Gadgetory

joining me now the lovely the talented the delightful Mo Rocca mouths I'm praying for sure I wouldn't ask you something don't even do any finish that don't even finish telling me how you are your name mo mo is short for something yeah my um my father was a diplomat in Africa when I was born this is true you got your satanist yep in the late 60s and he was the ambassador to Mozambique and so it just mo is just I know I'm making that up I just want to see how you react to that know my mother right you got to admit I did catch that you were making that right it's the beauty it but then you lied for like they knew you really eww well I thought once I asked and you and then you said no I would imagine that you were a liar that you would lie to my face right no way now I know no and you were actually really thoughtful about it because I think you also thought the whole thing was loaded I've dragged Africa into it it got very sensitive a little bit but your day there's no these are shortcuts no no no no what happened is my mother was actually she was very sort of bohemian and kind of a hippie and I was born it is you know and so I she was she was living in the Mojave Desert when okay it's uh you don't want to help it I'm ashamed moving along so you're an Emmy and Peabody Award winner oh sure I mean I'm sort of one knows yes I did are you having I actually have an FBI agent front yes I had a statue it's a set yet I think well no they're statuettes and a statue oh this has to be large yes they don't give me like eight foot tall that's just not just an approximation of what you're getting exactly unless you steal the thing that's in front of the Academy which is a life-size one which was a cheap right it's just a prop you have to buy you have to be equal daddy you have to buy the MA you actually have to buy it that's actually very common for a whore it's apparently we want some some webbie's and I think that you have to buy the webbie's as well not there's anything wrong with that we love the webbie's continue to award us the prizes but okay so yeah your daddy supposedly an Emmy Award winner but you but you and you've done a lot of stuff in news comedy and get all of it you're doing food stuff now but you did children's shows thank you did a show called wishbone which I had never seen but there are several youngsters here in the room who were telling me about that how beloved the show is for kids and it's about a dog that sort of what is the dog okay it's a dog Jack Russell terrier who in his fantasy life becomes the hero of classic novels in order to familiarize kids between the ages of 6 and 11 with the themes of those books so that when they encounter them later on they'll find them less daunting right what kind of book so it could it would be a Don Quixote I did oh yeah oh yeah yeah no he was central pawns oh wow it's a great show anyone under the age of 30 um loves it and knows that not anyone but most people I mean not those kids if I'm 26 alright then you're one of the people I know you have TV yeah they take your TV away when you cross the Brooklyn you drop the Williamsburg Bridge as a guy waiting there that's terrible it hits you hands you a copy of Catcher in the Rye exactly you don't have a teeny you must be a really roll up the cost of your jeans I what was I saying no sorry the dog no so he would be such a Ponzo or he was a in I did Treasure Island and he was it suddenly became a character in Treasure on the kid Jim what's his name who's the kid Oh God in the book yeah let's say Jim that sounds wrong okay I know alright I'll totally I think it's Tony you went from wishbone to perfect 10 any porn magazine support is not really important magazine well that's you earlier yes Phoebe to poor not know the perfect time do you guys know do you guys know perfect 10 is it's a magazine it was a magazine from I think the 90s yeah it's the answer the modern answer to Playboy which is a lot of fake breasts at the time perfect tenant was a magazine for connoisseurs it was the only adult men's magazine that featured models without breast implants right and that was their thing yeah they're like they're attend naturally exactly and you were the I was salting editor of perfect ten and I was um I it was an unusual way that I got there but the guy who ran it was a totally fascinating guy named norm Zeta who made a lot of money playing international poker poker tournaments and was kind of like a mathematical genius he was very nice very generous highly neurotic and he had a house in the Hollywood Hills with all these beautiful women there he didn't even have sex with all these women that were in the house he was a very neurotic guy but liked having all these beautiful women around him and they were for the most part the staff of the magazine but he chose the negative staff by beautiful women in addition to having to pay and it was very hard to find models without breast implants so a lot of the women came from Eastern Europe I think it's when the iron curtain fell it took a while for breast implants to pour and I guess and so I right right at the start oh it's interesting the iron curtain came down there was a lot of beautiful women of that breast implant so there was also a clown glut I remember this because there were a lot of state-supported circuses and there were all these clowns that couldn't find work because this is totally true yes that has nothing to do with the story but times were out of work because the state was no longer this it was no longer like a guarantee State College yeah exactly yeah yeah and so anyway so he had this magazine and and it wasn't he wasn't he didn't oppose breast implants for ideological reasons he just hated the way they looked and the way they found aesthetic yes but I was the magazine's grammarian basically because he was a real stickler about poor grammar and there was very little text in the magazine but he hired me for a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to pour over the copy and make sure that there were no syntax grammar punctuation errors okay so then so let's fast-forward a little bit okay let's have a Daily Show sure tell me about how how did you get involved in The Daily Show and at what point did news become a thing that was important to you well I was always like a news junkie and so I started going around the country visiting the homes and grave sites of obscure presidents I got very interested in seeing the weird off-the-beaten-path marginalized historic sites like all the Presidents between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt the guys with the facial hair a couple of them were knocked off like you know like Grover Cleveland he wasn't knocked off but like our James Garfield or bent Harrison and I found that when I went to their sites it wasn't like Hyde Park or Monticello where when you walk in you're already in awe but that the people had to really sell it to you because you might be there to use the bathroom and I met like a woman named Wanda we a woman named Wanda wheat wheeler in Indianapolis at the Benjamin Harrison house who volunteered there full-time for 22 years