#2235 - Mike Rowe

29:59I stopped by last night. Are you around tonight? No, I gotta get back tonight. Something about Thanksgiving. But I watched his set last night. He's awesome. He was great. And the thing... I've never been funnier. He's in top form right now. And he's gone. He's gone full Messiah, dude. I mean, I didn't recognize him. Oh, with the look. Yeah. 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 the sense that they're trying to make me laugh. I get the sense that they're trying to amuse themselves.

30:38Right. 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 gonna do anyway. It makes me comfortable. And that's why he's fun to watch. That's why this podcast is fun to listen to. Same reason. I couldn't have articulated that 35 years ago. Sitting there selling a cat sack. Were you intuitively new something? 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 QVC cable shopping channel over a three year period trying to make sense.

31:24Over the shifts. So three hours at a time, usually, over the course of 24 hours. So call it nature. So you would be on three hours at a time. Yeah. Would you come back again? Or would you only do three hours? I do three hours and I go home. And I mean, have you done overnight 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 shortly as doors, the cat lady's brain was scrambled by the Gandhi eye and the, and the Toxo. It does something. Is it a catian rhythm? Yeah. It's not just that. It is that.

32:04But it's, it's something primal. Even more primal than that. It just messes with you. And it forces you. For me, it like changed colors. It changed taste. It changed. Yeah, because I had never, I mean, I was upside down. After I talked about a pencil for eight minutes, I was on the air 48 hours later. At three in the morning. Trying to make sense of the health team infrared pain reliever. And the amcord negative eye on generator. Like, what the hell? Like, and - Did they give you a rundown of what these products were at all? 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.

32:53And you could take the time to prepare. 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. No, what you got was a blue card, usually from the manufacturer that set a couple of sentences about what the thing was. You had an item number. You had the price, the retail price, the QVC price. And maybe some easy payment terms, all the stuff, right? But it was just a blue card. And then you would kind 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.

33:33And if you understand that, you can talk about anything for as long as you need to. You never talk about a feature without talking about its benefit. And so that's kind of how that world worked. So you don't say it's a pencil for 99 cents. You say it's a yellow number two pencil with an eraser that is of the exact proportions. And it's a portion 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. 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.

34:18You want that canary yellow to pop and you can pick it up. And it's a number two pencil. It's not three with that thin, wispy line that you can't read or that thick, disappointing skidmark of a number one. So you just train yourself to fill dead air with nonsense. While you're fucking up your circadian rhythm. Yeah. While you're wondering, like, when your next meal is and here you're going to have it with. And you wind up making friends and essentially hanging with other people who live in that same weird like shadow land. 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.

35:05I 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. Oh, I forgot the flip the top and then hit the button. There you go. Hit it again. There you go. And so I was all fucked up from that. I would get up every day at five o 'clock in the morning. Normally to deliver papers because that a large route. Yeah. It was my way to make money without having to do a job where I had to listen to anybody. It's also a perfect example of a kind of job where you always know how you're doing while you're doing it.

35:49Like lots and lots of little visual undeniable cues. Right. You got 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. Yep. You know, you're making progress. You know the progress you're making as you make it. Right. You know what? You know, you only have 120 houses to go. That's right. And then it's 110. And then it's like people let it go to Dunkin' Donuts. Gaze up a nice donut at a coffee. Reward yourself days over. Yeah. My day would be done workwise by, you know, 8 a .m. 9 a .m. on a Sunday. 9 was rough. Yeah. Occasionally they would make enormous Sunday papers.

36:33And that would be a real problem because you'd have to make multiple trips. 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 350 Sunday papers in the back of that van. But see, you remember and you knew 350 that's an interesting number. That's it. I had bigger routes, but 350 was manageable. I got, how'd we? I started when I was just driving. So I was in high school still. So I think I started delivering papers when I was 17 or 18. Whatever legal age they allow you to do it. Yeah. So it was probably 17 or 18.

37:12I started driving and I drove till I was 22. 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 through and 65 days a year. You did not take any days off. It didn't matter if it snowed or rained or fucking frozen rain on the streets. Black ice didn't matter. You got to deliver newspapers. And if they did delay it, 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.

37:50It was a blizzard for people dying and get lawsuits. So they didn't make you deliver papers. It was unbelievably bad out. But for the most part, you drove every day. So you had a sense of consequence to this? Like you go. Discipline consequence. You didn't deliver the papers. You didn't get paid. It was very simple. It was a very simple job. 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 got plastic bags for great because you could chuck them out the window and it never damaged the paper.

38:25Rubber bands were real paying 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 fucking 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 more papers to deliver. So I'll do two papers. And the New York Times, the New York Times is a pain the ass because it would be like one every ten blocks.

38:56You have an enormous route. If you had 150 New York Times, that's an all day excursion. Did you start to equate the type of home you were delivering the type of paper to? Oh 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 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 she's asking me, what are you planning on doing with your career? I'm like, I have no idea. She didn't like it.

39:32She didn't like that I had no idea. Yeah, it makes people uncomfortable. You liked me but she didn't like that I had no idea. She was like very motherly to me 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 difference between the two until summertime and crabs. Like Maryland blue crabs are a big thing. They're big thing in my family, big thing 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.

40:08But which one? Which one? Oh, which one? Matters. I don't know why it does. So is it disrespectful to use the paper of note? No. No, it's better. No, I think it's a mark of respect. It's like, oh, we're having crabs get the news American. Oh, that's so silly. Get the news American. Because it's all spread out in front of you and you got the crab guts and the old bay and the giant number two and the national Bohemian beer. And maybe you can glance down and get informed. Isn't it interesting that there are newspapers like that? There's the New York Post. You want a fun headline. You want all the crazy shit.

