Sam Harris speaks with Judd Apatow about his career in comedy. They discuss his new documentary on George Carlin, why so much comedy ages badly, Carlin’s drug use, how Judd structures his work, using improv in his films, adventures in parenthood, what is worth worrying about, the downside of fame, advice for creatives, the unique properties of standup comedy, the problem of political fragmentation, the consequences of not believing in free will, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
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Okay, well the last episode on guns and gun violence caused some consternation, especially for people outside of the U.S. well the last episode on guns and gun violence caused some consternation, especially for people outside of Yeah.
Thank you.
I don't think I have more to say on the topic.
It seems that clearly articulating that I was recommending policies far more restrictive than anyone in the gun safety community in the United States was insufficient to spare me the wrath of those of you who think we should just scrap the Second Amendment and confiscate all firearms.
If any of you see a path toward doing that, well then, by all means, describe that path.
I mean, honestly, there have to be 5 million people for whom gun ownership is basically a religion.
So unless we were going to fight a civil war with these people to confiscate their guns, I really don't see any hope there.
Graham and I briefly discussed the possibility of a $1 trillion buyback of guns.
I'm pretty sure that would be a non-starter for a variety of reasons.
Anyway, if you need more from me on that topic, my original article, The Riddle of the Gun, is there and it's in podcast form in Episode 19.
Okay, well today I'm speaking with Judd Apatow.
Judd is an Emmy award-winning director and producer, screenwriter, author, and comedian, who is one of the most prolific comedic minds we have.
He recently co-directed, along with Michael Bonfiglio, and produced the HBO two-part documentary George Carlin's American Dream.
He also recently authored a book, Which is a New York Times bestseller titled Sicker in the Head, which is a collection of interviews with fellow giants in comedy and he has no doubt written, directed, or at least produced some of your favorite comedies in film.
Anyway, this is a wide-ranging conversation about Judd's career in comedy, how he views society at large, questions of fame and success, advice for other creative people, and other topics.
I found it a lot of fun.
I hope you enjoy it.
And now I bring you Judd Apatow.
I am here with Judd Apatow.
Judd, thanks for joining me.
Great to be here, finally!
It's only taken two decades or more to actually have a conversation, because you and I sat across the table from one another at our mutual friend Brent Forrester's wedding.
I think that's the only time I'm aware of hanging out with you.
Am I forgetting some time?
I think that was it, other than a drive-by in the neighborhood, but I remember that wedding very well.
Brent is an old, old friend.
Yeah.
You know, he, uh, one of the original writers of the Ben Stiller Show.
And we also work together on love.
And so we, we share an intimacy.
We're not intimate with each other, but we are intimate with the same man.
And that's the proximate cause of us speaking in addition to you bringing out a documentary that was great that we'll talk about.
Just to remind people of who you are and the kinds of things you do, you are known for producing and often writing and directing some extraordinarily funny films.
This is Forty, Knocked Up, The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, Walk Hard, Anchorman, Superbad, those are all just hilarious movies.
And you've also done a fair amount of television, going all the way back to, I guess, was The Ben Stiller Show your first TV, or did you do something before that?
That was the first thing I did.
Before that, I wrote for people and produced some stand-up specials.
So I did some writing and produced Roseanne's special, and I worked on Jim Carrey's special in the early 90s.
But the first TV series was The Ben Stiller Sketch Show on Fox.
Right, right.
I'll be interested to know how you first started, but your filmography here also now includes documentaries, of which I have seen two.
I don't know if you've done others, but you had the Zen Diaries of Gary Shandling that came out a couple years ago, which was really great.
And then you have this new one on HBO, George Carlin's American Dream, which we will Talk about a little bit.
I think people should just go see it.
But I'll be interested to know what your experience of Carlin was.
But before we go there, let's go to the beginning.
How do you start producing a special for Roseanne?
What was your first foothold?
Well, I used to interview comedians in high school from my high school radio station just as a way to meet them and ask them how they do it.
And that led to finding the courage to try to do stand-up during my senior year of high school on Long Island.
And then I went to USC Cinema School, where I would book comedy at the school.
And then started booking a club and getting on stage, which led to getting in at the improv and doing a lot of standup there.
And then a lot of my friends started needing jokes, and a lot of comedians wouldn't write jokes for other people.
But I needed money, and I thought that was a fun thing to do, because I just liked hanging around with comedians.
And then slowly people started getting specials, like Tom Arnold and Roseanne and Jim Carrey.
A pre-game show to Paul Simon in Central Park for Dennis Miller, and then I met Ben Stiller and we came up with an idea for a sketch show, and that led to me veering away from doing stand-up and focusing more on writing for a long time.
I went back into stand-up about eight years ago, but at the time I stopped because I just thought, well, the world is pulling me in this direction for some reason, so I'll just follow it.
Did you go to USC as an undergraduate, or was that a graduate school in film?
It was undergraduate.
I was 17 years old.
I didn't know what I was doing.
I just saw all my notes in a storage facility from class, and it was everything I should know right now but still don't know in the notes about making movies.
But it was the only major that seemed close to comedy or stand-up, so I studied screenwriting Ran out of money about a year and a half in, and then went full-time into stand-up just because I couldn't afford USC any longer.
So you knew you wanted to go into comedy at the first possible moment.
That's pretty interesting.
So who was in the pantheon at that point?
My comedy history is weak here.
Was Richard Pryor the most famous comedian in the world at that point?
Well, I'm about the exact same age as you.
Yeah.
I forget, when did Eddie Murphy become the most famous comedian?
What year does that put us at?
That's around 1981, when Eddie Murphy really hit And so, yeah, that's our sweet spot.
That's 13, 14.
Saturday Night Live hit when we were eight, so then Steve Martin came on the heels of that, and that was the era of Richard Pryor and Monty Python and Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart and MASH and all the family.
That's what I grew up on.
And so comedy was what I was attracted to.
It's how I saw the world.
I obviously was into George Carlin.
He was hitting hard in the mid-70s, and it was my way of processing, I think, just how weird life is, how weird the world is.
Our families, our schools, and I must have been hostile.
I look back and think, I must have been angry and enjoyed the avatar of furious people, even if it was the Marx Brothers, that I just liked that someone was calling out all the bullshit, and it was a way of figuring out how to look at the world as something that, in a lot of ways, was scary and ridiculous.
Did you know Carlin at any point, or is this documentary just a labor of love that is more abstract than the one you did with Gary Shandling?
Well, Gary Shandling, obviously you knew quite well, and that really comes through in the film, but was there any overlap between you and Carlin?
Well, I interviewed George Carlin for Canadian television.
In the early 1990s, and I had gone to see him work on new sets, but I didn't know him at all.
I knew his daughter, Kelly.
And when I was asked to do this, I mean, I knew Kelly a little bit at the time through Gary Shandling.
My first thought was, you know, don't ruin this man's life.
I mean, it is pretty scary to put these things together because in a lot of ways it becomes the The main public record of their entire life.
And if you do a terrible job, and we've seen documentaries that don't work, it may change people's perception of this person.
So I was really nervous about it, especially because I didn't know him.
And I wondered if through talking to relatives and friends and looking at the footage, you could capture this.
Can you really capture the vibe of a person?
So I'm so happy that Kelly loves the documentary because that is the thing that drives me.
My terror of doing it wrong.
I don't know.
I might've had a stroke in the interim.
I watched the documentary a couple of weeks ago.
I don't remember.
Did you put footage of your Canadian TV interview of him in it?
No, it was the one interview I could not find.
I'm such a hoarder.
I saved everything.
But you know what?
I think it was a bad interview.
I was very young.
I think other people did much better interviews with him than I did.
I mean, it might have been cute to see me there, but I think it wasn't very good.
But I remember him being very clear and Kind, and was certainly in that early 90s phase where he started getting very dark and very political, and had a special called Jammin' in New York around that time.
And a lot of the bits that people are quoting about abortion and other issues came from that special.
Yeah, it was interesting to see what a prisoner of the available formats he was in the beginning.
He was doing all those variety shows, and then it was fascinating to see how he had to kind of muscle his way out of all that.
It was, I think, you know, a simple path back then.
If you were a comedian, when he started, there were no comedy clubs, so you were performing at nightclubs, usually with a singer.
I mean, he got fired from the Playboy Club for talking about Vietnam This was a pulley boat club in Wisconsin, and the bill was him and Bette Midler.
And that's what the shows were like.
And if you wanted to get famous, you had to go on these variety shows.
And they were very, you know, conservative for the most part.
People weren't very edgy.
They didn't challenge the audience.
Politically, it was pretty soft, and I think he really was a clean-shaven, well-behaved comedian, trying to slip some things in here and there, like the hippy-dippy weatherman.
Obviously, he's finding a way to act stoned on TV in the 60s and do that kind of a bit.
But then, I think, as the country was having a lot of problems and the war was getting more and more intense, And the counterculture movement hit, he thought, I don't want to play for everybody's parents.
He just thought, my crowd is the people that I don't want it to be.
I want to be talking to the people who are changing the world.
And he had to take some chances and he started cursing on stage and getting more political.
He started getting fired for it and also later arrested for it.
And Finally, you know, he grew his hair and his beard and just made a very conscious choice to not be the guy he was before.
And he was making a lot of money.
I mean, they said he was making 12 grand a week in Vegas when he got fired for cursing on stage at the Frontier Hotel.
I mean, that's insane money for 1969.
And to then switch to colleges and coffee houses, I'm sure he did Really badly for a long time, but it was important to him and I think that inspired a lot of other comedians to be themselves on stage and to be more authentic.
It is amazing to reflect on the fact that just a few decades ago, you could get arrested for saying something off-color on stage.
We talk a lot about cancel culture and abridgements of free speech or attitudes that would lead to such abridgements, but it really was, watching the documentary, it was a bit of a shock to realize I had forgotten that a few short years ago, Literally, the cops would show up and drag you off stage.
It just somehow seems impossible.
Yeah, we hear about Lenny Bruce getting arrested, and you wonder what that was about, and I think Lenny Bruce thought it was about the fact that he talked about the church.
And that they used obscenity laws as a way to punish him for doing bits about the church.
He had this very famous bit called God Incorporated, where he would do a sketch where he played all the characters, and it was the head of every denomination talking about how business was going.
Like a stockholders meeting, or a board meeting of the company, and the company being religion.
And he went after religion pretty hard.
So if he went to, you know, certain cities, he would get arrested for cursing on stage.
But they said it was a way to just, you know, victimize him for his stances.
And he spent, you know, a lot of, you know, the end of his life fighting those things in court.
And he was a drug addict at the time and died of of an overdose, but really lost himself in that battle and would stay on stage reading the transcripts.
A lot of people have seen the movie Lenny with Dustin Hoffman, but it was a pretty tragic affair and it does feel like it was less about the cursing than it was about speaking out against organized religion.
Is Lenny Bruce still funny?
It's been a long time since I've watched any of his stand-up, but I remember going back at some point and trying to find what was funny and coming up short.
Did I just miss his genius?
You didn't like Dwight Eisenhower bits?
Somehow they didn't land for me.
But comedy ages really badly for most people.
Can you draw any lesson from that?
I mean, is there comedy that you think Will be truly timeless that stands a chance of being absolutely hilarious 50 years from now or are you continually surprised and disappointed to find that you are you're finding stuff you you know you were you thought something was hilarious and now it is decidedly less so or even unfunny to an embarrassing degree to you now?
Yeah it's uh it's certainly a victim of Changing times, changing values.
You know, Lenny Bruce, you know, he was a hipster comic.
It was connected to like jazz clubs and a certain way of speaking.
And at the time, no one did it the way he did it.
And he was very bold in a way very few people other than maybe Mort Sahl was.
And if you listen to the records, You almost have to listen to them through the filter of history and think about when he did it to really appreciate it.
There certainly are things that are very funny, but also it's a style that doesn't resonate anymore for the most part.
But there is some funny stuff, but you probably have to dig through a bunch of things to get to it.
The things that were shocking then are not shocking at all now.
A lot of references are to things at the time, but it is pretty hard to be Funny in the long run.
For me, I could watch WC Fields and really laugh.
I think some of the Charlie Chaplin stuff and the Buster Keaton stuff can be hilarious.
The Marx Brothers make me laugh a lot.
With stand-up, though, it ages out pretty quickly.
And even people that we love, like, say, Bill Hicks, who was in the style of Carlin to a certain extent, his stuff was maybe more about that moment.
He had more references.
And so it ages where George Carlin, he didn't have that many references to things like Reagan and the Sandinistas.
He would do it here and there, but he tried to talk about the big issue.
You know, what do we make of abortion?
What do we make of dark money and politics or big pharma and drug laws?
And as a result, it doesn't age because he's asking the larger question.
Yeah, I was surprised to learn just how much drugs and alcohol derailed him.
It was cocaine for him and I guess alcohol for his wife, but I mean, they really had a precarious existence there for a while.
I mean, it was easy to see they could have been just total casualties of the lifestyle they had created at one point, but then they kind of pulled themselves out of a nosedive.
I mean, part of the story is about he met his wife in 1960 and had a baby, Kelly, shortly after.
And he went on the road, and he didn't have much money, and he would leave three weeks at a time, six weeks at a time.
And his wife, Brenda, didn't get to pursue her dreams.
She had to stay home.
That was part of the culture.
It wasn't like a marriage was built around What she wanted to do professionally and i think he wanted her to stay home because he wasn't home and i think it broke her spirit and a lot of the story is is about her becoming addicted to alcohol as a result of that i'm sure there are other reasons as well and then he was i think a pot smoker from the time he was in junior high school and at some point that turned into
Hallucinogens, which he said was part of his transformation to his new style of comedy, and then it was also cocaine, which it seems like was somehow connected to an obsessive-compulsive disorder he had, an obsession with words and language, and maybe he had some sort of attention deficit that he was self-medicating for.
But back then, I don't think people thought they were going to die from cocaine.
They looked at it differently.
People started dying later than that.
People were more aware of the danger.
And he would go on three-day benders, six days without sleep.
And there's tapes in the documentary which are him just screaming and singing.
And it's a little bit terrifying.
And that's what Kelly grew up in, this house where her parents were really at war with each other.
There was an enormous amount of addiction.
And strangely, Thank God they both got sober.
I think George still probably did some things throughout his life, but for the most part, they were sober and were able to find each other again.
It's kind of a miracle that they were able to do that.
Yeah, he got surprisingly nihilistic toward the end of his life.
I don't know if this was when he was still having problems with drugs, or even if this was when he was sober, and it was just a shadow that was cast over the rest of his life.
But there's a quote in, I think, if memory serves, this might have been one of his handwritten notes that you show in the doc, where he says, you can't care what happens and be really funny.
And by caring what happens there, he seemed to mean like, you know, whether the species, the human species gets wiped out or, you know, suffers any other kind of cataclysm.
And he seemed to be, I mean, do you think he was honestly expressing his psychological and ethical worldview at that point?
Or do you think it was just kind of a nihilistic affectation he was putting on for comedic or rhetorical effect?
Well, I think it was a combination.
It certainly was a comedic stance.
I think the more you exaggerate the funnier you are, the angrier you are, the funnier you are.
That's why there's a lot of angry people, a lot of opinionated people.
I mean, he had five different sections to his career.
I mean, he kept changing what he was doing.
He started out in a comedy team that was a little bit political, then he did a pretty soft solo act, and then he went and became a hippie and went hard against authority.
became a real critical thinker.
Then he softened again 'cause he had like a heart attack and he thought I can't make myself so crazy, I'm gonna die from being this stressed out.
And then he saw Sam Kennison and he thought, I don't wanna breathe this guy's dust.
And he tried to become a better writer and a better comic and out Kennison, Kennison in a way.
And then he became very political But the last phase was that phase that people debate, because he started saying, there's no hope for the human race, I'm just going to watch it as a spectator, and I'm going to enjoy the show as this comes apart.
And I always took it as getting so dark, That you're basically saying to people, I'm trying to be funny, but things are terrible, and I doubt it'll get fixed in my lifetime.
If you're smart, you would fix it, but it ain't gonna happen for me, so I'm just gonna enjoy the madness of this reality and the human race and the disaster they've made of it.
