What is Julian Shapiro-Barnum Even Doing?
Elvis Duran and the Morning Show ON DEMAND
Elvis Duran Podcast Network and iHeartPodcasts
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Enlivening the pod stu today is Recess Therapy and Celebrity Substitute creator, writer, comedian, actor and podcaster Julian Shapiro-Barnum, who takes Kyle on his creative journey from theater student to viral sensation for his playground interviews with kids during the pandemic and a hit second show plus podcast. The guys discuss why children are such refreshing interview subjects, what Julian has learned so far from his award-winning career, Kyle’s sage parenting advice, Julian’s comedy improv troupe, playground slang, Pokémon and wallets, before channeling their inner Jim Henson for Finger Puppet Friend Time.
Tune in every Thursday for new episodes of What Are We Even Doing?
Executive Producers: iHeart Media, Elvis Duran Podcast Network, and Full Picture Productions Executive Produced for Full Picture Productions by Desiree Gruber + Anne Walls Gordon
Produced by Ben Fingeret, Nora Faber, and Maia Mizrahi
Editing by Mikey Harmon and Nicholas Giuricich
Research by Kimberly Walls
Music by Yatta
Art by Danica Robinson
Additional GFX by Chris Olfers/The Southern Influence
Styling by Dot Bass
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:04.3 | What are we even doing? |
| 0:11.0 | What are we even doing? |
| 0:13.8 | Hey there, everyone. |
| 0:14.7 | I'm Kyle McLaughlin, and we're about to jump into what are we even doing where we speak with artists, musicians, |
| 0:22.2 | creative, people that are shaking up the internet to discuss their creativity, their process, |
| 0:26.9 | what really motivates them and why they do what they do. |
| 0:29.6 | And I am so fortunate today to have a special guest. |
| 0:33.0 | Julian Shapiro Barnum with us, the host of Re therapy, writer, comedian, just very happy to speak |
| 0:40.8 | with them. Welcome to the podcast, the pod stew, as we sometimes refer to. Kyle, it's an honor |
| 0:46.7 | to be here. Thank you for having me. It's so fun to have you here. I am so curious about what you |
| 0:52.7 | have done, what you've created. I mean, just the subject is unusual. It's like you decided you were going to speak with kids about everything, how they feel, and what's going on with them. It's been a fantastic adventure of it as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I bet. What sort of brought you into this? I asked you everyone kind of, was there a core memory, let's say. Was there something that triggered this? And you went, hey, this is something that I'm going to do for you. It's one of those things where it's like, you know, you look back your life and you can see the breadcrumbs and you're like, oh, it makes sense that I got here. But like inciting incident was I was in college at Boston University. Okay. And I'm very young. I was there when COVID happened. Okay. I hate you because you're so young, but that's right. It's right. I can feel the resentment burning through. I was studying theater. I'm a theater kid. Yeah. And I was doing a lot of like improv and playwriting and just making things any chance I could. Yeah. And then when COVID happened, all of a sudden, we couldn't make anything together. |
| 1:47.3 | And did you, during COVID, do any, like, Zoom theater or readings or anything? |
| 1:53.0 | But you definitely, yeah, I started to Zoom. |
| 1:55.2 | I actually have a wine business. |
| 1:57.7 | And so I would do tastings with people online over Zoom because it was the only way. |
| 2:03.2 | So we would send the wine out and do it at. So I kind of use it for that. But I think there was, |
| 2:07.6 | I think maybe you're going towards this is there was a kind of a creative possibility here in a different way. |
| 2:15.3 | Yeah. I was just like my entire life I had been really drawn to doing things in person and like |
| 2:19.7 | doing theater and live comedy shows and all of a sudden like it actually felt like |
| 2:24.8 | torture to do a scene with somebody through a computer like in my bedroom. |
... |
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