The Three Questions with Andy Richter - Max Brooks

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

Author Max Brooks talks with Andy Richter about exploring social collapse (through zombies), finding himself outside the shadow of his father Mel Brooks, and putting his Bigfoot fascination to the page with his latest novel Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre.

thank you for tuning into the three questions uh again i hope this is again and if it's uh your first time you're in for a good one because uh my guest today is Max Brooks, is the author of all that crazy zombie shit. Yeah, that's how I refer to it. So, well said. Yeah, but you're a writer. You worked on SNL for a while, and now you pretty much just write books, right? Yeah, I'm pretty much a novelist. I divide my time between writing books and my two think tanks that I'm a non-resident fellow at.

Which are? I don't know anybody in a think tank. Oh, God. Yeah. Well, the first one is a civilian think tank in Washington, D.C. It's the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. And the other one is a military think tank called the Modern War Institute at West Point. And so both of those are focused on national security. And that those that's my night job. not know this when many years ago, my book, World War Z, was chosen by the president of the United States Naval War College to be on its reading list. And when they called me and asked me to speak, I said, you know, are you sure you got the right guy? And I think if you, that lecture is on YouTube, and that's how I open. I say, is there a Lieutenant Commander Max Brooks wandering around Comic-Con saying, wait a minute, I think there's a problem.

But, you know, what I do in my writing is I present a fictional threat and I attack it with real world solutions. Yeah. Which requires years of research into how this world really works. And so even though the problems may be fictional, zombies are in the new book, Bigfoot, I have an understanding, you know, as you as you did, it was three books, right? It was the How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. Yeah. First one was the Zombie Survival Guide. And then there was World War Z. And now the new one is Devolution.

Well, but there were two versions. Weren't there like two versions of the first book? Well, the first book, Zombie Survival Guide, I had some recorded attacks in the back that we adapted to a comic book. Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, because I just was, to me, it was just so fascinating, both of those books. I mean, the first book, the How to Survive a Zombie Attack, was more comic. I mean, it was more sort of overtly comic, don't you think? Not to me. You know, that was the funny part. If there was a joke, the joke was on me. Because they tried to position it, because no one had ever written a book like that.

So they thought, well, this guy can't possibly be as much of a nerd and a loser as this book is he must it must be tongue-in-cheek so they positioned it as mel brooks jr uh makes fun of zombie nerds yeah and rightfully so people hated it until i got in front of it and said no no no i actually am that much of a loser and a nerd and i'm really really into this stuff yeah because you look into every nook and cranny of of the possibility of this purely fictional like that you know this purely fictional sort of phenomenon you know and i mean where i guess maybe it was george romero that sort of i mean or maybe going back to voodoo like who sort of made up the rules you know like the like the way a vampire has garlic and a steak through the heart you know like they're the zombie rules that they're slow moving and they eat brains and all this stuff that's romero romero basically he took the old voodoo zombie threw it

away actually a big nerd moment romero invented something completely new which was never called a zombie it was the original title was night of the flesh eaters and had nothing to do with zombies or voodoo and then they changed the title at the last minute called it night of the living dead and they only used the word zombie in once in his second movie dawn of the dead and that's it so really we we have ruined the word yeah yeah and and then well but you were you were obsessed enough with this topic to go through to another book uh world war z which is fantastic read. Really, really just, just really, it's, it really is like you sat down and thought, okay, seriously, what would it be like? And what could we do? And

you're just the chapter, just that you devoted a chapter about where dogs and zombies would intersect. I mean, it was just so, it's just such a particular obsessive kind of focus on this one topic. And I just, I mean, why? Why so much zombies? You know, I think for me, zombies are a great way of studying how the world could fall apart. Because most monster movies, you have to go find them and as far as i'm concerned that's your ass and and the horror films that you and i grew up with remember it was it was a group of horny teenagers and a token black guy and they always made a bad decision oh hey you hear about like the summer camp and there was like that guy that like killed everyone we should like totally go. Yeah, yeah.

And I would watch these movies and I'd say, I have no sympathy for you. Yes. There's a giant shark in the water. Don't go in the water. Yeah, yeah. Whereas zombies, as I started to really think about if there were really zombies, how would I survive? I realized, oh my God, I could die without ever having seen a zombie. I would die of dehydration, malnutrition, getting an infection.

What happens when the toilets don't flush and all that toxic poo piles up? And I realized I'm really talking about a mega disaster or a war. And so that has always fascinated me, is sort of what happens when this amazing bubble called the first world suddenly pops. Yeah. And we're kind of, well, I mean and we're kind of well i mean we're kind of seeing a little bit of that now i mean these are pretty unprecedented times i mean you know you can go back to the whatever 1917 is that what it was the 1918 the influence of pandemic 1918 so i mean that's that's the closest analog we have. I mean, SARS doesn't count. Ebola doesn't count.

It did not shut down the world the way this has. No, no, it really didn't. But, you know, the closest we came to was when we were young, when there was AIDS. And there's still no cure. We had to change our culture. We had to go from free love to safe sex. And as a teenager, you know, sort of coming of age, I'm proud to say that I did my part by not getting laid. Yes.

Good job. Congratulations. I was on this. I was in the same boat. I was, you know, I was an incel before it was cool. We flattened the curve. Yeah. Yeah.

We did it. Yeah. No, but I, well, well i mean i do remember that being a terrifying time about especially and i mean and i was young and it you know you're you're coming into your you know into your sexual adulthood and then all of a sudden oh yeah now it can kill you i mean and not just because that's an axe wielding murderer at a summer camp. It's, you know. Oh, my God. Yes. Well, we remember it was like, you know, the generation before us got well, kids, you're having these special new feelings. Yeah, that's OK. Not us. We got kids. These special new feelings are deadly.

deadly yeah yeah especially if you with us we we had puberty in the midst of the great panic where it was just like if you if you kiss a girl's hand you got aids it was just everywhere yeah well i mean have you been talking with your think tanks about i mean as there as obviously i imagine covid19 has been a big topic of discussion. Oh, my God. That's all it is. We just did a big webinar yesterday about germ warfare. I mean, if you really want a horror story, the fact that while most people are looking at this pandemic saying, oh, my God, this is so terrible. There are people looking at it saying, wait a minute, this tiny little microbe shut down planet earth i want to bottle this stuff so we we have to be careful you know we have to be mindful that germs can be

weapons i came out with a comic book a couple years ago about that about germ warfare uh really nasty stuff so yeah we're in the national security world. That is very much on our minds. Now, let's keep on current topics because you sort of, or, you know what, we'll come back to it at the end. Because I was going to say, how did you go from zombie to Sasquatch? But we'll talk about that later. We'll talk about that more towards the end. Because I want to, I mean, you have the, well, you know, you're the child of famous people.

And I imagine that's, you know, that creates a unique perspective of you on life because you're, like you said, you know, when your book came out you were mel brooks jr uh you know right that's how they tried to position it and it was a big flop and rightfully so yeah and i mean and i mean is it what's it like i mean generally speaking i imagine it's pretty wonderful to have a great person like your dad is your dad, but I, I mean, just in terms of your own identity and forging it separate, what kind of challenges does that present? You know, I think in the long run, it was a very good thing because in the long, in,

in the short term, it was tough, but it forced me to think about who I was and what was my identity, what I wanted out of life, which a lot of young people really don't think about. A lot of young people just, you know, you float through your teens and your 20s and sort of life lives you and eventually maybe you find your level. little kid and people are trying to categorize you in relation to your parents, you have to form your own identity literally as a defense mechanism. You got to figure out very quickly, this is who I am. This is what I want. So people don't use me. And that, so in the long term, turned out to be a great thing. I mean, when you talk about about the wonderfulness the wonderfulness was not from my parents fame it was from their generation because i'm gen x but i have world war ii parents yeah which is pretty freaking cool to have parents that grew up with the kind of values that we only read about uh yeah my dad was in world war ii his brothers in the war and all his friends you know uh there was you want to talk about hollywood being turned upside down uh there was there was a woman her name is

still alive her name is julianne griffin she's merv griffin's ex-wife and she had you should have a house up in the hills up in up on mall holland and if you were famous from 1975 to 1985 that's where you went every sunday to play tennis and so there i am i'm a little kid me and dom deluise's kid david you know we're playing six million dollar man on the on the front lawn and on the tennis court is literally the six million dollar man but when when you're off the tennis court and you get all these famous people, my dad, Carl Reiner, Gene Wilder,

Alan Alda, uh, what you got was a group of immigrants to this strange new country of Southern California, all trying to figure out their lives. Yeah. So the conversations were all about, uh,

where do you find a good dentist? Uh, where do you service your car? Hey, my kid's got this thing brand new. It's called dyslexia. Does anybody know where he can get tutored? Those are the kind of things. And they come from parents who grew up in the Depression.

