South Beach Sessions - Mina Kimes & Bill Lawrence
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What is the longest you'll go without being in your phone over the course of today? Is this it? Will this next hour be the longest over the course of the day? No, for me, only because I had to ban phones from the writer's room. Because if you're talking in a group setting and you say, what does everybody think? And two out of the seven people in there are looking at their phones, you're screwed.

So you banned it. Banned it in the writer's room. You have to, if you have to go to your new parents get to keep it, you know, in their pocket, but can't have it on the table. It's too much, too toxic.

Is that common in writers' rooms? Yeah. We are, by definition, a scattered and a group of people that aren't great at maintaining focus. You know what I mean? And so finding the excuse to go, hey, I'll look that up on the Internet is usually an immediate 20-minute trip to nowhere. Because, look, the job is trying to find ways not to work. Yeah.

You have to consciously get out of it, though, right? Because beyond the addiction of it, our jobs are perpetually rewarded by whatever's in there, right? Like, it's got punishments, but the pursuit of content is something that is...

It's a hamster wheel. A hundred percent. I think, though, with phone, like there's are we using it as a stand in for social media or group chats or just having constant stimulation of like news and stuff? Because I find different aspects of it do different things to my brain. The actual phone itself is just an innocuous device, piece of hardware I can use to call my mom and FaceTime with her and show my kid. The social media apps in here are the actual devices.

Problem in my experience. Don't you find all of it, though, to be just a giant package of addiction? I mean, have you ever looked at that? You know how you can access how many hours you were on it? You looked at thing? No. It's like staring at the sun. Absolutely. It is bleak. No, thank you. Are you on your phone all the time? The two of you, yeah. I'm on it too much, but I've made some conscious decisions over the last five years just because for the first time, I have felt like the encroaching gray of addiction

ooh, this does not feel good too often. There are too many times there are things happening here where I'm going to a thing that doesn't feel that good when I'm in it and then it feels really bad when I'm done with it. And so I have to be

conscious about like watching myself because Mina and I have had some experiences with this in terms of how it is we've experienced social media because I at the very beginning of her career she's sort of walking into just a firestorm of garbage tornadoes because she went from business reporter to famous right like

There's some intermediary steps along the way. But social media famous? No? Yeah. I've definitely seen countless attacks on you based on gender and your connection to sports. So that must have happened fast. Yeah. The biggest difference is just scale. I mean, when we first started doing stuff together, I was not.

as prominent as I am now and wasn't as discussed as I am now. And thus, I looked at it a lot more than I do now. And my the way my relationship with social media has changed a lot just because of that. With me, I because I remember explaining to me that the very advent of what was her ESPN time was

That as a newspaper columnist in my 20s, developing the voice that would make people write in, I enjoyed for a long time whatever feedback was like pre social media. Didn't mind criticism. Get to pardon the interruption. Start doing it with Tony and Mike.

And I'm delighting in the fact that nobody wants me there. Like nobody, they want Tony and Mike, they don't want me. And so I sort of enjoyed that because I had what was at the time, a pretty impenetrable professional confidence, right?

But it's been weird in my 50s as I'm doing things that I'm less confident in, as I'm trying to study business to feel delayed what you were feeling at the beginning when I met you. Like I haven't got I got into my 50s before some of this stuff started affecting my head. Do you think that those feelings are because of your like, I guess, personality?

sensitivity to where you are and the things you're doing? Or do you think it is just the nature of the response? What's being amplified? What's being sent your way? Is that different? It's super interesting to live it this way. It's aging in all its forms because I'm not talking about all social media. I'm not on Facebook or Instagram. I'm in one place that has been rotting.

I'm in Twitter land where everything there has changed some and whatever used to not bother me in terms of being politicized as a weapon for takes, which you get a ton of now. That was something that wouldn't bother me once upon a time. But now I'm in an environment where it feels like I'm surrounded. Well, you can't escape it, man. I find it.

You're gonna say it's gonna hurt my heart. You're a different generation than me. It's really upsetting to me. We're the same generation. On some level, everybody that does what I do at some point in time relished the anonymity of being a writer. And because by the way, if it works out for you, you get some of the perks of celebrity, restaurant tables and access and financially rewarded, but you don't have to deal with all the negatives

And for me, social media has brought what sounds like a good opportunity is the ability to brand yourself. Do you know what I mean? And to then by extension, get to make more stuff, you know, and get to do more things that you like.

like, but it opens a door to the stuff that I think subconsciously I was always hiding from, which was what you had to face immediately, which is suddenly people going, "Hey, this is why I think this guy sucks." By the way, and that never, ever happened to writers before. You know what I mean? And now you're seeing it. Yeah. And are you seeing it? I do see it. I see it. It's a combination of clickbait and do either of you guys, I told Dan I was going to ask you about it, do you ever search your own name? No.

