoa. But it's interesting because part of the thing for me in going through these boxes, which is really difficult, and I'll take a box and I'll think, okay, I'm gonna make progress today. I'm gonna do a box, and it's a box of Christmas cards from 1974. Like, how meaningful can this be? And I'm going through it, and then some of it are people who I knew and I remember. Walter Matthau, his wife Carol was my mom's best friend.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 9:10Anderson Cooper?

  Una Chaplin and Charlie Chaplin's Christmas cards and...

• 9:13Speaker 04

  See, that's incredible.

• 9:15Anderson Cooper?

  Well, like, what do you do with that stuff? Because everything feels like a piece of my mom or my dad or my past.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:20Anderson Cooper?

  And yet it's not.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, it's hard. Like, you start to organize stuff and then you're like, well, why, what is this? Then what do I do with this? Ultimately, I think it's, I hear my dad's voice in my head when I'm doing it because he was very much about saving stuff. It's funny, though, because it gets exhausting, too, in the moment when you're doing it. I think after a little while, it just gets tiring, too, because...

• 9:40Anderson Cooper?

  You have to stop.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then you're like, well, and then you start to get like a little bit like, ah, I guess like, do I keep the Charlie Chaplin Christmas card or not? I, you know, I don't know. No, let's put it, in other words, you like get a little wiped out in the moment and you kind of forget even like how, like how much this, it's like you just keep all this stuff. It's great to have it. And then you do find, I think, the little things that mean something to you.

• 10:01Anderson Cooper?

  I've come to the realization, I'm trying to make sense of what happened. Like, what was this entire experience of growing up in the family that I grew up in? That's so in my mind, like saturated with colors and the smell of Rego candles and cigarettes and clinking glasses and people drinking and...

• 10:21Speaker 04

  So funny, I got so many similar...

• 10:22Anderson Cooper?

  And like, parties at the house.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  Parties at the house.

• 10:25Anderson Cooper?

  Famous people who you see on television suddenly in your house. My parents gave, when Charlie Chaplin came back to America after being in exile to receive a special Academy Award, he and Una flew to New York first, and my parents gave him a big welcome party. And there's a photo in the New York Times of me shaking Charlie Chaplin's hand. In 19, I was six or seven years old.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  Wow. Did you, did you, did you know?

• 10:50Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, they, they gave me a whole, like, course of study of we watched Charlie Chaplin films, but of course, he looked nothing like the little tramp. So I was like, who's this old guy? But for you, was it a sad thing to do this?

• 11:06Speaker 04

  I think ultimately, even if you feel a little closer, or you learn something, you are left feeling the sadness of, I still miss them. And all of this searching and all of this connecting, or making a movie, or writing about it, or anything, ultimately, at the end of the day, you're still dealing with the reality of what it is to be a human being, and not have people around who you loved. For me, making the movie, the first two and a half years of working on it, were not like, very happy. There were so many times when I didn't want to deal, really deal with going into that stuff.

• 11:44Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  Because when you do go into it, it brings up the different feelings. I think both of our childhoods, we were around adults a lot, who were partying and living their lives in that way that parents in the seventies did, which was, for us as kids, it's like, we had to figure it out on our own.

• 12:02Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, my mom took me to Studio 54 when I was 11, twice.

• 12:05Speaker 04

  So you know, I went to Studio 54 when I was 13.

• 12:07Anderson Cooper?

  No.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  This is so weird.

• 12:09Anderson Cooper?

  It was like letting children into Studio 54, basically. I'm obsessed with the patterns of history that run through families, and how we find ourselves repeating the patterns of those who come before us. You grew up with these parents who were working constantly, who needed to work to support the family, they were on the road a lot.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:28Anderson Cooper?

  And then you had kids, and you ended up repeating the pattern of your parents with your kids.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  I did, yeah. And I think about how that happened, because always being aware of thinking, oh, I don't want to make mistakes that my parents made, or things they did as parents that weren't, you know, the best. But I think for me, what happened is, like, my relationship with my work, it became very important to me, and probably like...

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Out of balance with really attending to all the relationships in my life.

• 13:00Anderson Cooper?

  I well understand the perspective you have about your work is the same I have and it is very difficult for anybody around me. I get laser focused and I'm a perfectionist. Like it's so obvious the way it has to be and nothing else is acceptable.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:17Anderson Cooper?

  And no one else understands this. I'm just trying to make it perfect. That's all I want.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, these are the people in your life who love you.

