Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - EMMY NOMINEE: Seth Meyers

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

It’s been 10 years since Seth Meyers took the Late Night baton from his friend Jimmy Fallon, carrying on a legendary legacy started by David Letterman in 1982. Before taking over behind that desk, Meyers spent over a decade at Saturday Night Live, first as a cast member, then as Head Writer and host of “Weekend Update.” Willie Geist gets together with the television host and comedian to talk about applying those writing skills to a children’s book inspired by his three kids, and more. (Original broadcast date March 20, 2022) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks, as always, for clicking and listening along. I am very happy to bring you this week. My conversation with the always hilarious, the always charming, my buddy, Seth Myers, host of Late Night with Seth Myers for eight years now. Did you know that? Eight years. He took over for Jimmy Fallon, who took over for Conan O'Brien,

who took over for David Letterman. It's a pretty impressive chain of comedians, and he's putting his own stamp on it. doing segments like a closer look, which can be 10, 12, 14 minutes, rendering the day's news with jokes, not an easy lift. And a more recent ad called Corrections, something that goes up on YouTube. He shoots it every week. It's become very popular where he just sits and basically reads through mostly hateful, some flattering, but mostly hateful comments on YouTube about him, about his show, on Twitter.

He keeps a running tally all week and answers the criticism point by point. If you haven't seen it, it's great. He talks about doing the show during the pandemic up in the attic of his house, which is really his kids' playroom, kind of living the way we all were living, trying to work in the middle of family, in a slightly claustrophobic house or apartment, perhaps. But he did find time to write a new children's book. It is called, I'm Not Scared, You're Scared, which he wrote for and with his three very young children. One so young probably didn't contribute Addie, who was born just last fall. he's got two boys. They are mentioned in the book. They are thanked in the book. And he says central to the making of the book. So that explains why Seth and I are doing this interview at the children's section of the New York Public Library. Very cool to be in the New York Public Library. It's open for business. If you're in New York, it's beautiful, it's cool. All the branches are great. We found ourselves on 53rd Street down in the children's section. So it was a little bit like back to school night, whereas two 40-something men, sitting on smallest chairs surrounded by children's books.

Always a great time with Seth Myers right now on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Seth, good to see you. It's great to see you. Thanks for having me. It's great to see you outside the COVID testing line. That's where we usually meet. Yeah. And we do a little, we do the gentleman pull down.

You know, after we test. After we test. Of course. And it's like, hello, sir. Yeah. Quick catch up. And so now here we are. Yep.

And we're in a children's library. Here we are. Who would have thunk? Yep. We have permission. I want to stress. We didn't bust in. It's not as creepy as it may appear.

You, my friend. You saw in the children's library. No kids. Geist and Myers. I know they have kids, but they weren't with them. They were just hanging out. No children. They came in like after hours a little bit too.

And like the guards knew them. You get the sense it's a, I don't know. Anyway, keep it to yourself. It was just a wave and they let us right in. We actually are here because. because you are a children's book author. Congratulations. Thank you very much.

I mean, it's obvious why you've written a children's book. You have three adorable children. I have three kids. What made you want to sit down and enter the fray? As a kid, I loved children's book. And then there was a long gap where I didn't think about them at all. It didn't even occur to me to pick up a children's book. And then, yeah, you have them and you start reading them.

And it's maybe my favorite of the faces my children make. My favorite is when they're listening and focused on a story. when they're engaged. And not just because they're quiet for half a second. But when my kids do that, it makes me really happy. And also, you realize there are very good children's books, and then there are ones that are less good. And I thought I could aim for the top 30%.

If I just somehow, I don't think I'm, you know, the first time out, but I did want to tell a story that had a beginning, middle, and end, and hopefully we engage kids, and hopefully be about something that maybe parents wanted to talk their kids about. As someone who's been through a lot of children's books, you most certainly are in the top 30%. Thank you. I'm going to put you squarely in there. It's a little late to get that quote on the back cover, but maybe for the next one. This isn't the top quartile of books I read. Yes. We did it. For the paperback. Great. So let's talk about the story. I'm not scared. You're scared. Was this born of an experience with your kids or something else that you wanted to say?

It was written during the pandemic, but it was not in any way to shape or form inspired by the pandemic. It was mostly just you have kids. And as a parent, you start feeling. fear in a way you did not think it was capable. And you're surrounded by these human beings that are slowly finding the things they're afraid of. And you're watching both how they process their fear and how you as a parent try to help them through those fears. And also as a parent, how there are things you're so happy your kids are afraid of. Like crawling up on a thing that's too high. Or, you know, they don't want to run into traffic because they are scared of what might happen. So it was kind of a book where the two different characters had different ideas about whether or not they should be afraid of things and how sometimes one is right and sometimes the other is.

So clearly you have some people to review this book in your house, your wife and your children. What were the early reviews of this when you gave it to them? I started by telling them the story is a bedtime story as I was working through it even before I sat down to write it. And there were a few times where the older one said, that's too scary. And no part of this book wanted, it's about fear, but I didn't want anyone to be too scared to be. read it. So we pulled back on a lot of that. And then he wanted a producer credit. And I said, we don't have those for books. That's not even a thing. And he's like, I'm pretty sure. And then his agent, and then we're just going, there's it back and forth right now. I'm not legally allowed

to talk about it right now. They do. I dedicated the book to my three kids. And they, when they show it to people, they immediately flip to that page. Because they do think they think it's, like they also worked on it. Right. Yeah. Right. But yeah, so it was fun to read it to them. And then as I show them pictures, I think they, and again, I should stress, when you write a book, when you only do the writing, it's amazing that they pair you with an artist who does all the hard work. And Rob Sayah Jr., you know, when he was sending me the art, it was both a thrill for me to see it and it was a thrill to show it to the boys.

Yeah, that's so obviously, I was telling my wife writes these books, too. It's such a companion piece because you can write a story, but you don't know what it's going to look like, which is arguably as important. So how did you find the artist, and what did you think when you saw the early sketches? My editor Margaret had said when you turn in the manuscript, and that's her words. I don't want people to think that I say manuscript about my kid's book. She said, when we get your manuscript, I will give you a choice of artists that I think might pair up really well. And then she read the first draft and said, I actually think it's really just this one person.

Rob is so perfect. And I looked at some of this stuff and I agreed. And so it's been an amazing process with him. So what's it like to actually, you had the vision, you had an idea of what it might look like to see this thing right now. It's going to be on a shelf. It's on a shelf in this library. What's that like for you? You know, we've got some copies out to friends who have kids,

and I am almost embarrassed how happy it makes me when they tell me their kids like it. If they say the kid wants to read it twice, that is really high praise. And so it's fun. It's fun to know that it's going to be in stores, and people are going to be able to buy it. The other thing about kids, terrible liars. You know what I mean? So when they tell you they like it, I think it's true. No question.

If it's bad, they let you know like that. Yes. I should know. this is based on the fact that my kids have been with this book for a very long time, over a year and a half as far as this story. And when the book came, they were really excited. And they've read it a bunch. But the other night in front of me, and this just speaks to how they're bad liars. The three-year-old said to the five-year-old, should we read Daddy's book? And the five-year-old went, um, and I just said, don't be polite. Don't fake politeness with me. Like, um, should we read? I feel like, let's take a, let's take a break.

Don't patronize me. Yeah, I'll just, if you don't want to read it, that's fine. In fairness, they've been through it a few times. They've read it a bunch of times. The book holds up. So the kids, as you say, are brutal critics, but so can parents be reading children's books. We were discussing a little bit early. We've been through a lot of them. Some are great.

Some aren't so great. Did you feel like there was a specific area of need in the children's book lane? Or was this just like an idea you had? I'm going to write it in my voice. I think there's nothing missing in the world of children's book. It was more aiming for the kind of book that I liked. that there was a story that was engaging. There were parts for a parent to play,

if you're the kind of parent who likes to do voices. My kids don't like it when I do voices. Really? They don't like, it takes them out of it, I think. So, and I also wanted it to be one of those books that hopefully if your kids love it, it won't drive you crazy if you have to read it 10 plus times. Right, right.

Because there's that kind of book, which is genuinely great for a kid, And then as a parent, you want to pull your hair out when you're reading it for the 10th time. So hopefully it avoided any of those sort of irritating pitfalls. Hey, guys, thanks for listening to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Stick around to hear more from Seth Myers right after the break. Welcome back. Now more of my conversation with Seth Myers.

