The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 433: Coffee with Mom—That Toy Really Sucks

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Peggy Rowe, a.k.a. Mike's three-time NYT bestselling mom, is back for a check-in. In this episode you'll hear about the horrors of hoarding, books you'll never read, dancin' chicken, crab pickin', and a Mother's Day story about a toy that really sucks!  

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Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by lead bank member FDIC. A cup of coffee with my mom. Mom was just telling me a story about this hoarder that our family knew very well, who needed help. But how do you decide? Like, when are you helping, Mom? And then when are you enabling? It was really difficult for us because I knew him well.

You know, he was employed. He had a good job. But he was just a hopeless hoarder. His house was filled, his car was filled, his van was filled. He had bought three storage sheds for his backyard. They were filled. He kept saying, well, I'm going to start getting rid of some of this stuff. He couldn't do it.

He was mentally ill. And when he called us and said, I can't get into my kitchen. I've taken off my pants with the bulging pockets and I've turned sideways. I can't inch my way through the clutter in my kitchen. I can't get to my bathroom and my bedroom. I can't fit in my car anymore. Could I just spend a couple of nights with you and then I'll come back in the daytime and get rid of some of this stuff?

Can I just bring some of my stuff with me when I come over? at which he would have done. I didn't know what to do. I did write to a friend, and he's a minister, actually, to see if he could help. But in the meantime, I said, I am so sorry, but we're leaving in the morning. We're going to Florida. You know, sorry about that. Lyer.

I didn't know what else to say, because I knew if he came, he would not leave. He was not capable of leaving. You know, I'm not trained to deal with mental illness. But you certainly know how to lie when your back's against the wall. But I did put him on to this mutual friend of ours who was a minister. Oh, good. Oh, really? Wow.

Awesome. Are you guys still friends? Well, he passed away tragically because of his hoarding. He couldn't get to his medication in the refrigerator. Oh, God. Look, I don't even know how to. It's a horrible. It is horrible, but, you know, when it gets to the point where you can't get through your own kitchen without taking your pants off, somebody's trying to send you a message, surely.

I'm just trying to wrap my head around that, that his pockets were so full, like he was hoarding in his pants as well, right? He had cargo pants, and the sides of his legs bulged out as far as the pants would allow. and all of his pockets were filled. Any idea what was in them? Oh yes, balls of string, tape. Oh, golly, various sundry things. I don't remember now, but I remember all of that string that he had. He couldn't throw anything away.

He was powerless to throw away an envelope that had a canceled stamp on it. Oh, my goodness. I have pictures that it's just something. That's a sad story. And Mike, your dad, oh, hi, Freddie. I just wanted you to say goodbye to him because I'm going to go ahead and throw him out now with all the other things that are just making me crazy over here. He's looking at you, you know.

I know. You haven't seen a boy in a while. He wants your approval. Michael, don't let him do that. I don't care anymore. I love the dog. He's 12 years old now. If he wants to lick me in the mouth, I don't care.

I don't care. I mean, I do care a little bit, but obviously not enough. I want to talk about, I mean, since we're on this weird subject, isn't it crazy how, like, when you were 30 or 40 or 50 was hoarding, I mean, I know it was a word, but was it a thing? Did anybody talk about it? Like, all of us, I mean, this couldn't have just happened in the last 30 or 40 years, but it got a name. We gave it a name. And shortly after it had a name, it had a TV show. It had a TV show. And it damn near had a whole network, Chuck.

Hoarders was a huge show. And many, many hoarding shows spun off of that. You know, and I can't prove it. But I think it might have been another one of those that Dirty Jobs helped kickstart. We did a segment back in season one. It wasn't about hoarding. You know, it was about this woman who had a dirty job. and I wound up going back to her house for whatever reason in the course of filming.

And her house was just, it just looked like a garage, like that had been completely overfilled, but every inch of the house. And even back then, this was 2004. Like the first thing that popped into my mind wasn't, oh my gosh, we got ourselves a hoarder. It was just, man, this place is a mess. But now here we are. Horting is a thing. it's a mental condition, obviously.

I'm not making light of it. I'm just saying that isn't it odd how once you name a thing, there it is everywhere you look. Well, I'll tell you one thing I did. I did call protective services, and I talked to them about this person, and they said, oh, yes, that was something that they could take care of. So they went and picked him up and committed him temporarily to an institution that could have helped him. He called me from there and he said, please come and get me.

He didn't know that I had done this. And he said, please come and get me out of here. These people don't know what they're doing. It took them two hours just to go through my pockets. And he was blaming them for that. He just, you know, he was hardly coherent. And I said that I couldn't do that, that perhaps they could help him do

what he had committed to do to get rid of a lot of his stuff, you know, and he hung up. How do you think it happened? But let me tell you what happened. some well-meaning people that he knew from a church went and got him out. And they thought they were doing what was right because he called and he begged them. You know, they shouldn't have done that, but they thought they were doing the right thing.

There it is. That's the message for the season. it's your best intentions, right? You can't always know, and it's such a torture. I know we talk about this a lot because being a best-selling author now, three plus times over, people ask you for advice, and they ask you for encouragement, and it's always fun to give, but you don't always know who you're talking to.

