BONUS The Friday Show - Birds of a Feather
Guest:Kevin Nash, who was like NWO guy, you know, big sexy.
Guest:He was Diesel in the WWF.
Guest:And he came over, and he was sort of running the locker room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We took a break and walked out, and he goes, you're a musician.
Guest:He goes, are you gay?
Guest:And, you know, this is the first, like, second day in.
Guest:And I'm sort of like, I said, yeah, I am, Kev.
Guest:Is that going to be a problem?
Guest:He goes, nah.
Guest:I have a lot of gay friends.
Guest:You smoke pot?
Guest:Like, yeah, sometimes.
Guest:Like sushi?
Guest:Like, hell yeah.
Guest:He goes, yeah.
Guest:Right on, brother.
Guest:You're riding with us.
Guest:Hey, Friday Show listeners, it's Brandon.
Guest:How are you?
Guest:It's not a normal week for us here.
Guest:I am on spring break with my family.
Guest:So I'm recording this from inside my car because it's the only quiet place that I have while on vacation.
Guest:You might hear some nice chirping birds outside, which is pleasant for you.
Guest:And unlike golf broadcasts, I didn't dub them in.
Guest:They are real birds.
Guest:Chris is also not available this week.
Guest:He is traveling for work, finds himself in the Midwest.
Guest:I believe he is currently the Sausage King of Chicago, has been to Wrigley Field, is doing the whole thing.
Guest:Got some nice pictures from Chris of the L trains.
Guest:Love Chicago.
Guest:Love that Chris is hanging out there.
Guest:But he is unfortunately not able to be with us this week.
Guest:And so because of that, we took care of you ahead of time.
Guest:We recorded some more questions and answers today.
Guest:When you sent in questions last week, there's a whole batch of them that we didn't get to.
Guest:So we recorded those and we're going to bring those to you in a minute.
Guest:And then after that, for you wrestling fans out there, I have something that I dug into our archives to find.
Guest:You know, we told you about all the wrestling oriented episodes that Mark has done over the past 14 years with guests like Mick Foley, CM Punk, Colt Cabana.
Guest:uh what i did is i went back and found some things that we haven't mentioned that you might not know are wrestling oriented episodes but they are and we will get to those in just a little while but first let's go to the questions chris and i recorded last week as well as my answers to those questions and these all came from you our listeners when i asked you to send us stuff that you're interested in knowing and we would do our honest best to answer them
Guest:to this day when people recommend the podcast they say you can skip the first 10 minutes but the person does say which is dumb what's your response since you edit the whole thing
Guest:Well, first of all, I like that they asked this question because I think about it all the time.
Guest:And I don't think it's dumb, to be honest with you.
Guest:I'm not slighting the person who wrote that question.
Guest:Like, if they think it's dumb, that's cool.
Guest:But I don't think it's dumb or weird that someone who's newly dipping into the show would be like, oh, you can skip that part where he's talking.
Guest:That's fine.
Guest:Like, that's, to me, is the whole point of a podcast.
Guest:You listen to whatever you want on the thing.
Guest:It's on demand.
Guest:It's at your discretion.
Guest:And it's like, you don't have to like everything at the circus.
Guest:You don't have to stick around if you don't like the trapeze and you're just there for the lion or whatever.
Guest:Like, it's fine.
Guest:And I've always thought the whole point of having those 10 minutes there is not for the person who's just joining for the first time and they want to, you know...
Guest:looking to dip in and want to skip it.
Guest:But it's like when you come back and you come back again and you come back again, if you're hearing that stuff over and over again, well, that is what builds a loyal audience, right?
Guest:Like the connection that the person will form with this host.
Guest:And I got to tell you, I see it more and more now than I ever did before.
Guest:Getting emails from people that say, you know, I don't always listen to your guest, but I do check in with every episode just to hear the first 10 minutes.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Right.
Guest:More than ever before, because that relationship has been cultivated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Between Mark and the listener.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's I mean, it's it's like it's what all media is these days is a is is a certain form of parasocial relationship.
Guest:And how do you want to engage with that?
Guest:So I don't have any problem ever with people skipping an episode, a part of an episode, these Friday shows, the Tuesday shows, anything.
Guest:Do whatever you want.
Guest:That's literally why I'm doing this right now, where I'm like, hey, if you want us to do stuff that's more oriented toward WTF type of stuff, I'll do that.
Guest:If you want to listen to it, great.
Guest:If you stop listening to it, we'll stop doing it.
Guest:That's the whole point of this.
Guest:If people had stopped listening to WTF...
Guest:Ten years ago, we might have emerged doing something.
Guest:OK, we should just do a straight up interview show.
Guest:Forget about Mark.
Guest:Forget about your cats or anything like that.
Guest:You know, nobody wants to hear that stuff.
Guest:But that never happened.
Guest:And so why should I stop?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was there ever a consideration for you to just do like WTF, just the interviews?
Yeah.
Guest:Not as a podcast, but we were constantly being pitched with the idea of putting it on television.
Guest:And then it actually happened once with Vice and we filmed a pilot.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And Mark and I thought it stunk.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we said, this isn't great.
Guest:And then the guests, they were presenting us for future episodes.
Guest:We were like, this doesn't line up with the way we do this.
Guest:And we backed out.
Guest:Because it just wasn't working.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I didn't know that.
Guest:All right, next question.
Guest:What are the interviews that needed the most editing?
Guest:I think Mark mentioned years ago that the Fiona Apple interview sounded significantly less focused when it was recorded.
Guest:Yeah, that's true.
Guest:And people have asked me this before.
Guest:I think I did an article for Vulture about it.
Guest:Somebody asked me about the... They're doing a series of the hardest things you've ever produced as a producer.
Guest:And the Fiona Apple one is the only one I'm ever comfortable with saying specifically by name that that one was hard because she said it.
Guest:She went on Twitter...
Guest:I can't remember where, but somewhere when that episode was posted, she, uh, made a comment that, that was, it was, uh, she, she couldn't believe that it turned into a listenable episode because she found that she was, she thought she was like, I thought I was all over the place.
Guest:I thought it made no sense.
Guest:And, uh, she was right.
Guest:Uh,
Guest:And so it was a tricky one to edit, but it happened.
Guest:And I'd say that has happened in that level of difficulty maybe 15, 20 times.
Guest:So out of 1,400 plus, not a ton of times.
Guest:But there have been some very labor-intensive episodes just because –
Guest:I'm trying to make the person sound somewhat coherent without altering what they're intending to say.
Guest:That's the big thing.
Guest:You're not trying to put words in somebody's mouth, right?
Guest:But you also don't want it to be an unlistenable experience.
Guest:So my standard response has been the Fiona Apple one is the only one I feel comfortable saying this about because the other people- She said it first.
Guest:Right, and the other people, like, it's not their fault, right?
Guest:Like, I don't feel like it's, I'm not comfortable being like, oh, that person, they didn't talk great.
Guest:Well, no, it's more just that they talk the way they talk.
Guest:And then I, as a producer, made it sound more, you cleaned it up.
Guest:I cleaned it up.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:That's the only way to say it.
Guest:It's like, you see it all the time in print interviews, right?
Guest:It says, this interview has been edited for clarity.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:All the time.
Guest:And that's all I'm doing there with that.
Guest:I guess I don't feel it's out of line for me to say, because if you listen to it, it's probably pretty clear that the recent episode with Courtney Love was very similar.
Guest:That was hard.
Guest:But I also, it was mostly hard from the sense of not cleaning it up to a point of totally sanitizing it.
Guest:I needed to make sure Courtney stayed in that interview, right?
Guest:It had to sound like Courtney Love and the brain of Courtney Love, but it also couldn't be just tremendously confusing to the listeners, which it was if you listened to it in the raw audio.
Guest:Oh, interesting.
Guest:So that Courtney Love interview is episode 1395 and Fiona Apple way back in 297, episode 297.
Guest:Yeah, that's a long time ago.
Guest:That is a long time ago.
Guest:My God, you've been doing this a while.
Guest:Suggestions on equipment to start recording and editing while on a budget.
Guest:Well, listen, if you're on a budget, there's a lot.
Guest:Basically, you can just Google, you know, best podcast equipment on a budget and whatever.
Guest:If you don't mind laying out a few hundred dollars for this thing that's going to be your hobby, right?
Guest:Maybe you're just doing it for a hobby and that's how much you want to invest in your hobby.
Guest:The thing you have to invest in is the microphones.
Guest:Like literally right now, the mic I'm talking on is not a great mic.
Guest:And I don't love it, but it's also the... You know, I never intended to become a podcaster, and I'm just doing this as bonus content.
Guest:If for some reason this grows and stays and it's a viable thing for a long time, I will get the exact mics that Mark has in the garage, which are Shure SM7s, and those are the best ones, and you shouldn't do any less.
Guest:Like, I'm doing it on a lesser mic right now, and I...
Guest:I wouldn't do that.
Guest:I wouldn't recommend that.
Guest:And so I would say, you know, invest where you can in great mics.
Guest:And the Shures are great.
Guest:S-H-U-R-E.
Guest:In terms of audio software, get anything.
Guest:There's plenty of free audio editing software.
Guest:Mark uses one just to press record and ingest the thing.
Guest:Audacity.
Guest:Mark uses Audacity.
Guest:And he used to use GarageBand, right?
Guest:And any of those things are fine if you're just recording spoken word.
Guest:podcasts.
Guest:You don't need anything more complicated than that.
Guest:I use Adobe Audition, which costs about, I think, like 300, 400 bucks for the Adobe Creative Cloud suite.
Guest:But I use that because it's what I'm most comfortable with as an audio editor.
Guest:I've been using it back when it was called Cool Edit.
Guest:Good old Cool Edit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, Chris, you used that, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So yeah, that's just my comfort level with that.
Guest:If you're comfortable using Pro Tools, use Pro Tools.
Guest:There's like way too much on Pro Tools that I would ever need to use.
Guest:But if that's what you're comfortable with, use it.
Guest:But if you're talking about doing it on a budget, just get free audio editing software.
Guest:How do you agree on guests to interview and is scheduling them for impact something you consider?
