Empowering Humanity with The Good Road Hosts Craig and Earl

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. READ THE FULL INTERVIEW ON WE SAID GO TRAVEL

LISTEN on APPLE PODCAST: MAKE YOUR OWN MAP

Lisa’s book: Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty