George Stroumboulopoulos

0:01I'm going to drink some red. How's it going? I might go drink the red for the habs and I'm going to last very long for the playoffs. That's how it's going to start. What do you think? I'm saying five games. Well, here's the thing. Our goalie is better than their goalie. So, these better forwards are nowhere near it. No, we're near it. But in the playoffs, right, you know, a hot goal tenor can steal the series. You know, in the habs have done well in the playoffs. There's that whole Montreal Canadiens myth, but there's... Stitch don't play well. I mean, they played... That last game they played against Elise was like the way the Bulls and the Raptors played. It was just awful. I was like, just put them out of the Miz room, man. You think Galak's going to get all the starts? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He carries just done for the year. Yeah, totally. Unless something happens. When nothing happens, right? If Galak is a smoking game, then Price Steps in, who knows Price steals a game? Who knows what could happen? You never know. He doesn't blow a fish.

0:46You approach the playoffs two ways, right? You approach it practically like a hockey fan and then you approach it like a supporter of your team. So, practically, if we win a game, I'll be surprised. And that there'll be some goalie con. But as a supporter of my team, maybe the gods will smile and will race it all the way. The finals, but who knows? Must be nice to work here because you're so entrenched in CBC in the hockey. Yeah, totally. I mean, although CBC is not picking up the habits, CBC is picking up. It's on competition. Yeah, it's on TSN, which is crazy. I know we can mention them. Oh, okay. You do whatever you want? Yeah, you do whatever you want for sure. Yeah, I know. It's nice to be around Hockey Night in Canada. It absolutely is. You can sit yourself a journalist or a talk show host. I think you can beat lots of things. What would you label the show as? The show is, none of that. The show is just a natural conversation program, right? Which has elements of journalism, elements of comedy, elements of just thoughtfulness.

1:36It is sometimes a bit over the line. It's just what it is. The show's kind of built around the personality of me. And I'm a human being, which means there's lots of different ways I can go, right? So I think the show just sort of reflects that. How's it evolved over time? As I've evolved it, as I've gotten older, the show's changed a little bit. I think the biggest evolution happened from the Switch and Time slot. When we're on at 8 o'clock, you're on before the evening news, right? So you serve a different purpose in the audience. Watch the television a little bit differently at 8, then they do it at 11. At 11 I can slow it down a little bit and settle in a little bit, which is what we've done. So the show's changed in terms of the format. But the ethic is still the same, right? The show where we try to give you a high quality interview.

2:23We also present news in a way to an audience that's not always connected to newscast. And we try to be a good company. So that's never changed. That's what the show's always been. And just some of the formatics have changed over time. Well, one of the things, you're not voicing the intros anymore. Yeah. The playoffs, that's right. Just the lack of time you're doing so much with other things. No, I think it was about bringing another voice on the show. Also, it was just something we were trying out. It's what I'm doing in the interview, right? I need to be in a position where I can have as much possibility for discovery. Right. If I voice the bio, then the conceit is that you know everything about the guest. Here's their life. And then when I walk into the interview, I have to walk into the interview thematically like I know all this stuff.

3:09But I want to be curious in the interview. I want there to be a sense of discovery. I'm telling Jen's voice to come on. And it's not a disembodied voice. Jen is one of the writers in the show. So, and Jen writes the bio's with another guy named Randy. So, her doing that allows me to then approach the interview a little bit more openly. Are you able to do as much research that way? Are your writers doing that for you too? Research? No, no. You have a producer who's assigned, so a guest gets assigned to a producer. They come up with research. I do my own research and we talk a little afterwards. Right. So, it's not like Leno. I'm sure he does a lot of his own questions too, but he's got writers running questions. Yeah, no. If you watch our show, it's pretty fluid. Like it's pretty off the cuff. We don't have a set of questions and answers. You know, we have talking points that we think we might want to address depending on the interview.

