The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 195: The Epistemological Jack-in-the-Box

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Mike tells the true story of a famous poet who wrote her best stuff while working as a waitress in a diner, many years ago. After that, another true story about the time Joan Rivers saved his career, followed by a rather remarkable catch-up with Paul Kelley, a true renaissance man who worked the overnights with Mike, back in the glory days of home shopping.  Yeah, it gets a little weird… and there is some adult language.

The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kelp forests. The ocean teaches us how our choices impact even the deepest places. The ocean connects us. Visit Monterey Bay Aquarium.org slash connects. Hey guys, it's Mike Row and this is episode number 195 of the way I heard it. And it's called the Epistemological Jack in the Box. That's right. The Epistemological Jack in the Box.

That's just one of several spontaneous turns of phrase that I had not heard until my conversation with today's guest, an old friend of mine called Paul Kelly, who just might be the most interesting man in the world. I say this with great respect and deference to Jonathan Goldsmith, the actor who played the most interesting man in the world for Dosekies. Remember those commercials? Stay thirsty, my friends. That campaign was amazing. Went on for over 12 years, won all kinds of awards, and made Jonathan Goldsmith instantly recognizable around the world.

Well, Paul Kelly is not as recognizable as Jonathan Goldsmith, but he is way more interesting because Paul Kelly is the real deal. He's what you call a polymath. He speaks several languages. He's a philosopher, an actor, a director, a former professor at Rutgers University, a poet, a salesman of unparalleled, persuasive talents. And among other things, the smartest man to work the overnight shift at the QVC cable shopping channel where I had the great pleasure to meet him 31 years ago, shortly after accepting my first job in television.

Paul Kelly, he really is one of the smartest people I've ever had the pleasure to cloud. around with and man did we clown around back in the golden age of home shopping where the products were inexplicable and the live phone calls were unpredictable and the eight second delay was simply non-existent it was a great time to make up the rules as we went and so we did I wanted to chat with Paul Kelly today because today is chapter I don't even remember what chapter it is in my book but it's all about rule breakers. It's called the cherry pie is to die for. And it tells the true story of an aspiring poet

who followed her own rules and broke the ones she didn't like, a woman who wrote poetry in the diner where she worked as a waitress, even as she broke the heart of the man who loved her. That's followed by the true story of another rule breaker who stole my heart once upon a time and saved my crows. career, such as it is, the one and only, Joan Rivers, whom I also had the good fortune to meet

at QVC once upon a time. That's what got me thinking about Paul Kelly, and wondering what sage wisdom I might be able to extract from his enormous cranium with regard to the nature of breaking rules in the interest of finding out who it is we really are. Our conversation is a very weird mix of poetry and prose, subversion, silliness, laughter, loquaciousness, nihilism, and navel gazing, all of which, incidentally, we did reliably. Once upon a time, on the graveyard shift of the QVC cable shopping channel. We'll do it again momentarily. It's an epistemological jack-in-the-box preceded by some cherry pie that's to die for. And it all starts right now. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources?

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The cherry pie is to die for. for Bob Dylan. Ted stands perfectly still in the Louisiana woods and looks for signs of prey. He loves to hunt, but today he'd rather be home. The heat is stifling, the rifle feels heavy in his hands, and there's no sign of game. Ted allows his mind to wander, and before long, he's thinking about the waitress in Dallas, the one he met five years ago, the one who got away. They'd met at the lunch counter at Marcos. He'd been a postal worker back then and had stopped in one afternoon for a quick bite. The waitress hadn't noticed him at first.

She'd been writing something. Must be mighty important, Ted said, to make such a pretty face scrunch up like that. The waitress jumped at the sound of his voice. Sorry, mister. I was someplace else. What can I get you? She was a tiny thing, not even five feet tall. her blonde hair was uncombed, and her eyes were wide and very blue.

I'd like a BLT, said Ted, and a cup of coffee. You got it, but save some room for dessert. The cherry pies to die for. Thanks, said Ted. I'll do that. The waitress wrote up his order, passed it to the cook, and went back to her papers. What are you working on, Ted asked? Oh, nothing, she said.

It's just a poem. What's it about? The waitress considered the postal worker. He had a warm smile and a trustworthy face. It's about a nice boy who falls in love with the wrong girl. Maybe you'd like to read it to me, said Ted. And that's what the waitress did. You don't want to marry me, honey, though just to hear you ask me as sweet. If you did, you'd regret it tomorrow, for I'm only a girl of the street. Time was when I'd gladly have listened before I was tainted with shame, but it wouldn't be fair to you, honey. Men laugh when they mention my name.

Back there on the farm in Nebraska, I might have said yes to you then, when I thought the world was a playground, just teeming with Santa Claus men. But I left the old home for the city to play in its mad, dirty whirl, never knowing how little of pity it holds for a slip of a girl. The waitress stopped reading. That's all I got, she said. What do you think? Well, said Ted, I'm hoping for a happy ending. The waitress offered a sad little smile. Aren't we all, mister? Aren't we all? Five years have gone by, and Ted hears a sound that yanks him back to the hunt. Something is approaching in the distance, something large. Ted clicks off the safety of his rifle and waits to see what might appear in the

clearing. He understands the stakes. He understands the stakes. He understands. the danger, but his thoughts are still on the waitress. He recalls their second meeting. She was still behind the counter at Marcos when he walked into the joint, still writing, still lovely, her pretty face still scrunched up in concentration. You were right, said Ted, the cherry pie was to die for. Once again, the waitress jumped at the sound of his voice. You got to quit sneaking up on me, mister. Ted laughed. Sorry about that. I thought you saw me come in. The waitress poured him some coffee. How's the poem coming? He asked. Chipping away at it. She picked up where she'd left off, reading quietly so that the other customers couldn't hear.

Her lips were very close to Ted's ear. I soon got a job in the chorus, with nothing but looks and a form. I had a new man every evening. My kisses were thrilling and warm. Then I fell for the line of a junker, a slim devotee of hop. And those dreams, in the juice of a poppy, had got me before I could stop. But I didn't care while he loved me, just a lion his arms was delight. But his ardor grew cold, and he left me in a Chinatown hop joint one night. The waitress paused and brushed away a tear. Ted wanted to take her hand.

He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to tell her that he'd be a bit of her. People can change, even a girl from the street. But the waitress wasn't quite finished. Don't spring that old gag of reforming. A girl hardly ever goes back. Too many are eager and waiting to guide her feet off of the track. A man can break every commandment, and the world will still lend him a hand.

Yet a girl that has loved, but unwisely, is an outcast all over the land. Ted could take no more. He'd never seen so much sadness in such a pretty face. Listen to me, he said. One day, a man is going to walk through those doors and sweep you off your feet. A good man, a man who doesn't care about your past. And from that moment on, your life will never be the same. Do you really think so, she asked. Ted looked earnestly into her wide blue eyes and said, Maybe he already has. For the next three months, the postal worker stopped by every day for a quick bite with some poetry on the side. And for a while there, it looked like the waitress might write him into her story.

But one day, she was gone. Her replacement, Edna, was a 65-year-old grandmother with a snagletooth. It was Edna who gave poor Ted the bad news. Don't know where she went, said Edna. said she wouldn't be back, said she found the love of her life. Now what can I get you? Ted was stunned. He swallowed hard and looked blankly down at the menu, but the menu had nothing he wanted. Edna poured him some coffee. Try the cherry pie, she said. It's to die for. Even now, five years later, hidden in the Louisiana woods, Ted can remember the heartbreak he felt that day.

even as his prey crawls ever closer, even as his fellow hunters raise their rifles alongside his, even as the stolen ford crests the hill on Highway 154 and slows down at the intersection of the clearing, even as he and the rest of the posse open fire with Tommy guns from the woods on the side of the road. When the shooting finally stops, 136 rounds of hot lead have perforated the stolen Ford. Many of those bullets have also perforated the man behind the wheel. Then the smoke clears and Ted slowly approaches what's left of the driver. It's him all right.

Justice has finally caught up with the bank robber who's killed 12 cops in cold blood. Now Ted considers the passenger. She is a tiny thing, a slip of a girl, not even five feet tall. Her blonde hair is uncombed. Her dead eyes are wide open and very blue. He hangs his head, closes his own eyes, and recalls the final stanza from the poem she'd read him five years ago. You see how it is, don't you, honey? I'd marry you now if I could. I'd go with you back to the country, but I know it won't do any good, for I'm only a poor branded woman, and I can't get away from the past. Goodbye, and God bless you for asking,

but I'll stick it out now, till the last. You might not have heard of Ted Hinton, the postal worker turned deputy sheriff who was hired to hunt down the notorious bank robber. You might not remember a poem called The Street Girl. But you've probably heard of the waitress who wrote it, the woman who got away until she didn't. An aspiring poet

whose only appearance in print was in the headlines on the most wanted posters, a famous outlaw named Bonnie Parker. What if Bonnie had taken a flyer on Ted? She didn't know him from Adam, and yet there was something between them.

Ted had felt it. Had Bonnie felt it too? He might have kept on working for the post office. She might have kept on being a waitress or become a published poet. Together, they might have been happy, as I was when a woman named Joan took a flyer on me. It was September, 1991. I had been fired from QVC a few months earlier, justifiably, rehired, inexplicably, then banished, sent back to the graveyard shift for my sins permanently. Then a nasty flu had gone around, and most of the prime-time hosts had gone home, where they'd been now for several days, puking their guts up. I'd been called in to fill in for the stricken, and I was halfway through a riveting hour called ideas to make your life easier, when Joan walked into the studio. Rivers was the Joan in question, a mythical figure

who'd come up the hard way in the business, enduring ups and downs that would have crushed lesser women. She was a genius, a legend, a rebel. She was the Bonnie Parker of comedy. I'd never met her, but I knew who she was, and it was unthinkable to me that my bosses would turn her loose on QVC's G-rated audience. Stranger still, that they would allow her to share the same stage with me. And yet, there she was. Rivers was there to promote her line of clothing and jewelry.

She had been scheduled to appear that morning with a real, reputable host. But on her way to the green room, she had stopped to watch as I sang a tune from Mac and Mabel, hoping to boost the sales of a portable karaoke machine. When I was done, she pulled something out of her giant purse, walked onto the set, and began asking questions right there on live time. television. Oh my God, she said. Where did you get that tie? I beg your pardon. Your tie, she said. It's awful. Did you steal it from a Lutheran? I made it myself, I said, on a loom in my attic. It's hideous, truly, and that suit, you look like an unmade bed. Thanks, I said. It helps me sleep

on the job. You look radiant, though, if I may be so bold. Look a little closer, one more facelift and I'll have a goatee. It took me a second, but the image sunk in. I may have chortled. I may have even guffalled. If I'd been wearing dentures, I might have spat them across the room. You seem like a nice young man. It's a shame you don't have any taste. Is there a woman in your life? Several, I replied, but none that compete with your years of experience. Joan laughed. She gave me the finger. Then she presented me with a tie-button tie, a fancy piece of silk with the buttonhole in the back that allowed a gentleman to affix the tie to the button on his shirt in a way that, in her words, was simply to die for. It won't swing into your spaghetti sauce the next time you take one of your special ladies out for a big night at the Olive Garden, she said.