Yeah. So I actually had a very grounded, I don't want to say mundane, but very down to earth upbringing. but very down to earth upbringing. And I, well, and yeah, and there is a support structure, like you said, of, well, those are all primarily New York people. Those are all, I believe all Jewish people. And they kind of, then they kind of, you know,

did have to sort of look to each other to figure this new place out, you know, especially this place that was pretty anti-Semitic. You know, everybody talks about how, you know, especially this place, this place that was pretty anti-Semitic. You know, everybody talks about how, you know, I mean, you know, the cliched, horrible statement about the Jews run Hollywood and like, yeah, but, you know, against, against opposition, they sort of ended up, you know? Oh, yeah. I mean, the Jews ran Hollywood because this is what my what I learned later from my dad and all his friends. The Jews ran Hollywood because nobody else would let them in. Yeah. All the traditional businesses, the big businesses, corporate America, those doors were closed.

There were limits to how far a Hebrew could rise at Ford or something or someplace like that heavy industry, US steel. So because a lot of Jews were silly entertainers, they came out West where the weather was good, where you could shoot outdoors. And they took this weird new invention called film and they took their vaudeville heritage and they invented movies. Yeah. And that was a place where nobody got in the way because there wasn't that much money yet. Right. So nobody wanted to take it from them. Right.

And nobody understood what the hell it was or what the possibilities involved were. I mean, you really did have people coming here who, like, there was just like i i don't i always remember in the movie rag time oh god i love that movie where there's and i i can't remember who it is but there's manny patinkin yeah manny patinkin he's just kind of a jewish immigrant and then you see him a few scenes later and he's a famous film director yes based on on salesmanship and on believing in himself and just kind of going like oh oh, yeah, I can do that. I know I can tell a story. I grasp this medium. And, you know, and I'm sure that's exactly what it was.

Yeah. It wasn't a real job. Yeah. It wasn't. You know, that's why, you know, guys like us, we look back at the golden age of television and we think, oh, my God, it's so good. Yeah. It's so funny it's yeah because if you went into show business as a television writer say in the 50s or 60s

you had to really want it because there was no prestige you didn't get paid a lot i went to scroll i was school with a girl whose dad wrote for i love lucy never got residuals before residuals wow so if you went and wrote jokes for somebody that was, that was your passion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You weren't getting rich doing it.

You know? No, no, there were, there were, there were no clubs at Harvard. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, yeah. Groomed you for show business. Right. Exactly. Now, um, are you,

you're an only child? I'm an only half child. My dad's got three kids from his first marriage, but I grew up alone. I see. His first marriage, New York. I grew up in Southern California, me, my dad, and my mom. And I know my siblings, obviously, we're good friends. My older brother's kind of my best friend.

So, but we didn't all grow up in the same house. I see. And they were older too. I mean, your dad had already had sort of a complete family and your mom hadn't had any kids at that point, right? Yeah, no, that by, by the time my dad met my mom, uh, those kids were out of the house and, and my dad didn't have a pot to piss in. So my mom took care of him for many, many years. The house I grew up in was my mother's. She did a movie she was deeply ashamed of called the Hindenburg. But she was very, very smart because she said, I want this house. We've been renting it for a year.

I want to buy it. What do I do? Okay. Movie. I'll do it. And now I have a place where I can raise my son. Oh, that was the deal. I'll do it. And now I have a place where I can raise my son. Oh, that was the deal. I'll do this movie if you pay, if you buy me this house. Well, she, she looked at how much they were, how much they were asking for the house. Yeah. And she looked at how much they were offering for the Hindenburg. And she said, okay, this isn't exactly one of my finest moments as an actress, but I'll, I'll get a house out of this. It's, it's what you do. I mean, there's been plenty of things that I've done that certainly aren't close to my heart, but I think like,

that's four car payments. You know, I mean, just like little one-off things. It's like, I can't say no to the four car payments, you know, or something that takes an hour or whatever, you know. You got to live. And, you know, you talk about you gotta live. And you know, my, you talk about the wonderfulness, what I was very grateful from with my parents was they always led me to believe that show business is fickle. Yeah. You know, you've got to make your nut while you can, because one day it will just go away. Oh, absolutely. I was raised on these stories of these Hollywood legends who ended up in dire poverty. And I was like, mom, why, why is that? And she said, because they always thought that they would continue to live at a certain level. So they spent at that level while the

income went away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very basic, good economic lesson that you're, you're lucky to have learned from your folks. Well, you know what's so fascinating, Andy, is, and you as a comedian understand this, I think better than anyone, nobody is writing articles about this. No one in the Wall Street Journal is talking about the economics of the internet and what it has done for comedy.

Because back in the day, when you were coming up in the 90s, the goal was to do as many road gigs as possible to get yourself a TV show. And then that TV show would go on basic cable and syndication. And boom, you were golden for the next three generations. Yeah. Well, now with streaming, that money's gone. Yeah.

The syndication, basic cable? No. And so now it's flipped. The TV show is supposed to be an advertisement for your road gigs yeah so you can charge more and now because of covid19 the road gigs are gone so what is this going to do to the institution of comedy i know and how many people uh you know it's gonna you know there's gonna you're gonna mean, one could make the case that it's not that big a loss, but there's, we're going to come to the other end of this with people not being in comedy anymore because they just couldn't do it. You know, they had to, they had to, you know, go ahead and get that job, get that day job or just, you know, go back to school or.

day job or just, you know, go back to school or. We focus on the top tier. We focus on the comedians who've already made it. But what about the guys and girls who are grinding away right now? Yeah. Who, who have to live on the road, who have to make their living on the road. They're doing Zoom nights. They're, you know, they're, they're Zooming comedy online. It's, you know, it's, it's crazy.

I'm glad I'm, I'm glad i'm old because i would i the energy that it would take to keep doing this would be is just gotta be oh it's brutal you know it it's it's changed everything it's changed how my dad makes a living because he's still working 93 years old still working but he does a lot of personal appearances evening with mel brooks yeah can't do that anymore and he writes musicals instead. Yeah. Can't do that anymore. And he writes musicals instead of movies now. Can't do those anymore. Yeah.

With me, I'm supposed to have a book coming out in three weeks. And I've made my career. We talked earlier about sort of me having to invent myself as Max Brooks. Well, I did that by going to Comic-Cons. Yeah. You know, by giving giving talks by answering questions by introducing myself to this community and making fans one handshake and picture at a time yeah and i don't see a safe economic way to have comic cons right now yeah yeah oh no no how do you social you can't socially distant the only way that a comic con works is cramming people in shoulder to shoulder. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It wouldn't. Yeah. It just, and also too, I mean, it's, it's among the most crowded thing I've ever been to. So it's, it doesn't, there's too many people. There's no way you, there isn't enough, enough of an area to get six feet between all the people that want to go to that thing.