I used to. I used to. I do it on the daily. Not only do I do it on the daily, but I have this perverse side of me as I answer some people. Like, so I surprise. I try to do it always comedically. As some dude really went in hard. They're rebooting the show Scrubs.

And if you guys ask me my reasons for it, we're all friends, nobody's making anything. I'm in a weird time in my life that I get to make stuff and not only have friends I would want to spend time with anyways, but people that aren't working getting to work, production in LA, could all be very cool.

But I just read somebody going, look at this, you know, asshole rebooting the show that is already over and already blah, blah, blah. You shouldn't do it. And so stupid. And so I just like going on with people like that and going, hey, thanks. You totally turned me around on this. Just because in my head, I think without being mean, the value of people knowing the stuff they think they get to anonymously put out. You boop them. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah.

Pretending that there's someone human at the end. You don't have to give any kerosene to a brush fire type of thing, but just to go, hey, occasionally there's other side to what you're putting out there. But the reason I said used to and I don't know if it's the same for you. It was a conscious decision because there was something happening when I talk about the encroaching gray.

I don't know what it is about human nature. Like obviously social media can be a poison pit in a number of different ways if you're just comparing yourselves to people. But to have access to

10 items of praise and then get stuck on the handful that aren't like there was a deterioration there that was happening to me that I was I there was something happening with me where I was not absorbing the positive. Like that's everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Praise is like I don't think that's everybody. That's everybody. Yeah.

I don't know. You know, I think you have to if you're going to believe the good, you probably have to believe the bad on some level. But I think the game is the second you go looking to anonymous outside faces for anything to boost your self-esteem, positive or negative, you're doomed. You know, but you're talking about you're putting your work out into the world. You're not putting it in a drawer. Yeah. Yeah. Look, it's I talk a big game. I wanted to call my production company Noble Failure Productions.

Because if you could just show something that your friends and family didn't think was awful, you know, I mean, that's really, there's so many things out of your control, that's all you can shoot for. But I talk a big game, but no, I hate it. You know, it affects me as, on a logical level, I know I should distance myself from it. On an emotional level, I always take those blows and carry them around for at least a couple hours. When I say I used to, though, like, it's not, that's not an absolute. It's, I've been, it's a weaning thing.

Well, I got a question for you guys. It's a chicken and egg question that I was obsessing about before I got here because of what you do. We're all so very quick

is going to be me turning a spotlight on the media. All right. We're also very quick to go. The anonymity of these social media platforms has created an environment for people, young people, to spew venom without consequence, right? But do you think that's what came first and then different media sites and platforms said, oh, that's working, we're going to do it? Or here's the opposite side of the chicken and egg thing, which is,

In my business, even before social media started grabbing, I noticed a cultural turn that a desperation clickbait. You know what I mean? And I used to read criticism and reviews of shows, my own shows and other people's shows.

And I found them constructive. There was even a critic. I mean, you guys remember Pauline Kael and people that people would read what I did for fun, you know, because it was eloquently written. The negatives were well-spoken. The positives were well-spoken. And now I...

Dan made me read one on the air once, like the review of shrinking by time magazine. And I only care because my parents read it was shrinking as an insult to therapy, comedy and Harrison Ford. And I'm like, who writes that headline? But,

You know what I mean, by the way? By the way, that's such a different that's such a different pool than, hey, I didn't love the show. You know what I mean? Yeah. So the question is, do you think it started as a as a competitive thing amongst your business to grab people's eyes and look? Or do you think it started as people found a way on social media to do this and it worked so everybody could?

Because I sometimes point my finger at the media types. Yeah, you're basically asking, were people always this mad? Yes. Mad and shallow in the madness, right? Because even if there was criticism before, at least it felt kind of more earned or developed. It felt earned, it felt constructive, and it felt like you said there were kernels of truth because it didn't feel like everything that I have to deal with is at least starting from a place of wanting people to go, oh, no way, I can't believe they said that.

Well, you know, you can speak more to the olden times when people wrote letters to TV shows that they were mad at. People would bring them on a horse and stuff. Even in 10 years, though. I do miss that your rage and hatred had to reach me by mail with a stamp before it got to me. And now it gets here a whole lot quicker than it used to. But when you talk about are people angrier now?

It's the difference between shouting in a bathroom by yourself and now having it heard and seen, getting that anger heard and seen so that young people can be in the business of being famous. Right? Yeah. Well, I would also say, to make it more narrow, even in the last five to seven years versus 10 years ago, so as I've been doing this now for about 10 years, that

The pipes, meaning the platforms, are incentivizing. The thumb is on the scale now for the matter, the better. Not just the matter, the better. The more provocative you are, the more of a gotcha, the more angry, the more political, the more likely it is to go crazy. So there is an actual incentive, sometimes financial, for people to be angrier than even five to seven years ago. There's on Twitter, for example, a For You page that didn't exist before. It's algorithmic. And when you go there...

