TCB Infomercial - Episode #734: The Jimmy Kimmel Show's Executive Producer, writer and author Danny Ricker joins TCB on the eve of his book launch. "Wow, You Look Terrible!" is a funny and frank look at parenting, fatherhood and the follies of growing humans. Danny also shares his unique perspective as the co-head writer of the best Late Night Show leaving Bryan & Krissy to wonder....does TCB need a Danny? DANNY'S LINKS: Follow Danny on Instagram Order Danny's Book "Wow You Look Terrible" Visit Danny's Website Watch EP #734 on YouTube! Text us or leave us a voicemail: +1 (212) 433-3TCB FOLLOW US: Instagram: @thecommercialbreak Youtube: youtube.com/thecommercialbreak TikTok: @tcbpodcast Website: www.tcbpodcast.com CREDITS: Hosts: Bryan Green & Krissy Hoadley Executive Producer: Bryan Green Producer: Astrid B. Green Voice Over: Rachel McGrath TCBits: Written, Performed and Edited by Bryan Green To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guest of this episode?
Oh, yeah, cats and kittens, welcome back to the commercial break. I'm Brian Green. This is my dear friend and the co-host of this show, Chris Joy Hoadley. Best to you, Chris. Best to you, Brian. Best to you out there in the podcast universe. Thanks for joining us on a TCB Infomercial Tuesday with Jimmy Kimmel, executive producer, Oscar writer, and now writer of books, a book writer.
What do they call those? Authors. Authors, Chrissy. There you go. Wow, you look terrible, Danny Ricker. Danny will be joining us in just a few minutes here, but he's got the bona fides. He's an executive producer, co-executive producer at Jimmy Kimmel.
I know, that's big.
And when asked if he could do our show, I said, sure, why not? Yeah. co-executive producer of Jimmy Kimmel. I'm not going to shy away from saying it. I said, yeah, okay, sure. And then I started to read his book. They gave us a copy, an advanced copy. It's on sale today, but I got an advanced copy.
And as a father, as a parent, this book will leave you probably stitches, probably crying, and with a little bit of good advice along the way. Because kids are a pain in the ass. And anyone that has them knows it's a pain in the ass. And he gives us a few, he gives his
tips and tricks on how to like you know declutter the mind the soul and maybe your house and make life a little bit easier some cheat codes if you will as a father himself it's a really well written book and I'm glad that we're bringing him in today so that we have an opportunity to chat with him about all those things about Jimmy Kimmel and about the book and and life love and the pursuit of happiness if you don't mind Chrissy that's what this show is all about life love and pursuit of happiness speaking of children they are dreams
Pursue your dreams. Live, laugh, love. My breasts. The Instagram. The Instagram never fails to surprise me. And having children, I am so terrified. I'm glad. Here's the thing. There's a lot of pushback right now. And I'm digging this. on children and cell phones, adults and cell phones, social media in general. I'm not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I do think social media is entertaining. I spend a lot of time on it, mainly for the show, but I spend a lot of time on it. And I think it's entertaining. But I also think that at least most of the time I have my head on my shoulders and I know that it's just entertainment, that I'm just... And if you would see my algorithm, you would know I'm not getting caught up in, you know,
Who's got the nice car and who's got the nice house and who's on the next vacation? I'm really looking at like the dregs of the earth. I mean, people who are not well.
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Chapter 2: What is Danny Ricker’s role on The Jimmy Kimmel Show?
They're talking about it all, the fights, the failures, and the moments that changed everything. You can follow and listen to Rule Breakers with Serea on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And hear, hear to the Rule Breakers for keeping life interesting. Danny's here with us now. Danny, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, guys. This is an honor to be on, so thank you.
Well, it's an honor to have you. You're a co-executive producer of my favorite late-night television show. I think the one that is doing the best at carrying on that late-night tradition, which is Jimmy Kimmel, of course. And I've been a big fan of Jimmy's for a long time. I like Colbert, too. But I think Kimmel is my favorite because I think I resonate most with his comedy style and his voice.
And you are one of the voices of that comedy styling. So... Question. It's got to be an absolute, like, chaotic, hot mess to put a show on every single night of the week, starting from scratch.
Yeah, it's a lot. We have a great team at our show. I mean, from the writers to our producers to our props department. I mean, everybody is really, really good at their job, which makes it a lot of fun. So, Uh, it is chaotic. It's crazy. It's weird. So, you know, we started about 6 AM and we're doing a show at 4 30 and we don't know what's going to be in the show that night.
But, uh, because we have such a great group of people, it gets done every day, uh, by hook or by crook.
Do you have like a, um, like, so here, you know, largely blossoms from our brains. We write notes down. We also do four, four days a week. So, but we don't have production elements. We don't have 25 cameras. We don't have props.
We
So, whatever we can use our voices for is about as much as we're going to get out of the show. Do you have ideas that carry over from day to day, like evergreen ideas? You put it on a list and you say, okay, Jimmy didn't pick that one. I'm assuming Jimmy has the last one.
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Chapter 3: How is a daily late-night show like Jimmy Kimmel Live produced?
Yeah.
now our show is political i we feel like our goal every day is to get up and look at what's happening and decide how we feel about it and then talk about it and you know for many years like when i started as a writer um you know every day like our main story was like who got voted off american idol and and that's not because we were particularly interested in american idol but it's like that's what our country was talking about i mean that was exactly
I mean, literally like that season, Sanjaya was on American Idol, whatever year that was. Like CNN would cover that. Like a story on CNN was Sanjaya didn't get eliminated from American Idol.
So we try. How I long for those times. I know. Bring me back. I know.
So we try to be a mirror to what's going on. Jimmy always says, I want to talk about what people are talking about. And so I think over the course of the last 10, 15 years, our country has started talking about different things and we've just kind of gone along with it.
So I feel like just the very small cog that I am in this process, I just look at what's going on and I go, what is my reaction to that? Do I feel that's hypocritical? Do I feel like that's a Good idea. Good thing. You know, and then I just try to word that as humorously as I can. And sometimes the news is sad and we still got to do a show that night.
And so we try to find our little angle that maybe we can add a little levity to it and help other people digest it, too. And so one of the biggest compliments we can get is. You know, we do a monologue on a kind of a big news day, even if it's something that's kind of serious. And people will text me the next day and go, you know what?
I really that helped me kind of think through what was going on. And and it made me laugh, too, when we go, OK, well, then I think we're doing our job if that's going on.
Yeah, I think for time immemorial, or at least as long as I've been alive, late night TV is a place where you go where you have an opportunity to see that there are other people that are laughing through the pain. And there's kind of a voice, this being Jimmy, maybe Letterman or Carson, however far you want to go back, where you would tune in and there was... I don't know. I don't know.
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Chapter 4: How does the team decide what political content to include?
I agree with you. I saw a reel the other day, and I don't know which book she was referring to, but there was a woman, and I'm not bashing this. I'm just sharing. This wouldn't be my personal choice, but along these same lines. She said, I read this book, and they said we should give our children one age-appropriate task to do all on their own. every single week.
And as they grow older, they get more age-appropriate tasks. So she was having her four-year-old girl go into a gas station to buy like some potato chips by herself. And I'm thinking to myself, that girl's four years old. She's not gonna know. She don't even know where the potato chips is. But I agreed with the premise.
The premise was, you know, have them do something where they take ownership over their own lives and their own actions and they understand how to get things done. We've all seen this father in Japan who puts ropes and rocks and dirt in front of his child on the way to school every day and he doesn't help him.
He says, you have to figure out how to get over the ropes, how to get around the rocks, how to get through the mud. And every day, and he's teaching his kid resilience, how to use his brain and how to be himself and independent. And that's how I was raised. I don't remember my dad playing with me. And my dad was also a good dad in his own tough love kind of way.
I appreciate him now, maybe not then. But I learned a lot on my own because my father let me fail. And he wasn't there to save me every time. He told me he wasn't going to be there to save me. And now I appreciate that so much, but that feels scary to me as a parent. It feels scary to let my kid fail because I don't want them to hurt and I don't want them to be hurt and all that other stuff.
But, you know, it's an interesting reminder, and your book shares this, is that... We did okay. We survived. And we became human beings that, you know, live and breathe on this earth. That read self-help books. Yeah, that read self-help books and have lots of therapy and suffer from all kinds of PTSD. And they should go through the same shit we went through. Pain begets pain, kid.
Hurt people hurt people. I'm sorry. You're too. You're going to go to the motel and check in and stay the night by yourself. That's your task for today.
I think it's a good reminder. It is. You know, it's funny. When I went to college, I remember my first week I lived in a dorm and all my clothes were dirty. And I went, oh, I don't know how to do laundry. And the reason I didn't is because my mom loves me and, you know, was trying to help me out in high school and all these things.
But I just went, oh, and I remember in my dorm popping the lid of the washing machine open and reading the instructions on the bottom of the lid. Who Who has ever done that? But you know, besides like me and I was like, Oh, okay. I need like detergent. I had no idea. And that just came from my mom, like wanting to take care of me, like out of the kindness of her heart.
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Chapter 5: What was Danny Ricker's career path to becoming co-executive producer?
This is for like, if we're going on a flight, you can watch Netflix on it, or you can FaceTime your friends, and that's it. So I think as long as you're really paying attention, I think that stuff is fine. But again, that book, Anxious Generation, really lays out some like...
crazy data and how damaging it can be to kids and you know i mean you know our daughter's 11 she feels young right now but i know she's going to middle school next year i know that's gonna like speed up real quick and so as long as we can we're just trying to keep them uh off the internet
Yeah, I don't disagree with you. We have two iPads and we started... We gave one to my firstborn when he was like three, but only for like, you know, 15 minutes if we were, you know, on a flight, on a long drive or whatever. And we just put whatever, you know, baby first or whatever it was that they were watching just to kind of keep them occupied and quiet and whatever.
But we learned very quickly that that has a snowball effect. So now... They're not even in sight on weekdays when there's school involved. And on the weekends, we only allow them... They can play Spotify. They can listen to music, their own playlists or whatever. Or we have certain... They can go on Netflix and watch whatever, the rated G things, whatever it is. But what we have noticed is...
Since we took the iPads away for 99% of the time, they don't ask for it anymore, which is kind of strange. Only on occasion will they ask to play Spotify, and most of the times we can play it on the Sonos or whatever we have. But they don't really ask for it.
But when they had access to it for like the six months that we would say, okay, you can watch it for 15 minutes or whatever, the more that they had it, the more that they asked for it. And it became so blatantly clear to me that this is addictive. And the more that they have it, the more that they want it, something is feeding that dopamine channel. And so we snapped back real quick.
And it was a lesson that we learned. And for like a week, there was a lot of complaining about it. And then just eventually they forgot it. They went and played with their toys or listened to the music or whatever. So that's the most dangerous thing. And I think we're all about to learn a lesson about screens, that those screens are no good for us. I think a lot of people have learned this lesson.
I think more waking up to it. Those screens are tethers that just suck us all in and make us less aware of the world around us, less attached, less connected, and feel more lonely. And I just don't want my children to go through that.
Yeah, I mean, I'm terrible with it. I mean, like, I have a really hard time. I go, and I'm like a 40-year-old man. I go, you know, these kids, like, have no self-control. They're just, they're so young, you know? So it does, it feels like a drug. I mean, it's like giving them cigarettes or something, you know, where you just need to be like, okay, like, I mean, it's like dangerous, you know?
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Chapter 6: What inspired Danny Ricker to write his parenting book?
Yes.
12 hours of TCB coming May 31st. That's a Saturday, so you have a chance of keeping up with it. 12 hours of TCB. Celebrities are coming by. They're going to talk about mental health. We're going to talk about mental health awareness. We're going to check on our own mental health by the end of the day. It's all going to be for a good cause and celebrating five years of the commercial break.
Five years of the commercial break. Unbelievable. 750 episodes, five years. It's crazy. And we're going to what? Add another 30 episodes that one day. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We're going to go straight to 800 by the end of the day. Also, don't forget America's. Oh, what? No, nevermind. Nevermind. I can't say that yet. I'll let that out of the bag later on this week. Big news coming later on this week.
Stay tuned. I also wanted to tell you that 212-433-3TCB, that's 212-433-3822. We take questions, comments, concerns, content ideas, all right there. One location at that phone number. You can also leave us a voicemail if you want to be heard on the commercial break. TCBpodcast.com. All the audio, all the video, and your free TCB swag. Go to the Contact Us button. Give us your address.
And the team behind us will send you something very shortly. The Danny Ricker of the commercial break will send you some swag very quickly. Add The Commercial Break on Instagram, TCB Podcast on TikTok, and YouTube.com slash The Commercial Break for all the episodes on video the same day they air here on the audio.
And while we're speaking about the video, thank you to our video production team, Weeplash. If you need video production services, reach out and we'll send you their information or look them up. Weeplash. Okay, Chrissy, that's all I can do for today. I think so. I'll tell you that I love you. I love you. Best to you. Best to you. And best to you out there in the podcast universe.
Thank you.
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