And he did say that underneath a cynic, if you scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist.
And I think he was disappointed in the opportunity that the human race had.
You know, he would joke about how beautiful the world was, nature, and how we decided to build malls and just walk inside these malls, and that we were just screwing everything up and hurting each other.
And how ridiculous we are.
And I think he thought it was funny to just call it all out.
But underneath it, I think he never wanted anyone to get hurt or suffer.
I think it was just the final scream of someone who was saddened by some of the things that we all do.
Well, anyway, all I can do is recommend that people watch both parts of the doc because it's just an amazing tour through his career and also just the time capsule experience of just that period in history.
It's fascinating.
How do you think about your career at this point?
How much of your life is spent writing versus actually making movies versus doing the business of making movies?
Do you have a sense of how many days a year you've got a camera rolling and how many days a year you're just facing a blank sheet of paper?
Well, a lot of directing is Writing and trying to get something together to direct.
So I usually direct every two or three years and in between produce some television and do some documentaries.
I, you know, I have this book Sicker in the Head, which is interviews with a lot of comedians.
You know, I enjoy like the historian aspect of it now and It's, you know, I get pulled in different directions.
I try to just be very open and do what I'm passionate about in that moment.
There's no real logic to the career, other than if I have a good idea, I think, well, I'm being pushed to make a movie with Pete Davidson, and I'm interested in the world of firefighters and everything that Pete went through as the son of someone who lost their life in 9-11, so that suddenly might occupy me for three years, where I'm just trying to figure out how to tell that story appropriately.
And then in the aftermath of it, I might just go, well, now's a good time to make the George Carlin documentary.
It's almost a form of healing and recovering and switching to a different skill, you know, when I'm out of gas.
And it almost fills up my tank to think about someone else's career and their work and organizing a way to tell that story and writing the book and interviewing comedians.
You know, if I take two years and interview, you know, Sacha Baron Cohen and Margaret Cho and Amber Ruffin and all these people, I learn from talking to them.
And it makes me excited about taking another risk, because the movies are the big risk.
If they don't do well, it hurts.
You know, you're really putting years of your life on something which is an experiment.
Every movie is an experiment.
It might not work.
And you do have to steel yourself for the swing and hope that, you know, you pull it off.
Yeah.
How much of your experience is of having too many irons in the fire or something close to too many where you're bouncing between projects and kind of triaging your attention?
Or how much is your just having actually figured out a cadence and a workflow that is really optimized where you can just kind of move from project to project without a sense of having taken on too many commitments?
It's a never-ending struggle to figure that out.
Because early in my career I tried to write a movie and do nothing but write this one movie.
I thought I'll be like James Brooks and I'll just spend several years on one thought.
And then I finished it and no one wanted to make it.
Right.
And I felt like I just wasted like two or three years.
So I guess I need to have a couple of things going at the same time.
And usually people only want to deal with one.
Every once in a while, a few things are happening at the same time.
But the main moment when I was really busy was after The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a hit, we had written a lot of movies and developed a lot of movies that no one wanted to make.
And then suddenly everyone was like, oh, we get what you're doing now, so we'll make Pineapple Express and Superbad and Walk Hard and forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Like suddenly they all just went.
And that was a terrifying moment, but I was lucky because I was working with teams of people, incredible directors and writers like Seth and Evan and Greg Mottola and David Gordon Green and Jason Segel, that they were so incredible that, you know, we were able to, you know, avoid disaster when suddenly there clearly was too much going on.
But that was just the result of being so out of work that we just kept writing another movie.
And I kept saying, well, let's just write another one.
At some point, someone's going to let us make one of these.
And then, you know, we got lucky that they were like, OK, well, we'll make it now because Superbad, we were trying to get that made for forever.
I mean, it was six or seven years when we were.
Trying to convince people that that would be a good idea.
And then suddenly, people thought, oh, I think we get your style now.
Right.
And then they said, okay.
Well, from the outside, it seems like there's a fair amount of improvisation.
Is there?
How much is on book and how much is just you letting these very talented comedic actors freewheel for a while and hoping you catch something?
