Joe Rogan Experience _2235 - Mike Rowe(M4A_128K)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Podcast check it out. But Joe Experience Train My Day Joe.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Rogan podcast by name all day.

Speaker 1 (00:12):
We got scars, we've got coffee, we've got micro cigars.
Crawls over there storing. So what were you doing on QVC?
What are you selling?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
That was the greatest line from Blazing Saddles, by the way,
when Gene Hackman he says cigars. Remember Peter Boyle is coming,
he had just left, and Gene Hackman is there after
getting the soup spilled in his lap, and he's basically
saying I had cigars. As the creature stomps off in Frankenstein, I.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Don't remember that too long since I've seen that movie.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Best. Uh, he's a.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Little bit of a fucking distraction. Can he calm down?
Frank him? We hear went on our headphones on. Maybe
put our headphones on.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
I thought you were talking about me. No Carl for
an awful moment.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Like we we wore them out. Jamie was throwing the
toy for Carl, and I was.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Like, he's such a great dog. He's scot I mean,
he's adorable. I mean it's it's such a personality thing
at that for me with dogs and pets, in general.
You know, like you know right away if this thing
has a personality, He's.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Got a lot of Carl's got a lot of personality,
There's no doubt about that.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah. And a person name which I think is super interesting.
Mine's Freddy. He's a terrier.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
But I like a dog with a person. Yeah, me too,
Like fo what the is a FIGHTO?

Speaker 2 (01:40):
No one knows?

Speaker 1 (01:41):
That's well? Actually, oh no, that's Philo. I was thinking
of Clint Eastwood and every which way but loose he
was Philo Betto.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Could also be Philo Farnsworth, who created the television for Real.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah, did only one guy do? It? Was one of
those like light bulb type deals where like a bunch
of people are scrambling for it, and what.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Are they like like a hive mentality? Right? Like that
happened with the integrated circuit right when Kilby at Radio
Shack was doing the same basic work I think that
Robert Nois was doing for Intel. And one was here

(02:20):
in Texas and the other was in California, and they
had never met and they had never compared notes, but
the work on the circuitry was so close that they
wound up sharing the Nobel Prize Oh, that's interesting, super
super strange. But that you know, I.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
Don't know common thing with human beings. And it's this
concept of morphic residents. Have you ever heard of that concept?
Rupert Sheldrake he wrote about this, and the idea is
and it's based on some actual facts too, about there's
some real statistics about rats, like if you teach a

(02:57):
rat how to run a maze in on the east coast,
a rat on the west coast will run it faster.
It's like they learn the pattern somehow or another. It's
very bizarre. There's like information that's apparently shared across species,
and the idea is that somehow or another, they're quantumly entangled,

(03:18):
like that the entire group of these specific types of
animals are quantumly entangled or entangled in some way that
we don't understand.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
So it's a kind of I mean, I would think
biological evolution might flirt with that. I read a paper
guy wrote name was Patrick House. This was his PhD.
And he was talking about toxoplasma gandhi eye and histoplasmosis.
And it's a crazy paper. His real premise was trying

(03:47):
to understand the phenomenon of the cat lady, and why
why every culture like this isn't unique to America. In
every culture you can find a woman who, you know,
two cats, three cats maybe, but like went all the
way to thirty eight right, and just was like this
perfectly normal. So his paper was what happens to a

(04:10):
person's brain to tell it it's normal to have thirty
eight cats? And then it gets super complicated because he
identifies a Gandhi eye that lives in the cat's gut
and basically breeds there. And what he learned was when
the cats were crapping, the Gandhi eye would come out,

(04:33):
and then the rats and the mice that ate the
cat crap something was happening to their brains. On a
neurological level, This Gandhi eye basically disabled the part of
the brain that would tell an otherwise sentient rat to
run from the cat. But suddenly they weren't running. They

(04:54):
became prey, and they became docile, and the cats started
obliterating the mice and rat pop population because this thing
that was breeding in its ass was effectively making its
prey easier to catch. So doctor House thought, well, you know,
we've all heard about why pregnant women should stay away

(05:15):
from cats because that that can have an effect, and
a rat's brain and a human brain have a surprising
number of parallels. So he basically postulated that, you know,
Doris the cat lady, was living a fairly normal life
until she got just a little bit of catch on
her fingers and ate it, and the Gandhi eye disabled

(05:37):
the part of her brain that said, hey, maybe two
cats is not.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
It's worse than that. It actually makes the rats sexually
attracted to the smell of cat urine exactly right, Yeah,
it actually makes them aroused.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah. Now, I don't know if Doris went that far.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Have you ever seen them like run up to cats,
the toxo infected rats. It's bizarre. They run right up
to them for the cats, like what the fuck is
going to The cats like bounce away from the rat.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
It's like it's like watching the Beatles at the Ed
Sullivan Theater. You know that people like, what's wrong with you? Why?

Speaker 1 (06:10):
What's happening? Is psychosis?

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Yeah? Yeah, that's super interesting.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
You know, there's also a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims
that test positive for toxo did not. Yeah, it makes
people more impulsive it makes the more reckless and impulsive end.
Countries that have high rates of toxoplasma have more successful
soccer teams.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
I read and I think there's got more of these two.
I'm like, I don't want to compete. I'm going to lose.
But you'll love this and you probably already know it.
Homeostatic risk and risk equilibrium and the unintended consequences, especially
with motorcycle riders, that emanate from safety protocols gone too far.
Really yeah, so like every like if you study the

(06:56):
way you drive your motorcycle, like you measure your every
decision that you make in terms of cornering and speed
and braking and all that stuff, and then you measure
the same things with all the safety gear employed, including
a helmet, especially a helmet, You drive faster, your corner tighter,

(07:18):
you take more chances. Because the risk equilibrium that we
all have in our brain is different from one person
to the next. But what's the same is our desire
to compensate for the environment around us. So compensatory risk
and the subconscious decisions that we might make behind the

(07:40):
wheel when we're buckled up versus not buckled up, but
when we have abs brakes as opposed to not having them.
They did a big survey in Berlin years ago where
they took half of the taxis and they put in
state of the art breaking systems and half of them
and left the others the same, and then they hooked
up the cars to monitor every driver decision and in

(08:05):
virtually every case, the drivers with the better safety gear
took more chances because their brain is subconsciously compensating. Right,
it's the same sense. It's yeah, I mean, it's it's controversial,
but I I understand it. It's why the most dangerous
intersections have signs that tell you when to walk and

(08:27):
when not to walk, and have crossed because the little
man is walking it says go, So you step off
and there's the big blue bus and then you're spattered.
So yeah, the unintended consequences of following traditional safety protocols,
you know, has always really been interesting.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
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(09:09):
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(09:55):
it completely makes sense. If you have a vehicle that's
more able and capable, you're gonna probably drive it faster
and you're probably gonna take more risks because it can
do stuff like I used to think. I used to
have a Lexus SUV's big boat lex and you know,
what I loved about it. I drove slow in it.
I was just like, real because it doesn't stop that good.

(10:16):
It's not that fast, but it's just it's big and comfortable,
and it just chilled me out. And then I had
an M three. I had two cars at the time,
and my M three was a zippy little thing, and
I was flying around that thing. I was like, why
do I drive different in this fucking car than I
do in the big car? The big car would just
chill me out. I just get in that big old
boat and I just sure the world was like quiet

(10:37):
out there. It's nice and relaxed.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
I think it's a I think it's a slightly different analysis,
like if you're going to adjust your behavior consciously to
adapt to the uh to the externality, right, Like you
know you're gonna drive faster if you have a fast car,
because you know that's why the guy built the thing, right,

(11:00):
And it would almost be rude, right, It would be
rude to drive a hot rod like a boat. You know.
It's the unconscious things that you do when you assume
or mitigate risk as a result of employing an externality
that I think is it's just super interesting because it

(11:21):
is interesting. Well because if it's right, Joe, if it's right,
what it does is it turns all the safety first
protocols not necessarily on their head. But this happened in
Dirty Jobs. I did a whole special called safety third
because because safety isn't really first, not really ever, and.

Speaker 1 (11:43):
Because if it was, you would never get a lot
of things done.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Well, you never get out of the studio.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
You would definitely never do construction.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
Heck, no, no, you wouldn't do anything. Yeah, you wouldn't
do anything. It's a.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
How are you gonna move Steve girders of safety first,
you'd be like, the first thing we should do is
not move this fucking girder.

Speaker 2 (11:59):
That's right, thing's too big, that's right. Look, I mean
for me, it was really a It took two years
to kind of puzzle it through because on Dirty Jobs,
for the first two years nobody got hurt. You know,
we were and we sat through probably fifty mandatory safety briefings,

(12:19):
whether it's minds or confined spaces or high spaces or
you know, lockout, tag out. All those protocols and procedures
were super intense, and we were really really focused on
coming home alive and in one piece, so we like
really paid attention. But after two years of these mandatory,

(12:41):
compulsory meetings and all of these procedures, we all started
getting hurt. I mean not nothing serious, but broken fingers
and you know, a cracked rib and singed off my
eyebrows and my eyelashes and mild concussions and things like that.
I was like, what the hell's happening? What was happening
is the safety experts in all of these mandatory meetings

(13:06):
started to sound like remember Charlie Brown's teacher, missus oathmar wha,
we were just falling asleep, right. So it was like,
holy crap, we're in compliance, but we are not out
of danger, got it? And so that begs the question, what,
you know, what happens to a normal person who actually

(13:29):
comes to believe, either on the job site or or
just in life, that somebody else cares more about their
well being than they do. And it's like that's when
complacency rears its ugly head. So on dirty jobs, we
just it was just shorthand among the crew, but it
was always safety third, which meant heads up, man, keep

(13:52):
your head on a swivel. You can be and you
can be as compliant as you want, but in the end,
if you don't want to fall off the bridge, that's
it's kind of on you.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
Is there also a factor when you have a person
who's the safety officer who's kind of annoying and they're
like really like super interested, and maybe you kind of
like pawn off the safety aspect to them, and then
you don't think about it as much because someone's supposedly
looking out for you.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
How much do you think about proper driving technique when
you're sitting in the back on your laptop or even
up front next.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
Times on who's driving. For sure, if I was driving
and my wife is in the backseat, she'd be paying
attention a lot.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
Shout out to your guy. Was his name, Ashton? Who
picked me up this morning? Excellent driver?

Speaker 1 (14:38):
Man, Oh glad you're happy with it?

Speaker 2 (14:40):
Just so you know, I mean, I know he drives
a lot of your guests, and this is a feedback
I want to pass along. He was, you know, very frosty.
But yeah, look, I think anytime anytime that we abdicate.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Responsibility, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
There's going to be it's like whack them, moll It's
going to pop up someplace else, and it's probably not
going to be in your interest.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
Well, your show like sort of illuminated a lot of
really crazy jobs that people probably weren't aware of that
you go, oh, yeah, this guy didn't do this, we'd
kind of be fucked. Yeah, and you don't even think
about it. Yeah, it's just a thing that's going on
behind the scenes or you know, out of your radar.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, that was it, man, it was How did.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
You get started in that? Like, who came up with
the concept?

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Well, I mean technically I guess I did, but I
mean I honestly, there are no no ideas this. I
stole this from George Plimpton Stud's Turkle a little bit,
Charles Carralt, some Paul Harvey a little bit. You know
that that kind of storytelling was always kind of interesting

(15:48):
to me, and I freelanced for years, probably twenty years,
in the entertainment business, working pretty much whenever I wanted,
on shows that I didn't care about at all. And
I was taking my retirement in early installments and really

(16:09):
happy with the model. You know, I'd been fired a
few times from QVC and hired back, and it was
nineteen ninety three when I finally left, and I had
a decent toolbox. I was great in auditions, so I
could get cast, but I didn't really much care about
the nature of the work, and I had a pretty

(16:30):
good balanced life really. And then I was in San
Francisco working for a CBS on a show called Evening Magazine.
You know, the show comes on after like the local news,
and I was a host and I would go every day.
This is a cushy gig. Nobody watched the show, but
it was fun to work on. It was you go

(16:52):
to museums, you go to wineries, and then you throw
to these wrapped packages. Right, it's all just if there's
a three legged dog in Marin overcoming a heart tugging
case of canine kidney failure. You know. That was like
an Evening Magazine story. We did these all the time.

(17:13):
And my mom called me and I was in my
cubicle at CBS and she says, Michael, your grandfather will
be ninety years old tomorrow. And my granddad, by the way,
seventh grade education, electrical contractor by trade, but also a
plumber and a steamfit or pipe He fabricate fix anything.

(17:34):
He had that chip you know, and I grew up
next to him on this little farmstead north of Baltimore,
and I knew I was going to follow in his footsteps.
I knew it. But the handy gene is recessive, right,
I didn't get that. And it was my pop who
got me. He basically said, dude, just get a different
you can be a tradesman. I know you're enamored of

(17:56):
being a tradesman. Just get a different toolbox. So that's
what me into entertainment. And twenty years later I had
completely run amuck. I had sung in the opera. I
had sold stuff on QVC opera eight years.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
Man, did you were you classically trained?

Speaker 2 (18:11):
Not really?

Speaker 1 (18:12):
How did you get how did you get involved in
the opera?

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Sing? Well, it's a weird look. Sidebar. You go to
the Rosedale Public Library and you ask the librarian for
the shortest aria they have like ever written, which happened
to be by Jiacomo Puccini.

Speaker 1 (18:31):
Is an aria a song.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
An aria is a song. It's the they're in an opera.
Most of the big moments are arias, right, and most
of the arias are you know, I mean, they're they're
sung by the main characters and There are lots of
ones that you would recognize and remember German, they're in
Italian for the most part. This one was Italian. It

(18:55):
was from La Bom, which is just another version of
Rent essentially, but it was called The coat Aria and
it was only two minutes long and it was in Italian.
So I walked around Baltimore with you remember the sony Walkman.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, I remember I had one of those.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
I had one too, and I listened to a guy
named Samuel Raymie singing The coat Aria about two minutes
and forty seconds, and the words didn't mean anything to me,
but the sounds did, and I can carry a tune,
so I just memorized the sounds. And then I crashed
an audition for the Baltimore Opera in nineteen.

Speaker 1 (19:35):
No classic training at all, just a walkman and a cassette.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Yeah. I had had a music teacher prior to that,
like a mister Holland type of guy who actually changed
my life. He kind of fixed a stammer that I had,
and then he forced me to audition for plays that
I didn't really want to be in. And then the
craziest thing. This guy his name was Fred King. He

(20:02):
was known as king of the barbershoppers. He was like
a legend in this weird world of a cappella singing,
and he put me in a barbershop quartet when I
was in high school and opened up like this very
weird world of music written long before I was born
that I found super interesting. And so my best friends

(20:26):
and I we just started learning these ancient songs and
singing for people, usually unsolicited from nurses.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
Kind of fucking dudes, are you hanging out with that?
We're interested in doing this with you.

Speaker 2 (20:40):
Well, one of them is basically my producer, guy called
Chuck Klausmeyer, who I went to high school with, produces
my podcast and we still write will write unauthorized jingles
for our sponsors in singam and four Part Harmony. I'm
not saying it's cool. I'm just saying it's a thing
that I did when I was young, and I never
really shook it. Because like way leads onto.

Speaker 1 (21:01):
Way, right, So you knew how to sing, I could
carry it to so you'd had some experience singing kind
of yeah, and then you decided you were going to
learn how to sing opera.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
Well, what really happened was I decided that my toolbox
wasn't going to let me work in the construction trades
or do anything my pop could do. And he really
was a magician, and I really took his advice seriously.
So I wanted to be in entertainment. I didn't want
to be in the opera. I wanted to be on TV.
But I needed an agent, and I couldn't get an

(21:34):
agent unless I had my Screen Actors Guild card. And
I couldn't get my SAG card unless I had an agent.
So I couldn't audition for things that I wanted to
do unless I found a way around this weird tautology.
And a friend of mine, guy called Mike Geller, told me.
He said, hey, so there's the Screen Actors Guild there
at the time, there was after A and I'm sure

(21:56):
you were part of both. The thing you didn't know
about was AGMA. The American Guild of Musical Artists is
a sister union to the Screen Actors Guild and to AFTRA,
who have since combined. And the rule back then was
if you could, if you could get into any of them,

(22:16):
you could simply pay your dues to the other and
then you you were in. So for me, it was
easier to kind of fake my way into the opera
than it was onto a sitcom.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
So my plan this is all diabolical. Well, I mean
great plan. I mean it's like that kind of strategic thinking.
It's very value. You should be in the navy or something.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
Well, look, I was just I was just trying to
get a job, I know, but it's clever. Well, there's
always a stage door, right, I mean, there's always a
back way in, and so I thought, you know, I
memorized the aria I auditioned. I was stopped halfway through
it by the musical director, guy named Willia Nutsi, who's

(23:02):
like a mister Rowe. You you have no idea what
you're saying at all, do you are?

Speaker 1 (23:09):
He's saying the words wrong. You're just repeating the sounds.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
I was singing it loud, and I was singing it
like I like I understood what I was saying. All
I really understood was the repertory company was desperate for
young men with low voices. I knew that, and so
I kind of looked the part. So whatever, I got
into it. And my plan was to do one production

(23:35):
or one season, like they would do three shows in
a season and I had some friends who were in
the chorus, and I was just a chorus member. I'm
just holding a spear and just singing along with the
rest of the chorus. And my plan was to do
one or two of those, get my card, and then
buy my SAG card, and then go about the business
of being a famous TV star, right simple. Well, the music, man,

(23:58):
the music was so much better than I imagined it
might be. And like when you get up in the
catwalks of like a real theater, you know, I mean,
you've done shows in these theaters. It's just nothing magically
different about them. But when there's a full orchestra playing
the hell out of Verity or Rock Mononov, and you're

(24:20):
looking down on this scene and you're looking out at
the audience, and the sound is just just amazing, and
the girls so like they're Oh. There were eighty eighty
people I guess in the rep company, more or less
forty five women, thirty five guys. Thirty of the guys

(24:40):
had zero interest in one percent of the women, and
of the remaining five straight dudes, three were married, and
the only other single guy had a mold the size
of your thumb on his eyelid with thick black hair
like growing out of it. It was just I was
really the only straight dude.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
You were the bell of the ball, and I'm dressed
like a.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
Viking or a pirate, and I'm going on stage and
I'm I'm a fake. I mean, I admit it. I
barely learned the language enough to kind of keep up,
and people in the in the chorus took pity on me,
you know. And it was a world, really, it was

(25:25):
a world that I didn't know existed. And once I
saw it, I didn't fall in love with it, but
I fell in love with the idea that there were
worlds out there that I didn't know anything about and
that were maybe more interesting than I thought. And so
I stayed for eight years. Wow yeah, I mean I

(25:47):
never got out of the chorus. I never had like
a you know, a featured role. I had a couple
lines here and there. But the Baltimore Opera was a
big deal looking back at it, and that was for
me eighty eighty three to ninety Wow. Yeah. And then,
since we're talking about it, was a Sunday and during

(26:11):
the intermission of something I think it was the Ring
des Nibel lungeon, this giant wagner epic torturous thing, and
the chorus didn't have to be this is the one
you saw it on Bugs. Bunny killed a Webit killed
a web. It's that one, right, right. So there's an

(26:31):
intermission and I'm I'm not needed on stage for like
forty minutes after the intermission, so I go across the
street to the Mount Royal Tavern to drink a beer
and watch the football game dressed as a Viking, which
I recommend, by the way. We you walk in a
bar with the horns and the spear. The bartender knew me.

