#2235 - Mike Rowe AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Joe Rogan Experience

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Episode: #2235 - Mike Rowe

Author: Joe Rogan
Duration: 03:12:22

Episode Shownotes

Mike Rowe is the creator and host of "Dirty Jobs," "Somebody’s Gotta Do It," and Facebook’s "Returning the Favor." He is also the CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, a nonprofit championing the importance of skilled labor and addressing the critical workforce gap, and host of the podcast "The Way I

Heard It."

www.mikerowe.com www.mikeroweworks.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In episode #2235 of The Joe Rogan Experience, Mike Rowe discusses the importance of skilled labor and the misconceptions surrounding it. He highlights personal experiences from his careers in television and skilled trades, advocating for recognizing the value of tradespeople. Rowe critiques society's stigma against vocational paths while emphasizing personal responsibility over complacency. The conversation touches on the evolution of media authenticity, reflecting on how platforms can effectively engage audiences through genuine representation and self-discovery amidst the backdrop of substantial workforce gaps in skilled trades.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#2235 - Mike Rowe) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_03
So what were you doing on QVC?

00:00:23 Speaker_06
What are you selling? That was the greatest line from Blazing Saddles, by the way, with Gene Hackman. What's on? He says, cigars. Remember? Peter Boyle has come. He had just left. And Gene Hackman is there after getting the soup spilled in his lap.

00:00:40 Speaker_06
And he's basically saying, I had cigars, as the creature stomps off in Frankenstein.

00:00:45 Speaker_02
I don't remember that. It's been too long since I've seen that movie. He's a little bit of a fucking distraction. Can he calm down? I don't hear him on the audio. Trank him. I don't hear him at all. Oh, we hear him. We don't have our headphones on.

00:01:02 Speaker_02
Maybe we should put our headphones on.

00:01:03 Speaker_06
I thought you were talking about me.

00:01:04 Speaker_02
No, Carl.

00:01:05 Speaker_06
For an awful moment.

00:01:06 Speaker_02
We wore him out. Jamie was throwing the toy for Carl, and now he's like.

00:01:12 Speaker_06
He's such a great dog. He's got, I mean.

00:01:15 Speaker_02
He's adorable.

00:01:16 Speaker_06
I mean, it's such a personality thing at that, for me, with dogs and pets in general, you know? Like, you know right away if this thing has a personality.

00:01:25 Speaker_02
Oh, he's got a lot of, Carl's got a lot of personality.

00:01:27 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:01:28 Speaker_02
There's no doubt about that.

00:01:30 Speaker_06
Yeah, and.

00:01:30 Speaker_02
He's like a little kid.

00:01:32 Speaker_06
And a person name, which I think is super interesting. Mine's Freddy. He's a terrier.

00:01:36 Speaker_02
I like a dog with a person name. Yeah, me too. Like Fido? What the fuck is a Fido?

00:01:40 Speaker_06
No one knows.

00:01:41 Speaker_02
Well that's, well actually, oh no that's Philo. I was thinking of Clint Eastwood in Every Which Way But Loose. He was Philo Beto.

00:01:48 Speaker_06
Could also be Philo Farnsworth who created the television.

00:01:53 Speaker_02
For real?

00:01:53 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:01:54 Speaker_02
Did only one guy do it, or was it one of those light bulb type deals where a bunch of people are scrambling for it? What do they call that?

00:02:01 Speaker_06
Like a hive mentality.

00:02:04 Speaker_02
Yeah, right, right.

00:02:05 Speaker_06
That happened with the integrated circuit, right? When Kilby at Radio Shack was doing the same basic work, I think, that Robert Noyce was doing for Intel. And one was here in Texas and the other was in California.

00:02:23 Speaker_06
And they had never met and they had never compared notes, but the work on the circuitry was so close that they wound up sharing the Nobel Prize.

00:02:31 Speaker_02
Oh, that's interesting.

00:02:33 Speaker_06
Super strange.

00:02:34 Speaker_02
That's a common thing with human beings. It's this concept of morphic residence. Have you ever heard of that concept? No. Rupert Sheldrake, he wrote about this. It's based on some actual facts, too, about There's some real statistics about rats.

00:02:56 Speaker_02
Like if you teach a rat how to run a maze on the East Coast, a rat on the West Coast will run it faster. It's like they learn the pattern somehow or another. It's very bizarre. There's like information that's apparently shared across species.

00:03:14 Speaker_02
And the idea is that somehow or another they're quantumly entangled, like that the entire group of these specific types of animals are quantumly entangled or entangled in some way that we don't understand.

00:03:27 Speaker_06
So it's a kind of, I mean, I would think biological evolution might flirt with that. I read a paper Guy wrote, name was Patrick House. This was his PhD. And he was talking about Toxoplasma gondii and histoplasmosis. And it was a crazy paper.

00:03:45 Speaker_06
His real premise was trying to understand the phenomenon of the cat lady and why every culture, like this isn't unique to America. In every culture, you can find a woman

00:04:00 Speaker_06
Who, you know, two cats, three cats maybe, but like went all the way to 38, right? And just was like, this is perfectly normal. So his paper was what happens to a person's brain to tell it it's normal to have 38 cats.

00:04:15 Speaker_06
And then it gets super complicated because he identifies a gondii that lives in the cats. gut and basically breeds there.

00:04:25 Speaker_06
And what he learned was when the cats were crapping, the gondii would come out and then the rats and the mice that ate the cat crap Something was happening to their brains on a neurological level.

00:04:43 Speaker_06
This gondii basically disabled the part of the brain that would tell an otherwise sentient rat to run from the cat. But suddenly, they weren't running. They became prey, and they became docile.

00:04:57 Speaker_06
And the cat started obliterating the mice and rat population because this thing that was breeding in its ass was effectively making its prey easier to catch.

00:05:10 Speaker_06
So Dr. House thought, well, we've all heard about why pregnant women should stay away from cats, because that can have an effect. And a rat's brain and a human brain have a surprising number of parallels.

00:05:25 Speaker_06
So he basically postulated that Doris the cat lady was living a fairly normal life until she just a little bit of cat shit on her fingers and ate it. And the Gandhi eye disabled the part of her brain that said, hey, maybe two cats is enough.

00:05:42 Speaker_02
It's worse than that. It actually makes the rats sexually attracted to the smell of cat urine. Exactly. Right. Yeah. It actually makes them aroused.

00:05:50 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:05:51 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:05:52 Speaker_06
Now, I don't know if Doris went that far.

00:05:53 Speaker_02
Have you ever seen them, like, run up to cats? The toxo-infected rats? It's bizarre.

00:05:59 Speaker_06
Yep.

00:05:59 Speaker_02
They run right up to them. The cat's like, what the fuck is going on? The cats, like, bounce away from the rat.

00:06:04 Speaker_06
It's like it's like watching the Beatles at the Ed Sullivan Theatre, you know, what's wrong with you?

00:06:10 Speaker_02
Why what's happening? That is psychosis.

00:06:13 Speaker_06
Yeah. Yeah, that's super.

00:06:14 Speaker_02
You know, there's also a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims that test positive for toxo did not yeah, it makes people more impulsive it makes them more reckless and impulsive and Countries that have high rates of toxoplasma have more successful soccer teams.

00:06:29 Speaker_02
Oh

00:06:31 Speaker_06
I read, and I think this- I got more of these, too. I don't want to compete. I'm going to lose. But you'll love this. You probably already know it.

00:06:41 Speaker_06
Homeostatic risk and risk equilibrium and the unintended consequences, especially with motorcycle riders that emanate from safety protocols gone too far. Really? Yeah.

00:06:53 Speaker_06
If you study the way you drive your motorcycle, you measure every decision that you make in terms of cornering and speed and braking and all that stuff.

00:07:06 Speaker_06
And then you measure the same things with all the safety gear employed, including a helmet, especially a helmet. You drive faster, you corner tighter, you take more chances, because the risk equilibrium that we all have in our brain

00:07:25 Speaker_06
is different from one person to the next. But what's the same is our desire to compensate for the environment around us.

00:07:34 Speaker_06
So compensatory risk and the subconscious decisions that we might make behind the wheel when we're buckled up versus not buckled up, when we have ABS brakes as opposed to not having them.

00:07:48 Speaker_06
They did a big survey in Berlin years ago where they took half of the taxis and they put in state-of-the-art braking systems in half of them and left the others the same. And then they hooked up the cars to monitor every driver decision.

00:08:04 Speaker_06
And in virtually every case, the drivers with the better safety gear took more chances because their brain is subconsciously compensating right it's it's the same sense it's yeah I mean it's it's controversial but I I understand it.

00:08:22 Speaker_06
It's why the most dangerous intersections have signs that tell you when to walk and when not to walk, and have crosswalks. Because the little man is walking, it says go, so you step off, and there's the big blue bus, and then you're spattered.

00:08:38 Speaker_06
So yeah, the unintended consequences of following traditional safety protocols has always really been interesting.

00:08:46 Speaker_02
Well, it completely makes sense if you have a vehicle that's more able and capable, you're going to probably drive it faster, and you're probably going to take more risks, because it can do stuff.

00:08:56 Speaker_02
I used to have a Lexus SUV, this big boat, and you know what I loved about it? I drove slow in it.

00:09:04 Speaker_04
Mm-hmm.

00:09:04 Speaker_02
I was just like real cuz it doesn't stop that good It's not that fast, but it's just it's big and comfortable and it just chilled me out And then I had an m3 I had two cars at the time and my m3 was a zippy little thing and I was flying around that thing I was like, why do I drive different in this fucking car than I do in the big car?

00:09:21 Speaker_02
The big car would just chill me out. I just get in that big old boat and I just Sure The world was quiet out there, it was nice and relaxed.

00:09:30 Speaker_06
I think it's a slightly different analysis. If you're going to adjust your behavior consciously to adapt to the externality, you're gonna drive faster if you have a fast car because you know That's why the guy built the thing.

00:09:51 Speaker_06
And it would almost be rude, right? It would be rude to drive a hot rod like a boat. It's the unconscious things that you do when you assume or mitigate risk as a result of employing an externality that I think is It's just super interesting.

00:10:12 Speaker_02
It is interesting.

00:10:13 Speaker_06
Well, because if it's right, Joe, if it's right, what it does is it turns all the safety first protocols, not necessarily on their head, but this happened in Dirty Jobs.

00:10:26 Speaker_06
I did a whole special called Safety Third, because safety isn't really first, not really, ever.

00:10:34 Speaker_02
Because if it was, you would never get a lot of things done.

00:10:36 Speaker_06
Well, you'd never get out of the studio.

00:10:38 Speaker_02
You would definitely never do construction. Heck no. No, you wouldn't do anything.

00:10:41 Speaker_06
You wouldn't do anything.

00:10:43 Speaker_02
How are you going to move steel girders if safety's first? You'd be like, first thing we should do is not move this fucking girder.

00:10:50 Speaker_06
That's right.

00:10:50 Speaker_02
This thing's too big.

00:10:51 Speaker_06
That's right. Look, I mean, for me, it was really a, it took two years to kind of puzzle it through because on dirty jobs for the first two years, nobody got hurt.

00:11:02 Speaker_06
You know, we were, and we sat through probably 50 mandatory safety briefings, whether it's mines or confined spaces or high spaces or, you know, lockout, tag out, all those protocols and procedures were super intense.

00:11:21 Speaker_06
And we were really, really focused on coming home alive and in one piece. So we really paid attention. But after two years of these mandatory compulsory meetings and all of these procedures, We all started getting hurt.

00:11:39 Speaker_06
I mean, nothing serious, but broken fingers and, you know, a cracked rib and singed off my eyebrows and my eyelashes and mild concussions and things like that. I was like, what the hell is happening?

00:11:51 Speaker_06
What was happening is the safety experts in all of these mandatory meetings started to sound like Remember Charlie Brown's teacher? Mrs. Othmar. We were just falling asleep. Right.

00:12:05 Speaker_06
So it was like, holy crap, we're in compliance, but we are not out of danger.

00:12:11 Speaker_02
Got it.

00:12:12 Speaker_06
And so that begs the question, what happens to a normal person who actually comes to believe, either on the job site or just in life, that somebody else cares more about their well-being than they do.

00:12:30 Speaker_06
And it's like that's when complacency rears its ugly head. So on Dirty Jobs, it was just shorthand among the crew, but it was always safety third, which meant heads up, man. Keep your head on a swivel.

00:12:44 Speaker_06
You can be as compliant as you want, but in the end, if you don't want to fall off the bridge, it's kind of on you.

00:12:52 Speaker_02
Is there also a factor when you have a person who's the safety officer who's kind of annoying and they're like really like super interested and maybe you kind of like pawn off the the safety aspect to them and then you don't think about it as much because someone's supposedly looking out for you?

00:13:11 Speaker_06
How much do you think about Proper driving technique when you're sitting in the back on your laptop or even up front next time I was driving for sure if my if I was driving and my wife is in the backseat.

00:13:22 Speaker_06
She'd be paying attention a lot Shut out that your guy was his name Ashton who picked me up this morning excellent driver, man

00:13:30 Speaker_02
Glad you're happy with it.

00:13:31 Speaker_06
Just so you know. I mean, I know he drives a lot of your guests and I this is a feedback I want to pass along he was uh, you know, very frosty. But yeah, look I think anytime anytime that we abdicate Responsibility. Yeah.

00:13:45 Speaker_06
Yeah, there's gonna be it's like whack-a-mole It's gonna pop up someplace else and and it's probably not gonna be in your interest. I

00:13:52 Speaker_02
Well your show like sort of illuminated a lot of really crazy jobs that people probably weren't aware of that you go Oh, yeah, if this guy didn't do this, we'd kind of be fucked.

00:14:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, and you don't even think about it Yeah, it's just a thing that's going on behind the scenes or you know out of your radar.

00:14:11 Speaker_06
Yeah, that was it man.

00:14:13 Speaker_02
It was How did you get started in that like what who came up with the concept? Oh

00:14:18 Speaker_06
Well, I mean, technically I guess I did, but I mean, I honestly, there are no, no ideas.

00:14:25 Speaker_06
This, I stole this from George Plimpton, uh, Studs Terkel a little bit, Charles Kuralt some, uh, Paul Harvey a little bit, you know, that that kind of storytelling was always kind of interesting to me. And, um,

00:14:42 Speaker_06
I freelanced for years, probably 20 years in the entertainment business working pretty much whenever I wanted on shows that I didn't care about at all. And I was taking my retirement in early installments and really happy with the model.

00:15:02 Speaker_06
I'd been fired a few times from QVC and hired back, and it was 1993 when I finally left. And I had a decent toolbox. I was great in auditions, so I could get cast.

00:15:15 Speaker_06
But I didn't really much care about the nature of the work and had a pretty good balanced life, really. And then I was in San Francisco working for CBS on a show called Evening Magazine. You know the show, it comes on after the local news.

00:15:34 Speaker_06
And I was a host, and I would go every day. This is a cushy gig. Nobody watched the show, but it was fun to work on. You'd go to museums, you'd go to wineries, and then you'd throw to these wrapped packages.

00:15:49 Speaker_06
It's all just, if there's a three-legged dog in Marin overcoming a heart-tugging case of canine kidney failure, that was like an evening magazine story. We did these all the time.

00:16:04 Speaker_06
And my mom called me, and I was in my cubicle at CBS, and she says, Michael, your grandfather will be 90 years old tomorrow.

00:16:14 Speaker_06
And my granddad, by the way, seventh grade education, electrical contractor by trade, but also a plumber and a steam fitter, a pipe, he could fabricate, fix anything. He had that chip.

00:16:28 Speaker_06
And I grew up next to him on this little farmstead north of Baltimore, and I knew I was gonna follow in his footsteps, I knew it. But the handy gene is recessive, right? I didn't get that, and it was my pop who got me.

00:16:41 Speaker_06
He basically said, dude, just get a different, you can be a tradesman. I know you're enamored of being a tradesman. Just get a different toolbox. So that's what got me into entertainment. And 20 years later, I had completely run amok.

00:16:55 Speaker_06
I had sung in the opera. I had sold stuff on QVC.

00:16:58 Speaker_02
You sung opera?

00:16:59 Speaker_06
Eight years, man.

00:17:00 Speaker_02
Were you classically trained? Not really. How did you get involved in opera singing?

00:17:06 Speaker_06
Well, it's a weird sidebar. You go to the Rosedale Public Library, and you ask the librarian for the shortest aria. they have, like, ever written, which happened to be by Giacomo Puccini.

00:17:22 Speaker_02
Is an aria a song?

00:17:23 Speaker_06
An aria is a song. It's the... They're... In an opera, most of the big moments are arias, right?

00:17:32 Speaker_06
And most of the arias are, you know, I mean, they're sung by the main characters, and there are lots of ones that you would recognize, and they're in German, they're in Italian for the most part. This one was Italian.

00:17:46 Speaker_06
It was from La Boheme, which is just another version of rent, essentially, but it was called the Cote Aria, and it was only two minutes long, and it was in Italian, so I walked around Baltimore with, you remember, the Sony Walkman.

00:18:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, I remember. I had one of those.

00:18:05 Speaker_06
I had one too, and I listened to a guy named Samuel Ramey singing the Coat Aria, about two minutes and 40 seconds. And the words didn't mean anything to me, but the sounds did, and I can carry a tune, so I just memorized the sounds.

00:18:20 Speaker_06
And then I crashed an audition for the Baltimore Opera in 1983.

00:18:26 Speaker_02
So no classic training at all, just a Walkman and a cassette?

00:18:32 Speaker_06
Yeah, I'd had a music teacher prior to that, like a Mr. Holland type of guy, who actually changed my life. He kind of fixed a stammer that I had, and then he forced me to audition for plays that I didn't really want to be in.

00:18:49 Speaker_06
And then the craziest thing ever, this guy, his name was Fred King, he was known as King of the Barbershoppers. He was like a legend in this weird world of acapella singing.

00:19:02 Speaker_06
and he put me in a barbershop quartet when I was in high school and opened up like this very weird world of music written long before I was born that I found super interesting and so my best friends and I

00:19:18 Speaker_06
And we just started learning these ancient songs and singing for people, usually unsolicited, from nursing.

00:19:27 Speaker_02
What kind of fucking dudes are you hanging out with that were interested in doing this with you?

00:19:31 Speaker_06
Well, one of them is basically my producer, a guy called Chuck Klausmeier, who I went to high school with, produces my podcast. And we still write, we'll write unauthorized jingles for our sponsors and sing them in four-part harmony.

00:19:45 Speaker_06
I'm not saying it's cool, I'm just saying it's a thing that I did when I was young and I never really shook it. Because like, way leads on to way.

00:19:53 Speaker_02
Right, so you knew how to sing,

00:19:55 Speaker_06
I could carry it, too.

00:19:56 Speaker_02
So you had some experience singing, kind of.

00:19:59 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:20:00 Speaker_02
And then you decided you were going to learn how to sing opera.

00:20:04 Speaker_06
Well, what really happened was I decided that my toolbox wasn't going to let me work in the construction trades or do anything my pop could do. And he really was a magician, and I really took his advice seriously. So I wanted to be in entertainment.

00:20:20 Speaker_06
I didn't want to be in the opera. I wanted to be on TV. But I needed an agent. And I couldn't get an agent unless I had my Screen Actors Guild card. And I couldn't get my SAG card unless I had an agent.

00:20:30 Speaker_06
So I couldn't audition for things that I wanted to do unless I found a way around this weird tautology. And a friend of mine, a guy called Mike Gellert, told me, he said, hey, so there's the Screen Actors Guild.

00:20:44 Speaker_06
There at the time there was after a and I'm sure you were part of both. Yeah, the thing you didn't know about was agma The American Guild of Musical Artists is a sister union to the Screen Actors Guild and to AFTRA, who have since combined.

00:21:03 Speaker_06
And the rule back then was, if you could get into any of them, you could simply pay your dues to the other, and then you were in. So for me, it was easier to kind of fake my way into the opera than it was onto a sitcom.

00:21:22 Speaker_02
So my plan... This is all diabolical. It's a great plan. I mean, it's like that kind of strategic thinking is very valid. You should be in the Navy or something.

00:21:32 Speaker_06
Well, look, I was just trying to get a job. I know, but it's clever. Well, there's always a stage door, right? I mean, there's always a back way in.

00:21:43 Speaker_02
Right.

00:21:44 Speaker_06
And so I thought, you know, I memorized the aria. I auditioned. I was stopped halfway through it by the musical director, a guy named Bill Yannuzzi, who was like, Mr. Rowe, you have no idea what you're saying at all, do you?

00:22:00 Speaker_06
You say the words wrong you just repeating the sound I was singing it loud, and I was singing it like I like I understood what I was saying All I really understood was the repertory company was desperate for young men with low voices I Knew that and so I kind of looked the part

00:22:19 Speaker_06
So whatever I got into it and my plan was to do One production or one season like they would do three shows in a season And I had some friends who were in the chorus and I was just a chorus member I'm just holding a spear and just singing along with the rest of the course and

00:22:37 Speaker_06
And my plan was to do one or two of those, get my card, and then buy my SAG card, and then go about the business of being a famous TV star, right? Simple. Well, the music, man. The music was so much better than I imagined it might be.

00:22:54 Speaker_06
And when you get up in the catwalks of a real theater, you've done shows in these theaters, there's nothing magically different about them, but when there's a full orchestra, playing the hell out of Verdi or Rachmaninoff.

