Seth Meyers On: Handling Performance Anxiety, Managing the Inner Critic, Hacks for Better Conversation, and Staying Joyful in Dark Times

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:19Hey, hey, everybody. How we doing? One of the quirks of the Trump era is that hosting a late night television show, which used to be a rather apolitical position, is now very much about drinking out of the fire hose of news and then commenting on it, hopefully in a way that makes everybody laugh instead of cry and also gives us a dose of joy that can then produce some resiliency. That very much is the way my guest today, Seth Meyers, sees his job, and you're going to hear him discuss all of that in this interview. You'll also hear him talk about his techniques for staying sane in the middle of today's news environment, how he handles his inner critic when he receives tough feedback, how he's learned to find humor in his imperfections as a parent, the value of mild stage fright, and much more.

1:08I think all of you know who Seth is, but just in case you don't, Seth is the host of Late Night with Seth Meyers. Before that, he was a cast member on Saturday Night Live for 13 seasons. In recent years, he's released two stand-up specials, Lobby Baby on Netflix and Dad Man Walking on HBO Max. He also wrote a children's book called I'm Not Scared, You're Scared, and he co-hosts two podcasts, Family Trips with the Myers Brothers and the Lonely Island and Seth Myers podcast. Before we dive in, a quick plug for my new app, 10 % with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial.

1:48Talking to Seth today reminded me that I've always nursed this desire to be a late night host myself. That's almost certainly never going to happen, but I do host my own little weekly meditation show every Tuesday at 4 Eastern over on the app. We do a live meditation and Q &A session. Our next live sit is coming up on Tuesday, January 20th. We do these every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. I'll be joined by our Teacher of the Month, Bart Van Melleck. Sign up, danharris.com. We'll get started with Seth Meyers right after this. Seth Meyers, welcome to the show. So happy to be here, Dan. Pleasure to have you.

2:25Okay, I have a million questions for you. I've got time for nine. Okay. Hit me with your best nod. Yeah, I'll whittle it down. Okay, good. Just as a top line question, I don't think this was always the case for late night hosts. But now if you're a late night television host, you are like in the news cycle deeply. That's a little strange. Deeply. And so my question for you is like, how do you keep your shit together, given that you are by necessity drinking out of the fire hose? Well, one of the loveliest things is an honest answer to where I get my news is I get it from Late Night with Seth Meyers.

3:03In that I show up in the morning and my very talented writing staff has written a first draft. And so often I'm like, oh, that's really, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm glad we're talking about this, you know. Meaning you have not encountered these items in the news before you've walked into 30 Rock. I will say I do a little bit. But over the course of the weekend, what I've learned, and it is a gift. By the way, it's a Pyrrhic victory, Dan, in that the world is such right now that you don't actually have to pay attention to Saturday's news because it is such old hat by Monday. Like so much is happening now.

3:40You know, when this show started in 2014, I really did think it was my job to like pay attention to the news over the course of the weekend so I could be ready for Monday's show. And now it's sort of like late Sunday. You can sort of tune back in late Sunday. And that's ultimately what you can talk about on Monday. But yeah, I mean, am I part of the fire hose? I am, but I try not to get too caught up with it in that when I'm in the office, I'm paying very close attention to what's going on in the world. And then when I'm out of the office, I try to focus on being a part of an operational family.

4:10And you're pretty good at the like digital hygiene when you're with your family? I am. I would say if I have a digital hygiene problem when I'm out of the office, it's probably like more sports related than like, you know, the actual the actual news. So I can have wild swings, wild mood swings, but they're thankfully not due to anything that's happening in D.C. Right. It's pegged to your fortunes on FanDuel. I'm happy to say it's more due to like real loyalty as opposed to any wagers. I'm not a gambler, but I bet the entirety of my heart on a few sports teams that have not come through with me.

4:49Which are those teams? pittsburgh steelers yeah live and die with pittsburgh steelers and then i'd have a healthier relationship with the boston red socks after the incredible run we had post 2004 i kind of feel like that's everything i had ever wanted as a kid and now i'm gonna allow myself to have freedom from that so just back to late night because you are you said before you're kind of part of the fire hose and i don't know exactly what you meant by that but like you are a vector of information at this point, which late night TV shows have become. And do you think about your responsibility in that light?

5:26Do you have a desire to be more heat than light? Or is it just make good jokes and keep it moving? Well, it's interesting because we don't want to turn our backs on things that we think are bad and things that are important because of who they're affecting. But we definitely, and certainly post this last election, there's a real effort to be joyous about the way we perform the show that maintaining joy is a really important piece of strength to have because when people take your joy away that's effectively a good sign that you've lost and so again like we're not like hey we're gonna the show's not gonna be about bad things anymore that's how we're gonna be joyful we're like no we're gonna talk about bad things but we're gonna make it very clear that we're having fun we like being in an audience full of people that has chosen to spend time with us.