So we're talking about your audience, your kids at home. You have a new member of the audience. We do. Congratulations. Thank you very much. How was it with three versus two? It's not. Not that bad because she's a beautiful, full of light lump.

She's not going anywhere. Right. And she's sleeping. So if you have a baby that sleeps, you realize that's kind of the least of your worries because she can't move around. So if you put her somewhere safe, you're sort of good to go. But we realize, you know, the... I also think, you know, we have this little girl and we have these two boys, and she's very watchful and very thoughtful. And I think part of it is her saying, you know what?

You guys got a lot going on. You take care of them, and then maybe in time for my bat mitzvah, I'll be a holy terror. But you know, just brace yourself for that. It is sort of like the calm before the storm. Yes. She's mobile. And I think we forgot because when you have your first, again, having a baby is the scariest thing that's ever happened to you. And so because she was our third, that we were like, oh, yeah, we got this.

And we forget that she's going to grow into a person with her own ideas about things. Was she born? This is an important question for you. Yeah. In a medical setting. She, well, it's an interesting question. We had a homebirth, so I mean, hopefully you count that. But she wasn't born in a hospital.

She was born in a bathtub as planned. Right, that's what I meant. Yeah. I mean, is it a comedian, it's a little disappointing that more didn't go wrong? But it did, I mean, I'm happy for her. I'm happy for the mother. Guess there won't be a second Netflix special off this. Yeah, no, they don't.

Nobody's going to watch a special called Planned Homebirth. Skip. No, but it's great. I've been saying to people, you know, I would never have gone for this if it was our first. It just would have been too scared about the idea of having a baby at home.

But we had great people with us, and because of having it at home, like, it was way more miracle than medical. And she was born at a perfect time, like, you know, 11 o'clock at night. She slept between my wife and I in bed. Oh, man. And the boys woke up in the morning,

and it was better than Christmas. to say, you guys aren't going to believe this. You've got to go check out mom's room. And so everything about it was great. And while you're so happy with the first kid to have people checking in on you every two hours, this time you just kind of didn't need to. You could hear her. She was fine.

And it was great. And you have instinct now. You know what to do, right? My wife would ask that she's allowed to respond to that. If I said on national television, I have really good instincts when it comes to being a parent. I never have to ask follow-up questions. to a spouse about how this works or where this goes. If you say that here, she'll change the locks on you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, not a good idea. No, no. And the boys are good with her? They're happy. The boys are great. Most of her life is a brother this close to her face, just looking at her, talking to her, and they are, again, they don't know what's coming either

because she's not taking or ruining or breaking or wrecking anything. But they are very much in love. My oldest did say that he really wanted a baby sister. So much in the way he takes credit for my book, he will also tell people, yeah, this was my idea. So I probably shouldn't complain, considering he's trying to take credit for a baby that my wife delivered. In my family, we have a lot of all-boy situations. Yeah. And there's always, I don't know if it's relief or some feeling of, okay, we've got some more female energy in the house.

Yes. Was there some of that? It does feel like it's just going to add another dimension to the whole thing. and I'm fascinated too because I grew up, I only had a brother, and then I only had boys, and now I have this new thing. And I just can't imagine it's not going to be anything other than this gigantic gift. Where sort of late in life you realize what it's like to grow up with a girl in the house. Yeah, it's great.

I have a daughter. Yeah. You're going to love it. She's older, right? She's 14. Gotcha. She just went to her first high school dance. Wow.

It goes from infant to first high school dance real quick. Yeah, well, for us it is because she's going to one this weekend. she really? So literally for us was that fast. I mean the guy's really nice. So I mean, he was very asked. Just doing that. I'm very polite. Rented a limo, the whole thing.

Yeah. But the thing is, like, I don't know if you've ever tried to put a car seat in a limo? They're not built for it. So you've got the book, you've got the new baby. Yep. And you just celebrated eight years of late night. Congratulations. Thank you.

I remember when you started 2014 and you had the stand-up monologue and your suit and the whole thing. And just to watch the evolution of it. Yeah. We were talking before, I feel like just watching even last night of the casual nature that allows you to sort of react to a moment. If it doesn't go well, it's almost funnier. Like there's just, you've opened, you're part of it's the pandemic, but you've opened up and pulled back the curtains so much. Yeah.

