Discovering the World’s Hidden Gems: A Behind-the-Scenes Interview with Craig and Earl from ‘The Good Road’ on PBS
Thank you to Earl Bridges and Craig Martin, longtime philanthropologists and best friends, who trek around the world to meet people who are making a difference, for taking the time to talk with me on my podcast. On their show, The Good Road, they share “a raw look at the messy and complicated business of global charity. Two philanthropy veterans and globe-trotters set off around the world to find good.“
Listen or watch our interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or your favorite podcast platform
READ THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW
Lisa Niver:
Good morning. This is Lisa Niver from We Said Go Travel, and I’m here today with Craig and Earl from The Good Road. Hello!
Earl:
Hey. How’s it going?
Craig:
How are you, Lisa?
Lisa Niver:
I’m doing great. I can’t believe you just wrapped season four of filming for The Good Road. Congratulations.
Craig:
Thank you.
Earl:
It’s hard for us to believe, too. I think it’s when you start down this road you have no idea if you’re going to ever get through season one and now we’re at season four, looking at season five.
Lisa Niver:
It’s incredible. So, if there are people that don’t know, The Good Road is on PBS, and the two of you are long-time friends and philanthropists who are sharing incredible stories from all over our planet. Could you tell my listeners a little bit about how did this happen? You have both lived around the world. You care about our planet, and you have many interesting stories especially about water and the ocean. What made this happen? What made you wake up and say I want to be a filmmaker and we’re going to walk this road together?
Earl:
Craig, you want to kick it off?
Craig:
Earl and I went to school together in Bangkok, Thailand at the International School of Bangkok together. I was actually born and raised there, and Earl was raised there. His father started as an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam era. Then I was there because my parents were Baptist missionaries, so that’s why I was in Thailand. But we’ve known each other a long time. About five or six years ago, the company Earl and I were at evolved.
Earl asked me at the time, he had a company called Good Done Great. So, he asked me if I’d travel with another friend of ours from the International School of Bangkok, Patty DiMartini-Williams. So, they took me along to be kind of the shooter and storyteller on video for both of their companies. It was on that trip to Myanmar, Nepal, and Vietnam that Earl said he had an idea for a TV show which was like Bourdain meets philanthropy and I said- I kind of love that.
That kicked off our Good Road story. Incidentally, and somebody asked us this the other day when we were filming in New York, whether or not we had done a lot of stuff together through the years after our time in Bangkok. The reality is I had not seen either Patty or Earl since high school when we took that trip. We had stayed in touch on Facebook and things like that, but it was a cool reunion of our high school days. The three of us and then Earl and I of course continued on with our good friendship for many, many years in person embarking on this project together.
Earl:
I mean the idea is not very many people want to watch a movie about doing good. They don’t want to watch charity videos. Quite frankly, that’s the kiss of death. So when we first started, we called the show Good All Over, and people just wouldn’t watch our trailer. So, we wrapped it into this travel format, made it The Good Road, and the idea is that we’re going to take you to Thailand or Canda or Uganda or wherever and we’re going to show you some people that are going to introduce you to a world you may not have thought about. The formula basically is we’ll take you somewhere. We’ll try to highlight an issue. We’ve done anti-poaching, prison reform, maternal health, and all these other things. But the story that I like that I think illustrates the formula of the show best is when we went to Yangon, Myanmar.
We were trying to figure out, Burma has one of the oldest running civil wars in the world. It’s got the Rohingya crisis. It’s got this interesting kind of mixture of different foods and different ethnic minorities, and we were trying to figure out who is it that would make a good interview for us. We ran across what we thought was the perfect interview the second we heard about it. It was a punk rock band called Rebel Riot. You don’t expect to find punk in Myanmar because its oppressive military government, they’re super-conservative Buddhists, and yet this lead singer Joe-Joe is this tall guy with this big mohawk and the kindest face ever.
And it was those guys that were really tied into not only the larger punk community but the downtown community, the street kids. So, they’re feeding kids, they’re doing literacy classes in the middle of a median in downtown Yangon. I think that’s what we do. We flip whatever narrative that you thought you knew about a place, and we try to expose that place in a different way but it’s really character driven. It’s can we find somebody that can represent this area and show it to you in a way that’s very different than you’ve seen it before. That’s really the show. That’s The Good Road.
Lisa Niver:
I love that. I myself have traveled a couple of different times in Myanmar, and you’re right. It’s such a unique place. I loved being out on Inle Lake with the leg rowers. When people see the video there are surprised that they row with their legs? I think you’re right. Travel is such an amazing lens into what’s happening.