6:12And everybody here knows it's a comedy show. So we're going to make sure that even when this stuff is serious, we're finding ways oftentimes in like tangents or dumb impressions or like, you know, silly visual gags to like release the stress and the pressure. And look, it's a fine line because I realize half of what I'm saying is like, oh, be irreverent. And the other half is like, these things are really bad sad and serious and we can't take them lightly. But ultimately, that's been the alchemy we're trying to hit week in and week out. And I do think since last November, we're getting pretty good at it.

6:43We feel like we're delivering on it pretty consistently. I want to deliver a full throated defense of what you just said, and then you can react on the other side. And I know I'm supposed to be asking questions, but I just want to say - No, no, no. I'm very excited. It's like, I like that you're now my legal counsel. What Seth meant to say was, there is a great quote from, I'm going to mangle the quote and I can't even remember who said it, but it's something like, engage joyfully in the sorrows of the world. Oh, that's really good. And as you said, if you take away the joy, you are depleting our resources to engage effectively.

7:20Yeah. So I actually think there's a real public service in what you're doing and it's not something to be like sheepish about. Well, you know, it's always interesting because you don't want to get, I've been doing this for a long time and people since weekend update days have said like what do you think about people who get their news from you and i've always said like i don't get your news from me like we're a good secondary source you know get your news and then but this is a different thing that i've like come to appreciate which is like people aren't coming to get their news from me but like they're coming to like get a collective shared joy from a thing that otherwise would be uh depressing and i think sometimes there is a real strength to knowing you're not alone, knowing that your feelings about things are not solitary.

8:03Sometimes it's just in the vocabulary we used to talk about things, which is like, oh, you're living in a bubble or, you know, it's an echo chamber. But like, there is something to be said for, no, you come here and we're going to lay out things that based on like this moral code that we all thought we shared, some of us still share it. And we're at a place where we're allowed to say like this is bad and this is crazy but it's also silly and here's a joke about it and yeah it's not that we're just gonna throw our hands up and say this is how it is now yeah i completely agree it's like a kind of sustenance like we're in it together we can laugh at this thing yeah so let's re-engage from that standpoint and i'm very frustrated that i have now said it twice and you said it the best in your middle and your very short middle section and you were very succinct about it.

8:53So for the listeners, I also think Dan said it best. Well, I suspect that might be the pattern throughout the rest of this interview. So let's see how it goes. Okay, good. I'll do it really long and then you just boil it down for... Okay, so let me ask, you'll brush me off if I get too personal here, but you have spoken publicly about kind of your inner atmosphere, having an inner critic. You also wrote a book for kids back in 2022. I believe it's called I'm Not Scared, You're Scared, where you talk about anxiety. So you're on the record talking about inner critic and also having anxiety. I'd just be curious, like, how salient are those phenomena for you internally these days?

9:38It's better. Look, I think the hardest time I ever went through was getting your dream job of SNL and then showing up and realizing everybody there. was also like the best person the last place they were and that your bag of tricks is now seems very meager compared to the talent you're sort of stacked up against and i was probably hired for the wrong thing when i got hired at snl because i think if laura michaels go back in time he would probably say oh that guy will be a good writer as opposed to a cast member and so i had to sort of like back my way into the job i was right for and that was a really rough five years of finding my way there and then you get a show like late night and it's the same thing which is you spend the first couple of years aiming for sort of competence so they don't take the show away and it's only after you feel your legs underneath you that you actually start trying to make it the show you want it to be you know those were rough years too but nothing nothing ever compared to the first five years at SNL.

10:44And I do think that having survived those and look, it's why so many people, I think thrive in their years after working at that show is they've already been through the worst gauntlet they're ever going to go through. What makes it such a gauntlet? I think it's just weirdly, it's a meritocracy against the very best people in the world. So it's hard to say like I was treated unfairly. We all get, you know, our at bats every week, you know, you'd write sketches, you'd read it at the table. And it was pretty clear to me and obviously everybody else like, oh, no, that wasn't in the best 10 things this week.

11:18You know, that sort of happens week in and week out. And you realize certainly there are very kind people there who are doing their best to get the best out of you. But at some point, they're not gonna put you on TV as a favor to you. And for me, the hardest time, again, I've talked about this as well was like I was in a cast where the other male cast members were like Will Forte, Andy Sandberg, Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, Fred Armisen, Kenan Thompson. And, you know, I was writing sketches and I remember I would be like, man, I would be my seventh choice. You know what I mean? And so, and I've got a rooting interest in me.