Rivers told me all about the various trinkets and garments she'd come on to sell, including a simulated diamond set in 14-carat gold that she suggested would be perfect for any of the women in my life. Remember ladies, fake jewelry doesn't have to make you look like a slut, even if you are one. She described one stretch jersey as a pretty little thing with a nice comfortable lining that won't get stuck in your ass crack. She made me laugh, both because she was funny and because I imagine my bosses recoiling in horror. Joan wasn't off script. She was unscriptable. To me, that made her heroic. I didn't see her again for a year and a half. By then, she had become a fixture at QVC,

well on her way to selling a billion dollars worth of stuff. Really, a billion. I, on the other hand, I was still working the graveyard shift, still hawking products that appeared to have been sourced from the midway of some condemned carnival. Then, I caught a break. QVC and CBS agreed to co-produce a pilot around Joan, tentatively called, Can We Shop? Under the terms of the deal, Joan could select any QVC host to be her second banana, and she chose me. I can't express how profoundly surprising that decision was, to me, to my fellow QVC hosts, and most of all to those who had consigned me to the graveyard shift. But, Rivers, insisted.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting next to her on a soundstage in New York City, doing my very best Ed McMahon impression. Go figure. In television, as in real life, you don't always know the significance of the thing when it happens. This was different. I knew exactly what it meant. Appearing on CBS with Joan Rivers was the first thing I'd done that looked halfway legitimate. I left QVC soon after that, of my own volition. I never saw Rivers again, not in person, anyway. Like the rest of the world, I saw her on the red carpet and watched her shenanigans here and there. How could I not? Icons have a way of being everywhere at once.

I watched a piece of work, the fine documentary about her. I wanted to call her afterward and tell her how brave she'd been to be that forthcoming. I still wish I had, but I'll settle for my memories of a holiday party at her Fifth Avenue penthouse. It was a black tie affair, but I wore one of her tie-button ties. It amused her to no end. I brought her some cookies, too. My mom, upon learning that I would be visiting the home of a bona fide celebrity, was afraid I would arrive empty-handed, or worse, with a six-pack of rolling rock under my arm. She made a tin of chocolate-chip cookies and told me to give them to Mrs. Rivers with her compliments, which I did.

I don't know if Joan actually ate them, but she accepted them with grace and put them on the mantle next to her menorah. Do do do do do do do dumb. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle.

The poop is out of the goose, I'm afraid. AI is here to stay. And every business in the country is asking themselves the same question. How do we make it work for us? Well, the answer to that question, question varies, but you'll find it in a free guide that you can get right now at netsuite.com slash Mike. It's called demystifying AI. It's totally free. It's essential reading for anybody trying to make sense of a future that appears to have arrived yesterday. NetSuite, of course,

is the number one AI enterprise resource planning software out there, trusted by over 43,000 businesses. With NetSuite, you can use the AI of your choice, GROC or Claude or chat, GPT, whatever else is out there to connect to your actual business data, all of it, and automate all of those tiresome, time-sucking, sole deadening manual processes. This is AI built into the system that's currently running your business. Learn more at nettsweet.com slash Mike. And while you're there, pick up their free business guy, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at netseweet.com

slash mic. That's netsuite.com. Netsweet. I'm going to try very hard to keep this at least in the Chartreuse range instead of going full blue here. And those are the first words you've heard

from my old friend Paul Kelly, who has begun this interview with a commitment not to go blue, but to stay Chartreuse. And if there's anything more. If there's any better way to describe the way this man's mind works, than what you just heard, then by God, I don't know what it is. How are you, my friend? I am exceedingly well, my friend. How are you? I'm great. Man, it's good to see your face. And is that Caesar, Augustus? Augustus Caesar? That is big jewels. That's Julie Caesar. Yeah. That's the, that's the Ids of March.

Beware the Ids of March. Stab me in the heart, Julius Caesar. You guys can't see what I'm seeing. But aside from my old friend Paul Kelly, he does have a famous Roman bust nearby, which is as it should be, my friend, you have always managed to somehow subtly incorporate the classics even into the most mundane of proceedings. And I assume you're still doing that these days. Well, one does what one can. I would like to point out that, as you may or may not know, and I think you do, I did live in Italy for a time. I'm in the city of Rome, so I am more than a little familiar with Roman busts. Part of the reason that you leapt to mind at the end of the chapter we just heard, and by the way, I assumed you listened to it? I did. Part of the reason you leapt to mind was because you did something at QVC that I really,

I never saw any other home shopping host do. I've seen very few personalities on television juxtapose the way you juxtapose virtually anything with everything. And I stole that from you, my friend, not just when we were at QVC doing our thing contemporaneously, but years later on dirty jobs when I tried from time to time to inject a little Yates into some chicken sexing. And I always thought of you. You know, I remember one night on QVC in the wee small hours of the morning. You just started, I think you did an entire presentation in Italian just to see if anyone was listening. Well, I was.

I did. Yeah. You were one of the few at that point. But yes, I did. Let's talk about what it was like to be on the air, on live television, in the glory. days of home shopping, because you were there before I was. What was that weird mix like for you? Broadcasting, transactional conversation, a soap opera. Did you know what it was when it was happening? Is there a D answer like all of the above? Because it was, in fact, all of the above.

