Maury Povich

would check every story out.

And I can say in 31 years, we never got faked on the air.

Sometimes we got faked before the show ever started and we sent the guests home.

But we never got faked on the air.

And so I applaud the way we handled things.

Jerry's show was different.

Jerry kind of gave me...

the best compliment i ever had when he would publicly say you know maury your show's the real deal and my show is wrestling and so that's how i uh differentiated it so how how did that go because i've heard that you became friends at some point i guess you were kind of like rivals essentially jerry and i uh we started the same month in the same year 1991.

That's when he started his show, I started my show, and both admitted back then in the beginning,

The shows were very kind of tame.

I mean, they were just afternoon or morning versions of the Today Show.

We would do topics.

I mean, if there was an edginess to it, it would be, you know, I have a favorite crushes, things like that.

I mean, that would be as far as we would push the envelope.

Pretty tame next to where we ended up.

I think one of the reasons we changed, uh, was the, uh,

was when Ricky Lake, who, by the way, is our guest this week on the podcast.

I hadn't seen Ricky in, yeah.

And so Ricky came in and she, first of all, most of us were in our 40s and 50s doing the show in the early 90s.

Ricky was 24 years old when she started.