418: David Alan Arnold—Dead Man’s Curve

Dude, that was fun.

Oh, yeah.

A fun and unexpected.

Another one of those.

It's micro, by the way.

The way I heard it, that's Chuck oohing and eyeing in the background.

Because

we, don't make it weird, because we just had

a really, for me, unexpected conversation with a guy named David Allen Arnold, who I hadn't seen in 20 years,

maybe 21 years.

It had been a while.

But David, I met up in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, when we were filming the early episodes.

In fact, it was season one of Deadliest Catch.

That qualifies as an early episode, I would say.

Well, I'm thinking, you know, people don't, like, there's pilots.

This show didn't technically have a pilot.

That's true.

It had...

three episodes of something that aired the year before called Deadliest Season.

And during Deadliest Season, you know, the producer, Tom Beers, he shot it as best he could, but he didn't have a deal with the network or anything.

So he kind of bootstrapped it.

And then he went on to sell the series, but we didn't know what the series was.

We didn't know what it looked like.

The network didn't know what it looked like.

They hired you on camera for it?

They hired me to host the thing, yes.

And I was later cut out of it, which kind of broke my heart.

But ultimately, it gave me dirty jobs, so no harm, no foul.

But what they knew was to tell the stories properly, they needed to film from above.

Yes.

And so they hired a pilot, a guy called Sam Igley, who I don't think has the part of your brain that tells you to be frightened of things.

Right.

And they hired a young guy who had already established himself as a great aerial photographer.

And that's my guest today, David Alan Arnold, who lives basically in the back of a helicopter, getting those amazing shots that you see in so many movies,

in so many TV shows.

He didn't even know how many Emmy Awards he'd won.

Yeah.

Well, he'll tell it in here, but basically someone said congratulations and he hadn't realized that he'd actually won his seventh.

Yeah.

So that's pretty good.

But let me just tell you that if you're a fan of Deadliest Catch,

you are going to love this episode and hearing from David because it is all about that.

And secondly, I want to just say one other thing.

I found this particularly interesting because it was just like the Nathan Phillian episode where I got to see two people who hadn't seen each other in 20 years reminisce about stuff that happened with them.

And that was really fun.

Well, it's fun for me too.

And, you know, he reached out.

Because I'm pretty sure he's a big fan of what's going on at Microworks.

And we share a lot of that same passion.

And he listens to the podcast.

He listens to the podcast, which, by the way, this episode is going to be called Dead Man's Curve.

And let me tell you why.

I'm going to read a very short paragraph that explains what this is.

Most people think about it as a stretch of highway that's particularly perilous and one that claims lots of lives.

Well, it is, but it also means something else for people who make their living in helicopters.

The unique attributes of vertical flight have many amazing benefits, but they also come with some downsides.

Fixed-wing airplanes have a coffin corner close to the limits of their flight envelope at high altitude.

Helicopters have avoid areas close to the ground, where a combination of height and velocity can render them vulnerable in the event of a power loss, which, by the way, is not uncommon at all.

This combination of height and velocity is graphically depicted in the Rotocraft Flight Manual in the HV diagram.

A more ominous epithet for the HV diagram, but one commonly used in the field, is Dead Man's Curve.

Yeah.

David Allen Arnold makes his living in the Dead Man's Curve.

Right.

He's been there for a long time, and he's still standing, and he is a meticulous man who is very cautious, but who nevertheless assumes an extraordinary amount of risk.

Sorry, I'm distracted because I hear a helicopter flying over us right now as I'm talking about Dead Man's Curve, which is my cue to shut up and introduce you to my old friend, David Alan Arnold, whom you shall meet forthwith.

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The day you were supposed to be here, you were surrounded by fire and the earth was quaking under our feet.

And it leads me to my first official question: which is,

how much of the last 25 years of your life have you spent with your sphincter slammed shut?

A fair amount.

This entire book reads like, I mean, it really reads like a thriller.

And I got to tell you, man, it was so interesting for me to go through it and then suddenly find myself looking back at me over here on page whatever it was.

I'm so honored to make your book.

And you've got photos of me when we were in Dutch Harbor in that, I guess it was 2024.

Was that right?

Does that sound right?

2004.

04, yeah.

Yeah.

2004.

2004, that's correct.

All right.

I'm still narrating that show, as you probably know, but paint the scene for people, right?

For people who haven't watched Deadliest Catch or really don't know much about Dutch, for a guy just to show up there and start working, doing what you do, that was a hell of a time.

You know,

I get a phone call.

I'm in Los Angeles, which is pretty much 72 degrees most of the time.

And they're telling me they want me to go to Alaska and fly in the Aleutian Islands over the Bering Sea for this new show they're going to make about crab fishing.

And

I'm listening and I think, oh, that sounds really dangerous.

So yeah, let's go.

And I get in the helicopter, we build the camera on, and we fly across the Aleutian Islands, which is a Dr.

Seuss

surrealist landscape.

I mean,

there's no one for hundreds of miles.

It's just these islands.

Some of them have black volcanic sand beaches.

One of the black sand beaches has a boat, a crab boat, sticking up out of the sand.

So the whole boat

wrecked

and

just it washed into the beach and this is such a forbidding landscape that like no one came to get the boat or to fix it or

you know the boat's still there all these years later and the sand from the ocean waves has buried the boat and only the wheelhouse is sticking up out of this black sand in the middle of nowhere.

So I'm looking at a photo that I think you must have taken because there was nobody out there except me, you, and Sam, the pilot.

And this is a photo of me and Sam standing on that black volcanic beach.

I mean,

didn't Sam find that derelict and bring it back to production, at least as a potential shooting thing?

Yes, as an Alaska pilot, he had flown up and down the Aleutian Island chains, and he knew

because he just went by them, like on his way to work, like there's a shipwreck, there's a shipwreck, there's a shipwreck.

and So our pilot on season one of Deadly as Catch he told me he said well, you know they used to just leave shipwrecks wherever they landed

and You know now in modern times if you're shipwrecked they make you come and pay to have it, you know taken away and cleaned up

but he knew where all these shipwrecks were and so One of the things we started shooting right away for Deadly's Catch was not just the fishermen and the boats, but also the boats that didn't survive up there.

Because people should understand: if there's a shipwreck in the Chesapeake Bay or the San Francisco Bay or really anywhere in the lower 48, you clean it up.

Right.

You get it out of the water.

You do whatever you have to do.

Not up there, man.

They just dot the landscape, and nothing quite sets the tone for danger on the high seas, like acre after acre of wrecks.

Yeah, boat skeletons.

So the crab boat was literally, I mean, when you and I were climbing through the wheelhouse in the sand, somewhere on the wheelhouse, it said retriever, and I think we had a boat called Retriever on the first season, coincidentally

of Deadliest Catch.

And it's just like, well, this one didn't survive, and so it's over here now.

It's almost like walking through a graveyard, except there are no gravestones.

There's just these huge monuments.

And, I mean, of course, you can't tell at a glance what went wrong.

You only know that something catastrophic occurred.

And it could have been a fire.

It could have been a rogue wave.

It could have been anything.

Unfortunately, when you look at some of those shipwrecks, you look at that and you know, well,

everyone on that boat may have died in this wreck because

in that emergency where the boat is, you know, capsizing or whatever,

the men on that boat are basically in the middle of nowhere in an environment where if you get into the water and you don't have a survival immersion suit on, you know, you can be dead in a couple of minutes.

Minutes, for sure.

I want people to understand how,

I mean, I definitely want to get your perspective as a cameraman in a chopper experiencing this landscape.

But by way of contrast, my experience as a host of sorts, we had shot the pilots for dirty jobs, but we hadn't really sold it, right, as a series.

And the network was trying to figure out what to do with me.

And I wasn't sure, really, what I wanted to do either.

They were on the fence about dirty jobs, called it a

talk show in a sewer.

But they said, if you like this kind of thing, and they went on to describe Dutch Harbor.

So I flew up there.

I met you.

I met Sam.

Brian Catalina's there calling the shots for original productions.

And the truth is, man, we didn't know what this thing was.

We didn't know.

It might be a mini-series.

It might be a documentary.

It might be a feature film.

It could be a series, but we just didn't know.

In fact, when I went up there the first time as the host of this thing, they had $250,000 set aside for me to give to the captain that got the most crap.

Unbelievable.

They thought it might be a reality show.

No one.

Like a competition show.

Exactly.

Because Survivor was killing it and they knew there was money involved.

But Chuck, they didn't understand.

They didn't really understand how dangerous it was and how crazy it would be to suggest that you could somehow raise the stakes when people are dying every year.

So that's the world I flew into.

And as I'm trying to sort it out, all we knew for sure is that I was going to do some weird impersonation of Stone Phillips meets a greenhorn, right?

I'd be working some days, I'd be hosting other days.

But the day I met you, Sam welcomed me onto his deathmobile, the chopper.

What was it, a 206

bell?

It was a Jet Ranger.

Yeah.

You're in the back doing whatever magic you do.

Was that a West Cam unit in those days?

Yeah, so season one, we were a standard definition television show.

So kids today probably don't even know what that means.

Basically, before we had HD, which we now all watch on our TVs,

we had a much

lower resolution format of television.

And so season one, we were using standard definition, and I had

Westcam gyrostabilized platform which was basically a military machine that they had adapted for TV and stuck a TV camera in it for what we were doing.

And to further paint the picture Sam Eagley if you were to Google rugged partially off-the-grid bush pilot There'd be a picture of Sam, right?

I learned a lot about Alaska talking to him because

he would tell me,

I think he came from Utah and he started flying in an airplane produce out to native villages.

Right.

He's telling me all these stories and I go, really?

And he goes, yeah, they didn't have produce.

And now I'm just picturing this like you live in this middle of nowhere landscape.

And you don't have tomatoes and bananas.

Like, they don't exist here.

They don't have trees.

They are no trees in Dutch Harbor.

There's no trees out in that part of the Aleutian Islands.

And

he started flying produce to these villages and delivering it.

And it was like this,

it's a really neat thing.

It's like, it's the entrepreneurial spirit of like finding a need and then figuring out.

He's by himself in an airplane in the worst, most unforgiving wilderness you can imagine and the worst weather in the United States.

And he's flying these little airplanes, you know, full of bananas and stuff.

And then the people who live in this bleak environment, they see all these beautiful, colorful fruit and vegetables come out of his airplane.

I bet they wept.

It's a Christmas.

It's Christmas morning with food.

You know, it's a human need.

That was one of his jobs when he first started flying in Alaska.

And so just hearing his stories of, you know, things that would happen to him,

you know, what the winds would do to his little aircraft.

I mean, it's just stuff.

Not only do they not teach it in flight academies, they couldn't even imagine.

What was he flying?

Like a beaver?

He had a number of different airplanes.

I think one of them was a beaver.

And

our helicopter, he was telling me, they had a pattern of winds up there called the Williwas.

And he's telling me all this.

And he goes, Yeah, I was walking to my aircraft one day, and one of the blades bent straight up

because the winds were so violent that they just grabbed the blade and just bent it in a way it's not supposed to bend and he said you know

it was just like just hearing those stories of how terrible the conditions are there i screamed at the top of my lungs we flew over ballyhoo and everything was great everything was calm and then It felt like we were going to flip over and crash in a second.

And he may have yawned at some some point, you know.

He may have said, you know, it's going to get a little sporty.

Hang on.

He was unflappable.

But

the day we met,

he flew us over to that wreck.

Not the one I'm looking at here, not the ship in the sand, but that giant old derelict.

Remember the big rusty

giant thing.

Oh, yeah.

Well, to get to this, we had to basically get to the top.

I'm going to call it a mountain.

It was probably a hill.

But it was like, I don't know,

it felt like it was about 1,000 yards up there.

And he had to drop us off.

He couldn't land.

So Sam, like, crabs in and gets the runner right on the hillside.

And I'm with a guy called Matt.

Remember Matt Renner?

Oh, yeah.

So Matt's sort of with me.

I don't really know why.

I think he was just, somebody said, keep an eye on him, man.

We'd hate to lose him on the first shoot.

Well, Matt was instrumental in recording your audio for those.

Right.

I remember Matt, we recorded one stand-up.

You were on top of a snow-covered mountain, and somewhere nearby,

Matt is under a white sheet.

And he's got the

wireless audio gear so we could record your audio of you talking to the helicopter camera as we fly around you.

It was insanely complicated, the shot.

And for me, it was the best thing I had ever done as a host.

It was the most fun.

It was the most exotic.

It was the most thrilling.

And so here's Sam.

He's crabbed up.

Like, there's ocean under us, a steep, steep hill.

And he's right perpendicular into the mountain.

Matt goes out onto the runner, and I follow him, and we jump.

And the first job is not to roll backwards because if you start to roll, you're just not going to stop.

So you kind of land on all fours, and then you crawl up and then over and then down to the wreck.

So we get off the plane.

Matt's got a knapsack with the gear in it.

And our idea is for me to scramble out onto this derelict and strike the best pose I can, high up, blue water all around me, big rusted hull.

For this thing's the size of a football field.

Yeah.

It's huge.

And we get settled in there.

And then you guys vanish.

You're just gone.

You know, it's just off into the distance.

Matt is hiding under his, wherever he is.

I don't see him.

And man, you are, it's lonesome out there and quiet.

And it just feels so deadly.

And then I got my walkie-talkie

and Matt's talking to him and he's talking to me.

And you guys come around.

And I really don't know what's going on, man.

I've never shot.

to a helicopter before.

And there's just a little dot in the distance and they're coming towards you and they're coming coming towards you, and they give you a cue, and you stand there.

You can't even really see where the camera is, but you know, you know, you're right on me.

And it was just so

great

to have you land and then show me what you shot, because I had no idea what you were seeing.

And, David, it took my breath away, man.

Some of those shots you grabbed there were, I just thought, beyond epic.

Well, first of all,

I had done shots like that for other television shows, but when the host of The Amazing Race walks out and he's talking to the helicopter camera, he's usually on the roof of a building or something.

Normal.

Like, he didn't risk his life to get there.

Right.

And we would land, like, we had this idea to put you in these

deadliest catch-looking places where you could talk to the camera and explain explain the episode.

And you would get out of the aircraft, and I'm watching you like walk maybe half a mile.

And everything I'm looking at can kill you.

Like, you could fall off the cliff.

You're right.

It's like a five or six story tall shipwreck, which is all rusting steel.

Nothing but points and edges.

Yeah, so I'm thinking, he could cut himself on that.

He could fall through a rusting steel.

He could fall through it.

He could fall through.

Like, I'm just watching that, and I'm just doing the math, and I'm thinking, I have never seen a TV host do stuff like this.

We got away with stuff.

And again, they didn't know what it was.

They didn't understand.

You're out of the reach of the actuarials.

You're out of the reach of HR.

It was like we were turned loose in not quite a playground.

but something super interesting and given access to a world-class pilot, a world-class bird, world-class camera gear, and sent out into an environment unlike anything we'd ever seen and said,

make something interesting.