And it depended on which day you're talking about. We knew. going in, that we were doing some stuff that nobody had ever done. And one of the beautiful things about it was that there were no rules, Mike, which is a situation that both you and I tend to gravitate to anyway. If there's a rule, let's break it, or at least bend it to see how far it will bend. Sure. How do you know where the line is? How do you know where the line is, Paul, unless you put your foot over it from time to time? Exactly. Exactly. I always tried to keep it within acceptable civil grounds. I didn't always succeed, but there were certain things, like there were members of our cadre

who had a direct link between their ear, and that is to say what the producer was saying to them in their little earbug and their mouth. filtered. So whatever the producers said in their ear came out their mouth, which was not always a good thing because the producers were not under the same kind of audio or visual scrutiny that, of course, we were. What Paul's saying in simple terms is that when you're sitting on the set at QVC, say you're in the living room set, for instance, and camera three has you lock down, right? So basically from the, from the nipples up, there you sit like a Christmas ham in maybe a million homes around the country. And the degree to which people can screw with you when you are in that helpless position is manifold. The technical director can give you bad advice and tell you

to look somewhere you shouldn't look. The producer can get in your other ear and whisper sweet nothings. And God forbid, a phone call comes through with a lunatic who's had one pop too many or some lonely heart who just takes that opportunity to share a thing. Are we going to go there, Mike? Are we going to go to the phone calls? We're going to go. Yes. Yes. Because look, you were there. You were there at the very, very beginning of a nascent industry. And so, you know, I came along in late 1989, early 1990. You were there from the jump, right? 87 was it? 86. So Joe Siegel, who got this whole thing started, picks you and a couple other people, and you go on the air without a net. Exactly. And they were,

the backgrounds of the people, the original 20 hosts, by the way, of the original 20 hosts who were listed as on-air hosts and co-hosts on the day we went live, I think only only not. Only not. survived the first year. There were a number of people that came in the second wave that survived a lot longer. But for those of us who did survive, we were every day making it up as we went along. This was like the biggest improv in history, I think, because you know, you weren't doing it in a small theater in Chicago. you were doing it on national television for those who cared enough to watch. But at the same time, it's a very lonely proposition.

I mean, I'm writing a book about this, you know, to the extent that I'm able. And I want to talk to you offline later about filling in some of the blanks. But one of the themes I keep coming back to is the incredible quietude of 2 a.m. in the morning or 3 a.m. in the morning on that giant rotating set. where the only relationship you really have is with the producer, who you can see, you know behind the tinted glass are people pushing buttons operating the robotic cameras. A stage hand from time to time brings you the next widget to sell. But it's really just you and the red light on the camera and the viewer,

except that there were a lot of viewers. So it was both small and isolated, yet enormous. and everywhere. And that's a weird muscle to develop. It is a weird muscle, but it's, there's something about it that causes you to create connections. When you're, and you know this is certainly as well as I do, when you are in that position and there's nobody there, there's just you in the camera, you can't be talking to the camera. You're going to be talking to the person on the other side at the camera. That's right.

whoever that is in your own head. And you can switch them out. I mean, I can be talking to Uncle Fester. Oh, yeah. And then 15 seconds later, you know, I'm talking to Aunt Matilda. Who did you normally talk to? Who was that person, by and large? Who was the default in your mind, side?

Wow. I had a whole family and not my family, but a whole family of people that I talked to. And they were in various stages of costume or undressed, depending on my mood at the time. So I could, in my own head, and I would tailor it to the product. For example, if I was doing a set of T-Fall frying pants in the kitchen and goofing around making a recipe as I went along, I would be talking to somebody far different than I would if I was talking about, let's say, some perfume or a piece of jewelry. That's a whole different audience. And so in my own head, I was talking to different people at different times.

That's so interesting. I went through a version of that. But because I think I spent more time in the overnights, at least in relative terms, than you did, my family of potential viewers sort of formed an amalgam, like a Borg. It was sort of, you know, like Stephen King, he, he calls them constant readers. He talks to his constant reader. And sometimes he addresses them directly, but all of his books by and large, it's that same voice. and it's that same kind of familiarity. And, you know, I make a lot of fun of QVC

because for a long time I didn't talk about it. But when I look back at the lessons I learned there, many from you, but mostly by myself in the middle of the night, trying to figure out who I was talking to, that's somewhere near the top of the list. You know, not to get philosophical about this, but when you're doing that, sometimes when you're trying to figure out who you're talking to,

you're also trying to figure out who the hell you are. Man, dude, I'm glad you went there because it does sound a little precious and a little grand, but that's what I meant before by the micro and the macro of this particular kind of broadcasting. When you're alone and yet surrounded, you pivot or perish, you adapt or die. And how many people, how many people have you seen go up in flames trying to figure out? It looks like they're going up in flames trying to figure out their job. But in reality, they're going up in flames trying to figure out who they are. And how they fit, exactly.

Yeah. I've seen that a thousand times. You know, I have this whole set of memories that I keep locked in the file cabinet in the back of my head. One of them, one of the most vivid ones is that. I was called into my boss's office. Well, that happened regularly. I was going to say, was that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday? Exactly.

I was called into my boss's office with another host. And we were told, and this is exactly what we were told, the two of us standing side by side, in front of our boss's office, we were told, our long-term plans don't include you two clowns. However, we still need the overnights hosted. In six months, you'll both probably be gone. However, we still need the overnights hosted.

So what we're going to do is we're going to give you two clowns, midnight to 6 a.m., Monday through Thursday. Do with it what you will. Now talk about pulling the Harakiri sword corporately and just falling on it because I'm sure you remember that moment. Oh my God, dude. I'm so glad you reminded me the minute you said it, I realized that that is so going in the book because it was very much a don't throw me in that briar patch moment, right? Because friends, midnight to six. A.m. on a home shopping shift is the part of the map that used to say, here be dragons, right?

I mean, it's, on the one hand, it's a sentence. You've been banished. On the other hand, there, to this day, is no level of broadcasting freedom that ever existed, with a possible exception of Tom Snyder, unsupervised or maybe Dick Cabot in the early days. No level of broadcast freedom rivals what you can do during a three-hour shift in the middle of the night when you're surrounded by products that looked like they had been purloined from the carnival midway. You can do anything you want. You can. And what makes it even more interesting is that you never know who is going to be on the other end of that telephone at 3 a.m. when that red light goes on and you're queued to a phone call, you don't know what kind of person that is. You only do know that it ain't normal.

Because it's- Whoever is it? Because it's 4 a.m. and they're awake and they're calling you. That's right. Yeah. Yep. So put it together and you end up with anything can happen. Somewhere in the reptilian part of your brain, I know there are a list of things that have happened that probably still haunt your dreams. Care to share a few? Well, I can share you one or two. There are a few that I probably shouldn't, but even those are... Sure. I was queued to a phone call one night, and it was about...

half past midnight. And let's just say it was Ellen from Spokane. Okay. Okay. So I said, hello, Ellen from Spokane. You know, the usual patter. How you doing? What are you calling for?

And Ellen talked about the product for about 10 seconds. And then she said, you know, Paul, there are three reasons why I love watching QVC. Now, right away, I should have the alarms, should have gone. should have gone off in my head. Right, right. But, okay. But they did and they didn't. But dummy here says, okay, Ellen from Spokane or what is the first reason?

She said, well, it's so convenient. All I have to do is sit down in my living. And she went on waxing poetic about that for about three seconds. And before I said stupidly, of course. And what's the second? And what is the second reason? And she says, your prices. Your prices cannot be beat anywhere you go.

And she went on and on about the prices and how economical it was to shit. And then she suddenly went quiet. Now, right there, I had an existential opportunity to bail. Yeah. Did I? No, you didn't. You're Paul Kelly. No, I didn't.

You don't bail? I didn't. I said coming out of this silence, well, Ellen, and what is the third reason? And she said, it's the only chance I get to shop and masturbate at the same time. And that's why we sold a lot of hands-free phones. And didn't we just? Yeah, that's one of the ones I remember vividly. Well, see.

And my response, I'm going to brag because without even missing a beat, I looked in the camera and I said, because they cut her phone off immediately. As soon as she said that, they cut her off. And I looked at the phone at the camera and I said, well, everybody needs a hobby. And the camera went to break. They cut me off. Oh, man. Well, you know, those are the, I mean, there was no eight second to live. at QVC.

No. There was no five second delay. There was no... Nothing. Nano second. Yeah. That thing was coming in low and hot, off the satellite. And the thing is, when calls like that happen on the air, it opens up a kind of Pandora's

box of childishness and depravity among the Great Unwashed, which simply means that there's going to be another one, right? You're damn right there is. And, you know, I remember the protocol. Paul's, Paul. Like, nobody got on the air who hadn't purchased an item in the past. Nobody got on the air who asked to go on the air. You had to be invited to go on the air. And these simple things were put in place to try and discourage the kind of thing you just described. But once something like that happened, man, people would go to great lengths to get there and destroy the host. Because like I said, there you are on camera three. You're stuck. They can say anything they want. And if the producer's not to, you're not. You're not. You're not. You're not. You're not. You're just. You're not. You're not. You're not. You're just. You're not. You're not. You're Johnny on the spot or if the technical director isn't really paying attention, you will twist in the wind. It's the deer in the headlights look that we both have seen innumerable times. There are those hosts and they're still there at QVC and other channels that are fine as long as they are in control.

but as soon as they lose control of their little world right there. And a caller like that will rest control instantaneously out of it. And you have to go with it. You cannot fight that. You have to go with it until you can get yourself into a position where you can regain that control. And you have to be able to let go. Well, it's just, I mean, it's such another great lesson. You know, I mean, I really think.

think every, every truly useful thing I learned about broadcasting. I learned in the middle of the night on the QVC cable shopping channel. And that's another big lesson. You have got to be willing to be subordinate. You have sometimes regarding humility, you just have to let it go. That served me really, really well in dirty jobs. But boy, in 1991 at 3.30 in the morning, 3.30 in the morning, those lessons came fast and furious. And I'm wondering, was that your first job in television? It was my first job in regular television. I had been a professor of acting and directing at Rutgers University for a number of years before that.

I had been a professional actor as you had a number of years before that. And nothing prepares you for that kind of improv like being on stage and having things go wrong. You just have to deal with it. And go ahead. What makes a great salesperson in this day and age? In this day and age. As if it's different than it used to be. Although I think it might.

I think the immediate access to. products and the transactional nature of life in the 21st century might have changed a few things, but on a fundamental level, what made the great ones great? I can answer that, Mike, because I've given it a lot of thought. Hit me. And to answer that adequately, I'm going to say that the people we used to call the suits, the executives, they didn't know what the hell they were doing. they did not know what they were doing.

When we first started training, we heard the product is the star of the show. The product is the star of the show. That is such utter nonsense. Yep. Because product is static. Television is a dynamic medium. You cannot have a static star in a dynamic medium.

It doesn't work. The star of the show is the interaction. between the host and the product. Widget means nothing. It's the host that makes the widget hop. It's the hopping widget that gets the attention. The hopping widget, not the sitting widget, not the standing widget. It's the one that moves.

Kinetics. So it is. And our executives never got that. They never got the fact that a huge percentage of the people, who tuned into QVC on a regular basis were tuning in to connect with a Kathy Levin or a Jeff Houston or a Steve Collin tunal or a micro. That's why they were tuning in. And when I went on the road for QVC to do their road shows across America, which I did for six years, I got to talk to these people face to face eye to eye. And I got to hear their stories and answer their questions.

And the questions were never, ever about a product. They were always about the who, not the one. You said to me one night, you think you're sitting on this set. You think it's lonesome. You're not on this set. You're in their living room. You might be in their bedroom. You might be in their bathroom. You are their friend and you are here, the collective you, i.e., all of the hosts at QVC, 24-7. I think, Paul, the thing that I learned from you that I most appreciated was you don't have to be outrageous to be outrageous. What you have to do is be slightly different than that which preceded you and that which follows you. Because for 24 hours a day, all the hosts there did pretty much the same thing,

pretty much the same way. You, being a jagged little pill, did not. And that wasn't lost on me, and it wasn't lost on the viewers either. My guest today, Tom Olbenice, is an American giant, and I'll tell you why. Tom understands on a fundamental level that the business of mining is a non-negotiable prerequisite of our civilization and our economic independence, just like the business of making things. American Giant knows this, which is why they committed themselves 16 years ago to make all their excellent clothing right here in this country. It wasn't easy, but they did it. They sourced locally grown cotton, and they built for them.

factories in towns across the nation where they could hire hardworking locals who cared about making a quality product. And then they went about the business of gently reminding people that when you buy a piece of clothing from American giant, you're not just buying a high-quality sweatshirt or t-shirt or another pair of jeans. You're investing in a local supply chain. You're supporting communities from the Carolinas to California. And you're getting a piece of clothing that won't just survive the wash, you're getting a garment that'll get better with age. Check out their high-quality staples, hoodies, teas, denim, built to be worn year after year at American-giant.com slash Mike.

It's quality you can feel and a true American success story that you can be proud to support. Use code Mike. Get 20% off your order at American-giant.com slash Mike. American Giant, American Man. American giant American made. I always had a great respect for the unexpected. The unexpected is what will bring a wandering attention right back. And so if you do something that is unexpected,

something that is interesting and unexpected, then you really will keep your audience. there was there was again another host at QBC in my in my later years there in my later years of the first round because I I left in 1993 because there's no room for you two clowns for maybe for six months so I mean there were some things uh there was all right look you and I shared the overnights one of my most vivid memories, and I can tell the story and I still laugh at it. And I laugh as if it happened now, yesterday. I had a, this was at 2.35 in the morning. I had a Yadro statue, a 13-inch-tall Yadro statue of a woman who had flowing skirts and a basket over one arm with eggs in the basket. And there was a goose behind her nipping at her hems, nipping at the skirt. I started talking about this and you came on and you had a walk on.

And that walk on lasted for 25 minutes. I do remember that. By the way, these walk-ons he's talking about, right? The host who has the next shift comes on to the host who's about to leave and kind of teases a product that might be coming on. Paul and I would do walk-ons that really turned into something altogether different. Well, they were epic pieces of literature, actually. They were Homeric. So at the end of this walk-on, and,

you know, you're talking about interesting use of the goose there as the goose is nipping at her skirts. And we went on and on about, and then you finally said, you picked it up. You picked up this Yadro statue. And you said, I'm going to go backstage and find out just how much fun one adult male can have with 13 inches of porcelain. and I have never forgotten that line because that was your exit line. It's so important. And you took my product with. It's so important, Paul, to know when to leave the party.

This is the thing. You know, I remember around that same time, I got saddled around, I think it was 4 a.m. With an hour of precious moments. Now, precious moments. Oh, those demonic little things. Oh, God, they all. They chewed their. way out of the depths of hell with their impossibly sad eyes. These are bisque porcelain figurines that are

sculpted into these impossibly earnest tableaus. And Paul and I and any host unfortunate enough to be saddled with them, you know, you've got to tell stories, man. It's, I mean, you get eight minutes. There was this thing. I remember it was called, it was called Love Lifted Me. And it was a, it was a figurine of a little girl and a little boy playing on a seesaw, right? And the girl is up in the air and the boy is down on the ground on the other end of the seesaw. And I was about six minutes into this thing, doing my best. And, you know, the producer winds up going to the bathroom and puts another four-minute

clock. So I'm just out there without a net. And I'm just going on and on about it. And finally, I just had enough, you know, it was a tight shot of the product. And I said, look, folks, I get it. Two playmates playing on a seesaw, love lifted one into the air. But let's be honest, look at the size of the boy. He's got 30 pounds on this girl.

She's not lifted by love. She's lifted by gravity, specifically the gravity that pulled her fat friend down to the surface of the earth. Now, I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here in the middle of the night and ignore the laws of physics. This is Einstein's, this is the second rule of thermodynamics. And by the time, I think Blair was on that night, he walked back to the producer's desk. He looks at me and he says, okay, you've lost it. You've rounded the corner. And for that, bang, another four minutes on the clock.

I have to jump in here. And this, you may or may not know, I hope you don't. And I hope you never think of it again. But when I was doing the 50-50 tour in the state of Missouri, somebody had built a church and they had inside the church recreated the Sistine Chapel, Michael Angelo's Sistine Chapel. Entirely in precious moments. Talk about into the seventh ring of Dante's Inferno.

No, no. Here's the seventh ring, Paul. years later. I mean years. I left QVC in 93. I didn't talk much about it professionally because I I mean, I wasn't ashamed of it, but I wasn't proud of it either. I didn't know what to do with it. I mean, I've been fired and rehired three times. I'd been through an absolute gauntlet of weirdness and I was just trying to find my own way out in the world. Well, years later, this would be 1999 on this thing called YouTube, which I'd never heard of, somebody tells me, hey, man, you should look at this. And among other things, on YouTube right now, you can Google

me and you can see me with that precious moment's figurine. Love lifted me. It's there. And so one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, because I know you'll be able to wax eloquent is this strange sensation of stumbling across video footage of yourself. It's undeniably you. And yet, you have no memory of that moment. And so I think it's hard for civilians to understand. But when you find an image of yourself on video and you can't deny it's you, but at the same time, you have no idea what you're going.

to say next or what's going to come out of your mouth, that is chilling in a way that is somewhere between Poe and Lovecraft. I think you're absolutely right. It is chilling, and it's chilling because that's not me now. That's not, that is a different person. It looks like me, it sounds like me. I remember being like that kind of, but somebody's impersonation. me as a younger person. I have a real, a real. Some things are meant to die, Mike. Some things are meant not to be remembered.

It's David Byrne. This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. And yet, you know, when when that which is inescapably real and yet inexplicably foreign lands right in front of you, you must react. You can't just wish it away. You just have to live with it. You have just opened an epistemological jack in the box. You know that?

You really have. So what who are we? What are we doing here? And and I want to take a moment just to say something really sincere to anyone who might be listening

who remembers us as we were then doing the foolish, wonderfully idiotic, crazy things that got us both taken into John Eastman's office and told that we were not going to be there. I just, I want to say to anyone who might be listening to this, thank you. Thank you because you made my life fun. You made my life a constant creative round of what do I do next? And how do I talk to so-and-so? And what does it mean what I'm doing here? Is it at all important beyond what it is? And yes, it was important beyond what it was.

And I found this out later. We will never know how many lives we can. touched at 2 o'clock in the morning. We'll never know that. But I do know that we did. And I know that because I've met a few of them. And so for all of those who may be listening to this, thank you for giving me the opportunity to do something meaningful in ways that was never meant to be meaningful and to enjoy the hell out of doing it. My friend, this is why you're the wisest man I know in broadcasting. That's another lesson. And I learned it from you in real time. But I don't remember the exact way you couched it, but it was not long after John

Eastman told us that the ice beneath us was thin and cracking. And the sound we were hearing was the inevitability of our own demise. It wasn't long after that. That you said, we were looking at our respective paychecks, I think, and bemoaning the injustice of it all. And you said, you know, we don't work for the people who sign this check. We don't actually work for the people who pay us. We work for the people who watch us. And your understanding of the audience, not just in a gratitude way, but in that connective way you were talking about before.

That was the thing that was most interesting. That's why I would linger sometimes and watch your shift and come in early and watch you. Because, Paul, you weren't trying to sell the product. You were trying to amuse yourself. And God damn, you were good at it. You cracked yourself up in ways that left a lot of people scratching their head. You never cared if people got the joke. You just cared to tell it.

And if there was some epistemological jack in the box that went off, if there was some sudden divergence into a language that nobody knew, or if you would just wax eloquent about some arcane theorem put forth by a philosopher that no one had heard of before, it didn't matter because you were amused, and that made you interesting. It's important for anyone who does anything. to be to enjoy themselves doing it you of all people know that because as shittiest situation as you find yourself in on a regular basis and I mean that literally uh there's always a part of you with one eyebrow raised as you look into the camera it's always huh see that look at that's

Look at this. It's always there. Sometimes it's right on the surface. Sometimes it's underneath. But it is always there. Paulie, you know, during dirty jobs, I described that feeling as being in on the joke. Not in a demeaning way at all, but just there are certain people in the world who you don't, you develop an immediate shorthand with. They know what you're talking about before you finish the sentence, much like the way you're nodding right now. You get it. And, you know, dirty jobbers as a group, like any band of brothers, they get it. Well, it occurs to me that my first sensation with that feeling really was in 1990. And it came out of the overnight shift. And it was a weird amalgam of being unsure about the next product that was being brought to me because I didn't come in early enough to do any prep. So that made it kind of interesting. right? What is the next product? Who is the next caller? What will happen along the way? And being in on the uncertainty and the fun of not knowing that most people don't do that. And it's such an important thing to figure out and unpack. And I want to thank you sincerely for helping me do that, whether you meant to or not. You were a hell of a mentor for a young kid trying to figure out broadcasting.

I'm flattered. I thank you very much. I didn't do it certainly on purpose. I was just sort of there. Excuse me. I'm reminded, if I can share this with you, of one of my all-time favorite poems from the great, who I consider it to be the greatest American poet, Robert Frost. It's called Forgive Lord.

Do you know it? I know. It's only two lines. Hit me. Forgive Lord, all my little jokes on thee. And I'll forgive thy great big one on me. Of course. Now, so that's so interesting that you would go there instead of mending wall

or obviously the road not taken. I think of that often. The road not taken? Yeah. We all of us. We all of us have taken roads and not taken others. And you wouldn't be human if you didn't think about that. And both that morning equally lay.

Two fields, no step, had troddened back. I kept the first for another day. But knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I would ever go back. See, now, there is the reason why I love micro. Because he can stand in his hip deep in shit. and spout Robert Frost. That is, that takes somebody who's willing to play without a net. Said by, that's really what we're talking to.

Said by a guy who would just start speaking another language on live television in the middle of the night if he found himself bored with the doll that he was asked to present, right? Oh, dolls. Yes, there's a whole bunch of stories about dolls. You and I are going to talk more about that because I'm trying, it's like, it's like my mind in those days, Paul, it's, it's, it's all there. It's just not organized. It's like my desktop. I have these, these, these memory fragments and things are attached to other things.

And look, that's my, that's why my book is called The Way I heard it, because I can't remember it for shit. And, and, you know, again, trying to describe that weird feeling of seeing yourself on video and not knowing what's going to come out of your mouth was not so different than me living on Georgia Farm in that giant estate all by myself, working the overnights, sleep deprived, trying to figure out this new set of muscles. It was a lonely, strange, wonderful time. And, you know, thank God you were there. Well, thank you. I thank God for you, because, look, the two of us being in the same Fibber McGee's closet corporately half the time, We sort of made life livable for each other on a day-to-day basis.

And I don't know. I have so many memories, as I said, some of them are so silly that I wouldn't even go back to them except at times when I've had a lot of Jack Daniels. That sometimes works. but so many of them are the people that, some of the people that we worked with, who are interesting people in their own right. But they are the people who I talked to through that camera. And the people that I met and visited with,

literally tens of thousands of them as we traveled back and forth across America. I learned so much about this country. I learned so much about the business and our audience and what they really thought and what they really were looking for. And it wasn't the lowest price in the last six weeks. That's not what it was. They didn't give a shit. Nope.

They were looking to be entertained and to be connected with. That's what they wanted. Dirty Jobs wasn't about. the dirt or the job. It was about finding people who were in on the joke, who you recognized, maybe saw something of yourself in, or maybe who reminded you of someone who was near and dear to you. Look, I'm fascinated by this whole conversation because I really thought we were going to dive right in and talk about Joan Rivers and talk about some of the celebrities that came onto our shows because we, again, few people had a better front row seat to say sports figures than you and

me. True. You know, we met a lot of them. We saw a lot of famous people. And here we are, a couple of MOOCs who could barely hold the midnight shift down, giving full credit, not to any of the celebrities, but to the anonymous people who watched. And the few who got through. That's, well, I'm going to give you something to think about.

Michael. And that is there was the biggest reason why both you and I were consigned to the caves. And that's because they were afraid to let us out in the sunlight. Corporate was afraid. They couldn't control us. They couldn't control either one of us. And they didn't trust us. enough to realize that we controlled ourselves, that we edited everything before it came out of our mouth, that we never said anything that would be insulting or offensive beyond a certain line. Sure. Because that's the kind of consciousness that we brought to the job.

so we were not we were not trusted we were enjoyed but we were not trusted wow that is something to think about you know there there was a moment of great optimism i remember when early on you know our bonus was a serious part of our comp plan and for a time it was weighed primarily on our ability to sell stuff. But mostly it was tied to these surveys. And the viewers would take surveys, right? And they would fill these things out. And QVC was very diligent about the results. And the line that I always got was, look, the product is the star of the show, but the programmers and the product will take care of the sales. What you need to do is feed and nourish your audience. Get yourself. a good-sized audience and let us take care of the wet work. Well, I took them at their word.

And so... Silly person. I took them at their word. And whether you did or not, it wouldn't have mattered. You would have done the show you always did anyway. But you and I, from what I recall, we had large numbers of viewers. Now, our sales, unfortunately, were not commensurate. We did okay, but based on the number of people who were watching us, we should have been selling a lot more. What we were doing instead was something called broadcasting. And, you know, when they started adding all that stuff up, I believe they might have changed the metric whereby bonuses were calculated. Are you saying that we may have been the reason for that change, or at least partially?

I'm saying in the end in the home shopping business ultimately beyond all the philosophizing, it's a transactional proposition. And when I started there, QVC was still begging vendors to come. Last year, I think they did $8.5 billion. So the worm has turned. It's a fascinating part of the industry. and I just was thrilled, honestly thrilled to look back and say I spent three years there. Not as much as you, but I had a shot.

Well, and you did and you made exceeding use of it. You did extremely well. You were fun to watch. I do owe you an apology, and I'm going to apologize to you in front of whoever is listening to this. Would you do? It was right after you came back after you've been fired. And you were on stage and I was coming up after you. You were on stage, on camera, and you were seriously selling something.

And I watched for about five minutes and I thought, where the hell is Mike Roe? And I started to goof around with you. and you did your best to ignore me. And we went to a break and you said, come on, man, I'm trying to be serious here. And I looked at you and I said, ain't going to happen, Mike. And I left.

I left. And I don't know. I never knew how that came out. But I want to, I want to apologize to you for attempting to undercut what was a sincere effort to be serious about things? Well, I want to thank you for trying to do that very thing because, in the words of Travis McGee, to whom my modest book is somewhat epigrammed, be wary of all earnestness.

And, you know, sincerity is on the same street, just a couple doors down. but the best salespeople and the best people on television, in my view, they're not the most earnest people. They're the ones who, as we've said, are in on the joke. And I'll leave you with this since you brought up Frost. My favorite Frost poem is two tramps in Mudtime. Do you know the one? I don't know that. It tells the story of the narrator, Frost, is chopping wood in his backyard, and he's enjoying it.

swinging his axe and everything is working well and the wood is exploding in stove-length pipes and two tramps lumberjacks walk out of the woods and they approach him and they offer to cut his wood for him for a small bit of pay this is what they do after all and they're poor and they need the work so the poem is a rumination on what do you do when you find that your hobby that you love is somebody's other, someone else's source of making a living, which is more important? Who has the better claim to the wood? And in the end, he says something, the lines that I remember that I love the most talk about making his avocation and his vocation one eye in sight, where love and need are one, and work is play.

for mortal stakes. That's magnificent. That's what you did to me that night. You reminded me, you can be serious, but only to a point. And you can be a clown, but only to a point. You go too far in either direction.

You're either earnest or just a jerk off, right? You've got to stay in your lane. You get to choose whatever lane you want to be in. But once you choose it, be there. Vocation, avocation, one eye. Right? So he sends a tramps back in the woods and calls, his own wood. Chop your own wood, said Lincoln. It'll warm you twice.

Mr. Lincoln did say that. Of course, Mr. Lincoln said a lot of things. Or it could have been Mark Twain. No, I'm, I'm, it could have been. It might have been Mankin. Now, you know what? It might have been Henry Ford. I think it was Henry Ford. It wasn't you or I, my friend. That's for sure. No, it was not me and not you. I could talk to you all day. In fact, uh, I'm, I'm going to. So go ahead and get yourself a cup of golf? No. I'm going to let you go. But man, it's so great to see your face and hear your voice and wallow around in your homespun wisdom. Thank you. It is at least that for me. You are a dear man and a dear friend. And we go for long stretches without connecting. We probably shouldn't do that. But life will bring us where life brings us, just always know that

If you need anything, Mr. Roe, look up me in your Rolodex. For three easy payments of 2495, all the advice you can eat. Plus tax. Don't hang up. I got to upload your file. As for the rest of you, if you can't wait to hear the next chapter of my book, you can download it at Audible or wherever people download books. You've been listening to Paul Kelly, the one and only Paul Kelly, connect with his old friend, Mike Roe.

We'll be back next week to do something similar. What's the phrase, Paul? If the Lord is willing and the Creek don't rise? And the Creek don't rise, yep. All right, friends. See you next week. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more.

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