Guest:Scheduling them for impact.
Guest:Oh, you mean like schedule?
Guest:I guess this person means like, do we schedule them in a strategic way, like to make an impact?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Although I would say that the biggest consideration we give is if someone has given us their time because they have a project coming out, we'll line it up with the project, right?
Guest:Like we don't want to, you know, use their time and what they've given us as an interview and then tell them that they're
Guest:the thing that they're promoting isn't worth it to us, right?
Guest:So that's generally how we will line these things up.
Guest:But strategically, sure, like I will always make sure, even if it's not about the scheduling that we have to do yet, if it's about the scheduling of upcoming bookings to make, I will talk to our booking team and say,
Guest:I want us to get somebody of a kind of strong name value within the next two or three weeks because we maybe have not had one.
Guest:And we need to kind of continuously have names that are recognizable to listeners that might not know our show, might be lapsed.
Guest:from our show and that's what keeps the show going 14 years in is that we have a very regenerative audience right you might lose some people but then you gain people you gain people because you had austin butler from elvis on and he has a huge fan base of people who had no idea what this show was much like the wrestling it's the same thing
Guest:Man, I love that Austin Butler episode.
Guest:I know you do.
Guest:Yeah, that's a great thing.
Guest:You're a perfect example, Chris, because to me, that Austin Butler episode was a very similar episode to several others that we've had in terms of the kind of guy he is and the stuff that they talked about and grief.
Guest:And you might not have heard those episodes, but you heard that Austin Butler one and you were like, that was so great.
Guest:And like that bullseye.
Guest:Like that's exactly why every once in a while we get somebody on who, you know, we know is going to have a broader name recognition than, you know, someone Mark knows from the comedy store who doesn't have a huge national profile.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Gotcha.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Next question.
Guest:Have the cats ever gotten into the studio and done damage?
Yeah.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I mean, they've gotten into the studio.
Guest:They've never done any damage.
Guest:In fact, I mean, the whole thing of Boomer Lives, you know, back when Boomer was alive, he came into the studio one time and was meowing.
Guest:And Mark picked him up and put him on the mic and had him meow into the mic.
Guest:And now, like, if you watched Marin, the IFC show, you know, our production company is called Boomer Lives Productions.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And at the end, we have the logo, Boomer Lives, with the illustration done by our artist, Dima, who does all the cat drawings for us.
Guest:We have Boomer's head, Boomer Lives, and then it does the like, meow, like the sound of the Boomer meow that he actually did on the mic when he came into the garage.
Guest:Follow-up question to that.
Guest:Any guests ever cancel slash refuse to come or have a sneeze attack due to severe cat allergies?
Guest:Oh, well, Mark has addressed this on the Ask Mark Anything questions once.
Guest:He almost killed Ed Helms.
Guest:Killed dead.
Guest:Because Ed had a severe cat allergy and didn't know it.
Guest:I didn't know there were cats in the location.
Guest:And it was at a time before Mark was like, you know.
Guest:It was early on.
Guest:I think if you look up that episode, Chris, it's got to be in the hundreds, I think.
Guest:It was not that long into the run of the show.
Guest:And go back and listen to that.
Guest:Halfway through, you start to hear Ed getting stuffy, and he's getting a little wheezy like that.
Guest:And he's like, do you have a cat in here?
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:And Mark's like...
Guest:Well, not in here, but oh, and at the time, I think there was an air vent that went that was not independent.
Guest:The air vent into the garage went into Mark's house.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:I think that's what it was.
Guest:You were literally killing him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like there's cat dust being sprayed into the garage.
Guest:And by the end of it, this guy was wheezing and like Mark totally should have ended the interview, but didn't.
Guest:And you hear the results of that ever since then.
Guest:Well, first of all, at that location, he wound up changing the duct system.
Guest:And so it was no longer connected to the house.
Guest:He also put an air purifier out there in the garage so that we didn't have that happening anymore.
Guest:But we did have people who came over who knew about the cat situation and were like, there can't be any cats around.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Van Zandt was, he was like, I'm, I'm fatally allergic to cats.
Guest:Oh, funny.
Guest:I cannot have any cats around.
Guest:So, uh, that was one I specifically remember.
Guest:Uh, but there was no issue because we didn't have cats and the garage was clean at that time.
Guest:Ah, awesome.
Guest:Uh, that Ed Helms episode, episode 165.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I knew it was very early.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He plays the banjo at the end of it, even, even though he was dying.
Guest:Unbelievable.
Guest:What a, what a man, what a showman.
Yeah.
Guest:before i uh jump off this mortal coil here's a dude for you that's how we all should go do what you like yeah uh all right next question have you considered a contest where the winner gets to sit in on an interview uh yes we have and we decided do not do that
Guest:uh no because you know we we talked about it people come to us all the time with like charity contest stuff and we did a contest we allowed a guy to come to uh meet mark and be there for like the recording of uh his intro and and stuff but we
Guest:The guest thing is, it's the same, like, it would be really weird for us to say yes to that, come sit down on a guest interview, right, when we don't allow guests to bring anyone into the interview with them, right?
Guest:Like, Mark's whole thing is...
Guest:You cannot have an observer effect taking place, right?
Guest:That's why we don't have any cameras.
Guest:That's why we make sure that publicists can't come in.
Guest:That's why if someone brings a spouse or whatever, they sit in the house or on the porch.
Guest:Because when you add another person, there is always the impulse to play to that other person.
Guest:Right.
Guest:whether it's a, a stranger or a loved one or a colleague, you know, Mark talks about how, when he used to work with us on the radio, he was always playing to us in the booth or you at the soundboard, you know, and especially with people who are performers, they're going to do that.
Guest:And I think, you know, the, the episode that put our show on the map was Robin Williams.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, um, Mark, um,
Guest:And he's I would say he's absolutely right.
Guest:The reason why that was a groundbreaking interview and it got a lot of attention and people still to this day talk about it.
Guest:And the Library of Congress has put it in their National Historic Registry.
Guest:is because they were the only ones there.
Guest:There was no one else around, just the two of them.
Guest:And if you ever saw Robin Williams on any talk show or any kind of interview where there's a camera, he's playing to it.
Guest:He turns into the genie.
Guest:And that didn't happen in that talk.
Guest:It was just two guys talking about life, talking about being comedians, talking about their fears and their anxieties.
Guest:And it's what made everyone take notice of the show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that is episode 67.
Guest:Robin Williams.
Guest:If you haven't tuned into that one, just check it out.
Guest:It's a really great one.
Guest:I love Mark's intro to it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a banger, as they say.
Guest:Well, it definitely changed our lives.
Guest:And I wouldn't have the life I have now were it not for Robin Williams.
Guest:One of my great regrets is that I never personally met the man to thank him for doing our show.
Guest:Let me bring the music down here.
Guest:Let me bring the music down because he's chirping birds.
Guest:Can you hear him?
Guest:Yeah, that's them, chirping away, making sure that I don't have a clean audio track on here.
Guest:That's okay, though, because we're here to just present some audio that already exists, but that if you're a wrestling fan who joined up to the full Marin when we did the AEW series, or you've just heard about some of this wrestling content that we've been doing, what you might not know is that there are episodes in the back catalog that have some good wrestling stuff in them.
Guest:You just might not know that from the title.
Guest:So, for instance...
Guest:Episode 524 with Bob Mould.
Guest:Bob Mould.
Guest:Do you know who Bob Mould is?
Guest:Maybe you know him from Husker Du.
Guest:You should.
Guest:Or from Sugar, his band, which is awesome.
Guest:I love Sugar.
Guest:Bob Mould also has the claim to fame of being the guy who made the Daily Show theme song.
Guest:But one thing that not a lot of people know is that for a period of time...
Guest:He was a writer and producer at World Championship Wrestling, WCW, back during the Monday Nitro days.
Guest:So Mark and Bob were talking about all sorts of things having to do with Bob's life.
Guest:And here was the section in which they talked about Bob's time as a wrestling producer at WCW.
Guest:In August of 99, I got a call to go work at Pro Wrestling.
Marc:What?
Guest:Yeah?
Marc:Do you not know about this?
Marc:I mean, I think I saw a little, but I forgot.
Marc:I'm glad you brought it up.
Guest:Oh, man.
Marc:Are you a big pro wrestling guy?
Guest:Yeah, that was my thing as a kid.
Guest:You know, kids like baseball, kids like comic books.
Guest:Well, you like KISS.
Guest:So I was like pro wrestling, KISS, spectacle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, you know.
Guest:How did you get that call?
Guest:A friend of mine named Gary Jester worked at a company called World Championship Wrestling.
Guest:And that was the TBS Turner AOL Time Warner Wrestling.
Guest:They were the direct competitor to Vince McMahon and WWF at the time.
Guest:And they were having a shakeup in the creative side.
Guest:And I had been giving them ideas all throughout the 90s.
Guest:And they knew that I knew the business.
Guest:And they said, why don't you come in and be a creative consultant?
Guest:So I got in there.
Guest:They just knew you knew as a fan?
Guest:Yeah, they knew that I was smart.
Guest:I'd gotten smartened up.
Guest:I knew how it all worked.
Guest:And they were looking for scripts?
Guest:They were looking for new ideas, something fresh, something different.
Guest:So I went down there and just got thrown into the lion's den, and it was amazing.
Guest:It was a really amazing time.
Guest:And it worked?
Guest:um it worked as best as best i could there was a lot of things that derailed my ideas other people came in and i did not have seniority or power i was just this guy who had really good handwriting uh-huh could produce a show on the fly yeah good with math good with you know kept my head down said yes sir no sir and
Guest:But you had a good time.
Guest:I had a great time.
Guest:I mean, man, that's a whole separate book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it was really, really, really great stuff because, you know, I got there like they brought me in on a Sunday night for a pay-per-view and I watched it in the production truck with the new boss.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he's like, what do you think of this?
Guest:What do you think of that?
Guest:What do you think of this?
Guest:I said, well, this should have gone longer.
Guest:You don't want to really expose that guy's weaknesses.
Guest:This storyline could work, but I'm not really sure it makes sense.
Guest:And so they're like, okay, so come to Monday Nitro tomorrow and meet with Hogan.
Guest:So they put me in a room with Hogan right off the bat, the shrewdest politician in the business.
Guest:And were you a fan?
Guest:I was a fan of the business.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To be nice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, I'm talking with Hogan.
Guest:I'm running this idea by him.
Guest:And, you know, he said, hmm, sounds good, brother.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All the time saying, who's this fucking Mark?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, you know, where'd this guy come from?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, I hung in there, stuck it out.
Guest:They found a spot for me.
Guest:And as it turns out, the job that I ended up with was working at my my showtime job was gorilla position.
Guest:And to explain what gorilla position is.
Guest:In the old days up in Northeast Wrestling, Vince Sr., Vince McMahon, they had a guy, Gorilla Monsoon, he was a wrestler.
Guest:And he was the one that would, in the old days before wireless and everything, during the matches, he would come down, he'd walk from the back to the ring, go down and just nod at the timekeeper and walk back.
Guest:And that was the signal for the guys in the ring to finish.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he would sit behind the curtain and give everybody their instructions.
Guest:So they call it the gorilla position.
Guest:So doing Monday Nitro, we're doing three hours of TV live every Monday night.
Guest:We would start at 8 Eastern.
Guest:WWF would start at 9 Eastern.
Guest:I'm sitting behind the curtain.
Guest:Our show with time code on the left side, their show with time code on the right side.
Guest:I'm sitting there with a script, 16 segments that we have to do in three hours and eight minutes, and we have to hit our marks.
Guest:So the first five segments, the first hour, segment six, we have to get on the air at 8.59 so that we can trump their hot open.
Guest:We trump their hot open.
Guest:We do all our ballyhoo and Hogan Ronan and all that shit.
Guest:So I'm sitting there.
Guest:I'm the last stop for all these guys to get their lines, their cues.
Guest:So I'm doing this, watching their show, so when they go on commercial, I get on a wireless mic and tell the refs, they're on break, speed it up, so that we try to do gimmick.
Guest:We're doing all this Zabada to keep people on our show.
Guest:The two networks are wrestling.
Guest:Yeah, we're competing, and I'm sending signals to the boys in the ring through the ref who's got a wireless.
Guest:That's hilarious.
Guest:Oh, yeah, it was nuts, the stuff that we did.
Guest:But it was a blast, right?
Guest:Oh, yeah, it was a blast and met great people, you know, just great people.
Guest:Kevin Nash, who was like NWO guy, you know, big sexy.
Guest:He was Diesel in the WWF.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he came over and he was sort of running the locker room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And at the first booking meeting, I sat in and I didn't say much, but I was taking good notes and keeping stuff straight for everybody.
Guest:We took a break and...
Guest:walked out and he goes you're a musician he goes are you gay and you know this is first like second day in and i'm sort of like uh i said yeah i am kev is that going to be a problem he goes nah i don't have a lot of gay friends you smoke pot like yeah sometimes like sushi like hell yeah he's
Guest:right on brother you're riding with us the initiation yeah it was just and then we were you know it was like a group of us yeah sushi pot talking sitting up till three in the morning in the hotel talking old 70s detroit wrestling with the chic and bobo brazil and oh my god so you're really crazy shit like you know
Guest:Yeah, Bobby Shane, the original king of wrestling in Florida.
Guest:Crazy, you know, watch the donkey matches in Amarillo in 58 and all this shit, you know, gimmicks, you know, try to come up with shit.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, I interviewed, I don't know a lot about wrestling, but I interviewed Punk, CM Punk.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And, you know, he's a great guy.
Marc:And I saw that documentary, Beyond the Mat.
Oof.
Marc:It's tough.
Marc:What's that guy's name?
Guest:Jake Roberts?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, Jake, he's totally turned his life around.
Guest:That's amazing.
Guest:One of the other ex-wrestlers, this guy Diamond Dallas Page, came up with this yoga thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he also, like, Jake was one of his mentors in the old days, and he brought Jake out to Atlanta to live with him, and they started filming it like a reality thing, and he got him clean.
Guest:He's got him clean and sober.
Guest:He looks great.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And Jake was one of the best minds in the business.
Guest:It was sad to watch that movie, but he's turned it all around.
Guest:That's amazing.
Guest:Mick Foley, Terry Funk.
Guest:He used to work with Terry Funk.
Guest:Mick's a great guy.
Guest:Yeah, Mick is... I've met Mick a couple times.
Guest:Yeah, he's a sweetheart.
Guest:Yeah, really good writer, really great, just does a lot of fun stuff for kids.
Marc:My partner, Brendan, in this thing, in WTF, he grew up with the wrestling thing, so he knows all about it, and he gets real excited about it.
Guest:Yeah, Punk's a good guy.
Guest:I never met him.
Guest:I...
Guest:I knew about him back in 2001.
Guest:You know Cold Cabana?
Guest:Yeah, I know Cold.
Guest:He's got a podcast.
Marc:Art of Wrestling.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And he modeled it after this show.
Marc:Excellent.
Marc:And I interviewed him when I was up in Chicago.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And he told me about that whole independent wrestling thing and...
Guest:Well, you know, punk was like straight edge, like, you know, the X on the hand, like Discord, minor threat, DC punk rock.
Marc:So, yeah, it's all good.
Marc:Yeah, it is very, the spectacle of it, the show of it, the people that love it really love it.
Marc:And it's one of those things that I just, like, I think I'm a little too old to lock into, but I definitely appreciate that people really fucking dig it.
Guest:it bums me out when people like oh that's fake it's like well no it's predetermined yeah it's choreographed it involves complete and absolute trust in the person you're doing all this crazy shit with because they could accidentally drop you on your head and kill you yeah and it's like it's like cirque de soleil meets like shakespeare no these morality plays exactly that's what it is you've got your you've got your face and you've got your uh you got babies and heels yeah yeah
Guest:Okay, two more episodes I wanted to highlight here are from big-time wrestling fans who just happen to be talking to Mark and bringing up that they love wrestling.
Guest:And one is Kieran Culkin, episode 1150.
Guest:This was done during the pandemic.
Guest:We talked to Kieran over Zoom.
Guest:And the whole Culkin family apparently were huge wrestling fans.
Guest:Used to see Macaulay on TV at wrestling shows all the time.
Guest:They'd make sure to get him on camera during the Home Alone days because it was a big get to have him in the crowd.
Guest:But Kieran talks about their shared love and, in fact, divulges one interesting bit of information about his family life and a past guest of ours.
Marc:Aren't you guys all wrestling freaks, too?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:That's, yeah.
Guest:Big, big wrestling fan.
Guest:And I've been the one that's been consistently a wrestling fan, whereas the others have sort of been in and out.
Guest:But they're kind of obsessive.
Marc:How long have you been into the wrestling?
Guest:Since WrestleMania V, probably, when the Mega Powers collided.
Guest:Mid-80s, I would say, mid to late 80s.
Guest:And then when the Ultimate Warriors, his rise to fame, when he took on Hulk Hogan, when it was champion, you know, WrestleMania VI, of course.
Marc:Were all you guys into it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then like, you know, one by one, like my brother Shane, I think when he was probably something like 13, there was a character named The Undertaker who showed up.
Guest:And I remember him looking at the cover of WWF magazine.
Guest:He goes, are we supposed to believe that this man is actually dead?
Guest:This is stupid.
Guest:And he threw down the magazine and that was his exit from wrestling.
Guest:Like he felt like his intelligence was being insulted.
Marc:That was the line, huh?
Marc:You're not going to, there are no zombies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's undead.
Guest:There's a guy carries an urn and that's his source of power.
Marc:This is stupid.
Marc:What do you like?
Marc:What do you think you, what do you think locked you into it?
Marc:Do you just like the spectacle of it or the stories?
Guest:It's my favorite form of escape.
Guest:Really?
Guest:There's nothing, there's, I've never watched a wrestling, so sometimes I'll watch a TV show.
Guest:And I can't fully escape.
Guest:I watch wrestling and I'll never go, oh, that's exactly like what I'm dealing with in my life.
Guest:There's just never, oh, I really relate to this character because his struggles are like, it just will never be that.
Guest:And it's a lot, you actually probably know this because I was going to ask you, have you been watching wrestling since your show?
Marc:Not really.
Marc:You know, I've talked to wrestlers over the years.
Marc:Like, you know, I've interviewed, you know, we used to have Mick Foley.
Marc:Mick Foley is amazing, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, because he used to, when I used to do political radio over at Air America, you know, he's a very active guy.
Marc:He does a lot of causes and a real sweet guy.
Marc:But, you know, he walks in.
Marc:He's huge.
Marc:He lumbers in.
Marc:He's just beaten.
Marc:He's almost disfigured most of the time.
Marc:He's hobbled.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But he was a real deal.
Guest:He's missing an ear and a few teeth.
Marc:But in terms of the show, in terms of research, it was never my thing as a kid, but I did learn from these guys.
Marc:And I also talked to Colt Cabana, who does that kind of old school, kind of retro independent wrestling, which is like no frills.
Guest:The story is within the match, whereas what you watch on TV, it's episodic, it's a soap opera, and you get a story that leads to the match, whereas if you go to an indie show...
Guest:The story is being told without words, just in the ring, you know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So I learned about that stuff and I talked to Chavo, the guy who trains the girls and his uncle was a big wrestler guy.
Marc:So I talked to them on set, but, you know, and I learned about the heel and I learned about the dynamics of it.
Marc:And I had to in the last season, I did a little reffing.
Marc:But it was never my thing, but I certainly understand and respect it because before I did Glow, I would dismiss it.
Marc:And, you know, that's problematic because relatively smart people like yourself and my producer enjoy the wrestling.
Guest:Yeah, it's really easy to take a look because people's memories of it are still from the 80s.
Guest:These really coked up, ripped guys going, scream at the camera!
Guest:And like...
Guest:No one guy was actually a garbage man who was a wrestler.
Guest:It was just like kind of horseshit silliness in the 80s.
Guest:And it's easy to look at that and just see that and think that it's stupid.
Guest:But it's a lot less choreographed than people think.