And when encouragement becomes enabling, When help becomes hurt, how do you know? Here is one more layer of this story. He had an offspring who lived out of state. You mean like a child? A child. I don't want this person to hear this and know that I'm talking. So I'll just call.

Yeah, but I mean, we just, for the clarity, we're staying within the same species. Let's just call his offspring a daughter. Let's say he has a daughter, had a daughter, who lived out of state. And protective services got in touch with her and asked for her help. She couldn't. She said, I can't do it. I have been dealing with this my entire life. My mother passed away, partly because of this problem.

She had lost a sibling, possibly. because of this problem. Their whole family had been really messed up. And she said, I just can't deal with it. I'm sorry. I'm not trained to deal with this, just as I had said, this mental illness. I can't do it. I'm sorry.

I have children. Can't expose them. So she received criticism for this from people here that I know. Yeah. But should she have? When you think about it, she had been dealing with that issue her entire life. Well, I mean, certainly her adulthood. God, it's so complicated. You know, when a person you love and who loves you asks for a drink and you know for a fact that they've struggled with alcohol, you don't give them a drink simply because they love you or because you love them. you can't do that. But you also have to be in a state of mind at that point when you understand that you're not dealing with a desire. You're dealing with a compulsion. Now, are you dealing with a disease? Well, a lot of people say yeah, a lot of people say no. Chuck, I would love for you to find some, like an expert on hoarding. I had no idea. We were going to talk about this, but I'm fascinated by it because I don't know if it,

if it really comes to you in the form of a disease or if it metastasizes, like where does it start? Should I be worried that my entire desktop is cluttered with icons because I don't like to file things and I really don't know how and I don't really care to learn or that my closets are overfilled? Like when do you, people have these spring cleaning rituals, for instance, that are so therapeutic, you know, because once you get used to getting rid of stuff, you get rid of more stuff. That all seems human and normal, but I really have no idea when things evolve or devolve into some

kind of illness. When you step over that line, well, I think it's when you open your front door and newspapers are stacked up from the floor to the ceiling. Yeah, when you can't find the line to step over. It's just a narrow pathway through your house and everything is junk around. Well, Chuck, that is exactly what happened. I've known this man for years of probably 28 years. And through the years, he has invited us to his home for certain things. I was shocked when I went into his house. I went in the front door, and there was a narrow pathway, as you describe it, through boxes.

and clutter, a narrow pathway into the kitchen or some room where this expert was going to teach us how to do something. So it was gradual because you used to be able to get in through the front door, and then that pathway gradually closed in. That's fascinating. Yeah, it is. And I know of someone here at the home who was hoarding. and he had a problem with something. Something was wrong with the electric or the water or something, and he had to call in general services.

And when they came in, they are trained to look for things. They might come in and you think, oh, they're just here to clean. They're just here to unclog the drain. But these people are trained to look around to see if there are problems that need to be dealt with. So when this person came into his apartment and saw all of the clutter, he realized this man can't even get to the pool cord if he needs help. And so they had a meeting and they told him, either he cleared out his apartment or he would have to leave. So fortunately, he had friends who helped him to clear out his apartment. I'm just so interested in the day, in the moment where you go from a messy person with a cluttered house to a hoarder to somebody who is suffering from a disease.

It's an environmental kinetic thing. You can look at it and you can say, okay, that's a mess. That's messier. That's super messy that now you've just entered. Like is it one, like a box too far, a bit of clutter too much? And then all of a sudden it looks like, oh, well, clearly this person's, you know, lost their mind. But they haven't. They're a frog in the boiling water and it progresses.

You know, my friend, Marianna, Mike's wife. She's had a business for years. I don't know if she still has it. But this happened about, I think maybe 20 years ago, she just started noticing there were so many people that she either knew or had access to that were in this space, suffering from some level of this problem. She started a business called Clutterflies, where she would come to your home and spend as much time as it took just to get you decluttered. And I remember her telling me once, you know, it's like sometimes it really is just a question of people who took

their eye off the ball and now they're just kind of disorganized and messy by nature and they just need some help. They just need a clean slate and then they can do a better job of keeping their basic area livable. And then there are people who are beyond help. And it's just fascinating and difficult to know at a glance which one you're dealing with. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. nobody's doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA.

And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. join the skilled trades movement, support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see too how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's

absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skills usa.org slash Mike. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S. Skills USA. Yeah, these people have to be willing to declutter. And if you are truly a hoarder, you are incapable of doing it. because dad and a couple of other guys who knew this person went over to his house one day and said we're here and they took big trash bags and they said we're here to help you because he said he wanted to declutter sadly they were unable to talk him into parting with anything he had canned goods on the kitchen table that were years expires

He said, no, they don't really expire. They just put those dates on there, but you can still use that stuff. A rubber band. Well, no, I might need that rubber band. So he'd stick it in his pocket. Oh, that was something else in his pocket, Chuck. Big balls of rubber bands. Oh, what else?

Old newspapers. His house was cluttered with old newspapers. That's common for hoarders. I don't know why, but that's common. He said, well, because there might be a little. coupon in there that I could use. They left that day without being able to get rid of stuff. This is the area.

Here, let me turn this light over here. This is my office, okay? Now, when we record, I'm over here. It's not terrible. It's not great. But, you know, I got my lights set up and I can sit here and I can talk. But right on the other side of this partition, which I have up just to control the sound, I got stuff that just comes in the mail.

And it's just, it's driving me crazy. It's just stacks of stuff. And every time I come over to try and tidy it up, the same thing happens. I look at a thing and I'm like, well, you know, somebody sent me that book. You know, they sent it to me. And in my case, half the time, they wrote it. So he wrote a book and they sent it to me. And now I've got a stack of like 30,

these books, I'm never going to read them. There's just no way I can. And then between the books are letters and explanations and pictures. And I can't tell you how many times I've gone over there to say, okay, this is the day. I'm just going to get a bag because I said, I know what's going to happen. I'll snap and I'm going to throw it all away. And I'm going to have a fire. I'm going to have a fire. And then I'm going to feel okay about it. But that's not normal either. It's like, why can't you just, you know, manage your stuff? You know, look, you've got three sons, and all of us are somewhat afflicted to varying degrees with whatever that is, and maybe it's just as simple as procrastination meets a bit of laziness,

meets a bit of distraction, or maybe we're nuts. Or maybe you know that somebody cared enough. about whatever they sent, that they wanted to share it with somebody who is very approachable. And you are, Mike. People trust you. You're a very trustworthy person. So why not send you something that means a lot to me? People send me stuff too, not on the same scale that they send you, because I don't have as many followers, but they do. I have a big box of books. Was that like a passive-aggressive cry for help or something? What just happened there?

I don't know. Tell me. Can you work up a tear? Because I don't have as many followers. No. And I'm happy for that because I'd have a bigger box full stuff. Oh, you know. But I've been a writer forever and I had so much rejection.

And these people who send me their books have had a lot of rejection. and they feel that maybe I can help them, or maybe if they just get an encouraging word from me and believe me, I've been there. I know that. I can't throw any books away. And I do read an occasional chapter here and there. Yeah. It's heavy.

Do you remember a book by a guy called O'Brien? I think it was Tim O'Brien. It was a big deal back in the 80s, I think it was called, the things they carried. Oh, Dad just read that book not too long ago. You're kidding. Yeah, it was a wartime book about the things that soldiers carried. And I know this because Dad loves to read aloud.

And I'm here. Is that a proclivity, a condition, a compunction, an ailment, disease? Some writing is meant to be read aloud. I have to say that. People tell me that my books are so good when shared with some. People just tell me that are so good when read aloud. I was one of those people. Yeah. And I think Chuck may have told you that too. Hey, Mike, I recently wrote something that I think you might like. It's a story that happened years ago when you were growing up. And you had two younger brothers, which you still have, but they were younger. Younger. Still brothers, if you're keeping school. And still younger.

And still younger. Not young anymore. But no longer growing up. But anyway, it's about a purchase that we made for our family. Do you remember Kirby? Oh, my God. Please tell me you've written this noun. I have written the story and I'd love it. It's filled with humor.

This is the story of a vacuum cleaner, at least on the surface, named Kirby. Well, Kirby was like the state-of-the-art manufacturer of vacuums once upon a time. Okay. And we had, prior to that, a Hoover, which Mom used to joke, you know, we got. from the Hoover administration because it was ancient. It was originally owned by Herbert. It was the opposite of a vacuum, this thing. You'd push it around and it made sounds.

And air rushed around, but I think it was pushing the air out. Because crap and dust just flew everywhere. It just didn't pick up any dirt at all. Anyway, sorry, Mom, going. But I love this story. So one day, John was on the phone and he was moving his feet around the floor, scraping his feet. And he scraped up a pile of dog hair because we had two dogs who shed like nobody's business.

And we lived like animals. And we lived like animals. And when John... But we just lived in a giant hairball. And when John... You were collecting the hairballs of the animals, right? Yes. And we put them in our pockets.

In your pockets, yeah. Yes. No, we filled pillows with them, really, and slept on them. All our clothes were made of dog hair. Well, that seems economical to me. Yes. That's not a bad idea. And we wove them into blankets.

But anyway. And ate the dogs and supplied the army with blankets. John was like not angry, but who lives like this? Look at this hair. And so, of course, I was a lot. little on the defensive side, and I said, you know where we keep the vacuum cleaner. Feel free to use it. And that's what he did right then.

He went to the closet, got out the Hoover. Now, in defense of Hoover, I don't mean to criticize Hoover, but this had been around for like decades. This vacuum cleaner sucked. Not at all. Not at all. So he vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed. And very little happened.

And I said, wait a minute, here's how you have to do it. So I laid it over on its side. And as he held it on, turned on the button, I fed the hair into the moving rollers on the bottom. I'd pick up a handful of hair, put it in the roller, and it would disappear. She's not making this up. I stood there. this is the house I grew up in. It's not like we didn't.

It's not like we didn't have appliances. It's just that they weren't in a state where they could be operated, you know, in the intended way. So you literally, to use our vacuum, you had to lay it on its side, pull the crap out of the rug, and jam it into the roller. And you should see how the blender worked. I would have no power. You had to just drop the eggs in or whatever, put the lid on it and then just shake it up and shake it like you were making them. Martini. The toaster? Well, it was great as far as toasters go, but it didn't generate any heat. So what you had to do? Two dick lighters, you know, on either side of the bread.

