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#2235 – Mike Rowe Podcast Episode Description
Mike Rowe is the creator and host of “Dirty Jobs,” “Somebody’s Gotta Do It,” and Facebook’s “Returning the Favor.” He is also the CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, a nonprofit championing the importance of skilled labor and addressing the critical workforce gap, and host of the podcast “The Way I Heard It.”
www.mikerowe.com
www.mikeroweworks.org
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#2235 – Mike Rowe Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, the discussion revolves around the evolution and impact of podcasting as a medium for information and entertainment. Joe Rogan reflects on the overwhelming amount of content produced over the years, noting the challenge of retaining information from numerous episodes and guests. The conversation touches on the emergence of platforms like Substack and X as alternatives for obtaining information, highlighting the appeal of podcasts as unfiltered, producer-free spaces where genuine conversations occur.
A recurring theme is the transformation of podcasting, with a variety of formats now available, including scripted dramas. The speakers emphasize the importance of being fully engaged and authentic during interviews, suggesting that this approach benefits the audience. The discussion also explores the role of hosts as both authoritative figures and curious learners, advocating for a collaborative learning experience with the audience.
The episode features insights into the dynamics of hosting a podcast, with Joe Rogan sharing his approach to staying focused and honest during conversations. He stresses the significance of being genuinely curious and extracting valuable insights from guests, which in turn enhances the listening experience.
Overall, the episode underscores the rapid growth and diversification of the podcasting industry, positioning it as a powerful medium for storytelling and information sharing. The overarching message is the value of authenticity and curiosity in creating engaging and informative content.
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#2235 – Mike Rowe Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
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00:01
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe
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00:04
Rogan experience.
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00:06
Train my day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
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00:12
We got cigars. We got coffee. We got Mike Rowe. We
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00:16
got Cigars.
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00:17
Crawls over there snoring. So what were you doing on QVC? What are you selling?
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00:23
That was the greatest line from Blazing Saddles, by the way, with Gene Hackman.
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00:28
Which line?
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00:29
He he says, cigars. Remember? Peter Boyle has come he 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 as the creature stomps off in Frankenstein.
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00:45
I don’t remember that. Tiny little movie. Long since I’ve seen that movie.
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00:52
Best,
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00:53
He’s a little bit of a fucking distraction. Can he, calm down?
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00:57
I don’t hear him on the other
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00:58
Trank him.
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00:59
I don’t hear him at all. We
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01:00
hear him because we we don’t have our headphones on.
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01:01
Maybe we
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01:02
should put our headphones on.
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01:03
I thought you were talking about
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01:04
me.
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01:04
No. Carl.
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01:05
For an awful moment. Like, We
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01:06
we wore him out. Jamie was throwing the toy for Carl, and now he’s like He’s such
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01:12
a great dog. He’s got I mean He’s adorable. I mean, it’s it’s such a personality thing at that for me with dogs and pets in general, you know. Like, you know right away if this thing has a personality.
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01:25
Oh, he’s got a lot of Carl’s got a lot of personality. Yeah. There’s no doubt about that. Yeah. And and little kid.
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01:32
And a person name, which I think is super interesting. Mine’s Freddie. He’s a terrier.
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01:36
I like a dog with a person name.
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01:38
Yeah. Me too.
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01:38
Like Fido? What the fuck is a Fido?
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01:40
No one knows.
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01:41
Well, that’s well, actually oh, no. That’s Philo. I was thinking of Clint Eastwood in every which way but loose. He was Philo Beto.
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01:48
Could also be Philo Farnsworth who created the television.
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01:53
For real?
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01:53
Yeah. Did only one guy do it?
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01:55
Or was it one of those, like, light bulb type deals where, like, a bunch of people are scrambling for it and What
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01:59
do they call that? Like a like a hive mentality.
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02:04
Right? Right. Right.
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02:05
Like, that happened with the integrated circuit.
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02:07
Mhmm.
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02:08
Right? When, Kilby at RadioShack was doing the same basic work, I think, that, Robert Noyce was doing for Intel. Mhmm. And one was here in Texas and the other was in California. And they had never met and they had never compared notes, but the work on the circuitry was so close that they wound up sharing the Nobel Prize.
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02:31
Oh, that’s interesting.
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02:33
Super super strange. But that, you know, I don’t
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02:35
That’s no common thing with human beings and and I the it’s this concept of, morphic resonance. Have you ever heard of that concept? Rupert 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 in on the East Coast, a rat on the West Coast will run it faster.
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03:03
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.
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03:27
So it’s a kind of I mean, I I would think biological evolution might might flirt with that. I read a paper. A guy wrote name was Patrick House. He this was his PhD, and he was talking about Toxoplasma gondii and histoplasmosis. And it was a crazy paper. His his real premise was trying to understand the phenomenon of the cat lady and why Right. Like, why why why every culture like, this isn’t unique to America.
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03:56
In in in every culture, you can find a woman who, you know, 2 cats, 3 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 and basically breeds there.
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04:25
And what he learned was when the cats were, crapping, the the gondii would 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 gondii basically disabled the part of the brain that would tell an otherwise sentient rat to run from the cat. But suddenly, they weren’t running.
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04:54
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 doctor House thought, well, you know, we’ve all heard about why pregnant women should stay away from cats because that that can have an effect.
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05:19
And a rat’s brain and a human brain have a surprising number of 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 catch on her on her fingers and and ate it. And the gondii disabled the part of her brain that said, hey, maybe 2 cats is enough.
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05:42
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.
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05:50
Yeah. Yeah. Now I don’t know if Doris went that far with
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their feelings.
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05:54
Them, like, run up to cats? The the the toxin infected rats is bizarre. Yep. They run right up to them. And the cat’s like, what the fuck is going on? The cats, like, bounce away from the rat.
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06:03
No. It’s like it’s like watching The Beatles at the Ed Sullivan Theater. You know? The people are like, what do you what’s wrong with
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06:09
you people? Why? What’s happening? That is psychosis.
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06:13
Yeah. Yeah. That’s super interesting.
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06:14
Also a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims that test positive for Toxo?
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06:18
Did not.
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06:19
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.
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06:31
I read, and I think this I
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06:33
got more of these to
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06:34
I’m like, I don’t wanna compete. I’m gonna lose, but you’ll love this. You probably already know it. Homeostatic risk and risky equilibrium and
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06:43
the
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06:43
unintended consequences, especially with motorcycle riders that emanate from safety protocols gone too far?
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06:51
Really?
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06:52
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.
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07:14
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 when we have ABS brakes as opposed to not having them.
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07:48
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 and in virtually every case, the drivers with the better safety gear took more chances because their brain is subconsciously compensating. Oh. Right?
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08:15
It’s it’s the same sense.
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08:16
It’s yeah. I mean, it’s it’s controversial, but I I understand it. It’s it’s why the most dangerous intersections have signs that tell you when to walk and when not to walk and
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08:28
have and
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08:29
have cross because you it the little man is walking. It says go. So you step off, and there’s the big blue bus, and then you’re and then you’re spattered. So, yeah, the unintended consequences of following traditional safety protocols, you know, has has always really been interesting.
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08:45
Well, it completely makes sense if you have a vehicle that’s more able and capable. You’re gonna probably drive it faster. Right. And you’re probably gonna take more risks because it can do stuff. Like, I used to think I I used to have a Lexus SUV, this big boat Lex. And you know what I loved about it? Mhmm. I drove slow in it.
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09:04
Mhmm.
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09:04
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 m 3. I had 2 cars at the time, and my m three 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.
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09:23
I just get in that big old boat and I just Sure. The world was, like, quiet out there. It’s nice and relaxed.
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09:30
I think it’s a I I think it’s a slightly different analysis. Like, if if if you’re going to adjust your behavior consciously to adapt to the, to the externality. Right? Like, you know, you’re gonna drive faster if you have a fast car because you know that’s why the guy built the thing. Right.
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09:51
And it would almost be rude. Right? It it would be rude to drive a hot rod like a boat. You know? It’s the unconscious things that you do, when you assume or mitigate risk as a result of employing an externality that I think is is just super interesting.
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10:12
Because 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 3rd because because safety isn’t really first, not really ever.
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10:33
And because if it was, you would never get a lot of things done.
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10:36
Well, you’d never get out of the studio.
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10:38
You would definitely never do construction. Heck no. No.
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10:40
You wouldn’t do anything. Yeah. You you wouldn’t do anything. It’s, you know, I How are
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10:45
you gonna move steel girders if safety is first? You’d be like, first thing we should do is not move this fucking girder.
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10:50
That’s right.
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10:50
This thing’s too big.
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10:51
That’s right. Look, I mean, for me, it was really a it it took 2 years to kinda puzzle it through because on Dirty Jobs for the 1st 2 years, nobody got hurt. You know, we were and and we sat through probably 50 mandatory safety briefings, whether it’s mines or confined spaces or high spaces or, you know, lockout, tag out.
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11:17
All those protocols and procedures were you know, super intense. And we were really, really focused on coming home alive and in one piece, so we, like, really paid attention. But after 2 years of these mandatory compulsory meetings and all of these procedures, we all started getting hurt.
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11:39
I mean, not nothing serious, but broken fingers and, you know, a cracked rib and singed off my eyebrows and my eyelashes and and mild concussions and things like that. I was like, what the hell is happening? What was happening is the the safety experts in all of these mandatory meetings started to sound like remember Charlie Brown’s teacher?
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12:00
Yeah. Missus Othmar. We were just falling asleep.
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12:05
Right.
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12:05
So it was like, holy crap. We’re in compliance, but we are not out of danger.
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12:11
Got it.
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12:12
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 or just in life that somebody else cares more about their well-being than they do. And it’s like that’s when complacency rears its ugly head.
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12:34
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 wanna fall off the bridge, that’s it’s kind of on you.
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12:52
Is there also a factor when you have a a person who’s the safety officer who’s kind of annoying and they’re, like, really, like, super interested and maybe you kinda, like, pawn off the the safety aspect to them and then you don’t think about it as much because someone’s supposedly looking out for you?
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13:10
How how much do you think about proper driving technique when you’re sitting in the back on your laptop or even upfront next to Depends on who’s driving. For sure.
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13:20
If my if I was driving and my wife was in the back seat, she’d be paying attention a lot.
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13:24
Shout out to your your guy, what’s his name? Ashton, who picked me up this morning. Excellent driver, man.
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13:29
Oh, glad you’re happy with it.
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13:31
Just so you know. I mean, I know he drives a lot of your guests, and I this is a feedback I wanna pass along. He was, you know, very frosty. But yeah. Look. I think anytime anytime that we abdicate. Responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. There’s gonna be it’s like whack a mole.
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13:47
It’s gonna pop up someplace else, and and it’s probably not gonna be in your interest.
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13:52
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 kinda be fucked. 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.
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14:11
Yeah. That was it, man. It was
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14:14
How did you get started in that? Like, what who came up with the concept?
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14:18
Well, I mean, technically, I guess I did, but I mean, I honestly there are no no ideas. This I stole this from George Plimpton, Studs Terkel a little bit, Charles Kuralt some, Paul Harvey a little bit, you know. That that kind of storytelling was always kind of interesting to me.
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14:40
And 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, I was taking my retirement in early installments and really happy with the model, you know. 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.
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15:11
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, had a pretty good balanced life, really. And then I was in San Francisco working for CBS on a show called Evening Magazine. You know the show. It comes on after
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15:32
Sure.
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15:32
Like the local news. And I was a host and I would go every day. This is a cushy gig. Nobody watched the show, show, but it was fun to work on. It was, you go to museums, you go to wineries, and then you throw to these wrapped packages. Right? It’s all just love it’s if there’s a 3 legged dog in Marin overcoming a heart tugging case of canine kidney failure, you know.
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15:58
That that was like an evening magazine
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16:00
story. Right.
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16:01
Right. Right.
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16:01
We did these all the time. And my mom called me, and I was in my cubicle at CBS, and she says, Michael, your your grandfather will be 90 years old tomorrow. And not my granddad, by the way, 7th grade education, electrical contractor by trade, but also a plumber and a steam fitter pipe. He could fabricate, fix anything.
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16:25
He had that that chip, you know, and he I grew up next to him on this little farmstead north of Baltimore, and I I knew I was gonna follow in his footsteps. I knew it, but the handy gene is recessive, right? I didn’t get that and it was my pop who got me He basically said dude just get a different you you can be a tradesman I know you’re enamored of being a tradesman Just get a different toolbox.
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16:49
So that’s what got me into entertainment, and 20 years later, I I had completely run amok. I had sung in the opera. I had sold stuff on QVC.
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16:58
You sung opera?
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16:59
8 years, man.
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17:00
Did you were you classically trained?
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17:02
Not really.
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17:03
How did you get how did you get involved in the opera singing?
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17:06
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.
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17:22
Is an aria a song?
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17:23
Is that what you’re saying?
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17:23
An aria is a song. It’s the they’re in an opera, most of the big moments are arias, right? And and most of the arias are, you know, I mean they’re they’re sung by the main characters and there are lots of ones that you would recognize and they’re German, they’re in Italian for the most part.
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17:43
This one was Italian. It was, from La Beaum, which is just another version of Rent essentially, but it was called the Cote Aria, and it was only 2 minutes long, and it was in Italian. So I walked around Baltimore with you remember the Sony Walkman?
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18:03
Yeah. I remember. I had one of those.
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18:05
I had one too. And I listened to a guy named Samuel Ramey singing the Coat Aria about 2 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
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18:25
in 1983. No. Classic training at all, just a Walkman and a cassette?
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18:32
Yeah. I’d had a music teacher prior to that, like a like a mister 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.
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18:55
He was like a legend in this weird world of 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, we we just started learning these ancient songs and singing for people, usually unsolicited from nursing.
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19:27
What kind
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19:27
of fucking dudes are you hanging out with that were interested in doing this with you?
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19:31
Well, one of them is basically my producer, guy called Chuck Klausmeier, who I went to high school with, produces my podcast. And we still write we we’ll write unauthorized jingles for our sponsors in singing them in 4 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, like, way leads on to way.
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19:53
Right. So you knew how to sing. I could carry it to. So you had some experience singing, kind of. Yeah. And then you decided you were gonna learn how to sing opera.
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20:04
Well, what really happened was I decided that my toolbox wasn’t gonna 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 I didn’t want to be in the opera.
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20:21
I wanted to be on TV, but I 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.
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20:37
And a friend of mine, a guy called Mike Gellert, told me he said, hey, so there’s the Screen Actors Guild. There at the time, there was APTRA, and I’m sure you were
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20:48
Mhmm.
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20:48
Part of both. Yeah. The thing you didn’t know about was AGMA. The American Guild of Musical Artists is a sister union to the Screen Actors Guild and to AFTRA who have since combined. And the rule back then was if you could if you could get into any of them, you could simply pay your dues to the other, and then you’d you were in.
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21:13
Uh-huh. So for me, it was easier to kinda fake my way into the opera than it was onto a sitcom. So my plan
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21:24
This is all diabolical. Well, I mean Great plan. I mean, it’s like that kind of strategic thinking is very valid. You should be in the navy or something.
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21:32
Well, look, I was just I was just trying to get a job. I know, but it’s clever. Well, there’s always a stage door. Right? Mhmm.
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21:40
I mean,
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21:41
there there there’s always a back way in.
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21:43
Right.
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21:44
And so I thought, you know, I I memorized the aria. I, I auditioned. I was stopped halfway through it by the musical director, a guy named Billy Nutzy, who’s like mister Rowe,
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21:55
you you have no idea what you’re saying at all, do you?
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22:00
Did you say the words wrong? You were just repeating the sounds.
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22:02
I was singing it loud, and I was singing it like I 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 I knew that, and so I kinda looked the part. So whatever. I got into it, and my plan was to do, one production or one season.
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22:26
Like, they would do 3 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 1 or 2 of those, get my card, and then buy my SAG card, and then go about the business of being a famous TV star.
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22:44
Right? Simple. Well, the music, man, the the music was so much better than I than I imagined it might be. And, like, when you get up in the catwalks of, like, a a real theater, you know, I mean, you’ve done shows in these theaters. There’s just nothing magically different about them.
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23:03
But when there’s a full orchestra playing the hell out of Verdi or Rachmaninoff and and and you’re looking down on this scene and you’re looking out at the audience and the sound is just just amazing and the girls so like they’re well, there there were 80 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.
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23:34
And of the remaining 5 straight dudes, 3 were married, and the only other single guy had a had a mold the size of your thumb on his eyelid with thick black hair growing out of it. It was just I was the really the only straight dude. You were the belle of the ball. And I’m dressed like a viking or a pirate.
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23:57
And I’m going on stage, and I’m I’m a fake. I mean, I admit it. I I I barely learned the language enough to kind of keep up and people in the in the course 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 know anything about and that were maybe more interesting than I thought and so I stayed for 8 years.
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24:36
Wow.
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24:37
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. But the Baltimore Opera was a big deal looking back at it, and that was for me 8083 to to 90.
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24:54
Wow.
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24:55
Yeah. And then, oh, Christ, since we’re talking well, it was a Sunday, and during the intermission of something, I think it was during this giant Wagner epic torturous thing and the the chorus didn’t have to be this is the one you saw it on Bugs Bunny. Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit. It’s that one. Right?
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25:20
Right.
Speaker: 0
25:22
So there’s an intermission and I’m 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 which I recommend, by the way. When you, like, when you walk in a bar with the horns and the spear, the bartender knew me.