11:55So, you know, one office over somebody who does not have a rooting interest in me, I'm definitely their seventh choice. And so it was just not seeing a path out. And also it wasn't that I thought if only they saw in me what I saw in me, I was like, no, I see the same thing. It's just like not quite good enough. Is it true? I read that there was a incident where you punched a very small hole in the wall. I opened a door so fast that the handle on the other side went through the wall. So it was like a handle shape hole. Yeah. Okay. That's a little less aggressive. It was a little less. It was pretty aggressive though.

12:32I mean, I would have loved to have done it with my fist. Let's just put it that way. What was the proximate cause of the door incident? I wrote something that I did think should have made the show, and it didn't make the show. And then my producing partner now, Mike Shoemaker, who was a producer at Essendon all the time, I remember he said, I'm not going to have that hole fixed because I want you to have to look at it every time you're in your dressing room and remember what a baby you are. and then by the way this is just uh just to make it clear that i haven't i'm not fixed the self same shoemaker who's now a producer on late night he recently had to leave he's my next door neighbor and my dearest friend and every time i feel like i'm about to melt down i just go into his office and i yell in that room and he just sort of like absorbs it i'm not yelling at him i'm never mad at him i'm just sort of like yelling to get it out remember those old cartoons where like people would like yell into a bottle and then the bottle would have the screams and like it was like to not wake up a baby or something and then they bring the the screams to the top of the mountain and let it out you'd hear him that's like what shoemaker does he's like the bottle i yell into and then he brings it to the top of mountain so nobody else that i work with hears the yells he's my release valve he missed two weeks for a knee surgery and i made it all the way until like the last day of the second week and something happened i was so mad i didn't have shoemaker's office to go to and i threw a pen against the wall and it exploded and left like a rorschach inkblot on the wall, he got a plaque.

14:00Instead of cleaning it, he put a plaque next to it and said, this is what happens when Shoemaker's away. So I'm coming up on like 25 years in the building. Basically, every room I've ever been in has some mark of me being petulant. I don't remember the cartoons you're referencing, but I do remember as a kid, I think I'm a little older than you, there was a character named Willie Whistle, and he would argue, but in a whistle. Oh, wow. Which I always thought was hilariously ridiculous. That does seem like something a very forward-thinking couple therapists would make two people do. Like just give him whistles and be like, without words.

14:34No, he was doing this with pursed lips. Oh, wow. This was not an actual whistle. No. Oh, wow. Well, it's a shame he didn't hit it bigger. This seems like a real talent. We'll leave that to the history books. But just back to your petulance, and I share it. This has been a lifelong struggle for me, as our mutual friend, my brother, would tell you. yeah how do you manage that now especially given that you are the leader of a pretty large organization i'm really good i mean i don't know if i would be as good without shoemaker is a real seth whisperer and i'm very lucky to have him but i am cognizant of it being a top down situation where you know whatever the host thinks they can get away with everybody else thinks they can get away with and so i'm very lucky to work in a place where you know we all treat each other with a lot of decency and respect.

15:26And it's the kind of place that everybody loves to come to every day, myself included. I should also say, it's not like I'm biting my fist 10 times a day because people make mistakes. It's like one of the problems is people here are so good at their jobs that when something goes wrong, I'm shocked. And often that's what catches even me off guard. But it's really nice. And I will say like, just to any parent who's listening, it's harder to have children than it is to have a talk show. as far as like temper stuff. So for you, the parenting stuff, which you've now done two comedy specials, which everybody should watch and I'll put links in the show notes.

16:02You've done two comedy specials on parenting. So is that a more difficult crucible for your temper than work? I think, yeah, ultimately like, cause at work you're still dealing with like adults. And so for me, like what my wife and three children would say is like, Like, oh, no, he definitely can't act at the show the way he acts at home because he's a lunatic. What would they point to as examples of lunacy? I have a very, I don't know, it's interesting. I've been doing a bit in my stand-up now about how my brother and I were really scared about my dad losing his temper. Like, it was the kind of temper that was, like, intimidating.

16:43And I feel like I've inherited my dad's temper. But my kids, it's just, like, very, like, neutered. I lose my temper and they all laugh at me like, this clown. Which is, of course, it's a very healthy reaction to your dad losing his temper because it's like, hey, one, you look dumb, and two, it's not working. It's just like that thing of trying to get three kids out the door is sometimes so much harder than writing and performing a talk show on network television. What are their ages? Nine, seven, and four. Okay, so you're in it. Yeah, we're in it. I mean, and by the way, they're really good ones.

