The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 202: The Leaf Blower Stays In

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

A famous woman vanishes and triggers the largest manhunt in British history. A hundred years later, Mike loses all his money in an elaborate Ponzi scheme. Coincidence? Probably. But Chuck wonders what Mike's fictitious hero, Travis McGee, might have to say about the scandal, and Mike has some opinions on the matter – opinions that are somewhat upstaged, paradoxically, by a leaf blower.

Hey guys, it's Mike Rowe. This is the way I heard it. Episode number 202. It's called The Leaf Blower stays in. Today's episode starts with the true story of a famous woman who vanished nearly 100 years ago. A mysterious woman whose mysterious disappearance launched the greatest manhunt in the history of Great Britain. Her inexplicable vanishing is followed by another mysterious disappearance, specifically the disappearance of my life's savings, which I managed to lose over 20 years ago, under circumstances that were altogether different from those surrounding the aforementioned Vanishing Lady. However, in both cases, the man best suited to unravel these mysteries is Travis McGee, a dear friend and brilliant sleuth who lives on a houseboat in

Bahia Mar, Florida, and solves mysteries of all shapes and sizes. Unfortunately, as some of you know, Travis McGee is a fictitious character, dreamed up by the one and only John D. McDonald. Consequently, McGee cannot be here today to share his thoughts on either mystery. He is, however, the subject of the chapter you're about to hear. And a big part of my conversation with Chuck Klausmeier, the intrepid producer of this podcast, who wants to know how and why a fictitious character had such a big impact on my professional and personal life. What follows is a conversation. on the nature of freelancing, safety nets, work ethic, authenticity, a code of honor,

and perhaps most importantly, the importance of leaving the leaf blower in the conversation. That wasn't the plan. Of course, no one plans on being interrupted by a leaf blower, as we were midway through our very enlightening chat. But life doesn't care about your plans. And neither do leaf blowers, which is precisely. why they should not be ignored. All of that will be made clear an episode. 202, the leaf blower stays in.

And it all starts right now. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have an HR department for better or worse. And it's also why I use ZipRecruiter whenever we need to expand. ZipRecruiter has proven themselves a million times over by helping countless employers get through the hiring process faster and more effectively than ever before. And now they have a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, the most passionate, and the most qualified candidates first. This is a huge time saver, hours and hours of save time. And it helps people like me find the people who can function in a non-traditional work environment like microworks. In other words, ZipRecruiter works for me,

and they'll probably work for you too. Post a job for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash row. And watch what happens. Odds are you'll find a human resource that just happens to be a great fit for your company in 24 hours or less. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. The smartest way to hire. Chapter 24. The mystery of the vanishing woman.

The woman checked into the resort alone. She arrived without reservations or luggage. She signed the guest book as Miss Neal and said she was visiting from Cape Town, South Africa, 8,500 miles to the south. For the next 24 hours, Miss Neal kept a low profile. Then a sharp-eyed banjo player recognized her from a photo in the paper. The banjo player knew that there was a reward for her apprehension. He called the authorities immediately.

Moments later, detectives were on their way from London, hoping Miss Neal might help them resolve a missing person's case unlike any other. The case had started two weeks earlier when a car was found on a steep in-eshoe. incline near a former rock quarry called the silent pool. The car's windshield was cracked. The headlights were still on. Inside, the police found a suitcase, a fur coat, and a driver's license belonging to one of the most recognizable women in England. Given the woman's wealth, detectives had feared a possible kidnapping, but there was no ransom note. They had questioned dozens of people, including the woman's husband. He feared that his wife might have killed herself. She's been in a terrible state, Archie said. Ever since her mother's

death, she's been deeply depressed. It's been quite terrible. The police tossed pronged hooks on ropes into the silent pool and dragged for a body. Bloodhounds were deployed. Fifteen thousand volunteers swept the countryside from Guildford to London. For the first time ever, airplanes were employed to search for a missing person. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, paid for the services of a medium. But no luck. England's newspapers couldn't get enough of the mystery. A suicide with no corpse, the headlines blared, a murder with no suspects, a kidnapping with no ransom. Across the pond in New York, the Times covered the mystery on its front page with a headline that simply read,

Who done it? But who done it wasn't the question. Not really. The real question was what happened? How could a woman as famous as that just vanish from the face of the earth? Then Scotland Yard started to crack the case. Detectives there learned that Archie

had asked for a divorce a month earlier. A request his missing wife had refused. Interesting. They also learned that Archie stood to inherit a great deal of money if his wife never returned. That was interesting, too. It gave them a motive. But, alas, Archie had an alibi. On the night of his wife's vanishing, he'd been at a dinner party with several people, all of whom vouched for his presence. Then there was another break in the case. One of the witnesses turned out to be Archie's young secretary. A young secretary who, it turned out, was having an affair with Archie.

A young secretary named, that's right, Miss Neal. Archie admitted the affair immediately, but even after prolonged questioning, he insisted that he had no knowledge regarding the whereabouts of his missing wife, at which point the detectives turned their attention to Miss Neal. What did the young secretary have to say to the detective? detectives about the mysterious disappearance of the woman whose husband she loved. Clearly, this was a woman who needed to be interrogated, and so she was. Detectives converged on the quiet resort in North Yorkshire.

Inside, the band played as guests danced and dined. The banjo players saw them and nodded in the direction of the dining room. And that's where they found Miss Neal, chatting with a few other guests over. a game of bridge. Only the Miss Neal they found was not Archie's mistress, nor was she Archie's secretary, nor was she from South Africa. This Miss Neal had no idea, no memory of how she'd gotten to the hotel, and no idea why she had identified herself as Miss Neal. But even though this Miss Neal didn't know who she was, the detectives most assuredly did, she was, she was. She was was the woman on the front page of every newspaper in Great Britain. She was the elusive subject

of what had been the largest manhunt in English history. Now she had finally been found, safe and sound and happy as a lark, 240 miles from her home at a hotel where she had checked in under the name of her husband's lover. But why? Thus began the real mystery of the Van woman. For 24 hours, the woman said, I wandered in a dream, and then found myself in Harrogate as a well-contented and perfectly happy woman who believed she had just come from South Africa. Doctors said that she had entered a fugue state, brought on by stress. In such a condition, they said, a person could black out while remaining fully conscious. But when the story hit the papers, It begged more questions than it answered.

How could the woman have gone unrecognized for so long when the entire country had been looking for her? She must have known about Archie's affair with the real Miss Neal. Was her disappearance an attempt to shame the philandering husband? Had the husband drugged her, perhaps to declare her insane and steal all of her money? Or was it all a publicity stunt, a promotion for her latest book? Everyone had a theory, but no one had a clue. Once she had been brought back home, Archie's soon-to-be ex-wife quickly regained her senses.

She divorced the husband, who immediately married his secretary, the real Miss Neal. Then she left her home once again. This time she left the car in her garage, hopped on a train to Baghdad, and had an exotic journey she'd never forget. a trip where she found adventure, inspiration, and new love. By the time she died, many years later, at the ripe old age of 85, the woman who had been at the center of England's largest manhunt was happily married, more famous than ever, and the best-selling author of all time. But here's an odd thing of all the mysteries that surrounded this remarkable woman, the true tale of her strange vanishing is largely forgotten.

It might be because, after returning from her trip to Baghdad, she refused to discuss the matter again. Even her autobiography makes no mention of the incident. In fact, her bizarre disappearance in 1926 is the only unsolved mystery in her compendium of tantalizing whodunnits. Sixty-six, in all, written by a heartbroken wife who found a fresh start on the Orient Express bound for Baghdad, a woman known very briefly as Miss Neal, who is best known today as a dame named Agatha Christie. Twenty-one mysteries of Georgia Farm revealed themselves to me all at once in 1991 while I was snowbound and trying to stay sane. I stumbled a across them in Morris Stroud study, a stack of dog-eared paperbacks by John D. McDonald.

Each one had a color in its title, bright orange for the shroud, a deadly shade of gold, pale gray for guilt, the quick red fox, and so forth. The first in the series, The Deep Blue Goodbye, was the best pulp fiction I'd ever read. More importantly, it was the book that introduced me to Travis McGee. McGee is a combat veteran turned salvage expert, a man who specializes in recovering that which has been conned or swindled from people who can't turn to the police for help. He's a modern-day knight-errant who lives in Florida on a houseboat called the busted flush. McGee works when he wants to, takes only the cases that interest him, and answers to no one. He isn't cheap, half of all he recovers he keeps for himself.

But he always delivers. He always gets the girl. He always does something admirable along the way. To this day, I talk about McGee in the present tense. I like to believe he's still down there in Bahiamar, sleeping on the busted flush, sipping Boodle's gin, waiting for the next damaged soul in need of assistance to come knocking.

For a guy living in a haunted mansion, McGee was great company. For a guy stuck on the graveyard shift at QVC, he was nothing short of inspirational. I read every book in the series and found myself yearning to live like my fictitious friend, not on a houseboat necessarily, or as a salvage expert per se, but as an inveterate freelancer, unencumbered by unnecessary obligations. Thanks to McGee, I started to question the wisdom of working at any one place for any one boss. And so, when QVC fired me once and for all, I began auditioning only for those projects that seemed doomed to fail, ones that would not tie me up for more than a few months at a time. To my delight, opportunities were everywhere.

Joan Rivers provided the first with that QVC-C-CBS hybrid, can we shop? A rhetorical question whose answer turned out to be a very literal no. It was canceled after three episodes, but no one blamed me. In fact, I was praised for my performance and quickly hired to host Romantic Escapes, a discovery show that turned out to be neither one of those things. It was canceled after the first season, but again, I wasn't blamed. I was hired to host New York Expeditions for PBS, the most for the History Channel, and Body Sense, a syndicated program. sponsored by Prevention Magazine with a weekly audience of dozens. I also hosted Worst Case Scenario,

a breathtakingly unwatchable TBS show that lived up to its name in every conceivable way. But was I concerned? I was not. I'd had a revelation. I could make real money by hosting shows that no one watched. My favorite failure was an empty shell of a show that aired exclusively at 37.

7,000 feet. American Airlines needed stuff that, in its words, looked like content. On-air TV, it was called. As the host, I was given a pass that allowed me to fly first class to any destination Americans served, then make a show about that location. But when I say show, I don't mean a TV show. I mean a piece of fluff designed to surround commercials specifically produced for Americans captive audiences. Basically, it was an airborne infomercial that took me all over the United States, but the pass also took me to Sydney, Cape Town, Amsterdam, and other exotic places, because coincidentally, or maybe not, that magic ticket stayed active for several years after on-air TV had been cancelled. This happy oversight I neglected to bring to the airline.

attention. A scout is thrifty, after all. Point is, all of those projects paid a fair wage for a few months of my time. Better yet, they gave me the freedom to audition for other kinds of work. Commercials, industrial films, narration, voiceovers. I even did some modeling work. There I was, standing in my underwear in a Boscov's catalog, holding a football, pretending to throw it, presumably to another 32-year-old man in his underwear standing on some other page. I didn't know if I was selling footballs or underpants, but I didn't care. I got paid. I auditioned for Domino's too. They were introducing a new deep-dish pizza and wanted a low voice for the ad campaign. Looking for a James Earl Jones quality, the agent said. So I channeled Darth Vader as I read the copy.

when it's got to be deep and it's got to be thick, it's got to be dominoes. Amazingly, I got the gig and ended up with $50,000 in residuals. Can you imagine, 50 grand for one silly line? The checks arrived that summer in $800 increments, filling my mailbox with thousands of dollars week after week. I had seen the light. Voiceovers were my secret weapon residuals. My salvation.

Travis McGee kept his stash hidden in the bow of his boat, but I knew better. I sent my earnings to the trusted financial advisor I'd come to think of as my friend, and built up my nest egg, a respectable safety net that allowed me to start taking my retirement in early installments, just like McGee. Do I sound proud of myself? Well, I was. While most of my friends in the industry were swinging for the fences, struggling to get that big hit, I concentrated on singles, singles that paid off in spades. By 2002, I had a financial portfolio worth north of a million dollars. I didn't own much more than a toothbrush, lived in hotels, worked eight months of the year

on projects I didn't care about, and took full and complete advantage of my magical American Airlines ticket. I was 37 years old and delightfully unencumbered. Until the day a letter arrived, informing me that the trusted financial advisor I'd come to think of as my friend had been running a massive Ponzi scheme with his client's money. It was a betrayal unlike anything I have ever experienced. Overnight, I lost everything. The safety net I had constructed was gone, and Travis McGee was nowhere to be found. 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 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.

Scrock 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, soul-deadening manual processes. This is AI built into the system that's currently running your business. Learn more at net suite.com slash Mike. And while you're there, pick up their free business guide, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at NetSuite. dot com slash mike that's net sweet dot com

don't you do three to one anymore or we're just past all that no the three to one happened i said here comes the three two one and then the three two one came up on the screen and oh i thought you were going to say in three two one or count me in or something no no remember how i pointed out to you that you can see the little three two one on the screen i can't see anything You can't see the time ticker? No. All I see is you sitting in your bedroom with some really questionable art behind your head and what appears to be a microphone with a pink wind sock on it.

Yeah. Ask me where I got the pink wind sock. Yeah. Ask me where mine went. It was yours. You stole it from my home. I did, yes. You bastard.

Yes. And just for the record, this is not my bedroom. This is the guest bedroom. This is where Rico sleeps. and that I believe is his artwork when Rico's here. I mean, that's vague enough to leave the casually interested listener wondering who the hell Rico is and what kind of relationship you're alluding to here before we even have had a moment to jump into whatever it is you want to jump into.

Oh, this is going to be a good one. I can tell already. You know who Rico is. I think we mentioned Rico in a previous episode. We did. I know we did. And Rico Colin Tony, the actor from, you know, the alien and galaxy quest. Elliot and Just Shoot Me.

He was in Stigma. He was on Hope and Gloria. He was on, gosh, there was the medical show. What was the medical show? I think you've made your point. Rico Colentoni is a working actor who you've known forever. I've known him for a very long time as well. But here he is.

This is a great example of what I think you might want to talk to me about today, I think. Freelancing, that life. I mean, that guy has been working steadily. Rico has been working steadily, not just freelancing, but with big gigs in big movies and big shows for, what, 30 years? He's more like a serial monogamist, or he was for a long period of time. He did Hope and Gloria for two years. He did just shoot me for, I think, seven or eight years, something. It was over 100 episodes.

It went syndication. Then he did flashpoint, and then Veronica Mars or Veronica Mars then Flashpoint. That's right. He's also Veronica Marr's dad. Yeah, it was something like 18 straight years where he was a series regular on a TV show. So that was less of a freelance gig than a serial monogamous type situation. But here's the point. Along with starring roles in a dozen TV shows, he had, he's appeared in many films. He's done one-man shows. He's been in plays, right? He's done all of it. And now in his mid-to-late 50s, this guy when he comes to town still sleeps in your back bedroom. He's a dear friend, man.

He's like if there were a best friend off, I don't know who would win. I've known you longer. Let me give you a hint. It's the guy who doesn't sleep in your house and actually pays you. You know, you do make a strong case. I love Rico.

He's a stand-up guy. But I don't know if you've noticed which way the money's flowing. But you might want to go ahead and bake that into your friendship algorithm. You know what? Duly noted, we should start this thing. I have many, many questions and none of them involve RICO. Yeah, but I bet they all involve money. Well, actually, the first one is I want to ask you,

how did you discover John D. McDonald and the Deep Blue Goodbye? Well, the first time I heard of them was from a guy named Mike Sisher. And Mike Sisher ran a telemarketing boiler room back in Baltimore. And I worked for this company years ago called Dial America Marketing. And Mike and I became friends. I was, I hated that job, incidentally, but paradoxically, I was good at it. And it was one of those first, one of the first great lessons, right? Just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it. Yeah. And just because you hate something doesn't mean you can't be great at it. it. Indeed. I was a good telephone salesman to my deep shame. And Mike Sisher was my boss. And one evening

over a beer, he told me about Travis McGee and recommended the deep blue goodbye. I did not follow up on his recommendation. But years later, in Georgia Farm, I serendipitously stumbled across the entire collection of Travis McGee stories. I grabbed the deep blue goodbye and entered a world from which I never fully escaped. And how long before you started to embrace the chronic freelancer idea that is exhibited by Travis McGee in the John D. McDonald's stories? I don't know. I think it was the frog in the boiling water. It was a super weird time for me. I was living in a haunted mansion, as we've discussed,

working shift work. So it's the middle of, I go to work in the middle of the night to fill three hours of live television. I come back home in this weird state of narcoleptic befuddlement, neither fully awake or asleep, and I sit out there on the giant front porch of this old Georgian mansion and start reading these great little pieces of pulp fiction about a modern day knight errant named Travis McGee, who, you know, is a Korean War veteran who helps people out of tight spots, but lives off the grid before there was even really a grid. You know, McDonald wrote that first story, Deep Blue Goodbye in 1964. And even then, McGee was railing against the advent of Big Brother and credit cards and

computers and what he called servo mechanisms and, you know, all of the modern bits of technology that made him uneasy and therefore unwilling to live in a fixed address. He lived in a houseboat at the Bahia Marina. He would take these jobs for which he kept 50% of whatever he recovered. He called himself a salvage consultant. But what he really did was he went out into the world to help people who had been conned or swindled out of their money and who had no legal recourse to recover it. And he would, on their behalf, go get their money back or go get their, in many cases, their pride back and their decency, right? Because once you've been fleeced, if you've ever been

swindled, you're just a hollow husk of a person. And so McGee helped these people get their lives back. And for his trouble, look, he was a mercenary with a heart of gold. He kept 50%. And Chuck, he would take his money and he would put it in the bow of the boat in a super secret safe. And he would live off that money for a few months until funds ran low or the next opportunity presented itself. And so that's what these books are. 22 examples of this guy coming out of his premature retirement to go back to work, to do what he was put on the planet to do. That lifestyle, as ridiculous as it sounds, I'm not going to live in a houseboat and

solve crimes, but the idea of taking your retirement early and then coming out of it from time to time to replenish the callfers, that appealed to me mightily. Dude, you're right. You're not going to be the crime solver. You could barely figure out how to get your mic working before this thing. I had to push back calls to make this happen. It's a great mystery. It's a great mystery. So, but yeah, Travis McGee, you know, were he a real person? existing in today's world would just want to eat a bullet because it's so technologically advanced and all the things that he stood for, this world is full of just the opposite. Let me say, just by the way of a shameless plug, if you go looking for these books, they're easy

to find. And they truly are the greatest examples, in my opinion, of modern great pulp fiction. Every book has a color in the title, the deep blue goodbye. a deadly shade of gold, bright orange for the shroud, the lonely silver rain, and so forth. They're just terrific examples of a time capsule as well. You're right. Travis was a man out of time. He was way ahead of his time and he was also behind the times. Behind it, yeah. But he was easy to like, easy to admire. Guy got laid like an egg, right? But never in an exploitative way. Like McDonald never let him off the hook. Every time he had a dalliance, there was always a consequence.

There was always a price to pay, you know, on a personal level. He wasn't a cad. He wasn't a rake. There was honor to his code. And he had a code. He lived by it. He was very mature. He was very masculine.

Unapologetically so. That's right. So listen, I don't think I've read all of them, but I read quite a few. When you told me about it years ago, I picked them up, ordered a few and read them. and they are great. But tell me about your recent trip to Bahia Mara. Oh, Marina. So that's where McGee lived, right?

Right. Slip F-18 Bahia Mar. He lived on a boat called the Busted Flush, which he won in a poker game. And that's really where just about every one of the stories starts. And after three or four stories, in my mind's eye, I could see him there. I could see Travis McGee sitting on the deck of the busted flush, sipping his butodles, waiting for the next little broken bird to walk up the dock with a sad story. And so we're in Fort Lauderdale doing this iguana control, dirty job story. And I walked out

of the hotel one morning right down there on the coast and just looked around and off in the distance, I see a giant sign that says Bahia Mar. I'm like, wait a minute, I'm that close to Beheumar. Of course I'm in Fort Lauderdale. So it's about a mile and a half. away and I walk to the Bahia Marina and it's there. Now, it's not exactly as I pictured in my mind's eye, but there are a lot of big boats, their houseboats, their yachts, their pleasure crafts, everything's there. I start looking for slip F18 and it's not there. I find the F doc, but there's no, it's just not there. And I'm like, oh, that's too bad. And I saw a dock worker and I'm like, hey, I'm looking for, and he says, slip F18. I'm like, yeah. And he goes, okay, what you do is

walk down there and you go inside that building, ask them, they'll show you something. And I walk down to the building and I go in there and I'm like, hi, I'm looking for slip F18. I'm like, yeah, as a matter of fact. And they said, it never existed. But the closest thing we had to it, and they gave me a number of, I think it was like Slip 602. But before I went looking for that, they showed me the plaque. And there's a plaque, it's literally a national literary landmark now. So many people have traveled from all over the world looking to see where the busted flush was moored. And so there's a plaque to John D. McDonald and Travis McGee in the main office at the Marina in Bahia Mar. And then, of course, I went looking for 602 and found it.

And it was empty. I swear, Chuck, it's so funny. The impact this fictitious character had on me, I just can't even overstated. I stood there on the dock and I could see him. I could see him sitting there with what McDonald called a tan that was somewhere between inexcusable and vulgar. Well, I know exactly. I know how much he had an effect on you. And when I saw that post on Facebook, I was like, wow, I was so excited for you because I knew that that was like, here's a guy that you really looked up to.

He's a fictional character, but you really sort of modeled a bit of your life around him. Did you not? Did you read the comments? No, no, I didn't. I said, no, I can't read. I can't read at all. I just saw the picture. That was it.

If you read the comments in that post, you'll see thousands of people who were similarly affected. He touched a lot of people. Like, John D. McDonald changed a lot of people with this character. It really is the greatest continuing character. One of the great characters, right up there with, you know, Philip Marlowe and all those other gum shoes and private dicks, right? I mean, but McGee was different. And he really did affect a lot of people. And I was really touched by the comments.

And you're right. It was not just a big fictitious escape. It was the combination of working as a tradesman with a code, you know. The tradesman thing came from my pop. I was really enamored of that, but I didn't get his skills. I wound up in the entertainment business wondering if I could work like a tradesman in this stupid industry. And as it turns out, you can. You just have to be willing to freelance.

In the midst of that, I find Travis McGee, a guy with the exact same attitude with a very different set of skills who lives on a houseboat and solves crimes, but takes his retirement in early installments. And so that was the big takeaway for me. By the time I left QVC, it was in 1993, I had my new toolbox. I could fill three hours on live television doing any number of things. I was writing, I was singing, I was doing all sorts of theater, and I was selling things in the middle of the night. I knew I could make a decent living, auditioning, and freelancing. And I also knew that I wanted to see the world and I wanted to travel and I didn't want to wait

to be 60 before I retired. That model existed in those books written by McDonald. And so from 1993 until 2001, I channeled my inner Travis McGee. I used the tools in my box to freelance as best I could in our industry. And I'll tell you, man, for a long time, well, you were there. You saw it. Sure. I was dialed in.

I had it figured out. I didn't need a lot of money. I just needed enough money to be comfortable to get a nest egg, to work when I felt like it. and to enjoy the 90s, which I did. You would show up at my house with a dark, dark tan and time to kill, you know? Yeah. But what I'm curious to know, is there a singular moment that you can point to where you decided, I'm going to be a chronic freelancer?

You know, because I know that just by the nature of the business, you know, I did the same thing for 25 years, 30 years for, I don't know how long I did it, but really up until the time I started working for you. This is the longest job I've ever had. Yeah. No, I know. Look, look, it's a really tricky algorithm because everything changes, right? Nothing static. What you're really saying is when did certainty and uncertainty get balanced, right?

When did security and insecurity get balanced? Because real freelancers, real jobbers, they come in a lot of different varieties. Some people love freelancing so much that they'll do it with nothing in the bank. That's what McGee did, right? He would bum around until funds ran low. And then he went back to work. I was not that inveterate in terms of my commitment to being a jobber. I needed a cushion.

And so for me, a couple things had to happen at the same time. I need to have a toolbox that would allow me to get more than my fair share. share of auditions, and I got that, then I needed to get more than my fair share of work, and I got that. But that still wasn't enough. I needed a nest egg. And so I squirled my nuts away, the way my dad taught me. I was very frugal. I still am in some ways, but I was very, very tight. I didn't spend much money on things. I didn't own really anything. Oh, I remember you distinctively telling me once that you got rid of everything because you, you know, somebody you read on a fortune cookie or a bazooka gum wrapper that we don't own our possessions,

they own us. Well, no, no. What happened? That moment, that's a big one. I came home from a late night in Georgia farm and I left the TV on underneath a couple of dead animal heads in the main room. And it was a big screen TV. And so when I let myself into that creepy.

old house, I could hear a voice, and it was the TV that was still on. And I walked back in there to turn it off. And on the screen was Tony Robbins, giant head with his giant teeth, right? Right. The guy had teeth like thumbs. And on that giant screen, everything looked larger. And it really made me jump. I walked in there. And there's Tony Robbins' giant head. And I walked in in just in time to hear him say, and so the more things you own, the more things own you. And it was just one of those truth bombs that like went off in my eye. You know, I was like, oh my God. And I had been, I had just been fired for the third time from QVC, subsequently rehired by

Joan Rivers, who insisted they bring me back to work with her on this show called Can We Shop? And I was really thinking, you know what? Enough. Enough of this. It's been three years. I'm not going to get any better at this job. I know everything I need to know.

And if I'm not careful, I'm going to wind up living in Georgia Farm forever. So that's when I got rid of. everything and left because I'd saved my money at QVC and I started investing my money with the trusted financial advisor who I mentioned in the book. And so to answer your question, I needed the tools to pursue the jobs that I wanted, but I also needed a cushion because I, to be honest, I just didn't have the balls to do it without a cushion. So here's my question, which came first, the chronic freelancing or the lost nest egg? Oh, the chronic freelancing.

Because, you know, I wouldn't have become a chronic freelancer had I not saved enough money to be comfortable during those two or three month periods where I wasn't working at all. And then I needed even more. It wasn't enough to have a nest egg. I needed to be an investor, right? I really went through a phase where I was very terribly interested. and understanding the markets and understanding risk. And I met my trusted financial advisor.

In the book, I'm sure we'll talk more about this later because there's another chapter that hits it harder on their head. But in the book, I call him a he, but he wasn't. He was a she. And I did that because the settlement that ultimately followed the fleecing came with a basically a non-disclosure kind of, you're not going to talk about this. Why are you talking about it? Stop talking.

Because it was 20 years ago, partly. But also, I'm not going to mention any names. I'm not going to talk about the institution or the woman who was at the heart of it. But it happened. If she was indeed a woman. She's a man, baby. She's a man, baby. Do do do do do do do do do.

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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 things. 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 made. American giant American made. I needed the security of a robust nest egg in order to fully embrace the romantic version of myself, which was a reflection of a freelancing Travis McGee who took his retirement in early installments. I needed both things to happen. And from 1994 until 1999, they did.

So it's fair to say then that you couldn't have embraced the chronic freelancing lifestyle if you hadn't had a nest egg. No, it's fair to say I couldn't have enjoyed it. I could have embraced. Look, I know a lot of people. Talk to your next Uber driver. You know, they're probably embracing some kind of chronic freelance life. or at least they're living a life where they have to do other things to make ends meet.

I was used to that. I just didn't enjoy it. How many times did I say to you back in the old days, oh, God, here we go. It's August. And I turned the page. And you know what August looks like? 30 blank squares or 31, whatever. Every single month for me began with 30 or 31 blank squares or 29 or 28 in a leap year.

And so my whole life was, well, how many of those do I have to fill in to feel okay? And the answer was usually seven, six or seven. Yeah. If I got six or seven gigs over the course of the month, I was more than fine. Now, I spent another 14 days in the month looking for those gigs. Yeah. Right. But that's the toolbox.

That's the audition process. And so once I got that in my head, I was super comfortable. I had enough money from QVC to feel okay to take the leap. And I had enough weird muscles developed in that strange world to book a lot of what I auditioned for. And once that all lined up, all the boxes were checked. And I went on a seven-year walkabout working when I felt like it, basically living something that was very opposite of microworks and very, very different from the life I'm living today. I know the freelance lifestyle, and I know what it's like to not have the nest egg while you're doing it. And I just fully expected that from the get-go.

Now, I sort of started off with a tiny, tiny nest egg because my very first job out of school was a Broadway show. And I did that for a year and a half before fully embracing the freelance lifestyle. But I didn't realize how anxious it made me until I had a steady gig. Yeah. It never occurred to me because I always expected that my life would be a chronic freelance gig just because of the nature of the business that I entered. But it was once I started working for you, I was about, how don't, they're doing some yard work here or something. I don't know. It's probably a freelancer with a leaf blower.

Is there ever a more useless tool, a leaf blower? And my father called it an urban fart. Like, I mean, talk about, I mean, I always thought of a leaf blower kind of in terms of, oh, that great line in Macbeth. Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. That's a leaf blower. I mean, all that noise, all that gasoline, all that power, for what? Yeah, it just moves this from here to there. It's a leaf, man.

It's a leaf. And dust and just dirt and, ah, useless. Imagine if everything that was ultimately responsible for cleaning anything made the same sound as a leaf blower. I would never clean a damn thing. You would never leave your house. Because the outside would be an endless, relentless cacophony. This is the kind of thing McGee would rail about, man. Right.

He would, if, I mean, leafblowers didn't exist when McGee was doing his seat. thing. But McDonald would have written pages about the looming end of Western civilization based on the existence and the application of a leafblower. Well, listen, I can't take this leafblower anymore, but I know we don't have time to just put this on pause. So I'm going to ask you a question, and I'm going to mute myself. Can you tell me what just what I wanted was about? Yeah, but what are you going to do about the leaf blower? Are you going to go out and disable him? going to close a window? Are you going to relocate? People are going to want to know how you're going to deal with this. I'm going to deal with it by muting myself and just only talking after you've

talked for a while and hopefully the leaf blower will be gone. I don't think you should do it. I think we've already established the leaf blower as a character in this exchange and to simply take steps to eliminate it. Well, that's like sweeping the leaf under the rug. People now know he's out there. And so if they suddenly hear him gone, they'll think you're doing something on a production level to eliminate the leaf blower. And that's just, that's the mute button. That's I am doing something to do it. If I do this. Yes, right. It's gone. Right. But look, production is the enemy of authenticity. If you really want people to believe you on the TV or in a podcast, then you have to either take them along, for a very produced ride like Malcolm Gladwell does, right, on revisionist history, which is terrific. Everything is calculated, careful, deliberate, and produced.

Or you do what we're doing, which I believe is technically called two dudes talking. And in the two dudes talking format, sometimes a leaf blower. Like the day's echmachina in a great play, the machine of the gods will insert itself. There's nothing you can do. Now, you can try and mute it out, but ultimately that's going to affect all the things. authenticity and people will then wonder what else you're muting, and now suddenly no one believes anything we're saying. In other words, let the leaf blower, let the leafblower play. Well, it's not an issue anymore because your soliloquy went on so long. He's done for the day.

Exactly. So tell me about just what I wanted. Single worst piece of TV I've ever done. That is saying something. Just what I wanted really deserves its own chapter at some point in time because it did connect me with a guy who became really, really important in dirty jobs, critically important. In fact, dirty jobs would not have happened without this horrible bit of television called Just What I Wanted. In 1996, maybe seven, I got a call from a woman named Nicole Perry, who happened to be

the wife of an agent that you introduced me to way back in 1991 named Sean Perry. Nicole had run into a guy named Michael Orkin at some kind of big broadcasting event. And my name had come up. And Nicole Perry said, oh, I know Micro. My husband used to represent him. And this guy, Michael Orkin, said, well, I need to see this guy. Because years ago, we worked on this thing called Just What I Wanted. And I want to hire him now for Evening Magazine.

This is in like 2001. So that's just a backstory, right? Just what I wanted was the thing. This guy Orkin, he had seen my QVC demo tape, which was just a collection of all the moments that led to my various dismissals. Sure. It was I dare you to hire me tape? Yep.

Well, he loved it. And he flew me to Memphis to host what really amounted to a half hour infomercial. And sidebar, Michael Orkin picks me up at the airport. He's driving a putty-colored Mustang, an old Ford Mustang with just the primer on it, right? It wasn't painted. It was just primer. The only thing on the hood, aside from the ornament that's worth pointing out, was an oil-based portrait of Elvis Presley. What?

Michael Orkin was obsessed with Elvis Presley. And he picked me up in this car with Elvis on the hood. He had a long ponytail. He was the opposite of a corporate dude. And he had been hired to produce a 30-minute infomercial called Just What I Wanted to air the three weeks prior to Christmas. The money for the infomercial was collected and put up by the merchants in a mall on the wrong side of West Memphis, a mall that was just one click away from being condemned.

Half of the stores had closed, but those who were still open were desperate to survive. And they wanted to produce a half-hour infomercial that really tugged on the heartstrings of the viewer and made them nostalgic for Christmas's gone by. And they wanted people to come to the mall to buy their Christmas presents. This is the idea. And Mike Orkin is in charge of this thing. So we go to the mall. I forget what the mall is called, but there's a cameraman with this guy named Rob Mayberry. and I just start talking to people to try and get their great Christmas memories, right?

We figure if we can get people talking to me on camera about their great Christmas memories, we can then intercut it with sappy, schmaltzy, nostalgic footage of Christmas's gone by. So it's like a mix of a Christmas story, that movie, right, the way that makes you feel with a shameless plug for a mall who's trying to stay solvent. Well, it went horribly wrong. Every single interview was just so depressing. I mean, these were poor people in this very poor mall, doing what shopping they could. And it was very depressing. And it was so depressing that we didn't, we just didn't know what to do. I couldn't get a single meaningful, nostalgic exchange from anyone. And it just got worse and it got so bad. We all just started laughing. At one point, I remember, I walked up to a woman. and Orkin said, you know, ask them about their favorite films, their favorite Christmas movies. So I thought maybe, you know, we could have a nostalgic conversation about Miracle on 34th Street or it's a wonderful life. So I walk up to this woman, I tap her on the shoulder. She jumps a foot in the air.

She doesn't know who I am. He's a guy with a stick microphone. There's a camera in her face. I'm like, hi, I'm Mike. And we're doing this show about our favorite Christmas memories. And she's like, uh-huh, uh-huh. What do you want? I'm like, oh, I was just wondering, you know, what's your favorite Christmas movie. Do you have one? There's so many great ones, don't you think? And she looks at me and blinks, and she thinks for a minute. And she says, well, I guess my favorite holiday film would have to be, oh, let me think. I guess it would have to be seven. As in the seven deadly sins? Yes, as in Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, where Paltrow's head winds up severed and in a box. Spoiler of all. Spoiler of. Spoiler alert. I'm saying, this is not a Christmas film. But in her mind, she was thinking, what's the last

movie you saw during the holiday? So I'm like, my God, woman, you go home and you watch seven for Christmas. And so Orkin and I just start laughing so bad. Long story short, all this, these horrible interviews are cut together and they go on the air. The mall goes out of business, of course. Nobody comes to the mall or buy anything. It was just, it was so. If you try to sell stuff to poor people. I mean, honestly, people need money to buy things, don't they? You would think. You would think. Anyway, I left Memphis. So I stayed at the Peabody Hotel. And Mike and I that night went to an REM concert. He had tickets through a local radio station. And I wound up meeting his girlfriend, a woman named Lisa. Mike and Lisa wind up getting married years later. And when Mike goes,

somehow he's inexplicably promoted through the ranks and becomes the executive producer of Evening Magazine in San Francisco, California. And when he goes to look for a host for that show, that's when he circles back to Nicole Perry and says, wait a minute, I remember Mike Roe. He was the worst best host I ever had. He would be great for Evening Magazine. So Nicole calls me and I come to San Francisco and I wind up getting that job from a guy who no longer has a ponytail and no longer drives a Ford Mustang with Elvis Presley painted on the hood. He hires me to do Evening Magazine. And it's during that time that I go into the sewer and come up with an idea called somebody's got to do it, which becomes dirty jobs. I remember you showing me the tape that you'd made.

And it wasn't about the sewer. The sizzle reel or whatever that you made, I guess. to try and sell the thing was the artificial insemination of a horse or a cow. It was a cow. And my gosh, I just could, you know, when your arm is shoulder deep into the rectum of a cow and pulling it out. And I just remember you sitting there smoking a cigar and talking about, you know, the cow doesn't call anymore. And I thought, this is the weirdest thing I've ever thought.

I've ever seen. It was the funniest thing I'd ever seen. And I thought, they're never going to put this on TV. Oh, no, we got it all on, dude. We got it all on. Michael Orkin turned out to be the guy who just said, go for it. He didn't care. I mean, we were doing a daily show.

Evening magazine was a daily show. Right. Which is like, that's a barking dog in the backyard. Yes, every day. You have to get something on the air. So, you know, I used to say to him, that show went on at 7, it would be 645, and we'd still be in the edit bay. It's like that scene in broadcast news where Holly Hunter's running through the building with the tape.

You know, get it at the last second and it goes on the air. I'd call down there and say, hey, are you close? He goes, yeah, yeah, we're close. And I said, how does it look? Does it look any good? And he would say, better than good, it's done. Done, yes. And that's what he said that night, that first one went on the air.

The sewer was the first one. And then it was the artificial insemination. And the other thing, Chuck, you know, Evening Magazine was so amazing because we were under the umbrella of news, which means we didn't need permission. We didn't need releases. You didn't have to clear anything, right? We didn't have to clear music.

Wow. So while I am artificially inseminating this cow, while I'm shoulder deep in the womb, injecting the sperm from, a horse or a no no we wouldn't do that from a bull you never as a rule you never want to put horse semen in a cow no no it's just wrong you don't know what you get no you know a very mess a very fast running lactating creature um utterly ridiculous so yeah we were playing love as a many splendid thing you know you can never get the rights to do that and you're right after the insemination scene I sat there covered in excrement and semen, smoking a cigar, talking to the cow, like in the warm aftergluck.

Yeah, pillow talk. Anyway, I majored in English for a few years before I finally decided, right? This all goes on the air. It all goes on the air. And all of that crazy, silly, hot mess of stuff became dirty jobs. And none of it would have happened but for a ponytail guy picked me up in a Ford Mustang with Elvis on the hood. and ask me to interview desperate people in a desperate situation at a wonderful time of the year, only to learn that the great underrated holiday movie of all time turns out to be seven.

Well, actually, that's a pretty good place to wrap it up, I think. You alluded to the fact that you lost your nest egg in this chapter. That'll come up out later in future chapters. If you'd like to get all the chapters all at once, you can pick up the way I heard it by Micro at any bookstores. Ask you what? No, I said, that's me. Oh, that is you, yes. I don't feel like you really introduced me in this one.

So who knows, there might be people who have forest dumped their way into this right now. And they're completely baffling. This is like, you know, I mean, this thing starts like 10 minutes into the podcast. The conversation does, right? All I know is every day I get emails from people who have found this podcast. for the first time and are desperately trying to understand what the actual hell is going on. Sometimes you're reading mysteries in a very presentational, deliberate way. We had a really extended conversation on flatulence that nobody was really expecting.

No. But you know what? I think people are liking. I don't know what you're reading, but people seem to like this hot mess of, don't let this go to your head, but I just read a long thread on Facebook the other day of people saying, And your guests are fun, but really you should just talk to Chuck because he seems to understand all the truly screwed up crap you've done. And that's who we want to hear from, they say. Well, I am flattered. My head is swollen. And I appreciate all that. I've read nothing but great stuff.

There's been a lot of great reviews on Apple, on Spotify. And yeah, leave us a review. Yeah, yeah. Good for us. Self-praise stinks. reviews do help. If you feel so inclined, yeah, leave us a review, only if it's a good one. And if you really want to treat yourself, and this truly is a shameless plug, but the deep blue goodbye still holds up. What McGee did on a literary front, what McDonald did with McGee was truly transformational. Carl Heisen, in fact, another great writer wrote the intro years ago when all these came out in paperback and a new printing. And he sums it up. better than anyone, I think. You know,

McDonald and McGee had the same effect on him as they did on me. And look, these are dated, folks. They're politically incorrect. I don't even know that you could get a lot of this on the shelf nowadays, but they're wonderful time capsules of a Florida that a lot of people never knew existed. And it's just a terrific character study. If you really want to wallow in the cognitive dissonance of a man who is constantly at war with his base images, but driven by a code of honor. It's just a great rumination on what it means to try and do the right thing in these uncertain times. And it's just so damn well written. You'll find yourself going back and rereading paragraphs simply because of the prose. It's that good. Having said that,

the way I heard it is also a fine read and available wherever books are sold. I was wondering, who is John D. McDonald's? Never mind. You know what? What? If his estate were to call. And, you know, because John died in like, I think, 97 or 98, if they were to call.

And if they were to say, obviously, Mike Roe is a fan. And we would like to hear the great John D. McDonald's books on tape as read by one of his greatest fans. I'm just saying it's not that I'm trolling for work, but I would do that. I'll troll for work. Let me read the stories and then you will play the voice of Travis McGee. So every time his whatever he says appears in quotes, we hear your voice instead of mine. Wow. Huh?

I do. You know what? Let me leave you with this. Gentle listener, go Google Travis McGee quotes and just read some of the stuff that came out of like the quick red fox and a deadly shade of gold. Look look for the quote where McGee talks about the things he is most suspicious of, the things he is most wary of. It's a long paragraph that touches on everything from credit cards to, I mean, birth certificates, right? Virtually everything. But it ends with earnestness. Yeah. Above all things, I am wary.

of all earnestness. And if you have read the book, you know that that is one of the epigrams that kicks the whole thing off. And an epigram, for those of you not quite familiar, is that little sentence in the beginning, it's kind of like a quote or something, that somebody else says that you think is really kind of good for the book, and so you put it in there. Study show, when Chuck breaks out the Baltimore accent, it probably is time to wrap it up. So thank you again for listening. Thank you to our sponsor. Thank you. Thank you. And, you know, that just made me want to go back to Baltimore myself, maybe, you know, have a couple National Bohemian beers, maybe go down the ocean.

Get a crab cake or two, you know what I'm saying? Just whatever you do, hon, don't throw up in a zinc. Oh, no, but that's where you wash the dishes. All right, you lunatic. I'll talk to you next week. And scene.