#2235 - Mike Rowe

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. We got stars, we got coffee, we got Mike Rowe, we got Carl's over there snoring.
So what were you doing on QVC? What were you selling? That was the greatest line from Blazing Saddles, by the way, when Gene Hackman. Which line? 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, and he's basically saying, I had cigars.
The creature stomps off in Frankenstein. I don't remember that.
Tiny little moment. It's been too long since I've seen that movie.
Best, uh... 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. We hear him.
We don't have our headphones on. Maybe we should put our headphones on.
I thought you were talking about me. No, Carl.

For an awful moment.

We wore him out.

Jamie was throwing the toy for Carl.

He's such a great dog.

He's got, I mean.

He's adorable.

I mean, it's such a personality thing at that.

For me, with dogs and pets in general.

Like, you know right away if this thing has a personality. Oh, he's got a lot of, Carl's got a lot of personality.
Yeah. There's no doubt about that.
Yeah, and... He's like a little kid.
And a person name, which I think is super interesting. Mine's Freddy.
He's a terrier. I like a dog with a person name.
Yeah, me too. Like Fido? What the fuck is a Fido? No one knows.
Well, that's, well, actually, oh, no, that's Philo. I was thinking of Clint Eastwood in Every Witch Way But Loose.
He was Philo Beto. Could also be Philo Farnsworth, who created the television.
For real? Yeah. Did only one guy do it, or was it one of those light bulb type deals where a bunch of people were scrambling for it? What do they call that? Like a hive mentality.
Yeah, right, right. like that happened with the integrated circuit right when uh kilby at radio shack was doing the same basic work i think that uh robert noyce was doing for intel and one was here in texas and the other was in california and they had never met and they had compared notes, but the work on the circuitry was so close that they wound up sharing the Nobel Prize.
Oh, that's interesting. Super, super strange.
But that, you know, I don't know. That's a common thing with human beings.
And it's this concept of morphic resonance. Have you ever heard of that concept? Rupertupert Sheldrake, he wrote about this, and the ideas, and it's based on some actual facts, too, about there's some real statistics about rats.
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 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.
So it's a kind of, I mean, I would think biological evolution might flirt with that. I read a paper, a 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. 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 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.
And then it gets super complicated because he identifies a gondii that lives in the cat's gut and basically breeds there. And what he learned was when the cats were crapping, the gandhii 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. This Gandhi eye 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 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.
So Dr. House thought, well, you know, 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. So he basically postulated that, you know, Doris, the cat lady, was living a fairly normal life until she got 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 not. 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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, I don't know if Doris went that far.

Have you ever seen them run up to cats?

Yeah.

The toxo-infected rats?

It's bizarre.

Yep.

They run right up to them.

And the cat's like, what the fuck is going on?

The cat's like bounce away from the rat.

It's like watching the Beatles at the Ed Sullivan Theater. You's wrong with you people? Why? What's happening? Mass psychosis.
Yeah, that's super interesting. Do you know there's also a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims that test positive for toxo? They'd know it.
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. I read, and I think this— I got more of these, too.
I'm Jack. I don't want to compete.
I'm going to lose. But you'll love this.
You probably already know it. Homeostatic risk and risk equilibrium and the unintended consequences, especially with motorcycle riders that emanate from safety protocols gone too far.
Really? Yeah. So like every, like if you study the way you drive your motorcycle, like you measure every decision that you make in terms of cornering and speed and braking and all that stuff.
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 is different from one person to the next.
But what's the same is our desire to compensate for the environment around us. So compensatory risk and the subconscious decisions that we might make behind the wheel when we're buckled up versus not buckled up.
When have abs brakes as opposed to not having them 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 and half of them and left the others the same and then they hooked up the the cars to monitor every driver decision and in virtually every case, the drivers with the better safety gear took more chances because their brain is subconsciously compensating, right? It's the same. Yeah.
I mean, it's controversial, but I understand it. It's why the most dangerous intersections have signs that tell you when to walk and when not to walk.
Yeah. 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.
So, yeah, the unintended consequences of following traditional safety protocols, you know, has always really been interesting. to me.
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.
Like I used to think, I used to have a Lexus SUV, this big boat Lexus. And you know what I loved about it? I drove slow in it.
I was just like, real because 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 the big car would just chill me out I just get in that big boat, and I'd just, whoo. Sure.
The world was quiet out there. It was nice and relaxed.
I think it's a slightly different analysis. If you're going to adjust your behavior consciously to adapt to the externality, you're going to drive faster if you have a fast car because you know that's why the guy built the thing right and it would almost be rude right it would be rude to drive a hot rod like a boat right you know it's the unconscious things that you do uh when you assume or mitigate risk as a result of employing an externality that I think is just super interesting.
It is interesting. 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.
I did a whole special called safety third because, because safety isn't really first, not really ever. And because if it was, you would never get a lot of things done.
Well, you'd never get out of the studio. You would definitely never do construction.
Heck no. No, you wouldn't do anything.
Yeah. You wouldn't do anything.
It's, you know, I.

How are you going to move steel girders of safety first?

You'd be like, first thing we should do is not move this fucking girder. That's right.
This thing's too big. 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.
And we sat through probably 50 mandatory safety briefings, whether it's mines or confined spaces or high spaces or lockout, tagout, all those protocols and procedures were super intense. And we were really, really focused on coming home alive and in one piece.
So we like really paid attention. But after two years of these mandatory compulsory meetings and all of these procedures, um, we all started getting hurt.
I mean, not nothing serious, but broken fingers and, you know, a cracked rib and singed off my eyebrows and my eyelashes and eyelashes and mild concussions and things like that. I was like, what the hell is happening? What was happening is the safety experts in all of these mandatory meetings started to sound like, remember Charlie Brown's teacher? Yeah.
Mrs. Othmar.
Womp, womp, womp. We were just falling asleep.
Right. So it was like, holy crap, we're in compliance, but we are not out of danger.
And so that begs the question, what, you know, what happens to a normal person who actually comes to believe either on the job site or just in life, life that somebody else cares more about their wellbeing than they do. And it's like, that's when complacency rears its ugly head.
So on dirty jobs, we just, it was just shorthand among the crew, but it was always safety third, which meant heads up, man, keep your head on a swivel. You can be in, 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. Is there also a factor when you have a person who's the safety officer, who's kind of annoying, and they're really super interested, and maybe you kind of pawn off the safety aspect to them,

and then you don't think about it as much because someone's supposedly looking out for you?

How much do you think about proper driving technique when you're sitting in the back on your laptop or even up front next to it?

Depends on who's driving.

For sure.

If I was driving and my wife was in the back seat, she'd be paying attention a lot.

Shout out to that. Your guy, what was his name? Ashton, who picked me up this morning.
Excellent driver, man. Oh, glad you're happy with it.
Just so you know. I mean, I know he drives a lot of your guests, and this is a feedback I want to pass along.
He was very frosty. But yeah, look, I think any time that we abdicate- Responsibility.
Yeah. Yeah.
There's going to be, it's like whack-a-mole. It's going to pop up someplace else and it's probably not going to be in your interest.
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.
Yeah. And 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 yeah that was it man it was how did you get started in that like what who came up with the concept well i mean technically i guess i did but i mean i no new ideas.
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, I, 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. 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, but I didn't, I didn't really much care about the nature of the work and, uh, had a pretty good balanced life really. And then I was in in San Francisco working for CBS on a show called Evening Magazine.
You know the show. It comes on after the local news.
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 go to museums.
you go to wineries, and then you throw to these wrapped packages, right? It's all just, if there's a three-legged dog in Marin overcoming a heart-tugging case of canine kidney failure, you know, that was like an evening magazine story. We did these all the time.
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. And my granddad, by the way, seventh grade education, electrical contractor by trade, but also a plumber and a steam fitter, pipe fabricter.
He could fabricate, fix anything. He had that chip.
And I grew up next to him on this little farmstead north of Baltimore. And I knew I was going to 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. He basically said, dude, just get a different, you can be a tradesman.
I know you're enamored of being a tradesman 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 i had sung in the opera i'd sold stuff on qvc opera eight years man did you were you classically trained not really how did you get how do you get involved

in the opera scene well it's a weird look 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. Is an aria a song?

An aria is a song. It's the

they're in an

opera most of the

big moments are arias, right? 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 in German, they're in Italian for the most part.
This one was Italian. 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? Yeah, I remember. I had one of those.

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.

And then I crashed an audition

for the Baltimore Opera in 1983. So no classic training at all, just a Walkman and a cassette? 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.

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. singing and he put me in a barbershop quartet when I was in high school and opened up like this very

weird acapella singing. 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, uh, we, we just started learning these ancient songs and singing for people, usually unsolicited from nursing.. What kind of fucking dudes are you hanging out with that were interested in doing this with you? 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. 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 way leads on to way.
Right. So you knew how to sing.
I could carry it, too. So you had some experience singing, kind of.
Yeah. And then you decided you were going to learn how to sing opera.
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.
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.

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.

At the time, there was AFTRA. And I'm sure you were part of both.
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. 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. So my plan...
This is all diabolical. It's a great plan.
That kind of strategic thinking is very valid. You should be in the Navy or something.
Look, I was just trying to get a job. I know, but it's clever.
There's always a stage door. There's always a back way in.
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 Yannutzi, who's like, Mr. Rowe, you have no idea what you're saying at all, do you? Because you're saying the words wrong.
You're just repeating the sounds. I was singing it loud, and I was singing it like I understood what I was saying.
Right. 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.
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 chorus. 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... 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.
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, 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. 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 mold the size of your thumb on his eyelid with thick black hair growing out of it.

