Danny McBride’s Delusions of Grandeur

From Kenny Powers (“Eastbound & Down”) to Jesse Gemstone (“The Righteous Gemstones”), Danny McBride has created some of the most vain, quintessentially American portraits of male dysfunction in recent memory. His debut short-story collection, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714769/thrilling-tales-of-modern-men-by-danny-mcbride/, is an ode to the overconfident yet woefully insecure characters that have defined his work for the past two decades. We begin with the origins of Danny’s new book (3:38), his mother’s church puppet shows that first inspired him to write (11:00), and a formative movie theater memory that (may or may not have) foreshadowed his parents’ divorce (16:00). Then, we walk through the lifelong creative partnerships he formed at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (20:00), the odd jobs he held before breaking through in Hollywood (25:00), and the substitute teaching stint that inspired Eastbound & Down (35:00). On the back-half, McBride reflects on making The Foot Fist Way (38:00), Tropic Thunder (44:10), This Is the End (45:38), and the cult classic Your Highness (50:00). We also discuss the significance of Kenny Powers in the Trump era (1:02:00), returning to Charleston (1:05:00), the impact of Danny’s late friend and collaborator Ben Best (1:02:00) and his vision for the post-Gemstones chapter ahead (1:10:00). Subscribe to our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod. As always, our email: [email protected]. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It's very similar to Eastbound and Down, which was, we wrote that whole thing. And then it was, I think it was like, honestly, it was an afterthought, right before we were getting ready to shoot the pilot, where Jody and I looked at each other and Jody's like, wait, do you know how to throw a baseball? And I'm like, I've never really tried. Should we like, see if I can? So like, our like, line producer saw it and was like, I think there might be a baseball person in town we can call and give you lessons.

• 0:22Sam Fragoso?

  Did this coach believe in you?

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Uh, no, he saw me throw and was like, good thing this is a comedy.

• 0:30Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Stephen Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:47Sam Fragoso?

  Today, actor, writer, producer, and now author, Danny McBride. For the past 20 years, McBride has been a fixture in American comedy. From The Foot Fist Way and Eastbound and Down to Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones, he's built an entire extended cinematic universe of overconfident, deeply flawed men who somehow improbably never stop believing that they're destined for greatness. And yet, whether it's Kenny Powers, Neil Gambi, or Pastor Jesse, you end up kind of rooting for these characters. Maybe that's because McBride, who grew up in the South, never thinks about mocking these characters, but instead tries to understand them. That fascination in the flawed continues in his debut short story collection, Thrilling

• 1:30Sam Fragoso?

  Tales of Modern Men, which is composed of washed-up actors, failed magicians, runaway teenagers, and degenerate dreamers of all stripe, trying and usually failing to hold their lives together, even when it all seems to be falling apart at the seams. And so today, we start with the new book. What these stories reveal about the kinds of men he's been describing and portraying over the last couple decades, and why he thinks audiences have come around to embracing these characters Hollywood once considered irredeemable. From there, we discuss growing up in Virginia, learning storytelling from his parents, his winding path from film school in North Carolina to Los Angeles, and how How he's told personal stories through outlandish shows like Eastbound and Down

• 2:14Sam Fragoso?

  and The Righteous Gemstones. We also talk about moving back to Charleston, creating community and what is basically a cottage industry out there with his collaborators, and why, to quote the late David Lynch, "You gotta go away to come back." This is Danny McBride. Danny McBride, welcome to the show.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  Thank you very much, Sam. It's very nice to meet you.

• 2:35Sam Fragoso?

  How are we doing, man?

• 2:36Speaker 00

  You know, I just got to Los Angeles yesterday, last night, and yeah, it's been beautiful. It's wonderful. 72 degrees. This is why people live here.

• 2:44Sam Fragoso?

  I heard you call yourself a reverse pioneer. You went back?

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Went back to the east, yes. Yeah.

• 2:51Sam Fragoso?

  So how has it been being back home?

• 2:53Speaker 00

  It's been great, you know. My, I grew up in Virginia. I moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I probably spent the most time when I was a kid in Virginia, but I'd lived in California for a little bit as well when I was a kid. But yeah, I lived out here in LA for almost 20 years. My wife's from here, and we moved to Charleston about 10 years ago.

• 3:13Sam Fragoso?

  I want to talk about the period of you living in LA, but I want to start first with this new book.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:18Sam Fragoso?

  It's your first short story collection. It's called The Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, which you've said, quote, "takes place in the spaces men build for themselves when the world moves on without asking their permission."

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Sounded like a thing that a writer would say, right? How to describe their work.

• 3:34Sam Fragoso?

  It really did. I mean, it almost seems like you're published by Penguin Random House.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 3:41Sam Fragoso?

  Now that you've written it, now that you've been thinking about it and on the road, reading it for people, you know, in front of audiences, how do you think of those guys and those spaces that you wanted to dive into?

• 3:51Speaker 00

  You know, a lot of these guys, this, to me, I look at this as it's an extension of the same kind of stories I've been telling in TV now for almost 20 years. I get exactly 20 years now. I sold Eastbound and Down in 2006. And I, you know, I was kind of approaching comedy from the way that I knew that there were certain comedies I always liked and certain comedies that got boring to me. And the comedies that I liked tended to be ones that actually had a little bit of depth. So when you got to the third act, you weren't just bored and ready for it to be over with, but you were kind of curious of how things would turn out. And so for me, it was about starting with these really complicated protagonists, like people that you weren't really sure how you felt about them. I think the more unsure you are about how you feel about them, the more unexpected the

• 4:36Speaker 00

  story can ultimately be because you don't even really know what you want to happen then.

• 4:39Sam Fragoso?

  So this book, would you say that you really wanted to create a safe space for men?

• 4:44Speaker 00

  A safe space for men? You know what? I think sure. You know, if men are needing a safe space, you know, I'm not sure how much solace this will give you, unfortunately.

• 4:54Sam Fragoso?

  Do you feel like, you know, men kind of need more safe spaces these days?

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Do they? Maybe they do.

• 5:01Sam Fragoso?

  You're always saying that.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's something I'm always about. You know, for sure, these men are terrible and we shouldn't be looking at these guys as examples of how we live. And if you identify with these guys, there might be bigger issues at play.

• 5:14Sam Fragoso?

  Are there parts in certain stories that you go, okay, I can see myself enough in those characters?

• 5:22Speaker 00

  I think for sure that's the goal with all of this, I think. And especially, I think if you're wanting to start your story with a character that isn't traditional, if you want to start with someone who veers on the side of being an asshole, I think it's your job to definitely figure out why someone would care about following that person. And so I usually think it has to do with finding depth or finding some relatability to them. And so I think the more that character has that, I just think the more interesting the character is.

• 5:51Sam Fragoso?

  You know, the publication of this book, I don't know if you noticed, but it coincided with America turning 250.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, I did that on purpose.

• 5:57Sam Fragoso?

  I was thinking that. Now, is this book really a kind of celebration of the bicentennial?

• 6:04Sam Fragoso?

  Are you trying to pay tribute to all the modern men of America who grew up on Rambo? But ended up working at Geico?

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I being a little, being a Gen Xer, a little dirty Gen Xer. It is funny when you look back at other generations' childhoods and I look at mine and I think I see it because my kids have such a different childhood of what's important to them in media or TV or anything. And for me, it was just, it was movies. I mean, movies like I remember to this day when we got a VCR for the first time and you could suddenly like see a movie as much as you wanted, that that was not something that was, you know, that was there before that. And so I think movies had an inflated piece of my existence, you know, and I think that when you're obsessed with movies and stories and TV,

• 6:55Speaker 00

  it can affect how you look at the world around you and what you, you know, how you see the world working out. I mean, I think, yeah, then you just kind of, you get older and you realize like, oh, I was like in digesting all these like stories that were just following a three act structure that where everything works out in the end, but that's actually not really how life often works.

• 7:15Sam Fragoso?

  I think you've spent a career like upending that structure.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  Trying to.

• 7:18Sam Fragoso?

  Is the first writer that you saw or sort of was influenced by your mother?

• 7:25Speaker 00

  You know, probably my, my mom was, she, you know, we went to church when I was a kid when we, we went a lot. My parents were really involved with the church and my mom took on the role of doing puppet ministry at the church we went to.

• 7:40Sam Fragoso?

  This is in Spotsville, Virginia?

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Spotsylvania, Virginia.

• 7:43Sam Fragoso?

  Around the time your father, who was a prison guard, got transferred from Lompoc to DC.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  To DC, yep.

• 7:50Sam Fragoso?

  And then your mother would be in the house on a typewriter. Tell me about these, these stories.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  It was, you know, they were, it was basically children's sermons. So they would be like, you know, three to four minute little morality bites, you know, like thou shall not steal and, you know, all, all the basics that kids need to figure out.

• 8:10Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, they sleep through those.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And so she-

• 8:13Sam Fragoso?

  Not you, though.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did. I would too. I didn't learn a lot of those lessons, unfortunately. She purchased these puppets and I remember that at our house, like different puppets started showing up when she got into it. I think by the end of it, we might have had like 10 or 12 of these puppets. And yeah, she just started creating these characters and then she would jam these things out on like a Wednesday. And then on Sunday, we're sitting here, coming to church early, setting up the stage. And then she would perform it with like different people from the church would voice these other puppets. But it was the very first time I think I even connected of like, oh, this is kind of interesting that she's writing this here. And then we go to church and I'm looking around the audience and seeing people respond to something that I already knew what was going to happen.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  And I knew how she came up with the idea and it was, you know, but it's, you're still kind of watching people react to it. And I think that was the beginning of me understanding that this is something that you could even do.

• 9:05Sam Fragoso?

  So you, you knew what they were going to be about. She maybe like gave a little, tested it on you.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, we would, we would like read through it with her.

• 9:14Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, you did a read through?

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:15Sam Fragoso?

  Cause this process, it sounds like how those guys at South Park make that show. It's like they have a thing on the, on the Wednesday.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Sensibilities, yes.

• 9:23Sam Fragoso?

  And, and you, and you know, people often say your mother and Trey Parker and there's, there's so much overlap. Why even show the Venn diagram? But like, it is kind of amazing. So there was a read through of this thing.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  This is a grassroots production. So everybody who was available had to participate.

• 9:41Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. So was there ever a story that played really well in the read through?

• 9:48Sam Fragoso?

  But didn't land so well on Sunday or reverse?

• 9:50Speaker 00

  How dare you? Of course my mom's puppet show's crushed every time.

• 9:53Sam Fragoso?

  Look, they can't all crush.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  You know what? Even if they didn't, I feel like I was.

• 9:59Sam Fragoso?

  Did have all of your projects? Well, that's very nice.

• 10:03Sam Fragoso?

  You know, you know what that sounds like? That sounds like someone who dedicated this book to their mother.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. That's exactly what you had to do. You gotta stick with what I started with.

• 10:10Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, have all of your projects landed a hundred percent?

• 10:13Speaker 00

  No, God, no. I mean, honestly, even the ones that have in hindsight, didn't, you know, didn't. Yeah, and I think that you got to kind of realize when you do this that that it shouldn't be the goal, you know? The goal, I think, is that there's so much stuff out there that people still, that you make something, even if it's a small portion of the people, that it's something that people still want to go back and visit, and there's a reason for people to like, watch it, or people to still talk about it, or I find that kind of like, that seems to be the goal.

• 10:42Sam Fragoso?

  The shows that did really well at church? Do you remember any of them that that kind of like linger or sit with you?

• 10:49Speaker 00

  I don't, I'm not gonna say that it's because they were forgettable, but I was a very young man, yeah.

• 10:54Sam Fragoso?

  What do you say it's because they were forgettable?

• 10:57Speaker 00

  You know, let's take that back. I think they were all very forgettable.

• 11:00Sam Fragoso?

  What did your father think of her writing?

• 11:03Speaker 00

  I would assume he thought it was cool, I, you know, I've, I didn't really like, pay attention to that stuff then.

• 11:10Sam Fragoso?

  His responses to things?

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did, especially, I'm obviously like, moms doing puppets, we're all on board with this, right? You know, another, you know, my mom's-

• 11:18Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, my dad responding to things?

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's not, I wasn't worried about that.

• 11:22Sam Fragoso?

  He was paying no mind.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  He's not, he's not the main character.

• 11:25Sam Fragoso?

  Where, and where was he? It's sort of a hierarchy of characters in your childhood.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  Uh, well, obviously, like any kid, it's like your parents are both, they share an equal position, uh, but you know, my parents got separated when I was in sixth grade, and so then I, my, my dad stayed down in Florida, and my sister and I, uh, stayed in Virginia with, uh, with my mom, and so then, from that point on, my mom is who had all of, uh, you know, all of the influence on me, and, you know, I was lucky too, that, you know, I have a pretty amazing stepdad that got, came into the picture when I was at high school, and he's still around, and, uh-

• 11:58Sam Fragoso?

  And they were both on, at Quantico?

• 12:00Speaker 00

  They ended up at Quantico, yeah.

• 12:02Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  But when they met, they were working at the shopping mall in a department store.

• 12:06Sam Fragoso?

  It sounds a little bit like a subplot in this book. Uh, you said recently that, that my father wasn't much of a storyteller, except for maybe the stories he would tell me and my mom and my sister about what he was up to.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  That was mean, that was a little dig.

• 12:22Sam Fragoso?

  Tough but fair.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:24Sam Fragoso?

  What kind of stories would he spin?

• 12:26Speaker 00

  You know, there's a lot of, a lot of fiction in some of these tales with him. I'm not, you know, I'm not really sure, you know, he was, like I said, he worked in a.

• 12:36Sam Fragoso?

  Well, what were some of the most convincing stories?

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know if they were convincing. I do remember he had disappeared for a while. And then when he came back, he said that he was at a, there was a prison riot in Texas and he was there. Uh, I guess it got sent there, but he came back with like three photographs, none of which he was in. And it was like, this is bullshit. Even as a kid, I'm like, he wasn't at any prison riot working. This is, he, God knows where he's been. He got these pictures from somebody and he's acting like he was there.

• 13:01Sam Fragoso?

  He got like news clippings from Davelston?

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Yes, this was me and my friends. We were helping people.

• 13:07Sam Fragoso?

  That guy, he almost escaped. Have you seen the film The Fugitive? Yes.

• 13:13Sam Fragoso?

  Where do you think he was?

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Well, who knows? Who knows? He, he was, uh, he was doing his own thing, let's say.

• 13:21Sam Fragoso?

  I don't know what that means.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, you don't have to.

• 13:25Sam Fragoso?

  Did you later in life, understand what that meant or what, what he was up to?

• 13:30Speaker 00

  I did, of course. I mean, it's like, you know, when my parents got divorced, you know, my mom, uh, had me when she was pretty young, you know? She was like 21 years old. And so even as we kind of went through the divorce, my sister and I, you know, and my mom, we were kind of in this thing together. So I think we oftentimes.

• 13:45Sam Fragoso?

  The three of you.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we would kind of like, you know, so we were definitely talking shit together. Working it all out on long walks around the neighborhood.

• 13:56Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, that's amazing. Did you understand why they split up like at that age? Cause you're like, at, at sixth grade, you're like, things are starting to happen a little bit. You're having some amount of self-awareness.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  I sensed something was off because we went to a movie theater one time, meet my mom, my sister and I. And we didn't get snacks at the concession stand. It's like, why aren't we getting popcorn and drinks? Like, is something going on? And that was the, the first disturbance in the forest. Like, oh, things aren't okay. Well, yeah, what, you know, yeah, I didn't really know what was going on, but at the same time, I just sort of rolled with what was going on and.

• 14:31Sam Fragoso?

  Now it's because you didn't have enough money for the snacks or because she thought in a time of sadness, no sweets.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  How I read it is I read it that she was getting her head around the idea that she was getting ready to have to like raise two kids on her own.

• 14:44Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, wow.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  That's what I thought, but I don't know if that's true. Maybe my mom just wasn't in the mood for, you know, raisin nuts and popcorn when we went to go see Ghostbusters 2.

• 14:51Sam Fragoso?

  I love that. It's like, it could mean the end of a marriage. Or she just wasn't in the mood for raisin nuts.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  I remember that my kid brain associate that. When I found out that they were getting separated, I was like, it was the popcorn. I should have known when we were at Ghostbusters 2.

• 15:06Sam Fragoso?

  She wouldn't let us salt it for some reason. There's one story from childhood that I feel like could appear in this book, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. When you're away from your family at summer camp with the Boy Scouts, did you ever have a cub master? Who was just a little odd?

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Yes, I did. I, uh, I wasn't a kid who went away to camp. Like I wasn't like a sleepaway camp kid. I think I went to a Boy Scout camp once. It was only for like a week. But I went to this, uh, this cub camp and, uh, our scout master was one of the kids dads, obviously that was in the camp. And every day he would like go into his tent and he would just put headphones on and he would just like listen to, uh, you know, we didn't know what music or whatever. So there was an afternoon where he was gone. He was out doing some scout master thing. And a few of my buddies and I were like, let's go snoop around his tent. And we, uh, we found his Walkman with his tape in there.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  And being the inquisitive young man, I wanted to know what was he listening to? Was this like Michael Jackson? Is this Stevie Wonder? Like who, what's, what's he rocking out to here? But I put the headphones on, I hit play and it was just his, it was his wife just giving him affirmations that he was a good man. That he was like, you know, well respected. And I just remember being shocked and just listening to it and then instantly terrified like I took it off like, we shouldn't have listened to this. We should never have come in his tent.

• 16:39Sam Fragoso?

  And what were the affirmations like you're a good guy?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  It was just that, it was that like, you know, I didn't listen to it for too long. But what I heard was you're a good man, you're a good man. It was just sort of like over and over telling him that stuff. So, you know, hell, man, maybe he just was like really, maybe he was missing her the same way I was missing my parents and he just needed to hear her voice to calm him down.

• 16:59Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, it's sort of scary to think that that guy was overseeing.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:03Sam Fragoso?

  And responsible for a lot of children.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I think that's the beauty of growing up in the eighties is that I think we were put in the hands of a lot of dudes like that.

• 17:13Sam Fragoso?

  I bring this up because I do kind of feel, I don't want to reach here. But when I hear that, this, this man in his thirties, early forties, I don't know, playing cassette tapes of his wife, giving him positive affirmations, like.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  You got this.

• 17:32Sam Fragoso?

  You got this, like, you're so good at.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  You don't need to kill those kids, just teach them, just, just coach them, you know? Don't give in to the darker impulses.

• 17:41Sam Fragoso?

  But there's a level of desperation to that man.

• 17:45Sam Fragoso?

  That I do feel like in the two men that we've talked about, your father and him, do you in some way see them as like, kind of templates or prototypes for the guys that you would go play in Eastbound and Down, Vice Principals, Gemstones?

• 18:04Speaker 00

  I don't even think it's just those two. I think in general, it's sort of, I just think that is part of that idea that when you're a kid and you see the world above you, you see all the adults, you assume they have all the answers, you assume they know what's going on. And the moment you get a peek behind the curtain and you realize that they're just as lost and confused as you are, I just think it's fascinating and they're probably even more stressed out because they got to deal with you. So.

• 18:30Sam Fragoso?

  But you learn that early.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:31Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, that's, that's something that people maybe get, get around to in college. And you're, you're talking about sixth grade and like 14 at a Boy Scout camp. That's pretty early to have it all.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Well, once you've decoded that, the rest of life becomes very funny. You start seeing it everywhere. It's like the Da Vinci Code of morons. You get to just dissect them all. It's great.

• 18:52Sam Fragoso?

  And, and so that's how you would describe your childhood, a Da Vinci Code of morons.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Then you, you could see the keys. You're like, they're everywhere. They're all around us.

• 19:02Sam Fragoso?

  So between those two guys, your mother writing these morality plays, where did you see yourself in all this? Like, what, what did you want to do as a teenager?

• 19:13Speaker 00

  I always was very creative. I was always interested in, in movies and TV and writing. I wrote from, you know, when I was, I have like notebooks filled with like little dumb stories I wrote when I was like in elementary school. I was, I would read all the time. So yeah, I always wanted to, to be in, in, you know, in this field of telling people's stories. But yeah, so because I knew that I, what I wanted to do, my whole like, you know, middle school, high school, everything was about sort of supporting that dream. So I would make films in my backyard with my friends. I was like one of those dorks. I was like Dawson from Dawson's Creek, just always like running around with a, with a video camera and getting into trouble and documenting it. And, uh, you know, and then I applied to go to the North Carolina School of the Arts and, uh,

• 19:59Speaker 00

  and I met a lot of the, like my co-conspirators there, guys I still work with to this day. We all kind of met there and.

• 20:05Sam Fragoso?

  Jody Hill.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Jody Hill and David Green. And then even beyond that, it was just guys like John Kachuri and Jeff Radley, who are both writers on, from Eastbound Vice Principals, Gemstones.

• 20:15Sam Fragoso?

  The late Ben Best.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  The late Ben Best. Yeah. Richard Wright, who, uh, he like shot my, uh, student films in college. And now he's the production designer and all the stuff we do. And Devo Yates, who is our music consultant on all the shows we've done. He finds all the, the hot tracks and I've known him since I was 18 years old. What was cool about that school was that it wasn't like, uh, only the rich kids could make the cool movies. Like that school kept you, everyone had to make films for the same exact budget that the school gave you and you had to stick to that. It was something kind of awesome. Like you didn't feel like you were like outclassed or intimidated by people with more resources. Like everyone was just on the same playing field and able to be as creative as they could.

• 20:56Sam Fragoso?

  How much money did you have to take out in student loans?

• 21:00Speaker 00

  I paid for all of my school. I paid for all of it. I worked during school. I think I was like on a work-study thing too, where I got some of my stuff knocked off if I worked at the school. And so my job was, I got a job of the campus security. And what that meant was that you just had to like walk around the campus like from nine to midnight, two days a week with a walkie-talkie. I lived across the street from the school.

• 21:23Sam Fragoso?

  There's real observe and report stuff.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Real observe and report, except I was much lazier because, because I lived across the street. I would just get the walkie and then just go back to my apartment and then just like smoke weed with my roommates. And then every like 15 minutes like, yeah, all is good on, in the commons area, you know?

• 21:43Sam Fragoso?

  You look out the window, everything is perfect from, hold on.

• 21:48Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, it looks great. Everything looks perfect. It's amazing.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:51Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, why don't we talk about what you did after college?

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Sounds great.

• 21:55Sam Fragoso?

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• 22:40Sam Fragoso?

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• 23:26Sam Fragoso?

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• 24:09Sam Fragoso?

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• 24:50Sam Fragoso?

  Coming back, you mentioned earlier that this year marks the 20 year anniversary of that moment when you sold the pilot of Eastbound and Down to HBO. And so I want to talk through this era of you coming to Los Angeles and making all this work that people love. This is a segment called the fact check.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 25:12Sam Fragoso?

  So if you're good with that, are you up for it?

• 25:14Speaker 00

  I'm just curious of what these facts will be.

• 25:17Sam Fragoso?

  So you graduate from film school in North Carolina, which is where you meet, as you said, Jodie Hill, David Gordon Green, the late Ben Best, and very quickly move to Los Angeles in 98, 99, I think it was.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  99, get your facts straight.

• 25:30Sam Fragoso?

  No problem. Where you get a job at the Burbank Holiday Inn.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  Well, actually, the first gig was at Battle Dome.

• 25:37Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  It was a rip off of American Gladiators.

• 25:40Sam Fragoso?

  This isn't exactly Woodward and Bernstein.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, listen, if we're going to talk about this, I think it's important to not leave Battle Dome out of this conversation.

• 25:48Sam Fragoso?

  I didn't mean to participate in Battle Dome Erasure. And I am.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  It was a show.

• 25:53Sam Fragoso?

  I am sorry. I'm really sorry to all the ba- what is it called?

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Battle Dome.

• 25:58Sam Fragoso?

  Battle, what is it?

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Battle Dome, D O M E. It's like Thunderdome, but no thunder.

• 26:04Sam Fragoso?

  Who was in it?

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Uh, they were all.

• 26:07Sam Fragoso?

  Doesn't matter. I'm really.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Very strong people.

• 26:09Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. To all the very strong people of Battle Dome.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:14Sam Fragoso?

  I'm really sorry.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you.

• 26:15Sam Fragoso?

  You also later worked at the Crocodile Cafe as a waiter. You once described your skills as a waiter to quote, like Neo in The Matrix.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yep.

• 26:26Sam Fragoso?

  Tell us about this time in your early twenties, struggling and trying to figure it out, Neo and all.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Uh, you know what? I loved waiting tables. I really did. I've, I saw it like a game. Like, I think my, the way my brain operates, I'm always trying to figure things out. So I, I liked when it got busy. I like when it got stressful. And I was like, oh, you got, all you gotta do is just like, I gotta go get that guy's bread, then I'm gonna get his drink, then I'm gonna come back with her lemon, then I'm gonna take his order, then I'm gonna drop his check. I was always just trying to find how to efficiently.

• 26:55Sam Fragoso?

  Make it fun.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  Execute, make it fun. Yeah. And I also just loved being around that many people. Like, every time people would sit down, whether they were nice or not, like, I always found it, uh, I always just found, I liked the challenge of it. Like, I mean, sometimes it would make me laugh if I was like at a table like, God, those guys are such dicks right now. And it would kind of make me excited every time I'd go back of like, how much worse is this about to get?

• 27:16Sam Fragoso?

  Did anyone give you a hard time about your hair or?

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Uh, did anyone give me a hard time?

• 27:20Sam Fragoso?

  That you wanted to be an actor or was that, was that kind of a given?

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:24Sam Fragoso?

  Being a waiter in LA?

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Being a waiter in LA. And I wasn't even trying to be an actor. I was even worse. I was trying to be a director. And they're just like, yeah, good luck, dog.

• 27:30Sam Fragoso?

  That may not be worse.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Well, if you're.

• 27:32Sam Fragoso?

  It's less of a cliche.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  If you're in that zone where you're like, I got a script and then you're dropping off like tortilla soup, uh, doesn't have a lot of credibility.

• 27:41Sam Fragoso?

  Hey, you have to start somewhere.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, you do.

• 27:43Sam Fragoso?

  After years of, of toiling, um, you caught your big break as a motion control cameraman. For documentaries like Dog Town and Behind the Music. What was this job?

• 27:55Speaker 00

  It was, you know, people are worried about AI taking jobs out. I was, I was in the forefront of this. I saw how a simple plugin in Final Cut can wipe out an industry filled with 10 people. There was, there was, you know, the Ken Burns effect. You see those documentaries? And there's like a still photograph and there's like a push in. And what was required to do that is there wasn't, you didn't scan that photograph in and do it in post. You literally had a massive machine that you put the photograph on the bed of it. There was a camera hooked up, up, you know, upside down filming it. And I had two joysticks and I would zoom in and like twist the table at the same time. So you could make the shot spin in, but it

• 28:35Speaker 00

  was all done manually. And there was only, I think, maybe three places in LA that did that. So we worked all the time. So you'd come in from behind the music and they would bring in all of these photographs and you could get through about, if you were good, which I was, you'd get through about 20 in an hour.

• 28:52Sam Fragoso?

  Were you good or great?

• 28:53Speaker 00

  I was probably one of the best. Out of, out of, like I said, I have like the eight people who knew how to do that job. I was at least, you know, in the top seven. Yeah, definitely.

• 29:01Sam Fragoso?

  That's good.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  But then, you know, I did that for, I guess it was about two years. And then we started seeing that we were getting less bookings, less bookings, less bookings. Like, what's going on? Is, have my moves deteriorated? Am I not delivering the stellar work?

• 29:14Sam Fragoso?

  You're getting older, maybe your, your, your thumbs are kind of atrophying.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, stuff's happening. You know, sometimes, sometimes even great athletes fall apart. And then one day I was like, they came in to do some cleanup. And I said, oh, we haven't seen you guys in here a bunch. Like, what's going on? They're like, I don't know how to tell you this, but this is what's going on. Can you guys fire up Final Cut? I'm like, yeah, what is it? And they're like, this is a new plugin. You can do what you do now without you doing it. And I remember my, like coworker and I looking at like, it's all over. Like, this has been nice, but it's done. Motion control's over.

• 29:47Sam Fragoso?

  I'm sorry that that profession was decimated.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:51Sam Fragoso?

  By Final Cut.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:52Sam Fragoso?

  And yet you seem to figure out a way forward.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Well, that's the hope even with this AI stuff, you know, it's like, look, it is going to decimate the economy. Millions and millions of people will be unemployed. But the good news is maybe people will find a way to do something else.

• 30:07Sam Fragoso?

  Do you believe that?

• 30:08Speaker 00

  Hmm, not so much. No. Everyone will be fine. Trust me.

• 30:13Sam Fragoso?

  Do you believe that?

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Hmm, hmm, for sure.

• 30:17Sam Fragoso?

  But do you believe that?

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Do you believe it?

• 30:22Sam Fragoso?

  Can I tell you what I believe?

• 30:23Speaker 00

  What do you believe?

• 30:23Sam Fragoso?

  I think you'll be fine.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Well, I have a very bad gambling problem. You don't know if I've made enough to sustain my proclivities.

• 30:29Sam Fragoso?

  But I thought you bet on the Knicks, did you not?

• 30:32Speaker 00

  I didn't.

• 30:33Sam Fragoso?

  You took.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  I didn't say I was good at gambling.

• 30:35Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:35Sam Fragoso?

  No, no, you just said it was a problem.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:37Sam Fragoso?

  Have you gone to rehab for that?

• 30:39Speaker 00

  I haven't. What is that?

• 30:40Sam Fragoso?

  I don't know. Speaking of rehab.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Give it to me.

• 30:43Sam Fragoso?

  When you go back to Virginia. You were a substitute teacher in high school, bartender by night. This is a little after you were in LA. Now, obviously, I think the first season of Eastbound and Down and Vice Principals has a lot of this period. Was there ever a subject that you had to teach that perhaps you were not fluent in?

• 31:07Speaker 00

  There definitely was. You know, I was low man on the totem pole when it came to substitute teachers. Some substitute teachers get treated with respect. I wasn't one of them. I was just this young curly haired dude. And so I had to set my alarm and at like five in the morning, you would get a phone call of like so and so is out sick. You have to come in. And so you wouldn't really know whether you're going to go to work or not. One day I got one of those calls and the German teacher was out. And so I'm like, German, okay, well, I don't speak German. I don't know anything about German. You know, I don't know anything about the Germanic language. There's nothing. So I showed up and I get there and I'm like, all right, cool. What do I, what do I do? And they're like, oh, that's a good question. They looked around, there was no lesson left. There was nothing.

• 31:44Sam Fragoso?

  You gotta dig deep.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And what I found was that in the filing cabinet, there was a VHS tape with episodes of Cops. And I just played Cops for the kids all day long. That was all we did. We just watched Cops. It was it. I was the best substitute teacher.

• 31:58Sam Fragoso?

  But in that moment, where were you at? Were you like, God, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing next.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  For sure was that. Cause I had, the reason why I left LA at that point, I'd been out there for about, I guess like a year and a half. And I didn't have any money when I came out there. I was like living with like friends and we were all together. And then one by one, people were like falling off. And I was at a point where I just had, I had zero money and I had zero money to get into a new apartment. You needed to have like first and last month's rent and deposit. Yeah, it was just, it was, if it was more than 30 bucks, it wa, I wasn't going to be able to. Participate. And so I just knew that I needed to go. I knew I wasn't going. I knew I wasn't done with LA for good. But I knew I needed to go and plan more appropriately. So yeah, I just went home and crashed at my parents' house. And then just kind of dedicated my time to just working like I was, you know, like I said, I was substituting all day.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  And then I'd go in and bartend all night and I was just socking all that money away. And um, yeah, just so that I could get back out here and kind of get back at it again.

• 32:55Sam Fragoso?

  Is that really where you found Eastbound and Down?

• 32:58Speaker 00

  You know, for me, being a writer, I'm always sort of in situations where I I it's hard for me not to look at situations and and think like, oh, this would be kind of interesting if this was that or, you know.

• 33:08Sam Fragoso?

  Life is kind of like endless raw material.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. And so I definitely feel like I was looking like that's I was looking at things that way for sure. And I didn't, I wasn't bold enough to think I was going to sell a show to HBO like.

• 33:20Sam Fragoso?

  Of course.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Or nothing, but it was I was taking in and even just like having enough perspective to look at myself and see how stupid I was being. That I was like in there like worried about what these kids thought of me and that I was like such an ass that I was like literally thinking like, I don't want them to see me as like another teacher. It's like, I was, you know, meanwhile, I'm like a guy who's like living in his parents' house again. And I have like 10 bucks to my name and I I'm suddenly like thinking that I I got to let them know that I'm trying to be in the movie industry. That was something so much greater than what their teachers are doing.

• 33:52Sam Fragoso?

  This is, there's gonna be a show that come from this. It's not completely pathetic.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not.

• 33:58Sam Fragoso?

  One day, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell will produce a show about you and me.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  You'll see. And you got, you can all say, he barely taught me when.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  So I just, I always was into writing and I always dedicated most of my time to it. I mean, I would go have fun, but to me, it was more fun to come home after working and then sit up in my room for like an hour and a half and try to pound something out. Like, I just always found enjoyment in that. I mean, it really was my hobby, so much so that once I actually started getting paid to do it, I was at a point of crisis because I'm like, I don't know what I'd do for fun. It used to be like pretend that I was going to work in the movie industry.

• 34:33Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. And then it was gambling.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that, yeah. So then that's when you find gambling.

• 34:37Sam Fragoso?

  And just, just so that we finish it off there, how much do you owe?

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Uh, how much? You know, who, who wants to count those, those things?

• 34:45Sam Fragoso?

  The bookies.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you just kind of change your number every now and then, keep moving. It's real, the real reason why I moved to Charleston. Come and find me, dog.

• 34:53Sam Fragoso?

  God, I thought it was about community. It was about debt.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  It was about bad debt.

• 34:57Sam Fragoso?

  It was pure debt. After you have those experiences, you start writing the show. You're in this film, Foot Fist Way. When Will Ferrell and Adam McKay saw that movie and then read Eastbound and Down, my understanding is that they were confused as to why you wanted to make a TV show instead of a movie. Like usually when someone was in a movie, it was so that they could make more movies.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:19Sam Fragoso?

  Not the other way around. This is 20 years ago. Why did you know, or why did you and Jodi Hill know that this had to be a TV show? That it made more sense?

• 35:29Speaker 00

  You know, I think a little bit of it was, I think, you know, movies at that point too were like going, they would go through the testing process and, you know, so they would like screen the movie in Burbank. And then they would ask people questions of what did you think about this and that? And what we were learning from Foot Fist Way was that our movie tested like terrible. It was like, you know, like a 40 or something. It was like something terrible. And what we were sort of at least smart enough to get is that our stuff is a little bit, it's not conventional and just the average, if the success of it is going to be dictated on a bunch of strangers like getting it, it's probably not going to happen for us. So I just kind of felt like with a TV series, we wouldn't have to hit the kind of benchmarks that you would in a 90 minute story.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Like you could be a little bit more unexpected and then you hope maybe that with more time, the audience would figure out how to watch it or what they're watching, you know? But if you have to just jam that story into 90 minutes, maybe it just ends up becoming something like what they've seen before and they're not into it. So to us, it was the idea of trying to tell a comedy in, you know, in a larger format than 90 minutes. Try to fit a story into three hours and then kind of see if you could take some more unexpected turns.

• 36:38Sam Fragoso?

  But it does kind of work in the way that this book does, where it does have a short story quality. And that each episode, each, I think they were called chapters.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:49Sam Fragoso?

