Morgan Fallon, a longtime friend of Joe Rogan since 2012, shares raw memories of Anthony Bourdain’s punk authenticity—from climbing desert roofs with Bedouin tribes to filming unscripted street food adventures. Fallon credits Bourdain’s Emmy-winning Parts Unknown for revolutionizing travel media by blending culture, history, and ethics into culinary storytelling, while Meat Eater’s Steve Rinella set a moral standard in hunting docs, rejecting gimmicks like frozen octopus. Both shows thrived under Netflix’s creative freedom, proving substance over spectacle reshapes entertainment. Fallon’s work reveals how rare, immersive travel broadens perspective, even amid fleeting conflicts like Goma’s rock-throwing crowd. Their legacy? Unfiltered storytelling that challenges norms and celebrates humanity’s depth. [Automatically generated summary]
And then there was this seminal moment on that show where we go out and we go ripping across the desert with the Bedouin and go out and cook a goat in the ground.
And so as we're driving out over the desert, we're like, well, we need some shots from car to car, right?
And I was like, well, I'll get on the roof.
And for some reason, there's a four-post bed tied to the roof of this Land Rover.
And so I get up there and kind of latch my arm around it.
And these guys take off at, I swear, 80 miles an hour across the desert.
And then in, you know, you got to hand it to CNN too, is like, all of a sudden we had these creative partners who were like willing to let him be him, you know, like willing to let him do a show like the Tokyo show where we're like, you know, really climbing into Japanese subcultures, rope bondage, really climbing into Japanese subcultures, rope bondage, tentacle porn.
And one of the things that really made that show was Tony's narration.
Because the narration gave you a sense of the way his sort of passion and enthusiasm for the world and for various aspects of cooking and travel and food and culture.
Yeah, I think that's, I mean, it may be in some ways the most important aspect of the show.
You know, I mean, he is after all a writer, right?
And that is how he experienced the world.
But actually making the shows and the technical part of actually making the shows, you know, we'd...
Once you'd go through and kind of edit the show, none of that voiceover was in at the rough cut phase.
And he'd send it out to him and get his writing back and record that VO. And I keep describing it as like that kind of Dr. Frankenstein lightning bolt to the temples kind of moment where like the monster rises.
It would really just bring the show to life.
So this kind of Carcass that was laid out in rough cut form on the table all of a sudden just gasped and jumped up and you know it was really beautiful like to see that and to have you know as a director, as a producer, as a creative you know at any level you know to have that kind of power to have his voice and his writing and his introspection and thoughts and you know that would have like powerful you know powerful force to work with.
Well, it was a brilliant design, the way the show was put together.
That narration really did make it something special and different from all those other kinds of shows because just his articulate and insightful and poetic and artistic view of these things, that he had this infectious passion for things.
He completely changed the way I thought about cooking.
I'd always thought about cooking as, oh, this guy knows how to make delicious food.
Oh, this place has good ribs.
And then...
When I saw his show, when I saw Parts Unknown, I went, oh, it's an art form.
Yeah, and even beyond that, it's an art form that's taking and incorporating all of these greater kind of macro-social elements of where you are, the history of where you are, what people did for a living, what people's ancestors did for a living.
It's rooted in so much more.
And what I think...
Ultimately, we kind of joke around a lot and say, yeah, it's a food show.
It's not a food show.
But the reason that worked, I think, is because of what you're saying.
Food is an art form that incorporates all of these other aspects.
And so it can be a jumping point off for exploration into anything you want to talk about.
Yeah.
I talked about the history of a place, the politics of a place, the religion of a place, all of these things that inform who people are.
Well, that's all written into the cuisine of a place or an area.
It's like, it's easy to, you know, to look at these kind of high-end French preparations, these highly talented, you know, highly trained French chefs.
And there's tremendous beauty in that and all of those other things we talked about.
To look at the woman on the corner that's making the best lingua tacos, that was revolutionary.
