Soul Boom - Steve from Blue's Clues Sits Down in Our Thinking Chair

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

Steve Burns (original host of Blue’s Clues, musician and writer) joins Rainn Wilson to unpack the surprising emotional and spiritual journey behind one of the most iconic figures in children’s TV. Steve opens up about facing depression at the peak of his fame, the haunting internet rumor that he had died, and the healing power of solitude, music, and deep listening. He discusses what it means to live with grace, redefine masculinity, and reconnect with the soul through nature, creativity, and community. THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS! Airbnb 👉 ⁠https://airbnb.com/host⁠ BRAGG (20% OFF! CODE: SOULBOOM) 👉 https://www.bragg.com SOUL BOOM LIVE IN LOS ANGELES 5/27! Tickets 🎟️: ⁠https://soulboom.com/live⁠ ⁠⏯️ SUBSCRIBE!⁠ ⁠👕 MERCH OUT NOW! ⁠ ⁠📩 SUBSTACK!⁠ FOLLOW US! 👉 ⁠Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom⁠ 👉 TikTok: ⁠http://tiktok.com/@soulboom⁠ CONTACT US! Sponsor Soul Boom: ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Work with Soul Boom: ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Executive Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to So. Blue's Clues, the whole show was an homage to Fred Rogers in so many ways. But he created a problem for the rest of us. You get to be two things as a kid show host. You get to be an implausible saint like Fred Rogers. Or you get to be a crack-addled monster. Right, right. There is no in between.

You can't be a flawed and struggling human being who has qualities of great wisdom to share and to help educate, but also has struggles. It was difficult to be the happiest man in North America when I did not feel that way. Every day on Blue's Clues, I would sit in a chair and look at someone in the eye and ask, will you help?

It wasn't until I did that in my life. That thing's changed. It's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. Soul Boom live at Largo, May 27th. I am so excited to announce that we're doing our very first in real life, IRL Soul Boom podcast recording live in Los Angeles, May 27th.

at the legendary Largo Theater. That's the Largo Theater in L.A. with our very special guest and a dear friend of mine. So get ready for a night of laughter, deep thoughts, spiritual silliness, as I dive into all things, comedy, consciousness, God, and whatever else flies out of our weird little brains.

That's the Largo Theater at the Coronet, May 27th in Los Angeles. Go to soulboom.com slash live. Tickets are limited. Soulboom.com slash live. Hi, Steve. Hello, Raymelson. Some folks, I don't know who,

but I imagine that there's folks listening to the podcast right now or watching the podcast on YouTube who really have no idea who you are. Yeah. I got to know you because my son was born in 2004. You were off the show at that point, right? Yes. But I think there were like a lot of reruns.

Yeah, it's been on the air for like 30 years. Your face was still everywhere, as our little toddler watched your show, Walter. It was a beautiful experience, but, you know, I read something that you were really in the depths of a lot of despair and clinically depressed while hosting this show as the show became this international phenomenon. Yeah. What was that like? Awesome. No, it was, first of all, I was a kid, you know, I was 21, 22 years old.

Yeah. And I didn't know. what was going on with me. Yeah. I knew I had a good thing going, but you can imagine, you know, it was difficult to be the happiest man in North America

when I did not feel that way. And it was very difficult to come to work. I was the only actor in every take of every shot every day. It was a lot of pressure, you know. And it was all. on a blue screen. It was challenging to begin with. But I knew that I got the job because

of some mining expedition I accidentally did in an audition where I found a piece of vulnerability and I found something that could connect through a lens. So I knew that I had to do that every day. And it was difficult

to provide, eventually provide a generation with self-esteem or something when I did not even have my own approval that day, you know. And depression I've learned is in all sadness. For me, it was very frustrating. I felt very frustrated.

And I would... Frustrated with the job. So was it kind of circumstantial depression, or was it something greater than just doing this really isolating, difficult acting job day in and day out? I think it was part circumstantial and just part brain chemistry, you know, a lot of depression in my family. And a lot of it felt super unmanageable because I did not understand what was going on.

And I've talked about this before, but in the 90s, there weren't tools for mental health and depression and anxiety. You know, I was having these anxiety attacks for years that would render me unfunctional. I knew they were anxiety attacks because I had heard about them or someone told me and I almost went to the emergency room a couple times. I'm like, you're not having a heart attack. These are anxiety attacks. And I could, once I knew that, I could feel that.

But what do you do? I didn't have money to go to a therapist. So, you know, there's no podcasts or apps or even books about mental health back then. Oh, you didn't even, you didn't even address it. No, and it wasn't in the lexicon. No. It wasn't part of the conversation.

What I did was I fought it. you know because it was weak to feel this way right did you have any drug and alcohol stuff going on to help medicate through that those times i would drink you know i really want i wanted so bad to be bad you know but the schedule would not really allow for any seriousness in that world you know i mean i there was no there's no such thing as doing an episode of blues clubs hung over for example that just doesn't that's not a thing you're not going to make it through the day i think that think that I would have gone down that path in a pretty serious way if I didn't have to schedule that I did. No, that you ask that question. Yeah. Because I was looking for something to mitigate

this imposter syndrome and this pain that I was in. So I would just hunker down and fight like rocky. You know, but you don't fight depression. You collect it. Right. And that's what I was doing. That whole time. And so when the show ended is when I collapsed. You know, and I probably, I probably, would have stayed a couple more seasons. But when you're mining and mining and mining for a sense of authentic joy and there's all this pressure to do so for so long without any kind of strategy to replenish that,

whatever gland that is was a weird husk by the time I left that show. Like me, you didn't get therapy or turn to therapy. That wasn't really an option. That was just for rich people who lived on the Upper East side. You know, that wasn't like... Yeah, it was also just, you know, who needs that?

Right. And it had a different perception back then, like, oh, if you're in therapy, you're really fucked up. Yeah, it's like, oh, why not spend 50 minutes out of your incredibly long week, you know, or month or whatever, to examine what's going on with you emotionally and what your behavior patterns are like and where it might come from and trauma you might have suffered.

I came to New York to be an actor, but became kind of, An accidental educator. Uh-huh. An icon. Right. In fact, fashion icon. Really? The rugby shirt?

Oh, yeah. Come on. Beautiful. By the way, I'm so glad that you weren't tearing it up, like, at the clubs with, like, I wanted to. A crack pipe and a bottle of vodka because Steve from Blue's Clues, like, you know, raging on a table with your pants below your ankles or something would have. once that would have been a sight. Yeah. It's not that I didn't want to be wild. You know, I did.

Who wouldn't? You know, there was, I mean, my character's name was Steve. My name was Steve. Yeah. Mistake number one. There is what I would always call the Fred Rogers problem. Right. Where Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers to you, was an avatar of the Buddha. Right. That man, I mean, I think I believe he's going to be remembered as an important teacher more even than the children's television show host. Yeah. I believe he should be on our money. I concur. And decades ahead of his time in terms of having programming that was just slower and safer for kids and had a pace that was so human.

and, you know, stories with such nuance. Not this kind of like hyper-adrenalized kids programming where they're just blasting an image at a kid and a sound at a kid every second and a half. He reached through that screen and held your hand through dark shit. Like, I don't know when the last time you watched Fred Rogers was, but he's talking about dark shit. There's darkness in that.

And that is about respect. for that age group. Blue's Clues, the whole show was an homage to Fred Rogers in so many ways. But he created a problem for the rest of us through his example, wherein people assume that, oh, if you're on a kid show, it is a ministry of yours. And you are that person. You get to be two things as a kid show host. You get to be an implausible saint like Fred Rogers.

or you get to be a crack-addled monster. Right, right. There is no in between. Right. You get bifurcated and marginalized to the extremes. You can't be a flawed and struggling human being who has qualities of great wisdom to share and to help educate, but also has struggles.

Rain, you're saying everything perfectly. Like, this is the way, this has been a struggle of mine. You know, I used to always feel, like, dear God, I'm screwed because I'm going to disappoint everyone by being normal. Mm-hmm. And human and struggle. Yeah. Because, I mean, I'm not Fred Rogers.

Of course I'm not. I make no such claim. I'm a pretty nice guy. Like, and I try to be and I aspire to be. But I'm no more wholesome than you or anyone else. You know, I'm also not a crack-out old miscreant. You know, I am a person with wonderful qualities and flaws, just like anybody else. And I've always felt like, man, do I get to be that?

You know, will people be sad if I'm not either of these things, you know? And that's kind of the, that's kind of the Fred Rogers problem. Well, there was a melancholy about that show, and there was kind of a melancholy about you as the character of Steve. You got that? Oh, yeah, yeah. And maybe that's what made it so riveting and especially for children.

There was a genuine vulnerability. God, I absolutely agree. I mean, I'm so, it's actually really wonderful to hear someone who I admire noticing those things, you know, because I was trying to do that. And it's, I can say it now, but, you know, it was always kind of a struggle on the set of blues clues.

Where the producer's like, Why can't you be happy? Like a thousand percent. Papp it up a little bit here. Thousand percent. And they were brilliant, the people who created. They are brilliant human beings. Angelus Antemarro, Tracy Johnson.

But they weren't TV people. They weren't acting people. They weren't, like they didn't know what I was doing. They didn't get it. And I was working hard. You know, I was like, look, I didn't write this show. I didn't create the show. But this camera thing, that's mine.

Right. That's what I'm doing. Yeah. And I'm working really hard at that. You know, I am trying to add these human colors to it. And they would often say things like, that looks sad. That looked mean. You know, that looked. I'm like, I don't know if that's true. And it was always this struggle. And I always told them, like, I got my best work done while you were checking your email. You know, I would sneak it in there and to hear that that got through is great. And I suspect you're right that. All these years later, if I do kind of have special access to that generation that watched it, if that relationship was viable and believable, it's because of those human things that weren't what you were saying, that weren't just peppy, monochromatic. You leave the show, you hand it off to your fictional brother, Joe, or whatever's who I saw last night.

Yes, he's a dear friend of mine and a wonderful guy. He's no Steve from Blues Fluse. No, he's not. No, he's not. But what happens then for you on your mental health journey? I was still not addressing any of the mental health problem. That's when I was like, now it's time to be bad. Right?

I had no desire ever. Did you rage? I tried, but I never wanted to kill Steve. You know, I never wanted to do that. It was precious to me, you know, and still is very much so. But I wanted to go out and party and meet girls and be famous, but I wasn't. I was famish, you know, which is like being famous without public dignity, really. And I was-

I relate. Well, I think you can relate to being indelible to playing a character that is indelible. Yeah. And, you know, my struggle, I think to a more limited degree than yours is, just I'm gonna be known as the guy who played Dwight. And a lot of people see me and they just see Dwight. And people call me Dwight and they call you Steve, but like you said, you wish that it had been like Bobby or anything else.

Eddie from Blue's Clues other than Steve and separate yourself from the character. Roobes Pierre. But that is, it is a very particular burden to be known for one of these characters that I've played. I've played dozens of characters. Sure. in theater. I've played dozens of characters on TV, dozens in films. This is the one that

broke through. I'm so grateful, but, you know, it is a struggle being known just as one character. Now, if you're a certain kind of an actor and you're limited as an actor and there's one character that you do, like there's one kind of comedic character that you do, and then that's you. you know, if you're buddy Hackett and you're all, and that's what you play for your whole life. That's great. God bless you. But I came from, you know, theater training about transforming into characters.

Dwight was a transformation that I made. Dwight was like, let me design the most unflattering haircut known to man. It was bad. Thank you. How does he listen? How is he in his body? What role does he play comedically

against Michael and against Jim. How is he different from me? How is he the similar to me? And people are struck always like, oh, you're so different than Dwight. It's like, that's called acting. This is, that's how it works. This is the Fred Rogers problem.

I think people understood you were acting. People assumed that I wasn't. Because of the Steve Steve. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, Fred. Got it. And so when I'd show up at the clurb, you know, with my camel,

You know, you're getting ready. You switched from American spirits to Camilla? I think I switched to American spirits from Camelowlis. Actually, no, that's not true. I'm now lying. I quit smoking while I was on the show. Okay. All right.

Because I was outside taking a break in the wardrobe, smoking a cigarette. Someone took a picture. Somebody's kid walked by and said, Steve, and I was like, I am done smoking. Oh, nice. I cannot be per sear. Yeah. But yeah, when you're at the club trying to meet girls, and they're like sing the mail song, you're like, oh, shit.

You know, people see me in this one. way. Yeah. And in no other way. Right. I know that you've had a lot of mental health struggles and you speak to that a good deal with college kids, as do I. And I would just love to hear kind of what you went through and how that kind of anvil of depression that was hanging over your head for so many years, how you were finally able to deal with it, to release it, to embrace it. I was in kind of the throes of this depression after I left the show. But what a lot of people don't understand is that during the show, the internet was beginning to internet and the world decided, or a large portion of the world decided that I had died. Right. This was a big deal. This was a meme. I remember

hearing about this. Or else that you were like a heroin addict and that you were... I was a dead heroin addict. Okay. Okay. I had died of an overdose and I had died. And I had died. of suicide, which is not what you want to hear when you're severely clinically depressed, or that I, the one was that I had wrapped a Dodge charger around a tree or something, which is insane because I would not ever drive a charger. You know it, please. No, please. Come on.

It's a cop car. Yeah. But when a gazillion people you've never met, yeah, tell you that you're dead. Yeah. It's bad when you're severely clinically depressed. And there was nothing I could do about this rumor. I mean, Nickelodeon didn't like it either. So I would go on the Rosie O'Donnell show

and be like, hi, I'm still alive. And everyone thought I was dead. I was on like one talk show where I danced with Buster Rhymes and people still thought I was like, what else do you have to do? You know? That's a Steve Burns impersonator. Exactly, right.

And after I left the show, this rumor continued. And people, it was one of the most common things people would say to me was, I thought you were dead. Wow. Yeah. And after the show ended, that's when alcohol became a thing in my life. I built a house in Brooklyn and never left it, right? I'd say I call it the gray hum of my life.

There was about 10 years where I did nothing, but like drink a couple bottles of wine every night alone, watch Mythbusters. Not that that's a bad thing to do. That's a wonderful thing to do, actually. And you just eat pad tie. Like, I gained like 50 pounds. I was completely unrecognizable. I didn't recognize me.

And everyone thought I was dead. And eventually I started playing along. You know, that was the strategy. Was just, eh, maybe I am. You know? It's a weird... Were you doing anything to get help at that time? No.

And you have friends that were worried about you, reaching out? Yes. Interventions? Almost. See, that was the thing is I never quite got bad enough. You know, I was always very manageable on the outside. But a lot of it is about the internet because I don't think any of us were, I know I wasn't prepared for the kind of manufactured consensus that it, that, the towering consensus of. a gazillion people.

Yeah. And we have seen, we now live in this world where something demonstrably false becomes true. Yep. Through consensus. And something demonstrably true

becomes false. Becomes less interesting than another narrative. Mm-hmm. That becomes, that is invested in and becomes truth. It is a much more interesting narrative that climate change

has been created by liberal, academic, in their ivory castles and is an excuse to increase government overreach. That's a highly entertaining conspiracy. That's a fabulous story. And the inconvenient truth that humanity for 200 years has been belching up all this CO2 into the atmosphere is just not as interesting. It's harder to parse.

It's harder to understand. It's complex. There's consequences to that. It's easier to believe the other narrative. Yeah. My continued existence was an inconvenient truth, apparently. You know, and when you just kind of, you know, mental health is kind of like a garden in my mind, and it can just get weedy. And mine was weedy as fuck.

And was the internet contributing to that? You're spending way too much time on it. Yeah. I learned never to Google myself, you know, but there was something I would hear from people. Oh, I thought you were dead. Didn't you die? Yeah. You know, and you start to think.

when a rumor like that persists for three or four years, it stops being funny. When it persists for 10 years, it feels like a cultural preference. Right. Which does the world refer me dead? Yeah. When it persists for 15 or 20 years,

you start to feel like you're supposed to be. You know. That's heartbreaking. Being an urban legend in that, way is is a thing that I think is difficult for almost anyone else in the world to understand. Yeah. You know, and it, it messed me up. It was not a good. Yeah. It was not a good stressor. I was, I have been the victim of fake deaths on the internet several times. One time my mom, I was working and I was shooting and my mom was calling me over and over and over again. And finally,

I picked up the phone like, what's going on? And she's like, oh, thank God you're okay. I read on the internet you were dead. Oh, you had fallen off a cliff in New Zealand. Yeah, my mother called me crying in line from an Arby's, you know? What the fuck was your mom doing at an Arby's? I grew up in Pennsylvania, dude. Yeah. We were at Arby's a lot. Yeah, limited choices. Don't shit on Arbys. Well, Pennsylvania is the home of, is it Wawa or what's the other one? It's Wawa. And Sheets. And Sheets. Yeah, sure. Sheets is pretty amazing. You go into sheets, like the sandwiches. I'd rather be in a wah-wah than a sheets, my friend.

Sometimes they're across the street from each other. I know. You would choose wah-wa-over-sheets? That's a precarious situation. It's irresponsible. Hashtag team sheets, right here. Oof. I liked you so much.

Yeah. This started out so well. Okay. All right. All right. Through. So your mom called you from an Arbys. Yeah. So the death rumor was not great.

Yeah. But it was something that I internalized and accepted. That's the other thing about depression is eventually you, accept it and you identify with it. And that's when you're in trouble. That's when you're an astronaut floating toward a black hole. And how did you get out of that? Well, my father died.

And I was very involved with his caretaking. And I was also in a terrible relationship at that time that ended at that time. and I just blew a gasket and lost my mind. You know, I remember I was in a hospital with my dad, getting some stuff done. And there was in the room in the bed next to us, there was a young, youngerish family, I guess not that young.

This guy was very much an analog of mine. He was kind of my age, you know, and he had a couple kids on his lap, that were very happy that he was doing better. His wife was there and they were all crying and happy. And I thought, oh, God, I am sitting here, you know, trying as best I can to be the best son I can. I am no one's father. You know, this is, this is crazy.

And I don't like how I feel all the time. And I can't do this, you know. And I broke down. I remember I just started running laps. around the hospital. I started running. And eventually I was screaming and running. You know, and it was shortly after that.

Out of necessity, because I had responsibilities, I was like, I have to do something. And that's when it just sounds so trite every time I say this, but it's true. That is when Steve became my teacher. Right? It's so woo-woo to say, but it's real. Yeah, I get that.

Every day on Blue's Clues, I would sit in a chair and look at someone in the eye and ask, will you help me? Ah, wow. Right. Right. And it wasn't until I did that in my life, in my real life, that things changed. Who did you ask for help? A therapist.

And it turns out, my life. My shit's pretty manageable. Mm. You know. Did you go on meds? I tried that. Mm-hmm. I'm not now.

Mm-hmm. Didn't work. It's more about what I don't do. What don't you do? I don't attach to the bad. I don't indulge in the negative self-talk, the behaviors. I am much more able to accommodate the happy inset. You reached out.

You asked for help. Mm-hmm. You started to gain some tool. your father passed away at the same time. Talk us through that chapter of the journey. Well, I realized, I was with my father when he died. You know, my sister and I were right there. What was that like?

Big. I knew he was still there. And then I knew that he was gone, but I could not tell you exactly when that happened, even though I was a couple of is away from him. I don't know if there is such a thing as a good death. I think that death might not be great on average, you know, but I think my father had

that was good. That was a good way to go. But it did change me. I realized people aren't here forever. People die. And I was not one of them yet. You were only mythically dead. Yes.

And that I had an awful lot to be alive about. I had a wonderful experience after my father passed. I went to Antarctica. I'm always going far flung, right? And I got to the literal edge of the world. And I was at the bow of the ship staring at an ice sheet that was, I don't even know how many zillion miles long. It was at the edge of the actual universe. Yeah.

And my father was in the Navy, and he absolutely would have loved that experience. And I'm sitting there all alone And I absolutely felt him standing next to me I mean it didn't even feel Strange it was just He is absolutely here And I kind of sat with him for a while And then I very clearly felt him say

What the hell are you doing? You know? What are you doing? And he was telling me to go back to the world I'm getting sad I just still miss that guy He was telling me to go back to the world and share to participate. Because I hadn't, you know, I had gone away for so many years.

And I think he was saying, for better or worse, get back in the game, you know, share yourself. Yeah. You have something worth sharing. Yeah. That's kind of when things changed for me. But as you see, it still works on me. You know, I wish you were here. I lost my father about four and a half years ago.

Yeah. I get the same emotional reaction every once in a while. And I will say, and it sounds terribly woo-woo, but I 100% go through periods of time or certain circumstances where I absolutely feel my father with me. I have this little meditation bench I've talked about on the show and pray and meditate

sometimes I just feel him right there. Sometimes there was a time a few months ago I was making coffee and I just knew he was just right there. You want to hear a wild story? Yes. So I moved, one of the things I did is one of the best things I ever did

for my mental health was I left New York City. Okay. I'm not a person who is attuned to live there. Okay. Never was. I grew up in the woods in Pennsylvania. So I moved to upstate New York. I live off-grid halfway up a mountain in upstate New York. Nice. And the reason I got there is I was camping and I had a dream that I was turning into a moth and then my wings would turn into ash and then I would turn into a moth and my wings would turn it. It's a very vivid dream. And I woke

up in the middle of upstate New York somewhere and I went to get gas and again my father's voice right my father had a very deep voice so it was very clear that it was him talking to me and he said go beyond the gas station I was like all right whatever dude so I got gas and I went behind the gas station where there were a hundred monarch butterflies all drinking from a puddle and I went over to get the insta photo and they batmaned me you know I was like well that's a sign even though I don't believe in that shit that's a sign so i started looking around for property there and i found a piece of property and i camped on it that night and i put in an offer the next day the day after that right up the street i saw burns road so i went up and i met old man burns and the burns's founded the town oh man and i took a picture of old man burns and he looks so much like my grandfather that when i

I sent it to my sister, she wept. So I feel like my dad told me to go up there. To go to the Burns homestown. We don't know that we're related. Sure, of course. But I'm just going to say that we are. Okay. I'm just going with that.

Fair enough. So I feel very led to the life that I have right now, you know, even though I don't believe in that. But I still feel like that. That's amazing. Well, you came back into the world in a glorious way. You said, hey, it's Steve and I'm back. and the message, the internet,

and the post that you left about that went viral with millions of hits. And now you're having great success on TikTok with these beautiful videos of you interacting and listening to your followers in a really beautiful way. Tell us how you arrived at that and trying to kind of do good with social media,

turn it upside down. I think is what you've called it before. Yeah, I try to use it backwards. Backwards. Yeah, trying to use social media backwards. So blues turned 25, which was insane. And I was behind the scenes at that point. I was writing, directing, and, you know, doing stuff for the reboot of the show.

And I was directing music video for that. And they said, there's now three hosts of Blues Clues. And they said, you guys should do shoutouts. And so they were doing their little shoutouts, you know, And I was like, you know what? No, I don't want to talk to kids. Kids have no idea who I am. Yeah.

They'll say, who is the strange, bald man? Yeah. You know, why is he here? Yeah. It's like, I want to talk to my friend. Mm. I want to talk to my ride or die. Mm.

Mm. Mm. Who is now 30-something. Yeah. And I improv did it. You know, I didn't write it. Mm-hmm. We did two takes.

The first take, I cried. Second take, the, the, uh, crew did. Mm. And I just can't. came out. And there was no, again, there was no high-minded thought process to it. I was just like, can we, the conversation that we always had on blues clues was one of respect because of the Fred Rogers model. Instead of talking about shapes and colors and gram crackers, let's talk about the moment we're in. That's the most respectful thing I can think of. And this was

in the middle of COVID. And the internet was particularly dicky in that moment. And I was like, you know, now it's student loans and our parents are sick. And, you know, life is, this is hard. We're in a hard moment. And I just wanted to reconnect. I needed that message. I needed to reconnect to that. And the response to it was overwhelming and beautiful and surprising, honestly, to me,

because I thought, everyone thought I was dead. And that was a really healing thing for me. Because in that moment, I was both Steve's for the first time. Wow. That's beautiful. You know, I was me. That was me. Yeah.

But I was also Steve. Yeah. And that was okay. Yeah. And I realized, oh, that's great. And that was a big deal. You were embraced both as Steve Burns and as Steve from Blues Clues. Sure.

And it was, that was really healing for me. And with the TikTok thing, someone suggested that I do a TikTok page and I looked at TikTok and said I have no desire to do any of these things. I dislike this. I would love to see you do a sexy dance. Okay.

Later. We can absolutely make that happen, right? I just thought, you know, could I just, listen, would that still work? I was really testing to see if I still had this special access, really, and would that work?

And it did. And I'm a little wary of it. I'm a little wary of the parasocial nature of it. I'm a little, I kind of want to talk to, who is it, Jonathan Hyde about it? See, am I coddling the American mind by doing this? What is this good or bad? But I think to the degree that it presents a neutral energy and accepting empathetic energy in this highly, charged space is net positive. And when I read the comments, which I can't always do because it's a lot, people will post some pretty heavy things. And then 4,000 people will post in support. And I say, okay, that's community. That's happening.

That is a good thing. I think that we are participatory beings, animals, right? And we live in a highly participatory world. I think that the internet has had the... What do you mean by participatory? You mean tribal, like... I think like ants in an ant hill. Like on a biological level, we have evolved to be participatory with each other.

And I think our world is more and more. Connected. Reesing. Connected, interactive. Mm-hmm. I think that we have a biological need to connect. And I think that we are constantly in search of relation. And I think that the internet, which is defining our lives,

has had the ironic effect of isolating us. And so we keep looking to the internet for connection. And it keeps not hearing us. And it keeps not listening to us, right? Because it's not designed to do this. that. It's designed to mind you for attention. And I think that the next step for us, because we want to be heard, we need to be seen. We need to be heard. And we keep reaching for this technology to do it for us. But it's not going to. We're going to have to. It's the illusion

of connection. It is. But that being said, like in your wonderful TikTok videos where you just listen, you have said there's thousands of comments of people to whom that interaction is very special and meaningful to them. And at Soul Boom, you know, we get some really long comments on our YouTube channel especially, but all over on our social media and people that feel like found a safe place to share themselves. How do you rectify that? Are we part of the problem or the solution?

Okay. You know how you can text someone? an emoji, you know, the butt emoji and a thumbs up or something, and you know, you get something across that way. Or you can handwrite a letter and that can be so full of meaning and connected human tissue, right? Sometimes even more so than communicating with someone in person because of the care that you bring to that letter

and the absence of care that you brought to the butt emoji. It's just a technology. writing a letter and sending an emoji are both remote technologies involving language. And symbols. Yes. So can't we use the internet

in the same way that we handwrite a letter? Can't I believe we can connect. The fact that people are willing to listen to a simple TikTok post is kind of evidence of that. That we not only want to connect this way, but we could. It's a question more of what we're,

bringing to it, not what we're expecting to receive. That I feel is using the internet backwards. We often have this conversation here at Soul Boom and I had this company called Soul Pancake before this where we're trying to do inspiring media, uplifting media, deep, meaningful conversations, but we're using platforms that are essentially evil because they are designed to algorithmically kind of latch onto dopamine response systems and keep you hooked and keep you staring at your screen. Like even if you're staring at your screen for something inspiring, are we still part of the problem? We have this ongoing debate. It's the cure for cancer and a cigarette, you know, and that's how I feel about it too. I'm a little. But I think with just

the listening hook, it does interrupt that. And if that moment is special, it's because of something people are bringing to it that they're not bringing probably to their Instagram feed. You know, it is at least inclusive of connection. Ostensibly, the concede is that we're connecting and I'm listening, but what's really happening is you're connecting to yourself in that moment.

And that's a presence that I think is generally lacking in social media use, I suspect, anyway. Again, I'm not like a thought leader or an expert in any of these things. I'm just a neurotic dude who used to be on a kids TV TV show. But that's my suspicion. One of the most important human qualities is listening and listening with empathy. And I do believe that social media has degraded our ability to do that. And that's what you practice on your videos in your.

videos. But I've noticed it becoming more and more missing with just basic human interactions. People listen to wait until they get to speak. Deep listening is kind of a lost art in a way. I think Steve from Blue's Clues was an originator of that in a way. And you're perpetuating this, you know really beautiful important and kind of lost skill set you know mr mr rogers said that um listening is one of the greatest gifts a person can give another person and i love that because it is so easy to think of listening as receiving as getting information but if you're doing it right you're giving the gift of your attention and your care and the energy is going this way and i believe that's true i think listening is an art i think it's kind of a sacred art and it's where compassion starts and

it's where empathy starts is where all the good shit happens is allowing silence allowing yourself to be silent and listening is more than listening to words you know it's it's listening to it's listening to what someone is saying between their words. It broadens when you're deeply listening. And I do believe that that is a missing thing, you know. And I think it's our best best bet at a bridge, probably, between all of this tribalism and divide. I think that listening is probably a good place to start looking for an antidote.

What was the legacy of blues clues when you hear from your fans in their late 20s through early 40s? No, that would be 20. Oh, no. Am I that old? Mid 30s. Mid 30s, yeah. What did they say was most important about the show for them? It's interesting because, you know, when I hear from fans, they talk about all these sort of pro-social things, this empathy, this kindness and all this stuff. But that really wasn't our curriculum.

them. We were like pre-verbal focused. We were like letters, numbers, shapes, and colors, and we were serious about it. That's what we were doing. That was my job, was to teach those things. But the vibe, I think, is what people got. And people got that connected feeling. What I mostly get is thank you for my childhood. Thank you for being my friend. One of the things that is really touching to me is when people say, you know, Blue's Clues was a constant. Their parents might be having a divorce. There's ups and downs. I was moving.

There's chaos in their lives, but they could come back to Blues Clues. Yeah, I was a constant presence, a constant friend. And again, that's that relationship with a screen. But that's very meaningful to me when people say that one, you know. So there is a legacy of generally. and kindness that we weren't going for necessarily, but that I am beyond touched to hear about. What mental health tools do you use

on a daily or weekly basis to keep your tendency for depression and isolation at bay and at check? What are some of the tools that you use? Well, first of all, you say isolation, that's a big one, right? I kind of flipped the script on the isolation thing. I was more alone in a city of eight and a half million people than I am now living off grid up a mountain, right? There's a difference between aloniness,

being alone, isolation. Solitude and isolation. And solitude is the big one, right? And what I found was solitude. You know, there's loneliness is a circumstance that is upon you that you don't. don't want solid there's an intentionality to solitude yeah that allows for self-compassion allows for self-reflection contemplation and uh i have a meditation practice i do soto zen

zhazen um every day so tell us about the zazen practice specifically it's very simple it sounds very japanese and crazy but it is the simplest thing it's the hardest thing but it's a very simple thing i mean i i sit in silence and and release my thoughts, you know, and I don't attach to them as best I can. And, you know, it's not fun. And it's not a blissful state by any means. You know, I'm sitting there for sometimes 40 minutes,

you know, staring at a wall two feet from a wall with my eyes open. The idea is to release the thoughts that you have, to accommodate them. And the saying is touch them gently with a feather, you know. Or if it's like traffic, they're cars that pass. You don't jump in the middle of the traffic and get run over or get in one of the cars and drive to Guam, which is what my brain wants to do, which everybody's brain wants to do.

You can't drive to Guam. In my mind, you can. Okay. But half the time, you know, you're sitting there meditating and you're writing operas and doing a to-do list and you're failing. But the idea is a practice of non-attachment. And that has been enormously valuable to my mental health. What are the practices do you have that bring you? solace and and peace you know i'm very lucky i live in a beautiful part of the world nature has always

been a big part of peace for me when i was a little kid my mom tells me you know i'd come home from school and i would put my school bag down and i would just walk immediately into the woods and start building forts one of the great things about living the way i live i don't want to make it sound like i live a subsistence living where i'm hunting and trapping my own food it's not like that at all yeah but there There are a lot of chores to do at all times. There's plenty of stuff to do. That's huge. You know, just, do you read any Thomas Merton?

Yeah, I love Thomas Merton. New Seeds of Contemplation. Oh, sure. And Thomas Merton is a hero of mine. He was a trappist monk, who was also just a brilliant kind of rapscallion at the same time. I love your penchant for looking like down the lens. I wish that I could stop doing it, but you must have the same problem. Sometimes I do when I'm acting in non-office things.

I always include you. You're always here. I'm acting and then it's just so easy to just have a moment and then just look at the camp. What do you think of that? I imagine very few people. You have the same proclivity. You must.

You are trained to look at the camera. Steve from Blue's Clues and Dwight Shrut have a tendency to look at the camera. Yes. And not at each other. Exactly. Oh, there you are. Thomas Merton is one of my favorite writers. He's he in many ways is someone that I don't get and understand. He's a Catholic mystic. He left the monastery and had an affair with a nurse. Yes, all this stuff. But he also brought Zen Buddhism and a lot of other Hinduism and kind of Eastern modalities to Catholicism and integrated it with. He's also a great writer. And poet. And poet. And poet. And he, He lived this really monastic, silent life in the woods where he would just observe nature and contemplate the existence.

And it's not always pretty and it's not always beautiful or it doesn't always feel good. But he was after the profound. He was after the profound experience. And it's just someone that I really, really admire. And I read him in the mornings a lot. I wake up and I'll... New seeds of contemplation or poetry or collected works. New seeds of contemplation, I believe, is a compilation.

Right? The one I have in my bag right now is the true solitude. My view of solitude as sort of a clarifying force, as sort of a room to grow. in a room to be contemplative comes from him, comes from his contemplative way. Tradition of chopping down trees in Kentucky.

So, funny story, I spent the night in Thomas Merton's hermitage. No, you didn't. In Getsemin? In Gethsemini at the monastery, which I visited a couple of times with my friend, and my friend knew one of the head monks there, and he essentially snuck me in,

because you're not supposed to do it. You bastard. And because I love Merton, it was scary as fuck. Really? Because it's this little, they built him this little cabin. I'm going to do it.

They built him this little cabin in the woods about half a mile or a mile from the main monastery itself. And the cabin is two rooms. One is like a little bedroom, very old-fashioned, kind of 1960s, 1970s bedroom because he passed away then,

I think in the six. and the other room is filled with crucifixes. Okay. And it has a pew. And like, that's the room I don't understand. The light is like flickering and there's all these crosses everywhere. It's right out of a horror film.

Like if a bunch of kids were running from a psycho killer and came into that cabin with those. They would find no peace. They would find no peace there. I am jealous of your Thomas Merton horror experience. Yeah. And I didn't know you could get in there. Yeah. Because you just had, you had a backstage pass.

I had a, yeah, I had a way in. Who would have thought we were both Merton nerds? How about that? Beckett nerds. And Samuel Beckett. Yeah. Wow, man. They had two very different philosophies, but incredibly brilliant souls.

Yeah. Also, Seventh Story Mountain. Seventh Story Mountain was my father's favorite book, and it's a book that he recommended to me. That brought so many young men into the Catholic Church over the decades. It is powerful. See, my father was the only one of his siblings that was not a priest. restore a nun. That's how Catholic. And I think he was more Catholic than both of them. But

seven-story mountain made me less Catholic. You know, that's not the side of Merton that I related to. Right. You know, it's pretty hardcore, pretty fundamentalist. It's pretty mystical. It was his first book, too. It's pretty mystical. He has that direct transmission with this thing. Yeah. That I find very beautiful, but I don't think I relate to. Yeah. Yeah. But so yeah, like, you know, hard days work it's hard to it's it's hard not to feel purpose after that building a fence did something yeah anything yeah um and music is huge you know i play the guitar every day i just got this weird little complicated synthesizer and i just write vibes and that is a a meditation for me little sigorous vibes yeah little eight bars over and over and over again that i add to that really makes my soul sing

even when they're not great. You know, my guts start to rhyme when I start to make music. And I feel rebooted and reorganized and reset. And that's about listening, though. I mean, listening to what makes your heart sing. You know, listening for those clues that light you up and pursuing those, has made a big difference in my life in terms of my mental health.

That's beautiful. I've been the subject of internet rumors as well, which is hysterical. It's been happening over the last five or six years that I'm part of Jeffrey Epstein's flight log. Oh, I'm so sorry. And yeah, it's a whole Q&ON kind of thing, which is hysterical to me for so many reasons.

You can look through comments on my social media and stuff like, check the Epstein flight logs. It's like, first of all, I've never met Jeffrey Epstein. I had no idea who he was until everything came out with his suicide or supposed suicide. And but the idea that this multi-billionaire, you know, living on Park Avenue who hung out with like Bill Gates and heads of state and, you know, all kinds of people had this island and was doing this nefarious, horrible stuff with supposedly underage prostitutes or whatever. like, like, can you imagine like Jeffrey Abstein being like, you know who I want to hang out with?

The guy from the sitcom. Get me shrewd. Somebody get me shrew. Oh, you mean Steve Carell? No, no, no, no, no, not Steve Carell. He's too big. He's a movie star. The one with the hair.

Get me the one with the bad hair. I want to hang with him. I want to put him on my private jet, which, by the way, I think I've flown on like three like private jets, usually to like some kind of corporate event or something like that or a lecture or something. And like, I want to put him on my, corporate jet and fly him down to my, my fantasy island, uh, is, is just hysterical.

But this and people just read it and they assume there's no, I don't know what kind of Epstein flight logs there actually are, but people will just read it online and oh, that's true. Yes. You know, oh, oh, yeah, I read that he was on it. It's true. I read he was on it. Well, where did you read that? I don't know, some guy's Facebook post or some guy's Twitter post or something like that. And it's been years and it's still going around and people are convinced with zero proof. I've barely even, other than going to Haiti

where we do some nonprofit work, like I think I went to Barbados. And that's like it. Like it's so laughably far from the truth. That's horrible, actually. I mean, I know you see the humor in it. It's horrible that hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions of people believe that.

That is absolutely horrible. And again, it's how we use the inner. because what you say about someone in your comment section and and and what you forward to your friend seems entirely harmless and not real and possibly like entertainment but what you are doing is you are creating a Voltron of harm right I don't know what Voltron is but that's important Voltron is a robot okay that is made of other robots until it becomes a giant robot uh-huh so you're creating in aggregate you're creating harm.

Yeah. And you're culpable for that. Yeah. And you're involved. You're putting negativity in the world. You're putting lies into the world. And there are, you're throwing kerosene on the fire of.

There are human souls at the end of your comment. Mm. And we need to treat each other better. Yeah. On the internet. Truth matters. Truth is important. It's not just what entertains you.

Mm-hmm. And yeah, I'm sorry to hear that, man. And that, that, that sucks. I mean, a zillion people thought I was dead for so long that I started to believe it was true.

If your comment doesn't matter, why did it make me feel like that? You know, like it's real. There's real force to all of this manufactured consensus. And we have to, societally, I think, take responsibility for how we contribute to that.

Yeah. You know, because if you can be part of a Voltron of harm, I believe you can be part of good. A Voltron of good? A Voltron of good. And I have to believe that the opposite is possible. Right.

You know, and I think it is. But I don't think that's the self we bring to our phone most often. I've talked about this in my book, Soul Boom, about there's two forces at work in the world today. The forces of integration and the forces of this integration. And what you're talking about is exactly that. Like, do you want to be part of the forces of integration or of disintegration? Yeah.

And we all have a responsibility. And you're right. And it's every negative comment. It's the media that we choose to consume. Because if you're choosing, you know, train wreck gossip. And if you're choosing, you know, negative social media content and media content, then people are just going to make more because it's, We live in a capitalist society.

So more and more of that stuff is going to be generated. And algorithmically, it will exponentially compound. And yeah, so we're in a real precarious spot, I think, with this technology. We're seeing it. I think it could swallow us whole one way or the other, which is why, you know, I think we just need to bring our human selves to it. You know, that's our only shot. And we all have an individual responsibility to investigate the truth for ourselves.

Yeah. And if you read something online, I was just hearing someone that I really liked and admired the other day speaking about how vaccines cause autism. And I didn't say anything because it was in this kind of social situation. I didn't want to jump in. But it's like that's very easily explorable. Every single study has proven that to be false. Yeah.

And now kids by the hundreds are getting the measles in Oklahoma because of this anti-vaccine stuff and a lot of it has to do with the with the autism rumor so we have a responsibility to to dig deeper and find out the truth i think part of the problem rain is i suspect that the person who who said that thinks they did dig deeper to find the truth because they found it's confirmation bias right working backwards from uh from an answer you like right so you kind of backfill information into that. And that feels like doing your own research, right, as opposed to looking for facts in evidence and demonstrable, falsifiable information and critical thinking. If you're anti-mainstream media and your anti-kind of medical establishment, then you're not going to trust anything in the mainstream

media that has to do with medical establishment. So that is a confirmation bias of itself. Confirmation bias is another way of saying we've confused. We assume that all information needs to be on some level entertaining or it is not valid information. If this information doesn't spike your dopamine. Tittalate. Yes. If you're not titillated, then why listen at all? No, I say.

Critical thought and leading well-examined life is difficult in the face of a fire hose of information. You know, it's like trying to eat nutritious food in a sea of McDonald's. You know, there is all of this junk that tastes great. It tastes, it feels good to be an asshole. McDonald's has a salad. That one orders it. But isn't it like one of the least healthy things

because of the amount of that I don't know. Slime that they put on it? Yeah, it could be that I don't know. Hey, you just got back from an incredible trip in Alaska. What happened? Where'd you go? Why? I went to Alaska to experience true remote stillness and calm in the dead of winter in February.

And true remote stillness, cold and calm are there. That's where that is. And to see the Northern Lights, which I saw. Those are incredible, right? Yeah. Did you have like a mystical experience looking at the Northern Lights? I did. Actually, we were dog sledding. I was on like a four-day dog sledding excursion north from Fairbanks. I'm sorry I have to ask. Go ahead. Was Blue one of the dogs? No.

She would never do anything like that. That's just way too... What? Rough? Yeah. You know, her name was in the show. You know, I don't hear from her very often. I didn't even know Blue was a female.

Most people didn't, but we weren't hiding it. I mean, I called her a girl the whole time. We, you know, we... Yeah. We gendered her pronouns at all times. I was misgendering Blue for decades. A lot of people did. A lot of people did.

That was kind of the point, though, was to say that, you know, blue. So you're saying Blue is too much of a pussy to be on a dog sled. You're saying that. You're saying. Well, that is what I'm reading between the lines. I did not say that. All right.

So your dog sledding in Alaska, northern lights, four days. That's incredible. How cold was it? Where were you? It was extremely. cold in certain areas because you go over some mountains and we get down in the rivers

in the valleys and it was like negative 20. Where was this near? North of Fairbanks in the White Mountains. Oh my gosh. But the thing is with a trip like that is you're not alone.

You know, there's a guide and some people that are along with you and you're staying in these little tiny hunter cabins like much smaller than the studio. And so a fair amount of that trip was like being on a road trip in a minivan or something with just people, strangers. And so there's a lot of talking and a lot of chatter. And the people that I was with were extraordinarily nice and wonderful.

But I was really there for quiet. You know, I really wanted to get out into the nothing. Right. And so one night I said, hey, this might sound insane, but can I sleep outside? Because the northern mites were going off. And they were like, if you use our negative 30 sleeping bag and this, this, and this, and wear everything you're wearing. So I went outside with the sled dogs.

And I laid down under the Northern Lights and stared at heaven pouring down on me. I listened to a little cigaros. It was insane. I wept. That's fantastic. It was. fantastic. I was the luckiest man in the world. Did you get any sleep at all? I slept many hours, but then I think I slid off my little mat. Yeah. And my sleeping bag was on the ice,

and I woke up shivering. Yeah. And I went inside, but it was, it was extraordinary. You know, you just think, oh, God is great and you go to bed. You know, it's just so, I've seen pictures of Northern Lights, but I had no context for that. Yeah. And it was reconfiguring, I suppose. I'm still kind of high from it. That's amazing. It was amazing.

That's amazing. What else did you do in Alaska? I did a Comic-Con in Fairbanks, which was great, actually, and wonderful. But I was really doing the Comic-Con so I could get to Alaska so I could do the dog sledding. Amazing. Yeah, yeah. Do you have any specific thoughts or feelings when you're looking at the Northern lights, what color were they?

Overwhelmingly green. Some purple, which is apparently good, and some pink, which is apparently like, ooh. But it was more just, it was more the depth of them. Because I'm laying, you know, like in Victorian corpse pose under a, in a sleeping bag, swaddled maximally so that I do not die in the cold. And I'm just staring straight up. And the perspective is straight up. You know, and some of it is very Tim Burton-esque and,

and just swirly. And then it goes away. And then it comes back. And it just felt like a reminder. It just felt like a perspective kind of mindset switch. You know, does that make sense? Yeah. How did it shift perspective?

The vastness of space, the, um, insignificance of self, you know, is all very clear in that moment. Yeah. It's profound. Yeah, I saw them briefly. I did a trip in Greenland to do a mini documentary on climate change. Oh, God, it was one night that we saw them. We didn't see them very much, but there was one night.

And what I was struck by, I think, is what you're describing, too, is like, they're 3D. Yes, exactly. You know, it's not laid out here. You see pictures, and it looks too. but then you see it like going up into the atmosphere and like down and it looks like it's like 20 feet above you and you're like jumping trying to touch and then it's way up in the in the cloud layer

and then like there's perspective to it. Yeah. Almost like you're being warped into space. Yeah. It's trippy and strange and cool and wonderful and absolutely beautiful. And the cold helps and the fact that there's no light pollution helps. And the fact that I was surrounding by these peaceful little fuzzy croissants of sled dogs,

you know, and I'm sleeping in the snow. Did they accept you into their pack? They accept almost everybody into their pack. They're pretty cool. As a society, I would say those 20 sled dogs were more peaceful, on average, than a corresponding number of men would be. I can 100% concur with that. But when you hook them up to the sled,

they are chaos and... A lot of barking. And ferocity. And they're like biting each other and there's blood and poop everywhere. And they're... And then as soon as you give them their purpose, they're bliss out and in Zen

and dragging you over a mountain. It sounds like there's a little mental health lesson contained in... The whole thing was rife. In the dynamics of the sled dog. I would say so. Yeah. You studied acting in college and

Pennsylvania, moved to New York City, somehow kind of stumbled into the world of children's television. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey, how you got to the casting of Blues Clues? I know you've told that story a thousand times before. It was entirely an accident. And the fact that I became a children's television show of any note, children's television show host of any note still feels completely inappropriate to me. Okay. I often have felt miscast in my own life. I was a scrubby little skate rat who just wanted to play indie rock. And I moved to New York.

I was in college in a very small theater school in Pennsylvania. And I had won an award in my little regional thing. And then that advanced. And eventually I won an award at the Kennedy Center for being a swell actor. Oh, nice. Okay. And Uda Hagen told me that I was good. She, uh, she was our, she taught a seminar and I felt blessed. Yes. Right. For those who don't know, one of the preeminent acting teachers. A terrifyingly of all towering acting teacher. She said, she said, I was great. She said, I was great. She said, I was great. She said, I was great. For one shining moment, you were blessed by Uda. I honestly didn't, I was only a sophomore in college and I was already thinking maybe I don't want to do this acting. It just didn't, there's a lot about it and there's still a lot about it that I, it just seems a little suspect to me. Believe me.

Yeah. Believe me. Right. But ironically, I was considering leaving the acting program and pursuing education. Mm-hmm. But my friends convinced me, look, you have a flurry of interest from agents and managers in New York City. You should go do this. Go try it.

So I went to New York to fail privately, you know, to be an unknown actor who did off-Broadway stuff. Yeah. Or to be Al Pacino, one or the other. Uh-huh. You know, I definitely saw myself as like a dangerous short guy actor, you know. And so did you live that actor's life waiting tables and auditioning and okay no I moved to Times Square in 1994 1990s still a little rough then then dude now it is it's a theme park now it is yeah it is a theme park designed to sell you M&Ms and Crocs and yeah you know but then it was

New York City's very own porn district for real for real uh I remember one of the first people I ever met in New York was a crack addict named Lucky. And she was also a prostitute. And she would sit. Not sure about the name, but everything else. Yeah. She would sit in a one of the wire mesh trash cans that they had back then. Yeah.

And swing her feet. And I would walk by her every day and she'd say, hey, Anthem. You want a blow job? And I would say, no. No, thank you. Not today, Lucky. And she'd say, okay, handsome, have a good day. I was like, oh, New York City, you know.

And lucky was a smoker, I'm taking it. Of the voice. Of much. Of many things. Yeah. And I lived in a hallway. I built like a little shelf in a hallway between two tiny bedrooms across the street from a parking lot. Above the Army Navy on 42nd Street, which is still there, which is great.

You know. Amazing. In a world where nothing. Nothing lasts. Yeah. So you're saying you didn't have to wait tables because you lived such a meager existence. Oh, yeah. I mean, I lived in New York City.

I got Blue's Clues early. Oh, okay. But every waiter I ever knew made more money than I did for the first many seasons of that show. But I was really fortunate because my real gig, Blues Clues was my side hustle forever. You know, my real gig was, I was a voiceover guy. I fell into that early. So I was doing kind of voiceover stuff for commercials, which kind of sustained me. But, man, it was, it was grim for a long time.

But, you know, I was getting auditions, like serious, dangerous actor auditions. Homicide, you know, all these. I was like a little creepy. You did the Law and Order auditions? Well, everyone, that's their first job. That's everyone's first job. Was it? No.

I was the only actor that went through the entirety of the 90s. I came to L.A. in the year 2000. I didn't have a single audition for Law & Order. That's not possible. I was never deemed right for television and film. And I couldn't get TV auditions to save my life. I was the theater actor because I had done Shakespeare and tours and I had done Eugene O'Neill and a lot of serious theater.

It wasn't until I came to L. LA and then started booking some stuff here that I was able to book a law and order. Okay, so you have, obviously. I did one in like 2002, but it was like, yeah, it was a big guest star. Yeah, it was a, it was a guest spot. It was still a small little gig,

but literally every episode, as you know, has like 14 people going like, oh, him? Yeah, he used to come around here. I haven't seen him in a while. Maybe you wanna go check down at the florist shop. He used to hang out down there, a lot. Like, you just need someone to do that, you know.

You need someone to carry the exposition while typing on a computer or drinking a slurpy. Yeah, or, you know, shoveling something or sweeping something. But you were auditioning for these things. Sure. You know, like, I remember, you know, I was getting serious auditions, right? So I thought of myself. So how did the Al Pacino thing go? Not great.

And one day I had an audition for what I thought was to be the voice of a cartoon. on a children's television show. Yeah. And if I had known that it was to be the guy on the show, on camera, I wouldn't have gone.

Not only because I was a pretentious young man at the time, that was part of it, but also because children's television had never occurred to me. Yeah, I didn't even know any kids,

you know? And I just, I think there's no way I can do that. I would have said, no, no, that's a mistake. But because I thought it was a voice thing, I went to the audition. And when I got there,

there was a camera in the room. Yeah. And I thought, oh, shit. I better do something. Yeah. And so I looked at the script and, you know, I figured I was, I've been blessed by Uda Hogan. I'm going to act the shit out of this, you know. It read to me like a game show, like the price is right.

Yeah, because you're looking for the clues. Oh, blues let these clues and. But that's trying to figure out of the audition. The audition was much more like, which one is the triangle? Do you know? Yeah. You guessed it. Good job.

And that wasn't interesting to me. So I thought of, I immediately thought of the kid show stuff that I liked, which was, I realized now, which is all Frank Oz, you know, Bert, Grover, right? These are the characters that are broken. There's something broken. Jim Henson World. Something broken about Bert. and Grover is what I was really thinking of

and I kind of thought of Grover and I thought at the end of what was interesting to me about the audition was that it was to the camera right and that I was talking to the camera the whole time

and I had just gotten out at theater school and I had all this ham-fisted sort of bad acting stuff in my mind so it was like oh that's my acting partner and so I just kind of did the status exercise with it

It was like, I'll make them cooler than me. And instead of making it like a game show, I'll get really close to the camera, like way too close to the camera. And I'll pretend that I don't know the answer to this question. And so I was like, which one is the triangle? Do you know? And it got like weird and conspiratorial. And like, I waited for way too long.

Mm-hmm. And I was like, oh, yeah, you're right. I was like, oh, that felt kind of cool. Yeah. Right? And I thought for sure. I mean, I had long hair. I had hair down to here.

Yeah. I had a pack of American spirits in my pocket or camelites probably at that time. What do you smoke? Exactly. Exactly. So which one is the... Right. And so I thought for sure that that wasn't going to get that part.

But then they... Well, I think it was so great about you in that role. and, you know, because it took off and became like the most popular show in Nickelodeon history and kind of kept the network on the air for years. Hello. And you're looking at the wrong camera. You want to look at that camera. There you go.

You should have been on the office. Well done. The was how unkids show like you were, which is probably why you got the Wilson. Because thank you so much. Well, no, you had like an internal life and you were, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you could see your thoughts in your head. And I imagine probably a thousand people audition for that part. And I can imagine a lot of people like,

hey, do you like a triangle? What's the triangle look like? Does it look like this? I'd love to hear from you. And you've probably got a lot of people doing that. And then you've got you being like Dustin Hoffman, homicide life on the streets, you know, kind of bringing that reality

where you're like the anti-kids thing. And so immediately you're flipping through the television, and you see you kind of having like this organic experience with an animated dog. And you're like, whoa, what is that? And you just draws you in. There's nothing like it's not coming out at the TV and blasting at you like so much kids programming is.

And they still haven't learned from your success that you can be smart and psychological and relatable. But we were all, I remember me and my friends and friends with kids. we just were so struck by your ability to do that. I'm going to climb over this table and embrace you. We're going to do that at the end of the podcast. You beautiful, beautiful, man. You just said the nicest things.

The best children's television always does that. All of it. You take Barney as an example. Barney is not my jam. That is a really well-made show in its own way. It is based on some solid. stuff. Dinosaurs were not purple. And anyway, keep going. You're not wrong. But Barney is a mask. Right. It's one, it's a monochromatic thing that doesn't change. It is one note and it is, hey, I don't

trust that because life is not that. Life is unsatisfactory, right? And I deeply don't trust that. And I deeply don't trust that. And I think kids sniff that out too. I really, really do. Yeah. Authenticity. Yeah. And the real good children's television always, in my opinion, has human ballast. Right? Bert. Like, Bert does not move comfortably through the universe, right? Like, at all. You can tell. Grover is a mess. Cookie Monster is a mess. Charlie Brown. Ernie and Bert, by the way, have been canceled by the current government. They no longer exist. They're no longer allowed to be broadcasted because of the subterranean gay subtext of

Bert and Ernie. They've been utterly defunded. Yeah. They no longer are. Which is a shame because they were great. But all of that stuff has a humanity to it. The stuff that lasts anyway, does. And the stuff that doesn't last doesn't.

And I wasn't, I didn't have any high-minded ideas about it in that audition. I was just desperately pulling something out of my ass and referencing the stuff that I liked. But it's always that. After the show, I certainly had not addressed any mental health issues at that point in my life. But the next thing I did was I was always a musician, a very bad, very poor musician. But I had been writing songs. and I hooked up at the Flaming Lips who were my favorite band.

Yes. They say don't meet your heroes, but I did and they are great people. Amazing. I got to interview Flaming Lips for this... Oh, you did? VH1 Who extravaganza back when they actually... VH1 actually used to do rock and roll.

They're great guys. And the lips were covering a Who song. Yeah. I got to interview them and hang with them a little bit. And what a great group of... Yeah. And hardworking, brilliant, insane, beautiful people. Yeah.

And I heard your album. It was pretty damn good. Oh, thank you. You're the only one. You and my mother, I believe, are the only ones who've heard that album. It's like the Revenge of the Dustmites. Songs for Dustmites. Songs for Dust Mites.

Check it out. It's on Spotify. It's great. It's poppy. You definitely hear the Lips production there with the inverted guitar stuff that they were using on Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Well, I recorded that album while on their downtime, while they were recording Yoshimi.

Oh, wow. How come you haven't done more, have you done much more? I still play. I play a lot of music. I just haven't written songs in a long time. The first cut on that record is the theme song to Young Sheldon. Amazing.

So, yeah, so I guess technically I'm a professional musician, which is hilarious because I suck. But, yeah, so that was a dream come true. So I was on tour with the Flaming Lips. They took me on tour in the UK for... Some of the most brilliant. Sorry. Some of the most brilliant musicians of all time. I agree.

Suck. I agree. I don't know what Leonard Cohen can actually play. He can play a little. A little. But he's playing on Suzanne, isn't he? But a brilliant songwriter. The best.

You know, one of, you know, an absolute icon. Are you a Nick Cave fan? Yeah. I thought so, yeah. I'm in my Nick Cave era. Okay. I've always liked him, but now I'm like, dear God. Yeah.

You're God, man. He's next level. Yeah. Trying to get him on the show. Ooh, that would be great. What an interview that would be. Yeah, he's known a lot of grief and a lot of loss. How do you define the word soul?

You know, it's people toss it around a lot. I started a company Soul pancake. Now we've got Soul Boom. What is Soul when you hear that word? How would you define it? I mean, my mind is scrambling right now, you know, because there are so many ways to get, at it. Right. There is, I think of a soul, one of the first things I think of is something I don't believe in.

Okay. A ghost that lives inside of you that survives death. I don't know about that. But you've had these mystical experiences with your father, but yet you're skeptical of that construct. I am skeptical of that construct. I'll tell you what I do believe in more and more is grace, which I would define somewhat spiritually. An ability to accommodate a deeply unsatisfactory world with compassion and dignity and kindness and love. I don't want to say it comes from somewhere else, but I think it's like an invisible sea around us in which we can get to, which we can draw from.

I love that. I love the idea of the divine being a sea of grace that we can draw from. Yeah. Without it being necessarily like, quote unquote, God or some being that has will. And I also really love that word grace because it's, I think people a lot of times conflate it with forgiveness. And there is an element of forgiveness in grace, but there's something broader. It's kind of connecting dots and finding peace

and kind of a radical acceptance of our own flaws and others' flaws. And there's kind of a warm embrace of the universe that has to do with grace. In a state of grace, for sure. You know, people always ask me, you know, are you happy? I'm like, I don't know, sometimes I am.

I've honestly, and this is true, I do not live my life to be happy. You know, I'm concerned with grace, well-being. In abandoning that pursuit, I find a lot of happiness, you know, and I guess that's sort of the paradox of it, but... Abandon the chase for happiness and in so doing, find happiness. Yeah.

If you pursue grace, happiness might be a byproduct. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's probably right. You know, I don't know. What do you think? I'm in. Sign me up.

Yeah. I agree 100%. And service is another big part of it. I know that that's a big Baha'i thing, right? It's like the big Baha'i thing. But the older I get, the more I'm interested in that, the more I'm like, how can I stop thinking about Steve Burns and start thinking about other people?

That seems to be where happiness actually is. And there's all kinds of studies about that. And in the darkest period, you were all about Steve Burns. You're kind of like an endless. spiral of Steve Burns. Steve, Steve Burns, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. You know, and that is, that's a recipe for misery.

Yeah. Yeah. In the Baha'i faith, service is equal to worship. It's the same as worship. So we think of worship this and like, oh, God, this, or our father of art in heaven, this, or, you know, church on Sunday or mosque on Friday or, you know, Saturday or, you know, synagogue or whatever. And if service is the highest form of work.

worship to that all-embracing sea of grace that's around us. That's great. Maybe that's what soul is. There you go. We figured it out. I believe in that. If that's what you mean by soul. Now, you said you were going to crawl across the table and embrace me in thanks for my deep understanding of Steve from Blue's Clues and what it is you were trying to do.

I'm going to do it. Let's do this. All right. Are we crawling? Go. You're the crawling. Not me. I didn't say I was going to crawl.

Bring it in. Bring it in, right. Bring it in, right. There it is. There it is. There it is. All right. I don't. I'm going to stay. I'll stay. You smell nice. Thank you. So do you. Kind of cinnamon-y. Simminimini.

Oh, it's whatever lotion they have at the Garland Hotel. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.