We just put the whole thing in the oven, turned into bake 450, then put the bread in the toaster. Boom, Bob's your uncle. Michael, you do exaggerate. But the, but the Kirby... Why my story is better than yours? So the Hoover part of the story. That is true. The hairy part. It is a hairy story for sure. So this is a Mother's Day story.

For Mother's Day, John happened to see an advertisement on the bulletin board where he taught for a Kirby vacuum cleaner. Yeah. And so. And it was expensive. Like it cost real money. It costs $100. And on a school, I didn't work. I stayed home with the children.

What year was this? What year? Well, I think Phil was about five. And he was born in 67. Yeah, so this was early 70s, 70s, 73, maybe. Gotcha. $100 a lot of money. A lot of money.

Oh, my gosh. It was like a mortgage payment. John was more proud of that Kirby when he brought it home. You would have thought it was gold. And we all stood around and our mouths gaped open. We oohed and ah, the kids had never seen anything like it. I mean, it was like Christmas morning. Well, anyway, so I've written all this into a story.

And I call it a Mother's Day story. I was going to put it in my book, but maybe. You know what? Send it to me. Send it to me today. I will record it. Right? I'll read it, like the old big blue purse thing that got,

got this whole thing started. And we'll just put it up, either with the podcast or right after it or we'll figure out something to do with it. It gets very dark, though, remember, Mike? It gets super dark. Is the audience up to that? This story is. Well, without giving too much away, what I can tell you, Chuck, is, I mean, we've never seen

the old man spend money on really anything ever. And so including toys. Like we we didn't have toys at that point. Like not not traditional toys, right? But was it a ball of hair or whatever with a leash on it? Right? We'd get like maybe 16 pieces of Lego and do your best. You know, we had one Lincoln log, which is difficult to build much with.

But you connect the Lincoln Log and the logo. You use the hair. You use the hair and the Lego. Yeah, you tie it together. Link and log together. Yeah. So, like, we did the best we could. We didn't know any better.

We thought, you know, this is all part of, you know, expanding your imagination. But this vacuum cleaner was better than a toy. It was a beast. It was a machine. A true machine. A true engineering marvel. It could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, man. It was amazing.

And, like, once we saw it, action. Like, we couldn't wait to, like, my brothers and I were fighting over who gets to vacuum. Wow. And then it was like, oh, my God, it'll lift up a pillow. It'll lift up a ball. It's the attachments. When they discovered the attachments, it was Christmas morning. I'm telling you, it was a weapon, it was a tool, it was pure fun. I'm guessing some of your brothers got some hickies somewhere on their body. And they might have been pulled upwards somewhere. First day.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. There were hickies all over the place. I mean, it was just crazy. Like, everything in the house needed to be tested against Kirby and the attachments. It had a hose, right? The hose had these different attachments. I know it's all very common today, but in 1973, it was literally like the

front NASA stuff. Yeah, it was a time directive on Star Trek. An alien came and left a device from the future on our porch. And now we were just trying to figure out all the different things that could happen. Well, look, I don't want to screw up the story because I'll be curious, Mom, if you heard it the way I heard it, if we remember it the same way. Yeah, that's good. Okay. Probably, I mean, the facts are there, but interpretation.

will probably vary because you saw it from a, what, 11-year-old boy's eyes through your eyes. Oh, Chuck, it was, honestly, I didn't know what to expect next. They wanted to vacuum the curtains. They pulled the curtains right off the wall, and the curtain rod came right off the wall. They just about destroyed the house. I mean, and the poor, the poor dogs. Well, the one dog was 50. pounds, it lifted her hind end right off the floor.

Right off the ground. But the other dog had a real thick coat. She was part shepherd. She loved it. Oh, my God. She thought she died and went to heaven when they put that on her back. She loved it. It scrubbed the hair, pulled the hair right off of it, not all of it, of course, just the loose hair.

One of it. We would vacuum the dog. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise. And Ben's absolute determination to keep it has not only propelled good ranchers into the top tier of meat delivery companies, it's fueled enormous awareness among meat eaters like me that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported meat to be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switch to good ranchers. If I'm being honest, though, I doubt that I would have stayed this long had the

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get good ranchers now. It was amazing. The hair never stopped coming off the dog, but the dog never went totally bald. Bald. Right. But we sucked a lot of hair off that dog. We really did.

I'm so curious as to how it went dark. Oh, God. Well, I want the darkness was. I don't want to wreck it, but I'll just tell you that in our particular home, which was a haven for all creatures, great and small, cats, all sorts of creatures. And not all of them take to being vacuumed equally. Okay. Is Peter going to get involved in this story once it's over? Yes.

I hope not. I hope not. Yeah. It won't be the first angry letter I've gotten from that particular angry acronym. But this is a screwed up Mother's Day story. But since you've written it, since Mother's Day's Round the Corner, send it, I'll read it. Done. It was such fun to write.

I couldn't stop laughing when I wrote it. And I called your brothers to see if they remembered it. And of course, they remembered it. remembered it. We're all still in some form of therapy for that whole decade. I can't wait. I cannot wait for this story. We had horses. We were boarding horses back then. We had dogs. We had cats. Phil was like a, even at that age, he was only like five or six years old, but he was like Steve Irwin. He'd come home. He'd bring home fish out of the creek. You'd bring home lizards, frogs, all sorts of things. We had two turtles that walked our kitchen floor. That must have taken a while because they're pretty slow.

Well, we had a big kitchen too. Oh, my golly, crayfish. We had a pan of crayfish under a bed. One night, John and I woke up in the middle of the night. And we heard scratching, scratching. I said, what the heck? And John looked under the bed. There was a big pan of crayfish.

And little Philip had put them there because he said, I was afraid they might wake up in the middle of the night and miss their mommies and daddies. So I wanted him to be close to you. So I put him under our bed. Oh, a snake. Phil brought a big black snake into the basement, wrapped around his arm.

And then you know what? He's still an animal person. He hasn't changed that much. Yeah. Yeah. Still loves animal. Anyway, Mike, I'm so glad to see that you're up and about. Because you were a little bit under the weather.

You know, there's so much crud going around. And yeah, I got back from Clint Hill's funeral and didn't feel bad, but just didn't feel great. And then every day, it's just a little worse, a little worse. And then it's like, oh, you know what? You're sick. And then you take your temperature. And it's like, what? 103.

So yeah, that's high. It was high. And I spent the weekend in bed and now I feel exponentially better. I'm so glad. Are you coughing? Because when I had that, it left me with a residual cough that just lasted for a long time. I know. I was so worried about you.

Was it COVID or do we even care anymore? Is that even a polite question? We both tested positive for COVID in the first week. of April. April 1st for me, and I think maybe April 3rd or fourth for your father. So we did have COVID, but very different forms of COVID. We had different symptoms. You had the kind that you can only get after you've been vaccinated and boosted three times. That most rare form of COVID reserved for people who did everything they were told to do, but nevertheless have it visited upon them. For reasons, no one is, it's just unknowable. It's just a fluke, I suppose. I don't know,

but I do know that I miss the latest booster because I had COVID. And they said, I don't think you need it. Don't think about it. Maybe in a few months you might decide to go there. But it's funny, I wrote about it because I am right. And I talk about our lives. Well, I got the greatest comments from readers who wanted to tell me what to do to stay healthy and how to avoid coughing. It was so funny. One lady said, oh, sip pineapple juice. That'll do it.

That does it for me every time my coughing stops the minute I sip pineapple juice. Another woman said, sprinkle salt into the palm of your hand and lick it. and she said by the time you lick up all that salt you won't even want to cough the cough will be gone I didn't do that because I try not to you know ingest too much salt um oh my golly and for the coughing oh wasn't there something about wrapping your oh my gosh somebody told me to slice more than somebody I mean a lot of people said oh yeah yeah that works that slice a raw onion, very thin, and wrap it on the bottom of your feet. Put it on the bottom of your feet and wrap saran wrap around it.

Oh, my. I'm doing it as I'm talking. And that will help. Well, don't try to go to the bathroom and walk on onions because you'll get bruised feet. And then somebody told me, oh, this is easy. you just get Vicks vapor rub and you rub it all over the soles of your feet just before you go to sleep and then put your socks on and you won't cough all night long. I did that. I did do a little coughing too.

I mean, I might have done more if I hadn't tried that. Yeah, but that's like saying, you know, my head still hurts after I took the aspirin, but it would have hurt so much more if I didn't. you know. COVID would have been so much worse if you hadn't gotten the boosters. That's right. We got a much easier ride. You know what? I know this tweaks a lot of people, but I'm sorry. I'm sorry. If we're living in an age where the most enlightened minds in the world keep telling us to take more and more boosters and everybody keeps getting the same disease over and over and over again, then I'm not sure how bananas it really is. to wrap your feet in bananas or to sip pineapple or eat onion or rub salt on your hand. I don't know how to think about people who have to take their pants off in order to walk through their kitchen on account of all the clutter. I don't know if I should just set them off in Crazy Town while the rest of the population is lining up to get booster number 12.

While they're infected with the very thing it's supposed to prevent, I just don't know. how to think about it all, Mother. Please say something wise for those dozen or so people still listening. I do have one reader who raises goats, and she wrote to me and suggested that I put Vicks in one nostril and some garlic, a garlic clove in the other nostril. She said, really, that helps so much. You'll get well faster, and the coughing will be at a minimum. Also, she feeds her goats, honey, and cinnamon and dark red wine. And I said, you know, if I do succumb to this illness, I want to come back as one of your goats.

Honey and wine. Nice. Yeah, honey and wine. Sure. But the garlic clove and the, I don't know about that. Well, you've got. I mean, just like jamming a clove up your nose? is she saying?

Like clogging your nose? Well, she wasn't real specific. And I don't know how big goats' nostrils are. Well, when she did that to her goats or she was saying for you to do that. Oh, no. When her goat gets sick, she puts a thing of garlic. Mom, that's not what you said. Oh, what I say.