  Did you see like 70s American movies as a kind of influence for that?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  I think we saw it in terms of the kind of characters we were wanting to tell stories about.

• 36:59Sam Fragoso?

  Like Five Easy Pieces?

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Five Easy Pieces for sure. Even the end of the first season of Eastbound was like inspired by the ending of Five Easy Pieces.

• 37:06Sam Fragoso?

  Amazing.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  I love that movie. In film school and but even just things like, you know, taxi driver, just in the seventies, they were telling all these stories about these like damaged people. Uh, and I would see that in the British comedies too, you know, at that point, I think the the British Office had like just finished and, you know, having a whole comedy series that's like about a guy, David Brent, that's just like such a train wreck. It just seemed fun to me and, you know, it just seemed different. I feel like in America at that point, all all the the heroes of comedies were just sort of like, oh, he's unlucky in love and, you know, he's trying to not be a virgin. And it just felt like it was stuff that.

• 37:42Sam Fragoso?

  What films are you talking about exactly?

• 37:43Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know about those.

• 37:44Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know if there were any.

• 37:46Sam Fragoso?

  So you kind of thought unlucky in love, not enough. How about unlucky everywhere?

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Well, in unlucky in love, not that it's not enough, but it seems like it's well traveled. Like people have told that tale, you know?

• 37:56Sam Fragoso?

  But you never had that problem.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  No, I've always found love, always.

• 38:00Sam Fragoso?

  Almost too much.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  That's the, there's one thing you can say about.

• 38:03Sam Fragoso?

  At every corner, that's what I was reading.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Too much love, too much love.

• 38:07Sam Fragoso?

  And when are you gonna make a movie?

• 38:09Speaker 00

  About love.

• 38:11Sam Fragoso?

  About just at every turn.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:13Sam Fragoso?

  At every turn, Danny McBride.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, finding love.

• 38:16Sam Fragoso?

  But you did find love, right? I think around this time when you were going back and forth between LA and um, the East Coast.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  I like this transition here. This is good.

• 38:25Sam Fragoso?

  Did you fall in love with your wife on a trip? Is that what happened?

• 38:31Speaker 00

  It, well, you know what? I think I was in love with her before the trip, but the trip sealed the deal. So I had, I quit the motion control job. I quit the motion control job twice. Once, the first time I quit it, uh, was David Green was shooting All the Real Girls. I got this call from David that an actor had, he was getting ready to shoot All the Real Girls and this actor dropped out that was in this kind of supporting part that was just comedic. And, uh, Green was in a real pinch and he was like, would you ever come down and do this? And the only experience I ever had with acting was really just from acting in each other's films in school, uh, in film school. We would just kind of, because we didn't know actors, we would just act for each other. So that was the only reason why Green was even turning to me is just because I was one of his only buddies who had tried it before.

• 39:16Sam Fragoso?

  I like that nickname for him.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, Green.

• 39:18Sam Fragoso?

  That's good.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I call them, sometimes I call them green jeans, Mr. Green Jeans, you know.

• 39:21Sam Fragoso?

  I don't like that as much.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  You should. Mr. Green Jeans is from Captain Kangaroo. So it's a classic. It's a classic callback. And then that movie, we shot that movie in the fall. I moved back to LA. But I was only coming back to kind of tie up my loose ends. And then I was going to move to North Carolina for real, because I loved when we shot all the Real Girls there. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna just move back here with all my guys. And we're gonna try to make movies here. I met my wife at a party and I was like, oh, man, it's, you know, I was almost like I was a soldier shipping off to her. I'm like, ah, if only we lived in a different time, but this train's moving, babe. I'm heading back to North Carolina in three months.

• 39:58Sam Fragoso?

  And that was the speech you gave.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  That's what I said. I said, this train's moving, babe.

• 40:00Sam Fragoso?

  And she said, I'll.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  She was like, I'll, I'll love you as best I can in the meantime.

• 40:04Sam Fragoso?

  Wow. In the interim.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  In the interim. And, but we just, we, we didn't, we just kind of, we didn't know where it was heading. And we just kept seeing each other. And then when I was gonna drive across the country, I asked if she wanted to come with me on this road trip. And she had never driven across country. So we kind of embarked on this two-week, awesome drive across the country. And in my attempts to impress her and make the trip memorable, I blew through every bit of money that I was going to use to set myself up in North Carolina. So I left her, moved with my parents, made a bunch of money, probably like 20 bucks, and then moved back to LA.

• 40:39Sam Fragoso?

  So when the train finally reaches a station.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:43Sam Fragoso?

  I want to talk about a few movies.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:45Sam Fragoso?

  Tropic Thunder. People always talk about how you couldn't make X and X today, and they don't make comedies like they used to. Do you think Tropic Thunder could be made in 2026?

• 40:55Speaker 00

  It's not like they were opening up the gates for a movie like Tropic Thunder to be made back then. I think at the end of the day, you have to have somebody who's really intelligent, like Ben Stiller, who has like a really smart idea. And even like, it wasn't like when people would read those, that script, that you weren't thinking it was provocative. I mean, I remember the, like, reading about, you know, what Robert Downey Jr.'s character was, and be like, this is insane. Are they gonna really do this? And you go on to say, like, they're really doing it.

• 41:18Sam Fragoso?

  I'm sure people felt that way when they got the Eastbound.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. And so I think in some regards, uh, it's not like in that time period, it was like, casting call, this is what we're looking for. It's like, I think you have to have someone who's intelligent, who has an angle. That is gonna work that, you know, and that's what people are investing in. And I mean, they gave Ben like over a hundred million dollars to make this crazy R rated movie. You know, it was awesome. And I think it's why people still love it is that Ben was so sure of what he was doing. And it was funny. And, uh, but I think that could anyone just make that? Hell no, you know, but I think.

• 41:52Sam Fragoso?

  You're saying it helps to be a straight white guy doing it?

• 41:54Speaker 00

  I think it helps to be intelligent to do it. I think that's what it is. I think anybody who has a good angle on it, uh, on anything can. Yeah, I don't think anybody is, uh, is limited.

• 42:05Sam Fragoso?

  And this is the end. You play a larger than life version of yourself. And you said the filming of it was like the Holy Spirit was speaking through you.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 42:14Sam Fragoso?

  Was that the closest you came to God while acting?

• 42:18Speaker 00

  It, you know what it probably was, but I would just look at Jonah Hill's face or James Franco's face. I always just knew exactly what to say to destroy them.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  So Michael Sarah's gone. It's not a total loss, huh?

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Michael Sarah's dead.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  It's not like that. That ain't funny, man.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Seth, that's a better performance than you've given in your last six movies. Where the fuck was that in Green Hornet, huh? Jonah, you're fucking sucking balls. You're an Academy Award nominated person. You need to be fucking selling that shit, dude.

• 42:45Sam Fragoso?

  And that came naturally to you.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  Well, once again, I don't, I don't even, I love both those guys. And so I don't think I was coming from a place of just. Like I didn't, I didn't have a bone to pick with either of them. I think something was being channeled through me. That was like, put these dudes in their place right now.

• 42:59Sam Fragoso?

  Speaking of movies that wouldn't get made today, um, it's my understanding that Kanye West. Came to visit you and asked you to play him in a biopic of his life.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, he wanted to talk about that idea.

• 43:11Sam Fragoso?

  Tell me about that.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  It was one of the most surreal encounters I've had in this, uh, in this career. He, he, he called, he called me out of nowhere. I didn't believe it was him. It was just like, he's like this, this is ye. And I was like, yeah, right. And it was him. And he told me this idea he had and, uh. Yeah. And he said that he would come down to Charleston and we could talk more about it. And he did. He flew down there with one of his buddies. And we just spent this afternoon cruising around. My friend's boat, just talking about life and all this crazy stuff and talking about this. We talked about the idea for the movie very little. Once he got there and it just became, it just became us just cruising around Charleston. The creeks in Charleston, just talking. We went to dinner afterwards and then he got on a plane and went home.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  And it was, I remember when it was done, it was so surreal. I couldn't believe it had just happened.

• 44:02Sam Fragoso?

  And during that trip, did he ever say like, this is why I think you, Danny McBride.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Alluded to the fact he's like, you know, in your comedy, you don't care. And that's what I think the person has to play me has to have like you, you know, that's he had like that he had alluded to that. So.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  And then the only other like real memorable thing was that my son was pretty young then. He was really into Fortnite and we came, we were downstairs. We come in from the boat and like my wife didn't really know what to do. We didn't, it's, it's interesting when a musician comes to your house the first time. Like I was like, what do we, what kind of music do we have on and stuff? You know, what do we do? Like, what's the proper way to meet him? And I remember I just like had, I love this radio station on Sonos called Distant Kingdom. It's like old, like vintage world, like jazz and funk. It's awesome.

• 44:51Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  I listen to it all the time, but.

• 44:53Sam Fragoso?

