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00:00:05
Speaker 1: Hi, and welcome back to The Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My guest today is Mike Harlow. Mike is a writer, producer, and filmmaker, and host of Mike Progressed on YouTube. So nice to have you on, Mike.
00:00:18
Speaker 2: So glad to be here, Carol. Thank you so much for having me. I've been an admirer of yours for the longest time.
00:00:25
Speaker 1: It's an honor. I was going to say the same. Very mutual appreciation society here. What? You have one of the best Twitter accounts and I don't, is that like a, I mean, I mean it as a giant compliment. I feel like, you know, people, um, talk smack about Twitter and how much we use it, but I love your account. I learned so much. You have so much interesting stuff on there. How did you get into being a writer, producer and having your own show on YouTube?
00:00:53
Speaker 2: Um, well in terms of like the political side of it, the YouTube, I really just kind of fell into it. Um, I've been writing my whole life. I sort of I come from a family of crazy artists and musicians. My dad is a music producer. My mom is a jazz singer. My grandpa was an Italian singer. Him and Sinatra were rivals with each other. So I grew up singing in punk bands. But then I realized the apple fell very far from the tree when it comes to musical talent. So like, what else do I like to do?
00:01:24
Speaker 1: I don't believe that.
00:01:26
Speaker 2: Oh, you don't want to hear me sing?
00:01:27
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe I do.
00:01:30
Speaker 2: No, no. You'll lose all your viewers. Where did you grow up? New York City. Born and raised. About a year or two ago, moved to Florida. So I feel like I was sort of on the last plane out of NAMM.
00:01:45
Speaker 1: Right. It'll be five years for us in January that we left Brooklyn for South Florida. Wow. Very, very similar trajectories. Also lifelong New Yorker right up until that, though.
00:01:58
Speaker 2: What area are you from?
00:01:59
Speaker 1: I grew up in Brooklyn. My husband grew up in Queens. So we were like legit, you know, New Yorker, New Yorkers. And we were never going to move. But then, you know, the city lost its ever loving mind during COVID. And we didn't see that getting better. And we feel like geniuses like every single day. We're like, we're so smart for getting out when we did. So where did you live and what made you finally leave?
00:02:22
Speaker 2: Well, my dad is from Brooklyn. The last place I lived was in Queens and I grew up in Manhattan, Upper West Side. Have you ever seen the movie You've Got Mail?
00:02:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course.
00:02:31
Speaker 2: That's basically like a tour of where I grew up. They filmed it in my neighborhood when I was a kid. They went to every local spot. And it's so tragic watching that movie now because... This city doesn't exist anymore.
00:02:45
Speaker 1: Right. It's so gone.
00:02:47
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:02:47
Speaker 1: We lived on 68th and Broadway for a little while. So I think in that same 69th.
00:02:51
Speaker 2: And West End.
00:02:52
Speaker 1: All right. So we might have seen each other. Oh, my God. Yeah.
00:02:56
Speaker 2: It's sad. I miss the city that was. It just doesn't exist anymore. Yeah.
00:03:03
Speaker 1: I mourned it so completely that I'm. kind of over it and I appreciate it for what it is you know we go visit sometimes I go eat like really spicy Asian food and then I come home to like beauty and safety and security and functioning government.
00:03:19
Speaker 2: It's great isn't it so weird being able to just walk and not have to like look behind your back and it's crazy.
00:03:26
Speaker 1: Awesome so okay you don't become a singer you what's what's the next thing that happens.
00:03:33
Speaker 2: To you So I've always loved writing. I've been writing since I was a kid. And so I became a bit of a professional writer where I was working with a publishing company, ghostwriting books. And then that evolved into consulting on screenplays and stuff like that. And so around 2015, 2016, which in many ways feels like the turning point of humanity when everyone lost their mind, I'd created a TV series that we were in the midst of pitching to different outlets. Mm-hmm. People seem to really like it. And then we got a letter from GLAAD, the Gay Defamation League, saying this is homophobic.
00:04:13
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:04:13
Speaker 2: We will fight you every step of the way in making this shut. They are like the mafia. Shut down all the meetings. Everything.
00:04:21
Speaker 1: What was your show? What was it going to be about? It was.
00:04:25
Speaker 2: I always described it as like if a romantic comedy got hit with a bucket of ice cold reality. So it was sort of just like an honest depiction of being gay and single from an honest perspective, though. So the main character was sort of a rebel trying to. make his way through this very conformist gay world. So it was like semi-autobiographical.
00:04:48
Speaker 1: I could see that, right. And they didn't like that you weren't just like everybody else? Is that the whole problem here? Or was it like the gay character was right of center? What was the problem?
00:04:59
Speaker 2: No, not even. That's the thing, because I actually should have mentioned I was a liberal my entire life. I was a liberal when I wrote it. It wasn't a political show, but it's not their narrative.
00:05:07
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:05:08
Speaker 2: You know, everyone's homophobic. Everyone's out to get you. Maybe the biggest problem in the lives of gay people are gay people. So they did not like that. They said I have internalized homophobia.
00:05:23
Speaker 1: Clearly.
00:05:24
Speaker 2: It's externalized. It's externalized, I assure you.
00:05:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, that doesn't happen. What happens next?
00:05:30
Speaker 2: That sort of was one of the things. There were already sort of seeds planted, but that was sort of one of the things. This was the same time that everyone was becoming homophobic.
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hyper politically correct you can't say a word yeah suddenly every minute of every day I'm racist homophobic sexist a Nazi a fat I'd never been called any of these words in my life um so is all of these many things combined sort of led to me becoming more right-leaning which which I feel like I don't I I don't even really call myself conservative because I feel like being on the right today is just, I don't know, being sane, living in reality, common sense.
00:06:09
Speaker 1: Right. So your show doesn't go on because the gay mafia tells you that you can't do it. What do you do then?
00:06:19
Speaker 2: Well, so I fell into talking about politics and just kind of speaking my mind. I think I was very naive at the time. Of how like I thought I was just saying things that were common sense or just basic reality. What do you mean there are a thousand genders? What do you mean? Like things that we'd never heard of in our lives that are now hate speech. So I started speaking out. And this was the height of, you know, 2018, 19, 2020. So I found myself being one of the most banned people on the Internet.
00:06:51
Speaker 1: Right.
00:06:51
Speaker 2: Banned from every platform, Instagram, Twitter, all of that. I think I had like 20 plus permanent bans. And I think it was very deliberate, too, of that era that you look at people who actually are hateful. You look at white supremacist leaders. None of them are banned from anything. So I think it really was kind of a targeting of common sense people?
00:07:13
Speaker 1: I think gay people who are right of center get it the worst. I actually think like, you know, I'm Jewish and right of center and most Jews are liberal. Like they, I don't care. I don't care what they think of me, but even more like they're not, they just, it isn't as much of a, how dare you as it is for gay people. It's like, how dare you step at all outside the lines that we have drawn that you're supposed to be in. I've had, you know, several different gay people on the show who ended up being right of center, Chadwick Moore, Ben Apple, like these are Dave Rubin, of course, but like they get so much pushback from the gay community. And they all say kind of the same thing is that they didn't get that same pushback for being gay from the conservative community that like they thought they would. Were you surprised by that?
00:08:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was shocked because my whole life I was led to believe that anyone who's not far left is just, you know, racist, homophobic, all these things. But I'd never met people who were conservative. And then I started meeting them and I was like, oh, I like these people. I like them way more than these other people, because that really is kind of the one thing that stayed consistent with me is from day one. I always felt like the gay community was is just built on conformity. It's about, down to everything, down to what music you can like, what political opinions you can have, how you dress, how you speak. They just have labels and rolls and boxes for every little thing in life. And it has always felt to me like sort of stripping away any sort of individual identity and just painting over it with a rainbow.
00:08:53
Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, I could so see that. So the show doesn't happen. You get into writing. What goes on next? How do you grow to be, you know, the Mike Harlow that I know on X now?
00:09:06
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know. I don't know if that's good or not.
00:09:09
Speaker 1: Did you have like a moment, a breakout moment where, you know.
00:09:15
Speaker 1: Suddenly everybody knew who you were or it just slowly developed? I don't know.
00:09:19
Speaker 2: I've been told I'm a cult classic. I'm like under the radar a bit, but I did a lot.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: You're my Taylor Swift.
00:09:26
Speaker 2: Oh my God, you're the best. Well, so I did a bunch of speaking events in 2020. I was invited to the White House to participate in the Republican National Convention. So I got to do a bunch of cool things. I did all these speaking events across the country. To be honest, I spent a long time feeling like Damn, I destroyed my life by speaking my mind and being honest.
00:09:50
Speaker 1: Do you feel like you've come out of it on the other end? I actually do now. What did I do?
00:09:54
Speaker 2: I actually do now. And I think we're at the very, very beginning. of this changing, not in the sense that any, you know, people talk about, oh, woke is dead. That is not true. So I don't think it's in the sense of any of these corporations or studios changing. Suddenly they're going to embrace conservatives. I don't think it's that. I think that we're going to start to see the golden age of independent art in film in comic books in literature in everything where there are ways to get around the gatekeepers um so for a long time i kind of had to mourn my passion of what i want to do in life and i think and i think another thing that was really depressing about it is at this point i don't want to say i'm politically homeless because i will vote republican but But do they give me anything to vote for? No, there's nobody I feel passionate about in politics. And, and also I think a lot of people, a lot of people on all sides of politics really do the same thing that gay people do is that they think a political position is a replacement for a personality. Just like they think a sexual orientation is a replacement for a personality.
00:11:03
Speaker 1: Yeah. I see. You're so, so true. I, you know, I, I think that when you vote, like, you know, you say you don't feel passion for any people. Don't look for that. Like, just look for somebody who's going to, like, get your garbage out and cover the potholes and do the kind of things that will make your everyday life better. And for me, that's always the Republican. It's never been the Democrat in my lifetime that I thought would make things function better. But I don't fall in love with any of these
characters either. I think that that's, you know... It's almost far-fetched to believe that. I have to say I had a real soft spot for Ron DeSantis, obviously.
00:11:40
Speaker 2: I was just going to say, except DeSantis.
00:11:43
Speaker 1: He saved my life. He saved our family. You know, he gave us somewhere to go when everything else was bananas. And he really did have such an impact on my children. I think that they're always going to remember him as the guy that really saved their lives. And I love that. Yeah. Is he like your guy too?
00:12:02
Speaker 2: Except Ron DeSantis.
00:12:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:12:06
Speaker 2: But no, and I think for a while I got into this space feeling like, I don't know, it feels like when I started and probably when you started too, maybe this was partly being naive, but it felt like people who were speaking out were truth tellers who felt so passionate that they had to speak out. Boy, what did I know? Look at things now. So we're now it's like, I didn't know this is like a money making opportunity for people. I didn't know anything.
00:12:32
Speaker 1: So.
00:12:33
Speaker 2: Now, seeing that it's just like the outrage industry, who can be the most outrage, who could be the biggest liar, who could be the most vile? I'm like, I really don't want any part of this. I can't live like that.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: I get it. Totally. And this show, actually, people have like have told me that they find this show relaxing because I'm not trying to put anybody in the spot. I'm not trying to have a gotcha. I'm not trying to have a flashy moment like. It's literally just getting to know the person, finding out like what their path in life was to getting them, you know, to be having this conversation. And people enjoy that because it's not this, you know, sensationalist thing. And I like my audience liking it.
00:13:11
Speaker 2: Oh, I love it.
00:13:13
Speaker 1: So tell me what you would have done instead. What could have been your plan B?
00:13:20
Speaker 2: You know what? And here's the thing. Like I said, I feel like I've come out on the other end of it. However... there is no plan b there because i know even if it weren't this thing or that thing that woke me up i never would have made it through so many things that happened i never would have made it through covid with my mouth shut i never would have made it through trans kids with my mouth so it wasn't a matter of if it was a matter of when um but no i felt i really felt like for a long time that i just had to kind of mourn the life that i wanted my passion what i want to do in life and then all of a sudden, maybe a year, year and a half ago, I had this idea for a film and it felt like a story that I have to tell. I'm like, I don't care if I don't do anything else in my life, I will tell the story. And I was so afraid to even start writing it because I'm like, who is ever going to let me make a movie? But I just started writing it anyway. And the moment that I did, suddenly all these opportunities started appearing of people who were interested and want to help and want to make, and it's, it's a, It's a romantic slasher. It's the bloodiest love story ever told. And so I got to meet all these amazing people in the horror world who are just the sweetest people in the world. And so, yeah, I really think that now we're kind of seeing the path that the roadmap is there for how to go around the gatekeepers and be able to finance something yourself and get a distributor yourself and make your stuff anyway.
00:14:51
Speaker 1: So when is it coming out? When should we look for it?
00:14:53
Speaker 2: Well, I'm still figuring out budget and financing and all that. So it'll be a ways in the future, but it's just, I've already gotten so much further than I ever thought I would that just the fact that I'm having these meetings, that it's on track and making progress. I would have never thought possible.
00:15:11
Speaker 1: That's amazing. And you'll have to come back on to the Carol Markowitz show and talk about it when it comes out because romantic slasher movie, that sounds up my alley.
00:15:20
Speaker 2: Are you a horror girl?
00:15:22
Speaker 1: I mean, I get scared easily, so not so much. But, you know, I like it.
00:15:28
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, imagine you're watching a love story and then halfway through it turns into a horror movie. But with conservative subtext.
00:15:35
Speaker 1: Okay. All right. I'm definitely going to watch your film.
00:15:38
Speaker 2: You know, one of the big things that I've always wanted to do in life that I just thought wouldn't be possible until 10 years, 20 years from now is to start my own production company to be able to not just make my own things, but help other people who aren't part of the group think and the conformity make their stuff um so i think kind of ingenuity is part of being down and out because for the last year year and a half i was down and out i could not find work i couldn't get arrested let alone hired like thank god now i have a wonderful place great place to work And I had so many people I was meeting with that wanted me to produce shows for them. And then it just never ended up happening. So throughout that, I was like, you know what? Yeah. I'm going to start my production company myself. These shows that these people are talking about, I'm just going to do it myself. So my production company is starting our first show. It's a YouTube. It's called PolitiDate. It's a cross between a dating show and a debate show. Oh, I love it. It pairs up two political opposites on a first date. They'll talk. They'll answer questions. And at the end, they vote on if they'd go on a second date. So to kind of see if attraction can overcome the divide.
00:16:54
Speaker 1: Are you going to do it in Miami or it's going to be in various cities?
00:16:57
Speaker 2: I think it's going to be... It's ultimately going to be in different locations. But yeah, the first... We're
going to film the first couple episodes soon in Florida.
00:17:04
Speaker 1: I can't wait. I'm going to be your biggest fan. That sounds awesome.
00:17:08
Speaker 2: Aw, you're the best. But yeah, if anyone watching is single... Apply to PolitiDate.
00:17:12
Speaker 1: I'll send you single people for sure. I don't know if I want them dating libs, but okay, maybe.
00:17:17
Speaker 2: They don't have to. They can reject at the end. It'll have a happy ending.
00:17:22
Speaker 1: So a question that I ask all of my guests this season of the show is, do you have something that you've changed your mind on?
00:17:34
Speaker 2: I've changed my mind so much. When it comes to politics, I think I was talking about this a little bit before. I think it has to be politics again, that politics is not our savior. It does make a huge difference, especially locally. God, living, you know, in New York, it drives me nuts when people say, oh, the two parties are exactly the same. And where do they live? They live in Florida. They live in Texas. Go to New York. Go to Chicago. Go to San Francisco. Go to Portland and tell me the two parties are the same.
00:18:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:18:04
Speaker 2: But yeah, what's what's really something I've sort of changed my mind on is thinking that politics can be your savior or can be the thing that your life revolves around. Like, I think it's so poisonous that we, you know, back when I was growing up, politics wasn't in your face all the time. It wasn't in everything. Now it's everywhere.
00:18:23
Speaker 1: It's in sports.
00:18:24
Speaker 2: It's in movies. It's where you go to the bathroom. It's everything.
00:18:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely.
00:18:29
Speaker 2: So I think. We could all, which is why I love your show so much. I think we could all use a political detox.
00:18:36
Speaker 1: I love that. Thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, that's definitely what the point is, that get to know the actual people behind, you know, the opinions. Another question I ask all of my guests, give me something you've experienced recently that's been the best. It could be best restaurant, best book, best place you visited, best idea you've heard, anything.
00:18:59
Speaker 2: OK, I have a movie I saw recently that just really touched me. It's so original. It's probably nobody watching has ever heard of it. It is. I have to say it's probably not for everyone, but it just really touched me in a profound way. It's called Boys in the Trees. It's this Australian film. It's like it's wearing the suit of a horror movie, but it's not a horror movie, but it just has the aesthetic of it. And it's sort of. This existential journey of two childhood friends who drifted apart. And it has this amazing sort of nostalgic atmosphere where everything seems slightly familiar and something off. And it has so much heart to it, but with a side of emotional devastation.
00:19:42
Speaker 1: All right. Boys in the Tree. I don't watch that many movies, but if you swear by it, I'll check it out.
00:19:49
Speaker 2: I will say it's not for everyone. But I feel like it's so rare nowadays with all the crap that gets put out. It's so rare to see something that's really original and creative and hasn't been done before.
00:20:02
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, Mike, I have loved this conversation. I think you're so awesome and I love getting to know you a little bit more here. End us here with your best tip for my listeners on how to improve their lives.
00:20:17
Speaker 2: All right. I will tell I put a lot of thought into this. I will tell you my tip for life is Life is a horror movie. And I'll tell you why. I don't mean that in a facetious way. I will tell you why. You can find the meaning of life in horror cinema. Life is about fighting to survive. It's about defeating the monster, no matter what that is. For some people, that's addiction. For some, it's self-esteem. It's about defeating the monster and fighting and living long enough to see the end credits so that you're the person standing there no matter if you're bloodied, beaten, battered, that you stand tall and get through the darkness and make it to daylight. So I really think life is about being the final boy and final girl of our own lives.
00:21:08
Speaker 1: I love that. He is Mike Harlow. Check out Mike Groagrest on YouTube and follow him on X. Such a good account. Thank you so much for coming on, Mike.
00:21:16
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. You're amazing.