You said that a woman who owns goats wrote to you and suggested that you stick garlic cloves up one nostrils. Oh, well, she was just telling me what she does. does with her goats. And then she thought, important detail of the story, really critical detail. Well, I'm sorry. Yeah, because I was picturing you with the clove of garlic. But even that,

I mean, the pita people should talk to her with a jamming garlic up a goat's nose. This woman. Talking about a woman who vacuums by turning on the vacuum, lying it on its side, and then pulling the dirt out of the rug and jamming

it into the roller. It's not beyond the pale that she might strap some onions to her feet and shove some garlic up her nose. This woman loves her goats. She wouldn't do anything to harm her goats. So she feels that this is really a good remedy.

Garlic in the nostril. We had a goat, didn't we? For a while? Oh, we didn't, but our neighbor did, and our neighbor kept in fact, the goat's name was Mary. And he used to put Mary in our

back pasture. That's why. You can see my confusion. When you live in a petting zoo and you look out the window and there's a goat in your back pasture, it's not a stretch to think it might just belong to you, be part of the menagerie. Also, their chickens used to come into our garden and eat our tomatoes. Yeah. Yeah.

Chickens. You should get some chickens, Mike. Yeah, you should get chickens. They're very popular. Yeah. I mean, backyard chickens are really the rage now. A lot of people have chickens in their backyard. They make eggs.

You can eat them. I love that. And they're not going to be diseased eggs if you control your chickens where they go and so forth. I learned more than I wanted to know about all that season. I think it was season one of Dirty Jobs up at Murray McMurray. You remember that hatchery segment? where we did a we did chick sexing. Oh, I remember that.

Yeah, I remember. That was funny. Well, I mean, first of all, it's like 350 breeds of chickens. Really? There are so many. And secondly, the vast majority of chicks that are purchased by people all over the country are sent to them through the U.S. mail. they're literally put in a box and just shipped, you know, they can survive for a while because the white part of the egg, what you call the albumin, is absorbed by the yolk,

and that's filled with, I guess, the fluids, the nutrition, whatever hydration is necessary to keep the chicks alive for a couple of days. I don't know if you saw the episode, but chick sexing, right? You just, oh, yeah. Oh, my God, you take these chickens one at a time. They're little chicks. They're like little Easter tweeters.

They're little balls of yellow feathers. Little down. With a tiny beak. Yes. And to separate the pullets from the cockerels, you need to have a really experienced eye. And for whatever crazy reason, at least 20 years ago, I'm not sure it's still the same, but the go-to-chick-sexing teams were flown all around the country to different farms to perform this service.

And incredibly, and inexplicably, these teams often consisted of very old Japanese men who, for whatever reason, had some facility for the work. and the work involved picking up each of these little chicks and peering into their buttholes to identify the tiniest little bump. The bump was associated with the cockerel, of course, and the pullets were bump free. And so the two sexes were separated, but in between the peering into the butthole was the evacuation of the intestines, which presumably were filled with some ingested albure. So the first thing you do is you pick them up and you hold him over a coffee can. In this case, I think it was a Folgers if I remember, right?

Not that it matters, but you'd literally squeeze the chick and the poop would fly out. And then you'd look into the butthole, bullets to the right, cockerels to the left. And it was really only the pullets that people wanted. Those were the ones that typically got shipped by the thousands every day. And then what happens to the male chicks? Oh, geez. The cockrels. Really?

All right. Well, I mean, since we're having that kind of conversation. Yeah. Yeah, this wasn't dealt with in the episode because it was deemed too upsetting by my executive producer at the time. But they're not needed. And so they are disposed of. And by disposed of, I mean, they are by the thousands poured into a hopper of sorts.

that leads straight into a grinder. It's like a whisper chopper. And what comes out the other end is just cockerel goo, which if memory serves, is ultimately repurposed and turned into chicken feed. So there you go.

Hokuna Matata, Mom. Circle of life. Well, that's a happy. That's a happy story, Mike. Well, when your nephew, you weren't born yet, of course. I was just a teenager, but my sister was married

and had a little boy who was three and we lived in the country on a farm well i bought stephen who was three i bought him six little baby chicks for easter well they were little babies and when i bought them at the feed store i said i would like females please five of them were males and one was a female Well, those males... Same thing happened with your kids, as I recall. Yes, yes. I ordered girls three times. But anyway, they were horrible.

They all ran loose, of course. We didn't have a chicken house. They just ran free. Well, you couldn't go out the back door. They would attack you. They would put their wings up in the air and scratch the ground and put their heads down and run right for you. They were horrible. You would try to cut the grass and they would have.

attack the lawnmowers. So your uncle Charles came up from Virginia and took them home with him, and they had chicken for dinner. Yeah, where they spent the rest of their lives in rich fulfillment up on the farm. Do you remember the first time you saw your grandmother ring the neck of a chicken? Oh, my golly, it was traumatic. My sweet little grandma Daisy, just with the apron on and her braids wrapped around her crown like a cherub. Just the sweetest little thing in a little pair of glasses. She picked up that hatchet, grabbed that chicken by the head, and laid him over the tree stump and whack.

And the blood, I mean, the blood splattered on her face. And what was left of that chicken just danced around the yard. Oh, I remember it like it was yesterday. That's another kind of dark story. isn't it? I don't know. I mean, you came out with mental illness. Yeah. It involves dancing, you know. We paint with a broad brush over here with coffee with mom. I know. Can't we think of something happy? Mm-hmm. 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 simple, 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 netseweet.com slash Mike. It's called demystifying AI. It's totally free. It's essential reading for anybody trying to 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,

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And again, it's free at netsuite.com slash mike. That's netsuite.com. Netsweet. I got one. Since you mentioned, Daisy, here's another. other episode that never really aired, which is a shame. But I did a story on these people who were living off the grid outside of Georgia who raised rabbits as their primary source of protein. And we're getting a lot of hate mail from people that go online and they would, you know,

their kids are participating and they're, you know, they're walking them through all the steps of raising and slaughtering and preparing and they're making rabbit stew and hoss and feffer and I just thought, it was a great chance for people to understand where their food comes from. And I wanted to do that story. So we went there and we filmed it. And sure enough, man, it's very instructive. You know, a rabbit, mom, is so much more efficient than a cow to an almost extraordinary magnitude. Like, the meat from a rabbit that you'll eat when it's properly slaughtered and prepared is well over 90%.

But a cow is probably less than 50 when you, you know, your count for all the organs and all the fat and all the stuff that you don't want. Anyway, it's super efficient. But I'll never forget this father taking one of the rabbits, big plump Easter bunny. I mean, he just looked like the star of a Cadbury commercial and just gave it a slow pet and said some soothing words to it. And the kids came over and they petted the rabbit. And the father, the father laid it on the ground and took an axe handle and gently put it behind the head and on the neck. And the little boy and the little girl each petted the rabbit again. And the father put a foot on either side of the handle and then grabbed the hind legs.

And then they said a little prayer. And then the little girl reached out and rubbed the ears one more time and said, by Daisy. And then the father pulled the hind legs of the rabbit and the neck snapped. And within four minutes, that thing was completely dressed. And five minutes after that, it was in a pot. And two hours later, we were having rabbits too. And the network just said, we just don't know how to think about it.

I literally called the episode by Daisy. And you know what? I mean, you brought her up. But it was beautiful. I mean, it was rough because you don't want the Easter bunny. You don't see the Easter bunny as your meal. Yeah, we don't want to see things die. I mean, we know we like a hamburger, but we went up to your Uncle Nelson's one year.

Golly, I can't remember. I think it was over the Christmas holiday. And we had dinner, and we were eating, they had hamburgers, but they called them Max Burgers. And I was curious as to how they got that term. Max burgers, you know, are they like maximum ketchup and mustard relish? No, this was Max. Remember Max out in the field? eating grass, this was Max.

These are Max Bergers. You guys couldn't eat very much. Oh, but I do remember it. And honestly, that was somewhere in the back of my mind when we did Earl the Butcher. That mobile butcher segment, that one did air, and

that one upset a lot of people. Remember, I shot the cow. I shot a cow in an episode of Dirty Jobs, yeah. It was probably a steer. No, it was a cow. Oh, I It was horrible. But, you know, I rode with the butcher.

This was a family who raised the cow for this specific purpose, and it would provide them with six, seven hundred pounds of meat, feed them for the whole year. And when the day came to take it, they didn't want to do it. You know, they had kids, and it wasn't a pet, but they had become attached to it. I forget the name of this thing. What I'll never forget, though, is opening the segment standing there by the gate. It's a shot of me and the cow, and the farmer and his wife and his family are out of the shot, and the mobile butcher, Earl, is standing on the other side of the camera with a rifle. And I just introduced the segment by saying, we're here, and we were in Western Michigan, I remember.

And I quickly introduced Earl, and the camera caught him. and then I quickly introduced the family and the camera panned over and then it came back to me and I'm standing next to the cow and I explained to the viewer that this cow is going to feed that family for the next year and that man, Earl, is going to show you exactly how every cut is prepared, dry aged and then returned to this place. But he's also here because the family doesn't want to do what has to be done. But make no mistake, what has to be done is going to take. happen. As I'm talking, the cow is licking my neck, nuzzled up and licking my neck. Oh, no. Yeah, and that's what I do. She had a name, and she'd been giving them milk? Yes. Is she a milk cow?

Well, I mean, it is traditional. I mean, if she wasn't given the milk, I don't know what she was given them. I mean, it's life, isn't it? And we don't want to see that side of it, but we're we're very anxious to eat a hamburger or a steak or, you know. Mom, it's one of the few things that I'm positive about today. Not everybody agrees, but I say it all the time. And Chuck's heard me talk to lots of different guests about this, but you just have to get your head out of the sand. I don't care what the issue is.

You know, if you want to trade with China, you have to look at what's going on with the Uyghurs. you have to look at what's going on with organ harvesting. You don't have to like it, but you have to at least be mindful of it. And if you're going to eat a steak or a hamburger, yeah, you damn well better meat, Max. You better understand where it's coming from. The animal deserves that much, at least. And I guess if you're going to make lighthearted jokes about a condition like hoarding,

then you need to hear a real-life story about somebody who had to take their pants off to walk through their own kitchen. It's real, and it's a heck. of a thing, but in the end, it's better to know, right? Yeah, we should be informed. Well, I tell you what, in the interest of information, as we land the plane here, I'll remind the two or three viewers we still have left that I'm going to read your story. It better be as good as I remember it, and we're going to have it up either for Mother's Day or just before it. And by the way, folks, if you haven't bought her latest book,

Do I have you a copy of it sitting around? Oh, no, here it. It's probably on your bedside table. Well, of course it is, dog-eared, but here's my copy right here. Oh, no, not the home. It's her fourth book. It's as good as the rest, maybe even better. How did that last event go?

Oh, it went very well. Yeah, lots of compliments. Yeah. Did you tell them about killing chickens and hoarders and all that, Or did you just stick with you? No, no, no. Oh, no, I just stuck with the usual. Lots of humor.

Well, they were just curious to know what it is like for a resident in a facility such as this, you know, long-term care facility. Because they knew it from an employee's side, but they hadn't really heard it from somebody who was willing to tell it like it is. You know, Chuck, it's really risky. with humor. I mean, if you think about it, there are people who run this Erickson operation are bringing my mom in to talk to large groups. Wow. They buy her book and she tells them the realities, warts and all. I mean, it's almost always funny, but I think it's terrific, Mom. I think what you're doing, you know, well, as you know, I'm a fan. I love you. Everybody else does too. So I got to jump, but go wrap some onions on your feet and get that garlic up your nose and get out there and live your best life.

Okay, Mike, I'll do that. This has been fun. It's always nice to see you guys. All right. Well, I have to go narrate another riveting episode of Deadliest Catch. Oh, okay. I look forward to hearing it. Well, spoiler alert, pot goes over, pot comes up.

What's in the pot? Crab, no crab, crab, no crab. It's crab. Oh, my gosh, let's smoke a cigarette. Poth goes over. What's it going to be? Crab, no crab. Look at the size of that wave.

Oh, my God, I'll smoke another cigarette. Crab, no crab. It's crab. Oh, no crab. It's very sad. Give me another cigarette. That wave's enormous. Yeah, you know the show.

I know. You really sell it. Well, you know what? Any season could be our last now. This is season 21. I can't believe that show's still going on. As long as people are eating crab. I think you're safe.

Yeah. And crab is very popular. It's very popular here at the home. And in Baltimore and in Maryland, it's all about the crab. Well, in Maryland it's Calinectus Sabatus. Really? Okay. The beautiful swimmer, the blue crab.

These are just the big Alaskan red crabs and Opeleo crabs and Tanner crabs and all that. But they are good meat. I mean, they must taste good or they wouldn't go to all that effort. I've had, I mean, everything from stone crab to dungeness, all the ones I've mentioned, I still say a big jumbo, Chesapeake Bay, Maryland blue crab, properly prepared. There's just no better meat. It would be a part of my last meal, if such a thing were ever offered to me. And it's so difficult.

It's such a great example of... adversity. You've got to work for it. You know, you're going to get cut. You're going to get some of the old bay. You're going to get some of the J.O. It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt. It's going to be pleasant. You're going to wind up rubbing your eye at some point. The old bay is going to get in there. You're going to be blinded. You're going to be crying. You're going to be bleeding. It is a social occasion for sure, sitting around eating crabs. Marylanders love it. I mean, Baltimoreans especially. It's a great thing. to do. But I can't do it anymore because my arthritic hands will not let me get into the crab.

Well, that's why Dad's there. I know, for Dan. Even before you were all crippled up with the arthritis, he was making little piles of claw meat for you and back, Finn. Yeah. That's true love right there. It is. It really is. And you know what? one day we accompanied Mike on a job over on the eastern shore. He was preparing crab. And when we left, they gave us a whole pound container of nothing but little back fin balls.

Oh, my golly, was that good. That was a real treat. You remember what your husband did? We took him into the cleaning and picking area. I remember him sitting next to that woman who, really taught him how to pick crabs and told him her life story. Well, there were two women, each of whom had been picking crabs for a long time, was Sissy and Nicy.

That's right. And like Sissy had been cleaning crabs for like 60 years, and her daughter had been added for like 25. And my dad sit right between the two of them, these two unbelievably experienced black women telling my, dad, once you put my dad on a task, he can't leave until it's done. He perseverates. He must finish a job. He cannot, he can't turn around without going where he meant to go. You know, he can't stop any task until it's complete. Yes. Right. I mean,

it's a kind of OCD, I think, but he's always used it to as an advantage. It's never devolved into a hoarding thing. but it is remarkable to watch and we're filming the show. We've got beats. We got a day to do. And he's just, look, there's a pile of crabs at the end of the table. And he's sitting there between Sissy and Nisi and there's work to be done. He's like, look, son, you can film, you can not film. I really don't care.

He wasn't about to leave. He's not leaving. He's not leaving until all the meat is out of the crab. And so we had no choice but to move on. It was really funny. Those women, their hands were fairly flying. Oh, they were so fast. You couldn't even follow what they were doing.

And then there's dad laboriously pulling this off and reaching it for this. They were very patient. Mom, I love you. We got to go. Okay. Love you guys too. Happy Mother's Day, whatever. Happy Mother's Day.

Yeah, whatever. All right, I'm looking forward to that story. Make it a great one. Okay, we'll do. All right. All right. Bye. See you. When you leave a review, only five stars will do, not just one or just two or just three. We were hoping. Four than a four. Just a quick review with five stars two from a you. Five stars will do.

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