The mad stuff does well. The gotchas do well. So there's actually incentives. I would add to that the thing that blows me away is absolutely no consequences to be completely uninformed on the topic, even if you're going head to head with an opinion or an issue from someone that has spent a lot of their adult life or of their working career pursuing knowledge in that topic.

that there's no weighted thing to experts anymore. I find that fascinating. Yeah, I'm certainly sure. An insult to therapy, comedy, and Harrison Ford. I got all three. It's a trifecta.

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You've had a remarkable amount of success early, and a lot of people would say that you are wildly confident. It's not. It's a trademark of my family is completely unearned confidence.

But it's earned in your case. Oh, it's nice. Well, but I mean, you've had monster successes. I've had, you know, I did not expect to have a career renaissance in my mid-50s. Part of my business is highs, lows, and I've had

plenty of peaks and valleys. And the only thing that remains true is, uh, the nowadays more than before, when you're in a peak, you have this general sense just because of what Mina's talking about, uh, excitement for you to hit your next valley, which is so weird, you know, because I root for the people I love to do great. You know what I mean? I don't, I don't, uh,

sit around going, oh man, I can't wait till this one goes badly. But you both know when you've made something well, right? Like how much more impenetrable are you to whatever the cruelties are in this if you know it's good? I don't know if you guys can do this because the nature of business. My personal epiphany was when I realized that success of something creative, you can't use your metric correctly.

to be how financially successful it is or you're doomed, you know? And yeah, that's an easy thing to say for someone that, you know, was doing well financially, but it really helped me. I did made this show that I thought was awesome called Whiskey Cavalier and a horrible title. Don't worry about it. And it was really good. And I had to move to the Czech Republic to shoot it because it was a big action TV show and we can only do it in an affordable way there. It took place in Europe and,

Paris and Amsterdam. And the show was cool. And I challenged people to go watch it and say that it stinks. I'm now going to get 9000 tweets. But it failed miserably. And I found myself going. I was in the Czech Republic for six months watching.

away from my family and it did not feel like a success. It felt like a giant mistake. And I finally got to a point that I was really lucky because my, my youngest kid watched it. He's like, dude, that show was good. My friends and I really dug it. I'm like, oh, cool. Yeah. Right. It has merit. So I think what success means to you is the, is the, the biggest life change for me. That's positive. I think in this sort of connects to,

what we've been talking about with social media, for me, a challenge and something I've really spent a lot of time is trying to disentangle my perception of whether something I've done is good from two things. One, the reaction on the internet, which is hard and real. And especially when we're now in an internet business and it's like, well, this didn't, this didn't go viral. This didn't get X amount of reviews. So it must be bad. No, sometimes the internet is wrong. Sometimes. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Go back a second. Sometimes the internet is wrong. Ah,

That's crazy. Sometimes it happens. If it's on there, it's mostly true. I'm going to blow your guys' minds. Sometimes bad things go crazy on the internet. It's unbelievable, but it happens. And then the other is to find...

the opinions that people actually value and trust and really, not just say it, but really privilege those above, again, the masses or whatnot, which isn't to say that the masses are wrong. Sometimes they're right. And sometimes somebody who's been watching my stuff forever is one of those voices that I should trust, but really trying to zero in on that. I mean, like to curate the people that you listen to. An example that kind of connects both of them is back when I did

read more of my internet mentions, and I think I've told you this before, I was really upset that day because a bunch of fans were just like saying really vile stuff to me. And I was bitching about it to my husband. We get in a car, we go to a party, we're on the way out of the party, someone stops me. And it's Don Cheadle. And he's like, hey, you do a great job. I just want you to know, this is such a humble backstory, I don't care. I'm such a fan. And I'm like, wow. We walk out and I'm like, you know, those fans. And my husband's like,

Don Cheadle is your fan and you're bitching about him?

He's like, you got to like step back and learn how to weight things better. Come back to that, though. You guys think everyone's like that. You think that everyone is like that. I hope so. That everyone who gets 15 compliments focuses on the one negative? I think that's how humans are wired. I really do. I would also say this. Minus narcissists. I was excited to try and find a way to do this. So I am in a role, you know, my daughter is in an even younger generation than Mina. Yeah.

It's fun to say. I see young people that live in this world. My daughter was in this world. She's got a million Instagram followers. It's part of her career. She self promotes her music. And and I've witnessed things that are confusing to me.

I've seen her once, a friend had a pair of jeans on that my daughter thought were amazing and she said it's ridiculous that these jeans are like 400 or $500. I'm like, yeah, you shouldn't buy them. She's like, no, no, just wait. And she had a friend take a picture of them, her in them. And on that she said, you know, not an ad, really like these. They fit great. They're fun.

and within a week that company contacted her and, uh, and she's like, now I just have to not be a jerk and say, I want 20 pairs and just say, I like want one or two pairs. And she lives in that world. And, uh, um,

I think she takes the negatives in stride even more than I do. You know what I mean? Um, uh, because, uh, uh, she is at least savvy enough to know that if you're going to make a living on, uh, the same way that we know the pluses and minuses that came with our career going in young people, I think don't go into this with blinders on, they go into it.

with tons of stories from their friends of the negatives and of what can happen and what you have to be careful about. And they're so much more savvy. It's an extension of that joke metaphor of how I don't know anything about technology. I don't know anything about entering that world. My daughter will educate me all the time. I'm surprised to hear you say, though, that you made something that you knew was good and you're... Whiskey Cavalier. No.

I just wanted to say it. I hadn't got a chance to say it. You should say it like that, too. It's fun to say. We were talking about it today because I thought it was going to be a huge show. It was my last network TV show. I thought it was going to be a huge ABC show. And then we went to Upfronts, but they still did when you bring you there and they talk about what show. And it was relegated to a mid-season replacement. And then Jimmy Kimmel, who's just an absolute buddy of mine. I love the guy. He had to do the big presentation. He made fun of the title. So I went from going, this show's going to be huge to it's a mid-season replacement. He mocked

the title and then it was over in like uh uh seven weeks and no one ever watched it and then for it to come full circle um we were out trying to sell a show about six weeks ago and someone's like we're looking for a show that's kind of like action comedy like whiskey cavalier if you know that show and i almost lost my mind i almost went across the table and choked the person i'm like i made that show i lived in the czech republic it was very cold and there's castles everywhere

That's a roller coaster, though. You had the standard. You believed that that was good, and then you were taken off of your position by results. Yeah.

Yeah, it really upset me. That doesn't happen to you very often, does it? No, usually the stuff that doesn't work is so bad. Have you ever made something that you knew was bad? Yeah, my career was in a valley when I was trying to just get work and I turned the movie Rush Hour into a TV show. Was it your favorite? That sounds good. Yeah.

It's a great movie. I haven't seen the show. Who was in the show? Did you, wait, did you do an Asian person and a black person in the show? I did. And, uh, and by the way, both, uh, great young actors, but no, it just didn't work. You know, the funniest thing was, uh, it came back to haunt me in a good way. So Wendy Malick, um, was on that show and she's, uh, she's in shrinking now, but, uh, uh,

An affront to comedy therapy and Harrison Ford. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Still there. And I called her up and go, hey, you got to do this show. And she's like, I don't think it's that good. She even said it in a great way. And I'm like, look, I think it might work. Come do the show. And if it doesn't go well, I'll put you in something great eventually. And she came and did that show and it was a disaster. And then when I was putting Shrinking together, she literally was like, hey, you owe me one. Yeah.

That's how bad it was. Keeping receipts. Yeah, yeah. Which character is she? She plays Harrison Ford's wife. Oh, okay. She was like on Just Shoot Me and stuff. She's been around for a long time. Is that where your confidence was lowest there? Me? No. Oh.

Because Mike Schur, when Mike Schur speaks of Bill Lawrence, he speaks of meteoric rise. Mike Schur is not, you know, jealous of many people as somebody who was in his early 20s doing Saturday Night Live. And this was like the one person that he was looking at and being like, that guy's career path is meteoric. I search the Internet for anybody. It's not a lot because Mike's killing it for anybody that says that he's a poor man's Bill Lawrence. And if I find it, I find a way to get it to him.

Whoever sees this, please put that out there as a test of that. No, I. But you bothered people with your confidence at that point. Yeah. Look, I think I learned a lesson that you spoke of a second ago, very young, which is growth from failure. And, you know, I talk about it way too much, but I was mercilessly fired off my first three big jobs because

Three? Yeah, I got fired off of Friends, The Nanny, and Boy Meets World all in a row. Bam, bam, bam. I know. And the fact, and that was my lowest, you know, because I would, watching Friends become, you know, I wrote on the first season of the show and watching it become a juggernaut with young writers that I'd become friends with and just seeing it explode while I was in my boxers, like, fetal on a futon was amazing.

And I think that experience of getting canned off all those shows that all went on to be very successful and actually getting another gig gave me this feeling of like, oh, shoot, failure actually can point you in the right direction. So I stopped being that's my luckiest thing that happened to me. I stopped being afraid of failing very young.

You lacked confidence at the beginning, right? At ESPN, because this is the most confident version of you I've seen, but it's at least in part because of the sheer extraordinary amount of preparation that she has done in order to meet this moment. Like when you were talking before we started here about one of the secrets in Hollywood is you can actually outwork people. I've seen what happens when you want to work because it's so important to be like,

more on top of things than everyone else is. I would imagine, I'm speaking for you here, but I would imagine this is the most confident version of you. I'd like to answer this for me. Just give me a second. Yeah, I guess so. I, I, I,

I feel confident now in a way that I definitely didn't when we first started doing television together. But that makes sense because I was very green and bad at doing television at the time. And I didn't honestly deserve to be confident doing it. And I've just been doing the exact job I'm doing now for a few years now, quite some time. So I should hope that I'm more confident.