And people trust you to do that. I think it's, you know, talking about how you can find the joy in mistakes. for things that don't go well. I think when you started the show or when I started the show, I saw the audience every night is the thing you had to conquer or win over.

And now, and again, it's not just a journey I was on, but the audience as well. They got to know me, they know my taste. They know at which level they can trust us to deliver a show. And so when things go wrong,

we're all in it together. I don't feel like I've let them down or, you know, this isn't... I don't feel like anyone's going to stand up and say, They enjoy being part of the very authentic process of making a TV show. So it's great. And I think it was all sped up to some degree.

Obviously, by the pandemic, the show probably changed a great deal through the first six years and probably changed just as much in the last two years based on everything we went through. But having been able to speed it up and take more creative risks based on the fact that we obviously did it for so long with no audience has been. than, you know, worst possible reason, but a lot of it was fairly exhilarating. You've talked about this before, but I think when you started it was like, okay, this is what a late night show is.

I come out in my suit, and I do my mom along, and I go sit down, I talk to a guest. And at some point, you're like, this isn't what I'm good at. Yeah, nor do you realize the audience never reviews it that way. They never say, you know, I was very impressed.

He walked right to the desk. Every time the guest came out, he shook their hand, he got them in the chair, all the things I was focusing on nobody cares about. So it did, with that said, I think if I had started right away doing the show I'm doing today, if I'd come out in jeans and a flannel, and was this sort of loose with everything,

people would have thought I maybe wasn't treating it with the proper amount of respect. So that's what I mean is you have to, you know, you do kind of put on a few layers of base coat before you can build a show like this, but it's been nice to have the time, have the patience, to get to the place where we're doing the favorite. my favorite version of the show we've done. And I mean, you get to flex your weekend update and your writing muscles with a closer look. Yeah.

Which is, that's a big lift. I mean, if you watch 12, 14 minutes of like process and synthesize what happened in the news and distill it to something funny, I don't think people fully appreciate to do that on a nightly basis. It is. It's a lot. It's a lot. I mean, the fact that we do it on a nightly basis makes us better at it. You know, like the reps have been so important.

And because it's a lot. it's 12 to 14 minutes, we also, it takes up a huge chunk of the real estate in our show, and we know that every day. So at least we're not running around trying to find a three-minute bit for here or a six-minute bit for here. And knowing our energies are going to go into that, at least makes you eager to get to the office, get working on it. It is a big lift, but I think it's one we really enjoy doing. And we feel like we're getting better at the longer. How has the transition been from the Trump years where you really could be bored in every night And that too, obviously there's no shortage of news, but it's an entirely different political climate.

Well, obviously, it's strange because you never hear from Trump. And we thought he maybe would still do stuff. Just very quiet, quiet retirement. Yeah. I hear he's working on a series of novels, actually. They're like fantasy novels. But, uh, so the thing, the biggest difference is, at no point, I feel like, does news break anymore between when we tape and when the show airs?

You know, we do the show. And during the pandemic, we actually moved up our taping time a little bit earlier at a necessity. But we're taping that at 4 in the afternoon. And now certainly sometimes world events will happen. And I think our audience is aware that, you know, we have this actual logistic region. We can't cover it. But it used to be that stuff would – it would have been crazy, I think, during that past administration to say, let's do the show at four, because I think too many people would say,

okay, but just so you know, at 415, this is going to happen at 445, there's this tweet at 515. You know, there's a, and so it's been, I think, and I, you know, it's not like we're living through easy times, but at least there's not this sort of self-inflicted noise coming from leadership. So when you come in, just so you're understanding your process, because it is a big, it's a lot to go through. Yeah. So you come in, you meet with your writers, and you have to figure out what.

So it's, every morning I wake up, I know we're not supposed to talk about this. You and I come here. We have an hour conversation in the room, no kids. Yeah. Then I go to the office. And basically there's Sal Debt-Teal who writes closer look, head writer for that. He'll have a draft of a closer look. And a lot of it is adding in jokes, adding in bits, finding things we should take out,

you know, because maybe there's something else that's breaking later in the day that is coming in. And, you know, they obviously don't want to go too long. And then we just have a very short conversation about the guests on the show. I don't like to over-prepare for my interviews. They're not, you know, it's seven, eight, nine minutes. It's not something like this. It's not a podcast. You have a very short amount of time with interesting people.

And I feel like if you can ask the right questions and be a good listener, it goes really fast. And it's better to be loose and sort of agile with it than drill down as to what you want to accomplish. And then the show, which is the most fun hour of my day. Was there ever temptation to sort of like, do you look around at the other late night shows and they're playing games and they're doing wacky stuff and they're playing beer pong and all that stuff? At the beginning, was there some sense of like, oh, I'm like late night? I got to be doing that kind of stuff or was it like I need to be true to what I am? I think I knew that I'd be bad at it and it would look like somebody doing the thing that maybe they were 10th or 11th at. I should say as when I'm a guest on those shows, they are joyous to do as a guest. It's so fun because you, I think any nerves you have about being a guest on talk show go away. And I think for us,

we try to make those go away by letting people know, hey, it's just going to be a conversation. You're nothing to worry about. But, you know, I think when you have a show like this, you try very hard not to be the second or third best at something that your competition, not that I consider them, I consider them more colleagues than competition, but, you know, you try not to be a cheap copy of any of them. Yeah. Well, you found your own lane. I hopefully people think we found her online as the most flanneled the currently most flannel

man in late night You mentioned the attic Those shows How hard were those shows where Because we'd play clips on Morning Joe We'd come in Yeah You'd tell a really good joke

To silence Oh yeah Because you were up in the playroom In the attic How as a performer As a guy who's used to that Affirmation from the audience What was that like?

It was so surreal The worst part though Was just having to also deal with the technical specs of putting on a show. You know, I was filming myself on an iPad. I was doing my own sound, my own lights, my own makeup. I had a teleprompter app that was scrolling along the side of the iPad. It was just awful. So to some degree, the actual performing of the show, while surreal, was a relief. Just to say jokes out loud, even though there was no audience. And there was this

space to be honest about how crazy you were going, because, like no other time in my life, you had this firm belief that the audience was going through the same thing, that you were doing a show at home while your kids were downstairs and you were losing your mind and you didn't know when anything was going to go back to normal. And the people who you were watching you were watching you were going through the exact same thing. So that gave you a freedom to worry less about the instantaneous reaction, knowing that there was a grander reaction out there that you could probably predict. I remember the first interview at home like this I did was Ben Stiller with these guys and like no makeup, no nothing.

And I watched it back. I was like, oh, I need makeup and all the things that make a TV show what it is. This is not a good look. So we all had to learn that stuff. Well, I did, the heartbreaking thing that happened to me is I went to the YouTube comments after a week of doing shows at home.

And everybody said this show, like, just looks terrible. Like, the way it looks is so terrible. I can't believe it's on network television. So then I got an HD camera because I was using my iPad and I used the HD camera. And I did one show with the HD camera, and I looked, and everybody on YouTube said, you look terrible.

Because, you just, because, again, it's like, I had, like, lights I'd bought, you know, Amazon lights, makeup that I was putting on while, you know, my makeup person in New York was, you know, was, like, through an iPhone, and I'm like, is, good? And she's like, I don't know, it's hard to tell. You got a pretty smudgy lens.

We were all living through it. Yeah, but we were all living through it. Yeah. Well, the YouTube comments brings us to corrections, which is another great recent ad. Yeah, corrections very much born in the pandemic. Well, it's also like, to me, it's like the next step from what we were talking about, the looseness of the show. Yeah. And it looks to me like just you and your element.

Like if someone knew Seth Myers, is that you? Yes. Yeah. My friends have said it is so funny that you've had a show for eight years, and now I watch the thing that is the purest version of you. that's on TV, even though it's only on YouTube. But that was, truly, it's just for people who haven't seen it, you just sit and read through the comments. You accept some of the criticism, but mostly don't.

I'll accept if I got a word wrong. Like, I'll accept if I didn't know that defenestration means to throw somebody out a window. That's a very helpful thing I learned from a YouTube commenter. I call them jackals, which I think they've taken to the name. It was born out of making, I think the thing that tipped me over the edge is I said, said Legos. And there is a brand of person in the world, a bad kind of person who says, it's actually Lego bricks. You don't say Legos. So these bad people sort of flooded my tour of me. And every time I tried to correct it, I would, without malice or plan, I would make some

other mistake that they would call out, which is what you realize, like, I think I said Lego blocks, for example. They're like, dude, I'm closer, though. Can we just, men efforts being made? And so there was something deeply funny to me about that if you actually responded to every criticism you've got on YouTube, that it would be this never ending. It would never end. Right. At no point is the internet going to say, you know what? We're good. And so much of Corrections now has become this looping back over things I've screwed up a million times.

And it also, what I love so much about it, is it is performative. They are now, the people who are engaging with corrections, they're performing as people who are angry about mistakes. I'm performing as someone who is frustrated about mistakes. And the best part is I just write, I spend the whole week writing down things that people have told me I've gotten wrong and building what amounts to a 15-minute stand-up sketch. It's like a 15-minute stand-up act about my week's show.

And the only week clear the audience out, so it's just the crew. And it is, I really look forward to it. The other thing you'll learn maybe you have already, It's not Legos, if you say it's Lego is the plural. They'll get on you for that too. I've had that. They're like, if you want to pluralize, you have to say Lego bricks. Yeah, which I reject out of hand.

Yeah. You just, because ultimately, you know, the idea of like, I want to say, so in your world, you walk in and you say two children, clean up these Lego. Get out of town, my man. Get out of town. That's a liar. Just what are you talking about? I loved your line. the end of last week when you said,

people were saying they watch this, but they hate it. And you're like, there's a lot of other stuff on YouTube. Your line was, do you just walk into the grocery store and take the first thing you see? Yeah.

You went to a place that has more choice than anything. I mean, it's not like the old days of TV. There's three channels. There's nothing to watch. There's an endless supply of things to watch on YouTube, and yet people are watching it. And saying things like, this is too long.

You don't get course credit for finishing. it. Just stop watching it. Oh, it's so good. It's so much fun. Stick around to hear more of my conversation with Seth Myers right after a quick break. Welcome back. Now the rest of my conversation with Seth Myers. I mentioned your Netflix special, which was a huge hit. And I think to some people who, like, didn't know about your stand-up chops were like, wow. Yeah. Is that something you're going to be doing more of? You know, the only, the only, the, The only thing in the way, I would say, is just how when you have a show and you have three kids, it's hard to find the time to actually get something refined to the place you want to do it again.

But I did start going out last summer again, and it was super excited to get back on stage. I mean, obviously, every time I go on stage, I'm a little disappointed about how boring Addie's birth was. But, you know, I've got to move on. Maybe you can fudge it, add some detail. I don't know. I think. I think that's fine. That's for her to work out in therapy 30 years from now.

And then my dad will just, like, make up the story. You should let her know as soon as she can understand it, how disappointing her birth was. Well, I think my son, my oldest son is now jealous of Lobby Baby. Because when we're in the park, people will say, so that's Lobby Baby? And my oldest one says, I'm a hospital baby. And everybody's like, okay. Nobody cares. like the most common kind of baby.

Do you let him say, but I was almost born in an Uber? At that point, the people have usually walked away. They've had enough. They're so bored by the hospital baby. Well, congrats on everything, man. It's always so good to talk to you. This was a delight. This is so much fun.

You want to hear an embarrassing thing about my kids? Yeah, yeah, yeah. My three-year-old asked if the bear and the rabbit were there when I took the picture. Oh. Yeah. Well, three. That's okay. Yeah. I don't know. Is it?

I was trying to be generous. Feels like something a two-year-old would say. Congrats, thanks. I see you. My big thanks again to Seth for a great conversation for spending some time with me in the children's section of the great New York Public Library.

Next time, maybe we'll bring our kids. You can find Seth's new book. I'm not scared. You're scared. In stores or online now, wherever you get your books. My big thanks, as always, to all of you for listening.

If you want to hear more of these conversations with my guests every week. Be sure to click follow so you never miss an episode. And don't forget to tune in to Sunday today every weekend on NBC. I'm Willie Geist. We'll see you right back here next week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast.