Jake Shane did not come out of nowhere. He came out of the Disney Channel. Not as a kid actor — as a kid whose dad was writing the movies.
Shane sat down with the Jonas Brothers on their podcast Hey Jonas!, taped on the afternoon of their first of two nights at Madison Square Garden, and somewhere between a debate about Gatorade flavors and a running bit about location sharing, one of the brothers asked a question that stopped the room.
“Am I right to say — did your dad write Disney Channel shows?”
He did. And not obscure ones.
“He wrote a draft of Smart House, the first Smart House,” Shane said. “He wrote this movie called Model Behavior, and he wrote a Mary-Kate and Ashley movie called Switching Goals.”
The Jonas Brothers’ reaction was immediate and correct: “Switching Goals, an iconic classic.”
For anyone who needs the receipts: Shane’s father, Matt Roshkow, co-wrote Switching Goals, the 1999 Wonderful World of Disney movie in which Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen play twins who swap places on rival soccer teams. The Olsens trained with the U.S. women’s national team to prepare for it.
Roshkow also wrote the teleplay for Model Behavior, the 2000 Disney movie that happens to be Justin Timberlake’s film debut.
So the man now running one of the biggest podcasts in the world grew up in a house where the family business was making the exact kind of thing his entire audience was raised on. Shane’s mother, Helaine Olen, is a longtime journalist and Washington Post columnist. Both parents, professionally, talk to people for a living.
Shane’s only real complaint about the Olsen connection was that it never paid off socially.
“The best thing about them is they would never, ever — I haven’t heard from [them] in what feels like thirty years.”
The advice from his dad that actually landed
The better story is what his father does now. Roshkow still gives notes. Sometimes those notes are, in Shane’s words, just “pitching bits.” But occasionally they’re something else entirely — and the best one Shane has ever gotten didn’t even come to him directly.
“The other week, I was really crashed out about something,” Shane said. “And he told — I think he told Zach, my manager, who told me. I don’t even know why he didn’t tell me.”
The message, relayed secondhand: “I worried about being respected too much early in my career, and that hindered me later. Instead of just doing things that worked and things I was good at, and not caring about the respect aspect. And that really hindered me.”
Shane didn’t have to be told twice.
“Zach told me that, and I was like, oh my God. That completely just changed the way I looked at my whole week.”
It’s a pointed piece of advice for someone in Shane’s specific position — a comedian who spent a chunk of the spring being told he wasn’t a real journalist after hosting a red carpet, and who has been open about how much that stung. His father’s version of the lesson is that chasing the respect is the trap. Do the thing you’re good at.
His mother’s version is blunter, and he quotes it constantly.
“She’s always told me this — nobody is thinking about you,” Shane said. “No one cares about you, no one’s thinking about you. Just keep it moving.”
Keeping it moving
He has. Shane is 136 episodes into Therapuss, made his Broadway debut earlier this year alongside Ray Romano, Nicholas Braun and Jenny Slate, guested on season four of Hacks, and told the Jonas Brothers his remaining dream podcast bookings are Taylor Swift and Jennifer Lawrence.
Near the end of the episode, though, the brothers found the hole in his mother’s advice — after spending the first five minutes revealing that Joe Jonas has quietly had Shane’s location shared with him for roughly five years.
“I am looking at your location,” one of them pointed out.
Shane finished the thought for him: “You can tell your mother that you are.”
Somebody’s thinking about him.
Hear the full conversation with Jake Shane on Hey Jonas! on the free iHeartRadio app.