• 13:23Anderson Cooper?

  Yes, these are the people in your life, exactly.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  And then when, once the work goes away and when you're old and on your deathbed, these are the people you hope are around.

• 13:29Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, and they're not gonna be around. I wanna be present in the lives of my kids. And yet, I, I watch this and I realize it's not enough to think that and to realize that. It's, you actually have to work on it every single day and take action on it.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Which I, I think is an advantage when, when you do have kids, when you're not, you know, like, super young because...

• 13:51Anderson Cooper?

  What are you saying?

• 13:54Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, I'm 50. Okay, fine. I know. I started like 50.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  No, you got it together. No, but like, I, I, you know, I wasn't super young myself. Like, I was like 35 or 30, right? That's not really young to have kids. But even then, I think if, like, if I had them now, it would be a whole different thing because I think I do have a little more self-awareness in that, in that area. Or maybe it's because I learned it through trial and error, but there was a blind spot for me. As much as I had these ideas about my parents and what they got right and what they didn't get right, it, it didn't jibe with my ambitions or my creative drive. I didn't understand that, that I was actually doing the same thing, you know? That's, that's, that's the thing, like, that I'm kind of like, wow, that's really, like, I really miss that.

• 14:41Anderson Cooper?

  There's a conversation you have in the film with your son. Let's play that.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 14:46Anderson Cooper?

  You know, after a tough day, you know, or something was going wrong, you can get very much in your own head, you know what I mean? And I think, once you kind of go into that place, hard to get you out of it. So that would kind of put a damper on the, you know, fun part about being on vacation. You know what I mean? You have all these hats that you're trying to balance, you know? Being a director, an actor, you know, a producer, a writer, but also just like a father, right? And sometimes I felt that that would come, you know, last to these other things.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  The irony is, I thought I was doing so much better than my parents. I thought I was pulling it off. I was flying home on the weekends and having special places for the kids to play when they come visit the set, but in reality, and just hearing them talk about it, for them, it was the same thing I was going through as a kid. And I just couldn't see that at all at the time.

• 15:52Anderson Cooper?

  I find that devastating.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not, you might listen to it. I'm like, I was not expecting him to say "last", you know, I thought he was gonna say like, maybe like, "not at the top of the when he said 'last'". It was like, um, but like, look, it's valid because that's his experience. We all learn as you have kids and they get older that kids take in everything we took in as kids, they're taking in.

• 16:18Anderson Cooper?

  That scene made me think, my five-year-old, what is he gonna say in 20 years?

• 16:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:24Anderson Cooper?

  I'm actively thinking, okay, what do I need to do now? I mean, I've already made, I feel like I've made-

• 16:30Speaker 04

  But the fact that you're asking those questions, honestly, is, that's all you can do, you know what I mean?

• 16:35Anderson Cooper?

  Well, you can do more than that. You can actually-

• 16:37Speaker 04

  Right, of course, you can actually change your-

• 16:38Anderson Cooper?

  Change your behavior.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  Well, let's not go too far. But, um, but even to be aware of it is the key, you know? And all you can do is to do the best you can.

• 16:47Anderson Cooper?

  But that perfectionism is something your dad had as well.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  A hundred percent, yeah. Almost all the time, I feel like he was in his head, which, again, I really identify with.

• 16:58Anderson Cooper?

  There's a conversation that he recorded between your mom and him. It's essentially an argument where your mom is saying, and we'll play in a second, that he's just joyless, that he's so perfectionist that he sucks the joy out of everything.

• 17:14Speaker 05

  I know the work and how people respond to you and how great your performances are under these conditions, no matter what. You are always there. I know all this. I'm aware of it. And yet, at the end, when things go awfully decently-

• 17:35Speaker 05

  Your relief is embarrassing. It's like you're just, oh, God, God, it was so great. It was so, you know. How you go over, how you're thought of as a good guy. I do want to be thought of as a good guy, yes. That is, what is your mind? No, it doesn't clutter my mind. And, you know, and, you know, we're looked upon very lovingly by people. Nobody's wrong now, they're looking at the... You're in the top one thing. What? For either of us leaves this planet, there has to be some way you can get an authentic sense of yourself without worrying how you're perceived. It is joyless. Absolutely joyless.

• 18:18Anderson Cooper?