Unless you hold, you know, hold it in Death Valley or something. I mean, that's the thing. When I would go to Comic-Cons, I had a strict, almost Buddhist regimen, which was do every biological function that is necessary to human survival before getting on the Comic-Con floor. Because once you squeeze into that autograph booth, you ain't getting out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So get it all out now empty your body of everything because you're stuck for eight hours now as a as

a as sort of a professional worrier if i must say because that's in a way you know i mean like you said it's it's risk management that's about worrying That's about foreseeing danger. Were you worried at that time of like, I, have you been a germ, a germ phobic kind of person or no, I was, I was no more germ phobic than, than anybody should be. Yeah. You know, it's, it's the, I mean, I always sort of washed my hands when you get on a plane and you touch surfaces and you touch your face. The thing is, I always knew about all this stuff because I was so lucky because my mother, once again, show business, you know, the world wanted to see her as Mrs. Robinson. She was a closet scientist. Oh, really? Her favorite book was something called The Microbe

Hunters. Yeah. The history of people who discovered germs. So I knew about this. So flash forward 2001, Anthrax at 30 Rock when I was a new writer for SNL. I was there too, yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's, remember when the president of NBC went floor to floor to tell us all, he was like, see if it coop with AIDS, you know, here's Anthrax and here's how you can get it and not get it. And here's what you do if you have it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I already knew this because of my mom. But and that knowledge helped me stay calm. And that's what I do with my writing. It's people ask me, you know, is writing about this stuff freak you out? It doesn't. I'm already freaked out. It's the learning about it and the writing about it totally calms me down. Were you were you an anxious child? Like, did your folks have to kind of deal with you as an anxious child? Oh, well, I had to also deal with them as anxious parents. Oh, really? Are they anxious people?

Well, they weren't. But this world sure made them. Because remember, you're there. They're World War Two generation and they didn't know sex, drugs and rock and roll. So that was all scary to them. Plus, they got really famous just at a time when the public started to turn on celebrities. It wasn't like the 40s where you sort of waved to Clark Gable from a distance. It was like John Lennon getting shot by a guy who loved him. Yeah, yeah. And we had incidents. Rob Reiner's, I don't know if he was married to Penny Marshall or, I can't remember, but I think she was held at gunpoint in her house.

That was a big deal. Oh, wow. It was terrifying. Yeah, yeah. There was a time when Dom DeLuise was doing a gig in Vegas and my friend David was really sick. I mean, he had a fever of a hundred and God knows what. And Dom was carrying him through the lobby trying to get him to a cab to the emergency room. And someone got in his way and said, hey're dom deluise you're really funny give me an autograph and dom's like look my kid's really sick i gotta go he goes what what you're too good

for me listen i'm your public i need you and i can break you yeah this this is the the entitlement and this is what my parents were coping with and it was very scary to them because they had no basis of understanding. Right. Does it affect a change in their lives? Do they end up kind of being homebodies? Do they, you know, or? No, that's the thing. That's what, God, I'm so grateful to them

because they lived their lives. Yeah. But they lived it smartly. It was the kind of thing where they went out all the time and they traveled, but they went out and traveled with a group of close friends that they trusted. I see. They never went to parties because you never knew who was going to be there and you never knew what was going to happen. And my mother said to me, never ever take your picture with

someone you don't know because you don't know if that picture is going to end up on the cover of the national enquirer right exactly and with you with the you know the grand dragon of the klu klux klan or something yeah because people would always try to take pictures with my parents and they would say no no no i'm sorry you know because they didn't know where that was going to end up. Yeah. And so they had friends, they saw the world, but they did it very consciously. Now, were your folks as, I mean, you know, I mean, your mom was a film actress. Your dad was at that time making movies. Were they home a lot?

I mean, did you get to see them? Did they trade off? I mean, how did that work? Yeah God, they were so great because, uh, my dad was home because he shot in LA. This was back in the day when you didn't have to shoot on location. Right. So he was home every night, uh, seven 30, uh, you know, home for dinner. Uh, my mother, God bless her. My mother read to me every night. And then when she had to go do a shoot, she would finish the book on an audio cassette and play it. So I would play it every night going to bed. So either in the flesh or on an audio cassette, my mother would read a story to me.

Oh, wow. So very routine. And my mother organized everything around how to keep a routine in the family. It's like, we bought a little shack in Fire Island off the coast of New York when I was a kid. My mother bought two of them so then her sisters could come out. And so there would always be extended family. Yeah. Yeah. That, that was always important. And so there was, yeah, there was a lot of routine. This is the crazy thing. You know, people always assume that somehow having famous parents makes me Tatum O'Neill. Yeah, no, I, yeah, well, I mean, well, then, you know, the odds are, I, well, I wonder,

I wonder, you know, you just hear about the, about the problematic kids of famous people, you know, but I, I do think it, I do think it's a unique kind of pressure to put on, to put on a kid, you know, on a little kid to have their parents be known so much. And, you know, I think everybody's got, everybody's got something and you just have to develop coping mechanisms. Right. You know, so my, my coping mechanisms very much like my parents is that I don't have a huge group of friends, but the friends I have I trust very much. And my core group of friends are the ones that I made in junior high school. They're still my buddies.

What town did you live in when you – I mean, you grew up here in L.A., yeah? Yeah, I grew up in hill country initially, in the hills of Beverly. I see. So Beverly Hills up until I was about 12. Once again, my mother moved us around according to what my needs were. She said, well, this kid's got dyslexia. He's also very artistic. There's a new high school called Crossroads in Santa Monica.

So we're going to move to Santa Monica so he doesn't have to spend hours a day in the car commuting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she was always very conscious about health. You know, the air quality was better in Santa Monica back then when they had smog alerts. So from 12 to 18, Santa Monica. Yeah. That, I mean, when I first came to LA, it was, that was one of the selling points of Santa Monica because the air is a lot better. The closer you are to the ocean, the cleaner the air is. So yeah, that was, was you know it's a little better now now when when were when were you diagnosed with the dyslexia when did they figure it out little kid little kid i mean that was actually one of

the downsides of having famous parents was not only did the teachers back then not understand what dyslexia was some of them assumed because my parents were celebrities that i was just a rich brat goofing off you're right you know that i didn't a nanny raised jerk yeah just didn't feel like working yeah yeah that was that was the assumption that the reason i was the class clown or staring off into space was because I thought I could get away with it. Right. And so not only did my mother, God knows how she found out about dyslexia in like 1980 or whenever, she had me tested, had me diagnosed. And then because there were no such things as accommodations back then, she would go

to my school every year, sit down with my teachers and school them on what dyslexia was and what accommodations I needed, like on-time tests or audio books, whatever helped me get through. Because her attitude was, the kid is working just as hard, if not harder than the other kids, but he needs to work smart so he's not banging his head against the wall. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really, you really are hamstrung by just, you know, your brain's processing things differently. And I also read somewhere that because she was Annie Sullivan in the Helen Keller movie. Yeah. The Miracle Worker. She had worked with the Braille Institute in LA and she took all my books. Just as research for the role sort of. Yeah. She would go deep. She's like Daniel DeLue. She'd go deep in every role. So then she took my books to the Braille Institute and had them read every single one onto audio books.