I would take this all back to Dan's original question. You know, when you asked if, you know, does everybody feel it, the negative harder than the positive and all that stuff, is the one thing I've noticed in Hollywood, and that's why I was so interested in what you guys saw yourself getting here, is I am constantly amazed that

And I don't say this in a judgmental way that people that started with the goal of being the face or being famous or being in that situation, they've thought about it so much. I'm often amazed by how Teflon they are about when they land there, as opposed to people that ended up there because of a career path. Because by the way, there are young people right now who you can, uh, there's a horrible article I read that, uh,

and it was on the internet, so it's true, that said, they asked kids, would you rather be the, you know, they gave them one job that seems like it really matters, or the assistant to someone famous.

And the assistant to someone's business blew the other one just out of the water. You know what I mean? And so it was saying early on that they're growing up in a culture of I want people to know who I am. And I think that anybody that starts there –

maybe in a good way, maybe in a bad way, does not suffer the same things that we will talk about suffering as people that have ended up there. That's 100% true, by the way. This generation fame, I feel like has a appeal and a premium and it is seen as a viable career path for kids in a way because of social media, whatever. And I'm like,

Like for a lot of them, like it's not like this is the thing that I want to do and maybe fame will be a consequence of that. It's what can I. On the savviness from it is so off putting. I've met people both through my daughter and my son, especially being in L.A. that I was talking to a young woman. I won't name check her that said that she's like, look, right now I'm kind of insta famous.

So that buys me a window of a few years to figure out what it is that I want to do. And in my head, I'm like, oh, this kid's scraping by. And I'm like, what is... She's like, no, I mean, I make like $700,000 a year on...

This is somebody in their 20s. And by the way, and then the foresight to go. And I know that has a shelf life. Yeah. But that buys me a window to figure it out, you know? And I'm like, oh, that's a level of savviness that maybe that's cool that there's opportunities like that for young people. I don't know. I don't want to give Dan affirmation because I like watching him struggle. But I think you also have to look at

at anything that affects people emotionally. And you guys both live in that world too. I was told my folks that I was coming to talk to you again. And the interview you did with me that you talked a lot about your brother and I talked about my dad and stuff. It was so meaningful and helpful to so many people in my family that I ended up being just really grateful for it. And I think if you also, if you touch

Yes, if it's really funny. Yes, if you have those moments. But also, I think you probably know when you've hit an emotional thing that feels a little universal. I mean, because I've seen you do it a bunch.

Well, she makes fun of me for being the grief eater. She's... Is that, by the way, is that an official nickname? That's fantastic. Yeah, I stole it from, there was a show on HBO, a limited series called The Outsider. Did you watch that? It's one of their like, yeah, anyways, there was a monster called a grief eater who feeds off of sad people. Yeah.

But I think a lot of people have the same reaction to a lot of your work. We're like, oh, this really, this family dynamic really resonated with me. This emotion that they talked about or this experience or the lightness of it helped me get through hard times. But, and this circles back to what we were talking about, like, do you engage with the audience?

When you see things like that, when people tell you things like that, does it resonate? Does it enter into your cortex? So there are two different kinds, right? So I was talking about the writing. It's lonely. Writing is lonely. And then you release it out into the world and you get whatever the feedback is of that. But I made a choice at 30, the choice that I made that had less to do with performer than it had to do with, oh, that seems like it would be a lot less lonely writing.

was seeing the group of people who were working behind the scenes at Pardon the Interruption before they ever went on the air. And that community of people being, I mean, it's your writer's room. It's the community of people that we work with now that you work with on television.

The vibration of the laughter and the communal nature of it was like open air. It was like breathing compared to – because writing, for me, I didn't enjoy writing either. Writing is awful. For everybody? Yeah. Excruciating. I say the same joke every time I teach, which is I say, raise your hand if you like writing. And a few people do. And I always say, if you really mean that, you're a sociopath.

because it's not real. Writing's awful. What you like is having written something, like being done with something and then showing it to people. I get that. I don't get anybody that says they actually enjoy sitting down there in that mental struggle. But so the community of what I'm talking about, going out from whatever that sculpting, obsessive compulsive sculpting is into a group of people that you can laugh with. I mean, that you're sharing any part of the human experience. He's mentioning the South Beach session that we did

I don't know how much time. You're exceedingly, musingly, not introspectively male in some places that I find. It's true. It's true. We're the worst. Men are, we're not mature. We're not, there are any number of places that we have not looked.

in a way that would have value for us. And you specifically, when we talked about the stuff in the deep and the dark places, I don't know how much time you spend there with others, like volunteering it. It's not my favorite. I think you can distance yourself from it with writing about it and volunteering.

you forced me to talk about it in my own personal experience, which is not my favorite jam. But I think that's why I ended up being so grateful for it. But I'm just saying people who love you would have seen you talking about something there that I, I mean, my friends will all make fun of me because I'm terrible at small talk. I'll just go right. I mean, she spends, she spends a lot of time mocking that I'll go right there to like, give me the good stuff on wherever it is. What, what, give me the, all the best parts of motherhood. Yeah.

Just before we get to the car, then I want to listen to music. Also, just being bad at small talk makes you the world's worst texter. Oh, yeah. I mean, have you ever tried text with him? It's a nightmare. Literal nightmare.

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Are you actually looking to the audience at all? And do you feel that when people like it? You say the audience. Yes is the short answer, but it's not the feedback of the audience. My audience is the people in the room. Yes. Well, it's again, this...

I went for 20 years. I've been doing something that doesn't take hardly any inventory of who's actually listening. It's the five, the seven of us, the nine of us. It does it feel good in here. And then other people happen to be watching it. But the entire I mean, it's going to be hard for me to explain how different radio is from all the other things. But it's just the intimacy of it is something it's why I

I've chosen it to be the thing that sustains me professionally because it's just different from the other things in terms of how intimate it feels. Back to the original topic. It's so interesting as you kind of load social media into this. And Dan said, like, oh, you know, there's so many things wrong with men. Do you feel the obligation as a young woman in in specifically in what you're doing to

Is there a responsibility, you know, as you kind of enter the fray of this stuff and when you determine how you behave to be a role model for young women that now can see it? Like, by the way, it's so weird that we're saying this now. Yeah. I can't imagine a young woman who wants to be in the world of sports who isn't looking at you and going, oh, it's you know, that's a thing I can do. So you have to be super extra, super secret careful. Right. So.

Some of it, I would say less careful and more like there's pressure to be perfect, right? And not make mistakes and to be extra prepared and be 110%. And that to me is like the best role model I can be. It's just like doing my job really well and having the respect of the players I'm around. That's the best thing I can do for young women. But, and this again goes back to what we were talking about, like, do you read the internet? Do you engage?

I don't know if this is going to sound solipsistic or self-aggrandizing, but the big part of the reason every now and then I punch back is because women love it. Yeah.

The number one thing when I meet young women in the industry and they're like, hey, you know, how do you do this? I'm like, oh, yeah. And they're like, so like I saw you dunk on this dude and it just made me feel so good. Give me joy. Give me a moment of pure joy. Just for once, one of us hit back and won. And like, I don't, I hope that doesn't sound like I'm like. No, it sounds awesome. Like.

Yeah, I'm justifying my own trolling because it makes me a role model. I don't think that's valid, but it is that I swear to God is the first thing women tell me is that they love it. I think the pure form of that is people knowing that they can fight young women, especially knowing they can fight back. I think it's cool.

Look, there's so much overlap between what you all do and what I do. And sports and entertainment, even the contracts feel like you're on a sports team. And I ask that knowing that, you know, I'm not that old. I mean, I'm not like Dan old. I think you're younger than me, aren't you? We're about the same. Yeah.

The way he's dressing now makes it a little confusing. The way you're dressing now. I'm very cool in hip. Gucci sneakers under the table. They might not get captured by the camera. So I just want to make sure. I know. I just looked at them and it bummed me out. They're sick. They're pretty nice. I have a white version. But, uh, uh, my career started with, uh, uh, comedy rooms were, um, you know, maybe nine people and, uh,

Eight of them were white dudes and there was one woman who was most likely also white, you know. And just the way that that business has changed from then to now is both heartening, but also, I mean, it's not that hard to look up and see, you know, how many show creators are women as opposed to men. It's still skewed and still drastically imbalanced. It's still skewed in our world, too. Yeah.

Dramatically. So like that, that she would still pass for representation in 2025 is kind of a stinging indictment for the industry at large. Just because there's so few of us or. Yes, I wasn't. I was just saying it's 2025 and still. Yeah, right. I know I get asked the same questions. We're talking 2025 and you're saying like, and it's OK to fight back. And it's like you you treat social media as sport.

It feels like you are a cat playing with yarn on acid and hatred. Like, I know that that's not the lived experience, but it's the way that it looks from over here.

I, yeah. It's also a calculated response that's both safe and fun at the same time a little bit, yeah? Mostly, yeah. Sometimes I probably walk the line a little bit too much. But like I, listen, like I said, I get called DEI bitch all day. Like if you guys search my name, I'm sure like the first thing you'll see, that's new, right? Because of the last couple of years. But like, yeah, I...

I am DEI. And it's not the way that it's being interpreted now, which is a stand in for a slur, is a stand in for being unqualified. It's because when I first came into this industry, the people who had me on the shows, like Dan, like ESPN, who hired me, had to open up their...