That was rare.

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And, you know, just to emphasize the point, like, we're putting you on stuff that men may have died on.

Like, that's how deadly it is.

And now we want you to go stand on it and talk to us about this.

Say something interesting.

I'm looking at this boat now back in the sand.

I'd forgotten.

You'll send me these photos, right?

Because it's ridiculous that I don't own this.

But my favorite shot of that whole crazy trip was going up the ladder on the mast.

So this is total master and commander stuff.

Oh, man.

And standing up at the top of this thing here.

Look at this thing, Chuck.

So I'm up there.

It's taller than it looks.

And he's coming in, and Sam is circling.

Show the camera.

Well, I'm sure we'll just throw it off on the screen.

We have the technology.

Are you sure?

Not really.

But that

looked so

because

you can zoom.

So like while he's pulling out, you could be zooming in.

While he's zooming in, you could be pulling out.

You can do all those crazy, like, forced perspectives.

It's like the beginning of Hawaii 5-0.

I love that.

That's the shot we were doing.

Sort of.

Although we didn't shoot it backwards the way they did, the cheaters.

I remember that setup.

I remember, you know, being TV people, you know, we had talked to you and it was decided you would do one, I think, in the sand next to the wheelhouse.

I think you did one on the roof of the wheelhouse.

And then you climbed up to the top of the crow's nest.

And as soon as I saw that, you know, as a cameraman, you kind of just know.

And I saw you on top of the crow's nest.

And

we're flying across the Bering Sea.

We line up on this black sand beach and the Bering Sea waves are crashing over the black sand.

And then we fly up to you, and you're on this pinnacle of this deathboat.

And

as we're circling around you, there are two active volcanoes behind you that have smoke coming out of them.

And so, of course, I looked at that and I said, yeah,

that's the one they'll use.

There's your open.

Well, of course, I mean,

for me,

that day and two or three others like it, I was up there for two and a half weeks in October.

That's when we met.

And then we came back in January.

Still

didn't quite know what the show was, but we knew what big waves looked like, and we knew what injury looked like.

We didn't know what death looked like, but we were about to see it, man.

And you were there for that, too.

And that's a chapter in your book.

I remember

being in the hotel in Dutch Harbor where the TV production office was.

Grand Illusion.

The Grand Illusion.

And

I remember,

this is kind of scary.

I just remember sitting in the production office, all the TV bosses are, you know, walking around and making decisions and stuff.

And this radio traffic comes in.

You could just read it in people's eyes that they

we all knew what we were doing, why we were there, but you could read it in their eyes that instantly

it like took everyone's breath away that

one of the boats

had sunken, and

it just went through the room of everyone's expressions just shifted to

whoo

that could have been the boat with our people on it and just

it is a

it's a terrible realization

and

everyone always says like

when are they going to stop making Deadliest Catch and are they still making that show and I always always hear those questions, and I say, well,

it is a deadly, dangerous environment where blue-collar guys can make a lot of money

that will never not be interesting and exciting and adventurous.

Well, the way I always put it is: you know, look, you can't script the Bering Sea.

And that was the day we learned that.

That was the day that

production had begun to do what production always does, which is plan, anticipate, think about story arcs, try and imagine what this thing could be.

And then,

I mean, I can think of, there have been a number of occasions, and probably not as many as you, but where you get, where shit gets real in a way that it snaps you out of your spell.

And there is a spell.

that descends over the business of making television.

You see it all the the time.

A lot in dirty jobs, but this was the granddaddy of it.

And it's so difficult to explain to people who haven't experienced it, but it's a kind of invincibility or at least

a bulletproof quality.

It's not going to happen to me.

I'm on camera.

It's not going to happen to that boat.

There are cameras on that boat.

It's not going to happen to Dave.

He's an hour chopper, right?

And then,

man, there was a, they pounded on my door.

Brian Catalina stuck his head in and said, I'd been up about two days straight.

We'd been shooting all round, exhausted.

And I'd gone down to Cape Cheerful, like a dunderhead, and had a couple of pops.

Why do they call it Cape Cheerful?

They're all about the irony in Dutch.

No, because it's pretty cheerful.

It's pretty cheerful.

That's the, you know, there were a couple of bars up there that were legendary.

The Elbow Room probably being the most famous.

Not there anymore.

But Cape Cheerful was in the hotel.

So I'm tucked, you know, I'm maybe 90 minutes into a sleep that's long overdue and way, way down the rem hole.

And Catalina's big bald head came crashing through my door and said, Mike, boat went down.

We need you now.

And I still hear it.

Boat?

What do you mean, boat went down?

Well, you know how you've been talking in those stand-ups for the last couple of weeks about how anything could happen, how it's the most dangerous job in the world, and about, you know, you use statistics and you do your stand-ups and you strike your little heroic pose and everything looks great and everything, gosh, this is going to be amazing.

Boat went down.

Yeah, that changed everything.

Every single thing.

Were you at the services?

I think we might have been flying to show the town during that time.

I didn't go to the services that I can recall.

I just remember, you know, worrying about all of the people on all of the boats ever since that day and hearing how quickly it can happen

and then

seeing how

really

there's no one to help you in most of Alaska when something bad happens.

It's too far away.

You might as well be on the moon.

And so if your boat rolls over,

you know, it's you against nature.

And that's all you got.

You know what scared me more than anything?

The boat was called the Big Valley.

And it went out in calm seas.

You know, they were loaded with pots, maybe too many, don't know.

But they were loaded with pots.

And the weather got a little snotty, but it wasn't anything like the conditions that you would film in later that month, you know,

three-foot swells, maybe, you know.

And, you know, they call them rogue waves, but just a, I think they were in a slack tide, and a wave just caught it broadside and rolled it right over.

And it was gone.

It was just gone.

Six on board, five died.

And then during the rescue operation on a boat called the shaman, I want to say, a guy was washed overboard as they were going through the debris field.

But what were you doing during the rescue?

Did they have the bird in the air at that point?

Were they

how were they thinking about

filming this?

Well, that's what's interesting, the history of the show.

People who watch Deadliest Catch, they know all the boats and the captains.

And Cornelia Marie was, this doesn't relate to the helicopter, but Cornelia Marie was a camera boat on season one.

And they're in the show, and you see them basically drop what they're doing and steam over to the location.

The story that I was told was

that

basically

the boats have an E-perb, which is a satellite distress beacon attached to the boat, and it's on the mast, and it's set to detach below a certain depth which means if the boat rolls over and it comes back up it doesn't activate.

If it goes to a certain depth they know well at that depth that's below the mast height of the boat and therefore the boat's underwater.

So at that point it breaks off from the boat, floats to the surface and starts transmitting to satellites.

And

basically

the Coast Guard gets the call

and then they call all of the boats in the area and say, Hey, we have a distress beacon from this boat.

It's at this GPS location.

And of course, they're going to launch a C-130 if they can, and a helicopter if they can.

But the first aid is basically all the boats in the area that are close that can start going that direction.

So I know our camera boat did that, and you see them in the show, and they're, you know, they're looking hopefully to get survivors out of the water.

Yeah.

You know, some of that stuff happens too far away from shore for our little helicopter to get to.

Yeah.

And it is a little helicopter, really, when you think about it.

I started a practice of,

you know, I looked at what we were doing and the environment that we're in, which is the most dangerous environment I've ever flown in.

And I looked at that and I started a practice of

Before we would take off, we would call the producers and tell them where we were going, how much fuel is on board.

In other words, how much time the aircraft can fly

and who's on board.

And from that, they could calculate: okay, if he's got two hours of fuel and it's been three hours,

A, we know where they were going, so we can start with that, but B, they're now overdue, and

after three hours, the engine is done because it's out of fuel.

So I started a practice of doing that.

That way, if something happened to us, at least they could have some idea

of that there's a problem and where to start looking for us.

Yeah.

Didn't you also ask the pilot what kind of gun he was packing because of the bears?

I ask, whenever I fly in Alaska, you know, people always tell me, they go, oh, you fly in Alaska?

Oh, wow.

Sounds so romantic.

And I go, you don't see Alaska like I do.

Most of Alaska is uninhabited.

There's nothing there.

There's no roads.

That's why everyone flies to get around in Alaska.

There's no cities, no houses, no roads.

You know, probably 99.999% of the state.

However, if you land your helicopter and get out, there are things that will eat you.

And they've eaten a lot of people.

And so I always, whenever I fly in Alaska, I always like to ask them, like, what kind of gun?

And, you know, sometimes they'll just tell me.

And sometimes they'll, well, it's a, you know, it's an elephant gun.

And they take it out of the hat rack, and I look at it, and the bullets that big, and I go, wow, that's a cannon.

Speaking of which, what's hanging around your neck there?

This is messages from people I've lost.

Really?

Yeah.

Yep, I take them with me everywhere I go.

May I?

Yeah.

Some of those stories are in the book.

people who've sent me messages.

I carry them with me everywhere I go.

People you've flown with.

People, you know, members members of my family or

someone that I've flown with, and then

I have a message from them after they died.

I just keep it with me.

What do you mean after they died?

This story is in the book.

It's in Help from Above.

When my mom died, I was 25 years old, and it was the first time in my life, because I'm a really happy person.

We were just talking about, like, I got here like

three or two or three hours hours early, and I'm just sitting outside on the bench, just doing my Instagram comments.

And you can just leave me anywhere.

With the rest of the influencers in Santa Monica.

Well, I would add, because coming to Santa Monica, it's like, whoa, this is like a city full of beautiful people and homeless dudes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And never the twain shall meet.

So I looked for a place to sit where I didn't smell urine, and I'm just sitting there.

You could leave me there all day.

I'm just happy.

I'm not.

You You should write brochure.

You found one?

I'm you found a spot that didn't smell until.

Yeah, it was a good spot.

So I'm happy all the time.

It doesn't matter.

That's probably why I've gotten some of the jobs I've gotten over the years is because I'm just always happy.

I never complain.

And

I don't remember you as happy.

Not saying you're not.

I remember you as

preternaturally enthusiastic and curious.

Okay.

You were like a kid in a candy shop up there.

Because at that point in your career, which I want to get into more,

and I bet it's still the same, that's still not quite the right word.

Wonder.

You had a sense of wonder.

You would look at me like after a shot and like, can you believe we're doing this?

Can you believe?

Can you believe this?

We got this pilot.

Right.

And your job, so people understand, it's a pretty short list of people who do what you do.

Very short.

And here you are on what would become the premiere show for this kind of photography.

And

I guess the question is: did you understand that then?

Did you have enough context in your career at that point to know that the stuff you were filming in Dutch would be a thing that you and I could potentially be talking about 21 years later?

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I definitely did not see that far into the future.

I think I was just fascinated

because

the environment is so dangerous and unforgiving that If you wreck your boat,

they might just leave the boat wherever it is, sitting on the beach, buried in sand.

And that there's guys that make a living in that environment.

And that includes us.

So I'm just like, whoa, sensory overload.

To be in such a violent, dangerous, unforgiving, and also bountiful environment,

it's like this gold rush of crab legs and money and it could kill you.

Yeah.

And your finger's gone today.

You know?

Yeah.

I won't belabor the point because I've talked about it before, but the injury rate, at least the year I was up there, according to the actuarials, was 100%.

Like, if you work a full season on a crab boat, you're going to get hurt.

You're going to break a finger, roll an ankle.

Catastrophic was 9%.

And mortality was, they didn't have a percentage.

It was one a week.

People hear the term derby fishing on Deadliest Catch, which was how it was when we first got there.

Yeah.

And I don't think it fully expresses how crazy that was.

And

I feel like the guys who did it, I feel like they loved it.

And it was like this intense game

where they could really get rich in a very short period of time.

Or they might not catch anything and they could be broke.

or the boat could sink.

And because they were racing to catch the crabs, it meant that they would push into, it's not like, ah, there's a frozen hurricane out there right now.

Let's go in three days.

No, they're like, well, the season's open.

We're going.

And then now it's like this thing of like fishing in a frozen hurricane because they don't know when the season will stop.

And they've either made a million dollars or they

haven't made enough to pay for the fuel and the bait.

That's the point that people miss.

They think, oh, you're getting crazy rich or you're dying.

But there's a lot in the middle that is really not that glamorous.

That's an important part to understand about this vocation, which is you can actually lose money.

You know, you go out there in a boat as a full share deckhand or even a greenhorn.

You know,

you pay for the gas.

You pay for the groceries.

You're all on the hook for that.

You start in the red, right?

And to break even is not wildly uncommon.

It just doesn't make for great TV.

And by the way, neither does a flat Bering Sea.

My first two, three days out on a boat, it was like a duck pond.

I'm like, this isn't a dangerous job.

It was like 68 degrees.

We're hauling pots.

It was like, this is pretty pleasant.

These are some interesting guys.

We're learning some things.

And then in about over the course of 25 minutes, temperature drops 40 degrees, and it's blowing sideways, and you're still working.

And you guys were up in that, man.

You were up.

I remember once seeing you flying.

I couldn't believe you were still in the air filming us.

It made no sense.

There's just no way the FAA could have been cool with that.

There was a point on season one

where Sam, he and I were going somewhere and he looked over at me and he goes, How you doing, Dave?

And I said,

I don't like this.

And he laughs and he goes, Welcome to Alaska.

The weather in Alaska is so violent that flying up there is

adventurous at a level that

pilots, I think, in the lower 48 just cannot imagine.

And it's just, that's how you get from point A to point B is,

you know, it's what you said where you like you leave Dutch Harbor and you go to fly a couple of islands over,

but

after you leave, the wind changes and becomes an 80-knot headwind.

Yeah.

So now the aircraft's only doing 15 miles an hour, but we don't have enough fuel to go 150 miles at 15 miles an hour.

The engine will stop running before we get there.

And that's how intense it is to just go to work in Alaska.

The learning curve is a right angle.

It takes a while.

You know, one of the first things Sam did with me, I don't think you were in the bird because we were doing these other shots where I would sit next to Sam and I had a camera guy behind me, and we were doing, we shot

so many stand-ups.

But I said, kind of jokingly, I'm like, you know, that thing in the beginning of Magnum PI when the helicopter just dives and then flattens out like 50 feet over the water?

What's that maneuver called?

And Sam goes,

I called it this.

And down we go.

And it was so crazy fast.

It doesn't feel like you're descending.

It feels like the world is rushing up at you.

And then he flattens out.

And then you realize, yeah, that was my sphincter making that sound.

And then you realize you've soiled yourself.

There were just so many moments of it, though.

My story, it doesn't end there, but it changed because

after the Big Valley disaster, everyone at the network understood, okay, this is not a reality competition show.

This is not a movie.

This is something else.

We're still not quite sure what it is, but you know what it doesn't need?

It doesn't need a host.

Not really.

It needs...

We can tell this story like flies on the wall with well-placed cameras,

and then we can follow the men who do the work and we can see what happens.

Can't script the Bering Sea.

And so I went back to Dutch several times to do various specials.

That was it for me.

I was up there for four weeks, and I realized I had just hosted what was going to be the biggest show of my career.

And then I learned that I couldn't be in it.

And then they picked up dirty jobs, and we all lived happily ever after.

But you went back for season two

and three

and four.

So tell me, what did I miss?

They paved the roads in Dutch Harbor and they put up street lights.

When I first got to Dutch Harbor, there was no cell service.

You see the guys in the show with like a candy bar phone?

That's all, the only phones that could work up there because this cell system up there was like 30 years old.

I don't know what a candy bar phone is.

Can you?

It doesn't have a touchscreen.

So old school.

It only has numbers.

Like an old house phone.

It's just like the numbers that you press to call someone.

That's all it has.

Gotcha.

There is no data at all.

And

so they definitely, over the years, you know, they kept adding stuff.

One time in Dutch Harbor,

an airplane was trying to land on the runway and it hit a truck.

So

they

basically piled rocks into the Bering Sea to make a surface so they could extend the runway and then

also put the road further away to get the airplanes more so they could come in and land without hitting a vehicle that was going by at the end of the runway on the street.

People should understand too

just how jacked up landing is in Dutch.

I mean, the crosswinds are crazy.

You're flying in between a couple of mountains.

I don't remember the percentage of aborted flights or landings, but it's a bunch.

Sometimes on social media, I'll post a video from inside the plane that takes us there.

And two out of ten comments will say, it's not really, you're just shaking the camera, right?

Because I can barely hold on to the camera.

And sometimes there's people screaming, and sometimes there's stuff falling.

One time we took off out of Dutch harbor and the guy behind me,

after we got out of the airport area, he leaned forward and he goes, Dave,

when we took off, my backpack went up and hit the ceiling.

Is that normal?

And I said, yeah, that's pretty normal.

Yeah.

You can't overstate it.

First time I flew in was actually pretty uneventful.

Second time, this is a plane, so the carriers at Pen Air,

and I think some of the best pilots in the world, their resumes are unbelievable.

And the first time we came in, I would say 80% of the people on the plane, including me, were screaming.

It wasn't like, oh, some turbulence.

It was just boom,

like all the overheads snap open, stuff is moving.

Grizzled fishermen are praying.

You don't land somewhere, you just kind of bounce in.

Third time, we were flying into crazy headwinds

from Anchorage, right?

So it's a couple hours to Dutch from Anchorage.

And

the captain just comes on.

It's raining, pouring down raining and windy, and we're just flying and flying and flying.

And he says, guys, we're not going to make it.

I've got to put her down.

Now, in my mind, like, I'd looked at a map of the Aleutian Islands, and I'm like, okay, there are islands around, but put her down.

What do you mean?

Like, it wasn't clear.

Like, are we crashing?

He landed in Cold Bay.

have you ever landed there oh yeah

oh

the way you said that was harrowing i mean what's crazy about cold bay as opposed to dutch is i think they built didn't they build that runway for the shuttle i think so it's like a cartoon

as to how remote it is and uh the first year that i did deadly as catch we flew out on the helicopter and we landed there and this kid comes out and he's pumping fuel in the helicopter And we're in the middle of nowhere.

And

he mentions that the plane had gone through a day or two before with TV people on it.

And this young guy, he's pumping the fuel and he goes, Man, they had real pretty women.

There were some pretty girls on that shoot.

And to hear that was like,

so that's what it's like to live here.

Right.

Yeah.

You don't see that too often, I take it.

And Cole Bay is interesting because it's so in the middle of nowhere, and there's no hotel there.

So what we do is we stay in a house that they call like a bed and breakfast.

And there's a family that lives in the house and they feed you.

And there's nothing else there.

It's not like you can go to some restaurant or something.

So we all come to the dinner table, everyone who's staying in the hotel.

And

sitting across from me is a Coast Guard pilot who flew in a Jayhawk to get there.

And

I suddenly realize

this is the pilot in the book I'm reading about maritime rescues.

And it like takes my breath away.

I go, the guy I'm reading about is sitting across from me.

And of course in the book, it's just this crazy storm in the Bering Sea and he's in his helicopter trying to get people out of the water.

Is that Lost in the Storm?

Is that chapter?

This story isn't in the book.

Oh.

But it's one of the craziest things that I've ever heard.

And

I do post on social media about the Coast Guard up there a lot because I really admire them.

And so I'm talking to this guy, and in aviation, you know, I fly on little aircraft aircraft all over the world.

So the pilot before every flight makes a go or no-go decision.

So this is the mission.

We're going to fly over the Super Bowl.

Okay, I got to have this amount of fuel.

I'm going this far to get there.

How is the weather?

How high are the clouds?

Can I get underneath them?

Will I have enough visibility to safely maneuver the aircraft?

You know, he just runs down a list of things that can kill us.

And if anything's on the list seems too dangerous, it's a no-go.

The pilot waves it off.

This is before every flight.

So I'm sitting across from this legendary Coast Guard rescue pilot, and I just got so curious.

I'm like, how do you,

because someone has made a distress call, and they need to be,

they're going to die if you can't save them.

So how do you make your

go, no-go decision?

And he said something that I will never forget.

Because it's so different from the rest of aviation.

He said, well, sometimes the wind can blow 100 miles an hour.

And when it gets up there, it's really hard for us to open the hangar doors.

Because it presses against the doors, and they physically can't open the hangar doors to get the Jayhawk out of the hangar.

And he said, if we can get the hangar doors open, we go.

We go.

Wow.

And if we can't, we just figured the universe is trying to tell us something.

Yeah.

Well, it's just a whole different metric.

It's just a whole different way of thinking about risk.

And like anything else, I think our ability to

assimilate risk, I think that ability is a muscle.

And I think the more you exercise it, the bigger it grows, you know?

Or if you overexercise it,

Maybe you start to ignore it.

I think it's healthy.

The thing I love about Deadliest Catch is after 20 years, they are still going for it.

And the fishermen are still going for it.

Because we live in a world that's run by lawyers and insurance companies.

And I love that there are people

who still say

yes to the call.

and they go out there and try and make a lot of money and feed their families in a risky environment.

I personally believe that

that's something that's missing from our modern, luxurious, affluent culture today.

And I think it's why you see kids doing street takeovers.

I think it's why you see people fighting so bitterly on social media because they don't have a challenge.

and a risk and a meaningful quest in their lives.

And so when they see someone they disagree with on Facebook, it's on.

They fight to the death.

Because I think that not having risk

and not being willing to take a risk, it leaves a part of their human spirit starving.

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I think about that a lot.

I think of it in terms of the unintended consequences of what happens when somebody tells you that your safety is their priority.

I think that, however, well-intended that might be, whether it's coming from an airline pilot or just a head of compliance at DuPont or any other big company,

when you tell your employees that

their safety is the most important thing to you,

you're basically saying that they don't have to worry about it as much as they otherwise might.

And that's the trick.

I think you're absolutely right.

And I think we saw it during the lockdowns.

This idea that

zero, you know, that's what we're shooting for.

Zero risk.

Get rid of all the risk.

We want to eliminate all the risk entirely.

And it took a while, but I think we eventually realized that's not how you live.

That's not living.

That's just existing.

It doesn't mean you should take foolish risks, but it does mean that that you'll never ever be able to eliminate it from the equation.

And if you try too hard,

something's going to like whack-a-mole, something else is going to pop up.

To your point,

all of the craziness that we're seeing online.

I hadn't thought about it that way, but you might be honest on it.

I think it's like

by taking risk and adventure away from people,

it's like a poisonous thing that you do to their spirit.

And that's why they try to kill each other when someone gets cut off in traffic.

That's not a normal reaction.

That's a reaction to someone who just has nothing to fight for in their life.

And so any fight is to the death.

They just like their whole spirit is craving a risk and a reward.

And I do think that's an unhealthy aspect to our very comfortable society that we have today.

And I'll tell you,

it's the reason I'm still proud to narrate that show.

It's not a perfect show, and I can quibble with any number of decisions that have been made that might unnecessarily lean into this narrative or that narrative, but all that stuff is subordinate to the big idea, which is: this is a real job, it's really dangerous, filming it is really dangerous, but all of that risk is worth it.

It's worth it because it's real

and you get a look at a vocation and a community of men, not all men, but mostly men, who

understand

that the stakes are primal.

And so they assume the risk.

And you've had a front row seat to it, man.

You have seen it.

Through the viewfinder, perhaps.

Yeah, I was very fortunate to start my career in television, flying cameras, and I entered a very swashbuckling era of

guys jumping into small, underpowered machines, strapping cameras to them, and I don't want to say doing stunts, but

in the early days of film flying, it's like every camera flight was a kind of a risky adventure.

And it's one of the first things I learned was that

we were dwelling

beyond a mathematical equation called the dead man's curve.

It's a boundary in helicopter flight beyond which you can't safely land if the engine quits.

And I slowly learned as I got more into TV and movie flying how much of our time was spent in the dead man's curve.

And

you know, in a sense, I guess it's like being on a crab boat where if you fall out of the crab boat or the boat sinks, that's it.

Death is close and it's quick.

So working in that realm

was a hell of an adventure.

And,

you know, we used to do behind-the-scenes on Deadliest Catch.

Oh, yeah.

And so they would come out to the helicopter and they would film us and they would ask questions.

And I never forget there was a producer there.

We were probably

five years into Deadliest catch, and he's listening and he's doing the math in his head.

And you could just see the wheels turning.

And he goes,

is that dangerous?

And I said, yeah.

And he goes, why do you do it?

And,

you know, answering that question was kind of how I started to figure out a little bit of how my work is different than other jobs.

You know, kind of like a fisherman who keeps going fishing even though, you know, friends have died on other boats.

I kind of looked at it and said, well, that is kind of different.

You know, it's like

returning to a place that you know you escaped last time and got what you wanted, but you might not make it out this time is an interesting exercise of the human spirit, really.

Is it addictive?

Not to me.

In the case of Deadliest Catch, I've always just been so glad when I'm done filming.

I worry about the people on the boats.

I've been doing this show for 20 years and every time they go out, I worry

because I'm not always there when they're fishing.

And I just, I worry about them, you know,

having that one trip where something goes wrong with the boat or the weather is just too bad, you know.

You gave me a copy of your book and you put some helpful post-it notes in it just to direct me to various areas, but this is the most interesting one.

It's a little tiny post-it note you put at the end of a chapter called Lost in a Storm.

And it says,

I should be dead.

Yeah.

I realized as I learned more about aviation, about the aircraft, how they perform, and different things that can kill you, I started to recognize when I was in a situation that basically was a complete accident report, except for the ending.

You know, it's like everything that can can go wrong that can kill you is happening as i wrote the book

i did write it and publish it myself

and

a friend of mine was helping me like he would read it and then he would you know tell me what was wrong with it that day he gave me a thousand corrections

things i did wrong in writing the book and one time he looked at it he goes why don't you just start the book with one of your stories

and at that point in my life

this was about 2015, I had never told my stories to anyone.

So writing this book was quite an ordeal for me.

And so

I started writing the stories

and there were times, especially in a realm like Deadliest Catch,

there were times where everything that can kill you in an aircraft was happening right now.

And the worst one was we were offshore at night.

This story is called Lost in a Storm,

and we're flying over the wizard, and I noticed that the sodium lights on the wizard are projecting like the bat signal in front of the boat.

That's weird.

And by this point in my career, I was the most scaredy cat in the aircraft at all times.

And so I'm looking at that, and I go, hmm.

So I asked the pilot, I go, how much time you got left for fuel?

I got about 10 minutes left.

I said,

let's go back now

which is one of a dozen things that's probably why I'm alive today was I was just so nervous to be offshore at night

and I said let's go back now and then he says something I will never forget he goes okay

let me see if I can figure out which way town is oh my gosh And I was sitting in the back of the aircraft.

I would always keep looking out the back windows of the aircraft so I could see the lights of town because A, that told me I could still see the town and that my pilot knew which way is up.

Because

what has killed so many people, especially in Alaska, is if the pilot loses his references, this is

in Kobe.

This is what happened to Kobe.

Yeah.

Is the pilot...

lost his references and he got disoriented and he didn't know that he was basically tumbling

And so I keep watching the lights because I know if I can see the lights, he can see the lights.

If he can see the lights, we stay alive.

This is worth pausing real quick.

People need to know: you're in the back of the helicopter.

You're operating your gear.

It's kind of like sitting in the middle seat in the back of a plane.

You are utterly, utterly, I mean, everybody on the plane, of course, is dependent on the pilot, but you're helpless.

You're utterly vulnerable back there.

Yeah, I'm along for the ride.

So I do try to be a canary in the coal mine, which is why I started getting scared.

The lights are super bright on those boats, but once it starts projecting like a beam,

that tells me that the atmospheric conditions are getting really hard to see through.

So I start getting nervous.

I said, how much time you got left?

10 minutes.

Okay, let's just go.

And then he

looks around and he can no longer see town.

So then I look out my window.

Sure enough, it was there a minute ago, and now the town is gone.

It's just ink, it's just black.

You know, and I and I know what he's doing.

He's he's trying to find something to tell him which way is up so he can keep the aircraft upright and then navigate where we have to go.

And

so I immediately turn off all of my equipment and I pull my circuit breakers because I don't even want the

little green LED on the monitor

to like distract the pilot.

I don't want any light except the lights outside in the town.

And the director goes, hey, Dave, my monitor just went off.

And I said, yeah, it's not coming back on.

And now I'm really scared because this, no one survives this.

If you lose your references, just like JFK Jr., just like Kobe, you're not going to live through it.

It's impossible to do.

And so I'm just seeing that now is instantly upon us.

And

so the pilot starts navigating and he starts complaining.

He goes, Dave, turn your equipment off.

Your lights are messing me up.

And I'm looking around.

I go.

I not only turned everything off, I killed the power to the turnoff switch.

Like I killed the breakers.

I don't have any lights.

And then I suddenly realize

20 feet behind us are the nav lights of the aircraft on the tail.

And we're in such a disorienting weather conditions that the lights

way back behind us, these little lights are coming up and getting into the cockpit in front with him.

And he's having such a hard time seeing any reference he can find that that little dim light is bothering him.

And I go, it's your nav lights.

Turn your nav lights off.

So boom, turns the nav lights off.

Now we are in pitch black darkness.

I'm looking from the back seat, I'm looking over his shoulder and I'm hoping to see like a horizon so we can live.

And I don't see it.

And there's nothing there.

But if I look away, I can almost see a little teeny tiny nothing of a light.

That's how small that point of light is out in front of the aircraft.

And I said, what are you flying to?

And he he goes, I don't know.

I thought it was the lights of town, but now I'm not sure.

And that was it.

I knew we were dead.

I said, turn the aircraft around right now and go back to our boats.

And

he's smarter than I am.

He's actually a pilot who can navigate in a storm.

So these are all his calls to make.

Go, no, go.

And he knows,

unfortunately, we've been flying for like 10 minutes now to this little light of something.

He knows that if he turns around and goes back to the boats, we may not have enough fuel to get to shore, even if he knows where it is, even if he can find it.

But he turned that aircraft on a dime.

He didn't even say a word, just boom.

I said it.

He turned.

And I told the director, I said, call our boats because he had a Marine Radio.

Director sitting next to you?

He's in the front seat.

Oh, boy.

I said, call the boats and tell them to steam towards Dutch Harbor, turn all their lights on.

And I told the pilot, I said, okay.

By the way, Sig Hansen,

smart captain that he is, he knew exactly what was up because we had left 10 minutes ago.

And so the director calls on the radio and says, to turn all your lights on and steam towards Dutch Harbor.

I told the pilot, I said, that's going to give you your heading.

And you're telling the pilot this,

which I have no business doing,

but to his credit,

he also was probably scared.

And I just felt like if we're going to run out of fuel or tumble into the ocean, I'd rather do it next to our boats, the people that can help us, maybe survive, than in the middle of nowhere.

And no one even knows where we're at.

So

Sig Hansen, Captain Sig, comes right back on the radio, says, okay.

Follow me.

I will take you right to the dock.

Because the conversation is going through the director to the Marine Radios.

and that was when the pilot said, Tell him we can't.

The boat's too slow.

We don't have enough fuel to fly at that speed back to Dutch Harbor.

And once again, Sigansen, just he's just such a smart guy.

He goes, That's okay.

He goes, You push out on my heading, and that will take you between the mountains to town.

Wow.

Because he knew what we needed to do to survive.

And so that was it.

That was that moment of, you know, Captain Sig is using his lights to show us the way home, but his boat's so slow, we can't stay with him.

So we fly on his heading and the lights go behind us and it just becomes nothing, just black.

And I'm sitting in the back of the aircraft and I'm just listening to the rhythm of the...

the blades and the engine.

And it's kind of comforting.

It's just that sound of life, like it's the heartbeat of the aircraft.

It's still beating, even though we might be going upside down.

And

we

came around the corner and we all saw the lights of town, which means, okay, now we can survive.

Even if we run out of fuel, the pilot can auto-rotate and we won't go into the ocean upside down.

So we all saw the lights and I knew we were going to make it at that moment.

But that's it.

Until then, I didn't know.

And I was just kind of sitting in the back of the aircraft just waiting to crash into the bearing sea

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Here's how you wrote it.

The camera crew leaves and takes the director back to the hotel.

The pilot and I are left alone with the helicopter in the old hangar.

I lean into the pilot and ask, when we were lost out there and turned around to go back to the boats, where exactly...

Did you think we were heading?

The pilot scratches his head and says, I don't know.

But I'm pretty sure we were heading offshore.

So that's it.

The storm had the pilot so confused he was flying away from Dutch Harbor with no fuel in his tank.

We had nothing ahead of us but a thousand miles of Bering Sea.

If we hadn't turned around and gone back to our boats, I wouldn't be here.

The Bering Sea had already claimed our helicopter with every soul on board.

We won our lives back by turning around, going back to our boats, and asking our friends to light up the darkness.

Thank God for our pilot's skill, that little voice in my head, Captain Sighhansen, and our director, who did just the right thing at just the right time to save us from the darkness and death of Deadliest Catch.

This book's full of this stuff, man.

I know the feeling.

I got one foot off the curb out here one day.

Somebody put a hand on my shoulder just as the big blue bus goes by, right?

You're like, oh, that was close.

And then you're going with your life.

This is not the conversation I thought I was going to have with you.

I just have to ask you, because a lot of people are listening to this and they're going, in spite of all these nightmare stories, they're thinking, I want to do that.

That sounds like a big life.

That sounds like an exciting life.

It sounds like a life worth living.

Real quick,

what's the path to becoming one of the most specific camera people in the world?

And does work ethic or luck have anything to do with any of this?

My whole life, I've always looked at impossible challenges.

And I've always felt like,

okay, this can work.

And so I lived as far from Hollywood as you can get.

I live 3,000 miles away from Hollywood, and I wanted to work in the TV and movie business.

You were in Florida at the time.

I was in Florida.

And

there's no way to get from there to Hollywood or New York.

You know, you can't get to the movie business from there.

You can't do it.

And, but I didn't let that stop me.

I said, okay, I'm just in those days, we had the phone book, and I went through the phone book and I looked for any company that had anything to do with film and television.

And then I would just go see them about every two weeks.

And one of the companies told me to stop doing that.

The poor guy at the front desk, because every two weeks I stopped, hey, how's it going?

Remember me?

I can take pictures for you.

I'll work for free.

You don't have to pay me.

I'll just start working.

And then if you like what I'm doing, you could pay me, you know.

And

so the poor guy at the front desk was like, will you just get out of here?

All we do are helicopter cameras.

We have no use for you.

And I said, oh, okay.

About three weeks later, the vice president of that company called me and I was like this curiosity to him.

He's like, you make a living like this?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

And then he said,

you know, one of my guys just quit.

We didn't know he was quitting.

But he's gone now.

And I'm supposed to hire someone from Hollywood,

but I noticed you keep coming here.

We don't pay you.

So he was kind of like, what's wrong with you and he was

and he was kind of like while I'm talking to the guys in Hollywood I think you should come in and interview and that was it so he brings me in and he tells me okay you know well we work on big movies and TV shows in this little office I said oh okay and

he said nobody here would hire you because you don't have any skills and he said but the one thing I like about you is you seem hungry are you hungry I said oh yeah yeah, I'm hungry.

So I go home and he said, well, in a couple of days, I'll decide I'm going to hire.

It's probably a guy in Hollywood.

And I went home and I thought, oh, my God,

these guys work on big movies.

I would love to do that.

In my little town, there's a company that works on big movies.

I didn't know that.

I said, okay, man, how do I, God, how do I show him I really want this job?

And I was taking my trash out.

And in the dumpster, I threw my trash.

And in the bottom of the dumpster, I saw the most perfect thing I'd ever seen.

I literally dove into the dumpster and got an old, grimy, disgusting work boot that someone had thrown away.

And I brought it back to my apartment and I took a picture of myself with a fork and a knife cutting into that disgusting old boot with a big smile.

Like you had it on a plate?

I had it on a plate.

At your dinner table.

Yep, knife and a fork, cutting into this disgusting, filthy boot with a big smile.

And I sent him, in those days, we actually cut and pasted.

So I pasted the picture to a letter and I typed it up and I said, you asked if I was hungry.

Does this answer your question?

And

the marketing director of the company, she was laughing one day.

She goes, you know, the second he saw that picture of you eating your boot, you had the job.

And so I always tell people, because kids always ask me, they just assume I'm some super genius or I have some incredible resume.

Like, how'd you get your job?

How could I get a job like that?

And I always tell them, I go, you know what?

I knocked on doors.

So I recommend if there's something you want to do, you go find those people and you just start helping them.

Don't ask them to hire you.

Just start bringing them food.

Just start keeping in touch with them.

Because what's going to happen is you're going to be there one day and they're going to say, you know what?

Someone's got to drive the Fresno.

You want to drive the Fresno?

And they're going to have you drive the Fresno.

And then, you know, a year later, you're going to look back and go, yeah, I've been working here for a year.

But dude, I did a poor job of explaining the hierarchy and the trajectory of most people who do it the normal way.