  And I have been accused of this as well, and I, I agree.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  Me too, and I, also, I agree too. Like, that's, that, what hit me when I heard her say that was also like, yeah, that is, I've had that feeling sometimes when I stress out about something so much. Like, doing something on the Oscars, or something where it's like a pressure moment to be funny or deliver, which is, I, I don't love doing those kinds of things because of that. Because what happens is, I stress out so much about it that, you know, and then if it goes well, it's literally what she says, "I'm just relieved." You know? It's not like I'm happy, like, "Oh, it was great." It's like, no, I'm relieved. I think my mom was also responding to, like, her relationship with my dad in terms of how

• 19:00Speaker 04

  he was with people, uh, because he was incredibly outgoing and generous and genuine in his interest in other people and connecting with people and wanting people, as he says, to like him. Which I, again, like, a very human thing that I really identify with too. But my dad, he didn't have any issues to say, "Yeah, I want everybody to love me," because I didn't really get loved when I was a kid, you know?

• 19:25Anderson Cooper?

  We'll have more with Ben Stiller in a moment. If you want to listen or watch past episodes of this podcast, you can do that wherever you get your podcasts, or at our grief community page at cnan.com/allthereis. You can also watch our new weekly companion show there, All There Is Live, Thursday nights at 9:15 PM Eastern. We'll be right back with more from Ben Stiller.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. We're going to talk about rethinking how we die. How we think about death in the first place greatly informs how we live. Our guest is Dr. B.J. Miller. He's a hospice and palliative care physician.

• 20:06Speaker 06

  We are aging as a people. This is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging and therefore getting closer to the end of life on some level as a group. It's not at all surprising that you'll see a revving up of interest, services, and also sort of anxiety that pushes us away from the subject and makes us cling to life.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:34Anderson Cooper?

  Do you feel like you grieved your parents?

• 20:36Speaker 04

  I still feel like I'm going through that.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  I have these moments of, you know, I think making the movie for me was a way to address connecting with my grief. Because I have such a barrier towards really opening up to that, I think. And maybe similar to you in that way where like if you made a documentary about your mom, you process in making this podcast, like you can take what you do and use it as a way to help yourself work through stuff. And I actually think that that's a lot of what art is and creativity is. It shouldn't be indulgent self-therapy or whatever that nobody wants to see.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  And by the way, that was a concern I had too in making the movie. But I do think that being able to do this and have a way to delve into it through quote unquote work or, you know, creative process was a way in for me to like start to connect with them. And now what I think it's opened up is I have these moments by myself where I try to connect with my parents a little bit.

• 21:50Anderson Cooper?

  Do you feel them?

• 21:53Speaker 04

  I have.

• 21:55Anderson Cooper?

  Do you feel anything?

• 21:57Speaker 04

  No, that's, that's the issue.

• 21:59Anderson Cooper?

  No, I'm joking, but, but look, I'm saying, I'm asking, I'm saying this to somebody.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  Sometimes I do, but a lot of times.

• 22:06Anderson Cooper?

  When I see it, because I've spent my life not feeling anything.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Well, if you're like me, it's like somebody just going through life, you have to kind of like, put up the deflector shields, right?

• 22:14Anderson Cooper?

  No, I.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, but the problem is you get used to having them up and then when you let them down. But yes, I've had these weird moments, little spiritual kind of connection moments that I, like, they sound so silly, but like, of a moment when you meet somebody or something and you feel like you're somehow connecting with your parent. Have you ever had that?

• 22:35Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  I was at West Point scouting for a movie, you know, West Point up the Hudson. And I knew my mom had gone to boarding school up there at a place called Lady Cliff Academy that was in Highland Falls, New York. And I had never been able to find it. And I was in the West Point Visitor Center and I asked somebody, I said, hey, there's a place called Lady Cliff Academies. And he said, you're standing in it. This was Lady Cliff Academy. West Point bought it a few years ago. It's part of their.

• 23:05Anderson Cooper?

  Wow.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  Thing. And then this woman recognized me there and she came up to me and she was so happy to see me. She gave me this big hug, was just so excited. And I was in that place in that moment and I felt like I was somehow connecting with my mother in that moment. And there are those types of things that happen every once in a while, but then for me, I can just like sort of sit with these images. I have like a screensaver on my computer of me and my mom when I was like nine years old. And those are these kind of touchstones where I can, I feel okay, kind of just like going there and opening up and letting down the shields and just trying to be with them, you know?