And then the realization that all of that greatness, all of that nuance, all of that flavor contained right within there.
That was an access point to it as well.
It's just an access point that everyone can afford, that everyone can go in.
And, you know, I mean, right place at the right time.
I think that people, like, it seems like the culture at large was ready for that, ready for that, like, experience in food and ready to kind of chase that.
And, yeah, I kind of keep like a loose running list of my favorite meals, you know.
And some of them are on the show and some of them are not on the show.
And I'd say most of them are that.
You know, most of them are accidentally stumbling into some place where someone's doing something completely awesome that isn't, you know, some massive 26-course tasting menu, you know.
And I think it's also about, you know, it's about place, you know?
It's about where you are, the context of where you are, what it smells like, what it sounds like, what it looks like, you know, who you're with, you know?
And so, you know, that's kind of, I think, another reason the show kind of worked is we had an opportunity to articulate all of those things.
All of those elements, you know.
We're able to choose an incredibly interesting guest to sit down with at a really interesting restaurant with, you know, people cooking of a really interesting backstory in a beautiful place and then use the power of kind of the magic of TV to, you know, to polish it up and present this version of travel and food in the world that...
And I think, too, I mean, you know, what I kind of love about, like, you know, at this point spent a good amount of time in kitchens and a good amount of time around kitchen staff is there's kind of two elements coming together.
There's the artistic element that you're talking about, right?
But there's also this very, you know, very earnest working class kind of element to the way a kitchen works, you know?
This tough, hard, sweaty...
Work, you know, it's a rough environment, you know, and I think that's kind of part of what makes it so appealing to us.
He kind of pulled back the curtain on that, you know, and say, like, these guys are, you know...
These guys are not these inaccessible icons, the Paul Bocuse of the world.
They are, as much as Paul Bocuse is awesome, they are these kind of rough and tumble guys that are back there making something really awesome.
Tony also had this sort of punk rock sensibility to it all, too.
You know, I mean, that was part of the thing about him that people found appealing is that they had seen cooking shows before, but they never saw cooking shows where the host gets fucked up.
You know, like, dude, I was, first time I partied with him, I'm like, this guy goes so hard!
I was like, I can't believe he can do this all the time.
Like, I think one of the first times we ever got hung out together was in Montreal.
We were there for UFC fights and we went out afterwards and we had some steaks and it was just amazing walking into this restaurant and people freaking out.
One guy actually had a copy of Kitchen Confidential in the actual kitchen itself and had Tony sign it.
Well, their show, one of the ones that I really loved was the one where they did ice fishing.
They were on the water, and they had this ice fishing shack, but inside the ice fishing shack they had fine silverware and fine china, and they had bottles of really excellent wine, and they were cooking on a wood stove.
They had a wood stove, and they were cooking foie gras right there on the stove.
And then they were laying out what they think makes you a good dinner companion.
And, you know, Dave was like, I shut my phone off.
I turn it off.
I put it away.
He goes, I don't check it.
He goes, I don't put my elbows on the table.
You know, and he's like, and I come prepared with stories.
And Tony was like, you prepare?
You prepare stories?
He goes, I have stories to tell.
I come prepared.
Like, to him, it's like...
Not really a performance, but it's an agreement that you're gonna you're gonna go there and you're gonna share this enthusiasm for this experience together and you're gonna try to enhance it with your own anecdotes and personality and your own Appreciation for the food and the wine and and then afterwards they're smoking Cuban cigars It's like the whole thing is it made you want to go eat at a really good place Yeah,
or in a, you know, in a shack, you know, with people who understand that there's an elegance to all of these things, you know, that you can create an environment that has an elegance.
And that's You know, I'd say that's like a hallmark of a lot of the chefs that I've met through the show is like, you will see that, you know, no matter how big they get, no matter how successful, there is an inherent kind of desire to please on multiple levels, you know?
You'll have like, I remember we were in...
Daniel Balloud's house in France, like at his parents' house, right?
And so here's Daniel Balloud, like the mega chef, you know?
But like running around to all of the crew members like, do you have something to eat?
Are you good?
Do you want another glass of wine?
Do you want to like, you know?
And it's just inherent to his nature is exactly what you're talking about.
This idea that, you know, they have this just...
Ongoing desire to please their guests, to entertain, to, you know, make sure that everyone's taken care of.
I was in Chicago and I woke up and I checked my phone and I got a text from my friend Maynard, Maynard Keenan, from Tool.
And Maynard is a jiu-jitsu brown belt and really loves jiu-jitsu.
And he texted me and said, so much for the Maynard versus Anthony Bourdain celebrity jiu-jitsu match.
And that's the whole text.
And...
You know, just sunk, sunk a pit in my stomach, and I just, I just picked up my phone, I went into Google, and I looked it up, and I saw it, and I'm just like, oh, fuck.
He said he was shitting bone chips because he worked out with some old school Carlson Gracie guys that they don't I believe in rolling light and it's all top game and smashing you.
And he's like, I'm shitting bone chips.
But I admired that a guy could be 58 years old and decide, I'm going to learn jujitsu and I'm going to be obsessed with it.
And then he became addicted to it, which, you know, jujitsu is a very beneficial thing to be addicted to, but it is absolutely an addiction.
I've come back from injuries where I definitely shouldn't have been training yet, and I just wrap my arm up and just fucking get in there.
People get super, super addicted to it, and he got addicted to it, just like he's been addicted to many things.
It's just crazy to see someone do something that's that physically demanding at 58 with no background in athletics at all.
You could see when he was doing things, like when he went to Kurt Osiander's place and was rolling around, he doesn't have a background in that, but he's just pushing himself to it.
It's just different for a guy who's 58. I mean, a guy who does it at 20, I admire anybody who does jiu-jitsu because it's a real humbling, ego-dissolving experience in a lot of ways because it makes you realize, like, all your illusions of how well you can defend yourself, they go out the window when someone just chokes you easily.
And you're like, oh, great.
I'm just a bitch, wandered around.
Running around this life thinking I'm a man.
But the fact that he did it at 58 just showed what kind of an unusual dude he was.
Yeah, but what you just talked about there, I mean, what you were talking about with the ego-diminishing aspect of it, again, I think that that was something that he took great pleasure in.
And I think that if you look at the way he went through the world, one of the things that I appreciated right off the bat and one of the things that kept me around as long as I stayed around, you know, For Tony, I think that he was constantly trying to dismantle that persona.
To say, I'm not the focal point of this scene.
What we're interested in here, what I'm interested in talking about is out there.
The camera's pointed away from me.
He was kind of a clearinghouse for all that information, and he was the root of the show, and it was his journey.
Ultimately, what was refreshing is he wasn't working with some celebrity or host that was completely consumed by their own ego and their own brand and how they were presented to the world.
I mean, what worked about that is he had, like, an instant ability to sniff through the bullshit, you know?
So, you know, listen, there's all kinds of famous people, celebrities, you know, well-accomplished people that he met that he didn't feel that way about, you know?
He would cut through that shit instantly.
But if you were on his radar in that way, you know...
And a really interesting, thoughtful dialogue around the campfire with Land Townie from Backwoods Country Hunters and Anglers and all these other guys that were with us.
You know, these guys who, it was good to get a different perspective on what going out and getting your own wild food is like.
Yeah, I know he was really pissed about the Cadillac ad.
What was that about?
Honestly, I don't really know a lot of the details of the whole story.
I don't know what other deals were on the table besides CNN. But it's safe to say that I think the relationship with Travel Channel was toxic before that.
I think the original people that owned it, because my friend Bert Kreischer has a show over there, or had a show over there, a couple shows.
Bert the Conqueror, and what was his other show?
Hurt Bert?
Yeah, she's a crazy asshole.
But, you know, Bert had issues with that too.
Like, when he would be on the show, if we'd all be hanging out together, if he wanted to smoke pot, he had to make sure that Jamie turned the camera away from him.
