Sept. 12, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:45:30
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Four, three, two, one. | ||
| What's up, Mo? | ||
| What's up, man? | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| Good to see you, man. | ||
| It's good to see you. | ||
| I'm glad we decided to get together and do this, you know, and talk and, you know... | ||
| It's a crazy subject, right? | ||
| I mean, you and I have known each other since 2012 when I did Meat Eater. | ||
| You were there filming when I shot my first deer, which is a very important part of my life, man. | ||
| And then you went on to direct and produce Parts Unknown with our late friend Anthony Bourdain. | ||
| And we just thought it would probably be a good thing to come in here and just talk about him. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| And I'm really grateful for it. | ||
| You know, it's actually, you know, a lot of people have been saying to me, like, oh, it must be really hard to talk about that. | ||
| I actually find it kind of the opposite. | ||
| Like, I want to talk about him. | ||
| I want to talk about who he was and what that experience was, you know. | ||
| So, thanks, man. | ||
| My pleasure, brother. | ||
| Did you know him before you guys started working together? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I met Tony 10 years ago, and I was called in. | ||
| He had a DP on a show who, at the last minute, canceled. | ||
| Couldn't go to Egypt. | ||
| So I got a call like a week before, you know. | ||
| I was like, do you want to go to Egypt with Anthony Bourdain? | ||
| I was like, fuck, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And so I met him in Cairo, man. | ||
| It was kind of like perfect, yeah. | ||
| Holy shit, that's like Indiana Jones type shit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Exactly, man. | ||
| Is that the episode when you guys ate a camel? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| We didn't eat a camel. | ||
| No. | ||
| But, you know, I met him there. | ||
| You know, we started filming. | ||
| We were on the streets of Cairo. | ||
| And, like, you know, it's like all of a sudden it was thrown into these kitchens. | ||
| We're just like, we're eating pigeon. | ||
| You know, it's like, go and cover them cooking pigeon. | ||
| And, you know, I had seen the show, like, maybe once before. | ||
| But I knew who he was. | ||
| And I knew what that adventure was. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I was so amped for it. | ||
| 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 you're on a bed? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely no regard for the fact that I'm on the roof, you know, shooting. | ||
| And... | ||
| And when we got there, we got to camp. | ||
| I survived it. | ||
| I had this big black and blue where I was holding on to the four-post bed. | ||
| And I go over and I show Tony. | ||
| And that was it, man. | ||
| From that moment on, he was like, I like this guy. | ||
| And I started going out with him. | ||
| I started getting invited to do more shows. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| So that was it, man. | ||
| How many years? | ||
| Ten years. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Ten years, yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I didn't realize that Parts Unknown was even... | ||
| Were you doing No Reservations first? | ||
| Yeah, so that was a No Reservation show, and then we went to Parts Unknown five years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| So Parts Unknown's been on for five years? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And that transition, No Reservation was great, and it really laid the foundation for what we do and what Tony did. | ||
| I think it really built an audience and a following for him. | ||
| That's what I found out about him. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| It was a great show. | ||
| But that transition going on to CNN and going into Parts Unknown, that really changed things. | ||
| That really opened up a lot of locations and stuff that we didn't have access to before. | ||
| It opened up CNN's logistics, Rolodex, and things that... | ||
| We didn't have at the other network. | ||
| No Reservations was awesome. | ||
| We did some incredible shows. | ||
| Parts Unknown got really fun. | ||
| Yeah, it was on another level. | ||
| I remember watching the chains. | ||
| I was like, okay, this is more him. | ||
| tone of it and the narration. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, all this stuff that most network executives are probably a little bit leery of, You know, CNN was kind of like, you know, go for it, man. | ||
| Be yourself, you know, and let's figure out what this is together. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| That really is amazing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like you got it through his own words, you know? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's just an art form that you eat. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's just a temporary 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he was into stuff that wasn't necessarily even like high dollar items. | ||
| He was into street food. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| It wasn't just the finest French bistros where these celebrated world-famous chefs were cooking these bizarre small-plate dishes. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, and again, I think that was kind of like a whole new kind of fresh take on looking at food, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Because now, I mean, that's all anyone wants now. | ||
| Well, I think it's because of him. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Because, I mean, I'm sure that he changed the way I look at things in terms of food. | ||
| And I think he had that effect on many people. | ||
| I mean, you think about... | ||
| How many years was Parts Unknown for five, and then No Reservations for nine? | ||
| No Reservations, yeah, for about ten, and then there was Cook's Tour before that, which was the original incarnation. | ||
| All told, a decade and a half of his influence on people's food choices and just appreciation for food. | ||
| I mean, I know personally I've had some great meals in restaurants, but some of my favorite meals have been like stepping outside of a bar. | ||
| You know, it's 1.30, you got a little buzz on, and some dude's got a taco truck. | ||
| You're like, oh, baby, what do you got over there, my friend? | ||
| Or in New York, you know, it's late at night, and there's a falafel cart, and some guy's got incredible kebabs. | ||
| Like, oh, something about street food, man. | ||
| Absolutely, man. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Yeah, and really everywhere, too. | ||
| I mean, you guys covered Asia, you covered Europe, you covered some weird places in the South where people were cooking pigs in their backyard. | ||
| I mean, it was just, it gave people an understanding of the preparation of food and a view to chefs. | ||
| And this view of chefs as artists. | ||
| I mean, these chefs look like tattoo artists. | ||
| They look like, you know, guys who are painters or something, or women who are sculptors. | ||
| I mean, they're real similar in the way they appear to what we consider artists. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| 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! | ||
| That was amazing! | ||
| Yeah, told me about it. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was pretty fucking badass. | ||
| Where'd you go? | ||
| I do not remember. | ||
| Was it Joe Beef? | ||
| No, it wasn't, but he turned me on to Joe Beef, and I've eaten there several times since then. | ||
| Those guys are coming on the podcast, too. | ||
| I love those guys. | ||
| Fred and Dave. | ||
| Yeah, no, they're fucking amazing. | ||
| That restaurant is one of my favorite restaurants on the planet. | ||
| No doubt, man, but they'll hurt you. | ||
| Yeah, they keep it coming. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, they'll give you an inch-thick slab of foie gras, you know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They're curators of an experience. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and so to be able to, you know, run around the world for 10 years and explore that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It was nice, man. | ||
| God, man. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I could only imagine. | ||
| How many shows did you guys film together? | ||
| I don't, you know, I'm, I don't know, 57 or 60, something like that. | ||
| Somewhere in that area. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| So, I mean, and listen, there are people, you know, at 10 years on the show, I was on the show for a long time. | ||
| There's people a lot longer. | ||
| There's people who did the whole 17 years. | ||
| People have done well over 100 episodes, you know. | ||
| No one left that show. | ||
| You don't leave that show if you get a spot on it. | ||
| Were you with him when it ended? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I was with him about a week and a half before. | ||
| So I had good friends that were there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I just couldn't believe it. | ||
| I couldn't believe it. | ||
|
unidentified
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I started crying. | |
| I think I called my wife. | ||
| I think I called Maynard. | ||
| I texted him. | ||
| I called my wife. | ||
| Called a few friends. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Just like... | ||
| You know, I just couldn't believe... | ||
| You know, when someone's just not there anymore... | ||
| I didn't get to see him a lot, but I was just a... | ||
| I just appreciated the fuck out of that dude. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, I don't want to do anybody's TV show. | ||
| But when I got a call from him, I was like, fuck yeah! | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| We're going to shoot pheasants? | ||
| And hunt? | ||
| And camp? | ||
| And we're going to cook by the campfire? | ||
| Fuck, I'm in, dude. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| I just really appreciated him as a genuine, unique person. | ||
| Like, he's a genuine, rare person. | ||
| And, you know, that's what I got out of being... | ||
| Being able to spend some time with him and being able to talk to him and pick his brain. | ||
| He did my podcast once and we always planned on doing it again. | ||
| We never got around to it because we both have ridiculous schedules. | ||
| I would think about things differently because of him. | ||
| I would sometimes hold things to his standards. | ||
| Legitimately, his... | ||
| His appreciation for things and his enthusiasm for things changed the way I look at a lot of aspects of food and culture and even travel. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| I'm sorry, man. | ||
| And I know he thought very highly of you. | ||
| And that experience in Montana was fantastic, man. | ||
| So fun. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, I... It's been. | |
| It's been a rough three months, and it's still hard for me to really contextualize it and put it together. | ||
| It feels like, you know, upside-down world. | ||
| Like, there's no—and he was such a—I mean, he was a friend and a collaborator, you know, but also just such an icon to me, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And, uh, that it's almost like, you know, it's almost like the sun disappears, you know, or something. | ||
| It's something that is so just inherently... | ||
| Part of life. | ||
| ...there and dependable and, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
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Um... | |
| So, yeah, I mean, it's been... | ||
| It's hard to describe how profound that's been. | ||
| Um... | ||
| Remember when he got into jiu-jitsu, I got psyched because I'm like, we got more to talk about now. | ||
| I could actually show him some shit. | ||
| You know, and he was always asking about things. | ||
| You know, he's really good at things. | ||
| Remember when we were in Montana, we were rolling around on the dirt. | ||
| I know, I remember. | ||
| I was showing him stuff, him and Josh. | ||
| I was like, when you're in here, like, here's what you can do. | ||
| You can get there. | ||
| And he's like, oh, yeah. | ||
| He was so wide-eyed, you know. | ||
| I think it was before he even got his blue belt or maybe it was like a round blue belt. | ||
| So he was super, super jacked about it, and he was doing it every day. | ||
| I remember when we were filming, we were outside of Billings? | ||
| Is that where we were? | ||
| Where were we? | ||
| Yeah, well, where the hunt was. | ||
| The hunt, we were up in central Montana. | ||
| So we kind of started in Billings, but we headed up towards central Montana. | ||
| He was training so often and even on the road that he traveled to a club. | ||
| There was just a jujitsu club in Bozeman. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he found some guys and he was rolling with these guys in Bozeman. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| And I was like, damn, are you doing it every day? | ||
| Every day. | ||
| For a long time on the show, that was a mandate. | ||
| We find the local clubs and make sure that he had a place to roll. | ||
| He texted me from some European block country. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He jumped right into the jujitsu experience. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I'm glad he did. | ||
| It was clearly, like, really good for him to us. | ||
| I mean, I know very little about jiu-jitsu. | ||
| I know what I know from Tony, you know. | ||
| He got so slim. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He lost all that weight. | ||
| All of a sudden, he had a six-pack. | ||
| Stopped smoking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, those were big things, man. | ||
| And he looked great. | ||
| He got off statins. | ||
| He was no longer on any sort of medication. | ||
| He lost all that weight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cut all the carbs out. | ||
| He was just eating like, you know... | ||
| Yeah, just protein. | ||
| Crazy, man. | ||
| He looked so good. | ||
| He did look good. | ||
| He did look good. | ||
| And also just, you know, the whole thing was kind of indicative of the way he... | ||
| I mean, he did things so passionately, you know, whether it was travel and the world and soaking up all these experiences or jujitsu or whatever. | ||
| If he was into something, if something caught his attention, he was just so aggressive about... | ||
| Knowledge, learning what he could, pulling everything out of it that he could. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and again, I think that was true with everything. | ||
| If it was something that was interesting to him, he just went. | ||
| He loved it, man. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| And I remember texting him, going, like, how deep are you getting into it? | ||
| He goes, real fucking deep. | ||
| And he goes, I'm getting tapped out every day, but I'm giving guys half my age a real struggle. | ||
| And I'm loving it. | ||
| Yeah, and he talked about that a lot. | ||
| I mean, I think he talked about, like, the failure as much as anything else. | ||
| And he loved that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Going in and, you know. | ||
| Getting smashed. | ||
| Yeah, but, you know, again, to his credit, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| We'd show up in these places, you know. | ||
| Bozeman, Montana, man. | ||
| Or Butte. | ||
| I think he rolled in Butte. | ||
| Butte's a hard-hitting town, man. | ||
| And listen, I love Butte. | ||
| I love Butte, too. | ||
| Much respect to anyone from Butte. | ||
| But man, that's a hard-hitting town. | ||
| And he'd roll into these places and get the shit kicked out of him. | ||
| Show up on set all sore and bruised and, oh man, oh, oh, you know? | ||
| And then just jump into that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's so disgusting, right? | ||
| Yeah, dude, but it's everywhere. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, he was very self-deprecating. | ||
| And he had reverence for real artists and real masters. | ||
| Total reverence. | ||
| Yeah, it came across. | ||
| It came across. | ||
| I texted him about some guy. | ||
| There was a photo of a restaurant. | ||
| And I'm sure it's still on my phone. | ||
| Some dude who's like a real famous guy who's like some big-time chef character. | ||
| And I was eating in this restaurant. | ||
| And so I'm like, who the fuck is this guy? | ||
| It seems like it's a big deal. | ||
| And so I texted him the photo of this cat right here. | ||
| Do you know who that guy is? | ||
| What's that guy's name? | ||
| So I said, who is that guy? | ||
| He says, Marco Pierre White. | ||
| Made Ramsay cry like a bitch. | ||
| All-time original rock star chef. | ||
| Genius. | ||
| Madman. | ||
| The original punk. | ||
| But that kind of text, that's a Tony Bourdain text. | ||
| That text shows that reverence for the masters. | ||
| I mean, even the way he phrases it. | ||
| Made him cry like a bitch. | ||
| All-time original rock star chef. | ||
| Genius. | ||
| Madman. | ||
| You know, and that's the way... | ||
| 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... | ||
| It's like total commitment to what you do. | ||
| You were in or you're out of the Anthony Bourdain club. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Dude, you want to be in, man. | ||
| That list of people is like... | ||
| That's a cool list to be on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I just remember hanging out with him. | ||
| He was one of the ones that I met that I was pretty starstruck right away. | ||
| I said something really stupid. | ||
| Like, my wife says you're my boyfriend. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I'd watch his show all the time. | ||
| She would just joke around, oh, you watch your boyfriend on TV? I'm like, he's great. | ||
| This guy's great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop. | |
| Leave him alone. | ||
| But when we were in Montana, that's when I realized... | ||
| Well, I always knew how hard he went. | ||
| But when I was blasted out of my mind, and he was like, where's that bottle? | ||
| Where's those joints? | ||
| And I was like, Jesus, man. | ||
| I can't even... | ||
| I'm hanging on to the earth here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that was a late night, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That one, I mean, listen, like in all fairness, not every night was quite like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But we had a lot of fun that night for sure. | ||
| It was real fun. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, and then having him cook it there, it was delicious. | ||
| Yeah, it was awesome. | ||
| But also, being able to put those ideas on a major network and print time is pretty rare, man. | ||
| Yeah, kudos to CNN for having the cojones to put together that kind of a show and have it on. | ||
| Big time, man. | ||
| Again, what can I say? | ||
| Best creative partners you could ask for, in terms of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You really enjoyed it that much. | |
| That was the dream job. | ||
| You do what I do. | ||
| You are interested in making documentary television. | ||
| That's it, man. | ||
| That's the show. | ||
| How did it wind up at CNN? Were there some other options? | ||
| Because I know he had a giant problem with the Travel Channel because I know he had told me that they fucked him over and did some Cadillac ad. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Travel Channel is a religious-owned place. | |
| At least was. | ||
| I don't know if still is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because they couldn't see him smoke pot. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, for sure. | ||
| And listen, I don't have any inside information, so this is purely my outside perspective. | ||
| I don't do the deals, and I don't deal in that stuff. | ||
| I make the shows. | ||
| But I saw a network that was more interested in making shows about sandcastles and ghosts. | ||
| That's why they had a bunch of ghost shows. | ||
| A lot of ghost shows. | ||
| Yeah, the ghost shows are fucking popular. | ||
| Yeah, they're really popular, man. | ||
| So stupid. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a hook, man. | |
| It's a hook after hook after hook. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is the craziest, weirdest thing. | ||
| It's one of the weirder things on television. | ||
| I just can't imagine having to shoot those shows. | ||
| Oh, could you imagine? | ||
| Try to make them interesting, like you? | ||
| Stumbling around some fucking old house, like with night vision, you know, trying to... | ||
| Is that a fear now? | ||
| I mean, look, you went from Meat Eater, which is an amazing show, and Parts Unknown, and No Reservations. | ||
| So you've got these three amazing shows. | ||
| And they put you on a ghost show. | ||
| No, that's not a fear of mine. | ||
| Listen, that might be a nightmare. | ||
| That might be something I dream about and wake up sweating through my sheets. | ||
| No, man. | ||
| Listen, I still work for 0.0. | ||
| Hi, Morgan, Morgan Fallon. | ||
| It's Mike from Finding Bigfoot. | ||
| Listen, we're coming back for season 1000. We're going to find him this year. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Please, please come aboard. | ||
| We love what you did with Tony Bourdain, and we think you could do that with Bobo. | ||
| You know, but here's the thing, they don't. | ||
| They don't want that. | ||
| They don't want cinematography and art. | ||
| You know, they want, listen, man, they want some kid producer, director, slash cinematographer that they can, you know, they don't want what we do. | ||
| They want fake Bigfoot noises. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like I said, I'm still with 0.0, Tony's long-time production company. | ||
| We do awesome work, a ton of awesome stuff lined up. | ||
| We'll be okay, man. | ||
| Are you going to do more stuff with Steve at MeatEater? | ||
| I'll go out with Steve anytime he calls. | ||
| I just need a little more advance warning these days. | ||
| I think they called me last week to see if I wanted to do an elk hunt. | ||
| Now, if you do that, would you try to get in shape first? | ||
| Like heavy duty? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Because the last time I went out with him, I got my ass kicked. | ||
| It's fucking rough. | ||
| Are you kidding, man? | ||
| Dude, he's got... | ||
| I mean, talk about a guy with, like, you know... | ||
| He has no empathy whatsoever for the people he's with who maybe can't keep up with him, man, when you're in the... | ||
| It's like, if you can't make that hike, you're just not making that hike, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, he weighs 110 pounds, and he can walk for days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and he's been doing this since he was a baby. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| No, man. | ||
| The last time I went out with him was, I guess, two years ago. | ||
| I went up to Alaska and did the blacktail hunt. | ||
| But we actually had nice weather, which was kind of unbelievable. | ||
| Because I know you've been up there when it's like, you know, 10 days of rain coming in sideways. | ||
| Yeah, we had to leave early last time I was there because a storm was coming and we had to make a decision. | ||
| It's a storm coming every time we get up there. | ||
| We weren't going to be able to get out. | ||
| It was a possibility. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Part of me was like, even though we're rain-soaked, I want to hunt the last six hours. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because if I stay the last day, never know. | ||
| That's so many times, that's when you hook up with an animal. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, in my experience up there- Hook up with an animal sounds like the wrong thing to say. | ||
| Really, really wrong. | ||
| You can hook up with an animal and catch can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| A lot of bear up there, too. | ||
| Yeah, tons of bear. | ||
| No, but he, you know, I got my ass whipped last time I went up there. | ||
| The first time I went up there, I was still in shape, you know? | ||
| I was younger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I did pretty well. | ||
| Well, you were doing it all the time. | ||
| You have to do it all the time. | ||
| You have to do it all the time. | ||
| The hiking thing is something, I mean, you're basically building up this endurance in your legs that you only get from hiking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| Hiking endurance is no joke. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Eight more days. | ||
| Fuck, yeah. | ||
| And then the Yeah. | ||
| And if your immune system is at all taxed, it's going to crash hard. | ||
| You might get sick. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Like you said, you can't train for it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Stairmaster will help a little. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Stairmaster will help a little. | ||
| It'll help the major muscle groups, right? | ||
| Running hills helped me. | ||
| It helped me a lot. | ||
| Just because it's so much harder than hiking. | ||
| Just run them. | ||
| You could do it easier. | ||
| It makes hiking easier. | ||
| Hiking with weighted packs on, too. | ||
| Did you ever do that? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And that's what we did. | ||
| But I mean, just like for training purposes? | ||
| Oh, just for training? | ||
| Yeah, I would. | ||
| On the Stairmaster, actually. | ||
| Here I am. | ||
| I'm dissing the Stairmaster with that. | ||
| Stairmasters are good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I'd put weights in my pack and go in the Stairmaster. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And boots. | ||
| You know, weird boots on the Stairmaster. | ||
| Did they let you do that at the gym or did they look at you weird? | ||
| Everyone looks at you weird. | ||
| My God, if you even talk about hunting in Los Angeles, they'll look at you weird, man. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| What's wrong with you? | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| That guy got camo on for me. | ||
| Jesus Christ, dude. | ||
| Did you wear camo at the gym? | ||
| I feel like I may have had some camo aspect to my pack. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Bloodstains. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It toughens you up. | ||
| It toughened me up. | ||
| It opened me up to the idea of... | ||
| It opened me up to... | ||
| Accepting, you know, possibilities for myself that I had never thought of before. | ||
| Your capabilities. | ||
| Your capabilities. | ||
| You know, that we, like... | ||
| We all have that somewhere back down in the brainstem, this idea, this ability to just go out in the woods and hunt something and eat it. | ||
| And up until that point, I had never done that. | ||
| I'd done some hiking and some camping. | ||
| It was always on trails, and they're all nicely marked and stuff like that. | ||
| The idea of stepping out of the back door of Steve's cabin and just into the woods, at that time for me when I first did it, that was completely new. | ||
| I was like, well, you can just walk into the woods? | ||
| What? | ||
| What do you mean, man? | ||
| Where are you going? | ||
| Where do we go? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it was big for me too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is how I'm getting my meat now. | ||
| I'm going to do this. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| I don't know. | ||
| There's so many just, like, really glib interpretations of, like, the motivation behind hunting, you know? | ||
| Cruelty and bloodlust. | ||
| Because in its worst cases, that's true. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And I would say it's a good question for me, too. | ||
| I definitely have limits. | ||
| As much as I went around with Steve, I have limits on what I would personally choose to do. | ||
| And I've got to say, the Africa stuff, for me, man, I just... | ||
| It's not interesting to me. | ||
| The only thing that's interesting to me in Africa would be to hunt something that I would eat. | ||
| So if they have antelope in Africa, I would love to hunt an antelope. | ||
| They've got a lot of those. | ||
| Yeah, hunt an antelope and cook it and eat it. | ||
| That to me makes sense. | ||
| There's no way I want to shoot a hippo or anything else. | ||
| Even if people do eat hippos, and I understand they do, that, okay, good luck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't want to have nothing to do with any of that. | ||
| No, me neither. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That, to me, makes sense. | ||
| It would be just an adventure to go to Africa. | ||
| But Africa's so fucking scary. | ||
| It's so sketchy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love... | |
| I mean, see, I love Africa. | ||
| And I became like... | ||
| I kind of took all the Africa shows I could on Parts Unknown. | ||
| Really? | ||
| To me, it's like the most wonderful place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| First of all, I think there's a lot of misperception when it comes... | ||
| I've never had a negative experience there. | ||
| I've had maybe... | ||
| I had one experience that was kind of quasi-threatening. | ||
| Quasi? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We had a crowd kind of turn on us and throw rocks at us as we were driving away. | ||
| That's the one experience. | ||
| There were like hundreds of experiences. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What was that about? | |
| Well, we were in... | ||
| We're in Goma in the DRC, you know? | ||
| And it's just a really, really chaotic place. | ||
| The place has been run over by civil wars for decades. | ||
| People are in serious desperation. | ||
| But I think worse than any of that, there's a huge culture of non-profit organizations and stuff there. | ||
| So I think they're used to kind of white folks coming in with this very patronizing kind of view. | ||
| And then we're down there with cameras filming them, and then all of a sudden they realize that we're not paying anyone for this, you know? | ||
| And I think, you know, there's a tendency for people to feel like, well, you're here taking something from us, you know? | ||
| You're clearly making more money than any of us will ever, you know, be able to make, and what the fuck do we get for it, you know? | ||
| And I can understand that point of view. | ||
| And how did it turn into them throwing rocks at you guys? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Self-taught. | ||
| And all of that potential is there to be tapped. | ||
| And they're starting to. | ||
| So I guess I just find it a hopeful place. | ||
| That's amazing that you only had one bad experience. | ||
| Only one. | ||
| Only one. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I think that he really showed people that. | ||
| That is a problem with our view of the world, is that if it doesn't look scary, they're not going to show it to you. | ||
| No. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think you're starting to see it a little bit, but mostly you're seeing it on CNN's Africa network. | ||
| There you're starting to see them covering stories about entrepreneurs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, positive aspects, you know, building economies. | ||
| But it's a real problem in our view of the world for people that don't travel. | ||
| Well, listen, Africa just simply doesn't make news in the United States. | ||
| I mean, it takes a genocide, you know. | ||
| Well, all I've been hearing about Africa lately is what's going on with white farmers in South Africa. | ||
| It's very scary stuff where people are encouraging people to attack white farmers. | ||
| You know, and there's a whole lot of sociopolitical and economic shit that goes on with that that I'm not even going to pretend I understand. | ||
| But that's what you hear about. | ||
| You don't hear about good things. | ||
| You hear about how many farmers have been murdered in their homes. | ||
| Well, that's a shame, man, because, you know, you go there and most of what I find going on there is positive. | ||
| You know, listen, there's a lot of pain. | ||
| There's a lot of suffering. | ||
| There's a lot of bad shit that happens there, too, obviously. | ||
| I'm not going to deny that, you know. | ||
| We don't hear the good stuff. | ||
| Did you have a place where you enjoyed traveling to the most? | ||
| I don't think really. | ||
| To me, this is another real lesson of the show. | ||
| I think we got to a place where we were finding something everywhere. | ||
| There are some places that I didn't enjoy as much. | ||
| I think most places we found something that was like, oh, this is awesome. | ||
| What was the one place where you're like, eh, I'm not going back here again? | ||
| I don't want to say. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Keep it positive, people. | ||
| Keep it positive. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And... | ||
| Anyways, it worked well. | ||
| We won an Emmy two nights ago for it. | ||
| Yeah, posthumous Emmys are always odd, right? | ||
| Yeah, that was a rough night. | ||
| When he would get the rough cut, would it be the length of the actual show? | ||
| And then he would add narration to it? | ||
| Did he have any say in the editing process? | ||
| Huge. | ||
| I think that's something important, too, about who he was. | ||
| Everyone calls him a chef. | ||
| He wasn't a chef. | ||
| He was a producer. | ||
| He was a television producer. | ||
| He would pick the locations. | ||
| He would pick the subject matter for the most part. | ||
| There were a couple. | ||
| How did you guys work it out? | ||
| Say if you were going to go to Puerto Rico or something like that, how would you make the decisions? | ||
| How would you decide where to go and why? | ||
| I'll take you through the whole process. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Usually minimal notes from him, you know. | ||
| And then we'd go out, scout. | ||
| Shoot the show. | ||
| How weird is it shooting in a restaurant with camera people standing over the table? | ||
| I think we got really good at not taking over the environment. | ||
| I don't know how to answer that. | ||
| How do you do it? | ||
| Say if you and I are having a conversation at dinner and we're being filmed, would they be as close as Jamie is right there? | ||
| The cameras? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Closer than that. | ||
| Right on top of you. | ||
| Yeah, they're pretty close. | ||
| But, you know... | ||
| And they're standing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we wouldn't use, like... | ||
| There were rules to that, right? | ||
| Because, like, we're a documentary show. | ||
| We can't just go in and just, like, completely take over some place or take over some village or scare the shit out of local people or... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, we got to go in with some deafness, you know? | ||
| So we would go in early and we would light... | ||
| So that the characters, Tony, aren't really seeing us screw around with lighting, stuff like that. | ||
| That's all kind of in place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Put the cameras in there. | ||
| No sound guy, no big booms. | ||
| Sit the rest of the crew down. | ||
| Are they wearing wireless mics? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And then fill in local people in the rest of the restaurant. | ||
| Make sure that there are people who actually go to that restaurant in the restaurant. | ||
| Make sure that it feels alive, not full of... | ||
| You know, extras, like, miming dialogue. | ||
| And are they carrying large cameras? | ||
| Like, how big are the cameras they're carrying? | ||
| They're big cameras. | ||
| Like, regular, big ol' production cameras, heavy on the shoulders? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you guys would use a mediator? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not so... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, but... | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I have to say, we traveled all over the place. | ||
| A lot of people had never been on camera before. | ||
| It largely worked, you know? | ||
| So we must have been doing something right. | ||
| Was there ever a time you were in a restaurant and people were pissed off that there was people standing there with cameras filming a table? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, that's pretty easy. | ||
| You know, someone gets pissed off and they wave you off. | ||
| Okay, cool. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| You know? | ||
| No worries. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It never really escalated. | ||
| You know, at least with me. | ||
| It never escalated. | ||
| You had a view of the world by doing that show and traveling the way you did that is less than 1% of the population is ever going to experience. | ||
| Probably less than 1% of 1%. | ||
| Yeah, I would say for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's got to be an incredibly enriching journey for you. | ||
| Yeah, hugely. | ||
| I mean, hugely. | ||
| There's, I mean, it's, I don't know, it's very simple. | ||
| There's before and there's after. | ||
| And it's two different people, really. | ||
| Because just all the data you had to take in, the view of the world changes, it gets bigger, becomes a much bigger place. | ||