Wow. And so that's how I listened to all my books. Otherwise, I never would have gotten through high school. And I do that today. That's how I survive being in a think tank because I have to read a lot of books. So what I do is, you know, I listen to the book on Audible with the hard copy next to me and I underline it. Oh, I see. And is writing, I mean mean does dyslexia affect

your writing much uh or it did oh my god yeah one once again my mother uh because my penmanship was terrible and remember back in the day when they they cared about they insisted yeah i mean one of the things we talk about in these military think tanks a lot is obsolescence and the dangers of obsolescence. And we are living proof of it, remember? Because we were getting yelled at for our penmanship at a time when computers were coming in. And my mother saw right past that. And she said penmanship is bullshit. I'm going to force you in eighth grade to take a typing class because sooner or later,

everybody's going to have a computer and that's how you're going to, if you want to be a writer, that's what you're going to be writing on. So you better learn how to handle it. So she forced me to take typing and a computer course. Wow. She's pretty great. You know, now when you, when you've got so much, you're an only child of parents that are older and obviously very devoted to you, does so that you don't, you know, because a lot of times, I mean, it does happen sometimes with the kids that are, you know, because everything is sort of has to have a middle ground. And with kids that are really

focused on, sometimes they go out into the world and they find out, oh, the focus isn't on me. Yeah. Well, yes and no. as far as the assumption that the world was just gonna love me for me no my my mom and dad were both very clear about how hard show business is about how hard any business is yeah and you know the great part is my mother preached it and my dad modeled it because i also sort of became cognizant of what my father did for a living when his movie career started to sputter so because when he was on top of the world you know with young frankenstein and blazing saddles high anxiety i was just a little kid but when i became an adolescent those were the later movies And so I watched this man struggle with bad reviews, with studios fighting over budgets.

Because remember, he also had Brooks films, which made The Elephant Man and Francis and the Fly. So those are the movies he got made. But I watched him pitch many projects that nobody would touch. This is Mel Brooks at his height. So it was very sobering to think, wow, my dad, who's this sort of icon that everybody loves, he is not omnipotent. And if I'm just going to be starting out,

who the fuck am I? Right. So there was that. So I didn't have that expectation, but what I did have was, we talked about my parents being maybe a little wary, cautious, physical safety of the outside world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, remember, not only was my mother warning me about the outside world, but she was warning me as an Academy Award winning actress.

Yeah. So not only would she tell me what could happen to me, she would act it out. Yes. There was literally, I'm going to have to do one-man show one day and put this in it there was a class trip i think i must have been about six or eight and my mother wouldn't let me go and i said why why so she acted out how i would be kidnapped she said you're gonna go into the you're gonna be out and a good. Now, let me just preface by saying my mother grew up in the thirties. So all her characters came from black and white movies. Sure. So she said, you're going to go out and a guy's going to come to you and say,

hey, hey kid, come here, come here. You want a Hershey bar? And then there's something in the Hershey bar that knocks you out. So basically I was going to get kidnapped by James Cagney. Right. Right. Or Edward G. Robinson. so basically I was going to get kidnapped by James Cagney. Right. Right. Or Edward G. Robinson.

A 1930s gangster was going to kidnap me. Wow. Well, so, I mean, do you think that that's kind of where the, where the anxiety comes in? I mean,

you know, I think, I think the, just also the anxiety in general came from the fact of growing up in la on the edge of the apocalypse all the time because let me tell you having traveled the world and having seen how systems break down there are tribal regions in waziri stan that are better run than los angeles oh really i mean just the you you saw the book ready player one you've heard of the book right yeah yeah and and in the previews the character says i wish i'd grown up in the 1980s

and i think what the 1980s with aids and crack and gangs and the threat of nuclear war and my mother running into the room screaming because she thought i was watching the day after that 1980s let me tell you yeah i andy i don't know where you grew up, but growing up in LA in the eighties, it wasn't so great. Right, right. No, absolutely. And I mean, you know, and cocaine, the ravages of cocaine at that time, you know, in the early eighties. Oh my God. We had drug drug week week at my school yeah which which they would tell you these lies which you you know you believe they'd bring in some guy and say now listen there's your brain releases a pleasure chemical on a scale of one i'll never

forget this he said having your first baby would be a nine on a scale of one to 10 crack brings you up to 138. Then crashes you just as hard. I didn't know. Yeah. Yeah. Especially. I like that. There's they assign numbers to it. They sign up with,

well, because kids believe numbers. So they tell you a number and also being dyslexic. I thought, holy shit, I'm hanging on stone sober as it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, now, are you sure you're going to be in, I mean, is it just growing up in that house that you're just like, you know, you're going to do something in comedy or you're going to do something, you know, in show business or be a writer of some kind?

Do you ever think like, maybeistry or oh yeah a fireman you know there were things i wanted to do but dyslexia kind of killed that one i see but when i was 12 years old i sat down and wrote my first story and it was the only it was the first time in my life my adhd went away first time i was focused wow never stopped. I mean, I would write every day after school, I'd come home, I do my, my bullshit homework. And then I would put on my old records and I'd write from nine to 11 every night. Wow. So I knew this is whether I would ever get paid for it or not. I had no idea. And I had a great mentor. You might've heard of him, Alan Alda. Oh, wow.

He taught me how to write. God bless him. He, he took my novellas and he would, and he would give me notes. I mean, he was not, oh, this is wonderful. And you're just so great. Yeah. No, no, no. I mean, he was a task master and he would come down. How did, how did he come to read them? Did you know that he sort of, you know, had aspirations of teaching literature? Or did your dad pass him over? I loved MASH as a kid. Yeah.

And I knew Alan was in MASH. And I sort of worshipped him from afar. And he was sort of a family friend. And my mom said, well, if you really. Because this was also when Alan had transitioned into writing and directing movies. And so my mom said, why don't you ask him? And so she told him, I think secretly, so that he approached me and said, hey, you know, if you ever want to show me your writing, we can talk about it. And so we, back to Julian Griffin's house, he would be on the tennis court. And then he, when he was off, he would come to the tennis cottage with me and he had my novellas marked up and he would go to town on them and tell me and

say things like, listen, uh, anybody can write, but a writer is someone who rewrites. That's when you become a professional. That's it's the rewriting the drafts. Uh, you have to research, you have to know what you're talking about. Dialogue. You have to listen to people speaking. Because anytime anyone opens their mouth, they want something. That's why humans developed language. Yeah. Never forgot these lessons.

Yeah. Wow, that's pretty great. Can't you tell my love are growing so uh as you're going through to uh school are you writing for the paper are you writing for no i hit it i hit it oh really yeah because i figured i in school you're only judged by two things right sports or academia yeah And I had no interest in sports. And I sucked ass at academia. And I thought, well, my self-esteem is hanging by a thread. So I can't show anybody my writing because then I'm really in trouble.

Yeah, if they don't like it. If they, yeah. If the stakes are too high, yeah. If I suck at this, then I suck at everything. So I really did hide it from a lot of people until, until I had no choice. Yeah. I mean, I literally, which was what, what, what do you mean until it just, you knew that eventually, because this is going to be your life. Yeah. You've got to show people. Yes. And that's when I started going out, but even, you know, even when I got the job at SNL, I knew I was miscast. I knew I was a dead man walking because i'm not a i'm a funny guy as a defense mechanism uh but i don't as a

writer i don't live in a writer's room i'm not a kibitzer i see and i and i knew i knew the moment i got the job and i also don't fit in because when i got the job i knew a guy on david letterman show and he said oh you just got sn said, listen, let me tell you something. The key to survival is fitting in. So I came home. I said to my girlfriend, who's now my wife, I said, Michelle, we're not going to last too long. So don't spend anything. But towards the second part, I guess the second part of my first season, when I knew even if I got a second season, it was borrowed time.

I had a manuscript that I had written in the 90s for myself called The Zombie Survival Guide. Yeah. And I got it to a book agent. And thank God, once I was fired from SNL, the book was already being published. So I could slide right into that. That's great. Was SNL, did you get that job right out of college? No, no, no, no. Oh my God. No, I had, I, I was like a legends of the fall, but without being good looking. I, I traveled the world. I worked for the BBC and documentaries in Africa.

Oh, wow. Where did you go? Where'd you go to college? Let's go back to that. Oh, I went to college at Pitzer in the Claremont, and I did ROTC across the street at Claremont McKenna. Okay. Until I screwed up my knees and my back, so I only did a year of ROTC. Yeah. And then I did a semester, don't laugh, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Oh, my gosh. No, no, because I vacationed. Well, that's the funny part. Yeah. Because I vacationed there my whole life and I realized I knew absolutely nothing about these people.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. So I go there and I am essentially in an all black urban school. Yeah. urban school and they and it was a dry campus and the day when they lined us up against the wall and yelled at us uh about the statistics of dead and imprisoned black men this is not the same orientation i got at pitzer yeah where they go well this is your time to grow and spread your wings whereas in the virgin islands they were like is your time. And it's not about you. It's about your family.

Yeah. So that was crazy. I mean, these kids were like- And you were there for a year? I was there for a semester. A semester. Then I graduated. Then I went to grad school in DC.

And that's when I met you and Conan, but you didn't know me. Oh, really? I was in- Where was that at? I was in a basement apartment in Georgetown and my TV only got two channels. Actually, no, I think it only got, maybe it got one. And there were only two shows that I could watch clearly. One was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the other was your show. Oh, wow. And that was it. They're often known as companion pieces. That was it. And I was so mad because I had to run to class and I never got to see when Grady came back.

It's got to exist somewhere now, though. I mean, it's got to be there. I got to find it on YouTube because I had it. I watched your show religiously. And that's when I thought, I don't think I'm going to be a professional comedian. Oh, really? Well, yeah, because you guys, you guys, you lived it, you breathed it, you could see it, you could tell that you were a type of animal that I wasn't. Because even as I was in film school, learning to make movies, I was still writing a novel on the side i wasn't secretly writing

sketches because as much as i enjoyed your show i wasn't thinking someday i'm gonna write for them yeah well it's yeah it's i i can i can see that i mean and i you know i mean for me it's all been kind of a weird sort of side trip anyway, because I, you know, I set out wanting to be a film actor, you know, or wanting to make movies. So for being, you know, being a comedy broadcaster, like was not really what I set out to do. I mean, I'm glad, you know, it's, I can do it and I love doing it and I'm glad I did it, but I still kind of feel like, well, yeah, but I really just kind of wanted to be, I don't know, Ned Beatty, you know, or somebody like that, you know, Emmett Walsh or somebody like that.

Although those the roles you did on Arrested Development are amazing. Oh, thank you. I have to say we just watched Arrested Development with my son. He just turned 15. So when I tell him I'm, I've been on this podcast, he's going to freak out. Oh, good, good. That's nice. That's nice to hear. Well, now you, you would, the graduate school was film school, I take it. Uh, technically it's film school, but in reality, was it what it really was? And I've used this as, as the, for many a lecture in my think tanks is i got a graduate degree in obsolescence because i learned everything that would suddenly be obsolete three

years later because of because film to video you mean the technology the digital yeah not just the technology but also the marketing you know yeah because in film school i learned actual film and cutting and steenbecks yeah me too yeah yeah bullshit it all went away and now every everything at in that film school is on your iphone and they rammed up our ass every day about festivals festivals festivals it's the only way anyone's ever going to see your movie this is as the internet was coming out. Yeah. So I, it was, to me, it was, it was, it was great. It was a great life lesson because now I can take these lessons to the military

and say, listen, you guys are investing in tanks and aircraft carriers when the Russians are doing cyber and counter Intel and- Election tampering. Yeah, cultural jujitsu. And it's costing them Colpex. Well, it's costing us trillions.

Yeah. It's, uh, that's, uh, that's, that is very true. And I was the same thing with me. I went to film school and nothing. I cut film. I cut 16 millimeter film. I, you know, and even, you know, video editing was A, B, back and forth on three quarter inch tape, which like, just, I don't even think, I think if you showed a 22 year old,

a three quarter inch tape, they wouldn't even really fully understand what it was. No, you know, my first summer job in between high school and college doesn't exist anymore i was a production assistant for carl reiner on one of his movies and of my many jobs the most important one was running film back and forth to the lab yeah yeah you know what what is that that's like saying i was a farrier i was horseshoeing horses i used to do the same thing but it was for commercials in chicago yes the end of the montgomery Montgomery Ward shoot, my first stop would be over to the Kodak lab. Yeah. Check the gate. Check the gate.

That was, oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, now, when you get out of school, where do you go? Do you stay in Washington? Do you come back home to LA? Do you go to New York? I get out of school and I go back to LA and I, I become the only kid in America who has to stand up to his parents and say,

he doesn't want to be an actor. Every other kid, you know, I was the reverse of that kid in Goodwill hunting. Yeah. Yeah. But it was really my mom, and it hurt her. Did they really? They just expected that you were going to be a performer of some kind? Well, I think my mom did. My mom was very much about, you know, you're a good actor.

I've seen you do stage. You've got the talent. You've got my genes. You know, don't throw it all away. And I remember having this big heart-to-heart with her and saying, Mom, I hate it. I hate not just the process, not just the, what did the craft, whatever, but, but even when I would get roles, I would say, I don't live here. I live, I live with the words. I live with the story. I can't wait to get home and write something.

Yeah. Well, you got to know what you like too. I mean, I, you know, for a while I was attempting, I mean, I just, cause opportunities would come up to kind of like do some standup. And so I thought I might as well try this. It's a good thing. It's a good skill to have and stuff. And then I just, there was one day when I just realized I don't like this. just there was one day when i just realized i don't like this yeah i don't like being up here by myself i this is not you know i i don't i like i like making making comedy or but specifically also to making stories yes in a little and i love the feeling of a film crew i love the like that we're this like little band of people that pull up in a truck and unload everything and create a fake world and then get in the truck and go away. You have to love it so much.

I saw this when I was on SNL. And my office mate was a guy named Dean Edwards, and he was a stand-up. He was a cast member, but he was also a stand-up. And I would go with him to the clubs. And my God, the nights I saw him do his act for nobody you know there was two one time he did his whole act for a chinese tourist family that didn't speak any english but he that boy that light went on and he was there he had to do it and i think that's with every artist. If you don't have to do it, don't do it. Yeah.

So how does SNL come about? I mean, are you writing sketches? SNL came about because I was trying to write scripts. I transitioned from not acting to trying to be a screenwriter, and that wasn't getting anywhere. And we had a family friend. You've heard of him george shapiro uh-huh andy coffins manager seinfeld's manager everybody's manager he's also carl reiner's nephew and i think what i wanted i wanted to meet with him and ask him the big question that all young people should ask which is what am i doing wrong because when you're young and dumb and inexperienced, you don't even know

you're making mistakes. So I went to him and I said, listen, can I just tell you sort of what I'm doing and you can tell me how I'm screwing up and maybe point me in the right direction. And as we made small talk, he asked me where I was living. And I said, in the Valley. He said, why the hell are you living in the Valley? You know, you can live anywhere. I said, well, the Valley is what I can afford. Because I was making money editing commercials and doing production assistant jobs. Yeah. And cartoon voices.

And he said to me, yeah, but you're Mel Brooks' kid. You can live anywhere. I said, no, Mel Brooks can live anywhere. I'm not taking any money from my parents. I'm living by the money that I make. And then that impressed him. And he said, do you write comedy? And I said, well, my agent made me write this packet of sketches for something. And he said, let me give it to Lorne Michaels. And I said, yeah, you do that. And sure enough, I get a call from George. He said, Lorne really liked it. He would

like you to fly to New York and meet with him. And I did. And I got the job. Wow. That's great. Yeah. And then not, it pays to know Carl Reiner's nephew. Yeah. Well, but you know, that's the thing is you, you still have to do the work. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Oh no, I'm not. Yeah. No, nobody, you know, I'm sure that, that George Shapiro gave Lorne Michaels some other packets that Lorne didn't bother pursuing. Oh, yeah. Believe me. I know. Yeah.

You know, this is the thing. When you're the child of famous successful or just the child of successful people. Yeah. At least I was always on the lookout for other children of successful people. Yeah. And to sort of maybe learn from them and see, well, what are you doing right? What are you doing wrong? And I realized, my God, someone might be able to open the door for you, but good Lord, if

you can't do the work, if you can't pay your dues like everybody else, no, the nepotism peters out very, very quickly. It does. Like, yeah, you can get a job getting coffee, you know, if you're through nepotism. But once you're there, I mean, generally speaking, it does end up being a meritocracy. Oh, yeah. a meritocracy. Like you have to,

you like, you don't, nobody gives a shit who your dad is. It, when you're, you know, when you have to get this script done and, you know, and it has to be good and it has to be okayed.

And, you know, 12 different network people have to have their notes processed through it. Nobody gives a shit about that. They just want the, they just want results. Yes. And I think especially in our business, I think when you're in the business of entertainment,

when you connect with people, be it, you know, music, writing, acting, whatever, if you suck, nobody cares who your parents are. If the public, because they're your ultimate boss, your customers. If nobody liked what I read, nobody would buy my books. It's that simple. Yeah. So how does, I mean, how do you feel about getting a job on SNL? I mean, you're excited, but you're already, were you a little ambivalent about going into sketch writing like that? No, no. I figured I got it. And this is a once in a lifetime opportunity

and I will never throw this away and I never worked as hard as I did. Oh my God. Just burning myself out to try to prove myself. Was 2001 the first year? So were you just there when 9-11 hit? I got the job.

9-11 hit. It was a crazy time to be on the show. Wow. Yeah. Because it was also, I attribute the rise of 9-11 hit. It was a crazy time to be on the show. Because it was also, I attribute the rise of Jon Stewart to our failure because I saw the fork in the road. We all saw the fork in the road after 9-11. Do we embrace this new America?

Do we do political and current events? Or do we stick with the safe, not controversial 1990s pop culture model? And we stuck with the latter. And America did not want that. America was hungry to try to process what was happening. Remember, Bill Maher had been kicked off the air. So there was really nobody except this ingenue,

this guy named Jon Stewart, who had just taken over Daily Show, and he roared into the gap. And it was also the second season I was there was a really hard time to be there because the Iraq war had started, all the goodwill of 9-11 was gone. daily show that was every minute of every day taking on the news and also getting punched on the other side by the comedy tsunami that was chapelle's show oh yeah i mean my god so to have both of those two squeezing you at the same time it was that was a rough time i think for everybody and will ferrell left yeah well and it was also too, it was just, I remember, what I remember about that time was I had lived in LA for just a matter of months after, you know, having, I had a brand new kid. He wasn't even a year old yet. And that 9-11 just, there had already been a threat of an actor's strike right and so everyone had

done all they amped up their production ramped up their production to get it all done before the writer's strike was going to stop everything so already there had been sort of this you know burst of production just to spend the budget on the year. And then 9-11 hit. And then, I mean, for me personally, but I think for a lot of people, it was, I didn't do anything for about 10 or 11 months. I did not, you know, make any money. I did not make a dollar.

I just kind of, you know, the show I was on got canceled. And then I was just like waiting for the economy to recover uh so that people you know because it's it's not you know some in some ways entertainment is a necessary you know is like a is like a priority but in some ways we're not essential employees you know i mean when no no i mean we're and my parents were sort of very conscious of this that that i i remember when the first the oscars came back after 9-11 and tom cruise made a speech and said you know how the world has changed does that make what we do less important no it's more important yeah i, I was like, it's also how you use it.

Yeah. You know, if you, like you did with, like Jon Stewart did, if you use comedy as a way to help people think through what's happening to them, help to take away a little bit of the fear and help them process, then that's great. Then that is essential. That's keeping the home fires burning.

But if you're just doing sketches about fish genitals, which we did. Yeah, sure. You know, really? I mean, I think the world could have lived without fish genitals. The age of fish genitals. Yeah. That was a great 1995 sketch in 2001. Well, okay. Then you've got the zombie manuscript sitting there waiting. It's your parachute out of comedy. It's your safety, you know, it's your fallback. And it occurs to

me, I wonder, was it your first, do you think it was the, had you taken other things that were sort of anxiety provoking and that caused you to sort of look in a very systematic kind of way about like, you know, risk assessment or did just the zombie thing struck you? Well, there was another monster before zombies when I was even littler that used to terrify me, and that was Bigfoot. Oh, really? That was, yeah. I grew up, like we said, Beverly Hills. I grew up in Beverly Hills. And the house my mother bought was this post-war ranch-style home with plate glass walls, not just windows. Cause that was, that was a big thing after world war two, we had the technology to make plate glass. So suddenly homes, especially in Southern California, you can still find these houses. Uh, even like lower

middle-class houses were suddenly being built with these huge walls of glass because you could. And that was us. So I'm sitting there in a glass box at night with the trees rustling outside in the dark, watching these Bigfoot movies, watching Peter Graves in the Mysterious Monsters talk about Exhibit Z, the footprints, are they real? And I didn't know what a dramatization was. I didn't know what a recreation. All I knew was here's a shot of a woman watching TV like I'm watching TV and suddenly a big hairy fist smashes through the window trying to grab her. There was a lot of that stuff. There was a lot.

I just remember a lot of, you know, in my childhood, there was a lot, you know, in search of Noah's Ark. Yes. I mean, that, you know, the Robert Stack Show. What was that? Unsolved Mysteries. Unsolved Mysteries. But there was just a lot of stuff aimed at kids about Loch Ness Monster, you know, the cryptozoology kind of stuff. There was a lot of that and i didn't know

that it was bullshit yeah you know it's it's like when the teacher said crack brings you up to 138 oh my god he's using numbers he must be right so peter graves this tall white-haired gentile with his deep trust me voice yeah he's interviewing a psychic detective. And the detective is psychometrizing and psychometrizing. He's psycho wedding. That was a real word. Peter Grave. And he says this in this voice. Now I brought with me something in a sealed box.

Can you psychometrize what's inside? And he brought him a plaster cast of a Bigfoot footprint. Now, maybe Peter Graves actually in that moment did not tell him, what's inside and he brought him a plaster cast of a bigfoot footprint now maybe peter graves actually in that moment did not tell him but i think if you're the psychic detective and the production assistant calls you and says hey listen we're doing a show on bigfoot so peter graves gonna show up with a box with something inside it uh i'm not gonna tell you what it is i think yeah it's bigfoot's hat yeah uh but i. Oh my God. He's psychometrizing.

Yeah. Now, did you write Bigfoot stuff then? I mean, obviously the new project is Bigfoot or has just been sort of percolating in the back. It's been percolating all this time because I, once again, took a fictional monster and asked myself a very basic question. Is this, if this was real, how would it exist? Yeah. No folklore, no myths. Basically, if there was a species of great ape in North America, how would it survive?

And what would I need to do to survive an attack? Yes. And well, and do you touch on how does it survive invisibly? How does it survive without anyone knowing where it is? I hit that from two angles. The idea that if, because the mythos of Bigfoot is that it is descended from an actual great ape

that existed, Gigantopithecus, which was a sort of a super ape from the pleistocene era in asia so if it migrated across the bering sea land bridge to north america when we did when humans did uh could it have adapted at the same time we did which is actually this is this is why in africa you see very large mammals and why you don't see very large mammals living in europe or north america or in large parts of asia and that's because and this is true what happens is when homo sapiens came out of africa for the first time it was a blitzkrieg the animals had no idea what to expect from us and they didn't know how to adapt and boy we just massacred them

all the way down through the americas whereas the law what they call the megafauna the large animals living in africa uh they they grew up with us they evolved with us so they evolved coping mechanisms to deal with us so i see in my book i postulate that these gigantopithecus apes that migrated with us to North America had the intelligence to be able to understand us, figure us out, and be able to avoid us in a way that, say, the saber-toothed cat and the American lion and the giant bear couldn't have. That's why they avoided being in the La Brea Tar Pits with all the other bones. Yeah, yeah. avoided being in the La Brea Tar Pits with all the other bones. Yeah, yeah. Or that big one that looks like a giant road hog or a giant kind of a warthog or a groundhog.