They're the dumbest fucking shows on television, and there's like a hundred of them.
But the thing is, if you're watching, everybody's scared of ghosts.
So if you're watching, and there's some people, and they're in the basement, and they have night vision on, and they pretend they see something, you're like, what are they seeing?
Is there a fucking real ghost?
Cuts to commercial, and then all of a sudden you're hooked, and you watch a Tide commercial.
No, man, but, you know, like, that's exactly the way it was.
You go up there, and you'd be in, you know, six days of rain, but all of a sudden, you know, the fog would clear, and there's some, you know, blacktails standing right there looking at you, you know?
It seems like it's a joke, because if you hike for like five feet, it seems like nothing.
You climb a small hill, you're like, I could do this all day.
You'd think you could do it all day.
You'd do that for 20 minutes, you'd start heaving, you'd be drenched in sweat, you'd want to take your jacket off, and then you realize like, oh my god, I have to do this for eight more hours?
You can't train for that kind of backcountry stuff.
You can go out and run up and down the Stairmaster or whatever, but it doesn't train all those little muscles that you use to constantly stabilize yourself.
You know, it's interesting, though, because I think back on those times, like, you know, like, while we're talking about, like, all the shitty weather and all that stuff, and I just think back to that.
The first time I went out with Steve, him saying, like, yeah, dude, but you won't, you know, you never tell stories about the good days, you know?
And I gotta say, to his credit, that's been absolutely true.
It's like...
Those shitty days, freezing cold, getting out of your sleeping bag in the morning and putting on wet clothes, cold wet clothes to go out and hunt all day.
I look back on that with a great degree of fondness.
And I also have to say, it made me a lot more of a person than I was before.
And then to do it and to have it be successful and to bring that animal back and to sit around and eat it and all that stuff, that was a real huge aha moment for me, personally and professionally.
Like, oh, we can do shit that we used to do 10,000 years ago.
I remember saying that on the show, like when Steve was asking me and Brian on the first hunt, which just by sheer luck, we were both successful on the first hunt.
And Steve was like, do you think you're going to do it again?
I said, fuck yeah, I'm doing this forever.
Like I knew it.
And he goes, when did you know?
I said, the moment that deer dropped.
The moment the deer dropped, I'm like, okay, I'm doing this forever.
Yeah, and because I do think that hunting shows for years, that's a lot of what they put forward, was, like, kind of machismo and guys shooting, you know...
Black bears over, you know, donut barrels, you know, for all the wrong reasons, you know?
But at least we think of that as something that people, or at least I do, think of that as something that people eat for food.
When you think about Cecil, like Cecil the Lion, like that kind of shit really sours people on the idea of hunting because there's no justification for the average person for shooting a lion.
I mean, you have to...
You would have to do decades of education about conservation and the importance of the money that goes for the hunt.
And then they still don't get it because they're like, why would you want to shoot a lion?
And that's the good question.
The good question is, why would you want to shoot a lion?
But game animals that are delicious, Neil Guy, things like that, that people have eaten forever and that they hunt just like they hunt elk or deer here.
Again, they realized that we weren't going to be paying for any of this.
Our security team was like, hey guys, time to get in the car.
As soon as you get in the car and you're leaving, it's like, oh, these fucking assholes, man.
They just came down here, got all their footage, and they're going to pack up and go back to their nice hotel.
But that's the one experience.
A lot of experiences there.
For the most part, I found people there incredibly gracious.
I found it to be one of the most hopeful places, honestly.
My day-to-day experiences in Africa, I saw people who were Working their asses off on a grassroots level.
Some of the most dynamic grassroots capitalism that I've ever seen.
People who will literally find any way to scrape out an existence and a living.
This is not a lazy culture.
This is a culture that will fight through anything.
Go to Lagos, and Lagos is one of the most dynamic cities I've ever been in.
There's constantly moving, constantly people trying to make money, constantly people trying to find a niche in a city of 20 million people.