  But you didn't want to pander.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  I didn't want to pander, but I also just wanted to have something so that he knew like, yeah, McBride listens to stuff that's kind of cool. He's not just listening to like, you know, pop shit. So I had that in the background and I'm meeting him for the first time. We're talking and he's like, can we turn the music off? I'm just thinking about too much. Like, yes, I don't know why my wife put music on. It was such a bad idea.

• 45:17Sam Fragoso?

  By the way, in case you were wondering, folks, he'll throw you under the bus at the drop of a Kanye. It would be no problem.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Get it off.

• 45:25Sam Fragoso?

  Something about a kingdom.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  After our boat excursion, we came back in the house and he was, he was so nice and gracious to everybody, all my family, everyone. And my son came downstairs and he was like, do you think Kanye wants to watch me play Fortnite? And I'm like, I don't know. Why don't you ask him? And then he was like, we, do you want to watch you play Fortnite? And Kanye said, yeah. And we just like went upstairs and just both sat there silently as my son shot strangers. It was great.

• 45:52Sam Fragoso?

  In 2011, you and David Gordon Green and Ben Bass made a movie called Your Highness. It was reported that it lost somewhere between 20 or 30 million.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Sweet.

• 46:03Sam Fragoso?

  But do you think that's because Hollywood didn't actually know how to account for all the 13 year old boys who snuck into the film?

• 46:11Speaker 00

  I think that was a part of their accounting errors, yes.

• 46:13Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, because I was one of them.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I feel like that was, that was the big lesson from that movie is that we definitely, we made an R rated movie for 13 year olds, which isn't necessarily what you should do, I think, you know? But yeah, that's a movie that we, we had this big opportunity and we used it to, to literally just make a, a fantasy dick movie. Yeah, it was, it was amazing. We spent a lot of money.

• 46:34Sam Fragoso?

  My favorite quote from you at the time was, "We made exactly the movie we wanted."

• 46:39Speaker 00

  We did.

• 46:39Sam Fragoso?

  "We made exactly the movie we wanted."

• 46:45Sam Fragoso?

  Did the studio lose money? Who's to say?

• 46:48Speaker 00

  We had a great experience.

• 46:49Sam Fragoso?

  And can I tell you, I watched it recently. It really seems like you guys are having fun.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  We had a blast making that. Uh, we really did. And, uh, with that movie, we didn't even understand, like, we hadn't even discussed really, like, are we speaking in accents? Like, what are we doing? Like, what is this? It's, we're like, we're shooting this in Ireland and all the actors are all British. Are like, are James and I the only ones not speaking with accents? And so I think even the voice I did was something we, me and David just tried out like five days before shooting. And then I remembered, I've never been more nervous or embarrassed than the first day of shooting that when it's this whole British crew and they're all looking and it's like, well, here goes, time for this guy to, to say, is talking his stupid voice when we all have to hear it for the next four months.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  It is finally time for you to become a man. You must journey with your brother to rescue his bride.

• 47:38Speaker 05

  Father, you can't be serious. If you want me to go on to a quest, then let's start with something easy, like boiling a chicken or beating off in front of a pegasus, elementary things.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  It's very similar to Eastbound and Down, which was, we wrote that whole thing. And then it was, I think it was like, honestly, it was an afterthought, right before we were getting ready to shoot the pilot, where Jody and I looked at each other and Jody's like, "Wait, do you know how to throw a baseball?" And I'm like, "I've never really tried. Should we like, see if I can?" So like, or like, line producer Saul was like, "I think there might be a baseball." Well, person in town, we can call and give you lessons.

• 48:10Sam Fragoso?

  Did this coach believe in you?

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Uh, no, he saw me throw was like, good thing. This is a comedy, you know? And then Jody just would push in every time I threw. There was always zooms every time I threw.

• 48:20Sam Fragoso?

  I didn't notice that.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  You would never see my terrible form.

• 48:22Sam Fragoso?

  Walton Goggins, your co-star in Vice Principals and then later writes as Gemstones. He once compared you in the New York Times to quote, like a Woody Allen for fly over America.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  How reductive of him.

• 48:35Sam Fragoso?

  For such a short compressed sentence, it's odd to have so many things wrong with it.

• 48:43Sam Fragoso?

  Do you, do you like to think of yourself in that way? A Woody Allen for fly over America?

• 48:49Speaker 00

  You know?

• 48:49Sam Fragoso?

  Which part of that sentence offends you more?

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Uh, you know what? I understand what Walton was getting at. I think Walton was getting at the fact, and I'm not going to put words in his mouth, but I think he's.

• 48:58Sam Fragoso?

  Put his words.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  We, we, well, I'm not going to put his words in my mouth.

• 49:02Sam Fragoso?

  You let me do that.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  I think he just is a, I think he was saying that I sort of Woody Allen was able to write about his time and in New York and his, in his, he had his own sensibilities and his own way to deliver things. And maybe he's alluding to, I have my own sensibilities and my own weird ways of delivering lines. But I don't live in a cool fancy city like New York City, so I'm not making Manhattan. I'm, you know, I'm making a show set in Myrtle Beach. That's my world.

• 49:30Sam Fragoso?

  And one of the last short stories of your new book, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, you have this chapter about an old sitcom star who puts on this reunion show once the creator, I think, passes away. Is there any world in which you would do a reunion show for Eastbound, Gemstones or Vice Principals?

• 49:51Speaker 00

  You know what? I don't think there would be a world where I would go back to Eastbound again. Like, I do feel like Eastbound was such a perfect time capsule of all of our, our, our collective minds at that point, before we were married, before we had kids, before anyone had any responsibility, before we had sense. And I do feel like I've seen enough comedians go back to previous work and it doesn't seem to kind of give people the pop that they hope it will. And I. I don't think so highly of ourselves that we wouldn't fall for the same thing. I feel like that was a moment in time. Vice Principals, I have talked about going back to again, only because I like the idea that that was its own story, that it had a beginning and end.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  And so part of me have thought like it would, that one, I feel like I could create something that also stood on its own. Not to kind of keep coming back, but to have a distinct beginning, middle and end. Gemstones, I mean, I love gemstones and it's the closest. So getting back into that would be probably the easiest to get my head around. And there's so many characters in it that there's a lot of things you could do. But I think ultimately I like the idea of just looking forward and in leaving these things in the background. And hopefully what you do is you with each of them, you just build more fans and then you kind of take what you learn from those things and put it to something brand new.

• 51:10Sam Fragoso?

  It's funny you say this because like your career is one of constant reinvention and you could have just as easily done a billion pineapple expresses and eastbound etcetera forever and ever. And I wonder is, is part of the reason you've had this forward motion is like this focus on creating something new, does that come from your uncle in law? Cheech of Cheech and Chong, which sounds like a joke that I just made up, but is 100% real. What advice, career advice did he give you?

• 51:45Speaker 00

  I remember at one Thanksgiving, he, you know, stuff was starting to pop with my career and I, and I got a chance to talk with him. And he had kind of said this thing where basically with comedians, you get about eight movies, like about eight movies before people have seen your moves. And then, you know, inevitably they'll want something different. And I remember thinking that like, wow, that seems crazy. That can't possibly be true. And then I started doing the math and I'm like, oh, that is like, that's, that's generous if you get eight movies, you know, like a lot of times.

• 52:16Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, it's going well.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, eight's going really well. And then it kind of makes you just think about. You know, periods of movies in general, when I mean, I think about the movies that I liked when I was a kid. And then when you really go back and look at them, like all those John Hughes movies and that stuff is only over the course of like four years, you know, it's like those, those trends and those fads, they change quickly.

• 52:37Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  So yeah, part of me feels like that, you know, I just as someone who always wants to be creative, I get bored of things very quickly and I always want to be trying something new, just to keep myself motivated.

• 52:49Sam Fragoso?

  Well, let's talk about some of those new projects. We'll do that after the break.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Sick.

• 52:54Sam Fragoso?

  That's coming up next with Danny McBride. Whether you've been watching and listening to Talk Easy for a while, or if you've just found the show recently, you can see that every Sunday, a lot goes into each of these episodes. Between booking guests, preparing for the interviews, taping, and of course, editing, I don't often step away for a break. But when I do find myself away from my desk in another city, I'm reminded of why I started the show in the first place. And let me explain. Because really, the best part of traveling, it isn't always the place, but it's the people that you meet along the way. And when I started the show in 2016, it actually came from these conversations that I would have in a taxi or at a cafe. And, and it would be the result of, of me asking all these questions, in which people would tell stories about their

• 53:39Sam Fragoso?

  lives. And in a way, I'd end up understanding more about the city and the place that I'm visiting by the people who've called it home. Which made me think, I could offer that same feeling, that same sense of connection to someone visiting my city, Los Angeles, by hosting my space on Airbnb. Because where you stay can make a real difference in how you experience a new place, especially having a comfortable neighborhood, a good kitchen, and some peace and quiet after a long day of exploring. So while I'm out of town, another person traveling can experience my city the way I do. And on a practical level, it doesn't hurt that hosting can help offset the cost of my own plans while I'm already traveling

• 54:20Sam Fragoso?

  out of town. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com/host.

• 54:29Sam Fragoso?