You know, it depends.
I remember Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote Superbad, and we couldn't get anyone to make it, so we kept doing table reads of it, and they would punch it up, and we'd do another table read, and they would punch it up, and still no one would make it.
And then when we shot it, everyone talked about how much improv was in it.
And Jonah, I think, thought, oh, there's so much improv in it.
And I remember we all looked at the shooting script afterwards and realized there actually wasn't that much improv in it.
I think it was such a great loose set that it felt like a lot more.
But other movies, I think when I direct, I encourage more of that.
I just enjoy that process of seeing if something incredible can happen that you don't see coming.
The movie I just did for Netflix, The Bubble, we did an enormous amount of improvisation.
And I think some of the great moments in movies like Knocked Up or The Four-Year-Old Virgin were from letting people know they had a lot of rope.
And people like Craig Robinson, As the doorman and Leslie Mann, they could really have a moment.
We would have a great script and we could pitch them some lines, but if you just said, all right, just go at it.
You know where you have to go.
Here's A, here's B. Let's just see what happens.
Someone would do something so funny that you didn't see coming.
I was always happy that I gave them that opportunity.
That's a very funny scene.
When did you start working with Leslie, your wife, in film?
What was the first film she was in with you?
The first movie we did together was The Cable Guy.
And, you know, that was a wild movie because at the time, you know, Jim Carrey was just exploding, was the biggest comedy star in the world.
He got paid a lot of money for it.
There was a lot of attention on it.
And Jim told everybody that he wanted to do something different.
He didn't want people to think he was going to just make super hard comedies like Ace Ventura every time.
And this was a darker satire.
And so when it came out, we took kind of a beating, even though it did pretty well financially, it didn't do what they were hoping it would do.
But it was Jim laying down the gauntlet to say to the world, you're not going to pigeonhole me.
And then he went on to do the Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
But we took a little bit of a hit because people were shocked to see him go dark.
And then now, you know, it's a few decades later, and that's one of the movies that really held up over time.
Because it's pretty pure to Ben and Jim's vision of what they wanted that to be.
So that was the first time Leslie and I worked together.
And then I don't think we worked together again till...
We did The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where she played Nikki, who was like the bad date, who was drinking that Steve Carell went out with.
Yeah.
Yeah, that movie's less clear in my memory, but Knocked Up and This is 40, I don't know when I last saw them, but she is so funny on camera.
I agree.
And a real co-writer of most of those ideas and scenes.
It's a real collaboration as we try to figure out those types of stories.
Yeah.
That's great.
Is that just an unalloyed good to be working with your family?
You have your daughters in some of your movies too, and so you have a full A full showbiz family now.
Is that just a pure guilty pleasure to be able to collaborate with your family or is there any aspect of that which is a tightrope walk?
Well, in the beginning, I liked to work with my kids when they were very little on movies like Knocked Up because I didn't want to work with other people's kids.
I just was happy to have my kids around and then you don't have to worry about the parents of the kids.
You could just have them there.
So a lot of that work was just strapping them into a chair and putting bacon in front of them.
And, you know, they would just relax and you'd throw them a line here and there or they would improvise here and there.
But over the course of a bunch of movies, they really learned how to act.
And now they've gotten ridiculously strong mods on that show.
Euphoria and Iris was just in the bubble that we did.
And it's really fun to see them learn the craft, but in a very slow way without a lot of pressure, because we would just do this together every few years.
And I mean, I think it's fun.
I like the business.
I like being creative.
I always encouraged it.
Sometimes I wonder, you know, if I encouraged dentistry, would they have gone in that direction?
You know, did I, you know, steer them too much just with my pure love of it?
I think a film where Leslie is cast as a dentist offers a lot of comic potential.
It's fairly terrifying to picture.
My wife and I just learned that we are probably terrible parents for having allowed our 13-year-old daughter to watch Euphoria.
We haven't seen it.
We don't know what horrors she's been exposed to, but all of her friends have seen it, apparently, and we were just browbeaten to the point of, fine, You know, you can watch it, and we were at a dinner party where we confessed this and were greeted by looks of actual horror on the part of grown-ups who had seen Euphoria.
