Mike Reese is one of the great comedy writers of our modern day. He's been on The Simpsons since the beginning. He worked on Carson, he worked on Alf back in the eighties, and he's worked on Despicable Me and many other movies too. But some of his best material is when he talks about his own life and his vacations to places like North Korea and even visiting the Titanic. This is a bit of optimism. Mike Reese, thanks for joining me on the podcast. You are famous to most people who will know you as one of the writers from the TV show ALF. You'd be surprised. Actually, most people probably more likely know you as being one of the original writers from the Simpsons. So most people when they go on vacation, they want to do something exotic. They think Hawaii, and if you're really adventurous, maybe Vietnam. But you, you and your wife, you decided we want to go on a vacation to see the Titanic. That's right, So what how did you even pull that off? Like that's not like a choice destination yet, So I don't know how far to back this up. My wife and I have been to one hundred and thirty four countries, and then things like that, like we've been to the North Pole, which is not a country, and we've been to Easter Island, which you think is three thousand miles in the middle of the sea, but it's considered chilly, so those don't count as countries. And we climbed by killing the jar. And I think what's significant about all these things is you don't want to do any of that. I don't enjoy any of this stuff, none of it's my idea. I have a wife who loves to travel, and I love my wife, and if I want to spend a vacation whe her, I have to do it in North Korea or live here or someplace like that. Mean this is the ultimate expression of love. I think, go to all these places that you don't want to go to. So Denise decides, I'd like to go see the Titanic. Correct, And you said, huh. We had a friend from lives outside of Seattle, and our friends know this is how we travel, this is the things we do. So he said, there's a guy in my neighborhood who's build submarines and takes them the dangerous places. And when I saw this, I thought of you, and so I'll give his name. His name is Stockton Run. Now I mean right, if that's your name, you are born to be an adventurer. And the guy he was a gent pilot and a rocket scientist, and now he built subs because his team is stocked and rushed. Oh for sure, exactly. That is the only qualification he's got, but it's a good one. He had no choice. So he built this sub And the first place we went with him was off of Staten Island. That was the first Exotic protocol Saton Island. And he took us down to something called the Hudson Canyon. And these subs are about the size of a van, and there's the interior space is like an suv with the seats ripped out. The guy's never heard of chairs, so you just sit on the floor of the sub and one side of it is a big window like a washing machine. Then you go down and you look out. And so we went down to Hudson cant. Hutson Canyon is like the Grand Canyon underwater off of Staten Island. We went a thousand feet down and then we came up and then he goes, well, congratulations, you're the first people to ever go into Hudson Canyon. It's like, what you're testing your sub on us. I want to go where people look then before. So that was it. I am the Neil Armstrong or the buzz Aldron of a Hudson Canyon. And again I don't want to be I don't. Now he's decided he's going to go to see the Titanic. Now listen to Hudson Canyon. That was a thousand feet down. The Titanic is twenty five times step two and a half miles steep. How long did it take to go down twenty five thousand feet two and a half hours. Yeah, it's two and a half miles of just dropping. This is a funny thing if anyone's interested what these subs are like, because it's like if you drove your car into the ocean. I mean, that's all it is. They dunked the sub up the back of the boat and it just sinks, and it just sinks for two and a half hours, and there's nothing to see it just black man and here in me. You know, I could have died on this adventure, but said I fell asleep. I was so just bored there's nothing to do, and I fell asleep and we hit bottom and again we don't know where we are. You know, we started off right over the Titanic, but there's underwa occurrence and we're drifting and we had this sense we're five hundred yards away from the Titanic. It's the biggest thing in the world, but we can't find it. You know, it's like two city blocks away. And so we're cruising around the bottom of the ocean looking for the Titanic and just the main things exciting. There was a hurricane coming, Oh my god at sea level, so our time was very limited and by the time we got down to the bottom, we had like forty minutes to find the Titanic, look at it, and then get back up before a hurricane came in. So we're just nosing around looking for the thing. And then oh, there it is. We see the Titanic, and our time was on short. We just got the greatest hits. I mean, I didn't like this because we weren't exploring. We were like tourists. It's like, oh, there's where Leo DiCaprio stood, and there's the anchor, and here's the funnel that fell over and you know, we got like three great photographs and then had to go back up. So that was it. I saw the Titanic in hindsight, even though you didn't want to go. I mean, it was amazing, wasn't it. It's like you and James Cameron, like those are the only people who've seen the Titanic. That's it. You know. It was funny because we had all these experts on the boat and I was so hopeful, like, oh Am, I the first jud to visit the Titanic, and there was a Franchi expert on board. He goes, No, that was fred Ci Salim de Mitt and he went three years ago, so it's like I'm not even the first juke. And there was a Mexican guy at Orgos. Am I the first Mexican? Yes, you are so, I am, And I can state this categoric like I am the first alf writer to visit the Titanic. So you also casually mentioned just a moment ago and I caught it. Oh yet you went that you went to North Korea. Yeah, these, I guess are the two things that really impressed people. Are well, I need a for most of us, it's not even on our list, and b even if it was, we wouldn't even know where to begin on how to go, and it's not in the realm of reality. So you walk me through this, Denise decides, because I know it wasn't you. Yeah, I'd like it. North Korea, Yes, well it was funny. It was even. I woke up one morning, it is up early, and I see we get an email from some travel agent because we're on everybody's list, and it's at running tours the North Korea. And I saw the email and I deleted it, and then I deleted it from trash and uh because I didn't want Denise to see it. But then they wrote to her separately, so she saw it and we're going. And the story is North Korea is closed to everybody, right, except they do a thing called the Mass Games. They do this thing every year called the mass Games, and it's like the Olympics opening ceremony with no Olympics behind it, because they don't believe in Olympics, because Olympics are competition and we're communists, we don't compete. Gaultwork together. But they still stage this amazing spectacular that they are so proud of. They let the world it for three weeks you are allowed. And now they bet everybody who comes in at uh huh so to get in. You know, I'm filling out the forms and they said, don't say you're a writer. They don't want writers coming in. So and they don't like you. And you know, they've never seen a Jew, but they hear bad things. So I had to say I was a Catholic publicist to get into North Korea, and we hear back from them. And then the other scary thing is North Korea kidnaps visiting talent. I mean, yeah, so you know this story. They'll have a film festival, they'll welcome these sporl directors and then keep them there and force them to make movies for the regime. You know, North Korea is not scary enough. I might get kidnapped and forced to make propaganda cartoons, I guess, or do the North Korean version of Valves. So I say I'm a Catholic publicist and we hear back, no, you're not. They said, we went to China to go gulli you because you can't there's no Google in North Korea. We went to China to google you, and we found out what you do, and we know your career and you're still welcome to come, which to me means you're not worth of kidnapping, which so that was a good kind of art. So we went to North Korea. It's an extraordinarily managed tour and anyone who goes to North Korea gets the exact same tour. There were fourteen people in our group. We had seven full time minders. There is one hotel in the national capital, yeong Yang, and it's a big high rise hotel surrounded by a moat. It literally has a boat, so you go into the hotel at night, they pull up the drawbridge. There is no escaping your hotel. And so the fourteen people in our group were just like us. They were just very jaded world travelers. There was one guy in the group who's the most traveled man on Earth, and you think, wow, this is Stockton Ruts. It's some diplomat or some deepen air man. And he was just a slub. He's he was like a math teacher from Brooklyn, but he happens to be the man who's been everywhere. So you've got seven handlers staying in the tower of Pyongyang right surrounded by a moat and not and there's it's a three gay tour and I kinda say, if you can ignore the human suffering around you, it's a great trick. It's a real I mean, they really put together a terrific tour. You go visit different monuments that North Korea is just crazy with, you know, gigantic Stalinist monuments, and you go visit these things, and you take a river cruise and you have a lantern festival. The food is fantastic. My favorite part. They took us to an indoor circus. It's just in the theater that clearly had just been doing like Death of a Salesman, because on stage it's just this nineteen fifties living room set. But all these circus performers come out and they do the rest. And then this is my favorite part. A bear, an actual like a grizzly bear, comes out with an upright vacuum cleaner and vacuums the carpet. That's the closer. He's the bear is vacuuming this apartment and I'm looking to going it's doing a pretty good job, you know. But anyway, the whole point is we're there to see the mask games, and we go see this show. It is literally the most spectacular thing you've ever seen. Like fifty thousand people on the floor of this arena. It's an outdoor stadium, and you know, they're doing Vegas style numbers. There's nothing propagandistic about it. They're just doing know, they're all in salor costumes. And then ten thousand people leave the bild as ten thousand more come on. They're in hula hoops and they're doing hula hoops. And meanwhile, in the background across the stadium on the other side is ten thousand kids with cards doing those cards showns where the whole stadium holds up a card and makes a big picture of the countryside or a tractor or something like that. And that went NonStop at the same time. So you watch the show, it's amazing. It's ninety minutes to the second. And it was only when we're leaving the arena we see it's pouring rain. You know, the spectators are covered, but all those people who just put on the greatest show in the world did it in pouring rain. Wow, that was it. That's my trip to Korea. So do you actually see I mean, I have to ask do you actually see the human suffering because Pyongyang is pretty sterile, isn't it. It is night. Well again, it looks great. It's got an Arc de Triome right in the middle of it. It's got being filled it with infrastructure. There's ten lane eyeways everywhere, but nobody has a car. So in fact, our bus driver would you drive down the highway sigsdagging from left to right, just having fun because he add the highway to himself. Yeah, so they got that. They live in eye rises, but nobody has electricity, so it goes to Arca ny the whole city. It's a weird mix. They have a subway system that's built in the Stalinist way and Stolid built these subways with chandeliers and fine iron on the walls, and they've got that too. Oh so the suffering, yes, you would say. If people were there, they were really thin. And one day we took a ride to the country to see that the military and and you saw people just trudging trudging down the roads. Again thin people, and you didn't know where they were going, but you knew, oh, they're walking a long way to get something they need. So there is that. But I'll tell you another funny thing. One day, they just set us loose in a park and they have this giant public park in Kyongyang that's as lovely as any public park you've been to. And people were having fun. They were having picnics, you know, they don't just sit there being miserable all the time. And we saw a bunch of older women in kimonos, drunk out of their mind and they were having so much fun and they're dancing to traditional music and my wife is filming them, and then I get pulled into the dance. I'm dancing with old North Koreen women and were drug and that's where a guard comes up and covers the camera and it's like, dude, you shouldn't cover this. This is people having fun in North Korea. Were you were allowed to take pictures of anything you wanted or was it very controlled? It was very controlled. It was very managed. And it is funny. We have no good photos from that trip, so you have to maybe I'm making it all up and I never went North Korea. It's like the lunar landing. Probably shouldn't talk about a lunar landing because Denise will probably plan it. Oh yeah, Oh is that another thing she wants to do. Do Do she want to put you on one of the virgins or the one of the rockets that all of these guys are doing, like she hasn't said this, and I don't know if you know without Bet, I've told you this story. In twenty eighteen, Mars was as close to the Earth as it's ever going to get, and so they didn't somewhat, Oh, some billionaire had this idea, let's send a pro just to go out, fly her around Mars and come back, and we'll send someone to take pictures. And if you know my wife, she's the woman for the job. She takes more photos than like most security cameras. So they said that it was going to be a five billion dollar mission, and they wanted to send a middle aged childless couple into space to photograph Mars. And it was a middle aged shadowless couple because if they died, who cares, right, And that was their thinking, and they go, oh, a couple, an old couple will get a look. So we volunteer, we'll go to Mars. And it was just going to be five hundred days. And it capsuled me and Denise and Uh and we applied and we got Neil de grass Tyson to endorse us. It's just somebody we know from college. So Neil endorsed us, and we made it past the first cut. You know, that was it. We were We were headed for in the again at SUV for five hundred days. And the only thing that scared me was I knew we were gonna have to be trained medically, so they were gonna have to teach the niece how to take out my appendix in space if that came up. And I don't really love her cutting my air, so that would be a challenge. But but that was if we were gung ho. We were going to go into space and hopefully come back from space. And then the whole mission collapsed. This billionaire put up a billion dollars and nobody came up with the other five billions. Are you still writing TV at all? Oh? Yes, I still work at the Simpsons. I consult at the show a day a week, and that's a pleasure. And in fact, because of COVID, you know, I used to I live in New York and I used to fly to LA every Wednesday to work at the Simpsons and I would work a day and then I get on a red Eye and fly back to New York or North Korea or Australia, yeah, or wherever we're going for marsh. But with COVID the show has gone on to zoom. We worked on Zoo two and a half years, which means I can still keep my phony Bloch up, but I don't have to fly to La eight somzing. This has completely untathered us. So we've been traveling NonStop once the world opened up, and I every week and of Wednesday, I'll log in to soon work at the Simpsons and they go, where are you now? And I'll go, I'm in Peru, I'm in Tanzania. And that's it. I had now zoomed into work at the Simpsons from every continent of the world. Yeah, we have these wonderful little claims to fame, of which I know some not all. Yeah, but the Minions Dominions. Yeah, this is wonderful story of the first Minions movie, not the actual Menions. What was the which was the actual Despicable Me? Despicable Me. Right, there's this wonderful story I recall of the first Despicable Me where I think they asked you to consult on the script and you kept getting confused between it kept saying Minion one, Minion two. You kept getting confused which one was which. So that was it. I'm working on the script and I grew the Steve Carrell character. It's only just called boys today. We're going to do the boys even to dress the menuons, you know that way as a group. And I decided, well, let's let's pretend they're distinct. Now I couldn't tell the part. I mean, they just look like new print. They're just little and yellow, and they all look exactly the same. But it said, what if he dresses them all individually, and let's give but even though they're so weird, let's give them really boring white guy name. And I was doing this on the sly at the Simpsons and I look around. I go, well, here's a bunch of boring white guys. The Simpsons writer. So I just named them. I just had him go, Bob Stewart, Kevin, Phil jack Al, we've had a great time together. He saw no him and it's just Simpsons writers. And it was no big deal at the time, except when they started spinning off the minions to give them their own movies, and then they would you would see posters everywhere. Here's Kevin, this is Stewart. You know, Bob's on a big adventure, and I go, oh, these are just by friends from the Simpsons. So it wasn't supposed to stick. It was you just mucking about. It was just really a joke. I think I did twice in the original script, and you know, the name stuck, and then the names became characters. I love that. So a cartoon of Yellow People. The writers are now immortalized in the Cartoon of Yellow not People. One of them the three may Minions, the guys who carried the Minions franchise. One of them is named Kevin, and he's named after Simpence Riger Kevin Current, who has passed away. So this is his legacy. He lives on, He lives on his minion. I know, I know that Simpsons fans who are maybe listening would be mad at me for not asking a couple of things. Oh of cars. I'm sorry, and I'm sorry everyone said I put up with this. Yeah, I know. I like the North Korea stories. Do you have a favorite episode? You know? Uh? And I'm sure it's a question you get asked a lot, so yeah, you've had a lot of time to think about the answer. Right, there's a funny language is the show's been on now we're in we're writing our thirty fifth year. The show insane. It's insane. It is really crazy. You know. He grew up in a factory town and people worked in a factory, or they worked for an insurance company. And there were people there whose dads worked for the same company and eight for thirty five years, and I go, Wow, that's the life I want, and I got it at TV. I'm just one of these career lifers at The Simpsons. So I've been there for thirty five years except for two years in the middle I've missed. There's two years I just walked away from TV. I thought I'd never do it again. And those were the two years I could go home and watch The Simpsons and not know what was coming out, and I go I not only went wow, this is a great show. I got gee, it's so much better without me. So those are the two years I really love. And I think it's like season six and seven of the show are absolutely fantastic, and it actually does. There's an episode called Itchy and Scratchy and Poochi which is the fans' favorite episode. It's unbelievable that there's some consensus out of seven hundred episode they love this show. And of course I had nothing to do with it, So that one I really like of the ones I've worked on, and you know, I ran the show for a couple of years. There's the Mono Rail episode. Fanslow the Motter Rail episode. It was written by Conan O'Brien. It's directed by Rich Moore, who went on to win an oscar for the movies. Who told me so, some real future talent there, and it just came out great. And it was one of those shows where it wasn't working all the way through till right at the end it all came together. And you know, that's the one we show at fill festivals and it just it just plays great from start to find it. That's a great lesson, right, which is it's not working. It's not working, this creative product is not working, and it all comes together at the end. Creative products are different than engineering products. You know, you don't sort of you don't reverse engineer a creative product. What is it about Simpsons as a creative product that works? Because there's been plenty of beloved characters with very talented writers that just could not survive for thirty five years. It's the creative product started to break down. What is it about this creative process you think that's given it such remarkable longevity. We all thought, oh, what is special about us? And whyably run so long? And then one day it hit me, Gee, if The Simpsons wasn't on the air, the longest running show on TV would be South Park, And if South Park went off the air, it would be Family Guy. And then suddenly you see the pattern, which is animation goes forever, and you know, you look at Mickey Miles. There's nothing appealing about Mickey Miles, but he's been around for ninety five years. He's still liable. And suddenly you realize, oh, this is why other shows go off the air. Is it's the actors. The actors get tired, the actors get bored. Actually, the only reason Cheers is not on TV and it's burny bit year was Ted Danton said I'm sick of this. I've done or seinfeldt Seinfeld goes, I'm sick of playing Jerry Seinfeld. You know, of course people would still be watching Seinfeldt state, So it's just it's almost always just the actors. You have actors. You and actors have been around forever. Yeah, but they you know, they work their schedule. They work. Our actors work forty four hours a year. That's how they do twenty two episodes over the course of a year. They've worked forty four hours. They each get about nine million dollars a year, and I did the map on that. I think it's they make about forty dollars a second doing the show, and they're half the budget of our show. Just our six actors have been there since the very start, and no one begrudges them there. They're really nice people. They appreciate this great hand life has delta. But they're so talented, you know. We the way any character comes into The Simpsons is we write a joke with you know, sort of a generic character like janetor and then we get to a table read where they all come together and if things are going well, they come up with this funny voice that fits that joke, that makes us laugh. And then our animators hear that voice, hear the line, and draw what they think that guy would look like, and then it comes back to us where you know, three months later we watch it in animation and if that makes us laugh, we go, oh, we like this guy. We'll keep bringing them back. And that's a moment. Outside of the main Simpsons characters, almost everyone else on the show, and we have two hondred characters on the show. They all started out that way, one generic line. Generally, you know, they don't even have a name. They're just called you know, May grocery store or studie clerk. They all come about that way and they grow organically. And you talk about a creative enterprise. How the show works, it's that there are people at every step of the way who just make it better. Everyone's pulling in the same direction. But we write the best script we can, and we work and rewrite. Every script is rewritten from top to bottom, eight full times eight wow page one rewrites between Wow initial script and going on the air. So we do all the writing we can. But then we have these really brilliant actors who'll bring them to light. And then we have great designs create the characters and brilliant directors who bring those characters to life, and it just gets better at every stage. I so love that that each creative discipline is allowed to direct where the creative could go. You said, the writers write the jokes, then the actors give voices to those characters and those jokes, and then the animators try and bring that voice to life, and the directors figure out how it all comes together. I mean, how wonderful a process that is. I can't think of any other industry, you know, because usually the way most things work is there's some sort of creative genius at the beginning, and other people sort of are beholden to that creative genius, and the creative genius directs everything and sort of makes everything happen or not happen. But so rare is this kind of collaboration. Yeah, you know, people would be surprised. I think they don't understand how generally collaborative network TV is. That's just almost all of it is done. All that on sitcoms, at least all the writing is done by a group, by a writer's for you know, someone will write the script and a show like Big Bang Theory, and you can't be more successful than Big Bang Theory. They don't even start with the script. It's just a bunch of people in the room. Throwing it out and crafting this thing together as a group. I wonder if we could something like that in the business world, you know, where you just put a bunch of people in the room and just well, he knows, we have to produce a thing, but we don't know what the thing is yet. I wonder if that's repeatable. It sounds like it's a pretty pretty remarkable family that's been built there over the years. I mean, you've all known each other for I mean at least the you know, the old guard and the actors. You've all known each other for you know, three decades, three decades, and even the show runner is my college roommates that we're going on I like forty five years together. It's very amicable and in fact, you know, I wrote a book. I wrote a memoir of my thirty years at the Simpsons, and I to be candid, one reason I broke this book was to get fired. I just said, all right, I'm gonna you know, I'll do this book. I won't ask anyone, and they'll fire me and finally I could book my life. But the book just turned out to be a love letter to the Simpsons. And yeah, it came out and the only complaint I ever got was Sprum, an Israeli book critic. He called up, where is the dirt? There must be dirt, And it was only then I realized, oh, yeah, there's no dirt. Thirty five years and there were maybe two bad weeks and thirty five years where people were not getting along, and that's in the book. But mostly it shouldn't be a surprise. Oh gee, why does the Simpsons keep running? Because it's nice. It's a nice place to work. People like to go there every day, they like to see each other. You're making a case, you know. I mean it's a microcosm of what a good corporate culture is supposed to be, which is if you have shared values and if you had shared cause. You know, as you said, all of these people, the writers and the actors and the animators were all coming together for common cause. That if you all get along and share values and have common cause, it should work. Like yes, there actually is no great mystery to this. You know, it's the same as friends. You know, when friends get along, good things happen. Nice things happen because we just like each other. I've been a TV shows where one guy who just doesn't get along. You can be a great writer. But if he doesn't get along with the group, everything comes grinding to a whole. It's unbelievable how quickly just one male contend can shut down a whole show and progress and have people not really want to come to work anymore. It's true. In business, they call it the new asshole rule. Oh okay, so we can say asshole on this podcast. Okay, you can say. You can even say more than that. You can. Okay, Now let me because I'll tell you a very famous Simpson s lury, which is, we had this wonderful writer at the show, so talented that everybody thought he was an asshole. And so the bosses call him in for a meeting and they said, gee, we love the work you're doing, but people, you're in an asshole and we'll have to let you go unless you can stop being an asshole. And he said, let me think about it. And he went home, and he came back the next day and he said, well, I discussed it with my wife and she agreed, I can't stop being an asshole. So he got fired for that. He got fired. I love the fact that he said, let me think about it. Yeah, you know it's true to himself and U. I mean, only an asshole would think to themselves. Let me think about whether I went a step being an asshole. We let a couple of people go over the years because of that. Almost all them have gone on to fabulous things, giant careers, including this guy who I'm a huge fan. I never thought he was an asshole. There was a period where everybody was a little precious that thought at the Simpsons and they weren't quite getting a launch and the shows. It was interesting in that the shows stayed funny, in fact, they were really funny during this time, but they got a little meaner. There was a little more cruelty in the shows. They're a little more savagery in the shows. And that was it. I think it kind of just kind of percolated up into the show. Mike, I could talk to you forever. I love your stories. Thank you so much for coming on. The one thing that I sort of walk away from this, which is a how to have a successful marriage. Yeah, I've learned that how to have a successful relationship, which is all the crazy ideas your partner can come up with. Just just say yes, yes. That is my mom I mean, you have a jois de vive and a love of life that I think is contagious. And you make me want to take more adventures even if I don't come up with them, And just the way you've approached your career, you know it really is. I think there's a lot to transfer. I really want to do this experiment. We just put a bunch of smart, fun, talented people in a room and say, all right, you have to come up with something. I don't care what it is. I'll see in a week. I beg, I beg it would work. I bet they're corporate people, and I bet probably startup for the gold. We need friction, and friction generates ideas that we need conflict. And I always say the only two good things ever created by friction are fire and babies. And on that note, thanks for coming, thank you, And this is so much fun. I can't shut up, You'll say, when you're my age, I can't stop talking. It's so the herissic. I've always said, there's no such thing as weaknesses or strengths. It's just characteristics and attributes and the goals to put yourself in a place where those things are strong and broadcast is a good place for people who don't stop talking. I've made a career out of it too. Not so good at like family dinners. Mike, thanks so much. Please give Denise a big hug for me. I sure will. I'll talk to you real soon. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to learn more about the topic you just heard, please check out the Optimism Library at Simon Sinik dot com, where you can get access to more than thirty five undemanded classes about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.

Mike Reese is one of the great comedy writers of our modern day. He's been on The Simpsons since the beginning. He worked on Carson, he worked on Alf back in the eighties, and he's worked on Despicable Me and many other movies too. But some of his best material is when he talks about his own life and his vacations to places like North Korea and even visiting the Titanic. This is a bit of optimism. Mike Reese, thanks for joining me on the podcast. You are famous to most people who will know you as one of the writers from the TV show ALF. You'd be surprised. Actually, most people probably more likely know you as being one of the original writers from the Simpsons. So most people when they go on vacation, they want to do something exotic. They think Hawaii, and if you're really adventurous, maybe Vietnam. But you, you and your wife, you decided we want to go on a vacation to see the Titanic. That's right, So what how did you even pull that off? Like that's not like a choice destination yet, So I don't know how far to back this up. My wife and I have been to one hundred and thirty four countries, and then things like that, like we've been to the North Pole, which is not a country, and we've been to Easter Island, which you think is three thousand miles in the middle of the sea, but it's considered chilly, so those don't count as countries. And we climbed by killing the jar. And I think what's significant about all these things is you don't want to do any of that. I don't enjoy any of this stuff, none of it's my idea. I have a wife who loves to travel, and I love my wife, and if I want to spend a vacation whe her, I have to do it in North Korea or live here or someplace like that. Mean this is the ultimate expression of love. I think, go to all these places that you don't want to go to. So Denise decides, I'd like to go see the Titanic. Correct, And you said, huh. We had a friend from lives outside of Seattle, and our friends know this is how we travel, this is the things we do. So he said, there's a guy in my neighborhood who's build submarines and takes them the dangerous places. And when I saw this, I thought of you, and so I'll give his name. His name is Stockton Run. Now I mean right, if that's your name, you are born to be an adventurer. And the guy he was a gent pilot and a rocket scientist, and now he built subs because his team is stocked and rushed. Oh for sure, exactly. That is the only qualification he's got, but it's a good one. He had no choice. So he built this sub And the first place we went with him was off of Staten Island. That was the first Exotic protocol Saton Island. And he took us down to something called the Hudson Canyon. And these subs are about the size of a van, and there's the interior space is like an suv with the seats ripped out. The guy's never heard of chairs, so you just sit on the floor of the sub and one side of it is a big window like a washing machine. Then you go down and you look out. And so we went down to Hudson cant. Hutson Canyon is like the Grand Canyon underwater off of Staten Island. We went a thousand feet down and then we came up and then he goes, well, congratulations, you're the first people to ever go into Hudson Canyon. It's like, what you're testing your sub on us. I want to go where people look then before. So that was it. I am the Neil Armstrong or the buzz Aldron of a Hudson Canyon. And again I don't want to be I don't. Now he's decided he's going to go to see the Titanic. Now listen to Hudson Canyon. That was a thousand feet down. The Titanic is twenty five times step two and a half miles steep. How long did it take to go down twenty five thousand feet two and a half hours. Yeah, it's two and a half miles of just dropping. This is a funny thing if anyone's interested what these subs are like, because it's like if you drove your car into the ocean. I mean, that's all it is. They dunked the sub up the back of the boat and it just sinks, and it just sinks for two and a half hours, and there's nothing to see it just black man and here in me. You know, I could have died on this adventure, but said I fell asleep. I was so just bored there's nothing to do, and I fell asleep and we hit bottom and again we don't know where we are. You know, we started off right over the Titanic, but there's underwa occurrence and we're drifting and we had this sense we're five hundred yards away from the Titanic. It's the biggest thing in the world, but we can't find it. You know, it's like two city blocks away. And so we're cruising around the bottom of the ocean looking for the Titanic and just the main things exciting. There was a hurricane coming, Oh my god at sea level, so our time was very limited and by the time we got down to the bottom, we had like forty minutes to find the Titanic, look at it, and then get back up before a hurricane came in. So we're just nosing around looking for the thing. And then oh, there it is. We see the Titanic, and our time was on short. We just got the greatest hits. I mean, I didn't like this because we weren't exploring. We were like tourists. It's like, oh, there's where Leo DiCaprio stood, and there's the anchor, and here's the funnel that fell over and you know, we got like three great photographs and then had to go back up. So that was it. I saw the Titanic in hindsight, even though you didn't want to go. I mean, it was amazing, wasn't it. It's like you and James Cameron, like those are the only people who've seen the Titanic. That's it. You know. It was funny because we had all these experts on the boat and I was so hopeful, like, oh Am, I the first jud to visit the Titanic, and there was a Franchi expert on board. He goes, No, that was fred Ci Salim de Mitt and he went three years ago, so it's like I'm not even the first juke. And there was a Mexican guy at Orgos. Am I the first Mexican? Yes, you are so, I am, And I can state this categoric like I am the first alf writer to visit the Titanic. So you also casually mentioned just a moment ago and I caught it. Oh yet you went that you went to North Korea. Yeah, these, I guess are the two things that really impressed people. Are well, I need a for most of us, it's not even on our list, and b even if it was, we wouldn't even know where to begin on how to go, and it's not in the realm of reality. So you walk me through this, Denise decides, because I know it wasn't you. Yeah, I'd like it. North Korea, Yes, well it was funny. It was even. I woke up one morning, it is up early, and I see we get an email from some travel agent because we're on everybody's list, and it's at running tours the North Korea. And I saw the email and I deleted it, and then I deleted it from trash and uh because I didn't want Denise to see it. But then they wrote to her separately, so she saw it and we're going. And the story is North Korea is closed to everybody, right, except they do a thing called the Mass Games. They do this thing every year called the mass Games, and it's like the Olympics opening ceremony with no Olympics behind it, because they don't believe in Olympics, because Olympics are competition and we're communists, we don't compete. Gaultwork together. But they still stage this amazing spectacular that they are so proud of. They let the world it for three weeks you are allowed. And now they bet everybody who comes in at uh huh so to get in. You know, I'm filling out the forms and they said, don't say you're a writer. They don't want writers coming in. So and they don't like you. And you know, they've never seen a Jew, but they hear bad things. So I had to say I was a Catholic publicist to get into North Korea, and we hear back from them. And then the other scary thing is North Korea kidnaps visiting talent. I mean, yeah, so you know this story. They'll have a film festival, they'll welcome these sporl directors and then keep them there and force them to make movies for the regime. You know, North Korea is not scary enough. I might get kidnapped and forced to make propaganda cartoons, I guess, or do the North Korean version of Valves. So I say I'm a Catholic publicist and we hear back, no, you're not. They said, we went to China to go gulli you because you can't there's no Google in North Korea. We went to China to google you, and we found out what you do, and we know your career and you're still welcome to come, which to me means you're not worth of kidnapping, which so that was a good kind of art. So we went to North Korea. It's an extraordinarily managed tour and anyone who goes to North Korea gets the exact same tour. There were fourteen people in our group. We had seven full time minders. There is one hotel in the national capital, yeong Yang, and it's a big high rise hotel surrounded by a moat. It literally has a boat, so you go into the hotel at night, they pull up the drawbridge. There is no escaping your hotel. And so the fourteen people in our group were just like us. They were just very jaded world travelers. There was one guy in the group who's the most traveled man on Earth, and you think, wow, this is Stockton Ruts. It's some diplomat or some deepen air man. And he was just a slub. He's he was like a math teacher from Brooklyn, but he happens to be the man who's been everywhere. So you've got seven handlers staying in the tower of Pyongyang right surrounded by a moat and not and there's it's a three gay tour and I kinda say, if you can ignore the human suffering around you, it's a great trick. It's a real I mean, they really put together a terrific tour. You go visit different monuments that North Korea is just crazy with, you know, gigantic Stalinist monuments, and you go visit these things, and you take a river cruise and you have a lantern festival. The food is fantastic. My favorite part. They took us to an indoor circus. It's just in the theater that clearly had just been doing like Death of a Salesman, because on stage it's just this nineteen fifties living room set. But all these circus performers come out and they do the rest. And then this is my favorite part. A bear, an actual like a grizzly bear, comes out with an upright vacuum cleaner and vacuums the carpet. That's the closer. He's the bear is vacuuming this apartment and I'm looking to going it's doing a pretty good job, you know. But anyway, the whole point is we're there to see the mask games, and we go see this show. It is literally the most spectacular thing you've ever seen. Like fifty thousand people on the floor of this arena. It's an outdoor stadium, and you know, they're doing Vegas style numbers. There's nothing propagandistic about it. They're just doing know, they're all in salor costumes. And then ten thousand people leave the bild as ten thousand more come on. They're in hula hoops and they're doing hula hoops. And meanwhile, in the background across the stadium on the other side is ten thousand kids with cards doing those cards showns where the whole stadium holds up a card and makes a big picture of the countryside or a tractor or something like that. And that went NonStop at the same time. So you watch the show, it's amazing. It's ninety minutes to the second. And it was only when we're leaving the arena we see it's pouring rain. You know, the spectators are covered, but all those people who just put on the greatest show in the world did it in pouring rain. Wow, that was it. That's my trip to Korea. So do you actually see I mean, I have to ask do you actually see the human suffering because Pyongyang is pretty sterile, isn't it. It is night. Well again, it looks great. It's got an Arc de Triome right in the middle of it. It's got being filled it with infrastructure. There's ten lane eyeways everywhere, but nobody has a car. So in fact, our bus driver would you drive down the highway sigsdagging from left to right, just having fun because he add the highway to himself. Yeah, so they got that. They live in eye rises, but nobody has electricity, so it goes to Arca ny the whole city. It's a weird mix. They have a subway system that's built in the Stalinist way and Stolid built these subways with chandeliers and fine iron on the walls, and they've got that too. Oh so the suffering, yes, you would say. If people were there, they were really thin. And one day we took a ride to the country to see that the military and and you saw people just trudging trudging down the roads. Again thin people, and you didn't know where they were going, but you knew, oh, they're walking a long way to get something they need. So there is that. But I'll tell you another funny thing. One day, they just set us loose in a park and they have this giant public park in Kyongyang that's as lovely as any public park you've been to. And people were having fun. They were having picnics, you know, they don't just sit there being miserable all the time. And we saw a bunch of older women in kimonos, drunk out of their mind and they were having so much fun and they're dancing to traditional music and my wife is filming them, and then I get pulled into the dance. I'm dancing with old North Koreen women and were drug and that's where a guard comes up and covers the camera and it's like, dude, you shouldn't cover this. This is people having fun in North Korea. Were you were allowed to take pictures of anything you wanted or was it very controlled? It was very controlled. It was very managed. And it is funny. We have no good photos from that trip, so you have to maybe I'm making it all up and I never went North Korea. It's like the lunar landing. Probably shouldn't talk about a lunar landing because Denise will probably plan it. Oh yeah, Oh is that another thing she wants to do. Do Do she want to put you on one of the virgins or the one of the rockets that all of these guys are doing, like she hasn't said this, and I don't know if you know without Bet, I've told you this story. In twenty eighteen, Mars was as close to the Earth as it's ever going to get, and so they didn't somewhat, Oh, some billionaire had this idea, let's send a pro just to go out, fly her around Mars and come back, and we'll send someone to take pictures. And if you know my wife, she's the woman for the job. She takes more photos than like most security cameras. So they said that it was going to be a five billion dollar mission, and they wanted to send a middle aged childless couple into space to photograph Mars. And it was a middle aged shadowless couple because if they died, who cares, right, And that was their thinking, and they go, oh, a couple, an old couple will get a look. So we volunteer, we'll go to Mars. And it was just going to be five hundred days. And it capsuled me and Denise and Uh and we applied and we got Neil de grass Tyson to endorse us. It's just somebody we know from college. So Neil endorsed us, and we made it past the first cut. You know, that was it. We were We were headed for in the again at SUV for five hundred days. And the only thing that scared me was I knew we were gonna have to be trained medically, so they were gonna have to teach the niece how to take out my appendix in space if that came up. And I don't really love her cutting my air, so that would be a challenge. But but that was if we were gung ho. We were going to go into space and hopefully come back from space. And then the whole mission collapsed. This billionaire put up a billion dollars and nobody came up with the other five billions. Are you still writing TV at all? Oh? Yes, I still work at the Simpsons. I consult at the show a day a week, and that's a pleasure. And in fact, because of COVID, you know, I used to I live in New York and I used to fly to LA every Wednesday to work at the Simpsons and I would work a day and then I get on a red Eye and fly back to New York or North Korea or Australia, yeah, or wherever we're going for marsh. But with COVID the show has gone on to zoom. We worked on Zoo two and a half years, which means I can still keep my phony Bloch up, but I don't have to fly to La eight somzing. This has completely untathered us. So we've been traveling NonStop once the world opened up, and I every week and of Wednesday, I'll log in to soon work at the Simpsons and they go, where are you now? And I'll go, I'm in Peru, I'm in Tanzania. And that's it. I had now zoomed into work at the Simpsons from every continent of the world. Yeah, we have these wonderful little claims to fame, of which I know some not all. Yeah, but the Minions Dominions. Yeah, this is wonderful story of the first Minions movie, not the actual Menions. What was the which was the actual Despicable Me? Despicable Me. Right, there's this wonderful story I recall of the first Despicable Me where I think they asked you to consult on the script and you kept getting confused between it kept saying Minion one, Minion two. You kept getting confused which one was which. So that was it. I'm working on the script and I grew the Steve Carrell character. It's only just called boys today. We're going to do the boys even to dress the menuons, you know that way as a group. And I decided, well, let's let's pretend they're distinct. Now I couldn't tell the part. I mean, they just look like new print. They're just little and yellow, and they all look exactly the same. But it said, what if he dresses them all individually, and let's give but even though they're so weird, let's give them really boring white guy name. And I was doing this on the sly at the Simpsons and I look around. I go, well, here's a bunch of boring white guys. The Simpsons writer. So I just named them. I just had him go, Bob Stewart, Kevin, Phil jack Al, we've had a great time together. He saw no him and it's just Simpsons writers. And it was no big deal at the time, except when they started spinning off the minions to give them their own movies, and then they would you would see posters everywhere. Here's Kevin, this is Stewart. You know, Bob's on a big adventure, and I go, oh, these are just by friends from the Simpsons. So it wasn't supposed to stick. It was you just mucking about. It was just really a joke. I think I did twice in the original script, and you know, the name stuck, and then the names became characters. I love that. So a cartoon of Yellow People. The writers are now immortalized in the Cartoon of Yellow not People. One of them the three may Minions, the guys who carried the Minions franchise. One of them is named Kevin, and he's named after Simpence Riger Kevin Current, who has passed away. So this is his legacy. He lives on, He lives on his minion. I know, I know that Simpsons fans who are maybe listening would be mad at me for not asking a couple of things. Oh of cars. I'm sorry, and I'm sorry everyone said I put up with this. Yeah, I know. I like the North Korea stories. Do you have a favorite episode? You know? Uh? And I'm sure it's a question you get asked a lot, so yeah, you've had a lot of time to think about the answer. Right, there's a funny language is the show's been on now we're in we're writing our thirty fifth year. The show insane. It's insane. It is really crazy. You know. He grew up in a factory town and people worked in a factory, or they worked for an insurance company. And there were people there whose dads worked for the same company and eight for thirty five years, and I go, Wow, that's the life I want, and I got it at TV. I'm just one of these career lifers at The Simpsons. So I've been there for thirty five years except for two years in the middle I've missed. There's two years I just walked away from TV. I thought I'd never do it again. And those were the two years I could go home and watch The Simpsons and not know what was coming out, and I go I not only went wow, this is a great show. I got gee, it's so much better without me. So those are the two years I really love. And I think it's like season six and seven of the show are absolutely fantastic, and it actually does. There's an episode called Itchy and Scratchy and Poochi which is the fans' favorite episode. It's unbelievable that there's some consensus out of seven hundred episode they love this show. And of course I had nothing to do with it, So that one I really like of the ones I've worked on, and you know, I ran the show for a couple of years. There's the Mono Rail episode. Fanslow the Motter Rail episode. It was written by Conan O'Brien. It's directed by Rich Moore, who went on to win an oscar for the movies. Who told me so, some real future talent there, and it just came out great. And it was one of those shows where it wasn't working all the way through till right at the end it all came together. And you know, that's the one we show at fill festivals and it just it just plays great from start to find it. That's a great lesson, right, which is it's not working. It's not working, this creative product is not working, and it all comes together at the end. Creative products are different than engineering products. You know, you don't sort of you don't reverse engineer a creative product. What is it about Simpsons as a creative product that works? Because there's been plenty of beloved characters with very talented writers that just could not survive for thirty five years. It's the creative product started to break down. What is it about this creative process you think that's given it such remarkable longevity. We all thought, oh, what is special about us? And whyably run so long? And then one day it hit me, Gee, if The Simpsons wasn't on the air, the longest running show on TV would be South Park, And if South Park went off the air, it would be Family Guy. And then suddenly you see the pattern, which is animation goes forever, and you know, you look at Mickey Miles. There's nothing appealing about Mickey Miles, but he's been around for ninety five years. He's still liable. And suddenly you realize, oh, this is why other shows go off the air. Is it's the actors. The actors get tired, the actors get bored. Actually, the only reason Cheers is not on TV and it's burny bit year was Ted Danton said I'm sick of this. I've done or seinfeldt Seinfeld goes, I'm sick of playing Jerry Seinfeld. You know, of course people would still be watching Seinfeldt state, So it's just it's almost always just the actors. You have actors. You and actors have been around forever. Yeah, but they you know, they work their schedule. They work. Our actors work forty four hours a year. That's how they do twenty two episodes over the course of a year. They've worked forty four hours. They each get about nine million dollars a year, and I did the map on that. I think it's they make about forty dollars a second doing the show, and they're half the budget of our show. Just our six actors have been there since the very start, and no one begrudges them there. They're really nice people. They appreciate this great hand life has delta. But they're so talented, you know. We the way any character comes into The Simpsons is we write a joke with you know, sort of a generic character like janetor and then we get to a table read where they all come together and if things are going well, they come up with this funny voice that fits that joke, that makes us laugh. And then our animators hear that voice, hear the line, and draw what they think that guy would look like, and then it comes back to us where you know, three months later we watch it in animation and if that makes us laugh, we go, oh, we like this guy. We'll keep bringing them back. And that's a moment. Outside of the main Simpsons characters, almost everyone else on the show, and we have two hondred characters on the show. They all started out that way, one generic line. Generally, you know, they don't even have a name. They're just called you know, May grocery store or studie clerk. They all come about that way and they grow organically. And you talk about a creative enterprise. How the show works, it's that there are people at every step of the way who just make it better. Everyone's pulling in the same direction. But we write the best script we can, and we work and rewrite. Every script is rewritten from top to bottom, eight full times eight wow page one rewrites between Wow initial script and going on the air. So we do all the writing we can. But then we have these really brilliant actors who'll bring them to light. And then we have great designs create the characters and brilliant directors who bring those characters to life, and it just gets better at every stage. I so love that that each creative discipline is allowed to direct where the creative could go. You said, the writers write the jokes, then the actors give voices to those characters and those jokes, and then the animators try and bring that voice to life, and the directors figure out how it all comes together. I mean, how wonderful a process that is. I can't think of any other industry, you know, because usually the way most things work is there's some sort of creative genius at the beginning, and other people sort of are beholden to that creative genius, and the creative genius directs everything and sort of makes everything happen or not happen. But so rare is this kind of collaboration. Yeah, you know, people would be surprised. I think they don't understand how generally collaborative network TV is. That's just almost all of it is done. All that on sitcoms, at least all the writing is done by a group, by a writer's for you know, someone will write the script and a show like Big Bang Theory, and you can't be more successful than Big Bang Theory. They don't even start with the script. It's just a bunch of people in the room. Throwing it out and crafting this thing together as a group. I wonder if we could something like that in the business world, you know, where you just put a bunch of people in the room and just well, he knows, we have to produce a thing, but we don't know what the thing is yet. I wonder if that's repeatable. It sounds like it's a pretty pretty remarkable family that's been built there over the years. I mean, you've all known each other for I mean at least the you know, the old guard and the actors. You've all known each other for you know, three decades, three decades, and even the show runner is my college roommates that we're going on I like forty five years together. It's very amicable and in fact, you know, I wrote a book. I wrote a memoir of my thirty years at the Simpsons, and I to be candid, one reason I broke this book was to get fired. I just said, all right, I'm gonna you know, I'll do this book. I won't ask anyone, and they'll fire me and finally I could book my life. But the book just turned out to be a love letter to the Simpsons. And yeah, it came out and the only complaint I ever got was Sprum, an Israeli book critic. He called up, where is the dirt? There must be dirt, And it was only then I realized, oh, yeah, there's no dirt. Thirty five years and there were maybe two bad weeks and thirty five years where people were not getting along, and that's in the book. But mostly it shouldn't be a surprise. Oh gee, why does the Simpsons keep running? Because it's nice. It's a nice place to work. People like to go there every day, they like to see each other. You're making a case, you know. I mean it's a microcosm of what a good corporate culture is supposed to be, which is if you have shared values and if you had shared cause. You know, as you said, all of these people, the writers and the actors and the animators were all coming together for common cause. That if you all get along and share values and have common cause, it should work. Like yes, there actually is no great mystery to this. You know, it's the same as friends. You know, when friends get along, good things happen. Nice things happen because we just like each other. I've been a TV shows where one guy who just doesn't get along. You can be a great writer. But if he doesn't get along with the group, everything comes grinding to a whole. It's unbelievable how quickly just one male contend can shut down a whole show and progress and have people not really want to come to work anymore. It's true. In business, they call it the new asshole rule. Oh okay, so we can say asshole on this podcast. Okay, you can say. You can even say more than that. You can. Okay, Now let me because I'll tell you a very famous Simpson s lury, which is, we had this wonderful writer at the show, so talented that everybody thought he was an asshole. And so the bosses call him in for a meeting and they said, gee, we love the work you're doing, but people, you're in an asshole and we'll have to let you go unless you can stop being an asshole. And he said, let me think about it. And he went home, and he came back the next day and he said, well, I discussed it with my wife and she agreed, I can't stop being an asshole. So he got fired for that. He got fired. I love the fact that he said, let me think about it. Yeah, you know it's true to himself and U. I mean, only an asshole would think to themselves. Let me think about whether I went a step being an asshole. We let a couple of people go over the years because of that. Almost all them have gone on to fabulous things, giant careers, including this guy who I'm a huge fan. I never thought he was an asshole. There was a period where everybody was a little precious that thought at the Simpsons and they weren't quite getting a launch and the shows. It was interesting in that the shows stayed funny, in fact, they were really funny during this time, but they got a little meaner. There was a little more cruelty in the shows. They're a little more savagery in the shows. And that was it. I think it kind of just kind of percolated up into the show. Mike, I could talk to you forever. I love your stories. Thank you so much for coming on. The one thing that I sort of walk away from this, which is a how to have a successful marriage. Yeah, I've learned that how to have a successful relationship, which is all the crazy ideas your partner can come up with. Just just say yes, yes. That is my mom I mean, you have a jois de vive and a love of life that I think is contagious. And you make me want to take more adventures even if I don't come up with them, And just the way you've approached your career, you know it really is. I think there's a lot to transfer. I really want to do this experiment. We just put a bunch of smart, fun, talented people in a room and say, all right, you have to come up with something. I don't care what it is. I'll see in a week. I beg, I beg it would work. I bet they're corporate people, and I bet probably startup for the gold. We need friction, and friction generates ideas that we need conflict. And I always say the only two good things ever created by friction are fire and babies. And on that note, thanks for coming, thank you, And this is so much fun. I can't shut up, You'll say, when you're my age, I can't stop talking. It's so the herissic. I've always said, there's no such thing as weaknesses or strengths. It's just characteristics and attributes and the goals to put yourself in a place where those things are strong and broadcast is a good place for people who don't stop talking. I've made a career out of it too. Not so good at like family dinners. Mike, thanks so much. Please give Denise a big hug for me. I sure will. I'll talk to you real soon. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to learn more about the topic you just heard, please check out the Optimism Library at Simon Sinik dot com, where you can get access to more than thirty five undemanded classes about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.