(26:54):
Everybody laughed and I sat down, but the game wasn't on.
The bartender was watching a fat guy in any suit
selling pots and pans, and it was the early days
of the QVC cable shopping channel. I'm like, Rick, why
are we watching this? And he says, because I'm auditioning
for that guy's job tomorrow morning. QBC was doing a

(27:15):
national talent search. Anyway, we had a conversation about the
end of Western civilization and what it meant for polite
society to have a twenty four hour infomercial that just
never went away, and whether or not. You know, there
was any honor at all in auditioning for such a thing.
And at that point I thought it'd be great to

(27:37):
have some money, you know, I hadn't had any before,
and I'm sitting there drinking this beer, addressed as a Viking,
thinking I could probably do that job if I had to.
So I went with him the next day and auditioned
and got hired.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Wow was he mad? The bartender, Yeah, that you got
the gig, you know, because you didn't even know about it.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
Well, it's a good question. I don't know what became
of him. We had a friendly We.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
Got a fucking voodoo doll of Mike Row a bunch
of pins in it.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
We had a wager. I said, look, I don't know
if I'll get the job, but I bet i'll get
a call back. He was like, You're not going to
get a call back for this thing. You know. We
were just actors at the time, or like people pretending
to be actors trying to find waiter. You know, he
was nice enough. He sang in the opera with me too.
Actually he also attended bar just he just wasn't in
that one. But yeah, it was a very strange thing

(28:34):
man too that That was my first job in TV. Look,
I've done some minor local commercial stuff, but I talked
about a pencil for eight minutes. That was the audition.
It was so strange in those days. They didn't have
a like, there's no playbook to see who can sell

(28:56):
stuff on TV?

Speaker 1 (28:57):
You know, do you have a script or are you
just kind of like you have the facts about the pencil? No?

Speaker 2 (29:03):
No, nothing, nothing. Here's what happens again, it's probably changed today.
I think UVC did eight billion dollars last year. Back
in nineteen eighty nine, nineteen ninety it was nothing like that.
And if they hired a salesman, that didn't mean you
had anybody who understood really how to behave on TV.
And if you hired a TV person, that didn't really

(29:25):
mean you look at you. Oh Jesus, that's the cat
sack right there, dude, that's a sack for your cat.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
What are you telling me? Hear this a sack for
your cat? What the fuck?

Speaker 2 (29:38):
Just crazy? They just love it, that's why this is
a cat toy. Love it.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
So the cats play with it.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah, they crawl inside it and.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
They just go nutty because it makes a lot of noise,
twenty five bucks. That's twenty five bucks, roll.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
Around and sort of wrestle with the bag.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
And just really so this is like sort of just personality,
fucking around, having fun with the toy and selling it.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
Well, that's what I did. I look, remember, that's what
you did.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Was that novel that you were doing it that way?

Speaker 2 (30:12):
Yeah? Yeah, in relative terms like that was actually one
of the great one of the one of the true
great life lessons. You know, you don't have to be
outrageous to stand out, you just have to be relatively outrageous.
So QBC was a steady diet of of men and

(30:33):
women doing the same exact thing all the time. And
then at midnight or three am, I showed up and
put a cat bag over my head, were busted open
a lava lamp.

Speaker 1 (30:44):
So you were like a morning DJ.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
Kind of except right.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Because they're kind of fun. And that was different than
the regular radio guy.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
You know, I would I mean, for me, I thought
of it more like like my favorite comedians. And by
the way, I saw one last night, thank you. Ron
White was over at the mother Ship.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
He's there tonight too.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
I stopped violent. No, I got to get back tonight
something about Thanksgiving. But I watched his set last night.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
He's awesome.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
He was he was great.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
And the thing, he's in top form right now and he's.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Gone, he's gone full Messiah dude, he's I mean, I
didn't recognize he said hello, and I'm like, hey, how
are you? I mean, you're back, Jesus, good to see you.
He was great, And as I watched him do his thing,
it reminded me like my favorite comedians. I never get

(31:41):
the sense that they're trying to make me laugh. I
get the sense that they're trying to amuse themselves, right,
And and that's what makes it comfortable for me to
be in the audience to see somebody who, you know, hey,
if I laugh, that's just a happy symptom of whatever
it is you're going to do. Anyway, it makes me comfortable.
And then that's why he's fun to watch, you know,

(32:03):
That's why this podcast is fun to listen to, same reason.
I couldn't have articulated that thirty five years ago, sitting
there selling a cat sack.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
But you intuitively knew something.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
I knew in the middle of the like everything that
I that, it turned out that I needed to know
about this crazy business. I learned in the middle of
the night on the QBC cable shopping channel over a
three year period trying to make shifts. So three hours
at a time, usually over the course of twenty four hours.

(32:39):
So call it.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
You would be on three hours at a time, Yeah,
would you come back again or would you only do
three hours?

Speaker 2 (32:45):
I do three hours and I go home, And I mean,
have you done overnights before? No, So I guarantee you
there are a lot of people listening who have worked
an overnight shift in their trade, in their vocation. It
changes you just as surely as Doris the cat Lady's
brain was scrambled by the Gandhi eye and the toso.

(33:08):
It does something. It's not just that it is that,
but it's it's something primal, even more primal than that.
It just messes with you and it forces you. For me,
it changed colors, it changed taste, It changed yeah, because

(33:28):
I had never I mean I was upside down after
I talked about a pencil for eight minutes. I was
on the air forty eight hours later at three in
the morning, trying to make sense of the Health Team
infrared pain reliever and the amcor negative ion generator, Like,
what the hell did.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
They give you a rundown of what these products were
at all?

Speaker 2 (33:52):
It was up to you if you came in a
couple hours early and you took the time to look through,
Like there was a table like this with all of
the stuff on it that you were going to be selling,
and you could take the time to prepare.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
But there was no Google back then. It's not like
you could just watch a YouTube video that would explain
what this thing did.

Speaker 2 (34:09):
No, what you got was a blue card, usually from
the manufacturer, that said a couple of sentences about what
the thing was. You had an item number, you had
the price, the retail price, the QBC price, and maybe
some easy payment terms, all the stuff, right, But it
was just a blue card. And then you would kind

(34:30):
of go off and think about how you would make
sense out of this skull and where it came from
and why it's interesting and it's feature benefits selling, you know,
and if you understand that, you can talk about anything
for as long as you need to. You know, you
never talk about a feature without talking about its benefit.

(34:52):
And so that's kind of how that world worked. So
you don't say it's a pencil for ninety nine cents.
You say, it's a yellow number two pence with any
eraser that is of the exact proportion necessary to last
for the life of the pencil. So when this thing
is down to a nub, you'll still have enough eraser left.

(35:12):
It's really a monument to efficiency and ingenuity. And it's
not just yellow. It's yellow because you're a busy professional
and when you need a pencil, Joe, when you open
up your drawer, you don't have time to root around
for some vaguely beige colored writing implement. You want that
canary yellow to pop and you can pick it up right,
And it's not it's a number two pencil. It's not

(35:33):
three with that thin, wispy line that you can't read,
or that thick, disappointing skid mark of a number one. Right,
So you just it's like train yourself to fill dead
air with nonsense.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
While you're sucking up your circadian rhythm.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah, while you're wondering like when your next meal is
and here you're gonna have it with And you wind
up making friends and essentially hanging with with other people
who live in that same weird like shadow land.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
Yeah, shadow land. That's a good way to put it.
I have kind of an experience with overnight, but it's
not the same. I delivered newspapers, and so at least
one day a week on Sunday, I would basically show
up Saturday night at three in the morning, right, because
you would. I would deliver Sunday papers. And the Sunday
papers were it was a huge under you flip the top.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
Flipped, Oh, I forgot to flip the flip the.

Speaker 1 (36:30):
Top and then hit the button.

Speaker 2 (36:32):
There you go, hit it? Hey, all right?

Speaker 1 (36:36):
And so I was all fucked up from that. I
would get up every day at five o'clock in the morning,
uh normally to deliver papers because at a large route,
it was my way to make money without having to
do a job or I had to listen to anybody.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
It's also a perfect example of a kind of job
where you always know how you're doing while you're doing it.
Like lots and lots of little visual undeniable cues. Right
you got to your bags or your baskets full of paper,
or your car or whatever you were doing. You're tossing
them out one at a time. You know you're making progress.

(37:12):
You know the progress you're making as you make it.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
You know, it's you know, you only have one hundred
and twenty houses.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
To go, that's right, and then it's one hundred and ten,
and then it's like.

Speaker 1 (37:24):
People, let's go to Dunkin Donuts, get yourself a nice
donut and a coffee, reward yourself. Days over, Yeah, my
day would be done work wise by you know, eight
am nine am on a Sunday. Nine was rough. Occasionally
they would make enormous Sunday papers and that would be
a real problem because you'd have to make multiple trips.

(37:45):
And I bought a van, so I had a big
cargo van and I drove that around to deliver newspapers
for a while. That made it a lot easier because
I could stack three hundred and fifty Sunday papers in
the back of that van.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
But see, you remember and you knew three hundred and fifty.
That's an interesting that.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
I had bigger routes, but three point fifty was manageable.
Were I started when I was just driving, so I
was in high school still, so I think I started
delivering papers when I was seventeen or eighteen whatever legal
age they allow you to do it, so it was
probably seventeen or eighteen. I started driving, and I drove

(38:23):
till I was twenty two. I just started doing stand
up comedy. I drove all throughout my competitive martial arts career.
I drove in the morning. It was good because it
gave me discipline, because I had to do it seven
days a week, three and a sixty five days a year,
and you did not take any days off. It didn't
matter if it snowed or rained or fucking frozen rain

(38:45):
on the streets, black ice, didn't matter. You gotta deliver
newspapers and if it if they did delay it, you
would just it would delay your delivery of the paper,
so you'd have to call the depot you know, hey,
are we delivering yet? Because they didn't want to be responsible.
It was a bluie for people dying and get lawsuits,
so they didn't make you deliver papers if it was

(39:06):
unbelievably bad out. But for the most part, you drove
every day.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
So you had you had a sense of consequence too.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yes, like you, you disciplined consequence, you didn't deliver the papers,
you didn't get paid. It was very simple. It was
a very simple job. You would show I don't even
remember how they trained us. I think that maybe they
trained us for like one day. You were taught how
to fold the paper one two, stuff it in the
bag you had. Plastic bags were great because you could
chuck them out the window and it never damage the paper.

(39:34):
Rubber bands were real pain in the ass because you
could hit a corner on the concrete, it would rip
the corner of the paper, and then the customer would
complain because they're trying to read about what's going on
in Syria and then there's this, fuck yeah, broken piece
of paper. I delivered the New York Times only because
it was cool. Like I delivered the Boston Globe because
that was the biggest distribution, like I could get the
biggest route, and then the Boston Herald because I wanted

(39:56):
more papers to deliver, so I would do two papers,
The New York Times. But New York Times is a
pain in the ass because it would be like one
every ten blocks. You'd have an enormous route. If you
had one hundred and fifty New York Times, that's an
all day excursion.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
Did you start to equate the type of home you
were delivering the type of paper.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
To Yes, the New York Times. People took themselves very seriously.
They were very serious people. They would ask me what
I'm doing with my life. I remember this lady I
was I was taking courses at Boston University just so
people wouldn't think I was a loser. It was literally
the only reason why I was going to college. And
you know, she's asking, what are you going to what

(40:37):
are you planning on doing with your career? I'm like,
I have no idea? Like and she didn't like it.
She didn't like that I had no idea.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, it makes people uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 (40:45):
Liked me, but she didn't like that I had no idea.
She was like, very motherly to me.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
I guess it's funny. We had the Baltimore Sun, which
was the paper of record, and then we had the
News American, which was sort of like the upstart. And
I never thought too much about the dfference between the
two until summertime. And crabs, like Maryland blue crabs are
a big thing, big thing in my family, big thing

(41:09):
where I grew up. And everybody who eats crabs in
the summer eats them outside on a picnic table and
you lay the newspaper out, but which one, Joe, Oh,
which one matters? I don't know why it does.

Speaker 1 (41:23):
So is it disrespectful to use the paper of note? No, No,
it's better.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
No, it's it's I think it's a mark of respect.
It's like, oh, we're having crabs. Get the news American.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
Oh, that's so silly.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
Get the news American, because you know it's all spread
out in front of you, and you got the crab
guts and the Old Bay and the Jail Number two
and the National Bohemian Beer and maybe you can glance
down and get informed.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
Is isn't it interesting that there are newspapers like that? Right?
Like there's the New York Post. You want a fun headline,
you know, you want all the crazy shit like what happened?
Who got pregnant? You know, what's going on with this?
What's going on with that? And then you have the
New York Times, where you know it's important to put
tampons in the boys room. It's like, what is happening?

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Have you ever walked through the offices of the Post
any chance? Oh? No, dude, it's amazing, it's amazing. I
had a old girlfriend whose sister worked there, worked for
page six.

Speaker 1 (42:23):
Oh boy, Yeah, that's the fun one.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
Yeah, so much fun.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
So that's like all the gossip and the craziness and
persons getting arrested right right drunk driving and bokers, and they.

Speaker 2 (42:35):
Have a hallway. It's like this place in the censer.
There's so much on the walls, but it's all front
pages and it's the best headlines.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
Ah so it's the best ones they've ever come up.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
With, the best ones ever, starting with the classic headless
body found in Topless Bar, which is still tough to be.

Speaker 1 (42:53):
That's great, but so many of them. I love the post. Yeah,
I've always loved the post. I love the just the
fun name nature of the news. That was like the
working person's newspaper.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
This is the point I was trying to make about
the comedian who entertains himself first and the schmuck on
QVC who tries to keep himself awake right before he
sells the thing. That's how I felt reading the post.
It was like these guys, somehow I'm imagining me laughing.

(43:24):
They're laughing their cigars and they're all in on the joke. Ye, Like, yeah,
we're going to report the news, but you know, it's
a lot of sharp elbows out there. It's a very
competitive world. So what can we do to maybe get
the stick a little, you know, out of our ass,
just a little bit? You know? How can we be different?
That's what fascinates me. Yeah, you know, how can whether

(43:46):
you're publishing a paper or eating a blue crab, you know,
or writing a book or a song, you know, how
can you? How can you in relative terms, distinguish yourself
not from these other worlds and other categories, but from
from your friends from right, that's the that's the trick, man, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
That is the trick. And then there's people that want
to be that person that is taken seriously, that's reading
the New York Times. You want to be that person
with their legs crossed reading the New York Times, like
very serious, very serious people who very very smart people
keep up to date.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
Yeah, I said to uh, Ashton, you're a very excellent
driver who brought me here. I said, you know, it's
been fun watching Joe do this thing over the last
five or six years. And then I kind of stopped
myself in the middle and I said, actually, you know,
I take it back. What's been fun is watching, uh,

(44:45):
watching the world catch up to it like watching the
headlines catch up to you or whoever. You really haven't changed.
And man, it's so interesting to watch people realize, Oh,
we're we're going to do it this way now. You know,

(45:07):
we're going to do it this way now, and and
and that's been whether it's comedy or whether it's music.
You know, it's when culture changes. It feels like there's
some instigator, some jagged little pill who's pushing it forward.
And I guess maybe that's that's true, but I also
think there's this this larger hive mentality in the audience,

(45:28):
and right, they start to realize, oh, there's a there's
another way to deliver a paper, there's another way to
do a thing, And it feels new, but it's it's
probably what you've been doing for the last twelve years.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
Yeah, it's definitely the same way I've always done it.
It's just having conversations with people. I like talking to people.
It's fun, yeah, but you may enjoy it good. I'm
a more curious person and I like talking to people.
But that's it's real simple.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
Yeah, but it's just because it's simple, right, you make
it sound like com parenthetical. Oh, it's just a conversation. Yeah,
that's only just the hardest thing there is to do.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
But it's not really, it's not why do it? Because
why I enjoy it? They don't enjoy it like I
enjoy it. Like some people genuinely don't like talking to people.
You know why, because they're interested in themselves. You have
to be interested in other people. I think we're all connected.
I really firmly believe this in a non hippie way.

(46:25):
I think it's like a scientific reality. I mean, if
I think if we could figure out a way to
study it, we would recognize that we were psychically all
connected in some strange way. And I am curious as
to how someone from with a different biology, different life,
experiences different geographic location in which they were raised, Like

(46:49):
how are they navigating the world? And why are they
interested in opera? What is it? Why? What got you
to be a beekeeper? Why why are you so fascinated
with painting? What made you start writing music? Like I'm interested.
I like talking to people, so for me it is easy.
It really is. It's just talking to people like I

(47:11):
would talk to people like you and I gonna have
the same exact conversation if we're having dinner somewhere for sure,
same conversation.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
Yeah, but again it makes perfect sense. And it's not
that it's difficult. It's just that very few people do it.
And if your explanation is because very few people genuinely
enjoy it, I can't disprove it, you're probably right.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
I think that's what it is. Just got lucky. I
think I just got lucky and I found a job
that I would be doing anyway.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
Well, here's what I don't understand, and maybe this is
not even relevant, but we did three hundred and fifty
dirty jobs, probably sixty some of this thing called Somebody's
Got to Do It. I don't even know returning the favor.
I think we did one hundred episodes of that. I
don't even I couldn't tell you how many things I've narrated, hundreds.

(48:01):
If there's a will to beast trying to get across
the vast reaches of the Baron Serengetti, right, right, Like
if I could remember every episode of How the Universe Works,
ten years of this stuff, if I could remember half
of what I narrated, that would be something I can
remember a chunk. But my sense is that I can't

(48:23):
even remember the last twenty guests I had on my podcast.
And the reason isn't because I'm not curious, and it's
not because I'm not because I lack the requisite intelligence
to remember. For me, it's just it's so much. There's
been no time to think about what I'm going to
do next, and even less time to think about what

(48:45):
I just did. So you just talked to Josh Brolin,
and then you talk to the musician guy Stuart, Yeah right, Scott, Yeah, Scott,
and then before that our friend Evan was in right,
So like I have a better it's easier for me
to remember what you've done in the last two months

(49:06):
than it is for me, and that freaks me out.
And I wonder if sometimes you get over your skis
to the point where you've started to forget what you've
done yourself.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
Oh yeah, there's no way to keep it all. I
have a bucket that's overflowing with information. It's overflowing. My
hard drive is not capable of retaining all of it.
It's not possible. I retain a lot, though, a lot
more than I ever would know. I got an unexpected

(49:39):
education doing this show, for sure, like I never anticipated it.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
It's it conscious, Like, can you choose to be interested
in a thing enough to know that you're not going
to forget it? Or does the interest just kind of
bubble up and certain things stick to you.

Speaker 1 (49:58):
The interest bubbles up and they still yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
Like my my daughter asked me a question the other day.
I don't even remember what the question about, but it's
a very technical thing. And I said, no, that's not
exactly it. It seems like that, but this is the
reason why. And they figured this out because of this.
And I started rattling off and she's like, how the
fuck do you know this? She was laughing, and I
was like, I don't know everything. I forget things. I
forget my own birthday, but I do remember things that

(50:24):
are fascinating. I remember most things that are fascinating to me.
I have an unusual recall, but I've always had an
unusual recall. It's like, I think it's a genetic thing.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
They let me get really good at things too, because
I can remember like technical like it was really good
for martial arts because I can remember technical details like
really like like, I don't forget things.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
See you to me, are the are the deeper end?
Of the pool. I'm more the the shallow end. Not
I don't mean the for that to sound comparative so much.
But like with martial arts, I'm interested in martial arts.
I'm interested in Ultimate Fighting. I narrated The Ultimate Fighter, right,

(51:05):
I did, Yeah, with ten seasons of it. But like
that's sort of the extent, Like I don't. I don't
go very deep. I've seen a couple, but I but
it's like, well, this.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
Is the big giant difference between being a former competitor
and also like dedicated decades of my life to martial arts.
It's not as simple as like I go and I
do commentary. Like I started doing martial arts when I
was fifteen, and it changed my life. It gave me
discipline and a will to overcome oncomfort discomfort and to

(51:39):
push myself and to overcome fears and to do something
that's very scary and to compete. And that was like
it formulated me as a teenager. So I started competing
competitively like serious shit when I was like fifteen years old,
and so we were traveling all over the country, and
so my social life from like fifteen to twenty one

(51:59):
was completely retarded. It was like retarded as it slowed
down like the real term, and it was mostly just
training and competing. That's all I did. And when the downtime,
I was tired, so I would just sleep a lot.
I was like eating, sleeping, working and competing. And then
I started teaching, so then that I was making my

(52:20):
living off of teaching, but not enough money. So I
was still delivering newspapers. So I delivered newspapers in the morning,
and then I would teach, and I was teaching at
Boston University. I was teaching. I had my own school
by the time I.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
Was twenty taekwondo. Yeah, so this is my point. You
take a deep dive when you get interested in a thing. Yeah,
you go into the thing. Comedy wasn't a hobby. It
became I think, as it becomes everything, it becomes everything
almost nothing I do becomes everything nothing almost nothing.

Speaker 1 (52:53):
But what are the things what becomes everything?

Speaker 2 (52:55):
I'm not sure yet. Let me think about it.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
Is there one thing that if you have, like free time,
you super look forward to doing. You have a hobby?
Do you play golf?

Speaker 2 (53:05):
No?

Speaker 1 (53:06):
Nothing.

Speaker 2 (53:06):
I don't have hobbies and I don't know lobbies. No,
I don't collect that.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
I own very little. I never have.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
I wish I had a hundred lives to live simultaneously,
I would have. I would do one hundred different things.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
This is the difference. You're insatiable in that way. You
you you, You get a thing and you're gonna nail
it to the wall. Man, You're gonna My late.

Speaker 1 (53:28):
Great friend Anthony Bourdain, his headline is bio on Twitter,
it said enthusiast. I really wish that I'd come up
with that, because that's what I am. I'm an enthusiast.
I would I wouldn't say it now because I would
rip him off. And also now my bio says dragon believer.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
Because the congratulations on that, the ladies.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
They said, I believe in dragons, triple checked, triple checked, Mike,
got to be true. But I'm an enthusiast. That's what
I am. I am a person who is very fortunate
and that I have a love of a lot of things.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
Well, you and Tony were similar, obviously in that way.
He took big bites, he took big swings.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
Well, we became good friends when he really got into
jiu jitsu. Yeah, because I kind of got him into
it and then his wife really got him into it.
But he started going to the UFC. His wife was
training in jiu jitsu and she got really into it.
She was really loving it, and then she was like,
let's go to the O scen He's like, this is
fucking great. And then you know, he came to one
of my comedy shows. We became friends. Started going going
to dinner. By the way, with Anthony Bourdain's the coolest

(54:32):
fucking thing in the world because you go to dinner
with him and all the chefs freak out. Yeah, and
so they just want to feed you. You know, they
just want to like, don't touch the menu. We got you,
and they come over and bring food and you know.

Speaker 2 (54:43):
I wrote a eulogy for him that crashed my website.
Oh wow, it's really funny. I only I met him twice,
and each time it was fairly brief. But there. It
was a time when he was doing No Reservations, Dirty

(55:03):
Jobs was early on. I bet your Fear Factor was
still in production then too.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
Yeah, Fear Factor was Nah, maybe it was probably at
the Fear Factor stopped in two thousand and seven, and
No Reservations I think was around that time.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
Yeah, he was on and six mm hm for sure.
Dirty Jobs went on in.

Speaker 1 (55:22):
Three yeah, and then the CNN show, which was I
think like CNN's highlight of their time, and I think
he really changed that network because all of a sudden,
that network was this fucking cool show where this guy
had this brilliant narration and he had this wonderlust but

(55:44):
also with this like real fascination with people and cultures
and it just really loved it. He just loved going
to Vietnam, he loved going wherever he could go. He'd
love to eat their street food. He'd loved to talk
to them. He really wanted to know what these people
were all about.

Speaker 2 (56:01):
You know, I've never with the pot This will sound
vainglorious and I don't mean it too, but with the
possible exception of me on Discovery in twenty ten narrating
half their shows and hosting Dirty Jobs, which was a thing,
you know, I felt really triangulated then. But then when

(56:24):
I met Tony and I had a show on CNN
at the same time. Actually it was a companion show.

Speaker 1 (56:30):
What was show.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
It was called Somebody's Got to Do It.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
Oh, that's right.

Speaker 2 (56:34):
It followed Dirty Jobs, and Jeff Zucker wanted something with Tony.
So he was like, well, let's kind of do a
version of this, and I said, yeah, okay, but all
the trouble in the world, man, every crisis, whether it's
Haiti or whether it's a riot, you know, the show
got preempted constantly. They didn't preempt Tony, but they preempted

(56:54):
me a lot. And I was commiserating with Tony about
this once and and that's when we had the conversation
where I said, look, I just got to tell you, man,
I have never in my life seen anybody doing the
right show for them at the right time, on the
right network for them.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
I've never seen that like that before. I mean, and
that never mind the Peabody. It was the Peabodies that
got me. Actually, I don't know who cares about the Emmys.
They're easy, but jeezus, here was this one Peabody Award
after the next. Yeah, and it wasn't a huge The
audience wasn't as big as people think, but they were engaged.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
Well that's what's important, I mean, the audience, if they're
really there for you, rather than if they're just flipping channels,
you know, because there's a lot of shows that just
get people that are flipping channel. Sure, well we used
to do. When I was on news radio, everybody wanted
this shot the spot after Seinfeld because there was sign
there was Seinfeld and Friends were on the same night
and it was just this murderous Thursday night lint see.

(57:58):
It was an unbelievable lineup, and if you got lucky,
you were sex in the City or the single guy.
And what Paul Simms, the producer of news radio, would
call a shit sandwich because you had your brilliant show
and then your terrible show, and then another brilliant show
and another terrible show. But if you got in those
time spots, oh boy, you got a good spot because
people are going to just keep tuning in. They didn't

(58:18):
tune in for news radio. News radio wasn't really successful
after it was off the air.

Speaker 2 (58:23):
You were in the slipstream. Yeah, you were in the orbit.

Speaker 1 (58:26):
Well, we weren't owned by NBC, so it was a
different production company. It was Pearlstine Gray, so they didn't
have a vested interest in us being successful. So the
writers would show up. My friend Lou would wear a
T shirt and he would write the number that we were.
When we would do the table reads, and one day
it was eighty eight and I was like, for real,

(58:48):
He's like yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
I was like, oh no, with a bullet.

Speaker 1 (58:52):
We thought we were going to get canceled literally every
year except the year we got canceled. The year we
got canceled, that was shocked because that was like the
year after Phil died, and then John Lovettz took his
place for a season, and then they canceled it after that,
and like in the perfect thing for our show. We
never even hit one hundred episodes for syndication. They had

(59:12):
to sell it at like ninety eight episodes. That was
like our show. It's like we were always like barely
hanging on, you know. It was just we It was
a funny show. It was a really good show with
talented people.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
Love that show the people.

Speaker 1 (59:23):
I was super lucky to work on it, and it
ruined me because I could never work on another show
after that.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
What did you look? What was the big lesson from
news radio if there was one for you.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
Wow, it was just fortune. The lesson is that you
could just be fortunate, you know, because I was not
a trained actor at all. I did a set on
MTV half hour Comedy Hour. They had this comedy show.
I did a set, and then MTV offered me a
development deal and then my manager said, this is terrible money.

(59:56):
They're going to lock you up for like three years
for like five hundred dollars, crazy, ridiculous, bad money. He said,
I'm gonna take your tape and tell all these other
production companies that MTV wants to sign a deal with you,
and then it'll start a bidding war. And he was brilliant,
and he did it, and that's exactly what happened. And
the next thing, you know, I couldn't answer my phone
because my phone was just calling. But agents and people

(01:00:18):
would just call me, Like some guy called me from Universe.
I was like, what what the fuck is go up
this shitty apartment on my way out the door to playpool,
and this guy is telling me he wants me to
get on a flight that night. We have a flight
at ten pm leaving out a Laguardi. I was like,
what are you talking about? And so then I called
my manager. This guy just fucking called me from me.
He was like, don't answer your phone. He's like, go playpool,
get out of here. I'll take care of it. Next thing,

(01:00:39):
you know, I was in Hollywood. It was like that
quick and I was on a show called Hardball. It
went six episodes, and the only reason why I stayed
in California, I wanted to go back to New York.
I hated it. I hated actors. I just couldn't deal
with being around these weirdos. They were these weird phony people.
They would say good to see you, because they couldn't
remember if they met you, say nice to meet you,

(01:01:01):
and fucking up and go I'm sorry, mate, I'm sorry,
I fucked up. They didn't want to be real, so
they everyone said good to see you. Everyone's good and
it was super unsincere. I was like, this is so weird. Yeah,
it was a super uncomfortable experience. And it was the
worst experience on a show because the people that ran
the show, Jeff Martin and Kevin Curran, super funny, talented
guys who had worked on Married with Children and The Simpsons, brilliant,

(01:01:22):
but the studio didn't think that they were good enough
to run a show, so they brought in this hack
and this guy comes in and just butchers all the scripts.
It was horrible, so that gets canceled. The only reason
why I stay is because I had a lease, so
I got a nice apartment. I'm like, the first apartment
I ever had. Was like I thought I was gonna
be on TV forever, Like this is gonna be easy.
And now fuck, I got to get out of here.

Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
I was.

Speaker 1 (01:01:42):
I wanted to go back to New York. I thought
about breaking my lease, but then NBC contacted me and
they said, we have the show. It's called News Radio
and we're recasting one of the one of the roles.
Do you want to come in? And so I came
in and an auditioned for it, and the next thing
you know, I'm working with Phil Hartman. It was bizarre,
no aspirations whatsoever to be an actor, never wanted to
be on TV. And then I'm working with Andy Dick

(01:02:05):
and Phil Hartman and Mara Tyranny and Candy Alexander, Vicky
Lewis and Dave Foley, Like this is crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
From the kids from Second City.

Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
Yeah, he was brilliant. Dave Polly, by the way, was
the secret producer of News Radio because he would they
would give him full autonomy, so he would completely rewrite
scenes like on the spot, come up with punchlines for everybody.
We all did that for everybody, Like we would all
come up like maybe you should say this. Maybe that
was like super collaborative. So just fortune, complete, utter good fortune.

(01:02:35):
Because I had friends that were on terrible sitcoms and
they were living in hell. Yeah, and we'd hang out
at the comedy store and you know, they were living
in hell, and I was like, look, I'm gonna show
that nobody watches, but it's fun as shit and I
can't believe him on TV. This is nuts.

Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
Yeah, you're in on the joke.

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
Yeah, it was fun. It was really fun. But it
was just fortunate. I could have easily never never done
any of those things easily.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
I thought for years that really a sitcom had to
be the best gig in the world to have to
do a basically to do a play every week.

Speaker 1 (01:03:13):
If it's a good sitcom, if it's a good sit
if it's a bad sitcom, it's hell. Sure, those guys
who do a lot of coke and buy nice cars,
those are on, but they're on bad shows. They just
want to give themselves something to reward themselves for this. Sure,
fucking slaves. I wouldn't say slave work. I just say, like,
you're a slave to money. It's not your you're compromising

(01:03:35):
who you are for money. You don't really want to
do that show, but you're on it and it sucks
and you have to repeat these terrible lines.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
That's what I'm getting at. See, it's the for me.
It came down to that I finally got a chance
to do one. I played Tim Allen's younger brother on
Last Man Standing for a turn.

Speaker 1 (01:03:54):
I never saw that show. That was a weird one, right,
because they get mad at him because he was right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
Yeah, yeah, didn't they cancel It was a number one
show and they canceled. Then Fox picked it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
Up, so nuts they canceled it because they didn't like
his politics.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
Yeah wow, dude, that I mean, that's that basically happened
to Dirty Jobs too. Really, Oh yeah, yeah, it's it's
mind boggling. But but the point was I finally got
a chance to I.

Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
Don't want to gloss over that. I want to come
back to that.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
You can hear that, all right, Yeah, yeah, now that's
a great one. You'll you'll love this, But but to
Tim is great, by the way, and we became friends
and chemistry on camera. Everybody loved it and when it
was over, I was like, well, you know, do an
honest inventory, Mike, Like what what did you love? What?
What didn't you love? And really, the only thing I

(01:04:43):
loved was I was seeing people who loved each other
and being welcomed into their.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
Little world plan. That's it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
Yeah, everything like the idea that somebody else is writing
lines for me. I know that sounds impossibly arrogant, but
I was so you to nobody writes for me. Dirty
Jobs was truly unscripted. Everything I ever did there were
never any lines.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
And so that's an alien experience for you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):
Yeah, I mean I'd done plenty of plays as a
kid and stuff, but that's different. You know, that's a
that's different once you're in Hollywood, and once you're sort
of in the machine, it still lingers. I mean, that's
the whole reason I crashed the audition for the opera.
I was just trying to find a sitcom at some
point somewhere. And then when I when I finally got it,
you know, I realized just how lucky I had been

(01:05:32):
prior to that, and how here you want this, and
how crap man. You know, a thing can live in
your mind so much bigger than it is in reality,
and so while I love doing it, for that week,
I said to my business partner over that this thing
that I used to think of as the single most

(01:05:54):
efficient way to make a living was so wildly inefficient.
It takes four days to rehearse for a half hour thing.
You gotta be kidding me. I could do five one
hour shows right in the same period.

Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, completely different experience in that way.
It's a collaborative, fun time, and you do become like
a little bit of a strange family.

Speaker 2 (01:06:15):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:06:15):
We all hung out together and drunk together.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
And that's important.

Speaker 1 (01:06:19):
Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, it is important. It's it was
like we you know, it was a lot of fun, man,
you know, and meeting people like Stephen Root, who you know,
went on to do a million different things. Brilliant, brilliant guy.
You get to see people that are like really good
at like he was a character. He was the only
one of us that wasn't really himself, Like he was

(01:06:39):
this one guy who was like a super sweet guy
when you meet him in real life, and then he
was Jimmy James my Stapler. Yeah, he becomes did you
see what was that one? Cohen Brothers had some Netflix
thing a while west Netflix thing he played on that
he was fucking.

Speaker 2 (01:06:53):
Genie, wasn't he brother did?

Speaker 1 (01:06:56):
Yeah, he wasn't. I think he was an old brother.
He's been in everything, He's in a million different things.
But just being with these people that you know, Like
I said, I had no aspirations to act. I just
wanted I was just a comic. I just wanted to
make a living doing comedy. And then somebody offered me
more money than I made in a year for a week,
and I was like, this is crazy, And then all
of a sudden, I'm on a show. It was like

(01:07:16):
just fortune. I I auditioned for two shows ever, and
I got both of them. Those are the only two
shows I ever auditioned for. What was the only one,
Hardball the first one that I went for that was terrible. Yeah,
that was the baseball show that got canceled. And then
I auditioned for news radio. So it was it was nuts.
It was just I was just stepping in shit every
step of the way. Didn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
So I never had an agent except for a very
brief period when I did, and it was you know,
Sean Perry over it endeavor you guys, Ever crossed paths.
I know his former assistant turned out to be his wife. Later,
how's that work, Nicole Taylor? That's man, They're they're living great.
They live up in the hills somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:07:57):
How's it work with your former assistant? How's it worked?
That's none of my business, but that's a dangerous undertaking.

Speaker 2 (01:08:04):
She called me one day and I was in my
full on freelance world. I hadn't had a job since QVC,
so this is like nineteen ninety nine, and she says,
I just want to I just want to send you
out for something cause I know you're going to book it.
And I said, well, actually yeah, I could use a gig.
So she sends me out. In the same week, she says,

(01:08:24):
you should read for Craig Poligian over at Pilgrim Films.
He's doing something called Worst Case Scenario and he's looking
for a host, and so I auditioned for that. And
then later that week she says, this guy from Nashville,
Michael Orkin was his name, who I had worked with
years earlier, not Nashville, Memphis. He was hosting or the

(01:08:49):
EP on that evening magazine thing that I mentioned, and
he's ready to hire you based off your blooper tape.
I never had a tape either. I just my whole
audition reel in those days was a compilation of every
moment that went off the rails at QVC, all the
things that led to my eventual firings, as well as
the cat sac and all the other crap. That's it was,

(01:09:11):
I dare you to hire me. I got hired for
both jobs that week, both jobs, and so suddenly I'm
working for TBS hosting Worst Case Scenario, which lived up
to its name. And then I'm up in San Francisco
hosting Evening Magazine and there.

Speaker 1 (01:09:26):
Was no conflict of interests, no, like you totally negotiated
both of them at the same time.

Speaker 2 (01:09:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09:31):
Wow, that's cool.

Speaker 2 (01:09:32):
Yeah. And then Nicole switched agencies and I and I
never really had an agent, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:09:39):
Prior to that or fortunate or since super fortunate Financially
it's great, you know what's fortunate?

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
Man? Remember? Okay, so my mother calls me. I'm at
Evening Magazine sitting in my cubicle. My dad, my granddad's
ninety years old. Remember this. I didn't close the loop
on this, But that's to answer your first question. What
happened was my mom called me and said, your grandfather
is going to be ninety tomorrow, and before he dies,

(01:10:07):
wouldn't it be great if he could turn on the
TV and see you doing something that looked like work. WHOA, Yeah,
my mother's a savage jeez. She just finished her fourth
book by the way.

Speaker 1 (01:10:20):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:10:21):
Yeah, she's written three best sellers after eighty.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):
That's incredible.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
She's out of control, that's incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:10:28):
So she was like, she wanted you to do something impressive.

Speaker 2 (01:10:31):
My mother wrote every day for sixty years. Wow, no agent,
No got published in like the News American and the
Baltimore Son, you know, local stuff, some horse magazines. We
were horse people kind of growing up, and and her
her dream was to write. She finally got a book
deal when she was eighty, went to a number four

(01:10:52):
best seller.

Speaker 1 (01:10:53):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:10:54):
And everything she's written so far so that's recently. Back
in whatever it was two thousand. Once she was just
a pain in my ass, and she called me to say,
you know, wouldn't it be great if your granddad, this
guy whose shadow I grew up in, you know, could
see you doing something, because like my pop hads he'd
seen the opera, he'd seen QVC, he'd seen every godforsaken

(01:11:15):
infomercial he'd seen. You know, I've done a lot of things,
probably two hundred jobs in the whole freelance world. And
so I was forty two and I took my cameraman
from Evening Magazine into the sewer of San Francisco the
next day to host the show from a sewer. And
what happened in the sewer, judge was, I mean? It changed?

(01:11:38):
It's I wrote a book about it. It changed my
whole life. The roaches are the size of your thumbs.
They're millions of them, and they crawl all over you.
The shit comes at you in a chocolate tide of
unending disappointment. And it's filled not just with all the
stuff that comes out of your body. It's filled with

(01:11:59):
stuff that comes out your medicine cabinet and plastic products
and rubber private condoms stuck to your rubber suit. You know,
it's unspeakably vile. You can barely breathe. And what and
what happened to me down there is I I completely
failed to like host the show. All the stand ups

(01:12:22):
went wrong. Laterals exploded with because we were all getting
hit in the head with it's like a shooting gallery.
There was a rat the size of a loaf of
bread that crawled up my I lost my footing fell
into I was I was baptized. I was baptized in
a river of crap. And at the end, my cameraman

(01:12:47):
throw up at one point an enormous puke. And I'm
squatting in the filth, you know, looking at the camera,
trying to open the show. And when you see when
you see your camera mans vomit float past you as
you're trying to articulate the thought. And meanwhile, the guy

(01:13:10):
who was like my minder was an actual sewer inspector,
and he's in the background trying to do his job,
which is to hammer out the old bricks that are
rotting and replace them with new ones. Now it's all
it's one hundred five degrees. It's the seventh level of hell. Oh,

(01:13:30):
it's clear I can't do my job. So I go
over to this guy's name was Jeene Cruz, and I say, hey,
what are you doing. He's like, I'm putting bricks in.
I said, you need a hand, So I start mixing
the mortar and we start talking just like people, you know,
not like a hosty thing, but like what you were saying,

(01:13:51):
just what would happen if you had an honest conversation
totally unscripted with a guy who didn't really know he
was going to be on camera? But what if you
film and put it on TV? Anyway? What would happen? Well,
what happened a week later when this thing finally aired
was I was fired? Is because people sitting down to

(01:14:13):
hear their heart tugging story of the three legged dog
up in Marin overcoming canine kidney failure and it's me,
a smart ass forty two year old, crawling through a
river of crap. I mean, they're trying to eat their meat. Love.
You know, it was the wrong segment for that, for
that show, but talk about fortunate. The mail that came

(01:14:34):
in as a result, some people said it was funny
and they liked it. Some people were repulsed. But the
letters that changed my life were the ones that said,
you think that was dirty? Way do you see what
my brother does? Way do you see my cousin does?
My mom, my sister, my uncle? Right? And I'm like,

(01:14:55):
oh my god, there's I mean, if the Bay Area
is any kind of a microcosm for the country, and
I'm not saying it is, but from a TV standpoint,
I was like, this is new. No, I've never seen
feedback like this. I've never seen curiosity among the viewership

(01:15:17):
like this. And so that's that's where the idea came from.
It was like, what if the viewer programs the show
a and what if be the host of the show
is the person that I meet who welcomes me into
their shithole or wherever they work. And what if what

(01:15:40):
if I'm not a host after all, after twenty years
of impersonating a host, what if I'm a guest or
an apprentice, or a or an avatar or a cipher, Right, Like,
what if I just think of myself differently than this
guy who hits the mark and looks at the camera
and tells you the cat's act is twenty nine? I mean,

(01:16:02):
what if you just let all that go? And you know,
I don't know that I would have thought of it
like that at twenty at twenty two, certainly, not not
even at thirty two, But at forty two I was
entering a more introspective kind of phase, and so I

(01:16:22):
was really just curious to see what would happen if
I if I thought of myself as something different.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27):
Well, if we think about the history of just media,
it's very recent, right. You have radio, which is like,
when did people start listening to radio? Was the eighteen hundreds? Okay?
And then you have television, which kicks on in the fifties,
and everyone's a presenter, ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles, right,

(01:16:50):
everyone's Ed Sullivan, Everyone's Jack Jack Parr. Like, there's these
type of people that do this job. And it's like,
you go to a you do a morning radio Show'm
sure you have morning DJ boys, Hey, five o'clock on
the hour, let's go with bomb Jovie. There's a voice
that they have a strip club DJ. Similar, there's a

(01:17:12):
voice an anchorman. Yes, the news, especially local news, they
have a very specific thing that they're doing. Yeah, well
it's fake. It's not a person. It's no people act
like that. If you had a guy like that over
your house for dinner and be like, what the fuck
is wrong with Bob? Bob's a psycho. The guy's got
people buried in his fucking basement. Who talks like that? Right?

(01:17:35):
And so I think the Internet opened up a lot
of room for unprofessional people to thrive. That's me so like,
I'm I can't do that's what it is.

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
You're not unprofessional.

Speaker 1 (01:17:50):
But it's like I mean in that regard, like I'm not.
So I wasn't trying to do something that had already existed.
I was just doing like I was doing, like a
guest on Opie and Anthony show. That's what it was like,
Like when you're a guest on Opi and Anthony, that's
how you talk. Everybody would just hang out and talk.

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):
That's a fun show. Was anyway, that.

Speaker 1 (01:18:09):
Opened my eyes up to podcasting. And then you know,
Anthony Kumia had his own show that he did in
his basement live at the Compound where he singing karaoke
holding a machine gun on that fucking maniac. And then
the other big one was doing a Tom Green show
because Tom Green had his own sort of internet talk

(01:18:30):
so that he did out of his house.

Speaker 2 (01:18:31):
Sure I remember that.

Speaker 1 (01:18:32):
Yeah, that was huge. So that also helped too. And
I actually was in negotiation with the people that were
doing his show, and I was thinking about doing something
my own, but then I was like, I can't work
with anybody. I gotta do this on my.

Speaker 2 (01:18:42):
Own quick sidebar. I don't know if this is of interest,
and Jamie, forgive me, because I don't know if I'm
supposed to ask you to do things. But I sold
the first karaoke machine ever in this country on TVC. Yeah. Oh,
let's see that it's out there. I'm not proud of it.

Speaker 1 (01:18:59):
You should be proud of but it was statistic.

Speaker 2 (01:19:01):
It was like twelve fifteen in the morning, you know,
And they sent me one of these things to my
apartment and I'm like, what is this? Is this? Even? Like, look,
they're everywhere now obviously we've gone through the.

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):
Crazy though that you're like the godfather of karaoke.

Speaker 2 (01:19:18):
Well, I'm among them.

Speaker 1 (01:19:19):
So what year is this?

Speaker 2 (01:19:20):
What are we talking at you?

Speaker 1 (01:19:23):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (01:19:26):
Five? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:19:34):
Yeah, it's hard to see. It's so blurry. It's interesting,
like how bad television looked back then in comparison and
now like just the resolution.

Speaker 2 (01:19:44):
Yeah, but you know what, there's something there's something more
trustworthy about rudimentary production.

Speaker 1 (01:19:53):
Value, right, you can't like Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:19:56):
I was talking to your guy Bruce about this earlier.
He was saying how much she loves like an antique
road show and this old house, you know, and I said,
I love this old house. I still I was on
this old house, were you? Yeah? Man? They invited me on.
They wanted to raise money for the to reinvigorate the trades.

(01:20:18):
They had a very similar cause as I do today,
and and they got all these advertisers lined up, and
then and then the guy in charge said, well, Mike's
doing the same basic thing. Let's call him and maybe
we should just give him the money and let his
foundation give it away. It'll be simpler than starting a
new thing. And they called and I said, yeah, I'll

(01:20:39):
do that, sure, but I'd like to be on your show.
And they wet that'd be great. So they invited me
on and it was awesome. But my point is part
of the charm of those shows is the almost remedial
simplicity of the production. It's it's old. It's like there's
an entrance, what's the last time you saw it? Dissolve? Right?

(01:21:03):
Like all that stuff. And I used to make fun
of it. I used to make fun of QVC. I
still do, but in reality, man, that there was something
strangely comforting about that kind of production value. And everything
I learned that turned out to be useful, you know,
I learned in the middle of the night something.

Speaker 1 (01:21:24):
Thing about something that's overproduced that kind of dissolves some
of its authenticity because there's too much thought put into
each in every shot, everything about there's too much coordination.
It's almost like you lose a comfort, like I might
be entertained by it, it might be fascinating, like like
keeping up with the Kardashians. You ever noticed like they

(01:21:45):
change scenes every five seconds, like keep you like, keep
you tuned in. There's something smart about that because it
does keep you engaged, but it doesn't feel as authentic
as if it was just like one person following them
around in real time, with no edits at all, just
one camera from them.

Speaker 2 (01:22:05):
Here's a thesis, at least in the world of nonfiction.
This doesn't apply to scripted but production is by definition
the enemy of authenticity, right, it's the enemy of it.
You need it in order to have a finished product.
But when you get in your own way, then you

(01:22:26):
get in the viewer's way. And one of the things
that kept Dirty Jobs on the air for twenty years.
Early on, I kind of realized that, and I wasn't
sure what to do about it, but I thought, maybe
maybe we need to think of the show like a documentary.
So we got it behind the scenes camera that never

(01:22:47):
stopped rolling. And so if my mic pack went out,
or if a plane flew over, or if somebody screwed
something up, or if we had to stop for whatever reason,
I always knew there was a truth. That's what I
called it, and I could always look to it and
I could say, all right, well what happened here? Blah
blah blah. And so it was those moments where I

(01:23:10):
think the viewer realized, oh, oh, he's not He's not
trying to sell me anything, at least not here. You know,
he's letting us see the sausage. And that was new
in nonfiction. You know, that was a whole new way
to think about authenticity. But veg Ramaswami was the only

(01:23:32):
the only candidate I invited onto my podcast because he
I read somewhere that he said if he was nominated,
he vowed to never use a teleprompter to deliver a speech,
whether you can pull it off or not. I just
thought that was so interesting and I and I wanted

(01:23:52):
to talk to him about that specifically. And then it's
funny a year later, you know, I think I think
the teleprompter is probably the best example of one forced
error after the next. Like when you think about the
anchor who just wants to be believed, the spokesman who

(01:24:12):
just wants to be seen as credible, the politician who
just wants to be just wants it just so. It's
like they want to be authentic, and yet they do
the single most inauthentic thing you can possibly do, which
is pretend to not read a thing that everyone can
see you're reading, right, And so like the cognitive dissonance

(01:24:36):
is rich, you know, And I just think we've entered
into this world where like the least persuasive thing you
can do is say trust me or take it from me.
You know, people have just been burned so much that
they're going to need We need a truth camp. We

(01:24:58):
need it in the newsroom, not just in a sewer.
I mean it did work there, but we we need
it everywhere.

Speaker 1 (01:25:04):
Fuck it, we'll do it live.

Speaker 2 (01:25:06):
Bill O'Reilly of all people alive.

Speaker 1 (01:25:10):
That's the real Bill.

Speaker 2 (01:25:11):
Yeah, that's it. That's the real Bill. That's it.

Speaker 1 (01:25:13):
Yeah. That's what's interesting about social media and social media, right,
Like it's there's this giant resistance, right, now to the
idea that X is the new source of.

Speaker 2 (01:25:25):
The world, the mast it is the mainstream, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:25:28):
The new source of the world. You and these people
that want to cling to authority and say, no, you're
not you're goddamn it, you're not the fucking you're not
a journalist, you're not this. You guys fucked us too
many times, and we don't believe you anymore. And so
the only way for us to find out what's real

(01:25:49):
and what's not real is someone posts it online and
then everybody looks at it, and then you get the
community notes. And that's way better than the New York
Times telling me that the fruit loops in Canada are
exactly the same as the fruit loops in America except
for a bunch of shit that's banned. And that's the
whole point of the whole fucking thing. I Meanwhile, they're
fact checking RFK Junior. So now I don't trust you

(01:26:11):
anymore either.

Speaker 2 (01:26:12):
You can't.

Speaker 1 (01:26:13):
So it's like, that's what's going on.

Speaker 2 (01:26:15):
You can't gloss over the community notes.

Speaker 1 (01:26:17):
You can't.

Speaker 2 (01:26:18):
That's it.

Speaker 1 (01:26:18):
It's it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:19):
That's the truth. Cam It's a solution.

Speaker 1 (01:26:22):
It's a solution to this thing that we're trying to
figure out, how do we know what's true and what's
not true. You get a consensus, there's enough people that
actually can read scientific papers, there's enough people that know
the field that's being discussed, or you're gonna get out
of the hundreds of millions of people on X, you're
gonna get an expert who's gonna say this is why
this is incorrect and this is how you're supposed to

(01:26:43):
read it. And then everybody goes, oh, okay, this is wrong. Now,
you know, And if you can just do a little
research and go through that paper or go through that thread,
you'll if you're an objective person, you'll probably get a
good sense of who's right and is wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:26:58):
It's a weird dichotomy though, right like skepticism. We have
to be skeptical, yes, but part of the reason we
have to be as skeptical as we are is because
so much of the media has abdicated on skepticism and
they've become something else, you know, something else, and so

(01:27:18):
you know, you can't you can't really blame people for,
you know, considering what we used to dismiss as a
conspiracy theory. When the theories start to get born out,
and when there's such a level of eroded trust in
once credible institutions like well.

Speaker 1 (01:27:37):
That's also the whole reason for the disdain for conspiracy
theorists in the first place, is that no, you're not
an expert. I'm the expert, and you're wrong. But then
when they're wrong, there's no repercussions. They never want to say,
you know, we were wrong about all this.

Speaker 2 (01:27:51):
Yeah, we're sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:27:52):
We were wrong about masking, we were wrong about social distancing,
we're wrong about all of it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:57):
Where's the humility, man.

Speaker 1 (01:27:59):
Yeah, no humility, because they're not humans. And that's why
you don't believe them, because you know, they're just people
reading off bullshit off a teleprompter. That's it. That's it.
That's all it is. And nobody wants that anymore. You
don't have to have that anymore. And that's why x
is emerged and substack and all these different things. It's
like the place where people go to get actual information.
And that's why they like podcasts because it's just the

(01:28:21):
three of us in this room, that's it. Whoever is
the numbers of people in Carl carls out cold now,
but the numbers of people that are listening is like,
it just this crazy number that are all just listening
to three people. So there's no producer, there's all that
shit that gets in the way of things has been removed.

Speaker 2 (01:28:42):
It's actually four people. When you think about it that way,
like if the audience becomes its own amalgam. I think
of it like that. You know, I think the audience
gets short shrifted a lot. You know, I thought of
it last night in your club. It's like the audience
is I mean, without the audience, what are you doing?

(01:29:02):
You know you're build.

Speaker 1 (01:29:03):
Certainly at a club. Yeah, at a club, it's everything.

Speaker 2 (01:29:06):
It's everything everything. But why is it different?

Speaker 1 (01:29:08):
Well, because you can't think about it that way. Because
the best way to do it, in my opinion, the
best for me, the best way I've found to do it,
is to never think about the audience. All I'm interested in.
I think about it in terms of like if I'm bored,
they must be bored, Like let me pick this up
a little bit, let me move this around a little bit,
let me figure out a way to you got to
move a conversations like sometimes I've talked to like very

(01:29:30):
old scholars, like very old in its time sometimes like okay, right,
we gotta focus here, like we gotta get you on this.
Like a little bit in the beginning when he was
telling me the story with Lincoln's bedroom, I was at
the bed was he was a long man. He was
a very tall, very tall. So I was like, Okay,
we got to figure out a way to what's it
like to be the fucking president? What does that feeling like?

(01:29:51):
How crazy is it on the first day? That's what
I really wanted to know. So it's like you got
to kind of move people around. But that is for me,
like as an audience member, I'm not thinking about the
audience because I feel like the best way to do
it is for me to actually one hundred percent be
engaged and interested in what this person's talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:30:10):
But don't you think that that's you are the proxy
for the audience when you're at your best. Yeah, for
sure in my view, yes, But I'm listening to you
when I like high five you virtually it's when you
asked the question I was thinking, and I really tried
to do that in the sewer. I really tried to

(01:30:31):
do that. On dirty Jobs, I really tried.

Speaker 1 (01:30:34):
I think you did. I think that's why I resonated
so much with people. Well, I hope so well for sure,
because you didn't ever seem like a fake guy doing
a thing. You seem like a fun guy, a regular
guy who's doing this thing where you're interacting with be
like what how do you do this? Like what is this?

Speaker 2 (01:30:48):
So? Yes? Thanks? But then all of a sudden I
look up and Donald Trump's and the sewer with me.
Oh shit, and there's an election in a week. Oh
this takes around me, right, all of a sudden have changed.
So it's so interesting that he was sitting right where
I'm sitting, and you feel the need to kind of

(01:31:10):
put some sides on this thing because you understand first
and foremost that as an audience member, right, as somebody
who's just listening to this as a fly on the wall,
I'm getting a little lost.

Speaker 1 (01:31:23):
Yeah, I'm a little bored.

Speaker 2 (01:31:24):
Let's move it along, right, So I mean you can
say that, hey, that's Joe being a good host, or
that's Joe being super honest in a conversation where he's
starting to drift a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:31:37):
I'm most certainly aware that people are going to listen
to it. Don't get me wrong. But I don't think
like the questions like maybe the audience would want to
know this. I do do this one thing, even if
I know that some I know how this thing works,
I will ask a person how a thing works so
that the audience can hear it from them rather than
from me. I don't want to be mister smarty pants here.

(01:31:59):
I don't have to. But that's one thing that I
do where I'm aware that people probably don't know what
we're talking about. So let's like, could you explain where
this came from or why this is? Because sometimes people,
especially if they have an area of expertise, they just
assume that people know what they're talking about when they're
talking about specific techniques or ways they do things. So
that in that way, I do think about the audience.

(01:32:19):
But most of the time that's just like I'm just
doing my job. But mostly all I'm trying to do
is be one locked in. Yeah, just locked And I
feel like if I'm locked in and I'm just real
honest and just try to like be really curious and
really just try to get the most out of this person,
that's going to be good for the audience.

Speaker 2 (01:32:39):
What was more consequential him coming on or her not
coming on.

Speaker 1 (01:32:46):
Him coming on.

Speaker 2 (01:32:47):
Why do you say.

Speaker 1 (01:32:48):
That, Well, because realistically, like, Okay, my thought about her
coming on was I just I was going to be
very nice. I was I want to have fun with her.
I wanted to just be able to talk to her
and ask her a question. I want to get a
sense of her as a human being. And if it's
policy talk that bothered them, Like, there was a few
things they didn't want to talk abou marijuana legalization. They

(01:33:09):
initially didn't want to talk about internet censorship, and then
they changed their tune, and then they wanted to talk
about Internet centship. Almost great. Internet censorship is important, let's
talk about it. But whatever she wanted to talk about
fucking riding bikes, I don't give a shit. I don't
give a fuck what you want to talk about. I
want to talk about cooking, rock climbing. I just want
to just get a sense of her as a human being.

(01:33:30):
That's just as a human being. What is it like, Like,
does it freak you out when people get mad at you?
Does it freaking out when you fuck up a sentence
and you ramble? And you know, I know what it's like,
you know, when you don't you know that people are listening,
and you're like, I gotta fucking bring this home, and
I don't know how to and you just sort of
repeat these key lines or this maybe some new word
you become enamored with.

Speaker 2 (01:33:51):
You you want to realize and again, when you realize
you're in the middle of a sentence with no obvious ending. Yes,
that's it, that's QVC in a nutshell. Yes, that's what
it is. Right, And when the teleprompter breaks, that's when
you get to know the person and so and so.
That's why I'm asking I. I don't I wonder you know.
I mean, I listened to the interview and and and

(01:34:13):
I ask myself, well, is anybody gonna vote differently as
a result? I don't think so. Are some people going
to vote who otherwise might not have voted? Maybe? But
for me, when you started to talk very casually about
the fact that that that her campaign had stipulations, they had.

Speaker 1 (01:34:35):
Think there was a lot of people that were she
had made some a bunch of blunders, and there was
a lot of concern that she was gonna make blunders. Here.
This is what I was gonna get to she might
have it might have been a mess. I might have
asked her about immigration. We might have had a conversation
about like what is the goal, Like why hasn't this
been this doesn't if we can, you know, launch rockets

(01:34:56):
and land them at the same time as we can't
control a border that seems not real, that doesn't seem real.
One seems way harder, And that's happening. He's fucking catching
rockets with robot arms. Yeah, okay, if that's happening, how
come this can't be fixed because this didn't used to
be like this? Why is it like this now? Why
does the Red Cross have these stations set up where

(01:35:16):
they're giving people maps and instructions. Why does China have
these places in Mexico where they only have Chinese menus,
Chinese writing, Chinese everything, and these people are coming from
China specifically to the spot and then making it across
the country. What's the purpose of this? Has anybody ever
examined what these people are up to, why they're doing this?
How is it so organized? Like what is that about?

(01:35:37):
Maybe that would have been a disaster, because that's something
that I felt like if she didn't want to talk
about the marijuana and didn't want to talk about internet censorship.
Immigrations are an interesting one, right, It's very interesting because, like,
first of all, I am pro immigration. I am the
grandson of immigrants. My grandparents came over here during the depression.

(01:35:58):
If they didn't do it, I wouldn't be here. The
entire country, other than the Native Americans, are immigrants. That's
all of us. Every We are a country of immigrants.
So we should have some stipulations though about who gets
in and how you get in, and where are you
coming from, and what is your past? Like are you
a murderer? Are you a gang banger? Have you been

(01:36:20):
selling fentanyl for the last twenty years? Like what are
you doing with your life?

Speaker 2 (01:36:24):
Bob inquiring mind?

Speaker 1 (01:36:26):
We want to know. I think that's reasonable.

Speaker 2 (01:36:29):
Do you see a difference between an immigrant and a settler?

Speaker 1 (01:36:35):
Well, it all's the timeline, right, is a timeline thing? Yeah,
not only that you're an invader. Like if you're one
of those people that comes over in eighteen twenty and
you're making your way across the plaines and you encounter
the Comanche, you're the piece of shit. You're not supposed
to be there. That's where they live. You're in their yard.
You're some fucking weird, scruffy American looking for gold. You know,

(01:36:57):
what are you doing here? Bro? You're the problem, you know.
And now all of a sudden, that's Texas, right, That's
where we are. We live here, now, this is my land, bitch, right,
this is where I live. I got this now. Well,
we're all invaders in one at one point in time.
Every human being that's a nomadic person that's made their
way across the country, you've probably entered a place where
people were before.

Speaker 2 (01:37:18):
Every freedom fighter is a terrorist.

Speaker 1 (01:37:20):
Yes, right, Depen's on who wins.

Speaker 2 (01:37:23):
History gets too. Aside all that, sure, if we.

Speaker 1 (01:37:25):
Didn't actually, if the founding fathers didn't pull it off,
you know, we would be these wild, renegade English people
that decided to come over here and just fucking create havoc.

Speaker 2 (01:37:36):
So yeah, man, there are a lot of ways to
go with all this, But I'll just come back to
the teleprompter and say, if that's an essential part of
how you communicate, and if that's an extent, if that's
part of your image, you know, then you can't be

(01:37:56):
on this show.

Speaker 1 (01:37:57):
Right right right?

Speaker 2 (01:37:58):
You can't you you can't join me in the sewer right, right,
there's no room for the contrivance. There's just no room.
There's just no time.

Speaker 1 (01:38:07):
I just wonder if that's what they make them do. Like,
if you make me do that, I'll suck too. You know,
I can't read off a telepropter. Yeah, but I'm not
interested in doing that. It's not my thing. But if
you make a person do that, like if if you're
going to be a politician, right, okay, and you were
a senator and which is you know, you don't get
that kind of exposure that you get if you're a

(01:38:27):
vice president or you're running for president initially, right, Like,
that's a totally different scene. And there's probably a bunch
of people that coach you how to do it right,
and you don't know what the fuck you're doing. And
if you're not a powerful person, like a big personality
like Donald Trump, who could just do it. But also
coming from a world of entertainment for most of his life,

(01:38:47):
he's been in the public eye and hosting The Apprentice
for fourteen years. Like he's he's used to being in
front of the camera. It's a normal experience for him.
He has a massive advantage.

Speaker 2 (01:38:58):
That's what I meant by production becomes the enemy of
authenticity when you rely upon it to the point where
you can't function in the midst or in the wake
of a glitch. Well, in a world of glitches, you're
in trouble, you know. And I think the audience, not
just yours, but the country. I just think they're just
exhausted by people who have been managed and focus grouped

(01:39:23):
and weighed and measured and tested and then put out there.

Speaker 1 (01:39:27):
I think it's also the evolution of culture in general,
because if you just go back to what we were
talking about media, you go back and watch a film
from nineteen fifty versus a film from twenty twenty four.
The way people communicate now is much more realistic. There
was a way of talking like Hannah, what did you do?

(01:39:48):
You know? There was a weird performative aspect of it
because they didn't know how to do it right.

Speaker 2 (01:39:52):
And sitcoms too. In everything Father knows best.

Speaker 1 (01:39:55):
All that stuff. And then as time moved on it changed,
like All in the Face Family was all of a sudden,
this realistic portrayal of a family where you've got a
racist dad and the son is a you know, the
mead heead the son in law, and the daughter's a
hippie and the mom just came.

Speaker 2 (01:40:12):
For what do you do?

Speaker 1 (01:40:14):
What do you do? It's a fucking amazing show. Watch
it was an amazing shown. Sanford and Son is another one.
You know, it was a comedy, but people talk like
people would talk in real life. And then as culture
moves on, songs change, books change everything sort of like
moves into the there's a much greater understanding. If you

(01:40:36):
had a show and you try to do Father Knows
Best today, it would almost be like you were putting
on like a parody, like you would. It would be weird,
you would be It would be like a weird Tim
and Eric type thing, like you're doing something weird on purpose, right,
And that's not acceptable anymore. So the culture has moved on.

Speaker 2 (01:40:55):
So for sure, but it moves on and fits and
starts and it's not a line.

Speaker 1 (01:41:02):
Yeah, just the climate right right.

Speaker 2 (01:41:05):
So like the even that, look the changes in podcasting,
like it's happening right now, right in front of us.
You can see so many different types of podcasts. Yeah,
see so many different kinds of scripted dramas. I mean,
oh my god, look, can you imagine breaking bad?

Speaker 1 (01:41:20):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:41:21):
Thirty years ago. It's impossible, right, A whole lot of
things had to happen in front of that for that thing.

Speaker 1 (01:41:28):
To the Sopranos had to happen.

Speaker 2 (01:41:29):
That's right. And something had happened before that. Yeah, well,
in my world and in the world you're describing, that
was the age of authority. That's when Eric Severid could
talk to you like this. That's when like, like, Discovery
is a good example. You asked about it, and I'll
tell you. First of all, John Hendrick's a friend of

(01:41:50):
mine who created that channel. You would love. He did
this in his garage basically. I mean, the story is
incredible how he talked Malone into getting some transponder space
or maybe his Westinghouse and mortgage his house to buy
some documentaries from Australia and started beaming all that stuff down.

(01:42:11):
I asked him years ago, I'm like, what was the like,
what was the guiding principle behind this business model? And
of course, you know Discovery has since purchased Warner Brothers.
You know, they're the biggest entertainment company in the world today.
And it started with John Hendrick saying one goal to

(01:42:34):
satisfy curiosity. H that's it. Every discovery. Everything I do
must line up with a traditional definition of what a
discovery is. It's the satisfying of curiosity. And so when
I pitched Dirty Jobs, I was coming in on the

(01:42:57):
heels of what you're talking about. There was still in nonfiction.
It was Richard Attenborough, it was Jacques Cousteau, it was
Jane Goodall, it was you know, the Discovery brand was
very much a reflection of some of the greatest naturalists
and historians and you know, astrophysicists in the world. They

(01:43:19):
they deferred to experts, and then they hired guys like
me to narrate shows and we could sound even more official.
And so you had this dance, this production dance, where
you had a credible sounding voice and an expert at
the center of the thing. Dirty Jobs was not that.

(01:43:40):
Dirty Jobs was what if the expert is a septic
tank technician or a welder. What if the expert is
a skull cleaner or a golf ball retrievist. It's a
job or a sheep castrader, an oral sheep castrator, which
we can get into if you want, Like, what if
they become your source of credible information? And what if

(01:44:02):
the host somehow morphs from this authoritarian expert into a
guest with a bunch of questions. So this conversation happened
between me and some of the guys over there in
two thousand and three, and they bought it. They didn't
buy dirty they didn't like dirty jobs. They took it

(01:44:25):
really to shut me up. They wanted three episodes and out.
The deal I made with these guys was rooted in
this paradigm of me saying, send me out into the
world to go on adventures, and don't ask me to
know more than I know, but just let me look
under the rock and let's learn together. And so they said, Okay,

(01:44:47):
we're gonna you know, you'll go to the Titanic with
James Cameron. You'll climb Kilimanjaro.

Speaker 1 (01:44:52):
You went to the Titanic.

Speaker 2 (01:44:53):
No, and I'll very nearly. It was canceled a month
before because dirty Jobs. Finally, but prior to that, I
went to Egypt. I was exploring tombs with Zahi Hawas.
I was at the Pyramids, I was in some of
the greatest the largest undiscovered graveyard in Baweti, the Sands

(01:45:15):
of the Dead, where they found the mummies with the
golden masks, and nobody knew who the hell they were
because it wasn't attached to any dynasty, and who are
all these people with golden masks on their faces? And
so Discovery would send me to do these these shows
and they were great. Meanwhile, this hot mess that looked

(01:45:36):
like a German porno called Dirty Jobs winds up on
the air and it rates like through the roof. But
the problem in two thousand and four was that And
this is a kind of cognitive dissonance that always is
super interesting. Right when a big company or a brand,

(01:45:57):
or a political party, or really anybody realizes that the
thing their audience wants is not the thing they want
them to want, that's amazing, right, And it happens all
the time, and most of the time when it happens,
you know the the uh, you just walk up behind

(01:46:19):
the barn and shoot it and you never hear about it.
But Dirty Jobs actually got on the air before it
was shelved for a year, and it was during that
year that I went on a series of adventures for
the network doing this other thing. Is it shelved? It
was shelved because it was deemed off brand. It was
shelved because I was biting the testicles off of lambs

(01:46:43):
with ranchers, and that's how they castrate their lambs, and
they have for hundreds of years. It was not that
specific episode that that got me in trouble later, but
it was shelved because it was an unscripted, random romp.
We never did a second on the show. It didn't
look like everything else on the network. It didn't look

(01:47:04):
like anything else on the network. It was just a
jagged little pill. But they liked me, and they liked
this idea of a more unscripted look at the world,
and so we reached this kind of Dayton and I
started narrating all their tent pole shows, and then I
went to Alaska to host Deadliest Catch, which is a

(01:47:25):
whole nother story, that crabfishing show. Yeah that's twenty one
years now, right and up there people died. You know,
it's a crazy job. People died, And I went to
six funerals in six weeks. And when they when we
looked at the footage of that, and somebody up the

(01:47:46):
food chain eventually decided, Okay, this is a world we
have to get into. But Mike, you're not hosting two
shows at the same time, so pick one. So Dirty
Jobs came back went in a full product late in
two thousand and four, and Deadliest Catch went in full
production about the same time. But I just narrated moral

(01:48:06):
of the story is everything that happened after that and
around that I'm not saying because of it, but but
right around that same time, I think the media world
in nonfiction anyhow, began this migration from the age of
authority into the age of authenticity, and ever since nonfiction

(01:48:30):
has been has been grappling with that just as surely
as every other vertical because people want to see something
that feels like the truth and that's that's a sliding scale.

Speaker 1 (01:48:44):
Yeah, that's interesting, and that is what people are gravitating
towards more today. And it's that's I mean, I think
that's the whole thing we're talking about. Why, like mainstream
news is failing.

Speaker 2 (01:48:59):
But you know it when you see it, Yeah, you
know it when you see it.

Speaker 1 (01:49:03):
Yeah, you can tell the difference.

Speaker 2 (01:49:05):
Oh Boordine, Yeah, okay, uh. I think for me, the
moment that crystallizes all of this, and he and I
were on parallel paths. I think he was dealing with
his Network, the Travel Channel at the time, the same

(01:49:25):
way I was dealing with Discovery. We were constantly at
each other's throats trying to navigate this this weird line
of reality and authenticity. And there's a there's a scene
in Parts Unknown. I think he's in. It might be Sardinia.

Speaker 1 (01:49:43):
He's diving, Oh yeah, on the throwing the fake octobuses in.

Speaker 2 (01:49:47):
It's one of the single greatest moments in the history
of it's amazing nonfiction.

Speaker 1 (01:49:52):
He shows you exactly how the sausage is being made.
But it's also like, now you can trust him because
you know he's kind of sabotaging the narrative that they've
created for his own show Authenticity.

Speaker 2 (01:50:01):
I would do that for a scene, maybe even for
an act, maybe even for a whole segment, maybe if
I got like a like a bee in my bonnet
and I really just couldn't, you know, I got angry
every now and then, and I you know, but Tony dude,
he went out and got drunk, I mean drunk drunk,

(01:50:26):
and shot the whole show smashed, and he made them
cut it in and you can see him. He's he's
so disgusted, just so you're just so the audience understands
they're supposed to be spearfishing for Octopi, and the local
handler wasn't sure that they were going to find any,

(01:50:47):
so he bought some at the market, but they were
frozen and dead. And so Tony's down there with his
spear gun with some other diver and these these frozen
squid just start to come by him. And in narration,
this is where he really owned it, because he owned

(01:51:09):
that show like he could. Nobody's going to tell him
what to say. So his real rant happens months later
in the vo booth when he's just describing the heartbreaking insincerity.
Don't they know who I am? What did they think
I was going to do? So it's like he says
something like it, in the face of this kind of

(01:51:31):
wanton deception, a reasonable man can turn to nothing but
the elixir of distilled alcohol. And he just drinks for
the rest of the show. And it airs. It airs
on CNN, and I think it won a peabody.

Speaker 1 (01:51:49):
Was that the CNN one? Or was that No Reservations?

Speaker 2 (01:51:52):
That was CNN?

Speaker 1 (01:51:53):
Was it it was Parts Unknown?

Speaker 2 (01:51:55):
Look, I'm pretty sure it was Parts Unknown. I'm pretty
sure I could be wrong, but yeah, and god, I
just I mean, that's what I that's what I wrote
about when he died. It was that. Yeah, because I've
been man, I've been sitting on a zodiac. I've done that.

(01:52:17):
I've been in these in this world where you're nervous,
You've got a lot of stuff to worry about, and
then somebody just comes along and tries to produce a moment. Yeah,
you try to produce a moment.

Speaker 1 (01:52:30):
Well, also, these guys they probably didn't know, these Italian guys, like,
these fucking guys aren't going to find the octopus.

Speaker 2 (01:52:35):
We've killed them all, probably right. But I got to
think there's somebody there in his crew, somebody over from
zero point zero the production company. Somebody must have you know,
who knows, who knows?

Speaker 1 (01:52:45):
Man, who knows?

Speaker 2 (01:52:46):
But look, the fact that that happened is is wonderful.
The fact that he was able to insist that it
air that was important.

Speaker 1 (01:52:57):
Yeah, that was important. Yeah, well it's certainly important for
how you trust him. And you had to trust him.
I mean that was his whole thing. You know, you're
coming with me, this is actually me.

Speaker 2 (01:53:09):
Here we go fly on the wall.

Speaker 1 (01:53:11):
Yeah. Yeah, that was a very unique show too. Because
it taught me that food is art. I really learned
that from No Reservations, but it followed over through parts unknown.
Food is art. I didn't think of it as art
until I saw his show, and then I was like, oh, okay,
that's right, because I just thought of art as being
like a thing that people make that you look at

(01:53:32):
or touch. I never thought it would be a thing
you make that you or you hear, right. I never
thought it would be a thing you make where you eat.
And then I saw I'm like, oh, these are artists.
These are artists. All these people they've discovered these different
ways to make things delicious.

Speaker 2 (01:53:46):
And Okay, they're mediums different.

Speaker 1 (01:53:49):
Yeah, it's just different. It's a different kind. But they
then hanging out with them, it's like, yeah, they're all artists.
They talk like artists. They're they're covered in tattoos, they're
fucking weirdos, they like to do drugs, they're all listening
to crazy music.

Speaker 2 (01:54:01):
You know, they're also craftsmen. H Like, I mean to me, yeah,
food is art. It sure can be, and it can
also be fuel. Yeah, you know it's it's it's actually both.
It's kind of perfect.

Speaker 1 (01:54:18):
Yeah, you could have both it could be art and fuel.
You just gotta pick what you eat.

Speaker 2 (01:54:23):
Is hunting art.

Speaker 1 (01:54:29):
Hmmm. It's a discipline. It's a primal discipline. It's a
discipline that connects you with life and death in a
very unique way that I don't think anything else does
where you. It's very if you do it correctly, right,
I'm talking about like mountain hunting, like mountain elk hunting

(01:54:50):
in particular, which is my favorite. It's very hard to do.
I train for it. I have to get in really
good shape. I practice. So there's so much. I fucked
my backup because as I was getting developing like tendonitis
in my lower back, and I just ignored it. Shut up,
we got it. We are work to do. And so
it's it's it's a discipline more than it is anything.

(01:55:13):
But it's like I don't know, some people call it
a sport. I find that wrong. That's not the right.
It does take like physical entery. You have to be
in shape to do it. You have to be in
great fitness. But it's not a sport. It's a it's
a it's a discipline. It's a discipline that's very very
very primal. It taps into something you didn't even know

(01:55:34):
was there. It's like there, people who've ever gone fishing,
there's a thing that happens when you catch a fish.
There's an excitement that you're not prepared for. It's a
weird excitement. That excitement is You're gonna feed your family
and stay alive. That's what that excitement is. Because that
excitement is like hardwired in your human reward systems, and
you don't know it's there until you go fishing, and

(01:55:54):
then you're like, whoah, here he is, get them, get
him in the net, get him in the We got them.

Speaker 2 (01:56:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:56:00):
And hunting is at times one hundred. Hunting is that
his hunting is way different because you're you're defying their
protective senses. You have to make sure the wind is
going in the right direction. You have to go all
the way around. If it's not, you got to figure
out a way to move through the trees. You got
to move very slowly, only moving their heads down.

Speaker 2 (01:56:21):
I think that's art.

Speaker 1 (01:56:23):
I don't know, man, I mean, it's a shot is art.
I'll tell you that archery is art. A good archery
shot on an animal I watch it. Look it's art
because it's hard to do it's very hard to do.
When I see someone just hit a perfect fifty yard
shot in the vitals and that broadhead sinks in, I
know that animal is going to die very quickly. It's
a quick, humane death, and that's what you practice for,

(01:56:44):
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:56:45):
Jos Josh Smith over at Montana Knife might have change, sure,
very well. He sent me a video the other day
he went on a big hunt with his hunt. Yeah yeah, yeah,
his boy got wanted about that.

Speaker 1 (01:56:56):
A few hundred yards juice fucking use for a first moose.
That's so crazy that kid hit the jackpot.

Speaker 2 (01:57:03):
But the excitement on the video, oh yeah, that he
sent me and Josh yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:57:09):
And bow hunting is even more primal than that. Bow
hunting is that times one hundred. So it's uh, regular
hunting is fishing times one hundred. Then bow hunting is
regular hunting times one hundred.

Speaker 2 (01:57:20):
I just think, you know, if you're whatever canvas you're
in front of, whether you're painting or whether you're cooking,
or whether you're stalking, like you can the meuse like
does the mews come to you when you're stalking? Does
it come to you? You know, I don't have an
answer for it, but but I know that people talk

(01:57:41):
about it, like some people say, well, you're in the zone.
You know. Sometimes when I write, I'm surprised, Like I
just the other day I started. I started writing something
on the tarmac of SFO, and when I looked up,
I was I was at JFK.

Speaker 1 (01:57:57):
It was like that, Yeah, you got into it. The
airplanes are great for that.

Speaker 2 (01:58:01):
They're the best.

Speaker 1 (01:58:02):
They force you into that seat, they're the best. Can't
get up because there's a guy next to you. You
get that laptop open and it just comes out of you.

Speaker 2 (01:58:09):
And I like a little look. I wrote a book
on a plane.

Speaker 1 (01:58:15):
I believe it.

Speaker 2 (01:58:15):
I really did, and and I did it mostly in
moments that I don't really remember, when when time gets compressed.
And I think that that can happen when you're fabricating something,
when you're hunting something, when you're painting something, maybe in
the middle of a set, maybe in the middle of
a fight.

Speaker 1 (01:58:34):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:58:35):
I talked to boxers who say that it's it's so
odd the way things will sometimes almost feel like they're
in slow motion even though they're they're happening so fast.

Speaker 1 (01:58:44):
Some fighters it's art. Well, I think martial arts are
art for people to understand it. If you watch it,
it's beautiful. But there's some fighters that are just so artist.
You know who am Manuel Augustus is. Yeah, okay, that
guy is an artist. That guy's an artist, seminartist because
he's first of all completely unique, okay, doing a thing

(01:59:06):
in this beautiful, deceptive way he's dancing, but he's also
he has an understanding of distance that's fantastic, so he's
really good at avoiding punches. His head movement, even with
this unorthodox dancing style is fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:59:20):
He's stalking, he's doing.

Speaker 1 (01:59:21):
Something like here's here's a manual, like look at I mean,
imagine you're fighting a guy who's moving like this. It's
so crazy. He was so hard. Floyd Mayweer said he
was the most like he just punched him with two hands.
At the same time, Floyd Maywooder said he was the
most skilled a pony ever. Thought, wow, he and his
record didn't indicate his actual physical ability. His abilities were incredible,

(01:59:43):
but it's just like it was such a wild style,
so unusual.

Speaker 2 (01:59:48):
It's like boxing a bobblehead.

Speaker 1 (01:59:50):
Right Like Prince Nasim Hahmed had a kind of a
similar thing going on when he was in his prime.
Nasim Hahmed was very very unorthodox. He see, here's here
fighting Floyd. He gave Floyd a hard fucking time because
he's so difficult to fight, Like, look, how do you
deal with that? And when you're a guy like Floyd
and you're getting clowned here he's he's fighting Mickey Ward.

(02:00:12):
When you're a guy like Floyd and you're you know,
the cream of the crop, Olympian, I mean, a fucking
phenomenal boxer, just a fantastic boxer, and then you're fighting
this guy who's dancing in front of you, like you
what the fuck? But also really good. It wasn't just that,
like you rarely get a guy who's clowning like that,
but also like those kind of that kind of head

(02:00:33):
movement skill, phenomenal movement, but also can dance in front
of you and land shit that you don't see coming
because it's coming at those weird angles.

Speaker 2 (02:00:42):
Who was this trainer?

Speaker 1 (02:00:44):
Oh man, I don't think anybody trains you to do that.

Speaker 2 (02:00:46):
I don't either, Like, what does custom Otto say? He
never wouldn't allow it?

Speaker 1 (02:00:50):
No, he you know he was, but maybe maybe if
the guy started winning like that, he would change his tune.
So maybe people change their tune when they see something extraordinary.
Oh and they see something weird, you know, they change
their tune. They go, well maybe, fuck. I don't know,
because you don't know. Sometimes you don't. There's there's guys
that come along and fighting in particular, that have styles
that are so weird and so unique you go, wait,

(02:01:12):
wait a minute, how come nobody else is doing it
like this? Is this gonna work? Like? You do? You know
who Sean stricklet is. He was a UFC middleweight champion.
Stands straight up, puts his hand like one hand like this,
one hand down here, and beats the fuck out of everybody.
Stand straight up. Everybody else is down, everybody else is
moving Shawn Sean straight up, moving towards you. Phenomenal head movement,

(02:01:33):
awesome timing, and walks people down in a weird style.
There's a bunch of guys that fight weird, but they're
really good at it.

Speaker 2 (02:01:41):
Well, think baseball too, I mean it's everything, Louis Tian
remember the pitcher.

Speaker 1 (02:01:45):
I don't really follow baseball. You'll love this, Jerry, I
know almost nothing about sports, believe it or not.

Speaker 2 (02:01:52):
Huh, you know, I mean you will. One day you're
gonna look at a baseball game and go, hey, you
know what I need to do. I need to play
for professional baseball. And then five years later we're going
to be reading about it because you're going to go
crazy with it. The same way.

Speaker 1 (02:02:06):
But this Louis Tian, what did he do differently?

Speaker 2 (02:02:08):
Louis Tiant was a picture and his wind up was
such that it looks sort of traditional, but then he
turned his back to the batter without leaving the rubber right,
So this guy would spin all the way around before
he threw, and he go further than that sometimes.

Speaker 1 (02:02:31):
Is that really unusual?

Speaker 2 (02:02:33):
Yeah, yeah, it's unusual. That's unusual.

Speaker 1 (02:02:38):
Oh so it freaks people out a little bit.

Speaker 2 (02:02:40):
Well so yeah, yeah, because he just breaks. He stops
looking at you, look his his.

Speaker 1 (02:02:46):
Back, look at his ankle.

Speaker 2 (02:02:48):
That's crazy, That's exactly it. So it's like, oh, you know,
if you're a batter, you're like, all right, there are
a lot of different pictures and I'll get used to
this and I'll get used to that. And then this
guy comes along.

Speaker 1 (02:02:57):
That dude has flexible knees, flexible everything, because look at
the angle his knee is in before he turns. That's crazy. Yeah,
yeah you would.

Speaker 2 (02:03:07):
Actually, I'm surprised you're not in the baseball because I can't.

Speaker 1 (02:03:11):
It's I don't have any room.

Speaker 2 (02:03:13):
I know the bucket.

Speaker 1 (02:03:15):
Yeah you know, like, uh, I watch football now. My
wife's into football, but I can't. I can only pay
attention so much. My head is filled with combat sports.
There's I have to follow jiu jitsu, muy Thai, m
m A in the UFC, MMA, in the PFL, bellatour

(02:03:37):
one FC, there's I have. I have to keep track
of a thousand fighters, like literally a thousand fighters. Maybe
casually some of them like some of the Glory kickboxers.
Casually I'm watching you know, oh boarhar is fighting. Oh
you know, this guy's fighting. That guy's fighting. I know
who these people are. I watch him fight. I'm watching
fights just hours and hours in a day. I might

(02:04:02):
watch my watch fights two hours every day.

Speaker 2 (02:04:05):
Is it work or fun?

Speaker 1 (02:04:06):
It's fun. Yeah, it's only fun. But I do feel
obligated to pay attention. Like there's guys that are coming
up in other organizations. I see guys have like a
specific skill set that's unique. Like I contacted Connor McGregor
in like twenty thirteen, he was fighting in Cage Warriors
and I reached out. I said, dude, you're fucking super talented.

(02:04:28):
I hope I get to see in the UFC someday.
And it's like, you know, kickboxers like Alex Pereira. I
follow him in Glory and then finally he comes over
to the UFC and I was like, you gotta see
this guy. This guy's fucking insane. It's like you have
to have some sort of an understanding of what's coming,
you know, and also you have to like kind of

(02:04:49):
be tuned into the state of the art, because the
state of the art is very different in twenty twenty
four than it was in ninety seven when I first
started working for the UFC. The state of the art
is elite. Now you're getting these eighteen year old kids
that can do everything at like a super high level,
and they're like these phenomenal athletes that instead of going
into baseball, are instead of going into football now they're

(02:05:12):
just they're only focused on becoming a UFC champion and
this is their goal in life. And they're they're eighteen
and you get to see them in amateur organizations. You
get to see them in foreign organizations, you get to
see them travel overseas, compete in Japan, you know. So
to me, it's like, I don't have any room. I
don't have a room for baseball.

Speaker 2 (02:05:30):
It's interesting, man, You've had a front row seat to
watching that sport become as dominant as it is. At
the same time you're watching the podcast World Blow Up. Well,
you had a really way first.

Speaker 1 (02:05:47):
See, I was a fan of the UFC in the very,
very beginning, and it got me into jiu jitsu. So
in ninety six I started taking jiu jitsu. Ninety four
I found out about the UFC. I've you know, kept
it in my head for a little bit. I was
still kickboxing at the time, just not fighting anymore, but
just training. I was training a bunch of different places
in North Hollywood, this place called the Jet Center in
Van Eyes before that one under So I was just

(02:06:09):
interested in martial arts always, and then the UFC came
along and I was super interested in it, but I
didn't really have a lot of it was on news
radio at the time. It was very difficult to have
the time to start training. Then ninety six I started
training and So I started working for the UFC in
ninety seven, and that was when it was banned from cable.
You could only get it on direct TV, and we

(02:06:31):
had to do these shows in like Dothan, Alabama, or
he took a propeller plane. It was fucking hell. It
was no money.

Speaker 2 (02:06:37):
He is in ninety seven, Da bar Knock Golden Dana
was not involved yet. When did Dana get involved two.

Speaker 1 (02:06:43):
Thousand and one. So I'm on fear Factor at the time.
And one of the things that me and my friend
Eddie Bravo, who was also a big fan from back
in the day, and he taught me jiu jitsu when
we were first really into it. When we would go
to like Louisiana, the only places that would sanction these fights.
There were bare knuckle people wore shoes, you could grab

(02:07:04):
their shorts. It was like crazy rules. And we said,
you know what it would take these billionaires who love
the sport and dump a ton of money into it.
That's what it would take, Like someone would have to
dump a ton of money. You did, and then a
long times Lorenzo and Frank Furtida in two thousand and one,
these billionaires that happened to get in love with the sport,

(02:07:25):
and so they buy the UFC and then they started
putting these shows together. And then I made Dana, and
then I started asking Dana like, have you ever heard
about this guy? Did you ever see this guy fight
in Japan? Ever heard this Russian dude? And I started
asking him about fighters, like you should try to get
these guys, and he's like, do you want to do commentary?
And then next thing you know, I'm a commentator for

(02:07:47):
the UFC.

Speaker 2 (02:07:48):
Okay, this is just very weird triangulating.

Speaker 1 (02:07:52):
But they didn't even have any money at the time
because they were hemorrhaging money. So I did the first
thirteen shows for free.

Speaker 2 (02:07:57):
And back to the art thing, you must be willing
to give it away. Whatever it is you love, you
must be willing to give it away for a time
at least.

Speaker 1 (02:08:06):
Well, for me, money has always been fun coupons, and
so I was on fear factor, so I had plenty
of fun coupons. So my thought was like, oh, I
have money, I don't have to worry about money right now,
Like I'll just do this, Yeah, this would be fun
to do.

Speaker 2 (02:08:20):
Nevertheless, you know, I mean, it was the same thing
with dirty jobs once that thing lit up, I had
to be willing to sign a contract that was probably illegal.
I mean, it was such a ridiculous contract the way
they own.

Speaker 1 (02:08:31):
You, so isn't it crazy.

Speaker 2 (02:08:33):
It's like no money. But if it's a hit, if
it sticks, we have you for ten years, or you renegotiate.
My ace in the hole with Dirty Jobs was technically
I was the host, and I can host that show
without doing the thing in the show that made people watch,
which was actually do the work. There's no contract that

(02:08:54):
can force you to bite the balls off of sheet right.
You have to be willing to do that. And so
I was able to fix that. But Dana, I'm trying
to remember what yearless would have been. When did The
Ultimate Fighter?

Speaker 1 (02:09:09):
Two thousand and five?

Speaker 2 (02:09:10):
Okay, so in two thousand and four, Dirty Jobs was
on the air. It was in that weird space where
we didn't know if it was going to be a
hit or what. But I was narrating all kinds of
stuff for this guy, Craig Poligian. And I walked into
Craig's office in Hollywood and Dana was sitting in there.

(02:09:31):
I had no idea who he was. I just walked
in to say hi, and Dana kind of knew me
or recognized me. And Craig said, hey, this guy, Mike,
he's narrating American Chopper, American hot Rod. He's narrating. He
just goes down the list and Dana says, say something,
and I said, and I said, previously on The Ultimate Fighter.

(02:09:56):
And he said, fine, you'll be great seasons. That sounds
like Dan has to say something. Yeah, it's hilarious, it's great. Yeah,
that's hilarious.

Speaker 1 (02:10:08):
Yeah, that's interesting how things happen like that.

Speaker 2 (02:10:11):
You know, well you were gonna you know, you wouldn't
be sitting here now if your lease wasn't up or whatever.

Speaker 1 (02:10:17):
Yeah, I probably wouldn't. I would have gone back to
New York.

Speaker 2 (02:10:20):
I think the art thing, we should not be done
with that yet. There's something I'm thinking about the clips
you were playing. What do they call boxing? The sweet science? Yeah,
so like art and science, I think I think anybody
who's passionate about what they do can approach what they

(02:10:41):
do like a scientist or like an artist, or maybe both,
or maybe both.

Speaker 1 (02:10:48):
I think both.

Speaker 2 (02:10:50):
So you know, I I've got this this foundation that
evolved out of dirty jobs. It's called microworks, and we
award these scholarships to people who don't want to go
to a four year school but who want to learn
a trade. Right. We've been doing it for sixteen years,
and I started doing it in part for my granddad,

(02:11:13):
but mostly because they're what eight million jobs now that
don't require four year degree and there's one point seven
trillion dollars in student loans on the books, right, that
is just bananas, and we've got these huge shortages in

(02:11:34):
the skilled trades. So I spent a lot of time
talking about how that happened and what might be done
to fix it. But regarding art, it's like you're old
enough to remember wood shop and metal shop, and you know,
before it was shop, it was it wasn't just votech.

(02:11:56):
It turned into votech. But before it was votech, it
was the vocation arts. That's what they called h And
so we didn't just get rid of the vocational arts.
We started with the language and we took art out
of it, and that's when it became votech. And then
there were a bunch of other acronyms and abbreviations and

(02:12:18):
hyphenations and stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:12:19):
But there's also a weird distortion in our society where
we have decided that we place a higher value on
someone spending an enormous amount on education for a job
that doesn't pay nearly as much as the education cost,
where you're burdened with debt, doing a job where you
have to work your way up a corporate ladder. That
might be hell over becoming a carpenter, over building a house.

(02:12:43):
Everybody needs a fucking house. Over being a plumber. And
if you're a guy who can figure out how to
do good carpentry, if you understand how to use tools,
you're taught properly, you have a good apprenticeship, you can
make it incredible living. It's very satisfying. It's skilled, it's
it's it's a job that is creative, it's skillful, and

(02:13:06):
when you're done, you bring satisfaction to other people that
live in that house like you. There's a great benefit
to it. But our society has got this distorted view
of tradesmen, and it's a really dumb thing because it
fucks you up. Because if you're a kid and you
go through the university system, you get a degree that's
kind of useless, but then you get a job and

(02:13:27):
you're making sixty thousand dollars a year, and you're like,
oh my god, I have two hundred thousand dollars in
student loans and I'm doing a job that's not very
satisfying and I'm kind of stuck. I'm working my way up,
but it's going to take a long time before I
make enough money where I'm not burdened by this. Or
you could have a successful construction company by then. I
mean you could. You could get a small business loan

(02:13:50):
and you could you could start hiring other people. You
could have trucks with your name on it, Like I
know people have done that. They live very well, and
you know, it doesn't mean you're dumb. Like a lot
of these people that live very well are very self educated.
They read books, they watch documentaries, they're interesting.

Speaker 2 (02:14:08):
People, and they're entrepreneurial.

Speaker 1 (02:14:09):
Oh we've got this bizarre thing in our head that
if you didn't go to a school and get a degree,
you must be a dumb person. It's weird and it's
not smart. It's not good for anybody to think that way.

Speaker 2 (02:14:23):
Well, you know, I very rarely play the devil's advocate
in this argument, but I do think I know why
it happened, or at least how And I was in
high school in the late seventies, and there was a
very concerted push for what we call higher ED, which
by the way, already sets the table, right. Yeah, if

(02:14:45):
it's higher right over here, I guess we have lower
at over here.

Speaker 1 (02:14:47):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:14:49):
The language is awful, but the PR and to be fair,
in the fifties, sixties, seventies, we needed more doctors, we
need more engineers, We needed more people culating through you know,
for your schools. But what happens with PR, at least
from what I've seen, is that it always goes too far.

(02:15:09):
And it wasn't enough just to make a persuasive case
for that path. We had to do it at the
expense of the jobs you're talking about. So if you
don't go this way, you're gonna wind up turn in
a wrench with a giant plumber's butt crack and some
other ridiculous trope. So there's a lot of stereotypes and
stigmas and myths and misperceptions that started to swirl around

(02:15:31):
the trades, and that you know, I don't know when
it happened, but I especially.

Speaker 1 (02:15:37):
Where you grow up, like you know, if you grow
up in a place that's highly educated at Massachusetts where
it was Boston, very very educated placed.

Speaker 2 (02:15:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:15:45):
So if you were a person that pursued the trades,
you were, you know, probably a failure. This is like
all you could do because you couldn't make it in.

Speaker 2 (02:15:54):
School, and yet you loved this old house. Yeah, which
is a love letter to the trades.

Speaker 1 (02:15:59):
It really is.

Speaker 2 (02:16:00):
Single one.

Speaker 1 (02:16:01):
I love watching people make things, yeah, even dumb things
like there's a there was a guy I think it
was a PBS show where he would make tools and
like do like stuff the way people did like way
back in the day, Like he'd make his own planer
and you know yeah, oh yeah, and he would make
furniture and shit. Yeah, I didn't have any desire to
make furniture, but I loved watching this guy because he

(02:16:22):
was really into making furniture. It was his art. He
was yeah, he was an artist. Yeah, and he was authentic.
He actually loved it. You could tell. It wasn't like
this is like a scam, like I don't what I'll do.
I'll take ancient tools and figure it out. No, this
guy really was into it.

Speaker 2 (02:16:40):
Well, what's happened here for me anyway, is that I.
I mean, after sixteen years of it, I can tell
a pretty good story anecdotally. But now I'm able to
go back and talk to people who we helped what
five six years ago, with like maybe a welding certification,
and it's a amazing when you say, hey, how's it going,

(02:17:02):
and they say how's it going, I'll tell you how
it's going. Two hundred and ten grand a year. I
bought a van, I hired my buddy who's a welder.
Then I hired a plumber, and I got two h
fat guys an electrician. We're doing three and a half
million a year, got no debt, and so like my
job is to talk to that guy, and I do

(02:17:24):
that a lot on my podcast. It's just like I
just want to hear your I want to hear stories
of people who prospered as a result of mastering a
skill that's in demand and then maybe applied some level
of either artistry or entrepreneurship or the willingness to move.
That's a big one too. You know where you go,
where the work is, or you know, and so it's

(02:17:45):
really become It's why Bobby Kennedy called me back in February.
You know. He was like, hey, man, this microworks thing,
you want to make it macro works? And I said, yeah, sure,
what do you have in mind? And that's I don't
know how. I don't know if you knew this, but
we had this whole conversation about like running together. Really

(02:18:07):
Oh yeah, no, he he asked if I wanted to
be vice president.

Speaker 1 (02:18:12):
Oh jeez, Louise, what'd you say, dude?

Speaker 2 (02:18:15):
I was in Munich. I was in Munich in January,
and he had he had called me earlier just to
talk really generally about about the middle class because he's like, look,
what you've done with the foundation that's my campaign is
a lot about that and and I'd love to talk
to you more about it. So I kind of put

(02:18:36):
him in the category of elected officials, politicians who might
who might be useful. You know, I'm not. I'm not
that guy. But I said, yeah, look, man, I'd be
happy to chat. Well, he called back, and you know
Gavin Talker, right, yeah, yeah, So they did a dive.

(02:18:58):
They this was very strange me. They did a deep dive.
And when I got back to the Bay Area, he
invited me down to his home to meet, you know,
the cats they were all there, and we talked for
like three hours, and I'm looking over my shoulder, honestly,

(02:19:19):
like I'm being punked, Like which one of my crazy
friends put you up to this? But he was serious,
and I was weirdly flattered, maybe like I knew I
couldn't say yes, but I was so interested in what

(02:19:39):
his thinking was. And we spoke for a few hours,
and then we stayed in touch for like the better
part of the next month, and I actually, really, for
the first time ever, just tried to try it on,
you know, and it didn't fit. You know, I would
never do well in an office or in a bureaucracy.

Speaker 1 (02:20:00):
He called me up once to ask me who I
thought would be like good vice president. I was terrified
he was going to ask me. Oh yeah, I was terrified.
I was like, please don't ask that because I know
he asked, uh well, he asked Aaron Rodgers, Yeah, which
is crazy.

Speaker 2 (02:20:15):
Yeah. I literally heard the sound of my sphincter slamming shut.

Speaker 1 (02:20:20):
Like what whatt the fuck? Man?

Speaker 2 (02:20:21):
Like I just tensed up, and I was like.

Speaker 1 (02:20:23):
Oh, that's that job, Like what it's a fucking job.
That's jobs insanity.

Speaker 2 (02:20:29):
But man, I'll tell you man. He It was a
really he was very gracious and very direct, and I
tried to be too, and I told him, I'm like, look,
the infectious disease thing, I get that, The middle class thing,
I totally get that. The forever wars, I get all that.

(02:20:50):
And then he's like, Mike, deep, do you understand seventy
seven percent of the youth today wouldn't wouldn't qualify to
get into the armed forces. Do you understand what the
crisis is we face right now? Never mind, health health
is its own thing, and I've got lots of things
to say about it. But fitness, just basic fitness. You know,

(02:21:14):
his uncle was starring in commercials forty five years ago
that were literally we'd call it fat shaming today, you know, challenging.
I just talked to him the day before yesterday, and
he said, you know, google any photo of Yankee Stadium
sold out from the sixties or even the seventies, and

(02:21:38):
try and find the fat people. They're not there, and
if they are, they're hard to find. Do it today
They're impossible to miss. Something colossally horrible has happened. Anyway,
He was very passionate about all that.

Speaker 1 (02:21:54):
Yeah, And I said, but it's an important message. It
is an important message, and it gets lost in this
idea of being a compassionate person that allows people to
just be their authentic self, you know. And there's nothing
wrong with being fat, there's nothing wrong with being big.
You're being lied to, Okay, you're robbing your life of vitality.
It's just that's just the way it is. And I'm

(02:22:14):
sorry if you're already there, but it doesn't help anybody
to pretend that you're not there. And the only way
we get out of this is we try to figure
out what happened between nineteen sixty and twenty twenty four,
what happened in the well, we can figure it out.
It's not Colombo. This is a fucking This is like
the evidence is all there. We know what the ingredients

(02:22:34):
are that are bad for you, we know we've done
the food supply, we know we've done. Really, it's readily
available what you eat.

Speaker 2 (02:22:42):
When you say we though, I mean.

Speaker 1 (02:22:44):
Human beings, collective the collective intelligence.

Speaker 2 (02:22:47):
What percentage of this country do you think what has
been informed?

Speaker 1 (02:22:51):
This is part of the problem, and this is why
it benefits to have something like that in office. Most
people aren't aware of it. You know, I've had a
lot of conversations with people though they have that this
really destroy idea of nutrition and what's important and what
you need. But what's good to thrive, what's optimum versus
what is just going to keep you alive? These people think, oh,
you just need a balanced diet. No, you need to

(02:23:12):
take vitamins. If you do not take vitamins, you will
not have full optimization of your body.

Speaker 2 (02:23:19):
What do I want to take with D by the way,
is it magnesium?

Speaker 1 (02:23:21):
You want to take magnesium and you want to take
K two. You want to take vitamin K magnesium. And
you know there's some arguments from other stuff too that
would also enhance it. But you definitely need vitamin D.
Almost everybody does. And if you live in a cold
climate in the wintertime. You know, a body mine did
his residency and I think it was Boston, and he

(02:23:42):
was saying people would come in and they'd have undetectable
levels of vitamin D because they were just never in
the sun and they didn't supplement at all. And you
know there's some vitamin D in milk when they enrich
it with vitamin D. But the reality is you need
vitamin D and you need quite a bit of it.
And if you want an optimal immune system that's really healthy,

(02:24:02):
it's imperative. It's really important. And there's a lot of
other things that are really important. Vitamin C is really important,
you know, the vitamin B is very important. Bunch of
different bes. You need, essential fatty acids. They are very important.
You need all these things. If you don't have these things,
your body won't function right.

Speaker 2 (02:24:18):
Do you think that the basic fear and conversation around
skin cancer and the lotions and the coverings and the sunscreens,
and I mean, to what extent do you think people
are not getting vitamin D because they've been scared out
of the sun.

Speaker 1 (02:24:37):
There's a lot of that, for sure. I mean, the
best way to get vitamin D most certainly is from
the sun. That's the way your body is naturally designed
to get vitamin D. You're supposed to be outside all
the time, and it'll bink you healthier physically. It's good
for you. It's actually a hormone that your body produces
when it's in the vitamin D is a hormone. It's

(02:24:57):
or a precursor to a hormone. I guess you take
it orally, but what it's doing to your body, Like
George Saint Pierre when he was fighting, would tan, and
he would tan specifically not to look good, because it's
actually better for your health and fitness. You get more
vitamin D that way.

Speaker 2 (02:25:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:25:13):
Yeah, and there's there's a reality to that. That's why
people are really fucking depressed when they live in the
Pacific Northwest because it's rainy all the time. You're not
getting enough vitamin D. It's actually bad for your psyche.
It's bad for your mind, it's bad for your health.
You're you're again overall vitality. If you want to have
a strong vitality, you eat nutritious food and take vitamins,

(02:25:35):
and you need to exercise. There's no if, ins or
butts about it. You need those three things.

Speaker 2 (02:25:41):
No shortcuts, no shortcuts. I don't know that. Probably not
many silver linings to the lockdown, but I did. I
started walking. I've always been active, but I kind of
backed off of the gym as I got older and
started walking every morning for eight miles. And then you
know Mikey, he became a friend the comfort crisis and

(02:26:05):
I started rucking. Yeah, and so that's great, yeahs of
that big time.

Speaker 1 (02:26:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:26:12):
In fact, when Bobby called it was fun, He's hard
to understand sometimes, and it was impossible to understand because
I was gasping for breath. I got sixty five pounds
on my back walking eight miles every morning. He's like,
what are you doing? Like I'm dying, I'm dying on it.
I'm rocking. But yeah, I just I think it. I

(02:26:33):
think there's really something important in that book that that
Easter wrote and and I think our it's not the
specifics of what we can do, this idea of what
do the Japanese call it a ma asogi a quest
or a challenge of sorts that you should well, you

(02:26:54):
should challenge yourself to do every so often.

Speaker 1 (02:26:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:26:57):
And one of the uh, one of the criterion is
you should have a fifty percent chance of failure. M right.
So it's a it's a real push into uncertainty and
discomfort and that that's why I rock. It's uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 (02:27:17):
Yes, yeah, I think that is an exercise for that
part of your mind, the same way cardiovascu exercise works
for your cardiovascular system. I think the discomfort exercise is
a real thing. And you know, Andrew Hubman has talked
about this. There's actually a specific area of the brain
when you enact voluntary discomfort and do things you don't

(02:27:38):
want to do all the time, it actually grows. Remember
what that is, Remember what you call that part of
the brain. But you know, he speaks about it, of course,
he's a neuroscientist much more eloquently. But I think that's real,
and I think it also makes regular life a lot easier.
That was one of my favorite things of jiu jitsu
when I found out it makes regular life easy because

(02:27:58):
it's regular life is not the anterior mid singulate cortex.
That's what it is. Engaging and challenging activities can stimulate
and grow this region, which is crucial for learning or
excuse me, leaning into and overcoming difficulties. Yeah, and if
your life is super easy and anything that comes up
as a nightmare, it's probably be because you lack enough

(02:28:21):
voluntary adversity to overcome uncomfortable moments. So uncomfortable moments are rare,
and when you encounter rare things, generally people like kind
of have anxious moments encountering rare things.

Speaker 2 (02:28:33):
Well, anxiety is a form of discomfort. Yes, and it's
not just pain. It's not you know, that's I think
most people equate discomfort or uncomfortable ness with like physical pain,
but the way Easter talks about it, it's it's also boredom.
Like being bored makes people super uncomfortable because we're so
not used to today, especially today, you could get this

(02:28:57):
damn thing up and you know, instant access to ninety
nine percent.

Speaker 1 (02:29:00):
So you're robbing yourself of a lot of possible ideas.

Speaker 2 (02:29:03):
Sure, yeah, because the best ideas come.

Speaker 1 (02:29:05):
Where you're bored. When you're bored, I just to have
some of my best ideas when I had no radio
in my car, because I would just be driving, and
my best ideas would come all as driving. So instead
of being entertained, I would just be like thinking, Like
you're constantly thinking yeah, you know, And when you're involved
in you know, an ordinary activity like driving, where you're

(02:29:26):
just so sort of like plugged in, like hit your blankers,
change lanes, you're so plugged in, so you're in like
this weird mindset. And then if there's no nothing entertaining you,
your mind just starts thinking about things, right, because sometimes you.

Speaker 2 (02:29:38):
Come up with great ideas your your mind your brain
will find whatever you send it out to look for. Yeah,
it'll just search and search until it finds it. And
if you don't give it anything, then it'll look inward. Right,
it'll find something. You know, Cold plunges not comfortable. Yeah,
but you know if you can find a way to

(02:30:02):
like it.

Speaker 1 (02:30:03):
I don't like it. I don't like it at all.
I do it every day. I hate it. Yeah, but
I love it when I get out. I the moment
before I get in, I'm always like, can I talk
to myself out of doing this? I don't want to
do this. It's fucking cold outside. It's forty degrees outside.
I'm climbing this thirty four degree water. But because I
do it, I know that I've already done something way

(02:30:24):
more difficult than most of my day.

Speaker 2 (02:30:27):
I think there's a difference in knowing what the benefits
are of a cold plunge, which would require you to
do some research and do some reading and do some
thinking and so forth, versus just saying, Okay, I know
there's some benefit. I don't actually need to know specifically
what it is. I just need to know that there's
a an overarching benefit in embracing the suck. Yeah, I need,

(02:30:51):
you know, And if I do that a couple of
times a day, I think I'm going to be better
for it. And that that's useful. That's been you to me.

Speaker 1 (02:31:00):
That's useful. But it also is beneficial physically, So it's
both things, and I think that's the case with exercise too.
It's also the case with sauna. Difficult things that are
also very beneficial physically. They seem to go hand in
hand because it's the hormetic effect. Your body's freaking out
because of the cold, and that's why it produces all
these cold shock proteins, and that's why it produces all

(02:31:23):
these anti inflammatories. Your body just feels better when you
get out. The endorphin rush you get you know, the
norp and effrin. This flood of these chemicals that last
for hours, wraps up your dopamat by like two hundred
percent and it lasts for hours. Like you genuinely feel better.
So there's all that. It's also good for recovery and

(02:31:45):
muscle soreness and just general inflammation. There's a lot of
like benefits. But that's the same with exercise. Right. It's
difficult to do. It's hard to do. But if you
can do it, man, you'll be stronger, healthier, you feel better.
It's like it's like you've got to go through that
suck to get those benefits. And people don't like that,
and so they come up with a bunch of reasons
why you don't need that. That's just a fad, that's

(02:32:07):
just this. They all look like shit. Everybody says that.
They all look like shit, they all talk like pussies.
They're all just they're cowards. They're afraid to get in there.
They don't like getting in there. They don't like that
other people get in there every day, and they don't
get in there every day, so they come up with
a reason why getting in there is not really worth it.
It's all it's all a bunch of hogwash. It's the
latest fad. It's this is that, And.

Speaker 2 (02:32:27):
Yet look at the stadium fifty years ago and look
at it today. Yeah, the evidence demands a verdict. Something,
something awful has happened. It's like the difference between being
hungry and feeling hungry. You know, That's something else I
think about a lot. I mean, how often do we
say maybe you don't, but how often do you hear it? God,

(02:32:50):
I'm starving. I'm fucking I'm famished. Like, no, you're not,
You're rid.

Speaker 1 (02:32:54):
You really not.

Speaker 2 (02:32:55):
You can't possibly be.

Speaker 1 (02:32:57):
Yeah, talk to a fighter that's trying to make weight.
Those guys are famished. Those guys are they have no
water in their body for the week before. They're living
in hell. They're living hell. Some of those guys they
start their cut like four or five days out. Crazy
that that's starving you really, that's only your voluntary, voluntarily starving,

(02:33:17):
you know, it's not real starving. Real starving is like
you might not be able to eat, you might not
be able to feed your kids. You're just using will
power to starve. That's so different than at any other
time in history. It's a different feeling, you know, Like
if you're a person that's making your way across the
country and you're the wag the wagon breaks, Yeah, that's

(02:33:37):
real starving, real starving.

Speaker 2 (02:33:39):
Did you ever read as a book by Nathaniel phil Brick.
It's called In the Heart of the Sea, No oh man.
This is the true story of the sinking of a
whale ship called called the Essex Right. And the sinking
of this ship inspired at Herman Melville to write Moby

(02:34:01):
Dick and what happened was in I think was eighteen
twenty one. The whaling industry in Nantucket is so fascinating.
This Nantucket back then was basically run by women because
the men would go out for two sometimes three years
at a time Jesus hunting right whales, which are just
sperm whales called years years. Yeah, they were called right

(02:34:24):
whales because they were the right whales to kill right
in that time. It was a great source of energy
for the country. All the lamp lights burned on whale oil.

Speaker 1 (02:34:35):
Imagine how many whales there were before they started doing this.

Speaker 2 (02:34:38):
They were like schools, there were so many. This book
will I mean, it's rich in a lot of different ways.
It's where they got the expression steely dan. Actually it
was because it was just the women and it was
a device used for pleasuring, because the men were all

(02:35:01):
out to see gosh, so they'd use the steely dam.

Speaker 1 (02:35:05):
But you want to talk about hard lives.

Speaker 2 (02:35:08):
The business, whatever it takes to shoot the elk and
get it down from the mountain. I get it that
that's a thing. But when you read through the real
process of getting a sperm whale out of the ocean
alongside the ship, and then onto the ship and the

(02:35:29):
cutting of the blubber and the cauldrons that burn twenty
four to seven on the deck and the blubber that's
put into the cauldrons.

Speaker 1 (02:35:38):
So they're just making this rendered fat.

Speaker 2 (02:35:40):
They're rendering the fat and the oil in real time.

Speaker 1 (02:35:43):
Oh wow. And because they have to rot.

Speaker 2 (02:35:47):
That's right. And so they just load up the boats. Whoa,
so what happens? And this is not really eating.

Speaker 1 (02:35:53):
The whales too, No, no, no, what are they eating.

Speaker 2 (02:35:58):
They've got their they got their hard tack. Mostly hard
tack is just kind of like crackers, biscuits, with no
real taste at all. It was the it was the
currency you used to anything. Probably it's scurvy, you know,
I mean, but they would, these guys would go all
around the world. And this boat, the Essex, was a

(02:36:20):
couple thousand miles off the coast of Venezuela. And what
happens is that it's it's the ship is the main
ship with the guys on it. And then when you
see a whale, right, you basically put the whale boats
in the water. And these are smaller, maybe twenty two
feet long, and men row them right, And so you

(02:36:41):
harpoon the whale and then you hang on and go
for what they called a a nantucket's sleigh ride. So
the whale would just drag the.

Speaker 1 (02:36:51):
What if the whale goes under, you.

Speaker 2 (02:36:53):
Can't go under much further, can't pull two boats down,
and it doesn't They tend to swim in a straight
line after they've been harpooned, So you just hang on
and then when it tires itself out, you wrote it,
and you back to the whale ship.

Speaker 1 (02:37:07):
Did they kill it first?

Speaker 2 (02:37:09):
Uh? Well no, no, it's killed back at the ship. Typically,
you don't want to kill it when it's when you're
a mile from the ship, because you got to drag
it back.

Speaker 1 (02:37:18):
They didn't know how smart whales.

Speaker 2 (02:37:19):
Were back then either, We didn't know anything.

Speaker 1 (02:37:21):
But isn't that crazy that that's only a couple hundred
years ago?

Speaker 2 (02:37:24):
Eighteen twenty one, isn't that nuts?

Speaker 1 (02:37:27):
Well, a couple hundred years ago. The ocean's filled with whales.

Speaker 2 (02:37:30):
Filled with them, and like that, because.

Speaker 1 (02:37:33):
If you look now, they're hard to find and nothing
hunts them.

Speaker 2 (02:37:38):
No, I never even really.

Speaker 1 (02:37:39):
Thought about it.

Speaker 2 (02:37:40):
They were everywhere.

Speaker 1 (02:37:41):
I mean I knew about it, but I never thought
about it. I never. I mean we've talked a lot
about the the decimation of the fish population in the ocean,
about like ninety plus percent of all the big fish
are gone, yeah, which is really nuts. But I never
really thought about it that way.

Speaker 2 (02:37:56):
When it comes to whales, Well, you can make a
really good and really controversial case.

Speaker 1 (02:38:01):
They made a movie.

Speaker 2 (02:38:02):
Yeah, yeah, Ron Howard made a movie this. Yeah, it's amazing. Look,
I mean they were everywhere. Wow. So these guys harpooned
one crazy from the whale boat. Then they get tugged
along look at all these whales. And then while they're
out maybe a mile from the ship, the mate of

(02:38:26):
the mail of the whale that was harpooned starts ramming
the ship, rams it three times, sinks it. Oh no,
Now you got a couple dozen guys in whale boats
two thousand miles off the coast of South America with

(02:38:48):
no supplies. So man, what happens? And this is all
in the in the preface, but the story basically starts
when one of the whale boats is discovered not far
from I think is Venezuela, and the guys look over
the gunwale of their boat and in the whale boat.

(02:39:12):
It's just like a giant carcass. It's just bleached bones
all in it, except for two quasi humans, one in
the stern and one in the bow, each skeletons huddled
up staring each other with wild eyes, just waiting to
see who would die next so they could eat them. Yeah,

(02:39:33):
and there were rules. There were almost like cookbooks that
were very common.

Speaker 1 (02:39:40):
How many people were on these boats?

Speaker 2 (02:39:42):
Mmmm, double check me, Jamie, but I think there were
probably a dozen on each one, many family members. It
was a cabin boy named John Coffin, I remember, And
there were I mean a lot of these guys were related,
you know. And there were dear friends and family. They
lived together on Nantucket.

Speaker 1 (02:40:00):
But they ate each other.

Speaker 2 (02:40:01):
They ate each other.

Speaker 1 (02:40:02):
Man, how long was it before they discovered them?

Speaker 2 (02:40:06):
They were at see a drift I think for the
better part of three months winning the nation. That's him
Nate phil Brooke Fantastics ipisode. In eighteen twenty, the whaleship
Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale,
leaving the desperate cruited drift for more than ninety days
in three tiny boats.

Speaker 1 (02:40:26):
When did this movie come out? Fifteen for the movie.
The manuscript was found in nineteen sixty verified in nineteen eighty.

Speaker 2 (02:40:33):
Oh yeah, dude, you want to take a deep dive.
Go to the like the Whaling Museum up in New England.
This stuff is this? I mean, in the day, there
were strict protocols on how to eat your friend, how
to prepare your friend for conside.

Speaker 1 (02:40:53):
Them on the spot or did they have them prepared?
The devis on the spot.

Speaker 2 (02:40:57):
There was what the rules know they were written. It
was it was like a maritime code.

Speaker 1 (02:41:03):
So they kind of knew that this was a possibility.

Speaker 2 (02:41:07):
They knew it was a certainty. They just didn't know
for whom this was common, That this was to find
yourself with a group of people hopelessly marooned, whether you're
on a boat or an island with nothing to eat
at all. There were protocols, pretty strict protocols on how

(02:41:27):
to draw lots, to decide who would go first, how
to kill the person who would go first, boy, who
not to eat based on the degree of your relation.
Oh so, like brothers are definitely off, but cousins not optimal.

(02:41:47):
So like people were being prepared for consumption. I mean,
I can't imagine how you would make a fire out there.
Oh my god, on speakable god, Oh my god, that's interesting,
Owen Chase.

Speaker 1 (02:42:04):
Right, the men's been over three months to see and
had to resort to cannibalism or to survive. Captain Pollard
and Charles Ramsdell were discovered gnawing on the bones of
their shipmates in one boat. Owen Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson
also survived to tell the tale, and all seven sailors
were consumed. Whoa.

Speaker 2 (02:42:24):
See, this is why nonfiction is the best. I know
it's nauseating, but I mean that book at.

Speaker 1 (02:42:32):
A point in time, you gotta go. I might wind
up in hell before I starve to death because I've
eaten everyone else. Right, well, you're knowing you're starving to
death and you've already eaten everyone else. Oh my god,
because there's gonna be one last person.

Speaker 2 (02:42:50):
And then there was one.

Speaker 1 (02:42:52):
Oh god, I know, I know. Reality is so terrifying
in that regard that we have. You know, we were
so fortunate that there's so much food available. The poorest
amongst us are fat. But the reality is if that
cut off, it would be real desperate, real quick. Most

(02:43:15):
people get really hungry after five hours, you know.

Speaker 2 (02:43:18):
They feel really hungry.

Speaker 1 (02:43:19):
Yeah, description if you'd like to no oka, Okay. The crew,
according to Chase, separated limbs from his body and cut
all the flesh from the bones, after which we opened
the body, took out the heart, and then closed it again,
sewed it up as decently as we could, and committed
it to the sea. They then ate the man's organs.

(02:43:40):
Soon they began to draw lots to see who would
be shot and eaten next, a custom of maroon sailors
dating back to the seventeenth century. Three men in one
boat survived and two in another. The three men who
remained behind on Henderson Island were also rescued after surviving
on eggs and crabs for nearly four months.

Speaker 2 (02:43:59):
Boy, and this is why we have Moby Dick. This
is why the greatest American novel, arguably of all time,
was written. Because Melville came from that part of the world,
and he understood the stakes of hunting whales, and he
understood the absolute imperative need to get energy. You can

(02:44:23):
make a really interesting and controversial case around how the
fossil fuel industry saved the whales.