I don't know how guilty your daughter is for producing that pornography or the most extreme scenes in there, but how much of a lapse of judgment was that to expose a 13-year-old to Euphoria?
It's funny, because I thought about this issue a lot, because when you're a parent now, you're just at war with the phone, you're at war with them being on YouTube, with them exploring what's on the internet without you.
And for a lot of years, when they're little, you think you can stop it.
And then there's this moment, I think for most people, it happens when they start junior high, and they convince you That they can handle a phone.
And you want them to have a phone because you just want to know where they are.
Yeah, yeah.
So you basically lose the battle of content, of what they watch, the moment you would like to control them with your GPS, or that they always can find you.
And I think what You know, what am I fearful of them seeing on the internet?
Because if I was 13, there is no scenario where I would miss anything.
And I think we all fool ourselves and believe that they're not seeing the things we're afraid of them seeing because maybe we took their phone away, but every one of their friends has access to everything in the world, basically.
So my philosophy has always been, I will discourage what I don't want them to see as much as I can, but I do want the relationship where they know they can tell me what they saw and we can talk about it.
If they're ashamed or they think they're going to get in real trouble, they'll never go, what was that scene about and what are they doing and why?
And I think When I look at my kids, I realize, well, that's why they're hopefully smart, is we had an open place where we could talk about it.
Because Euphoria is basically about traumatized kids, a lot of them having drug problems or acting out or acting out sexually, and it's really a beautiful story about how It affects them negatively in the ways that they try to heal and the ways that they struggle.
And I thought he did a pretty remarkable job over the two seasons of telling that story, which is very personal to the creator of it, Sam Levinson.
But certainly parents put it on and lose their minds.
And for me, I've never seen the movie Kids or the movie 13.
Yeah, I remember that.
Because I'm so afraid of seeing it.
So I get it.
But I think kids can process it and understand it more than parents can imagine.
Yeah, well, the lesson she seemed to be drawing from it is not a positive one with respect to drugs.
And she wasn't perceiving, or at least as far as I could tell, she wasn't perceiving much in there that was normative or desirable.
It was just a sense of How deranged people's lives can get by picking the wrong relationships and taking the wrong substances.
And so, it was a nice kind of conservative message being imparted, I think.
But still, I have not laid eyes on it.
So, you'll hear from our lawyers and psychiatrists if Well, that's what we always worry about, right?
Like, when our kids see something like that, such as, you know, a scene where, like, drugs create a nightmare for somebody.
Do they get that?
Does it make them go, I don't want to do that?
I was always the person that did think that.
You know, my grandfather produced Janis Joplin's first album.
So, at our house, they always talked about how Janis Joplin Uh, was a tragic figure because she was the most talented person in the world who was addicted to drugs and she died.
And so from birth, it was like, don't do drugs or you'll wind up like Janice Joplin.
That was the joke in the first episode of Freaks and Geeks when he says, you know what happened to Janice Joplin?
She's dead.
That was my family.
And you know what?
It worked.
Like it worked for me, but you do always wonder, are my kids picking up those messages?
I think there's a moment in Monterey Pop where Janis Joplin takes the stage, and if that's not the first moment where some of the prominent people in the audience were getting exposed to her, it seemed like it.
I just have this memory of, I think it was like Mama Cass and a few other people.
Yeah, Mama Cass has that look in her eyes where she just kind of says, wow.
Like, holy shit.
You know, I mean, this is unbelievable.
Yeah.
Talk about a great documentary and a time capsule.
That's just amazing to look at.
And there's a great Janis Joplin documentary out there, too, for people who are interested in such things.
I'm obsessed with all those documentaries.
When someone pulls off an amazing documentary like the George Harrison documentary or the Bob Dylan documentary, I'm so happy.
Yeah, yeah.
So, how are you viewing the world at this point?
I know you're fairly active on Twitter.
I get the sense that you might be left of me on a few points.
I don't know how familiar you are with my various heresies, but is there anything we worry about differently?
What's the view of this moment in history?
History of the Apatow House?
Yeah.
Well, I get worried probably most about The intersection of technology and money and control of what people think.
That's where I get most nervous.
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