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. And people in the chorus took pity on me.
you know, and it was a world, really. It was a world that I didn't know existed.

And 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 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.
Wow. Yeah.
I mean, I never got out of the chorus. I never had like a, you know, a featured role.
I had a couple lines here and there. Buttimore opera was a big deal looking back at it and that was for me 80 83 to 90 wow yeah and then right since we're talking well it was a sunday and during the intermission of something i think it it was during this Nibelungin, this giant Wagner epic, torturous thing.

And the chorus didn't have to be.

This is the one you saw it on Bugs Bunny.

Killed a wabbit, killed a wabbit.

It's that one, right?

Right.

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.
When 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 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. 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, 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.

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.

So I went with him the next day and auditioned and got hired. Wow he mad the bartender yeah you got the gig you know because you didn't even know about it well it's a good question i i don't know what became of him um we had a friendly got a fucking voodoo doll of mike rowe a bunch of pins in it we had a wager i said look i don't know if i'll get the job but i but i bet i'll get a call back he was like you're not gonna get a call back for this thing you know we were just actors at the time were like people pretending to be actors trying to find a hater 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 was my first job in TV. 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? Do you have a script or are you kind of like you have this fax about the pencil? No, nothing. 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 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.
What are you selling? Let me hear this. A sack for your cat.
What the fuck? It's just crazy. They just love it.
That's why this is a cat toy. So the cats play with it? Yeah, they crawl inside it.
And they just go nutty because it makes a lot of noise? Yeah, it costs $25. That's $25? $25? They just roll around and sort of wrestle with the bag.
And just really experience. So this is like sort of just personality, fucking around, having fun with the toy, and selling it.
Well, that's what I did. Look, remember.
That's what you did. Was that novel that you were doing it that way? Yeah.
In relative terms, that was actually one of the true great life lessons. You don't have to be outrageous to stand out.
You just have to be relatively outrageous. 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 so you're like a morning dj kind of except right because they're kind of fun and that was different than the regular radio guy. You know, I would, I mean, for me, I thought of it more 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.

Are you around tonight?

No, I got to get back tonight.

Something about Thanksgiving.

But I watched his set last night. He's awesome.
He was great. He's never been funnier.
He's in top form right now. It's amazing.
And he's gone. He's gone full Messiah, dude.
I mean, I didn't recognize him. Oh, with the look? He said hello, and I'm like, hey, how are you? I mean, 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. I get the sense that they're trying to amuse themselves.
Right. Right.
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. You know, 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. I knew in the middle of the, 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.
What were the shifts? So three hours at a time, usually, over the course of 24 hours. So you would be on three hours at a time? Yeah.
Would you come back again, or would you only do three hours? I do three hours, and I go home. And I mean, have you done overnights before? No.
So I guarantee you there are a lot of people listening who have worked an overnight shift in their trade, in their vocation.

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.

Your circadian rhythm.

Yeah.

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 like changed colors.

It changed taste.

It changed.

Yeah, because I had never.

I mean, I was upside down.

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? Like, and they give you a rundown of what these products were at all.
It was up to you. 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. 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. 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, 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.
And it's feature benefit selling, you know, and if you understand that, you can talk about anything for as long as you need to. You know, 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 99 cents.

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.

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 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. It's not three with that thin, wispy line that you can't read 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.
While you're fucking up your circadian rhythm. 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.
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 3 in the morning, right? Because you I would deliver Sunday papers and the Sunday papers were it was a huge under you flip the top Oh, I forgot the flip the top and then hit the button.
There you go And so I was all fucked up from that.

I would get up every day at 5 o'clock in the morning normally to deliver papers because I had a large route. It was my way to make money without having to do a job where I had to listen to anybody.
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? 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 know, you're making progress.
You know the progress you're making as you make it. Right.
You know, it's. You know, you only have 120 houses to go.
That's right. And then it's 110.
And then it's like. And then it's 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.
Nine was rough. Yeah.
Occasionally, they would make enormous Sunday papers. And that would be a real problem because you'd 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 but see you remember and you knew 350 that's an interesting oh yeah I had bigger routes but 350 was manageable how old were you 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 yeah so it's probably 17 or 18 I started driving and I drove till I was 22 I just started doing stand-up comedy I drove all throughout my competitive martial arts career I drove 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.
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.
It didn't matter. You got to deliver newspapers.
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.
So they didn't make you deliver papers if it was unbelievably bad out. But for the most part, you drove every day.
So you had a sense of consequence, too. 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 that maybe they trained us for like one day. You were taught how to fold the paper.
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.
Rubber bands were a real

pain in the ass because you could hit a corner on the

concrete and 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.

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. And then

the Boston Herald because I wanted more

papers to deliver so I would do

Thank you. like I delivered the Boston Globe because that was the biggest distribution like I could get the biggest route and then the Boston Herald because I wanted more papers to deliver so I would do two papers and the 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 if you had 150 New York Times that's an all-day excursion did you start to equate the type of home home you were delivering the type of paper to? 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.
It was literally the only reason why I was going to college. And she you know, she's asking me, I was like, 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.
Yeah, it makes people uncomfortable. She liked me, but she didn't like that I had no idea.
She was like very motherly to me, I guess. 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 crabs.

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. And you lay the newspaper out.
But which one, Joe? Oh, which one matters. I don't know why it does.
So is it disrespectful to use the paper of note? No, no, it's better. No, no, it's it's, I think it's a mark of respect.
It's like, oh, we're having crabs? Get the News American. Oh, that's so silly.
Get the News American. Because, you know, it's all spread out in front of you, and you've got the crab guts and the Old Bay and the J-O No.
2 and the National Bohemian Beer, and maybe you can glance down and get informed as you go. Isn't it interesting that there are newspapers like that, right? Like, there's the New York Post.
You want a fun headline. Right.
You know, you want all the crazy shit like, what happened? Who got pregnant? Right. You know, what's going on with this? 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? Have you ever walked through the offices of the Post? No. Any chance? No.'s amazing it's amazing i had a um old girlfriend whose sister worked there worked for uh page six oh boy yeah that's the fun one yeah so much fun so that's like all the gossip and the craziness and this person's getting arrested right right drunk driving and brokers and driving and brokers.
They have a hallway. It's like this place in the center.
There's so much on the walls, but it's all front pages, and it's the best headlines. Ah, so it's the best ones they've ever come up with? The best ones ever.
Starting with the classic headless body found in topless bar, which is still tough to beat. That's great.
But so many of them. I love the post.
I've always loved the post. I love just the fun nature of the news.
That was like the working person's newspaper. 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. It was like these guys, somehow I'm imagining a meeting.
They're laughing. 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. 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.
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, how can you, how can you in relative terms distinguish yourself, not from these other worlds and other categories, but from their, from your friends, from that's the, that's the trick, man. 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.
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. Yeah.
I said to Ashton, your very excellent driver, who brought me here, 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 and I said, actually, you know, I take it back.
What's been fun is 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.
You know, we're going to do it this way now. And that's been, whether it's comedy or whether it's music, you know, it's 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. 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.
And it feels new, but it's probably what you've been doing for the last 12 years. 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 make- I enjoy it. Good.
I'm a curious person, and I like talking to people. It's real simple.
Yeah, but just because it's simple, right, you make it sound like a parenthetical. Oh, it's just a conversation.
Yeah. That's only just the hardest thing there is to do.
But it's not really. Then why don't more people do it? Because they don't enjoy it.
They don't enjoy it like I enjoy it. Like 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. I really firmly believe this in a non-hippie way.
I think it's like a scientific reality. 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.
And I am curious as to how someone with a different biology, different life experiences, different geographic location in which they were raised, like, how are they navigating the world and why are they interested in opera?

Like, what is it?

What got you to be a beekeeper?

Why are you so fascinated with painting?

What made you start writing music?

Like, I'm interested.

Yeah.

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.

Like, you and I could have the same exact conversation if we were having dinner somewhere. For sure.
Same conversation. Yeah.
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. I think that's what it is.
I think I just got lucky. I think I just got lucky and I found a job that I would be doing anyway.
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 a hundred episodes of that.
I don't even, 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 Baron Serengeti, right? Right.
Like if I could remember every episode of how the universe works, 10 years of this stuff, If I could remember half of what I narrated, that would be something. I can remember a chunk, 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,

there's been no time to think about what I'm going to do next and even less

time to think about what I just did.

Right.

So you just talked to Josh Brolin and then you talk to the musician guy,

Storch.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Scott. Yeah.
Scott. Storch.
And then before that, Storch. Yeah, right? Scott.

Yeah, Scott.

Storch.

And then before that, our friend Evan was in, right?

So 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.

And I wonder if sometimes you get over your skis to the point where you've started to forget what you've done yourself. Oh, yeah.
There's no way to keep it all. 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.
I got an unexpected education doing this show for sure. Like I never anticipated it.
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? The interest bubbles up and they stick. Yeah, totally.
Yeah. Like my, 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.
It seems like that, but this is the reason why. And they figured this out because of this.
And I started rattling off. rattling off it 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 I forget my own birthday but I do remember things that are fascinating I remember most things that are fascinating to me I have a unusual recall but I've always had an unusual recall it's like I think it's a genetic thing yeah yeah 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 like I don't forget things see you to me are the are the deeper end of the pool I'm more the the shallow end not I don't mean for that to sound comparative so much, but like with martial arts.
I'm interested in martial arts. I'm interested in ultimate fighting.
I narrated the ultimate fighter. Right.
I did 10 seasons of it. But that's sort of the extent.
Like I don't go very deep. I've seen a couple but it's like – Well, there's a big giant difference between being a former competitor and also like dedicated decades of my life to martial arts.
It's not as simple as like I go and I do commentary. Like I started doing martial arts when I was 15 and it changed my life.
gave me discipline and a will to overcome on comfort discomfort and to push myself And to overcome fears and to do something that's very scary and to compete 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 traveling all over the country. And so my social life from like 15 to 21 was completely retarded.
It was like retarded as in slowed 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.
And then I started teaching. So then I was making my living off of teaching, but not enough money.
So I was still delivering newspapers. So I delivered newspapers in the morning, and then I would teach.
And I was teaching at Boston University. I was teaching.
I had my own school by the time I was 20. Taekwondo? Yeah.
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. It becomes everything.
It becomes everything. Almost nothing I do becomes everything.
Nothing? Almost nothing. But what are the things? What becomes everything? I'm not sure yet.
Let me think about it. 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? I don't have hobbies and I don't collect things. No hobbies? Nothing? I don't collect things.
Wow. I own very little.
I never have owned much. I wish I had 100 lives to live simultaneously.
I would do 100 different things. 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.
My late great friend, Anthony Bourdain, his bio on Twitter, it said enthusiast. 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 would rip him off.
And also now my bio says dragon believer. Congratulations on that.
Thank you. The ladies of the view.
They said I believe in dragons. She triple checked.
She triple checked, Mike. Gotta be true.

But I'm an enthusiast.

That's what I am.

I am a person who is very fortunate in that I have a love of a lot of things.

Well, you and Tony were similar, obviously, in that way.

He took big bites.

He took big swings.

We became good friends when he really got into jujitsu.

Yeah. Because 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 he came to one of my comedy shows.

We became friends. Started going to dinner

by the way with Anthony Bourdain. It's the coolest fucking thing

in the world. It's got to be.
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

I don't touch the menu We got you and they come over and bring food and you know I wrote a eulogy for him that crashed my website. Oh wow It's really funny.
I only I met him twice, and each time it was fairly brief. 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. Yeah, Fear Factor was maybe.
Fear Factor stopped in 2007, and No Reservations no reservations i think was around that time yeah he was on in six for sure dirty jobs went on in oh three yeah and then the cnn show which was i think like cnn's highlight of their time 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 wonderlust but but also 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. He really wanted to know what these people were all about.
I've never, this will sound vainglorious, and I don't mean it to, but with the possible exception 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.
What was your show? It was called Somebody's Gotta Do It. Oh, that's right it followed dirty jobs yeah 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 okay but all the trouble in the world man every crisis whether it's haiti or whether it's a riot you know the show got preed constantly.
They didn't preempt Tony, but they preempted me a lot.

And I was commiserating with Tony about this once. 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.
Yeah. I've never seen that like that before.
Yeah. And never mind the award.
It was the Peabody's that got me, actually. Who cares about the Emmys? They're easy.
But, geez, it was just one Peabody award after the next. Yeah.
And the audience wasn't as big as people think, but they were engaged. 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.
We used to, when I was on news radio, everybody wanted the spot after Seinfeld because there was Seinfeld and Friends were on the same night and it was just this murderous Thursday night line I see 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, oh boy, you got a good spot because people are going to just keep tuning in. They didn't tune in for news radio.
News radio wasn't really successful after it was off the air. You were in the slipstream.
Yeah. You were in the orbit.
Well, we weren't owned by NBC. So it was a different production company.
It was Pearlstein Gray. So they didn't have a vested interest in us being successful.
So the, the writers would show up. 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.
We thought we were going to get canceled literally every year except the year we got canceled. The year we got canceled, I was shocked because that was like the year after Phil died.
And then John Lovitz took his place for a season. And then they canceled it after that.
And like the perfect thing for our show, we never even hit the 100 episodes for syndication. They had to sell it at like 98 episodes.
That was like our show.

It's like we were always like barely

hanging on. You know, it was just

we, it was a funny show. It was a really

good show with talented people. 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 did you, what was the

big lesson

from news radio if there

was one for you? Well,

it was just fortune.

The lesson is that you could just be

Thank you. big lesson from news radio if there was one for you? 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.
And then my manager said, terrible money. They're gonna lock you up for like three years for like $500.
It was crazy Ridiculous bad money He said I'm gonna 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 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 agents and people would just call me Yeah, like some guy call me from Universal's like what? 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? And so then I call my manager this I go, this guy just fucking called me for me. 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. 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. 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'm going, I'm sorry I met you.
I'm sorry I fucked up. They didn't want to be real.
So everyone said, good to see you. Everyone was good.
And it was super unsincere. I was like, this is so weird.
It was a super uncomfortable experience. And it was the worst experience on a show because the people that ran the show Jeff Martin and Kevin Curran Super funny talented guys who'd worked on married with children and the Simpsons brilliant 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 cuz I had a lease So I got a nice apartment I'm like the first apartment I ever had I was like I thought it was gonna be on TV forever like this is gonna be easy and now fuck I gotta get out of here as I wanted to go back to New York 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 and the next thing you know I'm working with Phil Hartman it was bizarre no aspirations whatsoever to be an actor never wanted to be on TV and then I'm working with Andy Dick and Phil Hartman and Maura Tierney and Candy Alexander Vicki Lewis and Dave Foley like this is crazy from Second 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 would completely rewrite scenes like on the spot come up with punch lines for everybody we all did that for everybody like we would all come up like maybe you should say this maybe that it was like super collaborative so Complete, utter good fortune. Because I had friends that were on terrible sitcoms, and they were living in hell.
And we'd hang out at the comedy store, and they were living in hell. And I was like, look, I'm on a show that nobody watches, but it's fun as shit, and I can't believe I'm on TV.
This is nuts. Yeah, you're in on the joke.
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.
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.
If it's a good sitcom. But if it's a bad sitcom, it's hell.
Sure. Those guys who do a lot of coke and buy nice cars, those are all on, they're on bad shows.
They just want to give themselves something to reward themselves for this fucking slave, not, I wouldn't say slave work. I should say, like, you're a slave to money.
It's not, you're compromising who you are for money.

You don't really want to do that show,

but you're on it and it sucks and you have to repeat these terrible lines.

That's what I'm getting at.

See, it's the, 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. I never saw that show.
That was a was a weird one right because they got mad at him because he was right wing yeah yeah that's so crazy didn't they cancel it it was their number one show and they canceled then Fox picked it up that's so nuts they canceled it because they didn't like his politics yeah wow 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 okay i want to hear that all right yeah yeah now 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 when I was like, well, you know, do an honest inventory, Mike. Like, 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.
Yeah, the clan. That's it.
Yeah. Everything, like the idea that somebody else is writing lines for me.
I know that sounds impossibly 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.
You know, that's a, that's different. Once you're in Hollywood and once you're sort of in the machine, it still lingers.
I mean, that'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 crap, man, you know, a thing can live in your mind so much bigger than it is in in reality. And so while I love doing it for that week, I said to my business partner over that this thing that I used to think of as the single most efficient way to make a living was so wildly inefficient.
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. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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. And that's

important. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

It is important. 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.

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 It was like a super sweet guy when you meet him in real life, and then he was Jimmy James my stapler Yeah, he becomes did you see what was that one Coen brothers had some Netflix thing of Wild West Netflix thing? He played on that. He was fucking gene wasn't he and oh? Yeah, I think he was in Oh Brother.
He's been in everything. He's in a million different things.
But just being with these people that, you know, like I said, I had no aspirations to act. 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. And then all of a sudden I'm on a show.
It was like just fortune. I auditioned for two shows ever.
And I got both of them. Those are the only two shows I ever auditioned for.
What was the other one? Hardball. The first one that I went for that was terrible.
Yeah. That was the baseball show that got canceled.
And then I auditioned for news radio. So it was nuts.
It was just, I was just stepping in shit every step of the way that's hysterical any sense so i never had an agent except for a very brief period when i did and uh it was you know sean perry over at endeavor you guys ever cross paths i know his uh his former assistant turned out to be his wife later uh how's that work nicole taylor that's man they're they great. They live up in the hills somewhere.
I mean, how's it work with your former assistant? That's none of my business. That's a dangerous undertaking.
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.
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 Peligian over at Pilgrim Films. He's doing something called Worst Case Scenario, and he's looking for a host.
And so I auditioned for that. And then later that week, uh, she says this guy from, uh, uh, Nashville, Michael Orkin was his name who I had worked with years earlier, not Nashville, Memphis.
Uh, he was hosting that were, uh, 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.
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, I dare you to hire me. I got hired for both jobs that week.

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.

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.

Yeah.

And then Nicole switched agencies and I never really had an agent prior to that. That's fortunate.
Or since. Super fortunate.
Financially, it's great. You know what's fortunate, man? Remember? Okay, so my mother calls me.
I'm at Evening Magazine sitting in my cubicle. My granddad's 90 years old.
Remember this? I didn't close the loop on this. But to answer your first question, what happened was my mom called me and said, your grandfather's going to 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? Whoa. Yeah.
My mother's a savage. Jeez.
She just finished her fourth book, by the way. Wow.
Yeah. She's written three bestsellers after 80.
That's incredible. She's out of control.
That's incredible. So she was like, she wanted you to do something impressive.
My mother wrote every day for 60 years. Wow.
No agent. 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.
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 it was, 2001, 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.
Cause like my pop, it's he'd seen the opera, he'd seen QVC. 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. 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.
And what happened in the sewer joke was, I mean, it changed. It's, I wrote a book about it.
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.

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. 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.

We were all getting hit in the head.

It's like a shooting gallery.

There was a rat the size of a loaf of bread that crawled up my – I lost my footing, fell into – 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.
And I'm squatting in the filth, you know, 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.
Oh, my God. 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.
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.
So I start mixing the mortar and we start talking just like people, you know, not like a hosty thing, but like what you were saying, just 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 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. And it's me, a smart-ass 42-year-old crawling through a river of crap.
I mean, they're trying to eat their meatloaf. It was the wrong segment for that show.
But talk about fortunate. 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 till you see what my brother does.
Wait till you see what my cousin does. My mom, my sister, my uncle, right? And I'm

like, oh my God, there's, I mean, if, if the Bay area is any kind of a, a microcosm for the country, and I'm not saying it is, but from a TV standpoint, I was like, this is new. No, I, 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 was like, what if the viewer programs the show, A, and what if, B, the host of the show, is the person that I meet who welcomes me into their shithole or wherever they work. And what if I'm not a host after all? After 20 years of impersonating a host, what if I'm a guest or an apprentice or an avatar or a cipher, right? Like, 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? 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.
And so I was really just curious to see what would happen if I thought of myself as something different. Well, if we think about the history of just media, it's very recent, right? You you have radio which is like when when did people start listening to radio was the 1800s okay and then you have television which kicks on in the 50s and everyone's a presenter ladies and gentlemen the beatles right everyone's ed sullivan everyone's jack car Jack Parr.
There's these type of people that do this job. It's like, you ever do a morning radio show? I'm sure you have.
Morning DJ voice. Hey, 5 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. But now, the news.
Especially local news. They have a strip club DJ similar there's a voice anchorman anchorman, but no yes the news especially Local news they have a very specific thing that they're doing cadence.
Yeah. Well, it's fake It's not a person.
It's no people act like that If you had a guy like that over your house for dinner be like what the fuck is wrong with Bob? Psycho the guy's got people buried in his fucking basement. Who talks like that? Right? And so I think the internet opened up a lot of room for unprofessional people to thrive.
That's me. So I can't do the hosting.
But that's what it is. You're not unprofessional.
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 Opie and Anthony show.
That's what it was like. Like when you're a guest on Opie and Anthony, that's how you talk.
Everybody would just hang out and talk. That's a fun show.
It was anyway. That opened my eyes up to podcasting.
And then, you know, Anthony own show that he did in his basement live at the compound where he'd sing karaoke, holding a machine gun, that fucking maniac. 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.
Sure. I remember that.
Yeah. That was huge.
So 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 quick sidebar i don't know if this is of interest and jamie forgive me because i i don't know if i'm supposed to ask you to do things but i sold the first karaoke machine ever in this country on qv. On QVC? Yeah.
Oh, let's see that. It's out there.
I'm not proud of it. You should be proud of that.
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? Like, look, they're everywhere now, obviously.
We've gone through the the whole... It's kind of crazy, though, that you're like the godfather of karaoke.
Well, I'm among them. So what year is this? What are we talking...
Look at you. 91.
This is 91, 92. Wow.
99, 95. 99.95, yeah.

Yeah.

It's hard to see.

It's so blurry.

Isn't it interesting, like, how bad television looked back then in comparison to now?

Like, just the resolution?

Yeah, but you know what?

There's something more trustworthy about rudimentary production value.

Right. You can't, like, yeah.
I was talking to a guy, Bruce, about this earlier. He was saying how much he loves, like, Antique Roadshow and This Old House.
You know, and I said, why? I still love This Old House. I still, I was on This Old House.
Were you? Yeah, man. 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.
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. And they 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 end. of those shows is the almost remedial simplicity of the production.

It's old.

It's like there's an entrance.

Right.

There's an exit.

Right.

When's the last time you saw it dissolve?

Right.

Right?

Like all that stuff. And I used to make fun of it.

I used to make fun of QVC.

I still do.

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 So here there's a thing about something that's overproduced that kind of dissolves some of its authenticity because there's too much thought Put into each in every shot Everything everything. There's too much coordination.
It's almost like you lose a comfort. I might be entertained by it.
It might be fascinating. Keeping up with the Kardashians, you ever notice they change scenes every five seconds? Just keep you tuned in.
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 here's here's a thesis um at least in the world of non-fiction this doesn't apply to scripted, but production is by definition the enemy of authenticity, right? 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 viewer's way.
And one of the things that kept Dirty Jobs on the air for 20 years, early on, I kind of realized that and I wasn't sure what to do about it, but I thought maybe we need to think of the show like a documentary. So we got a behind the scenes camera that never stopped rolling.
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.
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 trying to sell me anything, at least not here.
He's letting us see the sausage. And that was new in nonfiction.
That was a whole new way to think about authenticity. 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.
Well, he could pull it off. 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. And then it's funny, a year later, you know, I think the teleprompter is probably the best example of one forced error after the next.
Like when you think about the anchor who just wants to be believed, the spokesman who just wants to be seen as credible, the politician who just wants to be just wants it just so. 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.
Right. And so, like, the cognitive dissonance is rich, you know? And I just think we've entered into this world where, like, the least persuasive thing you can do is say, trust me, or take it from me.
You know? People have just been burned so much that they they're gonna need we need a truth cam we need it in the newsroom not just in a sewer i mean it worked there but we we need it everywhere fuck it we'll do it live bill o'reilly of all people that's the real bill yeah that's real Bill. That's it.
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. They're the mainstream.
It is. They're the mainstream.
It's the new source of the world. And these people that want to cling to authority and say, no're not me you're god damn it you're not the fucking you're not a journalist you know this that you guys fucked us too many times yeah and we don't believe you anymore and so the only way for us to find out what's real what's not real is someone posts it online and then everybody looks at it and then you get the community notes.
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. But meanwhile, they're fact-checking RFK Jr.
so now I don't trust you anymore either. You can't.
So it's like that's what's going on you can't gloss over the community notes you can't that's it it's it that that's the truth cam that's a solution on twitter it's a solution to this thing that we're trying to figure out how do we know what's true what's not true you get a consensus there's enough people that actually can read scientific papers there's enough people that know the the field that's being discussed or you're going to get out of the hundreds of millions of people on X, you're going to get an expert who's going to say, this is why this is incorrect, and this is how you're supposed to read it. And then everybody goes, 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, if you're an objective person, you'll probably get a good sense of who's right and who's wrong.
It's a weird dichotomy though, right? Like skepticism. Like we have to be skeptical.
Yes. 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.
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 when the theories start to get borne out. And when there's such a level of eroded trust in once credible institutions.
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. 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.
Where's the humility, man? 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.
You don't have to have that anymore. And that's why X has emerged and Substack and 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 but the numbers of people that are listening it's like it's just this crazy number that are all just listening to three people.
So there's no producer, there's no, all that shit that gets in the way of things has 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. You know, I think the audience gets short shrifted a lot.

You know, I thought of it last night in your club.

It's like the audience is, I mean, without the audience, what are you doing?

You know, you're just building.

Certainly at a club.

Yeah.

At a club, it's everything.

It's everything.

It's everything.

But why is it different?

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. 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. It's like sometimes I've talked to like very old scholars, like very old, and it's like sometimes like, okay, we got to focus you here.
We've got to get you on this. With Trump a little bit in the beginning when he was telling me the story with Lincoln's bedroom, the bed was, he was a long man.
He was at the top. Very tall.
Very tall. So I was like, okay, we've got to figure out a way to what's it like to be the fucking president? What is that feeling? How crazy is it on the first day? That's what I wanted to know so it's like you got to kind of move people around 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 but don't you think that that's – you are the proxy for the audience.

When you're at your best –

Yeah, for sure.

In my view.

Yes, for sure.

When I'm listening to you, when I high-five you virtually,

it's when you asked the question I was thinking.

Yeah.

And I really tried to do that in the sewer.

I really tried to do that on Dirty Jobs.

I really tried –

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 you seem like a fun guy like a regular guy who's doing this thing where you're interacting with you like what how do you do this like what is this so yes thanks but then all of a sudden i look up and donald trump's the sewer with me. Oh, shit.
And there's an election in a week. Oh, the stakes around me.
Right. Yeah.
All of a sudden have changed. 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? As somebody who's just listening to this as a fly on the wall, I'm getting a little lost.
Yeah. I'm a little bored.
Let's move it along. 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. I'm most certainly aware that people are going to listen to it.
Don't get me wrong. But I don't think the questions, like maybe the audience would want to know this.
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. But that's one thing that I do where I'm aware that people probably don't know what we're talking about.
So could you explain where this came from or why this – 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 or ways they do things. So 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 locked.
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 going to be good for the audience. What was more consequential, him coming on or her not coming on? Him coming on.
Why do you say that? Well, because realistically, like, OK, my thought about her coming on was I would just I was going to be to be very nice. I wanted to have fun with her.
I wanted to just be able to talk to her and ask her questions. 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. 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.
And. It was great.
Internet censorship is important. Let's talk about it.
But whatever. She wanted to talk about fucking riding bikes.
I don't give a shit. I don't give a fuck what she want to talk about.
I want to talk about cooking, rock climbing. I just want to just get a sense of her as a human being.
Just as a human being. 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? 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 some new word you become enamored with. You want to say that over and over again.
When you realize you're in the middle of a sentence with with no obvious ending yes that's a that's qvc in a nutshell okay that's what it is right and when the teleprompter breaks yeah that's when you get to know the person right and so and so that's why i'm asking i i don't i wonder you know i mean i i listen to the interview and and and 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.
But for me, when you started to talk very casually about the fact that that that that her campaign had stipulations, they had. demands.
I think there 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 have been a mess.
I might have asked her about immigration. We might have had a conversation about, like, what is the goal? Like, why hasn't this been, this doesn't, if we can we can you know launch rockets and land them at the same time as we can't control a border that seems not real that doesn't seem real one seems way harder and that's happening 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 like this now? Why does the Red Cross have these stations set up where they're giving people maps and instructions? 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 to the spot and then making it across the country? What's the purpose of this? 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 because that that's something that I felt like if 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? Yeah, it's very interesting because like first of all I am pro-immigration I am the grandson of immigrants my grandparents came over here during the depression uh 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 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? Like, what are you doing with your life, Bob? Inquiring minds want to know.
We want to know. I think that's reasonable.
Do you see a difference between an immigrant and a settler? Well, it all is the timeline, right? Yeah. It's a timeline thing.
Yeah. Not only that, you're an invader.
Like 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. You're not supposed to be there.
That's where they live. You're in their yard.
You're some weird scruffy American looking for gold, right? You know, what are you doing here, bro? You're the problem, you know, and now all of a sudden that's Texas, right? That's where we are. We live here now This is my land, right? This is where I live.
I got this now Well, it's we're all invaders in one at one point in time 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 every freedom fighter is a terrorist yes right it depends on who wins history gets to decide all that 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. 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 an extent, if that's part of your image, you know, then you can't be on this show. Right, right, right.
You can't. You can't join me in the sewer either.
Right, right. There's no room for the contrivance.
There's just no room. 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. But if you make a person do that, like if you're going to be a politician, right, okay, 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, right? Like, that's a totally different scene.
And there's probably a 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 camera. It's a normal experience for him.
He has a massive advantage. That's what I meant by production becomes the enemy of authenticity.
Yes. 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. Right.
You know, 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. I 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, what did you do? You know, there was a weird performative aspect to it because they didn't know how to do it right. In sitcoms too.
In everything. yes all that stuff all that stuff and then as time moved on it changed like all in the family was all of a sudden this realistic portrayal yeah of a family where you got a racist dad and the son is uh you know the the meathead the son-in-law and the the daughter's a hippie yeah and the the mom just can't for what are you doing? It was a fucking amazing show.
It was an amazing show. You had Sanford and Son.
Sanford and Son is another one. It was a comedy, but people talked like people would talk in real life.
And then as culture moves on, songs change, books change. Everything sort of moves into the, there's a much greater understanding.
understanding understanding 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 you would it would be weird you would be it would be like a weird tim and eric type thing like you're doing something weird on purpose right right and that's not acceptable anymore. So the culture's moved on.
So for sure. But it moves

on and fits and starts and it's not a line. Right.
Right. It's no, no.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Just like the climate.
Right. Right.
So like the 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.

Yeah.

See so many different kinds of scripted dramas.

I mean, oh my God.

Yeah.

Can you imagine Breaking Bad?

Right, right.

30 years ago? Right, right, right.

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.

Yeah.

And something had to happen before that.

Yeah.

Well, in my world and in the world you're describing, that was the age of authority.

That's why we're going had happened before that. Yeah.
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.
That's when, like, like discovery is a, is a good example. You asked about it and I'll, 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.

I mean, the story is incredible. How he talked Malone into getting some transponder space or maybe his Westinghouse and mortgage his house to buy some documentaries from Australia and started beaming all that stuff down.
I asked him years ago, I'm like, what was the guiding principle behind this business model?

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. That's it.
Everything I do must line up with a traditional definition of what a discovery is. It's the satisfying of curiosity.
Yeah. And so when I pitched Dirty Jobs,

I was coming in on the heels of what you're talking about.

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 astrophysicists in the world.
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.
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.
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? So this conversation happened between me and some of the guys over there in 2003.
And they bought it. They didn't buy dirt.
They didn't like dirty jobs. They took it really to shut me up.
They wanted three episodes and out. 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 don't ask me to know more than I know, but just let me look under the rock and let's learn together.
And so they said, okay, we're going to, you know, you'll go to the Titanic with James Cameron, you'll climb Kilimanjaro. You went to the Titanic? No.
Very nearly. It was canceled a month before because dirty jobs finally hit.
But prior to that, I went to Egypt. I was exploring tombs with Zahi Hawass.
I was at the pyramids. 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. And 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. 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? 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.
Right. And it happens all the time.
Sure. And most of the time when it happens, you just walk 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. And it was during that year that I went on a series of adventures for the network doing this other thing.
Why was it shelved?

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.

They have for hundreds of years.

It was not that specific episode.

That got me in trouble later, but it was shelved because it was an unscripted, random romp

Thank you. 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. It didn't look...
Like everything else on the network. 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.
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 other story, that crab fishing show. That's 21 years now, right? And up there, people died.
That's a crazy job. People died.
And I went to six funerals in six weeks. And when they, when we looked at the footage of that 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. 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 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 non-fiction anyhow began this migration from the age of uh authority into the age of authenticity and ever since um non-fiction has been has been grappling with that just as surely as every other vertical

because people want to see something that feels like the truth.

And that's, that's a sliding scale.

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're talking about why like mainstream news is failing but you know it when you see it yeah you know it when you see it yeah you can tell the difference oh bourdain yeah okay uh 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 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 scene in Parts Unknown.
I think he's in, it might be Sardinia. He's diving.
Oh, yeah, and they're throwing the fake octopuses in? 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, for his authenticity.
I would do that for a scene, maybe even for an act, maybe even for a whole segment, maybe. If I got like a bee in my bonnet, and I really just couldn't, you know, I got angry every now and then.
And I, you know, 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.

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 these frozen squid to start to come by him. And in narration, this is where he really owned it because he he owned that show like he could.
Yeah. Nobody's going to tell him what to say.
So his real rant happens months later in the VO booth when he's just describing the heartbreaking insincerity.

Don't don't they know who I am? What did they think I was going to do? Right.

So it'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. Yeah.
It airs on CNN. Yeah.
And I think it won a Peabody. Was that the CNN one or was that No Reservations? That was CNN.
Was it parts unknown i'm look i'm pretty sure it was parts unknown i'm pretty sure i could be wrong but i think you might be right yeah and god i just i mean that's what i that's what i wrote about when he died it was that parts unknown yeah because i've been man i've been sitting on a zodiac i've done that i've been in these in this world where you're nervous 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 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.
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. Who knows? Who knows, man.
Who knows? 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.
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. Fly on the wall.
Yeah. Yeah.
That was a very unique show too because it taught me that food is art Hmm, 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 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 would be a thing you make or you hear, right? I never thought it would be a thing you make where you eat.
And then I saw, I'm like, oh, these are artists. These are artists.
All these people, they've discovered these different ways to make things delicious. And okay.
Their medium's different. Yeah, it's just different.
It's a different kind. But 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 they like to do drugs they're all listening to crazy

music you know they're also craftsmen 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. It's kind of perfect.
Yeah, you can have both. It could be art and fuel.
You just got to pick what you eat. Is hunting art? Hmm.
It's a discipline. It's a primal discipline it's a discipline that connects you with life and death in a very unique way that i don't think anything else does where you it's very if you do it correctly right i'm talking about like mountain hunting like mountain elk hunting in particular which is my favorite it's very hard to do i train for it i have to get in really good shape i practice so i practice so much i fucked my back up because i was developing like tendonitis in my lower back and i just ignored it yeah shut up yeah 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 like physical and you have to be in shape to do it. You have to be in great fitness

But it's not sport. It's it's all 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 people who've ever gone

Thank you. It's a discipline that's very, very, very primal.
It taps into something you didn't even know was there. It's like people who've ever gone fishing, 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 going to 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, oh, here he is.
Get him. Get him in the net.
Get him in the net. Oh, we got him.
Yeah. And hunting is that times 100.
Hunting is that. Hunting is way different because you're defying their protective senses.
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.
I think that's art. 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. When I see someone just hit a perfect 50-yard shot in the vitals and that broadhead sinks in, I know that animal's going to die very quickly.
It's a quick, humane death, and that's what you practice for. You know Josh Smith over at Montana Knife, by any chance? Sure.
Very well. He sent me a video the other day.
He went on a big hunt with his boy. The moose hunt? Yeah.
Yeah. His boy got one at about a few hundred yards.
Huge moose. Big moose, man.
Fucking huge. For a first moose, that's so crazy.
That kid hit the jackpot. But the excitement on the video that he sent me.
It's primal. Yeah.
And bow hunting is even more primal than that. Bow hunting is that times 100.
So it's regular hunting is fishing times 100, then bow hunting is regular hunting times 100. 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? 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.
Like, 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.
Yeah, you got into it. Airplanes are great for that.
They're the best. They force you into that seat.
They're the best. 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. And I like a little distraction.
A couple of Budweiser's. 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.
Yeah. 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.
Yeah. You know, I talk to boxers who say that it's so odd the way things will sometimes almost feel like they're in slow motion, even though they're happening so fast.
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? Yeah. Okay.
That guy is an artist. That guy's an artist.
What makes him an artist? 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 really good at avoiding punches his head movement even with this unorthodox dancing style is fantastic he's stalking he's doing something like here's here's a manual like look at i mean imagine you're fighting a guy who's moving like this it's so crazy he was so hard 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 he just punched him with two hands at the same time Floyd Mayweather said he was the most skilled opponent he ever fought wow he and his record didn't indicate his actual physical ability his abilities were incredible but it's just like it was such a wild style so unusual it's like boxing a bobblehead 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 he's fighting Floyd. He gave Floyd a hard fucking time because he's so difficult to fight.
Like, look, how do you deal with that? And when you're a guy like Floyd and you're getting clowned, here he's fighting Mickey Ward. When you're a guy like Floyd and you and you're you know the cream of the Crap 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 you what the fuck but also really good He it wasn't just that like you rarely get a guy who's clowning like that But also like those kind of kind of, that kind of head movement skill. Yeah.
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. I don't either.

No. Like, what does Customato say

to that? Never. Wouldn't allow it.
No.

He, you know, he was, but maybe,

maybe if the guy started winning like that, he would change his tune. So maybe.
People change their tune when they see something extraordinary. Oh, yeah.
When they see something weird, they change their tune. They go, well, maybe.
Fuck. I don't know.
Because you don't know sometimes. There's guys that come along in fighting in particular that have styles that are so weird and so unique.
You go, wait a minute. How come nobody else is doing it like this is this gonna work like you do you know strong sean strickland is he was ufc middleweight champion stands straight up 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 straight up moving towards you phenomenal head movement awesome timing and walks people down in a weird style there's a bunch of guys that fight weird but they're really good at it 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 I know almost nothing about sports believe it or not you know I mean you, 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.
And then five years later, we're going to be reading about it because you're going to go crazy with it. I'm too old for that.
But this Louis Tian, what did he do differently? Louis Tian was a pitcher. And his windup was such that it looked sort of traditional, but then he'd turn his back to the batter without leaving the rubber, right? So this guy would spin all the way around before he threw, and he'd go further than that sometimes.
Is that really unusual? Yeah. Yeah.
It's unusual. That's unusual.
Oh, so it freaks people out a little bit? Well, yeah. Yeah, because he just breaks.
He stops looking at you. Look, his back.
Look at his ankle. 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.
That dude has flexible knees. Flexible everything.
Because look at the angle his knee is in before he turns. That's crazy.
Yeah. Yeah, you would actually, I'm surprised you're not into baseball.
I can't. I don't have any room.
I know the bucket's overflowing. Yeah, it 100% is.
You know, like I watch football now. My wife's into football.
But I can't—I can only pay attention so much. My head is filled with combat sports.
There's—I have to follow jujitsu, Muay Thai, MMA in the UFC, MMA in the PFL, Bellator, 1FC.

I have to keep track of 1,000 fighters, like literally 1,000 fighters.

Maybe casually some of them, like some of the glory kickboxers, casually I'm watching.

Oh, Badr Hari's fighting.

Oh, this guy's fighting.

That guy's fighting. I know who these people are.
I watch them fight. I'm watching, you know, oh, Badr Hari's fighting.
Oh, you know, this guy's fighting. That guy's fighting.

I know who these people are.

I watch them fight.

I'm watching fights just hours and hours in a day.

I might watch fights two hours every day.

Is it work or fun?

It's fun.

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.
I said dude You're fucking super talented. I hope I get to see in the UFC someday and there's like You know kickboxers like Alex Pereira I follow him in glory and then finally comes over the UFC and I was like you gotta see this guy This guy's a 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 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. And they're like these phenomenal athletes that instead of going into baseball or instead of going into football, now they're only focused on becoming a UFC

champion.

And this is their goal in life. And they're 18.
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 any room for baseball. It's interesting, man.
You had a front row seat to to watching that sport become as dominant as it is at the same time you're watching the podcast world blow up well you're in a really similar way first see i was a fan of the ufc in the very very beginning and it got me into jujitsu so 96 i started taking ju, I started taking jiu-jitsu. In 94, I found out about the UFC.
I kept it in my head for a little bit. 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. 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. 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 DirecTV. And we had to do these shows in like Dothan Alabama or he took a propeller

plane it was fucking hell it was no money this is 97 and is Dana bare knuckle and Dana was not involved yet when did Dana get involved 2001 so I'm on fear factor at the time and one of the things to me and my friend Eddie Bravo who was also a big fan from back in the day and and he taught me jiu-jitsu. When we were first really into it, when we would go to like Louisiana, they were 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.
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.
Like someone would have to dump a ton of money into it. And then along comes Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta in 2001, these billionaires that happened 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. And then I start asking Dana, like, have you ever heard about this guy? Did you did you ever see this guy fight in Japan you ever heard this this Russian dude and I started asking about fighters like you should try to get these guys and he's like do you want to do commentary and then next thing you know I'm a commentator for the UFC okay this is just a very weird triangulating but they didn't even have any money at the time because they were hemorrhaging money.
So I did the first 13 shows for free. 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. 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. I'll just do this.
Yeah, this would be fun to do. Nevertheless, I mean, it was the same thing with dirty jobs.
Once that thing lit up, I had to be willing to sign a contract. It was probably illegal.
I mean, it was such a ridiculous contract, the way they own you. So preposterous.
Yeah. Isn't it crazy? It's like no money, 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 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. Yeah.
There's no contract that can force you to bite the balls off a sheet. Right.
Right. You have to be willing to do that.
And so 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, Dirty Jobs was on the air.
It was in that weird space where we didn't

know if it was going to be a hit or what. But I was narrating all kinds of stuff for this guy,

Craig, Peligian. 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 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 the ultimate fighter and he said fine you'll be great i do i do 10 seasons that sounds like dana says say something yeah that's hilarious it's great yeah that's hilarious yeah that's interesting how things happen like that you know well you were gonna you know you wouldn't be sitting here now if your lease wasn't up or whatever yeah I probably wouldn't I would have gone back to New York 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 science.
So like art and science. 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. I think both.
So, you know, I've got this foundation that evolved out of dirty jobs.

It's called Microworks. 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, right? We've been doing it for 16 years.
And I started doing it in part for my granddad, but mostly because there are, what, 8 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. 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. Sure.
You know, before it was shop, it wasn't just Votek. It turned into Votek, but before it was Votek, 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 a language and we took art out of it. And that's when it became VOTEC.

And then there were a bunch of other acronyms and abbreviations and hyphenations. 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, 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, you can make an incredible living. It's very satisfying.
It's skilled. 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. 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 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.

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.

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 you know, it doesn't mean you're dumb.
Like a lot of these people that live very well are very self-educated. They read books, they watch documentaries, they're interesting people.
And they're entrepreneurial. 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. 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.
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? Yeah. If it's higher ed over here, I guess we have lower ed over here.
Right. You guys are stupid.
The language is awful. 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. 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, you're going to wind up turning a wrench with a giant plumber's 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...
Especially where you grow up. Like, you know, if you grow up in a place that's highly educated, like Massachusetts, where I was, Boston, very, very educated place.
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.
And yet you loved this old house. Yeah.
Which is a love letter to the trades. It really is.
Every single one. Oh, I love watching people make things.
Yeah. Even dumb things.
Like there was a guy, I think it was a PBS show, where he would make tools and like do like stuff the way people did like way back in the day. Like he'd make his own planer you know yeah oh yeah and he would make furniture and shit yeah 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 he actually loved it you could tell it wasn't like this is like a scam like i know I know what I'll do.
I'll take ancient tools and figure out. No, this guy really was into it.
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. 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. 210 grand 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 three and a half million a year. Got no debt.
And so like my job is to talk to that guy. And I do that a lot on my podcast.
It's just like I just want to hear your – 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 really become, it's why Bobby Kennedy called me 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? And that's I don't know.
I don't know if you knew this, but we had this whole conversation about like running together. Really? Oh, yeah.
No, he he asked if I wanted to be vice president. Oh, geez, Louise.
What'd you say? 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. 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. But I said, yeah, look, man, I'd be happy to chat.
Well, he called back, and you know Gavin, the backer,. Yeah.
So, um, they did a dive. They, this was very strange for me.
Uh, they did a deep dive. And when I got back to the Bay area, um, 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 I'm looking over my shoulder honestly like I'm being punked like right like which one of my crazy friends right put you up to this but he was serious and and I was weirdly um flattered maybe like I knew I couldn't say yes, but I was so interested in what his thinking was.
Right. And we spoke for a few hours, and then we stayed in touch for, like, 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 you know right I would never do well in an office or in a bureaucracy 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 oh yeah I was terrified I was like please don't ask that I thought my because I know he asked uh well he asked aaron rogers yeah which is crazy

yeah i i literally heard the sound of my sphincter slamming shut like what the fuck man like i just tensed up and i was like oh that job like whoa that's a fucking job that's jobs insanity but Man, I'll tell you, Ben, he, it was a really, he was very gracious and very direct.

And I, I'll tell you, man, he, it was a really, he was very gracious and very direct. And I tried to be, too.
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. 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.
Health is its own thing, and I've got lots of things to say about it, but fitness, just basic fitness. His uncle was starring in commercials 45 years ago that were literally, we'd call it fat shaming today, challenging.
I just talked to him the day before yesterday and he said, 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. Do it today.
They're impossible to miss. Something colossally horrible has happened.
Anyway, he was very passionate about all that. Yeah.
And I said, but important message it is an important message and it gets lost in this idea of being a compassionate person that allows people to just be their authentic self you know and there's nothing wrong with being fat there's nothing wrong with being big you're being lied to okay you're robbing your life of vitality it's just 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 what happened in the well, we can figure it out. It's not Columbo This is a fucking this is like the evidence is all there.
We know what the ingredients are that are bad for you we know what we've done the food supply we know we've done it's real it's readily available it's what you eat when you say we though i mean human beings collective the collective intelligence what percentage of this country do you think what percentage has been informed this is part of the problem and this is why it benefits to have someone like that in office. Most people aren't aware of it.
You know, I've had a lot of conversations with people that 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. 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 K2.
You want to take vitamin K, magnesium, and there's some arguments from other stuff too that would also enhance it. But you definitely need vitamin D.
Almost everybody does. 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, 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.
And, you know, 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. And there's a lot of other things that are really important.
Vitamin C is really important. Vitamin B is very important.
A bunch of different Bs. You need essential fatty acids.
They're very important. You need all these things.
If you don't have these things, your body won't function right. 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? 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. Physically, it's good for you.
It's actually a hormone that your body produces when it's in the vitamin d is a hormone it's uh or a precursor to a hormone i guess you take it orally but what 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 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.
It's bad for your mind. It's bad for your health.
Again, overall vitality. If you want to have a 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. You need those three things 100%.
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. And then, you know Mike Easter, he became a friend, the comfort crisis, and I started rucking.
Yeah. Oh, that's great.
Mike's a big proponent of that. Big time.
Yeah. In fact, when Bobby called, it was fun.
He's hard to understand sometimes. I was impossible to understand because 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 like, dude, I'm dying.
I'm rucking. I'm rucking.
But yeah, I just, I think it, I think there's really something important in that book that Easter wrote. And I think our, it's not the specifics of what we can do, this idea of, what do the Japanese call it, a misogi, a quest or a challenge of sorts that you should, well, you should challenge yourself to do every so often.
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, that's why I rock.
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 the discomfort exercise is a real thing.
And, you know, 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. Remember what that is? Remember what he called that part of the brain? But, you know, he speaks about it, of course.
He's a neuroscientist, 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 of jujitsu when i found out it makes regular life easy because it's regular life is not anterior mid-cingulate cortex that's what it is uh engaging in challenging activities can stimulate and grow this region which is crucial for learning or excuse me leaning into and overcoming difficulties yeah and if your life is super easy and anything that comes up is a nightmare, it's probably because you lack enough voluntary adversity to overcome uncomfortable moments.
So uncomfortable moments are rare. And when you encounter rare things, generally people kind of have anxious moments encountering rare things.
Well, anxiety is a form of discomfort. Yes.
And it's not just pain. It's not, you know, that's, I think most people equate discomfort or uncomfortableness with like physical pain.
But the way Easter talks about it, it's, it's also boredom. Like being bored makes people super uncomfortable because we're so not used to.

Especially today.

Especially today.

You could pick this damn thing up and, you know, instant access to 99% of the information.

But you're robbing yourself of a lot of possible ideas.

Sure.

Yeah, because the best ideas come.

When you're bored.

When you're bored.

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, an 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 sometimes 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, then it'll look inward. Right find something you know cold plunges not comfortable yeah but you know if you can find a way to to like it 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.
It's fucking cold outside. It's 40 degrees outside.
I'm climbing this 34 degree water. But because I do it, I know that I've already done something way more difficult than most of my day.
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. 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.
I need, you know, and if I do that a couple of times a day, I think I'm going to be better for it. And, and that, that's useful.
That's been useful to me. 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, 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, you know, the norepinephrine, this flood this, this is a 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. 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. 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 this. They all look like shit.
Everybody says that. They all look like shit.
They all talk like pussies. They're all just – they're cowards.
They're afraid to get to get in there they don't like getting in there 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 yeah it's all it's all a bunch of hogwash it's the latest fad it's this is that and yet look at the stadium 50 years ago and look at it today yeah the evidence demands a verdict. Something awful has happened.
Yeah. It's like the difference between being hungry and feeling hungry.
Mm-hmm. You know, that's something else I think about a lot.
I mean, how often do we say, maybe you don't, but how often do you hear, God, I'm starving? I'm famished. Like, no, you're not.
You're really not. You can't possibly be.
Yeah. Talk to a fighter that's trying to make weight.
Those guys are famished. Those guys are, they have no water in their body.
Yeah. For the week before, they're living in hell.
They're living in hell. Some of those guys, they start their cut like four or five days out.
Crazy. That's starving.
You've got to really love it, man 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 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 uh you're the wag the wagon breaks. Donner party.
Table for two. Oh, yeah.
And that's real starving. Real starving.
Did you ever read a book by Nathaniel Philbrick? It's called In the Heart of the Sea? No. 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 is so fascinating.
Nantucket back then was basically run by women because the men would go out for two, sometimes three years at a time hunting right whales, which are just sperm whales. 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.

Imagine how many whales there were before they started doing this.

They were like schools.

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.

It was, because it was just the women, and it was a device used for pleasuring themselves. Because the men were all out to see.
Oh, my God. So they'd use a Steely Dan.
You want to talk about hard lives. The business, whatever it takes to shoot the elk and get it down from the mountain.
I get it. That's a thing.
But when you read through the real process of getting a sperm whale out of the ocean 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. So they're just making this rendered fat.
They're rendering the fat in the oil in real time. Oh, wow.
Because they have to or it'll rot. That's right.
And so they just load up the boats. Whoa.
So what happens, and this is not really a— Are they eating the whales too? No. No? No.
What are they eating? Well, 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.
Probably got scurvy, you know. I mean, but they.
But these guys would go all around the world. And this boat, the Essex, was a couple thousand miles off the coast of Venezuela.
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, you basically put the whale boats in the water.
And these are smaller, maybe 22 feet long, and men row them, right? And so you harpoon the whale, and then you hang on and go for what they called a Nantucket sleigh ride. Jesus Christ.
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. 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.
You don't want to kill it when you're a mile from the ship, because you've got to drag it back. They didn't know how smart whales were back then, either.
We didn't know anything. Isn't that crazy that that's only a couple hundred years ago? 1821.
Isn't that nuts? Well. A couple hundred years ago, the ocean's filled with whales.
Filled with them, and like that. Because if you look now, they're hard to find.
And nothing hunts them. No, spur whales.
I never even really thought about it. They were everywhere.
I mean, I knew about it, but I never thought about it. I mean, we've talked a lot about the decimation of the fish population in the ocean.
About like 90 plus percent of all the big fish are gone. Yeah.
Which is really nuts. But I never really thought about it that way when it comes to whales.
Well, you can make a really good and really controversial case. They made a movie.
Ron Howard made a movie. Yeah, Ron Howard made a movie on this.
It's amazing. Look, I mean, they were everywhere.
Wow. So these guys harpoon one.
That's so crazy. From the whale boat.
Then they get tugged along. Look at all these whales.
And then, while they're out, maybe a mile from the ship, the mate of the whale that was harpooned starts ramming the ship. Rams it three times.
Oh it three times, sinks it. Oh, no.
Now, you got a couple dozen guys in whale boats 2,000 miles off the coast of South America with no supplies. Oh, man.
What happens, and 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 it's just like a giant carcass it's just bleached bones all in it except for two quasi humans 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 them. Yeah.
And there were rules. There were almost like cookbooks that were very common.
How many people were on these boats? 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, I remember.
And there were, I mean, a lot of these guys were related, you know, and they were dear friends and family. They lived together on Nantucket.
And they ate each other. They ate each other, man.
How long was it before they discovered them? They were at sea adrift, I think, for the better part of three months. Went into the National, that's him, Nate Philbrook.
Fantastic. In 1820, the Whaleship 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.
When did this movie come out? 2015 for the movie. The manuscript was found in 1960, verified in 1980.
Oh my God. At least in 84.
Dude 84 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 Did they they devise them on the spot or did they have them prepared?

They devised it on the spot?

There was, what, the rules?

No, they were written.

It was like a maritime code.

So they kind of knew that this was a possibility.

They knew it was a certainty.

They just didn't know for whom.

This was common.

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, how to kill the person who would go first,

who not to eat based on the degree of your relation.

Oh, boy.

So, like, brothers are definitely off.

But cousins, not optimal.

So, like, people were being prepared for consumption.

Is eating them raw?

I mean, I can't imagine how you would make a fire out there oh my god unspeakable oh my god that's interesting owen chase right 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. Owen Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson also survived to tell the tale.
In all, seven sailors were consumed. Whoa.
Boy. See, this is why nonfiction is the best.
Ooh. 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.
Oh, my God. Because there's going to be one last person.
There's got to end. And then there was one.
Oh, God. I know.
I know. 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.
Most people get really hungry after five hours. They feel really hungry.
I found a description if you'd like to read. No.
No? Okay. It's not that bad.
Okay. 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.
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. The three men who remained behind on Henderson Island

were also rescued after surviving on eggs and crabs for nearly four months. Boy.
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 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 yeah i've heard this before because had had that that not happened in pennsylvania in titusville yeah not long after this we'd have hunted them into absolute oblivion well we almost did that to mammals north america yeah market hunting um there used to be elk in every state in the country there used to be deer everywhere um and we basically hunted them into oblivion the buffalo is the example of that, of course What the hell is the matter with us man? Oh, we're fucked up and we can't 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 No, it 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.

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.

Bananas.

I was in Custer a couple of weeks ago for a buffalo roundup oh wow man this was a kick this is um so this is western south dakota not far from crazy horse and um rushmore you know we worked on a crazy horseirty Jobs. We did an episode.

You mean the sculpture?

Yeah.

Sculpture is weird because there's no real drawing or painting or anything.

No photographs of Crazy Horse.

Nobody knows really what he looked like.

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.
I worked on the fingernail of Crazy Horse with a whole crew. What does it look like now? I haven't seen it in a long time.
Oh, you'll love this, Jane. It's so mine, but you can take all of Rushmore, all four heads, and put it on the forehead of crazy horse.

Wow.

That's how big this thing is. And wasn't it like one family's undertaking? Yeah.
Gort check. 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. Look at it.
Look at his finger in the lower right. That's what you worked on? Yeah.
And I scaled down his forehead to do basically some tidying up of his nostrils and whatnot when we were there. That's crazy how big that is.
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? That's what we're shooting for.
Wow. And it's going to take another half a century probably.
Wow. That's incredible.
You know, it's funny, man. It's very controversial amongst Native American communities though, right? I don't know.
It is know i think there's some there's a part of it is the thing that crazy horse didn't want to be photographed yeah you know he really believed that cameras were like stealing soul yeah that was a belief back then which is i mean might be honest well you have this novel thing where no one's ever seen it before and you take an image of someone like that Like it diminishes you Yeah, 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. Yeah, so of course they would say What, what are they doing now? This is the fucking coup de grace.

They're going to steal our soul with this fucking box.

Big thing goes off.

You got to stand still.

This guy, Korchak, he was so brilliant on so many levels.

Yeah, I think he had 13 kids.

And they were basically his workforce.

He built into the rock the staircases that they needed to take to get to this space. Like 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? I forget. But, you know, he had all of the, he had enough blessings of the requisite players to embark on this thing.
Well, I think anything, anytime you have some enormous thing, you're going to have controversy. You're going to have people that don't like it, that do like it.
You know, there's you do but the difference i mean for me i called when we brought um we brought dirty jobs back during the lockdowns because i just felt like i wanted to be i 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 by calling Rushmore and I'm, I'm not telling you the story to make anybody sound bad, but it really just was kind of appalling. You know, I said, look, I, I want to bring my crew and, and I, I'm really, I want to tend to this statue, this statuary, this monument at the time, you know, the headlines were filled with statues being pulled down and being disrespected for any number of reasons, right? Right.
I'm like, look, I think the, I think the park service does an amazing duty and I, and I, I want to meet the caretakers of our statuary and I would love, you know, to 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, 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.
And I really wanted to go to that part of the country. And so I knew Crazy Horse was nearby.
And the answer was, oh, yeah, come on out anytime. And the difference the difference of course was crazy horse isn't being built with a penny of federal money 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 when you talk to people who are in charge of a thing that means a lot to other people.
Monumental in reality. Monumental monuments.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, some people, I think, see it as a burden, some as a challenge, some as an obligation. But for me, the vast majority of Americans are never going to see either one of those monuments in person.
So to, to show them more people will have just seen what Jamie put up here as a result of this, probably then we'll, then we'll visit in person. And that's amazing, dude.
Yeah, that is amazing. 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 the way we, where we got our energy from just a little while ago, this Buffalo roundup I was telling you about, I mean, it's, there were only a couple thousand of them.
And when you think about the accounts of the day, where the Buffalo Rome was as far as you could see, just thick. Do you know Dan Flores? Do you know who he is? Tell me.
He wrote American Coyote, and he wrote, what is it? Buffalo Diplomacy, Buffalo Ecology? Is that what it was? I forget. But the buffalo premise is very fascinating because the numbers of buffalo, he believes, they were in such large numbers because so many Native Americans died out because of diseases.
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. But if the Native Americans, 90% of them were 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.
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.
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 population, because they didn't have to worry about wolves. They didn't have to worry.
So when they first were here, right, 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. The Cambrian thing? Well, there's two different time periods that they attribute to.
There's a shower, an asteroid shower that we go. 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 kind of dedicated his life to showing that this is probably what ended the ice age. There's a bunch of science behind it in terms of 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 you 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. And then you have this extinction event.
And then you have humans start hunting them. And so humans now, horses have been reintroduced to North America by Europeans.
Humans are on these horses, and then they're hunting these animals. Reintroduced, by the way, because horses originated in North America, including zebras.
All horse species came from here. North American, yeah.
But that was the Bering Land Bridge, and things moved around. 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 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 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 it's really interesting 1830 40 you'd have to go to whatever 1850 is what it's yeah yeah I here's the tragedy for me um I narrated a special about all that. I can remember it man really i mean i remember enough of it to know that i narrated it that's what i would told you three hours ago i'm is that the ken burns one is that what you could have been yeah could have been i know if it was ken burns he he always hires uh peter coyote oh peter does all this stuff he'soyote's great.
Yeah. But that's what I meant earlier when I'm like, I feel, I don't think there's anything wrong with me yet, but my bucket's full too.
And it's so annoying. 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.
And, um, you know, he, he, he, 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. Right.
I know, I know just enough to, you know, to keep a conversation on its feet. But it's like it's this constant thing, man.
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 remember more.
I should have remembered more about Philbrick. I should have remembered more about...
I don't think we're designed for it.

I don't...

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.

It's essentially a new thing with human beings. You know what Dunbar's number is? No Dunbar's numbers the number of people that you can keep like in your mind memory in your memory, right? That's essentially born out of necessity and tribal life, right? So we essentially have the same brains and the same capacity same hard drive as people who lived in tribes 10,000 years ago.
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.
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 in a meaningful way. It probably expands just like the part of your brain expands when you do difficult things.
It probably expands. There's a podcast, as you know, dedicated to what happened on your podcast.
I didn't know that. Yeah.
There's a podcast out there basically called, I don't know what it's callediencing 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. This is what we need, I think, more than anything today.

We need somebody, like if you're going to 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 going to go see a martial arts fight for the first time, if you're going to go to the octagon, it'd be better to sit next to you than me. Right? Sure.
But you'd be annoying. I'd have to say you don't.
Okay. How much do you know why that hurts? 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. It's just accessible in ways we've ever seen.
There's new information too. How can there be? Because information is acquired upon the consumption of all the other information.

It's all exponential. It piles on top of each other.
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.
How's that possible? People have been eating forever because now we know more about it. So it is new information.
Well, there's no such thing as an old joke if you hear it for the first time. Right.
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. 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 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, like, and what enhances that, what, you know, enzymes, different things that you eat.
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 right and the body of the stuff that I don't know yet that's been around forever is massive 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 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 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 are you are you reeling 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 a lot of us getting distracted jesus yeah but their stories their buffalo stories and whale stories they're out there i think that 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.
For sure. Yeah.
For sure. That's how we make a living, Mike.
Yes. Yes, Joe, it is.
That's what we've done. It's a pleasant living.
Listen, man. It's been awesome talking to you.
I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.
You know what, man? Three hours just fucking flew by. 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. 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.
Can I show you a truck before we go? Sure, sure. Because I know you're a car guy.
Yeah. So this company called Sugar Creek up in Ohio made me a truck.
Ooh, what kind? Well, it started as a 1964 Dodge Power Wagon. Oh.
It ended up as this. Dude, I've seen that online.
That's yours. That's mine.
Oh, that's crazy. I love those old Power Wagons.
Dude, that thing looks incredible. What a great job they did on that.
It's unbelievable. 2017.
It's about 9 000 man hours oh my god that thing looks

fucking incredible oh you got a heliphan engine in it 1100 horsepower 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 uh barrett jack Jackson is going to auction it off. No.
In January. Why? Why don't you keep it? Because my foundation needs money.
Oh. And right, so it's going to get a, I don't know what it'll go for.
He says a bunch, but. Oh, that'll go for a lot of money, man.
Yeah. That's probably going to go for half a million dollars at least.
No, he says two. Two million? Two million dollars? Probably cost half a million to make.
Wow. Beats me.
You know, this is another one of those worlds. 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.
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.
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. 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.
Dude, these guys, man. It's what we're, it's, I would never be able to let that thing go.

It's the art we were talking about.

It's,

it's,

that's,

that's artistry.

That's art.

Yeah.

Oh,

a hundred percent.

That's art.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike,

I 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. We'll see you next time.