• 23:50Anderson Cooper?

  I stopped doing this podcast after the first season. It was just kind of overwhelming. And I had solicited voicemails from listeners and we got calls from people about their grief. And I listened over the course of about four months. And I still wasn't going to do any more podcasts, but it made me go back down to the basement and start going through these boxes again, which I stopped. And the first box I opened up was a box, my dad's papers. He was a writer. And I randomly picked this box and I opened up a file, first file, and it was an essay called The Importance of Grieving that he had written. And it was about. The importance of children grieving and what happens to kids who don't grieve and how they go through their life with a certain melancholy, they can never quite put their finger on. And I realized that's exactly what I had done.

• 24:34Anderson Cooper?

  I had shut down as a kid and my entire life was spent keeping the grief buried and it made me realize I need to actually grieve. I need to actually feel, allow myself to feel, and that's what I've been doing the last like two years and it's been life-changing. It's been extraordinary, but very difficult.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  That feels like it literally like him kind of reaching.

• 24:58Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, I mean, it's again, it's one of those moments like.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  But that's like, I mean, it's almost undeniable.

• 25:03Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. How do you do that in terms of letting yourself feel stuff?

• 25:07Anderson Cooper?

  Well, doing this podcast, talking to people, just learning from other people how to grieve. I mean, I literally am trying to learn how to grieve.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Love to.

• 25:15Anderson Cooper?

  It's been incredible. I mean, Stephen Colbert.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  Can you tell me what you learned?

• 25:18Anderson Cooper?

  Stephen Colbert introduced me to the idea of grief as a gift and learning to love the thing you most wish had never happened. There's a guy, Francis Weller, who's talked about you can developing a companionship with grief and this notion that others have taught me that you can still have a relationship with somebody who's died. And my relationship with my dad has changed. I know my dad better now than I ever did before. I've read his letters and you know your dad better now than you did when he was alive because you've read everything there is.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  I definitely agree with that. I feel like people who are really close to you and that have made an impact and are a part of you, those relationships go on and continue. I know because how much I think about them or the conversations I have in my head with them, but overall, I think the relationship with my parents has become, I'm much more connected and interested and now besides being this age and being able to look at, you know, them through the eyes of having gone through a lot of experiences and having a lot more empathy for them, I just kind of also like can really appreciate them and

• 26:30Speaker 04

  maybe like five times a week, people will come up to me about my parents, saying like, this happened to me, your dad did this for me, your mom said this to me, your mom told me to fuck off this time or whatever. She had a, you know, I always have like a story of my mom saying to somebody, oh, get the fuck out of here. Because she loved to, you know, sort of test people that way. I feel, she feels so alive. She's such a interesting, smart, I have such an appreciation for her and my dad. I do feel like it's opened up a conversation with people, like the way you're talking to people. But I think it's also the understanding a little bit more what it is to be a person and that. I just feel, I feel better.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  I feel a little better about all of it, you know, like because it's out in the open.

• 27:20Anderson Cooper?

  Well, even talking about, you know, your mom's drinking.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Exactly. Once I saw that it actually was like, kind of opening up these conversations with people about their own experiences, which you were saying.

• 27:30Anderson Cooper?

  Which, by the way, are conversations that are sorely needed and people are desperate to have. But it's just not something we really allow in society. It's just not something we hold space for.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  No, and especially in television too. That's why, the other part I was really fascinated with making the movie was the archival 70s interviews. Gene Shalit, all those, Mike Douglas, all those people, like the stuff.

• 27:58Anderson Cooper?

  David Susskind.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  David Susskind, these conversations that people would have on TV in that era were much more real.

• 28:05Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  And that is the stuff that nobody talks about. Like, you can't talk about death, really, on a TV talk. I love Jimmy Fallon, but like, I'm not gonna talk about death on The Tonight Show. And you go out and you wanna have fun and be funny, but like the minute something comes up in your head, we go like, oh, that's something about a disease or death or something. So I can't talk about that.

• 28:27Anderson Cooper?

  Well, it's funny, I do New Year's Eve with Andy Cohen.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  Yes, you do.

• 28:30Anderson Cooper?

  And he's always like, okay, and he's very much programming the whole thing. And so he'll be like, okay, we'll do your grief two minutes. You get two minutes on grief. Do your grief thing.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  What's Andy's relationship with grief?

• 28:41Anderson Cooper?

  Oh, he's the happiest person I've ever met. I mean, thankfully, both his parents are there and they're amazing. But it's interesting to me because on New Year's Eve, I will talk about grief because as a child, I was watching the Dick Clark ball drop. My dad was in a hospital in 1978. I was 10 years old and he died five days later. And I remember watching the ball drop and just knowing something terrible was gonna happen in this new year. And. Me mentioning it in the minute or two that Andy allows me to on New Year's Eve, I cannot tell you the people who have reached out to me saying, you know what, I was watching the ball drop and really sad and it's such a difficult night and it meant so much that

• 29:24Anderson Cooper?

  you said this thing about, you know, I see you out there if you're missing somebody. And I'm sure you will find that as more people see the film, just people coming up to you and talking about your parents to you and it opens up a conversation, which is actually the most meaningful conversations I have and I get to have them all day long because people literally stop me everywhere I go to talk about people they've lost and it's beautiful.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  It's so valuable.

• 29:53Anderson Cooper?

  Do you have any regrets? Because there's a recording that your dad made of he and your mom talking and your mom's just gotten off the phone with you and she's sad and she's like, oh, he was clipped and your dad's like, what, he didn't want to talk to you? Which made me feel bad about not spending more time with my mom.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was actually one of the most uncomfortable things for me to hear when I found that. Because that was being like you're in the bathroom in high school and hear someone talking about, you know what I mean? But yet they're talking about their son.

• 30:25Anderson Cooper?

  And it's your parents.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  I know, and they're talking about like their son doesn't really want to hang out with them. But the thing is, I don't feel sad for them. I feel bad that I was not able to like really appreciate, you know, I feel bad that I was so not self-aware or like so wrapped up in my own stuff at the time. Now, with a 20-year-old and a 20, almost 24-year-old, I'm lucky when I get a call from them during the week that they actually even want to talk or hang out because they're doing their own thing. So it is a natural thing that happens, but I really kind of go more to like, oh, God, I was so wrapped up in the work at that point. It was probably like what my son said, I would get in my head and disappear a little bit.

• 31:08Anderson Cooper?

  You had like advanced prostate cancer that you found out about and had to have surgery for. Did that make you think about your mortality?

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, yeah. When you get a diagnosis like that, everything stops, you know? All your plans, all your thoughts, my job, my... It's like all of it's like, wait a minute, this is something that could change everything. It was scary, definitely scary.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Nothing like the feeling of relief when you get the call from the doctor, "Hey, the blood test came back, your PSA is zero, you're cancer-free." And you want to hold on to that feeling. For me, it's, I think it's 11 years now. That feeling of gratitude. And I still do have that. Of course, like, it goes up and down, you get wrapped up in things. But what I find even more kind of disturbing is like, I hear about people my age. Bill Burr has a funny routine about people just dropping dead. Like, it's age, like, guys in their 50s, 60s are just dropped dead. That's very disconcerting, because, again, it's like, we have all these plans and ideas

• 32:18Speaker 04

  and things we're doing, but it all could just be like, no, yeah, it's over. And honestly, like, if it was over tomorrow, it wouldn't be like, oh, yeah, he died kind of young, but, you know, you had a life.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  Right?

• 32:32Anderson Cooper?

  Ben Stiller, thank you so much.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  Thanks, man.

• 32:36Anderson Cooper?

  Ben Stiller's film about his parents, Stiller and Mira, Nothing is Lost, is out now. You can watch it on Apple TV. Next week, my conversation with actor Kelsey Grammer, whose 18-year-old sister Karen was murdered when Kelsey was 20. We talk about her loss and others he's experienced and the role that grief has played in his life.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  There was always a note of tragedy in my life. Karen's murder was so horrible and so overwhelming that I couldn't do anything but keep it with me. It stayed beside me for a long time. And even though I would still have moments when I would, like, live very well and happily, and it would always come sneaking back in. And I think that's OK.

• 33:18Anderson Cooper?

  That's next week on All There Is.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  Have I Got News For Your Ears, the podcast. I am your host, Michael Ian Black. We are talking about, will Bill Maher be invited back to the White House? Survey says, no. Obama and Trump hit the campaign trail. Trump's latest giveaway, the latest in the midterm lawsuits, and Israeli elections. Will it be bye bye Bibi? Have I Got News For Your Ears. Check us out on Apple, Amazon Music, wherever you get your podcasts. Even better, you can watch the podcast on Spotify.