3:54It depends on who it is and what kind of interviews they are, right? Those are things that sort of change depending on the person. But at the end of the day, the show's never really been anything other than what's happening, right? As off the cuff as possible. I know Harrison Ford, it was a little difficult for you to get him to. No, he just wasn't who he was. That's the thing, right? The sign of a good interview. That was interesting. Yeah, yeah. Maybe they'll smile on the habs. The quality of an interview to me is determined by whether or not the person you're interviewing reflects and represents themselves the best. However they want that to be. That's their job, right? So, I don't need an interview to seem like it's got the best conversation. I don't need the interview to feel like I get along with them. I don't need any of that stuff.

4:40That's not what it's about. It's just be who you are. Whoever you are today, that's good. So Harrison Ford, I was fine. It's because he didn't pretend. I mean, you'll see this when you're an interview. I'm sure you've experienced it. People are really difficult behind the scenes. And then once they get on camera, they're all smiley. That's kind of bullshit, right? I don't want that. I just want you to be who you are. Harrison was fine. He was very nice. I just don't think he likes doing a lot of press. Well, he doesn't. Yeah. And so I think that's pretty cool that he doesn't. Because you stick to your guns, right? You don't like doing it. Don't do it very often. He recognizes that he should do some press. You know, we all do. And I'm sure you feel the same way. But you just got to be who you are. So I kind of liked the Harrison Ford interview because I thought, it's kind of cool. From my end, it was a little bit of work. I had to put a little extra, find a couple of different gears.

5:26But in the end, he was, I thought it was all right. You're getting some bigger names nowadays. It's a little different from the show. It must have been very hard to get those big news and the show started. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure. When we first started, nobody knew who we were. Well, you had your watch music fame and notoriety. Yeah, well, that's why we had a lot of bands. Like in the very beginning, the biggest stars we had were bands that would come on. You know, cats who knew who I was either from a watch music or from when I worked in radio. But you're still doing? Yeah, still doing radio. Yeah, I've always done. That's what I started doing. Well, you're so busy with this. How do you fit in time for that? It's not about time. Doing what you love, right? Fair enough. Haven't been radio since, you know, 93. And I just love playing records. So that's just why I keep doing it, you know. What are some of the bands that people should be listening to that you're finding? It depends on kind of genre you like. If you like bluesy or white stripe stuff, there's a band from King City in Ontario called Coppertone.

6:14They've got one really dope song called Nighttime Wishes. I love that song. I feel like British music. I go for the big pink. I like the new Hot Chip album. I love a band from Toronto called The Beauty's. They do a little blue grassy and a bit of dirty rock and roll. The band called Flashlight and then that, some boogie, like the ZZ Top kind of stuff. Yeah, cool. And you're all underground bands. Yeah, some of them. Yeah, yeah. Is it hard being in a position you're in because you can help a lot of these bands. You get them on the show. Boom. They could blow up. You never know. But then again, you're also looking for viewers and you don't want to get the indie bands on because it might not help the program. So it must be a tough position for you sometimes. Well, it's a balance, right? I mean, I have a radio show that I can play all these bands.

6:59But, you know, we bit by bit work on ways to get other bands on TV. You know, when it sees fit, you know, every year on a Christmas special, we put some couple of bands that may not have mainstream appeal. Or people just don't know who they are. We put them on the show. We try to introduce them whenever we can. You know? It's one of the things where you don't overthink the emotion of the show because the show is what it is and who you are. So you find a spot. Today we're going to put this band on here. We want viewers, but it's not viewers at all cost. It still has to. You have to do what's right. There's lots of times we don't put people on the show who are very successful, very famous, who would bring in an audience. You don't put them on because it doesn't feel right. Everything has to feel right. You can't bullshit people and tell them you're going to come with an authentic voice and then not be it.

7:44You can't be an authentic. You just got to be who you are. Same thing with we programmed the bands. The radio show allows me the opportunity to build some energy behind a band if they need it. And then I can bring them on the show. So we play our known bands all the time on the show. You know, with that band I talked about, Coppertone. Last week we played the song on the show, on the TV show. So we do it. It's just you just pick your place as you find out how to do it. What about news stories in that regard? Like the Tiger Woods thing. It's popular news, but it's not really news. Leave the guy alone kind of thing. How do you feel about stories like that? We didn't do it. You didn't. Not at all. Didn't touch it. We'll see you there. Commendable. Didn't do it. Like the whole Paris Hilton thing when you had that boycott. We didn't do it. Yeah. It was irrelevant to me. I also think it's disingenuous for the press to go after this particular athlete.

8:30Fuck, they even leave an athlete alone for years as they should. You know, I'd be curious to see if any of these reporters, if their own personal life started to come out. How dirty that would be. Well, they won't sell papers though. They won't sell papers, but boy it'll make the news, won't it? It'll make the news. Yeah, I mean I think sexual politics are boring, dude. To be honest with you, everybody Google something weird at two in the morning. So I'm not judging. I don't care. We didn't do this sort of that. As a human being, you look at the Tiger Woods scenario and say, why did you have to humiliate your wife? The other side of it is she hit him with a golf club. I don't want to be part of that relationship. Both sides in that relationship have issues. But I'm not judging it. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I love the fact that he had a great tournament at the Masters. He had a great Masters for himself. Some people thought he didn't think he would make the cut.

9:16He had a couple of Eagles, which is nuts. So I like the more hard edge Tiger. You know what's told me golfers are one of your favorite interviews? They remember every shot they've ever taken. Well, yeah, I approach the show the way golfers approach is around them. You remember all of, you try to think of every throw that you did. How can you pull from past experiences? There's things I do on the air. I'll do tonight that while I'm doing it, I'll remember something that I did on the air eight years ago. You'll find, you'll go, oh, yeah, I need to do this. Or if I'm doing an interview and something is working really well or not working really well. And I'm trying to think about what's the next step in this conversation and it's happening real time. There's going to be an experience that happened when I interviewed Lincoln Park on their first interview where no one knew who they were in an elevator and apply a little thing from there. So you kind of approach it, you know, shot by shot.

10:03So I like that about golfers are good interviews when you're talking about the sport. Because they're very honest about their game. So like I don't know about interviewing golfers in terms of just the general stuff because that's different. But in terms of talking to somebody about their craft, golfers are like motorcycle racers. They'll tell you what went wrong. They'll tell you what went wrong. Hockey players don't tell you what went wrong. Hockey players, they'll say, we need to do this. We need to do that. We need to do this. Not here's what I did wrong. Whereas the audience, I find when you're honest about when things don't work. So I was telling you about the hair support interview. I don't care how an interview goes, right? If things don't work, that's fine. That's how the audience connects to you at home. If they go, okay, so here's where he made a mistake. He should have leaned here when he leaned there. He picked the wrong angle.

10:48He misjudged this green. And athletes are really good at that sort of thing. And if you can talk about yourself in terms of where you made mistakes, then you can, the audience at home, combine it and see when you do it right the next time. What about the audience in studio? Do you find it easier to do a show in front of an audience or like Hillary Clinton in a hotel room kind of thing? Or it's just one on one? Yeah, to me it makes no difference. No difference. I mean, it's nice that the energy of having an audience around is great. It's harder to get someone to open up in front of an audience. You think so? Oh, yeah, there's 120 strangers, man. But then again... They don't know them. You must have some guests that just enjoy that, telling the story to everybody and making a crowd laugh. Yeah, and that's good for a comedian. That's good for the right actor who likes to perform. But if you're trying to go inside, you're trying to talk to somebody about the time that they almost committed suicide. Right, you've got to work really hard to not break this.

11:34Right. When you've got all these people here. Do you ever feel like a therapist with your job in a way? I feel like a friend. That's what I feel like. I feel like I'm sitting on a streetcar with a friend of mine and they're having a good day or they're having a bad day or they're having a day somewhere in the middle. You know? And that's what I feel. I know that I'm not always a friend of the person at all, but it's not about that. I just sort of remove the construct of, do I know you? I just assume that we're going to talk to each other and trust each other and let's just have a conversation. We just did. Thank you. That's what I'm talking about. Thank you. Perfect. Thank you.