Start From Nothing

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Mike Siegel · Founder, Delta Sigs NIU

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A small backyard three blocks from the water in Redondo Beach. A little fire going, a dog named Gracie underfoot, and two men from Northern Illinois University who've been brothers for forty years. One of them flew in from Chicago with a microphone. What follows is a whole life, told the long way.

Mike Siegel has done stand-up for thirty-five years, hosted shows on VH1, TBS and HGTV, walked red carpets, and made a fourteen-year passion project out of a travel podcast. But among the men who came up with him, he's known for something that predates all of it. In the mid-1980s, as a broke seventeen-year-old freshman at NIU, Mike fell in with a handful of guys who decided that if the fraternities on campus weren't worth the price, they'd build their own. That became Delta Sigs — and Mike was there at the very start, when there was no house and the meetings were held in a dorm room.

This is the second interview in our Founders' Series — a companion to Brent Allen's "Lightning Struck." Where Brent was the first president and the driving force, Mike is the one who can tell you what it actually felt like to start something from nothing — and what that lesson was worth for the rest of his life.

Mike Siegel

Founding member of Delta Sigs at NIU. Crete-Monee kid, stand-up comedian, former VH1 VJ, TV host, and creator of the Travel Tales podcast. Twenty-plus years in the South Bay — still moving, still chasing the next stage and the next country.

01 A South-Suburbs Kid Who Landed at Northern

Mike grew up in Chicago's far south suburbs — Crete-Monee, University Park — a quiet, confidence-shy kid who played soccer and baseball and had no plans whatsoever for a life in the arts. He ended up at NIU almost by accident; his father's rule was simply "any Illinois state school." But getting out from under a critical father's roof, and into a place he could build himself, changed everything.

02 Starting Something From Nothing

He got pulled into the fledgling Delta Sigs the way everything happened back then — through the Crete connection. Paul, then Tony, then Larry and Brent. As a broke seventeen-year-old, what he mostly understood was "free beer." What he got was a front-row seat to a group of guys building a fraternity out of thin air: no house, meetings in a dorm, and eventually twenty of them crammed into a craftsman at 503 College Ave paying fifty bucks a month, with mats on the floor of a triangular attic.

It was there — homecoming, the "D for Dude" lip-sync competition, doing Greased Lightning with his shirt off in front of everyone — that the shy kid disappeared for good. He'll tell you plainly: college gave him the confidence his father's house never did. And later, tasked with finding the house on Greek Row, he watched the thing he'd helped start become something real.

03 Europe '89, and the Night the Wall Came Down

After graduating in 1989, Mike backpacked across Europe on a shoestring with a few friends — Madrid to Berlin, Bastille Day in Paris, Swedish girls with a Saab and a country house — and then peeled off to travel solo, a habit that would define the rest of his life. The stretch he never stops thinking about was a summer in West Berlin, an island of democracy walled inside East Germany, staying in the apartment of a young local who'd grown up there.

He rode the subway past "ghost stops" sealed since the divide, bought a day pass into East Germany, and came home with East German money he couldn't spend anywhere — money he still has. The lesson stuck harder than any souvenir: countries, borders, the whole map — it's all fluid. Everything can change.

04 The Hardest Thing He Ever Did

Back home in Chicago, broke and waiting tables, Mike started sneaking off to open mics — telling no one, writing jokes alone in his room for months. His logic was airtight and a little heartbreaking: if he bombed, and he told nobody, then nobody he cared about would ever have to know. So he picked a bar where none of his friends would be — The Union, at Sheffield and Berry — signed up, and waited until the very end of the night to go on.

A comic at the bar handed him a list of clubs — a place to sign up every night of the week. "You just gotta keep going up," he told him. "It's all stage time." Mike kept his day job for a few more years, then, in 1993, leapt.

05 New York, a VH1 Badge, and an NBC Deal

From Chicago he moved to New York — Park Slope — and landed a thirteen-week contract as a VJ at VH1. He played the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal as a "New Face," walked out of a week of Los Angeles meetings with an NBC development deal, and moved west the right way: with a deal already in hand.

06 Chicago Was the Best Place to Be Bad

He's clear-eyed about why it worked. Chicago, in those years, was the perfect place to fail your way to good before anyone important was watching — a late-night, after-hours scene thick with people who'd go on to become famous. The lesson generalizes: get good where the stakes are low, then go sell it where they're high.

07 Travel Tales, and Choosing the Life

When his TBS show ended and television stopped wanting generalists, Mike leaned into the one subject he never tires of and started the Travel Tales podcast in 2011 — fourteen years and counting. These days he hosts travel-comedy cruises, keeps moving, and dreams openly about living in Europe before too long — Portugal, maybe. At sixty-something, he's done chasing metrics.

★ Our Long Weekend in Redondo

A word about how this one got made. Mike called in June — "What are you doing in July?" — and it turned out to be one of the only weekends he'd be home. Gary flew out for a long weekend, and here's how fast this man moves: within two hours of landing at LAX, Gary was standing on the front of a boat off the Redondo pier, filming a whole pod of dolphins hopping through the water. He turned around, and Mike was just standing there holding two beers. Welcome to California.

That was the whole weekend: paddleboarding the marina, a long bike ride from Redondo down past Hermosa and Manhattan Beach to El Segundo and back, the old beach bars from the fifties — Old Tony's, the Bull Pen — a band playing Sublime at a bar with a hundred beers on tap, and Mike playing big brother the entire time, knowing every person we passed. It felt like the trip of a lifetime. To him, it was just a Tuesday. The photos and video are below — scroll all the way down.