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• 55:13Sam Fragoso?

  It's a world-expanding, genre-bending movie for one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. You can try MUBI free for 30 days at MUBI.com/talkeasy. That's MUBI, M-U-B-I dot com slash talkeasy for a whole month of great cinema for free. I think the best clothes you own are probably the ones you spend the least amount of time thinking about. They're just there when you need them. The sweater that goes with everything. The perfect pair of pants or the tee you always reach for first. That's what I've always liked about Quince. They focus on everyday staples, made with premium materials like organic cotton, merino

• 55:56Sam Fragoso?

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• 56:39Sam Fragoso?

  Which allows them to price everything 50 to 80% less than similar brands. So you're paying for the quality of the materials rather than a big brand markup. It's not just clothing. Quince brings that same approach to hotel quality bedding and bath, kitchen essentials and thoughtfully designed furniture. Well-made pieces for everyday living. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. You can get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Talk Easy. It's really the best way to support the show. Enjoy. Coming back.

• 57:22Sam Fragoso?

  So we started this conversation with your book, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men and America Celebrating 250 Years, which you're very excited about, right?

• 57:31Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 57:32Sam Fragoso?

  Since Trump won in 2016, I've seen a lot of people online make the connection between the type of unwavering confidence, the hubris, the delusion that Kenny Powers has with what Trump possesses. And in making Kenny, I read that you wanted audiences as recently as 2020 to quote, "have a bit more empathy with someone you don't like on the surface." When you look back on that show and that time, do you still believe that? Is that, is that the aim?

• 58:04Speaker 00

  I don't think the point of it is to justify anyone's behavior or the point of it is to, you know, no, you, you have to feel sympathy for somebody who acts this way. But I do think that we're all way more similar than we are dissimilar. And that like even with the craziest people, you know, if you were to look under the hood, there probably are things that, you know, as much as you might not like it, that are, you're wired the same exact way. And I think with Kenny or with Neil Gambi and Lee Russell or Jesse Jemson or any of these people, I don't think I'm asking people to like, you know, you like these people. I don't think that's the goal. I think the goal is more like you're probably more like this person than what you'd want to admit.

• 58:50Sam Fragoso?

  The gambling.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  The gambling mainly, yeah, mainly.

• 58:55Sam Fragoso?

  David Gordon Green said, or Green.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  Green Jeans, Mr. Green Jeans.

• 59:00Sam Fragoso?

  Quote, more and more people went from despising Kenny Powers to adoring Kenny Powers. And that, in its own cultural evolution, became very funny to us. What did you make of that?

• 59:11Speaker 00

  You know, it's, the only thing I can equate it to is, is weirdly when we worked on Halloween. You're like, well, Michael Myers, I grew up in being terrified of him. And now, since he's been around so long, people wear shirts with his face on it. And then you start realizing that they like, they cheer when he kills people. Like, they, it's, it's what they're showing up for. They want to see all the ways in which he's going to murder someone. And I feel like with Kenny, it was a very similar trajectory where you see what a dick he is. And then weirdly, that's his equivalent of being a slasher. And then you're showing up to see him be a dick to people. And show me an unforgettable way in which you're going to be an ass to someone.

• 59:52Sam Fragoso?

  So that's why Donald Trump won in 2024.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  Maybe people just want some more. They're cheering for Michael Myers.

• 1:00:00Sam Fragoso?

  There's something to this. I like, can't figure it out. And I find those articles to be kind of silly, making these connections. But I do think there's something, like I'm thinking about, um, Carol O'Connor, who played Archie Bunker in All the Family. And his whole life, he had this, this weird, because he was a very liberal guy. And he had this very complicated relationship with, with Archie. Because there was half the audience that loved him. And then there was another half that, that went, oh, like, I, I'm him. I see myself in him. And I think some of that is in Kenny Powers. But I do wonder, like, how you've thought about that.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  I, I think that when you're creating anything, you want it to resonate with as many people as you possibly can.

• 1:00:42Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  And I think some people choose to make things that are safe to do that. You know, you can, like, you hit the four quadrants, you know, by like, not being offensive to anybody. And then hopefully, there's enough of everyone that shows up. For me, I want to make something complicated, but I still want it to reach as many people. People as possible. So I'm okay with people that think about the world completely different, liking the same thing and seeing something completely different about what that is. Like, I feel like that's the sign of something that ultimately has depth or is interesting or relevant is because it can be interpreted how you want it. And to an extent, everybody's right.

• 1:01:23Sam Fragoso?

  I gotta tell you, this sounds a little like, did you, did you watch that documentary, The Last Dance?

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. No, I didn't see it.

• 1:01:28Sam Fragoso?

  Michael Jordan, when he didn't want to publicly endorse a candidate back home, he said, the reason I don't want to publicly endorse a Democrat is because Republicans buy sneakers too.

• 1:01:43Sam Fragoso?

  And what you described sounds a little like that to me.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  Well, I don't think it's because I'm, I'm not being vague about it because I'm, you know, I have some other motive or I don't want to isolate an audience. To me, it's like, I'm, I don't know what the hell's going on in the world. Like, I'm not going to be someone who comes out here and kind of like tells other people what to think. And then like a year from now, you're like, damn, I was wrong. Like, you know, and I, like I, to me, I'm someone, I'm learning. Like, I've even said with all this other stuff, I look at the world and take it in for what it is. You know, what I understand is, you know, dejection and shame or guilt or disappointment. Like, that stuff is sort of what I feel like I might have perspective on just from what I've experienced in my life or seen. And so I feel more educated to speak on those things.

• 1:02:30Sam Fragoso?

  Those are areas where you thrive.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  I'm a mess.

• 1:02:33Sam Fragoso?

  Is there any part of you that actually believes that?

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  I don't think I'm a mess in regard, like, I have my shit together.

• 1:02:39Sam Fragoso?

  You got a couple of kids.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Sam Fragoso?

  You've been married to the same person for 20 something years. Shows, eh, gone pretty well.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Sam Fragoso?

  Book, really good. Besides the crippling gambling addiction.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  There's not much else.

• 1:02:53Sam Fragoso?

  It seems like you're all right. But I mean, like, what is, at this point, the shit that you're still working out?

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  You know, I think like all of us, I think we all just like, what motivates us? Why do we want, what do, how do we find enjoyment in things? How do we, how are we present enough for what's going on? I mean.

• 1:03:09Sam Fragoso?

  Is that hard for you?

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  It's, I work on it. Honestly, it's like part of why I moved to Charleston is that I.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  I wanted to be in this industry since like I said, I was a kid. And then when I started to have these opportunities, I kind of became aware. I'm like, man, if I put all my value into just like these, like doing these projects, where will that leave me eventually when people don't care about what I'm doing anymore, which happens to everybody. So I really wanted to, I was like looking at my family. I'm like, this is where the real value is. I just want to make sure that I don't like position myself where I spend 25 years living in hotel rooms and being on sets. And then I missed all the stuff that was right there in front of me. So moving to Charleston was definitely a way to try to keep myself grounded and try to know that it's really unlikely that I found myself in this position to tell these stories and to do this.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  But at the same time, it's also awesome that I have two kids and a wife and I'm doing this and I need to put as much value in that stuff and experience it all and be there for it all.

• 1:04:12Sam Fragoso?

  There's sort of two different homecomings. You had to go back to Virginia to find Eastbound. And then you go back again, once you made Eastbound and these movies we talked about, to make Gemstones. And I've been thinking about endings a lot because it's, it's a huge part of this new book. As you go and finish out Gemstones, I saw somewhere like, oh, I didn't know if it was for sure going to end when we started it. But when your collaborator who you met in college, Ben Best, passed away, I think it was in 2021, was he and this like, I don't know, this sort of larger idea about endings on your mind as you were wrapping your, or finishing, you know, that season out?

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  You know, Ben passed away when we were shooting the third, it was the third season of it. And, you know, and you know, it's like anything in life, you lose people that you care about and it makes you think about everything that's, you know, that you're grateful for, you're lucky for, you know, and it makes you, does make you think about how you spend your time. I'm, I've always been, I've always been conscientious of how time is spent. Like, I don't know what it is, but I just have always thought about that. And, you know, definitely you lose a good buddy like Ben and that, that definitely will make you think even more about that.

• 1:05:26Sam Fragoso?

  How did you deal with that?

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  You know, I don't know. I still deal with it. I still think about him all the time. You know, I ran into his parents in Charleston unexpectedly, just like a few weeks ago. And it was so awesome to see them and, you know, it felt like there was so much I wanted to say to them. But, uh, you know, we're standing in the middle of a busy restaurant. But, uh, all I could get out was like, I think about him all the time. I still think about him, you know? And like, uh, you know, it's a, it's, it's a lot to process. I don't really, you know? I think it's not something that you just, uh, get over, you know? It seems like it's something that as you get older and more time goes from it, you just think about it in different ways.

• 1:06:05Sam Fragoso?

  And in this moment, how, how are you thinking about it?

