Factually! with Adam Conover - BoJack Creator’s Comedy Origins, with Raphael Bob-Waksberg

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

For the past decade, Raphael Bob-Waksberg has pioneered the niche genre of hilarious-yet-heartwrenching animated TV comedies. The BoJack Horseman creator’s new show, Long Story Short, recently landed on Netflix and was immediately met with praise for its perfect balance of madcap humor and intricately layered storytelling. It’s not the kind of show one puts together without many years of developing a craft and a voice. Long before he was creating and writing animated shows, Raphael was a member of a college comedy troupe alongside our very own Adam Conover. Today, Adam and Raphael discuss their earlier sketch work together, using it to plot a foundation for their creative careers over the past decades. --SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on this week's episode. And I'm so excited to have you this week because it's a very special episode or a crossover episode, if you will. Because this week on the show, my guest is Raphael Bob Waxberg. Now, you might know Raphael as the creator of BoJack Horseman on Netflix, the iconic animated show about the depressed alcoholic talking horse.

He's also the executive producer of the show Tuka and Birdie. and the creator of the new show, Long Story Short on Netflix. Incredibly funny, heartfelt animated program. You should check out if you haven't already. But what a lot of people might not know is that Raphael is also my oldest friend in comedy. We got our start together as comedy writers

when we were in college together at a school called Bard College, Upstate New York. We were in a sketch comedy group called Old English that started at that school. We then moved to New York City. We were operational from about 2002 to around 2010, we made video sketches together on the very early internet. We shot them ourselves, edited them in Final Cut Pro, compressed quick time files,

uploaded them to the internet before YouTube even existed. And that was how we got our start as comedy writers. We toured the country, we performed, and we became sort of the comedians that we are today as a result of doing this work together. And so we thought that what would be fun on the show this week is, instead of just, you know, going through Raphael's personal history as a show creator, which he has covered elsewhere, that it would be fun to go through some of our old work

and talk about what these sketches meant to us, not just how we made them, but what they say about creativity and the craft of comedy writing. That's the kind of conversation you really can't have anywhere else but a podcast like this. And we found it really fascinating to dive into, and I think you will as well. Now, if you want to see these sketches,

you can head to our website, old English. Old with an E, or you can search Old English sketch comedy on YouTube. That's the easiest way to see them. But we're also going to be putting clips of the sketches into this interview so that you can see and hear them as we're talking about them. Now, before we get into it, I want to remind you if you want to support the show. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show. Ad free, we'd love to have you.

And now let's get to this conversation between me and my very good friend, Raphael Bob Waxper. Thanks for being here. Thank you. It's wonderful to have you. It's been a long time coming, I feel like. Yeah. We've known each other for 20 years. 20 years.

This is how people have known each other for 20 years, start a conversation. So we've known each other for 20 years. Let's reestablish the length of time. 24 years maybe. I just, yeah, would have been 2002. Fall of 2002. So 24. The fall of, 20, oh, 2.

Of, is that what we called it back then? I believe, yeah. We were like, welcome to, 20-0-2. 20-O-2. 20-Ots 2. No, I call you my oldest friend in comedy, is what I say to people. Yeah. My oldest friend who I started comedy with who still does, does comedy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so. Is that true for me too? I think it might. I'm doing, I think very having friends from high school who are like still in the scene. Yeah. I don't think so. Yeah, I don't know.

Well, except for Lisa who does the arts. Oh, yeah, I guess she's my oldest. your shows. Yeah, she's your old... But is she a comedian? Well, whatever. I would say yes. Yes, she's taking stand-up classes right now.

Okay. So, yeah, I mean, you created BoJack Horseman. People know you from that. People... Well, okay. I do stand-up shows, right? After the shows, people come up and they talk... I do a meet and greed, and they say, oh, you know, I like the podcast.

That's very nice. Because a lot of times you know a podcast, you're like, are people listening. Turns out they are. That's nice. Yeah. Hello. I like Adam Ruins. everything. They'll say, I've been watching you since the college humor days. That's very nice.

The two other things people mention that I like is, they mentioned Bojack Horseman, because I did the voice of Orion Sea Crest type and a couple other characters. Bradley Hitler Smith. Yes. And a couple talking birds. Yeah. And then they all, but the people who are the real heads, the real heads say, I've been watching you since Old English, which is the sketch group that you and I had together with a number of other. gaggle of funny people in college, started at Bard College where we went to school together and then we moved in New York City. And we did that until 2000. 2008, I think we made the movie in 2010.

2010. It's petering out between 2008, 2010. Movie called The Exquisite Corpus Project. If people want to look that up, is the whole thing on YouTube now? I think it is. Yeah. So yeah, we... How often do you get Old English?

You know, honestly, it's, maybe every three or four shows a couple times a year someone might mention. I mean, I interact with fans less frequently than you do, but I still get it like once a year or so. I'd say someone like like, old English. I'm like, yeah. All right.

It was a very interesting time because it was comedy. We were doing comedy on the internet, putting it on the internet, pre- YouTube for a big chunk of it. I think it's hard for young people to understand that you could do that pre- YouTube. We were, I was sort of in charge of our post process, and I was the one who compressed our videos to quick time files. And that's why they looked so good?

That's what they looked as good as they could look at the time. I would like check and like make sure I got the settings right. And I would like follow the new compression algorithms and stuff. H264. That was a big deal. And then we would upload them to like FTP sites. And you if you were if you were interested in watching comedy on the internet, you could download the file over the course of like 45 minutes.

and then like, you know, after you like had dinner, you can come back and you watch. It was faster than that because we compressed it. I mean, we'd compress like a five minute long video into like four megabytes or something. And so they would download, but they'd be postage stamp sized. Right. And yeah, you would, you could have them embedded on the website or people would download them and like literally email the file to each other. Right. To the extent that we put at the videos, we had a little screen at the end that said, please download, distribute and share.

Yeah. And put a creative comments license on. them. And so yeah, we started doing that about 2002. And this is, I think it's important to say, this is, this is the origin story for both of us. Yes. In a sense, right? That we, you know, because the timing was right, we got a little bit of a following from this. And we parlayed that into our current careers. Yes. Right? That we got our manager that way. We still have this. We both still have the same manager that we got that way 15 years ago. Which I will not give him the benefit of saying his name on air.

He doesn't deserve it. He'll know when he's earned it. You can say 10% of his name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. J. J. That's all you get. Yeah, yeah.

And J, very much years, 20 plus years. Also responsible for our careers. And, you know, that's where I say, like, I went to comedy boot camp through that group. Like, I learned how to be a comedy writer. I learned about, like, how to advocate for my ideas, how to make things funny. what was funny in my head but not actually funny versus what actually

other people also thought was funny like I owe so much to that group both career wise and and voice wise yeah um you know I learned how to do funny voices no I mean like comedic voice yeah yeah yeah um and that and that's yeah and that's yeah

and again like right place right time that we were on the internet before everybody was doing that yep and we were able to get some kind of following because of that is kind of miraculous yeah I mean we literally went to college at this moment when they had just put the firewire port

on the Apple Power Mac G4 computers that let you capture DV videotape and edit digital video files on like Consumer Macs and there was a computer lab full of these things and like that was so new at the time that we were able to run around our college campus with cameras and film things and upload them at a time when like a lot of not really anybody else

was doing that. professionals were working with professional equipment. And we even at the beginning, we hosted our videos on the college server. Yes. And I remember there's a scene in the social network where Facebook becomes so popular that like the internet at Harvard shuts down. And I leaned over the person I was watching and we go,

we did that at Bard. We did too. We shut down the internet for a week. Yeah. No, the videos were so viral. And again, this is people downloading like four megabyte quick time files that the guy who was in charge of IT who was like a,

very cool dude with like the like super super long dreads I remember brought me in he was like I need to show you guys something and he like brought me into like a closet that had a bunch of like you know where they would monitor the college network and he was like these are the requests for your video and there were so many that he was like you have to you you can't host your videos here anymore and then we would go from server to server and honestly people don't remember this it was really hard to find a place to host the videos because they would charge you money for the amount of bandwidth or they would go down. Right. And the big thing that YouTube offered, like, that was a big moment on the internet was anybody could upload a video and they would just host it

for you for free because this was literally something people had to pay for before that. And that was sort of the beginning of the end of the distributed internet was like, why do we only have one website for video on the entire internet? It's because this website was like, oh, we'll give the bandwidth away for free and that was like a that was a new thing um but yeah we started using youtube in like 2005 or six but never enthusiastically like even at that time we felt like no we want people to come to our website we don't want people to watch our stuff on youtube yep like we weren't thinking because even then that it wasn't really a youtube algorithm like it wasn't we it wasn't a thing that you would like discover stuff by going to youtube and poking around and like yeah you'd go to youtube to

look for something specifically people would go to the front page right and uh like And I think they like, And it was not a personalized front page. Yes. Curated by an editor. Here is the YouTube front page that we are showing. Here's the stuff to look at today. Yep.

And actually, well, we're, we're going to show some clips in this podcast. If you're listening to audio format, you won't be able to hear, you know, you won't be able to see them. But the first one we should talk about was like a big breakout moment for us. Yeah. It was called One Picture Every Day. And it was a parody of a. video that a photographer named Noah Kalina did where he took one photo of himself every day for like, I think, 10 years and made this really cool time lapse. And then we did a parody of it and uploaded it to our, it was, I think, our first video that we uploaded directly to YouTube. And when it, it made it to the front page of YouTube. And when it did, it suddenly got a couple million views. And that was like a big, that was a big leveling up. A big leveling up moment. And we had a few, and can we take a step back though and like talk about what we're doing here today? Yes, what are we doing here today? So I think, I think, the idea is we're going to talk about some of the old videos we did together. We're going to

walk down memory lane, but we're also going to talk about me and what these videos. You're like, just to remind you, I'm the guest. You're the guest and I'm, Adam, don't talk about your own life that much. You interview you. We can talk about your life too. But what I, want to, when I want to tell the audience who maybe starting to get nervous, like, are they just going to fucking talk about their glory days in New York City? Like, that I want to talk about craft. I want to talk about comedy theory. I'm hoping to like use these videos. and some live sketches that we don't have videos of. It's like a jumping off point

to kind of talk about my philosophy of comedy and kind of where I'm from and what I'm interested in doing and how I figured myself out. You know, I talked earlier about how old English was my comedy boot camp. I want to share some of the things that I've learned and how that those things

that may be applied to the rest of my career. And I think one picture every day is a great jump and off point. Great. Okay. In that case, let's start with that. Let's see a little clip. Wow, what a great clip that what we're not watching it live, but we'll insert it later. So the listener, do you want to describe what, what this thing we were parodying was and what we did with that? So, uh, the original video is literally just a photo of Noah Kalina, one photo, uh, that he took every single day for like 10 years.

