#597: Morgan Fallon — 10 Years on the Road with Anthony Bourdain, 9 Emmy Nominations, Lessons from Michael Mann, Adventures with Steven Rinella, High Standards, Wisdom from West Virginia, and More

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No So you started mountain biking? A couple years ago. Actually right after Tony died. I quit drinking right after Tony died and uh started mountain biking a lot. I tend to overdo it with everything. So mellow like trail mountain biking on the fire roads quickly turned into like enduro charging on these like DIY kind of ridiculous and duro courses that they build around here that are

Totally unpredictable, like really unpredictable lips on the jumps and stuff like that. And I ended up just hammering one of these things and had just a horrific crash. I broke my nose. My nose was sideways. It was all torn up. I've made my way back to the main trail and these two uh Russian guys actually helped me out. And

You know you're in bad shape when the Russian guys have to help you out. That's right. Yeah. Exactly. But the difference, the profound difference in like having that fall at forty four as opposed to the last time I had ridden when I was young is it's unreal. I'd never broken anything. I'd never even hurt myself. And it's like I just shattered. On the ground. There's like dropping like a

China plate. Yeah. Uh So bad. It's so bad. So you are Or at points have been and have also self described as a very physical shooter. And if I'm remembering correctly, please please call

B S on me if I'm misremembering, but you told me a story about running I wanna say on a football field While filming. Yeah. Could you just briefly tell that story to give people an idea of what physical shooter means? You might give an additional example after that, but I just remember Almost losing my lunch with that one. So why don't we start there?

Well, this was kinda the depressing example. But uh yeah, we were we were shooting a documentary, me and my longtime friend Todd Lubin. But I'm still in contact with we're shooting a documentary in two thousand three on a football team in South Carolina. Coastal Carolina. Who's gone on to become like D two like champions. I mean they're like

players in the NFL and stuff. It's a really good program now. But uh I was trying to run sprints while holding the camera sideways along with You know, the players as they were running sprints. I started with like the O line. And it's like the O line guys, you can keep up with the O line guys, right? So I got all cocky feeling like I was hot shit running with the O line guys who were I'm fifteen years older than No, I started I tried to run with the uh the running backs. It was like I was raising a

Ferrari in a shopping cart. Yeah, so I'm running down the side and I and yeah, I stepped in a hole and just Well. Obliterated my name. Just blew it to shreds. But the dumbest thing I did

was I went, I flew to New Hampshire, I got an M R I. And flew back and finished the show. I shot another two months on the on the knee before getting surgery. And I regret it every day. I mean, it's just a disaster now. I didn't know that everything's amplified when you get older, you know? And so it's like you ever climbed up the top of a a mast on a sailboat when you're out at sea?

I wish I could say yes, but I haven't. Well, I've done this more than once. But it it's kind of mellow when you're on the deck, you're kind of rolling and stuff, and when you realize that you're at the top of a sixty foot mask, those the little bit of rolling there is like these massive twenty foot swings back and forth, and you just get shredded. That's what growing old is with injuries. It's like At the point of injury, it was like it was it was kinda mellow, you know, I was like oh I can roll with this, I'm tough, you know, I got tons of hormones still producing.

In my body, I and I can do anything. I just didn't realize that at forty six now. The effect of that would be so amplified that I basically spent my life limping around. Well, you and me both. You and me both, but I feel like you have you have better stories to tell. Most of mine are just from terrible decisions and questionable circumstances. But before we get any further Let me just read this bio.

Which was fun to read because I don't know if I've actually read a bio of yours before. Obviously, we've spent some time together. But let me just jump into this. Morgan Fallon. on Twitter at DiamondMofallon is a nine time ME nominated executive producer. Director and cinematographer who's born and raised in New England and studied film at Emerson College in Boston. First question's probably gonna be what you learned and did not learn. in your film courses at Emerson. After graduating, he spent three years working for his mentor, director Michael Mann, and in two thousand seven he began a long term working relationship with producers Chris Collins and Lydia Tanalia, and their New York based production company Zero Poctions. Through his tenure at ZPZ, Fallon focused primarily on work with ZPZ creative partner Anthony Bourdain.

on several episodic series and documentaries produced by Bourdain. Including the Emmy winning mind of a chef. The theatrically distributed documentary The Last Magnificent, and the ME Peabody PGA, T C A and A C E award winning series, Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown. Fallon shot directed and produced. throughout the series one hundred and three episode run.

Currently he's a director and executive producer for the EMI. winning series. United Shades of America with W Camal Bell. He lives in California with his wife and production partner, Jillian Brown, and his two children. You can find them like I mentioned on Twitter at Diamond Mo Fallon.

Instagram at Fallon.morgan and I'll include the Facebook and everything else in the show notes. And the website for zero point zero is zero point zero. dot com. And now we're back. So Morgan AKA Mo. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. And uh you have seen me

Read a lot of scripts and uh look into a lot of lights. And maybe we'll cover it. Some of that. I mean we were a lot of talk about physical shooter, like you know, you were you were you were headlong into that project.

Well, you know, you want to talk about like things that you roll with and then you realize now You're at the top of the mast in in a squall. that parkour episode, which was the episode. I am still fixing injuries from that episode. Oh, a hundred percent of the Tavers Experiment. Oh God. And it just seemed like such a great idea at the time. I know, but you're jumping in with people who had been doing that forever. Those kind of athletes, when they get to that point, they're like a purpose built race car. You know?

Yeah. That's that is what they are designed for. And to jump into that was yeah, that was a lot. You did it. That is one of the more generous ways to put it. Yes, I did it. And uh you know, slowly rebuilding my body however many years later. So Emerson College studying film. Yes. Why did you choose to study film?

And what were the most important things that perhaps you learned, if any And the most important things that you did not learn. And we c we could take it piecemeal also, we don't have to answer all of it. I mean, I think the story for me is like a lot of people in creative fields, it goes back, you know, far beyond college to my initial introduction to school and education and kind of figuring out my brain style didn't really jive with what people were asking me to do. So

Academic. portion of school was always really difficult for me. And then I found art. And so art was always a huge part of my life. That goes up through high school. I was actually I was originally I was gonna do ceramics. I was like headed to Alfred University and and I wanted to do ceramics and did that a lot in high school and actually had like pieces in the National Art Show and stuff. So I'm just you know, still pretty proud of that.

But at some point I started doing math. And ceramics, you know, listen, no shade on ceramics and like you climb to the top of that ladder like any other ladder, you can make a lot of money, but it's not exactly like the best life plan, I guess. And the other thing is I wanted to do something. I wanted to be in a medium that would that had power. that had power to tell stories to

inform people I grew up with to kind of bleeding heart liberal teachers. in my family. And my mom was a writing teacher and she focused on teaching writing through using film. So she was using like Pink Floyd the Wall. Deliverance Apocalypse Now. You know.

Do the right thing. Exactly, right. She's she was using pretty s heavy stuff with high school students to grow ideas and to teach critical thinking. Okay. All right, I'm glad you mentioned the time frame. Like high school, I'm imagining like Teaching little Timmy in third grade how to do his cursive deliverance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, qu I mean kind of age appropriate. I don't know, deliverance like I don't know. Some high school students, maybe some high school students, maybe not. But that introduced me to film and introduced me to the idea that film could be more than just the art form or the the money making enterprise that it could be like actually a way to talk about issues that are going on in our culture, a way to reflect on ourselves as humans. And I wanted to

be a part of telling those stories. So I just pivoted from Ceramics, which is the original goal to filmmaking. I mayor. I had jaws. This was I I love that movie. And I I had Jaws on uh VHS tape. I recorded it off of H VO. Right.

I watched that movie so many times I broke the VHS tape. So uh there was like a love for like the the art form before I even knew what the art form was. And I wanted to chase that. So I went to Emerson. It's the only school in the end. It was the only school that I actually sent an application to. They denied me. And I got in my car because I lived in New Hampshire. I got in my car and I drove down to Boston and went to the admissions department. Why'd you deny me? And they put me in a room and I talked to someone, and at the end of the meeting

She left and she came back in and she said, Cool. You wanna come to Emerson? Come to Emerson. That's incredible. I couldn't believe it. So after you after the I can't believe you denied me. Why'd you deny me? Wha was there a plan going into it? Why do you think they let you in?

Was it just the sheer fact that you were there in person and wouldn't leave? I think that's exactly it. You know, we work in an industry where like tenacity is kind of the key ingredient, right? That was a Total fuck up. You know, in so many ways. And I didn't know my you know my ass from my elbow. But

I was I was tenacious enough to go down there and basically demand that they save a bed for me. I do think in the meeting at some point I said, You better save a bed'cause I'm showing up. And uh and I I just think she liked that. You know, uh I wish I knew who that was. I wish I knew that admissions personally'cause I do have to kinda thank them. Yeah. So yeah, they save me a bet. It was great. They read the tea leaves correctly, too.

You know, in a sense. Yeah. Right. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Couple uh turns I didn't expect in the road there, but like, yeah, for sure. No, no doubt. Did you learn what you were hoping to learn? in school. I mean, honestly, going into college, I'm not even sure I knew what I wanted to learn, you know. I I had like these really weird conceptions of what the industry was.

I pictured it in terms of you know, I kinda wanna crawl out of my small town context and live in some big glitzy kind of space, you know, and I think that's what I thought was. And so like that was that was kind of the goal originally. And you like quickly learn that that's not really how it rolls. But here's a you know, here's the thing about Amerson College, and uh in like it's it is a really great school in a lot of ways. They put you on set. And so Emerson's kinda known for building technicians and what I learned that I don't know that I

went in wanting to learn, but was the most valuable thing is I learned how to be on set. I learned how to use everything on set. And I learned how to do everything on set. And That's a rarity, you know. A lot of film school is just theory. This was like hands on. And that allowed me to go out and like actually start doing stuff. And little did I know that my particular little niche of this industry in the end would require me to know how to do everything.

Yeah. I learned that. I guess I kinda believe in that. I believe in that aspect of You know, going to college and Yeah, I know there's a lot of people out there who think you don't have to go to film school and I

Guess I would kind of agree with that too. I think that you can go out and you Work in the industry and you'll learn what you need to learn. Lot of different ways, different paths to approach it. And

Post graduation All right. So spent three years working for your mentor, Michael Director Michael Mann. Now Right. Maybe for people who have no context, A kind of explain in brief who Michael Mann is now. And then At that time.

who Michael Mann was and how that actually came to be that you were working with him. I was extremely lucky'cause I mean, like, literally going out of school, I was like I want to work for Michael Mann or Terrence Malik or Martin Scorsese. This thing just fell into my lap. Who Michael is is And I think the most important thing to note about who he is and who he was then is Michael is one of the few truly powerful directors that was left in Hollywood. There's obviously a few now. But the age of the peck and paws, you know, these these incredibly powerful juggernaut. directors is kinda like come and gone.

What is I will admit, what is peck and pause? I don't know. Oh, like Sam Pack and Pow is like a very famous director. Like think of like the Wild Bunch, you know. Very, very powerful, huge personalities that can drive a set with three hundred extras and explosions and massive camera teams and think of the big seventies kind of films, you know, and these directors who were so just so big and so powerful that they could drive all of that. Well Michael was that. And even at the time that I started working for him, which was in two thousand, you know? And so he still had

the power to Go against the studio. When you say power, I'd love to hear you elaborate on that in terms of like leverage because of past performance. Just sheer personality and Stubbornness where people

will fold and allow him to do what he wants to do. I'd love to hear you. Describe. Little bit of all of those things. I think what he did really well and was really smart about was he always had the talent on his side.

Actors felt safe with him. His track record was obviously just incredible. I mean, you think of a film like The Insider and what he was able to do with Russell Crowe, who's obviously a brilliant actor, but like look at that character in the insider and look at what Michael was able to build, you know? And so he had the trust of actors. And when you have the trust of actors at that level, and the actors are like people like Russell Crowe and Will Smith and Tom Cruise. You have a lot of power. So that's one thing he had. But he also and I think this is like a thing that people don't understand a lot about directing.

It takes a level of discipline and drive and energy and fortitude. that is not within the scope of normal human existence to make these films. So you to pilot a a hundred and fifty million dollar film, a two hundred million dollar film. To be in charge of something that is so big and so sweeping and epic. And I worked with Michael on the making of Ali. So We were what, I think one thirty.

Something like that was the end budget. But we had nights, I mean, we had a night in Mozambique where we had fifteen thousand extras. Think about that. And he's at the helm of all that. And he has to hold all that together and he has to, you know, keep Keep focused, keep straight, keep drive, keep

the actors in there, keep the crew in there. You know, all of that stuff that takes a truly unique person, usually takes a total fucking tyrant as well. And he would fall into that category also. But those kind of directors are kinda less and less because the studios have quite a bit of control now. And so

The studio it's it's more kind of decision by committee. No. You know, you have very powerful studio heads, you have very powerful executive producers within the studios. And so I think that there's fewer and fewer of the directors I mean, I guess Paul Thomas Anderson would be like a modern kind of example of this, who can go in and say, This is the film, this is the story, this is my vision, this is what we're gonna execute, and you're not gonna fucking touch it.

And that's rare. And Michael had that. How did you Get the job. With Michael.

And actually two questions, maybe we can back up. So you said I want to work for Michael Michael Mann. A name I didn't recognize or Martin Scorsese. Terrence Malik. Who is Terrence Malik? And why those three?

In your mind. Terrence Malik is thin red line. He just has a way of making these incredibly articulate films it almost feel like visual poems you know? But a very powerful director and someone who was able to really exercise the medium of film and use all of the tools and spend like

Anyone who works in the industry will know it's like how hard it is to get like forty five seconds of silence. into a film or into a television show or into everything where you can just absorb the natural space or absorb the characters going through something, or it's like you constantly need to be packing action and you constantly need to be packing information. You constantly need to be feeding and feeding and feeding, right? And what I really loved about his films, like if you watch his films, he has these beautiful Little detailed, nuanced moments within the film that

Just hard to achieve. I mean Martin Scorsese is Martin Scorsese, he Directed. probably the greatest American film ever made, which is Goodfellows, I believe. I think it was Tony's favorite as well. It's I agree with him. It's you know, it's a masterpiece. And then but Michael, I really I loved Insider and I loved heat.

I think that the last sequence in Last of the Mohicans is one of the masterpieces of of film making. It's technically perfect. I just re watched Last of the Mohicans recently because I read the book for the first time. Oh that's cool. Yeah. Isn't it amazing?

So that's my goal. You know, so Michael did Last of the Mohicans and it's a good film. I like I like the rest of the film, but From the moment that they leave the village where they burn

The I forget his name, the British soldier. And he chases them up into the hills. It's perfect. It's perfect. He doesn't miss a beat in that.

It's beautifully really beautifully conceived and beautiful shot. And also Creatively deviates from the book in a bunch of really interesting ways. And so at some point I would love to talk to like the screenwriter and m I mean this is a fantasy, right? Sit at dinner, have some wine with like the screenwriter Michael be like I know it was a long time ago, but let's talk about it. How did you get the job with Michael?

It's totally random. I just got I got a phone call one day. What? Well why did they know who the hell you were? 'Cause I it was yeah, I got a call from someone who I had known at Emerson and it just said, Hey, they need a temporary office assistant. For three days, I can't take the job. It's Michael Mann's office. Do you want to do it?

I was like, You fucking kidding? Yeah, like absolutely. And I got in that office and I look back now and I'm like, they must have all thought I was just totally out of my mind. Like I didn't leave. I left at like eleven thirty at night or something. I stayed. I like stayed after. I like cleaned the whole copy room. I like organized the fridge. I like I just did anything I could. I was like, I'm doing anything I can to stay in this office. And I did, and at the end of the three days, they're like, Yeah, we got a film coming up. Do you want to be a PA on the film? Of course. So I took that. Where it really turned though is that

You know, Michael had an assistant and I was there and I was like the runner and the office, you know, lackey. But I knew because of Emerson, like I said, I I knew how to run cameras, I knew how to run systems, I knew how to do a lot of stuff, and I had a a solid base of understanding filmmaking. And the other thing I did is when I got in there, I I I asked for the research material and like hey, read this book, read this book, read this book. And I just went and read them all. And so I knew how to do all these things. And eventually I'd start, you know, I started setting up the rentals on cameras and stuff like that. Right. And then you know, they're video cameras, none of these cats know how to use them. These older like filmmaking cats like Michael and his generation, they didn't they look at a video camera and it's like

They had no idea what to do with these things, you know. And so he's like, Oh, you know how to run it? And I'm like, Yeah, I know how to run all this stuff. And he's like, Okay, come down to the gym. where we're training with Will and you can help me set these things up and stuff like that. So I would basically just set these cameras up and hand them to Michael. And Every once in a while with my head up and be like, Oh my God, I'm standing in a room with Will Smith and Michael Mann and you know, and then eventually Ali came by like hanging out with Ali and then Darius Kanji, who's a very famous cinematographer, was there and I remember one day Darius Kanji, who I was like these cats are like my

Idols when I'm in film school, right? Darius Kanji shot delicatessen. Darius Kanji came up to me. He's like, he's like, hey man. He's like Don't tell anyone, but I have no idea how to use this camera. I'm like I'm like cool. Or like dialing in for him. I'm like, You're all good, man. Just ask me. By doing that stuff and reading the research material, like eventually Michael kinda pulled me more and more in. And then I remember one night I still feel kind of bad for this kid, but it was such a bad call. He had this assistant, and the assistant went to a Roger Waters concert and left me alone with him. I'm like, dude, you just

You just left the fox in the hen house, man. Like you close the door behind you. Like I am gonna fucking destroy you. So I stayed and uh I stayed and eventually Michael comes out and he's like, he's like, where's you know, so and so. And I'm like, Oh, he went to a concert He's like Oh, he went to a concert? I was like, Yeah. Yep. I'm here. And he's like, Yeah, but you don't know any of the stuff.

He's like, I need this quote from the David Remnick book and I was like, Actually I read that book and I know right where that quote is and I'll get it for you right now. And I went down and made the photocopy and like I I don't know, a week later that kid's moving his shit out of his desk and I'm moving into his desk. And it was that cold. And I went on this uh incredible ride with him. Wow. I was gonna ask you how the research materials came in. Wow. So from the three day office assistant. Yeah. There has to be a world record pole vault.

into like a whole different stratosphere of responsibilities. That's just incredible. I mean, what a story. It was amazing. And he handed me also, like being his assistant, he handed me responsibility over all the creative materials. So listen, I I Michael's a he's a very, very difficult person. He can be cruel. He can be incredibly cold to people who have been loyal to him for years. There's a lot of ugliness there and a lot of stuff that eventually I was like, you know, I don't want to be that kind of person. And I still feel that way. But I can't but respect him to the

highest degree as as a creative. I've never seen someone With so much creative energy and so much drive. It was like all of a sudden just being in a different universe, you know, where like I add Twenty four.

was using every ounce of energy I had to keep up with this man who is 60. And like that's the difference. That's the difference. You know, with someone like him. But he handed me this, like he would keep these running notes that were Thousands of pages long. These huge volumes, huge three ring binders. Where

He had thousands of pages of of creative notes that he had made on every scene. And he handed me responsibility for all that stuff. And so a lot of what I was doing was a a look into someone who's operating at the very highest level, who's arguably a master of their craft. It was incredible. I mean it was it was amazing. And I was next to him for every second of it. That's incredible.

The research materials so I see how the research materials ended up being helpful. Did you request the research materials because you thought There might be an opening like that, or was there a different reason for you requesting I was like I'm I have a foothold here and I am going to live and breathe whatever I can that this man lives and breathes just because I'm here and I'm twenty four and I got it just like full of energy. I swe I do think that they probably thought I was a like a speed freak, though. I think they probably thought I was like either a coquette or a speed freak. I wasn't. But I was just so charged up and so full of energy that I

Just did all these things. Yeah. Just Total immersion. It was amazing. How did television?

Enter The fray. So to speak. How how did you then become involved with television? My career took a very weird kind of turn. I finished working for Michael. What I had done while I was with him, they they handed me a video camera'cause they're like, Well, you're here for everything. So Just keep the camera on you, film what you can.

In terms of like a behind the scenes Exactly. I ended up filming quite a bit. of that and they were producing a documentary for HBO on the making of the film. And it ended up being that like fifty percent of the footage and the end result was mine. And Which film was this? Just uh you may have already mentioned but which Ollie. Oh, that was Oli. Yeah, that was the film. The film was Ollie. Yep. And so

I had filmed all this stuff. They ended up using a lot of it. The producer came up to me and she said, Hey, listen, like we get a lot of footage from assistants and it's it always sucks. Your footage is actually really good. We use quite a bit of it. You might think about this as this is a skill you have. At the same time, like I you know Young and Hollywood.

There's a lot of temptation. I might need you to elaborate on that. What does that mean? Just the vices of Hollywood? Yeah, in the end I got pretty deep. on just alcohol and partying and, you know, a lot of stuff got a like caught a DUI, broke up with my girlfriend at the time, stopped working for Michael. Things just kinda fell apart a little bit, but I always had the camera.

So I ended up picture this. I'm like one day I'm flying around in Gulfstream Fives with Michael and Will Smith and like I had dinner at fucking Nelson Mandela's house in Mozambique. Like picture that. They go twenty four hanging out with Nelson Mandela. Quick interjection. Correct me if I'm wrong. So you grew up partially at least in West Virginia in an old farmhouse with no electricity. Am I making that up or is that legitimate? That's true. That's true. When I was much younger though.

Yeah. Yeah. So so I'm just painting the contrast since you're mentioning flying around in a G five. It's a good thing to paint because um West Virginia comes full circle in this uh this story of my life, too. West Virginia still has a place in my heart. I'll elaborate on that in a bit. So yeah, one day I'm flying around in Gulfstream and

You know, hanging out with Nelson Mandela. And the next day I'm like in my parents' basement back in the middle of winter in New Hampshire, like a broke ass, bombed out alcoholic, like dude you gotta put your life back together. And so I ended up Teaching a film class for my dad. who ran summer programs at this private school that I grew up at. And saved up enough money to buy a camera and then I just started shooting from the very bottom.

You know, and I just started again. What did you start shooting? I was literally shooting like America's most fantabulous homes and stuff like that. Were you finding the gigs in New York, or how did you find the gigs at that point? My friend the same friend that I shot the documentary on the football team with, my buddy Todd Lubin, reached out to me. And there's a number of times in my career and in my life that Todd Reached out to me and was like, Hey

You should come do this. A couple of life changing kind of moments. So he reached out, he hooked me up with these gigs, you know, making not much money. I didn't have a license. I lived in New Hampshire. Most of the jobs are in New York. I'd have to like Take a bus to like South Station in Boston with all my equipment and all these huge pelican cases. Get on the train, go down to New York, shoot these things, get back. I was hustling, you know.

And eventually we built it and you know how it is. Like You get better and better projects, you get kinda known for things, you meet people, your network starts to spread. The time with Michael is almost like Just like an appetizer, like an amuse boosh. And then the real work came of like building something from scratch again. building from the bottom. But that taught me how to be tough and it taught me how to shoot and it taught me how to be scrappy. And most of all, and the thing that

ended up paying off the most when I got down the road with Tony and stuff is learned how to make something out of nothing. Yeah,'cause you're like with Michael and on the projects like that, you got all these resources, huge budgets. Like you know, huge, huge stuff. When you're working on the kind of stuff that I do, it's a knife fight. You're intentionally small. You don't operate with big crews. You operate with small crews. You don't want to freak people out. I don't work with actors, you know? I work with people. You gotta have a light touch. You gotta go in, you gotta figure out how to pull the most value out of things with the fewest amount of resources.

Yeah, totally. How did you and then end up connecting with Chris and Lydia? At C P Z. Again, in in kind of working my way back up through the ranks by like two thousand and This was two thousand six. I had shot this show in Buffalo.

Called Tough Love. It was a dark r like romantic comedy about a matchmaker set in Buffalo. I lived in Buffalo for six months in the winter, which is I mean, hats off to anyone in Buffalo. You are you are tough people. And the DP on that show was uh someone named Zack Zamboni, who is a absolutely just a phenomenal

Gifted. DP who who understands this genre better than anyone else I know. When and I say this genre, I mean like the Verite documentary. Genre. He ended up giving my name to Chris and Lydia because he had been working for them and was at that time working for Tony on No Reservations. They hired me for a couple of jobs and that's how I got in with them. And so I owe a tremendous amount to Zach. I still talk to him all the time.

As much as possible. And what can you say about him? He's the pastor. Uh sounds like a mench too, along with Along with Todd. Yeah. Question about working your way back up. So if we do now just a mini flashback Yeah. You're taking a

All sorts of different projects. Now I'm tempted to say whatever you Okay, so anything, whatever you can get. However I know you're also a very smart guy. one could say what happened with Michael Mann was one part luck, but it was also like like many other

required many other ingredients for that to actually coalesce into what it did. As you are working your way back up Was there any particular strategy about how let's say past the halfway point before you get to ZPZ about how you chose projects or anything like that? Or was it really just throw as much against the wall? And hope there is some synchronicity.

was definitely throw as much against the wall as possible, but I think that a marker of many people's careers is certainly not my philosophy or anything like that, but like kind of like a trapdoor spider or something. You know, you sit there like you're kinda like patient. You're grinding out the days. And like When the cricket comes by, you grab it. And that's the moment. And I think that that has been when the when the assistant goes to the concert.

Come on, man. That's legitimate. That's a terrible. That is like a that is a terminal move that he made. I agree. I mean, who does he think he's working for? It was stunning to me that he allowed that opening. And for Roger Waters, which like respect, but like yeah, it's not the it's not Pink Floyd. Yeah, yeah. I think that it's just knowing those moments and like there are career changing moments and it's sometimes just a phone call and it's out of the blue and you're like, Oh, this is the moment, this is the thing, this is the project. When I

got turned on to C P Z and Chris and Lydia. That was like very clearly it. And I was very aware of Tony and no reservations at that point and was like That is what I want to do. I wanna do that. And so when they came into the picture, I was like, Oh, you I mean, yeah.

I'm gonna do anything that it takes. Put me on any project you want, and I will prove to you that I deserve to be on that. Ride and working with Tony. And that's what I tried to do. So how did you go about trying to do it? What did the first date look like? First thing I did for them was a show for PBS called Diary of a Foodie.

Which was a great show. It was a beautiful show. And so You know, what did I do? I you know, show up on time, work your ass off, shoot good footage, don't be a pain in the ass. Keep your head low. Figure out the lay of the land. Don't come in like you own the place. I don't know, the basics.

Yeah. Luckily learned how to do that shit from my dad. You know, they taught me how to work hard. And I don't think that I've been like someone in My career. I mean there are people lot of people in this industry that are just way more

Calculated and Machiavellian about how they go about. They see it way, way down the road. They know where they're headed. They know the strategy to get there. That's impressive to me. I can't do that. I see the thing come, I grab it. That's what happened with that. I knew that I wanted to work with Tony. I saw a window and I just was not gonna leave. So I mean that's I guess that's it. Same thing with ca showing up at Emerson and telling them that I'm coming regardless of whether they have a bed for me or not, I guess. Yeah.

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Tim. So part of what prompted me to reach back out And I think I said this in the text Was

I had an international flight. And I watched Roadrunner. This documentary about Anthony Bourdain. Tony Burdane

I thought it was to the extent that I could even assess it because I didn't know him, but I thought it was well done. It wasn't It didn't seem one dimensional. in the sense that they really approach it from many different perspectives. I would be curious to know what you thought was, if you have any opinion, like what you thought was important for them to include that they included, and then perhaps what you would have liked to have seen more of. Or mentioned. I'm stoked to talk about Roadrunner. We should back up at some point on the Z P C stuff'cause there's a bunch of stuff that happened in between there, which is Steve.

And we should talk about Steve. Oh yeah, yeah. We're definitely gonna do that. So Roadrunner. It was directed by Morgan Neville, who's one of the the great documentary filmmakers out there right now. By the way, I should like specify.

There were a lot of people that worked for Tony and a lot of people that were really close with him. It is I in no way am I the person or you know, a singular kind of thing there. There was a lot of people that were really close to Tony. And went on the ride with him. And I'm sure a lot of them have different opinions about Roadrunner. For me

When I watch the film and I've only seen it once, I may only ever see it once. It's hard. It's hard for me to watch it again. What I saw I think that what they did was as good a job as you could do. With that subject. without having been on the inside of it.