Rolodex and think like, well, this person is doing something entirely different, but she also seems to love football. What if we gave her this opportunity and it's something that we hadn't considered before? Let's see if we can include her. And they did. And I took it and I ran with it. And that's that is what

it means, even though it's been bastardized. I would also argue that there's a sound and smart business decision beneath it, because I don't think any of these corporations are just benevolent. I could be wrong. But I think on some level, that starts with how dumb are we that we're not opening ourselves up to a bigger fan base by bringing someone like you into the world? Yeah, I, I, I,

I wish we still were able to have that conversation in our industry. And it feels like now people are shying away from it a lot. I don't, and I know, I don't know if you're, obviously that's not something you're doing, but yeah,

Something you've thought a lot about over the last few years of the last 10 years. Well, you guys look, I did not know where all my blind spots and privilege was in this regard until Mina and Sarah and Katie taught me because on our show.

I've made this joke with her before. I'm stumbling onto the set with mac and cheese in my beard. And she's doing, she's doing her, you know, third hour of research for a show where I'm like, Mina, we're just going to watch a guy get hit in the balls by a sledgehammer. Like, what do you, you don't have to prepare that much. My least favorite part of the highly questionable because I couldn't prepare for it. The guy's getting hit in the balls. Which is what was our specialty. As someone who I think has watched a lot,

a pretty fair amount of your programming um sometimes when people ask me about like or do you feel like you should take a stand and i will say like sometimes just me being on a stage with a bunch of former players talking football that in and of itself is a stand and to draw a parallel here like i do feel like watching a lot of your shows just like you'd see the normalization of like obviously the shows have a pretty wide breadth of representation in their casts and they're not

talking about, you know, the biggest issues of the day or whatever. But just like seeing people like that laugh with each other and share jokes and be friends and relate in that way, to me, in and of itself, like that sort of modeling, which is much closer to real life than the things we see on the internet, I think is...

in and of itself saying something. I feel that way when I watch it. I feel better about people. I feel better about a world where people like that are friends and live together and work together and are cool. And I don't know. By the way, it's going to sound incredibly insecure, but I need to hear that because we live in a time where

that I'm sure everybody is going like, Hey, am I doing or saying enough? You know what I mean? And so, um, I think about it a lot. I was thinking about it today cause I'm working on a, um, we're doing a new college show star, uh, starting Steve Carell and the guy's awesome. Great dude. And to do a show that's set authentically on a college campus right now is very tricky because of, you know, and so you sit around in the writer's room going, um,

What happens if we put these things that are out in the world on a day-to-day basis in what is essentially escapist entertainment? And it is a scary tightrope. Yeah, right.

And by the way, and I'm somebody I'm not necessarily right or wrong, but I don't love being preached at in it when I watch when I, you know, if I if I'm turning to a show for an opinion, I love it. If I'm watching entertainment, I don't want to be preached at about what I should think. Yeah, I hear you. But I get to go back to a joke I made. I've made a couple of times now, like just me like a.

Asian women doing mock drafts on ESPN is escapist for some people and revolutionary for others. Yeah, okay, I got it. Escapist television can fill the same role. Like everybody in the country today, we're all just picking our spots.

And you, I feel like maybe you're having a little bit of trouble. It sounds like with that, not, not in action, but in thought, like where are the moments where I want to be outspoken, where I want to be. Well, it just feels weak. It's the same thing he's talking about there where he's, he's saying he makes things look, Ted Lasso landed at a time people needed what,

his message was like that. I don't know if there's another time that that show could have landed quite that way, given where we were and the need for, Hey, give me something, give me something that feels good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, we're all talking about the same fear is the fear of numbness. Right. And, and, uh, if you become inured to something, it's a,

Almost as good a word is that word Mina used earlier was it saw up something well, it's good stuff She does use that one. I like that one. It's a good one I'm gonna just nod and pretend I know what that means and nerds pretty good though The I don't know what it means either, but I'm sliding there But you know, it's a general fear that for me anyways I don't know if you guys have it that the sheer weight and the amount of stuff that's coming out is so fast that you become so numb and

that you just back out of it completely. And that's why I'm, you know, looking at what the type of work I'm doing and going, is this, you know, is this hiding from the stuff that's that I'm really feeling? Yeah. No, I mean, I sometimes, you know, like I could,

instead of doing my first mock draft for the week, I'll stop talking about mock drafts. I can be like, hey, I just saw, I read this article about tariffs. I used to be a business, like, let me talk to camera about tariffs or whatever. But, you know, I, and I don't, and sometimes I'm like, is it cowardice for me not to address more serious things? But I think there's a lot of things that I think about. One, am I actually the best qualified person to be talking about this? A lot of times it's no, to be honest. I'm not that smart. I'm not that book smart. Who can I amplify is something I ask a lot rather than myself needing to this.

to do something, recognizing that people do come to me for a lot of different things. And one of it is escapism and feeling better about people and getting away from that information, which they can get elsewhere. And then when I do pick my spots and every now and then I do, I want to make sure it hits. And I think...