We were like, let's take that format and turn it into a story. Yeah. Um, and it was like a parody of that. We did a parody of that where we artificially took a photo. We took like a couple hundred photos as though one was happening every single day. And then through that, we would tell stories. So it was Ben, it was one of the guys in our group,

Ben Topic. And we would do stuff of like, you'd see him with his girlfriend. And then his girlfriend would leave. And then a new girl would come in. And the first girl would come back. And he'd be like switching back and forth. You'd see him make a lot of money and his apartment getting nice.

And then him losing all his money and the things getting bad again. Right. And so it was this real process of just, first of all, on a technical level, like how do we, how do we do this? How do we take a bunch of people?

make sure his eyes are in the same place every time and change the background enough that it looks like it's progressive days, that it doesn't just look like we did this all, you know, in one day. Yep. And then on top of that, like, what are the, what kinds of jokes can we tell in this format? And that was, that was a big thing for us in Old English. It was like kind of taking a box or a format or a structure and then filling it out with comedy. Yep. And yeah, it was like, here's the general idea. Wouldn't this be a cool box to fill up? And then, okay, let's pitch on that. But the format itself is sort of like the star of the sketch. And I remember also we would take really seriously if we were doing like a music video or a movie trailer. Like what is the format of those things and not like the sketch version? But like how do we how do we mimic kind of the rhythms of that correct? Right. We did a movie trailer and I remember one thing that really annoyed me about movie trailer sketches I saw as I felt like they were like sometimes show like full scenes of a movie.

Yeah. For comedy, but I'm like, that's not how movie trailers work. Yeah, exactly. Like you don't get that, right? Or they would show the end of the movie in the trailer because that there are some funny jokes they wanted to tell that way. And so when we did a movie trailer, we wanted to actually be like quick cutting and like a trailer and it's like a line here and a line there and you're not getting too much back and forth. Yep.

And so we're real sticklers about format in that way. And that I think that's something that really defined us as a group. And it has really influenced the way I've thought about writing sense. Right. And so, you know, on BoJack Horseman, for one example, like a lot of the way I kind of come in to breaking a story is through form. Right. And I think content dictates form, but that doesn't necessarily mean the content has to come first. thing you have to figure out what's the right form for this. A lot of times as a creative, you can start with the form,

and then as we did, fill it up with jokes. You have to justify it with the content, right? So we would say, like, all right, you know, it would be really cool if we did an episode with no dialogue, right? And so, okay, what's a story we could tell in our world that would justify that? Yeah. How do we do that? But then also, like, how do we make that work, right?

Or like, I want to do an episode where it's just Bojack talking for the whole episode. Okay, what's an event? that would justify something like that happening. Right. And then you have to like really kind of kick the tires on. And this has to sustain interest for the whole episodes. It's got to be really juicy and interesting. And then how do you do that?

Right. And so I'm on my new show, long story short. That was the eulogy, by the way. That was the eulogy. Yeah. The eulogy episode of Bojjay. Right. So, so.

And I want to say it isn't, an important thing about starting with the forum is like if you were, if the starting point was, hey, there's going to be a funeral and Bojack's going to give a eulogy. Yes. You might not come to that idea of what if the whole episode is the eulogy, but if you're looking for what are formal, what are formal things we could do. What's an interesting challenge for me, the writer. Yeah.

And that a meta idea about the show is that there's going to be interesting challenges. Like community is another show that did this where it was like, let's have, let's have big picture ideas. And then what might they be? And then once you have a big picture idea, what might serve that? It does come the other way, right? Like Dan Harmon will talk about like, oh, you're doing a little thing and you're doing a little thing. go, are we doing a good fellows here? I think we're doing a good fellows. And you lean into it, right? So it doesn't necessarily have to be structure first, but I find that is really helpful, right?

I wrote a book of short stories. And a lot of that was just, you know, I'd start in a place, like, oh, here's that kind of a funny little voice or funny little device for a story or an interesting way in. And then the job of crafting the story is like, how do I justify that way in to tell a story? You know, what's a story that like makes sense with, with this? And it keeps it, I think, a little fun for the audience and it keeps it fun for me. And I think in a sense, like all of traditional television is that too, right? That you have these, you know, 22 minutes, three acts. And obviously in the age of streaming, we get away from that a little bit. But I find that really helpful. Yeah. And an animation that was a hard structure of like, you know, we can only afford to animate

these many frames per episode. So we have to like cut this down in the, the storyboard animatic to be, you know, basically broadcast length. Yeah. Whereas if we're doing a live action thing, you're like, oh,

we got some extra footage. Yeah, let's throw it in. Let's play around with it. Right. And so Bojack Horseman episodes, long story, short episodes are like pretty uniform in length.

And I like to write in three acts, even though there's no commercials, because that's how I learned how to write television. And I think it really helps for structure. It really helps you think about, okay, you know, a third of the way in,

uh, there should be some crisis, uh, two thirds of the way in. There should be a bigger crisis, right? Or like, how do you not just make it like a half

of slush, like think about as if you're putting a commercial break in here. And you don't have to make it like a hard cut to black commercial break like you would see on broadcast, but just like in the crafting of the story, I find that really helpful. So some of those like rules and structure help me think. Yeah, it helps you, it gives you something to anchor into while you're writing. Because anything could be anything. Yes. Right.

Anything, anything could be anything. And when it's a purely blank page. It's terrifying. Right. But when you're, the first thing you do is, oh. okay, I'm going to draw four lines, Act one, Act two, Act Three. A little less scary.

What's going to fit into them, you know, Adam Ruins, everything was like that where it started out of sketches, but like the essential thing was, okay, was this going to be as a show? Well, there'll be three related stories that come to a conclusion at the end. And there'll be a narrative through line

that connects all of them with a character who needs to learn three different things. And then they've made a meta mistake that they're going to be corrected on in Act four. And like, once you have that, it's helpful. Yeah, like, okay. and then we're going to do weddings in this episode.

And then there'll be two people who are having a wedding and then we'll do three things in the wedding. And once you set those rules, you don't have to be slavish to them, right? Like, it's your show. You can do whatever you want. Like, you know, you can be breaking an episode and get to a point of like, oh, we really don't have a thing.

Oh, it would be really cool if we could do a scene here, but that doesn't fit in with the way we do things. Like, okay, let's just do it. Yeah. It'll be fun and surprising. Yeah. And that's fine, you know. Hey, folks, this episode is sponsored by Ground News,

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It was like the five or six of us sitting with a laptop that we had Apple Photo Booth open on. and then we would hit the button on Apple Photo to take the photo. And then we would move everything in the background. Right. Okay, I'm in charge of adjusting this bookshelf. The blankets. Yeah.

And then we'd do some like a little stop motion animation and stuff. Things would move around. And we had a whole chart we were following. And this was like all of us spending all day on this. Plus, you know, a couple days of pre-production, a couple days of post-production. You might have been a couple days of shooting too.

I don't think we did it all in one day. Yeah, it could be. For no money. Yeah. Right. And just to do it, there was not a way to monetize any of this. And it was almost this sort of like, like pure, like creative, like forceful energy that was like making us do it. Right. And I often think of like that time in my life where, uh, we, we were so powered by that desire to just make stuff. Yeah. And I have trouble tapping into it now that I'm in my 40s, right? Um, yeah. And that was.

It was just such an essential piece of what made all of that go. What do you think about that? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a thing I'm trying to get back to myself is like creation for the joy of it. Right. And I think that part of it is I think we got to talk about Ben for a little bit. Sure. Because I think in retrospect, I think we're aware of it at the time in some level.

Like he was really the main character of that group. Like he was the driving force behind it. He's the one who wanted to form a comedy group. He's the one who said, I think we should put these videos on the internet instead of just showing them on our college campus. I remember at one point he said, we're going to start posting videos once a week. And I was like, you didn't talk to us about that. We're just doing that now. And he said, you know, I think we should do three, three a week.

Right. And so he had this drive and this ambition that if I'm being honest with myself, I don't really have. Right. And that I find that I am much more reactive. And I am ambitious in certain ways. and I am driven by desire to make cool things. But I think he really pulled the rest of us along. And then when he was kind of done with the group,

that's when we kind of fell apart. Yeah. And his new thing was he was like, I'm going to move to the island of Belize. Yeah. And spend the next couple years of my life snorkeling. And then when he moved to the island, he started a restaurant there,

which is very successful. It's like, you know, he's just the sort of person who. Yeah, he found his passion. He's going in that way. and then he moves on to the next thing. Yep. But for, yeah, for six years, we were that thing. Yeah.

And I think we all, some of us more than others, did a good job of like hooking into that and kind of like driving drive that ambition and feel a part of it. But there was like a self-startingness. Yes. That I don't have. And that, you know, like a lot of the, you know, the stuff that I do kind of comes around because someone drags me into it, right? that like Bojack Horseman.

Yeah, Bojack, I was developing for years. And Steve Cullen over Tornante, like, he was really hounding me on it. He was like, you know, what do you got? He's like, oh, maybe I could do this thing with my friend. It's like a talking horse. He's like, yeah, that sounds really interesting. Write us a pilot. And like, oh, and I got to ride a pilot.

Like, he really like pushed me up the hill on it. When I was like, all right, it's a good way to get, make some money, I guess. But this is never going to go. Or like, so, you know, my new show is long story short. Yes, about a little bit too. Please. And the original reason this show happened, when I say it's not to sell the show short,

because I'm very proud of it. And I want everyone to see it. And I think we've done excellent work on it. But it started because I was making these shows with Tornante. BoJack got canceled. Undone got canceled. Duke and Bertie got canceled. And all of a sudden,

I wasn't making any shows with Tornante anymore. And they realized they were still paying for my assistant. And they said, we're going to lay off your assistant. now. And you were like, I cannot do... I can't function. I can't go back to the old way. I don't know how to fill out a form. Are you kidding me? I've lost it. I'm dependent on this woman.

And so I said, okay, okay, what if we did like a blind development deal? I'll make you a new show. I'll come up with something. And you can just pay my assistant while I'm coming up with something. And then that very quickly became this show I developed Long Story Short, which I brought to Netflix and now we're... It's an incredible show and you're doing F. YC right now. It's all because I didn't want to lose grace. Grace being the assistant, not the state of God's touch of your life.

But also, long story short, fits into this idea of a format, right? So that also, yeah, so the kind of the, the kunz of long story short is that we're following this family over time. And every episode, we kind of pop in to a different time over the course of like 30 years in this family and a different POV character. We have this kind of rich ensemble. but in any given episode, someone might be the hero of the story, someone else might be the villain, and then vice versa. And you're kind of collage-like understanding this family as the season progresses. And I think when I set up this format for myself, I think my idea was to be really strict about it. And in some ways, we still are. But I thought, like, okay, who are my POV characters?

And then every episode is going to be strictly in one person's POV. And I broke that rule immediately. Like, in the first episode, I have a B story. Right. And so I'm like, okay, yeah, sometimes these these things are helpful, just kind of get you going. And then as you go, you can like shed off the, you know, the vestigal tail of the thing that helped get you here if it's no longer helpful to you. One of the other things I love about the structure of the show is because you're jumping around on the timeline. Right. You're showing us sometimes in the same episode, here's a character in college and then here they are when they're 43 or whatever. And that is so specific. to animation. You couldn't do that in live action. Yeah. Was that part of the idea because you can't, but because you can't age people up and down arbitrarily in real life. Yeah. I mean, you can. It would just, you have to like do like prosthetics and you have to, you know, get child actors and, you know, like, like this is us as a version that did it in real life. Sure. Okay. That's fair.

You know, boyhood is another way of doing it just gradually making the thing, right? So there are examples of things that do this kind of thing. But yes, I think animation offers you a different way to. to go about it. And I like, you know, I think as a writer, as I said earlier, like you want to justify everything that you're doing on some level. Like, and so, you know, a question people often ask in development is like, why does it have to be animated? And on, on some level, I think that's a dumb question because like, why does it have to be live action?

Like, everything has to be something, you know? Like, it has to be animated because I have experience in animation and I want to, you know, get home to see my kids at a good hour. I want to be on a set all day dealing with actors. But I also think that I am interested as an artist in kind of pushing the boundaries of that answer that I think traditionally you might answer that question with like because there's space lasers and aliens or because you know we're flying through a wall. We have cartoon physics. But to be able to answer that question with because we can watch characters age in a really specific interesting way and see a family's resemblance in a really specific bespoke way. and make the whole thing feel like an expression of memory

because it feels hand drawn. And that's a different way of answering that question. But to me, no less valid. I don't, by the way, agree with you that you don't have the sort of engine that Ben had or the desire to like start something. Because I've also- It's different with me.

To me, it's so much based around writing for you. Like you would, we were roommates for many years, by the way. We should talk about that. uh you're my one of my first college, sorry, after college roommates in New York City. Um, and you would like,

hole up for a couple of days because you had like an idea that you wanted to explore and come out with, you know, a sketch or you just right plays this way. Uh, I believe the first time you wrote a pilot, it kind of felt that way. Um,

that there, there was something. Yes. I like to write. Yes. And that's actually, we talk about like the, the habit.

Like that's something I'd like to get back into. Because I feel like in the last 20 years, I've fallen out of that habit. And I write now when I sell something, when I have like a job and I want to get back into the habit of writing just for me. Yeah. Because I think it is it is good for me. And this is something I wanted to talk to you about too. What if we never got to a second video? What if we just like-

That would be fine. What's really funny is by the way, you did come in with like a structural idea for this episode. Yeah. That you then are like imposing on me. and now we can are maybe breaking. No, no, no, no. I want to do it. I want to, we'll get back.

I also want to do it. We're going to get, the idea of writing for me, we're going to get back to you, but let's, let's talk to. Okay, you want to do another video instead. Let's do another video and see if I can loop it back into this. So one that I really want to talk about, uh, that people do bring up to me. Yeah. Because it was one of my most prominent sketches.

It has your name in the title. Has my name in the title. But it was your concept. I don't remember that. I think you wrote it. I know I directed it. Okay. I think someone else had the pitch, though.

This video is called Adams Orange Stand. Yeah. We'll show, I think we can show like a good chunk of it. Yeah. For those of you who can't see it, because again, this is another wordless sketch that we're going to show in a partially audio podcast. Here's the clip. Okay, so we're back from the clip. If you haven't, if you weren't watching the video version, the idea is that to a Django Reinhart soundtrack, I am selling oranges.

On the side of the road. On the side of the road. I believe. Wearing a suit that I am making an ill-fitting suit, that I am producing the oranges because we have reversed the footage of me eating an orange. So it's like a magic trick where I'm taking the pieces of orange out of my mouth. Yeah. And then the final punchline, which I remember writing specifically,

is that I then ask if the guy wants some orange juice. You have hold up a glass. Yeah. And he says, yeah, sure. And then I throw up. Yeah, we cut back to forward motion video of you just throwing up into the, for like an uncomfortably long amount of time.

Yeah. And the other man played by Caleb. Yeah, Caleb Mark. He's weirded out and walks away. He runs away, yeah. So it's just a, this is very, by the way, of the internet at the time where someone just has a fun visual idea.

Yeah. And like, you would click on a video and you're like, oh, look at the little visual idea play out. What a good time. You didn't need much more than that. It's very conceptual in that, like, yeah, the concept is sketch. Like, yeah, I mean, you came in with the pit.

Someone had the pitch and was like, what if we just did that? And then we just did it. And you had the button for it. Like, without the button, it's not really a comedy sketch at all. It's charming. It's like, as you're watching it, like, you understand how it was done. Like, we're not tricking anybody. Yeah.

Right? But, like, it's kind of fun watching this guy pull an orange out of his mouth backwards. And assemble the rind. I mean, people love backwards footage. It's like, who hasn't taken a camera? Yeah. and done something in reverse and then seen it. And I think the Django Reinhard does something to it too.

It gives it this kind of like old timey feel. But I think this is actually, it's a good example of the kind of comedy we did because a lot of it was very concept based, right? We were not doing like groundling style like character sketches or performance based sketches, right? And I think, I think a lot of us were writers first. I think we thought of ourselves as like crafters of things.

I think we were less, comfortable, uh, look at me. I'm a silly waiter. Like, I think this felt cheesy to us or like, embarrassing to even pitch to the other guys in the group. Like, what if I do this thing and no one thinks it's funny? Then I just made like an idiot out of myself. Yeah. Right. And I think like looking back at some of the things I, I don't love about our dynamic is I think there was this like fear of vulnerability or being uncool around each other. Yeah. So unhelpful for comedy. Yeah. And that, and that, like, I mean, that's, that's, you know, get six to seven, 19 to 21 year old, mostly men and you'll, and you'll have this.

Right. And it was, but also I think, you know, our influences at the time were like, Mr. Show, UCB, kids in the hall, the state. It all kind of had this like, fuck you, aggressive energy. Gen X. Like, like, punk comedy, right? Like, that's like, we're not doing Carol Burnett bullshit. Like, even though, like, all those guys did really silly, goofy stuff. Yeah. But, like, the framing around it.

was like, I remember we went to a comedy festival once. Oh, yeah. And we all wore suits because the sketches we were going to perform just made sense with us wearing suits. But we rolled up in the suits. And I remember having this feeling and even like saying it out loud, like, we're going to roll in like the bad guys from the Mighty Ducks. Like we're Iceland, you know?

Like we are intimidating. Right. To be like, we're going to be the cool guys, but your reference is the, not reservoir dogs. No, no, no. We're going to be the bad guys for the mighty ducks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that like part, we wanted to intimidate the other groups, right? And that like, for us, the weekend was not about like coming together and like seeing what these other funny people are doing.

It's like, we got to go. We got to be the best. We got to like scare them a little bit. Yeah. And like our comedy has to have like an edge to it. Yeah. It's like. And I think there was a lot of debate, which is, you know, in some ways helpful and kind of shaping our voice.

But in most ways, really not helpful of like people coming to pitch. And other people being like, that's kind of cornyer. That feels cheesy to me. Yeah. Or like that is that really the kind of thing we do? And I think some of us like Ben and wave and, and to some extent, me, we're better about kind of pushing our own things through the machinations of the group or just like going off and doing it ourselves.

And I think others of us had harder time getting that traction. Like you really struggled with that. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, a lot of my dynamic was, we've talked about this before, between ourselves. Like I had to get other people to agree for my thing to get through. Or I was like, why? Well, his idea, I thought, I thought his idea was just okay. And we're just doing that.

Yeah. And mine, I have to like beg and plead or it gets vetoed, you know, sometimes painfully. And look, I mean, that's just group dynamics. You know, we're all 20 years old. Nobody's treating each other professionally because no one's had a professional experience. And, you know, it's one of those things where their hierarchy. It was all kind of like. Well, there's a social pecking order.

Right. That's what. But it was not in, right? It was not like, okay, that's the head writer. It doesn't like my idea. I guess it's not happening. It was like, how do I maneuver this? Or what are...

Well, and that's why, like, the group breaking up ultimately, at first I was like, well, how is my career as a comedian over? And then afterwards, I was like, oh, wait, no. Now no one can say no to me. Right. And I just do my own things. And you found college humor, which was a much more functional in some ways. It was a workplace. Yeah, yeah.