Guest:It's a live performance sometimes in front of 20,000 people and on live television where they know the result, but they don't quite know how they're going to get there.
Guest:And you see them...
Guest:The thing that really interests people when they don't know it is the referee has a little thing in his ear talking to a director in the back, giving notes to them and making adjustments.
Guest:These are real athletes in a fake sport doing plays without words.
Guest:It's kind of amazing.
Guest:But when it's shit, it's the most embarrassing thing.
Guest:There are so many times weekly where I'm embarrassed to be a wrestling fan.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, because it's just like, that's not the stuff we like.
Guest:They think we like this crap.
Guest:I want to see the wrestling.
Marc:Like, for example?
Guest:Just the soap opera aspect of, like, I don't know, like, you stole my girl or something.
Guest:Sometimes the writers run out of ideas.
Guest:I had a feud once where somebody accidentally spilled coffee on the other, so he beat them up, and that's how they started to feud.
Guest:It was just stupid.
Marc:Or when it becomes more about the, you'd rather they do the acting without talking and just through wrestling as opposed to actually acting.
Guest:Yeah, stop it already.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, just fight.
Guest:Like, okay, I get it.
Guest:I actually fast forward now.
Guest:I'm like, oh, okay, so these guys are going to start having a feud.
Guest:Okay, and I'll just fast forward until the match happens.
Guest:Like, shut up.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Colt Cabana, I'll be enough in practice to change it after this podcast, but Colt Cabana is actually mine and my wife's safe room.
Yeah.
Marc:Is that true?
Marc:That's actually true.
Marc:Well, there you go.
Marc:I'm sure he'll be flattered somehow.
Guest:OK, and to close things out here, we have Rick Rubin.
Guest:Yes, that Rick Rubin, the record producer, the famous guru of music, Rick Rubin, the guy who was responsible in large part for mainstreaming hip hop with the Beastie Boys and Run DMC.
Guest:He is a lifelong wrestling fan.
Guest:And talk to Mark about why he thinks wrestling is still important today, perhaps maybe even more than it's ever been.
Guest:And so this is Rick Rubin from episode 1245.
Marc:It seemed like early on, you know, when talking about Steve Martin, too, that early on in in certainly in hip hop and whatever the sort of hybrid of punk and moving forward that.
Marc:And you've said it before that the idea of spectacle and the idea of putting on a show that sort of kind of evolved out of your love of wrestling was sort of like part of the hype that defined.
Marc:you know, who you were and also hip hop to a degree.
Marc:Where does wrestling, where do you stand with wrestling now?
Guest:Absolutely love it.
Guest:I watch more than eight hours every week.
Marc:More than eight hours?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Every week.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:There's a tremendous amount of pro wrestling on TV.
Marc:And you just love it.
Guest:I absolutely love it.
Guest:It's a really beautiful, fine art form.
Guest:It's storytelling taken to the next level.
Guest:It's beautiful.
Guest:It's beautiful.
Guest:It's American opera.
Marc:I was on a television show for three seasons about female wrestlers.
Guest:The Glow Show?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How was it?
Guest:How was the experience?
Marc:It was great.
Marc:I mean, I wasn't a wrestling guy.
Marc:And I'm not a wrestling guy in the show either.
Marc:I'm a film director who gets stuck with the job of making a wrestling show.
Marc:So I had to educate myself.
Marc:So I don't come at it.
Marc:When did you start loving wrestling?
Guest:Around the same time I started loving music.
Guest:Like very young.
Marc:And there's also all that rawness.
Marc:It's very punk rock in a way.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:It's definitely DIY crazy.
Guest:The stories they tell are reckless in a way that you don't get to see in the mainstream.
Guest:There'd be violence towards people in a completely inappropriate way on a regular basis.
Guest:But it makes sense because you're setting up bad guys and good guys.
Guest:So the bad guy has to do something really despicable to be a bad guy.
Guest:So they do some things that are really despicable.
Guest:But because it's like this hyper real, not real.
Guest:It's like you're not going to the movies.
Guest:They're not really characters.
Guest:They are, but they aren't.
Guest:It's like that line.
Guest:It's like where, what's real, what's not.
Guest:The fact that they work.
Guest:reality into it like if a guy gets hurt that becomes part of the storyline but then sometimes they say a guy gets hurt and he didn't get hurt it's it's only the storyline or sometimes like one of the characters gets divorced and then you like he might be getting divorced but maybe it's just story and you never know it's it's this like parallel reality always going on and it never ends and
Guest:And it goes on forever.
Guest:It's amazing.
Marc:So it's a perfect reflection of life in a controlled way for you.
Guest:I would say it's closer.
Guest:It's more honest.
Guest:It's the most honest form of information in our society.
Guest:Like pro wrestling is the most accurate representation of life.
Marc:Dude, like right now you've got heels in government.
Marc:Donald Trump was the biggest heel and the best heel that ever lived.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And by the way, in the WWE Hall of Fame, he's in the WWE Hall of Fame.
Guest:Makes sense.
Guest:It's like the best heel president has to be in the Hall of Fame.
Marc:But do you find it upsetting in any way that it's bleeding into our politics?
Guest:No, because it always did.
Guest:Now we see it.
Guest:I feel like the beauty of where we are now is it's always been wrestling.
Guest:It's always been wrestling.
Guest:Just now we know it.
Yeah.
Guest:It's like the curtain's been drawn back, and we see, oh, it's pro wrestling.
Guest:All this time, we thought it was real.
Marc:Was there ever a dream of yours to be like Vince McMahon?
Marc:Because, I mean, you funded some promotions.
Guest:Not like Vince McMahon, but I did invest in a wrestling company.
Guest:Also, all the things that I make, I make out of a desire as a fan of not being served.
Guest:And there was this window in time in pro wrestling
Guest:So when I was a kid, wrestling was great.
Guest:And then there was a second league called the NWA in the South.
Guest:And that was great.
Guest:And both leagues were kind of going along great for a long time.
Guest:And then the rock wrestling connection happened.
Guest:Do you know about this?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Cyndi Lauper.
Guest:When Cyndi Lauper got involved and it became more of a...
Guest:It changed.
Guest:It changed for a minute.
Guest:And in the success of it changing, it got very popular in that change more than it had ever been.
Guest:It went from like cable TV to network TV during that time because it got so popular.
Guest:The new audience was mostly kids, whereas before wrestling was it was kids, but it was everybody.
Guest:And it was sort of adult entertainment that kids loved.
Guest:Like horror movies were originally made for adults, but kids loved them.
Guest:And it's like that.
Guest:It's like genre exploitation movies, all of that kind of stuff, the harder stuff.
Guest:It's made for adults, but kids always love it because it's radical.
Guest:It goes past the back.
Guest:It breaks the rules.
Guest:It's taboo.
Guest:And then wrestling, in this moment of the Rock Wrestling Connection,
Guest:a lot of kids started watching and then they changed the nature of the stories and the characters to be more like kids superheroes and it became much more of a kids show much less you know guys hitting each other with chairs and bleeding all over the place because it was for kids and when that happened the nwa the southern league was still hard but then as wwe got more uh kid friendly
Guest:NWA, which always basically imitated whatever Vince did, then they followed suit.
Guest:And then everybody was doing wrestling for kids.
Guest:So I'm a hardcore wrestling fan for, you know, the craziness of it.
Guest:And now it kind of got dumbed down to be for kids.
Guest:So I supported a new league starting really just for the purpose of doing kind of old time, hardcore wrestling.
Guest:Blood and guts wrestling, life and death, and offensive wrestling.
Guest:The good kind, the real kind.
Guest:It's like dirty jokes.
Guest:I like dirty jokes.
Guest:If all jokes became clean, I might want to help somebody do dirty jokes, like support someone doing dirty jokes, just because they have to stay.
Guest:We need dirty jokes.
Marc:Yeah, they're still around.
Guest:Good, I hope so.
Marc:Well, so how how in terms of your feelings about wrestling and your feelings about music, what what about wrestling has contributed to how you perceive the world that you work in?
Marc:I mean, how do you what is important about music?
Marc:I just heard what you told me is important about wrestling, and it was very deep and very passionate and sort of thought out.
Marc:You know, and I understand all those reasons.
Marc:You know, it's a way of feeling alive and it's it's not it's a way of engaging in something that takes a lot of risks that you can't really take in life.
Marc:But also, you know, their story and there's characters and there's people you follow and you don't know what's real and what isn't.
Marc:I mean, that's that's all consuming.
Marc:That's an amazing world.
Guest:So the feeling of you can't believe what you're seeing, like you can't believe like sometimes you cannot believe what happens.
Guest:You cannot believe what happens.
Guest:When it's good, when it's good, you can't believe it.
Marc:You love it so much.
Guest:I do.
Guest:And those same emotions I'm interested in in music.
Guest:I'm interested in when you hear something,
Guest:If it can provoke an emotion, if it can make you cry, great.
Guest:If it can make you, if you can, if you, if it can make someone say, that's the worst thing I've ever heard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's pretty good.
Guest:It's like, it's like.
Guest:The worst.
Guest:The worst.
Guest:OK, I'll take it.
Guest:You know, not interested in it being mediocre.
Guest:Middle of the road.
Marc:So it's not really those are about that's about energy and about feelings and not about the spectacle of it.
Marc:But but that's what you sort of you get from wrestling is this ability to take it to the edge.
Guest:Yeah, it's an energetic feeling of you can't believe what you're, you know, nothing more exciting to me than listening to a piece of music and feeling like, well, I've never heard anything like this before or making me laugh, not because it's funny, but because it's gone so far.
Guest:You know, after all the music I've heard over the course of my life, someone can still put on something and I listen to it and it makes me laugh.
Guest:That's got power.
Guest:Okay, so once again, if you want to check those full episodes out, it's Bob Mould, episode 524, Kieran Culkin, episode 1150, and Rick Rubin, episode 1245.
Guest:Those are all in our archives, which you have full access to ad-free as full Marin subscribers.
Guest:And next week, we'll have a more live and in-person version of the Friday show.
Guest:Chris and I will be back in our usual command stations, and we'll talk to you then.
Guest:Have a great weekend.
Guest:Watch something fun, maybe even a little rest.