October 25, 2024 • 53 mins
Jump scare lightweights Trey & Brian gather around the jack o’ lantern to discuss not only bone chilling horror movies and creepy TV shows, but also heartwarming acts of kindness with SUPERNATURAL star and all around Good Human Misha Collins.
Misha Collins is an actor, director, producer, writer, and philanthropic activist who is best known for his role as Castiel on the global hit television series SUPERNATURAL. He is the founder of the 100% volunteer-run non-profit Random Acts, which inspires its supporters to promote and engage in acts of social good, as well as facilitate thousands of random acts of kindness worldwide.
Brian Phelps is an American radio personality, actor, and comedian best known for co-hosting the nationally and globally syndicated Mark & Brian Morning Show in Los Angeles for 25 years. As the co-lead of his own television series, with multiple roles in movies, and a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Phelps is also an inductee in the Radio Hall of Fame.
Trey Callaway is an American film and TV writer and producer who wrote the hit movie I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and has produced successful TV series like CSI:NY, Supernatural, Rush Hour, Revolution, The Messengers, APB, Station 19 and 9-1-1 LONE STAR. He is also a Professor at USC.
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Misha Collins is an actor, director, producer, writer, and philanthropic activist who is best known for his role as Castiel on the global hit television series SUPERNATURAL. He is the founder of the 100% volunteer-run non-profit Random Acts, which inspires its supporters to promote and engage in acts of social good, as well as facilitate thousands of random acts of kindness worldwide.
Brian Phelps is an American radio personality, actor, and comedian best known for co-hosting the nationally and globally syndicated Mark & Brian Morning Show in Los Angeles for 25 years. As the co-lead of his own television series, with multiple roles in movies, and a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Phelps is also an inductee in the Radio Hall of Fame.
Trey Callaway is an American film and TV writer and producer who wrote the hit movie I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and has produced successful TV series like CSI:NY, Supernatural, Rush Hour, Revolution, The Messengers, APB, Station 19 and 9-1-1 LONE STAR. He is also a Professor at USC.
___________________________________
Make sure to follow us on social media at:
begoodhumanspodcast.com
instagram.com
tiktok.com
threads.net
facebook.com
x.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Boozing from the inky blackness of nights arises a grotesque
figure from the bowels of Hell. Run Run. I'm Kamala Harris,
and I approve of this message.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Be good humans, Be good humans. Be good humans, or
we will think you sucked. Good humans, or we will
thank you suck.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Happy Halloween season everyone, Look we've got decor and everything.
Welcome to the Bigger Humans Podcast. I'm Brian Phelps and
that they're is the incomparable Tree Callowen.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
It is such a spooky pleasure to be here with you,
my friend. Yeah, and with all of you as well.
And thank you. By the way, we've been getting so
much incredible stuff through the bigin Humans podcast website. You're
telling us about all kinds of amazing humans in your lives.
Keep doing that, please and follow us on the socials
and like and subscribe and follow and all those scary things.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
We're very excited about today's show our guest, which we're
not even gonna tell you it is and tell us
time for you to know, but we will begin since
it is the Halloween season. Yes, scary things. What scared
you when you were a little kid? Did you have
a maine?
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:43):
I mean, look, I've never been a fan of jump
scares since I was a kid, like anybody, like you know,
the uncle would be like bo. So last year, I
think for the first time, I went to one of
those universal Halloween you know, horror nights or whatever, and
I just got pissed as the night went on. I
just want to punch people like that. I don't like that.
And then I have this weird fear of like maybe
(02:05):
it goes back to Jaws when we were kids, but
like underwater, maybe it goes back to you being a bedwetter. Well,
thanks for bringing that up when you're a little Yeah, okay,
so that's clearly that's the source of it. But like underwater,
like I feel like I'm out of my element. I
don't belong there. Creepy things are gonna come up.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Mind me. I don't like that, all right? What about you?
For me? There was there's one thing that that affected
me so much as a kid when I got to live,
as you know, in a very very old old house,
ancient and we had a very very old, ancient furnace
down in the basements. Oh say no more. Now this
is in a finished basement. There's no ping pong table
(02:42):
or pool table or television or carpeting or paneling. This
was dirt walls, brick floor, and in the far back
in the corner was this furnace. And when I was
eight years old, that's when Dad deemed me old enough
to have a chore, a big boy chore. Every night.
That is a big boy chort. And let me tell you.
(03:03):
There was a light at the top of the stairs
and a light over by the furnace. So and this
was we're talking about forty yards, yeah, okay, And so
I had to get from one place to the other
and inflick that light on. But eight years old, I
go downstairs dreading this and I'm supposed to put pour
water in this reservoir for the old furnace. I think
(03:23):
it was like a humidifier or something. So I had
to do this every night. The worst part was I'm done.
I'm still, you know, looking over my shoulder. I'm freaking out.
Every night. This was every night, I have to turn
off the light and then I have to run for
thirty yards forty or however along it was over to
the stairs where there's light. So I am booking, I'm
(03:43):
just and I'm in my mind, I'm imagining all these
things that are chasing me for real, are chasing me
for real. Of course, I'm booking up the stairs as
a little eight year old can as fast as I can,
and in my mind, I see monster of Carms about
to grab me, course me back down. So bet, I
was so frightened of that.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Well, first of all, I'm sorry, but second, thank you
for this story, because I am now going to write
the major motion picture forty Yards of Fear Going to Happen.
But speaking of movies, then, okay, let's talk about that, Like,
what are some of your favorite scary movies that just
you know, get to go.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
To the favorite scary movies. I love scary movies, adore
them up until they stopped making the original Frankenstein's and
you know Bella Lagosi, wolf Man and Dracula. I could
do those because I was raised every Saturday night with
acrey creature feature. I don't know if you had anything
(04:41):
like this, but it was a guy that would come
on at midnight to show Dracula or the show wolf Man,
the originals. Yeah, the old stuff. There wasn't any gore,
there wasn't. It was it was fun. It was it
was a plus. This comical guy, Acrey, Chuck Akrey would
come on during the commercials and sell siding you put
on the side of the house. He would sell sighting.
(05:02):
So there was just a whole joyful thing about these movies.
But then I a gettle older, and then all my
friends are now watching the gory.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
I can't.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Here's my thing. It boils down to, this is why
I cannot stand horror films. Okay, I hate the gore
because I hate the human suffering. Sure, I mean I
can't take that. Yeah, there's something inside me. And I
can tell you this. My father was the same way,
or maybe I'm the same as him. Okay, Well, when
I was fourteen, the Exorcist had just come out in theaters,
(05:36):
and you know it's you know, everybody's talking about it
every and my dad hates these kind of movies as
I do. My mother loves them. So my mother, I
don't know how she did it, but she finally talked
him in to kicking and screaming taking her to the
theater to see the Exorcist. Oh boy, this is a
(05:58):
true story. By the way. Now, by the time they
got home back home from the from the theater seeing
The Exorcist. I was already in bed, sound asleep. I'm
fourteen years old, sound asleep, Okay. About two thirty three
in the morning, I hear coming from downstairs, my father
standing there because my bedroom is right above their bedroom, okay,
(06:20):
and I hear my father waking me up, going right right,
and I'm like, yeah, yeah, he goes, stop moving around
up there, get back in bed, Dad. I was in bed.
I was sleeping, yeah, and he could oh, all.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Right, well, good night. Guess I got Linda Blair in
my head.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
So yeah. He told me the next morning that he
was he couldn't didn't get a week asleep that night,
and that movie affected him so much that he was
hearing every creek, every whatever sounded like footsteps. I mean
that's you've seen it. Oh yeah, mine, I haven't seen it.
I've seen clips, but I've you inherit, his fear, anything
anything dealing with that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Yeah, is it's weird, right, Like I can fake it.
I've faked it lots of times. I've written horror films.
I've you know, worked on crime shows where like it
used to be my job on CSI to unzip a
body bag literally and look at like whatever body fake
body was going to be on the table. I have
no problem with the fake stuff, but like man, one
(07:25):
of my kids skins their knee and I'm like a yeah,
like I can't handle if it's real. But the fake
stuff is, you know, like Exorcist I'm actually a fan of,
although I have an argument with my sons over they
don't think that's scary. They have a new definition of
what is scary. But that still scares me. The Omen,
which my father in law produced. I can never get
enough of that movie, The Shining, of course. And then
(07:47):
there's a very obscure Dutch film from the eighties called
The Vanishing, which I think might be the most frightening
film I've ever seen. This is a couple who wind
up getting buried alive. It's it's very scary. Do you
remember when Jaws came out? Okay, I was sixteen years
old and all my friends now know my hatred for gore,
for horror. They had seen the movie in the theater,
(08:10):
they had gone, and they somehow peer pressured me peer pressure,
peer pressure, peer, of course, into going to see the
movie with them. I hated the right into Moline. It's
about a thirty minute drive to go to the cinemas.
I hated So I'm sitting there two minutes before the
movie starts, and Dan is on my left side, and
there's about five of us sitting in a row, and
(08:32):
I said, Dan, what am I doing here? I'm going
to hate this. I'm dreading this. Of course I want
to go.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
He was not, Brian, it's great. So the movie starts
and sure enough, you know, the first gory thing that
does happen. I'm like this or I'm closing my eyes
working away, and they're all laughing and laughing, laughing. Now
it gets to the point in the movie where I
think it was Dreyfus that was scuba diving and he
comes up on this wrecked boat and there is hole
(09:00):
in the boat, the bottom of the boat, and without
any warning at all, Yes, a severed head, Yes, comes
out of the hole.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Yes, it's one of the best jump scares in Hollywood history. Okay,
well this is what happened. The first thing, or that
the thing I hear first after that scene was this
Dan saying.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Brian, Brian, am I what? And he goes sit down.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
This is a true story.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
It just lifted me.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Out of my Okay, terrifying, not terrifying.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Let's watch a comedy, maybe a rom com. Let's do that.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
I will also say that some of the most satisfying
horror I've enjoyed as a viewer, it was on television, right,
small screen horror. When I was a kid. My mom
used to watch the old soap opera Dark Shadows with
barn I did too. We'd race home to see Dark
Shadow Night Gallery.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Door by the way.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Yeah that's true, no gore. But you know, probably one
of my all time favorite horror series is one that
I actually got to write for. But to tell you
the full story so that you can appreciate it, I
got to go back to high.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
School for a minute. Okay, okay, all right, So I'm intrigued.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
So I grew up in Tulsa, and Tulsa's one of
those places where it's certainly at the time, like you
could have a shopping mall in one corner and then
cattle grazing on the other, right, just collision between rural
and urban life, right, And so being a teenage boy,
teenage boys in Tulsa, there's not a lot to do.