It made sense. Yeah. Yeah. But we're turning back to the tone of the group as being like a little bit punk. or a little bit like fuck you or there's like a coolness to do it. I'm saying as we're watching a sketch of you pulling oranges out of your mouth. For sure. And yet there was this there was this thing where it felt somehow like disruptive to do the comedy

at all. And I'm trying to think of like what on some level like why were we doing it in the first place when we're in college, right? We're not really thinking this is going to be a career. There's no internet particularly to like there's no YouTube that you could like do well on. Yes. Right. We were doing it.

There was no clear. Like, I remember a few years into it when the Lonely Island guys got on SNL. Yeah. And it felt like, oh, that's a pat. Like, oh, that could be us in five years later, right? Like, we're a little bit behind of that. Well, I actually felt like, oh, we missed that.

That could have been us. And it just went a different way. There were a couple other groups at the time that happened to. And that's great. And they were fantastic. Could have been us. No, couldn't have. Like, our first show was just for, you know,

100 other college kids, right? And so what was the point? Like, yeah, we liked comedy. We wanted to make some comedy. But it felt like there was some sort of inherent value in, we were sort of trying to wow ourselves and each other by doing things that it didn't seem like it was possible for you to be able to do. Right.

We wanted to keep it interesting for ourselves. I think some of us wanted that more than others. Right. And I think this is part of what made us interesting as a group. and part of it is how he fell apart was I think this was an argument we got into a lot, especially towards the end of it of I think you were really the voice of like,

let's just be funny, let's make people laugh. Like this is a funny thing that'll make people laugh. Why don't we just do this? And I think I had maybe more complicated ambitions than that. Or like I was, you know, I was, that to me was not the be all end all anymore. I wasn't just interested in that in and of itself.

And I don't think there is one right answer, I think it's interesting, right? That then you found areas where you could just be that, although now a lot of your work is not that funny. Right? Like the podcast, for example. The most important thing of every episode of factually is not that it's hilarious.

100%. If it is hilarious, that's cool. There are podcasts that are structured that way. And yeah, I'm like a comedian interviewing people and we're laughing sometimes, but it's also about talking about the ideas. Right. And even like, you know, Adam ruins everything.

Like you want every episode to be funny. You want it to be entertaining. but you're also trying to educate you there's a purpose to it more than just it being funny for its own thing well and that yeah and that came out of me doing comedy in new york city by myself and going okay a lot of people can make someone laugh but what do you do on top of that that makes the thing memorable or interesting which you know in something like in the case of bojack horseman that's um it's a very serious story about alcoholism yeah or whatever it is in that particular episode and long story short we're talking about memory and grief and yeah it's it's healing in some way

But I think the thing that I have trouble tapping into is from the old days with Old English is like, it's not just like the joy of creativity. It's like there's some pleasure you're getting out of doing something that like nobody thought that you could do. You know, just like the going for it impulse. Well, should we talk about the invisible man versus the ghost? This is a good segue. This is such a great example. And we don't have footage of this one. This is a live sketch.

We did once, maybe twice, but I think only one. I think I have footage of it on a hard drive somewhere, but it's never been. published. So we did a monthly show at the UCB theater in a basement underneath the supermarket called Very Fresh, where we had to do new stuff every single month. That was the challenge we set for ourselves. And describe what the invisible man versus the ghost was. So that this was, I don't remember who's the mastermind. I want to say wave. Wave and Caleb. This sounds like a wave joint. They really kind of took the reins on it. I think Ben was also excited about it because he understood kind of the challenge of And I feel like I mostly stood back and let it happen, although I probably contributed to-

You gotta describe what this was. So it was kind of a site-specific piece because it was only done in the basement theater of the UCB theater, which had all these like pipes in the ceiling. Yeah. And so the idea was that we're going to do a scene in the day in the life of the invisible man. And the way we're doing that is we're going to have this like stage full of like props and furniture and everything is connected to a string that has been like pullied over a pipe a fishing wire a fishing wire that someone in like the audience you know one of us is like you know in the aisle of

the theater is like manipulating to like make move while someone backstage is talking to a microphone well here i am the invisible man time to read my book and then like the book would like pull out of the bookcase and then of course part of the comedy was it was kind of janky it was incredibly Jank. Right? So kind of like flop out and like, oh dear, it fell on the ground. Let me pick it up. Yeah.

And then as if that wasn't enough, we put another thing on top of it where he's visited by an invisible ghost. So suddenly things start moving around that he is not controlling. And he goes, how did that happen? It must be a ghost. Be out of here, you spooky spectral spirit. And he has like this fight with the ghost. But it's never quite clear to the audience why things are moving when.

And then, and then again, again, if very. That's as if that wasn't enough. At one point, he pulls out a gun. Yeah. By which I mean a gun is lifted off of the ground from a string. I believe it was like in a shoe box and like came and like came out. The gun comes up and then they have a fight over the gun. Yes.

And then the gun goes off. Yeah. Uh, and then one of us pulling the strings gets shot and dies and drops the strings and everything falls on the ground. I forgot about that part. So there's just like meta twist at the end. that like breaks the reality of the whole thing. So it's this like very intellectually ambitious, like thing about itself.

Yeah. And that also relies on us. I think we were also inventing the concept of puppetry. It's just puppetry, but we're not puppeteers. Right. We've never done anything like this before. Yeah. We had to like get into the theater like an hour early, like set everything up.

Like the people in the theater were like, what the fuck are you guys? No one is at. This is an improv theater. Yeah. And this was like, again, this was one skis. in like a variety show that we hosted. So we had just kind of like ignore all the strings for most of the show. Like Kristen Shawl is coming out to do standout in the wreckage of this stupid ass thing

we've done. But that was like I think the for I think most of us, we think back to that as like the prototypical example of like what made us great. Yeah. Like that was the thing that we just wanted to do. Let's maybe the audience will catch up with us or not. And I don't even remember if people liked it or not. I just remember like being so proud of it.

We did. And I had so little to do with. And we did it for like 45 people in a basement of a theater one time. And this is not a thing that could ever go viral on the internet or that we could even do what other people's shows. Like it was just in this moment. You know, summer completely upends our routines and how we eat, doesn't it? For me, summer somehow ends up being my busiest season and I find myself running out of time

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Hi, I'm Beck Bennett. I thought I was Beck Bennett. No, no, no, I'm Kyle Mooney. Sorry about that. Exactly. No, all good. All good. Thanks, buddy.

Yeah. And we host the show, what's our podcast here on HeadGum? This podcast is brought to you by. SquareSpace. Square space is the all-on-one website platform designed to help you stand out and make you look like a kick-ass person online. Like you're skateboarding through the internet or you're like you're surfing through the web. Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. I like that it's all in one place.

I know. I like that I don't have to go around, you know, like different stores or something. It's just on my website. Well, it's like, oh, do I need to go to like a, do I need another type of website to like find the right? write pictures or like another type of website to upload the, you know, it's all in one place. The video or the audio or like, no, it makes it easy, make it easy on me, please. Yes, and you can do all those things, photos, videos, changing fonts. You know what I mean, the designs are amazing.

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And I have a hard time figuring out why that sort of thing is more difficult for me now, right? Like, obviously, when you make a career off of it, you have to make money off of it. So you're always thinking, how do I, how do I make money when you're building a career? A career is literally something where your individual projects further the career. So you're always trying to think, how does it make it grow? And to be, you know, fair, we were thinking about that too, like, more than we needed to at the time. Like, we were very aware of like any show could be our big, I think that's why we put so much pressure on ourselves. We really felt like, we're not getting paid for this.

But at any moment, we could be discovered. We could make a sale, like, everything has to be perfect. Everything has to be the best we've ever done it. Yeah. We have to wow people. Remember the less successful version of the Invisible Man versus the Ghost was technical difficulties. Oh, sure, yes. So this was for our Aspen audition.

This is fucking insane. And so at the Aspen Comedy Festival was like a really big deal festival that it was like the equivalent of what is now the Montreal Comedy Arts Festival. Right. Although that was happening at the same time. It was, but, but, but, but the myth around Aspen was like, this is where Bob and David got their start. Yeah, for Mr. Show, yeah. Even though they'd already worked in the Ben Stiller show together and Bob had worked on Saturday Night Live. Yeah. And David was like a very successful alt comedian.

Yeah. Right. But they're like, oh, they got discovered as a pair at, you know, at, at this festival, right? Yeah. Like the UCB had gone through here on their way to getting a TV show. Yeah. There's so much pressure to like get into this festival. And by the way, the year we went was the last year it ever happened.

I'd like to think we really put the nail on that coffee. Yeah. But for our audition, and like, normally for people's auditions, they would do their tried and true best material. But that's not the way we operated. We had to come up with brand new stuff every show. Yeah. And that's just like something about us that we got restless. Like we really didn't want to pull out the old favorites.

We didn't have kind of our catalog of stuff. And in fact, when we would do like other people's shows, and we would like run into other sketch groups that we knew. And we would see them like repeating bits we'd seen before. We'd like roll our eyes with them. Like look at these fucking hacks. Yeah. Like this is so lame.

Like I've, duh, I've already seen this one. Yeah. Right? As if like that matter. We'd make fun of stand-up comedians. Yes. There's a very funny comic name Greg Johnson who we loved in New York. But after we saw his act three times, we would like, quote it back.

We would quote it back and be like, well, yeah, that's what stand-up comedy is. Yes. Exactly. He's perfecting it. He's kidding like, you know, whereas we just like felt like if we figured out the game of something or the comedy of something and did it once, it was like not interesting anymore. Yeah. Right. The idea of like going back and doing it again felt like we were just like playing the hits, you know?

Like, you know, I'm Sting and like I want to play my, you know, harpsichord. Like I don't want to do. Don't stand so close to me. I want to fucking play my mandolin, you know. Yeah. And so before this Aspen audition, like, all right. It has to be really good. So let's come up with a bunch of brand new stuff we've never done before.