Craig:
I was just going to say part of the format comes from the fact that I referenced Bourdain earlier. Part of the format is, and we got a lot of affirmation from people in the TV business because of this but most people travel with a friend, a family member, just a really good traveling partner and his show, he was always kind of in one sense by himself. Not to be cliché but it’s kind of a buddy series because Earl and I, not only are we best friends but we both love to travel. So, we experience the travel together. That’s a huge part of the fun of it, so most of the things that people see on camera are very natural. When Earl and I experience somebody cool who’s talking about making big changes in their community. We were just in New York at Food Bank NYC, and we’re talking to these seniors at this community kitchen. I mean some of their stories are crazy.
There’s this guy, Gregory, who was working on Madison Avenue for decades as a writer, and Earl sees he’s this thin African American guy with a really nice suit on but he’s there to get his dinner. He says to Earl, where did you grow up? Where are you from? Earl says, Bangkok, Thailand and he says, hell, I know it’s Thailand. He was almost offended by the fact that Bangkok had to be clarified with Thailand.
Earl:
What other Bangkok is there?
Craig:
Yeah. What other Bangkok is there? We just love it. We just enjoy so much, and it does matter that we get to do that together. I think that’s an important part of travel is sharing the experience with somebody else.
Earl:
Yeah.
Lisa Niver:
I think you’re right. The other thing that you bring to the show is your long, long history of travel and living outside the United States and many people have visited Thailand but not many people have lived there. I studied abroad in college, but to have studied abroad at such a young age and be immersed and not study abroad, you lived there.
Earl:
We speak Thai. I always say that’s our bar trick, but it worked really well in a Thai bar. In America, no one cares if you speak Thai in a US bar. Having grown up there and then Craig went on to film in dozens of different countries for the organization that he was with and I had worked internationally. So, for us it’s always one of those if you get to know the places you know some of the language and you actually get to know the people.
What you won’t see on our show is us doing the top listicles- five place dive bars in Gurkha, Nepal or something like that. But you will see people. You’ll get to know people that are doing some interesting things. That could be professional baseball players, sculptors, activists. We were in New York City with a good friend of ours, Mickela, who has this Bare Feet show on PBS. She had us voguing in downtown Brooklyn. So, if you were there this last weekend, I apologize to everyone who saw that.
You talk about pride and it’s standing up and it’s having confidence and going down the street and being really proud about who you are as a person and just being with someone in that world wasn’t just a cutesy little dance that Madonna did. It was much, much more once you get to know why people do that. I think that’s what we get to do is expose it by the people that really care about it, and we find out just like the viewers do about some cool people all over the world.
Craig:
I would add, too, there’s an element of the way we grew up. There’s a cross cultural experience that happens only if you grow up in another country, and that cross cultural experience leans into the fact that we should all love and respect each other. We should try to identify and learn and understand another person’s culture before we made any kind of critique about it. In fact, it’s probably best to not critique other people’s culture because if you’re not part of it, if you’re not part of that group it quite frankly is annoyingly for you to be a critic of it.
So, for us that means being able to talk to…in the case of the voguing thing, we’re there for gay pride. I’m a heterosexual male, but you’re there amongst a lot of gay people. In that cross cultural experience, the only thing that I felt bad was I was screwing everything up because I’m such a bad and uncoordinated dancer.
Lisa Niver:
But anyone who’s watched Mickela’s show or danced with her, she’s such a great teacher. She’s so enthusiastic. She’s so welcoming. I think you’re right it’s a cross cultural experience. You talked about growing up in a specific faith-based reason for being in Bangkok. Can you talk about Season Four in Iraq with the kids in school?
Earl:
I was a missionary kid and not necessarily the best representative of the church always. And we all have our own journeys. So it’s not really a faith-based thing. In fact, I didn’t want to really go down the road of doing a lot of faith-based things. I just want to mention one little story.
We went to Mbale, Uganda, and we started to cover this husband and wife team, Adam and Kathy. Kathy was a neonatologist. Adam is an anesthesiologist. They were working in a really remote town. They had two tiny, little girls at the time. I remember saying why in the world? Because you can work in the UK where they were from and just crush it and then just send money down to someone else that could work in a maternal health clinic that was getting 200 kids referred in and they had a 50 percent mortality rate and see all the deaths. I mean to have someone else make your money and send it somewhere else to do it.
So, when we were asking them, why is it that you’re doing it? Were they to have said it’s because we believe that this is God’s will for us and things like that, I would have gotten it. I totally would have gotten it, but it quite frankly would have bored me because that story I’ve heard a million times. Instead what Kathy and Adam said is we’re not Christians. We’re Atheists. There was no mandate. It’s just humanity, seeing other humans, and then kicking in. So, sometimes it’s those things that, again, flip the narrative.
Iraq was interesting because Iraq is…Mosul is one of the most diversely religious cities in the world. They have thousands and thousands of a really large Christian population that’s been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. They also have the Muslims. You have some Jewish folks.
When we were there, most of what we knew about Iraq was really war coverage that you would have seen on the news. Now we’re inside of an elementary school. It was the 20th anniversary of the US’s involvement in Iraq. As we’re going into some very conservative schools where they were held by ISIS and there’s still ISIS folks that go to those schools. You started seeing people that had parents who were ISIS and kids whose parents were killed by ISIS in the same classroom.
You say how can peace happen when these kids who are 11 and 12-year-old girls…they’re all one sex. So it’s either girls or guys. In this case, the girls, it’s like how do you ever trust that other person that’s right beside you. So, the organization that we were highlighting, Hardwired Global, does a lot of curriculum around religious pluralism and just getting to know each other. That’s a metaphor for the rest of travel. I mean you have to be together. You have to see each other and you have to see each other as humans. That’s what travel does.
So, we can watch travel shows but when you’re there all of the fears that you may have had going into a country beforehand, our first time going to Iraq, there’s a lot of misconceptions. By the time you leave a couple weeks later, you’re like I see them as people very differently than I saw it, and I think that’s the beauty of real travel.
Craig:
I would add to that in terms of Iraq that one of the hardest days that Earl and I had there was when we listened to these really young girls talking. One of the things that they said was a smack down on all of us adults and all of the people who really are complicit in warfare. There was this one girl who had lost her father because he was an ISIS fighter. She said–we children want not to have war. That’s just what we’re asking for — We just don’t want fighting.
Out of the mouth of an eight or nine-year-old–That’s pretty profound. What a message for the world. Earl and I both were shedding some tears.
Earl:
That was a heart-wrenching episode.
Lisa Niver:
You’ve gotten to experience so many different cultures. One of the things I noticed is you’re also looking at how does our planet continue. Looking at sustainable farming or stoney coral disease, Atlantic sturgeon. You have a focus on some of the crisis in our planet. Is there one place that sticks out for you that is the good news or the good road where they’ve really made great strides with helping?
Earl:
You mentioned the sturgeon. We did an episode right outside Richmond in the James River. For decades people thought that the great sturgeon were no longer in the James River. Now they’re coming back and actually they’re coming back in droves. The point from one of the scientists, he said, we didn’t do any remediation. We didn’t go through and do a lot of clean-up. What we did was we stopped messing up the river. We just stopped polluting it, and it restored. A lot of times, with almost anything, it’s like the doctor code- first do no harm. It’s stop doing bad and there’s space for good to happen. That’s the story of the sturgeon but that’s also a metaphor for a lot of travel.
Craig:
The same in the US Virgin Islands. The stoney coral disease came over from Florida where they had been dumping sewage into the ocean and it made its way and wound up in the US Virgin Islands. In St. Thomas at the University of the Virgin Islands, when we interviewed them in the water, which was kind of cool. I had never really done an interview underwater. But in the water you’re looking at these coral that may never be able to bounce back from this disease. It’s like Earl said about the river. You can try to be reactive to the things like this disease, but you’ve got to really be proactive and think about what we’re doing before everything goes to hell.
Earl:
I think when you talk about a connection and community, air, water, all of these things we all share. We’ll see the impacts in a country from something that’s happening very far away. In fact, when we were in New York City this last time, you started to see the ash from the wildfires that were happening in Canada. Look, we’re connected very closely and when you start to see the impacts that are happening in one place that impacts all of us…it doesn’t feel like the borders are so rigid anymore. It starts to feel like we’re occupying the same space. I think that’s another area that we get to explore with this show in the format that we do. Who is it that has these worldwide, global problems that they’ve received from elsewhere and then how do they take care of themselves?
There is a lot of stuff that just show how interconnected we are.
Lisa Niver:
Well, it’s interesting how it’s all sort of the same layer, right? The children are saying you’re making war and it’s hard for us to live. The fire in one place but the air doesn’t know where the border is. We’re all connected, the water. The lionfish is a huge issue that I’ve been writing about. This invasive species, rivers with pollution. Your show is very aspirational about how can we dream bigger, how can we work together and How can we find the good road?
Earl:
Yeah. That’s it.
Craig:
Earl referenced space earlier. I will say that last season, we did a couple episodes about space. One of the things that we talked about was the overview effect and being able to look back at the planet and realize that all the borders and all the things we put on it for ourselves, Earl, what’s the comment from the astronauts?
Earl:
They say once you’ve seen the Earth from afar then it changes everything. They call that an overview effect. They say that astronauts leave the planet as astronauts and come back as conservationists because you see the world from such an unlikely existence and how subtle any little changes are and how connected they were. So, I love that because if travel has the ability to change your mind or help you understand the world better then space travel even more so.
They talk about how transformative that experience can be. So, we highlighted an organization called Space Perspective that does exactly that. They’re starting to launch balloons into space so you’re 100 thousand feet in the air. It’s two hours up, two hours in space, two hours descent. You get that experience to see the world in a very different way. Travel is all of that. Travel is that experience that can really change you.
When I said you first go to Iraq and you’re not sure what to expect, I know for myself that if I have blind spots, misconceptions, or stereotypes, that it probably makes sense for me to go somewhere. I went to Sudan in January of this year. Again, it was a brief period while it was peace, and I was so blown away with how great that experience was afterwards because I had no clue what these people were like. Their Muslim traditions, they’re so welcoming. There were a million things I learned and saw about their hospitality, and way of life.
I think at the end of it, once you’ve gone and come back, then you start seeing those people, as not very different. It just breaks down all of these barriers that you have in your mind. For us, that’s the beauty of travel.
Lisa Niver:
Well that was an amazing summary of how fantastic your show is and why you’re about to launch season four on PBS. Again, congratulations on all of the awards and all the destinations and really bringing the issues around our planet into people’s living rooms. Before I let you go, could you just let people know first, season four, when is it coming? If they haven’t seen the first three seasons, where can they find you?
Earl:
There’s a couple different ways that you could see it. You could see it on PBS.org in their Passport app. You can also see seasons one through three on Amazon Prime. It’s ad supported, so it’s free. It’s on Delta Airlines and Roku. Google The Good Road for more options.
Season four will start airing in September of this year, 2023. It’s eight episodes per season. They’ll run them in primetime spots beginning of September.
So, season four will run September through October and then it’ll rerun for the next two years on PBS channel, so check your local listings or check it out on TheGoodRoad.TV.
Craig:
We’ve gotten into a cadence. Season five will probably also be in the fall, so we’ve gotten into a cadence now where you can see it every fall but also all year through Amazon Prime and PBS.org.
Lisa Niver:
Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I’m so excited for season four and to learn more about all the incredible characters and destinations and philanthropy projects. Thank you both for being here.
Earl:
Thank you so much for having us.
Craig:
Thank you, Lisa. Appreciate it.
Craig entering a school in Iraq season 4
Season FOUR GALLERY
The new season of The Good Road, Season 4 launches in September 2023 on GBH-WORLD and then on all PBS stations in January 2024 through American Public Television.
SEASON TWO: “In THE GOOD ROAD, Earl Bridges and Craig Martin – longtime philanthropists and best friends – trek around the world to meet people who are making a difference in their communities. In season two, the hosts explore places closer to home like Virginia, South Carolina and Puerto Rico, and destinations abroad such as India and the Burmese border, where the duo discover inspiring change-makers and the limitless power of good.” Watch on Amazon Prime more on Facebook and Instagram.
Earl Bridges is a self-proclaimed “philanthropologist,” filmmaker and tech entrepreneur who believes that authentic storytelling is key to fixing the world’s most pressing problems. He also advises, speaks and writes about the potential of corporate social responsibility, company culture and engagement for good.
Craig Martin is a TV and film producer, director, writer and editor who has spent the past 30 years filming in war zones, disaster zones and remote villages in more than 85 countries. Craig has produced hundreds of projects, both long- and short-form, including the feature-length docudramas ‘The Insanity of God’ and ‘Free Burma Rangers;’ the Philanthropology podcast; and Confessions of a Philanthropologist.
Craig, Lisa and Earl recording for Make Your Own Map
LISTEN on APPLE PODCAST: MAKE YOUR OWN MAP
Lisa’s book: Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty
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