So what you're basically doing is trying to figure out
how to get into trouble. So one particular Saturday, some
(10:40):
friends and I are out driving and one of us
had a license at least, and we see what looks
to be an old overgrown driveway that goes into the woods.
So we don't know where it leads, so we're curious,
and so we get out of the car. We walk
up this old overgrown driveway and we find an abandoned house. Okay,
just sitting in the middle of the woods. Couldn't look
creepier from the outside. Course, we got to go in.
(11:00):
So we go in and uh, this is already oh yeah, right,
so the windows are broken, it has weird for some reasons,
a red painted ceiling with black beams. It's half already
set decked for like this just complete horror movie, like
you said. So we decide in the moment, like teenage
boys would do, let's do a little bit of work
here today and make this look like a house of
(11:23):
Satanic worship. Okay, so here's because we've all watched too
many horror films, right, and so first thing we do,
we get some paint. We paint a pentagram on the floor,
we melt. We get some candles. One of the guys
worked at Peer one, so we get some cheap candles.
We melt them down onto the points of theme about here.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
If I was your friend in that group of guys,
I gotta go.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Left.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
No no, no, you'll see where your part comes in,
by the way, So we do the pentagram. We find
an old work table behind the house.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
It's long.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
We pull it into the living room. We get some
cheap chain from a home depot. We nail it to
the corner so it looks like someone's been restrained on
the table. We poured a bunch of high sea punch
in the middle of it, so it looks like dried blood.
Like We totally set like this. And the last important
detail is I had just gotten a Blue Oyster Cult
record I'm Burning I'm Burning, Burning Field and it had
(12:14):
occult symbols on it. I didn't know what they meant,
but I just literally brought in my Blue Oyster Cult
record and I copied these occult symbols on the wall
with spray paint. Right finished, we go to the local
convenience store where all the kids hang out on a
Saturday night, and all we had to do was start
in conversation dropping little nuggets like, do you guys hear
about this devil House out out one hundred and eleventh
in y?
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I love it?
Speaker 3 (12:35):
And so it starts to spread like wildfire. Right for
the next two years, Brian, every weekend, kids from not
just our school, every school across Tulsa, they're all going
to the Devil House. And the best part of this
is they're coming back with these horror stories of I
saw a six eyed goat, I saw a dead man
floating in the pool, I saw like and they're just
(12:56):
their fears are running away with themselves. Right. I am
talking about this in the high school newspaper class, and
in Walk's Mss Purringon, who's the teacher and the editor
of the paper, And she's like, are you talking about
the Devil House? And I go yeah, She says, you know,
I've been hearing about this too. You seem to know
a lot about it. Why don't you write a story
for the school newspaper. So now I've not only created
(13:17):
a fake devilhouse, I then write a fake article in
the school paper about the devil House. Cut to many
years later, I'm living here in La, I have a
meeting with a guy named Eric Kripke. Cripke is best
known right now as the creator of the hit series
on Amazon, The Boys. I liked the first season. Oh no,
it's incredible. But like he's created many series. I worked
on Revolution with Eric Kripke, but his first great claim
(13:41):
to fame was creating the television series Supernatural. Right, So,
in case you somehow impossibly managed to miss, this show
is an extremely successful TV series fifteen seasons. It ran
between the WB and the CW network, and it was
basically about two brothers played by Jared Padleki and j
to Acles, the Winchester Brothers. Right, These are two brothers
(14:03):
who travel the country hunting demons and ghosts and monsters
and all kinds of superhu It was awesome.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
So I have this meeting with Eric Kripke during the
first season of Supernatural and I come in with pitches
and you know, I'm ready to sort of talk about
and he says, yeah, I don't want to hear your pitches.
Just tell me a scary story. So I tell him
the story of creating the Devil House as a teenager,
and he goes, oh my god, we have to do
this as an episode. Okay, so I now have not
only created the devil House as a teenager and written
(14:30):
a bogus article in the school paper, but then cut
to I write an episode. It's episode sixteen of first
season of Supernatural called hell House. Oh, a bunch of
kids who prank their friends into believing there's a devil house.
But of course the more people who believe in it,
the more the supernatural power becomes real. Right, right, So
(14:50):
all of that to say, like this is this was
Did you ever shared?
Speaker 1 (14:54):
But did you ever share with any of the people
that were sharing and creating these urban miss Yes? And oh,
by the way, we did that, buddies, and I did that.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
You share it a little bit later because we had
a Brian in our bunch who was our first test friend. Oh,
and we poor Brian. I mean this is James is
his name. We brought him out and just scared the
be Jesus out of him, like he was not happy
with us for a long time. Oh you little shit,
I know. But then we kept it to ourselves for
a long time. But here's the reason why I think
this is appropriate to talk about because when when we
(15:27):
come back, Brian when.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
We come back, we're going to chat with one of
the most beloved actors from Supernatural, a guy who's created
something magnificent and it continues to help people in a
plethora of amazing ways. He and get this, he's I
think the Yeah, he is the first guest we've ever
had that has his own army. Oh. I'll explain later
when we get Don't go Away. You're not gonna want
(15:50):
to miss this. This guy is so cool.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Of a Bundiger Killiger Kigi, we will take you suck.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Welcome back to be good humans. Listen.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Misha Collins is an extraordinarily gifted and unfrankly unstoppably determined
actor and director and producer and poet and best selling
author and activist and humanitarian. And he's got this incredibly
deep list of impressive credits that include NYPD Blue and
and CSI E. R. Monk, A Charmed twenty four Girl Interrupted,
(16:43):
Timeless Gotham Knights, and get this, twelve count them twelve
unforgettable seasons where he is probably best known and truly
beloved by its passionate fan base for playing a spellbinding
role of Castiel, the Dark Angel, probably MP teen thousand,
episodes of the series You Guessed It, Supernatural Mischi Collins.
(17:08):
You frighteningly talented bastard. Welcome to be good Humane.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
Thank you for having me here, and thank you for
characterizing me as an unstoppable and determined actor, because that
conjures up an image of somebody who's like absolutely insistent
on being cast in something whether or not anyone wants
to do, and I feel like that is how I
have built my career.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
So thank you.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
It was fun listening to you guys talk about you know,
it's not really what I expected I was signing up for.
Here with the bed Humans podcast childhood traumas form of
various different supernatural terrors, that was really nice to hear.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Good good.
Speaker 4 (17:53):
It got me reflecting on some of mine. I when
I was the first movie I remember seeing in a
theater was when I was six years old. My dad
took me to see Body Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Doubled Sutherland really really caused some permanent psychic starring there.
(18:17):
It was super difficult.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Wow. Yeah, that's that's big. That's big.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
I've always been absolutely terrified of scary things on screen. Yeah,
I'm astonished, Tray that you are able to delve into
that world in your imagination and not actually just wind
up quivering in a ball in the corner.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah, as I would bemes.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
You've written some kind of iconic horror movies.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Well, yeah, but here's the thing, Like I said, as
long as it's fake, I'm good like it gives me
a feeling of control over it maybe, And I think
that's a lot of what draws people to horror.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
I guess that sort of makes sense. It's like on
set of Supernatural. I never got scared on set. Okay,
when you see when you see the scenes, when you
know what's happening, right, fine, But when I was prepping
for my role on Supernatural, I was trying to watch
Supernatural to catch up. Supernatural is not even scary in
the scheme of things, but if I watched more than
one episode in an evening, I would have nightmares.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
Yeah, part set out in small doses in order to
not go down a rabbit hole.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
That's incredible.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
So as a kid, so yeah, you get you get
dragged into that kind of a terrifying movie. I still
get haunted by Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Bodies.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Other than movies. What were some of the things that
you were afraid of when you were a little kid?
What scared you?
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Uh? We lived on a river and I we had
a dog named Bear, who is this sweet black lab.
And me love fetching sticks, and I used to throw
the stick into the river and Bear would then run
and grab them stick out of the water and come back.
One time, when I was probably again about six, I
threw the stick in the water and he ran into
(20:04):
the water and came back. But as he was emerging
along the shore coming out of the river, he had
turned into a giant, black big bird, and he was
about ten feet tall. It looked exactly like big bird
except for all black. And I was absolutely terrified of
my dog from that point forward because I never knew
(20:26):
when he might turn into big bird. And I went
to school and I told everybody about it. And then
I moved to a new school the next year, and
I told everybody what had happened with my dog there.
And I didn't have I couldn't figure this out, but
I didn't really have any friends. I went to a
new school again for the next year and told everybody,
and as I was telling them, what happened to my dog.
(20:47):
It suddenly dawned on me, Oh shit, that was a dream,
wasn't it. But it took me years to figure it
out that I had been afraid of my dog, the
dog that, by the way, was still with us. Yeah,
but every every time we walk to the room, I'd
be like, well, oh there's something wrong with that animal.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
Took me, you used to figure out that I had
dreamed it, And when I did, it was an amazing epiphany.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
That just totally gave me the creeps. Another script, Exactly,
I got a two movies out of this show so far.
That's incredible. Listen, I'd be hard hard pressed to think
of anyone who's living their best life better than you.
And we're gonna get We're going to get into all
that in a second. And I've been really looking forward
(21:34):
to to speaking with you. But I just wanted to ask. Now,
you went to University of Chicago and you majored in
social theory. Most successful highly successful actors major in acting,
but you did social theory? What what what brought you
to social theory and more importantly, what is social theory?
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Well, I would love to have an answer to this
second question. I've been trying to get to the black
about that my whole adult life. But I thought I
was going to go into politics, and my expectation of
myself was that I would be going to law school
after college. And I went and interned at the White
(22:15):
House and briefly worked at National Public Radio.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
And during the Clinton administration.
Speaker 4 (22:20):
That's right, And I became disillusioned in that process with
the political infrastructure that I was looking at, and thought,
I don't think I want to go about this in
that normal way. If I want to get involved in politics,
this portrays how full of hubris and megal maniacal ego
(22:44):
I have. But I thought, oh, I know what I'll do.
I'll do well like what Ronald Reagan did. I'll just
I'll get famous, and then I'll use that to have
a positive impact in the world. Rather than doing this
whole like internships and law school and LSATZ and garbage
like that, I'll just skip to the end. And so
I went. So I left the nepotistic and self serving
(23:10):
world of Washington, d C. And went to Hollywood, where
everyone has integrity.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Yes, And.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
And then it didn't happen like I thought. I thought
it was going to be just right away. Everybody, everybody
was gonna, you know, turn me into the next Leonardo DiCaprio,
And it took years for me to even really make
a steady income. And uh, you know, eventually I lost
sight of that bigger picture goal and just focused on
my career as an actor. As you mentioned in the introduction,
(23:39):
my determination and insistence on being cast eventually daid off.