For the biggest career opportunity of our lives, let's do a bunch of stuff. No audience has ever seen. Yes. And so one of them was this ambitious sketch called technical difficulties. And the idea of it is that it was a video sketch, but that while it was playing, it would become clear there were some technical difficulties with the playback. So we would come on save and like bang the DVD projector, right? And to try to make it work.

and the comedy would come out of like all the things that weren't quite working right so like we would like be like look at that helicopter and the camera would would would would would pan up and that like the video would cut out you'd hear like a big explosion and you'd hear us say what a visually interesting helicopter explosion that's an example right yeah or we did one one scene like the language settings go off and so all of a sudden like we're talking in french and spanish or watching the DVD commentary right watching the like that's a technical difficulty on the sketch that the DVD commentary is coming on. So again, it was like very conceptual and meta and like broke its own rules. And I remember the the scout for the Aspen Festival who was talking to us after the show. And she was like, I don't know what that was. And she was like, you guys are great. But what? Don't do that ever again. Just do your popular sketches that you know people like.

And then we went to the Aspen Comedy Festival and we did a bunch of stuff that we wrote the weekend of the festival. Yeah. And did it on stage. Yeah. And the piece de resistance of which was we were staying in some kind of Airbnb kind of like vacation home. And we took a bunch of objects. We took like the furniture out of the hotel or the person's house we were staying in and brought it on stage to make fun of it.

Yes, that was the conceit. And then we would also, we escalated that where we would like, we went to like the store and we bought like track lighting. We could pretend we pulled off the ceiling or we got we got like some some picture frames from Walgreens. And we said, these are, this is the family. Like, pass it out amongst yourselves. Like, you know, as if we're being so cavalier with all of it. And then I remember after that show, the organizers like, please return everything to the house. Please do not.

So it was like this, this ethos. Again, that was us being punk, right? Like, we have to, like, prove that we're badasses. We're fucking up, you know, the hospitality of the festival was letting us stay at this house. Five white guys who with liberal arts degrees, like, how badass can we be? But that was the ethos. But the ethos was also. So to bring it back to writing, the idea of continually topping ourselves, you know, and always surprising ourselves and the audience and doing the thing that, like, nobody thought you could do.

And I, I again find that to be a hard thing to get. That informed a lot of Adam Ruins everything, right? We did do a lot of formal stuff on that show. It was really like the whole idea of that show that would be informational, but there was also a storyline throughout it. that would all come together and that like every scene was shot in a different location. It was super kitchen sink, right? It was like, this is my one chance. Everything has to be in this.

It has to be everything all at once. But, you know, I think now my creative life is very much around like what is the thing I can do routinely, right? This show, how do I have, how do I make a good show like literally at this point twice a week? Right. And have a good time and laugh and give the audience something and, you know, make a living for myself and the people. that the show employs and not stress out too much, you know? Well, there's, you know, I think there's an advice that I give to early career writers, right, which is when you're writing your, your spec script, your sample, don't think about

production, make it as wild as you, like, make it weird. Don't think about like, what kind of movies actually get made? Like, your first script's not going to get made. Do you want to show off your ingenuity, your creativity? Right. And then I think as you get a career, it's, it's harder to find your way back to that because you know so much about like, well, you know, dinner table scenes are really hard to shoot or like, you can't do in too many locations.

And like, you start to edit yourself before you're even writing. Yeah. And I think what I am, what I would like to do now is get back to that early space of like, what if it's never going to get made? Yeah. And not worry about that. I also wonder if part of it is when you're starting, when you're doing creative work, it's so often you have to reconceive of yourself as someone who is doing that type of work,

right? Like the first time we did a sketch comedy show, it's like, yeah, no, we're sketch comedians. Like, you know, the shows you saw on TV? Like, we are doing that too. You didn't think that a week ago, but now you're seeing us, right? And especially the format that we were working in, again, nobody was doing this on the internet. We were trying to make television level comedy using consumer equipment.

And that was like a new thing. And so the whole context was disruptive, right? And so the comedy took that form as well. And it was that point in me, like right now if someone was like, I want to start an online sketch comedy group, there's so many examples. And you'd be in the context of all the people

who are doing that. And I think people... But also now, like, you wouldn't even necessarily call it a group. You'd just be like, yeah, I'm doing these front-facing videos. I'm playing a character and like me and my friend. Like the please don't destroy guys. Like they weren't even like a formal group, I don't think.

I think it was just like three friends who would be in each other's videos and like make videos. Yep. Right. And there's so many examples of that on Instagram and TikTok. It's actually you're putting your finger on what has bugged me about that group sketches. Okay.

And I take. Here we go. Yeah. We can do it. I think right now when people, if someone wants to make. YouTube videos now, right, for the first time. They're watching YouTube, right?

They're aware of what works and what doesn't work on YouTube. And so there's sort of this awareness that you have to like make something good right away, you know? And when I watch those sketches and sketches from lots of other groups, I see comedy that is really finely tuned to work really well, you know, where it's like, it's like we're hitting the format so correctly in order to produce exactly the right reaction. Yeah. you know, that it feels like overtight and like, it's like missing some sort of like humanity

or weirdness to it. Whereas like when we were doing it, yeah, there was nothing to really pattern it off of. You know what I mean? That's interesting. I mean, I would not share that criticism. I don't think it's a criticism. It's just a reaction that I had when watching it. Yes, yes. That's that's fair to have your own reaction. I, but I remember, I mean, I've also felt that. Like I remember in when we were in New York, I went to, uh, see the Hammercats to a show at the UCB. These were peers of ours. There's a legendary, uh, NYU, uh, sketch comedy group at the time Donald Glover was in the group, D.C. Pearson. I think this was after Derek had already split off. So I feel like Dan Greger, Doug Mann. Yeah. Uh, first guest on the show. Right. Um, so, uh,

I don't remember who else was with me. I know Jesse came, Jesse Novak, um, who was a member of Old English, but at that point was not, it was just our friend. And when we saw the show and I remember the subway ride back nitpicking it to death and just being like, it was so like precise and clean, but like, yeah, where's the, where's the humanity? Where's the mess of it? Like that's, we would never do a show like that like that da da da da da da da da da da da and then finally Jesse was like, but it was really good, right? Yeah, it was really good. I had to hit you know, but like my first instinct was to be like, Here's here's all the reasons that I don't like it. Here's what's,

it's too, yeah, it's too tight. It's too clean. Yep. But like, I don't know, maybe that was my own jealousy or my own taste or I don't know what.

But it's, well, and the criticism that I get, or the feeling is I do that in my own work, right? I want to make it work now. I want, right,

when I do stand up, I want it to feel like a standup act. When I do a podcast, I want it to feel like a podcast. And the sort of blue sky, it could be anything feeling as is harder. to capture. Yeah. We talk about Adam fever?

Yeah, let's talk about Adam fever. Let's do it. All right, because I have some stuff I want to talk about Adam fever. Okay, well, let's see a little clip of Adam fever. Makes no sense. What's wrong with Yon? What? Yon.

What's wrong with Yon? I don't know. It looks like he's got a cabin fever or something. I don't know. Adam fever? No, no. Cabin fever. Adam. This sketch makes no sense at all.

Okay, so the premise of the sketch is two guys are at a loud party, and one guy says the phrase cabin fever. The other guy mishears him as Adam fever, and then we cut to two men, but really boys at the time. One of them is me. One of them is Adam Kanover, who was one of the Adams in our group. The other one is Adam Janos, who is the other Adam in our group. just kind of dancing around to,

to butterfly by Crazy Town. Yes. And, you know, the joke that there is one is that, hey, look, it's two guys named Adam.

And Adam fever kind of sounds like cabin fever, which is also a weird thing you would never bring up in a party. Yeah. So it's like this very, this is a wave sketch, Wave Siegel. And it's,

I wanted to talk about it for two reasons. One is I, I think the origin of using Crazy Towns Butterfly was that Wave had made a mix for himself of songs that he hated. He's like,

what do I think are the worst songs right now? And this is such a hymn thing to like make this mix and then like listen to it over and over again and kind of, I guess Stockholm syndrome himself into falling in love with them. I don't quite know what he was trying to get out of it, but he ended up like a real fan of this song,

even though the whole premise of it was like, I hate that. goddamn song. And so then I guess he couldn't stop thinking about it and he put it in the sketch. And I actually, I thought this would be a natural plug for Long Story Short. We have a butterfly needle drop in season one of Long Story Short. And I put it in for similar reasons of like we had an episode set in 2002 at a prom. And I thought, oh, this will really place us in that time, this like cheesy song.

And then in editing the episode, we just kept extending the song, like, to cover a montage, it wasn't even supposed to cover. It's like, this is really fun. So now it's like, we don't play almost the entire song, I think, because it really is like, no, this is really, it's like me watching the Hammercats. Like, yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. I got to hand it to them.

I got to hand it to them. I wanted to talk about it for that reason, but I also wanted to talk about the two atoms. Okay. Because I feel like in our group, you two represented, and I'm oversimplifying a little, bit and you can kind of speak up and say, no, I never said that. But I would say two polls of an argument broadly over the course of, you know, the six years you were making videos. I feel like on the one hand, you have Adam Yanoch who was like very conceptual, very postmodern, like interested in challenging the audience, interested in writing stuff that like I would be pressed to explain

why it was funny. In addition to being very funny also, like you could also write traditional, very funny sketches. He could do funny voices, funny characters. He was like a great sketch comedian. but also had this like more high-minded interest of kind of, you know, doing this Brechtian circus with our act, which I think other members kind of bristled against of like, that's not really funny though. Like maybe it's interesting or challenging or, but is it funny to anyone but yourself?

Sometimes it would be like, what am I supposed to get out of this at all? It seems like completely random, you know, collection of words and images. And there were other people who would play around in that side of the pool as well, right? Like Joel would sometimes bring him sketches like that. Yeah.

Right? He was not alone in that. Yeah. And then I would say the other side of the spectrum was the other Adam, Adam Conover, who especially, you know, towards the end of it, I think you really started to bristle at some of the stuff we're talking about earlier of like trying to tell more emotional stories or do different kinds of things in the form of sketch comedy. And you're just like, I'm just here to make people laugh.

Like that's all, all I want to do is like, you know, go out. And if the audience laughs, that means we did a good job. And if they don't laugh, we're not smarter than the audience, right? Like, we didn't, like, it's not that we got a bad audience. Like, they tell us if we're funny or not. Like, the success or failure of this joke is if it connects and make somebody laugh. Yeah, I think I would broaden that to what I was thinking about at the time was, was I wanted it to work, you know?