00:23:10 Speaker_06
And you're looking down on this scene and you're looking out at the audience and the sound is just amazing. And the girls. So like there were 80 people, I guess, in the rep company, more or less. 45 women, 35 guys.

00:23:30 Speaker_06
30 of the guys had zero interest in 100% of the women, and of the remaining five straight dudes, three were married, and the only other single guy had a mole the size of your thumb on his eyelid with thick black hair growing out of it.

00:23:49 Speaker_06
It was just, I was really the only straight dude. You were the belle of the ball. And I'm dressed like a Viking. Or a pirate. And I'm going on stage, and I'm a fake. I mean, I admit it. I barely learned the language enough to kind of keep up.

00:24:10 Speaker_06
And people in the chorus took pity on me. And it was a world, really. It was a world that I didn't know existed.

00:24:20 Speaker_06
Once I saw it, I didn't fall in love with it, but I fell in love with the idea that there were worlds out there that I didn't know anything about and that were maybe more interesting than I thought. And so I stayed for eight years.

00:24:36 Speaker_05
Wow.

00:24:37 Speaker_06
Yeah. I mean, I never got out of the chorus. I never had like a, you know, a featured role at a couple lines here and there, but the Baltimore opera was a big deal looking back at it. And that was for me, 80, 83 to 90.

00:24:54 Speaker_05
Wow.

00:24:55 Speaker_06
Yeah. And then right, since we're talking about,

00:25:00 Speaker_06
It was a Sunday, and during the intermission of something, I think it was during this Nibelungen, this giant Wagner epic, torturous thing, and the chorus didn't have to be, this is the one, you saw it on Bugs Bunny.

00:25:17 Speaker_06
Killed a rabbit, killed a, it's that one, right?

00:25:20 Speaker_04
Right.

00:25:22 Speaker_06
So there's an intermission, and I'm not needed on stage for like 40 minutes after the intermission. So I go across the street to the Mount Royal Tavern to drink a beer and watch the football game, dressed as a Viking, which I recommend, by the way.

00:25:40 Speaker_06
Would you walk in a bar with the horns and the spear? The bartender knew me, everybody laughed, and I sat down, but the game wasn't on. The bartender was watching a fat guy in a shiny suit selling pots and pans.

00:25:55 Speaker_06
And it was the early days of the QVC cable shopping channel. I'm like, Rick, why are we watching this? And he says, because I'm auditioning for that guy's job tomorrow morning. QVC was doing a national talent search. Anyway.

00:26:11 Speaker_06
We had a conversation about the end of Western civilization and what it meant for polite society to have a 24-hour infomercial that just never went away, and whether or not there was any honor at all in auditioning for such a thing.

00:26:25 Speaker_06
And at that point, I thought it'd be great to have some Money, you know, I hadn't had any before. And I'm sitting there drinking this beer dressed as a Viking thinking, I could probably do that job if I had to.

00:26:41 Speaker_06
So I went with him the next day and auditioned and got hired.

00:26:45 Speaker_02
Wow. Was he mad?

00:26:47 Speaker_06
The bartender?

00:26:48 Speaker_02
Yeah. That you got the gig? You know, because he didn't even know about it.

00:26:52 Speaker_06
Well ... It's a good question. I don't know what became of him.

00:26:55 Speaker_02
We had a friendly ... He's probably got a fucking voodoo doll of Mike Rowe. Got a bunch of pins in it.

00:27:01 Speaker_06
We had a wager. I said, look, I don't know if I'll get the job, but I bet I'll get a callback. He was like, you're not going to get a callback for this thing. We were just actors at the time. We're like people pretending to be actors trying to find work.

00:27:13 Speaker_02
He sounds like a hater.

00:27:14 Speaker_06
You know, he was nice enough. He sang in the opera with me too. Actually, he also attended bar. He just, he just wasn't in that one. But, um, yeah, it, it was a very strange thing, man, to that, that was my first job in TV.

00:27:29 Speaker_06
Look, I've done some minor local commercial stuff, but I talked about a pencil for eight minutes. That was the audition. It was so strange in those days. They didn't have a, like, there's no playbook to see who can sell stuff on TV, you know?

00:27:49 Speaker_02
Do you have a script, or are you kind of like, you have this fax about the pencil? No, nothing.

00:27:55 Speaker_06
Nothing. Here's what happens. Again, it's probably changed today. I think QVC did $8 billion last year. Back in 1989, 1990, it was nothing like that. And if they hired,

00:28:07 Speaker_06
A salesman, that didn't mean you had anybody who understood really how to behave on TV. And if you hired a TV person, that didn't really mean you... Look at you. Oh, Jesus. That's the cat sack right there, dude. That's a sack for your cat.

00:28:24 Speaker_02
What are you selling? Let me hear this. A sack for your cat? What the fuck?

00:28:28 Speaker_06
It's just crazy. They just love it. That's why this is a cat toy.

00:28:33 Speaker_02
So the cats play with it? Yeah, they crawl inside it. And they just go nutty because it makes a lot of noise?

00:28:44 Speaker_06
That's $25. That's $25?

00:28:49 Speaker_02
So this is like sort of just personality, fucking around, having fun with the toy and selling it.

00:28:57 Speaker_06
Well, that's what I did. Look, remember.

00:29:00 Speaker_02
That's what you did. Was that novel that you were doing it that way?

00:29:03 Speaker_06
Yeah, in relative terms, that was actually one of the great, one of the true great life lessons. You don't have to be... outrageous to stand out. You just have to be relatively outrageous.

00:29:21 Speaker_06
So QVC was a steady diet of men and women doing the same exact thing all the time. And then at midnight or 3 a.m. I showed up and put a cat bag over my head or busted open a lava lamp.

00:29:35 Speaker_02
So you were like a morning DJ. Right, because they're kind of fun, and that was different than the regular radio guy.

00:29:44 Speaker_06
You know, I mean, for me, I thought of it more like... Like, my favorite comedians, and by the way, I saw one last night. Thank you. Ron White was over at the mothership. He's there tonight, too. I stopped by last night.

00:30:00 Speaker_02
Are you around tonight?

00:30:01 Speaker_06
No, I gotta get back tonight. Something about Thanksgiving. But I watched his set last night. He's awesome. He was great.

00:30:08 Speaker_02
He's never been funnier. He's in top form right now. It's amazing.

00:30:11 Speaker_06
And he's gone. He's gone full messiah, dude. I mean, I didn't recognize him.

00:30:15 Speaker_02
Oh, with the look? Yeah.

00:30:16 Speaker_06
He said hello, and I'm like, hey, how are you? You're back. Jesus, good to see you. He was great. And as I watched him do his thing, it reminded me, like my favorite comedians, I never get the sense that they're trying to make me laugh.

00:30:35 Speaker_06
I get the sense that they're trying to amuse themselves.

00:30:38 Speaker_05
Right.

00:30:39 Speaker_06
And that's what makes it comfortable for me to be in the audience, to see somebody who, you know, hey, if I laugh, that's just a happy symptom of whatever it is you're going to do anyway. It makes me comfortable. And that's why he's fun to watch.

00:30:54 Speaker_06
That's why this podcast is fun to listen to. Same reason. I couldn't have articulated that 35 years ago, sitting there selling a cat sack. But you intuitively knew something.

00:31:06 Speaker_06
I knew in the middle of it, like everything that it turned out that I needed to know about this crazy business, I learned in the middle of the night on the QVC Cable Shopping Channel over a three-year period, trying to make sense.

00:31:24 Speaker_02
What were the shifts?

00:31:25 Speaker_06
So three hours at a time usually over the course of 24 hours So call it you would be on three hours at a time Yeah, would you come back again, or would you only do three hours?

00:31:36 Speaker_06
I do three hours and I go home and I mean have you done overnights before no I So I guarantee you there are a lot of people listening who have worked an overnight shift in their trade, in their vocation.

00:31:52 Speaker_06
It changes you just as surely as Doris the Cat Lady's brain was scrambled by the Gandhi eye and the toxo. It does something.

00:32:00 Speaker_02
Your circadian rhythm, yeah.

00:32:02 Speaker_06
It's not just that. It is that, but it's something primal, even more primal than that. It just messes with you, and it forces you. For me, it changed colors. It changed taste. It changed, yeah, because I had never, I mean, I was upside down.

00:32:22 Speaker_06
After I talked about a pencil for eight minutes, I was on the air 48 hours later at three in the morning trying to make sense of the health team infrared pain reliever and the Amcor negative ion generator. Like, what the hell?

00:32:40 Speaker_06
Did they give you a rundown of what these products were at all? It was up to you.

00:32:45 Speaker_06
If you came in a couple hours early and you took the time to look through, like there was a table like this with all of the stuff on it that you were going to be selling and you could take the time to prepare.

00:32:55 Speaker_02
But there was no Google back then. It's not like you could just watch a YouTube video that would explain what this thing did.

00:33:00 Speaker_06
No, what you got was a blue card, usually from the manufacturer, that said a couple of sentences about what the thing was. You had an item number, you had the price, the retail price, the QVC price, and maybe some easy payment terms.

00:33:16 Speaker_06
All the stuff, right? But it was just a blue card. And then you would kind of go off and Think about how you would make sense out of this skull, and where it came from, and why it's interesting. It's feature benefit selling.

00:33:33 Speaker_06
And if you understand that, you can talk about anything for as long as you need to. You never talk about a feature without talking about its benefit. And so that's kind of how that world worked. So you don't say it's a pencil for $0.99.

00:33:48 Speaker_06
You say it's a yellow number two pencil. with an eraser that is of the exact proportion necessary to last for the life of the pencil. So when this thing is down to a nub, you'll still have enough eraser left.

00:34:03 Speaker_06
It's really a monument to efficiency and ingenuity. And it's not just yellow, it's yellow because you're a busy professional. And when you need a pencil, Joe, when you open up your drawer, you don't have time to root around for some

00:34:15 Speaker_06
Vaguely beige colored writing implement you want that canary yellow to pop and you can pick it up, right? And it's not it's a number two pencil.

00:34:23 Speaker_06
It's not three with that thin wispy line that you can't read or or that thick disappointing skid mark of a number one, right so you just It's like train yourself to fill Dead air with nonsense.

00:34:39 Speaker_01
While you're fucking up your circadian rhythm.

00:34:41 Speaker_06
Yeah. While you're wondering, like, when your next meal is and who you're going to have it with. And you wind up making friends and essentially hanging with other people who live in that same weird, like, shadow land.

00:34:59 Speaker_02
Yeah. Shadow land. That's a good way to put it. I have kind of an experience with overnight, but it's not the same. I delivered newspapers. And so at least one day a week on Sunday, I would basically show up Saturday night at three in the morning. Right.

00:35:14 Speaker_02
Because I would deliver Sunday papers. And the Sunday papers were, it was a huge under, you'd flip the top. Oh, I forgot to flip the top. Flip the top and then hit the button. There you go. Hit it again. There you go. And so I was all fucked up from that.

00:35:29 Speaker_02
I would get up every day at five o'clock in the morning. Normally to deliver papers cuz I had a large route Yeah, it was my way to make money without having to do a job where I had to listen to anybody

00:35:41 Speaker_06
It's also a perfect example of a kind of job where you always know how you're doing while you're doing it. Like lots and lots of little visual undeniable cues, right?

00:35:54 Speaker_06
You got your bags or your baskets full of paper or your car or whatever you were doing. You're tossing them out one at a time. You're making progress. You know the progress you're making. as you make it.

00:36:09 Speaker_02
You know, you only have 120 houses to go.

00:36:12 Speaker_06
That's right. And then it's 110.

00:36:13 Speaker_02
And then it's like, people always go to Dunkin Donuts, get yourself a nice donut and a coffee, reward yourself, day's over. Yeah, my day would be done work-wise by you know, 8 a.m. 9 a.m. On a Sunday 9 9 was rough.

00:36:29 Speaker_02
Yeah, occasionally they would make enormous Sunday papers there definitely and that would be a real problem because you have to make multiple trips and I bought a van so I had a big cargo van and I drove that around to deliver newspapers for a while that made it a lot easier because I could stack 350 Sunday papers in the back of that van and

00:36:47 Speaker_06
But see, you remember and you knew. 350, that's an interesting number.

00:36:53 Speaker_02
Oh yeah. I had bigger routes, but 350 was manageable.

00:36:57 Speaker_06
How old were you?

00:36:58 Speaker_02
I started when I was just driving. So I was in high school still, so I think I started delivering papers when I was 17 or 18, whatever legal age they allow you to do it. So I was probably 17 or 18. I started driving and I drove till I was,

00:37:18 Speaker_02
22 I just started doing stand-up comedy. I drove all throughout my competitive martial arts career.

00:37:25 Speaker_02
I drove in the morning It was good because it gave me discipline because I had to do it seven days a week 365 days a year and you did not take any days off It didn't matter if it snowed or rained or fucking frozen rain on the streets black ice didn't matter You got to deliver newspapers

00:37:40 Speaker_02
And if they did delay it, it would delay your delivery of the paper. So you'd have to call the depot, you know, hey, are we delivering yet? Because they didn't want to be responsible if it was a blizzard for people dying and get lawsuits.

00:37:54 Speaker_02
So they didn't make you deliver papers if it was unbelievably bad out. But for the most part, you drove every day.

00:38:01 Speaker_06
So you had a sense of consequence to this. Yes.

00:38:05 Speaker_02
Discipline, consequence. You didn't deliver the papers. You didn't get paid. It was very simple. It was a very simple job. I don't even remember how they trained us. I think maybe they trained us for like one day. You were taught how to fold the paper.

00:38:18 Speaker_02
One, two, stuff it in the bag. You had plastic bags were great because you could chuck them out the window and it never damaged the paper.

00:38:25 Speaker_02
rubber bands were a real pain in the ass, because you could hit a corner on the concrete, it would rip the corner of the paper, and then the customer would complain, because they're trying to read about what's going on in Syria, and then there's this fucking broken piece of paper.

00:38:36 Speaker_02
I delivered the New York Times only because it was cool. Like I delivered the Boston Globe because that was the biggest distribution, like I could get the biggest route.

00:38:45 Speaker_02
And then the Boston Herald because I wanted more papers to deliver, so I would do two papers. And then New York Times, but New York Times is a pain in the ass because it would be like one every 10 blocks. You'd have an enormous route.

00:38:58 Speaker_02
If you had 150 New York Times, that's an all day excursion.

00:39:03 Speaker_06
Did you start to equate the type of home you were delivering the type of paper to?

00:39:08 Speaker_02
Oh yes. The New York Times people took themselves very seriously. They were very serious people. They would ask me what I'm doing with my life. I remember this lady, I was taking courses at Boston University just so people wouldn't think I was a loser.

00:39:23 Speaker_02
It was literally the only reason why I was going to college. And she's asking me, what are you planning on doing with your career? I'm like, I have no idea. And she didn't like it. She didn't like that I had no idea.

00:39:33 Speaker_06
Yeah, it makes people uncomfortable.

00:39:35 Speaker_02
She liked me, but she didn't like that I had no idea. She was very motherly to me, I guess.

00:39:40 Speaker_06
It's funny, we had the Baltimore Sun, which was the paper of record, and then we had the News American, which was sort of like the upstart. And I never thought too much about the difference between the two until Summertime and Krabs.

00:39:56 Speaker_06
Like, Maryland blue crabs are a big thing. They're a big thing in my family, big thing where I grew up. And everybody who eats crabs in the summer eats them outside on a picnic table.

00:40:07 Speaker_02
And you lay the newspaper out.

00:40:08 Speaker_06
But which one, Joe?

00:40:10 Speaker_02
Oh. Which one? It matters.

00:40:12 Speaker_06
I don't know why it does.

00:40:14 Speaker_02
So is it disrespectful to use the paper of note?

00:40:17 Speaker_06
No. No, it's better. No, I think it's a mark of respect. It's like, oh, we're having crabs? Get the News American.

00:40:26 Speaker_02
Oh, that's so silly.

00:40:27 Speaker_06
Get the News American. Because, you know, it's all spread out in front of you, and you got the Crab Guts and the Old Bay and the Jail No. 2 and the National Bohemian Beer, and maybe you can glance down and get informed as you go.

00:40:39 Speaker_02
Isn't it interesting that there are newspapers like that, right? Like there's the New York Post, you want a fun headline, you know, you want all the crazy shit like, what happened? Who got pregnant? You know, what's going on with this?

00:40:50 Speaker_02
What's going on with that? And then you have the New York Times where, you know, it's important to put tampons in the boys' room. It's like, what is happening?

00:40:59 Speaker_06
Have you ever walked through the offices of the Post?

00:41:03 Speaker_01
No.

00:41:03 Speaker_06
Plenty chance?

00:41:04 Speaker_01
No.

00:41:05 Speaker_06
Dude, it's amazing. It's amazing. I had an old girlfriend whose sister worked there, worked for Page Six.

00:41:14 Speaker_02
Oh boy. Yeah. That's the fun one.

00:41:16 Speaker_06
Yeah. So much fun.

00:41:18 Speaker_02
So that's like all the gossip and the craziness and this person's getting arrested. Right, right. Drunk driving and hookers.

00:41:26 Speaker_06
They have a hallway. It's like this place in the sense that there's so much on the walls, but it's all front pages and it's the best headlines.

00:41:34 Speaker_02
So it's the best ones they've ever come up with?

00:41:36 Speaker_06
The best ones ever. Starting with the classic headless body found in topless bar. Which is still tough to beat.

00:41:44 Speaker_02
That's great.

00:41:45 Speaker_06
But so many of them.

00:41:46 Speaker_02
I love the Post. I've always loved the Post. I love the just the fun nature of the news. That was like the working person's newspaper.

00:41:54 Speaker_06
This is the point I was trying to make about the comedian who entertains himself first, and the schmuck on QVC who tries to keep himself awake before he sells the thing. That's how I felt reading the post.

00:42:10 Speaker_06
It was like, these guys, somehow, I'm imagining a meeting.

00:42:14 Speaker_02
They're laughing.

00:42:15 Speaker_06
They're laughing, they're cigars, and they're all in on the joke. They're like, yeah, we're going to report the news, but, You know, it's a lot of sharp elbows out there and it's a very competitive world.

00:42:25 Speaker_06
So what can we do to maybe get the stick a little, you know, out of our ass, just a little bit, you know, how can we be different? That's what fascinates me.

00:42:35 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:42:36 Speaker_06
You know, how could, whether you're publishing a paper or eating a blue crab, you know, or writing a book or a song, you know,

00:42:44 Speaker_06
How can you, in relative terms, distinguish yourself, not from these other worlds and other categories, but from your friends? That's the trick, man.

00:42:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, that is the trick. And then there's people that want to be that person that is taken seriously, that's reading the New York Times.

00:43:06 Speaker_02
You want to be that person with their legs crossed, reading the New York Times, like very serious, very serious people, very smart people, keep up to date.

00:43:14 Speaker_06
Yeah, I said to Ashton your very excellent driver who brought me here.

00:43:20 Speaker_06
I said, you know, it's been fun Watching Joe Do this thing over the last five or six years and then I kind of stopped myself in the middle I said actually, you know, I take it back. What's been fun is watching

00:43:36 Speaker_06
watching the world catch up to it, like watching the headlines catch up to you or whoever, you really haven't changed. And man, it's so interesting. to watch people realize, oh, we're going to do it this way now. We're going to do it this way now.

00:44:00 Speaker_06
And that's been, whether it's comedy or whether it's music, when culture changes, It feels like there's some instigator, some jagged little pill who's pushing it forward. And I guess maybe that's true.

00:44:14 Speaker_06
But I also think there's this larger hive mentality in the audience. And they start to realize, oh, there's another way to deliver a paper. There's another way to do a thing.

00:44:28 Speaker_06
And it feels new, but it's probably what you've been doing for the last 12 years.

00:44:32 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's definitely the same way. I've always done it. It's just having conversations with people. I like talking to people. It's fun Yeah, but you may enjoy it good.

00:44:42 Speaker_02
I'm a curious person and I like talking to people but that's it's real simple Yeah, but it's just cuz it's simple right you make it sound like a parenthetical.

00:44:52 Speaker_06
Oh, it's just a conversation Yeah, that's only just the hardest thing there is to do is

00:44:56 Speaker_02
But it's not really.

00:44:58 Speaker_06
Then why don't more people do it?

00:44:59 Speaker_02
Because they don't enjoy it. They don't enjoy it like I enjoy it. Some people genuinely don't like talking to people. You know why? Because they're interested in themselves. You have to be interested in other people. I think we're all connected.

00:45:13 Speaker_02
I really firmly believe this in a non-hippie way. I think it's like a scientific I mean, I think if we could figure out a way to study it, we would recognize that we're psychically all connected in some strange way.

00:45:27 Speaker_02
And I am curious as to how someone with a different biology, different life experiences, different geographic location in which they were raised, how are they navigating the world, and why are they interested in opera? What is it?

00:45:47 Speaker_02
What got you to be a beekeeper? Why are you so fascinated with painting? What made you start writing music? I'm interested. I like talking to people. So for me, it is easy. It really is. It's just talking to people like I would talk to people.

00:46:04 Speaker_02
You and I could have the same exact conversation if we were having dinner somewhere.

00:46:08 Speaker_06
For sure.

00:46:09 Speaker_02
Same conversation. Yeah.

00:46:10 Speaker_06
But again, it makes perfect sense. And it's not that it's difficult. It's just that very few people do it. And if your explanation is because very few people genuinely enjoy it, I can't disprove it. You're probably right.

00:46:25 Speaker_02
I think that's what it is. You're probably right. I think I just got lucky. I think I just got lucky and I found a job that I would be doing anyway.

00:46:32 Speaker_06
Well, here's what I don't understand. And maybe this is not even relevant, but we did 350 dirty jobs, probably 60 some of this thing called somebody's got to do it. I don't even know returning the favor. I think we did 100 episodes of that.

00:46:48 Speaker_06
I couldn't tell you how many things I've narrated. Hundreds. If there's a wildebeest trying to get across the vast reaches of the barren Serengeti, right?

00:46:58 Speaker_06
If I could remember every episode of How the Universe Works, ten years of this stuff, if I could remember half of what I narrated, that would be something. I can remember a chunk.

00:47:12 Speaker_06
But my sense is that I can't even remember the last 20 guests I had on my podcast. And the reason isn't because I'm not curious. And it's not because I'm not. Because I lack the requisite intelligence to remember for me. It's just it's so much.

00:47:29 Speaker_06
There's been no time To think about what I'm gonna do next and even less time to think about what I just did, right? So you just talked to Josh Brolin.

00:47:40 Speaker_05
Mm-hmm.

00:47:40 Speaker_06
And then you talk to the musician guy store. Yeah. Yeah, right Scott. Yes Scott storage. I And then before that, our friend Evan was in, right?

00:47:50 Speaker_06
So like, I have a better, it's easier for me to remember what you've done in the last two months than it is for me. And that freaks me out.

00:48:00 Speaker_06
And I wonder if sometimes you get over your skis to the point where you've started to forget what you've done yourself.

00:48:10 Speaker_02
Oh, yeah, there's no way to keep it all. Um, I have a bucket that's overflowing with information. It's overflowing. My hard drive is not capable of retaining all of it. It's not possible. I retain a lot though. A lot more than I ever would know.

00:48:29 Speaker_02
I got an unexpected education doing this show for sure. Like I never anticipated it.

00:48:34 Speaker_06
Is it conscious? Like, can you choose to be interested in a thing enough to know that you're not going to forget it? Or does the interest just kind of bubble up and certain things stick to you?

00:48:49 Speaker_02
The interest bubbles up and they stick. Yeah, totally. Yeah, like my daughter asked me a question the other day. I don't even remember what the question about, but it's a very technical thing. And I said, no, that's not exactly it.

00:49:01 Speaker_02
It seems like that, but this is the reason why. And they figured this out because of this. And I started rattling off. And she's like, how the fuck do you know this? She was laughing. And I was like, I don't know everything. I forget things.

00:49:11 Speaker_02
I forget my own birthday. But I do remember things that are fascinating. I remember most things that are fascinating to me. I have an unusual recall, but I've always had an unusual recall. It's like, I think it's a genetic thing.

00:49:24 Speaker_02
I think it let me get really good at things, too, because I can remember, like, technical, like, it was really good for martial arts because I can remember technical details, like, really, like, I don't forget things.

00:49:36 Speaker_06
See, you, to me, are the deeper end of the pool. I'm more the shallow end. I don't mean for that to sound comparative so much, but with martial arts, I'm interested in martial arts. I'm interested in ultimate fighting. I narrated The Ultimate Fighter.

00:49:56 Speaker_06
I did 10 seasons of it. But that's sort of the extent, I don't go very deep.

00:50:04 Speaker_02
I've seen a couple, but it's like... Well, there's a big, giant difference between being a former competitor and also dedicated decades of my life to martial arts. It's not as simple as I go and I do commentary.

00:50:20 Speaker_02
Like I started doing martial arts when I was 15 and it changed my life. It gave me discipline and a will to overcome uncomfort, discomfort, and to push myself and to overcome fears and to do something that's very scary and to compete.

00:50:35 Speaker_02
And that was like, it formulated me as a teenager. So I started competing competitively, like serious shit when I was like 15 years old. And so we were traveling all over the country. And so my social life from like 15 to 21 was completely retarded.

00:50:52 Speaker_02
It was like retarded as in slow down like the real term. And it was mostly just training and competing. That's all I did. And when the downtime I was tired. So I would just sleep a lot. I was like eating, sleeping, working and competing.

00:51:08 Speaker_02
And then I started teaching. So then that I was making my living off of teaching, but not enough money. So I still deliver newspapers. So I deliver newspapers in the morning, and then I would teach and I was teaching at Boston University.

00:51:20 Speaker_02
I was teaching I had my own school by the time I was 20.

00:51:24 Speaker_06
Taekwondo?

00:51:25 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:51:26 Speaker_06
So this is my point. You take a deep dive. When you get interested in a thing, you go into the thing. Comedy wasn't a hobby. It became, I think, as important.

00:51:37 Speaker_02
It becomes everything.

00:51:38 Speaker_06
It becomes everything. Almost nothing I do becomes everything.

00:51:42 Speaker_02
Nothing?

00:51:43 Speaker_06
Almost nothing.

00:51:44 Speaker_02
But what are the things? What becomes everything?

00:51:46 Speaker_06
I'm not sure yet. Let me think about it.

00:51:49 Speaker_02
Is there one thing that if you have free time you super look forward to doing? Do you have a hobby? Do you play golf? No. Nothing?

00:51:57 Speaker_06
I don't have hobbies, and I don't collect things. No hobbies? No hobbies.

00:52:00 Speaker_02
Nothing?

00:52:00 Speaker_06
I don't collect things.

00:52:01 Speaker_02
Wow.

00:52:02 Speaker_06
I own very little. I never have owned much.

00:52:04 Speaker_02
I wish I had 100 lives to live simultaneously. I would do 100 different things.

00:52:10 Speaker_06
This is the difference. You're insatiable in that way. You get a thing and you're going to nail it to the wall, man. You're going to nail it.

00:52:19 Speaker_02
My late great friend Anthony Bourdain, his headline, his bio on Twitter, it said enthusiast. And I really wish that I'd come up with that, because that's what I am. I'm an enthusiast. I wouldn't say it now, because I'd rip him off.

00:52:34 Speaker_02
And also now my bio says dragon believer. Congratulations on that. Thank you. Thank you very much. They said I believe in dragons. She triple checked. She triple checked, Mike. Got to be true. But I'm an enthusiast. That's what I am.

00:52:48 Speaker_02
I am a person who is very fortunate in that I have a love of a lot of things.

00:52:54 Speaker_06
Well you and Tony were similar obviously in that way He took big bites. He took big swings.

00:53:02 Speaker_02
We became good friends when he really got into jiu-jitsu Yeah, cuz I kind of got him into it, and then his wife really got him into it But he started going to the UFC his wife was training in jiu-jitsu, and she got really into it She was really loving it, and then she was like let's go to the UFC He's like this is fucking great, and then you know he came to one of my comedy shows We became friends started going going to dinner by the way with Anthony Bourdain.

00:53:23 Speaker_02
It's the coolest fucking thing It's gotta because you go to dinner with him and all the chefs freak out. Yeah, and so they just want to feed you Yeah, they just want to like don't touch the menu.

00:53:31 Speaker_06
We got you and they come over and bring food and you know I wrote a eulogy for him that crashed my website It's really funny I only I met him twice and Each time it was fairly brief

00:53:50 Speaker_06
But there was a time when he was doing No Reservations, Dirty Jobs was early on. I bet you Fear Factor was still in production then, too.

00:53:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, Fear Factor was, maybe. Fear Factor stopped in 2007 and No Reservations, I think, was around that time.

00:54:09 Speaker_06
Yeah, he was on in six. For sure, Dirty Jobs went on in three.

00:54:14 Speaker_02
Yeah. And then the CNN show, which was, I think, like CNN's highlight of their time.

00:54:21 Speaker_02
And I think he really changed that network because all of a sudden that network was this fucking cool show where this guy had this brilliant narration and he had this wanderlust.

00:54:34 Speaker_02
But also with this like real fascination with people and cultures and just really loved it. He just loved going to Vietnam. He loved going wherever he could go. He loved to eat their street food. He loved to talk to them.

00:54:50 Speaker_02
He really wanted to know what these people were all about, you know.

00:54:52 Speaker_06
I've never with the pot this will sound vainglorious and I don't mean it to but with the possible exception of of me on discovery in 2010 narrating half their shows and hosting dirty jobs which was a thing you know I felt really triangulated then but then when I met Tony and I had a show on CNN at the same time actually it was a companion show

00:55:21 Speaker_02
What was your show?

00:55:21 Speaker_06
It was called Somebody's Gotta Do It.

00:55:23 Speaker_02
Oh, that's right. That's right.

00:55:25 Speaker_06
It followed Dirty Jobs. And Jeff Zucker wanted something with Tony. So he was like, well, let's kind of do a version of this. And I said, yeah, OK.

00:55:35 Speaker_06
But all the trouble in the world, man, every crisis, whether it's Haiti or whether it's a riot, the show got preempted constantly. They didn't preempt Tony, but they preempted me a lot. And I was commiserating with Tony about this once.

00:55:51 Speaker_06
And that's when we had the conversation where I said, look, I just got to tell you, man, I have never in my life seen anybody doing the right show for them at the right time on the right network for them. I've never seen that like that before.

00:56:10 Speaker_06
And never mind the award. It was the Peabody's that got me, actually. Who cares about the Emmys? They're easy, but geez, he was just one Peabody award after the next.

00:56:21 Speaker_06
And it wasn't a huge, the audience wasn't as big as people think, but they were engaged.

00:56:27 Speaker_02
Well, that's what's important. I mean, the audience, if they're really there for you, rather than if they're just flipping channels, you know, because there's a lot of shows that just get people that are flipping channels. Sure.

00:56:38 Speaker_02
But we used to, when I was on news radio, everybody wanted the shot, the spot after Seinfeld, because there was Seinfeld and Friends were on the same night and it was just this murderous Thursday night lineup. I see.

00:56:49 Speaker_02
It was an unbelievable lineup and if you got lucky you were sex in the city or the single guy and what Paul Sims the producer of News radio to call a shit sandwich because you had your brilliant show and a terrible show and then another brilliant show and another terrible show But if you got in those time spots, oh boy, you got a good spot because people are gonna just keep tuning in they didn't tune in for news radio news radio wasn't really successful after it was off the air and

00:57:14 Speaker_06
You were in the slipstream.

00:57:15 Speaker_02
Yeah. You were in the orbit. Well, we weren't owned by NBC. So it was a different production company. It was Brillstein Gray. So they didn't have a vested interest in us being successful. So the writers would show up.

00:57:30 Speaker_02
My friend Lou would wear a t-shirt, and he would write the number that we were when we would do the table reads. And one day, it was 88. And I was like, for real? He's like, yeah. I was like, oh, no. With a bullet.

00:57:43 Speaker_02
We thought we were going to get cancelled literally every year except the year we got cancelled.

00:57:47 Speaker_02
The year we got cancelled I was shocked because that was like the year after Phil died and then Jon Lovitz took his place for a season and then they cancelled it after that. Like in the perfect thing for our show.

00:58:00 Speaker_02
We never even hit the hundred episodes for syndication They had a salad at like 98 episodes. That was like our show.

00:58:06 Speaker_02
It's like we were always like barely hanging on You know, it was just we it was a funny show was a really good show with talented people.

00:58:12 Speaker_02
I love that show the people I was super lucky to work on and it ruined me because I could never work on another show after that What what did you look what was the big?

00:58:21 Speaker_06
Lesson from news radio if there was one for you. I

00:58:25 Speaker_02
Well, it was just fortune. The lesson is that you could just be fortunate, you know, because I was not a trained actor at all. I did a set on MTV half hour comedy hour. They had this comedy show. I did a set and then MTV offered me a development deal.

00:58:44 Speaker_02
And then my manager said, This is terrible money. They're going to lock you up for like three years for like $500." It was crazy, ridiculous bad money.

00:58:53 Speaker_02
He said, I'm going to take your tape and tell all these other production companies that MTV wants to sign a deal with you and it'll start a bidding war.

00:59:01 Speaker_02
And he was brilliant and he did it and that's exactly what happened and the next thing you know I couldn't answer my phone because my phone was just calling people agents and people would just call me like some guy called me from universe I was like what?

00:59:14 Speaker_02
Shitty apartment on my way out the door to play pool and this guy's telling me he wants me to get on a flight that night We have a flight at 10 p.m. Leaving out of LaGuardia. I was like, what are you talking about?

00:59:23 Speaker_02
And so then I call my manager, this guy just fucking called me from, he goes, hey, don't answer your phone. He's like, go play pool, get out of here. I'll take care of it. Next thing you know, I was in Hollywood. It was like that quick.

00:59:33 Speaker_02
And I was on a show called Hardball. It went six episodes. And the only reason why I stayed in California, I wanted to go back to New York. I hated it. I hated actors. I just couldn't deal with being around these weirdos.

00:59:45 Speaker_02
They were these weird, phony people. They would say, good to see you, because they couldn't remember if they met you. So instead of saying, nice to meet you and fucking up, I go, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I fucked up. They didn't want to be real.

00:59:56 Speaker_02
So everyone said, good to see you. Good to see you. Everyone was good. And it was super insincere. I was like, this is so weird. Yeah. It was a super uncomfortable experience.

01:00:04 Speaker_02
And it was the worst experience on a show because the people that ran the show, Jeff Martin, Kevin Curran, super funny, talented guys who'd worked on Married with Children and The Simpsons. Brilliant.

01:00:13 Speaker_02
But the studio didn't think that they were good enough to run a show. So they brought in this hack. And this guy comes in and just butchers all the scripts. It was horrible. So that gets canceled. The only reason why I stayed is because I had a lease.

01:00:25 Speaker_02
So I got a nice apartment. I'm like, the first apartment I ever had. I was like, I thought I was going to be on TV forever. Like, this is going to be easy. And now, fuck, I got to get out of here. I wanted to go back to New York.

01:00:34 Speaker_02
I thought about breaking my lease. But then NBC contacted me and they said, we have the show. It's called News Radio. And we're recasting one of the one of the roles. Do you want to come in? And so I came in and auditioned for it.

01:00:47 Speaker_02
And the next thing you know, I'm working with Phil Hartman. It was bizarre. Yeah. No aspirations whatsoever to be an actor. Never wanted to be on TV.

01:00:54 Speaker_02
And then I'm working with Andy Dick and Phil Hartman and Maura Tierney and Candy Alexander, Vicky Lewis and Dave Foley. Like, this is crazy.

01:01:03 Speaker_06
From the kids from Second City.

01:01:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, he was brilliant Dave Foley by the way was the secret producer of news radio because he would they would give him full autonomy So he had completely rewrite scenes like on the spot come up with punchlines for everybody We all did that for everybody like we would all come up like maybe you should say this maybe that was like super collaborative so just fortune complete

01:01:25 Speaker_02
Utter good fortune because I had friends that were on terrible sitcoms and they were living in hell Yeah, and we'd hang out at the comedy store and you know, they were living in hell and I was like look I'm gonna show that nobody watches but it's fun as shit and I can't believe I'm on TV.

01:01:40 Speaker_06
This is nuts Yeah, you're in on the joke.

01:01:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, it was fun. It was really fun, but it was just fortunate I could have easily never Never done any of those things easily.

01:01:52 Speaker_06
I thought for years that Really a sitcom had to be the best gig in the world to have to do a Basically to do a play every week if it's a good sitcom

01:02:05 Speaker_02
If it's a good so if it's a bad sitcom, it's hell sure those guys who do a lot of coke and buy nice cars Those are on but they're on bad shows.

01:02:13 Speaker_02
They just want to give themselves something to reward themselves for this sure fucking slave nuts I wouldn't say slave work. I just like You're a slave to money. You're compromising who you are for money. You don't really want to do that show.

01:02:29 Speaker_02
But you're on it, and it sucks, and you have to repeat these terrible lines.

01:02:34 Speaker_06
That's what I'm getting at. For me, it came down to that. I finally got a chance to do one. I played Tim Allen's younger brother on Last Man Standing for a turn.

01:02:45 Speaker_02
I never saw that show. That was a weird one, right? Because they got mad at him because he was right-wing?

01:02:50 Speaker_06
Yeah, yeah.

01:02:50 Speaker_02
That's so crazy. Didn't they cancel it?

01:02:52 Speaker_06
It was their number one show and they canceled it and Fox picked it up.

01:02:54 Speaker_02
That's so nuts. They canceled it because they didn't like his politics.

01:02:59 Speaker_06
Yeah. Wow. Dude, I mean, that basically happened to Dirty Jobs too. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's it was mind-boggling. But but the point was I finally got a chance to I don't want to gloss over that I want to come back to that.

01:03:13 Speaker_02
Okay.

01:03:13 Speaker_06
All right. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a great one you'll you'll love this but but to Tim is great by the way, and we became friends and and chemistry on camera everybody loved it and And when it was over, I was like, well, do an honest inventory, Mike.

01:03:30 Speaker_06
What did you love? What didn't you love? And really, the only thing I loved was seeing people who loved each other and being welcomed into their little world.

01:03:40 Speaker_02
Yeah, the clan. That's it.

01:03:42 Speaker_06
Yeah. The idea that somebody else is writing lines for me, I know that sounds impossibly

01:03:48 Speaker_06
Arrogant, but I was so used to nobody writes for me dirty jobs is truly unscripted Everything I ever did there were never any lines and also that's an alien experience for you Yeah, I mean I had done plenty of plays as a kid and stuff, but that's different.

01:04:05 Speaker_06
You know that's a that's different the once you're in Hollywood and once you're sort of in the machine and It still lingers.

01:04:12 Speaker_06
I mean, it's the whole reason I crashed the audition for the opera I was just trying to find a sitcom at some point somewhere and then when I when I finally got it, you know I realized just how lucky I'd been prior to that and how here you want this and and how I

01:04:29 Speaker_06
Crap man, you know a thing can live in your mind so much bigger Than it is in in reality.

01:04:37 Speaker_06
And so while I love doing it for that week I said to my business partner over it that This thing that I used to think of as the single most efficient way to make a living was so wildly inefficient

01:04:48 Speaker_02
You it takes four days to rehearse for a half-hour thing you got to be kidding me I could do five one-hour shows in the same period Completely different experience in that way It's a collaborative fun time and you do become like a little bit of a strange family You know we all hung out together and drunk together

01:05:09 Speaker_06
And that's important.

01:05:10 Speaker_02
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It is important. It's it was like we, you know, it was a lot of fun, man, you know, and meeting people like Steven Root, who, you know, went on to do a million different things. Brilliant, brilliant guy.

01:05:23 Speaker_02
You get to see people that are like really good at like he was a character. He was the only one of us that wasn't really himself. Like he was this one guy who was like a super sweet guy when you meet him in real life.

01:05:33 Speaker_02
And then he was Jimmy James, my stapler. Yeah, he becomes. Did you see, what was that one? Coen Brothers had some Netflix thing, a Wild West Netflix thing. He played on that. He was fucking genius.

01:05:45 Speaker_06
Wasn't he in Oh Brother?

01:05:47 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think he was in Oh Brother. He's been in everything. He's in a million different things.

01:05:51 Speaker_02
But just being with these people that you know, like I said, I had no aspirations to act I just want I was just a comic I just wanted to make a living doing comedy and then somebody offered me more money than I made in a year For a week and I was like, this is crazy.

01:06:05 Speaker_02
And then all sudden I'm on a show. It's like just fortune I auditioned for two shows ever and I got both of them and Those are the only two shows I ever auditioned for.

01:06:15 Speaker_06
What was the other one?

01:06:16 Speaker_02
Hardball. The first one that I went for that was terrible.

01:06:18 Speaker_06
Yeah.

01:06:19 Speaker_02
That was the baseball show that got canceled. And then I auditioned for news radio. So it was it was nuts. It was just I was just stepping in shit every step of the way. That's hysterical. Didn't make any sense.

01:06:28 Speaker_06
So I never had an agent except for a very brief period when I did. And it was, you know, Sean Perry over at Endeavor, you guys ever crossed paths? His former assistant turned out to be his wife later. How's that work? Nicole Taylor.

01:06:44 Speaker_06
Man, they're living great. They live up in the hills somewhere.

01:06:47 Speaker_02
I mean, how's it work with your former assistant? That's none of my business. That's a dangerous undertaking.

01:06:55 Speaker_06
She called me one day, and I was in my full-on freelance world. I hadn't had a job since QVC. So this is like 1999, and she says, I just want to send you out for something, because I know you're going to book it.

01:07:08 Speaker_06
And I said, well, actually, yeah, I could use a gig. So she sends me out. In the same week, she says, you should read for Craig Poligian over at Pilgrim Films. He's doing something called Worst Case Scenario, and he's looking for a host.

01:07:24 Speaker_06
And so I auditioned for that. And then later that week, she says, this guy from Nashville, Michael Orkin was his name, who I had worked with years earlier, not Nashville, Memphis.

01:07:38 Speaker_06
He was hosting that were a the EP on that evening magazine thing that I mentioned and he's ready to hire you based off your blooper tape I never had a tape either.

01:07:47 Speaker_06
I just My whole audition reel in those days was a compilation of every moment that went off the rails at QVC All the things that led to my eventual firings as well as the cat sack and all the other crap That's that was I dare you to hire me.

01:08:04 Speaker_06
I got hired for both jobs that week and Both jobs. And so suddenly I'm working for TBS hosting Worst Case Scenario, which lived up to its name. And then I'm up in San Francisco hosting Evening Magazine.

01:08:17 Speaker_02
And there was no conflict of interest? Oh, no. Like you totally negotiated both of them at the same time? Yeah. Wow, that's cool.

01:08:23 Speaker_06
Yeah. And then Nicole switched agencies and I never really had an agent. You know, prior to that or since. That's fortunate. Super fortunate.

01:08:34 Speaker_02
Financially, it's great.

01:08:36 Speaker_06
You know what's fortunate, man? Remember, okay, so my mother calls me. I'm at Evening Magazine, sitting in my cubicle. My dad, my granddad's 90 years old. Remember this? I didn't close the loop on this.

01:08:48 Speaker_06
But that's, to answer your first question, what happened was my mom called me and said, your grandfather's gonna be 90 tomorrow. And before he dies, wouldn't it be great if he could turn on the TV and see you doing something that looked like work?

01:09:05 Speaker_02
Whoa.

01:09:06 Speaker_06
Yeah, my mother's a savage.

01:09:08 Speaker_02
Jeez.

01:09:08 Speaker_06
She just finished her fourth book, by the way.

01:09:11 Speaker_02
Wow.

01:09:12 Speaker_06
Yeah, she's written three bestsellers after 80.

01:09:15 Speaker_02
That's incredible.

01:09:16 Speaker_06
She's out of control.

01:09:18 Speaker_02
That's incredible. So she was like, she wanted you to do something impressive.

01:09:22 Speaker_06
My mother wrote every day for 60 years. Wow. No agent, no, got published in like the News American and the Baltimore Sun, you know, local stuff, some horse magazines. We were horse people kind of growing up. And her dream was to write.

01:09:38 Speaker_06
She finally got a book deal when she was 80. Went to a number four bestseller. Wow. And everything she's written so far. So that's recently back in whatever was 2001.

01:09:50 Speaker_06
She was just a pain in my ass and she called me to say, you know Wouldn't it be great if your granddad this guy whose shadow I grew up in you know Could see you doing something cuz like my pop it's he'd seen the opera. He'd seen QVC.

01:10:05 Speaker_06
He'd seen every godforsaken infomercial he'd seen You know, I'd done a lot of things, probably 200 jobs in the whole freelance world.

01:10:15 Speaker_06
And so I was 42, and I took my cameraman from Evening Magazine into the sewer of San Francisco the next day to host the show from a sewer. What happened in the sewer job was I mean it changed. It's I wrote a book about it.

01:10:31 Speaker_06
It changed my whole life The roaches are the size of your thumbs there are millions of them, and they crawl all over you the shit comes at you in a chocolate tide of unending disappointment.

01:10:46 Speaker_06
And it's filled not just with all the stuff that comes out of your body, it's filled with stuff that comes out of your medicine cabinet, plastic products and rubber, private condoms stuck to your rubber suit. You know, it's unspeakably vile.

01:11:01 Speaker_06
You can barely breathe. And what happened to me down there is I completely failed to host the show. All the stand-ups went wrong, laterals exploded. My kid, we were all getting hit in the head with, it's like a shooting gallery.

01:11:20 Speaker_06
There was a rat the size of a loaf of bread that crawled up my, I lost my footing, fell in. I was baptized. I was baptized in a river of crap. And at the end, my cameraman threw up at one point. An enormous puke.

01:11:43 Speaker_06
And I'm squatting in the filth, looking at the camera, trying to open the show. And when you see your cameraman's vomit float past you, As you're trying to articulate a thought.

01:11:59 Speaker_06
And meanwhile, the guy who was like my minder was an actual sewer inspector. And he's in the background trying to do his job, which is to hammer out the old bricks that are rotting and replace them with new ones. Now it's 105 degrees.

01:12:18 Speaker_06
It's the seventh level of hell. It's clear I can't do my job. So I go over to this guy, his name was Gene Cruz, and I say, hey, what are you doing? He's like, I'm putting bricks in. I said, you need a hand.

01:12:34 Speaker_06
So I start mixing the mortar and we start talking, just like people, you know, not like a host-y thing, but like what you were saying.

01:12:42 Speaker_06
What would happen if you had an honest conversation, totally unscripted, with a guy who didn't really know he was going to be on camera? But what if you film it and put it on TV anyway? What would happen?

01:12:54 Speaker_06
Well, what happened a week later when this thing finally aired was, uh, I was fired because people sitting down to hear their heart tugging story of the three legged dog up in Marin overcoming canine kidney failure.

01:13:08 Speaker_06
And it's me, the smart ass 42 year old crawling through a river of crap. I mean, they're, they're trying to eat their meatloaf, you know, it was, it was, it was the wrong segment for that, for that show. But, Talk about fortunate.

01:13:23 Speaker_06
The mail that came in as a result. Some people said it was funny and they liked it. Some people were repulsed. But the letters that changed my life were the ones that said, you think that was dirty? Wait, do you see what my brother does?

01:13:41 Speaker_06
Wait, you see my cousin does my mom my sister my uncle, right? I'm like, oh my god, there's I mean if if the Bay Area is any kind of a microcosm for the country and I'm not saying it is but from a TV standpoint I was like This is new.

01:14:00 Speaker_06
No, I've never seen feedback like this. I've never seen curiosity among the viewership like this. And so that's where the idea came from. It's like what what if the viewer programs the show a and what if be?

01:14:21 Speaker_06
the host of the show is the person that I meet who welcomes me into their shithole or wherever they work and what if what if I'm not a host after all after 20 years of impersonating a host and

01:14:36 Speaker_06
What if I'm a guest, or an apprentice, or an avatar, or a cypher, right? What if I just think of myself differently than this guy who hits the mark and looks at the camera and tells you the cat sack is 29. I mean, what if you just let all that go?

01:14:56 Speaker_06
And, you know, I don't know that I would have thought of it like that at 22, certainly not, not even at 32. But at 42, I was entering a more introspective kind of phase.

01:15:12 Speaker_06
And so I was really just curious to see what would happen if I thought of myself as something different.

01:15:19 Speaker_02
Well, if we think about the history of just media, it's very recent, right? You have radio, which is like, when did people start listening to radio? Was the 1800s? OK. And then you have television, which kicks on in the 50s. And everyone's a presenter.

01:15:38 Speaker_02
Ladies and gentlemen. The Beatles right everyone's Ed Sullivan. Everyone's Jack car, but Jack par like there's these type of People that do this job. It's like you ever go to you ever do a morning radio show.

01:15:53 Speaker_02
Oh, yeah sure you have morning DJ voice Hey five o'clock on the hour. Let's go with Bon Jovi There's a voice that they have a strip club DJ similar. There's a voice anchorman anchorman

01:16:05 Speaker_06
But now, the news.

01:16:06 Speaker_02
Especially local news. They have a very specific thing that they're doing. It's a cadence. Yeah, well it's fake. It's not a person. No people act like that.

01:16:16 Speaker_02
If you had a guy like that over your house for dinner, you'd be like, what the fuck is wrong with Bob? Bob's a psycho. That guy's got people buried in his fucking basement. Who talks like that, right? And so I think

01:16:29 Speaker_02
The internet opened up a lot of room for unprofessional people to thrive. That's me. So, like, I can't do the hosting, but that's what it is.

01:16:40 Speaker_06
You're not unprofessional.

01:16:41 Speaker_02
But it's, like, I mean, in that regard, like, I'm not... So, I wasn't trying to do something that had already existed. I was just doing, like... I was doing, like, a guest on the Opie and Anthony show. That's what it was like.

01:16:55 Speaker_02
Like, when you're a guest on Opie and Anthony, that's how you talk. Everybody would just hang out and talk.

01:16:59 Speaker_06
That's a fun show, wasn't it, anyway?

01:17:00 Speaker_02
That opened my eyes up to podcasting. And then, you know, Anthony Cumia had his own show that he did in his basement, Live at the Compound, where he'd sing karaoke holding a machine gun, the fucking maniac.

01:17:12 Speaker_02
And then the other big one was doing a Tom Green show, because Tom Green had his own sort of internet talk show that he did out of his house.

01:17:22 Speaker_06
Sure. I remember that.

01:17:23 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:17:24 Speaker_06
That was huge.

01:17:24 Speaker_02
So that also helped, too. And I actually was in negotiation with the people that were doing his show, and I was thinking about doing something my own, but then I was like, I can't work with anybody. I gotta do this on my own.

01:17:34 Speaker_06
Quick sidebar. I don't know if this is of interest, and Jamie, forgive me, because I don't know if I'm supposed to ask you to do things, but I sold the first karaoke machine.

01:17:43 Speaker_02
Ever?

01:17:43 Speaker_06
In this country.

01:17:45 Speaker_02
On QVC?

01:17:45 Speaker_06
Yeah. Oh, let's see that. It's out there. I'm not proud of it.

01:17:50 Speaker_02
You should be proud of that.

01:17:51 Speaker_06
That's a statistic. It was like 12.15 in the morning, you know, and they sent me one of these things to my apartment, and I'm like, what? Is this even possible? Like, look, they're everywhere now, obviously.

01:18:05 Speaker_02
It's kind of crazy, though, that you're like the godfather of karaoke.

01:18:09 Speaker_06
Well, I'm among them.

01:18:10 Speaker_02
So what year is this? What are we talking? Look at you. This is 91, 92. Wow!

01:18:22 Speaker_02
9995 Yeah, it's hard to see it's so blurry There's an interesting like how bad television looked back then in comparison and now like just a resolution Yeah, but you know what there's something There's something more trustworthy about rudimentary production value

01:18:45 Speaker_06
Right you can't like yeah, I was talking to a guy Bruce about this earlier. He was saying how much he loves Like a antique roadshow and this old house You know I said, I love this old house. I still I I was on this old house Were you? Yeah, man.

01:19:03 Speaker_06
They invited me on. They wanted to raise money to reinvigorate the trades. They had a very similar cause as I do today. And they got all these advertisers lined up. And then the guy in charge said, well, Mike's doing the same basic thing.

01:19:21 Speaker_06
Let's call him and maybe we should just give him the money and let his foundation give it away. It'll be simpler than starting a new thing. And they called and I said, yeah, I'll do that, sure. But I'd like to be on your show.

01:19:32 Speaker_06
And they were like, that'd be great. So they invited me on and it was awesome. But my point is, Part of the charm of those shows is the almost remedial simplicity of the production. It's old, it's like, there's an entrance, there's an exit.

01:19:52 Speaker_06
When's the last time you saw it dissolve? Right? Like all that stuff. And I used to make fun of it. I used to make fun of QVC. I still do.

01:20:01 Speaker_06
But in reality, man, there was something strangely comforting about that kind of production value and everything I learned that turned out to be useful. You know, I learned in the middle of the night selling karaoke machines.

01:20:14 Speaker_02
There's a thing about something that's overproduced that kind of dissolves some of its authenticity because there's too much thought.

01:20:22 Speaker_02
put into each and every shot everything about there's too much coordination it's almost like you lose a comfort like I'm I might be entertained by it it might be fascinating like like keeping up with the Kardashians you ever notice like they change scenes every five seconds like keep you like yeah keep you tuned in

01:20:41 Speaker_02
There's something smart about that because it does keep you engaged But it doesn't feel as authentic as if it was just like one person Following them around in real time with no edits at all just one camera on them.

01:20:56 Speaker_06
Here's here's a thesis At least in the world of nonfiction this doesn't apply to scripted but production By definition the enemy of authenticity, right?

01:21:10 Speaker_06
It's the enemy of it You need it in order to have a finished product But when you get in your own way Then you get in the viewers way right and one of the one of the things that kept dirty jobs on the air for 20 years early on I kind of realized that and and I wasn't sure what to do about it, but I thought I

01:21:31 Speaker_06
Maybe we need to think of the show like a documentary. So we got a behind-the-scenes camera. that never stopped rolling.

01:21:39 Speaker_06
And so if my mic pack went out, or if a plane flew over, or if somebody screwed something up, or if we had to stop for whatever reason, I always knew there was a truth cam. That's what I called it.

01:21:52 Speaker_06
And I could always look to it, and I could say, all right, well, what happened here? Blah, blah, blah. And so it was those moments where I think the viewer realized, oh, oh, he's not He's not trying to sell me anything, at least not here.

01:22:10 Speaker_06
He's letting us see the sausage. And that was new in nonfiction. That was a whole new way to think about authenticity.

01:22:19 Speaker_06
Vivek Ramaswamy was the only candidate I invited onto my podcast because I read somewhere that he said if he was nominated, he vowed to never use a teleprompter. to deliver a speech.

01:22:38 Speaker_06
Whether you can pull it off or not, I just thought that was so interesting. And I wanted to talk to him about that specifically.

01:22:46 Speaker_06
And then it's funny, a year later, I think the teleprompter is probably the best example of one forced error after the next. When you think about the anchor,

01:23:00 Speaker_06
who just wants to be believed, the spokesman who just wants to be seen as credible, the politician who just wants it just so.

01:23:10 Speaker_06
It's like they want to be authentic, and yet they do the single most inauthentic thing you can possibly do, which is pretend to not read a thing that everyone can see you're reading. And so the cognitive dissonance is rich.

01:23:30 Speaker_06
And I just think we've entered into this world where the least persuasive thing you can do is say, trust me, or take it from me. People have just been burned so much that they're going to need We need a truth cam.

01:23:49 Speaker_06
We need it in the newsroom, not just in a sewer. I mean, it worked there, but we need it everywhere.

01:23:55 Speaker_02
Fuck it, we'll do it live.

01:23:57 Speaker_06
Bill O'Reilly, of all people. I'll do it live!

01:24:01 Speaker_02
That's the real Bill.

01:24:02 Speaker_06
Yeah. That's it. That's the real bill. That's it.

01:24:04 Speaker_02
Yeah. That's what's interesting about social media and social media. Like, there's this giant resistance right now to the idea that X is the new source of the world. It is. They're the mainstream. It is. They're the mainstream.

01:24:19 Speaker_02
It's the new source of the world. And these people that want to cling to authority and say, no, you're not. God damn it, you're not the fucking, you're not a journalist, you're not this, that.

01:24:31 Speaker_02
You guys fucked us too many times, and we don't believe you anymore. And so the only way for us to find out what's real and what's not real is someone posts it online, and then everybody looks at it, and then you get the community notes.

01:24:46 Speaker_02
And that's way better than the New York Times telling me that the Froot Loops in Canada are exactly the same as the Froot Loops in America, except for a bunch of shit that's banned, and that's the whole point of the whole fucking thing.

01:24:58 Speaker_02
But meanwhile, they're fact-checking RFK Jr., so now I don't trust you anymore either. So it's like, that's what's going on.

01:25:06 Speaker_06
You can't gloss over the community notes.

01:25:08 Speaker_02
You can't.

01:25:09 Speaker_06
That's it.

01:25:09 Speaker_02
That's it.

01:25:10 Speaker_06
That's the truth cam on Twitter.

01:25:13 Speaker_02
It's a solution to this thing that we're trying to figure out. How do we know what's true and what's not true? You get a consensus. There's enough people that actually can read scientific papers.

01:25:21 Speaker_02
There's enough people that know the field that's being discussed. Out of the hundreds of millions of people on X, you're going to get an expert.

01:25:31 Speaker_02
He's gonna say this is why this is incorrect and this is how you're supposed to read it and then everybody goes.

01:25:36 Speaker_02
Oh Okay, this is wrong And now you know and if you can just do a little research and go through that paper or go through that thread You'll you'll if you're an objective person, you'll probably get a good sense of who's right and who's wrong

01:25:49 Speaker_06
It's a weird dichotomy though, right? Like skepticism, like we have to be skeptical.

01:25:54 Speaker_02
Yes.

01:25:55 Speaker_06
But part of the reason we have to be as skeptical as we are is because so much of the media has abdicated on skepticism and they've become something else, you know, something else.

01:26:08 Speaker_06
And so, you know, you can't, you can't really blame people for, you know, considering what we used to dismiss as a conspiracy theory.

01:26:20 Speaker_02
when the theories start to get borne out and when there's such a level of eroded trust in in once credible institutions like well that's also the whole reason for the disdain for conspiracy theorists in the first place is that no you're not an expert I'm the expert and you're wrong but then when they're wrong there's no repercussions they never want to say you know we were wrong about all this yeah

01:26:42 Speaker_02
We're sorry, we were wrong about masking, we were wrong about social distancing, we were wrong about all of it. It's all bullshit.

01:26:48 Speaker_06
Where's the humility, man?

01:26:50 Speaker_02
Yeah, no humility. Because they're not humans. And that's why you don't believe them. Because you know they're just people reading off bullshit off a teleprompter. That's it. That's it. That's all it is. And nobody wants that anymore.

01:27:01 Speaker_02
You don't have to have that anymore, and that's why X has emerged and substack and all these different things It's like the place where people go to get actual information And that's why they like podcasts because it's just the three of us in this room That's it the whoever is the numbers of people and Carl Carl's out cold now

01:27:19 Speaker_02
But the numbers of people that are listening it's like it's just this crazy number that are all just listening three people So there's no producer.

01:27:27 Speaker_06
There's no all that shit that gets in the way of things is been removed It's actually for people when you think about it that way like if the audience becomes its own amalgam I think of it like that. I think the audience gets short shrifted a lot.

01:27:46 Speaker_06
I thought of it last night in your club. It's like the audience is, I mean, without the audience, what are you doing?

01:27:53 Speaker_02
Certainly at a club, yeah, at a club it's everything.

01:27:57 Speaker_06
It's everything, but why is it different?

01:27:59 Speaker_02
Well, because you can't think about it that way. Because the best way to do it, in my opinion, for me, the best way I've found to do it is to never think about the audience.

01:28:10 Speaker_02
All I'm interested in, I think about it in terms of like, if I'm bored, they must be bored. Like, let me pick this up a little bit. Let me move this around a little bit. Let me figure out a way to, you got to move a conversation.

01:28:19 Speaker_02
It's like, sometimes I've talked to like very old scholars, like very old, and it's like, sometimes like, okay. We gotta focus here. We gotta get you on this. We're gonna land this plane, baby.

01:28:29 Speaker_02
With Trump, a little bit, in the beginning, when he was telling me the story with Lincoln's bedroom, I was like, the bed was, he was a long man. He was that tall. Very tall. Very tall.

01:28:37 Speaker_02
So I was like, okay, we gotta figure out a way to, what's it like to be the fucking president? What is that feeling like? How crazy is it on the first day? That's what I really wanted to know. So it's like, you gotta kind of move people around.

01:28:48 Speaker_02
But that is for me, like as an audience member, I'm not thinking about the audience because I feel like the best way to do it is for me to actually 100% be engaged and interested in what this person is talking about.

01:29:01 Speaker_06
But don't you think that you are the proxy for the audience. When you're at your best, in my view, when I'm listening to you, when I high-five you virtually, it's when you ask the question I was thinking. And I really tried to do that in the sewer.

01:29:21 Speaker_06
I really tried to do that on dirty jobs. I really tried.

01:29:25 Speaker_02
I think you did. I think that's why it resonated so much with people. Well, I hope so. No, for sure, because you didn't ever seem like a fake guy doing a thing.

01:29:32 Speaker_02
You seemed like a fun guy, like a regular guy who's doing this thing where you're interacting with people. You're like, how do you do this? Like, what is this?

01:29:39 Speaker_06
So yes, thanks. But then all of a sudden, I look up and Donald Trump's in the sewer with me. Oh, shit. and there's an election in a week, oh, the stakes around me, right, all of a sudden have changed.

01:29:55 Speaker_06
So it's so interesting that he was sitting right where I'm sitting and you feel the need to kind of put some sides on this thing because you understand first and foremost that as an audience member, Right?

01:30:10 Speaker_06
As somebody who's just listening to this as a fly on the wall, I'm getting a little lost.

01:30:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, I'm a little bored. Let's move it along.

01:30:16 Speaker_06
Right, right, right. So, I mean, you can say that, hey, that's Joe being a good host, or that's Joe being super honest in a conversation where he's starting to drift a little bit.

01:30:28 Speaker_02
I'm most certainly aware that people are going to listen to it. Don't get me wrong. But I don't think, like, the questions, like, maybe the audience would want to know this.

01:30:37 Speaker_02
I do do this one thing, even if I know how a thing works, I will ask a person how a thing works so that the audience can hear it from them rather than from me. I don't want to be Mr. Smarty Pants, but I don't have to be.

01:30:51 Speaker_02
But that's one thing that I do where I'm aware that people probably don't know what we're talking about. Could you explain where this came from or why this?

01:31:00 Speaker_02
Because sometimes people, especially if they have an area of expertise, they just assume that people know what they're talking about when they're talking about specific techniques.

01:31:07 Speaker_02
Ways they do things so that in that way I do think about the audience But most of the time that's just like I'm just doing my job, but mostly all I'm trying to do is be 100% locked in yeah, just like and I feel like if I'm locked in and I'm just Real honest and just try to like be really curious and really just try to get the most out of this person That's gonna be good for the audience What was more consequential?

01:31:32 Speaker_06
him coming on Or her not coming on

01:31:37 Speaker_02
him coming on.

01:31:38 Speaker_06
Why do you say that?

01:31:39 Speaker_02
Well, because realistically, like, OK, my thought about her coming on was I just I was going to be very nice. I was I want to have fun with her. I wanted to just be able to talk to her and ask her questions.

01:31:52 Speaker_02
I want to get a sense of her as a human being. And if it's policy talk that bothered them, like there was a few things they didn't want to talk. Marijuana legalization.

01:32:00 Speaker_02
They initially didn't want to talk about internet censorship and then they changed their tune and then they wanted to talk about internet censorship. Great, internet censorship is important. Let's talk about it.

01:32:08 Speaker_02
But whatever, she wanted to talk about fucking riding bikes. I don't give a shit. I don't give a fuck what you want to talk about. Cooking, rock climbing, I just want to get a sense of her as a human being. Just as a human being.

01:32:23 Speaker_02
What is it like, does it freak you out when people get mad at you? Does it freak you out when you fuck up a sentence and you ramble?

01:32:29 Speaker_02
I know what it's like when you know the people are listening and you're like, I gotta fucking bring this home and I don't know how to. And you just sort of repeat these key lines or maybe there's some new word you become enamored with.

01:32:41 Speaker_02
You want to say that over and over again.

01:32:43 Speaker_06
When you realize you're in the middle of a sentence with no obvious ending, that's QVC in a nutshell. That's what it is. And when the teleprompter breaks, that's when you get to know the person. And so that's why I'm asking.

01:33:00 Speaker_06
I wonder, you know, I mean, I listened to the interview and I asked myself, well, is anybody going to vote differently as a result? I don't think so. Are some people going to vote who otherwise might not have voted? Maybe.

01:33:15 Speaker_06
But for me, when you started to talk very casually about the fact that her campaign had stipulations, they had

01:33:26 Speaker_02
I think there was a lot of people that were, she had made a bunch of blunders and there was a lot of concern that she was going to make blunders here. This is what I was going to get to. She might have, it might've been a mess.

01:33:37 Speaker_02
I might've asked her about immigration. We might've had a conversation about like, what is the goal?

01:33:42 Speaker_02
Like why hasn't this been, this doesn't, if we can, you know, launch rockets and land them at the same time as we can't control border, that seems not real. That doesn't seem real. One seems way harder. That's happening.

01:33:56 Speaker_02
He's fucking catching rockets with robot arms. Yeah, okay, if that's happening How come this can't be fixed because this didn't used to be like this, so why is it like this now?

01:34:05 Speaker_02
Why does the Red Cross have these stations set up where they're giving people maps and instructions?

01:34:09 Speaker_02
Why does China have these places in Mexico where they only have Chinese menus Chinese writing Chinese everything and these people are coming from China? Specifically the spot and then making it across the country What's the purpose of this?

01:34:22 Speaker_02
Has anybody ever examined what these people are up to? Why they're doing this? How is it so organized? Like, what is that about? Maybe that would have been a disaster.

01:34:30 Speaker_02
Because that's something that I felt like if she didn't want to talk about the marijuana and didn't want to talk about internet censorship, Immigration is an interesting one, right?

01:34:41 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's very interesting because like first of all, I am pro-immigration I am the grandson of immigrants.

01:34:46 Speaker_02
My grandparents came over here during the Depression If they didn't do it, I wouldn't be here the entire country other than the Native Americans are immigrants that's all of us every is we are a country of immigrants and

01:34:59 Speaker_02
So we should have some stipulations, though, about who gets in and how you get in and where you're coming from and what is your past like? Are you a murderer? Are you a gangbanger? Have you been selling fentanyl for the last 20 years?

01:35:13 Speaker_02
Like, what are you doing with your life, Bob?

01:35:16 Speaker_06
Inquiring minds want to know.

01:35:17 Speaker_02
We want to know. I think that's reasonable.

01:35:20 Speaker_06
Do you see a difference between an immigrant and a settler?

01:35:26 Speaker_02
Well, it all is the timeline, right? It's the timeline thing. Not only that, you're an invader. If you're one of those people that comes over in 1820 and you're making your way across the plains and you encounter the Comanche, you're the piece of shit.

01:35:40 Speaker_02
You're not supposed to be there. That's where they live. You're in their yard. You're some fucking weird, scruffy American looking for gold. What are you doing here, bro? You're the problem. You know, and now all of a sudden that's Texas, right?

01:35:53 Speaker_02
That's where we are. We live here now. This is my land, bitch. This is where I live. Shut the fuck up. I got this now. It's weird. We're all invaders at one point in time.

01:36:02 Speaker_02
Every human being that's a nomadic person that's made their way across the country, you've probably entered a place where people were before.

01:36:09 Speaker_06
Every freedom fighter is a terrorist.

01:36:11 Speaker_02
Yes, right. It depends on who wins.

01:36:14 Speaker_06
History gets to decide all that.

01:36:16 Speaker_02
Sure. If we didn't actually, if the founding fathers didn't pull it off, you know, we would be these wild renegade English people that decided to come over here and just fucking create havoc.

01:36:27 Speaker_06
So yeah, man, there are a lot of ways to go with all this, but I'll just come back to the teleprompter and say if that's an essential part of how you communicate, and if that's part of your image, then you can't be on this show.

01:36:48 Speaker_06
Right right right you you can't you you you can't join me in the sewer right right? There's there's no room for the contrivance. There's just no room.

01:36:57 Speaker_02
There's just no time I just wonder if that's what they make them do like if you make me do that. I'll suck too You know, I can't read off a teleprompter. I'm not interested in doing that. It's not my thing.

01:37:08 Speaker_02
But if you make a person do that, like if if you're going to be a politician, right, OK, and you were a senator and which is, you know, you don't get that kind of exposure that you get if you're a vice president or you're running for president initially.

01:37:21 Speaker_02
Right, like that's a totally different scene and there's probably a bunch of people that coach you how to do it Right, and you don't know what the fuck you're doing And if you're not a powerful person like a big personality like Donald Trump who could just do it But also coming from a world of entertainment for most of his life He's been in the public eye and hosting The Apprentice for 14 years like he's he's used to being in front of the camera.

01:37:46 Speaker_02
It's a normal experience for him He has a massive advantage

01:37:49 Speaker_06
That's what I meant by production becomes the enemy of authenticity. When you rely upon it to the point where you can't function in the midst or in the wake of a glitch, well, in a world of glitches, you're in trouble.

01:38:04 Speaker_06
And I think the audience, not just yours, but the country, I just think they're just exhausted by people who have been managed and focus grouped and weighed and measured and tested and then put out there.

01:38:18 Speaker_02
Think it's also the evolution of culture in general because if you just go back to we were talking about media you go back and watch a film from 1950 Versus a film from 2024 the way people communicate now is much more realistic There was a way of talking like Hannah.

01:38:38 Speaker_02
What did you do right? You know, there was a weird performative aspect to it because they didn't know how to do it, right and

01:38:43 Speaker_06
In sitcoms, too.

01:38:44 Speaker_02
In everything.

01:38:45 Speaker_06
Father Knows Best. Yes.

01:38:46 Speaker_02
All that stuff. All that stuff. And then as time moved on, it changed.

01:38:50 Speaker_02
Like, all in the family was all of a sudden this realistic portrayal of a family, where you got a racist dad, and the son is, you know, the meathead, the son-in-law, and the daughter's a hippie, and the mom just came from, what are you doing?

01:39:04 Speaker_02
God, it was a great show. It was a fucking amazing show. It was an amazing show. You had Sanford and Son. Sanford and Son is another one. You know, it was a comedy, but people talked like people would talk in real life.

01:39:17 Speaker_02
And then as culture moves on, songs change, books change. Everything sort of like moves into the, there's a much greater understanding.

01:39:27 Speaker_02
If you had a show and you try to do a Father Knows Best today, it would almost be like you were putting on like a parody. Like, it would be weird. It would be like a weird Tim and Eric type thing. Like, you're doing something weird on purpose, right?

01:39:42 Speaker_02
And that's not acceptable anymore. So the culture's moved on.

01:39:46 Speaker_06
So for sure. But it moves on and fits and starts, and it's not a line.

01:39:51 Speaker_02
Right. No, no. It's this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like the climate.

01:39:55 Speaker_06
Right, right. So, like, even the... Look, the changes in podcasting. Like, it's happening right now, right in front of us. You can see so many different types of podcasts.

01:40:05 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:40:05 Speaker_06
You can see so many different kinds of scripted dramas. I mean, oh, my God.

01:40:09 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:40:10 Speaker_06
Can you imagine Breaking Bad... Right, right. ...30 years ago?

01:40:13 Speaker_02
Right, right, right.

01:40:14 Speaker_06
It's impossible. Right. A whole lot of things had to happen in front of that for that thing to... The Sopranos had to happen. That's right, and something had to happen before that.

01:40:23 Speaker_06
Well, in my world, and in the world you're describing, that was the age of authority. That's when Eric Severide could talk to you like this. Like, Discovery is a good example.

01:40:37 Speaker_06
You asked about it, and I'll tell you, first of all, John Hendricks, a friend of mine who created that channel, you would love. He did this in his garage, basically.

01:40:46 Speaker_06
I mean, the story's incredible, how he talked Malone into getting some transponder space for maybe his Westinghouse and mortgaged his house to buy some documentaries from Australia and started beaming all that stuff down.

01:41:02 Speaker_06
I asked him years ago, I'm like, what was the, like, what was the guiding principle behind this business model?

01:41:11 Speaker_06
And of course, you know, Discovery has since purchased Warner Brothers, you know, they're the biggest entertainment company in the world today. And it started with John Hendricks saying, one goal, to satisfy curiosity.

01:41:27 Speaker_06
Mmm, that's it mmm everything every everything I do must line up with a traditional definition of what a discovery is it's the it's the satisfying mmm of curiosity yeah, and so when I pitched dirty jobs

01:41:47 Speaker_06
I was coming in on the heels of what you're talking about.

01:41:51 Speaker_06
There was still in nonfiction, it was Richard Attenborough, it was Jacques Cousteau, it was Jane Goodall, it was, you know, the Discovery brand was very much a reflection of some of the greatest naturalists and historians and, you know, astrophysicists in the world.

01:42:10 Speaker_06
They deferred to experts, and then they hired guys like me to narrate shows, and we could sound even more official. And so you had this dance, this production dance, where you had a credible-sounding voice and an expert at the center of the thing.

01:42:29 Speaker_06
Dirty jobs was not that. Dirty jobs was, what if the expert is a septic tank technician or a welder? What if the expert is a skull cleaner or a golf ball retrievist? It's a job.

01:42:44 Speaker_06
Or a sheep castrator, an oral sheep castrator, which we can get into if you want. Like, what if they become your source of credible information? And what if the host somehow morphs from this authoritarian expert into a guest with a bunch of questions?

01:43:04 Speaker_06
So this conversation happened between me and some of the guys over there in 2003. And they bought it. They didn't like Dirty Jobs. They took it, really, to shut me up. They wanted three episodes and out.

01:43:19 Speaker_06
The deal I made with these guys was rooted in this paradigm of me saying, Send me out into the world to go on adventures and and don't ask me to know more than I know But just let me look under the rock and let's learn together.

01:43:35 Speaker_06
Yeah, and so they said okay We're gonna you know, you'll go to the Titanic with James Cameron. You'll climb Kilimanjaro. You went to the Titanic. No, and I'll Very nearly it was cancelled a month before because dirty jobs finally hit.

01:43:51 Speaker_06
But prior to that, I went to Egypt. I was exploring tombs with Zahi Hawass. I was at the pyramids.

01:43:59 Speaker_06
I was in some of the greatest, the largest undiscovered graveyard in Bawiti, the sands of the dead, where they found the mummies with the golden masks, and nobody knew who the hell they were because it wasn't attached to any dynasty.

01:44:15 Speaker_06
Who are all these people with golden masks on their faces? And so Discovery would send me to do these shows and they were great.

01:44:22 Speaker_06
Meanwhile, this hot mess that looked like a German porno called Dirty Jobs winds up on the air and it rates like through the roof. But the problem in 2004 was that And this is a kind of cognitive dissonance that always is super interesting, right?

01:44:47 Speaker_06
When a big company or a brand or a political party, or really anybody, realizes that the thing their audience wants is not the thing they want them to want. That's amazing. And it happens all the time.

01:45:04 Speaker_06
And most of the time when it happens, you just walk up behind the barn and shoot it, and you never hear about it. But Dirty Jobs actually got on the air before it was shelved for a year.

01:45:19 Speaker_06
And it was during that year that I went on a series of adventures for the network doing this other thing.

01:45:25 Speaker_02
Why was it shelved?

01:45:27 Speaker_06
It was shelved because it was deemed off-brand. It was shelved because I was biting the testicles off of lambs with ranchers, and that's how they castrate their lambs, and they have for hundreds of years.

01:45:38 Speaker_06
It was not that specific episode, that got me in trouble later, but it was shelved because it was an unscripted random romp. We never did a second take on the show.

01:45:52 Speaker_02
It didn't look like everything else on the network.

01:45:55 Speaker_06
It didn't look like anything else on the network. It was just a jagged little pill. But they liked me, and they liked this idea of a more unscripted look at the world.

01:46:06 Speaker_06
And so we reached this kind of detente, and I started narrating all their tentpole shows. And then I went to Alaska to host Deadliest Catch. Which is a whole nother story that crab fishing show.

01:46:18 Speaker_06
Yeah, that's 21 years now, right and up there People died, you know people died and I went to six funerals in six weeks and When they when we looked at the footage of that

01:46:35 Speaker_06
and somebody up the food chain eventually decided, okay, this is a world we have to get into, but Mike, you're not hosting two shows at the same time, so pick one.

01:46:47 Speaker_06
So Dirty Jobs came back, went into full production late in 2004, and Deadliest Catch went in full production about the same time, but I just narrated. Moral of the story is, everything that happened

01:47:01 Speaker_06
After that and around that I'm not saying because of it, but but right around that same time I think the media world in nonfiction anyhow began this migration from the age of Authority into the age of authenticity and ever since Nonfiction has been has been grappling with that just as surely as every other vertical because

01:47:29 Speaker_06
People want to see something that feels like the truth and that's that's a sliding scale.

01:47:35 Speaker_02
Yeah That's interesting and that is what people are gravitating towards more today And it's, that's, I mean, I think that's the whole thing we were talking about, why mainstream news is failing. But independent news is succeeding.

01:47:51 Speaker_02
You know it when you see it. Yeah.

01:47:52 Speaker_06
You know it when you see it.

01:47:54 Speaker_02
Yeah. You can tell the difference.

01:47:56 Speaker_06
Oh. Bourdain.

01:47:59 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:47:59 Speaker_06
Okay. I think, for me, the moment that crystallizes all of this, and he and I were on Parallel paths, I think he was dealing with his network the travel channel at the time the same way I was dealing with discovery.

01:48:18 Speaker_06
We were we were constantly at each other's throats trying to navigate this this weird line of Reality and authenticity and there's a there's a scene in parts unknown. I think he's in um might be Sardinia He's diving.

01:48:36 Speaker_02
Oh Yeah on the throne the fake octopuses in

01:48:39 Speaker_02
It's one of the single greatest moments in the history of Nonfiction he shows you exactly how the sausage is being made But it's also like now you can trust him because you know he's kind of sabotaging the narrative that they've created for his own show I was authenticity.

01:48:53 Speaker_06
I would do that for a scene maybe even for an act Maybe even for a whole segment Maybe if I got like a like a be in my bonnet, and I really just couldn't you know I got angry every now and then and I you know

01:49:09 Speaker_06
But Tony, dude, he went out and got drunk. I mean, drunk drunk, and shot the whole show smashed. And he made them cut it in. And you can see him. He's so disgusted, just so the audience understands, they're supposed to be spearfishing for octopi.

01:49:33 Speaker_06
And the local handler wasn't sure that they were going to find any. So he bought some at the market. But they were frozen and dead. And so Tony's down there with his spear gun with some other diver, and these frozen squid just start to come by him.

01:49:55 Speaker_06
And in narration, this is where he really owned it. Because he owned that show. Nobody's going to tell him what to say. So his real rant.

01:50:06 Speaker_06
Happens months later in the vo booth when he's just describing the heartbreaking insincerity Don't don't they know who I am right? What did they think I was gonna do right?

01:50:18 Speaker_06
so that's like he says something like it in the face of this kind of wanton deception a Reasonable man can turn to nothing but the elixir of distilled alcohol And he just drinks for the rest of the show And it airs. It airs on CNN.

01:50:38 Speaker_06
And I think it won a Peabody.

01:50:40 Speaker_02
Was that the CNN one or was that No Reservations?

01:50:43 Speaker_06
That was CNN.

01:50:44 Speaker_02
Was it? It was Parts Unknown?

01:50:46 Speaker_06
Look, I'm pretty sure it was Parts Unknown. I'm pretty sure. I could be wrong.

01:50:52 Speaker_02
I think you might be right.

01:50:54 Speaker_06
Yeah, and God, I just I mean, that's what I that's what I wrote about when he died It was parts unknown. Yeah Because I've been I've been sitting on a zodiac. I've done that I've been in these in this world where you're nervous.

01:51:11 Speaker_06
You've got a lot of stuff to worry about and Then somebody just comes along and tries to produce a moment. Yeah, you try to produce a moment

01:51:21 Speaker_02
Well, also these guys, they probably didn't know. These Italian guys. Like, these fucking guys aren't going to find the octopus. We've killed them all.

01:51:27 Speaker_06
Probably right. But I got to think there's somebody there in his crew, somebody over from 0.0, the production company. Somebody must have, you know.

01:51:35 Speaker_02
Who knows.

01:51:36 Speaker_06
Who knows, man.

01:51:37 Speaker_02
Who knows.

01:51:38 Speaker_06
But look, the fact that that happened is wonderful. The fact that he was able to insist that it air, that was important. Yeah. That was important.

01:51:50 Speaker_02
Yeah. Well, it's certainly important for how you trust him. You had to trust him. I mean, that was his whole thing. You know, you're coming with me. This is actually me. Here we go.

01:52:01 Speaker_06
Fly on the wall.

01:52:02 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah. That was a very unique show, too, because it taught me that food is art. I really learned that from No Reservations, but it followed over through Parts Unknown. Food is art. I didn't think of it as art until I saw his show.

01:52:17 Speaker_02
And then I was like, oh, okay, that's right. Because I just thought of art as being like a thing that people make that you look at or touch. I never thought it would be a thing you make or you hear, right?

01:52:27 Speaker_02
I never thought it would be a thing you make where you eat. And then I saw him like, oh, these are artists. These are artists all these people. They've discovered these different ways to make things delicious and Okay, their mediums different.

01:52:40 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's just different. It's a different kind, but they then hanging out with them It's like yeah, they're all artists. They hang they talk like artists. They're they're covered in tattoos. They're fucking weirdos.

01:52:49 Speaker_02
They like to do drugs They're all listening to crazy music, you know

01:52:53 Speaker_06
They're also craftsmen mm-hmm like I mean to me Yeah food is art it sure can be and it can also be fuel yeah You know it's it's it's actually both. It's kind of perfect.

01:53:09 Speaker_02
Yeah, you could have both it could be art and fuel You just gotta pick what you eat is hunting art Hmm It's a discipline. It's a primal discipline.

01:53:28 Speaker_02
It's a discipline that connects you with life and death in a very unique way that I don't think anything else does. If you do it correctly, right? I'm talking about like mountain hunting, like mountain elk hunting in particular, which is my favorite.

01:53:44 Speaker_02
It's very hard to do. I train for it. I have to get in really good shape. practice so I practice so much I fuck my back up because I was get developing like tendonitis in my lower back and I just Ignored it. Yeah, shut up. Yeah.

01:53:59 Speaker_02
Yeah, we got work to do and so it's it's a discipline more than it is anything but it's like I don't know. Some people call it a sport. I find that wrong. It's not the right. It does take physical energy. You have to be in shape to do it.

01:54:14 Speaker_02
You have to be in great fitness. But it's not a sport. It's a discipline. It's a discipline that's very, very, very primal. It taps into something you didn't even know was there. It's like there people who've ever gone fishing.

01:54:30 Speaker_02
There's a thing that happens when you catch a fish There's an excitement that you're not prepared for it's a weird excitement that excitement is you're gonna feed your family and stay alive That's what that excitement is because that excitement is like hardwired in your human reward systems and you don't know it's there until you go fishing and then you're like

01:54:47 Speaker_02
Oh, here he is. Get him. Get him in the net. Get him in the net. Oh, we got him. And hunting is that times 100. Hunting is that. Hunting is way different because you're defying their protective senses.

01:55:01 Speaker_02
You have to make sure the wind is going in the right direction. You have to go all the way around if it's not. You got to figure out a way to move through the trees. You got to move very slowly, only moving their heads down.

01:55:12 Speaker_06
I think that's art.

01:55:14 Speaker_02
I don't know, man. I mean, a shot is art. I'll tell you that. Archery is art. A good archery shot on an animal, I watch it like it's art. Because it's hard to do. It's very hard to do.

01:55:24 Speaker_02
When I see someone just hit a perfect 50-yard shot in the vitals, and that broadhead sinks in, I know that animal's gonna die very quickly. It's a quick, humane death, and that's what you practice for.

01:55:35 Speaker_06
You know Josh Smith, over at Montana Knife, might he chance?

01:55:39 Speaker_02
Sure. Very well.

01:55:40 Speaker_06
He sent me a video the other day. He went on a big hunt with his boy.

01:55:44 Speaker_02
The moose hunt? Yeah. Yeah.

01:55:45 Speaker_06
Yeah. His boy got one at about a few hundred yards.

01:55:48 Speaker_02
Huge moose. Huge, big moose, man. Fucking huge. For a first moose, that's so crazy. That kid hit the jackpot.

01:55:54 Speaker_06
But the excitement on the video that he sent me. Oh, yeah.

01:55:58 Speaker_02
It's primal.

01:55:59 Speaker_06
Yeah.

01:56:00 Speaker_02
And bow hunting is even more primal than that. Bowhunting is that times 100. So it's regular hunting is fishing times 100, then bowhunting is regular hunting times 100.

01:56:11 Speaker_06
I just think, you know, if you're, whatever canvas you're in front of, whether you're painting or whether you're cooking or whether you're stalking, like you can, the muse, like does the muse come to you when you're stalking?

01:56:26 Speaker_06
Does it come to you, you know, I don't have an answer for it, but I know that people talk about it, like some people say, well, you're in the zone. You know, sometimes when I write, I'm surprised.

01:56:40 Speaker_06
Just the other day, I started writing something on the tarmac of SFO, and when I looked up, I was at JFK. It was like that.

01:56:49 Speaker_02
Yeah, you got into it. Airplanes are great for that. They're the best. They force you into that seat. You can't get up because there's a guy next to you. You get that laptop open, and it just comes out of you.

01:57:00 Speaker_06
And I like a little distraction.

01:57:01 Speaker_02
Couple of Budweisers.

01:57:02 Speaker_06
Let's go. I wrote a book on a plane. I believe it. I really did. And I did it mostly in moments that I don't really remember, when time gets compressed.

01:57:16 Speaker_06
And I think that can happen when you're fabricating something, when you're hunting something, when you're painting something, maybe in the middle of a set, maybe in the middle of a fight. You know, I talk to boxers who say that it's so odd the way

01:57:30 Speaker_06
Things will sometimes almost feel like they're in slow motion. Even though they're happening so fast.

01:57:35 Speaker_02
Some fighters, it's art. Well, I think martial arts are art for people that understand it. If you watch it, it's beautiful. But there's some fighters that are just so artistic. You know who Emmanuel Augustus is?

01:57:46 Speaker_06
Yeah.

01:57:47 Speaker_02
Okay. That guy is an artist. That guy's an artist.

01:57:50 Speaker_06
What makes him an artist?

01:57:52 Speaker_02
Because he's, first of all, completely unique, okay? Doing a thing in this beautiful, deceptive way. He's dancing, but he's also, he has an understanding of distance that's fantastic, so he's really good at avoiding punches.

01:58:06 Speaker_02
His head movement, even with this unorthodox dancing style, is fantastic.

01:58:11 Speaker_06
He's stalking.

01:58:12 Speaker_02
He's doing something. Like, here's Emmanuel. Like, look how he moves. I mean, imagine you're fighting a guy who's moving like this. It's so crazy. He was so hard.

01:58:21 Speaker_02
Floyd Mayweather said he was the most, look, he just punched him with two hands at the same time. Floyd Mayweather said he was the most skilled opponent he ever fought. Wow. And his record didn't indicate his actual physical ability.

01:58:33 Speaker_02
His abilities were incredible. But it's just like, it was such a wild style. So unusual.

01:58:40 Speaker_06
It's like boxing a bobblehead.

01:58:41 Speaker_02
Right. Like Prince Nassim Hamed had a kind of a similar thing going on when he was in his prime. Nassim Hamed was very, very unorthodox. See, here's here's fighting Floyd. He gave Floyd a hard fucking time because he's so difficult to fight.

01:58:56 Speaker_02
Like, look, how do you deal with that? And when you're a guy like Floyd and you're getting clowned here, he's he's fighting Mickey Ward.

01:59:03 Speaker_02
When you're a guy like Floyd, and you're, you know, the cream of the crop, Olympian, I mean, a fucking phenomenal boxer, just a fantastic boxer, and then you're fighting this guy who's dancing in front of you, like, what the fuck?

01:59:15 Speaker_02
But also really good. It wasn't just that, like, you rarely get a guy who's clowning like that, but also, like, that kind of head movement skill.

01:59:25 Speaker_02
Phenomenal movement, but also can dance in front of you, and land shit that you don't see coming, because it's coming at those weird angles, Who was his trainer? Oh man, I don't think anybody trains you to do that.

01:59:37 Speaker_06
I don't either. What does Custom Auto say to that?

01:59:40 Speaker_02
Never.

01:59:40 Speaker_06
He wouldn't allow it?

01:59:42 Speaker_02
No. But maybe, maybe if the guy started winning like that, he would change his tune. People change their tune when they see something extraordinary. They see something weird, you know, they change their tune. They go.

01:59:53 Speaker_02
Well, maybe fuck I don't know because you don't know sometimes you don't there's there's guys that come along in fighting in particular That have styles that are so weird and so unique you go.

02:00:03 Speaker_02
Wait, wait a minute How come nobody else is doing it like this? It's gonna work like you do know strong Sean Strickland is He was UFC middleweight champion stand straight up

02:00:12 Speaker_02
Puts his hand like, one hand like this, one hand down here, and beats the fuck out of everybody. Stands straight up. Everybody else is down. Everybody else is moving. Sean's straight up, moving towards you. Phenomenal head movement. Awesome timing.

02:00:26 Speaker_02
And walks people down in a weird style. There's a bunch of guys that fight weird, but they're really good at it.

02:00:32 Speaker_06
Well, think baseball too. I mean, it's everything. Louis Tion. Remember the pitcher? I don't really follow baseball. You'll love this, Jamie.

02:00:40 Speaker_02
I know almost nothing about sports. Believe it or not. Huh. You know.

02:00:45 Speaker_06
You will, one day, you're going to look at a baseball game and go, hey, you know what I need to do? I need to play professional baseball.

02:00:52 Speaker_06
And then five years later, we're going to be reading about it, because you're going to go crazy with it, the same way you do everything.

02:00:56 Speaker_02
I'm too old for that. But this Louis Tion, what did he do differently?

02:01:00 Speaker_06
Louis Tion was a pitcher. And his windup was such that it looked sort of traditional, but then he turned his back to the batter without leaving the rubber. Right? So this guy would spin all the way around before he threw.

02:01:21 Speaker_06
And he'd go further than that sometimes.

02:01:22 Speaker_02
Is that really unusual?

02:01:24 Speaker_06
Yeah. Yeah. It's unusual. That's unusual.

02:01:29 Speaker_02
Oh, so it freaks people out a little bit? Well, yeah.

02:01:32 Speaker_06
Yeah, because he just breaks. He stops looking at you. Look at his back.

02:01:38 Speaker_02
Look at his ankle.

02:01:39 Speaker_06
That's crazy. That's exactly it. So it's like, oh, you know, if you're a batter, you're like, all right, there are a lot of different pitchers, and I'll get used to this, and I'll get used to that. And then this guy comes along.

02:01:48 Speaker_02
That dude has flexible knees.

02:01:51 Speaker_06
Flexible everything.

02:01:51 Speaker_02
Because look at the angle his knee is in before he turns. That's crazy.

02:01:56 Speaker_06
Yeah. Yeah, you would actually, I'm surprised you're not into baseball because- I can't.

02:02:02 Speaker_02
I don't have any room. I know the bucket's overflowing. Yeah, it 100% is. I watch football now, my wife's into football, but I can only pay attention so much. My head is filled with combat sports. I have to follow jujitsu, Muay Thai,

02:02:24 Speaker_02
MMA in the UFC MMA in the PFL Bellator one FC There's I have to keep track of a thousand fighters like literally a thousand fighters, right?

02:02:36 Speaker_02
Maybe casually some of them like some of the glory kickboxers Casually, I'm watching, you know, Oh Bata Hari's fighting. Oh, you know, this guy's fighting that guy's fighting I know who these people are. I watch him fight. I'm watching fights and

02:02:51 Speaker_02
Just hours and hours in a day. I might watch fights two hours every day. Is it work or fun? It's fun.

02:02:59 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's only fun, but I do feel obligated to pay attention like there's guys that are coming up in other organizations I see guys have like a specific skill set that's unique like I contacted Conor McGregor in like 2013 He was fighting in cage warriors, and I reached out.

02:03:16 Speaker_02
I said dude. You're fucking super talented I hope I get to see in the UFC someday, and it is like I You know, kickboxers like Alex Pereira, I follow him in glory. And then finally he comes over to the UFC and I was like, you gotta see this guy.

02:03:30 Speaker_02
This guy is fucking insane. It's like, you have to have some sort of an understanding of what's coming, you know? And also you have to like kind of be tuned into the state of the art.

02:03:42 Speaker_02
Because the state of the art is very different in 2024 than it was in 97 when I first started working for the UFC. The state of the art is elite now. You're getting these 18 year old kids that can do everything at like a super high level.

02:03:56 Speaker_02
And they're like these phenomenal athletes that instead of going into baseball or instead of going into football, now they're just only focused on becoming a UFC champion. And this is their goal in life. And they're 18.

02:04:09 Speaker_02
And you get to see them in amateur organizations. You get to see them in foreign organizations. You get to see them travel overseas, compete in Japan. So to me, it's like, I don't have any room. I don't have room for baseball.

02:04:21 Speaker_06
It's interesting, man. You've had a front row seat to watching that sport become as dominant as it is. At the same time, you're watching the podcast world blow up in a really similar way.

02:04:36 Speaker_02
Well, the UFC blew up first. See, I was a fan of the UFC in the very, very beginning, and it got me into jujitsu. So in 96, I started taking jujitsu. 94, I found out about the UFC. I've, you know, kept it in my head for a little bit.

02:04:50 Speaker_02
I was still kickboxing at the time, just not fighting anymore, but just training. I was training at a bunch of different places in North Hollywood, this place called the Jet Center in Van Nuys before that went under.

02:05:00 Speaker_02
So I was just interested in martial arts always. And then the UFC came along and I was super interested in it, but I didn't really have a lot. I was on news radio at the time. It was very difficult to have the time to start training.

02:05:11 Speaker_02
And then in 96, I started training. And so I started working for the UFC in 97. And that was when it was banned from cable. You could only get it on direct TV. And we had to do these shows in like Dothan, Alabama, where you took a propeller plane.

02:05:26 Speaker_02
It was fucking hell. It was no money either.

02:05:29 Speaker_06
This is 97?

02:05:30 Speaker_02
Mhm, 97.

02:05:30 Speaker_06
And is Dana?

02:05:31 Speaker_02
Bare knuckle. Dana was not involved yet.

02:05:33 Speaker_06
When did Dana get involved? 2001.

02:05:35 Speaker_02
So I'm on Fear Factor at the time, and one of the things, me and my friend Eddie Bravo, who was also a big fan from back in the day, and he taught me jujitsu, when we were first really into it, when we would go to like Louisiana, the only places that would sanction these fights, they were bare knuckle, people wore shoes, you could grab their shorts, it was like crazy rules.

02:05:59 Speaker_02
And we said, you know what it would take? These billionaires who love the sport and dump a ton of money into it. That's what it would take. Someone would have to dump a ton of money into it.

02:06:09 Speaker_02
And then along comes Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta in 2001, these billionaires that happen to get in love with the sport. And so they buy the UFC. And then they start putting these shows together. And then I meet Dana.

02:06:21 Speaker_02
And then I started asking Dana, have you ever heard about this guy? Did you ever see this guy fight in Japan? You ever heard of this Russian dude? And I started asking him about fighters. Like, you should try to get these guys.

02:06:32 Speaker_02
And he's like, do you want to do commentary? And then next thing you know, I'm a commentator for the UFC. OK.

02:06:40 Speaker_06
This is just a very weird triangulating.

02:06:43 Speaker_02
They didn't even have any money at the time because they were hemorrhaging money. So I did the first 13 shows for free.

02:06:48 Speaker_06
And back to the art thing, you must be willing to give it away. Whatever it is you love, you must be willing to give it away for a time, at least.

02:06:58 Speaker_02
Well, for me, money has always been fun coupons. And so I was on Fear Factor, so I had plenty of fun coupons. So my thought was like, oh, I have money. I don't have to worry about money right now. Like, I'll just do this. Yeah, this would be fun to do.

02:07:11 Speaker_06
Nevertheless, you know, I mean it was the same thing with dirty jobs once that thing lit up I had to be willing to to sign a contract. It was probably illegal I mean, it was such a ridiculous contract the way they own you so yeah, isn't it crazy?

02:07:24 Speaker_06
It's like no money, but yeah, but if it's a hit if it sticks we have you for 10 years or you renegotiate my ace in the hole with dirty jobs was

02:07:35 Speaker_06
Technically I was the host and I can host that show without doing the thing in the show that made people watch Which was actually do the work.

02:07:44 Speaker_06
Yeah, there's no contract that can force you to bite the balls off a sheet right right you you have to be willing to do that and so I I was able to fix that but Dana I'm trying to remember what year this would have been when did the ultimate fighter 2005 okay, so in 2004

02:08:04 Speaker_06
Dirty jobs was on the air. It was in that weird space where we didn't know if it was gonna be a hit or What? But I was narrating all kinds of stuff for this guy Craig Poligian

02:08:17 Speaker_06
And I walked into Craig's office in Hollywood, and Dana was sitting in there. I had no idea who he was. I just walked in to say hi. And Dana kind of knew me, or recognized me.

02:08:30 Speaker_06
And Craig said, hey, this guy, Mike, he's narrating American Chopper, American Hot Rod. He just goes down the list, and Dana says, say something. And I said, previously on The Ultimate Fighter. And he said, fine, you'll be great. I do 10 seasons.

02:08:53 Speaker_02
That sounds like Dana. He said, say something. Yeah, that's hilarious. It was great. Yeah. That's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting how things happen like that, you know?

02:09:03 Speaker_06
Well, you were gonna, you know, you wouldn't be sitting here now if your lease wasn't up or whatever.

02:09:08 Speaker_02
Yeah, I probably wouldn't. I would have gone back to New York.

02:09:11 Speaker_06
I think the art thing, we should not be done with that yet. There's something, I'm thinking about the clips you were playing, what do they call boxing? The Sweet Science. So like art and science.

02:09:27 Speaker_06
I think anybody who's passionate about what they do can approach what they do like a scientist or like an artist. Or maybe both. Or maybe both. I think both. So I've got this foundation that evolved out of Dirty Jobs. It's called MicroWorks.

02:09:50 Speaker_06
And we award these scholarships to people who don't want to go to a four-year school, but who want to learn a trade. We've been doing it for 16 years. And I started doing it.

02:10:03 Speaker_06
in part for my granddad, but mostly because there are, what, eight million jobs now that don't require a four-year degree, and there's $1.7 trillion in student loans on the books, right, that is just bananas, and we've got these huge shortages in the skilled trades.

02:10:27 Speaker_06
So I spent a lot of time talking about How that happened and what might be done to fix it. But regarding art, it's like, you're old enough to remember wood shop and metal shop. Before it was shop, it was It wasn't just vo-tech. It turned into vo-tech.

02:10:48 Speaker_06
But before it was vo-tech, it was the vocational arts. That's what they called it. And so, we didn't just get rid of the vocational arts. We started with the language, and we took art out of it. And that's when it became VOTEC.

02:11:06 Speaker_06
And then there were a bunch of other acronyms and abbreviations and hyphenations and so forth.

02:11:10 Speaker_02
Well, there's also a weird distortion in our society where we have decided that we place a higher value on someone spending an enormous amount on education for a job that doesn't pay nearly as much as the education cost, where you're burdened with debt doing a job where you have to work your way up a corporate ladder that might be hell over becoming a carpenter.

02:11:33 Speaker_02
Over building a house everybody needs a fucking house over being a plumber And if you're a guy who can figure out how to do good carpentry if you understand how to use tools You're taught properly you have a good apprenticeship.

02:11:46 Speaker_02
You can make an incredible living. It's very satisfying. It's skilled it's it's it's a job that is creative it's skillful and When you're done, you bring satisfaction to other people that live in that house. There's a great benefit to it.

02:12:03 Speaker_02
But our society has got this distorted view of tradesmen. And it's a really dumb thing. Because it fucks you up. Because if you're a kid...

02:12:13 Speaker_02
And you go through the university system, you get a degree that's kind of useless, but then you get a job and you're making $60,000 a year, and you're like, oh my god, I have $200,000 in student loans, and I'm doing a job that's not very satisfying, and I'm kind of stuck.

02:12:27 Speaker_02
I'm working my way up, but it's going to take a long time before I make enough money where I'm not burdened by this. Or you could have a successful construction company by then.

02:12:37 Speaker_02
I mean, you could get a small business loan, and you could start hiring other people. You could have trucks with your name on it. I know people who've done that. They live very well. And it doesn't mean you're dumb.

02:12:52 Speaker_02
A lot of these people that live very well are very self-educated. They read books, they watch documentaries, they're interesting people.

02:12:59 Speaker_02
But we've got this bizarre thing in our head that if you didn't go to a school and get a degree, you must be a dumb person. It's weird, and it's not smart. It's not good for anybody to think that way.

02:13:14 Speaker_06
Well, you know, I very rarely play the devil's advocate in this argument, but I do think I know why it happened, or at least how.

02:13:24 Speaker_06
And I was in high school in the late 70s, and there was a very concerted push for what we call higher ed, which, by the way, already sets the table, right? If it's higher ed over here, I guess we have lower ed over here. The language is awful.

02:13:43 Speaker_06
But the PR, and to be fair, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, we needed more doctors, we needed more engineers, we needed more people matriculating through four-year schools. But what happens with PR, at least from what I've seen, is that it always goes too far.

02:14:00 Speaker_06
And it wasn't enough just to make a persuasive case for that path. We had to do it at the expense of the jobs you're talking about. So if you don't go this way,

02:14:10 Speaker_06
You're gonna wind up turning a wrench with a giant plumbers butt crack and some other ridiculous trope So it's a lot of stereotypes and stigmas and myths and misperceptions that started to swirl around the trades and that you know, I don't know when it happened, but I I

02:14:28 Speaker_02
Especially where you grow up like, you know, if you grow up in a place that's highly educated Massachusetts where I was Boston very very educated place Yeah, so if you were a person that pursued the trades you were you know, probably a failure This is like all you could do because you couldn't make it in school.

02:14:45 Speaker_02
I

02:14:45 Speaker_06
And yet, you loved this old house.

02:14:48 Speaker_02
Yeah.

02:14:48 Speaker_06
Which is a love letter to the trades.

02:14:50 Speaker_02
It really is. Every single one. I love watching people make things.

02:14:54 Speaker_06
Yeah.

02:14:54 Speaker_02
Even dumb things. There was a guy, I think it was a PBS show, where he would make tools and do stuff the way people did way back in the day. He'd make his own planer.

02:15:07 Speaker_07
Oh yeah.

02:15:07 Speaker_02
And he would make furniture and shit. I didn't have any desire to make furniture, but I loved watching this guy because he was really into making furniture. It was his art. He was yeah, he was an artist. Yeah, and he was authentic.

02:15:20 Speaker_02
He actually loved it You could tell it wasn't like this is like a scam like I know what I'll do Yeah, take ancient tools and figure it out. No, this guy really was into it

02:15:31 Speaker_06
Well, what's happened there, for me anyway, is that I, I mean, after 16 years of it, I can tell a pretty good story anecdotally.

02:15:40 Speaker_06
But now, I'm able to go back and talk to people who we helped, what, five, six years ago, with like maybe a welding certification. And it's amazing when you say, hey, how's it going? And they say, how's it going? I'll tell you how it's going.

02:15:56 Speaker_06
$210,000 a year. I bought a van. I hired my buddy who's a welder. Then I hired a plumber. Then I got two HVAC guys and an electrician. We're doing $3.5 million a year. Got no debt.

02:16:09 Speaker_06
So like my job is to is to talk to that guy and and I do that a lot on my podcast It's just like I just want to hear yours I want to hear stories of people who prospered as a result of mastering a skill that's in demand right and then maybe applied some level of either artistry or Entrepreneurship or the willingness to move that's a big one, too You know where you go where the work is or you know, and so it's it's really become it's why Bobby Kennedy called me

02:16:40 Speaker_06
back in February, you know, he was like, hey man, this micro works thing, you want to make it macro works? And I said, yeah, sure. What do you have in mind?

02:16:50 Speaker_06
And that's, I don't know how, I don't know if you knew this, but we had this whole conversation about like running together.

02:16:57 Speaker_01
Really?

02:16:58 Speaker_06
Oh yeah. No, he, he asked if I wanted to be vice president.

02:17:03 Speaker_02
Oh geez, Louise, what'd you say?

02:17:05 Speaker_06
Dude, I was in Munich. I was in Munich in January, and he had called me earlier just to talk really generally about the middle class.

02:17:19 Speaker_06
Because he's like, look, what you've done with the foundation, my campaign is a lot about that, and I'd love to talk to you more about it. So I kind of put him in the category of elected officials, politicians who might be useful. I'm not that guy.

02:17:37 Speaker_06
But I said, yeah, look, man, I'd be happy to chat. Well, he called back. And you know Gavin DeBacker, right? They did a dive, dude. This was very strange for me. They did a deep dive.

02:17:53 Speaker_06
And when I got back to the Bay Area, he invited me down to his home to meet, you know, the cats. They were all there. And we talked for like three hours. And I'm looking over my shoulder, honestly, like I'm being punked.

02:18:12 Speaker_06
Like, which one of my crazy friends put you up to this? But he was serious, and I was weirdly flattered, maybe. I knew I couldn't say yes, but I was so interested in what his thinking was.

02:18:32 Speaker_06
And we spoke for a few hours, and then we stayed in touch for the better part of the next month. And I actually really, for the first time ever, just tried to try it on. You know? And it didn't fit, you know? Right.

02:18:47 Speaker_06
I would never do well in an office or in a bureaucracy.

02:18:51 Speaker_02
He called me up once to ask me who I thought would be, like, good vice president. I was terrified he was going to ask me.

02:18:57 Speaker_06
Oh, yeah?

02:18:58 Speaker_02
I was terrified. I was like, please don't ask that. Because I know he asked, well, he asked Aaron Rodgers.

02:19:05 Speaker_06
Yeah.

02:19:06 Speaker_02
Which is crazy.

02:19:06 Speaker_06
Yeah. I literally heard the sound of my sphincter slamming shut. Like I just tensed up and I was like, oh That's jobs insanity, but man, I'll tell you man he It was a really He was very gracious and very direct, and I tried to be too.

02:19:31 Speaker_06
And I told him, I'm like, look, the infectious disease thing, I get that. The middle class thing, I totally get that. The forever wars, I get all that.

02:19:41 Speaker_06
And then he's like, Mike, do you understand 77% of the youth today wouldn't qualify to get into the armed forces? Do you understand what the crisis is we face right now? Never mind health.

02:19:58 Speaker_06
Health is its own thing, and I've got lots of things to say about it, but fitness. just basic fitness, you know. His uncle was starring in commercials 45 years ago that were literally, we'd call it fat shaming today. You know, challenging.

02:20:15 Speaker_06
I just talked to him the day before yesterday and he said, you know, Google any photo of Yankee Stadium sold out from the 60s or even the 70s and try and find the fat people. They're not there, and if they are, they're hard to find.

02:20:35 Speaker_06
Do it today, they're impossible to miss. Something colossally horrible has happened. Anyway, he was very passionate about all that. It's an important message. It is an important message.

02:20:48 Speaker_02
And it gets lost in this idea of being a compassionate person that allows people to just be their authentic self. And there's nothing wrong with being fat. There's nothing wrong with being big. You're being lied to. You're robbing your life of vitality.

02:21:03 Speaker_02
That's just the way it is. And I'm sorry if you're already there. But it doesn't help anybody to pretend that you're not there. And the only way we get out of this is we try to figure out what happened between 1960 and 2024. Well, we can figure it out.

02:21:21 Speaker_02
It's not Columbo. The evidence is all there. We know what the ingredients are that are bad for you. We know what we've done to the food supply. We know what we've done. It's readily available. It's what you eat.

02:21:33 Speaker_06
When you say we, though, I mean... Human beings, collective, the collective intelligence... What percentage of this country do you think understands?

02:21:41 Speaker_02
What percentage has been informed? This is part of the problem. That's what I'm asking. And this is why it benefits to have someone like that in office. Most people aren't aware of it. I've had a lot of conversations with people.

02:21:49 Speaker_02
They have this really distorted idea of nutrition. and what's important and what you need, but what's good to thrive, what's optimum versus what is just going to keep you alive. These people think, oh, you just need a balanced diet.

02:22:03 Speaker_02
No, you need to take vitamins. If you do not take vitamins, you will not have full optimization of your body. What do I want to take with D, by the way? Is it magnesium? You want to take magnesium, and you want to take K, too.

02:22:15 Speaker_02
You want to take vitamin K, magnesium, and, you know, there's some arguments from other stuff, too, that would also enhance it. But you definitely need vitamin D. Almost everybody does.

02:22:26 Speaker_02
And if you live in a cold climate in the wintertime, you know, a buddy of mine did his residency in, I think it was Boston.

02:22:33 Speaker_02
And he was saying people would come in and they'd have undetectable levels of vitamin D because they were just never in the sun and they didn't supplement at all.

02:22:42 Speaker_02
And there's some vitamin D in milk when they enrich it with vitamin D. But the reality is you need vitamin D and you need quite a bit of it. And if you want an optimal immune system that's really healthy, it's imperative. It's really important.

02:22:56 Speaker_02
And there's a lot of other things that are really important. Vitamin C is really important. You know, vitamin B is very important, bunch of different Bs. You need essential fatty acids. They're very important. You need all these things.

02:23:06 Speaker_02
If you don't have these things, your body won't function right.

02:23:09 Speaker_06
Do you think that the basic fear and conversation around skin cancer and the lotions and the coverings and the sunscreens and, I mean, to what extent do you think people are not getting vitamin D because they've been scared out of the sun?

02:23:28 Speaker_02
There's a lot of that, for sure. I mean, the best way to get vitamin D, most certainly, is from the sun. That's the way your body's naturally designed to get vitamin D. You're supposed to be outside all the time, and it'll make you healthier.

02:23:40 Speaker_02
Physically, it's good for you. It's actually a hormone that your body produces. Vitamin D is a hormone.

02:23:48 Speaker_02
It's or a precursor to a hormone I guess if you take it orally but what it's doing to your body like George St Pierre when he was fighting would tan and He would tan specifically not to look good because it's actually better for your health and fitness You get more vitamin D that way.

02:24:04 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah, and there's there's a reality to that That's why people are really fucking depressed when they live in the Pacific Northwest because it's raining all the time You're not getting enough vitamin D. It's actually bad for your psyche and

02:24:15 Speaker_02
It's bad for your mind. It's bad for your health. Again, overall vitality. If you want to have strong vitality, you need to eat nutritious food and take vitamins. And you need to exercise. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

02:24:29 Speaker_02
You need those three things, 100%.

02:24:32 Speaker_06
No shortcuts. No shortcuts. I don't know that probably not many silver linings to the lockdown, but I did. I started walking. I've always been active, but I kind of backed off of the gym as I got older and started walking every morning for eight miles.

02:24:49 Speaker_06
And then, you know, Mike Easter, he became a friend, the comfort crisis. And I started rucking.

02:24:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, and so that's great. Yeah, it's a big proponent of that big time.

02:25:03 Speaker_06
Yeah, in fact when Bobby called it was fun He's hard to understand sometimes and I was impossible to understand cuz I was gasping for breath I got 65 pounds on my back walking eight miles every morning. He's like, what are you doing? I'm dying

02:25:18 Speaker_06
I'm rocking but um Yeah, I just I think it I think there's really something important in that book that that Easter wrote and and and I think our It's not the specifics of what we can do this idea of what are the Japanese call it?

02:25:38 Speaker_06
I'm a so I'm a soggy A quest or a challenge of sorts that you should Well, you should challenge yourself to do every so often.

02:25:48 Speaker_06
Yeah, and one of the One of the criterion is you should have a 50% chance of failure Right, so you it's a it's a real push into uncertainty and discomfort And that's why I rock.

02:26:06 Speaker_02
It's uncomfortable. Voluntary discomfort. Yes. Yeah. I think that is an exercise for that part of your mind the same way cardiovascular exercise works for your cardiovascular system. I think discomfort exercise is a real thing.

02:26:20 Speaker_02
And Andrew Huberman has talked about this. There's actually a specific area of the brain when you enact voluntary discomfort and do things you don't want to do all the time, it actually grows.

02:26:31 Speaker_02
Remember what that is remember what he called that part of the brain, but uh, you know, he speaks about it Of course, he's a neuroscientist.

02:26:37 Speaker_02
Yeah much more eloquently, but I think that's real and I think It also makes regular life a lot easier That was one of my favorite things of jiu-jitsu when I found out it makes regular life easy because it's regular life is not easy

02:26:51 Speaker_02
Anterior mid-cingulate cortex. That's what it is. Engaging in challenging activities can stimulate and grow this region, which is crucial for learning or, excuse me, leaning into and overcoming difficulties. Yeah.

02:27:04 Speaker_02
And if your life is super easy and anything that comes up is a nightmare, it's probably be because you lack enough voluntary adversity to overcome uncomfortable moments. So uncomfortable moments are rare.

02:27:18 Speaker_02
And when you encounter rare things, generally people like kind of have anxious moments encountering rare things.

02:27:24 Speaker_06
Well, anxiety is a form of discomfort. And it's not just pain. I think most people equate discomfort or uncomfortableness with physical pain, but the way Easter talks about it, it's also boredom.

02:27:40 Speaker_06
Being bored makes people super uncomfortable because we're so not used to.

02:27:45 Speaker_02
Especially today.

02:27:46 Speaker_06
Especially today. You can pick this damn thing up and instant access to 99% of the information.

02:27:51 Speaker_02
But you're robbing yourself of a lot of possible ideas.

02:27:54 Speaker_06
Sure. Yeah, because the best ideas come.

02:27:56 Speaker_02
Way bored when you're bored.

02:27:58 Speaker_02
I used to have some of my best ideas when I had no radio in my car Because I would just be driving and my best ideas would come while I was driving so instead of being entertained I would just be like thinking like you're constantly thinking yeah, you know and when you're involved in you know and

02:28:15 Speaker_02
Ordinary activity like driving where you're just so sort of like plugged in like hit your blinkers change lanes You're so plugged in so you're in like this weird mindset And then if there's no nothing entertaining you your mind just starts thinking about things right because you come up with great ideas your your mind Your brain will find whatever you send it Out to look for yeah, it'll just search and search until it finds it and if you don't give it anything

02:28:42 Speaker_06
then it'll look inward. It'll find something. Cold plunges, not comfortable. But if you can find a way to like it.

02:28:54 Speaker_02
I don't like it. I don't like it at all. I do it every day. I hate it. Yeah, but I love it when I get out. I the moment before I get in, I'm always like, can I talk myself out of doing this? I don't want to do this, right? It's fucking cold outside.

02:29:08 Speaker_02
It's 40 degrees outside. I'm climbing this 34 degree water. But but but because I do it, I know that I've already done something way more difficult than most of my day.

02:29:18 Speaker_06
I think there's a difference in knowing what the benefits are of a cold plunge, which would require you to do some research and do some reading and do some thinking and so forth, versus just saying, okay, I know there's some benefit.

02:29:32 Speaker_06
I don't actually need to know specifically what it is. I just need to know that there's an overarching benefit in embracing the suck. Yeah. And if I do that a couple of times a day, I think I'm going to be better for it. And that's useful.

02:29:50 Speaker_06
That's been useful to me.

02:29:51 Speaker_02
That's useful, but it also is beneficial physically. So it's both things. And I think that's the case with exercise, too. That's also the case with sauna.

02:30:00 Speaker_02
Difficult things that are also very beneficial physically they seem to go hand-in-hand Because it's the hormetic effect your body's freaking out because of the cold and that's why it produces all these Cold shock proteins and that's why it produces all these anti-inflammatories your body just feels better when you get out the endorphin rush you get

02:30:20 Speaker_02
You know, the norepinephrine, this flood of these chemicals that last for hours, ramps up your dopamine by like 200%, and it lasts for hours. Like you genuinely feel better. So there's all that.

02:30:35 Speaker_02
It's also good for recovery, muscle soreness, and just general inflammation. There's a lot of like benefits. But that's the same with exercise, right? It's difficult to do. It's hard to do. But if you can do it, man, you'll be stronger, healthier.

02:30:47 Speaker_02
You'll feel better. It's like you've got to go through that suck to get those benefits. And people don't like that. And so they come up with a bunch of reasons why you don't need that. That's just a fad. That's just a this. They all look like shit.

02:31:00 Speaker_02
Everybody who says that, they all look like shit. They all talk like pussies. They're all just, they're cowards. They're afraid to get in there. They don't like getting in there.

02:31:08 Speaker_02
They don't like that other people get in there every day, and they don't get in there every day. So they come up with a reason why getting in there is not really worth it. It's all a bunch of hogwash. It's the latest fad. It's this, it's that.

02:31:18 Speaker_06
And yet, look at the stadium 50 years ago and look at it today. The evidence demands a verdict. Something awful has happened. It's like the difference between being hungry and feeling hungry. That's something else I think about a lot.

02:31:36 Speaker_06
I mean, how often do we say, maybe you don't, but how often do you hear, God, I'm starving? I'm famished. No, you're not.

02:31:45 Speaker_02
You're really not.

02:31:46 Speaker_06
You can't possibly be.

02:31:48 Speaker_02
Yeah. Talk to a fighter that's trying to make weight. Those guys are famished. Those guys, they have no water in their body. For the week before, they're living in hell. They're living in hell.

02:31:59 Speaker_02
Some of those guys, they start their cut like four or five days out. Crazy, that's starving.

02:32:04 Speaker_01
You gotta really love it, man.

02:32:05 Speaker_02
And that's only, you're voluntary. Voluntarily starving. You know, it's not real starving. Real starving is like you might not be able to eat. You might not be able to feed your kids. You're just using willpower to starve.

02:32:16 Speaker_02
That's so different than at any other time in history. It's a different feeling. You know, like if you're a person that's making your way across the country and the wagon breaks. Donner party, table for two. Oh yeah, and that's real starving.

02:32:29 Speaker_02
Real starving.

02:32:30 Speaker_06
Did you ever read, there's a book by Nathaniel Philbrick, it's called In the Heart of the Sea?

02:32:35 Speaker_02
No.

02:32:36 Speaker_06
Oh, man. This is the true story of the sinking of a whale ship called the Essex, right? And the sinking of this ship inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. And what happened was in, I think it was 1821, the whaling industry in Nantucket.

02:32:59 Speaker_06
So fascinating this Nantucket back then was basically run by women Because the men would go out for two sometimes three years at a time Jesus hunting right whales, which are just sperm whales.

02:33:12 Speaker_06
They call years years Yeah, they were called right whales because they were the right whales to kill right and in that time It was a great source of energy for the country all the lamplights burned on whale oil They were like schools.

02:33:32 Speaker_06
There were so many. This book will, I mean, it's rich in a lot of different ways. It's where they got the expression steely Dan, actually.

02:33:43 Speaker_06
It was, because it was just the women, and it was a device used for pleasuring themselves, because the men were all out to sea.

02:33:53 Speaker_01
Oh my God.

02:33:54 Speaker_06
So they'd use a steely Dan.

02:33:57 Speaker_01
You want to talk about hard lives.

02:33:59 Speaker_06
The the business Whatever it takes to shoot the elk and get it down from the mountain. I get it that that's a thing but when you read through the real process of getting a sperm whale out of the ocean

02:34:16 Speaker_06
alongside the ship, and then onto the ship, and the cutting of the blubber, and the cauldrons that burn 24-7 on the deck, and the blubber that's put into the cauldrons.

02:34:29 Speaker_02
So they're just making this rendered fat.

02:34:31 Speaker_06
They're rendering the fat in the oil in real time.

02:34:35 Speaker_02
Oh, wow.

02:34:35 Speaker_06
Because they have to or it'll rot. That's right. And so they just load up the boats.

02:34:40 Speaker_02
Whoa.

02:34:42 Speaker_06
So what happens, and this is not really a- Are they eating the whales, too?

02:34:45 Speaker_01
No. No? No.

02:34:47 Speaker_06
What are they eating? Oh, they've got their hardtack, mostly. Hardtack is just kind of like- Crackers. Crackers, biscuits with no real taste at all. It was the- Oh, they're probably sick. It was the currency. You're used to anything.

02:35:03 Speaker_06
Probably got scurvy, you know what I mean? But these guys would go all around the world. And this boat, the Essex, was a couple thousand miles off the coast of Venezuela.

02:35:15 Speaker_06
And what happens is that it's the ship, is the main ship with the guys on it, and then when you see a whale, right, you basically put the whale boats in the water. And these are smaller, maybe 22 feet long, and men row them, right?

02:35:31 Speaker_06
And so you harpoon the whale, and then you hang on and go for what they called a, A Nantucket sleigh ride. So the whale would just drag the... What if the whale goes under? It can't go under much further. It can't pull two boats down. And it doesn't.

02:35:47 Speaker_06
They tend to swim in a straight line after they've been harpooned. So you just hang on. And then when it tires itself out, you row it and you back to the whale ship. Do they kill it first? Well, no. No, it's killed back at the ship, typically.

02:36:04 Speaker_06
You don't want to kill it when you're a mile from the ship, because you've got to drag it back.

02:36:09 Speaker_01
They didn't know how smart whales were back then, either.

02:36:11 Speaker_06
We didn't know anything.

02:36:13 Speaker_01
Isn't that crazy that that's only a couple hundred years ago?

02:36:15 Speaker_06
Isn't that nuts? A couple hundred years ago, the ocean was filled with whales. Filled with them, and like that.

02:36:23 Speaker_02
Because if you look now, they're hard to find, and nothing hunts them. No, I never really thought about it.

02:36:31 Speaker_06
They were everywhere.

02:36:32 Speaker_02
I mean, I knew about it, but I never thought about it. I never, I mean, we've talked a lot about the, um, the decimation of the fish population in the ocean, about like 90 plus percent of all the big fish are gone, which is really nuts.

02:36:46 Speaker_02
But I never really thought about it that way when it comes to whales.

02:36:49 Speaker_06
Well, you can make a really good and really controversial case. They made a movie.

02:36:52 Speaker_00
Ron Howard made a movie.

02:36:53 Speaker_06
Yeah, Ron Howard made a movie. It's amazing. Look, I mean, they were everywhere.

02:37:01 Speaker_06
So these guys harpoon one that's so great from from the whale boat then they get tugged along And then While they're out, maybe a mile from the ship the mate of the male of the whale that was harpooned and

02:37:22 Speaker_06
starts ramming the ship, rams it three times, sinks it. Now you got a couple dozen guys in whale boats 2,000 miles off the coast of South America with no supplies.

02:37:41 Speaker_06
So what happens and you this is all in the in the preface, but the story basically starts when one of the whale boats is discovered not far from I think is Venezuela and The guys look over the the gunnel of their boat and in the whale boat.

02:38:03 Speaker_06
It's just like a giant carcass It's just bleached bones all in it except for two quasi humans

02:38:11 Speaker_06
One in the stern and one in the bow each skeletons huddled up staring each other with wild eyes Just waiting to see who would die next so they could eat them. Yeah, and there were rules they were almost like cookbooks That were very common.

02:38:31 Speaker_01
How many people were on these boats? Oh

02:38:33 Speaker_06
Mmm, double-check me Jamie, but I think there were probably a dozen on each one many family members It was a cabin boy named John coffin.

02:38:42 Speaker_06
I remember and there were I mean a lot of these guys were related, you know And and they they were dear friends and family. They lived together on Nantucket each other.

02:38:52 Speaker_01
They each other man How long was it before they discovered them?

02:38:57 Speaker_06
They were at sea adrift. I think for the better part of three months. I That's him, Nate Philbrook. In 1820, the whale ship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale, leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than 90 days in three tiny boats.

02:39:17 Speaker_00
When did this movie come out? 2015 for the movie. The manuscript was found in 1960, verified in 1980, released in 84.

02:39:28 Speaker_06
You want to take a deep dive go to the like the whaling museum up in New England the stuff is this I mean in the day There were strict protocols on how to eat your friend How to prepare your friend for consumption on the spot, or did they have them prepared?

02:39:47 Speaker_06
They devised on the spot there was what the rules no no they were written. It was it was like a maritime code and

02:39:54 Speaker_02
So they kind of knew that this was a possibility.

02:39:58 Speaker_06
They knew it was a certainty, they just didn't know for whom. This was common.

02:40:05 Speaker_06
To find yourself with a group of people hopelessly marooned, whether you're on a boat or an island with nothing to eat at all, there were protocols, pretty strict protocols on how to draw lots to decide who would go first.

02:40:22 Speaker_06
How to kill the person who would go first. Who not to eat based on the degree of your relation. So like brothers are definitely off. But cousins, not optimal. So like people were being prepared for consumption.

02:40:44 Speaker_06
I mean I can't imagine how you would make a fire out there. Unspeakable. That's interesting. Owen Chase, right?

02:40:56 Speaker_02
The men spent over three months at sea and had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Captain Pollard and Charles Ramsdell were discovered gnawing on the bones of their shipmates in one boat.

02:41:05 Speaker_02
Owen Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson also survived to tell the tale. In all, seven sailors were consumed.

02:41:13 Speaker_02
Whoa, dude boy see this is why nonfiction is the best I know it's nauseating but I mean that book at a point in time you got to go I might wind up in hell before I starve to death because I've eaten everyone else right well you're knowing you're starving to death and you've already eaten everyone else

02:41:38 Speaker_02
Oh my God, because there's gonna be one last person.

02:41:41 Speaker_06
And then there was one.

02:41:43 Speaker_02
Oh, oh God. I know.

02:41:47 Speaker_06
I know.

02:41:48 Speaker_02
Reality is so terrifying in that regard that we have, you know, we're so fortunate that there's so much food available. The poorest amongst us are fat. But the reality is, if that cut off, it would be real desperate, real quick.

02:42:06 Speaker_02
Most people get really hungry after five hours, you know?

02:42:09 Speaker_06
They feel really hungry. I found a description if you'd like to read it.

02:42:12 Speaker_02
No! Okay. It's not that bad. Okay.

02:42:16 Speaker_02
The crew, according to Chase, separated limbs from his body and cut all the flesh from the bones, after which we opened the body, took out the heart, and then closed it again, sewed it up as decently as we could, and committed it to the sea.

02:42:29 Speaker_02
They then ate the man's organs. Soon they began to draw lots to see who would be shot and eaten next, a custom of maroon sailors dating back to the 17th century. Three men in one boat survived and two in another.

02:42:42 Speaker_02
The three men who remained behind on Henderson Island were also rescued after surviving on eggs and crabs for nearly four months. Boy.

02:42:51 Speaker_06
And this is why we have Moby Dick. Wow. This is why the greatest American novel, arguably of all time, was written. Because Melville came from that part of the world, and he understood the stakes of hunting whales.

02:43:06 Speaker_06
And he understood the absolute imperative need to get energy, you can make a really interesting and controversial case around how the fossil fuel industry saved the whales.

02:43:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, I've heard this before.

02:43:23 Speaker_06
Because had that not happened in Pennsylvania, in Titusville, not long after this, we'd have hunted them into absolute oblivion.

02:43:32 Speaker_02
Well, we almost did that to mammals in North America. Market hunting. There used to be elk in every state in the country. There used to be deer everywhere. And we basically hunted them into oblivion. The buffalo is the best example of that, of course.

02:43:48 Speaker_06
What the hell is the matter with us, man?

02:43:49 Speaker_02
Oh, we're fucked up. We don't see consequences. We see what's in front of us right now and what we need to do. And back then, they didn't really have a real understanding of what would happen. That had never been done before.

02:44:01 Speaker_02
No one had just showed up at a continent filled with mammals and just started decimating them. There wasn't like a history of that. It was also the invent of the firearm was fairly recent. So it was a lot easier to get these animals.

02:44:12 Speaker_02
And then they had the Henry rifle, so the long-range rifles. So they were able to shoot buffalo from a distance. And then they, you know, for a lot of them, they only used their tongues. They pickled their tongues and sent them back east.

02:44:24 Speaker_06
I was in Custer a couple of weeks ago for a buffalo roundup. Wow Man, this was a kick. This is So this is Western, South Dakota not far from crazy horse and Rushmore, you know, we worked on a crazy horse for dirty jobs.

02:44:44 Speaker_06
We did an episode mean the sculpture.

02:44:46 Speaker_02
Yeah Sculpture is weird because there's no real drawing or painting or anything and no photographs of crazy horse No, nobody knows really what he looked like

02:44:55 Speaker_06
Well, they're working from a model that seems to have been blessed by all the appropriate parties. But they started working on this thing 50 years ago. And it's going to take another 40 before they're done.

02:45:08 Speaker_06
I worked on the fingernail of Crazy Horse with a whole crew.

02:45:12 Speaker_02
What does it look like now? I haven't seen it in a long time.

02:45:14 Speaker_06
Oh, you'll love this. It's so mine. But you can take all of Rushmore, all foreheads, and put it on the forehead. Of Crazy Horse.

02:45:25 Speaker_02
Wow.

02:45:25 Speaker_06
That's how big this thing is.

02:45:27 Speaker_02
Wasn't it like one family's undertaking?

02:45:30 Speaker_06
Yeah. Gorchek.

02:45:32 Speaker_02
Go to that last picture that you just had. That one right there. So that shows before and after. That shows where it was a while back and where it is now.

02:45:40 Speaker_06
Look at his finger in the lower right.

02:45:42 Speaker_02
That's what you worked on?

02:45:43 Speaker_06
Yeah, and I scaled down his forehead to do basically some tidying up of his nostrils and whatnot while we were there. Wow.

02:45:53 Speaker_02
That's crazy how big that is.

02:45:54 Speaker_06
It's massive. It's absolutely massive. And yeah, there was one guy, Korchak was his name, and he was an immigrant, and he loved the Indian people. And that's the model there at the right, yeah. That's what it's going to look like?

02:46:11 Speaker_06
That's what we're shooting for.

02:46:12 Speaker_01
Wow.

02:46:13 Speaker_06
And it's going to take another half a century, probably.

02:46:16 Speaker_01
Wow. That's incredible.

02:46:19 Speaker_06
You know, it's funny, man.

02:46:20 Speaker_02
It's very controversial amongst Native American communities, though, right?

02:46:24 Speaker_02
I don't know it is you know, I think there's some there's a part of is the thing that crazy horse didn't want to be photographed Yeah, you know, he really believed that cameras were like stole your soul.

02:46:35 Speaker_02
Yeah, that was a belief back then sure Wayne might be honest come well you have this novel thing where no one's ever seen it before and you take an image of someone like that and

02:46:47 Speaker_02
Like it diminishes you also human beings at that point in time were so horrible to each other and these settlers had done Essentially demonic things. Yeah to the population just with diseases just bringing diseases.

02:47:01 Speaker_02
Yeah, so of course they would say what are they doing now? This is the fucking coup de gras. They're gonna steal our soul with this fucking box and Big thing goes off.

02:47:11 Speaker_06
You got to stand still this guy Korchak. He was so Brilliant on so many levels. Yeah, I think he had 13 kids and that they were basically his workforce he built into the rock the staircases and that they needed to take to get to this space.

02:47:30 Speaker_06
The work ethic is mind boggling what they did. And he was a real friend to the Native Americans. And this was a love letter for them and to them. And who was Crazy Horse's, was it Sitting Bear, maybe?

02:47:46 Speaker_06
I forget, but he had all of the, he had enough blessings of the requisite players to embark on this thing.

02:47:55 Speaker_02
Well, I think anything anytime you have some enormous thing you're gonna have controversy Well, you're gonna people that don't like it that do like it.

02:48:04 Speaker_06
You know this for sure what you do, but the difference I mean for me I called when we brought

02:48:10 Speaker_06
We brought dirty jobs back during the lockdowns because I just felt like I Wanted to be I've wanted to be the first show back on the TV You know that was that was shooting and this was one of the first things that that we did, but I started by calling Rushmore

02:48:27 Speaker_06
And I'm not telling you this story to make anybody sound bad, but it really just Was kind of appalling you know I said look I want to bring my crew and and I I'm really I want to tend to this statue this statuary this monument and

02:48:44 Speaker_06
At the time, the headlines were filled with statues being pulled down and being disrespected for any number of reasons, right?

02:48:54 Speaker_06
I'm like, look, I think the Park Service does an amazing duty, and I want to meet the caretakers of our statuary, and I would love to

02:49:05 Speaker_06
work on this with the people who work on it and and they not only said no they were like are you are you crazy we would never we would never permit anything like that like I think they thought it was exploitative somehow and I'm like I want America to

02:49:24 Speaker_06
to learn the story of Rushmore. I want them to learn something about the people memorialized on it. I want them to meet the people who care for it. It's just a love letter to one of our monuments. But it was a hard no.

02:49:36 Speaker_06
And I really wanted to go to that part of the country. And so we, I knew Crazy Horse was nearby. And the answer was, oh, yeah, come on out anytime. And the difference, of course, was Crazy Horse isn't being built with a penny of federal money.

02:49:51 Speaker_06
It has no federal oversight. It's very personal to this family, and the people who are still in charge of it are true custodians of it. It's really interesting when you talk to people who are in charge of a thing that means a lot to other people.

02:50:12 Speaker_02
monumental in reality.

02:50:14 Speaker_06
Monumental monuments.

02:50:15 Speaker_02
Yeah.

02:50:15 Speaker_06
Yeah. I mean, it's some some people, I think, see it as a burden. Some as a challenge, some as an obligation. But for me, I you know, the vast majority of Americans are never going to see either one of those monuments in person. So to to show them.

02:50:31 Speaker_06
Right. More people will have just seen what Jamie put up here as a result of this, probably, than will visit in person. And that's amazing, dude.

02:50:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, that is amazing.

02:50:43 Speaker_06
When you think about a couple of guys smoking cigars and sipping a coffee and just passing the time, and all of a sudden, you're able to learn about the way they drew lots and where we got our energy from just a little while ago.

02:50:59 Speaker_06
This Buffalo Roundup I was telling you about, I mean, there were only a couple thousand of them. And when you think about the accounts of the day, where the Buffalo roam was as far as you could see, just thick.

02:51:17 Speaker_02
Do you know Dan Flores? Do you know who he is?

02:51:20 Speaker_06
Tell me.

02:51:20 Speaker_02
He wrote American Coyote and he wrote, what is it, Buffalo Diplomacy, Buffalo Ecology? Is that what it was?

02:51:28 Speaker_02
I forget, but the Buffalo premise is very fascinating because the numbers of Buffalo, he believes, but they were in such large numbers because so many Native Americans died out because of diseases.

02:51:42 Speaker_02
So the Native Americans would follow the buffalo, hunt them, and kill them. It takes a long time for gestation for a buffalo. So when the buffalo have new buffalo, it's a long time to repopulate.

02:51:53 Speaker_02
But if the Native Americans, 90% of them are wiped out by disease when the settlers came here. So there's no one hunting them for a long time. And so the populations grew immense.

02:52:04 Speaker_02
And so that this was not something that was reported when the first settlers got here, when the first people came to the first Europeans came to North America and made their way across the country. Never did they describe massive herds of buffalo.

02:52:18 Speaker_02
It wasn't a thing It wasn't a thing until after the Native American population had been decimated by disease and then the buffalo flourished and became overpopulated in a sense an Unnatural poppy because they didn't have to worry about wolves.

02:52:32 Speaker_02
They didn't have to worry. So when they first were here in Right?

02:52:36 Speaker_02
Buffalo existed far back before the ... There was a mass extinction of like 65% of North American mammals that coincided with the end of the Ice Age and probably had to do with the Younger Dryas impact, which is a theory about- The Cambrian thing, or was there-

02:52:56 Speaker_02
There's two different time periods that they attribute to ... There's a shower, an asteroid shower that we go to.

02:53:02 Speaker_02
If you really want to get into this, you should really look up Younger Dryas Impact Theory online, and then there's a guy named Randall Carlson, who's dedicated his life to

02:53:14 Speaker_02
Showing that this is probably what ended the ice age There's a bunch of science behind it in terms of like core samples and stuff they do that shows that there's asteroid impacts that happened all over the world during this particular time period and he thinks that coincided with the extinction of the woolly mammal the American lion a lot of different animals that just died off 65% of North American mammals died off during this time period and

02:53:39 Speaker_02
And you've got to think, like, when the buffalo existed back then, they existed with the North American lion, which was bigger than the African lion. It's the biggest lion ever. So they're getting jacked by these massive predators.

02:53:54 Speaker_02
And then you have this extinction event, and then you have humans start hunting them. And so humans now, horses have been reintroduced in North America by Europeans. Humans are on these horses, and then they're hunting these animals.

02:54:07 Speaker_02
Reintroduced, by the way, because horses originated in North America, including zebras. All horse species came from here. But that was the Bering Land Bridge, and things moved around.

02:54:18 Speaker_02
And when the mass extinction event happened, it killed off all the horses here. But then there was horses over there that they had kind of extirpated from America, brought them back in. And now Native Americans have horses.

02:54:30 Speaker_02
And so they are really effective at hunting buffalo. They get the numbers down to a number where when people are making their way across the country, they're not seeing them everywhere.

02:54:41 Speaker_02
And then you have this mass event where 90% of Native Americans die. Then you have millions of buffalo. This is what Dan Flores writes about.

02:54:51 Speaker_06
It's really interesting 1830 40 you'd have to go to whatever Yeah, I here's the tragedy for me I narrated a special about all that hmm. I can't remember it man. I Really, I mean, I I remember enough of it to know that I narrated it.

02:55:11 Speaker_06
That's what I would told you three hours ago I'm I don't Ken Burns one.

02:55:16 Speaker_02
Is that what you could have been?

02:55:17 Speaker_06
Yeah I know if it was Ken Burns. He he always hires a Peter Coyote.

02:55:22 Speaker_02
Oh Peter does all these guys great.

02:55:25 Speaker_06
Yeah, but I am that's what I meant earlier when I'm like, I I feel I I don't think there's anything wrong with me yet, but my bucket's full, too. And it's so annoying.

02:55:39 Speaker_06
Like, I was talking to a friend of mine just yesterday about how the universe works, which is a show I've been narrating for the Science Channel literally for 10 years.

02:55:50 Speaker_06
And he knows all of the information in the show, but he thinks because he heard me tell it to him that I know it too, but I don't. I'm just adjacent to it. I know just enough to keep a conversation on its feet, but it's this constant thing, man.

02:56:11 Speaker_06
I'm older than I've ever been, and it's just nagging at me now, because it's like, god damn it, I should know. I should have remembered more about Philbrick, I should have remembered more about...

02:56:25 Speaker_02
I don't think we're designed for it.

02:56:29 Speaker_02
And I think humans like yourself, this is kind of a new thing in terms of human history, people that are exposed to so many different things, so many different topics, so many different experts, so many different timelines and stories that you're dealing with.

02:56:43 Speaker_02
It's essentially a new thing with human beings. You know what Dunbar's number is? Dunbar's numbers the number of people that you can keep like in your mind memory memory, right? That's essentially born out of necessity and tribal life, right?

02:57:00 Speaker_02
So we essentially have the same brains and the same capacity same hard drive as people who lived in tribes 10,000 years ago. Yeah

02:57:08 Speaker_02
but we're still stuck with this hard drive with this world that has an endless supply of information and it's consistently bombarding you with new facts.

02:57:18 Speaker_06
I read that like Bill Clinton's number is Way high, like certain people's numbers. Oh, who they can keep in their head. Like the number of people you can keep.

02:57:28 Speaker_02
It probably expands just like the part of your brain expands when you do difficult things. It probably expands.

02:57:33 Speaker_06
There's a podcast, as you know, dedicated to what happened on your podcast. Didn't know that yeah, there's a podcast out there basically called experience.

02:57:43 Speaker_06
I don't know what it's called Experiencing the Joe Rogan experience or something because because there's too much information on your show right right There's just too much and people who love it get anxious because they can't process all of it and so like there's an ecosystem in other words there's a docent to bring it back to art and

02:58:03 Speaker_06
This is what we need. I think more than anything today. We need somebody like if you're gonna go to an art museum You need somebody to lead you through I do anyway somebody who can it helps it helps man if you're gonna go see

02:58:19 Speaker_06
If you're gonna go see a martial arts fight for the first time, if you're gonna go to the octagon, it'd be better to sit next to you than me. Right? Sure.

02:58:30 Speaker_02
But you'd be annoying. I'd have to say, you don't, okay. How much do you know why that hurts?

02:58:38 Speaker_06
Here, let me show you. Can you feel that? I'm just saying that I think more than ever before, people need a guide. They need somebody to make sense out of all the information. Because I don't think there's any, there's not much new information.

02:58:56 Speaker_06
It's just accessible in ways we've never seen.

02:58:58 Speaker_02
I think there's more. There's new information, too. How can there be? Because it's, information is, Acquired upon the consumption of all the other information like it's all Exponential piles on top of each other.

02:59:11 Speaker_02
It's it's not just Now we know because of the new information because of the information that we've acquired now we have a new understanding So that's new information you know, nutrition. There's constantly new information on nutrition.

02:59:25 Speaker_02
How's that possible? People have been eating forever because now we know more about it. So it is new information.

02:59:31 Speaker_06
Well, it's, there's no such thing as an old joke if you hear it for the first time.

02:59:36 Speaker_02
Right.

02:59:36 Speaker_06
So if I just learn that vitamin D is important, but better assimilated with magnesium and K2, I might say that's some new information. But you would go, no dude, that's old information. You're just learning it.

02:59:50 Speaker_02
Right, but it's fairly new anyway, because nutritional science has really only been around for, what, 100 plus years? And the understanding of it today is far greater than at any other time in our life.

03:00:01 Speaker_02
Because of guys like Huberman, because of these different scientists that have dedicated themselves to educating people about nutrition, the process that your body goes through, and it absorbs nutrients, and what enhances that, enzymes, different things that you eat.

03:00:16 Speaker_06
Let me say it this way, then. There's a body of information that exists that I don't know, and then there's a body of new information that I also don't know because it's new. And the body of the stuff that I don't know yet, that's been around forever,

03:00:32 Speaker_06
Massive the new stuff is new and I don't know how big it is, but it's not as big No as this incredible repository of stuff like when I walk in a library and look I mean just look at all that stuff man.

03:00:45 Speaker_06
Look at this cursed thing here in my hand It's like oh my god, if I have an internet connection, I have access to 98% of everything that we've ever known Yeah

03:00:55 Speaker_06
Now that either makes you intensely curious or intensely uneasy Because now you know both maybe but you have it now you like like if you're not like what are you doing? Like you're sitting on the toilet.

03:01:08 Speaker_06
Are you are you really are you tick-tocking like? How are you spending the one truly finite resource you have your time? What are you doing with it, man?

03:01:17 Speaker_02
A lot of us getting distracted Jesus. Yeah

03:01:20 Speaker_06
but they're stories, they're buffalo stories and whale stories that are out there, man.

03:01:24 Speaker_02
I think that's why people like your shows, you know? I think that's why people like podcasts. I think that's why people are interested in documentaries. There's still people out there that are interested in being curious.

03:01:34 Speaker_06
For sure.

03:01:35 Speaker_02
Yeah. For sure. That's how we make a living, Mike.

03:01:37 Speaker_06
Yes. Yes, Joe, it is.

03:01:39 Speaker_02
That's what we've done.

03:01:40 Speaker_06
It's a pleasant living.

03:01:42 Speaker_02
Listen, man, it's been awesome talking to you. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.

03:01:45 Speaker_06
You know what, man?

03:01:46 Speaker_02
Three hours just fucking flew by.

03:01:48 Speaker_06
I'm just, I mean, full disclosure, I'm kind of relieved. I mean, I was getting so annoyed with friends of mine who were like, hey man, why haven't you been on the show? I'm like, maybe, my mother said maybe he's not that into you.

03:02:03 Speaker_02
It's just a time thing. He'll call you one day. There's a lot of people out there, but I really did want to talk to you.

03:02:09 Speaker_06
Can I show you a truck before we go?

03:02:11 Speaker_02
Sure, sure.

03:02:12 Speaker_06
Because I know you're a car guy. So this company called Sugar Creek up in Ohio made me a truck.

03:02:20 Speaker_05
What kind?

03:02:22 Speaker_06
Well, it started as a 1964 Dodge Power Wagon. It ended up as this.

03:02:29 Speaker_02
Dude, I've seen that online. That's yours.

03:02:31 Speaker_06
That's mine.

03:02:33 Speaker_02
Oh, that's crazy. I love those old power wagons. Dude, that thing looks incredible. What a great job they did on that.

03:02:40 Speaker_06
It's unbelievable. 2070, it's about 9,000 man hours.

03:02:44 Speaker_02
Oh my God, that thing looks fucking incredible. Oh, you got a heliphant engine in it.

03:02:49 Speaker_06
1100 horsepower.

03:02:50 Speaker_02
Oh my goodness, look at that. So it's got a TRX hood. it's it's wow you will that's cool that's fucking great i know oh do you drive that

03:03:03 Speaker_06
Barrett Jackson is gonna auction it off. No in January.

03:03:08 Speaker_02
Why?

03:03:09 Speaker_06
Because because my foundation needs money and right so that's it's gonna get a I Don't know what it'll go for.

03:03:17 Speaker_02
He says a bunch but oh, that'll go for a lot of money, man Yeah, that's probably gonna go for a half a million dollars at least. No, he says to oh Two million? Two million dollars?

03:03:27 Speaker_06
Probably cost half a million to make. Wow. Beats me. You know, this is another one of those worlds.

03:03:32 Speaker_02
Maybe. Auctions are crazy because a bunch of rich guys get in there and go, I want it. I know. And then they start feeding off each other. Look at this fucking thing. That's incredible. Two million dollars? Jesus Christ.

03:03:41 Speaker_06
Well, who knows? But I went up to Columbus to see the garage where they make this thing. And you need to put this on your list of stuff to do when your bucket's not overflowing.

03:03:53 Speaker_06
Because a guy called John Richardson, who owns the biggest bacon factory in the country, Sugar Creek, is crazy automotive freak. He built this giant garage. He hired 27 savants.

03:04:07 Speaker_06
And all they do is take classic cars from his sort of quasi junkyard and turn them into these gems. Oh, wow. So he built this for me. And Barrett Jackson said, yeah, we'll auction it off. So I went up there with my crew just to look at it.

03:04:22 Speaker_06
Dude, these guys, man.

03:04:23 Speaker_02
It's what we're... I would never be able to let that thing go.

03:04:26 Speaker_06
It's the art we were talking about.

03:04:27 Speaker_02
Yeah.

03:04:28 Speaker_06
That's art. That's artistry.

03:04:29 Speaker_02
That's art. Yeah. Oh, 100%. That's art.

03:04:32 Speaker_06
Yeah.

03:04:32 Speaker_02
Yeah. Mike, appreciate you very much, man. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. It was a lot of fun. All right. Bye, everybody. See ya.