Which I guess is in some ways I mean that in as kind of the greatest compliment I can give Because I think that there were things that were missed, but I think that there are things that you kinda had to really be there and know him and have gone through that experience. to really fully grasp and understand. And I think they did a really good job of getting who he was and getting what that journey was in as far as things I wish they had leaned into more and Away from more. I I do wish they had gotten a little bit more of

Who Tony was In terms of his relationship to People and the way he approached people, the way he approached the world. Yes, he was he was a a champion of the underdog and they mention that in the film, but

It was more than that. Tony really, really deeply felt I think a connection to people whose environments he was walking into. And he felt that connection as a guest. But

He's the kind of person who'd like wade into a room and Pick up a baby and Shit. in someone's living room and like really actually kinda be there and be with them and be

with them on their terms. And That was one of the kind of the intangibles about him. You should say a very connected person to the world for someone who is like as

Strangely agoraphobic. As he was He had an amazing ability to be truly like connected and in the moment and see the beauty. In Things that are often passed up.

in to see the like the beauty in people and in the small nuances and details of their life and I guess that a little more of that and a little less of the kind of Who done it aspect of Tony's suicide. I understand going down that road for sure. And who am I to talk? I'm like I contributed as much to that as anyone else through my interview, you know. But It is not the defining characteristic of who Tony was. There's there are so many others that That I feel could have.

I guess. Played a little bigger. It's well done, though. Yeah, makes sense. And we'll we'll certainly come back to Tony.

So you mentioned Z P Z. Let's talk about Z P Z. Right. And Steve. So who is Steve and what do these chapter look like? So I came in on foodies.

And then did a couple of no reservations with Tony. Those were great. So The first one I got called to replace someone on the Egypt show. with Tony and I got along with him, which was kind of amazing, I guess. I didn't know at the time. I didn't know it was anything special, but I got a call after from Lydia and she's like, He knows your name. This is a benchmark moment. I was like, Oh, okay, cool. So I went to Egypt with them and we had a great show. I did a few other no reservations, was like getting to know Tony.

But Then they call me. I was working at the time. Again for my buddy Todd. Who was showrunning biggest loser? And I had shot ninety six episodes of Biggest Loser, which is

Real format y reality TV. With a little more puking than normal reality TV. But I had gone in like I Done that for three years and really I learned like how to shoot on that thing. Cause you're just grinding out. You have a camera on your shoulder for like ten hours a day and you are just grinding out shooting.

It's the same stuff over and over again. But you're like You'll really learn it. I got a call and they're like we have this guy, Steve Ranella. He's got a really interesting story. He lives in Brooklyn, but he hunts for his food. He's a conservationalist and a hunter and a writer and

He's a really smart guy and you should meet him. I think you'd get along with him and So I go and meet Steve in a parking lot in Michigan and Within thirty five minutes I am

This deep in a swamp, you know, up to my shoulders in a swamp, holding the camera above my head as Steve sets turtle traps. And it was just like this moment of like, Oh my God, this is this is it, because this is like super experiential. It's super visual. He's incredibly smart, just a fountain of information, as you know from hanging out with him. Yeah. Encyclopedic. It's just Unbelievable. And so it had all of everything was there. You got all of the information, you got something that's really smart. You got a philosophy behind it.

That makes sense. And yet you're doing stuff that's highly physical, that's really cinematic. That's really kind of gripping and kind of hits on like a root human level. You're out Doing it. You're not like getting food, you know? So I Met him in that swamp.

and just started a journey with him. We went on to film eight episodes of a show called Wild Within. Which was A early attempt to make a hunting show and figure out what a hunting show could be in terms of also telling a story and having a narrative progression. It was really unique in that We were just actually doing

The stuff that we said we were gonna do. I remember early on like a producer came on, they're like, Okay, where's the line item for the animal Wrangler? Steve's like fucking animal wrangler. He's like, Animal Wrangler, dude. We're going to Alberta to hunt moose. And he's like, Well, how do you know you're gonna be successful? He's like, I don't. It's hunting. We don't know if we're gonna be successful. Who's dropping off the moose? No one's dropping off the moose.

To present that to a network and be like, how are you going to assure us that you come up with something here? We're not. We're gonna go out and actually do it. That was a lot for a network to get their heads around, but it allowed us to to be genuine about what we were doing. You know, and I I really believe like when you would you watch these shows, people know they know when they're being bullshitted and they know when it's honest. The bullshit is fun to watch. I get it. It draws numbers and people enjoy it.

But if you want to build a legacy You wanna build one of these legacy shows. You gotta be honest with your audience. That's what they will come back for year after year after year. That's what they're looking for.

And that's what Steve provided. And so we went and we did this show that was really unique. And I I felt like we had moments that were unlike anything I had ever seen on TV before. We're in it, man, hunting pigs and Hawaii. Having the pigs. run up this cooley and get in this little they got in this little stream there where we found them. They're like in a

fight to the death with the dogs that had run them down. Steve's like in there with a knife trying to stab pig and not dog. Blood. Screaming. There's mud and shit flying all over the place and

I know that that can be very difficult for some people to hear and understand, but for me, I had this moment where I was like I feel incredibly connected to like The human experience to the natural experience. I feel like a part of kind of the whole dynamic and We ate pig.

And we used all of it and we You know, we were responsible about it and So I could kind of from a philosophical standpoint, I felt like I could get my head around it and like understand Oh, this is why this person does this. Had you ever hunted prior to that show or been involved with hunting?

Not at all. Never. What I realized is like I growing up in New Hampshire, I th felt like I was outdoorsy and then I went with Steve to Alaska and I was like, Oh, I'm not outdoorsy at all. I like I've never been off a trail. I've never been off like a well marked trail and all of a sudden you're standing in the middle of like Prince of Wales Island with Steve, it's fucking pouring rain, you're freezing cold, you're cliff hung.

'Cause it's Steve. And something always happens. What does that mean? Ha. What is cliffhang? So Cliff Hung, if you're if you're

I think it usually happens when you're descending, but basically you're say you're descending through heavy cover. And you get out to a cliff and you make a decision which is like I can get down this thing and you go down A drop. That you can't come back up. And then you realize that the drop the next drop

Isn't fifteen feet, it's sixty feet. Then you're Cliff. Oh shit. So that's that sounds like a great situation. And you gotta figure it out. But figuring all that stuff out was like was incredible. Again, just I was just like, I'm just a dude. I didn't come from any kind of special background. I'm not a green beret, you know?

I was dropped into this thing with no understanding of what my capacities were when I was put into an environment where you have to rely on like your natural instincts and your ability to do shit and your ability to like not get yourself fucking killed. when you're out in the woods. And At first I was like I can't do this. And by the way, I'm Got a fifty pound pack on and a camera. All the time.

So I got one hand. Everyone else got two hands. At first it was terrifying. I remember that first time we got a little bit cliff hung and I'm like Where's the sapphone? Let's call it a coast guard. And they're like they're like dude. We don't call the Coast Guard over this. Trust me, you're gonna be okay. And it was an incredible, an incredible realization to be like, Oh, wait I I'm gonna be okay.

I've got all the all the stuff is innate in being human that I need. To like survive this. And to figure it out. out and to deal with it. Whereas I think a lot of my career up to that point had been like how to navigate the human world. The constructed world. Yeah. That's right. I had never connected with the natural world. And I had no idea that

within me and within all of us was this ability To navigate the natural world by simply connecting with stuff that We are born with. Steve brought that out of me, and once I realized that.

Then the whole world opened and you're like, Oh my God, I'm in the middle of this highly dynamic, highly visual thing that we can just run with and we can like No one's I don't wanna say no one's ever Done that style, you know, of production before, but truthfully, honestly, in the hunting world, they did a lot of like And you know what it is. They sit in a blind, they shoot

A bear over a fifty five gallon drum of donuts. I find all that shit disgusting. A lot of these shows won't even finish the episode unless they get a good kill shot. And we were like, fuck kill shots. I don't give a shit about the kill shot. We were doing something that just felt so raw and real and unproduced and unscripted. that it was very refreshing. And once kind of figured out, oh, this you put your feet here, you walk this way, you hold the camera like this, this is how you don't get yourself killed. This is how you don't get yourself hurt.

Once we figured all that shit out, or once I figured all that shit out, then you were left with just this incredible canvas to paint on. And I think we did something really special. I think we really put people in that sensory environment, what it feels like to be out there and to be a predator and to be Part of this whole dynamic that's always going on around us, but that we have largely Excised ourselves from.

And we were there with a camera to capture it. I'll be the the first to Concur that Steve is as legit as I've seen. Certainly having spent time with him for one episode Yeah.

In the Brooks range. Which was incredible. You got thrown into the deep end. Oh, that was that was exciting. Yeah, having the barren barren ground grizzlies charging the camp. Yeah. Oh my god. And Steve I remember when uh When one charged the camp and it's running.

Because Giannis spotted it. But Yanis is that is that right? Am I getting his name? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so So Yanis nickname I th I would be like the bear whisperer.

I think on that trip. ended up at some point he was just unpacking some gear or something and then he Kind of sat up and he's like, Wait a second, grabbed his binoculars and then lo and behold, he spotted this bear that was on its hind legs smelling some of our uh meat. And it just comes. Galloping, that's probably not the right term, but like loping towards us around this line. Barreling is usually the way I feel about

Yeah, barreling. That's yes, absolutely barreling. And I remember Steve. Is being summoned, right? We're like, Steve, Steve because half of us are muggles who have never dealt with bears before. And Steve comes out of his tent and he's so pissed off.

Because he had Left his cell phone in the corner of his tent in this mosquito kind of deet. Liquid had pooled in that side and destroy his cell phone and so he's like Ranting and raving and Fuck this and fuck that. And he's so pissed as this bear is running, he's completely unconcerned. And we're all like, uh, Steve Bear.

Uh Steve Bear. Steve Bear. And you know eventually he's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he like shoots a shotgun in the air and like waves at it and it runs off and turns around a quarter mile away and just sits there staring at us and I'm like, Now now what do I do? But he is absolutely A hundred percent. Able to walk the talk. Yeah. And every part of that story, including him destroying his cell phone it rings so true to Steve. But that's exactly right. I mean he y to be with Steve Renella is to you're with someone who is so

so surefooted and so competent in their environment is really something to behold. And I he kinda shrugs it off when you try to compliment him, but That is one of the toughest, smartest, most solid people I've ever met in my life. I was just gonna add incredible human and also for those people who are like oh isn't that the hunting guy on TV, he is also an incredibly Talented and not just talented, because that kind of infers he's born with it out of the box. Maybe some of that is true, but

Skillful writer. I mean American Buffalo Many other books. Excellent writer. That's earned. I mean sure, like born with a predilection for writing, sure. I'm sure that's true. But He's a writer. I mean he writes from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon every day.

He does the job. And it has made him a great writer. And I would say that his voiceover and his writing as some of the best in the industry. He's just excellent. And it's built that initial show Wild Within went on

Of course it was canceled in the first season because like no network was ever gonna be able to really wrap their head around what we were doing. And so we launched a f a self financed endeavor, which was Meteor, which has now grown into this big company that Steve owns or partially owns or whatever. I don't know exactly what the ownership structure is, but It's grown into this big thing. When we actually went out and did that, that was like the fully formed version of the show. I feel like Wild Within we were just kinda like learning. How to be outside and how to make TV and how to not bullshit people. And trust me, we did a little bit of eye rolling bullshit and And wild within. But by the time we got to Mediator, we weren't bullshitting anymore.

We were just going out and doing it and grinding and we got really good at it. And I've just watched recent episodes now and they're beautiful and smart and Just Excellent high quality T V and like very, very proud of that that that

that something I was involved in, like on that ground level has maintain that kind of quality is like incredibly Rewarding. What do you feel like aside from What we've already discussed.

What skills did you develop or what did you learn from that show, that experience on the show? That has ended up. transferring to other things, helping with other things later. Does anything come to mind?

The psychological game is everything. I think we have a tendency to shut down when we feel defeated, or to shut down when We feel like we've reached an impasse. And What's amazing about being in the natural environment like that and really doing it is that you're forced to face The landscape you're forced to face

The elements, you're forced to face weather, you're forced to face all these things that are incongruous with producing television and achieving your goal. And you don't have the option because you're out alone. I mean, you know, you know how it I mean from the Brooks Range show. You get dropped off by like a piper cub in the middle of nowhere. And they're not coming back for ten days, or however long you were out. And so you gotta figure all that shit out in between. And yeah, we go out with like a lot of tools and stuff, but it's hard not to feel defeated when you're freezing, when you're soaking wet, when you roll out of your sleeping bag in the morning, and the reality you're facing is that you gotta put on

You're soaking wet. Yeah. Underclothes. That have been out in forty degree weather all night. And it's gonna suck and it's gonna hurt and it's gonna be

miserable and cold and depressing And you gotta push through that anyways. I think for me, and I don't know that this is the same for everyone else, you know, but I think for me That was the greatest thing that I took away from that is

Keeping your Head space. Keeping your mood elevated, keeping the possibility of something amazing and beautiful and brilliant happening. And keeping grinding. Is the way to

Do this specific line of work'cause Again, we don't have the resources to control all the variables and we're working with real people. In all the work that I do. So you're kinda at the whim of a lot of dynamics and you gotta learn how to see the things that get in your way as gifts. You know, you gotta learn how to take them and operate around them and move off of them and and use them.

That's what I learned out there. With Steve. So let's try a segue. Into The world of Tony.

And this may or may not make sense as a segue, well let's let's try it and then we can go anywhere you want to go. The first time working with Tony In Egypt. This is sort of the what was the term you used? Trap spider moment.

Yeah. That definitely was. Yeah. What happened in Egypt. Yeah, I got the call I was waiting for, which was hey, you know, one of the shooters can't go to Egypt. Think he got sick or something and is your passport up to date. Can you go like next week? And I was like, you know, absolutely. There's no way I'm missing that. So

I went to Egypt. I kinda jumped in, you know, that show had been going already for a while and so they had ways of doing things. Tried to do my best to assimilate to the the ways they were doing things and Bring what I could to the table, but the thing that changed at all. And like Tony was not like everyone that came in the door was like, Hey, how's it going? You know, he's He plays it cool and and the other thing is like if he doesn't like you, like you are just simply not going anywhere on that show. And there's a lot of people he didn't like. He had pretty kinda like particular I think if you were honest, I think if you weren't a dick to people, I think that if you carried yourself in a respectable manner, I think that if you saw that you worked hard and I think that if you saw that you could like hang out and

Yeah. Have to admit there was a lot of drinking on the show. If you could hang out And not become just like a sloppy Drunk? Then you were then you were kinda cool and you could hang out. But it initially he wasn't gonna give you anything. The thing that changed it for me with with Tony was we were going out, we were gonna go out and spend a night out in the western desert with the Bedouin.

And we go we drive, you know, a few hours outside of Cairo, we meet them. in the desert and you're like on a paved road with just Sand on both sides. We meet this group at Bad One. All in their late seventies Toyota Land Cruisers, which is the car of choice in the western desert of Egypt.

And we're just gonna go drive off into the desert. And I was like, Well, okay, so we're driving across the desert, I should get up on the roof of one of these cars and just Film a bunch of car to car stuff. Like We're driving across the desert, how bad can it be? Five minutes later, we're going like eighty miles an hour across the desert. I am absolutely terrified. I have one hand on the camera and my other arm.

My right arm was around a four post bed that for some reason they had strapped to the roof of the car. And so I have my arm. Four post bed. This is like a bed with a huge canopy above it. Is that what you mean? Yeah. One of those. It was broken down into pieces. They had broken it down into the pieces and strapped it to the roof of the car. I think that they thought that Tony would want to sleep in a four post bed. Like out in the desert. Which is Absurd. You know, again like Tony if you know Tony like t all Tony wants to do is go off and like pass out in the sand. So anyways, they had this ridiculous thing on top of the car and it saved my life because I was able to hold on to the car. I this

Whoever the driver was must have been like, I am gonna show this white boy. You know, and uh and so they go. Barreling off across the desert. And it is harrowing. And I see Tony looking out the window at this. big ridiculous grin looking at me and like, Oh yeah, look at the new guys suffer, you know, like this great. I got great footage and also What I think did it for me is like by the time we got to camp

I had a hematoma the size of like a small nerf football on my bicep where I was holding on that was like deep purple. where I'd been holding that's how hard I was holding on to this thing. And that's the kind of beating that took up there. And I think that that act of he's like, oh, this is a cat who's like it. I mean, I'm a physical shooter. This is a cat that's gonna throw himself completely into this. And it's like a light switch went off. I landed in camp. He's like, Hey, all right. It was a pretty rough ride. I was like, Oh yeah, look at this. I showed him the bruise and

From that moment on, Tony liked me. I got called after that. Like I said, Lydia was like this is a benchmark moment. He actually knows your name after one show. Do you want to come back? You want to do another? I was like, I'll do as many as I can for as long as I can. And that's what I did. Yeah.

So that was the introduction to Tony. It just took a act of I don't know. I didn't have kids at the time, so I don't consider it too selfish, but I wouldn't recommend it to any young shooters. Yeah.

What were some other Pivotal moments or episodes for you. With Tony. I'm thinking One and we could do something chronologically that happens sooner, but you know, like Ethiopia.

Thious huge, yeah. So we could we could jump into that if you want to just describe So when I came on the show, I was just a camera operator. And then worked my way up where I was like the lead camera and a DP on the show

And then I was like if I don't Take the opportunity to try to direct the show. and produce this show and do everything that I can on this show, I'm gonna regret it. And so around

I guess it was around like two thousand fourteen I started asking and being like I really want to direct. The show. And I did a season of Mind of a Chef with Magnus Nielsen in Sweden, which was a show that Tony produced. That allowed me to really like showcase like, hey, I can go out there, I can make up eight episodes, I can like lead a show, I can get it done. Um, and it turned out really well, partly because Magnus is like an absolute genius and one of the most fascinating people you can hang out with. He's like with Steve. Just an incredibly dynamic person.

I mean someone who had created like one of the best restaurants in the world out of a what was a moose fondue restaurant in central Sweden. Imagine imagine what he started with. Created one of the best restaurants in the world by his mid twenties. And was already a master psalm at that point, so Yeah. That's who Magnus does. Incredible.

It's incredible. But I did that. Tony saw it, Tony liked it and agreed to let me direct and it was Ethiopia with Marcus Samuelson. So if you know Marcus, Marcus I know of him. I don't know him personally, but certainly know of him. He's you know Does every he's on tons of cooking shows, you know, he's he's a Incredibly magnanimous, huge smile, wonderful person.

Tons of energy. But Marcus's story is that he was born in Ethiopia. And During a oh God, I wanna say it was a cholera outbreak. It was an infectious disease outbreak in Ethiopia.

Tuberculosis. tuberculosis. And Marx's mother walked he and his sister when they were just You know, little little kids. like something like seventy five miles from her village into Addis and got them to an orphanage and then died.

And so Marcus and his sister were adopted and grew up in Sweden. So this was this show was his return to Ethiopia. And he had been there before, but like it was his also his wife, Maya, who's just an absolutely incredible person. And just simply one of the most gorgeous you'll ever meet. was also from Garay and from one of the more prominent tribes in Ethiopia. And so it was a return to her village. It was a return to find his father and reconnect with his father. It was a big show.

And I was Yeah. I was Terrified. I don't even I don't even know why. It seems irrational at this point, but it was I was totally terrified. What were you terrified of?

I don't know. You know, it just I just respected Tony so much. I love the show so much. I I You know, and I'm someone I suffer from anxiety disorders. I you know, I'm bipolar. I you know, I d I have a few things, you know, in my bag like everyone does to kinda deal with and

It set those off pretty good. But You know, I went, I did it, we we had this in incredible show. Ethiopia is an a just an totally extraordinary place. Like so many places In Africa, totally misunderstood. One of the more dynamic environments that you can step into. It's got a young population there that is just

Totally plugged in, totally driven, super hard working. Yeah, it's one of those places where you're like man if The corruption at the top can ever get out of its own way. These people are gonna just kill it. It was amazing experience. Amazing experience to like go and go back into Maya's home village to find Marks' father.

The funniest part of it was For all the shit that Tony ate through his career. He just Cannot handle Ethiopian food. I love Ethiopian food.

Of all things. Of all things, he said he found his kryptonite. And so he was basically starving to death during the show. I'm begging him to eat cliff bars and stuff like that because he wouldn't eat anything.

But that was amazing. That was the first show I directed. It was a huge moment, and Tony was very kind to me. He gave me the benefit of the doubt. How did you prepare for that? And what is I know this is gonna seem like a really Elementary, naive question, but I've seen you in action. With the camera, right? And we're gonna talk more about that just because the the kind of dance involved, especially when you have multiple shooters. Yeah.

Is Incredible. I mean it's such an amazing craft and so much geometry. So we're gonna get into that. But directing in a situation like this seems to represent other skill sets that you've not exercised perhaps as much. So how did you prepare for this? You don't seem like the guy to just wing it.

Directing is like an interesting word to use for these because like when you typically think of a director, you're working in narrative and so your you're working with actors, you're working with the crew. Yeah. Storyboarding it out or whatever. Yeah. Very, very precise. Endeavor. This is different. What we do

on these shows is i initially starts with like a ton of research, right? So we're just trying to get our head around the environment. We're trying to understand the dynamics of what's going on, trying to understand what we can and can't do. And we have to be also in a place like Ethiopia especially, you have to be sensitive to the environment. That is a totalitarian government that is one hundred percent Watching everything you do. And the people that we work with there are going to be left with the repercussions of what we do and how we behave there. So you uh you know certain things off the bat where you're like

There's certain stuff that we're not gonna do. There's certain boundaries we're not gonna try to push. And I again hats off to all the people that go and do do that. I hope they do it carefully and with respect to the people that they're leaving behind. But we were gonna be very careful going into an environment like Ethiopia because I don't wanna end up that my PAs or my drivers or my fixer is is sitting in some Dingy prison. Because of something we did. And that's a reality there. So It's going in and assessing what you can and can't do, assessing what the boundaries are, knowing the landscape, and then starting to pull out, okay, so this is this very interesting thing. There's this

culture of these Asmari there. And they are basically Minstrals, right? play this very kind of old fashioned kind of music. It's kind of like a rap where they'll freestyle stuff from the room. They used to travel around from village to village, but what's really interesting there is they use the Ismari as a way to have these kind of coded political discussions, right? So they have all kinds of nuance and intricacies in the way that they do their freestyle rap. that is actually talking about politics in an environment where you can't talk about politics, right? So we know we're gonna this is a cool thing, we're gonna do a scene with them. Okay.

Where are we gonna do that? What's that gonna look like? So you're finding different Esmari, you're looking at the locations, you're pulling people in. Okay, so we're gonna do the Esmari, but we need some, you know, we wanna bring some dancers in. There's another dance troop over here, we can get them to work together. This is a good environment, you know, this particular place to shoot it. What you're actually trying to do is set up an environment that is simultaneously real and autentic. And also

Construct it. And in a way that we know that the apparatus of television making is gonna work. We're actually gonna walk away with something that works. The sound's gonna be workable, the lighting's gonna be workable, you know, we're gonna be able to control the environment and not have other kinds of background pollution or other things that are out of our control infecting what we're trying to do. I think

Zach Zamboni, who I reference before said it best and he said like when we make a show about Vietnam Vietnam doesn't look like that. But Vietnam doesn't not look like that either.

These are real things, but they are filtered through our process of trying to set them up in a way where we can then Can I just Give the ship a little push. And hope that it crosses the lake. And that's what we're really trying to do is pull those elements together. And that's the directing. In terms of if you're gonna go in and direct Tony like you think you're gonna direct an actor, that was never gonna happen.

You maybe can get him to ask a couple of questions. And if he spends forty five minutes of his hour long interview talking about John Wick, too, you're gonna have to kinda like suck it and deal with that, you know? Which happened a lot. For like the amount of shit that I've heard about John Wick. I've never even seen it. I actually won't watch John Wick. Because Tony talk about it so many goddamn times in moments where I'm like, dude, I need content here. Like we're dying here. I don't have anything to put this scene together, and you're talking about fucking John Wick. Like I won't watch the movies.

And I hear they're great. Yeah, uh that's incredible. That's basically the process of what we're doing. And then you're talking to the the DPs about how we're gonna shoot it and what style elements we're gonna use, what that's gonna look like, et cetera. You know, and this was a show where we you had a lot of film references that we were trying to Pack in. What makes someone

A D P Maybe we should also just spell out what that stands for. And Did you interact as a director, did you interact with the DPs differently than most directors interact with DPs? Definitely. I'm sure it drives them crazy. Cause I have really high expectations. Cause I was a very accomplished D P before. So a D P is a director of photography, cinematographer, you know, shooter, kinda go by all those names.

I did really well. That was my thing. I was really good at it. I did really well. And I was known. Known for it. Again, in my little Kind of s subgenre.

So yeah, I interact to interact with the DP differently because I can see the shots. I have a real advantage in that. My wife is a director as well. She doesn't come from a cinematography side. So I I spent a lot of time working with her on like how to see things from a photography standpoint. And it gives you a real advantage when you can. It also will drive your fucking DPs crazy because I'm breathing down their neck all the time. I'm like, Yeah, is that the best shot? Maybe stand over there a little bit. More you know, move over that way, a little bit tighter. You know, they're like, dude, I'm trying to find it. So yeah, I think I've probably ride them a little harder. But uh

I'm right. So it's okay. Ha ha ha. Most of the time. I'd like to double click on High standards.

Yeah because This is fertile territory for all sorts of conversations. Yeah. All right. So I want to read Something. You can't believe everything you read on the internet, but in the course of doing research for this Conversation. I found something on CNN.

Okay. I'm gonna read it and then we can explore it. Would Morgan Fallon director, cinematographer, and producer of Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown. Misses most about working with Tony is the pressure. In a recent phone call with CNN Travel, Fallon described Tony's exceedingly high expectations in awe. Indeed, he may have been smiling on the other end of the phone he explained the editing process for parts unknown. You could get absolutely gutted in a rough cut, Fallon said. In other words, Bourdain didn't sugarcoat it, and this approach was appreciated by Fallon and other crew members.

The celebrity chef and star producer, quote, was never going to accept anything mediocre, end quote, said Fallon, who was pleased with the workflow. I felt good when Tony was happy with the show, he added. And I was watching We don't have to spend a ton of time on this, but this doc Yeah. That uh in in some ways prompted me reaching out, you know, Roadrunner and I Yeah, Tony is so human and so nuanced and like so loving in so many ways. And has really fucking high standards, right? And I remember at one point when the in that doc they're talking about the rough cut and it they said something like more than once Tony Tony told the editor to unfuck themselves or something like that. I got told that on a daily basis.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfuck yourself. Okay. Yeah. So so let's talk about different types of high standards. Could you elaborate on Tony's particular species of high standards. And if you have any funny stories, that's always great. But you know, any any stories that come to mind are also super helpful. And just so you know where this is going, I'm wondering like how it contrasts with say A Michael Mann.

Or I don't think you've had experience with like James Cameron, but like James Cameron, another person who's really famous for having extremely high standards. And uh You know, where the line is between being like brutally direct And turning into something else.

You know what I mean? Yeah, I do I'd love to explore that'cause this is something I struggle with also. So speaking at the very high end, you were speaking about the Michael Manns, the James Cameron, so the level of expectation is never achievable. It's never good enough.

They do not have a level where it's good enough. It can always be better. You have to be that way. Yes, they are assholes. I will say it straight up. Michael Mann is an asshole. And he's known that way in the industry. But he has to be. That is the only way that you get that caliber of project done. You want to get through a Titanic.

you are going to have to be an asshole, a hundred percent. And the same is true in high caliber kitchens. You want to run a high caliber kitchen? There is only one way to do it and you are not friends with your crew. you are in charge and it's your responsibility. And and I think that Tony Tony approached it from that perspective, at least initially.

He had Extremely high expectations that I think were based on his history of knowing how to run an effective kitchen. And at the same time. He had all kinds of his own neuroses and stuff that bled into that. And you see it in Roadrunner. I actually one of the parts I really liked was when he talks about

Hey, I'm not gonna stop for the cameras. You guys learn how to get fast. You get fast, I do what I do. And that was I love that. Because I could do it. I was fast and I loved working fast like that. So yeah, super high standards. W with Tony though, different than like Michael and James Cameron. And I and I have not worked with James Cameron. I know a number of people who have though.

I don't think you're ever gonna get that moment with Michael or with someone like Michael Mann or someone like James Cameron where you're like Sitting down and drinking beers with them out in the desert and talking about like life and things that really mean something. And like with Tony you did. And that was the difference. He was actually, he was a friend. And a very, very important friend who I miss every single day. He was not Those guys. He wasn't an asshole. He could be an asshole.

You could be an asshole all the time. It could be incredibly frustrating to work with. But there was something under it. There was something very loving. there. There was something very caring. And once you were kind of in his sphere he really did care about people. So from that perspective it was different. From the work perspective, though, he wasn't gonna mince words in the same way that he wasn't gonna mince words when a dish isn't right in the kitchen. Like you can't Yeah, it doesn't work that way unless you want twenty fucking risotto sent back.

You better get the first one right. And when someone fucks it up, you better let them know that they fucked it up big time right now. immediately and correct the problem. And that was a lot of the process with Tony in post for sure. In the field, it was more like things that were cumbersome or inconvenience Tony. He didn't like messiness, he didn't like sitting around and like you know that

When shit goes south on a crew, I mean, my God, we just look like a bunch of chickens with our heads cut off running around trying to make shit happen or trying to make shit work. And there's a lot of reasons that that can happen, you know. He didn't like any of that. And we'd you'd hear about unfucking yourself quite a bit in those moments. But when it came to posts, like That's a much more calculated thing. And like I would send him rough cuts, and everyone has been through this, I would send him rough cuts where From the very beginning, he's like What Possible.

Reason do you have for presenting me? with This piece of garbage I didn't work so hard. Dot dot dot. In full caps, you didn't work so hard. To have your work flush down the toilet.

By this. Asshole editor. And you're like oh Okay. Are we gonna like are we gonna go in a constructive direction? Like what do you you know

But he would. And that's the th that was the thing about him is that The good ones. Right. You know Michael Mann as much of an asshole as he was to people, like

You'd have to kind of be like, Well, he's right though. You know? He's right. He knows. And he's right. He's not wrong. Ninety percent of the time he was he was right. And it wasn't up to the standards. What was cool about Tony is that then he would go on and work the material. You would start

reforming it, you'd start working with him, he'd give constructive notes. And that's something that I tell people or try to explain to people. And I think that people should know about him. And something I do uh, you know, kind of wish they had said in Roadrunner Two. Tony was a you know, he's like you go on his Wikipedia and it's like celebrity and it's like, Yeah, that's not how I think of him. And he wasn't that great of a chef. Also just that label doesn't I and I didn't know him at all, but the the label doesn't make any sense. Sounds so hollow to me given the breadth of what he did. Yeah, totally. Right. A hundred percent.

To me, what he was more than anything else within my sphere of working with him was he was a Absolutely Incredible television producer. And he understood story. He understood story structure. He understood Cinematography. He understood using the tools of film to make something.

that was cinematic. Even though we were on you know, making our little show on TV. It was like It always wanted to be a feature film. And so we were using our limited resources to get as close to that benchmark as possible. It should look beautiful. The framing should be great. The lighting should be great. The music needs to be great. the editing, the pace, the build up, the way that you present subjects, you know

All of that stuff needs to be like at the highest level. And that's what people are seeing. I I think when they respond to the show and the kind of response that the show has gotten, which is really incredible. They're seeing a couple things. Authenticity. 'Cause we never did shit twice. We never faked anything. That's all real. Everything you see is real. We didn't set up shots. We didn't call cut. We didn't call action.

We got fast. We did what he told us to do. We got fast. Well you see authenticity and you see just a very, very high level of production value. Given our resources. And I think it's something that

Something that I constantly want to point out to people is like look at the weight classes that we were punching in. We were way out of our group. We're going out on shows where we're shooting for seven days in the field. We had a Three thousand dollar external equipment rental budget. And we're getting cinematography nominations. My last cinematography nomination was up against free solo.

It was up against free soul. We're punching way out of our class. And that was because of the very high standards. And that can only come from the top. We were down with it because over the time He was powerful enough and the the show was magnetic enough to pull in people. Who were very talented.

who were gifted, who really wanted to do like good work and push the genre as far as they could. But that comes from the top. And that was Tony. That's what you get from that impeccable nature of like, no, everything needs to be good. And also you just Tony was so fucking cool that you like you you really wanted to please him.

On my wall I have framed The best email I ever got from him. That was when I sent him the first act of the Nigeria show. That we shot Legos. And it just says out fucking standing.

With two exclamation points. And then under it it says couldn't be happier. And I framed it and I put it on my wall. So Maybe that time is the moment. I mean, that's like the highest moment of my career, so Yeah.

You know, there there are two things And there are many others, but two things that jump to mind as I'm listening to you describe all this. You know, the first is that

When you watch Roadrunner. Yeah. And I'd never seen any of this. Archival footage. But

It took a while for Tony to find The path to express himself authentically. In front of cameras. Right.

Immediate. It wasn't automatic. It took Some screwing around. And throwing a lot against the wall to get there. And when I think of

Some of my favorite episodes. on this particular episode I'm gonna reference, but there are many examples of this. Yeah. The authenticity of things going totally sideways and him being really fucking pissed off and having the writing shops To actually make it.

into a super entertaining scene. Are you talking about the Sicily show? I think it was Cicely with the octopus and the guy throwing the octopus. Can you okay, tell you know that's funny. You and I have never talked about this and you knew exactly what I was thinking about. Okay, so please tell this story because it's so fucking hilarious. Oh my God. It wasn't there. It was directed by Sally Freeman, who's an incredible director and one of my like favorite fucking people in the world. She is just this. Ass kicking salty brit.

Who doesn't take any shit from anyone. She's the only person I've ever seen. be able to refer to Tony as shit cakes to his face without being summarily fired. Um which in and of itself is a tremendous achievement.

I literally saw her in Finland in the hotel lobby say to the group where's shit cakes. with Tony standing right behind her and then turned around and she says, Oh, there you are So Ha ha ha. Hats off to Sally. She must have been good at what she did, yeah.

She was directing that, and I don't think that that w that wasn't premeditated on her part. I mean, they were gonna go out, they were gonna die for octopus, but I think she as I recall She said that like she kinda knew they were fucked when they got there'cause it's like a it was like a popular beach. There's like tons of people in the water. It's like this whole thing, the guy shows up. You know, they go they're putzing around in the water looking for octopus. Or of course there are no octopus there because the you know water on that beach was probably twenty percent urine. And uh And

And all of a sudden, so the way Tony described it, and we talked to him, we were in Tokyo with him like right after this happened, and he's telling us this story. of the park hyatt in Tokyo, right where Bill Murray was in Lost in Translation. Soaking up just being in that space and being like this is the spot where Bill Very was. And Tony's saying, like, I you wouldn't believe it. I was in Sicily, I'm underwater. All of a sudden this dead fucking octopus floats down to the bottom of the ocean and I realize what's happening because the other diver goes and

claims the octopus, the dead limp octopus off the bottom of the ocean and goes to the surface and holds it up as if he's found the octopus, you know, and so is a total setup. And I think it was actually like a really miserable moment for Tony because he was not when We got to Tokyo, it wasn't like Oh, I'm gonna write this thing and it's gonna be great and we're gonna figure it out and it's gonna be funny. He was like

That was the worst fucking moment of my life. He went into like a hole of existential angst. He as you know in the show, he goes and he downs like six Negronies after that, you know. Oh yeah, he just he he's like he just fucks off and walks down the beach and just gets Beyond hammered. He was genuinely bummed. And the reason he was genuinely bummed is cause he felt like It was a breach of Of exactly what we were talking about. Of that authenticity, you know, and the thing that had really been the most important trading capital of the show up until that point was yeah, well, not up until that point. I mean there are other examples of that. And that certainly didn't break that. But he was bummed about it. I think it's also a testament to Sally that she was able to say, hey, no, this is there's something here that's like really funny and really

worth exploring. And then he wrote to it. And it ends up being this iconic scene. Lots of people talk about it. But what you're seeing there is a real response from Tony. He was genuinely bummed out. So let me come back to the quote framed on your wall for a second. This is gonna be a bit of a non sector from what we were just talking about. The plop, plop, plop as I recall the voiceover, was something like plop plop, and then I realized what was happening. Yeah, exactly. These poor dead octopi are being thrown into the water around him. Yeah.

Are there any particular Quotes, poems. Books. memorabilia. It could be anything. The that you have found to be

meaningful enough to revisit. More than once. Could be anything. I'm just thinking about this letter on your this email on your wall. Right. Is there is what did I keep around my house? Do you keep around your house or that you keep inside your head? Could be anything. It's full of stuff. It's full of stuff. This is the piece of paper that he was typing We needed a scene of when we did the Tangers episodes, we needed a scene of him typing.

And so he's typing And we're just filming him type and this is what he wrote. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Call me Ishmael. This is the saddest story ever told. Jackie Brown at twenty six with no expression on his face said he could get some guns. You're watching CNN.

You're watching Mind of a Chef. You're watching Tram on HBO. You're watching the layover. You're watching repeats of no reservations. So this is him just Freestyle typing. I don't know why. I picked it up. It's it's on my wall. My life is full of these things. I have shit everywhere from just

stuff that I picked up when we were on the road with Only. We have like an Adobe bri from Marfa of a Muzzle break from West Virginia, you know? I have a lighter that Josh Home gave us uh When we did the show with Queens of the Stone Age, you know?

This Collected crap everywhere. All right. I'll narrow it down. So let's assume Family, any pets?

Photo albums, all of that is in the clear, but House is burning down, you can take three to five. Of these many items that you have. Fuck it. Let it burn. Yeah. Let it all burn. Okay. I think it's more in the spirit. I'm I'm probably grabbing the Emmy.

Ha ha Mm-hmm. Oh. I don't know, man. It all means you know, honestly, it all jokes aside, it all means something to me. Like These are the things I decorate my house with.

These are the things I want around. This is the greatest thing I ever got to do in my life was be with Tony. To travel the world with Tony to see Uh World that

A tiny handful of people get to see because the price of admission As a civilian. as someone who just wanted to go out and do those things would be so extraordinarily high. that you just you can't achieve it. It wasn't like

We got to go on some sweet vacations. It wasn't like oh I have the money to go to the Maldives and stay in like a sick resort. It wasn't like that. We had access We had things that no one else will ever get because of who Tony was. And that is why this ship is special to me. You cannot do this again. This is not replicable. And I think it's actually a lesson that the TV industry needs to learn because I hear a lot of it's the bordane of this. It's the bordane of that. It's the bordane of that. And you're like,

No, it's not because the first word you're using is border and that is gone. And it's not coming back. We gotta stop trying. This was a singular experience. And I think we're all very aware of that. So yeah, I decorate my house with The detritus of traveling the world with Tony.

And I'm fucking proud of it. Junk all over my house. So Tony and we don't have to explore this. It's gonna segue to a question about you. Tony obviously had Things in his sort of psychological, psychoemotional bag.

Yeah. As I think y you mentioned earlier, you do. Yeah. And we all have our Demons. You know,

Battles we're fighting that no one knows about, or maybe only a few people know about. For the Anxiety and Bipolar.

What have you found to be most effective in terms of tools or behaviors or anything at all. for helping with those things. For you. So work in progress.

Bipolar. I mean you can I'm Still trying to go unmedicated. I don't wanna go on a on a mood stabilizer. They're pretty Pretty heavy. Consistency.

Is uh is really important. It's a hard thing to do when you're traveling the world is is have a consistent schedule. You know, but having a consistent schedule I I have no proof of this. This probably gets into your world and your expertise a lot more than mine.

But I find Techno? I listen to a lot of techno. A Bluetooth head. And I will listen to seven, eight hours of techno straight while I work. And it's like a metronome for my head. It keeps me

Planted on task. Clean. You know So those things exercise Eating right. Those are the ways that I'm trying to deal with with my bag.

But yeah, we all have them. Tony definitely had But I also think that Most of the people on our crew did. You know, we kind of like were a a collection of like minds, and I don't wanna speak for anyone, but

I think what we found in the end when we kinda looked around the room and these are the people in my life that I like I hold with like the highest regard and like the greatest value that We were all people who Uh strong creative capacity and

We're all kind of for some re one reason or another kind of I don't wanna say that Island of Misfit toys'cause it's so corny, but it it's it you know, it's got kind of an element of that. You know, everyone was kinda had like a thing that was broken. And the thing that they were struggling with. And you kinda knew those things. But those that brokenness and in the kind of pain that comes out of that.

I think was critical. in terms of looking at the world through the lens that we were trying to look at the world through. Where we were trying to see everything. We were trying to see the beauty. We were trying to see the pain. We were trying to see all of it. That's not a formulaic show. That's not a show that everything's gonna end happy every time. It's not a show where you're gonna hit happy beats every time. It's not like an upbeat travel show where like oh today we're you know It's not. It was an exploration of the world in all of the permutations of what that means.

And if you don't understand pain. You don't understand fear. You don't know those things, you are never gonna be able to see it. You're not gonna be able to see it. And I don't mean to be

Dismissive of anyone. But I remember we, you know, at one point we had a new editor coming on for a show. And I talked to him for ten minutes on the phone. And I asked him a few questions, what's your favorite shows? What's your life like? You know, what do you do for what are your hobbies and stuff like that? And I called my, you know, our showrunner, Sandy Zwig, and I said, I'm sorry. This isn't gonna work.

And she's like, Why? And I was like, he's too fucking happy. His life's too good. Everything's okay with him. And he's not gonna get it. And he didn't.

And That wasn't prophetic on my Part is just knowing that We had to embrace those things. And so You know, you get to the end and

What happened happened and All those things and we and there's a lot of different ways to analyze That But What's I think important to note is that

Those things. That experience of pain and and dealing with those things was a critical part of making the show. And it came with a lot of shit that We were kinda

all hot to trot on at the time, but I that I look back and I'm like, you know. A lot of alcohol. There was a lot of like I'll speak only for myself. There's a lot of

Almost daily. I mean yes, daily. Just drink yourself to sleep. Wake up in the morning, hammer fucking coffee. go on adrenaline and caffeine as far as you can and then start drinking again. And come down. And that was

That was the rhythm of the Gear Shifts. Every day. And that's kinda how we got through it. Why did you stop? Drinking.

When Tony died. Is it because you felt that was maybe a contributing factor? Was it for other reasons? And I'm not asking you to speculate. I'd just love to hear Hear your thinking, you know what your experience was. I wanna be careful about not speculating. I wanna be respectful to you and everyone in Tony's sphere. I will say this. It is impossible for me to separate alcohol

from Tony's death. And that's kind of a reality for me is like And I feel like Other people on the show felt that way as well. Again, I don't want to speak for them. There's a lot of people involved in this. There's a lot of people that have their own journeys. There are people who are a lot closer with Tony than I was. But I was fairly close.

With him. And After he died, I I could not separate alcohol. From his death. I don't mean

Did he die because he had been drinking? I just mean that that was part of the calculus. For sure. It was in there. And it's a dangerous drug and it's Severely underestimated. In our culture.

I just couldn't do it anymore. Oh like couldn't. And I went hard for a long time. What did that process look like? For you.

Stop driving. Was it easy? I mean, was it hard? It was frantic at first. I stopped drinking, I got a mountain bike and like I swear for the first couple months I was riding every night, I was riding uh twenty miles a night.

Up on the fire roads outside of my house. And this is in the months after Tony died. And I would ride from my house up to the Nike station. on Dirtmall Holland. And back and it's it's you know, ten miles each way. It's not the hardest ten miles. I'm not like I don't think I'm Lance Armstrong. I'm definitely not Lance Armstrong.

But like that's where I that's where I was and I was alone at night. Riding. You know, and just trying to I don't know, trying to make sense of shit. It got it was dark right after, like the the month after he died, I went pretty hard. I woke up on my lawn one night.

You mean went hard drinking? Yeah, like I I drank like a bottle of tequila, I woke up on my lawn, scared myself. I did have two young kids. I was like this is this this must end. Good for you, man. Well.

Yeah. A lot of people do it. Yeah. And and they all need credit. You know. It's a hard thing. To uh to do. Yeah, let me ask you a related question. As I watched Roadrunner I thought it was well done. I'm sure it's imperfect.

But there were Some takeaways that seemed To takeaways or perspectives that seem to be shared by more than one person. And one of them was That when Tony was doing jujitsu

Seriously, he was in one or w perhaps in one of the better places. Yeah, emotionally speaking. And Parallel with that. I'm thinking about something you said earlier in this conversation that I I just want to highlight because I'm not sure people understand just what it requires, and that is

Running through the wilderness with a fifty pound backpack. Yeah. With a camera on your shoulder, being able to use one hand. And maybe the technology has changed, but when you and I We're uh spending time together. And I was able to watch you film. This is not an iPhone that you're using to film. I mean this is a this is a significant rig on

I don't know how much it weighs I mean w uh w w w what would you say at the time? I don't know, twenty twenty plus pounds for sure, I would. Yeah, only twenty plus pounds. We were on slightly bigger cameras for Tim Ferriss experiment, though. than what we use like with Meteor. Meteor was slightly smaller cameras, but It doesn't really matter. Yeah, it's incredibly physical. Yeah, it's very physical. There were days we were doing fifteen miles of backcountry

That may not sound like a lot. That's a fair amount when you're doing it day to day, when you're in snow, when you're in environments that you're not on a trail. You're in backcountry. Again, I don't not try to pretend like I'm super rugged, but It definitely took some doing. You're pretty rugged, man. I mean I don't wanna you know overstate it, but you're pretty rugged. And And where I was going with that is, you know, you've been very physical.

You know, I'm speculating, but I would imagine that's been Good medicine. For you to be that active. A hundred percent. Yeah. What are your versions of jujitsu? Like the activities that seem to nourish you.

And counterbalance maybe some of these things that you're carrying in your bag, right? The anxiety, the bipolar, et cetera. When would people say you are at your best. What type of activities? What are my hobbies? Yeah. Sure. Surfing? mountain biking and I was really into racket ball for a long time, but I my knees are kinda

My knees feeling a little tough on me with rackaball. Those things for me, when you're doing them, you're not doing anything else. Surfing's got a solitary element to it that's almost like meditation. Doesn't even matter if you're really catching waves. I mean, that's like a bonus, but you're sitting there, you have the rhythm of the ocean, you're Thinking, you're processing things, but

You know, you're on liquid. You know, and you're staring out at the ocean, waiting for waves. It's unbelievable. I mean it's very, very centering. I mean, there's a reason that There are stereotypes of of surfers, you know. It's true. You get a surfer owned to you.

I like mountain biking because it's really physical. It's like a real grind. It really pushes your heart rate. But when also when you're doing like you know, like said, I like the kinda enduro style stuff. You know, you got a lot of shit coming at you fast and you're making a lot of calculations, a lot of decisions. I like that. It's very dynamic and I tend to like solitary kinda sports. Rackaball's just fast and for anyone who knows racquetball, it's a killer game.

you're looking for kill shots. You're playing strategy, you're playing geometry. in looking for opportunities to execute kill shots and it's a blast. I don't know. I like aggressive shit and I like shit that like keeps your heart rate way up. Hay Alright, I'm gonna use the door that was just opened by the use of the word geometry. And then we're gonna

go to muzzle break in West Virginia'cause Yeah. promised earlier I'd come back to West Virginia. Yeah. But I mentioned the dance and watching and this is seguing to the geometry and you really need Kind of two players in the game, maybe to to fully visualize this. At least, which is why I wanted to mention Marcus Lehman, who was also working on Tim Ferris Experiment. Great guy, very skilled. And watching the two of you guys

dance with geometry was So fun. To the extent that it was almost Not distracting, but I was so intrigued. Yeah. And almost just puzzled by how you guys could pull it off. So for someone who has no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, could you

Just explain how geometry plays into what we were doing or what you would do with Steve. And so on. So if you picture it in a in a basic sense, right, say you have two characters who are talking to each other.

They're standing in a room and they're facing each other. This is like Very simple setup, right? We are not a scripted show. There is no script. We need to

capture as much of that conversation for the edit as possible in real time. When you're on a scripted show You can shoot one camera on one angle of that conversation. And then you can move the camera to the other angle of that conversation and shoot the other side. So you're shooting one character first. And you move and you shoot the other character. When we're doing documentary stuff, you can't do that. You need to get it in the moment. So we have at least two cameras, right?

And so one camera is shooting one angle on character A. And one camera shooting the other angle on character B. Now That's the basic setup. And you could just stand there and you could be in one frame size and whatever, and you could cover the conversation and the editor will cut back and forth between those two cameras as they see fit, but it's gonna be boring. You want to add dynamics. So you're gonna need to add movement to that scenario. You're gonna need to move your characters around the room. You're gonna need to allow them to go on some kind of endeavor. They need to accomplish some goal. They need to do whatever. So they start moving, and now the geometry is always changing.

Now you need to be shooting both sides of that interaction. You also need to be shooting your insert shots. You need to be shooting wider shots to give you a context of the environment. You need to be shooting all of the supporting footage that tells you where you are and what those characters are doing. And you need to have that in your head. And you can't talk out loud. I mean, I can talk on the walkie a little bit to the other camera operator, but when you're really doing it well. You know, and I guess again, there's a million different ways to do this. So there's all kinds of different um ways that people achieve this. But when you're doing it really well with someone who really knows what they're doing. You know inherently I know because of the action.

Because of where the other camera's standing. I know what their shot is. I know where their lens is. I know where their background is. I know where not to cross into their shot. I know what they have. So you're simultaneously watching them. And understanding

what they're covering and where they are. And you're reacting to that or you're Establishing your shot and they're reacting to you, right? When it's really good. It moves that way without conversation.

And after you shoot with someone for a while, you really get into a rhythm. Where you both know what the other person has, you know what the other person's shooting. And as your characters move around the world as they do their, you know, thing, you know. how to move together to maintain that coverage. There's a variable in that which dictates a lot of this, which is called the hundred and eighty degree rule. So picture this.

There's a car. moving along a bridge. And you are shooting From a helicopter. Out.

On the passenger side of the car. tracking along with it, right? You can picture that. Got it. Again. The direction of the car, then, if you're doing that, is moving from frame right

To frame left. That is the way that the action moves. If you then cut to a shot from the driver's side. Oh, wait a second. Could you say that one more time? So I'm imagining in my head. I'm in the helicopter. It's so much easier when you can draw it out. Passenger side is on the right hand side of the car. Passenger side is on the right hand side of the car, and you're moving along with them. And the car is going along. And so when you see that shot on the screen, the car is moving in a direction that is From the left hand side of the screen. Sorry. Left side. Left side. I messed it up. Left s left hand side of the screen.

To the right hand side of the screen, right? The car is pointed to the right. Now if you go and you switch over And you shoot from the driver's side. What direction is the car going when it goes on screen? It's going on. It's going to opposite. It's going right to left.

You've crossed the hundred and eighty degree line. A lot of these rules are just set up to be broken, right? So there's a lot of variables in there. But in a basic sense, you are confusing your audience because the car that was going Left to right. is now going right to left. And that is confusing when you're following the continuity of an edit.

The same thing with a conversation. If you have two characters And the cameras are standing On the same side of those characters, you have one character which is looking screen direction left. And then you have one character that's looking screen direction, right, and you're cutting in between of those. If one of those cameras

crosses that line. You now have two characters either looking screen direction right or screen direction left. And when you try to cut between them, It won't make sense because they both look like they're looking away from each other. Yeah. When it's done well, you don't notice it, but when it's screwed up, you really notice I and that's right. I was watching a super high budget scripted show.

Yeah. I'm not gonna mention the name. And they messed this up. It was like a bunch of royalty seated at a long table on one side having a conversation. And it was so confusing. That's right. To my brain. That it was uncomfortable. I think what people don't appreciate a lot is that you need to establish the geometry of your environment in order for people to understand what's going on in a physical sense when you're in a scene. There's a lot of tricks to doing that.

And there are some things that you can do that Break that. And that's one of the things that you can do that breaks that. But now picture You have two characters who are now like I keep thinking of The one we did in Vegas, right? Where you're

Basically what did we call that episode? It wasn't uh the gambling one. It was We did two in Vegas. We did uh we did the poker, the heads up poker, and then we did the evasive driving Yes, that's it. Or evasive tactics, right? Because it was also on foot. It was getting uh zip ties and Yeah, exactly. So you have two characters moving around in a dynamic environment there and they're constantly crossing each other. They're constantly crossing the line. They're constantly moving around. Now you need to know where that hundred and eighty degree line is all the time. And both your cameras need to be tuned up enough.

To move with that line and reestablish that line. without thinking about it and without talking. And that's the dance that you're seeing. So when you talk about the dance, the dance is really maintaining that coverage in a way that is gonna make sense for the editor and ultimately make sense for the audience. And it is difficult to learn. And once you do learn it, like with anything else that's Fun to do.

It's a blast. It's really cool to work with someone that understands how that works. I don't know if this is the schedule we had was was normal. If it is, I don't know how the hell You guys do it for so long. Yeah, I yeah, I remember we had whatever was, like thirteen weeks of shooting and it was like five or six days of

shooting a half a day to a day of transition to another location if necessary and then you're right back into shooting. Yeah. And then I was reviewing rough cuts and so on at night. Which was just a really Incredible introduction to the velocity of that type of production. Yeah but what I was gonna say is it also makes it sometimes hard to remember because they're removing pieces and sometimes people wouldn't be available for a week or two. Were you on the New York City episode with Josh Waitskin and more Maurish Ashley? Okay, that was amazing. Yeah, so I wanna mention one scene because it's A, it's a super fun scene, but it also demonstrates How

Well Shooters. can dance this dance in a complex environment. You probably know where I'm going. But this is Grandmaster Maurice Ashley playing This Hustler.

The trash talker. I've loved it. Oh my God. This is my favorite things I've ever seen. Yeah. Oh.

It's incredible. And people can find this clip actually on uh The YouTube channel for Grandmaster Maurice Ashley. And I I wanna see how many views it has now. It's got Yeah, nine million views. This is just such an incredible scene in Washington Square Park. Yeah, it was amazing. So Maybe you could just walk us through since this is a real world example, right?

If you recall, just What were some of the considerations? What was happening? Cause we're sitting in Washington Square Park. It's freezing out. Like if people are wearing their winter clothing. And this is where A, you know, Josh Waitskin, who was the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher, both the book and the movie, played as a little kid. It's where in the details from Maurice Ashley, it's where the the late great Vinny Livermore used to beat my ass at the same table. This is from him. Yeah Maybe you could just if you remember any of the

Experience just gotta walk through because this is Complex. This is this is it seems to me at least like hard to get right. And it just Came out so so well. Yeah, I mean so I don't remember the specifics of the blocking. I remember it was one of the coolest things that I've ever seen because you had this grandmaster chess player sit down with a New York City street hustler and listen.

I don't know shit about chess, but I know that those New York City street hustlers are damn good chess players and they play fat they can play. And we watched a grandmaster sit down and devour this cat as if he just didn't even exist. And also return fire with shit talking in equal measure, right? That's right. And called him out when he tried to knock the pieces over and hustle him. Yeah. It reminded me there was a famous quote, I forget the name of the Crow scout who was working with the US Cavalry when Custer was decimated at Little Bighorn, but they asked him after how long it took, and he said, about as long as it takes a hungry man to eat a sandwich. And that's how we described Custer getting taken down at Little Bighorn, and that's how I would describe that grandmaster running through that cat.

He fucking devoured him. It was so satisfying to watch. Not because I have anything against the street hustler, by the way, but just to see someone that proficient at something was incredible. I don't remember the specific blocking, but this is what I would say in remembering that scene and and thinking about how I would go into that, right? So you know a couple of things going in. You know that it's gonna be all about the energy between them, right? And so you're looking at tight shots of eyes, you're looking at establishing their connection, establishing the board. And you have two things going on. The connection between them. And the shit talking and all that stuff, and then what's going on on the board. And you got to cover what's going on on the board, too. And then you have the crowd. Around them.

I'm getting to that part. Right. I'm getting to that part. Because You in their dynamic, you need to cover the game, right? You need to cover the game, but you need to be quick enough to know that you got to get up to the two shot. You also got to establish the environment, right? And part of the environment and part of what you know is gonna tell the story is the reaction of the people that are standing around. So you got to get out to those wide shots. Got to see where the crowd is. Gotta see where where er, you know, kinda everyone is placed, right? Gotta get in on the details of the game. Gotta get in on their rapport and then you gotta start

searching the audience, that crowd that was standing there for the telling reaction shots. And so when I'm standing in an environment like that, I'll be Doing my coverage, looking around, and when any moment I get, I'm looking up and I'm like, who's the most expressive here? Who's the person that's gonna come out with the big line? Who's the person that's gonna and I think I remember that day someone being like eventually to the street hustler guy like, Like kind of patting him on the shoulder and being like Do you know do you know who this is? Am I right about that? I feel like he like at one point. There was there was definitely a moment. Yeah, there was. Absolutely. Exactly. And so it's looking for that and understanding in two cameras, you know, you know that the people that are on your side of the line, the other camera's gonna have them, and the people that are on the other side of the line, you have them. And you're kind of those that's how you divvy up the responsibility. But if you miss it, you miss it. And remember,

These are not actors. You cannot go back. You cannot get those original reactions again. You have to get it in the moment. And that's where it gets back to Tony and when he said, You be fast. And he was he was right about that. And it pissed a lot of people off. A lot of people come on to the show and be like, This is fucked. We don't get time to set up. We don't get something to do that. And I'd be like, dude. You are not cut out for this show. Or

Not just dude. A lot of women, you know, uh in our line of work too. But You're not gonna make it here. Because what you don't understand is that you're fucking it up. By trying it right.

You gotta learn how to not miss it the first time. And it might not be perfect and it might not be pretty, but you gotta get it. That's how I would think about a scene like that. The most important element being that it doesn't happen again, happens once. Yeah. Hundred percent. And what made that scene also

So gratify is that Maurice Is Like a handsome, charismatic. Morpheus. In a black leather jacket.

can also just murder people on the chessboard and Trash talk. Really well. So it's so fun. We'll put a link in the show notes. Yeah, that's worth watching. So what I'm pulling up

You may never guess who I texted. So I texted uh John Badolis and Chris Vivian. Oh yeah, John. And uh so John directed a ton of these uh Tim Ferris Experiment episodes. And so I I asked him what topics and questions he thought might be fun to explore. So Okay. This is gonna be interesting. Yeah, yeah. Well yeah, yeah, he has some good ones. Yeah. And I'll start with

Th there are many different ways we could go here, but like from DPU to director to showrunner, what skills or habits do you find help most in transitioning? from a more narrowly creative role to a broader creative role with more managerial responsibilities. So there there are many ways to approach this. I mean, I suppose the the simplest way would just be to say, What advice would you give to someone? Who is really technical and good. That one thing, right? They deliver. They're really exceptional.

And they hope to embrace or they're being asked to embrace a role that is broader with managerial responsibilities. Like what advice would you give to your younger self as you were doing that or to someone else who's in the similar uh in a similar position. Get ready to relinquish control because if you don't, you're gonna smother the people who are working under you. You need to trust them and you need to be able to work with the people who need work.

in a proactive manner to get them to the place where you need them to be because you are not going to be able to control everything anymore. When you have the camera in your hand, you have this tiny little world in the viewfinder and you can control every aspect of it. As you start to climb the ladder. Up to directing. And then to show running, you need to depend on other people. So part of that is bringing good people in, the other part is understanding

When you need to Let people do their job. Well let's get super specific. So this I would imagine is super hard for people who are very Proficient. And

Something they are now supervising. Right, like you were talking about with the with the D P is right, and you're just like You sure that's the right shot? Like why don't you move over a little bit? Yeah, but I think maybe why not w maybe a little tighter? So does it mean Just picking your battles well and like letting things go that you can let go, but holding a really strong line on certain quality Decisions where you need to push a little bit. I just love to hear

'Cause it doesn't sound easy. To just like flip a switch. I don't think it is either. And I think it took me some time and I had times when I blew up at camera operators or D Ps that I really regret because it was like exactly the wrong way to go about things. I had a D P who I really, really respect. We had a Pretty vicious exchange in the field.

one time and he came to me after and he's like, dude, he's like, you took what was just a lovely, delightful day where we were getting great stuff. And you fucking murdered it over a detail. And you've ruined the whole vibe of the day in the shoot. And that was really profound for me. And I thought about that a lot, you know. For what?

Because like he missed a shot that I knew was there. I know I was right. I know the shot was there. I knew the shot would make the edit. I knew it was important. Why I had to rip his head off about it, I have no idea now. I don't do that anymore. So I think that, you know, one aspect is just finding ways to approach what you need to get. In a way that's positive and proactive. You know, we worked with uh Angelo Dundee when we were doing Ali.

Angela Dundee's to just fill everyone in who doesn't know Angelo Dundee was Ali's trainer. one of the great boxing trainers of all time. So you want to talk about a level of expectation and perfection. I mean that is operating at the very highest level of that. But he wouldn't come in and be like Your jab sucks and like what the fuck? Why am I wasting my time and you know, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. He would come to Ali and he'd be like, Hey, you know?

I was watching your jab. You're doing really good with that jab. I love the way that you're doing this. Even if it was something that Ollie wasn't doing, he was trying to point out something to get a response to get him to focus on a particular aspect of that movement. And I think that that's really important in in finding ways to work with people. And say Get what you want in a way that is a little smarter than just coming out and just hammering folks. So what might you have said?

To that guy. The newer version of you, how might you have handled that situation? In retrospect now? I think the number one thing is I I would stay calm.

Uh didn't stay calm in that moment because I was kinda dying because I knew I needed shot. But I think I would stay calm and say, Hey, listen, like This is happening right now. You need to break off. Let go what you're doing. Don't worry about the shot that you're on. We're fine on that. I got it in post, but we need this right now. I think that's a pretty easy explanation. Yeah. But we tend not to do that because we're so controlling.

that in the moment it feels like you're losing control. And that's not the truth, you know. I think that as you get older you get more experience with management. Unless you're going to be uh Jim Cameron or uh Michael Mann. Unless you're going to be a tyrant, which trust me, that's twenty hours a day of Work.

Hard work. I'm not that and I'm not gonna do it. And I never was, and I don't wanna treat people like that. And listen, no shade on them. What they do is unbelievable. But You know, I think I know myself enough now to know that that's not how the style and how I'm gonna accomplish what I need to accomplish. I think it's building people up now and saying like I trust you. Think about it this way. Think about it this way. Try this. I know from experience I can tell you, you know, that this is gonna work, but

Being willing to work with people. Let's come back to that. Muzzle break. On your shelf. Right. Maybe you could explain what a muzzle break is to people and then let's talk about

The return to West Virginia. And why it matters. A muzzle break, first of all, is a way to dispense the energy of the bullet coming out of the gun, it it can provide accuracy and and safety by pushing the energy of Firing the bullet out to the sides.

This muzzle break was made by J Mac Customs and West Virginia, which is cool because They're an independent operation. Which takes people who, you know, were laid off in coal mines and various other extractive industries that have left West Virginia and puts them to work and trains them as machinists. And they do high quality work.

I'm not particularly into guns, but I respect what their Doing. And uh probably get a little bit of Commentary online about my understanding of the dynamics of muzzle breaks, but

That's what the internet's for. Yep. West Virginia for me, you know, and this is a very personal story, so if everyone can bear with me, like West Virginia for me was the most important thing that that I ever did. And then when I say West Virginia, I'm I'm like talking about the parts unknown. episode of West Virginia. I had lived in West Virginia when I was a kid. And my family went through a pretty tough time when we were there.

My parents were kinda on the rocks. West Virginia can be a tough place, especially in that time. It's a place that's been hit really hard by the dynamics of extractive industries and capitalism and Listen, I'm not bitching about capitalism, like I believe in capitalism. Maybe not our particular form of it, but For the most part I believe in it.

But you have a state that was really predicated on the coal industry and as soon as they found Easier, cheaper coal in China and in Wyoming they Just Drop those people like They didn't even exist, you know?

And so it created a tough environment and I grew up to some degree in West Virginia in an environment that was kinda tough. We didn't have running water, electricity, et cetera. There's also some things I remember about it that are very fond, but it was like a Really formative. moment in my life and Had really bad associations with West Virginia for a long time.

And wouldn't yeah, I would just wouldn't think about it, wouldn't go there. I went back in two thousand three after I stopped working for Michael Mann and I happened to be there. In southern West Virginia and when there was really bad flooding. And I saw these people and had this moment where I was just like, You're talking about the heart and soul of America. They are Especially when you get down to Southern West Virginia, that is a a mixed group of, you know, white folks, black folks who came

to that area to build lives for themselves and in the process built this country. And we basically shit on them. We engage in these ridiculous hyperbolic stereotypes of who they are. We've consider them.

To be uneducated and I mean how many jokes do you know about hillbillies? It's not true. Those are like the hardest working, most independent. Rugged. self determining people. And that's the reason they went to those mountains in the first place.

They are the heart of who we're supposed to be as a country. And I think we've seen, and I don't want to dive into politics here, but I think we've seen the result of what happens when you shit on those people and you ignore them. They get fucking angry and they got a right to. I always wanted to go back and make a show from what I saw there. And the hardships that those folks were going through.

And so We were in Antarctica with Tony and I pitched him on a West Virginia show and he was stoked on doing it. And so We got to go back to the town of Welsh in McDowell County. McDowell County is

highest percentage population loss in the United States. For any county. Over the past fifty. The place that's just been like decimated. It's always number two or three on the most impoverished counties list in the United States. And we went there and I had this moment where I was like

Taking Tony. To a place where there's no restaurants. There's no food. It's like literally a food desert. Is he gonna connect with this place? Is he gonna like see What I feel like I saw which was what I feel like we were kinda always looking for to some degree in the show, which was like the beauty that's underneath that surface level. And uh and we went there, we we go through the first couple of days of shooting and then Tony starts tweeting.

Like these tweets, like nothing moves me like this place. He just all these like really beautiful, wonderful and I had this moment where I was like, Yeah, dude, uh like it's Tony man, of course he gets it. Of course, like he gets what what you're trying to show him. Of course he gets like These people in this place. And I think it was so important because

It showed, you know, on a show called Parts Unknown. We're going to like central Appalachian in the United States. I think it showed his ability To walk into a context and environment this is right after Trump was elected, by the way. You know, to walk into a context and environment and see people for who they really w are, not what our perception of them is not based on his political feelings, not based on

Anything but the evidence of sitting down with someone and and saying like what What are your values? What What does life mean to you? What do you want? You know, what are you looking for? And

As soon as he saw who they were, he he responded to it. We made this beautiful show. It was one of the few shows that we got to do where CNN gave us extra time. They gave us an extended episode. Show one and Emmy. And I sent the Emmy back to Welsh and it's in Welsh. It's someone's house. Oh, that's amazing. How cool.

And It was just for me personally, for me professionally In every way it was like this is full circle. This is how you make peace with something that's painful. In your childhood. You go and you confront it and you you find out what's really there beneath the surface and then

You try to be benevolent about what it is. And I guess that's in part. Now I'm kind of making a this a little bit of a leap, but You know, looking for like we said earlier, looking for the gift in something. Here's this thing that was really painful for me as a child, but There was this tremendous gift in it, which was like an understanding of this place.

And a connection to it that allowed us to go and do something Within our own country, looking at ourselves. At a time when we critically need it. Because we are Fucking falling apart, if you haven't noticed.

You know? Yeah. Yeah. Anyone who hasn't noticed, man.

But we need to we need to connect with each other. We need to talk to each other. We need to be good to each other. How are you choosing the projects that you work on now? And how did you end up becoming involved with United Shades of America. I mean, this was like again, this is like one of those lucky moments where you're like, Oh, well, obviously I'm gonna do that. We had taken uh Kamau Bell

to Kenya. On parts unknown. And CNN wanted to do a crossover show. Camao has a Kenyan name, though. I don't know what his genetic descent is, but probably, you know, West African, not East African.

For those who don't know, who is Camel? Camau is a comedian from Oakland. Black comedian from Oakland who has, you know, really I think carved out like a niche for himself. dealing in identity and cultural issues in the United States, but from a comedic lens, and has been someone who's like really been willing to sit down

with the other and have honest conversations with them, but do it in a way that is not so heavily laden. he's really kind of brilliant at that. Again, I mean one of these people that I'm so lucky to have the opportunity to work with'cause he's he's super smart, super dynamic. And is doing something at a time in America where I like really believe We need it.

Where we are talking about these things head on. His current project, which I had absolutely nothing to do with, is The four part documentary on Showtime on Bill Cosby. And I think it's Really brave a Cam.

to come out and like be willing to have that conversation. A lot of people weren't. That's who he is. We took him to Kenya simply because his name is Kenyan. Kamau in Kenya is like Dan here. You know, you look at the phone book and it's like half the people in the phone book are come out. We went we shot this awesome show there. So cool. Went on Safari, we were like three feet from Lions, you know, uh the Safari was uh black rhinos, white rhinos, hung out with the Masai, hung out Nairobi, which is an incredible incredible city. Again with like a really young, really vibrant, really hard working. population that is is another place that is just driving this kind of like uh

How does one even say it? I mean, Africa's on fire right now, and I I believe it's the next real growth place. I mean, with some hot centers around like Lagos and Nairobi and Accra and other places, but Shot this great show in at the end of it. I kind of With a little bit of Scumbaggery producerness.

Uh said, Hey, listen, like if you're ever dissatisfied with your production company or if you ever just want to make a change, I shouldn't say dissatisfied because I don't want to put words in his mouth. We'd love to work with you. And we got a call a year later and you know he wanted to Try something new. So We've been lucky enough to do that. And like it just I feel again, I feel very, very lucky in that because at a time when we're bleeding, man. This great incredible country that we have, we're hurting. We gotta be able to talk about these things with each other without Ripping each other's heads off. And more and more it feels like we're just

Ripping each other's heads off. So Whereas my life was really focused on like the external world, you know, the world outside of the United States for so many years with Tony. I I felt like at a time when We really needed to look inward, like I got a chance to do you know, I have gotten a chance to do that with Camau and it's been amazing. Learned a tremendous amount about who we are. And have seen some shit that I can't

Unsee. I feel like it's so hard for us as white Americans to get a glimpse into What it's like to be black in this country. And I will never know that, and I know that I will never know that. But I've been able to see with much clearer resolution than I think a lot of people get to see.

what that experience was like and I can't Unsee it now. For whatever that's worth. Like anyone in black America gives a shit what I have to say about anything, but I mean, be that as it may, as as you mentioned.

These are hard conversations to have, but if the conversations aren't had we're What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? Yeah, I mean th then what? What's plan B in that case? And we know what plan B is. I like all you gotta do is read history, you know what plan B is. Plan B is blood, man. Plan B is not good.

Yeah. So better to go with plan A and I was struck. I didn't know about this, but when you mentioned that Kamal was working on this you said mini series for showtime or four part series. Four part doc series. Yeah. Just for Cosby. Yeah.

That is And I don't know the content, I don't know the angle. I don't know him. I'm not referring to Bill, but referring to Kamal. Yeah. But that is a

Ballsy move. Very That's a bold move and it's I applaud that however people may feel about Bill Cosby like it's To make a character study and a historical study of that, I think

Yeah. It seems important, right? It seems important. Again, we have to talk about it. We want to fix these issues, you have to talk about it, you know. But Again for Cam, and I don't want to speak out of turn here.

But As a black comedian. I look at what Bill Cosby did. Bill Cosby broke more goddamn barriers, you know? Uh what he accomplished was amazing. And I and that's why I think that What ended up

coming out about Bill Cosby, which is pretty irrefutable. You know, despite the fact that he is now walking the streets free. That is soul crushing. That is hard to face. That is hard to deal with when you've looked at this as a person who has been able to transcend a lot of the boundaries that have have held you down. So I think as a black American to do that.

And to take that on head on is Damn Gotsy. I think he should be applauded for that. Regardless again of of how you feel. About um about Cosby and and the cases surrounding Cosby in particular.

So What's next for you? What are you most hoping to do or looking forward to doing in the next few years? I don't know, man. I was just wait waiting for crickets to walk by. Waiting for cricket. You seem to have the ability to wait in the right spots. And to pick the right crickets, I must say.

Yeah. You are an excellent spider. You're a fantastic, fantastic spider. I I don't honestly know, Tim. I mean, like it you know, you wanna keep progressing, right? You wanna keep building and keep You know, you want to see how far you can go. I think the

I'm open. Man, I I'm like open. I want You know, I want new challenges just like everyone else. And we'll see where that goes. I have another Bidal is question.

Yeah. And uh I'm gonna read it exactly as he texted it to me because I love The brevity. It's almost like a haiku. So I've I would probably reword this Just because I'm a different person, but I I love it in its current form. So I'm going to read it. Here we go. You work with your wife. Period. Potentially loaded situation. Period. How do you deal? Question mark. So this is though, I think a question that applies to a lot of people. How have you

navigated or made rules around or figured out how to Coexist and collaborate. With a spouse. Honestly, be willing to lose and be honest about what is right in a particular situation. I think a lot of times in relationships we spend so much trying trying to prove that we're in control and competent. I think again it is giving someone spa the the respect to give them space. and allow them to take control of a situation, you know, I mean we do that at home with the kids.

We do that. You know, in our household we we do it at work and I don't know. I I came up with this concept. I didn't come up with it. What the fuck am I talking about? It tapped into an age old concept uh that I feel like has some wisdom to it, which is like This idea of like strategic loss. Be willing to lose some fucking battles.

What are you trying to prove it's your wife? She's not g I mean, she's not going anywhere. You know, I hope. I needed to do a couple of things to make it all work. This is the life I want. I wanna work with my wife. I wanna travel around the world with my wife.

I want to be as much a part of helping her build her career as I wanna build my own, you know? But it took for me coming to the point where it had to be like, You are gonna have to learn how to lose, not be right about everything, give her space, let her learn, you know, let her teach you and follow through on the shit that you say you're gonna do. Yeah. To me is like

number one relationship killer, right? If we're just talking about the relationships. You say you're gonna do something, do it. Don't not do it. You're breaking trust, you know? And when it came down to my wife going back to work after She raised the kids and went through two home births without medication. I have to mention that'cause she's rugged as shit. Ha.

Match made in heaven for a Mo Valley. That's right. I I I I said to her, like, if you go back to work, I will learn how to do this stuff. I promise you I will follow through on my end of holding up the family, my end of the household. Learn how to do this stuff. You mean handling Handling the kids and so on. Yeah. Yeah, there they cute audio. Yeah. I think that that's gonna be okay. Um

In the house. There's a daddy long leg in the house? No, I'm the painting. I'll come handle it, sweetheart. I just gotta finish this up though, so give me ten minutes, okay? Maybe ten or fifteen minutes. No, we don't have to worry about that. I need I do need some space though, but

Mm. You say hi to Tim? Hello.

Oh. You can come play with it after sweeter. Yeah, yeah. All right, I'll be in in a sec. I'm I'm so glad I slipped her that twenty to make that appearance and talk about spiders. It was perfect.

But for I mean, for me it was like realizing that, you know, anyone who doesn't think that taking care of kids in the household isn't like a full time professional job is like it just has not done the work and does not understand what goes into it. It is a full time gig. If my wife was gonna go back to work and we were gonna have this future where we could work together, I had to be willing to any up. I did. And like it made all the difference. But

What a dream, right? You know, I mean. Just to put this in perspective a little, and I uh sure uh I I don't I don't wanna cry on my own violin here, but When Tony died, Jillian and I had just finisco directing, co-producing the second Parts Unknown that we made for him. And It was in Florence. It's a show that has not air. It was never finished. We shot it a week before Tony died.

And We were sitting with Tony on the last day and he turned to Jillian and uh he g you know he gave her his seal of approval. He said, I I like this. I like working with you. We're gonna do this a lot more. I just sign another three years. And like buckle up, get ready. And that was the last interaction.

The three of us had together and Jill and I went home that night and we looked at each other like we did it. You know, we did it, man. We did this is the dream. We're on the Coolest fucking show on TV. the best ride you can possibly go on if you're a, you know, a sensualist who wants to see the world.

This is it. Yeah. Doesn't get better than this. We're doing it together. We're able to bring our kids The next show that we talked about potentially doing was in Kyoto. It's like You know, who doesn't want to do that?

We had the dream. You know, and we had worked really hard to get there and a week later that was gone. And that was a tough blow. And so We've just focused in on like, okay, cool, how do we get back there? And that's the I mean, man, that's so important to me. She's also super, super good at what she does, so it makes it easy. Yeah. Now she's outgrowing me though, because everyone wants her

Well, quality problems and uh sounds like you have Sounds like you both have great co pilots. Yeah. Done pretty well. Well, Mo let me uh let me do this'cause I know um

You've let Going on over there and we've already been gone for almost three hours. That's so much fun. This is so great, man. It's so wonderful to see you and I'm so happy to see you Doing so well with the family.

And is there anything else you would like to say, share, any requests you'd like to make of the audience, any complaints about the podcast you'd like to state publicly? Anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind to a close here? There's so many things. Like when we were gonna do this, I was just going through all this these incredible experiences in my mind. It's too much to get into one thing. But I did want to talk about one day that I felt like it was, you know, really the best day of my career. And I f feel like really got to typify like what the whole experience was about. Then I don't know if this will make the cut or anything. Anyone wants to hear my anecdotes, but We did this this show in Antarctica, which was a huge show for us, and I think was really like showed it was a real expression of what I was talking about of like you can't buy this ride. You gotta earn this with something special like that show.

We get invited to go down to Antarctica. You know now, uh you've been, you know, you've you've fly you fly to Christchurch, pop a C one thirty to McMurdo. And then from McMurdo, we hopped another C one thirty to the South Pole. Like we had our own C one thirty. Like how ridiculous is that? It was uh actually the show was directed by Eric Osterho. So I gotta like give him mad props for getting us down there and produced by Josh Farrell. who's like also just like a great producer and co D P on that was Fred Minot, who's a gifted Cinematographer. And uh we also had Josh Flanagan, who is uh you know, one of our other DPs is also just gifted on the show. So we have this incredible crew. We had our own friggin' C one thirty flying around.

And we did this thing where we went out to uh a place called Dry Valleys, which is It's kinda like the get. If you go to Antarctica, you hang out at McMurdo. Dry valleys is interesting because they've had no precipitation for like ten thousand years. So you're in Antarctica, but It looks like you're in the desert.

People don't know this. There's places in Aranarica where there's no snow. Where we were was kinda mixed, you get glaciers and you get rock. So we go Have this incredible meal with this crew that's there. We're drinking whiskey out of ice that's these little shot glasses they make out of the ice there, that's fifty thousand years old.

Isener drinks it's fifty thousand years old. There's a beach there next to the so we're like sitting on the beach. Tony's playing music as he always would. He would be like the DJ we drink Shoot a little, play Frisbee, shoot the shit, talk. Just kinda soak it up. It's like You know, bright sunlight. Twelve at night.

He was playing specifically, he was playing gin and juice. I remember that. Ha And we're all just having a great time. We go to sleep, camp out next to the glacier there, and wake up the next morning, and the next morning we were just gonna shoot B roll. And we get picked up by a helicopter, right? Uh an A star. was piloted by a pilot who had been flying Apaches and Cobras

in Afghanistan and then you know got to go down and and be one of these pilots on the ice. But when you're a pilot down there, basically all you do is You either pick up human waste and shuttle it back to McMurdo from these uh substations, or you're like Ferrying scientists and samples back and forth. Like you don't really get to do a lot of fun stuff, but then we're like the the rock and roll crew that comes in. And we get this pilot who's just hot to trot and You wanna go see some shit and we're like, Yeah, we wanna go see some shit.

And just took us on a tour of all the craest Shit that he could get to within fuel range of that substation and You know, we're flying through these canyons and no one's ever been in.

It'll fly you up to a cliff that's two thousand feet high. The scale of Antarctica cannot be described. You'd be like we'd be on this cliff that's two thousand feet high, looking down into a valley where you could easily fit Manhattan. With room. And standing in a place where no human beings ever been.

Pop back in the helicopter and then he'd do some crazy drop off the cliff where you're like weightless for a second and go fly around and Going through canyons and just everything you ever wanted to do if you ever had a helicopter and a Apache pilot to yourself, you know? And we're filming and filming, filming and Eventually we need fuel. We stop at this refueling station, there's intermittent refueling stations around

And we're sitting there. And You know, surrounded by fifty five gallon drums of jet fuel. And these three folks come out and they are the people who work at the refueling station and their job is to be out there all season long. Refueling choppers.

Pretty lonely. You know, out there. You I mean you are literally at that point, you are living on hot. And They come out with these pulled pork sandwiches. Like they made pulled pork sandwiches for us. And we're so we're sitting there. Drinking warm coffee.

Eating pole pork sandwiches. Over a fifty five gallon drum of jet fuel. The helicopter's still hot. And just had this moment of like, this is it, man. This is the top for this particular thing that I'm gonna do in my life, this particular journey. Nothing is gonna get any

Cooler. Than this. Nothing is gonna get any more singular, inaccessible, or like Amazing to be able to Do those things and see those places.

and to hope to be able to capture enough of that in an organic enough way. that it would translate some of what that journey was to people at home who like Will never be as lucky as I've been to stumble into this thing and to be able to hang out and hang on and And get to that place. That was it, man.

I don't know. It feels kinda selfish to tell that story in a way because Oh, look at the you know, look at the awesome fucking thing that I got to do. But I actually don't mean it that way. I actually mean like I hope that what we did at the end of the day. Was be able to bring some of that back and show people

What is out there. It is vast and beautiful and extraordinary. And So much bigger than our little daily, you know, kind of day to day context. And not trying to belittle or trivialize that, but

There's something very freeing about the humility that comes with like those massive spaces and being able to say like no one's ever stood here this ice is fifty thousand years old or This is timeless. This goes so much deeper and beyond me. I hope that maybe everyone gets to experience some degree of that at some point in their life because

I I think it's really important. To be able to feel small. And ultimately that Is what the show did, I guess, for me and like The best way is Give me a perspective on what this world really is.

FYI. We should fucking take care of it. And don't be so goddamn afraid of other people. I keep telling people. What I saw out there, seven continents, seventy countries. And a lot of hairy moments, you know, and a lot of beautiful moments and a lot of whatever I

Ninety nine percent of the people that we encountered were just beautiful, awesome people that wanted to Take us into their homes and feed us. And share their life with us and tell us who they were. And

That's the truth of what's out there. There's a lot of othering that goes on in this world and like They're not. Same concerns, same people. All of them.

Same shit we're trying to do. Same. I don't know if that makes sense. That is. That makes perfect sense. And that I could not have scripted a better place to end. And I'm glad that uh there's no scripting involved, man. It's uh The perfect place to wrap up. Mo, it's so nice to see you again. Yeah, man.

Hopefully we can hang out in person at some point here too. Oh, I would love that. I would love that. And people can find you on Twitter at Diamond Mo Fallon. And we already got the Mo Bart. F A L L O N. Instagram Fallon.morgan. Facebook Morgan.fallon. three one and uh zero point zero you can find all spelled out zero point zero dot com. Yeah, come be uh another one of my uh disappointed and frustrated social media followers. Ha ha ha. I don't do great on social media. Oh, that is the perfect way to get people to look at your social brilliant.

Yeah. Genius. Absolutely genius. And really appreciate you and what you do in the world and the ruggedness and rigor. that you bring to what is both incredibly Artistic, but and I saw this when we were working together, also very tender. And and human. It's a gift that you help bring to the world. So thank you for

Shit. I mean that's it's an incredible compliment coming from you and everything that you do and and bring and I I think you bring that same humanity to everything that you do. A real marker of your success. So I I mean listen, I'm humbled, man, by the whole Thing. So thank you. Yeah. Thanks to you, man. And we'll we'll get together, have some coffee.

Maybe go mountain biking on something that isn't like uh forty five degree single single track. And uh I'll let you get to the daddy long legs and for everybody listening for links to everything we discussed, everything we talked about, and more. I will put that all in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. And until next time. Be just a little bit kinder than you think is necessary, and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out. every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.

Thanks for listening. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me in the last few years. I've come to conclude it is the end all be all that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Flux mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste.

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