Cameraphone moment behind the Shark Tank chairs as Aldo Orta prepares to deliver his pitch for his jewelry line. Entrepreneurs are shown their marks but are not permitted to speak to the Sharks until the pitch begins.

Visiting TV sets is always a thrill. It’s not because I am a pure fan. I mean, I am not necessarily always pinching myself in disbelief over being there. Of course I knew Chandler and Joey’s apartment was an existing set when I toured the home of Friends at Warner Bros.

No, for me, the thrill is strangely historical. Just as I love going to Westminster Abbey, where kings and queens from the storybooks still lie, I get excited to be in a place that I previously knew only as an image or a symbol. It’s where received information clicks into reality.

That’s the way it was when I was on the Shark Tank set. It’s always a mind-twist to see how the shapes and distances and perspectives that you see on television are so different in the flesh. It’s odd to see how a room you thought was so familiar in fact does not feel the way you thought it would. First, of all, it has no ceiling other than the industrial soundstage ceiling, many feet above. It’s also a good reality check to see how a good TV set operates no different from a set in a community theatre production — it just takes a lot more money to design and build.

And more than anything, I love the heritage of the soundstages. Look up at Sony Pictures Studios, which used to be MGM, and staring back at you are wooden rafters that were silent witnesses to some of the world’s most recognized performances and faces. Even the dust is historic there, and unlikely to have been swept away. The soundstage in which the Shark Tank crew and cast ate lunch one day was the same one in which Flying Monkeys were filmed in The Wizard of Oz. “Singin’ in the Rain” was shot on Stage 27. Name a famous MGM movie, and those aged soundstages, so hollow most of the time, were where they happened, shot by shot.

They are the warehouses from which our American culture was shipped to us.

From a historic perspective, that’s a very intense thing to hold onto. Everything you see on camera has to happen somewhere, but when it comes to movies, we tend to accept that they’re in a spatial limbo. Yet cameras captured something that happened on that very spot, and afterward, every sign of the event was cleared away, leaving the soundstage as a shell. It’s the only thing left to witness those vital moments of American history.

Just being in that place, for me, makes The Wizard of Oz true. Not a story that happened, of course, but a thing that was cared about and created and hammered out, shot by shot and minute by minute, by working people who got hungry and sweat and yelled and got stuck in traffic on the way home. Movies become records of real events (of fabricated scenarios) that happened to be snatched in seconds-long increments. Being in a studio brings me out of the mindset of a consumer and irresistibly into connection with the people of the past.

Shark Tank‘s second season was shot on stage 22, and its “holding” room for entrepreneurs was built in Stage 8 (which means that when you see someone stewing ahead of their appearance, they’re not actually in the same stage; when the time comes, they have to run outside, across a lane, and into Stage 22.) My time roaming the soundstage was among my favorite during my season two shoots.

True story: Daymond John saw this and tweeted, "I tried to watch...but Kevin O'Leary's bald head was so damn shiny! I had to throw sand on the screen to kill the glare!" My head is cropped out, so it must be true.

After I interviewed Shark Tank Sharks Kevin O’Leary and Robert Herjavec (click here to watch that interview, which dates from my Traffic Cone Professor sartorial period), a debate emerged in the comments section. The two also appear on the older, Canadian version of ABC’s fish-themed angel investor show, Dragon’s Den, and the bickering began: Which show is better?

Judging by the comments, you’d think Dragon’s Den has the edge, but the numbers probably aren’t representative. After all, Canadians are more likely to be vocal about their preferences since American culture has a way of dominating North America. They’ve got to be louder than the Americans when a comparison is at stake or else they risk not being heard at all.

O’Leary and Herjavec think the crucial difference between the two shows has a lot to do with that imbalance. After all, they’re business, and they think in terms of market potential:

Jeff Foxworthy and me: Hapeville-made

This season on Shark Tank, two new men join the lineup of Sharks: Mark Cuban and Jeff Foxworthy, both of whom rotate in Kevin Harrington’s chair when he’s not there.

I met Foxworthy, who hosts another of producer Mark Burnett’s shows, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, at the dawn of his first day on his new job. I learned a couple of interesting things when I did my pre-shoot homework. One is that he lived in the same town that my grandparents did: Hapeville, Georgia. (I wonder if he used to go to the Richway, like I did.) The other is that 25 years ago, his job was to maintain mainframe IBM computers.

As it happens, I realized, fellow Shark Robert Herjavec, who immigrated to Canada from Croatia as a kid, got his beginnings selling IBM mainframe computers during the same period. It’s hard to get a scoop in the over-covered entertainment universe, but I was pretty proud of finding that one. You can see Robert Herjavec learning about it for the first time on yesterday’s video interview with him.

By the time I met Foxworthy, the next day, Herjavec had already filled him in on their shared origins in the make-up room. Took my scoop and used it to make a fast buddy! If they go in on a business together during the second season of Shark Tank, I’d like to think I brokered the friendship between them that allowed it all to happen. Hey, Robert — it’s on camera.

Some people may wonder what a stand-up comic such as Foxworthy is doing on a panel of self-made titans, but that’s where they’re wrong. As I pointed out when the casting was first announced, Foxworthy has created a multi-milliondollar merchandise franchise out of his personal brand.

He’s certainly canny, and a dark horse among Sharks, but does he have the teeth to hang with his flesh-eating colleagues? You be the judge: