The Joe Rogan Experience - #2235 - Mike Rowe

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

Mike Rowe is the creator and host of "Dirty Jobs," "Somebody’s Gotta Do It," and Facebook’s "Returning the Favor." He is also the CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, a nonprofit championing the importance of skilled labor and addressing the critical workforce gap, and host of the podcast "The Way I Heard It." www.mikerowe.com www.mikeroweworks.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Need more hot takes? Head to the FanDuel Sportsbook app. They've got more ways to bet, more ways to win, and more ways to cash out quick. You can cook up same-game parlays on any MLB or soccer game all in one place, not to mention golf, tennis, and more. Download FanDuel and get more from North America's number one sportsbook. Please play responsibly. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca the Joe Rogan experience We got Mike Roe, we got Carl's over there snoring. So what were you doing on QVC? What are you selling?

That was the greatest line from Blazing Saddles by the way, when Gene Hackman. What's the line? He says, cigars, remember? Peter Boyle has come, he had just left and Gene Hackman is there after getting the soup spilled in his lap and he's basically saying I had cigars as the creature stomps off in Frankenstein I don't remember that tiny little long since I've seen that movie best he's a little bit of a fucking distraction can he calm down I don't hear him on the other side. Trank him. I don't hear him at all. We hear him. We don't have our headphones on. Maybe we should put our headphones on.

I thought you were talking about me. No, Carl. For an awful moment. We wore him out. Jamie was throwing the toy for Carl and now he's he's such a great dog he's got I mean he's adorable I mean it's He's such a great dog. He's got, I mean... He's adorable. I mean, it's such a personality thing at that, for me with dogs and pets in general, you know? Like, you know right away if this thing has a personality. Oh, he's got a lot of...

Carl's got a lot of personality. Yeah. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, and... He's like a little kid. And a person name, which I think is super interesting. Mine's Freddy. He's a terrier. I like a dog with a person name. Yeah, think is super interesting. Mine's Freddy, he's a terrier by the way. I like a dog with a person name.

Yeah, me too. Like Fido, what the fuck is a Fido? No one knows. Well, actually, oh no, that's Filo. I was thinking of Clint Eastwood in Every Which Way But Loose, he was Filo Beto. Could also be Filo Farnsworth, who created the television. For real?

Yeah. Did only one guy do it it or was it one of those like light bulb type deals where like a bunch of people are scrambling for it and Thomas Edison kind of? What do they call that, like a hive mentality? Mm, yeah, right, right. Like that happened with the integrated circuit, right? When Kilby at Radio Shack was doing the same basic work

I think that Robert Noyce was doing for Intel. And one was here in Texas and the other was in California 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. Oh that's interesting. Super, super strange but that you know. That's a common thing with human beings and it's this concept of morphic residents. Have you ever heard of that concept? Rupert Sheldrake, he wrote about this and the idea is and it's based on some actual facts too about there's some real statistics about rats. Like if you teach

a rat how to run a maze on the East Coast, a rat on the West Coast will run it faster. It's like they learn the pattern somehow or another. It's very bizarre. There's like information that's apparently shared across species and the idea is that somehow or another they're quantumly entangled like that the entire group of these specific types of animals are quantumly entangled or entangled in some way that we don't understand. So it's a kind of I mean I would think biological evolution might flirt with that. I read a paper a guy wrote name was Patrick House He this was his PhD and he was talking about

toxoplasma gondii and histoplasmosis and It's a crazy paper his his real premise was trying to understand the phenomenon of the cat lady and why Like why why why every culture like this isn't unique to America, in every culture you can find a woman who, you know, two cats, three cats maybe, but like went all the way to 38, right, and just was like, this is perfectly normal. So his paper was what happens to a person's brain to tell it it's normal to have 38 cats.

And then it gets super complicated because he identifies a gandhi that lives in the cat's gut and and basically breeds there and what he learned was when the cats were crapping the the gandhi 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 gandhi basically disabled the part of the brain that would tell an otherwise sentient rat to run from the cat. But suddenly they weren't running.

They became prey and they became docile and the cats started obliterating the mice and rat population because this thing that was breeding in its ass was effectively making its prey easier to catch. So Dr. House thought, well, you know, we've all heard about why pregnant women should stay away from cats because that can have an effect. And a rat's brain and a human brain have a surprising number of parallels. So he basically postulated that, you know, Doris the cat lady was living a fairly normal life until she got just a little bit of cat shit on her fingers and ate it, and the gandhi disabled the part of her brain that said, hey, maybe two cats is enough.

It's worse than that. It actually makes the rats sexually attracted to the smell of cat urine. Exactly, right. Yeah, it actually makes them aroused. Yeah. Now I don't know if Doris went that far with her feelings. Have you ever seen them run up to cats?

The toxo-infected rats? It's bizarre. They run right up to them. The cat's like, what the fuck is going on? The cat's like bounce away from the rat. It's like watching The Beatles at the Ed Sullivan Theater. You know? People are like, what's wrong with you people?

Why? What's happening? Mass psychosis. Yeah. Yeah, that's super interesting. Do you know there's also a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims that test positive for toxo? Mass psychosis. Yeah, yeah, that's super interesting. Do you know there's also a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims that test positive for toxo? They know it.

Yeah, it makes people more impulsive. It makes them more reckless and impulsive. And countries that have high rates of toxoplasma have more successful soccer teams. I read, and I think this- I got more of these too. I don't want to compete I'm gonna lose but you'll love this you probably already know it homeostatic risk

and risk equilibrium and the unintended consequences especially with motorcycle riders that emanate from safety protocols gone too far really yeah so like every like if you study the way you drive your motorcycle, like you measure every decision that you make in terms of cornering and speed and braking and all that stuff. And then you measure the same things with all the safety gear employed, including a helmet, especially a helmet. You drive faster, you corner tighter, you take more chances because the risk equilibrium that we all have in our brain is different from one person to the next, but what's the same is our

desire to compensate for the environment around us. So compensatory risk and the subconscious decisions that we might make behind the wheel when we're buckled up versus not buckled up when we have ABS brakes as opposed to not having them. They did a big survey in Berlin years ago where they took half of the taxis and they put in state-of-the-art breaking systems and half of them and left the others the same and then they hooked up the cars to monitor every driver decision and in virtually every case the drivers with the better safety gear took more chances because their brain is subconsciously compensating right Right? It's the same. Makes sense.

Yeah, I mean it's controversial, but I understand it. It's why the most dangerous intersections have signs that tell you when to walk and when not to walk and have crossed. Because the little man is walking, it says go, so you step off and there's the big blue bus and then you're spattered. So yeah, the unintended consequences of following traditional safety protocols has always really been interesting to me. Well, it completely makes sense if you have a vehicle that's more able and capable, you're

going to probably drive it faster and you're probably going to take more risks because it can do stuff Like I used to think I used to have a Lexus SUVs big boat Lex and you know what? I loved about it. I drove slow in it. I was just like real because it doesn't stop that good It's not that fast, but it's just it's big and comfortable and it just chilled me out And then I had an m3 I had two cars at time, and my M3 was a zippy little thing and I was flying around that thing. I was like, why do I drive different in this fucking car

than I do in the big car? The big car would just chill me out. I'd just get in that big old boat and I just, ooh. Sure. The world was like quiet out there, I was nice and relaxed. I think it's a slightly different analysis. Like if you're going to adjust your behavior consciously

to adapt to the externality, right? Like you're gonna drive faster if you have a fast car because you know that's why the guy built the thing. And it would almost be rude, right? It would be rude to drive a hot rod like a boat. Right. You know? It's the unconscious things that you do when you assume or mitigate risk as a result of employing an externality that I think is just super interesting.

It is interesting. Well, because if it's right, Joe, if it's right, what it does is it turns all the safety first protocols, not necessarily on their head, but this happened in Dirty Jobs. I did a whole special called Safety Third because safety isn't really first, not really, ever. Because if it was, you would never get a lot of things done. Well, you'd never get a lot of things done. Well, you'd never get out of the studio. You would definitely never do construction.

Heck no. No, you wouldn't do anything. You wouldn't do anything. How are you going to move steel girders of safeties first? You'd be like, first thing we should do is not move this fucking girder. That's right. This thing's too big. That's right.

Look, I mean, for me, it was really a it took two years to kind of puzzle it through because on dirty jobs for the first two years, nobody got hurt. You know, we were and we sat through probably 50 mandatory safety briefings, whether it's mines or confined spaces or high spaces or you know lockout, tag out, all those protocols and procedures were super intense and we were really really focused on coming home alive and in one piece so we like really paid attention but after two years of these mandatory compulsory meetings and all of these procedures, we all started getting hurt. I mean, nothing serious, but broken fingers and, you

know, a cracked rib and singed off my eyebrows and my eyelashes and mild concussions and things like that. I was like, what the hell's happening? What was happening is the safety experts in all of these mandatory meetings started to sound like, remember Charlie Brown's teacher? Mrs. Oathmar. We were just falling asleep. So it was like, holy crap, we're in compliance, but we are not out of danger. And so that begs the question, what happens to a normal person who actually comes

to believe, either on the job site or just in life, that somebody else cares more about their well-being than they do? And it's like that's when complacency rears its ugly head. So on Dirty Jobs we just it was just shorthand among the crew but it was always safety third which meant heads up man keep your head on a swivel you can be and you can be as compliant as you want but in the end if you don't want to fall off the bridge that's it's kind of on you. Is there also a factor when you have a person who's the safety officer who's kind of annoying and they're like really like Super interested and maybe you kind of like pawn off the the safety

Aspect to them and then you don't think about it as much because someone's supposedly looking out for you How much do you think about? Proper driving technique when you're sitting in the back on your laptop or even up front next to it? Depends on who's driving. For sure. If I was driving and my wife is in the back seat, she'd be paying attention a lot. Shout out to your guy, what was his name, Ashton, who picked me up this morning. Excellent driver, man.

Glad you're happy with it. Just so you know. I mean, I know he drives a lot of your guests and this this is a feedback I want to pass along he was uh, you know, very frosty. But yeah, look I think any time any time that we abdicate Responsibility. Yeah. Yeah, there's gonna be it's like whack-a-mole. It's gonna pop up someplace else and and it's probably not gonna be in your interest well your show like sort of to be in your interest. Well your show like sort of illuminated a lot of really crazy jobs that people probably weren't aware of that you go oh yeah this guy

didn't do this we'd kind of 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 yeah that was it man it was How did you get started in that? Who came up with the concept? Well, technically, I guess I did, but I mean, honestly, there are no new ideas. I stole this from George Plimpton, Studs Terkel a little bit, Charles Kuralt, some, Paul Harvey a little bit, Charles Carrault, some, Paul Harvey a little bit, you know? That kind of storytelling was always

kind of interesting to me. And 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. I was great in auditions so I could get cast. But I didn't really much care about

the nature of the work and had a pretty good balanced life really. And then I was in San Francisco working for CBS on a show called Evening Magazine. You know the show, it comes on after like the local news. And I was a host and I would go every day, this is a cushy gig, nobody watched the show, but it was fun to work on. It was, you go to museums, you go to wineries, and then you throw to these wrapped packages, right? It's all just, if there's a three-legged dog in Marin overcoming a heart-tugging case of canine kidney failure, you know, that was like an Evening Magazine story.

Right, right, right. We did these all the time. And my mom called me, and I was in my cubicle at CBS, and she says, Michael, your grandfather will be 90 years old tomorrow. And my granddad by the way, seventh grade education, electrical contractor by trade, but also a plumber and a steam fitter, pipe, fabricate, fix anything. He had that that chip, you know, and he I grew up next to him on this little farmstead north of Baltimore and I knew I was gonna follow in his footsteps, I knew it. But the handy gene is recessive, right? I didn't get that and it was my pop who

got me. He basically said, dude just get a different, you can be a tradesman. I know you're enamored of being a tradesman. Just get a different toolbox. So that's what got me into entertainment and 20 years later I had completely run a muck. I had sung in the opera, I had sold stuff on QVC. You sung opera? Eight years, man. Were you classically trained? Not really. How did you get involved in opera singing? Well, it's a weird, sidebar, you go to the Rosedale Public Library and you ask the librarian for the shortest aria they have like ever written which happened to be by Giacomo Puccini. Is an aria a song?

An aria is a song. It's the they're in an opera most of the big moments are arias right and and most of the arias are you know, I mean, they're sung by the main characters and there are lots of ones that you would recognize. And German, they're in Italian for the most part. This one was Italian. It was from La Boheme, which is just another version of rent, essentially. But it was called the Cote Aria. And it was called the coat aria and I was only two minutes long and it was in italian so I walked around Baltimore with you remember the Sony Walkman yeah I remember I had one else I had one too and I listened to a guy named Samuel Ramey singing the coat aria about two minutes and 40 seconds and the words didn't mean anything to me, but the

sounds did and I can carry a tune so I just memorized the sounds. And then I crashed an audition for the Baltimore Opera in 1983. So no classic training at all, just a Walkman and a cassette? Yeah, I'd had a music teacher prior to that, like a Mr. Holland type of guy who actually changed my life. He kind of fixed a stammer that I had and then he forced me to audition for plays that I didn't really want to be in. And then the craziest thing ever, this guy, his name was Fred King, He was known as King of the Barber Shoppers. 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 just started learning these ancient songs and singing for people, usually unsolicited from nursing. What kind of fucking dudes are you hanging out with that were interested in doing this with you? Well one of them is basically my producer guy called Chuck Klausmeyer, who I went to high school with, produces my podcast. And we still write, we'll write unauthorized jingles for our sponsors and sing them in four-part harmony.

I'm not saying it's cool. I'm just saying it's a thing that I did when I was young and I never really shook it. Because like, way leads on to way. Right. So you knew how to sing. I could carry it to you so you had some experience singing kind of yeah and then you decided you were gonna learn how to sing opera 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 didn't want to be in the opera. I wanted to be on TV but I needed an agent and I couldn't get an agent unless I had my Screen Actors Guild card and I couldn't get my SAG card unless I had an agent. So I couldn't audition for things that I wanted to do unless I found a way around this weird tautology. And a friend of mine, guy called Mike Gellert,

told me, he said, hey, so there's the Screen Actors Guild. At the time, there was AFTRA, and I'm sure you were part of both. The thing you didn't know about was AGMA. The American Guild of Musical Artists is a sister union to the Screen Actors Guild and to AFTRA who have since combined. And the rule back then was if you could if you could get into any of them you could simply pay your dues to the other and then you you were in. So for me, it was easier to kind of fake my way into the opera than it was onto a sitcom.

So my plan... This is all diabolical. It's a great plan. It's like that kind of strategic thinking. You should be in the Navy or something. Well, look, I was just trying to get a job. I know, but it's clever. Well, there's always a stage door, right?

I mean, there's always a back way in. Right. And so I thought, you know, I memorized the aria, I auditioned, I was stopped halfway through it by the musical director, a guy named Billy Nutsi, who's like, Mr. Rowe, you have no idea what you're saying at all, do you? Because you're saying the words wrong, you're just repeating the sounds.

I was singing it loud and I was singing it like I understood what I was saying. All I really understood was the repertory company was desperate for young men with low voices. I knew that. And so I kind of looked the part. So whatever, I got into it and my plan was to do one production or one season. Like they would do three shows in a season.

And I had some friends who were in the chorus and I was just a chorus member. I'm just holding a spear and just singing along with the rest of the chorus And my plan was to do one or two of those get my card and then buy my sag card and then go about the business Of being a famous TV star, right? simple well the music the music was so much better than I then I imagined it might be and

Like when you get up in the catwalks of like a real theater, you know, I mean, you've done shows in these theaters, it's just nothing magically different about them, but when there's a full orchestra playing the hell out of Verdi or Rachmaninoff, and you're looking down on the scene, you're looking out at the audience,

and the sound is just amazing. And the girls. So like there were 80 people, I guess, in the rep company, more or less. 45 women, 35 guys. 30 of the guys had zero interest in 100% of the women, and of the remaining five straight dudes, three were married and the only other single guy

had a mole 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 and I'm going on stage and I'm I'm a fake I mean I admit it I barely learned the language enough to kind of keep up and people in the in the chorus took pity on me you know and it was 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 eight years. Wow.

Yeah. I mean, I never got out of the chorus. I never had like 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, 83 to 90. Wow.

Yeah. And then, oh Christ, since we're talking about, it was a Sunday. And during the intermission of something, I think it was during this Nibelungan, this giant Wagner epic, torturous thing. And the chorus didn't have to be, is the one you saw it on Bugs Bunny killed a rabbit killed a wet it's that one right right 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 recommend across the street to the Mount Royal Tavern to drink a beer and watch the football game dressed as a Viking, which I recommend by the way. When you walk in a bar with the horns and the spear, the bartender knew me. Everybody laughed and I sat down, but the game wasn't on. The bartender was watching a fat guy in a shiny suit selling pots and pans. And it was the early days of the QVC cable

shopping channel. I'm like Rick why are we watching this and he says because I'm auditioning for that guy's job tomorrow morning. QVC was doing a national talent search. Anyway we had a conversation about the end of Western civilization and what it meant for polite society to have a 24-hour infomercial that just never went away and whether or not 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 I'm sitting there drinking this beer dressed as a Viking thinking I I

Could probably do that job if I had to so I went with him the next day and auditioned And got hired Wow was he mad the bartender? Yeah You know, I didn't even know about it. Well It's a good question. I don't know what became of him We had a friendly got a fucking voodoo doll of Mike Rowe. Well, it's a pins in it. We had a wager. I said, Look, I don't know if I'll get the job, but I but I bet I'll get a call back. He was like, you're not gonna get a call back for this thing. You know, we were just actors at the time were like people pretending to be actors trying to find her. You know, he

was nice enough. He sang in the opera with me too. Actually, he also attended bar. He just wasn't in that one. But yeah, it was a very strange thing, man, to... That was my first job in TV. Look, I've done some minor local commercial stuff, but I talked about a pencil for eight minutes that was the audition it was so strange in those days they didn't have a like there's no playbook to see who can sell stuff on TV you know do you have a script

or each family you have this facts about the pencil? No, nothing. Nothing. Here's what happens. Again, it's probably changed today. I think UVC did $8 billion last year. Back in 1989, 1990, it was nothing like that. And if they hired a salesman, that didn't mean you had anybody who understood really how to behave on TV.

And if you hired a TV person that didn't really mean you oh Jesus that's the cat sack right there dude that's a sack for your cat what are you selling let me hear this sack for your cat what the fuck just crazy they just love it that's why this is a cat toy so the cats play with it yeah they crawl inside it and they just go nutty cuz it makes a lot of noise 25 bucks That's 25 bucks So this is like sort of just personality fucking around

personality, fucking around, having fun with the toy and selling it. Well that's what I did. Look, remember. That's what you did. Was that novel that you were doing it that way? Yeah, yeah. In relative terms, like that was actually one of the great, one of the true great life lessons, you know. You don't have to be outrageous to stand out. You just have to be relatively outrageous. So QVC was a steady diet of men and women doing the same exact thing all the time. And then at midnight or 3am, 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 because they're kind of fun and that was different than the regular radio guy You know, I would I mean for me I thought of it more like Like my favorite comedians and by the way, I saw one last night. Thank you. Ron White was over at the mothership He's there tonight, too. I stopped by like you around tonight. No, I gotta get back tonight something about Thanksgiving, but I watched this set last night He's awesome. He was he was great and the thing I love been funnier. He's in top form right now And he's gone. He's gone full Messiah, dude. He's I mean, I I didn't recognize him. Oh, with the look? He said hello and I'm like, hey, how are you? I mean, you're back, Jesus, good to see you. He was great. And, and as I watched him do his thing,

it reminded me, like my favorite comedians, I never get the sense that they're trying to make me laugh. I get the sense that they're trying to amuse themselves. Right. 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 that's why he's fun to watch. That's why this podcast is fun to listen to Same reason I I couldn't have articulated that 35 years ago sitting there selling a cat sack. Well you intuitively knew something I knew in the middle of the like everything That I that it turned out that I needed to know about this that it turned out that I needed to know about this crazy business I learned in the middle of the night on the QVC cable shopping channel over a three-year period. Trying to make sense. So three hours at a time, usually, over the course of 24 hours.

So you would be on three hours at a time? Would you come back again or would you only do three hours? I do three hours, and I go home. And I mean, have you done overnights before? No. So I guarantee you there are a lot of people listening who have worked an overnight shift in their trade, in their vocation.

It changes you. Just as surely as Doris the Cat lady's brain was scrambled by the Gandhi I and the talk so it it does something circadian rhythm Yeah, 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 forces you for me it like changed colors, it changed taste, it changed, yeah, because I had never, I mean I was upside down. After I talked about a pencil for eight minutes, I was on the air 48 hours later at three in the morning trying to make sense of the Health Team infrared pain reliever and the Amcor negative ion generator.

Like, what the hell? Did they give you a rundown of what these products were at all? It was up to you. If you came in a couple hours early and you took the time to look through, like there was a table like this with all of the stuff on it that you were going to be selling,

and you could take the time to prepare. But there was no Google back then. It's not like you could just to be selling and you could take the time to prepare. But there was no Google back then. It's not like you could just watch a YouTube video that would explain what this thing did. No, what you got was a blue card, usually from the manufacturer, that said a couple of sentences about what the thing was. You had an item number, you had the price, the retail price, the QVC price, and maybe some easy payment terms, all the stuff.

But it was just a blue card. And then you would kind of go off and think about how you would make sense out of this skull and where it came from and why it's interesting. It's feature benefit selling, you know, and if you understand that, you can talk about anything for as long as you need to, you know, you never talk about a feature without talking about its benefit. And so that's kind of how that world worked. So you don't say it's a pencil for 99 cents, you say it's a yellow number two pencil with an eraser that is of the exact proportion necessary to last for the life

of the pencil so when this thing is down to a nub you'll still have enough eraser left. It's really a monument to efficiency and ingenuity and it's not just yellow, it's yellow because you're a busy professional and when you need a pencil Joe, when you open up your drawer you don't have time to root around for some vaguely beige-colored writing implement. You want that canary yellow to pop and you can pick it up, right? And it's not, it's a number two pencil. It's not three with that thin wispy line that you can't read or that thick disappointing skid mark of a number one, right? So you just, it's like train yourself to fill dead air with nonsense. While you're fucking up your circadian rhythm.

Yeah. While you're wondering like when your next meal is and who you're going to have it with. And you wind up making friends and essentially hanging with other people who live in that same weird shadow land. Yeah, shadow land, that's a good way to put it. I have kind of an experience with overnight, but it's not the same. I delivered newspapers. And so at least one day a week on Sunday, I would basically show up Saturday night

at three in the morning. Because I would deliver Sunday papers, and the Sunday papers papers were it was a huge under you had flipped the top Look, oh, I forgot the flip flip the top and then hit the button. There you go And so I was all fucked up from that I would get up every day at five o'clock in the morning Normally to deliver papers because that a large route Yeah, it was my way to make money without having to do a job because I had a large route. It was my way to make money without having to do a job where I had to listen to anybody.

It's also a perfect example of a kind of job where you always know how you're doing while you're doing it. Like lots and lots of little visual undeniable cues, right? You got your bags or your baskets full of paper or your car or whatever you were doing. You're tossing them out one at a time. You know, you're making progress.

You know the progress you're making as you make it. Right. You know it's. You know you only have 120 houses to go. That's right. And then it's 110. And then it's like. And then it's go to Dunkin Donuts,

get yourself a nice donut and a coffee, reward yourself days over. Yeah, my day would be done work-wise by you know 8 a.m. 9 a.m. on a Sunday. Nine was rough. Occasionally they would make enormous Sunday papers. They'd have like, and that'd be a real problem because you'd have to make multiple trips. And I bought a van. So I had a big cargo van and I drove that around to deliver newspapers for a while. That made it a lot easier cause I could stack 350 Sunday papers in the back of that van. But see you remember and you knew 350.

That's an interesting number. Oh yeah. I had bigger routes, but 350 was manageable. How old were you? I started when I was just driving, so I was in high school still, so I think I started delivering papers when I was 17 or 18, whatever legal age they allow you to do it. So it was probably 17 or 18. I started driving and I drove till I was 22. I just started doing standup comedy.

I drove all throughout my competitive martial arts career. I drove in the morning. It was good because it gave me discipline. Because I had to do it seven days a week, 365 days a year. You did not take any days off. It didn't matter if it snowed or rained

or fucking frozen rain on the streets, black ice, didn't matter. You got to deliver newspapers. And if they did delay it, it would delay your delivery of the paper. So you'd have to call the depot, you know, hey, are we delivering yet? Because they didn't want to be responsible. It was a blizzard for people dying and get lawsuits. So they didn't make you deliver papers. It was unbelievably bad out. But for the most part, you drove every day. So you had a sense of consequence to this. Yes. Discipline, consequence. You didn't deliver the papers. You didn't get paid. It was very simple. It was a very simple job. I don't even remember how they trained us. I think

maybe they trained us for like one day you were taught how to fold the paper One to stuff it in the bag You have plastic bags were great because you can 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 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'll do two papers and then New York Times But New York Times is a pain in the ass, because it would be like one every 10 blocks. You'd have an enormous route. If you had 150 New York Times, that's an all-day excursion. Did you start to equate the type of home you were delivering the type of paper to? Oh, yes. The New York Times people took themselves very seriously.

They were very serious people. They would ask me what I'm doing with my life. I remember this lady, I was taking courses at Boston University just so people wouldn't think I was a loser. It was literally the only reason why I was going to college. And you know, she's asking me, I was like, what are you going to, what are you planning on doing with your career? I'm like, I have no idea. Like, and she didn't like it. She didn't like that I had no idea. Yeah, it makes people uncomfortable. She liked me, but she didn't like that I had no idea. Yeah it makes people uncomfortable. She liked me but she didn't like that I had no idea. She was like very motherly to me I guess. It's funny we had the Baltimore Sun which was the paper of record and then we had the News

American which was sort of like the upstart and I never thought too much about the difference between the two until summertime and crabs like Maryland blue crabs are a big thing they're big thing in my family big thing where I grew up and everybody who eats crabs in the summer eats them outside on a picnic table and you lay the newspaper out but which one Joe which one matters I don't know why it does so is it disrespectful to use the paper of note? No No, it's better. No, it's it's I think it's a mark of respect It's like oh, we're having crabs get the news American

Oh, that's so silly get the news American because you know It's all spread out in front of you and you got the crab guts in the Old Bay and the jail number two and the national And you got the crab guts in the Old Bay and the Jio number two and the national bohemian beer and maybe you can glance Down and get get informed isn't it interesting that there are newspapers like that right like there's the New York Post You want a fun headline right you know you want all the crazy shit like what happened who got pregnant right? You know what's going on with this what's going on with that and then you have the New York Times where you know it's important to put tampons in the boys room Have you ever walked through the the offices of the post no any chance no dude, it's amazing It's amazing. I had a

old girlfriend whose sister worked there worked for Page six oh boy. Yeah. That's the fun one. Yeah, so much fun. So that's like all the gossip and the craziness and this person's getting arrested. Right, right. Drunk driving and hookers. They have a hallway.

It's like this place in the center. There's so much on the walls, but it's all front pages and it's the best headlines. Ah, so it's the best ones they've ever come up with? The best ones ever. Starting with the classic headless body found in topless bar, which is still tough to beat. That's great.

But so many of them. I love the post. I've always loved the post. I love just the fun nature of the news. That was like the working person's newspaper. This is the point I was trying to make about the comedian who entertains himself first and the schmuck on QVC who tries to keep himself awake before he sells the thing. That's how I felt reading the post. It was like these guys, somehow I'm imagining a meeting.

They're laughing. They're laughing, they're cigars and they're all in on the joke. They're like, yeah, somehow I'm imagining a meeting. They're laughing. They're laughing, they're cigars, and they're all in on the joke. And they're like, yeah, we're gonna report the news, but it's a lot of sharp elbows out there, and it's a very competitive world, so what can we do to maybe get the stick a little out of our ass, just a little bit?

How can we be different? That's what fascinates me. Yeah. You know, how can, whether you're publishing a paper or eating a blue crab, you know, or writing a book or a song, you know, how can you, how can you in relative terms distinguish yourself, not from these other worlds and other categories, but from your friends? worlds and other categories but from your friends. That's the trick man. Yeah that is the trick and then there's people that want to be that person that is taken seriously that's reading the New York Times. You want to be that person with their legs crossed reading the New York Times like very serious very serious people very smart people keep up to date. Yeah, I said to Ashton, your very excellent driver,

who brought me here, I said, you know, it's been fun watching Joe do this thing over the last five or six years. And then I kind of stopped myself in the middle and I said, actually, you know, I take it back. What's been fun is watching the world catch up to it. Like watching the headlines catch up to you or whoever, you really haven't changed. And man, it's so interesting to watch people realize, oh, we're gonna do it this way now. We're gonna do it this way now.

And that's been, whether it's comedy or whether it's music, it's when culture changes, it feels like there's some instigator, some jagged little pill who's pushing it forward, and I guess maybe that's true, but I also think there's this 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 yeah it's definitely the same way I've always

done it it's just having conversations with people. I like talking to people. It's fun. Yeah, but you make- I enjoy it. Good. I'm a curious person and I like talking to people. It's real simple.

Yeah, but 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. But it's not really. It's not a view. Then why don't more people do it?

Because they don't enjoy it. They don't enjoy it like I enjoy it. Like some people genuinely don't like talking to people. You know why? Because they're interested in themselves. You have to be interested in other people. I think we're all connected. I really firmly believe this in a non-hippie way. I think

it's like a scientific reality. I mean, I think if we could figure out a way to study it, we would recognize that we were psychically all connected in some strange way. And I am curious as to how someone from with a different biology, different life experiences, different geographic location in which they were raised, like how are they navigating the world and why are they interested in opera? Like what is it? Why, what got you to be a beekeeper?

Why are you so fascinated with painting? What made you start writing music? Like I'm interested yeah I like talking to people so for me it is easy it really is it's just talking to people like I would talk to people like you and I could have the same exact conversation if we're having dinner somewhere for sure same conversation yeah but again it makes perfect sense and it's not that it's difficult it's just that very few people do it.

And if your explanation is because very few people genuinely enjoy it, I can't disprove it. You're probably right. I think that's what it is. You're probably right. I think I just got lucky. I think I just got lucky and I found a job that I would be doing anyway. Well here's what I don't understand and maybe this is not even relevant but we did 350 dirty jobs probably 60 some of this thing called

somebody's got to do it I don't even know returning the favor I think we did a hundred episodes of that I don't even I couldn't tell you how many things I've narrated hundreds if there's a will toest trying to get across the vast reaches of the barren sarangueti, right? Right like if I could remember Every episode of how the universe works ten years of this stuff if I could remember half of what I narrated That would be something I can remember a chunk But my sense is that like I can't even remember the last 20 guests I had on my podcast. And the reason isn't because I'm not curious and it's not

because I'm not, because I lack the requisite intelligence to remember. For me it's just, it's so much, there's been no time to think about what I'm gonna do next and even less time to think about what I just gonna do next and even less time to think about what I just did. Right. So you just talked to Josh Brolin 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, right? So like I have a better, it's easier for me to remember what you've done in the last two months than it is for me.

And that freaks me out. And I wonder if sometimes you get over your skis to the point where you've started to forget what you've done yourself. Oh yeah, there's no way to keep it all. I have a bucket that's overflowing with information. It's overflowing. My hard drive is not capable of retaining all of it. It's not possible. I retain a lot though. A lot more than I ever would know. I got an unexpected education doing this show for sure. Like I never anticipated it. Is it conscious? Like can

you choose to be interested in a thing enough to know that you're not gonna forget it? Or does the interest just kind of bubble up and certain things stick to you? The interest bubbles up and they stick, yeah, totally. Yeah, like my daughter asked me a question the other day. I don't even remember what the question about but it's a very technical thing and I said no, that's not exactly it It seems like that But this is the reason why and they figured this out because of this and I started rattling off 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 remember things that are fascinating. I remember most things that are fascinating to me. I have an unusual recall, but I've always had an unusual recall. It's like I think it's a genetic thing. Yeah. I think it let me get really good at things too, because I can remember like technical deal, like it was really good for martial arts because I can remember technical details, like really, like I don't forget things see you to me are the are the deeper end of the pool I'm more the the shallow end not I don't mean 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 narr interested in ultimate fighting. I narrated The Ultimate Fighter. Right. Yeah. I did ten seasons of it. But like that's sort of the extent, like I don't go very deep. I've seen a couple, but I, but it's like... Well, there's a big giant difference between being a former competitor and also like dedicated decades of my life to martial arts. It's not as simple as like I go and I do commentary. Like I started doing martial arts when I was 15 and it changed my life. 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 so I started competing competitively like serious shit when I was like 15 years old and so we were traveling all over the country and so my social life from like 15 to 21 was completely retarded it was like it stopped retarded as in slowed down, like the real term. And it was mostly just training and competing. That's all I did. And when the downtime, I was tired. So I would just sleep a lot. I was like eating, sleeping, working and competing. And then I started teaching. So then 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 making my living off of teaching, but not enough money, so I was still delivering newspapers. So I delivered newspapers in the morning

and then I would teach, and I was teaching at Boston University. I was teaching, I had my own school by the time I was 20. Taekwondo? Yeah. So this is my point. You take a deep dive. When you get interested in a thing,

you go into the thing. Comedy wasn't a hobby. It became, I think, it becomes everything it becomes everything Almost nothing I do becomes everything nothing almost nothing, but what are the things what becomes everything? I'm not sure yet Let me think about it. Is there one thing that if you have like free time you super look forward to doing Like you have a hobby? Do you play golf? No. Nothing?

I don't have hobbies and I don't collect things. No hobbies? No hobbies. Nothing? I don't collect things. Wow! I own very little. I never have owned much. I wish I had a hundred lives to live simultaneously. I would do a hundred different things.

This is the difference. You're insatiable in that way. You get a thing and you're gonna nail it to the wall, man. My late great friend Anthony Bourdain, his bio on Twitter, it said, enthusiast. I really wish that I'd come up with that because that's what I am. I'm an enthusiast. I wouldn't say it now because I'd rip him off. And also now my bio says dragon believer. Congratulations on that. The ladies of the view. They said I believe in dragons.

She triple checked. She triple checked, Mike. Got to be true. But I'm an enthusiast. That's what I am. I am a person who is very fortunate and that I have a love of a lot of things. Well, you and Tony were similar, obviously in that way.

He took big bites, he took big swings. We became good friends when he really got into jujitsu. Yeah. Because I kind of got him into it and then his wife really got him into it. But he started going to the UFC. His wife was training in jujitsu and she got really into it. She was really loving it. And then she was like, let's go to the off scene like this is fucking great and then you know he

came to one of my comedy shows we became friends started going to dinner by the way with Anthony Bourdain is the coolest fucking thing in the world because you go to dinner with him and all the chefs freak out yeah and so they just want to feed you yeah they just want to like don't touch the menu we got you and they come over and bring food and you know I wrote a eulogy for him that crashed my website it's really funny I only I met him twice and each time it was fairly brief but there was a time when he was doing no reservations dirty jobs was early on. I bet you Fear Factor was still in production then too.

Yeah, Fear Factor was maybe, it was probably at the, Fear Factor stopped in 2007 and No Reservations I think was around that time. Yeah, he was on in six for sure, Dirty Jobs went on in 03. Yeah, and then the CNN show, which was I think like CNN's highlight of their time. And I think he really changed that network because all of a sudden that network was this fucking cool show where this guy had this brilliant narration and he had this wonderlust, but also with this like real fascination with people and cultures and just really loved it. He just loved going to Vietnam. He loved going wherever he could go.

He loved to eat their street food. He loved to talk to them. He really wanted to know what these people were all about. I've never with the pot, this will sound vain glorious, I don't mean it to, but with the possible exception of me on Discovery in 2010, narrating half their shows and hosting Dirty Jobs, which was a thing, you know?

I felt really triangulated then. But then when I met Tony, and I had a show on CNN at the same time, actually it was a companion show. What was your show? It was called Somebody's Gotta Do It. Oh, that's right, that's right. It followed Dirty Jobs,

and Jeff Zucker wanted something with Tony. So he was like, well, let's kind of do a version of this. And I said, yeah, okay. But all the trouble in the world, well, let's kind of do a version of this. And I said, yeah, okay. But all the trouble in the world, man, every crisis, whether it's Haiti or whether it's a riot, the show got preempted constantly. They didn't preempt Tony, but they preempted me a lot. And I was commiserating with Tony about this once.

And that's when we had the conversation where I said, look, I just gotta tell you, man, I have never in my life seen anybody doing the right show for them at the right time on the right network for them. I've never seen that like that before. I mean, and then nevermind the award, they have Peabody, it was the Peabody's that got me, actually, who cares about the Emmys?

They're easy, but jeez, he was just one Peabody award after the next. And it wasn't a huge, the audience wasn't as big as people think, but they were engaged. Well, that's what's important. I mean, the audience, if they're really there for you rather than if they're just flipping channels. You know, because there's a lot of shows that just get people that are flipping channels. Sure.

We used to, when I was on news radio, everybody wanted the spot after Seinfeld, because there was Seinfeld and Friends were on the same night, and it was just this murderous Thursday night lineup. I see. 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 to call a shit sandwich because he had your brilliant show and then a terrible show and then another brilliant show and another Terrible show, but if you got in those time spots, oh boy You got a good spot because people are gonna just keep tuning in they didn't tune in for news radio News radio wasn't really successful after it was off the air. You were in the slipstream Yeah, you you were in the orbit. Well, we weren't owned by NBC So it was a different production company was prilstein-gray. So they didn't have a vested interest in us being successful. So The the writers would show up my friend Lou would wear a t-shirt and he would write the number that we were when we would

Do the table reads. And one day it was 88. And I was like, for real? He's like, yeah. I was like, oh no. With a bullet. We thought we were going to get canceled literally every year except the year we got canceled. The year we got canceled, I was shocked

because that was like the year after Phil died and then John Lovitz took his place for a season and then they canceled it after that. and like in the perfect thing for our show we never even hit the hundred episodes for syndication they had a salad at like 98 episodes that was like our show it's like we were always like barely hanging on you know it was just we it was a funny show was a really good show with talented people I love that show the people I was super lucky to work on and it ruined me because I could never work

on another show after that. What did you learn? What was the big lesson from News Radio if there was one for you? Well it was just fortune. The lesson is that you could just be fortunate you know because I was not a trained actor at all. I did a set on MTV, half hour comedy hour. They had this comedy show. I did a set. And then MTV offered me a development deal. And then my manager said, this is terrible money. They're going to lock you up for like three years for like $500.

It was crazy, ridiculous bad money. He said, I'm going to take your tape and tell all these other production companies That MTV wants to sign a deal with you and it'll start a bidding war And he was brilliant and he did it and that's exactly what happened and the next thing you know I couldn't answer my phone because my phone was just calling people agents and people would just call me Yeah, like some guy called me from universe I was like what this shitty apartment on my way out the door to play pool?

And this guy's telling me he wants me to get on a flight that night. We have a flight at 10 p.m., leaving out of LaGuardia. I was like, what are you talking about? And so then I called my manager, this guy just fucking called me from here, he goes, hey, don't answer your phone. He's like, go play pool, get out of here.

I'll take care of it. Next thing you know, I was in Hollywood. It was like that quick. And I was on a show called Hardball, it went six episodes. And the only reason why I stayed in Hollywood. It was like that quick and I was on a show called Hardball. It went six episodes and the only reason why I stayed in California, I wanted to go back to New York. I hated it. I hated actors. I just couldn't deal with being around these weirdos. There were these weird phony people that would say good to see you because they couldn't remember if they met you. So instead of saying,

nice to meet you and fucking up and go, I'm sorry, I met you. I'm sorry. I fucked up. They didn't wanna be real, so everyone said, good to see you. Everyone was good, and it was super-unsinceral. It was like, this is so weird. It was a super-uncomfortable experience. And it was the worst experience on a show, because the people that ran the show,

Jeff Martin and Kevin Curran, super-funny talented guys who'd worked on Married with Children and The Simpsons. Brilliant, but the studio didn't think that they were good enough to run a show, so they brought in this hack, and this guy comes in and just butchers all the scripts. It was horrible, so that gets canceled. The only reason why I stayed is because I had a lease.

So I got a nice apartment. I'm like, the first apartment I ever had. I was like, I thought I was gonna be on TV forever. I'm like, this is gonna be easy. And now, fuck, I gotta get out of here. I was like, I wanted to go back to New York. I thought about breaking my lease. But NBC contacted me and they said we have the show it's called News Radio and we're recasting one of the one of the

roles do you want to come in and so I came in and auditioned for it and the next thing you know I'm working with Phil Hartman it was bizarre yeah no aspirations whatsoever to be an actor never wanted to be on TV and then I'm working with Andy Dick and Phil Hartman and Maura Tierney and Candy Alexander, Vicki Lewis and Dave Foley. Like this is crazy. From the kids from Second City. Yeah, he was brilliant. Dave Foley, by the way, was the secret producer of News Radio because he would they would give him full autonomy. So he would completely rewrite

scenes like on the spot, come up with punch lines for everybody. We all did that for everybody. Like we would all come up with, maybe you should say this, maybe you should say that. It was like super collaborative. So just fortune, complete, utter good fortune. Because I had friends that were on terrible sitcoms and they were living in hell. And we'd hang out at the comedy store and they were living in hell. And I was I was like look I'm on a show that nobody watches but it's fun as shit and I can't believe I'm on TV this is nuts yeah you're in on the joke yeah it was fun it was really fun but it was just fortunate I could have easily never never done any of those things easily I thought for years that really a sitcom had to be the best gig in the

world to have to do a basically to do a play every week. If it's a good sitcom. If it's a good sitcom. But if it's a bad sitcom it's hell. Sure. Those guys who do a lot of coke and buy nice cars those are on they're on bad shows they just want to give themselves something to reward themselves for this fucking slave, not, I wouldn't say slave work. I should say, like, you're a slave to money. It's not, you're compromising who you are for money. You don't really want to do that show.

But you're on it and it sucks and you have to repeat these terrible lines. That's what I'm getting at. See, it's the, for me it came down to that. I finally got a chance to do one. I played Tim Allen's younger brother on Last Man Standing for a turn. I never saw that show. That was a weird one, right?

Cause they got mad at him because he was right wing. Yeah, yeah. It's so crazy, didn't they cancel it? It was their number one show and they canceled it and Fox picked it up. That's so nuts. They canceled it because they didn't they cancel it? It was their number one show and they canceled it, then Fox picked it up. That's so nuts, they canceled it because they didn't like his politics. Yeah.

Wow. That basically happened to Dirty Jobs too. Really? Oh yeah, it was mind boggling, but the point was, I finally got a chance to... I don't wanna gloss over that, I wanna come back to that, I don't wanna hear that.

All right, yeah, yeah, now that's a great one, you'll love this. Tim 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 and really the only thing I loved was? What did you love? What didn't you love? And really the only thing I loved was seeing people who loved each other

and being welcomed into their little world. Yeah, the clan. That's it. Yeah. Everything, like the idea that somebody else is writing lines, for me, I know that sounds impossibly arrogant, but I was so used to, nobody writes for me.

Dirty Jobs is truly unscripted. Everything I ever did, there were never any lines. Also, that's an alien experience for you. Yeah, I mean, I had done plenty of plays as a kid and stuff, but that's different, you know? That's different. Once you're in Hollywood and once you're sort of in the machine, it still lingers. I mean, that's the whole reason I crashed the audition for the opera.

I was just trying to find a sitcom at some point somewhere. And then when I finally got it, you know, I realized just how lucky I had been prior to that. And how...here you want this. And how...crap, man. You know, a thing can live in your mind so much bigger than it is in reality. And so while I loved doing it for that week, I said to my business partner over, this thing that I used to think of as the single most efficient way to make a living was so wildly inefficient. It takes four days to rehearse for a half hour thing.

You got to be kidding me. I could do five one hour shows in the same period of time. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Completely different experience in that way. It's a collaborative, fun time, and you do become like a little bit of a strange family. You know, we all hung out together and drunk together. And that's important, you know?

Oh yeah, yeah, it is important. It was like, we, you know, it was a lot of fun, man. You know, and meeting people like Steven Root, who, you know, went on to do a million different things. Brilliant, brilliant guy. You get to see people that are like really good at, like he was a character. He was the only one of us that wasn't really himself.

Like he was this one guy who was like a super sweet guy when you meet him in real life. And then he was Jimmy James. Mike Stapler. Yeah, he becomes, did you you see what was that one Cohen brothers had some Netflix thing a Wild West Netflix thing He played on that he was fucking gene wasn't he an old brother Did you know I think he was in Oh brother? He's been in everything He's in a million different things, but just being with these people that you know like I like I said, I had no aspirations to act.

I just wanted, I was just a comic. I just wanted to make a living doing comedy, and then somebody offered me more money than I made in a year for a week, and I was like, this is crazy. And then all of a sudden I'm on a show. It was like, just fortune. I auditioned for two shows ever, and I got both of them.

Those were the only two shows I ever auditioned for. What was the other one? Hardball, the first one that I went for. That was terrible. Those are the only two shows I ever auditioned for. What was the other one? Hardball, the first one that I went for. That was terrible. Yeah. That was the baseball show, that got canceled, and then I auditioned for news radio. So it was nuts.

It was just, I was just stepping in shit every step of the way. That's hysterical. Didn't make any sense. 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? His former assistant turned out to be his wife later. How's that work? Nicole Taylor. Man, they're living great. They live up in the hills somewhere. I mean, how's it work with your former assistant? How's that work? That's none of my business. That's a dangerous undertaking. She called me one day and I was in my full-on freelance world. I hadn't had a job since QVC.

So this is like 1999. And she says, I just want to send you out for something because I know you're going to book it. And I said, well, actually, yeah, I could use a gig. So she sends me out. In the same week, she says, you should read for Pelligian over at Pilgrim Films. He's doing something called Worst Case Scenario, and he's looking for a host.

And so I audition for that, and then later that week, she says, this guy from Nashville, Michael Orkin was his name, who I had worked with years earlier, not Nashville, Michael Orkin was his name, who I had worked with years earlier, not Nashville, Memphis. He was hosting 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. My whole audition reel in those days was a compilation of every moment that went off the rails at QVC All the things that led to my eventual firings as well as the cat sack and all the other crap

That's that was I dare you to hire me. 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 worst-case scenario which lived up to its name and then I'm up in San Francisco hosting Evening Magazine. And there was no conflict of interest? Oh no. Like you really totally negotiated both of them at the same time? Yeah. Wow that's cool. Yeah. And then Nicole switched agencies and I'd 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. My dad's 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. Whoa. Yeah my mother's a savage. She just finished her fourth book by the way. Wow. Yeah she's written three bestsellers after 80. That's incredible. She's out of control. That's incredible. So she was like, she wanted you to do something impressive. My mother wrote every day for 60 years. Wow. No agent, no

got published in like the News American and the Baltimore Sun, you know, local stuff, some horse magazines. We were horse people kind of growing up and her dream was to write. She finally got a book deal when she was 80. Went to a number four bestseller and everything she's written so far. So that's recently back in whatever 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 cuz like my poppets. He'd seen the opera. He'd seen QVC. He'd seen every godforsaken infomercial he'd seen You know, I've done a lot of things probably 200 jobs in the whole freelance world. And so I was 42 and I

took my cameraman from Evening Magazine into the sewer of San Francisco the next day to host the show from a sewer. And what happened in the sewer joke was, I mean, it changed, it's, I wrote a book about it, it changed my whole life. The roaches are the size of your thumbs. There are millions of them, and they crawl all over you. The shit comes at you in a chocolate tide of unending disappointment. And it's filled not just with all the stuff

that comes out of your body, it's filled with stuff that comes out of your medicine cabinet, plastic products, and rubber, private cond condoms stuck to your rubber suit. It's unspeakably vile. You can barely breathe. And what happened to me down there is I completely failed to host the show. All the stand-ups went wrong, laterals exploded. My could, we were all getting hit in the head. It's like a the show. All the stand-ups went wrong, laterals exploded, we were all getting hit in the

head with... it's like a shooting gallery. There was a rat the size of a loaf of bread that crawled up my... I lost my footing, fell into... I was baptized. I was baptized in a river of crap. baptized in a river of crap. And at the end, my cameraman throw up at one point, an enormous puke. And I'm squatting in the filth, you know, looking at the camera trying to open the show. And when you see your cameraman vomit float past you as you're trying to articulate a thought. And meanwhile, the guy who was like my minder was an actual sewer inspector. And he's in the background trying to do his job, which is to hammer out the old bricks that are rotting and replace them with new ones. Now it's 105 degrees. It's the seventh level of hell. It's clear I can't do my job.

So I go over to this guy, his name was Gene Cruz, and I say, hey, what are you doing? He's like, I'm putting bricks in. I said, you need a hand. So I start mixing the mortar and we start talking, just like people, you know, not like a hosty thing. Like what you were saying, just what would happen if you had an honest conversation, totally unscripted with a guy who didn't really know he was gonna be on camera, but what if you film it

and put it on TV anyway, what would happen? Well, what happen a week later when this thing finally aired was I was fired because people sitting down to hear their heart-tugging story of the three-legged dog up in Marin overcoming canine kidney failure and it's me, the smart-ass 42-year-old crawling through a river of crap. I mean they're trying to eat their meatloaf, you know. It was the wrong segment for that show. But, talk about Fortunate. The mail that came in as a result,

some people said it was funny and they liked it, some people were repulsed, but the letters that changed my life were the ones that said, you think that was dirty? Ah. Wait till you see what my brother does. Wait till you see what my cousin does. My mom, my sister, my uncle, right?

And I'm like, oh my God. I mean, if the Bay Area is any kind of a microcosm for the country, and I'm not saying it is but from a TV standpoint I was like this is new no I 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 I was like, what if the viewer programs the show, A, and what if B, the host of the show is the person that I meet who welcomes me

into their shithole or wherever they work? And what if I'm not a host after all? After 20 years of impersonating a host, what if I'm a 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? 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's act is 29. I mean, right, right, right. What if you just let all that go and

is 29. I mean, what if you just let all that go? And you know, I don't know that I would have thought of it like that at 20, at 22, certainly not, not even at 32, but at 42, I was entering a more introspective kind of phase. And so I was really just curious to see what would happen if I thought of myself as something different. Well, if we think about the history of just media, it's very recent, right? You have radio, which is like, when did people start listening to radio? Was it the 1800s? Okay. And then you have television that kicks on in the 50s. And everyone's a presenter. Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles, right?

Everyone's Ed Sullivan, everyone's Jack Parr. Like there's these type of people that do this job. It's like, you ever do a morning radio show? I'm sure you have. Morning DJ voice, hey, five o'clock on the hour. Let's go with Bon Jovi There's a voice that they have a strip club DJ similar. There's a voice anchorman anchorman, but now yes the news Especially local news. They have a very specific thing that they're doing cadence. Yeah. Well, it's fake It's not a person

It's no people act like that. If you had a guy like that over your house for dinner, you'd be like, what the fuck is wrong with Bob? Bob's a psycho. That guy's got people buried in his fucking basement. Who talks like that, right? And so I think the internet opened up a lot of room for unprofessional people to thrive.

That's me. So like,'m I can't do that. No, man. No, no, no. But that's what it is. You're not unprofessional. But it's like I mean, in that regard, like I'm not. So I wasn't trying to do something that already existed. I was just doing like I was doing like a guest on Opie and Anthony show. That's what it was like. Like when you're a guest on Opie and Anthony, that's how you talk.

Everybody would just hang out and talk. That's a fun show, it was anyway. That opened my eyes up to podcasting. And then Anthony Kumia had his own show that he did in his basement, live at the compound where he'd sing karaoke, hold it in 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 I remember that yeah, that was huge So that also helped too and I actually was in negotiation with the people that were doing his show And I was thinking about doing something my own, but then I was like I can't work with anybody I gotta do this on my own quick sidebar I don't know if this is of interest and Jamie forgive me because I don't know if I'm supposed to ask you to do things But I sold the first karaoke machine ever in this country. Yeah on QVC. Yeah, let's see that It's out there. It's I'm not proud of it. You should be proud of that

but it was a statistic it was like 12 15 in the morning, you know, and they sent me one of these things to my apartment and I'm like, what, what is this? Is this even like, look, they're everywhere now. Obviously we've gone through the crazy though that you're like the godfather of karaoke. Well, I'm among them. So what year is this? What are we talking? Look at you. 91. So what year is this? What are we talking? Look at you. 91. This is 91, 92. Wow. 99, 95.

It's a 96? It's a 99, 95. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to see. It's so blurry. Isn't it interesting? Oh, new camera. Like how bad television looked back then in comparison to now? Like just the resolution? Yeah, but you know what? There's something more trustworthy about rudimentary production value. Right. You can't like, yeah. I was talking to your guy Bruce about this earlier.

He was saying how much he loves like an antique road show and this old house you know I said I love this old house I still I was on this old house were you yeah man they invited me on they wanted to raise money for the to reinvigorate the trades they had a very similar cause 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 Let's call him and maybe we should just give him the money and let his foundation give it away It'll be simpler than starting a new thing and they called and I said yeah, I'll do that Sure, but I'd like to be on your show and they like that'd be great. So they invited me on and it was awesome but my point is part of the charm of sure, but I'd like to be on your show." And they're like, that'd be great. So they invited me on and it was awesome.

But my point is, part of the charm of those shows is the almost remedial simplicity of the production. It's like, there's an entrance, there's an exit. When's the last time you saw it dissolve? Right. Like all that stuff. And I used to make fun of it dissolve? Right. Right. Like all that stuff. And I used to make fun of it. I used to make fun of QVC. I still do. But in reality, man, there was something strangely comforting about that kind of production value and everything

I learned that turned out to be useful. You know, I learned in the middle of the night. There's a thing about something that's overproduced that kind of dissolves some of its authenticity because there's too much thought put into each 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 Keeping up with the Kardashians,

you ever notice they change scenes every five seconds? Just keep you tuned in? There's something smart about that because it does keep you engaged, but it doesn't feel as authentic as if it was just one person following them around in real time with no edits at all, just one camera on them.

Well, 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. Right. And one of the things that kept Dirty Jobs on the air for 20 years, early on, I kind of

realized that and I wasn't sure what to do about it, but I thought maybe we need to think of the show like a documentary. So we got a behind the scenes camera that never stopped rolling. And so if my mic pack went out, or if a plane flew over, or if somebody screwed something up, or if we had to stop for whatever reason, I always knew there was a truth cam.

That's what I called it. And I could always look to it and I could say, all right, well, what happened here? Blah, blah, blah. And so it was those moments where I think the viewer realized, oh, oh, he's not trying to sell me anything, at least not here. He's letting us see the sausage. And that was new in nonfiction, you know, that was a whole new way to think about authenticity. Vivek Ramaswamy was the only candidate I invited on to my podcast because I read somewhere that he said if he was nominated, he vowed to never use a teleprompter to deliver a speech.

Well, he could pull it off. Whether you can pull it off or not, I just thought that was so interesting, and I wanted to talk to him about that specifically. And then it's funny, a year later, I think the teleprompter is probably the best example of one forced error after the next. Like when you think about the anchor who just wants to be believed,

the spokesman who just wants to be seen as credible, the politician who just wants to be, just wants it just so. It's like they want to be authentic and yet they do the single most inauthentic thing you can possibly do, which is pretend to not read a thing that everyone can see you're reading. Right. And so, like the cognitive dissonance is rich, you know? And I just think we've entered into this world

where like the least persuasive thing you can do is say, trust me, or take it from me. You know, people have just been burned so much that they're gonna need, we need a truth cam. We need it in the newsroom, not just in a sewer. I mean, it worked there, but we need it everywhere. Fuck it, we'll do it live Bill O'Reilly

That's the real bill yeah, that's that's the real bill. That's it. Yeah, that's what's interesting about Social media and social media right like it's there's this giant resistance right now to the idea that X is the new source of the world. They're the mainstream. It is. They're the mainstream. It's the new source of the world. You and these people that want to cling to authority and say, no, you're not. You're, God damn it. You're not the fucking, you're not a journalist. You're not this. You guys fucked us too many times and And we don't believe you anymore.

And so the only way for us to find out what's real and what's not real is someone posts it online and then everybody looks at it and then you get the community notes. And that's way better than the New York Times telling me that the Fruit Loops in Canada are exactly the same as the Fruit Loops in America, except for a bunch of shit that's banned and that's the whole point of the Whole fucking thing. Yeah, meanwhile, they're fact-checking RFK jr. So now I don't trust you anymore either You can't um, so it's like that's what's going on. You can't gloss over the community notes. You can't that's it

It's it that that's the truth cam. That's the solution on Twitter It's the 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 field that's being discussed. Or you're going to get out of the hundreds of millions of people on X, you're going to get an expert who's going to say this is why this is incorrect and this is how you're

supposed to read it. And then everybody goes, oh, okay, this is why this is incorrect and this is how you're supposed to read it and then everybody goes oh okay this is wrong and now you know and if you can just do a little research and go through that paper or go through that thread 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. It's a weird dichotomy though right like skepticism like we have to be skeptical. But part of the reason we have to be as skeptical as we are is because so much of the media has abdicated on skepticism.

And they've become something else, you know, something else. And so, you know, you can't really blame people for, you know, considering what we used to dismiss as a conspiracy theory when the theories start to get born out and when there's such a level of eroded trust in once credible institutions. Well, that's also the whole reason for the disdain for conspiracy theorists in the first place,

is that no, you're not an expert. I'm the expert and you're wrong. But then when they're wrong, there's no repercussions. They never wanna say, you know, we were wrong about all this. We're sorry, we were wrong about masking, we were wrong about social distancing, we were wrong about all of it, it's all bullshit.

Where's the humility, man? Yeah, no humility, because they're not humans. And that's why you don't believe them, because you know they're just people reading off bullshit off a teleprompter That's it. That's it. That's all it is and nobody wants that anymore You don't have to have that anymore And that's why X is emerged and sub stack 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 three of us in this room

That's it. The whoever is the numbers of people and Carl. Carl's out cold now. But the numbers of people that are listening it's like this crazy number that are all just listening to three people. So there's no producer, there's no all that shit that gets in the way of things has been removed. It's actually for people when you think about it that way like if the audience becomes its own amalgam I think of it like that you know I I think the audience gets short shrifted a lot you know I thought of it last night in your club

it's like the audience is I mean without the audience what are you doing you know you just build certainly at a building certainly at a club. Yeah at a club. It's everything It's everything but why is it different? Well, because you can't think about it that way because the best way to do it in my opinion the best for me The best way I've found to do it is to never think about the audience All I'm interested in I think about it in terms of like if I'm bored They must be bored like let me pick this up a little bit. Let me move this around a little bit.

Let me figure out a way to, you gotta move a conversation. It's like sometimes, I've talked to like very old scholars, like very old in this like time, sometimes like, okay, we gotta focus here. Like, we gotta get you on this. Like, with Trump a little bit in the beginning when he was telling me the story with Lincoln's bedroom, I was at, the bed was, he was a long man.

He was at, very tall, very tall. So I was at, the bed was, he was a long man. He was at, very tall. Very tall. So I was like, okay, we gotta figure out a way to, what's it like to be the fucking president? What does that feel like? How crazy is it on the first day? That's what I really wanted to know. So it's like, you gotta kind of move people around.

But that is for me, like as an audience member, I'm not thinking about the audience because I feel like the best way to do it is for me to actually 100% be engaged and interested in what this person is talking about. But don't you think that that's you you are the proxy for the audience when you're at your best. Yeah for sure. In my view. Yes. When I'm listening to you when I like high five you virtually it's when you ask the question. I was thinking And I really tried to do that in the sewer. I really tried to do that on dirty jobs

I really tried you did I think that's why it resonated so much with people Well, I hope so for sure because you didn't ever seem like a fake guy doing a thing You seem like a fun guy a regular guy who's doing this thing where you're interacting with each other. How do you do this? What is this? So yes, thanks. But then all of a sudden I look up and Donald Trump's in the sewer with me. Oh shit. And there's an election in a week. Oh, the stakes around me, right? All of a sudden have changed. So it's so interesting that he was sitting right where I'm sitting, and you feel the need to kind of put some sides on this thing

because you understand first and foremost that as an audience member, right? As somebody who's just listening to this, as a fly on the wall, I'm getting a little lost. Yeah, I'm a little bored. Let's move it along. Right, right, right. So, I mean, you can say that,

hey, that's Joe being a good host, or that's Joe being super honest in a conversation where he's starting to drift a little bit. I'm most certainly aware that people are going to listen to it, don't get me wrong, but I don't think the questions, maybe the audience would want to know this. I do do this one thing even if I know that some I know how this a thing

works, I will ask a person how a thing works so that the audience can hear it from them rather than from me. I don't want to be Mr. Smarty Pants, I don't have to be, but that's one thing that I do where I'm aware that people probably don't know what we're talking about. So 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 or ways they do things. So that in that way I do think about the audience. But most of the time, that's just like I'm just doing my job, but mostly all I'm trying to do is be 100% locked in.

Yeah. Just 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. What was more consequential, him coming on or her not coming on? Him coming on.

Why do you say that? Well, because realistically, like, okay, my thought about her coming on was I would just, I was going to be very nice. I was, I want to have fun with her. I wanted to just be able to talk to her and ask her questions. I want to get a sense of her as a human being. And if it's policy talk that bothered them, like there was a few things they didn't want to talk marijuana legalization they initially didn't want to talk about

internet censorship and then they changed their tune and then they wanted to talk about it essentially. I was great internet censorship is important let's talk about it but whatever she wanted to talk about fucking riding bikes I don't give a shit I don't give a fuck what you want to talk about. You want to talk about cooking, rock climbing. I just want to just get a sense of her as a human being. Just as a human being. What is it like? Does it freak you out when people get mad at you?

Does it freak you out when you fuck up a sentence and you ramble? I know what it's like. When you know the people are listening and you're like, I got to fucking bring this home and I don't know how to, and you just sort of repeat these key lines or this maybe some new word you become enamored with. You know, you want to say that over and over again. When you realize you're in the middle of a sentence with no obvious ending, that's QVC in a nutshell. Yes, yes.

That's what it is, right? And when the teleprompter breaks, that's when you get to know the person. Right, right. And so that's why I'm asking. I wonder, you know, I mean, I listened to the interview and I asked myself, well, is anybody gonna vote differently as a result? I don't think so.

Are some people gonna vote who otherwise might not have voted? Maybe. But for me, when you started to talk very casually about the fact that her campaign had stipulations, they had demands. I think there was a lot of people that were, she had made a bunch of blunders and there was a lot of concern that she was going to make blunders here. This is what I was going to get to. She might have. It might have been a mess.

Yeah. I might have asked her about immigration. We might have had a conversation about like what is the goal? Like why hasn't this been... this doesn't... if we can, you know, launch rockets and land them at the same time as we can't control border, that seems not real. That doesn't seem real. One seems way harder. That's happening. He's fucking catching rockets with robot arms. 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, 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? Maybe that would have been a disaster, because that's something that I felt like if she didn't

want to talk about the marijuana and didn't want to talk about internet censorship, immigration is an interesting one, right? It's very interesting because like first of all I am pro immigration. I am the grandson of immigrants. My grandparents came over here during the Depression. 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. We are a country of immigrants. So we should have some stipulations though about who gets in and how you get in and where you coming from and what is your past like? Are you a murderer? Are you a gangbanger? Have you been selling fentanyl for the last 20 years?

Like what are you doing with your life Bob? Inquiring minds wanna know we want to know I think that's reasonable. Do you see a difference between an immigrant and a settler Well, it all is the timeline right? Yeah, it's a timeline thing Yeah, I not only that you're an invader like if you're one of those people that comes over in 1820 and you're making your way across the plains and you encounter the Comanche. You're the piece of shit You're not supposed to be there. That's where they live. You're in their yard You're some fucking weird scruffy American looking for gold, right? You know, what are you doing here, bro?

You're the problem, you know, and now all of a sudden that's Texas, right? That's where we are. We live here now This is my land, right? That's where we are. We live here now. This is my land I got this now well We're all invaders in one at one point in time every human being that's a nomadic person That's made their way across the country you've probably entered a place where people were before every freedom fighters a terrorist yes Right that's on who wins History gets to decide all that sure if we didn't actually if the founding fathers Didn't pull it off You know we would be these wild renegade English people that decided to come over here and just fucking create havoc

So yeah, man, there are a lot of ways to go with all this but I'll just come back to the teleprompter and say if that's an essential part of how you communicate and if that's an accent if that's part of your image right you know then you you can't be on this show right right right you you you can't you you you can't join me in the sewer right right there's that there's no room for the contrivance. There's just no room. There's just no time. I just wonder if that's what they make them do. Like if you make me do that, I'll suck

too. You know, I can't read off a teleprompter. I'm not interested in doing that. It's not my thing. But if you make a person do that, like if you're going to be a politician, right, okay, and you were a senator, and which is, you know, you don't get that kind of exposure that you get if you're a vice president or you're running for president initially. Right? That's a totally different scene. And there's probably a bunch of people that coach you how to do it right, and you don't know what the fuck you're doing.

And if you're not a powerful person, like a big personality like Donald Trump who could just do it, but also coming from a world of entertainment for most of his life he's been in the public eye and hosting the apprentice for 14 years like he's he's used to being in front of the camera it's a normal experience for him he has a massive advantage that's what I meant by production becomes the enemy of authenticity yes when you rely upon it to the point where you can't function in the midst or in the wake of a glitch, well in a world of glitches you're in trouble. You know, and I think the audience,

not just yours, but the country, I just think they're just exhausted by people who have been managed and focus grouped and weighed and measured and tested and then put out there. I think it's also the evolution of culture in general because if you just go back to where we're talking about media, you go back and watch a film from 1950 versus a film from 2024.

The way people communicate now is much more realistic. There was a way of talking like, Hannah, what did you do? You know, there was a weird performative aspect to it because they didn't know how to do it right. In sitcoms too. In everything. Father Knows Best, all that stuff. And then as time moved on, it changed, like all in the family was all of a sudden this realistic portrayal of a family where you got a racist dad and the son is the meathead, the son-in-law, and the daughter's a hippie, and the mom just

can't feel, what are you doing? It was a fucking amazing show. It was an amazing show. You had Sanford and Son. Sanford and Son is another one. It 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. If you had a show and you tried to do a thought that was best today, it would almost be like you were putting on like a parody.

Like it would be weird. It would be like a weird were putting on a parody. It would be weird. It would be like a weird Tim and Eric type thing. You're doing something weird on purpose. And that's not acceptable anymore. So the culture's moved on. So for sure. But it moves on and fits and starts. And it's not a line.

Right. No, no. It's this. Just like the climate. Right. Right. It's no, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like the climate. Right. Right. So like the even the look, the changes in podcasting, like it's happening right now, right in front of us. You can see so many different types of podcasts. Yeah. See so many different kinds of scripted dramas. I mean, oh my God, look, can you imagine breaking bad? Right, right.

Thirty years ago. Right, right, right. It's impossible. impossible. A whole lot of things had to happen in front of that for that thing to- The Sopranos had to happen. That's right. And something had to happen before that. Well, in my world and in the world you're describing, that was the age of authority. That's when Eric Severide could talk to you like this.

That's when, like Discovery is a good example. You asked about it and I'll tell you, first of all, John Hendricks, a friend of mine who created that channel, you would love, he did this in his garage basically. I mean the story's incredible, how he talked Malone into getting some transponder space for maybe his Westinghouse and mortg mortgage his house to buy some documentaries from Australia and started beaming all that stuff down. I asked him years ago I'm like what was

the 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. That's it. Everything I do must line up with a traditional definition of what a discovery is. It's the satisfying of curiosity. And so when I pitched Dirty Jobs, I was coming in on the heels of what you're talking about. There was still in nonfiction, it was Richard Attenborough, it was Jacques

Cousteau, it was Jane Goodall, it was, you know, the Discovery brand was very much a reflection of some of the greatest naturalists and historians and, you know, astrophysicists in the world. They deferred to experts, and then they hired guys like me to narrate shows and we could sound even more official and so you you had this dance this production dance where you had a credible sounding voice and an expert at the center of the thing. Dirty Jobs was not that. Dirty Jobs was what if the expert is a septic tank technician or a welder? What if the expert is a skull cleaner or a golf ball retrievest? It's a job. Or a sheep castrator, an oral sheep castrator, which we can get into if you want. Like what if they become your source of credible information and what if the host somehow morphs from

this authoritarian expert into a guest with a bunch of questions. So this conversation happened between me and some of the guys over there in 2003 and they bought it. They didn't buy dirt, they didn't like dirty jobs, they took it really to shut me up. They wanted three episodes and out. The deal I made with these guys was rooted in this paradigm of me saying, send me out into the world to go on adventures

and don't ask me to know more than I know, but just let me look under the rock and let's learn together. And so they said, okay, we're gonna than I know, but just let me look under the rock and let's learn together. Yeah. And so they said, okay, we're gonna, you know, you'll go to the Titanic with James Cameron, you'll climb Kilimanjaro. You went to the Titanic? No, and I'll...

Very nearly, it was canceled a month before because Dirty Jobs finally hit. But prior to that, I went to Egypt, I was exploring tombs with Zahi Hawass, I was at the pyramids, I was in some of the greatest, the largest undiscovered graveyard in Bawiti, the sands of the dead where they found the mummies with the golden masks and nobody knew who the hell they were because it wasn't attached to any dynasty and who are all these people with golden masks on their faces and so Discovery would send me to do these 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 big company or a brand or a political party or really anybody realizes that the thing their audience wants is not the thing they want them to want. That's amazing. Right. And it happens all the time. And sure. 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. Why was it shelved? It was shelved because it was deemed off-brand. It was shelved because I was biting the testicles off of lambs with ranchers. And that's how they castrate their lambs. They have for hundreds of years. It was not that specific episode.

That got me in trouble later. But it was shelved because it was an unscripted random romp. We never did a second take on the show. It didn't look like everything else on the network. It didn't look like anything else on the network. It was just a jagged little pill. But they liked me, and they liked this idea of a more unscripted look at the world.

And so we reached this kind of detente, and I started narrating all their tent pole shows. And then I went to Alaska to host Deadliest Catch, which is a whole other story, that crab fishing show. That's 21 years now, right? And up there, people died, you know. That's a crazy job. People died and I went to six funerals in six weeks and when we looked at the footage of that, and somebody up the food chain eventually decided, okay, this is a world we have to get into, but Mike, you're not hosting two shows at the same time,

so pick one. So Dirty Jobs came back, went into full production late in 2004, and Deadliest Catch went into 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. 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. Yeah that's interesting and that is what people are gravitating towards more today and it's that's I mean I think that's the whole thing we were talking about why you like mainstream news is failing but independent news is succeeding. You know it when you see it. You know it when you see it. Yeah. You can tell the difference. Oh, Bourdain. Okay. I think for me, the moment that crystallizes all of this, and he and I were on parallel paths, I think. He was dealing with his network, the Travel Channel at the time, the same way I was dealing with Discovery. We were constantly at each

other's throats trying to navigate this weird line of reality and authenticity. And there's a scene in Parts Unknown, I think he's in, might be Sardinia, he's diving. Oh yeah, and they're throwing the fake octopuses in. It's one of the single greatest moments in the history of non-fiction. He shows you exactly how this sausage is being made, but it's also like now you can trust him,

because you know that he's kind of sabotaging the narrative that they've created for his own show for his authenticity. I would do that for a scene, maybe even for an act, maybe even for a whole segment. Maybe if I got like a bee in my bonnet and I really just couldn't, you know. I got angry every now and then and I, you know. But Tony, dude, he went out and got drunk. I mean drunk drunk and shot the whole show smashed. And he made them cut it in.

And you can see him. He's so disgusted, just so the audience understands, they're supposed to be spearfishing for octopi. And the local handler wasn't sure that they were going to find any so he bought some at the market but they were frozen and dead and so Tony's down there with his spear gun with some other diver and these these frozen squid right to start to come by him and in narration this is where he really owned it, because he owned that show. Like he could, 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 they know who I am? What did they think I was gonna do? So he says something like, in the face of this kind of wanton deception, a reasonable man can turn to nothing but the elixir of distilled alcohol.

And he just drinks for the rest of the show. And it airs. It airs on CNN. And I think it won a Peabody. Was that the CNN one or was that No Reservations? That was CNN. Was it? It was Parts Unknown?

Look, I'm pretty sure it was Parts Unknown. I'm pretty sure. I could be wrong. I think you might be right. Yeah, and God, I just, I mean, that's what I wrote about when he died. It was that. Yeah, parts unknown. Yeah.

Yeah. Because I've been sitting on a Zodiac, I've done that. I've been in this world where you're nervous, you've got a lot of stuff to worry about, and then somebody just comes along and tries to produce a moment Yeah, you try to produce a moment. Well, also these guys they probably didn't know Italian guys like these fucking guys aren't gonna find the octopus. We've killed them all 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 wonderful. The fact that he was able to insist that it air, that was important. Yeah. That was important. Yeah. Well, certainly important for how you trust him.

You had to trust him. I mean, that was his whole thing. You know, you're coming with me. This is actually me. Here we go. Fly on the wall. Yeah. Yeah.

That was a very unique show too because it taught me that food is art. I really learned that from No Reservations, but it followed over through Parts Unknown. Food is art. I didn't think of it as art until I saw his show. And then I was like, oh, okay, that's right. Because I just thought of art as being like a thing that people make that you look at or touch. I never thought it would be a thing you make

or you hear, right? I never thought it would be a thing you make where you eat. And then I saw, I'm like, oh, these are artists. These are artists. All these people, they've discovered these different ways to make things delicious and, okay. They're mediums different. 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 talk like artists. They're covered in tattoos, they're fucking weirdos, they like to do drugs. They're all listening to crazy music, you know? They're also craftsmen.

Like, I mean, to me, yeah, food is art. It sure can be. And it can also be fuel. Yeah. You know, it's actually both. It's kind of perfect. Yeah, you could have both.

It could be art and fuel. You just gotta pick what you eat. Is hunting art? It could be art and fuel. You just gotta pick what you eat. Is hunting art? 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 don't think anything else does. If you do it correctly, I'm talking about mountain hunting, like mountain elk hunting in particular, which is my favorite, it's very hard to do. I train for it. I have to get in really good shape. I practice. I practice so much I fuck my back up,

because I was developing tendonitis in my lower back and I just ignored it. Shut up. We got work to do. And so 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. That's not the right, but it does take physical energy.

You have to be in shape to do it. You have to be in great fitness. But it's not sport. It's a discipline. It's a discipline that's very, very, very primal. It taps into something you didn't even know was there. 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.

Because that excitement's like hardwired in your human reward systems. And you don't know it's there until you go fishing. And then you're like, whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, here he is! Get him, get him in the net, get him in the net! Oh, we got him! And hunting is that times 100. Hunting is that, hunting is way different because you're defying their protective senses.

You have to make sure the wind is going in the right direction. You have to go all the way around if it's not. You got to figure out a way to move through the trees. You got to move very slowly, only moving their heads down. I think that's art. I don't know, man. I mean, it's, a shot is art. I'll tell you that. Arch don't know, man. I mean, it's a shot is art. I'll tell you that.

Archery is art. A good archery shot on an animal, I watch it like it's art because it's hard to do. It's very hard to do. When I see someone just hit a perfect 50 yard shot in the vitals and that broadhead sinks in, I know that animal's gonna die very quickly. It's a quick, humane death,

and that's what you practice for. You know Josh Smith over at Montana Knife, might I chance? Sure, very well. He sent me a video the other day, he went on a big hunt with his boy. The moose hunt? Yeah. Yeah, his boy got wanted at a few hundred yards.

Huge moose. Big moose man. Fucking huge. For a first moose, that's so crazy, that kid hit the jackpot. But the excitement on the video Oh yeah. That he sent me, and Josh. that's so crazy. That kid hit the jackpot. But the excitement on the video that he sent me. It's primal. And bow hunting is even more primal than that.

Bow hunting is that times 100. So it's regular hunting is fishing times 100, then bow hunting is regular hunting times 100. I just think, you know, if you're, whatever canvas you're in front of, whether you're painting or whether you're cooking or whether you're stalking, like you can, the muse, like does the muse come to you when you're stalking? Does it come to you, you know?

I don't have an answer for it, but I know that people talk about it, like some people say, well, you're in the zone, you know Sometimes when I write I'm surprised like 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. Yeah, you got into it. Yeah airplanes are great for that Oh my they're the best they force you into that seat. They're the best get up because there's a guy next to you It's you get that laptop open and it just comes out of you and I like a little couple of advisors look I go I I wrote a book on a plane. I believe it

I really did and and I did it mostly in Moments that I don't really remember when when time gets compressed in moments that I don't really remember, when time gets compressed. And I think that can happen when you're fabricating something, when you're hunting something, when you're painting something, maybe in the middle of a set, maybe in the middle of a fight.

You know, I talk to boxers who say that it's so odd, the way things will sometimes almost feel like they're in slow motion, even though they're happening so fast. Some fighters, it's art. Well, I think martial arts are art for people that understand it. If you watch it, it's beautiful.

But there's some fighters that are just so artist. You know who Emmanuel Augustus is? Yeah. Okay, that guy is an artist. That guy's an artist. What makes him an artist? Because he's, first of all, completely unique, okay? Doing a thing in this beautiful, deceptive way.

He's dancing, but he's also, he has an understanding of distance that's fantastic, so he's really good at avoiding punches, his head movement, even with this unorthodox dancing style, is fantastic. He's stalking. He's doing something, like here's a manual. Like look at how he moves. I mean, imagine you're fighting a guy who's moving like this, it's stalking. He's doing something like here's here's a manual like look 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 he just punched him with two hands at the same time

Floyd Mayweather said he was the most skilled opponent ever fought Wow He and his record didn't indicate his actual physical ability his abilities were incredible But it's just like it was such a wild style so unusual It's like boxing a bobblehead right like Prince Naseem. Hamad had a kind of a similar thing going on when he was in his prime Naseem Hamad 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 and when you're a guy like Floyd and you're getting clowned here? He's he's fighting Mickey 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 but also really good He it wasn't just that like you rarely get a guy who's clowning like that But also like those kind of that kind of head movement skill phenomenal movement But also can dance in front of you and land shit that you don't see coming because it's coming at those weird angles Who was this trainer? Oh, man. I don't think anybody trains you to do that. I don't see coming, because it's coming at those weird angles. Who was his trainer? Oh man, I don't think anybody trains you to do that. I don't either.

Do you know what does custom auto say to that? Never. Wouldn't allow it? No. But maybe, maybe if the guy started winning like that, he would change his tune. So maybe- People change their tune when they see something extraordinary. Oh yeah.

When they see something weird, they change their tune. They go, well maybe, fuck, I don don't know because you don't know sometimes you don't there's there's guys that come along and fighting in particular That have styles that are so weird and so unique you go. Wait, wait a minute How come nobody else is doing it like this is gonna work like you do know strong Shawn Strickland is He was UFC middleweight champion stands straight up Puts his hand like one hand like this one hand down here and beats the fuck out of everybody Yes, Dan straight up everybody else is down. Everybody else is moving Sean Sean straight up moving towards you Phenomenal head movement awesome timing and they're out there though people down in a weird style

There's a bunch of guys that fight weird, but they're really good at it. Well think baseball too. I mean, it's everything Louie Tion Remember the pitcher. I don't really follow baseball. You'll love this Jamie. I know almost nothing about sports believe it or not. You know 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 five years later you know we're gonna be reading about it because you're gonna go crazy with it the same way you do it for that but but this Louis Tion what did he do differently? Louis Tion was a pitcher and his wind-up was such that it looks 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'd go further than that sometimes. Is that really unusual? Yeah, yeah it's unusual. That's unusual. Oh so it freaks people out a little bit? Well yeah, yeah because he just breaks, he stops looking at you Look his his back. Look at his ankle. That's crazy That's exactly it. So it's like oh, you know if you're a batter you're like, alright There are a lot of different pictures and I'll get used to this and I'll get used to that and then this guy comes along That dude has flexible knees

Flexible everything cuz look at the the angle his knee is in before he turns. That's crazy. Yeah Yeah, you would actually I'm surprised you're not in the baseball because it's it's I don't have any room I know the best over flow. Yeah, it 100% is you know, like I watch football now My wife's into football, but I can but I can only pay attention so much. My head is filled with combat sports. I have to follow Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai, MMA in the UFC, MMA in the PFL, Bellator, 1FC. I have to keep track of a thousand fighters, like literally a thousand fighters. Maybe casually some of them, like some of the Glory Kickboxers, casually I'm watching,

you know, oh, Bada Hari's fighting, oh, you know, this guy's fighting, that guy's fighting. I know who these people are. I watch them fight. I'm watching fights just hours and hours in a day. I might watch fights two hours every day. Is it work or fun? It's fun Yeah, it's only fun, but I do feel obligated to pay attention Like there's guys that are coming up in other organizations I see guys have like a specific skill set that's unique like I contacted Conor McGregor in like 2013

He was fighting in Cage Warriors, and I reached out and I said, dude, you're fucking super talented. I hope I get to see you in the UFC someday. And 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? And also, you have to like kind of be tuned in to 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. 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 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 room for baseball 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? Well, the UFC blew up first. See I was a fan of the UFC in the very, very beginning and it got me into Jiu Jitsu. So in 96 I started taking Jiu Jitsu. In 94 I found out about the UFC. I've kept it in my head for a little bit. I was still kickboxing at the time, just not fighting anymore but just training.

I was training at a bunch of different places in North Hollywood, this place called the Jet Center in Van Nuys before that went under. So I was just interested in martial arts always. And then the UFC came along and I was super interested in it, but I didn't really have a lot of, I was on news radio at the time, it was very difficult to have the time to start training. And then in 96 I started training. And so I started working for the UFC in 97 and that was when it was banned from cable you could only get it

on direct TV and we had to do these shows in like Dothan Alabama where you took a propeller plane it was fucking hell it was no money is 97 mm-hmm and is Dana bare knuckle and Dana was not involved yet when did Dana get involved 2001 so I'm on fear factor at the time and one of the things to me and my It's Dana? Bare knuckle, and Dana was not involved yet. When did Dana get involved? 2001. So, I'm on Fear Factor at the time, and one of the things, me and my friend Eddie Bravo, who was 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 were the only places that would sanction these fights.

They were bare knuckle, people wore shoes, you could grab their shorts. It was like crazy rules. And we said, you know what it would take? These billionaires who love the sport and dump a ton of money into it. That's what it would take. Like someone would have to dump a ton of money into it. And then along comes Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta

in 2001, these billionaires that happened to get in love with the sport. And they buy the UFC 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 heard this this Russian dude? And I started asking about fighters like you should try to get these guys and he's, do you want to do commentary? And then next thing you know, I'm a commentator for the UFC. OK. This is just a very weird triangulating.

They didn't even have any money at the time, because they were hammering money. So I did the first 13 shows for free. And back to the art thing, you must be willing to give it away. Whatever it is you love, you must be willing to give it away for a time at least. Well, for me, money has always been fun coupons. And so I was on Fear Factor, so I had plenty of fun coupons.

So my thought was like, oh, I have money. I don't have to worry about money right now. Like, I'll just do this. Yeah, this would be fun to do. Nevertheless, you know, I mean, it was the same thing with dirty jobs. Once that thing lit up, I had to be willing to sign a contract. It was probably illegal

I mean it was such a ridiculous contract the way they own you so yeah, isn't it crazy? It's like no money. But yeah, but if it's a hit if it sticks we have you for ten years Yeah, or you renegotiate my ace in the hole with dirty jobs was you renegotiate. My ace in the hole with Dirty Jobs was, technically I was the host, and I can host that show without doing the thing in the show that made people watch, which was actually do the work.

There's no contract that can force you to bite the balls off a sheep. You have to be willing to do that. And so I was able to fix that. But Dana, I'm trying to remember what year this would have been when did the Ultimate Fighter 2005 okay so in 2004 Dirty Jobs was on the air it was in that weird space where we didn't know if it was gonna be a hit or what but I was narrating all kinds of stuff for this guy, Craig, Polygian.

And I walked into Craig's office in Hollywood and Dana was sitting in there. I had no idea who he was. I just walked in to say hi and Dana kind of knew me or recognized me. And Craig said, hey, this guy, Mike, he's narrating American Chopper American Hot Rod He's narrating 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 That sounds like Dana says say something yeah, it's something. Yeah, that's hilarious.

It was great. Yeah. That's hilarious. Yeah. It's interesting how things happen like that. Well, you wouldn't be sitting here now if your lease wasn't up or whatever. Yeah, it probably wouldn't. I would have gone back to New York.

I think the art thing, we should not be done with that yet. There's something, I'm thinking about the clips you were playing, what do they call boxing? The sweet science. So like art and science, I think anybody who's passionate about what they do can approach what they do like a scientist or like an artist or maybe both or maybe both. I think both. So you know I've got this this foundation that evolved out of Dirty Jobs it's called MicroWorks and we award these scholarships to people who don't want to go to a four-year school but who want to learn a trade. Right? We've been doing it for 16 years and I started doing it in part for my granddad but mostly because there are what 8 million jobs now

that don't require a four-year degree and there's 1.7 trillion dollars in student loans on the books, right, that is just bananas and we've got these huge shortages in in the skilled trades. So I spent a lot of time talking about how that happened and and what might be done to to it. But regarding art, it's like you're old enough to remember wood shop and metal shop. And you know, before it was shop, it wasn't just VOTEC, it turned into VOTEC. But before it was VOTEC, it was the vocational arts.

That's what they called it. And so we didn't just get rid of the vocational arts. That's what they called it. And so we didn't just get rid of the vocational arts. We started with the language and we took art out of it and that's when it became VOTEK and then there were a bunch of other acronyms and abbreviations and hyphenations. Well there's also a weird distortion in our society where we have decided that we place a higher value on someone Spending an enormous amount on education for a job That doesn't pay nearly as much as the education cost where you're burdened with debt

Doing a job where you have to work your way up a corporate ladder that might be hell Over becoming a carpenter. Yeah over building a house over becoming a carpenter, over building a house. Everybody needs a fucking house, over being a plumber. And if you're a guy who can figure out how to do good carpentry, if you understand how to use tools, you're taught properly, you have a good apprenticeship, you can make an incredible living. It's very satisfying.

It's skilled, it's a job that is creative, it's skillful, and when you're done, you bring satisfaction to other people that live in that house. There's a great benefit to it, but our society has got this distorted view of tradesmen, and it's a really dumb thing because it fucks you up, because if you're a kid

and you go through the university system, you get a degree that's kind of useless, but then you get a job and you go through the university system, you get a degree that's kind of useless, but then you get a job and you're making $60,000 a year and you're like, oh my God, I have $200,000 in student loans and I'm doing a job that's not very satisfying and I'm kind of stuck. I'm working my way up, but it's going to take a long time before I make enough money where I'm not burdened by this. Or you could have a successful construction company by then.

I mean, you could get a small business loan, and you could start hiring other people. You could have trucks with your name on it. I know people who've done that. They live very well. And it doesn't mean you're dumb. A lot of these people that live very well are very self-educated

They read books they watch documentaries. They're interesting people and they're entrepreneurial 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 Well, you know, I I've very rarely played the devil's advocate in this argument But but I do think I know why it happened or at least how and I was in high school in the late 70s And there was a very concerted push for What we call higher ed which by the, already sets the table, right? If it's higher ed over here, I guess we have lower ed over here.

Right, you guys are stupid. The language is awful. But the PR, and to be fair, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, we needed more doctors, we needed more engineers, we needed more people matriculating through four-year schools. But what happens with PR, at least from what I've seen, is that it always goes too far.

And it wasn't enough just to make a persuasive case for that path. We had to do it at the expense of the jobs you're talking about. So if you don't go this way, you're 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. And that, you know, I don't know when it happened, but I- Especially where you grow up, like, you know, if you grow up in a place that's highly educated, like Massachusetts, where I was, Boston, very, very educated place. So if you were a person that pursued the trades, you were, you know, probably a failure. This

is like all you could do because you couldn't make it in school. And yet you loved this old house. Yeah. Which is a love letter to the trades. It really is. Every single one. I love watching people make things. Yeah.

Even dumb things. Like there was a guy, I think it was a PBS show, where he would make tools and do stuff the way people did way back in the day. He'd make his own planer and all. You know? Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. And he would make furniture and shit.

I didn't have any desire to make furniture, but I loved watching this guy because he was really into making furniture. It was his art. Yeah, he he was an artist. Yeah and he was authentic. He actually loved it. You could tell. It wasn't like this is like his scam like I know what I'll do. I'll make it take ancient tools and figure out no this guy really was into it. Well what's happened there for me anyway is that I I mean after 16 years

of it I can tell a pretty good story anecdotally but now I'm able to go back and talk to people who we helped what five six years ago with like maybe a welding certification and it's amazing when you say hey how's it going and they say how's it going I'll tell you how it's going. 210 grand a year. I bought a van, I hired my buddy who's a welder. Then I hired a plumber. Then I got two HVAC guys and an electrician.

We're doing three and a half million a year. Got no debt. And so like my job is to talk to that guy. And I do that a lot on my podcast. It's just like, I just want to hear your, I want to hear stories of people who prospered as a result of mastering a skill that's in demand. And then maybe applied some level of either artistry

or entrepreneurship or the willingness to move. That's a big one too. Where you go where the work is. And so it's really become It's why Bobby Kennedy called me Back in February, you know, he was like hey man this micro works thing. You want to make it macro works? And I said Yeah, sure. What do you have in mind? And that's I don't know how I don't know if you knew this but we had this whole conversation About like running together, you know

Really? Oh, yeah, you know he He asked if I wanted to be vice president. Oh geez Louise. What'd you say? Dude? I was in Munich. I Was in Munich in January and he had called me earlier just to talk really generally about about the middle class because he's like look what you've done with the foundation that's my campaign is a lot about that and and I'd love to talk to you more about it so I kind of put him in the category of elected officials politicians

who might who might be useful you know I know? I'm not that guy. But I said, yeah, look, man, I'd be happy to chat. Well, he called back, and you know, Gavin De Becker, right? Yeah, so they did a dive. 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 three hours and I'm looking over my shoulder honestly like I'm being punked. Like like which one of my crazy friends put you up to this.

But he was serious and I was weirdly flattered maybe. I knew I couldn't say yes, but I was so interested in what his thinking was. We spoke for a few hours and then we stayed in touch for like the better part of the next month and I actually really for the first time ever just tried to try it on you know and it didn't fit you know. I would never do well in an office or in a bureaucracy. He called me up once to ask me who I thought would be like good vice president. I was terrified. He was gonna ask me Oh, yeah, I was terrified. I was like, please don't ask that I

Know he asked Well, he asked Aaron Rodgers. Yeah, which is crazy. Yeah, I Literally heard the sound of my sphincter slamming shut Like I just tensed up and I was like shut. Like what the fuck man? I just tensed up and I was like oh. Who wants that job? That's jobs insanity. But man I'll tell you man he it was a really he was very gracious and very direct and I tried to be too 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 deep

Do you understand 77% of the youth today wouldn't wouldn't qualify to get into the armed forces? Do you understand? What the crisis is we face right now? Never mind health. Health is its own thing, and I've got lots of things to say about it, but fitness, just basic fitness. His uncle was starring in commercials 45 years ago that were literally, we'd call it fat shaming today,

challenging. I just talked to him the day before yesterday and he said, you know, Google any photo of Yankee Stadium sold out from the 60s or even the 70s and try and find the fat people. They're not there. And if they are, they're hard to find. Do it today, they're impossible to miss.

Something colossally horrible has happened. Anyway, he was very passionate about all that. Yeah. And I said, but look- It's an important message. It is an important message. And it gets lost in this idea of being a compassionate person that allows people to just be their authentic self, you know, and there's nothing wrong with being fat, there's nothing wrong with being big.

You're being lied to, okay? You're robbing your life of vitality. It's just, that's just the way it is. And I'm sorry if you're already there, but it doesn't help anybody to pretend that you're not there. And the only way we get out of this is we try to figure out what happened between 1960 and 2024. What happened in the f- well we can figure it out, it's not Colombo. This is a fucking- this is like the evidence is all there.

We know what the ingredients are that are bad for you. We know what we've done to the food supply. We know what we've done. It's real- it's readily available. It's what you eat. When you say we though, I mean- Human beings, collective, the collective intelligence- What percentage of this country do you think- readily available. It's what you eat. When you say we though, I mean human beings, collective, the collective intelligence. What percentage of this

country do you think understands? What percentage has been informed? This is part of the problem and this is why it benefits to have something like that in office. Most people aren't aware of it. You know I've had a lot of conversations with people though they have this really distorted idea of nutrition and what's important and what you need, but what's good to thrive, what's optimum versus what is just going to keep you alive. These people think, oh, you just need a balanced diet. No, you need to take vitamins. If you do not take vitamins, you will not have full optimization of your body.

What do I want to take with D, by the way? Is it magnesium? You want to take magnesium and you want to take K, too. You want to take vitamin K, magnesium and you know there's some arguments from other stuff too that would also enhance it but you you definitely need vitamin D almost everybody does 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 and he was saying people would come in and they'd have

undetectable levels of vitamin D because they were just never in the Sun and they didn't supplement at all and you know there's some vitamin D in milk when they enrich it with vitamin D but the reality is you need vitamin D and you need quite a bit of it and if you want an optimal immune system that's really healthy it's imperative it's it's really important and there's a lot of other things that are really important. Vitamin C is really important. Vitamin B is very important. Bunch of different B's.

You need essential fatty acids. They're very important. You need all these things. If you don't have these things, your body won't function right. Do you think that the basic fear and conversation around skin cancer and the lotions and the coverings and the sunscreens and I mean to what extent do you think people are not getting vitamin D because they've been scared out of the sun? There's a lot of that for sure.

I mean the best way to get vitamin D most certainly is from the sun. That's the way your body's naturally designed to get vitamin D. You're supposed to be outside all the time and it'll make you healthier. Physically, it's good for you. It's actually a hormone that your body produces when it's in the, vitamin D is a hormone.

It's a, or a precursor to a hormone, I guess if you take it orally, but what it's doing to your body, like, George St. Pierre, when he was fighting, would tan and he would tan specifically not to look good because it's actually better for your health and fitness. You get more vitamin D that way. Yeah.

Yeah, and there's a reality to that. That's why people are really fucking depressed when they live in the Pacific Northwest because it's raining all the time. You're not getting enough vitamin D. It's actually bad for your psyche. It's bad for your mind. It's bad for your health. Again, overall vitality. If you want to have strong vitality, you need to eat nutritious food and take vitamins. And you need to exercise.

There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. You need those three things. 100%. No shortcuts. No shortcuts. I don't know that probably not many silver linings to the lockdown but I did I started walking I've always been active but I kind of backed off of the gym as I got older and started walking every morning for eight miles and then you know Mike Easter he became a friend the comfort crisis and I started rucking yeah and so that's great yeah like a big proponent of that big time yeah in fact

when Bobby called this one he's hard to understand sometimes I was impossible to understand because I was gasping for breath I got 65 pounds on my back walking eight miles every morning he's like what are what are you doing? I'm like, dude, I'm dying. I'm dying. I'm rucking. But yeah, I think there's really something important in that book that Easter wrote. And I think it's not the specifics of what we can do.

This idea of, what do the Japanese call it, a misogi, a quest or a challenge of sorts that you should, well you should challenge yourself to do every so often. And one of the criterion is you should have a 50% chance of failure. Right? One of the criterion is you should have a 50% chance of failure. It's a real push into uncertainty and discomfort. That's why I rock. It's uncomfortable.

Voluntary discomfort. Yes. I think that is an exercise for that part of your mind the same way cardiovascular exercise works for your cardiovascular system I think the discomfort exercise is a real thing and you know, Andrew Huberman has talked about this there's actually a specific area of the brain when you Enact voluntary discomfort and do things you don't want to do all the time. It actually grows Remember what that is? Remember what he called that part of of the brain? But he speaks about it, of course.

He's a neuroscientist, much more eloquently. But I think that's real. And I think it also makes regular life a lot easier. That was one of my favorite things of Jiu-Jitsu when I found out. It makes regular life easy, because regular life is not anterior mid-singulate cortex. That's what it is.

Engaging in challenging activities can stimulate and grow this region, which is crucial for learning, or excuse me, leaning into and overcoming difficulties. Yeah, and if your life is super easy and anything that comes up is a nightmare, it's probably be because you lack enough voluntary adversity to overcome uncomfortable moments.

So uncomfortable moments are rare, and when you encounter rare things, generally people kind of have anxious moments encountering rare things. Well, anxiety is a form of discomfort. Yes. And it's not just pain. It's not, you know, that's, I think most people

equate discomfort or uncomfortableness with like physical pain, but the way Easter talks about it, it's also boredom. Like being bored makes people super uncomfortable because we're so not used to- Especially today. Especially today. You can get the stamp thing up and you know, instant access to 99% of the information. But you're robbing yourself of a lot of possible ideas.

Sure. Yeah, because the best ideas come- When you're bored. When you're robbing yourself of a lot of possible ideas. Sure. Yeah, because the best ideas come when you're bored. I used to have some of my best ideas when I had no radio in my car, because I would just be driving, and my best ideas would come while I was driving. So instead of being entertained, I would just be thinking. Like, you're constantly thinking. And when you're involved in an ordinary activity, like ordinary activity like driving where you're just so sort of like plugged in,

like hit your blinkers, change lanes, you're so plugged in. So you're in like this weird mindset. And then if there's no, nothing entertaining you, your mind just starts thinking about things. Right. Because sometimes you come up with great ideas. Your, your mind, your brain will find whatever you send it out to look for. Yeah. It'll just search and search until it finds it. And if you don't give it anything, then it'll look inward.

Right. It'll find something. You know, cold plunges. Not comfortable. Yeah. But, you know, if you can find a way to like it. I don't like it. I don't like it at all it I do it every day I hate

it yeah but I love it when I get out I the moment before I get in I'm always like can I talk myself out of doing this I don't want to do this right it's fucking cold outside 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. I think there's a difference in knowing what the benefits are of a cold plunge, which would require you to do some research and do some reading and do some thinking and so forth, versus just saying, okay, I know there's some benefit. I don't actually need to know specifically what it is. I just need to know that there's a an

overarching benefit in Embracing the suck. Yeah, I need you know, and if I do that a couple of times a day I think I'm going to be better for it and And that that's useful. That's been useful to me. That's useful, but it also is beneficial physically So it's both things and I think that's the case with exercise too. 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. Your body just feels better when you get out the endorphin rush you get. The norepinephrine, this flood of these chemicals that last for hours, ramps up your dopamine by like 200% and it lasts for hours. Like you genuinely feel better. So there's all that. It's also good for recovery, muscle soreness, and just general inflammation. There's a lot of like benefits, but that's the same with exercise, right? It's difficult to do. It's hard to do. But if you can do it, man, you'll be stronger, healthier, you'll feel better.

It's like you've got to go through that suck to get those benefits. And people don't like that. And so they come up with a bunch of reasons why you don't need that. That's just a fad. That's just a this. They all look like shit. Everybody says that they all look like shit. They all talk like pussies.

They're all just they're cowards. They're afraid to get in there. They don't like getting in there. They don't like that other people get in there every day and they don't get in there every day. So they come up with a reason why getting in there is not really worth it. It's all it's all a bunch of hogwash. It's the latest fad. It's this, that.

And yet look at the stadium 50 years ago and look at it today. The evidence demands a verdict. Something, something awful has happened. It's like, it's like the difference between, uh, being hungry and feeling hungry. You know, that's something else. I think about a lot I mean, how often do we say maybe you don't but how often do you hear it? God? I'm starving I'm famished like no, you're not you're really not you can't possibly be yeah Talk to a fighter that's trying to make weight those guys are famished those guys are they have no water in their body

Yeah for the week before they're living in hell. They live in hell. Some of those guys, they start their cut like four or five days out. Crazy. That's starving. That's only your voluntary, voluntarily starving. 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 any other time in history. It's a different feeling. You know, like if you're a person that's making your way across the country and the wagon breaks. Donner party, table for two.

Oh yeah, that's real starving. Real starving. Did you ever read a book by Nathaniel Philbrick, it's called In the Heart of the Sea? No. Oh man. This is the true story of the sinking of a whale ship called the Essex, right? And the sinking of this ship inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick.

And what happened was, and I think it was 1821, the whaling industry in Nantucket is so fascinating. Nantucket back then was basically run by women because the men would go out for two, sometimes three years at a time. Jesus. Hunting right whales, which are just sperm whales. They're called-

Years? Years, yeah. They were called right whales because they were the right whales to kill, right? And in that time, it was a great source of energy for the country. All the lamp lights burned on whale oil. Imagine how many whales there were before they started doing this. They were like schools. There were so many.

This book will, I mean, it's rich in a lot of different ways. It's where they got the expression Steely Dan actually. It was, because it was just the women and it was a device used for pleasuring themselves. Because the men were all out to see. So they'd use a steely dam. Oh, you want to talk about hard lives. The business, whatever it takes to shoot the elk and get it down from the mountain, I get it, that's a thing. But when you read through the real process of getting a sperm whale out of the ocean alongside the ship and then onto

the ship and the cutting of the blubber and the cauldrons that burn 24-7 on the deck and the blubber that's put into the cauldrons. So they're just making this rendered fat? They're rendering the fat in the oil in real time. Oh wow. And because they have to or it'll rot. That's right and so they just load up the boats. So what happens and this is not really a... Are they eating the whales too? No. No? No. What are they eating? Well they've got their they got their hardtack mostly. Hardt tack is just kind of like crackers, biscuits with no real taste at all. It was the currency. You're used to anything. Probably get scurvy, you know, I mean, but they would, these guys would go all around the world and this boat, the

Essex, was a couple thousand miles off the coast of Venezuela and what happens is that it's it's the ship is the main ship with the guys on it and then when you see a whale right you basically put the whale boats in the water and these are smaller maybe 22 feet long and men row them right and so you harpoon the whale and then you hang on and go for what they called a a Nantucket sleigh ride so so the whale would just drag the... What if the whale goes under?

Can't go under much further can't pull two boats down and it doesn't they tend to swim in a in a straight line after they've been harpooned so you just hang on and then when it tires itself out You row it and you back to the whale ship. Do they kill it first? Well, no, no, it's killed back at the at the ship typically You don't want to kill it when it's when you're a mile from the ship because you got to drag it back They didn't know how smart whales were back then either. We didn't know anything but I'm not crazy. That's only a couple hundred years ago 1821. Isn't that nuts?

Well. Couple hundred years ago, the ocean's filled with whales. Filled with them, and like that. Cause if you look now, they're hard to find. And nothing hunts them. No, sperm whales. I never even really thought about it. They were everywhere.

I mean, I knew about it, but I never thought about it. I never, I mean, we've talked a lot about the decimation of the fish population in the ocean. About like 90 plus percent of all the big fish are gone. Which is really nuts. But I never really thought about it that way when it comes to whales. Well you can make a really good and really controversial case. They made a movie. Ron Howard made a movie.

Yeah, yeah Ron Howard made a movie on this. Yeah, it's amazing. Look, I mean, they were everywhere. So these guys harpoon one. That's so crazy. From the whale boat. Then they get tugged along. Look at all these whales. And then while they're out, maybe a mile from the ship The mate of the mail of the whale that was harpooned Starts ramming the ship Rams it three times. Oh, no sinks it. Oh, no now you got a couple dozen guys in whale boats 2,000 miles off the coast of South America with no supplies. So what happens, and this is all in the preface, but the story basically starts when one of

the whale boats is discovered not far from, I think, Venezuela. And the guys look over the gunnel of their boat and in the whale boat, it's just like a giant carcass. It's just bleached bones all in it, except for two quasi-humans, one in the stern and one in the stern and one in the bow. Each skeletons huddled up staring each other with wild eyes just waiting to see who would die next. So they could eat them. Yeah, and there were rules.

They were almost like cookbooks that were very common. How many people were on these boats? Double check me, Jamie, but I think there were probably a dozen on each one. Many family members. There was a cabin boy named John Coffin, I remember. And there were, I mean, a lot of these guys were related. And they were dear friends and family.

They lived together on Nantucket. They ate each other. They ate each other, man. How long was it before they discovered them? They were at sea adrift. I think for the better part of three months Winner of the national that's him Nate Philbrook fantastic In 1820 the whale ship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than 90 days in three tiny boats.

When did this movie come out? 2015 for the movie. The manuscript was found in 1960, verified in 1980. Oh my god. Released in 1984. You want to take a deep dive. Go to the Whaling Museum up in New England. This stuff is this.

I mean, in the the day there were strict protocols on how to eat your friend, how to prepare your friend for consumption. Did they devise them on the spot or did they have them prepared? They devised them on the spot? There was what the rules? No, no they were written. It was it was like a maritime code. So they kind of knew that this was a possibility. They knew it was a certainty, they just didn't know for whom. This was common. To find yourself with a group of people, hopelessly marooned,

whether you're on a boat or an island with nothing to eat at all, there were protocols, pretty strict protocols on how to draw lots to decide who would go first, how to kill the person who would go first, who not to eat based on the degree of your relation. Oh boy. So like brothers are definitely off. But cousins, not optimal.

So like people were being prepared for consumption. Is he eating them raw? I mean I can't imagine how you would make a fire out there. Oh my God. Unspeakable. Oh my God, oh my God. That's interesting. Owen Chase, right?

The men spent over three 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 and all seven sailors were consumed. Whoa, good boy. See, this is why nonfiction is the best. I know it's nauseating, but I mean that book at a point in time, you got to go, I might wind up in hell before I starve to death because I've eaten everyone else. Right? Well, you're knowing you're starving to death and you've already eaten everyone else. That's- Oh my God, because there's going to be one last person. There's got to end, and then there was one.

Oh, girl. Oh, God. I know. Reality is so terrifying in that regard that we have, you know, we're so fortunate that there's so much food available the poorest amongst us are fat But the reality is if that cut off it would be real desperate real quick Most people get really hungry after five hours, you know, they feel really hungry Yeah description if you'd like to know, okay, okay description if you'd like to read. No. Okay. Okay. The crew according to Chase separated limbs from his body and cut all the flesh from the bones after which we opened the body, took out the heart, and then closed it again, sewed it up as decently as we could, and committed it to the sea. They then ate the man's organs. Soon they began to draw lots to see who would be shot and eaten next, a custom of maroon

sailors dating back to the 17th century. Three men in one boat survived and two in another. The three men who remained behind on Henderson Island were also rescued after surviving on eggs and crabs for nearly four months. Boy. And this is why we have Moby Dick. This is why the greatest American novel, arguably of all time, was written. Because Melville came from that part of the world and he understood the stakes of hunting whales.

And he understood the absolute imperative need to get energy, you can make a really interesting and controversial case around how the fossil fuel industry saved the whales. Yeah, I've heard this before. Because had that not happened in Pennsylvania, in Titusville, not long after this, we'd have hunted them into absolute oblivion. Well, we almost did that to mammals in North America. Market hunting. There used to be did that to mammals in North America. Market hunting. There used to be elk in every state in the country.

There used to be deer everywhere. And we basically hunted them into oblivion. The buffalo is the best example of that, of course. What the hell does it matter with us, man? Oh, we're fucked up. We don't see consequences. We see what's in front of us right now and what we need to do.

And back then, they didn't really have a real understanding of what would happen that had never been done before. No one had just showed up at a continent filled with mammals and just started decimating them. There wasn't like a history of that. It was also the invent of the firearm was fairly recent. So it was a lot easier to get these animals. And then they had the Henry rifle, so they had long range rifles, so they were able to shoot buffalo from a distance. And then they, you know, for a lot of them, they only used their tongues. They pickled their tongues and sent them back

east. And then I was in Custer a couple of weeks ago for a buffalo roundup. Oh, wow. Man, this was a kick. This is, so this is western South Dakota, not far from Crazy Horse and Rushmore. We worked on Crazy Horse for Dirty Jobs. We did an episode. Mean the sculpture? Yeah. Sculpture's weird because there's no real drawing or painting or anything, no photographs

of Crazy Horse. Nobody knows really what he looked like. Well, they're working from a model that seems to have been blessed by all the appropriate parties, but they started working on this thing 50 years ago, and it's going to take another 40 before they're done. I worked on the fingernail of Crazy Horse with a whole crew. What does it look like now? I haven't seen it in a long time. Oh, you'll love this, Jan. It's so mine, but you can take all of Rushmore, all four heads, and put it on the forehead of Crazy Horse. Wow. That's how big this thing is. Wasn't it like one family's undertaking?

Yeah. Gorshek. Go to that last picture that you just had. That one right there. So that shows before and after. That shows where it was a while back and where it is now. Look at his finger in the lower right. That's what you worked on. Yeah.

And I scaled down his, uh, forehead to do basically some tidying up of his nostrils and whatnot when we were there. It's, it's massive. It's absolutely massive. And yeah, there was one guy, Korczak was his name, and he was an immigrant, and he loved the Indian people. And that's the model there at the right, yeah. That's what it's gonna look like?

That's what we're shooting for. Wow. And it's gonna take another half a century probably. Wow. That's incredible. You know, it's funny, man. It's very controversial amongst Native American communities though, right?

I don't know. It is, you know, some. 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. Stole your soul. Yeah. That was a belief back then which sure

Wayne might be on its come well you have this novel thing where you know One's ever seen it before and you take an image of someone like that like someone is like minishes Yeah, also human beings at that point in time were so horrible to each other and these settlers had done essentially demonic things to the population just with diseases, just bringing diseases. So of course they would say, what are they doing now? 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. This guy, Korczak, 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 space. The work ethic is mind boggling what they did. And he was a real friend to the Native

Americans and this was a love letter for them and to them. And who was Crazy Horse's – was it Sitting Bear maybe? I forget but he had all of the – he had enough blessings of the requisite players to embark on this thing well I think anything anytime you have some enormous thing you're gonna have controversy well you're gonna people that don't like it that do like it you know this for sure what you do 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've wanted to be the first show 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 shooting. And this was one of the first things that we did. But I started by calling Rushmore. And I'm not telling you the story to make anybody sound bad, but it really just was kind of appalling. You know, I said, look, I wanna bring my crew and 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? I'm like, look, I think the Park Service does an amazing duty, and I wanna meet the caretakers of our statuary, and I would love to work on this

with the people who work on it. And they not only said no, they were like, are you crazy? We would never, we would never permit anything like that. Like I think they thought it was exploitative somehow and I'm like I want America to to learn the story of Rushmore. I want them to learn something about the people memorialized on it. I want them to meet the people who care for it. It's just a love letter to one of our monuments but it was a hard no and I really wanted to go to that part of the country and so 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. It has no federal oversight. It's very personal to this family and the people who are still in charge of it are true custodians of it. It's really interesting when you talk to people who are in charge of a thing that means a lot to other people. Monumental in reality. Monumental monuments.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a some people I think see it as a burden, some as a challenge, some as an obligation. But for me, I you know, the vast majority of Americans are never going to see either one of those monuments in person. So to to show them. Right. More people will have just seen what Jamie put up here as a result of this, probably, then we'll visit in person. And that's amazing, dude. Yeah, that is amazing.

When you think about a couple of guys smoking cigars and sipping a coffee and just passing the time and all of a sudden you're able to learn about the way they drew lots and the way we, where we got our energy from just a little while ago this buffalo roundup I was telling you about I mean it's there were only a couple thousand of them and when you think about the accounts of the of the day when where the where the Buffalo Rome was as far as you could see, just thick. Do you know Dan Flores? Do you know who he is? Tell me.

He wrote American Coyote and he wrote, what is it, Buffalo Diplomacy, Buffalo Ecology? Is that what it was? I forget, but the Buffalo premise is very fascinating, because the numbers of Buffalo, he believes, but they were in such large numbers because so many Native Americans died out because of diseases. So the Native Americans would follow the buffalo, hunt them, and kill them. Takes a long time for gestation for

a buffalo. So when the buffalo have new buffalo, it takes a long time to repopulate. But if the Native Americans, 90% of them, were wiped out by disease when the settlers came here, so there's no one hunting them for a long time. And so the populations grew immense. And so 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, they didn't have to worry. So when they first were here, right, buffalo existed far back before the, there was a mass extinction of like 65% of North American mammals that coincided with the end of the ice age and probably had to do with the younger dry ice impact, which is a theory. The Cambrian thing? Or it was 11.... well there's two different time periods that they attribute to... there's a shower, an asteroid shower, that we go... if you

really want to get into this you should really look up the Younger Dryas Impact Theory online and then there's a guy named Randall Carlson who's like kind of dedicated his life to showing that this is probably what ended the ice age. There's a bunch of science behind it in terms of like core samples and stuff they do that shows that there's asteroid impacts that happened all over the world during this particular time period. And he thinks that coincided with the extinction of the woolly mammal, the American lion, a lot of different animals that just died off.

65% of North American mammals died off during this time period. And you got to think like when the buffalo existed back then, they existed with the North American lion, which was bigger than the African lion. It's the biggest lion ever. So they're getting jacked by these massive predators. And then you have this extinction event, and then you have humans start hunting them. And so humans now, horses have been reintroduced to North America by Europeans.

Humans are on these horses, and then they're hunting these animals. Reintroduced, by the way, because horses originated in North America, including zebras. All horse species came from here. But that was 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. And so they are really effective at hunting buffalo. They get the numbers down to a number where when people are making their way across the country, they're not seeing them everywhere. And then you have this mass event

where 90% of Native Americans die. Then you have millions of buffalo. This is what Dan Flores writes about. It's really interesting. 1830, 40? You'd have to go to whatever it's paper. 1800 to 1850 is what it's really interesting 1830 40 you'd have to go to whatever Yeah, I here's the tragedy for me I

Narrated a special about all that Hmm. I can't remember it man. Really? I mean, I remember enough of it to know that I narrated it That's what I would told you three hours ago. I'm, I don't- Is that the Ken Burns one? Is that what you- Could have been. Yeah. Could have been. I know if it was Ken Burns,

he always hires Peter Coyote. Oh, Peter Coyote's great. But I, that's what I meant earlier when I'm like, I feel, I don't think there's anything wrong with me yet, but my bucket's full too. And it's so annoying. Like I was talking to a friend of mine just yesterday about How the Universe Works, which is a show I've been narrating for the Science Channel literally for 10 years.

And you know, he knows all of the information in the show, but he thinks because he heard me tell it to him that I know it too, but I don't. I'm just adjacent to it. I know just enough to keep a conversation on its feet, but it's like, it's this constant thing, man. I'm older than I've ever been, and it's just nagging at me now,

because it's like goddamn I should know I I should remember more that I should I should have remembered more about Philbrick. I should have remembered more about 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.

That's essentially a new thing. With human beings, you know what Dunbar's number is? Dunbar's number is the number of people that you can keep in your mind, in your memory, right? That's essentially born out of necessity and tribal life right so we essentially have the same brains and the same capacity same hard drive as people who lived in tribes 10,000 years ago yeah 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. I read that Bill Clinton's number is way high. Certain people's numbers. Who they can keep in their head. Like the number of people you can keep in a meaningful way. It probably expands just like the part of your brand expands when you do difficult things. It probably expands. There's a podcast, as you know,

dedicated to what happened on your podcast. I didn't know that. Yeah, there's a podcast out there basically called, I don't know what it's called, Experiencing the Joe Rogan Experience or something, because there's too much information on your show. Right. Right. There's just too much, and people who love it

get anxious because they can't process all of it. And so, like, there's an ecosystem. In other words, there's a docent to bring it back to art. This is what we need, I think, more than anything today. We need somebody, like if you're gonna go to an art museum, you need somebody to lead you through, I do anyway, somebody who can- It helps. It helps, man. You need somebody to lead you through. I do anyway. Somebody who can-

It helps. It helps, man. If you're gonna go see a martial arts fight for the first time, if you're gonna go to the octagon, it'd be better to sit next to you than me. Right? Sure. So everybody- But you'd be annoying.

I'd have to say you don't- okay. How much do you know why that hurts? Here, let me show you. Can you feel that? I'm just saying that I think more than ever before, people need a guide. They need somebody to make sense out of all the information. Because I don't think there's any, there's not much new information. It's just accessible in ways we've never seen. There's new information too. How can there be? Because it's information is acquired upon the consumption of all the other information.

Like it's all exponential, piles on top of each other. It's not just now we know because of the new information, because of the information that we've acquired, now we have a new understanding. So that's new information. You know, nutrition, there's constantly new information on nutrition. How's that possible? People have been eating forever because now we know more about it. So it is new information. Well, there's no such thing as an old joke if you hear it for the first time, right? So if I just learn that Vitamin D is important but better assimilated with magnesium and K2

I might say that's some new information, but you would go no dude. That's old information. You're just learning it, right? But it's fairly new anyway because nutritional science is really only been around for what a hundred plus years and the understanding of it today is far greater than at any other time in our life because of guys like Huberman because of these different scientists that have dedicated themselves to educating people about nutrition the process that your body goes through and it absorbs nutrients like and what enhances that what you know enzymes different things you eat let me say it this way then there's a body of information that exists that I don't know and then there's a body of new

information that I also don't know because it's new right and the body of the stuff that I don't know yet it'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 as this incredible repository of stuff. Like when I walk in a library and look at all that stuff, man, look at this cursed thing here in my hand. It's like, oh my God, if I have an internet connection, I have access to 98% of everything that we've ever known.

Yeah. Now that either makes you intensely curious or intensely uneasy because now you know. Maybe both. Maybe, but you have it now. Like if you're not, like what are you doing? Like you're sitting on the toilet. Are you reeling? Are you TikToking?

Like how are you spending the one truly finite resource you have of your time? What are you doing with it, man? A lot of us getting distracted. Jesus. Yeah, but their stories, their Buffalo stories and whale stories that are out there. I think that's why people like your shows. You know, I think that's why people like podcasts. I think that's why people are interested in documentaries.

There's still people out there that are interested in being curious. For sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah Yes, Joe it is It's a pleasant living listen, man. It's been awesome talking to you. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun I you know what hours just fucking flew by I'm just I mean full disclosure I'm kind of relieved to hell. 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, maybe? My mother said maybe he's not that into you

It's just a time thing. Oh, he'll call you one day. There's a lot of people out there But I really did want to talk to you. Can I show you a truck before we go? Sure sure Because I know you're a car guy. Yeah, so This company called Sugar Creek up in Ohio made me a truck. Oh, what kind? Well, it started as a 1964 Dodge power wagon. It ended up as this. Dude, I've seen that online. That's yours. That's mine. Oh, that's crazy. I love those old power wagons dude that thing looks incredible what a great job they did on that it's it's unbelievable

27 it's about 9,000 man hours oh my god that thing looks a fucking incredible so oh you got a hell of fan engine in it 1100 horsepower my goodness look at that so it's got a TRx hood. It's it's wow You will get that's cool. That's fucking great. I know oh, do you drive that? Barrett Jackson is gonna auction it off no in January why? Because because my foundation needs money and right so, so 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.

Yeah. That's probably gonna go for half a million dollars at least. No, he says two. Two million? Two million dollars? Probably cost half a million to make. Wow. Beats me. You know, this is another one of those worlds.

Maybe, auctions are crazy, cause a bunch of rich guys get in there and go, I want it. And then they start feeding off each other. Look at this fucking thing. That's incredible. Two million dollars? Jesus Christ. Well, who knows?

But I went up to Columbus to see the garage where they make this thing. And you need to put this on your list of stuff to do when your bucket's not overflowing because a guy called John Richardson, who owns the biggest bacon factory in the country, Sugar Creek, is crazy automotive freak. He built this giant garage. He hired 27 Savants. And all they do is take classic cars from his sort of quasi junkyard

and turn them into these gems. Oh, wow. So he built this for me, and Barrettrett 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 would never be able to let that thing go It's the art we were talking about. Yeah, it's it's that's that's artistry. That's art. Yeah. Oh hundred percent. That's art Yeah, yeah, Mike. Appreciate you very much, man. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. It was a lot of fun. All right. Bye everybody.