Speaker: 0
25:45
Everybody laughed and I 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 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.
Speaker: 0
26:08
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, you know, 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 I could probably do that job if I had to.
Speaker: 0
26:40
So I went with him the next day and auditioned and got hired.
Speaker: 1
26:45
Wow. Was he mad? The bartender? Yeah. That you got the gig?
Speaker: 0
26:49
You know because
Speaker: 1
26:50
I didn’t even know about it.
Speaker: 0
26:51
Well It’s it’s a good question. I don’t know I don’t know what became of him. We
Speaker: 1
26:56
had a friendly got a fucking voodoo doll, Mike Rowe, a bunch of pins in it. We had a wager.
Speaker: 0
27:02
I said, look. I don’t know if I’ll get the job, but I but I bet I’ll get a callback. He was like, you’re not gonna get a callback for this thing. You know, we were just actors at the time. We’re like people pretending to be actors trying to find work. Later.
Speaker: 2
27:14
You know,
Speaker: 0
27:14
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, yeah, it it was a very strange thing, man, to that that was my first job in TV. Look, I’ve done some minor local commercial stuff, but I talked about a pencil for 8 minutes. That was the audition. It was so strange in those days.
Speaker: 0
27:42
They didn’t have a like, there’s no playbook to see who can sell stuff on TV, you know.
Speaker: 1
27:49
Do you have a script, or are you just kinda like you have this facts about the pencil?
Speaker: 0
27:53
No. No. Nothing? Nothing. Here’s what happens. Again, it’s it’s probably changed today. I think QVC did $8,000,000,000 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.
Speaker: 0
28:13
And if you hired a TV person, that didn’t really mean you
Speaker: 1
28:18
Look at you.
Speaker: 0
28:19
Oh, Jesus. That’s the cat sack right there, dude. That’s a sack for your cat.
Speaker: 1
28:23
What are you selling? Let me hear this. A sack for your cat. What the fuck?
Speaker: 2
28:28
It’s just crazy. They just love it. That’s why this is a cat toy.
Speaker: 1
28:33
So the cats play with it?
Speaker: 0
28:35
Yeah. They crawl inside it.
Speaker: 1
28:36
And they just go nutty because it makes a lot of noise?
Speaker: 0
28:38
It costs
Speaker: 2
28:38
$25. Drawn to it.
Speaker: 1
28:40
That’s $25?
Speaker: 2
28:41
Crawl in the bag.
Speaker: 0
28:42
And they just roll around and sort of
Speaker: 2
28:44
wrestle with the bag.
Speaker: 0
28:48
And just really
Speaker: 1
28:49
So this is, like, sort of just personality fucking around, having fun with the toy and selling it.
Speaker: 0
28:57
Well, that’s what I did. I look. Remember
Speaker: 1
29:00
That’s what you did. Was that novel that you were doing it that way?
Speaker: 0
29:03
Yeah. Yeah. In in relative terms, like, that was actually one of the great one of the one of the true great life lessons. You know? You you don’t have to be outrageous to stand out. You just have to be relatively outrageous. So QVC was a steady diet of of men and women Right.
Speaker: 0
29:25
Doing the same exact thing all the time. Right. And then at midnight or 3 AM, I showed up and put a cat bag over my head or busted open a lava lamp. So you were like a morning DJ? Kind of except Right?
Speaker: 1
29:39
Because they’re kind of fun, and that was different than the regular radio guy.
Speaker: 0
29:44
You know, I would I mean, for me, I thought of it more like, like my favorite comedians. And by the way, I I saw one last night. Thank you. Ron White was over at the mothership. He’s there tonight too. I stopped by last night.
Speaker: 1
30:00
Around tonight?
Speaker: 0
30:01
No. I gotta get back tonight. Something about Thanksgiving, but I watched the set last night. He’s awesome. He was he was great. And the thing He’s never been funnier.
Speaker: 1
30:10
He’s he’s in top form right now.
Speaker: 0
30:11
And he’s gone. He’s gone full messiah, dude. He’s I mean, I didn’t recognize him.
Speaker: 1
30:15
Oh, with the look?
Speaker: 0
30:16
Yeah. 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 and as I watched him do his thing, it it reminded me, like, my favorite comedians, I I never get the sense that they’re trying to make me laugh. I get the sense that they’re trying to amuse themselves.
Speaker: 1
30:38
Right.
Speaker: 0
30:39
And I’d and 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 gonna do anyway. It makes me comfortable, and and that that’s why he’s fun to watch. You know that that’s why this podcast is fun to listen to same reason.
Speaker: 0
30:57
I I couldn’t have articulated that 35 years ago sitting there selling a cat sack.
Speaker: 1
31:04
But you intuitively knew something.
Speaker: 0
31:06
I knew in the middle of the thought like everything that I 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 3 year period trying to make chips. So 3 hours at a time usually over the course of 24 hours.
Speaker: 0
31:30
So call it usually
Speaker: 1
31:31
be on 3 hours at a time? Yeah. Would you come back again, or would you only do 3 hours?
Speaker: 0
31:36
I do 3 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.
Speaker: 1
31:51
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
31:52
It it changes you just as surely as Doris the cat lady’s brain was scrambled by the gondii and and and and the talk so. It it does something Your
Speaker: 1
32:00
circadian rhythm. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
32:02
It’s not just that. It is that, but it’s it’s something primal, even more primal than that. It just messes with you and it it it forces you. For me, it like changed colors. It it changed taste. It changed Oh. Yeah. Because I I’d never I mean, I was upside down.
Speaker: 0
32:22
After I talked about a pencil for 8 minutes, I was on the air 48 hours later at 3 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
Speaker: 1
32:40
Did they give you a rundown of what these products were at all?
Speaker: 0
32:43
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 gonna be selling, and you could take the time to prepare.
Speaker: 1
32:55
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.
Speaker: 0
33:00
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 all the stuff. Right? But it was just a blue card, and then you would kinda go off and think about how you would make sense out of this skull and where it came from and why it’s interesting.
Speaker: 0
33:30
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 kinda how that world worked. So you don’t say it’s a pencil for 99¢.
Speaker: 0
33:48
You say it’s a it’s a yellow number 2 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.
Speaker: 0
34:07
It’s yellow because you’re a busy professional. 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 2 pencil.
Speaker: 0
34:23
It’s not 3 with that thin wispy line that you can’t read or or that thick disappointing skid mark of a number 1. Right? So you just Right. It’s like train yourself to fill dead air with nonsense.
Speaker: 1
34:39
While you’re fucking up your circadian rhythm?
Speaker: 0
34:41
Yeah. Wow. While you’re wondering, like, when your next meal is and who you’re gonna have it with, and you wind up making friends and essentially hanging with with other people who live in that same weird, like, shadow land.
Speaker: 2
34:59
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
35:00
Shadow land. That’s a good way to put it. Yeah. 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 would I would deliver Sunday papers, and the Sunday papers were it was a a huge under you flip the top.
Speaker: 0
35:20
Flip oh, I forgot to flip the top.
Speaker: 2
35:21
Flip the
Speaker: 1
35:21
top and then hit
Speaker: 0
35:22
the button. There you go. Hit it again. There you go. Alright.
Speaker: 1
35:27
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. Yeah. It was my way to make money without having to do a job where I had to listen to anybody.
Speaker: 0
35:41
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 gotta your bags or your baskets full of paper or your car or whatever you were doing.
Speaker: 1
35:59
Those in the car.
Speaker: 0
35:59
You’re tossing them out one at a time. Yep. You know, you’re making progress. You know the progress you’re making as you make it.
Speaker: 1
36:07
Right. You know, it’s You know you only have a 120 houses to go.
Speaker: 0
36:11
That’s right. And then it’s a 110. And then it’s like
Speaker: 1
36:15
people Let’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 AM, 9 AM on a Sunday. 9:9 was rough. Yeah. Occasionally, they would make enormous Sunday papers. They would have, like, and that would be a real problem because you have to make multiple trips.
Speaker: 1
36:36
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
Speaker: 0
36:46
of that van. But see, you remember and you knew. 350, that’s an interesting number. That’s I
Speaker: 1
36:54
had bigger routes, but 350 was manageable.
Speaker: 0
36:57
How old how old were you?
Speaker: 1
36:58
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 the legal age they allow you to do it. Yeah. So it was probably 17 or 18. I started driving and I drove till I was 20 2. I just started doing stand up comedy. I I drove all throughout my competitive martial arts career. I drove in the morning. It was good because it gave me discipline.
Speaker: 1
37:28
Because, I had to do it 7 days a week, 3 65 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, didn’t matter. You gotta deliver newspapers. And if it if they did delay it, you would just it would delay your delivery of the paper.
Speaker: 1
37:45
So you’d have to call the depot, you know, hey, are we delivering yet? Because they didn’t wanna be responsible if it was a blizzard for people dying and get lawsuits. So they they didn’t make you deliver papers if it was unbelievably bad out. But for the most part, you drove every day.
Speaker: 0
38:00
So you had a you had a sense of consequence to
Speaker: 2
38:04
this?
Speaker: 0
38:04
Like, you you built
Speaker: 1
38:05
Disciplined consequence. You didn’t deliver the papers. You didn’t get paid. It was very simple. It was a very simple job. You would show 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.
Speaker: 1
38:17
1, 2, stuff it in the bag. You had plastic bags, they’re great because you could chuck them out the window and it never damaged the paper. Rubber bands are a real pain in the ass because you could hit a corner on the concrete, it would rip the corner of the paper and then the customer would complain because they’re trying to read about what’s going on in Syria and then there’s this fucking broken piece of paper.
Speaker: 1
38:35
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 2 papers. And the New York Times, the New York Times is a pain in the ass because it would be like one every 10 blocks.
Speaker: 2
38:56
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
38:56
You’d have an enormous route. If you had a 150 New York Times, that’s an all day excursion.
Speaker: 0
39:03
Did you start to equate the type of home you were delivering the type of paper to?
Speaker: 1
39:08
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, 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.
Speaker: 1
39:25
And, you know, she’s asking me, I was like, what are you good what are you gonna what are you planning on doing with your career? I’m like, I have no idea. Like, she didn’t like it. She didn’t like that I had no idea. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
39:34
It makes people uncomfortable.
Speaker: 1
39:35
She liked me, but she didn’t like that I had no idea. She was, like, very motherly to me, I guess.
Speaker: 0
39:40
It’s funny. We had the, the the Baltimore Sun, which was the paper of record, and then we had the News American, which was sort of like the upstart. Mhmm. And I never thought too much about the difference between the 2, until summertime and crabs. Like, Maryland blue crabs are a big thing.
Speaker: 0
39:58
They’re 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.
Speaker: 1
40:06
And you lay the newspaper out.
Speaker: 0
40:08
But which one, Joe?
Speaker: 1
40:10
Oh. Which one? Matters.
Speaker: 0
40:12
I I don’t know why it does.
Speaker: 1
40:14
So is it disrespectful to use the paper of note? No. No. It’s better.
Speaker: 0
40:19
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.
Speaker: 1
40:25
Oh, that’s so silly.
Speaker: 0
40:27
Get get the News American. Because, you know, it’s all spread out in front of you, and when you got the crab guts and the Old Bay and the jail number 2 and the National Bohemian beer, and, maybe you can glance down and get get informed as
Speaker: 1
40:38
you go. Interesting that there are newspapers like that. Right? Like, there’s the New York Post. You want a fun headline.
Speaker: 0
40:45
Right.
Speaker: 1
40:45
You know, you want all the crazy shit, like, what happened? Who got pregnant?
Speaker: 2
40:48
Right.
Speaker: 1
40:48
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 like Have you ever What is happening?
Speaker: 0
40:59
Have you ever walked through the the offices of the post? No. By any chance? No. Dude, it’s amazing. It’s amazing. I had a old girlfriend whose sister worked there worked for, page 6. Oh, boy. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
41:15
That’s the fun one.
Speaker: 0
41:16
Yeah. So much fun.
Speaker: 1
41:18
So that’s, like, all the gossip and the craziness and
Speaker: 0
41:20
Bad guy.
Speaker: 1
41:21
Getting arrested and
Speaker: 2
41:22
Right.
Speaker: 1
41:23
Right. Drunk driving and
Speaker: 0
41:24
They brokers. They have a hallway. It’s like this place in the sense that there’s so much on the walls, but it’s all front pages, and it’s the best headlines.
Speaker: 1
41:34
So it’s the best ones they’ve ever come up with?
Speaker: 0
41:36
The best ones ever. Starting with the classic, headless body found in topless bar, which is still tough to beat.
Speaker: 1
41:44
That’s great.
Speaker: 0
41:45
But so many of them.
Speaker: 1
41:46
I love the Post.
Speaker: 0
41:47
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
41:47
I’ve always loved The Post. I love the, just the fun nature of the news. That was, like, the working person’s newspaper.
Speaker: 0
41:54
That’s just 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
Speaker: 1
42:05
Right.
Speaker: 0
42:06
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. There’s cigars, and they’re all in on the joke. Yeah. They’re like, yeah. We’re gonna report the news, but, you know, it’s a lot of sharp elbows out there.
Speaker: 0
42:24
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. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
42:36
You know, how can whether you’re publishing a paper or eating a blue crab
Speaker: 1
42:39
Right.
Speaker: 0
42:40
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 your from your friends? Right. That’s the that’s the trick, man.
Speaker: 1
42:58
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.
Speaker: 2
43:05
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
43:05
You wanna be that person with their legs crossed reading the New York Times, like, very serious. Very serious people. Very very smart people. Keep up to date.
Speaker: 0
43:14
Yeah. I said to, Ashton, you’re very excellent driver who brought me here. I said, you know, it’s been fun watching Joe do this thing over the last 5 or 6 years, and then I kinda stopped myself in the middle and I said, actually, you know, I take it back. What’s been fun is watching watching the world catch up to it. Like, watching the headlines catch up to you or whoever, you really haven’t changed.
Speaker: 0
43:46
And, man, it’s so interesting to to watch people realize, oh, we’re we’re gonna do it this way now. You know? We’re gonna do it this way now. And and 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.
Speaker: 0
44:12
And I guess maybe that’s that’s true, but I also think there’s this this larger hive mentality in the audience, and Right. They start to realize, oh, there’s a there’s another way to deliver a paper. There’s another way to do a thing. And it feels new, but it’s it’s probably what you’ve been doing for the last 12 years.
Speaker: 1
44:32
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.
Speaker: 0
44:39
Yeah. But you make I
Speaker: 1
44:40
enjoy it. Good. I’m a more curious person, and I like talking to people. But That’s it’s real simple.
Speaker: 0
44:46
Yeah. But you it’s 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.
Speaker: 1
44:56
But it’s not really. It’s not Then
Speaker: 0
44:58
why do more people do it?
Speaker: 1
44:59
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. Mhmm.
Speaker: 2
45:09
You
Speaker: 1
45:09
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, if I think if we could figure out a way to study it, we would recognize that we we’re psychically all connected in some strange way.
Speaker: 1
45:27
And I I am curious as to how someone from with a 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, why what is it? Why what got you to be a beekeeper? Why why are you so fascinated with painting? What what what made you start writing music?
Speaker: 2
45:54
Like, I’m interested. Yeah. I like talking
Speaker: 1
45:54
to people. So for me, it is easy. I’m interested. Yeah. I like talking to people. So for me, it is easy.
Speaker: 2
45:59
It really is. It’s just talking to people
Speaker: 1
45:59
like I would talk to people. Like, you and I could have the same exact conversation if we’re having dinner somewhere. For sure. Same conversation. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
46:07
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.
Speaker: 1
46:25
I think that’s what it is.
Speaker: 2
46:26
You’re probably right. I think
Speaker: 1
46:26
I just got lucky. I think I just got lucky and I found a job that I would be doing anyway.
Speaker: 0
46:31
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 Gotta Do It. I don’t even know. Returning the favor, I think we did a 100 episodes of that. I don’t eve I couldn’t tell you how many things I’ve narrated. 100.
Speaker: 2
46:51
Mhmm. If
Speaker: 0
46:52
there’s a wildebeest trying to get across the vast reaches of the barren Serengeti. Right? Right. Like, if I could remember every episode of how the universe works, 10 years of this stuff, if if if I could remember half of what I narrated, that would be something. I can remember a chunk, but my sense is that, like, I can’t even remember the last 20 guests I had on my podcast.
Speaker: 0
47:17
And 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 gonna do next and even less time to think about what I just did.
Speaker: 0
47:37
Right. So you just talked to Josh Brolin.
Speaker: 2
47:40
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
47:40
And then you talked to the musician guy, Storch? Yep. Yeah. Right? Scott. Yeah. Scott. Storch. And then before that, our friend Evan was in. Mhmm. Right? So, like, I have a better it’s easier for me to remember what you’ve done in the last 2 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 where you’ve started to forget what you’ve done yourself.
Speaker: 1
48:09
Oh, yeah. There’s no way to keep it all. I have a bucket that’s overflowing with information. It’s overflowing. My my hard drive is not capable of retaining all of it. It’s not possible. I retain a lot though. Yeah. A lot more than I ever would know.
Speaker: 1
48:28
I got an unexpected education doing this show for sure. Like, I never anticipated it.
Speaker: 0
48:34
Is it conscious? Like, can you choose to be interested in a thing enough to know that you’re not gonna forget it? Or does the interest just kinda bubble up and certain things stick to you?
Speaker: 1
48:49
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 is 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.