I mean, yeah, yeah. There's like a huge ferret kind of creature. It looks like a guinea pig. There's a bunch of these weird ones. There's one. It's not an endricothere. I can't remember the exact name, but it looks like a giant armadillo. You go to the La Brea Tar Pits.

I used to go all the time with my son when he was little, and that was part of my research was just learning about all these giant animals that were here. North America looked like Africa when we got here. Yeah. How do you start with the zombie book? Do you think like what made you

think a survival guide was it just still sort of processing that anxiety you were feeling i started with a very simple premise uh i started i'm 13 years old and i'm doing what every 13 year old in 1985 should be doing which is sneaking into his parents room when they're out to dinner to go on cable tv and try to find boobs. Yes. So I did that. Sometimes we scored, but then I stumbled across an Italian cannibal zombie film, scared the crap out of me, and then spent the next— Which film was that? Do you want to plug it? They keep changing the name, but it's Nightmare of the Zombies.

I think it's like revenge of the zombies it's an italian special forces unit which is a joke in itself uh goes to new guinea and they're attacked by zombies and they're doomed it's a it's a punishment doomed movie and i think they used real cannibal footage from new guinea. So, yeah, to be 12 or 13, that leaves a mark. Wow. So then I spent years and years being scared of zombies, scared, scared, scared. And then I see what a movie that scared everybody else, but that gave me hope, which was Night of the Living Dead. Because like you said, suddenly there were rules. Yeah. And all I had to do was figure out the rules in order to survive. Yeah.

So I pivoted and spent years thinking, well, if there really were zombies, well, how would I do it? So flash forward, blizzard of 96 graduate school. I'm in my basement apartment watching you and Conan and the fresh Prince.

And my basement apartment had bars on the window and a steel door and i thought well if zombies attacked i am physically safe but wait a minute how much food can i stockpile what about water what about sewage what about air what about a first aid kit so a mental exercise yeah which then years and years later when y2k is happening and people are starting to think about survivalism, I thought, well, there must be a zombie survival guide. All the stuff I thought about, somebody must have written this down. And I went looking for it. Couldn't find one. And I said, you know what?

I'm going to write myself all the rules that I've been thinking about. And I started researching them to make sure that I knew what I was talking about. Some of it was a lot of book learning, but some of it was personal experience. I've done a lot of crazy hiking and camping and ROTC taught me about weapons. And I put it all into this manuscript that I thought, I will keep this for me. It'll be mine. Nobody will judge it and call me a loser and I'll stick it in a drawer. Yeah. And that was late nineties.

Wow. And what, what prompts you to bring it out? Knowing I was going to eventually be fired from SNL. Yeah, this sounds pretty good. Well, you know what? I don't, I don't have the luxury anymore. I say, well, this is my art now i have my special precious thing yeah i mean when you need to make a living to feed yourself your precious little

feelings are not part of the equation that is very true very very true now the book is a hit. I mean, are you surprised by that? Oh, God. You can still YouTube my very first zombie lecture. Because when the book, like we said, when the book came out, it got panned. I mean, the LA Times wrote the most scathing review ever, saying basically, like, why would the son of Mel Brooks write the least funny book ever written? Oh. But that's not his fault because clearly. Well, it also, it's like, it doesn't, you know,

it doesn't have anything to do with you, that critique. It's like, you know, but anyway. But somebody at Random House clearly gave him this book as a comedy book. Yeah. So why would they slam me? And then the horror nerds really slammed me because they thought Mel Brooks' brat was taking a giant dump on everything that they loved,

which is how the marketing campaign had positioned it. Yeah. So other than Comic-Con, what dug me out of the hole was doing zombie lectures around the country at colleges. And my very first one i think it's on youtube still i'm flop sweating like albert brooks in broadcast news and i thought all right i'm gonna i've done my lecture now i'm gonna open the floor up to

questions and i thought okay they've suffered through my little pet project yeah now they're gonna ask me about my dad or about maybe working on snl you know the stuff they really care about right and sure enough the questions were well if i like if i get bitten on the arm how long do i have to cut my arm off before the infection reaches my heart and zombifies me and i thought oh my god i'm not the only one in the world that thinks about this stuff yeah yeah yeah this stuff yeah yeah yeah but there's there is something it it because there is something sort of i think just defending the people and me being one of them that that sort of think of the the first book as kind of a comic book is it's there's something inherently comic about taking all of this stuff seriously about like really planning for you know if a

werewolf comes in here i mean there is something that's because it's absurd yes you know you know what i mean so but it's wonderfully absurd and it is like it does it's it's such a all of you know of this is just such a nice kind of map of how your brain works. Very orderly and very sort of, you know, linear and, and incredibly thorough, you know? And I mean, that's like, because World War Z where I I've told so many people, like it is one of the most devourable books I've ever read. Just, just chomp, chomp, chomp.

Couldn't get through. And it was just, like I say, just, I loved how many different aspects of, well, what happens? How would it happen? How would it spread? How would the, you know, who would be the heroes? Where would there be different sort of showdowns? How would India handle it? How would, you know india handle it how would you know europe handle it and it's it's you

know and i always conan was always impressed because i told him once i can't because i said and it's just something i lifted from you is like just go north go where it's cold right you know they'll just end up freezing you know when nightfall comes that's just stand there freezing and you can go up and just knock them into bits with a sledgehammer, you know. And therefore, your big enemy is not zombies. Your big enemy is winter. So how do you survive the winter? Right, right.

Yeah. This is how I write is I just keep answering my own questions. I start with, like you said, with a question. How would this happen? And then one question leads to bigger questions. Like you said, how would India handle this? Would the government of India be different than China? So I based my zombie virus coming out of China on SARS because everything I do, I take years of research and SARS had just happened. And I thought, well, if I have a zombie virus, I need a large population. I need an infrastructure. You know, I need trains and

planes to carry the disease, but I also need a government that's willing to suppress the truth because it couldn't start in India or Mexico because one intrepid reporter would blow the lid off it. You need a government that's willing to sit on the truth. And sure enough, the SARS outbreak validated that. And so did this new COVID-19 outbreak. that and so did this new covet 19 outbreak yeah yeah yeah and there's a there's a few a few governments willing to suppress it turns out it's like it's not an uncommon thing it's all the people that uh that are handling it poorly are the ones covering it up yeah um well that so at a certain point all right do you reach a point where you're like all right enough zombies i've it's done i've thought enough i've got i've figured out every angle well you know i think i am possibly the world's worst businessman uh because i always have to write from a point of view of passion which sounds sounds great, you know, from an artistic point of view. Sure.

You know, if we lived in Siena, Italy in the Renaissance, I'd be the man. Yeah, yeah. But the idiocy of writing a zombie book and having it hit so big and then not following it up with a sequel is just unforgivable. Yeah, yeah. sequel is just unforgivable. I mean, but the truth is, if I'm not passionate, I can't do it. I either have to be a hundred percent into it and just obsessive and deep, deep, deep, or else what's the point? I can't half-ass it. So and i i may be done with zombies for the rest of my life i may not be but i have answered the questions that i had asked you asked yourself yeah that you were asking yourself yeah i think that that because if you do and it's just gonna i you know i mean

there's you could name many examples of somebody that had an initial really great work of something and then to kind of get a payday sort of like well i guess i could sort of yeah you know make more out of it like yeah i could like you know we could you know take the bones of this story and boil them up into some broth and I can make another meal out of it. And then it just ends up being almost devaluing and sort of an insult to the original project. So. Yeah. And if I knew if I knew how to anticipate what people wanted, I mean, first of all, they wouldn't have fired me off SNL, but I have no idea what's going to be popular and what's not. I don't know. Some writers can do that and God bless them. I'm so jealous, but I can only write for me. I can only

write for the audience of one because then at least I know somebody's liking it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's worked. So you, it gives you a little bit of validation at least to trust that voice going forward. Oh i mean that yeah the new bigfoot book that's coming out i have no idea if anybody's gonna read it i don't know if anybody likes uh bigfoot the way i like it or certainly the way i write about it but this was the kind of story i've always wanted to tell so yeah as long as i don't regret it then it then it's a life worth lived, I think. Yeah. What's the title of the book? Devolution. And the title is what it says.