Speaker 1 (02:44:31):
Yeah, I've heard this before.

Speaker 2 (02:44:32):
Because had that not happened in Pennsylvania in Titusville not
long after this, we'd have hunted them into absolute oblivion.

Speaker 1 (02:44:41):
Well, we almost did that to mammals North America market hunting.
There used to be elk in every state in the country.
There used to be deer everywhere, and we basically hunted
them into oblivion. The buffalo is the best example of that.

Speaker 2 (02:44:56):
Of course, the hell doesn't matter with us, man.

Speaker 1 (02:44:58):
Oh, we're fucked up. We can't We don't see consequences.
We see what's in front of us right now and
what we need to do. And back then they didn't
really have a real understanding of what would happen. That
had never been done before. No one had just showed
up at a continent filled with mammals and just started
decimating them. There wasn't like a history that it was. Also,
the event of the firearm was fairly recent, so it

(02:45:19):
was a lot easier to get these animals, you know.
And then they had the Henry rifle, so the had
long range rifles, so they were able to shoot buffalo
from a distance. And then they you know, for a
lot of them, they only used their tongues. They pickled
their tongues and sent them back east.

Speaker 2 (02:45:32):
And I was in a custer a couple of weeks
ago for a buffalo roundup.

Speaker 1 (02:45:37):
Oh wow, man, this was a kick.

Speaker 2 (02:45:40):
This is so. This is western South Dakota, not far
from Crazy Horse and Rushmore. You know, we worked on
a crazy Horse for Dirty Jobs. We did an episode.

Speaker 1 (02:45:54):
I mean the sculpture. Yeah, sculpture's weird because there's no
real drawing or painting or anything. No photographs of Crazy Horse. No,
nobody knows really what he looked like.

Speaker 2 (02:46:04):
Well, they're working from a model that seems to have
been blessed by all the appropriate parties. But this they
started working on this thing fifty years ago and it's
going to take another forty before they're done. I worked
on the fingernail of Crazy Horse with a whole crew.

Speaker 1 (02:46:21):
What does it look like now? I haven't seen it.

Speaker 2 (02:46:22):
Oh you'll love this, Jane. It's it's it's so mind
But you can take all of Rushmore all foreheads and
put it on the forehead of Crazy Horse. Wow, that's
how big this thing is and.

Speaker 1 (02:46:37):
Wasn't like one family's undertaking.

Speaker 2 (02:46:39):
Yeah, gor Chek, go to that.

Speaker 1 (02:46:41):
Last picture that you just had, that one right there,
so that shows before and after. It shows where it
was a while back and where it is now.

Speaker 2 (02:46:49):
Look at it. Look at his finger in the lower right.

Speaker 1 (02:46:51):
That's what you worked on.

Speaker 2 (02:46:52):
Yeah, and I scaled down his forehead to do basically
some tiding up of his nostrils. We were there.

Speaker 1 (02:47:01):
It's it's crazy.

Speaker 2 (02:47:02):
It's massive, it's absolutely massive. And yeah, this there was
one guy, uh court Chak was his name, and he
was an immigrant and he loved the Indian people. And
that's that's the model there at the right.

Speaker 1 (02:47:19):
Yeah, that's what's going to that's what we're shooting for.

Speaker 2 (02:47:21):
Wow, and it's it's it's going to take another half
a century.

Speaker 1 (02:47:24):
Probably, but that's incredible.

Speaker 2 (02:47:28):
You know, it's funny.

Speaker 1 (02:47:29):
It's very controversial amongst Native American communities though, right.

Speaker 2 (02:47:33):
I don't know it is you know.

Speaker 1 (02:47:35):
I think there's there's a part of it is the
thing that crazy Horse didn't want to be photographed. Yeah,
you know, he really believed that cameras were like store
your soul. Yeah, that was a belief back then, which
I well, you have this novel thing where no one's
ever seen it before, and you take an image of
someone like that. Yeah, also human beings at that point

(02:48:00):
in time, were so horrible to each other. And these
settlers had done essentially demonic things to the population just
with diseases, just bringing diseases. Yeah, so of course they
would say, what are they doing now, Well, this is
the fucking KOUDI gras they're going to steal our soul
with this fucking box. Big thing goes off, You gotta
stand still.

Speaker 2 (02:48:21):
This guy coort Check, he was so brilliant on so
many levels. Yeah. I think he had thirteen kids and
that they were basically his workforce. He built into the rock,
the staircases that they needed to take to get to
this space. The like the work ethic is mind boggling

(02:48:42):
what they did. And he was a real friend to
the Native Americans and he and this was a love
letter for them and to them. And who was crazy? Horses?
Was it sitting bear? Maybe I forget, but you know
he had all of the he had enough blessings of
the requisite players to embark on this thing.

Speaker 1 (02:49:04):
Well, I think anything anytime you have some enormous thing,
you're going to have controversy. Well, you're going to people
that don't like it, that do like it. You know,
there's for sure you.

Speaker 2 (02:49:14):
Know what you do, but the difference I mean, for me,
I called when we brought we brought Dirty Jobs back
during the lockdowns because I just felt like I wanted
to be I wanted to be the first show back
on the TV, you know that was that was shooting
and this was one of the first things that we did.
But I started by calling Rushmore. And I'm not telling

(02:49:37):
you the story to make anybody sound bad, but it
really just it was kind of appalling, you know. I said, look,
I want to bring my crew and I'm really I
want to tend to this statue, this statuary, this monument.
At the time, you know, the headlines were filled with
statues being pulled down and being disrespected for any number

(02:50:01):
of reasons. Right, I'm like, look, I think the Park
Service does an amazing duty and I want to meet
the care takers of our statue where and I would love,
you know, to work on this with the people who
work on it. And they not only said no, they
were like, are you crazy? We would never we would

(02:50:23):
never permit anything like that. Like I think they thought
it was exploitative somehow. And I'm like, I want America
to learn the story of Rushmore. I want them to
learn something about the people memorialized on it. I want
them to meet the people who care for It's just
a love letter to one of our monuments. But it

(02:50:43):
was a hard no, and I really wanted to go
to that part of the country, and so I knew
Crazy Horse was nearby, and the answer was, oh, yeah,
come on out any time. And the difference, of course,
was Crazy Horse isn't being built with a penny of
federal money. It has no federal oversight. It's very personal

(02:51:05):
to this family, and the people who are still in
charge of it are true custodians of it. It's really
interesting when you when you talk to people who are
in charge of a thing that means a lot to
other people, monumental in reality, monumental monuments. Yeah, I mean
it's a Some people, I think see it as a burden,

(02:51:28):
some as a challenge, some as an obligation. But for me,
I you know, the vast majority of Americans are never
going to see either one of those monuments in person.
So to to show them more people will have just
seen what Jamie put up here as a result of this,
probably well then we'll visit in person. And that's amazing. Dude,

(02:51:52):
when you think about a couple of guys smoking cigars
and sipping a coffee and just passing the time, and
all of a sudden you're able to learn about the
way they drew lots and the way we where we
got our energy from just a little while ago, this
buffalo roundup I was telling you about. I mean, it's

(02:52:12):
there were only a couple thousand of them. And when
you think about the accounts of the day where the
buffalo roam was as far as you could see, just thick.

Speaker 1 (02:52:25):
Do you know Dan Flores? Do you know who he is?

Speaker 2 (02:52:29):
Tell me?

Speaker 1 (02:52:29):
He wrote American Coyote, and he wrote what is it
a buffalo diplomacy? Buffalo ecology? Is that what it was?
I forget? But the buffalo premise is very fascinating because
the numbers of buffalo. He believes they were in such
large numbers because so many Native Americans died out because

(02:52:49):
of diseases, so the Native Americans would follow the buffalo,
hunt them and kill them. Takes a long time for
gestation for a buffalo, so when the buffalo have new buffalo,
it's a long time to repopulate. But if the Native
America is ninety percent of them were wiped out by
disease when the settlers came here, so there's no one
hunting them for a long time, and so the populations

(02:53:12):
grew immense and so that this was not something that
was reported when the first settlers got here, When the
first people came to the first Europeans came to North
America and made their way across the country, never did
describe massive herds of buffalo. It wasn't a thing. It
wasn't a thing until after the Native American population had
been decimated by disease, and then the buffalo flourished and

(02:53:36):
became overpopulated in a sense, an unnatural population because they
didn't have to worry about wolves. They didn't have to
worry so when they first were here, right, buffalo existed
far back before there was a mass extinction of like
sixty five percent of North American mammals that coincided with

(02:53:56):
the end of the Ice Age and probably had to
do with the Younger Driest impact, which is a theory.
It's an eleven. Well, there's two different time periods that
they attribute to. There's a shower and asteroid shower that
we go If you really want to get into this.
You should really look up the Younger Driest impact theory online.

(02:54:17):
And then there's a guy named Randall Carlson who's like
kind of dedicated his life to showing that this is
probably what ended the ice age. There's a bunch of
science behind it in terms of like core samples and
stuff they do that shows that there's asteroid impacts that
happened all over the world during this particular time period.
And he thinks that coincided with the extinction of the

(02:54:38):
wilde mammal, the American lion, a lot of different animals
that just died off. Sixty five percent of North American
mammals died off during this time period. And you got
to think, like when the buffalo existed back then, they
existed with the North American lion, which was bigger than
the African line. It's the biggest lion ever. So they're

(02:55:00):
getting jacked by these massive predators and then you have
this extinction event and then you have humans start hunting them,
and so humans now horses have been reintroduced to North
America by Europeans. Humans are on these horses and then
they're hunting these animals reintroduced by the way, because horses
originated in North America, including Zebras. All horse species came

(02:55:22):
from here, but that was the north, the bearing land
bridge and things moved around, and when they the mass
extinction event happened, it killed off all the horses here.
But then there was horses over there that they had
kind of extirpated from America, brought them back in and
now Native Americans have horses, and so they are really
effective at hunting buffalo. They get the numbers down to

(02:55:44):
a number where when people were making their way across
the country, they're not seeing them everywhere, and then you
have this mass event where ninety percent of Native Americans die,
then you have millions of buffalo. This is what Dan
Flores writes.

Speaker 2 (02:56:00):
It's really interesting eighteen thirty forty.

Speaker 1 (02:56:04):
You'd have to go to whatever it's.

Speaker 2 (02:56:07):
Yeah, here's the tragedy for me. I narrated a special
about all that.

Speaker 1 (02:56:14):
Hm.

Speaker 2 (02:56:15):
I can't remember it, man, really, I mean I remember
enough of it to know that I narrated it. That's
what I told you three hours ago.

Speaker 1 (02:56:22):
I ken Burns one, is that what you could have
been could have been?

Speaker 2 (02:56:28):
I know it was ken Burns. He he always hires
Peter coyote Peter does all. Yeah, but I that's what
I meant earlier when I'm like, I feel I don't
think there's anything wrong with me yet, but my my
buckets full too, and it's so annoying. Like I was

(02:56:48):
talking to a friend of mine just yesterday about how
the Universe Works, which is a show I've been narrating
for the Science Channel literally for ten years, and you know,
he he he knows all of the information in the show,
but he thinks because he heard me tell it to
him that I know it too, But I don't. I'm

(02:57:09):
just adjacent to it. I know just enough to, you know,
to keep a conversation on its feet. But it's like
it's this constant thing. Man. I'm older than I've ever been,
and it's just nagging at me now because it's like, God, damn,
I should know. I should remember more that I should

(02:57:30):
I should have remembered more about Philbrick, I should have
remembered more about.

Speaker 1 (02:57:34):
I don't think there's designed for it.

Speaker 2 (02:57:37):
I don't.

Speaker 1 (02:57:37):
And I think the humans, like yourself is this is
kind of a new thing in terms of human history.
People that are exposed to so many different things, so
many different topics, so many different experts, so many different
timelines and stories that you're dealing with. A it's essentially
a new thing with human human beings. You know what
Dunbar's number is. Dunbar's numbers the number of people that

(02:58:00):
you can keep, like in your mind, memory, in your memory. Right,
that's essentially born out of necessity and tribal life. Right,
So we essentially have the same brains and the same capacity,
same hard drive as people who lived in tribes ten
thousand years ago. But we're still stuck with this hard drive,

(02:58:20):
with this world that has an endless supply of information,
and it's consistently bombarding you with new facts.

Speaker 2 (02:58:27):
I read that like Bill Clinton's number is way high,
like certain people's numbers.

Speaker 1 (02:58:33):
Oh oh, they can keep in their head.

Speaker 2 (02:58:35):
Like the number of people you can keep.

Speaker 1 (02:58:37):
It probably expands, just like the part of your brand
expands and you do difficult things, it probably expands.

Speaker 2 (02:58:42):
There's a podcast, as you know, dedicated to what happened
on your podcast.

Speaker 1 (02:58:48):
I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (02:58:49):
Yeah, there's a podcast out there basically called Experience. I
don't know what it's called, experiencing the Joe Rogan Experience
or something. Because there's too much information on your show,
right right, there's just much, and people who love it
get anxious because they can't process all of it. And
so like there's an ecosystem. In other words, there's a

(02:59:09):
docent to bring it back to art. This is what
we need. I think more than anything today, we need somebody.
Like if you're gonna go to an art museum, you
need somebody to lead you through. I do anyway, somebody
who can it helps. It helps. Man, if you're gonna
go see if you're if you're gonna go see a

(02:59:30):
martial arts fight for the first time, if you're gonna
go to the octagon, it'd be better to sit next
to you than me, right sure.

Speaker 1 (02:59:39):
So everybody an I'd have to say, you don't okay,
how much do you know why that hurts?

Speaker 2 (02:59:47):
Here? Let me let me show you. Can you feel that.
I'm just saying that, I think, more than ever before,
people need a guide. They need somebody to makes sense
out of all the information. Because I don't think there's
any there's not much new information. It's just accessible that way.

Speaker 1 (03:00:07):
There's new information too, because it's information is acquired upon
the consumption of all the other information, Like it's all
exponential piles on top of each other. It's it's not
just now we know because of the new information. Because
of the information that we've acquired, now we have a

(03:00:28):
new understanding. So that's new information. You know, nutrition, there's
constantly new information and nutrition. How's that possible people have
been eating forever because now we know more about it.
So this is new information.

Speaker 2 (03:00:40):
Well, it's there's no such thing as an old joke
if you hear it for the first time. Right, So
if I just learn that vitamin D is important but
better assimilated with magnesium in K two, I might say
that's some new information, but you would go, no, dude,
that's old information. You're just learning it, right.

Speaker 1 (03:00:59):
But it's fairly new anyway, because nutritional science has really
only been around for what one hundred plus years, and
the understanding of it today is far greater than at
any other time in our life because of guys like Huberman,
because of these different scientists that have dedicated themselves to
educating people about nutrition, the process that your body goes

(03:01:20):
through and it absorbs nutrients like and what enhances that
what you know enzymes different things that you eat.

Speaker 2 (03:01:25):
Well, let me say it this way. Then there's a
body of information that exists that I don't know, And
then there's a body of new information that I also
don't know because it's new, right, And the body of
the stuff that I don't know yet it's been around forever,
is massive massive. The new stuff is new, and I
don't know how big it is, but it's not as big. No,

(03:01:47):
it's this incredible repository of stuff. Like when I walk
in a librarian, look, I mean, just look at all
that stuff. Man, look at this thing here in my head.
It's like, oh my god. If I have an Internet connection,
I have access to ninety eight percent of everything that
we've ever known.

Speaker 1 (03:02:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:02:04):
Now that either makes you intensely curious or intensely uneasy,
because now you know both maybe, but you have it now.
You like, if you're not like, what are you doing?
Like you're sitting on the toilet? Are you? Are you?

Speaker 1 (03:02:18):
Really?

Speaker 2 (03:02:19):
Are you tiktoking?

Speaker 1 (03:02:19):
Like?

Speaker 2 (03:02:20):
How are you spending the one truly finite resource you
have your time? What are you doing with it? Man?

Speaker 1 (03:02:26):
A lot of us getting distracted Jesus.

Speaker 2 (03:02:29):
But they're stories. They're buffalo stories and whale stories. They're
out there.

Speaker 1 (03:02:33):
I think that's why people like your shows, you know.
I think that's why people like podcasts. I think that's
why people are interested in documentaries. There's still people out
there that are interested in being curious, for sure. Yeah,
for sure.

Speaker 2 (03:02:46):
Yes, yes, Joe, it is. It's a pleasant living.

Speaker 1 (03:02:51):
Listen. Man, it's been awesome, dok to you. I really
appreciate it. It was a lot of fun hours just fucking
flew by.

Speaker 2 (03:02:57):
I'm just I mean, full disclosure, I'm kind of relieved. Yeah,
I mean I was getting so annoyed with friends of
mine who were like, hey, man, why haven't you been
on the show. What's I'm like, maybe my mother said,
maybe he's not that into you.

Speaker 1 (03:03:11):
It's just a time thing one day. There's a lot
of people out there, but I really did want to
talk to you.

Speaker 2 (03:03:18):
Can I show you a truck before we go? Yeah,
because I know you're a car guy.

Speaker 1 (03:03:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:03:23):
So this company called Sugar Creek up in Ohio made
me a truck. Well, it started as a nineteen sixty
four Dodge power wagon. It ended up as.

Speaker 1 (03:03:37):
This dude, I've seen that online, that's.

Speaker 2 (03:03:39):
Yours, that's mine.

Speaker 1 (03:03:41):
Ah, that's crazy. I love those old power wagons. Dude,
that thing looks incredible. I whatt a great job they
did on that.

Speaker 2 (03:03:49):
It's unbelievable, twenty seventy it's about nine thousand man hours.

Speaker 1 (03:03:53):
Oh my god, that thing looks a fucking incredible. Oh
you got a hellifan engine in.

Speaker 2 (03:03:58):
It, eleven horsepower.

Speaker 1 (03:04:00):
My goodness, look at that. So it's got a TRX hood.

Speaker 2 (03:04:03):
It's it's wow, you.

Speaker 1 (03:04:05):
Will that's coral. That's fucking great.

Speaker 2 (03:04:09):
I know.

Speaker 1 (03:04:09):
Oh do you drive that?

Speaker 2 (03:04:11):
Uh? Barrett Jackson is going to auction it off? No
in January, Aye, because keep it because my foundation needs money.
And right, so it's it's gonna get a I don't
know what it'll go for, he says, a bunch, But.

Speaker 1 (03:04:28):
Oh, that'll go for a lot of money. Man. Yeah,
that's probably gonna go for half a million dollars at least. No,
he says too, two million. Two million dollars.

Speaker 2 (03:04:36):
Probably cost half a million to make.

Speaker 1 (03:04:38):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (03:04:38):
Beats me. You know, this is another one of those words.

Speaker 1 (03:04:41):
Maybe auctions are crazy because a bunch of rich guys
get in there and go, I want it, and then
they start feeding off each other. Look at this fucking thing.
That's incredible. Two million dollars.

Speaker 2 (03:04:50):
Well, who knows. But I went up to Columbus to
see the garage where they make this thing. And you
need to put this on your list of stuff to
do when your bucket's not overflowing. Because a guy called
John Richardson, who owns the biggest bacon factory in the country,
Sugar Creek, is crazy automotive freak. He built this giant garage.

(03:05:13):
He hired twenty seven savants and all they do is
take classic cars from his sort of quasi junkyard and
turn him into these gems.

Speaker 1 (03:05:22):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (03:05:23):
So he built this for me and Barrett Jackson said, yeah,
we'll auction it off. So I went up there with
my crew just to look at it. Dude, these guys man,
it's what we're.

Speaker 1 (03:05:33):
It's I would never be able to let that thing go.

Speaker 2 (03:05:35):
It's the art we were talking about. Yeah, it's that's
that's artists try. That's right.

Speaker 1 (03:05:39):
Yeah, that's right. Yeah yeah, Mike. I appreciate you very much, man,
Thanks for having thank you for being here. A lot
of fun all right by everybody.