Like, there are people out there

who don't really get to touch a camera, who are nevertheless working around them.

Like, they'll spend a decade, like, loading cameras, being a camera assistant, and never allowed to touch one.

You came in so hot, you just blasted by all that.

I wasn't old enough to rent a car.

And I literally had no technical skills when I started.

I just had a love for the movie and the television industry and the storytelling.

That's what I wanted to get involved with.

So they threw me into this role.

And when I would go on to a set of a Steven Spielberg movie, my supervisor would tell me, he goes, okay,

the assistant cameramen are all going to come around you and they're going to ask you questions because they want to know.

Sort of like fishing, like, which boats have you worked on?

And they're going to ask you, they're going to ask you questions, and they're not friendly questions.

And he said, don't talk to them.

And that was how I started working on these, the biggest movie productions in the world with the biggest directors.

I was just this hungry kid who I just showed up with an attitude that I want to work and you can pay me or not.

And

that was what got me in the door.

And then once I was there, they basically said, don't tell anyone where you came from or how you got here because they'll try and get you kicked off the set.

What was the Spielberg movie?

Oh

I was on set for a minority report

because I don't manage people.

I work by myself.

It's just me and a pilot my whole career.

So watching how he manages 200 people was such an amazing thing to witness.

I should get college credit just for being in the room with him and watching how he orchestrated that, how he dealt with problems.

He would look around the room.

He'd be talking to you.

He'd be looking at something you just handed him.

The whole time he's scanning the room because there's 50 guys working building the lights for the tank where the psychics, you know, do their visions for the future predictions and the news.

Three cores.

And

he would spot a guy over here.

Hey, can we get some help for this guy on this light?

And 16 people would lunge and help that guy to fix the light.

And the whole time he's doing other things and he's watching for things that aren't right or need more help and he's sending people there the whole time

while he's talking to other people and doing other things.

And then

there was a moment where he goes, okay,

who are we waiting for?

He's talking to a room full of 100 people.

I just want to know who we're waiting for.

And the room went absolutely silent, and all of his employees went into hyperdrive

because they didn't want to be named as the person that he's waiting for.

And I just, I watched that mastery of how to move 200 people to the next step in his day.

How to lead.

And

yeah, the guys who are there may have spent 20 years loading film before they were ever allowed to touch a camera.

And if they knew I had just walked in off the street because I had been knocking on doors, it would have infuriated them.

They would have had me kicked off the film.

Sure, you butted.

You cheated.

You cut the line.

You ate your boot.

Ate my boot.

Last question, because I know we got to jump.

Why'd you reach out to me after all these years?

I reached out because someone on my Facebook made a comment about your podcast, and a little light went off.

And I said, There's a podcast?

You know, because I hadn't seen you in 20 years, and I just knew you from watching your shows and seeing your Facebook posts, like everyone else does.

And I, there's a podcast.

So I went and found it and subscribed to it, and I just started listening to it.

And then I just fell in love with the show.

And the way you guys talk to people.

I love when you're just having coffee with mom and then I'm just hearing stories of your earlier lives and stuff.

And I just told Chuck, I texted him one day, I said, You should get college credit for listening to these episodes.

And I really felt like some of these shows that you guys do and the stories that you're covering, I just feel are more valuable than some college classes that people pay a lot of money for.

And

for me, it was just such an honor because

I sent an email to the

Info at.

Info at MicroWorks.

And

Nina, who runs my life and she's kind of in charge of getting in touch with people, and she's really good at it.

She just laughed at me.

She mocked me.

She said, it's an info account.

Nobody reads that.

She said, oh, really?

Info at MicroWorks, huh?

And

about three days later, we both fell out of our chairs.

And she, because

she runs my email too, and she found Chuck's email in the spam box.

And she goes, Where your email went to his spam box, yeah.

But meanwhile, we got him.

We got it.

Yeah.

That's hysterical.

And so she's really good at that stuff.

And she found it in the spam box.

And she goes, huh, they wrote back.

And

all I had said was, I would love to catch up with Mike because the last time I saw you, we were on Dudley's Catch and you said, Dave, you're not going to see me anymore.

And I said, I'm not.

And you said, no, Discovery Channel has decided that I can either be on camera for my show, Dirty Jobs, or I can be on camera here.

I can't do both.

And that's it.

I never saw you for 20 years.

And I just said, I'd love to catch up with Mike.

And then Chuck wrote back and he said, well, this is, I'm the producer.

And, you know, Mike said we could have you on the show.

And I said, I know who you are.

I listened to the show.

You're Chuck.

I go, what the Chuck?

It was like, I can be on the show.

Oh, my God.

This is my favorite podcast.

I just felt so honored that I could come in and catch up with you and share some stories.

Well, you buried the lead.

You should have led with that.

I'll send it out.

Somehow hot.

Only took an hour and 20.

Yeah.

How many Emmys have you won?

Funny you should say that.

Oh, wow.

Did money change hands when I wasn't looking?

No, no, no.

It's just been 20 years.

I've just thought, well, you know, I mean, you guys are both in television.

I know you have one.

I got one.

It's funny, funny to say that because I've worked on so many shows for so many years that I used to throw the Emmy invitations in the trash.

I didn't have time to go to some party in Hollywood.

And of course, during the Emmys, I'm working on some TV show somewhere.

And

today,

my life has changed a lot.

And last month, I had 28,000 comments on my Instagram.

And one of them was a guy who was mad at me for something.

He goes,

You're an Emmy award-winning cameraman for Amazing Race.

I wrote back, I said, thank you.

You didn't know?

I didn't know about that one.

Oh,

God, that's funny.

You know, Phil was on this this podcast.

Have you listened to that episode?

I can't wait.

I did not know that, and I would love to hear that.

We were still locked down.

We did it long distance.

He was in New Zealand, but he was a terrific guy.

Sig Hanson, too.

Yeah, Sig's Hanson.

Got to hear that one.

That was one of my questions for you.

I thought, I wonder if they've ever had the captains from Deadliest Catcher.

Well, you know, I mean, we actually,

those guys

did the first

national Zoom show during the lockdowns.

We were probably in late April.

It happened real fast.

We locked down in March.

We were up in April, and we were doing, trying to make sense of that.

They're up in Alaska, they got no, or Seattle, wherever they were, the connections were all terrible.

But we went on the air with it.

And people loved it.

And

it's a really interesting

group of men.

It's an interesting source of perspective and information and stories, of course.

And I couldn't agree with you more.

The country and TV is better for that show.

Imperfect as it is, it occupies some pretty rarefied air.

And the fact that you and I had a front-row seat to it back in the day, what a kick.

What an honor.

It's nice to see you still wearing the hat, too.

Oh, yeah.

Best of luck with the fires.

Thank you.

Watch your back for the earthquakes.

The book is called Help from Above.

How many have you written now?

I've written two books.

Well, I can vouch for this one.

What's the other one called?

The other one is Help from Above, Book 2.

Oh, clever.

The sequel.

What Lies Above the Clouds?

What Lies Above the Clouds.

And your Instagram is Airborne Camera.

Airborne Camera.

Yeah, you can find me most platforms.

I'm on most of them.

And you can find me with my name, David Allen Arnold, A-L-A-N.

Big life, brother.

Great to catch up.

Thanks again for reaching out.

So good to see you.

I'll give my mother your regards.

God bless you, and God bless your mom.

And thank you so much.

And to you, too, Chuck, because

it's just an honor to be here.

So, thank you guys so much for having me.

Our pleasure.

You bet.

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