December 20, 2025 • 16 mins
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Barry Show.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Those guys that risk their life out on that, you know,
crab fishing vessels that you do all the voiceovers for,
and you did dirty jobs out on a lot of boats,
and you were you know, in the bowels of those
fishing vessels and cleaning out stringy guts and you know
all that kind of stuff. But if you had never
gotten on that, you would have been safer.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
You know.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
So where does this stop?
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Well, it stops. I think we talked about this once before.
But it stops when people get bored of being terrorized. Okay,
it stops. We talked about it in London during the blitz.
You know, when those bombs started falling, the people went
to ground and they stayed underground for a week, week
(00:49):
and a half. After two weeks they came out. Bombs
are still falling, but they came out three weeks. The
school's open, the shop's open. Bombs are still falling. They
figured out a way to live in a world where
bombs were falling. C. S. Lewis writes very famously in
nineteen forty eight, how to Live in an Atomic Age.
(01:10):
His explanation works today too. You know, it took people
a while to get used to the fact that a
bunch of countries had the bomb horrifying times. But given
enough time and given a rudimentary understanding of mutually assured destruction,
we all took a deep breath and said, Okay, well,
life goes on, and now we're going to function in
(01:31):
this world.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Let's start kind of putting a bow tie on this conversation.
In one sense, we have really discussed things that I
think are really culminating in the fact that you know,
you got an opportunity to live with two generations of tradesmen.
(02:10):
Your grandfather, your father. Your father ran a construction company
that I'm recalling.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
My dad actually taught taught school.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Okay, who ran the who ran the bistruction.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
My grandfather had an electrical contracting company and could do
any trade.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Okay, So but they live next door, right, That's okay,
That's what That's where I got it. So basically, I read.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Your mom's book. By the way you read mine.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I read your mom's.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
This is devastated.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
You haven't sent me one. Your mom sent me one.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I actually dedicated to It's a pop up. You're gonna
love it.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Okay, perfect, You know you got to see what would
have been your grandfather's values, your.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Grandfather's you know, life impacted you. He was granddad next door.
Somewhere along the line. We live in a day and
age that is different. I want you to define that
difference and try to tell me what in the world
what flip got what switch got flipped somewhere along the
(03:27):
line that turned everything upside down. But before that, this
is a workshop. This is, you know, an analogy of
kind of modern tools. We've got some older tools that
I found in Dallas and had the guys, you know,
get them sand blasted, and then we kind of rubbed
(03:48):
this oil stuff into them, and you know, they work again,
and you know, you know, we're we're sitting in kind
of a cathedral to work. This is sensuating our conversation
in some way. Okay, that was certainly the attempt. Okay,
well you succeeded, Okay, perfect, But it is a cathedral.
(04:09):
And I'm not sure that I would have ever had
the opportunity to see you do a number one rated
TV show for almost a decade on Discovery Channel, Dirty Jobs,
if it hadn't been for your voice. So your pathway
(04:30):
to television started on stage because of a baritone capability
that you have. You're kind of in a cathedral, and
does any particular song come to mind that would resonate
off the cathedral? Could you somewhat dedicate this cathedral and
(04:55):
let it be a homage to really what got you
here in the first place?
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Some people saying man is made out of mud. A
poor man's made out of muscling blood, muscling blood and
skin and bone of mine that's week and the back
that's strong. You load sixteen tons, what do you get
another day, older and deeper in debt? Well, Saint Peter,
(05:25):
don't you call me because I can't go. I owe
my soul to the company stole. Hold on, see what
I did there? Yeah, Saint Peter, which I know you
love ye, debt which I know you hate, work, which
I know you love, song, which I know your door.
A lot of four letter words going in there that
(05:46):
are family friendly, song, work and love.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
And a little piece of the of the art. What
do you call them? With the little oratories or oh
that's the right word, oratory, aria, aria, with the touch
a touch, yeah, a little just a little piece of
the Italian thing, just for the sophisticated folk in the audience.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
You have sophisticated folks, and I think, so, hey, you
just said something. You mind if I take a quick
digression whatever it was you were trying to say, What
you said instead was art. Now what happens when you
take the art out of a thing, right, We took
the arts out of high school, the humanities. And there
was a great hue and cry right when we cut
(06:32):
music programs and things like that, And that affected me
and I was one of the ones complaining about it.
But before shop class was shop class, it was called votech,
and before vocational technology was called votech, it was called
the vocational Arts. That's what you've done here. You've taken
(06:54):
the talismans of work and you've made an artistic expression
of them. We didn't just take shop class out of
high school one day because we thought we ran out
of money. We first took the art out of the
vocational arts, and then we knocked it down to votech
(07:17):
and then we changed votech into shop and then we
walked it behind the barn and shot it. That's how
we got shop class on high school. We started with
a war not on work, but on craftsmanship and on art.
So anytime you see somebody challenging the artistry of this,
(07:42):
you know, the scales of I mean, there's art in
every single thing in here. You either see it or
you don't. There's risk in every single activity.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
You ever will perform in here.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
You either see it or you don't. And so your
earlier question had to do with what has changed since
my pop built the church I grew up in. By
the way, what's changed is the chronology of things we value.
Work has fallen far far down the list. Art has
(08:17):
fallen down the list. Safety has gone to the top,
comfort has gone to the top. And the road we
take in pursuit of what we'll call job satisfaction, right,
that's changed. That's what's changed. This is a great I
(08:38):
don't know if we don't know how much time we
have left, but unpacket all right, let me try and
land the plane like this. There was a time when
people who were happy in their work didn't start their
quest for happiness by trying to identify the proximate cause
of their bliss. In other words, what we tell kids
today is, if you want to be happy in your work,
(09:00):
the first thing you do is you sit down and
you think about what you want to do, and then
once you settle on it, you embark upon a grand
plan of action. Now many times that plan involves borrowing
money that you don't have, and then you go to
school in order to get all the necessary credentialing that'll
get you to the next step, and on and on
(09:21):
you go. And now suddenly you're twenty seven years old
and you're on your path to get the job that
will make you happy. But you're just running into roadblock
after roadblock after roadblock, and now you've got one hundred
and twenty thousand dollars in debt, and as it turns out, no,
you're not going to be a political scientist with a
major in mid Eastern studies. As it turns out, now
you're serving coffee and a Starbucks, and not that there's
(09:44):
anything wrong with that, but that's not what you signed
on for. And you're living in your mom's basement again,
and you're not happy, right, You're not happy because you
started with this very specific goal. The people on Dirty Jobs,
Matt buy and Large, I'm generalizing Buy and Large. None
of them are doing the thing that they identified in
(10:05):
their youth as their wish fulfillment. These are people who
looked around and said, where's everybody going? I'll go the
other way. Where's the opportunity septic tank cleaner in Wisconsin?
Less Swanson was his name, terrific guy Leswonson from Wisconsin.
He was a guidance counselor for like twenty years, a psychiatrist,
(10:29):
a psychologist. He quit it all, started a septic tank business,
not because he wanted to do that, but because that's
what needed to be done. He figured out how to
get good at it, and then he figured out how
to love it. That's what's changed. We've told a whole
generation of kids that your happiness depends on what you do,
(10:52):
not who you are, and we've given them a roadmap
that takes them right off a cliff. And we've encouraged them,
for their trouble, to borrow more money than they'll ever
be able to pay back, money by the way that
we can't even afford to lend them, to train them
for jobs that don't exist anymore. Everything is backwards, everything
(11:14):
is disconnected.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
You touched on something just now that hit a nerve
with me. It's an identity issue that you weren't who
you are, you are what your title says, you are
and how do you identify what is your identity based in?
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Well? Look, that was the great lesson of my life
because I had enough success up until I was forty
two to create a level of hubris in my own
work right as a guy who impersonated a host. I
got enough positive feedback in twenty years in TV to
(11:57):
feel very confident that I was on the right track
as a host.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Were you kind of a jerk back then?
Speaker 1 (12:03):
You know? Yeah? I mean I was still insanely likable,
as you know, right, of course, I was kind of
a jerk.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
I was.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
I was the kind of jerk you run into who
was quietly arrogant. You know, all my friends in my
industry had taken a traditional road. They had gone to
the America Academy of Dramatic Arts, they'd moved to La right,
and they all by the time I was forty, you know,
they all had success, but they were all struggling. I
(12:34):
was doing pretty good, not great, but good, and I
felt very confident and very kind of proud that I
had figured out a business model that worked for me.
But what I was doing didn't have any real inherent
meaning for me. It was just a way to pay
the bills and make sure I had four or five
months off a year to go see the world and
(12:54):
have a fun time. Dirty Jobs straightened me out. Dirty
Jobs was the show that forced me to be humble
in a way that I would have never imagined being
on camera, and to assume a new role, not the
role of a host or an expert, but the role
(13:15):
of an apprentice and an avatar. Right, And so yeah,
for me, when I accepted that new role, I had
a new business. And when that show blew up, then
other like minded shows made sense to pursue, and then
a foundation emerged. And then I got to see it
(13:35):
at the grown up table, and I got a chance
to sit here with people like you where we can
actually talk about topics that I believe can unite the country. Well,
we're divided in just about every possible way on every
possible thing, but work shouldn't be one of those things,
you know, And I'm afraid it has become a source
(13:58):
of division. But it can't be. We can't let we
can't let the country have such divergent views on the
definition of a good job or the role of risk
in life. You know, And look, if there's a silver
lining and there is There are several silver linings in coronavirus,
but one of them is this clarifying process that's going
(14:21):
to force us to think differently about these big epic
thematic ideas. And you can't talk about the definition of
a good job without the definition of a worthwhile education.
And when you see kids learning from home, when you
see college students we're currently enrolled in Harvard sitting home
for another semester for which they are not going to
(14:43):
be refunded, but going through the curriculum on nothing but
a screen, higher education is going to have to think
differently about the value proposition. If your life the Michael
Berry Show in podcast, please tell one friend and if
you're so inclined, write a nice review of our podcast. Comments, suggestions, questions,
(15:06):
and interest in being a corporate sponsor and partner can
be communicated directly to the show at our email address,
Michael at Michael Berryshow dot com, or simply by clicking
on our website Michael Berryshow dot com. The Michael Berry
Show and podcast is produced by Ramon Roeblis, The King
(15:27):
of Ding. Executive producer is Chad Knakanishi. Jim Mudd is
the creative director. Voices Jingles, Tomfoolery and Shenanigans are provided
by Chance McLain. Director of Research is Sandy Peterson. Emily
(15:50):
Bull is our assistant listener and superfan. Contributions are appreciated
and often incorporated into our production. Where possible, we give credit,
where not, we take all the credit for ourselves. God
bless the memory of Rush Limbaugh. Long live Elvis, be
(16:10):
a simple man like Leonard Skinnard told you, and God
bless America. Finally, if you know a veteran suffering from PTSD,
call Camp Hope at eight seven seven seven one seven
PTSD and a combat veteran will answer the phone to
provide free counseling
The Michael Barry Show.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Those guys that risk their life out on that, you know,
crab fishing vessels that you do all the voiceovers for,
and you did dirty jobs out on a lot of boats,
and you were you know, in the bowels of those
fishing vessels and cleaning out stringy guts and you know
all that kind of stuff. But if you had never
gotten on that, you would have been safer.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
You know.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
So where does this stop?
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Well, it stops. I think we talked about this once before.
But it stops when people get bored of being terrorized. Okay,
it stops. We talked about it in London during the blitz.
You know, when those bombs started falling, the people went
to ground and they stayed underground for a week, week
(00:49):
and a half. After two weeks they came out. Bombs
are still falling, but they came out three weeks. The
school's open, the shop's open. Bombs are still falling. They
figured out a way to live in a world where
bombs were falling. C. S. Lewis writes very famously in
nineteen forty eight, how to Live in an Atomic Age.
(01:10):
His explanation works today too. You know, it took people
a while to get used to the fact that a
bunch of countries had the bomb horrifying times. But given
enough time and given a rudimentary understanding of mutually assured destruction,
we all took a deep breath and said, Okay, well,
life goes on, and now we're going to function in
(01:31):
this world.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Let's start kind of putting a bow tie on this conversation.
In one sense, we have really discussed things that I
think are really culminating in the fact that you know,
you got an opportunity to live with two generations of tradesmen.
(02:10):
Your grandfather, your father. Your father ran a construction company
that I'm recalling.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
My dad actually taught taught school.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Okay, who ran the who ran the bistruction.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
My grandfather had an electrical contracting company and could do
any trade.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Okay, So but they live next door, right, That's okay,
That's what That's where I got it. So basically, I read.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Your mom's book. By the way you read mine.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I read your mom's.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
This is devastated.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
You haven't sent me one. Your mom sent me one.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I actually dedicated to It's a pop up. You're gonna
love it.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Okay, perfect, You know you got to see what would
have been your grandfather's values, your.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Grandfather's you know, life impacted you. He was granddad next door.
Somewhere along the line. We live in a day and
age that is different. I want you to define that
difference and try to tell me what in the world
what flip got what switch got flipped somewhere along the
(03:27):
line that turned everything upside down. But before that, this
is a workshop. This is, you know, an analogy of
kind of modern tools. We've got some older tools that
I found in Dallas and had the guys, you know,
get them sand blasted, and then we kind of rubbed
(03:48):
this oil stuff into them, and you know, they work again,
and you know, you know, we're we're sitting in kind
of a cathedral to work. This is sensuating our conversation
in some way. Okay, that was certainly the attempt. Okay,
well you succeeded, Okay, perfect, But it is a cathedral.
(04:09):
And I'm not sure that I would have ever had
the opportunity to see you do a number one rated
TV show for almost a decade on Discovery Channel, Dirty Jobs,
if it hadn't been for your voice. So your pathway
(04:30):
to television started on stage because of a baritone capability
that you have. You're kind of in a cathedral, and
does any particular song come to mind that would resonate
off the cathedral? Could you somewhat dedicate this cathedral and
(04:55):
let it be a homage to really what got you
here in the first place?
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Some people saying man is made out of mud. A
poor man's made out of muscling blood, muscling blood and
skin and bone of mine that's week and the back
that's strong. You load sixteen tons, what do you get
another day, older and deeper in debt? Well, Saint Peter,
(05:25):
don't you call me because I can't go. I owe
my soul to the company stole. Hold on, see what
I did there? Yeah, Saint Peter, which I know you
love ye, debt which I know you hate, work, which
I know you love, song, which I know your door.
A lot of four letter words going in there that
(05:46):
are family friendly, song, work and love.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
And a little piece of the of the art. What
do you call them? With the little oratories or oh
that's the right word, oratory, aria, aria, with the touch
a touch, yeah, a little just a little piece of
the Italian thing, just for the sophisticated folk in the audience.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
You have sophisticated folks, and I think, so, hey, you
just said something. You mind if I take a quick
digression whatever it was you were trying to say, What
you said instead was art. Now what happens when you
take the art out of a thing, right, We took
the arts out of high school, the humanities. And there
was a great hue and cry right when we cut
(06:32):
music programs and things like that, And that affected me
and I was one of the ones complaining about it.
But before shop class was shop class, it was called votech,
and before vocational technology was called votech, it was called
the vocational Arts. That's what you've done here. You've taken
(06:54):
the talismans of work and you've made an artistic expression
of them. We didn't just take shop class out of
high school one day because we thought we ran out
of money. We first took the art out of the
vocational arts, and then we knocked it down to votech
(07:17):
and then we changed votech into shop and then we
walked it behind the barn and shot it. That's how
we got shop class on high school. We started with
a war not on work, but on craftsmanship and on art.
So anytime you see somebody challenging the artistry of this,
(07:42):
you know, the scales of I mean, there's art in
every single thing in here. You either see it or
you don't. There's risk in every single activity.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
You ever will perform in here.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
You either see it or you don't. And so your
earlier question had to do with what has changed since
my pop built the church I grew up in. By
the way, what's changed is the chronology of things we value.
Work has fallen far far down the list. Art has
(08:17):
fallen down the list. Safety has gone to the top,
comfort has gone to the top. And the road we
take in pursuit of what we'll call job satisfaction, right,
that's changed. That's what's changed. This is a great I
(08:38):
don't know if we don't know how much time we
have left, but unpacket all right, let me try and
land the plane like this. There was a time when
people who were happy in their work didn't start their
quest for happiness by trying to identify the proximate cause
of their bliss. In other words, what we tell kids
today is, if you want to be happy in your work,
(09:00):
the first thing you do is you sit down and
you think about what you want to do, and then
once you settle on it, you embark upon a grand
plan of action. Now many times that plan involves borrowing
money that you don't have, and then you go to
school in order to get all the necessary credentialing that'll
get you to the next step, and on and on
(09:21):
you go. And now suddenly you're twenty seven years old
and you're on your path to get the job that
will make you happy. But you're just running into roadblock
after roadblock after roadblock, and now you've got one hundred
and twenty thousand dollars in debt, and as it turns out, no,
you're not going to be a political scientist with a
major in mid Eastern studies. As it turns out, now
you're serving coffee and a Starbucks, and not that there's
(09:44):
anything wrong with that, but that's not what you signed
on for. And you're living in your mom's basement again,
and you're not happy, right, You're not happy because you
started with this very specific goal. The people on Dirty Jobs,
Matt buy and Large, I'm generalizing Buy and Large. None
of them are doing the thing that they identified in
(10:05):
their youth as their wish fulfillment. These are people who
looked around and said, where's everybody going? I'll go the
other way. Where's the opportunity septic tank cleaner in Wisconsin?
Less Swanson was his name, terrific guy Leswonson from Wisconsin.
He was a guidance counselor for like twenty years, a psychiatrist,
(10:29):
a psychologist. He quit it all, started a septic tank business,
not because he wanted to do that, but because that's
what needed to be done. He figured out how to
get good at it, and then he figured out how
to love it. That's what's changed. We've told a whole
generation of kids that your happiness depends on what you do,
(10:52):
not who you are, and we've given them a roadmap
that takes them right off a cliff. And we've encouraged them,
for their trouble, to borrow more money than they'll ever
be able to pay back, money by the way that
we can't even afford to lend them, to train them
for jobs that don't exist anymore. Everything is backwards, everything
(11:14):
is disconnected.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
You touched on something just now that hit a nerve
with me. It's an identity issue that you weren't who
you are, you are what your title says, you are
and how do you identify what is your identity based in?
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Well? Look, that was the great lesson of my life
because I had enough success up until I was forty
two to create a level of hubris in my own
work right as a guy who impersonated a host. I
got enough positive feedback in twenty years in TV to
(11:57):
feel very confident that I was on the right track
as a host.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Were you kind of a jerk back then?
Speaker 1 (12:03):
You know? Yeah? I mean I was still insanely likable,
as you know, right, of course, I was kind of
a jerk.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
I was.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
I was the kind of jerk you run into who
was quietly arrogant. You know, all my friends in my
industry had taken a traditional road. They had gone to
the America Academy of Dramatic Arts, they'd moved to La right,
and they all by the time I was forty, you know,
they all had success, but they were all struggling. I
(12:34):
was doing pretty good, not great, but good, and I
felt very confident and very kind of proud that I
had figured out a business model that worked for me.
But what I was doing didn't have any real inherent
meaning for me. It was just a way to pay
the bills and make sure I had four or five
months off a year to go see the world and
(12:54):
have a fun time. Dirty Jobs straightened me out. Dirty
Jobs was the show that forced me to be humble
in a way that I would have never imagined being
on camera, and to assume a new role, not the
role of a host or an expert, but the role
(13:15):
of an apprentice and an avatar. Right, And so yeah,
for me, when I accepted that new role, I had
a new business. And when that show blew up, then
other like minded shows made sense to pursue, and then
a foundation emerged. And then I got to see it
(13:35):
at the grown up table, and I got a chance
to sit here with people like you where we can
actually talk about topics that I believe can unite the country. Well,
we're divided in just about every possible way on every
possible thing, but work shouldn't be one of those things,
you know, And I'm afraid it has become a source
(13:58):
of division. But it can't be. We can't let we
can't let the country have such divergent views on the
definition of a good job or the role of risk
in life. You know, And look, if there's a silver
lining and there is There are several silver linings in coronavirus,
but one of them is this clarifying process that's going
(14:21):
to force us to think differently about these big epic
thematic ideas. And you can't talk about the definition of
a good job without the definition of a worthwhile education.
And when you see kids learning from home, when you
see college students we're currently enrolled in Harvard sitting home
for another semester for which they are not going to
(14:43):
be refunded, but going through the curriculum on nothing but
a screen, higher education is going to have to think
differently about the value proposition. If your life the Michael
Berry Show in podcast, please tell one friend and if
you're so inclined, write a nice review of our podcast. Comments, suggestions, questions,
(15:06):
and interest in being a corporate sponsor and partner can
be communicated directly to the show at our email address,
Michael at Michael Berryshow dot com, or simply by clicking
on our website Michael Berryshow dot com. The Michael Berry
Show and podcast is produced by Ramon Roeblis, The King
(15:27):
of Ding. Executive producer is Chad Knakanishi. Jim Mudd is
the creative director. Voices Jingles, Tomfoolery and Shenanigans are provided
by Chance McLain. Director of Research is Sandy Peterson. Emily
(15:50):
Bull is our assistant listener and superfan. Contributions are appreciated
and often incorporated into our production. Where possible, we give credit,
where not, we take all the credit for ourselves. God
bless the memory of Rush Limbaugh. Long live Elvis, be
(16:10):
a simple man like Leonard Skinnard told you, and God
bless America. Finally, if you know a veteran suffering from PTSD,
call Camp Hope at eight seven seven seven one seven
PTSD and a combat veteran will answer the phone to
provide free counseling
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Betrayal: Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a brand new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack. And make sure to check out Seasons 1-4 of Betrayal, along with Betrayal Weekly Season 1.