I find a lot of beauty in just raw human endeavor there.
And I think that if they can clear some of the obvious stumbling blocks that they have in terms of corruption, in terms of foreign pressure, in terms of manipulation of markets, there's tremendous promise there.
I mean, just in terms of the internet and technology sector in Africa is absolutely booming.
You have kids that come in from the villages on the streets of Legos who can take your computer apart and rebuild it by hand.
But I can say that about traveling the world kind of in general.
I mean, we've been in a number of relatively hot zones.
I mean, we never did active conflict because we don't make that kind of show.
But being in places like Gaza or the DRC or...
I can count on one hand in many, many years of doing this the number of times that I actually felt threatened by someone.
I've found that the most likely scenario is you're going to get accosted by a sandwich or someone trying to introduce you to their kids or take a selfie with you.
And that's the world that I know.
I don't really understand the world that we see on TV here, man, because that's not my experience.
A lot of good people.
And again, getting back to Tony, I think that's the legacy, right?
Because if it's not dangerous, I mean, other than his show, what else are you seeing on CNN where they're in Africa where it's a good thing?
What else are you seeing where people are in Egypt where it's a good thing?
What else are you seeing where people are interacting with people on the street and there's not some sort of a murder story or a rape story or something awful?
Let's just say it's a highly militarized state with deep problems and deep divides on both sides.
And a lot of beautiful people on both sides.
But I think, you know, I mean, this was something we, like, would encounter a lot as we kind of progressed in the show.
I mean, my dad would say it to me all the time.
He's like, well, where are you guys going to go now?
You know, we've been everywhere.
It's just like, yeah, but I think we started to learn that you could, like, really point the camera kind of anywhere.
I think a big one for me was, like, doing this West Virginia show last year, which is a place that had always been, like, really close to my heart.
Like, I grew up there when I was a kid.
Um...
It's a place that has been, I think, deeply misrepresented.
Again, another place has been deeply misrepresented in the media.
I got into town on the scout there, and it's like, there's no restaurant.
It's not just that there's no restaurant in the town.
There's two restaurants in the county.
You know, and I remember having this moment of like, can we do this?
Does this work?
Like, will Tony respond to this when we make a show here?
And within two days, he was like, big, you know, very deeply heartfelt statements about the place, really loved it, you know, and it was kind of another aha moment where you're like, oh, yeah, of course.
Because there's something everywhere.
The human story is everywhere, and you can dig into it wherever you go.
The fundamentals of that don't change.
And I think that, you know, what he did was so cleanly and clearly and so free of bullshit cut to the core of those very fundamental kind of human stories, you know?
So Tony would come up with a list of places that he was interested in going, and maybe we would throw a couple in, like I mentioned the West Virginia show, you know.
Be like, but this is my list, right?
And then he'd write like a brief on each one.
I'm interested in X, you know, like I'm interested in Singapore.
It's Disneyland with the death penalty, right?
And you're like, okay, so there's kind of a basic operating thesis, right?
We can kind of go in and look at this place from this perspective.
And some of them didn't.
The Lagos episode, for example, you'd just be like, we haven't been to Nigeria, let's go to Nigeria.
And so we would start doing research on what that was.
Just big kind of You know, 30,000 foot macro, you know, what is this environment like?
What are the interesting things?
What are the stories that have been told about this place?
And how can we look at it from a different angle?
So like the Nigeria one, we kind of focused in on, like I said, you know, Grassroots capitalism, DIY entrepreneurship, you know, street level, you know, the street level kind of dynamics of the economy, you know.
And that became, like, we could see ways to kind of make a beautiful, like, human story out of those elements.
I'd end up putting down to him, probably in like a two or three page thing, like, here are my ideas.
You know, here's what I found based on what you were interested in.
Here's some other things I found.
This is the way we'd kind of like to go about it.
And he'd either be like, yeah or no.
You know, and from that point, we'd just get heavy into research, write a treatment, you know, and break that story into like six acts, right?