| It does. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And that's what's really interesting. | ||
| I tell people this too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The world's a big place, a lot of shit going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now... | ||
| They're going to keep airing these shows, right? | ||
| I mean, how long are they going to do this for? | ||
| How many did they have, all told? | ||
| How many did they did five seasons? | ||
| Five seasons, 18. I guess we're getting near 100 shows. | ||
| I've never counted. | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| A lot of shows, though. | ||
| Yeah, they'll keep airing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was like, God damn, what a good show it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was good, man. | ||
| You guys nailed it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You should be really proud. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm actually still working on one right now, which is maybe the weirdest experience. | ||
| You were asking about process before. | ||
| After we'd shoot it, that's when Tony really came in. | ||
| What do you do if he's not there for narration? | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| Who narrates it? | ||
| I'm not going to replace Tony. | ||
| So no narration? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| We have our sidekicks talking to him. | ||
| We have his dialogue in the field. | ||
| But who's going to step in and do that voice? | ||
| And how offensive would it be if we did that? | ||
| It would have to be someone who is so close to him that it didn't freak everybody out. | ||
| It would have to be someone who was on the show a thousand times and was just there with them always. | ||
| That person doesn't really exist. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| There's no voice there. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, yeah, getting back to process, I'd send him an act once it was in rough cut form, and then you get his notes back. | ||
| That was always kind of a terrifying moment, too, because you're like, dude, you've worked on this thing a lot. | ||
| You send it off to him, he can go one way or another, man. | ||
| I got gutted a few times, man. | ||
| But I got a couple that were like out fucking standing, you know, and that's all the notes he had. | ||
| But you would, you'd send him basically scratch writing. | ||
| So you'd say like, here's what we're thinking, you know, is this kind of idea goes here, this kind of idea goes here. | ||
| And then he would actually write it, you know, and you get that writing back. | ||
| How long would it take for him to do something like that? | ||
| Oh, he ripped that shit out, man. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| He was fast. | ||
| And that's the thing too. | ||
| I never, you know, there was never an email or a text that he didn't get back to you. | ||
| He was no slouch, man. | ||
| He was sharp. | ||
| He was on it. | ||
| He'd get back to you. | ||
| He'd do the work. | ||
| He took pride in that. | ||
| He would talk about that, doing the work. | ||
| Yeah, and he did. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, that was a real benefit to us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When did he start smoking again? | |
| You know, it's the weirdest thing, man. | ||
| I didn't really know he was smoking again, and then the Puglia show came out, and I just saw him light up on camera. | ||
| You know, I was like, oh shit, I guess we're doing this again. | ||
| And then a couple of my shows at the end, he'd start just lighting up on camera, and that was always no-go territory. | ||
| In the past, when he was smoking, we would stop shooting, you know? | ||
| 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 | ||
| was a bummer when he started again. | ||
| Did he stop going to jujitsu? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I guess it wasn't as frequent during the end, you know, during the last few episodes. | ||
| You know, we stopped kind of having to find gyms. | ||
| And we'd offer, you know, and be like, no, I'm, you know, cool. | ||
| So I think the last couple of shows were probably like that for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, you want us to find a local gym? | |
| And be like, no, you know, I'm good, man. | ||
| So was it within the last year or so or less, less than a year? | ||
| I'd say the last year or so, yeah. | ||
| So that's when the smoking started? | ||
| I guess, maybe a little earlier than that, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whew. | |
| It's a bummer when you see someone quit and then go back on. | ||
| That is one of the weirder things of our culture. | ||
| Because he got through the really hard part. | ||
| He had a couple years under his belt. | ||
| And he looked great, man. | ||
| He was doing really well with that. | ||
| Where do you go from here, Mo? | ||
| Where do I go from here? | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| You know... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Dude, I can't even talk about Pig Man. | ||
| A porkalypse? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, come on, dude. | ||
| Well, unfortunately, I enjoyed that. | ||
| For all the wrong reasons. | ||
| You see, there's justification in enjoying a pork lips. | ||
| First of all, because you've got Ted Nugent with a machine gun and a helicopter. | ||
| And then two, you have this real wild pig epidemic. | ||
| It's a legitimate epidemic in Texas and they don't know how to eradicate them. | ||
| I get all that. | ||
| But putting it on television on a hunting show, it's not really hunting. | ||
| It's assassinating out of a helicopter and they're laughing. | ||
| It's that part. | ||
| It's the mentality behind it. | ||
| Listen, I'm not saying don't have fun on a hunt. | ||
| I've had a lot of fun on hunts. | ||
| I have a great time on a hunt. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's something about... | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| I know exactly what you're saying. | ||
| Firing off a thousand rounds, cackling on the side of a helicopter. | ||
| Laughing when you see pigs do somersaults because you head shot at them from a sideways helicopter. | ||
| 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... | ||
| That was a crazy show. | ||
| Yeah, it was a crazy show, man. | ||
| I mean, I talked to him about it, and his sort of idea of why he didn't do it was so interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He just kind of went with his feelings. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To have a hunting show where you have a bear, which is what you're looking for, lined up in your scope and go... | ||
| I don't want to do it. | ||
| I'm not feeling it. | ||
| And I loved what he said too at the time. | ||
| He was like, I'm not saying I'm never going to shoot a bear again. | ||
| I just don't want to shoot a bear today. | ||
| And I'm not going to. | ||
| And that was a big moment, man. | ||
| Well, that's the words coming out of his mouth. | ||
| How conflicted. | ||
| Must his perception be to realize that, okay, I'm filming a show where I'm actively hunting bears. | ||
| There's camera people there. | ||
| There's a budget behind it. | ||
| Now I have to make a show about my decision to not hunt a bear. | ||
| And then next week, I'm going to go hunt something else. | ||
| And then the next week, I'm going to go hunt something else. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, his ability to admit and kind of understand that the human being is a complex animal with complex emotions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That, you know, this idea of just kind of uniform direction of the human mind is like a total fallacy, man. | ||
| We're all over the fucking place, you know? | ||
| And like, I don't know. | ||
| I really bought in at that moment. | ||
| If I hadn't before, which I completely kind of had, but I really bought in at that moment. | ||
| I was like, this is a guy I can always stand behind, you know? | ||
| One of my favorite episodes... | ||
| It was brave. | ||
| It was brave because you realize this is on the Sportsman's Network. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the Sportsman's Channel, and they have only hunting shows. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| And then he's on a hunting show with, you've got all these people that are watching that would kill to be on a hunt like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And to have a big old bear in their sights, what they want. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And he's going, no, I don't want to do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And everybody's like, what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, well that's worst case example. | ||
| But for some hunting people that are like... | ||
| Sort of deeply indoctrinated into the world of hunting. | ||
| They don't mind that show. | ||
| No. | ||
| They don't mind any of the show. | ||
| Listen, man. | ||
| More power to them. | ||
| I'm not trying to tell anyone how to be or what to like or what to appreciate. | ||
| There's just not a lot of guys like Steve. | ||
| I mean, do you know Donnie Vincent? | ||
| No. | ||
| Similar guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Similar guy. | ||
| Really, really smart guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And just great reverence for the outdoors and for wildlife. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, he does everything self-filmed and sells the films online. | ||
| He's smart. | ||
| You know, he knows what he's doing. | ||
| Yeah, cool, man. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, you know... | ||
| 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. | ||
| That guy is... | ||
| He's kind of a force of nature, you know? | ||
| He's a very unique person, you know? | ||
| And the amount of stuff that he's able to get done as well, you know? | ||
| Written a bunch of books and constantly doing these shows. | ||
| And I don't just... | ||
| The enthusiasm to... | ||
| I mean, he's not just going to these places and staying in hotels. | ||
| He's sleeping on the ground outside in these, you know, really fucked up places. | ||
| And you know about a Fognac, what happened with the bear attack. | ||
| I do, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Which is just so crazy to think of. | ||
| And the description of it. | ||
| And they made this podcast right after the fact. | ||
| So it's fresh in everyone's mind. | ||
| It is amazing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's an amazing story. | ||
| It's also amazing. | ||
| It's not the first time he's been charged by a number of different animals. | ||
| He was run over by a moose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I will say that, I mean, Steve also is like physically one of the toughest people I've ever met. | ||
| I mean, I watched him set beaver traps one time in, I mean, breaking ice with his bare fist to set beaver traps for hours. | ||
| Put your hand in that water for two minutes. | ||
| That's someone who does not have trouble enduring a lot of physical discomfort. | ||
| That was what was kind of exciting about the show, too. | ||
| He was really willing to integrate that stuff into the experience. | ||
| It wasn't like... | ||
| It wasn't like we need to go out, we need the perfect kill shot, we need to set this up, we need to set that up. | ||
| It was kind of like, well, we're just going to go out and we're going to see what happens. | ||
| We're going to kind of grit our teeth and bear it no matter what, you know, where the journey takes us and we're just going to document that. | ||
| That was like super exciting television to make at that time too. | ||
| I've done five episodes of this show and we struck out on two of them. | ||
| You know, that's... | ||
| It used to be they would never air shows like that. | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't know that they aired... | ||
| I mean, I'll probably... | ||
| I'm sure a lot of people will be like, yeah, dude, you don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| But I'm not sure that they aired a lot of failed hunts before we started doing it. | ||
| I don't think they did. | ||
| I don't think it was a popular thing. | ||
| It might have been done before, but not to the extent the way Steve did. | ||
| One of my favorite episodes, he never... | ||
| Never shot a deer. | ||
| It was talking about his dad. | ||
| Oh, that's brilliant. | ||
| It's a beautiful episode. | ||
| I think that was Alaska as well. | ||
| Wasn't it? | ||
| I don't think it was. | ||
| Wasn't it a blacktail hunt? | ||
| Maybe it was in Alaska. | ||
| No, I feel like it was a coos deer hunt. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| In Arizona. | ||
| And most of the show was him using a spotting scope and binoculars looking for deer and talking about his relationship with his father. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there was no music. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And whoever edited it and put it together was brilliant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was perfect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it was, you know, some heavy, heavy-duty shit. | ||
| And it sort of makes you realize, like, oh, this is where you came from. | ||
| You came from a hard man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Victim. | ||
| Taskmaster. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know. | ||
| That was a brilliant episode. | ||
| It was also, like, I think, you know, one of the things I like so much about that episode, too, is it feels so much like the process of hunting. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's long hours with people really kind of getting deep into stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I did an episode with him, too. | ||
| It hasn't aired yet, but it was a lot of that. | ||
| A lot of just talking about life. | ||
| I really enjoyed that part of being out with him, too. | ||
| Spending those long hours just sitting glassing hills talking about our families and plans for the future. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That was nice, man. | ||
| Listen, I can't tell you how lucky I feel in my career to land it with these folks. | ||
| Yeah, that's a great one, too, right there, those two guys. | ||
| But like we were saying, it's real hard to find those kind of guys. | ||
| There's not a lot of those kind of guys out there. | ||
| There's not. | ||
| It feels like there's more of what they call premium content now on TV. There's more people looking for things that have more substance to it. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| What do you think has happened? | ||
| What's the shift? | ||
| I guess I don't really know. | ||
| I'm not in development, so I'm not really in a place to say, but I get the feeling that outlets like Netflix have really shaken up the paradigm. | ||
| I think the internet in general has changed people's expectations. | ||
| And uncensored content is so prevalent and so much more attractive. | ||
| It's just changed the way people absorb things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that, you know... | ||
| 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. | ||
| There are idealistic suckers out there. | ||
| I'm one of them. | ||
| Well, that's what creates that satisfying art. | ||
| I mean, the stuff that we're talking about. | ||
| You're not going to get that any other way. | ||
| You have to have those people with that deep reverence for the subject that they're discussing and the subject that's being portrayed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now, again, more and more we have the outlets to put that on the air. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You think back to the days when those three networks, you know. | ||
| Tony's never getting on the air. | ||
| Never. | ||
| We're never going to find out about him. | ||
| I mean, he'll have to stick with being an author. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| In a lot of ways, it's the Wild West now, but in a lot of ways, that's a good thing. | ||
| Oh, it's a good thing. | ||
| I mean, it's a great thing for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody would ever give me a fucking show. | ||
| It wouldn't have been that crazy. | ||
| Totally, man. | ||
| This kind of show? | ||
| Where I go, oh, so what do you want to do? | ||
| I just want to talk to whoever I want to. | ||
| Who's going to schedule it? | ||
| Me. | ||
| What are you going to do on the show? | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Are you going to have a format of discussion? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, the Seattle one, I mean, they let him get blasted. | ||
| I mean, he was smoking weed on camera, smoking weed through the show, visiting growers, and then going to restaurants high as fuck. | ||
| Like, you could tell he was high, and he was talking about how he'd been smoking all day. | ||
| He's on camera talking about being baked with two people who are growers, the brother and sister who are hilarious. | ||
| They're awesome. | ||
| They were hilarious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I know. | |
| And they were laughing with them, and it's like the whole family's involved. | ||
| It's really... | ||
| That was a great episode, man. | ||
| And it also... | ||
| Fuck, goddamn, that episode got me hungry. | ||
| Because you see all the seafood in Seattle and all the delicious food. | ||
| Insane, man. | ||
| God, I want to get up to Seattle again. | ||
| I haven't been up there. | ||
| No, that was a good episode. | ||
| And those folks were awesome. | ||
| You know, I went out to that place and I filmed that and it's like, they were like, it was like dream scenario. | ||
| I mean, that kid, like, he put together... | ||
| Do you remember their names? | ||
| I'm trying to remember their names. | ||
| See if you can find it, Jamie, just to give them a shout out. | ||
| Seattle episode, growers, African American family. | ||
| They were awesome. | ||
| They were awesome. | ||
| And like, you know, that was all that kid. | ||
| He had like put together a PDF and like showed his family and they were like, cool, let's sink everything into it. | ||
| And they did. | ||
| And I went out to their place and they were just sitting back laughing. | ||
| You know, like counting stacks of money, you know, and all smoking big joints, you know. | ||
| Like the grandmas there smoking a huge doobie. | ||
| And she was like quality control tester. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| All these kids working for them and stuff like, you know, rolling joints and making oil. | ||
| And it was just like, man, good for you guys. | ||
| You know, like, way to go. | ||
| Isn't that the way, like, kind of American entrepreneurship is supposed to work? | ||
| Well, it's just rare that something comes along that's this controversial but yet also lucrative as marijuana sales. | ||
| And then all of a sudden it's legal in the state. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And you're like, oh, okay. | ||
| Well, so we could just do this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, because I'm working, you know? | ||
| Oh, but he's working too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, geez, you know, I never thought of it that way. | |
| I guess he was working. | ||
| Yeah, he's working too. | ||
| I guess it's the idea that you're holding machinery. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Hollingsworths. | |
| That's right. | ||
| Shout out to the Hollingsworths. | ||
| Hollingsworth Farm. | ||
| Hollingsworth Farm. | ||
| There they are. | ||
| Yeah, why was it? | ||
| I guess because maybe they're thinking you're holding a machine that's like real expensive? | ||
| I guess, man. | ||
| I think they didn't want the perception that we were just partying and out of control in the field. | ||
| And we weren't, man. | ||
| We're professionals. | ||
| So did CNN have a problem with it? | ||
| I think maybe there were elements at CNN that might have had a problem. | ||
| Someone must have chimed in. | ||
| But in the end, again, to their credit, in the end, you know, they left us alone. | ||
| That is the only way to make a good show. | ||
| As soon as those fucking cooks start coming into the kitchen and pointing at the stew and wanting to add ingredients. | ||
| Yeah, but that's the whole industry, man. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| Again, that's why this was so refreshing, you know? | ||
| It's like, how rare is it not to have people just breathing down your neck all the time? | ||
| And the same thing with Meat Eater, you know, because Steve Rinella came from The Wild Within, which was a show that's where I met him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I met him from that show and I had him on my podcast, but that show was a fucking goat rope. | ||
| He was telling me that they were trying to let animals loose out of cages and then he would shoot them. | ||
| Those were the early days when there were line items in for Animal Wrangler. | ||
| But to everyone's credit, very quickly at 0.0 and very quickly with Steve, they were like, dude, we don't do that. | ||
| We're not doing that. | ||
| But it's hilarious that a producer actually came up with that idea. | ||
| They're like, oh, I know how to do that. | ||
| It's not like a producer came up with that idea. | ||
| That was just a playbook on how you make TV. They're just pulling from the playbook. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Reality air quotes TV. Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Listen, there's a lot of huge mistakes in that show and a lot of bullshit. | ||
| I thought it was a pretty revolutionary and pretty interesting show in a lot of ways. | ||
| There's a lot of truth in there, too. | ||
| We did end up going out and just going on hunts. | ||
| This is a very high-pressure situation. | ||
| But also, this is very typical of the way that television works. | ||
| As we're out in the field, there's still, at the network, a lot of infighting and jostling about what the show actually was. | ||
| Is this history? | ||
| Is this... | ||
| Reality is this, you know. | ||
| Subsistence. | ||
| Yeah, you know. | ||
| I remember at one point someone saying something like, well, it's not a hunting show, you know. | ||
| And we're like, I'm like in the field covered in fucking moose blood, you know. | ||
| And I'm like, well, it looks like a hunting show from where I'm standing, you know. | ||
| Like, I don't know what to say. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| They were saying it's not a hunting show. | ||
| Yeah, I think that there's, you know, I don't remember who that was. | ||
| But I think that they're very leery of this idea of like a hunting show and what a hunting show was. | ||
| Well, meanwhile, those subsistence shows that they have, they're all hunting and gathering. | ||
| I mean, that is like one of the more popular shows on all of these cable channels where these people that live in Alaska and they're trapping. | ||
| Now it is. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| It wasn't then. | ||
| I know, it's crazy. | ||
| I mean, that genre really exploded after that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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? | ||
| But he lives in Brooklyn. | ||
| Why would you ever hunt? | ||
| You know, you live in Brooklyn, you know? | ||
| You just go to the shopping center, you know? | ||
| Yeah, well, you must be, there must be something wrong with you if you enjoy it. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| I think that's, like, I think that's part of the mentality. | ||
| Well, Tony addressed that on the show, too. | ||
| I remember one of the first times Tony shot a deer on the show, and then they cooked it at that same guy's restaurant. | ||
| Yep, exactly. | ||
| Marco Pierre White. | ||
| 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 I was like, wow, they put that on TV. That was a big moment for him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You talked about that a lot. | |
| Well, I mean, uh, he, um, that was Cajun country, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, Ooh, geez, man. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Like, that was cold, dude. | ||
| Well, what did they expect? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But he was like, he would talk about it as if like a gasp came up from the crowd. | ||
| It was like, jeez, wow. | ||
| You know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The double tap, you know? | ||
| Like it was like a mob hit or something. | ||
| Yeah, I think one's enough for a pig. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| Point blank range. | ||
| I've seen an animal shot in the head, though, that could have used another one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think especially... | ||
| I've seen a couple pigs go real ugly. | ||
| Double tap is totally acceptable to me because when a pig goes bad, it's really... | ||
| It's not pleasant for anyone, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's also... | ||
| You don't want an animal ever to suffer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| If you see it still alive, put another one in it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's always bow hunting, rifle hunting. | ||
| If it's still standing, put another one in it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, or suffering in any way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think that's, you know, that's like kind of a responsibility you take onto yourself when you decide to hunt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| So, you know, and I don't know. | ||
| I guess that all comes from Steve, really. | ||
| Yeah, he's got such strong ethics. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Again, both of them. | ||
| Tony and Steve. | ||
| Tony's moral compass is rock solid as well. | ||
| Any mistakes that he may have made in his life, I can honestly say he made them with his heart. | ||
| He made them with his moral compass in mind and making his best attempt to follow that. | ||
| And again, that was something that was really nice to be around and refreshing to be around. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Especially in this world of people with gimmicks trying to become more popular and more well-known. | ||
| And he had put zero effort into that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, just the base philosophy of the show. | ||
| We're not going to fake anything. | ||
| We're not going to do second takes. | ||
| We're not going to... | ||
| How about the one where they were throwing frozen octopus in the water? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So this is like a really famous story, right? | ||
| The Sicily episode, yeah. | ||
| He describes that as like maybe the darkest existential moment of his life, you know? | ||
| Who was throwing the frozen octopus? | ||
| The sidekicks. | ||
| So they set up these sidekicks who were like... | ||
| Sidekicks of the guy who was running the fishing operation. | ||
| Well, I guess they were the sidekicks in the scene that were going to work with Tony, right? | ||
| So, I mean, the way you'd set a scene up normally like that is you'd have, like, a sidekick. | ||
| Someone who's going to talk to Tony and be like, hey, what are we going to do? | ||
| We're going to go out and... | ||
| And the sidekick would be a local... | ||
| Yeah, usually like a local or an expert in something or, you know, a fisherman probably in this case. | ||
| I wasn't on that show, so I don't know exactly. | ||
| But... | ||
| And you'd be like, oh, we're going to go octopus. | ||
| Do you know someone who fishes octopus? | ||
| Oh, yeah, I know so-and-so. | ||
| We'll go out with them. | ||
| But it turned out that they went to this very crowded beach. | ||
| And I think even in the scene, Tony is like, Can we really catch an octopus? | ||
| There's, like, people swimming. | ||
| There's, like, kids with, like, snorkel masks, you know? | ||
| And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Everything's going to be fine. | ||
| Everything's going to be fine. | ||
| And he got in the water and he just starts hearing these plops and looks above him. | ||
| And there's these dead octopus, like, floating, you know, drifting down to the bottom of the ocean. | ||
| They're lobbing them in off the boat and then picking them up as if, like, I got an octopus! | ||
| I got one, you know? | ||
| But I think, again, like... | ||
| Most TV shows would do exactly that, you know? | ||
| Like, where's the octopus wrangler? | ||
| And for Tony, that was always a completely unacceptable way to make TV. So he had no idea it was going to happen before it started happening? | ||
| No. | ||
| Once it started happening, what did he say? | ||
| He left and went to the beach and hit like seven Negronis in a row. | ||
| He was really bummed out about it. | ||
| I saw him two weeks later in Tokyo, and he was still talking about it. | ||
| He's like, I just had the worst experience of my life. | ||
| Worst thing that ever happened to me. | ||
| The darkest moment of my life, you know? | ||
| Wow, the darkest moment of his life was someone throwing frozen octopus into the water. | ||
| Yeah, because it completely went against the whole ethos of the show, you know? | ||
| But he made fun of it on the show. | ||
| Listen, honestly, it's a great scene. | ||
| It's a great scene. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it was funny, too. | ||
| His take on realizing that they were throwing frozen octopus into the water. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And how mortified he was by it all. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| But again, that's the way it was. | ||
| We didn't go in and be like, okay, action, and now cut. | ||
| Okay, and now we're going to move the cameras and say that again. | ||
| There's none of that, man. | ||
| Part of the hustle of the show was like... | ||
| Being there with the camera. | ||
| Yeah, you set up the scene and then you press play and you let it go. | ||
| And what happens, happens. | ||
| And I'm sorry if you don't get exactly what you hoped out of it, you know, but we're not going to interrupt the world. | ||
| We're not going to manipulate and control things. | ||
| That is the difference between really good reality TV. The word reality TV is so weird. | ||
| Like, what does that even mean? | ||
| Because a lot of these shows, they're scripted. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I knew in advance. | ||
| I didn't know shit. | ||
| And then it's like it plays this conflict. | ||
| Like the Kardashians. | ||
| I mean, they've got it down to a fucking science. | ||
| A science of moronic television viewing. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| If you could just sit there slack-jawed, they'll keep you locked in. | ||
| They'll keep you locked in. | ||
| They'll be enough edits. | ||
| They'll show you their tits. | ||
| And then, boom, you cut to commercial and they're richer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's reality TV. What you guys were doing is more documentary television. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| And it's not saying that there's no affect of the convention of television there. | ||
| Of course there is. | ||
| But we used to say, like, you know, like... | ||
| Vietnam doesn't look like that. | ||
| But Vietnam doesn't not look like that. | ||
| You know? | ||
| There is a refinement and a manipulation in what we're doing because we're choosing these locations. | ||
| We're choosing to talk to this person. | ||
| We're choosing to shoot it in a certain way that's beautiful. | ||
| We're adding light. | ||
| You know, it's not exactly the way reality is, but there's a threshold. | ||
| There's a line which you don't cross. | ||
| And that line is a morally and ethically established line by Tony and by the crew that says, like, there's a place at which it becomes unfair. | ||
| The manipulation of reality becomes a manipulation that has now become unfair to the people who are viewing this, the people who are there. | ||
| You know, we've become self-serving. | ||
| And that's the line that we chose never to cross. | ||
| We can make it beautiful. | ||
| We can refine it down. | ||
| We can edit it. | ||
| We can make a compelling show. | ||
| But it has to exist within this certain threshold. | ||
| Or else, you know, what the fuck are we doing? | ||
| But it must be a small percentage of people in the business that have that ethic. | ||
| Incredibly small. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It seems like Netflix would be a really good place for something like that. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like Netflix would be a really good place for a lot of things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It seems like that's the best place for real freedom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't know how much is real freedom. | ||
| They're giving you money. | ||
| Anytime someone's giving you money, it's always like, you've got to give up. | ||
| The real way to do it would be to produce it yourself. | ||
| But in the end, CNN was the best place to do that. | ||
| And they really did back us up. | ||
| And they really backed up Tony and that philosophy. | ||
| And they completely, implicitly understood what we were talking about. | ||
| And we said, we can't do that. | ||
| Now, was Jeff Zucker, was it his idea? | ||
| Again, I don't know how the deal came about. | ||
| I assume so, because I think it came in just after that transfer of power. | ||
| Did he have other places where he was thinking about taking it besides CNN? Again, I don't know, man. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, you know, it was a really successful show in its own right at that point, so I'm sure it would have gone somewhere. | ||
| But that was, I assume it was Jeff Zucker who brought it in, and that was, like, just such a brilliant move. | ||
| It was, like, perfect marriage, you know? | ||
| Perfect marriage. | ||
| Like, perfect move for CNN. Like, perfect move for us. | ||
| Yeah, I thought it was interesting when they were taking a chance on these unscripted television shows, these non-news shows. | ||
| Have you seen United Shades of America? | ||
| Yeah, I've had W. Kamal Bell a couple of times. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| He's the best, man. | ||
| He's a super, super nice guy. | ||
| Yeah, I did an episode with him in Kenya with Tony, which will be the premiere of this upcoming season. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| How many episodes have you guys done that haven't aired yet? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And then there's a couple specials in there, like, you know, talking to the crew and stuff like that, you know. | ||
| So it's going to be a pretty profound season. | ||
| So, once you're done with that, you just start looking at new projects and different things to do? | ||
| I have a couple, like, assignments already. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think it's getting better. | ||
| There will never be another Tony who won't find that. | ||
| And I think that's something that people will have to be aware of going forward. | ||
| You're not going to copy that. | ||
| He's Tony and that's it. | ||
| Well, you saw Gordon Ramsay. | ||
| They announced some show with him traveling and people immediately just started shitting all over him. | ||
| Yeah, but he's like, from everything I understand, he's just like a really good guy. | ||
| Well, the problem is the way he portrays himself on the show, the Kitchen Nightmare show. | ||
| He just comes in like an asshole and yells at people that are intimidated by him. | ||
| That's his shtick. | ||
| That's his TV shtick. | ||
| As far as I know, I don't know Gordon Ramsay. | ||
| Seemed like a real nice guy. | ||
| I met Guy Fieri, too. | ||
| He was nice. | ||
| He's a nice guy. | ||
| He's got crazy hair. | ||
| I don't know Guy Fieri, man. | ||
| Tony would relentlessly shit on him. | ||
| Constantly, man. | ||
| Constantly. | ||
| But he shits on everybody. | ||
| Did he shit on Martha Ray, too? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He would pull that trigger. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Dude, he'd always make fun of his Lamborghini. | ||
| And I'm kind of like, dude, I want a Lamborghini. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| It's one of those things you're not supposed to have, right? | ||
| You could have some cool cars. | ||
| I remember when he did the show with the Queens of the Stone Age, Josh Holm, and one of the guys had a 69 Camaro. | ||
| Yeah, I shot that. | ||
| That's a badass car. | ||
| That was a bad car. | ||
| But that's an okay to have badass car because it's a classic, because it's got just style points. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But I would suggest to Tony that he might want to pick up the Lamborghini because of the traction control. | ||
| I think Tony would get in big problems. | ||
| He'd have big problems in the Camaro. | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah, as most people would. | ||
| You've got to learn how to drive one of those fucking things. | ||
| That was a hot rod, man. | ||
| That thing was sick. | ||
| I love that car. | ||
| Well, listen, brother, I'm glad we did this. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| I'm glad you reached out. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We decided to get together and talk, you know, give a lot of people insight to what it was like to work with one of my heroes. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| I mean, definitely my hero. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thanks, brother. | ||
| Appreciate it, man. | ||
| Thank you. |
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