I wanted the audience to get a thing. I wanted to have a clear intention. Yeah, I wanted to communicate something in the audience to get the thing that I was trying to communicate. Right. And to go, aha, yes, I like it. For one reason or another, which in the comedy context is often a laugh. And that's honestly the thing that sort of drew me to stand-up comedy is stand-up comedy.

Like, if the audience is not laughing, it is not funny. The audience can laugh more or less. You can paste it out. But like, everyone knows that they're there for a reason, you know. And I find my, I found myself and still do find myself kind of flitting between those poles, I would say. Like, I don't find that I've, like, found a firm branch in the middle. But I find that more and more, I'm whatever right of center, left of center,

like I think I'm closer to the con over end of the spectrum and the average end of the spectrum, right? That like I feel like my, not even my job as a writer, but my ambition as a writer is to articulate and communicate. Right? That, that, that, that, and, you know, I'm very much of the camp of like, you know, I don't need to be a thousand people's seventh favorite thing

if I can be one person's very favorite thing, right? Like, I would love to, like, make that, like, precise. Like, I don't need broad appeal, but I do want to be, you know, the metaphor I often use is like, I'm throwing something across a chasm, and I hope to God there's someone at the other end who's going to catch it. Yeah. And I'm greatly relieved when I see that somebody has, like, when some reacts to my work in such a way that I go, okay, you got it, right?

And I remember one of the reasons I don't always love doing mushrooms is because I feel like it makes me feel things that I cannot express and articulate, and I don't like that. I want to be able to articulate, like all my work is about, like, investigating things that I'm feeling or things that I think are interesting or funny

and, like, communicating that in a digestible way to an audience, right? And I find that recently, like very recently, I find myself drifting back the other way. And part of that is, thinking like, you know, what, what are the means I have of doing that? And, and, you know, in our industry, a lot of it is, you know, pitching something, getting something by the gatekeepers. Like, you got to get it out there for someone to respond to, right? Yeah. Again, like, I'm not a guy

who's just going to pick up a camera and just, like, shoot some stuff and put it on the internet. Like, I like collaborating. I like building something with other people. And these things I like building cost a lot of money and someone needs to say, okay. Right. Yeah. Um, but, But in the absence of that, do I also get something out of the process of writing that is not being fed when I am not right? So going back to what we were talking about earlier, about writing for an audience versus writing for yourself and finding the joy in the process again. I had a really interesting conversation with Wave a couple weeks ago, a wave from Old English, who I've remained very good friends with, as you. And he pointed something out to me, which is that he says, you know, I think you are someone who expresses yourself through your work. And some of that is sometimes you figuring yourself out.

So if you don't have the opportunity to do that, you yourself get blocked. And I think that is actually very true of me. And so I'm trying to get back into a practice of writing, not necessarily to be read or produced or seen, but for me. And when I say trying to get back to that, I'm like, I'm not yet, but I'm considering thinking about ways to try to get back to that. And like, you know, like could I journal? Could I write, you know, write stuff that like maybe could be something someday? Because I found that like, you know, we really, part of our origin story is also like coming of age during the rise of blogs. Right.

And I'm like, I got a lot of practice writing both for myself and for an audience by writing in my live journal and later Tumblr. and like really experiencing in real time like what worked, what didn't work, what felt good to me, what didn't feel good to me. And it was for me, part of the motivation for doing it was knowing that people were going to read it. And could I do that absent of that? I think I might like to try.

I think a lot of good stuff came from that. And I think if I started a practice of like, I'm going to write for an hour today just for me and just see what happens. I think a lot of good stuff would come out. And also I think I would feel less locked up and good. Yeah. the the question of whether you're doing it for an audience or not is so important.

And that was when I when I asked myself the question of why were we doing it back then, it was like, well, there are going to be people in the seats and they're going to see it, you know, that there is going to be someone on the other end. And yeah, Adam Jonas didn't always write with that. It was not always for other people. Yeah. Right. but, you know, when I get really tense about my comedy, when I, when I look back and I'm like, I don't like how that came out, or I was going, if I'm going through a bad period creatively, it's often because I'm putting too much pressure on what I think the audience is going to think, you know, like when I, what I'm trying to get away from for myself personally in my own work is I've often done stand up in a way where I'm like, afraid of the audience's judgment of me and the jokes are like armor.

Right, to try to like make them laugh and, and communicate with them and do all those other things. But it's like, it ends up being like a fearful relationship with them or I want to impress them or something. In reality, they're just some fucking people, you know? Who gives a fuck? And doing it for yourself is maybe a way to get away from that too. I found a lot of positive feelings from me.

I've been exploring which is like entirely different media. I've been like exploring photography and, and music and stuff like that, which is like, if it's for an audience at all, it's for like friends and family or, but primarily for my own pleasure. And that is like, you know, very, it feels very freeing in a way

to take all of those other things away from it. You know, before the pandemic, my wife and I started taking tap dancing lessons. And I loved it. And we stopped during the pandemic. And she's, I think she actually started back up again, like online. Can I just say a lot of people

when they take dance class, with their spouse, it's ballroom dancing. Yeah. Tap dancing is very funny specifically as a form of dance to do. Because I think of it as sort of a solo kind of. Well, it's, I'm, and I was always self-conscious about practicing at home because I didn't want to ruin the hardwood. And so I was like, I don't know if I'm allowed to here. But what I liked about it was it was just for us, right?

And like, sometimes the teacher would say something like, would you guys want us to like do like a, you know, a show of some kind? know is always like, no. Like, this is not for anybody else. Like, I am never going to get good at this. And I know that. And the pressure is off. And I can just enjoy the act of making art. Because I think so much for me, you know, in my psychology, in my history, is this pressure to succeed and be the best. Right. I have this competitive drive. Right. And so, you know, I say like, I'm not really ambitious. I'm more of, like, a passive guy. But like, in other ways, like, no, I, I don't want to do something unless I can really impress people with it, right? Like, I have this fear of like, what if I'm just okay? Um, and I would love to do more things to help me get out of that mindset. Right. Like, like, like the kind of people who like,

paint a painting every day and then throw it in the garbage, right? Is that a kind of person? I don't know. But like, the idea that like, I don't know they all throw it in the garbage, but yes. You know, that it's not for anybody else, right? It's not whether this is good or not. It's not like to impress anyone. It's that the, the act of creating art or expressing something is worthy in and of itself, even if nobody else sees it, right? And that so much of my understanding of art has been like, no, it is for somebody else. Like, it's worthless if you're not communicating, if you're not connecting in that way. It's masturbation. If you're, if you're making something that's too weird for anyone to understand. And I've started very recently to come

around to the idea of like, well, let's question that assumption. And like, is there worth in making something just for what it does for you, regardless of, of its artistic merit. Yeah. I have a couple thoughts from that. One is when I'm asking the question of like, what was our drive early on? I could say, yeah, there's all these great things about it.

It was also sort of like deep insecurity and trying to prove, there's a thing that young comedians do a lot, trying to prove that you're the best, right? And in our case, it was sort of a shock and awe strategy where we're going to do this stuff that's like so massively over the top that you'll have no choice but to sort of bow down, right? But, you know, now I experience that a little bit more as insecurity. I wish I could

let go of that and go like, well, what am I trying to prove? You know, built a nice career here. I can do whatever I want. You know, what? Nobody is actually judging me harshly at all ever. And yet I still feel that. And it gives me pain and anxiety now and sometimes it gets in the way of good work. And I feel like you were actually the least of that amongst us, right? Oh, God. No, like, in it, and I mean that in really complimentary way. Like, I, I feel like you had, you were carrying around less shame and competitive drive than I was, certainly. Like, I remember, you know, living in New York City.

We had this monthly show at the UCB theater. And I thought, you know, I would really love to take an improv class here. But what if someone saw me and recognized me? Like, I have a show here. I can't take a class here. Like, right? Like they would know that I had vulnerable, but I wasn't the best all the time.

That you're not one of the real comedians. You're one who's still growing and learning. Exactly. Like the fact that we have a show here means that like, yeah, I'm in that upper echelon. And if I take like improv 101, like what am I saying? Yeah. And even like three years later, I'm like,

oh, I should have done that. But now it's too late. And now, you know, 20 years later, I'm like, no, still you could have done it dead. Yeah. I can do it now, right? Like, I mean, I, and I would if I didn't have, if I had free time. I don't have time to do it now, but I would like to do it with taking an improv class.

I think it would be fun without the pressure of like, I have to be the best in this because like, I'm not going to be about some 20 something kid is going to be the best. Well, I'll tell you, you know, I actually did take UCB improv class. That's why, that's why I say, I envy this about you that you were, you could put your ego aside and be like, no, I'd like to learn how to do this. This sounds like fun. Well, except it was also ego because I was trying to. to like rebuild a career as a comedian.

This was sort of after the group had broken up. And I was like, okay, I'm going to find a path here. I'm going to take this seriously. But then in the improv classes, I was always, I want to be the best at this. I'm, I'm. famously good for improv. Yes, the classic bad improviser thing of I'm trying to write lines that I know will be funny. Yeah.

And I'm not trusting what I'm going to say. Living in the moment. And that is ultimately why after a couple of years, I stopped doing it. And I did stand up instead because stand up you can find. hone and and protect yourself from. But now, 20 years later, I actually, when I watch improvisers, you know, like all the folks on Dropout, for example, is an improv-based show, right? Like, God, they all trust themselves so much. They're not worried at all about what's going to happen because they've been working in that form for 20 years. And I'm like,

how do I get there? And for a while, I was like, how could I do some improv again? And actually a couple weeks ago, my friends Danny Jalice and Rachel Bloom put on a show where stand-up comedians did improv with improvisers and the improvisers had to do a little bit of stand-up too. But, you know, and the whole premise

was that we had never done improv before or had very rarely done it. You're not known for your improv school. Yeah. And literally at the beginning of the show, we went around and talked about what's our relationship with improv. I said, well, I stopped doing it because it made me very anxious. Yeah. And then we did, and I was like, okay, I'm just going to do it. And

there are a few moments where I jumped out and just entered a scene. I was like, I don't know what this is going to be, but I just started doing something and followed up on it. And it was like very healing and freeing. And I don't know if, you know, there's a way to keep that up, but like I had that experience, you know. Well, it's funny.

I think sometimes as artists and entertainers, we have this fantasy of like sneaking through the back door, right? Like, oh, you know, if I am a successful, real housewife, maybe I could get a part in a Broadway play. Or run for mayor. Right,

without having to like go through the usual steps that you would have to do that to do that. Like, oh yeah, wouldn't it be fun? Like, you know, I wrote a book of short stories

and I think that really benefited from having by the creator of BoJack Horseman on the front. Of course. Right? And, um, I, your story made you think of like,

you know, who's one of like the best improv actors out there is Paul F. Tonkins, who didn't come up through improv. Yeah, right? Like he, but he, he worked at it. Like, he found his own way in and he's one of the funniest extemporaneous thinkers there is. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's never too late. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. To find your way, you know, in without having to go through the traditional system. Especially because I thought, well, I haven't talked to Paul about this, but, you know, he did that late in life after he had like grinded on standup for a long time. And when you make that shift and you're like, okay, now I can work on something. thing in a new modality that I have less ego tied up in, you know. Well, that's, that's for me, one of the joys of writing my book was kind of what we're talking about is that I had no expectations for it because I'm like, I have my TV show.

This is just gravy. Yeah. Right. Like I wasn't worried. Is this going to be a bestseller? I never saw the numbers. Whatever money I got went right to my business manager. I don't even know.

Like, and I didn't have to know. And like, it's, it's so rare that we are afforded that opportunity. to create and not be connected to the results or you know hide up in knots over the results sometimes I think and maybe this is a good place to slowly bring it into a landing

I said to wave like a couple months ago I was like it would be interesting to try to write sketches again like it's been 20 years since I've written something as a comedy sketch I mean I guess I did a college humor but that have been in 2012, 13, so over 10 years ago. And that was like for a website that was like for YouTube. But if it was just, hey, just as sketches for the stage, right? For a small audience.

Put on a show. Put on a show. And I'm like, that would be interesting. I have trouble like imagining myself being able to do it somehow. How do you feel about that? We did the old English reunion show. It was like 10 years ago now. And we were both very busy.

So Ben and Wave did most of heavy lifting on that. And it was mostly old stuff, right? There was some new kind of like video things. And I think we probably had a new live intro. Yes. But it was mostly old stuff. And I think, yeah, I don't know how it would go about it. Like I don't know if I have those rhythms in me anymore.

Well, I remember one funny thing about that experience was we were doing something new for the reunion show. And Ben was kind of like, well, let's stay up all night working on this. And I was like, I don't do that anymore. Like, I'm going to go to bed. Yeah. Because I'm busy. And I need my sleep. But, but yeah, I mean, like, well, that's, I will say,

uh, one of the best things that happened to me for my career was having children. Mm-hmm. Because it, like, fundamentally shifted my priorities in a way that I think has not made my work worse, but has made my boundaries better of like, I go home now at the end of the day. and like I'm with my kids and I can't stay up all night writing this script. Like I got to take the kids to school in the morning. Right. Like it just,

it is it has created boundaries around my work life that I don't know if I would have been able to set for myself. Yeah. And I think it has been very benefit. And, you know, rewarding in a lot of other ways as well. But I'm saying professionally. Does it help you get stuff done? Because look, I don't have kids, but I do so much shit. I already feel like there's not enough time in the day.

One of my fears is, oh, I would, I would, I would. I would have to do less, right? But on the other hand, if my days are nothing but work, right, then I end up using them inefficiently or, you know, what's, you're on Wikipedia wormholes and things? Yeah, I mean, it's, the time blocking is not there, right? The on and off time. It forces me to be more efficient, make decisions faster.

Yeah. And then also, yeah, I do less. And that's okay too. But, but yeah, like, do you think you could write sketch comedy for the, for the stage again? Or would that be interesting? I don't know. I think it would be fun to perform on stage again.

Yeah. I don't know if I'd enjoy writing again. I don't, I like, how does a sketch? Because I think I would be really, I'd put all that pressure back on myself. Like this has to be groundbreaking and different. And like, you know, there's been 20 years of sketches since. And like, where is the sketch now as an art form?

And like how, like, what am I bringing to the table that necessitates me coming back to the stage to perform sketches? Yeah. Right? Like, I don't think I could just do like, Yeah, here's some fun, you know, observations about like different kinds of pizzas, you know, or whatever. That's not what sketch comedy is. No.

It's not observations about different kinds of pizzas. See, I don't even know. Sounds like stand up. Well, yeah, but in sketching. You ever go, you ever get a personal pan pizza? What's up with that? One of the things that I admire about Bob Odenkirk is that he is still very attached to sketch comedy as a form and still does it. He does it with his son.

And, you know, I don't, I think it's always for some bigger purpose. It's just like, hey, let's just. write some stuff and and a continued fascination with the format, you know, which, which I, I find that admirable, especially because in many ways it seems like the world that sort of moved on from sketch comedy. There's the S&L version. There's what people do on like Instagram. Right. There's sort of the YouTube version. There's a lot of groups that do it now that I admire. It feels like Comedy Central got out of the business. Yeah. And for a while, they were, you know, you had Amy Schumer, you had Key and P.O. Yeah. Like, you had people kind of like,

But it was a real like, I think one of the things I liked about stand-up comedy, sorry, sketch comedy, was that it as a format tried to break the, it was always trying to break new ground, you know, was always trying to do something like extra surprising, extra new. And I feel like it's good. Here are the rules and now we're going to kind of work around that. Yeah, exactly. Or we're going to, we're going to shatter them. And, um, but that's true.

I mean, like, you could do that in any form. Yeah, true. Yeah, I guess it was just part of the ethos of the people doing it at the time. Right. You know, if you think about Mr. Show and UCB, for example, those were both shows that were like specifically trying to like pull apart. Right. What sketch comedy was and reassemble it. And that was something a little bigger.

That was the thing we were influenced by, right? Yeah. But, uh, yeah. Should we knock out one more before we end this thing? Let's, okay, let's do one more. Um, I pick. Yeah. You know, um, one that I've been thinking about recent.

actually that would be fun to talk about is a sketch I wrote called the machine that turns food into poop. Great. And this is me doing a parody of a tech innovator at the time making a product that you don't really need, which is a machine that you put your food into

and poop comes out the other end. This is inspired by a real piece of art called Cloaca that an artist made. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, there's a real piece of art that I had read about called Cloaca where food goes in one side. They put in like full meals, and it's like a machine that simulates the human body.

Okay. And then poop comes out the other side. And people find this would be very unsettling work of art. And it's only been staged a couple times because it's kind of complex. But I was like, oh, wouldn't that be funny if that was a product and it sort of resembled tech products at the time? It takes all the inconvenience out of having to eat. Yes. Let's see a little clip of this.

Thanks to my invention, the machine that turns food into poop. It's simply the fastest, easiest way to turn food into poop ever designed. And we predict that within 10 years, it will become part of our daily lives. Here's a little taste of what we think the future will look like. Yes, I'll have the ravioli in treffle oil. And I'll have the pepper-crusted salmon. Very good.

Now, would you like to eat the food, or would you like to put it in a machine that turns food into poop? What's that? They just put the food in, and voila, out comes the poop. So I don't have to eat the food, but I still get to keep the poop. We'll have the machine, please. Excellent.

The machine that turns food into poop is a life-changing invention. It saves so much time. But, you know, sort of the core of the joke is that you don't actually need this done. Your body already does this. It doesn't make anything more efficient, right? Right. And in fact, eating... You still do need to eat.

Yes. And what has been pointed out to me since, I think one person said this to me after a show. That's what AI is. AI is the machine that turns food into food. the poop. Yeah, I find this sketch, which I got to be honest, was never one of my favorites at the time. Oh, okay. As really

the relevance of it keeps coming back to me. And I'm not a big scatological guy. Like generally, like... Oh, you don't like the poop. I don't like the poop after that. Yeah, you don't like poop. And I've, again, since having kids, I've grown much more comfortable with it. I'm like, oh, it's everywhere. Like, it's no longer like a private thing that happens in a

discrete place. It's like, yeah, it was poop, you touch it, you clean it, whatever. Yeah, yeah. on the walls. Like it doesn't phase me the way, you know, imagining it is not so scandalous. But, but, you know, um, really early in my, in my young children's lives,

I think I texted you that like, sometimes I think of my babies as the machine that turns food into poop. Oh, right. Food goes in, poop goes out and just kind of like, you got to change it. You got to, you know, swaddle it and cradle it and just kind of maintaining this machine that turns food into poop. But I also think, you know, more conceptually about it.

You know, we're talking about, you know, what is the role of art for us? And I, I, in our lives, and I think the flip side of the question is, what is the role of our lives in our art? And, you know, sometimes I worry

that I am a machine that turns food into poop, meaning that I take stuff in and my, the app in my brain is going, What's funny about this dynamic? What's interesting about this dynamic? Can I use this for something?

Can one of my characters be like this? Like, I'll be in therapy and my therapist will be trying to explain something to me, but I'm distracted because I'm going, wouldn't it be interesting if a character had a thing like this? And how would I describe that? Or what would the relationship be, right? And that is a very hard thing to get out of the habit of. And I think I've built some walls that I'm proud of.

But I'm curious what you think about that, about mining your own, because it's standup, you do it a lot, right? mind of your own personal life and sometimes telling stories that maybe you are not authorized to tell except we're all authorized to tell any story in a way, right, but incorporating other people or thinking about how other people might react to it or feeling like what is your responsibility to those people? Yeah, I mean, you kind of have to do both. So I had an interesting experience with this where, you know, right after Lisa and I broke up two years ago, I, you know,

fucked off out of L.A., went to New York for a couple months. And, I like, a month. And I just sort of went back to doing stand-up the way I had done it when I got started, which is just going in, like being in basements, you know, doing stand-up for like, you know, 10 people or less. And I just talked about what literally was happening to me at that moment and what I found funny about it, right? And for the first time in like really, maybe ever, I felt like I wasn't really trying to get much out of it because I was just processing. Right, right. It was like, this is the tool that I use to process, you know, know, my experiences, right? This is just the medium in which I work. And, you know, I'm expressing

myself or I'm using it to chew it up and spit it out, right? To feel the feelings or whatever. And then I hit the road to do some, you know, some tour date. It says, well, I'll just do that material, you know, and just sort of do it in this looser way. And the hour that came out of that is the editing it right now. It'll come out later this year. I'm much happier with it than any my previous stand-up because I did eventually have to like tighten it up and figure out how to make this a show, but it just sort of, it just sort of came out of me in a more natural way. And then I looked at all the pieces that came out and I said, okay, what are these adding up to? What is the story that's coming out of them? What am I learning about myself from it? You know, there's a phrase that

I have heard somewhere that I try to keep in mind that creatively you can be an architect or you can be a gardener. You can plan everything for the top down and try to get it all right the first time. Or you can just be like, let's just see what grows. Let's see what develops, right? And it was much more of a gardening experience. Is that true? Is that a metaphor for creativity or for life generally or both? For doing creative work, at least that's how I took it. Yeah, for when you're building something. And, you know, yes, I taped it. I'm going to release it. I made money from people buying the tickets, right, but working on that show was really just me doing, I do stand up comedy, this is what it is.

I talk about my life through it, right? I'm going to do that for a couple years. I'm going to tape it, you know, and I'm going to put it out there. I spent my own money taping at this time. I didn't like try to sell it to a network beforehand. And so it felt like, even though, sure, it's part of my work product as an artist, it wasn't like me. How do I turn this into a thing I'm going to sell?

You know, it was just like, I'm going to make the art out. of it and then it'll be what it is, right? And maybe I'll have lost money on it or whatever, but at least I got it out there. And people connect to it and they come up to me and they're, oh, hey, I relate to that experience or whatever. And so it still had to have. I've been relating to your experiences since the old English days. They have. Ever since I took an orange out of my mouth. There's a, there's a, I know you said we're ramping up here and this, that would be a great place to stop, but I do have some more points. We're winding down. That was that what you said, winding down. Just to put a pin in that. It was like,

like, so yes, I had to turn it into poop a lot, right? I had to like make it the, the piece of commercial art to a certain extent. But because the beginning was so much more organic and just like, let me just do what, what is happening. Right, right. It was a much better mix.

We're ramping up to a hard stop, I think, is the metaphor that I'm going for. Okay, so you want to crash into a wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. You know, there's a documentary about Nora Ephron. Everything is copy, which is based on, on a thing she got from her parents

who were ad people that everything is copy like you can use everything for copy right everything is fair game right and that ethos kind of defined a lot of her work and and the central tension of the documentary is except for one thing which is when she had cancer

and was dying and she told almost nobody right so this is a woman who lived her life by like here's all my stuff and that like you know arguably the biggest thing that happened to her she told almost no one and made no art out of it. And isn't, isn't that interesting?

What, what's going on there? And I think about, you know, kind of what we were talking about earlier, um, about letting some things be just for you. Right?

And not feeling the need or the, the temptation to, to use that and make it productive because you're using it. Right? To allow yourself to feel a feeling. and go, maybe I'll tell my friends about that, or maybe it was, you know, right, to kind of get out of the mindset of like,

I don't like mushrooms because I can't articulate what I'm feeling. I try to embrace the idea of like, let me just feel some things and not have to put them in the library of my emotions so that I can like refer to them later and use them. Yeah. And it's a challenge for me. To just feel the feelings. Yeah.

Or like I remember Kate Spencer, I don't know if you know Kate Spencer. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I remember years he needs. years ago, she wrote this blog post about how I need to take a break from the internet, because I'm, it's, as I think very relatable to most people, it's frying my brain. It's ruining my life. She probably wrote this in like 2010 or something. Yes, right? And she has this funniest side in the

blog post that my first instinct was to turn this into a blogging project of like, what if I was off the internet for 30 days? And I could like, write about that. And then she's like, no, no, no, shut that down. That's not what I'm doing here. And I feel like I do. I do. I do. have that impulse sometimes like how can I projectify this or how can I use this? Yeah. And I want to allow myself to just be more. I think the shift that happened for me with the act with the with this hour was I was not doing that. I wasn't like how do I projectify this breakup or this time in my life. But what I was allowing myself to do was to as an artist be the lens that the experience would pass through. Right, right. So I'm going to do the thing that I do.

where I experience the thing and then I have some thoughts about it and I say it to an audience and sort of comes through me to them, but that that's not immediately going to try to be commodified. I'm not trying to think about that in a career sense. I'm just like going to do the thing I do on it as this is why I'm here on earth, right, is to have these experiences that have words come out of my mouth that delight me a little bit, maybe delight other people, and then I'll move on. I'll have other experiences later. And I think the fact that I felt that way about it,

rather than, you know, how do I sell it to Paramount or whatever is, is what made it feel more honest to me and took the pressure off of it, right? Because like, nobody can say that that's good or bad, you know? And eventually there were times I had to wrestle with the anxiety of like, oh, does this punchline really work, et cetera? Towards the end, I enjoyed it less as I was tightening it up. But, you know, that's what made it feel like a pure, a purer experience. Now, whether or not I'd want to, you know, keep something entirely for myself and not even do that to it is a different question.

Oh, I remember the comparison I wanted to make. Yeah. The thing I like about photography, or at least the way that I think about it is I like the idea of, you know, I'm just an eye roaming the world, you know, seeing things. And occasionally my eye is in a particular spot and I see something. And it makes me go, oh, that thing looks cool or interesting. or there's some thought I have about it. And I liked the idea of just like, oh, I could just capture it and show it to someone else

and like show them my eye, right? Show them my lens. And just- It's like, look at this funny sign. Like that kind of thing? Yeah. You just showed someone like, look at this. Look at that cute dog.

Yeah, yeah. Like the mouse is eating the pizza. There's just a purity of that experience, right? And that's not the only thing photography can do. Look, it's like I'm squishing his head. And I saw someone and you know what? It looked like they were holding up the Tower of Pisa. Yeah, yeah.

You can't, that's the kind of thing we would try to do in our comedy. Yeah. Is that kind of like, but he's the meta. But he's not holding up the Tower of Pisa. Yeah. But just that, artists do a lot of things. That's one of the things that they do is I saw this thing. I had this thought.

I felt this feeling. Here it is, you know. And I was able to do that a little bit more with stand-up comedy. in that time of my life. And I don't know, maybe that makes some sense to you. Maybe it doesn't. So I guess with a pin in all this, what you're saying is that we are all on some level machines that turn food into poop.

I guess so. Is that the hard stop you want to end it? I think so. I don't know what else we got. All right. This is good a place as anything. Well, I'm so grateful to have you. You should just come on like once a year.

I would love to. Can I hard plug the show? show though because I feel like we're being very very delicate about it it is FYC time baby yeah it's a show called long story short if you enjoyed this conversation if you found it philosophical interesting emotional funny any of those things I think you will also like my show long story short yeah that's the pitch I don't want to I don't want to go into too much detail more than what we already described but it's on Netflix now season one long story short it's a gorgeous show it's really good so it's really good it's beautiful yeah and you know I have high standards yeah

I wouldn't just be saying that if I didn't really think that. It is really a wonderful show. And people should check it out. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Well, thank you once again to Raphael for coming on the show. Again, check out his show, long story short on Netflix. It's an incredible show, funny, heartfelt.

If you're an Emmy voter, please vote for it. It is FYC season for those of you who give a shit about that kind of thing. If you want to support the show, my show, that is. If you want to support his show, go watch it on Netflix. If you want to support my show, please support us on Patreon. $5 a month, get to every episode of the show, ad free for $15 a month. I'll read your name in the credits this week. I want to thank John McAvey, Quinn M. Enochs, Patrick Ryan, Shannon J. Lane,

Matt Clausen, Joseph Ginsburg, and Nicholas Raderman, that URL, patreon.com, slash Adam Conover. We'd love to have you there. And I want to thank my producers, Sam Radman and Tony Wilson, my engineer, Sam Rogich. Everybody here at Headgun for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. and we'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hello, I'm Johnny Knoxville.

And I'm Jeff Tremaine. Welcome to Jackass the Podcast, a new show coming to Fri-Ch. Coming to F***. That's what it is. Hello, I'm Johnny Knoxville. And I'm Jeff Tremaine. Welcome to Jackass the Podcast.

A new show now on HeadGum. Woo-hoo. I've learned a Jackass movie has to be really 90 minutes. Every minute over it. apparently there's only so much butthole you can take. We're going to take you behind the scenes of our entire history. All the best bits, bad behavior, and even worse decisions.

All of it. Sometimes we don't make the right decisions, Jeff. I've noticed that every so often. With guests like Spike Jones. I think this committed jackass the podcast. What was it going to be called? The Jackass podcast. The Jackass podcast.

Without you, the IQ drops significantly. Steve-o. There's a strong chance that we're not for jackass that I would be in cloud makeup right this fucking minute. Chris Pontius. That shot of your butt just cruising up. I'm like, I got that on TV. God bless us.

Dave England. Yeah, when you come in and you're being really nice, I'm like, damn it, something bad's going to happen to me. Wee man. Jeff grabbed me from the back of the head and threw a punch. The whole bar just stopped and wanted to kill me. and some of the crew that's been with us from the beginning. I had to share a room with this guy.

I left a nice surprise in the toilet form. Every time. Apparently, he hates to flush. Subscribe to Jackass the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Pocketcast, or wherever the hell you get podcasts. Our new episodes drop on June 18th. Woo! Look out for new episodes in your feed every Thursday.

Watch video episodes on YouTube and follow along with us on Instagram and TikTok. at Jackass the podcast. What were we just talking about? Probably buttholes. Hi, I am Mandy Moore. Sterling K. Brown. And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast.

That was us now on Headgum. Each episode, we're going to go into a deep dive. Yeah. From our show, This Is Us. That's right. We're going to go episode by episode. We're also going to pepper in episodes with different guest stars and writers and writers and casting directors.

Yeah. Are we going to cry? Yes. A little bit. Often? A lot. A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man.

Listen to that was us on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify. New episodes every Tuesday.