The feedback that I've gotten is like, OK, like it feels good sometimes to see a person who I go to for escapism or entertainment or fun, occasionally picking a spot to take a stand. But it doesn't have to be the substance of what they're doing. Thank you guys for spending this time with us. Love you both. Love you, buddy. Said that to a guy out loud.

Me and her were getting to know each other. It was hard for you, wasn't it? It was hard for you. I don't really hug my kids that much from getting there. There's still growth for you. There's still hope and possibility for you. William Van Dusen Lawrence IV. Oh, God. Wow. I'm so sorry. No, no. This has been super fun, super validating. Not quite as validating as Don Cheadle.

One of the things that I used to love about the feedback that we used to get, we used to have a Reddit community that was very passionate, outsized in its passion. And it was a positive place. And I have seen over the last however many years, it turned on me in a way that was like hurtful. It was like, whoa, I'm like, these are my people. Yeah.

I mean, I'm going to say that it sort of alerted me to the idea that there might have been a political division in this country that was racial that I wasn't quite aware of. Like, it's been several years since I've been there as it turned. But when I say it alerted me, I can only see it with the clarity of hindsight. I didn't see it as it was happening. I didn't see this was almost my introduction to a pure place that was –

pure place that felt so good that I was willing to actually seek out the constructive criticism. Yes, like these people really care. Let me see if they can help make me better. And then and I had to check out of it because of how much it was hurting the entire atmospheric change of it. Did it affect you emotionally? Yes. This is the thing I found with Reddit or with things like this.

is the people that are there to do the thing that attracted you in the first place. You just have to realize that the tide really hasn't changed in a massive way. But what happens is I find that once those Reddit streams turn to that, everybody that was there for the other reason just goes, peace out.

You know what I mean? And what you're left with is that. And it can actually convince you that that's the general consensus. Yes. You know, that's the group think and it's not. It's just that the people that were there for other reasons were like, oh, this turned into something not cool. So pretty much every TV show or podcast Reddit turns on the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone who's been on some of these at some point, especially for TV shows, not podcasts for me. And I think it is kind of a...

a little bit of a version of the George R.R. Martin thing where the fans are like, where's the books, dude? Where's the books? And then they knew more about the books than him. But it's like you take the most ardent fans of anything, eventually they'll get upset with the creative output, I find, which isn't to say that their objections are always wrong, per se. It's just like too passionate a little bit. But it's different. Well, Red is different from Twitter and these other things because...

And you were talking about this. Usually if somebody's mad at me on Twitter, they don't actually watch my stuff, right? People on Reddit are actually consuming the things that you make. They know it and they get you too. Yeah.

But it's what you said, by the way, of if they have, if there's a kernel of something correct, like a mistake that you made or a way you've contradicted yourself story-wise, you're like, I can't say. I was really tired and I've made 9,000 episodes of TV and you're right. I gotta come up with some other crafty response. Oh, well, a character continuity in this one episode. You said that this person went to this school and they actually went to Columbia and what were you thinking? Am I supposed to believe? Anytime someone starts with am I supposed to believe, I know I'm in trouble. Am I supposed to believe that a character who only episodes before...

I got to tell you guys, though, I find it super weird that I'm in my 50s being more affected by this than I was in my 40s, in my 30s, in my 20s. Like, it's a mindfuck.

I think it's partially, though, because if you're in the position, as you two both are, of world building, the second you enter into that nowadays, you have to be concerned about the culture that you've created, right? And that's not something that we necessarily worried about when we were first starting out. And if you're...

worried like I am about the culture at work and how it feels to be around all these people, which is a topic that didn't used to get in the way, so to speak, in art or what you were trying to make. You're much more susceptible to anybody that pokes at that. It just feels weaker. It just feels, I don't know how. Dan, we're strong. Let's stick with it. I don't, I do not. The very subject matter we're talking about right now,

It feels, I feel weakness in it. Our roles are so reversed from when we first started. It's crazy, right? It's crazy. We used to talk. I've told this story before, but there was one highly questionable where I just screwed up a lot and I was like so upset. I was on the verge of tears. Dan talked me down and I think about it all the time. What's so obsessive to me? If I know. Yeah.

This whole conversation could be classified as it. And once you Google it, then you'll... Oh, she's making me do homework. Do you want to try and spell it? Do you want to try and spell it? I really don't, but I'll tell you this. Is that a B or a P? As an end gag for the show, I will put it in the Steve Carell show, and you'll see that word in there. Oh, look at that. Congratulations. It's a private joke for us and whoever's listening. Look at that. What a gift. When that word is thrown out there. What an Easter egg. Choosing your ratings is what he's doing. I'll make sure Steve's character has no idea what it means.

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