And uh and then one you know, it was actually
Supernatural where there was this ardent fan base, and I
saw all of this. We would go to these fan
conventions for Supernatural, Supernatural, these fan commensions, and I saw
(24:01):
people were pouring all of this energy into the work
of being a fan, and it would come out in
these really artistic manificate manifestations. People were writing fan fiction,
people were creating beautiful drawings. Somebody brought up a needle
point portrait of my face that was almost photo realistic
(24:21):
on a pillow, and I was like, how long did
that take? And she said, oh, I don't know, probably
about a thousand hours.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
You're like, I didn't even work that long on the show.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Right, And it occurred to me, like, there's all this
creative energy that's being focused into the actual work of
being a fan of the show, and I started thinking
about how how we might redirect some of that energy
toward collective action that was of a positive benefit of
(24:51):
some sort. And I had a couple of little touchstones
along the way where I after the earthquake in Haiti,
I posted a linked to a unisef pages is shortly
after Twitter had even been birthed into the world. I
had a modest following there, like an everyone did at
that time, and I posted this link to a Seth
(25:12):
fundraising page and woke up the next morning to see that,
Oh my gosh, we've raised thirty thousand dollars, and that
was a little aha moment for me, thinking, Okay, actually,
it seems like this community is actually looking for direction
in this department. And then I sort of embarked on
(25:33):
this interesting kind of collaborative relationship with the fandom where
we were co creating both I think some conventional what
would be characterized as charitable works like that that that
first fundraiser then led into doing starting a nonprofit and
(25:53):
actually building a pretty large orphanage in Haiti, but an
interplay with the fandom where we were actually trying to
find ways to do something I called gamifying good. So
we were actually trying to find ways to have fun
in the world and be adventurous and be irreverent, but
(26:14):
at the same time find ways for those things to
actually have a positive impact. I mean, and I think
actually those things in the of themselves are inherently beneficial.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, absolutely, but they can.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Also mobilize more resources to genuinely help people who are
in need.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
In my in my head, you're the first to do this,
to to have that conscious thought of putting fun into
this and and and and challenging and maybe a little
irreverent and all for the good. Yeah. And that brings
us to your foundation, well one of them. But the
(26:52):
reason you're here is your foundation Random Acts. Now, before
we explain what this is, i'd love you to share.
I saw an interview with you and and you said, uh,
random Max was inspired by what you called your own
childhood baggage. Uh, you have a vivid childhood memory that
(27:12):
had a profound impact on you. Could you could you
share that?
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Well, it's funny because I don't actually know which one
you're talking about.
Speaker 5 (27:19):
But but I but I have a few of them. Uh,
one that I have cited in the past. I'm actually
gonna mention too, because I think that they're both relevant.
But one that I cited in the past was we
were really poor when I was a kid, and we were,
you know, at times homeless and and and at times,
you know, scraping by on welfare and and a kid
(27:44):
in my first grade class his mom saw that my
mom really didn't have any money and gave her one
hundred dollars to.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
Buy us Christmas presents one that year. And we would
not have had uh Christmas with any meaningful gear were
it not for that kid at that kid's mom. And
that just stuck with me for the rest of my life.
I was like, that was for her a relatively I mean,
it's a very generous act, but it's a relatively small act.
(28:13):
And yet here I was, thirty years later, thinking about
starting a nonprofit and thinking about that act, like that
one act still was lingering with me and percolating and
making me think about how I could have, you know,
how I could pay that forward somehow. But that was
another thing that I was coming to mind for some reason.
(28:36):
When I was five, my mother had a friend who
was a garbage He had had a really tough life,
and his job was he was one of those guys
that picked up garbage on the side of the road
and he had one of those little spears that used
to stab the garbage and put it in a bag. Yeah,
And it was my fifth birthday and he drew this
(28:59):
little card in watercolor. It was just about this big
and it was just a picture. It was almost looked
like Paddington. There was a little picture of him with
his raincoat on and his yellow slicker and he was
poking garbage and it said, I didn't mind working in
the rain today because it's Misha's birthday. This is a
guy that was not even a close family friend. It
(29:20):
was just this sweet little message. And our house burned
down when I was seventeen years old, and I kid
you not of everything I owned, I was like, oh no,
that card that card I had kept on the wall
in my room, and it was just like this constant companion.
(29:42):
And it was this tiny little gesture of kindness and attention,
like a kind of in the realm of what you
would expect from a mister Rogers in the world right
that had been had booied me throughout my entire childhood,
adolescence and into my tea years. Yeah, and I'm still
(30:02):
talking about it now. Yeah, And that just for me,
those little reminders of how being thoughtful and attentive to
other people can actually have a lingering impact for the
rest of their lives. It is not something that I
manage to carry out in my daily life on a
(30:23):
regular basis, on a consistent basis, but I keep trying
to remind myself. Yeah, two, be like that in the world.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Those small moments, those small acts just have a profound,
lasting impact. So you carry those with you. Then, like
you say, you begin to realize and recognize the power
of you know, fandom and those groups that are so
loyal and supportive and loving when it comes to the
shows that the art that we try to create. And
then on top of that comes this twenty ten Haiti earthquake.
(30:55):
So Random Acts is born as a charitable organization, but
at this point, like it's grown into this global organization.
It's run by more than one hundred and fifty plus
volunteer staff.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
More volunteers volunteer run.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Millions of supporters from all walks of life, all kinds
of annual events and stuff that happened like how do
you This is a lot, man, this is a lot
to carry, but it must still continue to feed your
soul in the same way that drawing from a guy
once did.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
Well. It does, and I really can't take credit for it.
One of I have found collaborators who have carried the torch.
I wouldn't be able to keep doing that because I
have other work that I engage in, and I'm raising
two kids and.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
You know, in the.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
Process of blending a family with even more kids. So
my I am still very much involved in random AX,
and I'm president of the board of random Ax. But
we have an incredible director, Rachel Minor, who was actually
also an actress. She was on Supernatural and she is
(32:15):
has now full time committed herself to the work of
running Random Acts as as a volunteer.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
I mean they funded almost six hundred different acts of
kindness last year alone.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Yeah, he's got I mentioned his own army. His army
is called Army of Good. They called themselves that. That's
that's pretty amazing. Yeah, because they all see that vision
that way. Hey, let's experiment with something. Let's do charity work.
Let's let's let's raise money for for people and organizations
(32:51):
that need it. But let's try to find a game
way of doing it. Play games in this. It's not
just random ax. There are others foundations that you've started
and one of myll you know.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
I sorry to interrupt you, but I wanted to just
say something. It's also not i would say, not necessarily
just about game creating a game aspect, although that is
part of it, and that has been integrated integral over
the years, but it's it's chiefly participatory and getting people
(33:27):
to see that they're they have agency and they can
participate in these things. And not only that, I'm really
interesting interested in dispelling the notion that it's a one
way transaction. I think a lot of times, you know,
when you go on to a website and you click
a donate button, it really does feel one way. I mean,
(33:48):
I guess in reciprocity there you do get a little
jolt of a good feeling having donated some money. But
when you actually participate in something, you're changed by that
process too. I'm going back to this, that Haiti project
because it was the first international thing that we did.
(34:08):
I did something called I guess it's called volunteerism, but
basically I got people. I was trying to figure out
how to raise enough money because we needed hundreds of
thousands of dollars for this project, and I thought, all right, well,
maybe we'll get people to you know, I got all
these fans that come to fan conventions. Maybe I'll say, like,
if you want to come with me to Haiti to
(34:29):
help build this orphanage. You had to figure out how
to raise five thousand dollars to come on a trip.
And we got the maximum number of people that we could,
you know, accommodate doing that, and raised a bunch of
money and did several trips over the course of several years.
But the people that went on these trips went thinking,
I am a relatively well off American who's going down
(34:58):
to this destitute country of Haiti to try to help
people who need my help. And it was I would
say it was maybe a larger share of the people
who went on the trip who were changed by the
experience than the people whom we were trying to help.
Real people who joined me on the trip. A lot
of the people ended up staying on for several months
(35:20):
in Haiti or quitting their jobs and moving back, you know,
moving into a different field altogether. It was a really
eye opening experience, and I think that's that's a big
part of this kind of work is if you're if
you're actually open to it and actually receptive, then it
actually has a chance to penetrate you and change you.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
You know, that participatory aspect. I mean, all of a sudden,
you've got direct skin in the game, like you're seeing it,
you're feeling it, your experience.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
You like the feeling. It almost becomes a drug.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
Yeah, yeah, Can I turn that interview lens on you
guys for a second? What was your impetus for starting
this particular podcast, because I actually don't know your origin story.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
Well, we just want to have an army like you,
So that's that's really what we're trying. That's what we're
working toward, right Briy No, we've been friends for a
long long time and as we have said in previous episodes,
you know for twenty five years. Brian is a radio
LA radio legend. It was half of an Extraordinary Team
morning team on the radio here in LA but also
(36:24):
syndicated around the world and had his own series on
NBC in a Star on the Walk of Fame and
it's in the Radio Hall of Fame. So he's a legend.
I'm just a schmuck, but he's a legend. But for
twenty five years he would say to his listeners all
around the world, he would sign off by saying, be
good humans. And that's at the heart of you know,
our friendship, frankly, but our dedication to this project is like,
(36:47):
let's you know, the world gets kind of ugly around
and so let's try to shine a light on the
people who are trying to make a positive difference and.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Kind of like part of what you've been doing in
your concept is it was an experiment for us to
make sure it wasn't modeling or it wasn't saccharin. But
we had yux, we had fun, we had energy, and
we're you know, let's find out if this can actually happen,
this is possible.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
Let's lift some people up. So you know, we feel
like kindred spirits. And that's why, like the minute our
mutual friend Eric Kripke told me about random Ax, I
was like, oh, yeah, why wouldn't we.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Want him on that show? What the angle of random Ax?
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Yeah, that's expuly right, that's exactly right.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
Talking to Eric in an hour we're conspiring on a
on another project.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Well, tell him thank you for having for turning us
on to you. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. They're just to talk
about some of the fun you've had and I'm gonna
mispronounce this. Uh, And we have been arguing for I
don't know a day and a half. He thinks he knows.
I think I know. It's by design, Dude, he did it.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
I didn't.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I'm going to say, and I wanted. The reason why
I'm bringing this up, yeah, is because it makes me
happy to read some of the things that you you've done,
that you're that your followers, that you're the people involved
have done. So I'm going to call it weis What
did you call it?
Speaker 3 (38:14):
Do you think?
Speaker 6 (38:16):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (38:16):
I mean I I put a little bit more of
a wez at the end than a wish, But then
it became so difficult to pronounce, which, by the way,
was by design. I thought it was funny, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
I was wondering either because you thought it was funny
or because I'm missing something definitely messing with people.
Speaker 4 (38:34):
Okay. We eventually truncated it to so you could just
you could say that and uh and get away with it.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Thank you, Thank God. The Gish is where you challenge
hundreds of thousands of people and over one hundred and
ten countries to create art, create positive mayhem. I love
that term, and create a lasting difference in the world.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Now, uh gifts.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Participants in this, they've raised millions, they've amassed. This is
my favorite part. Eight Guinness World Records. Yeah, that's incredible.
Eight Guinness including and this is just a few of them.
And I'm only reading this again because it makes me smile,
makes me happy. The largest online photo album of hugs
one hundred eight twenty incredible. The largest chain of safety
(39:24):
pins three thousand, five hundred and eighty three feet, like
you do. The largest gathering of people dressed as French
maids six hundred and ninety five. That's like your dream
come true. You couldn't quite make it to seven hundred there, man,
that's just a shaf The longest human chain to pass
through a hula hoop five hundred and seventy two. How stupid,
(39:48):
how fun, how ridiculous, and how lovely?
Speaker 4 (39:52):
Yeah, well listen, now, it wasn't all positive and without consequence.
And I'll explain why I'm saying that. First of all,
there were people who went to jail participating in Gish.
There were people who were court who were court martialed,
there were people who were injured unfortunately, and one day
(40:13):
I decided what it would be great if we could
break the Guinness World record of breaking the most Guinness
World records in a day, which was the day that
we did the French maids, the hula hoop and the
decorated hats. Unfortunately, Guinness, while conceding personally to me that they,
to their knowledge, didn't know of anyone who had broken
(40:34):
three Guiness World records in one stretch of three hours.
They wouldn't give me a fourth record on the record breaking.
But that was It was a hot day in Seattle,
and I had told people to congregate dressed as French
maids with decorated hats, and the only place that we
could find very affordably was a high school gymnasium. It
(40:58):
was the summertime, and it was like a record breaking
heat wave. It was, you know, for Seattle, very hot.
It was like almost ninety degrees and very humid, and
this gymnasium did not have air conditioning and really no ventilation.
To speak up, and I was coming over from the
San Juan Islands and I missed my faery, so I
(41:18):
was late, and everyone was in there waiting for me
in this hot like packed in like shoulder to shoulder
in this hot gymnasium on the hottest day of the year.
And I didn't plan ahead, so I didn't have like
water for people or anything like that. And I got
there and everybody was like dripped, like all of these
French maid costumes were drenched in sweat. And I did
(41:42):
this like, yeah, everybody's in this fun and we did
what we needed to do to get the record for
the French Maids. Everybody took a photo together and then
everybody donned their decorative hats, took another photo, and people
were starting to get a little woozy, and some of
the other people who were helping me put this together, like, MESHI,
I think we got to pull the plug. This is
not good. People are not feeling well. It's too hot.
(42:03):
This is what We didn't have water. And the plan
was now to do the longest human chain passing through
the hula hoop, which is basically like everybody has to
stand in a giant circle. There's almost seven hundred people
standing in a circle holding hands, and they opened the
chain at one point and let a hula hoop in,
and then you have to pass the hula hoop over
your arms, over head, over your legs without letting go
(42:24):
of the next person, and so on, and you have
to keep the chain. In order to keep get the record,
we had to make a video recording and show that
this chain remained unbroken in its entirety as the hula
hoop gets passed along this chain. Now we had gone
outside from this hot box of the gymnasium into this
big field where we were just under direct sun and
(42:48):
still no water, and everybody's holding hands and passing this
hula hoop and somebody can't stand up. He folds onto
the ground and she's like passing in and out of
conscious this but the people next to her don't want
to let go of her hands, and so somebody calls
nine one. One long story short, we had seven ambulances
(43:11):
show up. Seven people had heat strokes in the in
the in the process, and I spent the next day
on the phone with people like talking to them and
having recovered. Fortunately everyone was okay, okay, I mean.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
This is like the fire Festival of charitable events.
Speaker 4 (43:28):
Yeah, that's right. Shockingly no one sued me. I don't
know why. By the way, there's open invitation out there.
Anybody out there who's still harboring a grudge about this,
you probably should sue because that was a completely irresponsible occasion.
But we we did have a lot of fun, and
sometimes we pushed the boundaries a little bit and and
(43:51):
uh and created mayhem. There were there were there was
an item that I had took particular joy, and so
it was kind of like a scavenger hu. One of
the items was that I had put in a scavender
hunt was get one of the As it turns out,
the astronauts on the space station, the International Space Station
have the capacity to communicate with the ground and they
(44:13):
also have social.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Media accounts, right.
Speaker 4 (44:15):
So the instruction was to get an astronaut on the
International Space Station to hold up a sign with your
team name on it, because these are teams in and
so people started flooding, flooding the social media channels of
these astronauts with these requests, and NASA posted on their
official Twitter feed, we understand that you're participating in this game,
(44:39):
but please understand that our astronauts have real work to do,
Please please leave them alone. And MASSA just shut it down,
so understandable. Next year I wrote another item, which was
last year NASA told us to leave their astronauts alone.
We know that they've been kicking themselves all year for
(45:02):
missing out on the fund. So here's your assignment for
this year. Get was written in space. And that year
William Shatner happened to be participating as a participant in
this scavenger hunt, and he got in touch with NASA
to try to get his team to get the points
to get written in space.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Make it happen.
Speaker 4 (45:23):
Because we were a private company and NASA is public,
it's like completely forbidden for them to do any kind
of like cross pollination. So it had to go. This
had to go up to the director of NASA. NASA
the Director of NASA had to approve this, and they
officially named a mountain on Mars. And and NASA then
(45:47):
posted on their Twitter channel that we have officially named
a mountain on Mars and they like show it like
written in laser lettering on the mountain there.
Speaker 6 (45:58):
It was.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
It was a it was a pretty try a moment.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
You had to be all well at times, laughing more
than other times, but laughing at this whole thing. Yes,
I mean, it's a good cost, but it's so funny. Yeah,
I know, I know, it's so funny.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
You could just imagine, like that communication director at NASA,
it's like, Okay, we called this mountain gishust, now you
leave us alone.
Speaker 4 (46:17):
Yeah, and.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Also could you tell us how to spell it?
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Yeah? Well okay, so we I mean, we understand you've
at least temporarily pumped the brakes on that, but you
have not stopped one iota in your efforts to sort
of just try and find these ways to make a
positive difference but also show people a good time, all
all in the spirit of fun. You know, how how
(46:41):
can we work together to participate in something that is
a way to give back? And that's one of the reasons.
I mean, that's the main reason why we wanted to
talk to you today, Misha, because you're.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Just, yeah, prepping for this. That's why I kind of
opened up the interview saying I would be hard pressed
to find someone who's living their best life life better
than you.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
I'm just so so proud of you. Don't even know
you very well. I've never met you until today, but
I'm so I'm so happy for you, and I'm so
happy for the people that get you and doing all
these wonderful things in the spirit that they're doing them.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
So, Michae, fans of your work, whether it's on Supernatural
or just your natural impulse to not just put scares
but put love into the universe universe. If people want
to support what you hope to continue accomplishing with Random Acts,
how can they do that day? Should they go to
randomax dot org.
Speaker 4 (47:34):
Yeah, random ax dot org is a great place. We
have a We have just recently updated our website, so
it is a pretty good resource for checking out what
we've done in the past and what we're working on now.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
Fantastic.
Speaker 4 (47:50):
The best way for people to communicate with me about
activation in the world and getting involved in specific projects
that I am involved with is to actually text me.
I communicate specifically about specific projects that I'm working on.
Good people over text, so I can share that number please,
(48:13):
which is three two. It's three two, three four five,
three nine, and I'm working on right now. I'm about
to have a call with Eric KRIPKEI we're doing this
event next in ten actually right before this podcast will air,
we'll have done this so but but we're we're doing
some work to help get Kamala Harris elected. And I
(48:39):
don't know how much you guys talk about politics on
your podcast, but what whatever end you are on of
the political spectrum, I really think that the most, the
single most impactful thing that we can do in the
world is actually get people elected who report resent our
(49:00):
world views and our values. Because there are so many
more resources that are brought to bear by the federal
government than by all of the other nonprofits combined. There's
you know, privately, we can, we can dicker in the margins.
We can we can make incremental progress doing nonprofit work
(49:23):
and good creative work in the world. But the truth
is there is a tremendous amount of power and a
tremendous amount of resources that are held by elected officials,
and the only power we have over them is at
the ballot box.
Speaker 1 (49:39):
That's right, Well, I think I speak for my partner.
We couldn't agree more.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
With you without questions, So listen, We're going to drop
the random acts dot org website link on our website
at Begod Humans podcast dot com along with your text
so we can also text you at night like are
you well, so we'll have all that information.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
I also want to mention before we say our goodbyes,
and this has nothing to do with random x uh,
but in preparation and trying to get to know you
through through prepping for this episode, Misha, I I saw
that you wrote a book and I'm a book of poems,
and just the description of the poems that I said,
(50:24):
I was intrigued. So I bought it. I bought it
three days ago and I'm well, I've been through all
of them, but now I'm rereading them and some of
them are so special. So I'm wanting to suggest to
those who who like this sort of thing. And when
I say this sort of thing, you have no idea
what I mean, because they that they made me happy,
(50:46):
they made me warm, they made me laugh, kind of
like what the man you've you've met today in his
poetry and his insights and his memories. The book is
called Some Things I Still Can't I highly highly recommend.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
Please check that out. Please go to randomax dot org.
Please text him in the middle of the night, Misha,
Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (51:08):
Please one more thing in just a few days. If
you are an American go to the polls and boats.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
Yes, absolutely, please, please please, Misha, thank you not only
for scaring the but Jesus out of millions of us
and entertaining the hell out of us, but more than that,
thank you for truly in inspiring us with all of
your efforts to bring just some genuine kindness and fun
to the world. You are one hell See what I
did there, the dark Angel, You are one hell of.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
A good human. Thank you for joining us, my friend.
Speaker 4 (51:37):
Thanks for all your kindness.
Speaker 6 (51:38):
Gentlemen, we will thank you suck.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
This was one of those guests that was exactly like
I hoped he'd be so true with the humor and
with the energy and with it it was I just
couldn't be more more pleased with that guy.
Speaker 3 (52:02):
Yeah, I know, and considering we we started talking about
things that scare the but Jesus out of us, like
I wound up like feeling kind of genuinely entertained, Like
that guy's an amazing guy, and he's really doing the
right thing, and he's doing the kind of thing as
you rightfully called out, that we are hoping to do. True,
So we're going to continue doing that.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
What is that that's so annoying.
Speaker 3 (52:27):
Are you following us on the socials? Please do uh
on Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff, threads and
and TikTok, but most importantly, go to our website, Be
Good Humans podcast dot com. We're gonna have the links,
like we said, uh to random ax dot org and
Misha's personal text number I don't.
Speaker 1 (52:46):
Know, and we'll try to get your nasses.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
Yes you.
Speaker 1 (52:50):
Listen, Happy Halloween, be safe of course, and h now
are you still in your neighborhood given giving out candy
and dressing up?
Speaker 3 (52:59):
And it's too quiet and I think my neighborhood creeps
kids out, so we never get the traffic we have.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
We put it out and honor ball, but it's all
the pentagrams and stuff you've painted on this on your house.
Speaker 3 (53:09):
Okay, I'm never going to look that down. Oh my god,
I know what are you gonna do? I was a teenager.
Thank you for joining us, Happy Halloween and we will
see you next time.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
Be good Humans, everybody, bye bye, Be safe.
Speaker 2 (53:20):
Be good Humans, Be good Humans, Be good Humans, or
we will.
Speaker 1 (53:28):
Thank you sucked.
Speaker 3 (53:30):
Be Good Humans is executive produced by Brian Phelps, Trey Calloway,
and Grant Anderson, with associate producers Sean Fitzgerald and Clementine Callaway,
and partnership with straw Hut Media. Please like, follow, and subscribe,
and remember be good humans.
Boozing from the inky blackness of nights arises a grotesque
figure from the bowels of Hell. Run Run. I'm Kamala Harris,
and I approve of this message.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Be good humans, Be good humans. Be good humans, or
we will think you sucked. Good humans, or we will
thank you suck.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Happy Halloween season everyone, Look we've got decor and everything.
Welcome to the Bigger Humans Podcast. I'm Brian Phelps and
that they're is the incomparable Tree Callowen.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
It is such a spooky pleasure to be here with you,
my friend. Yeah, and with all of you as well.
And thank you. By the way, we've been getting so
much incredible stuff through the bigin Humans podcast website. You're
telling us about all kinds of amazing humans in your lives.
Keep doing that, please and follow us on the socials
and like and subscribe and follow and all those scary things.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
We're very excited about today's show our guest, which we're
not even gonna tell you it is and tell us
time for you to know, but we will begin since
it is the Halloween season. Yes, scary things. What scared
you when you were a little kid? Did you have
a maine?
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:43):
I mean, look, I've never been a fan of jump
scares since I was a kid, like anybody, like you know,
the uncle would be like bo. So last year, I
think for the first time, I went to one of
those universal Halloween you know, horror nights or whatever, and
I just got pissed as the night went on. I
just want to punch people like that. I don't like that.
And then I have this weird fear of like maybe
(02:05):
it goes back to Jaws when we were kids, but
like underwater, maybe it goes back to you being a bedwetter. Well,
thanks for bringing that up when you're a little Yeah, okay,
so that's clearly that's the source of it. But like underwater,
like I feel like I'm out of my element. I
don't belong there. Creepy things are gonna come up.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Mind me. I don't like that, all right? What about you?
For me? There was there's one thing that that affected
me so much as a kid when I got to live,
as you know, in a very very old old house,
ancient and we had a very very old, ancient furnace
down in the basements. Oh say no more. Now this
is in a finished basement. There's no ping pong table
(02:42):
or pool table or television or carpeting or paneling. This
was dirt walls, brick floor, and in the far back
in the corner was this furnace. And when I was
eight years old, that's when Dad deemed me old enough
to have a chore, a big boy chore. Every night.
That is a big boy chort. And let me tell you.
(03:03):
There was a light at the top of the stairs
and a light over by the furnace. So and this
was we're talking about forty yards, yeah, okay, And so
I had to get from one place to the other
and inflick that light on. But eight years old, I
go downstairs dreading this and I'm supposed to put pour
water in this reservoir for the old furnace. I think
(03:23):
it was like a humidifier or something. So I had
to do this every night. The worst part was I'm done.
I'm still, you know, looking over my shoulder. I'm freaking out.
Every night. This was every night, I have to turn
off the light and then I have to run for
thirty yards forty or however along it was over to
the stairs where there's light. So I am booking, I'm
(03:43):
just and I'm in my mind, I'm imagining all these
things that are chasing me for real, are chasing me
for real. Of course, I'm booking up the stairs as
a little eight year old can as fast as I can,
and in my mind, I see monster of Carms about
to grab me, course me back down. So bet, I
was so frightened of that.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Well, first of all, I'm sorry, but second, thank you
for this story, because I am now going to write
the major motion picture forty Yards of Fear Going to Happen.
But speaking of movies, then, okay, let's talk about that, Like,
what are some of your favorite scary movies that just
you know, get to go.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
To the favorite scary movies. I love scary movies, adore
them up until they stopped making the original Frankenstein's and
you know Bella Lagosi, wolf Man and Dracula. I could
do those because I was raised every Saturday night with
acrey creature feature. I don't know if you had anything
(04:41):
like this, but it was a guy that would come
on at midnight to show Dracula or the show wolf Man,
the originals. Yeah, the old stuff. There wasn't any gore,
there wasn't. It was it was fun. It was it
was a plus. This comical guy, Acrey, Chuck Akrey would
come on during the commercials and sell siding you put
on the side of the house. He would sell sighting.
(05:02):
So there was just a whole joyful thing about these movies.
But then I a gettle older, and then all my
friends are now watching the gory.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
I can't.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Here's my thing. It boils down to, this is why
I cannot stand horror films. Okay, I hate the gore
because I hate the human suffering. Sure, I mean I
can't take that. Yeah, there's something inside me. And I
can tell you this. My father was the same way,
or maybe I'm the same as him. Okay, Well, when
I was fourteen, the Exorcist had just come out in theaters,
(05:36):
and you know it's you know, everybody's talking about it
every and my dad hates these kind of movies as
I do. My mother loves them. So my mother, I
don't know how she did it, but she finally talked
him in to kicking and screaming taking her to the
theater to see the Exorcist. Oh boy, this is a
(05:58):
true story. By the way. Now, by the time they
got home back home from the from the theater seeing
The Exorcist. I was already in bed, sound asleep. I'm
fourteen years old, sound asleep, Okay. About two thirty three
in the morning, I hear coming from downstairs, my father
standing there because my bedroom is right above their bedroom, okay,
(06:20):
and I hear my father waking me up, going right right,
and I'm like, yeah, yeah, he goes, stop moving around
up there, get back in bed, Dad. I was in bed.
I was sleeping, yeah, and he could oh, all.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Right, well, good night. Guess I got Linda Blair in
my head.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
So yeah. He told me the next morning that he
was he couldn't didn't get a week asleep that night,
and that movie affected him so much that he was
hearing every creek, every whatever sounded like footsteps. I mean
that's you've seen it. Oh yeah, mine, I haven't seen it.
I've seen clips, but I've you inherit, his fear, anything
anything dealing with that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Yeah, is it's weird, right, Like I can fake it.
I've faked it lots of times. I've written horror films.
I've you know, worked on crime shows where like it
used to be my job on CSI to unzip a
body bag literally and look at like whatever body fake
body was going to be on the table. I have
no problem with the fake stuff, but like man, one
(07:25):
of my kids skins their knee and I'm like a yeah,
like I can't handle if it's real. But the fake
stuff is, you know, like Exorcist I'm actually a fan of,
although I have an argument with my sons over they
don't think that's scary. They have a new definition of
what is scary. But that still scares me. The Omen,
which my father in law produced. I can never get
enough of that movie, The Shining, of course. And then
(07:47):
there's a very obscure Dutch film from the eighties called
The Vanishing, which I think might be the most frightening
film I've ever seen. This is a couple who wind
up getting buried alive. It's it's very scary. Do you
remember when Jaws came out? Okay, I was sixteen years
old and all my friends now know my hatred for gore,
for horror. They had seen the movie in the theater,
(08:10):
they had gone, and they somehow peer pressured me peer pressure,
peer pressure, peer, of course, into going to see the
movie with them. I hated the right into Moline. It's
about a thirty minute drive to go to the cinemas.
I hated So I'm sitting there two minutes before the
movie starts, and Dan is on my left side, and
there's about five of us sitting in a row, and
(08:32):
I said, Dan, what am I doing here? I'm going
to hate this. I'm dreading this. Of course I want
to go.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
He was not, Brian, it's great. So the movie starts
and sure enough, you know, the first gory thing that
does happen. I'm like this or I'm closing my eyes
working away, and they're all laughing and laughing, laughing. Now
it gets to the point in the movie where I
think it was Dreyfus that was scuba diving and he
comes up on this wrecked boat and there is hole
(09:00):
in the boat, the bottom of the boat, and without
any warning at all, Yes, a severed head, Yes, comes
out of the hole.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Yes, it's one of the best jump scares in Hollywood history. Okay,
well this is what happened. The first thing, or that
the thing I hear first after that scene was this
Dan saying.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Brian, Brian, am I what? And he goes sit down.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
This is a true story.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
It just lifted me.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Out of my Okay, terrifying, not terrifying.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Let's watch a comedy, maybe a rom com. Let's do that.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
I will also say that some of the most satisfying
horror I've enjoyed as a viewer, it was on television, right,
small screen horror. When I was a kid. My mom
used to watch the old soap opera Dark Shadows with
barn I did too. We'd race home to see Dark
Shadow Night Gallery.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Door by the way.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Yeah that's true, no gore. But you know, probably one
of my all time favorite horror series is one that
I actually got to write for. But to tell you
the full story so that you can appreciate it, I
got to go back to high.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
School for a minute. Okay, okay, all right, So I'm intrigued.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
So I grew up in Tulsa, and Tulsa's one of
those places where it's certainly at the time, like you
could have a shopping mall in one corner and then
cattle grazing on the other, right, just collision between rural
and urban life, right, And so being a teenage boy,
teenage boys in Tulsa, there's not a lot to do.
So what you're basically doing is trying to figure out
how to get into trouble. So one particular Saturday, some
(10:40):
friends and I are out driving and one of us
had a license at least, and we see what looks
to be an old overgrown driveway that goes into the woods.
So we don't know where it leads, so we're curious,
and so we get out of the car. We walk
up this old overgrown driveway and we find an abandoned house. Okay,
just sitting in the middle of the woods. Couldn't look
creepier from the outside. Course, we got to go in.
(11:00):
So we go in and uh, this is already oh yeah, right,
so the windows are broken, it has weird for some reasons,
a red painted ceiling with black beams. It's half already
set decked for like this just complete horror movie, like
you said. So we decide in the moment, like teenage
boys would do, let's do a little bit of work
here today and make this look like a house of
(11:23):
Satanic worship. Okay, so here's because we've all watched too
many horror films, right, and so first thing we do,
we get some paint. We paint a pentagram on the floor,
we melt. We get some candles. One of the guys
worked at Peer one, so we get some cheap candles.
We melt them down onto the points of theme about here.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
If I was your friend in that group of guys,
I gotta go.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Left.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
No no, no, you'll see where your part comes in,
by the way, So we do the pentagram. We find
an old work table behind the house.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
It's long.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
We pull it into the living room. We get some
cheap chain from a home depot. We nail it to
the corner so it looks like someone's been restrained on
the table. We poured a bunch of high sea punch
in the middle of it, so it looks like dried blood.
Like We totally set like this. And the last important
detail is I had just gotten a Blue Oyster Cult
record I'm Burning I'm Burning, Burning Field and it had
(12:14):
occult symbols on it. I didn't know what they meant,
but I just literally brought in my Blue Oyster Cult
record and I copied these occult symbols on the wall
with spray paint. Right finished, we go to the local
convenience store where all the kids hang out on a
Saturday night, and all we had to do was start
in conversation dropping little nuggets like, do you guys hear
about this devil House out out one hundred and eleventh
in y?
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I love it?
Speaker 3 (12:35):
And so it starts to spread like wildfire. Right for
the next two years, Brian, every weekend, kids from not
just our school, every school across Tulsa, they're all going
to the Devil House. And the best part of this
is they're coming back with these horror stories of I
saw a six eyed goat, I saw a dead man
floating in the pool, I saw like and they're just
(12:56):
their fears are running away with themselves. Right. I am
talking about this in the high school newspaper class, and
in Walk's Mss Purringon, who's the teacher and the editor
of the paper, And she's like, are you talking about
the Devil House? And I go yeah, She says, you know,
I've been hearing about this too. You seem to know
a lot about it. Why don't you write a story
for the school newspaper. So now I've not only created
(13:17):
a fake devilhouse, I then write a fake article in
the school paper about the devil House. Cut to many
years later, I'm living here in La, I have a
meeting with a guy named Eric Kripke. Cripke is best
known right now as the creator of the hit series
on Amazon, The Boys. I liked the first season. Oh no,
it's incredible. But like he's created many series. I worked
on Revolution with Eric Kripke, but his first great claim
(13:41):
to fame was creating the television series Supernatural. Right, So,
in case you somehow impossibly managed to miss, this show
is an extremely successful TV series fifteen seasons. It ran
between the WB and the CW network, and it was
basically about two brothers played by Jared Padleki and j
to Acles, the Winchester Brothers. Right, These are two brothers
(14:03):
who travel the country hunting demons and ghosts and monsters
and all kinds of superhu It was awesome.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
So I have this meeting with Eric Kripke during the
first season of Supernatural and I come in with pitches
and you know, I'm ready to sort of talk about
and he says, yeah, I don't want to hear your pitches.
Just tell me a scary story. So I tell him
the story of creating the Devil House as a teenager,
and he goes, oh my god, we have to do
this as an episode. Okay, so I now have not
only created the devil House as a teenager and written
(14:30):
a bogus article in the school paper, but then cut
to I write an episode. It's episode sixteen of first
season of Supernatural called hell House. Oh, a bunch of
kids who prank their friends into believing there's a devil house.
But of course the more people who believe in it,
the more the supernatural power becomes real. Right, right, So
(14:50):
all of that to say, like this is this was
Did you ever shared?
Speaker 1 (14:54):
But did you ever share with any of the people
that were sharing and creating these urban miss Yes? And oh,
by the way, we did that, buddies, and I did that.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
You share it a little bit later because we had
a Brian in our bunch who was our first test friend. Oh,
and we poor Brian. I mean this is James is
his name. We brought him out and just scared the
be Jesus out of him, like he was not happy
with us for a long time. Oh you little shit,
I know. But then we kept it to ourselves for
a long time. But here's the reason why I think
this is appropriate to talk about because when when we
(15:27):
come back, Brian when.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
We come back, we're going to chat with one of
the most beloved actors from Supernatural, a guy who's created
something magnificent and it continues to help people in a
plethora of amazing ways. He and get this, he's I
think the Yeah, he is the first guest we've ever
had that has his own army. Oh. I'll explain later
when we get Don't go Away. You're not gonna want
(15:50):
to miss this. This guy is so cool.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Of a Bundiger Killiger Kigi, we will take you suck.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Welcome back to be good humans. Listen.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Misha Collins is an extraordinarily gifted and unfrankly unstoppably determined
actor and director and producer and poet and best selling
author and activist and humanitarian. And he's got this incredibly
deep list of impressive credits that include NYPD Blue and
and CSI E. R. Monk, A Charmed twenty four Girl Interrupted,
(16:43):
Timeless Gotham Knights, and get this, twelve count them twelve
unforgettable seasons where he is probably best known and truly
beloved by its passionate fan base for playing a spellbinding
role of Castiel, the Dark Angel, probably MP teen thousand,
episodes of the series You Guessed It, Supernatural Mischi Collins.
(17:08):
You frighteningly talented bastard. Welcome to be good Humane.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
Thank you for having me here, and thank you for
characterizing me as an unstoppable and determined actor, because that
conjures up an image of somebody who's like absolutely insistent
on being cast in something whether or not anyone wants
to do, and I feel like that is how I
have built my career.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
So thank you.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
It was fun listening to you guys talk about you know,
it's not really what I expected I was signing up for.
Here with the bed Humans podcast childhood traumas form of
various different supernatural terrors, that was really nice to hear.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Good good.
Speaker 4 (17:53):
It got me reflecting on some of mine. I when
I was the first movie I remember seeing in a
theater was when I was six years old. My dad
took me to see Body Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Doubled Sutherland really really caused some permanent psychic starring there.
(18:17):
It was super difficult.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Wow. Yeah, that's that's big. That's big.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
I've always been absolutely terrified of scary things on screen. Yeah,
I'm astonished, Tray that you are able to delve into
that world in your imagination and not actually just wind
up quivering in a ball in the corner.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah, as I would bemes.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
You've written some kind of iconic horror movies.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Well, yeah, but here's the thing, Like I said, as
long as it's fake, I'm good like it gives me
a feeling of control over it maybe, And I think
that's a lot of what draws people to horror.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
I guess that sort of makes sense. It's like on
set of Supernatural. I never got scared on set. Okay,
when you see when you see the scenes, when you
know what's happening, right, fine, But when I was prepping
for my role on Supernatural, I was trying to watch
Supernatural to catch up. Supernatural is not even scary in
the scheme of things, but if I watched more than
one episode in an evening, I would have nightmares.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
Yeah, part set out in small doses in order to
not go down a rabbit hole.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
That's incredible.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
So as a kid, so yeah, you get you get
dragged into that kind of a terrifying movie. I still
get haunted by Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Bodies.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Other than movies. What were some of the things that
you were afraid of when you were a little kid?
What scared you?
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Uh? We lived on a river and I we had
a dog named Bear, who is this sweet black lab.
And me love fetching sticks, and I used to throw
the stick into the river and Bear would then run
and grab them stick out of the water and come back.
One time, when I was probably again about six, I
threw the stick in the water and he ran into
(20:04):
the water and came back. But as he was emerging
along the shore coming out of the river, he had
turned into a giant, black big bird, and he was
about ten feet tall. It looked exactly like big bird
except for all black. And I was absolutely terrified of
my dog from that point forward because I never knew
(20:26):
when he might turn into big bird. And I went
to school and I told everybody about it. And then
I moved to a new school the next year, and
I told everybody what had happened with my dog there.
And I didn't have I couldn't figure this out, but
I didn't really have any friends. I went to a
new school again for the next year and told everybody,
and as I was telling them, what happened to my dog.
(20:47):
It suddenly dawned on me, Oh shit, that was a dream,
wasn't it. But it took me years to figure it
out that I had been afraid of my dog, the
dog that, by the way, was still with us. Yeah,
but every every time we walk to the room, I'd
be like, well, oh there's something wrong with that animal.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
Took me, you used to figure out that I had
dreamed it, And when I did, it was an amazing epiphany.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
That just totally gave me the creeps. Another script, Exactly,
I got a two movies out of this show so far.
That's incredible. Listen, I'd be hard hard pressed to think
of anyone who's living their best life better than you.
And we're gonna get We're going to get into all
that in a second. And I've been really looking forward
(21:34):
to to speaking with you. But I just wanted to ask. Now,
you went to University of Chicago and you majored in
social theory. Most successful highly successful actors major in acting,
but you did social theory? What what what brought you
to social theory and more importantly, what is social theory?
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Well, I would love to have an answer to this
second question. I've been trying to get to the black
about that my whole adult life. But I thought I
was going to go into politics, and my expectation of
myself was that I would be going to law school
after college. And I went and interned at the White
(22:15):
House and briefly worked at National Public Radio.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
And during the Clinton administration.
Speaker 4 (22:20):
That's right, And I became disillusioned in that process with
the political infrastructure that I was looking at, and thought,
I don't think I want to go about this in
that normal way. If I want to get involved in politics,
this portrays how full of hubris and megal maniacal ego
(22:44):
I have. But I thought, oh, I know what I'll do.
I'll do well like what Ronald Reagan did. I'll just
I'll get famous, and then I'll use that to have
a positive impact in the world. Rather than doing this
whole like internships and law school and LSATZ and garbage
like that, I'll just skip to the end. And so
I went. So I left the nepotistic and self serving
(23:10):
world of Washington, d C. And went to Hollywood, where
everyone has integrity.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Yes, And.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
And then it didn't happen like I thought. I thought
it was going to be just right away. Everybody, everybody
was gonna, you know, turn me into the next Leonardo DiCaprio,
And it took years for me to even really make
a steady income. And uh, you know, eventually I lost
sight of that bigger picture goal and just focused on
my career as an actor. As you mentioned in the introduction,
(23:39):
my determination and insistence on being cast eventually daid off.
And uh and then one you know, it was actually
Supernatural where there was this ardent fan base, and I
saw all of this. We would go to these fan
conventions for Supernatural, Supernatural, these fan commensions, and I saw
(24:01):
people were pouring all of this energy into the work
of being a fan, and it would come out in
these really artistic manificate manifestations. People were writing fan fiction,
people were creating beautiful drawings. Somebody brought up a needle
point portrait of my face that was almost photo realistic
(24:21):
on a pillow, and I was like, how long did
that take? And she said, oh, I don't know, probably
about a thousand hours.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
You're like, I didn't even work that long on the show.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Right, And it occurred to me, like, there's all this
creative energy that's being focused into the actual work of
being a fan of the show, and I started thinking
about how how we might redirect some of that energy
toward collective action that was of a positive benefit of
(24:51):
some sort. And I had a couple of little touchstones
along the way where I after the earthquake in Haiti,
I posted a linked to a unisef pages is shortly
after Twitter had even been birthed into the world. I
had a modest following there, like an everyone did at
that time, and I posted this link to a Seth
(25:12):
fundraising page and woke up the next morning to see that,
Oh my gosh, we've raised thirty thousand dollars, and that
was a little aha moment for me, thinking, Okay, actually,
it seems like this community is actually looking for direction
in this department. And then I sort of embarked on
(25:33):
this interesting kind of collaborative relationship with the fandom where
we were co creating both I think some conventional what
would be characterized as charitable works like that that that
first fundraiser then led into doing starting a nonprofit and
(25:53):
actually building a pretty large orphanage in Haiti, but an
interplay with the fandom where we were actually trying to
find ways to do something I called gamifying good. So
we were actually trying to find ways to have fun
in the world and be adventurous and be irreverent, but
(26:14):
at the same time find ways for those things to
actually have a positive impact. I mean, and I think
actually those things in the of themselves are inherently beneficial.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, absolutely, but they can.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Also mobilize more resources to genuinely help people who are
in need.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
In my in my head, you're the first to do this,
to to have that conscious thought of putting fun into
this and and and and challenging and maybe a little
irreverent and all for the good. Yeah. And that brings
us to your foundation, well one of them. But the
(26:52):
reason you're here is your foundation Random Acts. Now, before
we explain what this is, i'd love you to share.
I saw an interview with you and and you said, uh,
random Max was inspired by what you called your own
childhood baggage. Uh, you have a vivid childhood memory that
(27:12):
had a profound impact on you. Could you could you
share that?
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Well, it's funny because I don't actually know which one
you're talking about.
Speaker 5 (27:19):
But but I but I have a few of them. Uh,
one that I have cited in the past. I'm actually
gonna mention too, because I think that they're both relevant.
But one that I cited in the past was we
were really poor when I was a kid, and we were,
you know, at times homeless and and and at times,
you know, scraping by on welfare and and a kid
(27:44):
in my first grade class his mom saw that my
mom really didn't have any money and gave her one
hundred dollars to.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
Buy us Christmas presents one that year. And we would
not have had uh Christmas with any meaningful gear were
it not for that kid at that kid's mom. And
that just stuck with me for the rest of my life.
I was like, that was for her a relatively I mean,
it's a very generous act, but it's a relatively small act.
(28:13):
And yet here I was, thirty years later, thinking about
starting a nonprofit and thinking about that act, like that
one act still was lingering with me and percolating and
making me think about how I could have, you know,
how I could pay that forward somehow. But that was
another thing that I was coming to mind for some reason.
(28:36):
When I was five, my mother had a friend who
was a garbage He had had a really tough life,
and his job was he was one of those guys
that picked up garbage on the side of the road
and he had one of those little spears that used
to stab the garbage and put it in a bag. Yeah,
And it was my fifth birthday and he drew this
(28:59):
little card in watercolor. It was just about this big
and it was just a picture. It was almost looked
like Paddington. There was a little picture of him with
his raincoat on and his yellow slicker and he was
poking garbage and it said, I didn't mind working in
the rain today because it's Misha's birthday. This is a
guy that was not even a close family friend. It
(29:20):
was just this sweet little message. And our house burned
down when I was seventeen years old, and I kid
you not of everything I owned, I was like, oh no,
that card that card I had kept on the wall
in my room, and it was just like this constant companion.
(29:42):
And it was this tiny little gesture of kindness and attention,
like a kind of in the realm of what you
would expect from a mister Rogers in the world right
that had been had booied me throughout my entire childhood,
adolescence and into my tea years. Yeah, and I'm still
(30:02):
talking about it now. Yeah, And that just for me,
those little reminders of how being thoughtful and attentive to
other people can actually have a lingering impact for the
rest of their lives. It is not something that I
manage to carry out in my daily life on a
(30:23):
regular basis, on a consistent basis, but I keep trying
to remind myself. Yeah, two, be like that in the world.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Those small moments, those small acts just have a profound,
lasting impact. So you carry those with you. Then, like
you say, you begin to realize and recognize the power
of you know, fandom and those groups that are so
loyal and supportive and loving when it comes to the
shows that the art that we try to create. And
then on top of that comes this twenty ten Haiti earthquake.
(30:55):
So Random Acts is born as a charitable organization, but
at this point, like it's grown into this global organization.
It's run by more than one hundred and fifty plus
volunteer staff.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
More volunteers volunteer run.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Millions of supporters from all walks of life, all kinds
of annual events and stuff that happened like how do
you This is a lot, man, this is a lot
to carry, but it must still continue to feed your
soul in the same way that drawing from a guy
once did.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
Well. It does, and I really can't take credit for it.
One of I have found collaborators who have carried the torch.
I wouldn't be able to keep doing that because I
have other work that I engage in, and I'm raising
two kids and.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
You know, in the.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
Process of blending a family with even more kids. So
my I am still very much involved in random AX,
and I'm president of the board of random Ax. But
we have an incredible director, Rachel Minor, who was actually
also an actress. She was on Supernatural and she is
(32:15):
has now full time committed herself to the work of
running Random Acts as as a volunteer.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
I mean they funded almost six hundred different acts of
kindness last year alone.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Yeah, he's got I mentioned his own army. His army
is called Army of Good. They called themselves that. That's
that's pretty amazing. Yeah, because they all see that vision
that way. Hey, let's experiment with something. Let's do charity work.
Let's let's let's raise money for for people and organizations
(32:51):
that need it. But let's try to find a game
way of doing it. Play games in this. It's not
just random ax. There are others foundations that you've started
and one of myll you know.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
I sorry to interrupt you, but I wanted to just
say something. It's also not i would say, not necessarily
just about game creating a game aspect, although that is
part of it, and that has been integrated integral over
the years, but it's it's chiefly participatory and getting people
(33:27):
to see that they're they have agency and they can
participate in these things. And not only that, I'm really
interesting interested in dispelling the notion that it's a one
way transaction. I think a lot of times, you know,
when you go on to a website and you click
a donate button, it really does feel one way. I mean,
(33:48):
I guess in reciprocity there you do get a little
jolt of a good feeling having donated some money. But
when you actually participate in something, you're changed by that
process too. I'm going back to this, that Haiti project
because it was the first international thing that we did.
(34:08):
I did something called I guess it's called volunteerism, but
basically I got people. I was trying to figure out
how to raise enough money because we needed hundreds of
thousands of dollars for this project, and I thought, all right, well,
maybe we'll get people to you know, I got all
these fans that come to fan conventions. Maybe I'll say, like,
if you want to come with me to Haiti to
(34:29):
help build this orphanage. You had to figure out how
to raise five thousand dollars to come on a trip.
And we got the maximum number of people that we could,
you know, accommodate doing that, and raised a bunch of
money and did several trips over the course of several years.
But the people that went on these trips went thinking,
I am a relatively well off American who's going down
(34:58):
to this destitute country of Haiti to try to help
people who need my help. And it was I would
say it was maybe a larger share of the people
who went on the trip who were changed by the
experience than the people whom we were trying to help.
Real people who joined me on the trip. A lot
of the people ended up staying on for several months
(35:20):
in Haiti or quitting their jobs and moving back, you know,
moving into a different field altogether. It was a really
eye opening experience, and I think that's that's a big
part of this kind of work is if you're if
you're actually open to it and actually receptive, then it
actually has a chance to penetrate you and change you.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
You know, that participatory aspect. I mean, all of a sudden,
you've got direct skin in the game, like you're seeing it,
you're feeling it, your experience.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
You like the feeling. It almost becomes a drug.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
Yeah, yeah, Can I turn that interview lens on you
guys for a second? What was your impetus for starting
this particular podcast, because I actually don't know your origin story.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
Well, we just want to have an army like you,
So that's that's really what we're trying. That's what we're
working toward, right Briy No, we've been friends for a
long long time and as we have said in previous episodes,
you know for twenty five years. Brian is a radio
LA radio legend. It was half of an Extraordinary Team
morning team on the radio here in LA but also
(36:24):
syndicated around the world and had his own series on
NBC in a Star on the Walk of Fame and
it's in the Radio Hall of Fame. So he's a legend.
I'm just a schmuck, but he's a legend. But for
twenty five years he would say to his listeners all
around the world, he would sign off by saying, be
good humans. And that's at the heart of you know,
our friendship, frankly, but our dedication to this project is like,
(36:47):
let's you know, the world gets kind of ugly around
and so let's try to shine a light on the
people who are trying to make a positive difference and.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Kind of like part of what you've been doing in
your concept is it was an experiment for us to
make sure it wasn't modeling or it wasn't saccharin. But
we had yux, we had fun, we had energy, and
we're you know, let's find out if this can actually happen,
this is possible.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
Let's lift some people up. So you know, we feel
like kindred spirits. And that's why, like the minute our
mutual friend Eric Kripke told me about random Ax, I
was like, oh, yeah, why wouldn't we.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Want him on that show? What the angle of random Ax?
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Yeah, that's expuly right, that's exactly right.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
Talking to Eric in an hour we're conspiring on a
on another project.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Well, tell him thank you for having for turning us
on to you. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. They're just to talk
about some of the fun you've had and I'm gonna
mispronounce this. Uh, And we have been arguing for I
don't know a day and a half. He thinks he knows.
I think I know. It's by design, Dude, he did it.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
I didn't.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I'm going to say, and I wanted. The reason why
I'm bringing this up, yeah, is because it makes me
happy to read some of the things that you you've done,
that you're that your followers, that you're the people involved
have done. So I'm going to call it weis What
did you call it?
Speaker 3 (38:14):
Do you think?
Speaker 6 (38:16):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (38:16):
I mean I I put a little bit more of
a wez at the end than a wish, But then
it became so difficult to pronounce, which, by the way,
was by design. I thought it was funny, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
I was wondering either because you thought it was funny
or because I'm missing something definitely messing with people.
Speaker 4 (38:34):
Okay. We eventually truncated it to so you could just
you could say that and uh and get away with it.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Thank you, Thank God. The Gish is where you challenge
hundreds of thousands of people and over one hundred and
ten countries to create art, create positive mayhem. I love
that term, and create a lasting difference in the world.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Now, uh gifts.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Participants in this, they've raised millions, they've amassed. This is
my favorite part. Eight Guinness World Records. Yeah, that's incredible.
Eight Guinness including and this is just a few of them.
And I'm only reading this again because it makes me smile,
makes me happy. The largest online photo album of hugs
one hundred eight twenty incredible. The largest chain of safety
(39:24):
pins three thousand, five hundred and eighty three feet, like
you do. The largest gathering of people dressed as French
maids six hundred and ninety five. That's like your dream
come true. You couldn't quite make it to seven hundred there, man,
that's just a shaf The longest human chain to pass
through a hula hoop five hundred and seventy two. How stupid,
(39:48):
how fun, how ridiculous, and how lovely?
Speaker 4 (39:52):
Yeah, well listen, now, it wasn't all positive and without consequence.
And I'll explain why I'm saying that. First of all,
there were people who went to jail participating in Gish.
There were people who were court who were court martialed,
there were people who were injured unfortunately, and one day
(40:13):
I decided what it would be great if we could
break the Guinness World record of breaking the most Guinness
World records in a day, which was the day that
we did the French maids, the hula hoop and the
decorated hats. Unfortunately, Guinness, while conceding personally to me that they,
to their knowledge, didn't know of anyone who had broken
(40:34):
three Guiness World records in one stretch of three hours.
They wouldn't give me a fourth record on the record breaking.
But that was It was a hot day in Seattle,
and I had told people to congregate dressed as French
maids with decorated hats, and the only place that we
could find very affordably was a high school gymnasium. It
(40:58):
was the summertime, and it was like a record breaking
heat wave. It was, you know, for Seattle, very hot.
It was like almost ninety degrees and very humid, and
this gymnasium did not have air conditioning and really no ventilation.
To speak up, and I was coming over from the
San Juan Islands and I missed my faery, so I
(41:18):
was late, and everyone was in there waiting for me
in this hot like packed in like shoulder to shoulder
in this hot gymnasium on the hottest day of the year.
And I didn't plan ahead, so I didn't have like
water for people or anything like that. And I got
there and everybody was like dripped, like all of these
French maid costumes were drenched in sweat. And I did
(41:42):
this like, yeah, everybody's in this fun and we did
what we needed to do to get the record for
the French Maids. Everybody took a photo together and then
everybody donned their decorative hats, took another photo, and people
were starting to get a little woozy, and some of
the other people who were helping me put this together, like, MESHI,
I think we got to pull the plug. This is
not good. People are not feeling well. It's too hot.
(42:03):
This is what We didn't have water. And the plan
was now to do the longest human chain passing through
the hula hoop, which is basically like everybody has to
stand in a giant circle. There's almost seven hundred people
standing in a circle holding hands, and they opened the
chain at one point and let a hula hoop in,
and then you have to pass the hula hoop over
your arms, over head, over your legs without letting go
(42:24):
of the next person, and so on, and you have
to keep the chain. In order to keep get the record,
we had to make a video recording and show that
this chain remained unbroken in its entirety as the hula
hoop gets passed along this chain. Now we had gone
outside from this hot box of the gymnasium into this
big field where we were just under direct sun and
(42:48):
still no water, and everybody's holding hands and passing this
hula hoop and somebody can't stand up. He folds onto
the ground and she's like passing in and out of
conscious this but the people next to her don't want
to let go of her hands, and so somebody calls
nine one. One long story short, we had seven ambulances
(43:11):
show up. Seven people had heat strokes in the in
the in the process, and I spent the next day
on the phone with people like talking to them and
having recovered. Fortunately everyone was okay, okay, I mean.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
This is like the fire Festival of charitable events.
Speaker 4 (43:28):
Yeah, that's right. Shockingly no one sued me. I don't
know why. By the way, there's open invitation out there.
Anybody out there who's still harboring a grudge about this,
you probably should sue because that was a completely irresponsible occasion.
But we we did have a lot of fun, and
sometimes we pushed the boundaries a little bit and and
(43:51):
uh and created mayhem. There were there were there was
an item that I had took particular joy, and so
it was kind of like a scavenger hu. One of
the items was that I had put in a scavender
hunt was get one of the As it turns out,
the astronauts on the space station, the International Space Station
have the capacity to communicate with the ground and they
(44:13):
also have social.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Media accounts, right.
Speaker 4 (44:15):
So the instruction was to get an astronaut on the
International Space Station to hold up a sign with your
team name on it, because these are teams in and
so people started flooding, flooding the social media channels of
these astronauts with these requests, and NASA posted on their
official Twitter feed, we understand that you're participating in this game,
(44:39):
but please understand that our astronauts have real work to do,
Please please leave them alone. And MASSA just shut it down,
so understandable. Next year I wrote another item, which was
last year NASA told us to leave their astronauts alone.
We know that they've been kicking themselves all year for
(45:02):
missing out on the fund. So here's your assignment for
this year. Get was written in space. And that year
William Shatner happened to be participating as a participant in
this scavenger hunt, and he got in touch with NASA
to try to get his team to get the points
to get written in space.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Make it happen.
Speaker 4 (45:23):
Because we were a private company and NASA is public,
it's like completely forbidden for them to do any kind
of like cross pollination. So it had to go. This
had to go up to the director of NASA. NASA
the Director of NASA had to approve this, and they
officially named a mountain on Mars. And and NASA then
(45:47):
posted on their Twitter channel that we have officially named
a mountain on Mars and they like show it like
written in laser lettering on the mountain there.
Speaker 6 (45:58):
It was.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
It was a it was a pretty try a moment.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
You had to be all well at times, laughing more
than other times, but laughing at this whole thing. Yes,
I mean, it's a good cost, but it's so funny. Yeah,
I know, I know, it's so funny.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
You could just imagine, like that communication director at NASA,
it's like, Okay, we called this mountain gishust, now you
leave us alone.
Speaker 4 (46:17):
Yeah, and.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Also could you tell us how to spell it?
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Yeah? Well okay, so we I mean, we understand you've
at least temporarily pumped the brakes on that, but you
have not stopped one iota in your efforts to sort
of just try and find these ways to make a
positive difference but also show people a good time, all
all in the spirit of fun. You know, how how
(46:41):
can we work together to participate in something that is
a way to give back? And that's one of the reasons.
I mean, that's the main reason why we wanted to
talk to you today, Misha, because you're.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Just, yeah, prepping for this. That's why I kind of
opened up the interview saying I would be hard pressed
to find someone who's living their best life life better
than you.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
I'm just so so proud of you. Don't even know
you very well. I've never met you until today, but
I'm so I'm so happy for you, and I'm so
happy for the people that get you and doing all
these wonderful things in the spirit that they're doing them.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
So, Michae, fans of your work, whether it's on Supernatural
or just your natural impulse to not just put scares
but put love into the universe universe. If people want
to support what you hope to continue accomplishing with Random Acts,
how can they do that day? Should they go to
randomax dot org.
Speaker 4 (47:34):
Yeah, random ax dot org is a great place. We
have a We have just recently updated our website, so
it is a pretty good resource for checking out what
we've done in the past and what we're working on now.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
Fantastic.
Speaker 4 (47:50):
The best way for people to communicate with me about
activation in the world and getting involved in specific projects
that I am involved with is to actually text me.
I communicate specifically about specific projects that I'm working on.
Good people over text, so I can share that number please,
(48:13):
which is three two. It's three two, three four five,
three nine, and I'm working on right now. I'm about
to have a call with Eric KRIPKEI we're doing this
event next in ten actually right before this podcast will air,
we'll have done this so but but we're we're doing
some work to help get Kamala Harris elected. And I
(48:39):
don't know how much you guys talk about politics on
your podcast, but what whatever end you are on of
the political spectrum, I really think that the most, the
single most impactful thing that we can do in the
world is actually get people elected who report resent our
(49:00):
world views and our values. Because there are so many
more resources that are brought to bear by the federal
government than by all of the other nonprofits combined. There's
you know, privately, we can, we can dicker in the margins.
We can we can make incremental progress doing nonprofit work
(49:23):
and good creative work in the world. But the truth
is there is a tremendous amount of power and a
tremendous amount of resources that are held by elected officials,
and the only power we have over them is at
the ballot box.
Speaker 1 (49:39):
That's right, Well, I think I speak for my partner.
We couldn't agree more.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
With you without questions, So listen, We're going to drop
the random acts dot org website link on our website
at Begod Humans podcast dot com along with your text
so we can also text you at night like are
you well, so we'll have all that information.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
I also want to mention before we say our goodbyes,
and this has nothing to do with random x uh,
but in preparation and trying to get to know you
through through prepping for this episode, Misha, I I saw
that you wrote a book and I'm a book of poems,
and just the description of the poems that I said,
(50:24):
I was intrigued. So I bought it. I bought it
three days ago and I'm well, I've been through all
of them, but now I'm rereading them and some of
them are so special. So I'm wanting to suggest to
those who who like this sort of thing. And when
I say this sort of thing, you have no idea
what I mean, because they that they made me happy,
(50:46):
they made me warm, they made me laugh, kind of
like what the man you've you've met today in his
poetry and his insights and his memories. The book is
called Some Things I Still Can't I highly highly recommend.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
Please check that out. Please go to randomax dot org.
Please text him in the middle of the night, Misha,
Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (51:08):
Please one more thing in just a few days. If
you are an American go to the polls and boats.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
Yes, absolutely, please, please please, Misha, thank you not only
for scaring the but Jesus out of millions of us
and entertaining the hell out of us, but more than that,
thank you for truly in inspiring us with all of
your efforts to bring just some genuine kindness and fun
to the world. You are one hell See what I
did there, the dark Angel, You are one hell of.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
A good human. Thank you for joining us, my friend.
Speaker 4 (51:37):
Thanks for all your kindness.
Speaker 6 (51:38):
Gentlemen, we will thank you suck.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
This was one of those guests that was exactly like
I hoped he'd be so true with the humor and
with the energy and with it it was I just
couldn't be more more pleased with that guy.
Speaker 3 (52:02):
Yeah, I know, and considering we we started talking about
things that scare the but Jesus out of us, like
I wound up like feeling kind of genuinely entertained, Like
that guy's an amazing guy, and he's really doing the
right thing, and he's doing the kind of thing as
you rightfully called out, that we are hoping to do. True,
So we're going to continue doing that.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
What is that that's so annoying.
Speaker 3 (52:27):
Are you following us on the socials? Please do uh
on Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff, threads and
and TikTok, but most importantly, go to our website, Be
Good Humans podcast dot com. We're gonna have the links,
like we said, uh to random ax dot org and
Misha's personal text number I don't.
Speaker 1 (52:46):
Know, and we'll try to get your nasses.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
Yes you.
Speaker 1 (52:50):
Listen, Happy Halloween, be safe of course, and h now
are you still in your neighborhood given giving out candy
and dressing up?
Speaker 3 (52:59):
And it's too quiet and I think my neighborhood creeps
kids out, so we never get the traffic we have.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
We put it out and honor ball, but it's all
the pentagrams and stuff you've painted on this on your house.
Speaker 3 (53:09):
Okay, I'm never going to look that down. Oh my god,
I know what are you gonna do? I was a teenager.
Thank you for joining us, Happy Halloween and we will
see you next time.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
Be good Humans, everybody, bye bye, Be safe.
Speaker 2 (53:20):
Be good Humans, Be good Humans, Be good Humans, or
we will.
Speaker 1 (53:28):
Thank you sucked.
Speaker 3 (53:30):
Be Good Humans is executive produced by Brian Phelps, Trey Calloway,
and Grant Anderson, with associate producers Sean Fitzgerald and Clementine Callaway,
and partnership with straw Hut Media. Please like, follow, and subscribe,
and remember be good humans.
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