17:24I wouldn't trade any of them in. You mentioned getting the kids out the door. Are there other aspects of parenting that are nails on a chalkboard for you where you're just on tilt? I'm trying to think. They'd love to come on, Dan, and do a rebuttal episode where they list them all. I just sometimes can't believe. Like, I'll say my oldest son's name six times in a row, and then I'll just say, do you even do you hear it just out of curiosity do you hear it also a thing you learn pretty quickly is like sarcasm isn't an effective tool when you're trying to get your kids to do something like a withering put down doesn't have the uh the effect you might hope it would with an adult friend when my son was four he's 10 now or he'll be 11 by the time this airs actually you met my son once yeah when he was four we took him for one of those full-blown hearing tests uh-huh and his hearing was perfect but he was just ignoring us all the time yeah and that persists until this day it's like my voice is a dog whistle and he's a cat i have an interesting thing now which is my kids are obsessed, especially with my father-in-law, because they see him a lot.

18:44He's a big part of their life. And I watch how his daughters react to him. I'm like, oh, it just skips a generation. My kids hear their grandparents talk, but they don't hear their dad talk. But like their kids will one day be fascinated by everything I have to say. I just have to wait for that. One of the themes in your comedy, and you really, as stated, draw on parenting as a source for standup. Yeah. And I don't know whether you're interested in meditation or anything like that, but there's, to me, it rhymes with the spirit of meditation, which is bringing a sense of humor to your inevitable foibles and frailties and imperfections.

19:20Yeah. I'm also like very aware that one of the risks of mining your family for content is that they will one day consume it as they are older. Alexi and I have a nice understanding. Whereas, you know, my wife has veto power over anything i say about her whereas kids obviously less so and so it's very important for me to always more often than not make myself the punchline of the jokes when i'm talking about being a parent as opposed to the kids because i would like them one day to watch and be like oh it's nice that he knew it's nice that he knew his shortcomings but uh it is really fun to do and you know as far as meditation like i will say that like alexia and i started doing it i don't quite know how often she does it anymore.

20:04I don't do it with enough regularity, but I've never done it and thought it was not positive. I just have a hard time getting in the scheduled rhythm of doing it. That is super common. I don't even think it's that big of a problem per se. It's good at any dose. Yeah. And it's a little bit like exercise. Yes. I don't think it's like, ah, the bummer was I only did it once. I should have done it zero times. Like, no, once is better than zero. What flavor did you do when you did it? I don't actually know. And I think this would be one of the things my wife would point out, which is we had a full instructor sit down with us and I still can't tell you anything about it other than what to do during the actual 20 minutes.

20:47Oh, you dropped a clue there. 20 minutes. That's probably TM or Transcendental Meditation. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah, that's what it was. Is that a good one? How do we feel about that? I feel good about it. It's not what I do, but there's plenty of evidence to show that it's good for you. Okay, great. Is yours longer or shorter? Mine is super flexible. Matt and I, my brother and his wife, Jess, we all do the same flavor, which is kind of derived from Buddhist meditation or actually in our case, like full on Buddhist meditation. Five minutes is great. I try to do like broken up over the day an hour, but I'm a full time meditation evangelist.

21:25I'm not comfortable with the level of hypocrisy that would come with not doing, you know, a significant amount. Right.

21:35Coming up, Seth talks about parenting fears, his evolving relationship with anxiety and career longevity and creative diversification, and how he prepares for and shoots his stand-up specials, which are excellent, by the way.

21:57You said the thing that I was going to react to about your kids watching your stuff someday. I've worried about that with as a memoirist. I have some scenes. I'm writing a book right now, and there are some scenes where I describe my son's flatulence. I may decide ultimately to cut that because he, when he's 30, might be justifiably pretty pissed about it. Yeah. My fear is always that other kids will see it. that his peers will see it. At least there's less of a chance that a 13-year-old friend of his is going to read your memoir. That's true. Whereas I'm always worried a parent's going to put on my Netflix special and say to their kids, hey, this is Ash's dad or this is Axel's dad.

22:42We don't show it to my kids yet. And yet, you obviously can't control other parents and I can see them thinking it might be a novel idea to show them something. And so it's always like never tell a joke that like another kid could use against your child. Right. Even the nine-year-old hasn't seen your specials? No, he hasn't yet. Total lack of curiosity, Dan. I am deeply familiar with that. He's always like, can we watch the new Bill Burr? I'm like, son of a gun. Speaking of kids, I mentioned this earlier. You did write this book, I'm Not Scared, You're Scared. Yeah. We talked about your experience with The Inner Critic, especially in those early days on SNL, but how big a part of your life is anxiety, if at all?

23:27I don't think I have a ton of anxiety. I mean, I think I'm more anxious about the future and the things I can control than I am over my career, but it took me a long time to get there. You know, I like now that I've tried to diversify the things I do in my career at the same time that I'm hosting a late night show. I'm aware that those are not lifetime appointments. And so I tried very hard to develop things like stand-up as a skill and obviously having podcasts as something to do. And so I like that as I'm getting older, and again, I'm 51, and I'm proud of myself for coming up with a way to control that, which I can control.

24:08But a lot of my anxiety just comes from being a parent, having kids that you put into the world and what the world's going to be. And so, you know, I think, and again, the kids were younger when I wrote the book and I only had two of them at the time, but I'm not scared. You're scared was a lot more about like the way kids are and how as a parent, I think you love the idea that your kids would be fearless, except you also want them to be like careful, you know? And so it's sort of just a book about that balance between ultimately you want to raise kids who know what they should and shouldn't be afraid of.

24:42And you don't want fear to be a hurdle they have to get over when it's things you know they can do. But you also don't want them to lack any risk aversion. Yeah. So it's not like you're particularly angsty or anxious. It's that having three children moving through the world. That's where my anxiety is from. Yeah. what's going to happen to them at any given moment. Yeah. And like, don't get me wrong. I still have, when I do stand up, when I interview a big guest, I'm still driven by butterflies and that sort of anxiety. But I've had enough reps at this point to know that more often than not, it works out pretty well.

25:20And so I can actually put one foot in front of the other and go and do those shows. What makes you more nervous? A huge guest or taping a special? probably taping a special just because it feels more permanent you know and ultimately when you tape a stand-up special for me it's usually about three to four years worth of material that you've been working on and you sort of have one chance to make the version that everybody will see for time in memoriam and it's crazy because with jokes you know a special ultimately we have an hour worth of jokes like some of those jokes you're telling for the fifth time some of them you're telling for the 60th time they all have their own life you want to catch as many of them at their peak as possible but like that's a very hard thing to do so it's also the anxiety of like when are you going to shoot your special and do you shoot it too early or do you shoot it too late where you know all of a sudden like you are falling out of love with a joke right and once you do you feel like the audience is as well and even like the craziest things which i think matter the least which is like what to wear and what city to shoot it in because when you think of every great special like that you love other than like Eddie Murphy you can't remember what they were dressed like and the good news is I'm not gonna uh nobody wants me to dress like that anyway Eddie Murphy came to mind but also I kind of remember some of Chappelle's onesies yeah that's true that's true and again not one where I saw it and was like ah that's what I should have done when you were shooting those specials is it all one take or can you do two or three nights in a row and cut it all together so you do two it's fascinating this is really interesting you do two in the same night you tape it twice like a seven and a 9 30 and both times i did it i felt like i got it in the first show and then my director neil brannan who directed both of them said to me you have it so like just go and have fun with the second show like be loose, have fun, which I did both times.

27:16And in both cases, we almost use entirely the first one. So the one that internally for me was the one that felt tight and a little bit less joyful was the far better product. It just had the crispness to it because it was not observably tight. It was just my own, I don't know. It is a reminder that it's a technical skill. and as much as we watch comedy thinking it's loose there is actually like craft to making it look loose and when you actually make a internal choice to be loose it just looks a little worse interesting to watch yeah and it's kind of the case for nerves properly managed nerves really can up your game yes we always used to say at snl like nothing was worse than a host who would say they weren't nervous because we were always like oh you should be you know what i mean like we do this every week we're nervous so like you be a little because butterflies i think are i whenever i'm about to like go out and do something and i don't have butterflies that's where i feel like something's off i had a guest on the show who made this point you may have heard this before but it really landed for me because i still struggle with performance anxiety second half of my career was built on having a panic attack on national television.

28:38So it's on brand for me to be nervous every time I go on TV. The reframe was the nerves are a sign that you care. Yeah, I think that is true. And I'm really happy to do something that I care about that much. And backstage at late night even, and by the way, you know, look, late night's different in that it feels like every night's a home game and certainly the longer you do the show the more you have an expectation that the audience knows what they're there for and they know who you are you don't have to introduce yourself so it's the smoothest version of it but also you know it's going to be on television and you kind of can't trick yourself into forgetting that and backstage right before i walk out there's a sign on the wall with all the guests and the number of episodes it and every night I'm like 721 and you still feel like the butterflies.