Speaker: 1
49:04
And she’s like, how the fuck do you know this? She was laughing. And I was like, I don’t know everything. I forget things. I forget my own birthday, but I do remember things that are fascinating. I remember most things that are fascinating to me.
Speaker: 1
49:19
I have a unusual recall, but I’ve always had an unusual recall. It’s like I think it’s a genetic thing.
Speaker: 0
49:24
Yeah.
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49:25
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.
Speaker: 0
49:36
See, you, to me, are the are the deeper end of the pool. I’m more the the shallow end not I I don’t mean the 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 Yeah. Put 10 seasons of it.
Speaker: 0
49:59
But, like, that’s sort of the extent, like, I I don’t I don’t go very deep. I’ve seen a couple, but I but it’s like
Speaker: 1
50:07
Well, this is the big giant difference between, being, a former competitor and 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. It it gave me discipline and a will to overcome uncomfort, discomfort and to push myself and to overcome fears and to do something that’s very scary and to compete and that was, like, it formulated me as a teenager.
Speaker: 1
50:38
So I started competing competitively, like, serious shit when I was, like, 15 years old. And so we’re 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 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.
Speaker: 1
51:06
I was, like, eating, sleeping, working, and competing. And then I started teaching, so then that 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.
Speaker: 1
51:19
I was teaching I I had my own school by the time I was 20.
Speaker: 0
51:24
Taekwondo? Yeah. So this is my point. You take a deep dive. When you get interested in a thing Yeah. You go into the thing. Comedy wasn’t a hobby. It became, I think, as important everything. Yeah. It becomes everything. Almost nothing I do becomes everything. Nothing? Almost nothing.
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51:44
But what are the things? What becomes everything?
Speaker: 0
51:46
I’m not sure yet. Let me think about it.
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51:48
Is there one thing that if you have, like, free time you super look forward to doing?
Speaker: 0
51:54
Like, do you have
Speaker: 1
51:55
a hobby? Do you play golf? No. Nothing? I don’t
Speaker: 0
51:57
have hobbies, and I don’t collect things. No no hobbies. Nothing? I don’t collect things.
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52:01
Wow. I
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52:01
don’t I I I own very little. I never have owned much.
Speaker: 1
52:04
Wish I had a 100 lives to live simultaneously. I would have I would do a 100 different things.
Speaker: 0
52:10
This is the difference. You’re insatiable in that way. You you you you get a thing, and you’re gonna nail it to the wall, man.
Speaker: 1
52:18
You’re gonna nail it My late great friend Anthony Bourdain, his, headline, his bio on Twitter, it said enthusiast. And I really wish that I’d come up with that because that’s what I am. I’m an enthusiast. I would I wouldn’t say it now because I’d rip him off. And, also, now my bio says dragon believer
Speaker: 0
52:36
because Congratulations on that. Thank you. The lady said goodbye.
Speaker: 1
52:39
They said I believe in dragons. She triple checked.
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52:43
It was great.
Speaker: 1
52:43
She triple checked, Mike.
Speaker: 0
52:44
Gotta be true. But
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52:45
in I’m an enthusiast. That’s what I am. I am a person who, is very fortunate and that I have a love of a lot of things.
Speaker: 0
52:53
Well, you and Tony were similar obviously in that way. He took big bites. He took big swings.
Speaker: 1
53:01
I became good friends when he really got into jiu jitsu. Yeah. Because I kinda got him into it, and then his wife really got him into it. But he started going to the UFC. His wife was training in jiu jitsu, and she got really into it. She was really loving it. And then she was like, let’s go to the UFC. He’s like, this is fucking great. And then, you know, he came to one of my comedy shows.
Speaker: 1
53:20
We became friends. So we’re going going to dinner, by the way, with Anthony Bourdain. It’s the coolest fucking thing in the world.
Speaker: 0
53:24
It’s gotta be.
Speaker: 1
53:24
Because you go to dinner with him and all the chefs freak out. Yeah. And so they just wanna feed you.
Speaker: 2
53:29
Yeah.
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53:29
You know,
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53:29
they just wanna, like, don’t touch the menu. We got you. And they come over and bring food and, you know
Speaker: 0
53:34
I wrote, a eulogy for him that crashed my website.
Speaker: 1
53:39
Oh, wow.
Speaker: 0
53:42
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.
Speaker: 1
53:58
Yeah. Fear Factor was no. Maybe. It was probably at the Fear Factor stopped in 2007, and No Reservations, I think, was around that time.
Speaker: 0
54:09
Yeah. He was on in 6.
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54:11
Mhmm.
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54:11
For sure, Dirty Jobs went on in 03.
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54:14
Yeah. And then the CNN show, which is 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 wanderlust, but but also also with this, like, real fascination with people and cultures and just really loved it.
Speaker: 1
54:43
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,
Speaker: 0
54:52
you know? I’ve never with the pot this will sound vainglorious, I don’t mean it to, but with the possible exception of of me on Discovery in 2010, narrating half their shows and hosting Dirty Jobs, which was a thing, you know, I felt really triangulated then. But then when I met Tony and I had a show on CNN at the same time. Actually, it was a companion show.
Speaker: 1
55:21
What was your show?
Speaker: 0
55:21
It was called Somebody’s Gotta Do It. It’s
Speaker: 1
55:23
Oh, that’s right.
Speaker: 0
55:24
That’s right. It followed Dirty Jobs. Yeah. And Jeff Zucker wanted something with Tony. So he was like, well, let’s kinda do a version of this. And I said, yeah. Okay. Mhmm. 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 preempted constantly.
Speaker: 0
55:43
They didn’t preempt Tony, but they preempted me
Speaker: 2
55:46
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
55:46
A lot,
Speaker: 0
55:47
and I was commiserating with Tony about this once, and and that’s when we had the conversation where I said, look. I just gotta tell you, man. I’ve I’ve never in my life seen anybody doing the right show for them at the right time on the right network
Speaker: 2
56:06
Mhmm.
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56:06
For them.
Speaker: 1
56:07
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
56:08
I’ve never seen that like that before. I mean and and that never mind the award. Yeah. Peabody it it was the Peabody’s that got me, actually. I don’t who cares about the Emmys? They’re easy, but jeez. He was just one Peabody Award after the next. Yeah. And it wasn’t a huge it the audience wasn’t as big as people think, but they were engaged.
Speaker: 1
56:27
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 channel. Sure. But we used to when I was on news radio, everybody wanted the shot the spot after Seinfeld because there was Seinfeld there was Seinfeld and Friends who were on same night, and it was just this murderous Thursday night lineup.
Speaker: 1
56:49
It was an unbelievable lineup. And if you got lucky, you were Sex and the City or the single guy. And what Paul Sims, the producer of, News Radio would call a shit sandwich because you had your brilliant show and
Speaker: 2
57:00
then your terrible show and then
Speaker: 1
57:00
another brilliant show and then another terrible brilliant show and then another terrible show.
Speaker: 2
57:03
Right.
Speaker: 1
57:03
But if you got in those time spots, oh, boy, you got a good spot because people are gonna just keep tuning in. They didn’t tune in for News Radio. News Radio wasn’t really successful after it was off the air.
Speaker: 0
57:14
You were in the slipstream. Yeah. You you you were in the orbit.
Speaker: 1
57:17
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.
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57:36
Yeah.
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57:36
And one day, it was 88. And I was like, for real? He’s like, yeah. I was like, oh, no. 80.
Speaker: 0
57:42
With a bullet. We thought we were
Speaker: 1
57:43
gonna 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 Jon Lovitz took his place for a season, and then they canceled it after that. And, like, in the perfect thing for our show, we never even hit the 100 episodes for syndication. They had to sell it at, like, 98 episodes.
Speaker: 1
58:05
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.
Speaker: 0
58:12
I love that show.
Speaker: 1
58:13
The people I was super lucky to work on, and it ruined me because I could never work on another show after that.
Speaker: 0
58:18
What what did you what was the big lesson from News Radio if there was one for you?
Speaker: 1
58:25
Well, it was just fortune. The the lesson is that you could just be fortunate, you know, because I was not a trained actor at all. I, did a 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, this is terrible money. They’re gonna lock you up for, like, 3 years for, like, $500 or so. It was, like, crazy, ridiculous bad money.
Speaker: 1
58:53
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 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 because my phone was just calling. People agents and people would just call me. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
59:10
Like, some guy called me from Universal. I was like, what? Like, what the fuck is going through this shitty apartment on my way out the door to play pool? And this guy is telling me he wants me to get on a flight that night. We have a flight at 10 PM, leaving out of LaGuardia.
Speaker: 1
59:22
I was like, what are you talking about? And so then I called my manager. I go, this guy just fucking called me from here. He goes, hey, don’t answer your phone. Just like, go play pool. Get out of here. I’ll I’ll take care of it. Next thing you know, I was in Hollywood.
Speaker: 1
59:31
It was, like, that quick. And I was on a show called Hardball. It went 6 episodes. And the only reason why I stayed in California, I wanted to go back to New York. I hated it. I hated actors.
Speaker: 1
59:42
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.
Speaker: 0
59:50
Right. Right.
Speaker: 1
59:50
So instead of saying nice to meet you and fucking up, I go, I’m
Speaker: 2
59:53
sorry I
Speaker: 1
59:53
met you. I’m sorry I fucked up. Right. They didn’t wanna be real. They so they everyone said, good to see you.
Speaker: 0
59:57
Good to see you.
Speaker: 1
59:57
Everyone’s good and it was super unsincere. I was like, this is so weird. Yeah. It was just 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.
Speaker: 1
01:00:12
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 the scripts. It was horrible. So that gets canceled.
Speaker: 1
01:00:23
The only reason why I stayed is because I had a lease. So I 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.
Speaker: 1
01:00:33
I was like, 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 wanna come in? And so I came in and auditioned for it.
Speaker: 1
01:00:47
And the next thing you know, I’m working with Phil Hartman. It was bizarre. Yeah. No aspirations whatsoever to be an actor. Never wanted to be on TV.
Speaker: 1
01:00:54
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.
Speaker: 0
01:01:03
From the kitchen up from Second City.
Speaker: 1
01:01:05
Jesus. 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 you should say that. It was, like, super collaborative. So just fortune. Complete utter good fortune.
Speaker: 1
01:01:26
Because I had friends that were on terrible sitcoms and they were living in hell. Yeah. And we’d hang out at the Comedy Store and, you know, they were living in hell. And I was, like, look, I’m on a show that nobody watches, but it’s fun as shit and I can’t believe I’m on TV. This is nuts.
Speaker: 0
01:01:40
Yeah. You’re in on the joke.
Speaker: 1
01:01:41
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.
Speaker: 0
01:01:52
I thought for years that, really, a sitcom had to be the best gig in the world to to have to do a basically, to do a play every week.
Speaker: 1
01:02:04
If it’s a good sitcom.
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01:02:05
If
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01:02:05
it’s a good sitcom.
Speaker: 1
01:02:05
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 but they’re on bad shows. They just wanna give themselves something to reward themselves for this Sure. Fucking slave not I wouldn’t say slave work. I should say, like, you’re a slave to money.
Speaker: 1
01:02:23
It’s not you’re you’re compromising who you are for money. You don’t really wanna do that show, but you’re on it, and it sucks, and you have to repeat these terrible lines.
Speaker: 0
01:02:33
That’s what I’m getting at. See, the 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.
Speaker: 1
01:02:45
I never saw that show. That was a weird one. Right? Because they got mad at him because he was right wing.
Speaker: 2
01:02:49
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:02:50
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:02:50
It was
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01:02:50
so crazy. Did they cancel it?
Speaker: 2
01:02:52
It was
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01:02:52
their number one show and they canceled, then Fox picked it up.
Speaker: 1
01:02:54
That’s so nuts. They canceled it because they didn’t like his politics.
Speaker: 0
01:02:59
Yeah. Wow. Dude, that mean that’s that basically happened to Dirty Jobs too. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s mind boggling. But but the point was I finally got a chance to
Speaker: 1
01:03:11
I don’t wanna gloss over that. I wanna come back to that.
Speaker: 2
01:03:12
I
Speaker: 1
01:03:13
wanna hear that.
Speaker: 0
01:03:13
Alright. Yeah. Yeah. No. That’s a great one. You’ll you’ll love this. But but to Tim is great, by the way, and we became friends and and chemistry on camera. Everybody loved it. And when it was over, I was like, well, you know, do an honest inventory, Mike. Like, what what did you love? What what didn’t you love?
Speaker: 0
01:03:33
And, really, the only thing I loved was was seeing people who loved each other and being welcomed into their little world.
Speaker: 1
01:03:40
Yeah. That’s a plan.
Speaker: 0
01:03:41
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.
Speaker: 1
01:03:59
Oh, so that’s an alien experience for you?
Speaker: 0
01:04:01
Yeah. I mean, I’ve done plenty of plays as a kid and stuff, but that’s different. You know? That’s a that’s different. The once you’re in Hollywood and once you’re sort of in the machine, it it still lingers. I mean, it’s the whole reason I crashed the audition for the opera.
Speaker: 0
01:04:15
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’ve been prior to that and how here you want this.
Speaker: 2
01:04:26
Yeah. Thank
Speaker: 0
01:04:26
you. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:04:48
Are you it takes 4 days to rehearse for a half hour thing? You gotta be kidding me. I could do 5 1 hour shows Right. In the same period
Speaker: 1
01:04:57
of time. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:05:09
And that’s important,
Speaker: 1
01:05:10
you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It is important. It’s it was like we you know, it was a lot of fun, man. You know, and meeting people like Steven Root who, you know, went on to do a million different things. Brilliant, brilliant guy. 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.
Speaker: 1
01:05:29
Like, he was this one guy. He was, like, a super sweet guy when you meet him in real life. And then he was Jimmy James. My stapler. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:05:36
He becomes did you see what was that one Coen Brothers had some Netflix thing, Wild West Netflix thing? He played on that. He was fucking genius.
Speaker: 0
01:05:45
Wasn’t he in O Brother? Did he Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:05:47
He was in I think he was in O 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 I just want I was just a comic. I just wanted to make a living doing comedy and then somebody offered me more money than I made in a year for a week.
Speaker: 1
01:06:04
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 2 shows ever, and I got both of them. Those are the only 2 shows I ever auditioned for.
Speaker: 0
01:06:14
What was the other one?
Speaker: 1
01:06:16
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 it was nuts. It was just I was just stepping in shit every step of the way. That’s hysterical. Make any sense.
Speaker: 0
01:06:28
So I never had an agent except for a very brief period when I did. And, it was you know Sean Perry over at Endeavor? You guys ever cross paths? I know he His, his former assistant turned out to be his wife later.
Speaker: 1
01:06:42
How’s that work?
Speaker: 0
01:06:43
Nicole Taylor. That’s man, they’re they’re living great. They live up in the hills somewhere.
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01:06:47
He I
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01:06:48
mean, how’s
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01:06:48
it how’s it work with
Speaker: 0
01:06:49
your former assistant? I don’t do that. How’s it work? That that that’s none of my business.
Speaker: 1
01:06:52
That’s a dangerous undertaking.
Speaker: 0
01:06:55
She called me one day, and I was in my in my full on freelance world. I hadn’t had a job since since QVC, so this is like 1999, and she says I just want to I just want to send you out for for something because I know you’re gonna book it. And I said well, actually, yeah, I could use a gig.
Speaker: 0
01:07:10
So she sends me out In the same week, she says, you should read for Craig Polygynyon 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, she says, this guy from Nashville, Michael Orkin was his name, who I’d worked with years earlier, not Nashville, Memphis.
Speaker: 0
01:07:36
He was hosting or 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 that was I I dare you to hire me.
Speaker: 0
01:08:03
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.
Speaker: 1
01:08:17
And there was no conflict of interest? Oh, no. Like, you you totally negotiated both of them at the same time?
Speaker: 0
01:08:22
Yeah. Wow. That’s cool. Yeah. And then, Nicole switched agencies, and I and I and I never really had an agent, you know, 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.
Speaker: 0
01:08:42
My dad my granddad’s 90 years old. Remember this? I didn’t I didn’t close the loop on this. But that’s to answer your first question, what happened was my mom called me and said your grandfather is gonna be 90 tomorrow. And before he dies, wouldn’t it be great if he could turn on the TV and see you doing something that looked like work?
Speaker: 1
01:09:05
Woah.
Speaker: 0
01:09:05
Yeah. My mother’s a savage. Jeez. She just finished her 4th book, by the way.
Speaker: 1
01:09:11
Wow.
Speaker: 0
01:09:12
Yeah. She’s written 3 bestsellers after 80.
Speaker: 1
01:09:15
That’s incredible. She’s
Speaker: 0
01:09:17
out of control.
Speaker: 1
01:09:17
That’s incredible. So she was, like, she wanted you to do something impressive.
Speaker: 0
01:09:22
My mother wrote every day for 60 years. Wow. No agent, no Got published in, like, the News American and the Baltimore Sun, you know, local stuff, some horse magazines. We were horse people kinda growing up, and, and her her dream was to write. She finally got a book deal when she was 80, went to a number 4 bestseller Wow. And everything she’s written so far.
Speaker: 0
01:09:47
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? Because like my pop, it’s he’d seen the opera. He’d seen QVC. He’d seen every godforsaken infomercial.
Speaker: 0
01:10:07
He’d seen, you know, I’d 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, judge, was I mean, it changed it’s I wrote a book about it. It changed my whole life.
Speaker: 0
01:10:32
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 fucking medicine cabinet, plastic products, and rubber private condoms stuck to your rubber suit. You know, it’s unspeakably vile.
Speaker: 0
01:11:01
You can barely breathe. And what and what happened to me down there is I, I completely failed to, like, host the show. All the stand ups went wrong. Laterals exploded. We we we were all getting hit in the head with it’s like a shooting gallery.
Speaker: 0
01:11:20
There was a rat the size of a loaf of bread that crawled up my I lost my footing, fell into I was I was baptized. I was baptized in a river of crap.
Speaker: 1
01:11:34
And at the end,
Speaker: 0
01:11:37
my cameraman threw up at one point. An enormous puke. And I’m I’m squatting in the filth, you know, looking at the camera trying to open the show. And when you see when you see your cameraman’s vomit float past you as as you’re trying to articulate a thought Oh
Speaker: 1
01:11:58
my god.
Speaker: 0
01:11:59
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 a it’s a 100 5 degrees. It’s just it’s the 7th level of hell. It’s clear I can’t do my job.
Speaker: 0
01:12:23
So I I go over to this guy. His name was Gene Cruz, and I say, hey, what are you doing?
Speaker: 1
01:12:30
He’s like, I’m
Speaker: 0
01:12:31
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 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 gonna be on camera.
Speaker: 0
01:12:49
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, I was fired because people sitting down to hear their heart tugging story of the 3 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.
Speaker: 0
01:13:14
I mean, they’re they’re trying to eat their meatloaf, you know. It was it was it was the wrong segment for that for that show. But talk about fortunate. The mail that came in as a result, some people said it was funny and they liked it. Some people were repulsed, but but the the letters that changed my life were the ones that said, you think that was dirty? Oh.
Speaker: 0
01:13:39
Wait till you see what my brother does.
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01:13:41
Wait. Do you
Speaker: 0
01:13:41
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’ve never seen feedback like this. I’ve never seen curiosity among the viewership like this. And so that’s that’s where the idea came from.
Speaker: 0
01:14:12
It was like what 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 a or an avatar or a cipher? Right?
Speaker: 0
01:14:44
Like 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
Speaker: 1
01:14:52
Right. Right. Right. Right. What if
Speaker: 0
01:14:53
you just let all that go? And, you know, I I don’t know that I would have thought of it like that at at 20 at 22, certainly not. Not even at 32. But at 42, I was entering a more introspective kind of phase. And so I I was really just curious to see what would happen if I if I thought of myself as something different.
Speaker: 1
01:15:18
Well, if we think about the history of just media, it’s it’s very recent. Right? You have radio, which is like when were when did people start listening to radio? Was the 1800? Okay. And then you have television that kicks on in the fifties. And everyone’s a presenter. Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles. Right? Everyone’s Ed Sullivan.
Speaker: 1
01:15:43
Everyone’s Jack Carr Jack Parr. Like, there’s these type of people that do this job. It’s like you ever you go to a you ever do a morning radio show?
Speaker: 0
01:15:53
Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:15:53
I’m sure you have. Morning DJ boys. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:16:03
Anchorman. Anchorman.
Speaker: 2
01:16:05
But now Yes.
Speaker: 0
01:16:06
The news.
Speaker: 1
01:16:06
Especially local news. They have a very specific thing that they’re doing.
Speaker: 0
01:16:11
It’s cadence.
Speaker: 1
01:16:12
Yeah. Well, it’s fake. It’s not a person. There’s no people act like that. If you had a guy like that over your house for dinner, you’d be like, what the fuck is wrong with Bob? Bob’s a psycho. The guy’s got people buried in his fucking basement. Who talks like that? Right?
Speaker: 1
01:16:26
And so I think the Internet opened up a lot of room for unprofessional people to thrive. That’s
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01:16:35
me.
Speaker: 1
01:16:36
So, like, I’m I can’t do the No, man.
Speaker: 2
01:16:38
No. No. No.
Speaker: 1
01:16:38
No. No. No. I can’t.
Speaker: 0
01:16:39
You’re not unprofessional.
Speaker: 1
01:16:41
But it’s, like, I mean, in that regard, like, I’m not so I wasn’t trying to do something that had already existed. I was just doing, like, I was doing, like, a guest on the O P and Anthony show. That’s what it was like. Like, when you’re a guest on O P and Anthony, that’s how you talk. Everybody would just hang out and talk.
Speaker: 0
01:16:59
That’s a fun show. It was anyway.
Speaker: 1
01:17:00
That opened my eyes up to podcasting. And then, you know, Anthony Cumia had his own show that he did in his basement, live at the compound where he sing karaoke, hold it 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 they did out of his house. Sure.
Speaker: 0
01:17:22
I remember that.
Speaker: 1
01:17:23
Yeah. That was huge. So that also helped too. And I negotiation with
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01:17:27
the people that were doing
Speaker: 1
01:17:27
his show, and I was thinking about doing something on my own, but then I was
Speaker: 2
01:17:29
like, I can’t work with anybody.
Speaker: 1
01:17:29
I I gotta do this on my own. Quick sidebar. I don’t know if this is of interest. And, Jamie, forgive me
Speaker: 0
01:17:38
because I I don’t know if I’m supposed to ask you to do things, but I sold the 1st karaoke machine
Speaker: 2
01:17:43
Ever?
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01:17:43
In this country.
Speaker: 1
01:17:44
On QVC? Yeah. Oh, let’s see that. It’s
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01:17:47
it’s out there. It’s out. I’m not proud of it.
Speaker: 1
01:17:50
You should be proud of that.
Speaker: 2
01:17:51
But it
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01:17:51
was it was That’s a statistic.
Speaker: 0
01:17:52
It was, like, 12:15 in the morning, you know, and they they sent me one of these things to my apartment. And I’m like, what what is this is this even like, look, they’re everywhere now, obviously. We we we’ve gone through the
Speaker: 1
01:18:06
whole crazy, though, that you’re, like, the godfather of karaoke.
Speaker: 0
01:18:09
Well, I’m among them.
Speaker: 1
01:18:10
Is it so what year is this?
Speaker: 2
01:18:11
What are
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01:18:11
we talking look at you.
Speaker: 0
01:18:12
91. This is 91, 92. Wow.
Speaker: 1
01:18:21
99/95. 9995. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:18:36
But you know what? There’s something, there’s something more trustworthy about rudimentary production value.
Speaker: 1
01:18:45
Right. You can’t, like yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:18:46
I was talking to your 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?
Speaker: 1
01:18:57
Love this old house.
Speaker: 0
01:18:58
I still I I was on this old house.
Speaker: 1
01:19:01
Were you?
Speaker: 0
01:19:02
Yeah, man. They invited me on. They wanted to raise money, for the to reinvigorate the trades. They had a very similar cause as as I do today, and, and they got all these advertisers lined up. And then and then the guy in charge said, well, Mike’s doing the same basic thing.
Speaker: 0
01:19:21
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’re like, would that be great?
Speaker: 0
01:19:33
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 it’s old it’s like there’s an entrance.
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01:19:50
Right.
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01:19:50
There’s an exit.
Speaker: 1
01:19:51
Right.
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01:19:51
When’s the last time you saw it dissolve? Right. Right? Like, all that stuff, and and I used to make fun of it. I used to make fun of QVC. I still do. But but in reality, man, that 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 I’m carrying out the machine.
Speaker: 1
01:20:15
Thing about something that’s overproduced that kind of dissolve some of its authenticity because there’s too much thought put into each and every shot, everything about there’s too much coordination. It’s almost like you lose a comfort, like, I might be entertained by it. It might be fascinating, like like keeping up with the Kardashians.
Speaker: 1
01:20:35
You ever notice, like, they change scenes every 5 seconds?
Speaker: 2
01:20:38
Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:20:38
It’s like keep you, like Yeah. Yeah. 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
Speaker: 0
01:20:55
on them. Here’s here’s a thesis. At least in the world of nonfiction, 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.
Speaker: 1
01:21:18
Right.
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01:21:18
And one of the one of the things that kept Dirty Jobs on the air for 20 years early on, I kind of realized that and and I wasn’t sure what to do about it but I thought maybe 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 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
Speaker: 2
01:21:52
it.
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01:21:52
And I could always look to it, and I could say, alright. Well, what happened here? Blah blah blah.
Speaker: 1
01:21:57
Right.
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01:21:57
And so it was those moments where I think the viewer realized, oh oh, he’s not he’s not trying to sell me anything, at least not here. You know? Right.
Speaker: 1
01:22:09
Right. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:22:10
He’s letting us see the sausage. Yeah. And that was new in in nonfiction. You know, that was a whole new way to think about authenticity. Vivek Ramaswami was the only the only candidate I invited onto my podcast because he I read somewhere that he said if he was nominated, he vowed to never use a teleprompter
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01:22:35
to
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01:22:35
deliver a speech.
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01:22:36
Well, he could pull it off.
Speaker: 0
01:22:38
I whether you can pull it off or not, I just thought that was so interesting, and I and I wanted to talk to him about that specifically. And then it’s funny, a year later, you know, I think I think the teleprompter is probably the best example of one forced error after the next.
Speaker: 0
01:22:58
Like, when you 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 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.
Speaker: 2
01:23:24
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:23:25
And so, like, the cognitive dissonance is rich. You know? And I just think we’ve entered into this world where, like, the 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 Right. That they’re gonna need We need a truth cam. We need it in the newsroom, not just in a sewer.
Speaker: 0
01:23:52
I mean, it it worked there, but we we need it everywhere.
Speaker: 1
01:23:55
Fuck it. We’ll do it live.
Speaker: 0
01:23:57
Bill O’Reilly, of all people,
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01:23:59
I’ll do it live.
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01:24:00
That’s the real bill.
Speaker: 0
01:24:02
Yeah. That’s it. That’s the real bill. That’s it.
Speaker: 1
01:24:04
Yeah. That’s what’s interesting about, social media and social media, like, it’s there’s this giant resistance right now to the idea that x is the new source of the world.
Speaker: 0
01:24:17
They’re the mainstream. It is. They’re the mainstream.
Speaker: 1
01:24:19
It’s it’s the new source of the world. You and these people that want to cling to authority and say, no. You’re not. You’re goddamn it. You’re not the fucking you’re not a journalist. You’re not this you guys fucked us too many times. Yeah. And we don’t believe you anymore.
Speaker: 1
01:24:36
And so the only way for us to find out what’s real and what’s not real is someone posts it online, and then everybody looks at it, and then you get the community notes. 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.
Speaker: 1
01:24:58
Yeah. But meanwhile, they’re fact checking RFK Jr. So now I don’t trust you anymore either. You can’t. Checking RFK Jr, so now
Speaker: 2
01:25:00
I don’t trust
Speaker: 1
01:25:00
you anymore either. You can’t, So it’s
Speaker: 2
01:25:02
like that’s
Speaker: 1
01:25:02
what’s going on.
Speaker: 0
01:25:02
You can’t gloss over the community
Speaker: 1
01:25:04
notes. You can’t. That’s it.
Speaker: 0
01:25:06
That’s it. That that’s the
Speaker: 2
01:25:08
truth cam
Speaker: 0
01:25:09
Oh, it’s a solution. On Twitter.
Speaker: 1
01:25:13
It’s a solution to this thing that we’re trying to figure out. How do we know what’s true and what’s not true? You get a consensus. There’s enough people that actually can read scientific papers. There’s enough people that know the the field that’s being discussed or you’re gonna get out of the 100 of millions of people on x, you’re gonna get an expert
Speaker: 2
01:25:31
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:25:31
Who’s gonna 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 go through that thread, you’ll you’ll if you’re an objective person, you’ll probably get a good sense of who’s right and who’s wrong.
Speaker: 0
01:25:49
It’s a weird dichotomy, though. Right? Like, skepticism. Look, 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.
Speaker: 0
01:26:08
And so, you know, 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 in once credible institutions.
Speaker: 1
01:26:28
Like Well, that’s also the whole reason for the disdain for conspiracy theorists in the first place is that, no, you’re not an expert. I’m the expert, and you’re wrong. But then when they’re wrong, there’s no repercussions. They never wanna say, you know, we were wrong about all this.
Speaker: 2
01:26:42
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:26:42
We’re sorry. We were wrong about masking. We were wrong about social distance. We were wrong about all of it.
Speaker: 0
01:26:47
Where’s the where’s the humility, man?
Speaker: 1
01:26:50
Yeah. No humility. Because 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.
Speaker: 2
01:27:00
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:27:00
You don’t have to have that anymore. And that’s why x has emerged in substack and all these different things as, like, the place where people go to get actual information. And that’s why they like podcasts because it’s just the 3 of us in this room. That’s it. The the whoever is the numbers of people and Carl Carl’s out cold now.
Speaker: 1
01:27:18
But the numbers of people that are listening is like it’s just it’s just crazy number that are all just listening to 3 people. So there’s no producer. There’s no all that shit that gets in the way of things has been removed.
Speaker: 0
01:27:33
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 I 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?
Speaker: 0
01:27:53
You know, you’re just building
Speaker: 1
01:27:54
Certainly, at a club yeah. At a club, it’s everything.
Speaker: 0
01:27:56
It’s everything. It’s everything. But why is it different?
Speaker: 1
01:27:59
Well, because you can’t think about it that way. Because the best way to do it, in my opinion, the for me, the best way I’ve found to do it is to never think about the audience. Mhmm. I 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.
Speaker: 1
01:28:16
Let me move this around a little bit. Let me figure out a way to you gotta move a conversation. It’s like, sometimes I’ve talked to, like, very old scholars, like, very old. And it’s like, Tom sometimes, like, okay. Right. We gotta focus here.
Speaker: 2
01:28:26
Like, we
Speaker: 0
01:28:27
gotta get you on this. Like We’re gonna land this blank, baby.
Speaker: 1
01:28:29
A little bit in the beginning when he was, like, telling me the story with Lincoln’s bedroom. I was at the bed was he was a long man. He was at Target. Very tall. Very tall.
Speaker: 2
01:28:37
So I
Speaker: 1
01:28:37
was like, okay. We gotta figure out a way to what’s it like to be the fucking president? What does that feel? I’m like, how crazy is it on the first day? That’s what I really wanted to know. So it’s like you gotta kinda move people around. But that is for me, like, as an audience member.
Speaker: 1
01:28:51
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’s talking about.
Speaker: 0
01:29:01
But don’t you think that that’s you you are the proxy for the audience when you’re at your best Yeah. For sure. In my view.
Speaker: 1
01:29:10
Yes. For sure.
Speaker: 0
01:29:11
When I’m listening to you, when I, like, high five you virtually, it’s when you asked the question I was thinking. Yeah. And I I really tried to do that in the sewer. I really tried to do that on Dirty Jobs. I really tried
Speaker: 2
01:29:25
I think
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01:29:25
you did. I think that’s why it resonated so much with people.
Speaker: 0
01:29:27
Well, I hope so.
Speaker: 1
01:29:28
Well, for sure because you didn’t ever seem like a fake guy doing a thing. You seem like a fun guy or a regular guy who’s doing this thing where you’re interacting with people, like, what? How do you do this? Like, what is this?
Speaker: 0
01:29:39
So, yes, thanks. But then all of a sudden, I look up, and Donald Trump’s in the sewer with me. Oh, shit. And there’s an election in a week. Oh, the stakes around me. Right? 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 kinda put some sides on this thing because you understand, 1st and foremost, that as an audience member, right, as somebody who’s just listening to this has a fly on the wall, I’m getting a little lost.
Speaker: 1
01:30:14
Yeah. I’m a little bored. Let’s move it along. Right. Right. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:30:18
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 to drift a little
Speaker: 2
01:30:28
bit.
Speaker: 1
01:30:28
I’m I’m most certainly aware that people are going to listen to it. Don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think, like, the questions like, maybe the audience would wanna know this. I do do this one thing even if I know that some I know how this 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 wanna be mister smarty pants here.
Speaker: 1
01:30:50
I don’t have to be. But that’s one thing that I do where I am aware that people probably don’t know what we’re talking about. So let’s 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
Speaker: 2
01:31:07
or
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01:31:07
ways they do things. So that in that way, I do think about the audience. But most of the 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 gonna be good for the audience.
Speaker: 0
01:31:30
What was more consequential? Him coming on or her not coming on?
Speaker: 1
01:31:37
Him coming on.
Speaker: 0
01:31:38
Why do you say that?
Speaker: 1
01:31:39
Well, because realistically, like okay. My thought about her coming on was I would just I was gonna be very nice. I I was I wanna have fun with her. I wanted to just be able to talk to her and ask her I wanna 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 wanna talk, marijuana legalization.
Speaker: 1
01:31:59
They initially didn’t wanna talk about Internet censorship, and then they changed their tune. And then they wanted to talk about Internet censorship. Almost 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 wanna talk about.
Speaker: 1
01:32:15
I wanna talk about cooking, rock climbing. I just wanted to just get a sense of her as a human being. That’s just as a human being. What is it like? Like, does it freak you out when people get mad at you?
Speaker: 1
01:32:25
Does it freak you out when you fuck up a a sentence and you ramble and you know I know what it’s like. You know, when you don’t you know the people are listening, and you’re like, I gotta fucking bring this home when I don’t know how to, and just sort of repeat these key lines or this maybe there’s some new word you become enamored with.
Speaker: 1
01:32:42
You know, you realize over and over again.
Speaker: 0
01:32:43
When you realize you’re in the middle of a sentence with with no obvious ending
Speaker: 1
01:32:47
Yes.
Speaker: 0
01:32:48
That’s a that’s QVC in a nutshell.
Speaker: 1
01:32:50
Yes. Okay? Yes.
Speaker: 0
01:32:51
That’s what it is. Yes. Right? And when the teleprompter breaks Yeah. That’s when you get to know the person. Right. 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 I ask myself, well, is anybody gonna vote differently as a result?
Speaker: 0
01:33:08
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 her campaign had stipulations. They had demands.
Speaker: 1
01:33:26
There was a lot of people that were she had made some a bunch of blunders, and there was a lot of concern that she was gonna make blunders here. This is what I was gonna get to. She might have. It might have been a mess. Yeah. I might have asked her about immigration.
Speaker: 1
01:33:39
We might have had a a conversation about, like, what is the goal? Like, why why hasn’t this been this doesn’t if we can, you know, launch rockets and land them at the same time as we can’t control border, that seems not real.
Speaker: 2
01:33:52
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:33:52
That doesn’t seem real. One seems way harder, and that’s happening. He’s fucking catching rockets with robot arms.
Speaker: 2
01:33:58
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:33:59
Okay. If that’s happening, how come this can’t be fixed? Because this didn’t used to be like this. Why is it 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?
Speaker: 1
01:34:16
And these people are coming from China specifically to the spot and then making it across the country. Like, 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?
Speaker: 1
01:34:28
Maybe that would have been a disaster. Because that that’s something that I felt, like, if if she didn’t wanna talk about the marijuana and didn’t wanna talk about Internet censorship immigration’s an interesting one. Right? Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:34:40
It’s
Speaker: 1
01:34:41
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. 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.
Speaker: 1
01:34:57
Every is we are a country of immigrants.
Speaker: 0
01:34:59
Have you?
Speaker: 1
01:35:00
We should have some stipulations, though, about who gets in and how you get in and where you’re coming from and what are you 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?
Speaker: 0
01:35:16
Inquiring minds wanna know.
Speaker: 1
01:35:17
We wanna know. I think that’s reasonable.
Speaker: 2
01:35:20
Do you
Speaker: 0
01:35:20
see a difference between an immigrant and a settler?
Speaker: 1
01:35:26
Well, it all is the timeline. Right? Yeah. It’s a timeline thing.
Speaker: 0
01:35:29
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:35:30
I Not only that, you’re an invader. Like, if you’re one of those people that comes over in in 18/20 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. Yeah. You’re in their yard. You’re some fucking weird scruffy American looking for gold.
Speaker: 0
01:35:48
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:35:48
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, bitch.
Speaker: 2
01:35:55
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:35:55
This is where I live.
Speaker: 2
01:35:56
Don’t fuck
Speaker: 1
01:35:57
up. I got this now. Well, it’s weird. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:36:09
Every freedom fighter is a terrorist.
Speaker: 1
01:36:11
Yes. Right. It depends on who wins.
Speaker: 0
01:36:14
History gets to decide all that. Sure.
Speaker: 1
01:36:16
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.
Speaker: 0
01:36:27
So yeah, man. There are a lot of ways to go with all this, but I’ll 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 accent if that’s part of your image Right. You know, then you you can’t be on this show.
Speaker: 1
01:36:48
Right. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:36:48
Right. You you you can’t. You you you can’t join me in the sewer. Right. Right. There’s there’s no room for the contrivance. There’s just no room. There’s just no time.
Speaker: 1
01:36:58
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 I can’t read off a teleprompter. I’m not I’m not interested in doing that. It’s not my thing. But if you make a person do that, like, if 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 that kind of exposure that you get if you you’re a vice president or you’re running for president initially.
Speaker: 1
01:37:21
Right? Like, that’s a totally different scene, and there’s probably a bunch of people that coach you how to do it right. And you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. And if you’re not a powerful person, like a 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.
Speaker: 1
01:37:42
Like, he’s he’s used to being in front of the camera. It’s a normal experience for him. He has a massive advantage.
Speaker: 0
01:37:49
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.
Speaker: 1
01:38:03
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:38:04
You know? And I and and I think the audience, not just yours, but the country, I just think they’re just exhausted by by people who have been managed and focus grouped and weighed and measured and tested and then put out there.
Speaker: 1
01:38:18
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? Right.
Speaker: 1
01:38:39
You know, there was a weird performative aspect to it because he didn’t know how to do it right.
Speaker: 0
01:38:43
In sitcoms too. In everything. Father Knows Best Yes. All that stuff. All that stuff.
Speaker: 1
01:38:47
And then as time moved on, it changed. Like, All in the Family was all of a sudden this realistic portrayal
Speaker: 2
01:38:53
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:38:53
Of an of a family where you got a racist dad and the son is, you know, the the meathead, the son-in-law, and the the daughter’s a hippie Yeah. And the the mom just came for what are you doing?
Speaker: 2
01:39:05
What are you
Speaker: 1
01:39:05
it was a fucking amazing show. Oh, watch. It was an amazing show. You had Sanford and Son. Sanford and Son is another one. Yeah. You know, 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, like, moves into the there’s a much greater understanding.
Speaker: 1
01:39:27
If you had a show and you tried to do A Father Knows Best Today, it would almost be like you were putting on, like, a parody. Mhmm. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:39:41
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:39:41
Right? And that’s not acceptable anymore. So the culture’s moved on.
Speaker: 0
01:39:46
So for sure. But it moves on in fits and starts, and it’s not a line.
Speaker: 1
01:39:51
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:39:51
Right? It’s No. No. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:39:53
Yeah. Just like the climate.
Speaker: 0
01:39:55
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. You see so many different kinds of, scripted dramas. I mean, oh my god.
Speaker: 1
01:40:09
Look at
Speaker: 0
01:40:10
can you imagine Breaking Bad
Speaker: 2
01:40:11
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:40:12
Right. 30 years ago? Right.
Speaker: 1
01:40:13
Right. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:40:14
But it’s impossible. Right. A whole lot of things had to happen in front of that for 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.
Speaker: 0
01:40:29
That’s when Eric Sevieride could talk to you like this. That’s when
Speaker: 2
01:40:33
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:40:33
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 and mortgages house to buy some documentaries from Australia and started beaming all that stuff down.
Speaker: 0
01:41:02
I asked him years ago. I’m like, what was the, like, what was the guiding principle behind this 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.
Speaker: 0
01:41:27
That’s it. Mhmm. Everything everything I do must line up with a traditional definition of what a discovery is. It’s the it’s the satisfying of curiosity.
Speaker: 1
01:41:42
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:41:43
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 the greatest naturalists and historians and, you know, astrophysicists in the world.
Speaker: 0
01:42:10
They they deferred to experts, and then they hired guys like me to narrate shows, and we could sound even more official and so you 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?
Speaker: 0
01:42:35
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 in 2003 and They bought it.
Speaker: 0
01:43:12
They didn’t buy dirt. They didn’t like Dirty Jobs. They took it really to shut me up. They wanted 3 episodes and 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 and and don’t ask me to know more than I know, but just let me look under the rock, and let’s learn together.
Speaker: 2
01:43:35
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:43:36
And so they said, okay. We’re gonna you know, you’ll go to the Titanic with James Cameron. You’ll climb Kilimanjaro.
Speaker: 1
01:43:43
You went to the Titanic?
Speaker: 0
01:43:44
No. And I’ll 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 the Wow. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:44:14
And who are all these people with golden masks on their faces? And so Discovery would send me to do these these shows and they were great meanwhile this 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 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.
Speaker: 0
01:44:58
That’s amazing. Right. And it happens all the time and and most of the time when it happens, you know, the the you just walk it behind the barn and shoot it and you 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.
Speaker: 1
01:45:25
Is it shelved?
Speaker: 0
01:45:27
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 100 of years. It was not not that specific episode that that got me in trouble later, but it it it was shelved because it was an unscripted, random romp.
Speaker: 0
01:45:49
We never did a second take on the show. It didn’t look
Speaker: 1
01:45:53
Like everything else on the network.
Speaker: 0
01:45:55
It didn’t look like anything else on the network. It was just a jagged little pill. But they liked me, and and and they liked this idea of of a more unscripted look at the world. And so we reached this kinda detente, and I started narrating all their tentpole shows. And then I went to Alaska to host Deadliest Catch, which is a whole another story, that crab fishing show. Yeah. That’s 21 years now. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:46:21
And up there, people died, you know. That’s a crazy job. People died, and I I went to 6 funerals in 6 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 you’re not hosting 2 shows at the same time, so pick 1.
Speaker: 0
01:46:47
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 nonfiction anyhow began this migration from the age of authority into the age of authenticity.
Speaker: 0
01:47:17
And ever since, nonfiction 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.
Speaker: 1
01:47:35
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 independent news is proceeding.
Speaker: 0
01:47:52
Yeah. You know it when you see it.
Speaker: 1
01:47:54
Yeah. You could tell the difference.
Speaker: 0
01:47:56
Oh, Bourdain.
Speaker: 1
01:47:59
Yeah. Okay.
Speaker: 0
01:48:03
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 there’s a scene in Parts Unknown.
Speaker: 0
01:48:30
I think he’s in, might be Sardinia. He’s diving.
Speaker: 1
01:48:36
Oh, yeah. On the throne of fake octopus is in.
Speaker: 0
01:48:38
It’s one of the single greatest moments in the history of of of nonfiction.
Speaker: 1
01:48:43
It shows you exactly how the sausage is being made, but it’s also, like, now you can trust him because you know he’s kinda sabotaging the narrative that they’ve created for his own show for his authenticity.
Speaker: 0
01:48:52
I would do that for a scene, maybe even for an act, maybe even for a whole segment, maybe if I got a like a like a bee in my bonnet, and I really just couldn’t you know Right. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:49:23
He’s he’s so disgusted Just so you’re just so the audience understands.
Speaker: 1
01:49:27
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:49:28
They’re supposed to be spearfishing for octopi, and the local handler wasn’t sure that they were gonna 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, right, just start to come by him.
Speaker: 0
01:49:55
And in narration, this is where he really owned it because he he owned that show. Like, he could Yeah. Nobody’s gonna 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?
Speaker: 0
01:50:15
What what did they think I was gonna 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.
Speaker: 1
01:50:40
Was that the CNN one, or was that no reservations?
Speaker: 0
01:50:43
That was CNN.
Speaker: 1
01:50:44
Was it?
Speaker: 0
01:50:44
Yeah. It was parts unknown? I look. I’m pretty sure it was parts unknown. I’m pretty sure. I could be wrong, but he
Speaker: 1
01:50:52
I think you might be right.
Speaker: 0
01:50:54
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 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.
Speaker: 1
01:51:21
Well, also these guys, they probably didn’t know. These Italian guys, like, these fucking guys aren’t gonna find the octopus. We’ve killed them all.
Speaker: 0
01:51:27
Yeah. Probably right, but I gotta 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 is wonderful. The fact that he was able to insist that it that was important. Yeah. That was important.
Speaker: 1
01:51:50
Yeah. Well, certainly important for how you trust him, and you had to trust him. I mean, he that was his whole thing. You know, you’re coming with me. This is actually me. Here we go.
Speaker: 0
01:52:01
Fly on the wall.
Speaker: 1
01:52:02
Yeah. Yeah. That was a very unique show too because it taught me that food is art. Mhmm.
Speaker: 2
01:52:08
I
Speaker: 1
01:52:09
really learned that from No Reservations, but it followed over through parts unknown. Food is art. I 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.
Speaker: 1
01:52:24
I never thought it would be a thing you make that you or you hear. Right? I never thought it would be a thing you make where you eat. And then I saw them, like, oh, these are artists. These are artists.
Speaker: 1
01:52:34
All these people, they’ve discovered these different ways to make things delicious and
Speaker: 0
01:52:38
okay. Their medium’s different.
Speaker: 1
01:52:40
Yeah. It’s just different. It’s a different kind. But they then hanging out with them, it’s like, yeah, they’re all artists. They hang they talk like artists. They’re they’re covered in tattoos. They’re fucking weirdos. They like to do drugs. They’re all listening to crazy music, you know. They’re they’re also craftsmen.
Speaker: 2
01:52:54
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:52:55
Like, I mean, to me yeah. Food is art. It sure can be, and it can also be fuel. Yeah. You know? It’s it’s it’s actually both. It’s kind of perfect.
Speaker: 1
01:53:09
Yeah. You could have both.
Speaker: 0
01:53:10
It could be art and fuel. Just gotta pick what you eat. Is hunting art?
Speaker: 1
01:53:23
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.
Speaker: 1
01:53:43
It’s very hard to do. I train for it. I I have to get in really good shape. I practice. So I practice so much I fucked my back up because I was I was getting developing like tendinitis in my lower back and I just ignored it.
Speaker: 0
01:53:57
Yeah. Shut up. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:53:59
We got we got work to do. And so it’s 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 if it does take, like, physical enter you have to be in shape to do it. You have to be in great fitness, but it’s not a sport. It’s a it’s a it’s a discipline. It’s a discipline that’s very, very, very primal.
Speaker: 1
01:54:23
It taps into something you didn’t even know was there. It it’s like there 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 gonna feed your family and stay alive. That’s what that excitement is.
Speaker: 1
01:54:39
Because that excitement is, like, hardwired in your human reward systems, and you don’t know it’s there until you go fishing.
Speaker: 0
01:54:45
And then you’re like, woah.
Speaker: 1
01:54:47
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 a 100. Hunting is that hunting is way different because you’re you’re defying their protective senses. You have to make sure the wind is going in the right direction.
Speaker: 1
01:55:03
You have to go all the way around if it’s not. You gotta figure out a way to move through the trees. You gotta move very slowly, only move in their heads down.
Speaker: 0
01:55:12
I think that’s art.
Speaker: 1
01:55:13
I don’t know, man. I mean, it’s a shot as 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 gonna die very quickly.
Speaker: 1
01:55:31
It’s a quick humane death, and that’s what you practice for.
Speaker: 0
01:55:35
You know Josh Josh Smith over at Montana Knife by any chance?
Speaker: 1
01:55:39
Sure. Very
Speaker: 0
01:55:39
well. He sent me a video the other day. He went on a big hunt with his boy. The
Speaker: 1
01:55:44
1st hunt?
Speaker: 0
01:55:44
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. His boy got one at about at at a few 100 yards.
Speaker: 1
01:55:48
Huge Moose. Big Moose. Fucking huge. For a first Moose, that’s so crazy. That kid hit the jackpot.
Speaker: 0
01:55:54
But the excitement on the video
Speaker: 1
01:55:56
Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:55:57
That he sent me. And Josh and Primal.
Speaker: 1
01:55:59
Yeah. And bow hunting is even more primal than that. Bow hunting is that times a100. So it’s, regular hunting is fishing times a 100, then bowhunting is regular hunting times a 100.
Speaker: 0
01:56:11
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 like the 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 but but I know that people talk about it like some people say while you’re in the zone, you know?
Speaker: 0
01:56:36
Sometimes when I write, I’m surprised. Like, I just the other day, I started I started writing something on the tarmac of SFO, and when I looked up, I was I was at JFK. It was like that.
Speaker: 1
01:56:49
Yeah. You got into it. Yeah. The airplanes are great for that.
Speaker: 2
01:56:52
Oh my. They’re the best.
Speaker: 1
01:56:53
They force you into that seat.
Speaker: 0
01:56:54
They’re the best.
Speaker: 1
01:56:54
You can’t get up because there’s a guy next to you. It’s you get that laptop open, and it just comes out of you.
Speaker: 0
01:57:00
And I like a little
Speaker: 1
01:57:01
bit of track.
Speaker: 0
01:57:02
Look. Let’s go. I I I wrote a book on a plane.
Speaker: 1
01:57:06
I believe
Speaker: 0
01:57:06
it. I I really did, and and I did it mostly in moments that I don’t really remember when when time gets compressed. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:57:16
And I
Speaker: 0
01:57:16
and I think that 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 that it’s it’s so odd the way things will sometimes almost feel like they’re in slow motion
Speaker: 2
01:57:33
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:57:34
Even though they’re they’re happening so fast.
Speaker: 1
01:57:35
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 artist. You you you know who Emmanuel Augustus is? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That guy is an artist. That guy is an artist.
Speaker: 0
01:57:50
What makes him an artist?
Speaker: 1
01:57:51
Because he’s, first of all, completely unique. Okay? Doing a thing in this beautiful deceptive way. He’s dancing, but he’s also he has an understanding of distance that’s fantastic. So he’s really good at avoiding punches. His head movement, even with this unorthodox dancing style, is fantastic.
Speaker: 0
01:58:11
He’s stalking.
Speaker: 1
01:58:12
He’s doing something. Like, here’s here’s Emmanuel. Like, look look at how he moves. 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 2 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.
Speaker: 1
01:58:33
His abilities were incredible, but it’s just like it was such a wild style. So unusual.
Speaker: 0
01:58:39
It’s like boxing a bobblehead.
Speaker: 1
01:58:41
Right. Like, prince Naseem Hamed had a kind of a similar thing going on when he was in his prime. Naseem Hamed was, very, very unorthodox. You see, here’s here’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?
Speaker: 1
01:58:58
And when you’re a guy like Floyd and you’re getting clowned, here he’s he’s fighting Micky Ward. When you’re a guy like Floyd and you’re, you know, the cream of the crop, Olympian, I mean, a fucking phenomenal boxer, just a fantastic boxer, and then you’re fighting this guy who’s dancing in front of you, like, you what the fuck?
Speaker: 1
01:59:15
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 kinda that kinda 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.
Speaker: 0
01:59:33
Who’s this trainer?
Speaker: 1
01:59:35
Oh, man. I don’t think anybody trains you to do that.
Speaker: 0
01:59:37
I don’t either. No. You, man. Like, what does custom auto say
Speaker: 1
01:59:40
to that?
Speaker: 0
01:59:40
Never. Wouldn’t allow it.
Speaker: 1
01:59:41
No. He, you know, he was, but maybe maybe if the guy started winning like that, he would change his tune.
Speaker: 0
01:59:47
So maybe People
Speaker: 1
01:59:47
change their tune when they see something extraordinary.
Speaker: 0
01:59:50
Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:59:50
When they see something weird, you know, they change their tune. They go, well, maybe. Fuck. I don’t know. Because you don’t know sometimes. You don’t there’s there’s guys that come along in fighting in particular that have styles that are so weird and so unique. You go, wait wait a minute.
Speaker: 1
02:00:04
How come nobody else is doing it like this? Is this gonna work? Like, you do you know who Sean Strickland is?
Speaker: 0
02:00:09
I don’t know.
Speaker: 1
02:00:09
He’s a 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. Yeah. Stand straight up. Everybody else is down. Everybody else is moving. Sean, straight up, moving towards you. Phenomenal head movement, awesome timing, and it walks people down in a weird style. There’s a bunch of guys that fight weird, but they’re really good at it.
Speaker: 0
02:00:32
Well, think baseball too. I mean, it’s everything. Louis Thiont. Remember the pitcher?
Speaker: 1
02:00:36
I don’t really follow baseball.
Speaker: 0
02:00:38
You’ll love this, Jamie.
Speaker: 1
02:00:40
I know almost nothing about sports, believe it or not.
Speaker: 0
02:00:44
You know, I mean, you will. One day, you’re gonna look at a baseball game and go, hey, you know what I need to do? I need to play professional baseball. And then 5 years later, you’re we’re gonna be reading about it because you’re gonna go crazy with it. The same way you’re gonna
Speaker: 1
02:00:56
for that. But but this Louis Thien, what did he do differently?
Speaker: 0
02:00:59
Louis Thien was a pitcher, and his wind up was such that it looked sort of traditional, but then he turned his back to the batter without leaving the rubber. Right? So this guy would spin all the way around before he threw, And he go further than that sometimes.
Speaker: 1
02:01:22
Is that really unusual?
Speaker: 0
02:01:24
Yeah. Yeah. It’s unusual. That’s unusual.
Speaker: 1
02:01:29
Oh, so it freaks people out a little bit? Well, it’s yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:01:32
Yeah. Because he just breaks he stops looking at you. Look at his his back.
Speaker: 1
02:01:38
Look at his ankle. That’s crazy. That’s
Speaker: 0
02:01:40
exactly it. So it’s like, oh, you know, if if you’re a batter, you’re like, alright. 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.
Speaker: 1
02:01:48
That that dude has flexible knees.
Speaker: 0
02:01:51
Flexible everything.
Speaker: 1
02:01:51
Because look at the the angle his knee is in before he turns. That’s crazy.
Speaker: 0
02:01:56
Yeah. Yeah. You would actually I’m I’m surprised you’re not into baseball because
Speaker: 1
02:02:02
I can’t.
Speaker: 0
02:02:02
It’s it’s
Speaker: 1
02:02:03
I don’t have any room.
Speaker: 0
02:02:04
I know the bucket’s overflowing.
Speaker: 1
02:02:05
That’s it. Yeah. It 100% is. You know, like, I watch football now. My wife’s into football, but I I can’t I can only pay attention so much. My 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, 1 FC. There’s I’ve I’ve to keep track of a 1,000 fighters, like, literally a 1,000 fighters.
Speaker: 0
02:02:35
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:02:36
Maybe casually, some of them, like some of the glory kickboxers, casually, I’m watching, you know, oh, Badri Hari’s fighting. Oh, you know, this guy is fighting. That guy is fighting. I know who these people are. I watch them fight. I’ve I’m watching fights, just hours and hours in a day.
Speaker: 1
02:02:53
I might watch I might watch fights 30 minutes every day. Is it work or fun? It’s fun. Yeah. It’s only fun. But I do feel obligated to pay attention.
Speaker: 1
02:03:03
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, 2,013. He was, fighting in Cage Warriors and I reached out and I said, dude, you’re fucking super talented. I I hope, I get to see in the UFC someday.
Speaker: 1
02:03:22
And then it was, like, you know, kickboxers, like Alex Pereira, I follow him in glory and then finally he comes over to the UFC and I was, like, you gotta see this guy. This guy is fucking insane. It’s like you have to have some sort of an understanding of what’s coming, you know.
Speaker: 1
02:03:38
And, also, you have to, like, kinda 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 just they’re only focused on becoming a UFC champion.
Speaker: 1
02:04:06
And this is their goal in life, and they’re 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. You know? So to me, it’s like, I don’t have any room. I don’t have any room for baseball.
Speaker: 0
02:04:21
It’s interesting, man. You’ve 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
Speaker: 1
02:04:35
Well, the UFC in
Speaker: 0
02:04:36
a really similar way.
Speaker: 1
02:04:37
First. See, I was a fan of the UFC in the very, very beginning, and it got me into jujitsu. So in 96, I started taking jiu jitsu. 94, I found out about the UFC. I’ve I’ve, you know, kept it in my head for a little bit. I was still kickboxing at the time, just not fighting anymore, but just training.
Speaker: 1
02:04:53
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 an a lot of that was on news radio at the time.
Speaker: 1
02:05:08
It was very difficult to have the time to start training. Then 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 you took a propeller plane. It was fucking hell.
Speaker: 1
02:05:27
It was no money there.
Speaker: 0
02:05:28
This is 97? Mhmm. 97. And is Dana?
Speaker: 1
02:05:31
Bare knuckle and Dana was not involved yet.
Speaker: 0
02:05:33
When did Dana get involved?
Speaker: 1
02:05:34
2001. So, I’m on Fear Factor at the time and, one of the things that me and my friend Eddie Bravo who’s also a big fan from back in the day, and he taught me jiu jitsu. When we were, first really into it, when we would go to, like, Louisiana, these they were the only places that would sanction these fights. They were bare knuckle.
Speaker: 1
02:05:54
People wore shoes. You could grab their shorts. It was like crazy rules.
Speaker: 2
02:05:58
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:05:59
And, we said, you know what it would take? These billionaires who love the sport and dump a ton of 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 a long time, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta in 2001, these billionaires that happened to get in love with the sport, and so they buy the UFC.
Speaker: 1
02:06:17
And then, they start putting these shows together, and then I meet Dana. And then I started asking Dana, like, have you ever heard about this guy? Did you ever see this guy fight in Japan? You ever you ever heard this this Russian dude? And and I started asking him about fighters.
Speaker: 1
02:06:31
Well, you should try to get these guys. And then he’s, like, do you wanna do commentary? And then next thing you know, I’m a commentator for the UFC.
Speaker: 0
02:06:39
Okay. This is just a very weird triangulating, but
Speaker: 1
02:06:43
They didn’t even have any money at the time because they were hemorrhaging money. So I did the first 13 shows for free.
Speaker: 0
02:06:48
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.
Speaker: 1
02:06:58
Well, for me, money has always been fun coupons. And so I was on Fear Factor, so I had plenty of fun coupons. So my thought was, like, oh, I have money. I don’t have to worry about money right now. Like, I just I’ll just do this. Yeah. This would be fun to do.
Speaker: 0
02:07:11
Nevertheless, you know, I mean, it was the same thing with Dirty Jobs. Once that thing lit up, I had to be willing to to sign a contract. It was probably illegal. I mean, it was such a ridiculous contract the way they own you. So it
Speaker: 1
02:07:23
Yeah. Isn’t that crazy?
Speaker: 0
02:07:24
It’s like no money. But Yeah. But if it’s a hit, if it sticks
Speaker: 1
02:07:28
We have you for 10 years. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:07:30
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 Right. Which was actually do the work. Yeah. There’s no contract that can force you to bite the balls off a sheep. Right. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:07:49
You you have to be willing to do that, and so I I was able to fix that. But, Dana, I’m trying to remember what year this would have been. When did the ultimate fighter 2005. Okay. So in 2004, Dirty Jobs was on the air.
Speaker: 0
02:08:06
It was in that weird space where we didn’t know if it was gonna be a hit or what. But I was narrating all kinds of stuff for this guy, Craig Polygyan. 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, and Dana kinda knew me or recognized me.
Speaker: 0
02:08:29
And Craig said, hey, this guy, Mike, he’s narrating, American Chopper, American Hot Rod. He’s narrate he just goes down the list, and and Dana says, say something. And I and I and I said previously on the ultimate fighter, and he said, fine. You’ll be great. I did I did 10 seasons.
Speaker: 1
02:08:52
That sounds like Dana.
Speaker: 0
02:08:54
He says, say something.
Speaker: 1
02:08:54
Yeah. That’s hilarious.
Speaker: 0
02:08:56
This is great.
Speaker: 1
02:08:57
Yeah. That’s hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting how things happen like that. You know?
Speaker: 0
02:09:03
Well, you were gonna you know, you wouldn’t be sitting here now if your lease wasn’t up or whatever.
Speaker: 1
02:09:08
Yeah. I probably wouldn’t. I would have gone back to New York.
Speaker: 0
02:09:11
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. Mhmm. Yeah. So, like, art and science. I think I think Anybody who’s passionate about what they do can approach what they do?
Speaker: 0
02:09:33
Like a scientist
Speaker: 2
02:09:35
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:09:35
Or like an artist or maybe both or maybe both. I think both. So you know I I’ve got this this foundation that evolved out of dirty jobs. It’s called micro works, and we award these Scholarships to people who don’t want to go to a 4 year school, but who want to learn a trade. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:09:57
We’ve been doing it for 16 years. And, I started doing it, in part for my granddad, but but mostly because they’re, what, 8,000,000 jobs now that don’t require a 4 year degree, and there’s $1,700,000,000,000 in student loans on the books, right, that is just bananas, and we’ve got these huge shortages in in the skilled trades.
Speaker: 0
02:10:26
So I spent a lot of time talking about how that happened and and what might be done to to fix it, but regarding art it’s like you’re old enough to remember woodshop and
Speaker: 2
02:10:39
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:10:39
Metal shop and
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02:10:40
Sure.
Speaker: 0
02:10:41
You know, before it was shop, it was it wasn’t just vo tech. It turned into vo tech, but before it was vo tech, it was the vocational arts. That’s what they called it.
Speaker: 2
02:10:54
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:10:55
And so we didn’t just get rid of the vocational arts. We we started with the language, and we 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 and
Speaker: 1
02:11:09
so But 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. Yeah. Over building a house. Everybody needs a fucking house over being a plumber.
Speaker: 1
02:11:37
And if 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 it’s it’s a job that is creative. It’s skillful. And when you’re done, you bring satisfaction to other people that live in that house.
Speaker: 1
02:12:00
Like, you 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 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.
Speaker: 1
02:12:20
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
Speaker: 2
02:12:26
way up, but it’s gonna take
Speaker: 1
02:12:26
a long time before I make enough money where I’m not burdened by this. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:12:31
Or you could have a successful construction company by then. I mean, you could
Speaker: 1
02:12:31
you could get a small business loan and you could you could start,
Speaker: 0
02:12:33
like,
Speaker: 1
02:12:43
hiring other people. You could have trucks with your name on it. Like, 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.
Speaker: 0
02:12:59
And they’re entrepreneurial.
Speaker: 1
02:13:00
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 it’s not good for for anybody to think that way.
Speaker: 0
02:13:14
Well, you know, I I very rarely play the devil’s advocate in this argument, but but I I do think I know why it happened or at least how. And I was in high school in the late seventies, and there was a very concerted push for what we call higher ed, which, by the way, already sets the table.
Speaker: 0
02:13:35
Right? Yeah. If it’s higher ed over here, I guess we have lower ed over here.
Speaker: 1
02:13:38
Right. You you guys are
Speaker: 0
02:13:40
the language is is is awful. But the but the PR I mean, and to be fair, in the fifties, sixties, seventies, we we needed more doctors. We needed more engineers. We needed more people matriculating through, you know, 4 year schools. But what happens with PR, at least from what I’ve seen, is that it always goes too far.
Speaker: 0
02:14:00
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 if you don’t go this way, you’re gonna 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.
Speaker: 0
02:14:23
And that, you know, I don’t know when it happened, but I
Speaker: 1
02:14:28
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. Yeah. So if you’re a person that pursued the trades, you’re, you know, probably a failure. Something is this is, like, all you could do because you couldn’t make it in school.
Speaker: 0
02:14:45
And yet, you loved this old house
Speaker: 1
02:14:47
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:14:48
Which is a love letter to the trades.
Speaker: 1
02:14:50
It really is.
Speaker: 0
02:14:50
Every single one.
Speaker: 1
02:14:51
Oh, I I love watching people make things. Yeah. Even dumb things. Like, there’s a 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 and all you know?
Speaker: 1
02:15:06
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:15:06
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:15:07
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. My lord. Yeah. And he was authentic. He actually loved it. You could tell.
Speaker: 1
02:15:22
It wasn’t like this is like a scam. Like, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m like, I can take ancient tools and figure out. No. This guy really was into it.
Speaker: 0
02:15:31
Well, what’s happened there for me anyway is that I I mean, after 16 years of it, I can tell a a pretty good story anecdotally. But now I’m able to go back and talk to people who we helped, what, 5, 6 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 a year. I bought a van.
Speaker: 0
02:15:58
I hired my buddy who’s a welder, then I hired a plumber, then I got 2 HVAC guys and electrician. We’re doing 3 and a half 1000000 a year, got no debt. And so, like, my job is to is to talk to that guy, and and I do that a lot on my podcast. It’s just like I just wanna hear yours I wanna hear stories of people who prospered as a result of mastering a skill that’s in demand
Speaker: 1
02:16:24
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:16:24
And then maybe applied some level of either artistry or entrepreneurship or the willingness to move, that’s a big one too. Mhmm. You know, where you go where the work is or Yeah. You know. And so it’s it’s really become it’s why Bobby Kennedy called me back in February. You know.
Speaker: 0
02:16:42
He was like, hey, man. This micro works thing, you wanna make it macro works? And I said, yeah, sure. What do you have in mind? And that’s I don’t know how I don’t know if you knew this, but we had this whole conversation about, like, running together.
Speaker: 1
02:16:57
Really?
Speaker: 0
02:16:58
Oh, yeah. No. He he asked if I wanted to be vice president.
Speaker: 1
02:17:03
Oh, jeez, Louise. What’d you say? Dude, I was in Munich.
Speaker: 0
02:17:09
I was in Munich in in January, and he had he had called me earlier just to talk really generally about about the middle class because he’s like, look. What you’ve done with the foundation is my campaign is a lot about that, and and I’d love to talk to you more about it. So I I kinda put him in the category of elected officials, politicians who might who might be useful. You know? I I’m not I’m not that guy.
Speaker: 0
02:17:36
But I said, yeah. Look, man. I I’d be happy to chat. Well, he called back and, you know, Gavin Becker. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So they did a dive.
Speaker: 0
02:17:48
They this was very strange for me. They did a deep dive, and when I got back to the Bay Area, he invited me down to his home to meet, you know, the cats. They were all there. And we talked for, like, 3 hours, and I I’m looking over my shoulder honestly like I’m being punked.
Speaker: 0
02:18:11
Like
Speaker: 1
02:18:11
like Right. Right.
Speaker: 0
02:18:12
Which one of my crazy friends
Speaker: 1
02:18:14
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:18:15
Put you up to this? But he was serious, and and I was weirdly flattered, maybe. Like, I knew I couldn’t say yes, but I was so interested in what his thinking was.
Speaker: 2
02:18:31
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:18:32
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? Mhmm. And it didn’t fit, you know? It Right. I’m I I would never do well in an office or in a bureaucracy.
Speaker: 1
02:18:51
He called me up once to ask me who I thought would be, like, good vice president. I was terrified he was gonna ask me.
Speaker: 2
02:18:57
Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:18:57
I I was terrified. I was, like, please don’t ask that.
Speaker: 0
02:19:01
I my
Speaker: 1
02:19:01
because I know he asked, well, he asked Aaron Rodgers
Speaker: 0
02:19:05
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:19:06
Which is crazy.
Speaker: 0
02:19:06
Yeah. I I literally heard the sound of my sphincter slamming shut.
Speaker: 1
02:19:11
Like, what the fuck, man?
Speaker: 0
02:19:12
I, like, I just tensed up, and I was like, oh.
Speaker: 1
02:19:14
Who wants that job?
Speaker: 0
02:19:16
Who wants
Speaker: 1
02:19:16
that fucking job? That’s job’s insanity. But, man, I’ll I’ll tell you, man. He
Speaker: 0
02:19:23
it was a really he was very gracious and very direct, and I 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 he’s like, Mike, do you do you understand 77% of the youth today wouldn’t wouldn’t qualify to get into the armed forces?
Speaker: 0
02:19:50
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, you know his uncle was Starring in commercials 45 years ago that were literally we’d call it fat shaming today.
Speaker: 0
02:20:13
Mhmm. You know challenging. You know, I just talked to him, the day before yesterday, and he said, you know, Google any photo of Yankee Stadium sold out from the sixties or or even the seventies 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.
Speaker: 0
02:20:42
Anyway, he was very passionate about all that.
Speaker: 1
02:20:45
Yeah. And I said, but It’s an important message.
Speaker: 0
02:20:47
It is an important message.
Speaker: 1
02:20:48
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.
Speaker: 1
02:21:04
And I’m 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.
Speaker: 1
02:21:24
We know what the ingredients are that are bad for you. We know what we’ve done to the food supply. We know what we’ve done. It’s real it’s readily available. It’s what you eat.
Speaker: 0
02:21:33
When you say we though, I mean
Speaker: 1
02:21:35
Human beings, collective the collective intelligence
Speaker: 0
02:21:38
What percentage of this country do you think
Speaker: 1
02:21:40
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. They have the this really distorted idea of nutrition, what’s important and what you need and but what what’s good to thrive, what’s optimum versus what is just gonna keep you alive.
Speaker: 1
02:22:01
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.
Speaker: 0
02:22:10
What do I wanna take with d, by the way? Is it
Speaker: 1
02:22:12
magnesium? You wanna take magnesium and you wanna take k 2. You wanna take vitamin k, magnesium, and, you know, there’s some arguments, some other stuff too that that would also enhance it. But you you definitely need vitamin d, almost everybody does. And and if you live in a cold climate in the winter time, you know, a buddy of mine, did his residency in, I think it was Boston.
Speaker: 1
02:22:33
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 they didn’t supplement at all. And, you know, there’s some vitamin d in in 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.
Speaker: 1
02:22:54
It’s it’s really important. And there’s a lot of other things that are really important. Vitamin c is really important. You know, the vitamin b is very important, bunch of different b’s. You need essential fatty acids. They’re very important. You need all these things.
Speaker: 1
02:23:06
If you don’t have these things, your body won’t function right.
Speaker: 0
02:23:09
Do you think that the basic fear and conversation around skin cancer and
Speaker: 2
02:23:18
the
Speaker: 0
02:23:18
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?
Speaker: 1
02:23:28
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 is 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 it’s actually a hormone that your body produces when it’s in the vitamin d is a hormone. It’s a or a precursor to a hormone.
Speaker: 1
02:23:49
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. That you get more vitamin d that way.
Speaker: 0
02:24:04
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:24:04
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. Your your again, overall vitality.
Speaker: 1
02:24:20
If you wanna have a strong vitality, you need to eat nutritious food and take vitamins and you need to exercise. There’s no if, ands, or buts about it. You need those three things 100%.
Speaker: 0
02:24:32
No shortcuts?
Speaker: 1
02:24:33
No shortcuts.
Speaker: 0
02:24:34
I don’t know that probably not many silver linings to the lockdown, but I did. I started walking. I I’ve always been active, but I kinda backed off of the gym as I got older and started walking every morning for 8 miles. And then, you know, Mike Easter. Mhmm. He became a friend, the comfort crisis, and I started, rucking. Yeah. And so That’s great.
Speaker: 1
02:25:00
Yeah. Mike’s a big proponent of that.
Speaker: 0
02:25:02
Big time. Yeah. In fact, when Bobby called, it’s hard to understand sometimes. That was impossible to understand because I was gasping for breath. I got £65 on my back walking 8 miles every morning. He was like, what are you doing? I’m like, dude, I’m dying. I’m dying. I’m dying. I’m rocking.
Speaker: 0
02:25:19
I’m rocking. But, yeah, I just I think it I think there’s really something important in that book that that Easter wrote.
Speaker: 2
02:25:28
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:25:29
And and and I think our it’s not the specifics of what we can do. This idea of, what do the Japanese call it, a a misogi, a quest or a challenge of sorts that you should, well, you should challenge yourself to do every so often. Yeah. And one of the one of the criterion is you should have a 50% chance of failure. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:25:56
So you it’s a it’s a real push into uncertainty and discomfort. Mhmm. And that that’s why Iraq. It’s it’s it’s uncomfortable. Yes.
Speaker: 1
02:26:08
Yeah. Yep. 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 wanna do all the time. It actually grows.
Speaker: 2
02:26:31
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:26:31
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 Yeah. Much more eloquently. But I think that’s real. And I think, it also makes regular life a lot easier. That was one of my favorite things of jiu jitsu when I found out.
Speaker: 1
02:26:48
It makes regular life easy because it’s regular life is not anterior midcingulate cortex. Mhmm. That’s what it is. Engaging in challenging activities can stimulate and grow this region, which is crucial for learning or excuse me, leaning into and overcoming difficulties. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:27:03
And if your life is super easy and anything that comes up is a a nightmare, it’s probably be because you lack enough voluntary adversity to overcome uncomfortable moments. So uncomfortable moments are rare. And when you encounter rare things, generally, people, like, kind of have anxious moments encountering rare things.
Speaker: 0
02:27:24
Oh, well, anxiety is a form of discomfort. Yes. And it’s not just pain. Mhmm. 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.
Speaker: 2
02:27:39
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:27:39
Like, being bored makes people super uncomfortable because we’re so not used to
Speaker: 1
02:27:45
Especially today.
Speaker: 0
02:27:46
Especially today. You could Yeah. The same thing up and, you know, instant access to 99% of your information.
Speaker: 1
02:27:51
Yourself of a lot of possible ideas.
Speaker: 0
02:27:54
Sure. Yeah. Because the best ideas come
Speaker: 1
02:27:56
When you’re bored.
Speaker: 0
02:27:57
When you’re bored.
Speaker: 1
02:27:58
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.
Speaker: 1
02:28:22
So you’re in, like, this weird mindset. And then if there’s no nothing entertaining you, your mind just starts thinking about things.
Speaker: 2
02:28:28
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:28:29
Because Sometimes you come up with great ideas.
Speaker: 0
02:28:31
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.
Speaker: 1
02:28:44
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:28:44
It’ll find something. You know, cold plunges, not comfortable. Yeah. But, you know, if you can find a way to to like it
Speaker: 1
02:28:54
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? Yeah. I don’t wanna do this. Right. It’s fucking cold outside.
Speaker: 0
02:29:08
It’s
Speaker: 1
02:29:08
40 degrees outside. I’m climbing this 34 degree water. But but but because I do it, I know that I’ve already done something way more difficult than most of my day.
Speaker: 0
02:29:18
I think there’s a difference in 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 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 a an overarching benefit in embracing the suck.
Speaker: 0
02:29:41
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.
Speaker: 1
02:29:51
That’s useful, but it also is beneficial physically. So it’s both things. I think that’s the case with exercise too. It’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.
Speaker: 1
02:30:15
Your body just feels better when you get out the endorphin rush you get,
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02:30:20
you
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02:30:20
know, the, norepinephrine. This this this is 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.
Speaker: 1
02:30:39
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 feel better.
Speaker: 1
02:30:48
It’s like it’s like you’ve gotta go through that suck to get those benefits, and people don’t like that. And so they come up with a bunch of reasons why you don’t need that. That’s just a fad. That’s just a this. They all look like shit.
Speaker: 1
02:31:00
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 in there. They don’t like getting in there.
Speaker: 1
02:31:07
They don’t like that other people get in there every day, and they 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.
Speaker: 1
02:31:16
It’s this is that.
Speaker: 0
02:31:18
And yet, look at the stadium 50 years ago and look at it today. Yeah. The evidence demands a verdict. Something something awful has happened.
Speaker: 2
02:31:27
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:31:27
It it’s like it’s like the difference between, being hungry and feeling hungry.
Speaker: 2
02:31:34
Mhmm. You
Speaker: 0
02:31:34
know, that’s something else I 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 fucking I’m famished. Like, no, you’re not.
Speaker: 1
02:31:45
You’re really you’re really not.
Speaker: 0
02:31:46
You can’t possibly be.
Speaker: 1
02:31:48
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 live in hell. Some of those guys, they start their cut like 4 or 5 days out. Crazy. They look that that’s starving.
Speaker: 0
02:32:04
You gotta really look at it.
Speaker: 1
02:32:05
That’s only your voluntary, voluntarily starving, you know, it’s not real starving. Real starving is like you might not be able to eat. You might not be able to feed your kids. You’re just using willpower to starve. That’s so different than in 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, you’re the wag the wagon breaks
Speaker: 0
02:32:25
Donner Party Now you’re on table for 2.
Speaker: 1
02:32:27
Yeah. And that’s real starving. Real starving.
Speaker: 0
02:32:30
Do you ever read there’s 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, called the Essex. Right? And the sinking of this ship, inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:32:53
And what happened was in I think it was 18/21, the whaling industry in Nantucket is so fascinating. This Nantucket back then was basically run by women because the men would go out for 2, sometimes 3 years at a time Jesus. Hunting right whales, which are just sperm whales. They called Years? Years. Yeah. They were called right whales because they were the right whales to kill. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:33:17
And in that time, it was a great source of energy for the country. All the lamplights burned on whale oil.
Speaker: 1
02:33:26
Imagine how many whales there were before they started doing this.
Speaker: 0
02:33:29
They were like schools. There were so many. We this book will I mean, it’s it’s rich in a 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 a device used for pleasuring themselves because the the the the men were all out to see.
Speaker: 0
02:33:54
My god. So they’d use a steely Dan.
Speaker: 1
02:33:56
Oh, that you wanna talk about hard lives.
Speaker: 0
02:33:59
The the business whatever it takes to shoot the elk and get it down from the mountain, I get it. That that’s a thing. But when you read through the real process of getting a sperm whale out of the ocean alongside the ship and then onto the ship, and the cutting of the blubber, and the cauldrons that burn 247 on the deck, and the blubber that’s put into the cauldrons.
Speaker: 1
02:34:29
And So they’re just making this rendered fat?
Speaker: 0
02:34:32
They’re rendering the fat in the oil in real time.
Speaker: 1
02:34:34
Oh, wow.
Speaker: 0
02:34:35
And and because they have to or it’ll rot. That’s right. And so they just load up the boats.
Speaker: 1
02:34:41
Woah.
Speaker: 0
02:34:42
So what happens and and this is not really a
Speaker: 1
02:34:44
eating the whales too? No. No? No. No. What are they eating?
Speaker: 0
02:34:48
Oh, they’ve got their they’ve got their hardtack mostly.
Speaker: 2
02:34:52
Ugh.
Speaker: 0
02:34:53
Hardtack is just kinda like Crackers. Crackers, biscuits with no real taste at all. It was the
Speaker: 1
02:35:00
Oh, the It was
Speaker: 0
02:35:01
the currency. He used to anything. Probably got scurvy. You know? I mean, but they would these guys would go all around the world, and this boat, the Essex, was a couple 1000 miles off the coast of Venezuela. And, what happens is that it’s it’s the ship is the main ship with the guys on it.
Speaker: 0
02:35:20
And then when you see a whale, right, you basically put the whale boats in the water, and these are smaller, maybe 22 feet long and men row them. Right? And so you harpoon the whale, and then you hang on and go for what they called a a Nantucket sleigh ride. Jeez. So so the whale would just drag the What if
Speaker: 1
02:35:43
the whale goes under?
Speaker: 0
02:35:44
It can’t go under much further. It can’t pull 2 boats down, and it doesn’t. They they tend to swim in a in a straight line after they’ve been harpooned, so you just you just hang on. And then when it tires itself out, you row it and you back to the whale ship.
Speaker: 1
02:35:58
Do they kill it first?
Speaker: 0
02:36:00
Well, no. No. It’s killed back at the at the ship, typically. You don’t wanna kill it when it’s when you’re a mile from the ship because you gotta drag it back.
Speaker: 1
02:36:09
They didn’t know how smart whales were back then either.
Speaker: 0
02:36:11
We didn’t know anything. But on
Speaker: 1
02:36:13
Ain’t that crazy that that’s only a couple 100 years ago?
Speaker: 0
02:36:15
18/21. Ain’t
Speaker: 1
02:36:17
that nuts? Well Couple 100 years ago, the ocean’s filled with whales.
Speaker: 0
02:36:21
Filled with them and like that.
Speaker: 1
02:36:23
Because if you look now, they’re hard to find, and nothing hunts them.
Speaker: 0
02:36:28
No. And I never even really thought about it. They were everywhere.
Speaker: 1
02:36:32
I mean, I knew about it, but I never thought about it. I never I mean, we’ve talked a lot about the the decimation of the fish population in the ocean, about, like, 90 plus percent of all the big fish are gone
Speaker: 0
02:36:44
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:36:45
Which is really nuts. But I never really thought about it that way when it comes to whales.
Speaker: 0
02:36:49
Well, you can make a really good and really controversial case.
Speaker: 1
02:36:52
They made a movie. Ron Howard made a movie.
Speaker: 0
02:36:54
Yeah. Yeah. Ron Howard made a movie on this.
Speaker: 1
02:36:55
Of it.
Speaker: 0
02:36:56
Yeah. It’s amazing. Look. I mean, they’re they they were everywhere. Wow. So these guys harpoon 1 That’s so crazy. From 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 male of the whale that was harpooned starts ramming Oh.
Speaker: 0
02:37:23
The ship, rams it 3 times.
Speaker: 1
02:37:26
Oh, no. Sinks it. Oh, no.
Speaker: 0
02:37:29
Now you got a couple dozen guys in whale boats 2,000 miles off the coast of South America with no supplies. Oh. So Oh, man. What happens and, yeah, 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 gunwale of of their boat and in the whale boat, it’s just like a giant carcass.
Speaker: 0
02:38:05
It’s just bleached bones all in it, except for 2 quasi humans, 1 in the stern and 1 in the bow, each skeletons huddled up, staring each other with wild eyes, just waiting to see who would die next.
Speaker: 1
02:38:22
So they could eat them?
Speaker: 0
02:38:23
Yeah. And there were rules. They were almost like cookbooks that were very common.
Speaker: 1
02:38:31
How many people were on these boats?
Speaker: 0
02:38:34
Double check me, Jamie, but I I I think there were probably a dozen on each one. Many family members. There was a cabin boy named John Coffin, I remember, and and there were I mean, a lot of these guys were related, you know, and and they they were dear friends and family. They lived together on Nantucket.
Speaker: 1
02:38:51
And they ate each other.
Speaker: 0
02:38:52
They ate each other, man.
Speaker: 1
02:38:54
How long was it before they discovered them?
Speaker: 0
02:38:57
They were at sea adrift, I think, for the better part of 3 months. Went into the national that’s him, Nate Philbrook, fantastic. In 18/20, the whale ship, Essex, was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale, leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than 90 days in 3 tiny boats.
Speaker: 1
02:39:17
When did this movie come out? 2015 for the movie. The manuscript was found in 1960, verified in 1980.
Speaker: 0
02:39:24
Oh, my god. At least in 84. So you wanna take a deep dive? Go to the, like, the Wailing Museum up in New England. Oh. This 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?
Speaker: 1
02:39:44
Them on the spot, or did they have them prepared they devised on the spot?
Speaker: 0
02:39:48
There was, what, the rules? No. No. They were written. It was it it was like a maritime code.
Speaker: 1
02:39:54
So they kind of knew that this is a possibility.
Speaker: 0
02:39:58
They knew it was a certainty. They just didn’t know for whom. Oh. This was common. This 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 there were protocols, pretty strict protocols on how to draw lots to decide who would go first, how to kill the person
Speaker: 2
02:40:24
who would
Speaker: 0
02:40:24
go first.
Speaker: 1
02:40:24
Oh, boy.
Speaker: 0
02:40:25
Who not to eat based on the degree of your relation. Oh, boy. So, like, brothers are definitely off. Oh. But cousins, not optimal. Oosh. So, like, people were being prepared for
Speaker: 1
02:40:41
consumption. Eating them raw?
Speaker: 0
02:40:44
I mean, I I can’t imagine how you would make a fire out there Oh my god. Un unspeakable. Oh my god. Oh my god. That’s interesting. Owen Chase. Right?
Speaker: 1
02:40:56
The men spent over 3 months to see 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, 7 sailors were consumed.
Speaker: 0
02:41:13
Woah. Good boy. See, this is why nonfiction is the best.
Speaker: 2
02:41:19
Oh.
Speaker: 0
02:41:21
I know it’s nauseating, but I mean that book
Speaker: 1
02:41:23
At a point in time, you gotta go, well, 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 gonna be one last person.
Speaker: 0
02:41:40
There’s gotta Like, and then there was 1.
Speaker: 2
02:41:43
Oh, girl.
Speaker: 1
02:41:45
God. Dude, I know.
Speaker: 0
02:41:47
I know.
Speaker: 1
02:41:48
Reality is so terrifying in that regard that we we have, you know, we 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 5 hours. You know?
Speaker: 0
02:42:09
They feel really hungry.
Speaker: 1
02:42:10
Yeah. 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.
Speaker: 1
02:42:27
Mhmm. 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 17th century. 3 men in one boat survived and 2 in another. The 3 men who remained behind on Henderson Island were also rescued after surviving on eggs and crabs for nearly 4 months.
Speaker: 2
02:42:50
Boy.
Speaker: 0
02:42:51
And this is why we have Moby Dick.
Speaker: 1
02:42:54
Wow.
Speaker: 0
02:42:54
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.
Speaker: 1
02:43:22
Yeah. I’ve heard this before.
Speaker: 0
02:43:23
Because had Yeah. Had that not happened in Pennsylvania, in Titusville Yeah. Not long after this, we’d have hunted them into absolute oblivion.
Speaker: 1
02:43:32
Well, we almost did that to mammals in North America.
Speaker: 0
02:43:34
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:43:35
Market hunting. There there used to be elk in every state in the country. There used to be deer everywhere, and we basically hunted them into oblivion. The buffalo is the best example of that, of course.
Speaker: 0
02:43:47
What the hell is the matter with us, man?
Speaker: 1
02:43:49
Oh, we’re fucked up. 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 a real understanding of what would happen that had never been done before. No one had just showed up at a continent filled with mammals and just start decimating them. There wasn’t like a history of that.
Speaker: 1
02:44:06
It was also the advent of the firearm was fairly recent.
Speaker: 0
02:44:10
So it
Speaker: 1
02:44:10
was a lot easier to get these animals, you know, and then they had the Henry rifle. So they had long range rifles. So they were able to shoot buffalo from a distance and and then they, you know, for a lot of them, they only use their tongues. They pickled their tongues and sent them back east.
Speaker: 0
02:44:23
And then I was I was in, Custer a couple of weeks ago for a buffalo roundup.
Speaker: 1
02:44:28
Oh, wow.
Speaker: 0
02:44:30
Man, this was a kick. This is, so this is Western South Dakota, not far from Crazy Horse and Rushmore. You know, we worked on Crazy Horse for Dirty Jobs. We did an episode.
Speaker: 1
02:44:45
You mean the sculpture? Yeah. Sculpture’s weird because there’s no real drawing or painting or anything. No photographs of Crazy Horse. No. Nobody knows really what he looked like.
Speaker: 0
02:44:55
Well, they’re working from a a model that seems to have been blessed by all the appropriate parties, but this they started working on this thing 50 years ago, and it’s gonna take another 40 before they’re done. I worked on the fingernail of Crazy Horse with a whole crew.
Speaker: 1
02:45:12
What does it look like now? I haven’t seen it in
Speaker: 0
02:45:13
a long time. You’ll love this, Jay. It’s it’s it’s so mine, but you you can take all of Rushmore, all foreheads, and put it on the forehead of Crazy Horse. Wow. That’s how big this thing is. And Listen, wasn’t it like one family’s undertaking? Yeah. Court Gorchek.
Speaker: 0
02:45:32
Go to that last
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02:45:33
picture that you just had. That one right there. So that shows before and after. It shows where it was a while back and where it is now.
Speaker: 0
02:45:40
Look at it. Look at his finger in the lower right.
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02:45:42
That’s what you worked on?
Speaker: 0
02:45:43
Yeah. And I scaled down his, forehead to do basically some tidying up of his nostrils and whatnot while we were there.
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02:45:52
It’s That’s crazy how
Speaker: 0
02:45:53
big that is. Massive. It’s absolutely massive. And, yeah, this there was one guy, Korchak was his name, and he was an immigrant, and he loved the Indian people. And that’s that’s the model there at the right yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:46:10
That’s what it’s gonna look like?
Speaker: 0
02:46:11
That’s what we’re shooting for. Wow. And it’s it’s it’s gonna take another half a century probably. But Wow. That’s incredible. You know, it’s funny, man.
Speaker: 1
02:46:20
It’s very controversial in amongst Native American communities though. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:46:24
I don’t know. It is, you know, some
Speaker: 1
02:46:27
There’s a part of it is the thing that Crazy Horse didn’t wanna be photographed. Yeah. You know, he really believed that cameras were like stealing
Speaker: 0
02:46:35
Your soul.
Speaker: 1
02:46:35
Yeah. That that was a a belief back then which Wayne
Speaker: 0
02:46:40
Might be on some.
Speaker: 1
02:46:41
Well, you have this novel thing where no one’s ever seen it before and you take an image of someone like that
Speaker: 0
02:46:47
Like it like it diminishes you.
Speaker: 1
02:46:49
Yeah. Also, human beings at that point in time were so horrible to each other, and these settlers had done essentially demonic things
Speaker: 0
02:46:57
Yeah.
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02:46:57
To the population just with diseases, just bringing diseases. Yeah. So, of course, they would say, what are they doing now?
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02:47:04
All that
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02:47:05
this is the fucking coup de grace. They’re gonna steal our soul with this fucking box. Big thing goes off. You gotta stand still.
Speaker: 0
02:47:13
This guy, Korchak, he was so brilliant on so many levels. Yeah. I think he had 13 kids and that they were basically his workforce. He built into the rock the staircases that they needed to take to get to this Jesus. Space. The like, the work ethic is mind boggling what they did, and he was a he was a real friend, to the Native Americans, and he and this was a love letter for them and to them.
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02:47:41
And
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02:47:42
and who was, Crazy Horse’s was it Sitting Bear, maybe? I forget. But, you know, he he had all of the he had enough blessings of the requisite players to to embark on this thing.
Speaker: 1
02:47:55
Well, I think anything anytime you have some enormous thing, you’re gonna have controversy. Well You’re gonna have people that don’t like it, that do like it. You know, there’s for sure what you do.
Speaker: 0
02:48:06
But the difference I mean, for me, I called when we brought, 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 started 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?
Speaker: 0
02:48:33
I said, look. I I I wanna bring my crew, and and I I’m really I wanna 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.
Speaker: 0
02:48:54
I think the I think the park service does an amazing duty, and I and I and I I wanna 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.
Speaker: 0
02:49:17
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 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.
Speaker: 0
02:49:38
And so we I knew Crazy Horse was nearby. And the answer was, oh, yeah. Come on out anytime. And the difference, of course, was Crazy Horse isn’t being built with a penny of federal money. Mhmm. It has no federal oversight.
Speaker: 0
02:49:53
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 that means a lot to other people.
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02:50:12
Monumental in reality.
Speaker: 0
02:50:13
Monumental monuments. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s a some some people, I think, see it as a burden, some as a challenge, some as an obligation. But for me, I you know, the vast majority of Americans are never gonna see either one of those monuments in person. So to to show them
Speaker: 1
02:50:31
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:50:32
More people will have just seen what Jamie put up here as a result of this probably than we’ll than we’ll visit in person, and that’s amazing, dude.
Speaker: 1
02:50:42
Yeah. That is amazing.
Speaker: 0
02:50:43
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.
Speaker: 2
02:50:58
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:50:59
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 of the day when where the where the buffalo roam was as far as you could see, Just thick.
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02:51:16
Do you know, Dan Flores?
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02:51:18
Do you
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02:51:19
know who he is?
Speaker: 0
02:51:20
Tell me.
Speaker: 1
02:51:20
He wrote, American Coyote, and he wrote what is it? Buffalo diplomacy, Buffalo ecology? Is that what it was? I for I forget, But the Buffalo premise is very fascinating because the numbers of Buffalo, he believes but they were in such large numbers because so many Native Americans died out because of diseases.
Speaker: 1
02:51:41
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 take it’s a long time to repopulate. Yeah. But if the Native Americans, 90% of them are wiped out by disease when the settlers came here, So there’s no one hunting them for a long time, and so the populations grew immense.
Speaker: 2
02:52:04
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:52:04
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 pop because they didn’t have to worry about wolves.
Speaker: 1
02:52:32
They didn’t have to worry so when they first were here, right, buffalo existed far back before before the the there was a mass extinction of, like, 65% of, North American mammals that coincided with the end of the ice age and probably had to do with the Younger Dryas impact, which is a theory about The
Speaker: 0
02:52:53
Cambrian thing or was it
Speaker: 1
02:52:54
It’s 11 well, there’s 2 different time periods that they attribute to, there’s a there’s a shower, an asteroid shower that we go the the if you really wanna get into this, you should really, look up Younger Dryas Impact Theory online. And then there’s a guy named Randall Carlson who’s, like, kinda dedicated his life to showing that this is probably what ended the ice age.
Speaker: 1
02:53:16
There’s a bunch of science behind it in terms of, like, core samples and stuff they do that shows that there’s asteroid impacts that happened all over the world during this particular time period. And he thinks that coincided with the extinction of the woolly mammal, the the American lion, a lot of different animals that just died off.
Speaker: 1
02:53:35
65% of North American mammals died off during this time period.
Speaker: 0
02:53:38
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:53:39
And you gotta 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.
Speaker: 1
02:53:59
And so humans now horses have been reintroduced in North America by Europeans. Humans are on these horses, and then they’re hunting these animals reintroduced, by the way, because Yeah. Horses originated in North America, including zebras. All horse species came
Speaker: 2
02:54:13
from here.
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02:54:14
American. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:54:14
But that was the North the Bering land bridge and things moved around. And when they the mass extinction event happened, it killed off all the horses here. But then there was horses over there that they had kinda extirpated from America, brought them back in. And now Native Americans have horses.
Speaker: 1
02:54:30
And so they are really effective at hunting buffalo. They get the numbers down to a 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.
Speaker: 1
02:54:52
18 30? 40? You’d have to go to whatever it’s kinda 18 50 is what it’s
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02:54:58
saying. Yeah. Yeah. I here’s the tragedy for me. I narrated a special about all that. I can’t remember it, man.
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02:55:07
Really?
Speaker: 0
02:55:08
I mean, I I I remember enough of it to know that I narrated it. That’s what I would told you 3 hours ago. I’m I Is that the Ken Burns one?
Speaker: 1
02:55:15
Is that what you Could have been.
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02:55:17
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:55:18
Could have been. I I know. If it was Ken Burns, he he always hires Peter Coyote.
Speaker: 1
02:55:22
Oh, Peter Coyote’s great. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:55:25
But I am that’s what I meant earlier when I’m like I I I feel I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me yet, but my 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.
Speaker: 1
02:55:48
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:55:49
And, 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.
Speaker: 0
02:56:10
I’m I’m I’m older than I’ve ever been, and it’s just nagging at me now because it’s like, goddamn it. I should know I I should remember more that I I should I should have remembered more about Filbrick. I should have remembered more about,
Speaker: 1
02:56:25
I don’t think where’s it designed for it. I don’t And I think the humans like yourself is this is kind of a new thing, like, 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.
Speaker: 1
02:56:43
That’s a it’s essentially a new thing with human human beings. You know what Dunbar’s number is? No. Dunbar’s number is the number of people that you can keep, like, in your mind, memory in in your memory. Right? That’s essentially born out of necessity and tribal life.
Speaker: 1
02:57:00
Right? So we we essentially have the same brains and the same capacity, same hard drive as people who lived in tribes 10000 years ago.
Speaker: 0
02:57:07
Yeah.
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02:57:08
And but we’re still stuck with this hard drive, with this world that has an endless supply of information. It’s consistently bombarding you with new facts.
Speaker: 0
02:57:18
I read that, like, Bill Clinton’s number is way high, like, certain people’s numbers.
Speaker: 1
02:57:24
Oh, who they can keep in their head?
Speaker: 0
02:57:25
Like, the number of people you can you can keep
Speaker: 1
02:57:28
It probably expands just like the part of your brand expands when you do difficult things. It probably expands.
Speaker: 0
02:57:33
There’s a podcast, as you know, dedicated to what happened on your podcast.
Speaker: 1
02:57:39
I didn’t know that.
Speaker: 0
02:57:40
Yeah. There’s a podcast out there basically called I don’t know what it’s called, experiencing the Joe Rogan experience or something because because there’s too much information on your show.
Speaker: 1
02:57:49
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:57:50
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 gonna go to an art museum, you need somebody to lead you through. I do anyway.
Speaker: 0
02:58:14
Somebody who can
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02:58:15
It helps.
Speaker: 0
02:58:16
It helps, man. If you’re gonna go see if you’re if you’re gonna go see a martial arts fight for the first time, if you’re gonna go to the octagon, it’d be better to sit next to you than than me. Right? Sure. So everybody But it’d
Speaker: 1
02:58:31
be annoying. I’d have to say you don’t okay. How much do you know why that hurts?
Speaker: 0
02:58:38
Here, let me let me show you. Can 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 never seen.
Speaker: 1
02:58:58
There’s new information too.
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02:59:00
How do you
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02:59:00
send their
Speaker: 1
02:59:01
people? Because it’s information is acquired upon the consumption of all the other information. Like, it’s all exponential. It piles on top of each other. It’s it’s not just now we know because of the new information because of the information that we’ve acquired, now we have a new understanding. So that’s new information.
Speaker: 1
02:59:21
You know, nutrition, it’s con there’s constantly new information on nutrition. How is that possible? People have been eating forever because now we know more about it. So it is new information.
Speaker: 0
02:59:31
Well, it’s there’s no such thing as an old joke if you hear it for the first time.
Speaker: 1
02:59:36
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:59:36
So if I just learn that vitamin d is important but better assimilated with magnesium and k 2, I might say that’s some new information. But you would go, no, dude. That’s old information. You’re just learning it.
Speaker: 1
02:59:50
Right. But it’s fairly new anyway because nutritional science has really only been around for, what, a 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 what enhances that, what, you know, enzymes, different things that you eat.
Speaker: 0
03:00:16
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.
Speaker: 2
03:00:26
Right.
Speaker: 0
03:00:26
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.
Speaker: 0
03:00:45
Look at this cursed thing here in
Speaker: 1
03:00:46
my hand.
Speaker: 0
03:00:47
It’s like, oh my god. If I have an Internet connection, I have access to 98%
Speaker: 1
03:00:51
of everything
Speaker: 0
03:00:52
that we’ve ever known. Yeah. Now that either makes you intensely curious or intensely uneasy because now you know. Both. Maybe. But but you have it now. You like like, if if you’re not like, what are you doing? Like, you’re sitting on the toilet. Are you are you reeling? Are you TikTok ing?
Speaker: 0
03:01:10
Like, how are you spending the one truly finite resource you have
Speaker: 2
03:01:15
your time?
Speaker: 0
03:01:15
What are you doing with it, man?
Speaker: 2
03:01:17
A lot
Speaker: 1
03:01:17
of us getting distracted. Jesus.
Speaker: 0
03:01:19
Yeah. But their stories, their buffalo stories and whale stories that are out
Speaker: 1
03:01:23
there, man. I think that’s why people like your shows, you know. I think that’s why people like podcasts. I think that’s why people are interested in documentaries. There are still people out there that are interested in being curious. For sure. Yeah. For sure. Make a living, Mike.
Speaker: 0
03:01:37
Yes. Yes, Joe. It is.
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03:01:39
That’s what we’ve done.
Speaker: 0
03:01:40
It’s a pleasant living.
Speaker: 1
03:01:42
Listen, man. It’s been awesome talking to you. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker: 0
03:01:45
You know what?
Speaker: 1
03:01:46
3 hours just fucking flew by.
Speaker: 0
03:01:48
I’m just I mean, full disclosure, I’m I’m kinda 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? What’s I’m like, I maybe my mother said maybe he’s not that into you.
Speaker: 1
03:02:02
It’s just a time thing.
Speaker: 0
03:02:04
He’ll he’ll he’ll call you one day.
Speaker: 1
03:02:05
There’s a lot of people out there, but I but I really did wanna talk to you.
Speaker: 0
03:02:09
Can I show you a truck before we go?
Speaker: 1
03:02:11
Sure. Sure.
Speaker: 0
03:02:12
Because I know you’re a car guy. Yeah. So this company called Sugar Creek up in Ohio made me a truck.
Speaker: 1
03:02:20
Oh. What kind?
Speaker: 0
03:02:22
Well, it 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.
Speaker: 1
03:02:33
Oh, that’s crazy. I love those old Power Wagons. Dude, that thing looks incredible.
Speaker: 0
03:02:38
What a
Speaker: 1
03:02:39
great job they did on that.
Speaker: 0
03:02:40
It’s it’s unbelievable. 27 it’s about 9,000 man hours.
Speaker: 1
03:02:44
Oh my god. That thing looks fucking incredible. Oh, you got a hell of an engine in it. 1100 horsepower. Oh my goodness. Look at that. So it’s got a TRX hood.
Speaker: 0
03:02:54
It’s it’s Wow.
Speaker: 1
03:02:56
You will get That’s that’s fucking great. I know. Oh, do you drive that?
Speaker: 0
03:03:03
Barrett Jackson is gonna auction it off No. In January. Why?
Speaker: 1
03:03:09
Why don’t you keep it?
Speaker: 0
03:03:10
Because my foundation needs money. Oh. And, right, so it’s it’s gonna 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.
Speaker: 1
03:03:20
Yeah. That’s probably gonna go for half a $1,000,000 at least. No. He says 2. $4,000,000? Probably
Speaker: 0
03:03:27
cost half a1000000 to make. Wow. Beats me. You know, this is another one of those worlds.
Speaker: 1
03:03:32
Maybe. Auctions are crazy because a bunch of rich guys get in there and go, I want it.
Speaker: 0
03:03:36
I know.
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03:03:36
And then
Speaker: 1
03:03:37
they start feeding off each other. Look at this fucking thing. That’s incredible. $2,000,000?
Speaker: 0
03:03:41
Jesus Christ. Who knows? But I I 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.
Speaker: 0
03:04:02
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.
Speaker: 1
03:04:13
Oh, wow.
Speaker: 0
03:04:14
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. These guys, man, it’s what we’re it’s it’s I
Speaker: 1
03:04:24
would never be able to let that thing go.
Speaker: 0
03:04:26
It’s the art we were talking about. It’s it’s That’s art. That’s artistry. That’s art.
Speaker: 1
03:04:30
Yeah. Oh, 100%. That’s art. Yeah. Yeah. Mike, appreciate you very much, man.
Speaker: 0
03:04:34
Thanks for
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03:04:35
having me.
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03:04:35
Thank you for being here. Pleasure. A lot
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03:04:36
of fun.
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03:04:37
Alright. Bye, everybody.