It starts with a high-end, high-tech eco-community in the Cascade Mountains. And these are not off-the-grid hippies. They are the grid. This is telecommuting. This is solar panels. This is tap on your phone and get drone deliveries fresh direct groceries from seattle these are these are the high-end people who will get up every day and rule the world uh from their beautiful enclave and then they'll go for a walk in the woods and it's working until mount rainier erupts

and cuts them off and not only are they cut off, they're forgotten because Rainier blows in the direction of Seattle and they're on the other side. So nobody's even looking for them. So this little bedroom community of very highly paid, highly educated David Sedaris fans can't change a light bulb. Yeah, yeah. You know, this is the top of the pyramid.

Suddenly the pyramid's upside down. And their communication is broken down. They can't communicate. Yeah. They can't even call for help. Yeah. And they've got, what, maybe a week's worth of Amazon groceries that are running out and winter is coming. Yeah.

And they have no tools. Why? Because these are smart homes. These homes send a signal to a handyman in town who'll come up with a driverless van. But now the town is destroyed below them. So if that's not bad enough, the eruption has driven a pack of very big, very hungry Sasquatch creatures out of their traditional hunting grounds. And winter's coming for them too. And they got to stock up on calories and here comes a pen of sheep. So it is essentially, essentially Ira glass and Fran Lebowitz versus Bigfoot. Oh yeah. That's not a fair,

that's not a fair fight. Well, they have to devolve these people. They have to adapt. Yeah. That's great. That's great. i can't wait to read it um and uh and i think i think we're gonna schedule this to be to coincide so it'll be easy to find the book um you know we had to talk about adaptation we had to delay the book because

for me the audiobook is very important yeah it. It's, it's, it almost, I think more important than the actual book. Uh, but we had to delay it cause we couldn't get the cast in the studio. Ah, so we have spent the last two months, uh, rejiggering our homes to make home studios.

Yeah. Yeah. I've been through it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, I mean,

boy, I'm doing my Harry Potter impression under my stairs. Um, boy, I'm doing my Harry Potter impression under my stairs. Well, you know, but this, this podcast is, it's about where you've been and what you've learned. And this is sort of the, or where you're going. Let's get to that first. I mean, what's the next obsession or do we have more? Is there more Sasquatch in the future or are you and Sasquatch done? this pandemic is all engrossing right now.

And where I'm going is I have to rediscover the education. My mother gave me about viruses and the history of viruses, because I'll tell you one thing. I think one of the reasons that this thing got out of control was that we are victims of our own success. I think that we have evolved so much as a society that even our grandparents today grow up with vaccines. So we don't respect microbes the way my father's generation did. You know, the idea that my grandmother used to scream at me for going outside with wet hair because you'd catch a golden dye when she was a little girl.

Those days are way in the rearview mirror. And I don't think we have that muscle memory. So I'm trying to reeducate people. I'm doing a little thing for the History Channel, history at home. So I'm doing little vignettes about like the man who taught us to wash our hands, Ignaz Semmelweis, and a man named Joseph Lister, who taught doctors to actually wash everything. Because I think we need to rediscover the respect of germs if we're going to fight them. And that's got to be where my head is right now. Yeah. That's kind of is that sort of what you've learned, too? I mean, I mean, is there anything, you know, I mentioned there should be something in there about being nice to each other. Oh, God. That's always a helpful one.

to each other. That's always a helpful one. Well, what I've learned is what I've been learning since I was a little kid and every little kid around me could read and I couldn't, which is you have to adapt. You have to change. And I think that's been the way we've been going for some time. But I think this disease has really sort of kicked it on to a whole new level. Because, you know, for hundreds of years, our education model, our military model, it's all been along what's called the Prussian lines, which is memorization. Take information in. Hold it in your head just long enough to vomit it out onto a standardized time test. And then you move up a level. Right? That was school.

Yeah. And forget everything that you've regurgitated. You don't have to think about it. to a standardized time test and then you move up a level right that was cool yeah well and forget everything that you've that you've regurgitated you don't have to think about it you don't have to analyze it you sure as hell don't have to connect it to anything else you just put in a little box you know spat it out you're done move up which by the way isn't that how video games are there's only one way to solve a problem and then you solve it and then you go to the next level yeah well that's not life yeah what what life especially now the way technology and globalization and economics the way it's changed the world is you have to be a thinker you have to be an innovator and most importantly you have to be able to pick yourself up when you fail yeah i mean boy

if i've learned that i mean i'm i'm the king of getting punched in the face by life. Yeah. You, you have to reinvent you dyslexic kid who could barely get through school. Then I finally get through it and then I can't get a job as a screenwriter. Then I finally break in. Oh my God, SNL. Then they fire my ass. Then I have a book coming out, but it's marketed wrong so i yeah yeah yeah so my life has always been having to reinvent and to figure out how to get around life's maginot line yeah well uh i think you've done a pretty good job i mean you know i think so i don't know i know there's a lot of people that probably don't well Well, yeah. I mean, I don't really know them. My teacher certainly, certainly wouldn't.

My one teacher who said, when I said, I can't do this, she would say, well, you can do it. You just don't want to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Of course I don't. Right, right. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. I love this. This is so, where I'm at right now is so much fun. Yeah. It's great being 11 years old and feeling like a complete idiot while every other kid in the class races past me. Sure. Yeah, yeah. That's fun.

Yeah. Well, Devolution is the new book, and I'm certainly going to read it. And Max Brooks, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tell your dad I said hi. Are you at least getting to see him or do you see him sort of, you know, distance? Once again, we have to adapt. I don't know if you saw I did this little video with my dad about. Yeah, I did.

I did. You're outside the house. Yeah. Well, that was real. That's not that's not for the cameras. I have not hugged my dad since this started. And we go over to his house we go over so my son can go swim in the pool but he can't hug his grandfather so my dad sits on one side of the

of the window we sit on the other if he opens the door we talk through the screen we have to move back even farther yeah yeah but you know i wasn't kidding when I said it's, this disease is not just about me getting infected. If I infect him, he infects Carl Reiner who infects Dick Van Dyke. I wipe out a whole generation of comedians. Wow. Yeah. National treasures. You'd, you know, you would be, you would be like a, it would be terrible. You'd be a villain. Yeah. I'd be a villain yeah i'd be a comedy mass assassin yeah yeah wow well a lot of pressure to stay home uh and i'm glad that you took some of the time at home to talk to me thank you so much and everybody go out and get max's book and uh we will uh be back with you next week with more of the three questions bye-bye thanks i've got a big big love for of the three questions. Bye-bye. Thanks. I've got a big, big love for you.

The Three Questions with Andy Richter is a Team Coco and Earwolf production. It's produced by me, Kevin Bartelt, executive produced by Adam Sachs and Jeff Ross at Team Coco, and Chris Bannon and Colin Anderson at Earwolf. Our supervising producer is Aaron Blair, associate produced by Jen Samples

and Galit Zahayek, and engineered by Will Becton. And if you haven't already, make sure to rate and review The Three Questions with Andy Richter on Apple Podcasts. This has been a Team Coco production in association with Earwolf.