and by the end of the tour she gave you she was so committed to him you wanted to sandblast Mount Rushmore and replace it with hey you're like this why this guy getting his due yeah what number what number president is he he's 23 because he's in part of the Grover Cleveland sandwich he's Grover Cleveland's 22 24 non-consecutive terms and you're I think about that all the time Grover Cleveland had non-consecutive presidential terms anyway so I started meeting two really interesting characters there and at the at the Warren Harding house in Marion Ohio I met a god that was so obsessed with Florence Harding the first lady that he dressed up as her to give tours of the house in this small Ohio town and it wasn't like he was I mean I think people thought it was accepted I'm doing this solo you were just like I'm gonna go check out these places I've got some free time ya know I was I just thought I thought you know I had this like yen this itch to do this so I might and I did that and I collected some great stories and so then somebody said you should go on The Daily Show and do these as pieces yeah so that's how it started yeah that has morphed though from doing sort of comedy news you've done real news as well I mean you you sort of I would never be interested in going on the cable net on the news on the three cable nets and doing punditry I mean I get I ran out of opinions like that I'm like I'm done with I feel like whatever what do you think I go either way by doing like something you know my main gig is on CBS Sunday morning and doing like a seven-minute piece there on and this was actually felt almost like a Daily Show piece on right before the the 2012 election I went up to to see the the Chester Alan Arthur birthplace because when he was president in the 1880s there was a movement of people that said he was actually born in Canada so there were birthers and this is really back to your roots this is yeah it is actually history on both sides of the border you found Canadians going Chester Alan Arthur was the first American Canadian president like and they were and then the people in both are like owning it the controls are like this and you know they're like this is where he's a secret history of America that has a Canadian President exactly and then and then the Vermonter is to hear Vermonters get really upset about this was just really funny yeah so what number was he uh he is 21 because Garfield is 20 and then he gets killed upset it yeah poor poor Garfield yeah no not the cat is fine though he is my cholesterol from the lasagna lasagna yeah yeah okay so now now cooking your dinner you have an interest in food and cooking I don't know if your an interest in cooking necessarily you're gonna tell me in a second don't answer that yeah but you're doing a show it's called my grandmother's ravioli explain explain my grandmother's ravioli okay well so my grandmother this is another lie I can no no it's true my my grandmother was was a very good cook and she made really great ravioli and and when we were little we would show up at her apartment and like you know like ten minutes before it was time to eat and wolf the food down and then kind of take off and anyway so this shows really about guilt abatement because I never learned how to cook and I still don't but you don't you don't really cook no so I thought I want to go and learn how to cook from grandmothers and grandfathers across the country I would I feel like grandparents would be less concerned with the health factor of their food then modern parents might be yeah in the sense that like this is this recipe requires six sticks of butter coming that's no problem whatsoever are there are there I mean in the ravioli I would imagine that you had must not it couldn't be for that healthy right her ravioli was it was okay it had spinach inside no but like Millie's chicken salad had a whole lot of mayonnaise and marries pierogi had lots of butter or I'm just trying to think of our different grandparents and Gaitan Oh only eats what he shoots and kills I mean he's a 92 year old who's ever birth Mark Zuckerberg reacted think he'll only he'll only eat when he kills me what he kills yeah that's Caetano does that - he's 92 years old he took me out shooting and and and he also said that he had the big problem and it's it was in this episode with this guy he's a real badass is that today's kids are so attached to their smartphone that if their plane went down they wouldn't know how to survive if they're playing crash if the crashes in the Andes and they and they and they live yeah just very very he says that they're probably and I said what if they have cell phone coverage in the Andes yeah yeah exactly then they could look up like forage or something or just call the police and say can you come yet well right and he was really bothered by one of the he didn't like the concept he didn't like the scenario that I was painting he insisted that when the plane goes down in the Andes that your cell phone breaks it's just there's no way if you who you live with your cell phone breaks maybe if it was in the overhead compartment and that got destroyed well write it wait with it's an overhead compartment it's and you're alive it's likely I'm not I don't know either I'm confused about the whole concept of a plane crash anyway in anybody surviving but but you know guy tano is that his name I'm gonna let's go yes yes sure I mean my that's my my thought was well you'd obviously eat the people right because they're there but I think once they're dead you'd have to hunt them you have but you have to I don't know it's like eating a lobster I don't you know you have to kill them first right yeah yeah right well anyway yeah and so on I can't remember what he said I do know that he said that this is like a really good part to eat that thing but I feel like there's a lot of fat in that right that part is that good I think so I mean what savory okay I think that's we should just stop here on cannibalism where and when if I want to see this show the episode about cannibalism and others my grandmother's ravioli is on Cooking Channel on Wednesday nights and it is not the Cooking Channel there bear there really yeah is there you know there isn't it's just called Cooking Channel but I think it's I always feel like a caveman when I'm saying where it is because I also I have a new show on Cooking Channel they like country actually they can't say the the they are they don't say that and they're gonna have they're gonna happen it's like ending a sentence in a preposition at one point like you just have to do it like we have to get over that rule right has to be thought cooking yeah I agree so what time on The Cooking Channel I go to see this what day what time it's on Wednesday what channel on if I'm a Time Warner subscriber which I am do you know a channel The Cooking Channel is on my it's on Cooking Channel Judah you know that number it is in New York it's no don't go to The Cooking Channel because you'll never find this show right or any others right I think actually Paula Deen is now on The Cooking Channel that's the racist cooking check