And then look for scenes to kind of fill and articulate that story.
So scenes like, you know, I have this great economist, I know we're going to need an economist at some point, but we got to put, you know, economists are kind of boring by nature, so we got to put him somewhere more dynamic or there's this really interesting story.
Computer market that has a lot of energy.
So let's put the economists there.
They can walk around.
There's a great restaurant in the corner there.
So, like, here's some elements we can put together.
That's a scene in an act of the show.
So you put all that stuff together in treatment form, send it to Tony.
Again, it's two guys standing there with cameras that have been traveling, at least from Tony's perspective, been traveling with Tony for a long time.
It's just like having two more friends at the meal.
In terms of with the sidekicks, I think we learned early on that you've got to go up, you've got to introduce yourself, you've got to smile, you've got to laugh, you've got to be able to be self-deprecating, make them feel comfortable, like you're there to ask them questions, not to tell them who they are.
They'd be like, oh, well, you've been all these places.
Yeah, but the world doesn't work like that.
It's not like the more places you go, the smaller the world feels.
The more places you go, the bigger the world feels.
It just feels bigger and bigger and bigger because you realize there's this country, there's this county in this country, there's this town in this county, there's this street, there's all these other streets, there's all these other people.
Yeah.
Our shows were just a sliver of a place, a tiny little sliver.
You can go into Lagos.
We'd go back to Lagos and make 10 more shows, each one of them completely unique and individual.
I have it on my DVR, so they'll occasionally run these marathons, and I'll go to my DVR, and there's like 20 new shows.
Yeah.
I watched a few of them the other night.
The first time I watched it, In a while, I posted a thing on Instagram too about it because I was real reluctant to watch it after he died, but then I went on a bender.
I watched like, I binged, watched like three of them in a night.
When you would give him a rough cut, say, like I said, a show on Puerto Rico or what have you, so he would take that, he would watch it, and then he would start writing?
That's another thing that was so delightful about it.
It's not like you're having to drag some, you know, carcass along and, you know, prop him up in front of the camera.
And, you know, he was into it, man.
And, like, he had total ownership, total control.
Awesome.
Incredible creative ideas.
Incredible creative power.
Like, he was in, you know.
And no show was like, nah, fuck it.
You know, we can just, like, kind of slip by on this one.
You know, every show is important.
And when they, you know, when they weren't working, he was pissed, you know, and great.
You know, I think the biggest thing that I miss in this process of cutting this Texas show that I'm doing now is not having the pressure of him looking at it and being like, dude, you know, no, man, this ain't working.
All of a sudden he was just lighting up right on camera and I don't know it shocked the shit out of me you know I kind of looked around the crew like what do we do like I was shocked because he said that when his daughter was born is when he decided to stop smoking because he realized that you know he had something else to live for and that he you know he didn't want to be on some cancer bed yeah fucking iron lung having his daughter visit him yeah so he quit yeah It
Um, you know, Tony, I think, gave us, like, tremendous tools to, you know, for how we look at the world and, like, how we will continue to go on looking at the world.
And, um, I don't know exactly what show I'll do, but I know it will continue that kind of ethos, you know?
And, um, I get, you know, I feel like I have this very powerful kind of, um, I don't know, like I said, a set of tools now that he kind of handed us to go on and keep doing, I guess, this work.
Isn't the problem with this work that you need someone like him?
You kind of need either a Rinella, who's a very unique person, and in many ways similar.
Not self-destructive at all, but really meticulous about his work, and a very good writer as well, and his narration.
One of the things that separates Meat Eater from any other show is that Steve has this eloquent narration that goes through it, and it makes you realize our perception of what it means to be a hunter Is based on stereotypes, negative stereotypes.
This is the best example.
This is a really well-read, brilliant man who has a great passion for the outdoors and for public lands and for wildlife and for consuming wildlife and this adventure of pursuing it and eating it and cooking it and showing you the art of cooking it.
You know, you wouldn't be able to make Meat Eater with Pig Man.
I think that's one of the things I really loved about Steve.
Or love, still.
That I still love about Steve.
Yeah.
You know, a really poignant episode on that show for me was when we went up to Alaska and we're hunting black bear and he decided not to take a shot.
You know, I mean, here's a guy that loves animals as much as he loves hunting animals, as much as he loves conservation of animals, as much as he loves the knowledge and the science behind animals in the natural world, you know.
That, to me, was appealing.
Like, that's something I can sink my teeth into and dedicate my efforts towards, you know, furthering and working on...
And they're thinking, we're going to see Steve shoot this, then we're going to see him cook up a bear roast, and we're going to see stewed carrots and onions and potatoes, and this is going to be amazing.
Yeah, and we were really nervous, I remember, when the episode came out.
We had done a few things before, like we had failed at a hunt.
We had taken shots that missed and the hunt failed.
We had gone on a mountain lion hunt where we never even saw a mountain lion.
Those were all kind of moments where, like, will this work?
Can we put this out in the hunting community?
Will they respond to it?
And every one of those had kind of like hit or worked.
And I think people actually appreciate it because of the realism of it, you know?
That one was like, can you...
Can you put out a show where there's a perfectly legitimate shot at, again, I mean a very high percentage shot at exactly the animal we're going after and the choice to not take the shot?
You know, how are people going to respond?
Overwhelmingly, people were like, hey man, I know exactly how you feel.
It was incredible.
It was like this moment, and I don't mean to bag on anyone else, man, and I don't know that much about hunting shows before.
I know that a lot of what I saw I found to be really either uninteresting or just fucking stupid.
But...
You know, I think that it was like this moment where like, oh my god, like all these, you know, this industry has like missed a big, big part of who the people, you know, that are paying attention here are, you know.
You don't have to just go like sell arrowheads, you know, and, you know, cackle hanging out of a helicopter.
But he, you know, Steve, he sort of changed the perception of hunting for a lot of people that have become fans of his show the same way that Tony sort of changed the perceptions of food and of cooking.
I mean, I'm not like Terrence Malick or something, but I got a lot to offer and I got a career.
I'm not going to dedicate my career to these people unless I really, really believe in what they're doing.
And those are two cases of people that I like.
Really believe in, man, because they were willing to look at an industry or look at something that they loved and say, like, well, I have a completely different take on it, you know, and I'm willing to put that out there at whatever cost.
And in both cases at work, because they're both super smart, you know, really capable people, you know.
I don't think I've ever met really anyone more capable than Steve in a lot of ways.
Yeah, which is just, if anybody doesn't know, there's a two-part series on the Meat Eater podcast about a Fognac, which is an island in Alaska where they have enormous brown bears and they got charged and attacked by a fucking 11-foot bear.
I think, you know, listen, Netflix, they've spent a lot of money.
They've taken a lot of swings.
Not all of those swings have hit, but they've been pretty brave in terms of, like, how much and what a wide range of content they've been willing to take on.
Yeah.
And so, you know, again, maybe that's, you know, part of what's driving it.
I know I've been lucky enough to land at, like I said before, like 0.0 with Chris and Lydia there and their ethos of, you know, making content that like has a purpose, you know, that works towards bettering, you know, the world or showing people something about the world or...
You know, connecting people.
And that's probably been, you know, the greatest gift.
That's what brought me to Tony.
That's what brought me to Steve, you know.
This is a connection with them.
So there are people out there that want to use the medium to, you know.
But in a lot of ways, that's what Meat Eater was in the hunting version.
It was like, what's the concept of the show?
Well, I'm going to hunt the shit that I want to hunt.
We're going to go to places I want to go and hang out with the people I want to hang out with.
Well, are you going to shoot animals?
I don't know.
Maybe, maybe not.
It's hunting.
I can't tell you.
We're going to try.
Yeah.
And it was, man, again, it was great to be able to do that and, like, have that freedom.
And I think CNN in a lot of ways, like, you know, and Tony, that, you know, to have the freedom to be like, well, here's a, you know, 60-year-old, you know, ex-heroin addict.
We're going to do whatever he wants to do, you know?
We're going to go wherever in the world he wants to go, and we're just going to kind of let him talk, you know?
I'll tell you what's funny, the controversial part of that episode was not Tony smoking, because that's legal and it's perfectly, you know, it's fine for him to smoke.
It was when he handed the joint to me over the camera.
That one was a little, I think that was a little tough for some folks to swallow.
And I think there's something very different, you know, when you take like, you know, when you take like, I don't know, for some reason, when you take Steve, like New York City intellectual, and you put him in that environment, I think there was a different reaction than like, oh, these people live in Alaska.
It's like watching pygmies hunt, you know?
These are, this is the natural environment of, you know, and that's what they do.
And so hunting is acceptable under those conditions, you know?
It's like, why isn't it acceptable for someone who, like, lives it as, like, a base philosophy in their life, give them a chance to explain why, you know?
Yeah, at his restaurant, and they shot a deer, and Marco put the blood on Tony's head, which is what you're supposed to do when you get your first kill.
And then they went and cooked it.
There was a lot of that.
There was one time where he shot a pig at point-blank range with a pistol.
And, um, I think that he, I think he, I think the story goes that he like, he goes, they asked him to kill the pig and he goes up and like, just very, very coldly double taps the pig in the head.
And I think that he says there's just this moment of silence amongst the crowd.
When I made that decision, I've been on two hunts now with Steve.
I've shot two deer.
That was like a very clear kind of aspect of it.
You know, I was like, well, I'm taking responsibility now, not only for like this animal's life, but for this animal's pain and suffering and the consequences of my actions, you know?
So I'm not going to be lobbing off any 750-yard, you know, rifle shots because I'm not qualified to do that.
And it's irresponsible to the animal and the potential suffering that you can cause, you know, or losing the animal or, you know.
Yeah, I mean, it became really clear with me, just knowing him, that this guy's got a very powerful moral compass and core set of beliefs that are just non-negotiable.
It's a great scene, largely because Sally Freeman, the producer of that, is absolutely brilliant and one of the best directors that's ever come through that show.
They have these loose scenarios, and then they go in, they script them, and they redo things, they reshoot things.
It's not reality.
It's like shitty acting with people that are not trained, and they're edited with people talking in front of the camera like, I didn't know what Mo was thinking.
I thought he was crazy.
And they cut to you and was like, I told Joe what we were going to do.
And it's incredibly powerful to have people backing you that believe in that.
And super rare.
I mean, you know, we talk about in, like, the film industry today how rare it is to have true auteur final cut directors, you know.
There's only a handful of them, you know, largely the studios have taken over that control.
Well, equally in the television industry, it's that rare to have people that have the kind of power and control to have the luxury of saying, you know, hey, listen, I have guidelines here, and we're not going to cross them, you know, and then have people, you know, be like, great, go, go, go make it, you know, and we were able to do that, you know.
Well, I think we'll have seven in this next season.
That's the only one of those seven that was actually completed with Tony's narration.
The rest of them are incomplete in that respect.
Again, we've been kind of fighting through editing those over the last few months and trying to figure out ways to You know, to do this without completely gutting, you know, the method of making this show.
Some projects I'm, like, pretty excited about, you know.
I just don't know that they've officially been announced yet, so, you know.
But there's good stuff out there, and there's, you know, one nice thing in all of this incredibly difficult time is a lot of people have come to us and said, like, listen, we always believed in what you guys did, and we'd like you to continue doing it, and here's a project we have that we think, you know, so hopefully we can continue to make things with the same kind of, you know, it looks like we can.
Well, it seems like the success of the show and then the infectious enthusiasm that Tony had and that so many people who are fans of the show had for that style of television, it's just going to lead to more people taking more chances and doing things like that.