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  I'm thinking that, yeah, I don't know. You know, Ben was a super talented guy. He was one of my, you know, he was one of my best friends. He's super funny and, uh, you know, after we started getting a little bit of success, he just like, he had issues with substances and that's sort of what ended up like being his demise. You know, he had, um, yeah, you, we thought he had like, was gonna make a turn and, um, you know, at the end of the day, he caught up with them. And so, you know, there's obviously frustration in that and, uh,

• 1:06:36Sam Fragoso?

  Are you frustrated?

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sure everyone who loves him is, you know? But also you could see the vision of, uh, of Ben and what he could have been, you know? Uh, but that's not the world we live in.

• 1:06:47Sam Fragoso?

  Didn't he do some of the music?

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:50Sam Fragoso?

  For Eastbound?

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  He, he was one of the most talented dudes.

• 1:06:53Sam Fragoso?

  I read that and I was like, this guy was so unbelievable.

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was awesome. And I remember when we did Foot Fist Way, uh, we were looking to see who was gonna play Chuck the Truck. And we were like looking to like, we were, we wanted to go out to, uh, all these different actors. Nobody was interested. And we're like, who are we gonna cast? You know, that will work for 10 bucks and a peanut bone and jelly sandwich to come and be in this movie. Uh, and then we just had one boy, we're like, well, what about Ben? Like Ben has the energy of Chuck the Truck and, you know? I mean, that was some of the most fun I've ever had doing anything. Even to this day, when I look back and think about those scenes where we got to film together and we're just making each other laugh. We both have like no idea what we're doing. And we're both just like having fun. I mean, it was, it was cool.

• 1:07:34Sam Fragoso?

  That movie before all of this stuff. You're like making it back home. Everyone was staying at apartments that Jody Hill's father owned.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:44Sam Fragoso?

  It costs like 70 to 80 grand.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  Oh, there was nothing that felt better than when we wrapped that, that project. I mean, to have done that and it's all just, you know, we had like, We it was all of our friends, like my wife was the was in the art department. Like, everybody was just doing whatever they could and to finish it. And like, you know, at that time, too, there's it's not on digital. We were shooting it on Super 16. We had one camera. We didn't even have the ability to look at takes once we shot them, you know? I mean, we were really just, you know, just going out there. I mean, that was in the world where like, we could have got back dailies and like, oh, all of it was overexposed. Or, you know, we had, it was, we were being completely like, there's no way this will fail. But there could have been a million ways it failed. And so I think it's a miracle that it landed.

• 1:08:27Sam Fragoso?

  It's just like, I I keep thinking about all the work you guys made together and the work you've made since he passed. There is so much of of like, the hang and the partying and the drinking and all that stuff.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:08:42Sam Fragoso?

  And I'm sure you guys had a lot of good times. So was there some part of it was like, God, I did some of that nonsense with him, but it's

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  It was it was hard.

• 1:08:52Sam Fragoso?

  It was hard.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  It was different with him. I mean, it, you know, it's one of those things where like, he was Mr. Good Times for sure. And when you're young, when you, when you, when you have somebody like that, that's in your crew, it just is looked at like a superpower, like, oh, they like to have fun, you know? And I think as we kind of got older, you could kind of say, oh, those, that wasn't, uh, that was the signs of something more, you know? You're in your early twenties and, you know, your buddy who like stays up all night drinking and then like goes and parties with some random people and then like rolls back in the house at 7:00 a.m. with sunglasses on, you laugh at that, you know? But when you see where the story ends, you kind of like, it makes you go back and evaluate a little bit and be like, there's something beautiful about it, but it was also probably the signs that there was something else happening too.

• 1:09:34Sam Fragoso?

  And did you feel like you, having seen him, did you have to make a pivot?

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  I never, I felt, I, I didn't have those same pulls. I didn't, uh, to me, like, I like sleep and I like to chill.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  I don't like to party with strangers.

• 1:09:51Sam Fragoso?

  You may be retired from that.

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Sam Fragoso?

  I I saw some quote where you're like, oh, yeah, I I no longer could go to bars.

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Sam Fragoso?

  After Eastbound.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. We we saw it after the first season of Eastbound. The first season of Eastbound, when we were shooting it, we would just like, we would roll all over Wilmington. You know, we had it. That's where we shot it in Wilmington, North Carolina. And we just, you know, we we had a blast. And then after the second season, when we uh, when we were shooting the second season, we came back to Wilmington. It we I was like, oh, I can't go into these bars anymore. And like, you know, that was that that whole process of coming every year to shoot Eastbound, all of our lives would slightly have changed between every season. After the second season, I got married. And then after the third season, my wife was pregnant with our son, Declan. And then at the fourth season, my son was there, you know. So it was like, that was a that was a that, you know, every season of that represented a completely like, different change in all of our lives.

• 1:10:45Sam Fragoso?

  The last scene of Eastbound and Down. When you're on the computer in the office, writing about Kenny Powers and where he goes from here. In retrospect, was the ending of Eastbound like, I don't know, prescient? They're like forecasting the you who like, wrote this book?

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  You know, I don't know if it was or not, but it is kind of funny that I have like, walked in his footsteps.

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  I just think that, you know, with a lot of the Kenny stuff, I think Jody and I would would insert things in there like, you know, Kenny, for whatever reason, is like a massive fan, like fan of Criterion Collection. Like, he talks about his Criterion's.

• 1:11:21Sam Fragoso?

  Big physical media guy.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  Big physical media guy. And so I think I've always had ambitions to write. So maybe I was like, making fun of that by just making like, this is what it looks like when someone talks about writing a book.

• 1:11:35Sam Fragoso?

  The the the last book Kenny Powers wrote was called, what was the title of it again? It was You're [__] Out, I'm [__] In. Do you kind of see this as the B side to to to that book?

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  You know, it could be. You know, we thought about for a while after Eastbound was done about writing that book. Uh, we only had segments of it. But we never did it. We never wrote it. Yeah. So maybe this is the closest thing we'll ever get to that.

• 1:12:03Sam Fragoso?

  I like that you first had to make fun of the idea of being a writer.

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:07Sam Fragoso?

  Before you accepted.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Go do it. Yeah.

• 1:12:11Sam Fragoso?

  I think that says everything about you.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  That's it. Had to test the water.

• 1:12:14Sam Fragoso?

  You did, you did. And it's, can I say, it's warm.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  Oh, good.

• 1:12:17Sam Fragoso?

  It's good.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  I wonder why.

• 1:12:18Sam Fragoso?

  My last question, in the acknowledgements of your book, you write, "I want to thank my mom, who was a writer way before me, and she influenced me more than she will know." Does she know, or did she know, how much?

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  I don't know if she did.

• 1:12:37Sam Fragoso?

  She affected you and influenced you?

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  She's got to know that she had a massive impact on me because she raised me, you know? But I think even just the idea that she didn't pursue a career in, in writing, and she obviously was good at it, and obviously had the capabilities of it, you know? I don't know. I just wanted her to know that I saw that, that, you know, that I, I, I know that the stuff I'm doing doesn't come from nowhere.

• 1:13:02Sam Fragoso?

  Has she seen this?

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  She has seen. She said it's her favorite book she's ever read. So, just like her, her puppet plays, my favorite puppet plays I've ever seen. Yeah.

• 1:13:09Sam Fragoso?

  And what did she think of the acknowledgements?

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  Uh, we, we don't talk about it. We get a little teary eyed. And it's like, just go away. Get away from me.

• 1:13:17Sam Fragoso?

  Can I tell you about the book?

• 1:13:19Speaker 00

  Tell me about the book.

• 1:13:20Sam Fragoso?

  I think, you know, it's good you did it.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. Be, you know, we, we all got to spread our wings every now and then. It's fine. I can take it, man. I made your highness. I know what it's like when people don't like something you've done.

• 1:13:31Sam Fragoso?

  I watched your highness. No, the book is a lot of fun, and there are so many passages from it that I was highlighting last night. And I thought like, whatever emotion that you and your mother are avoiding, you've clearly put it in this book.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  Good, good.

• 1:13:47Sam Fragoso?

  And I thank you for that. And I, I guess my last thing is, this may be silly, but having gone back home, having kind of closed the loop on like, the writer that your mother was, you got to like, live this dream that she didn't, in so many ways. What do you want to do next?

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  You know, I feel like I'm doing it right now, honestly. It's like, you know, being able to sit down and talk with you about this, being able to, you know, I brought my kids on this trip to Los Angeles to spread the word about this book. But I kind of feel like in a weird way, as I've been bringing them along with me to, to do this, it's kind of my own way of doing what my mom did when I would like go to church and see the puppet show. It's like, hey, look what your old man can do. And who knows what that will inspire in them? And that's kind of what I'm focused on is just where they're going and making sure I'm here for it.

• 1:14:40Sam Fragoso?

  Dana McBride, thank you so much for the time and congratulations on the book.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:14:45Sam Fragoso?

  I look forward to what's next.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  Nice to meet you.

• 1:14:47Sam Fragoso?

  All right, sir.

• 1:14:48Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.

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• 1:16:22Sam Fragoso?

  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. We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats. I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there? There were 32,000 pounds of them. 32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats. As I said. 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.