40:47What happened? Who got pregnant? What's going on with this? What's going on with that? And then you have the New York Times where it's important to put tampons in the boys room. It's like, what is happening? Have you ever walked through the offices of the post? No. Plenty chance. Oh, no. It's amazing. It's amazing. I had a old girlfriend whose sister worked there. I worked for page six. Oh, boy. Yeah. That's the fun one. Yeah. So much fun. So that's like all the gossip and the craziness and this person's getting arrested. Right, right. Drunk driving and hookers. They have a hallway. It's like this place in the sense that there's so much on the walls, but it's all front pages.

41:32And it's the best headlines. So is the best ones they've ever come up with? The best ones ever. Starting with the classic headless body found in topless bar, which is still tough to beat. 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 nature of the news. That was like the working person's newspaper. This is the point I was trying to make about the comedian who entertains himself first and the Schmack on QVC who tries to keep himself awake before he sells the thing. That's how I felt reading the post. It was like these guys somehow I'm imagining a movie.

42:15They're laughing. They're laughing. They're cigars and they're all in on the joke. Yeah. They're 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 beat different? That's what fascinates me. How could, whether you're publishing a paper or eating a blue crab, 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 your friends.

42:54That's the trick, man. Yeah, 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, very smart people, keep up to date. Yeah. I said to a, 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 the world catch up to it.

43:38Like 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 going to do it this way now. We're going to do it this way now. And that's been, whether it's comedy or whether it's music, you know, 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 true, but I also think there's this larger hive mentality in the audience. And they start to realize, oh, there's another way to deliver a paper. There's another way to do a thing. And it feels new, but it's probably what you've been doing for the last 12 years.

44:32Yeah, 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 make it. I enjoy it. Good. I'm a curious person. I like talking to people. But that's, it's real simple. Yeah, but it's just because it's simple, right? You make it sound like a parenthetical. Oh, it's just a conversation. Yeah, that's only just the hardest thing there is to do. But it's not really. It's not why people do it. Then why don't more people do it? Because they don't enjoy it. They don't enjoy it like I enjoy it. Like some people genuinely don't like talking to people.

45:06You 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. 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. How are they navigating the world? And why are they interested in opera? Why? What is it? Why?

45:47What got you to be a beekeeper? Why? Why are you so fascinated with painting? What made you start writing music? Like I'm interested. Yeah. I like talking to people. So for me it is easy. It really is. It's just talking to people like I would talk to people. Like you and I are going to have the same exact conversation if we're having dinner somewhere. For sure. Same conversation. 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.

46:25I think that's what it is. You're probably right. I think I just got lucky and I found a job that I wouldn't be doing anyway. Well, here's what I don't understand. And maybe this is not even relevant. But we did 350 dirty jobs. Probably 60 some of this thing called somebody's got to do it. I don't even know. Returning the favor. I think we did 100 episodes of that. I couldn't tell you how many things I've narrated. Hundreds. If there's a will to be trying to get across the vast reaches of the Baron Serengeti. Like if I could remember every episode of how the universe works, 10 years of this stuff.

47:03If I could remember half of what I narrated, that would be something. I can remember it chunk. But my sense is that I can't even remember the last 20 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 I just did. Right. So you just talk to Josh Brolin. And then you talk to the musician guy, Stuart. Yeah, right? Scott. Yes, Scott. And then before that, our friend, Evan, was in.

47:49Right? So like, I have a better, it's easier for me to remember what you've done in the last two months 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. That what you've done yourself. 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. It will be a lot more than I ever would know. I got an unexpected education doing this show for sure. Like I never anticipated it.

48:34It's a 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? The interest bubbles up and they stick. Yeah, totally. They're like, my daughter asked me a question the other day. I don't even remember what the question was 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 it. And she's like, how the fuck do you know this?

49:07She 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 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. Yeah. Yeah. I think it let me get really good at things too. Because I can remember technical, like it was really good for martial arts. Because I can remember technical details. Like really, like I don't forget things. See, you, to me, are the deeper end of the pool. I'm more the shallow end.

49:44Not, 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. I did, yeah. But 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, there's a big giant difference between being a former competitor. And, 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 15 and it changed my life.

50:24It gave me discipline and a will to overcome uncomfortable discomfort and to 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 15 years old. And so we were traveling all over the country. And so my social life from like 15 to 21 was completely retarded. It was like retarded as in slow 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.

51:08And then I started teaching. So then that I was making my 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 was 20. Taekwondo? Yeah. So this is my point. You take a deep dive. When you get interested in a thing, you go into the thing. Comedy wasn't a hobby. It became, I think, as important. It becomes everything. It becomes everything. Almost nothing I do becomes everything. Nothing? Almost nothing. But what are the things?

51:45What becomes everything? I'm not sure yet. Let me think about it. Is there one thing that if you have like free time, you super look forward to doing? Like do you have a hobby? Do you play golf? No. Nothing. I don't have hobbies and I don't collect things. No hobbies. Nothing. I don't collect things. Wow. I own very little. I never have. I wish I had 100 lives to live simultaneously. I would do 100 different things. This is the difference. You're insatiable in that way. You get a thing and you're going to nail it to the wall, man. My late great friend, Anthony Bourdain, his bio on Twitter that said enthusiast.

52:26I really wish that I had come up with that because that's what I am. I'm an enthusiast. I wouldn't say it now because I'd rip him off and also now my bio says drag and believer. Congratulations on that. Thank you. Thank you very much. They said I believe in drag and she tripled checked. She tripled checked, Mike. It's 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. Well you and Tony were similar obviously in that way. He took big bites. He took big swings. Well, he became good friends when he really got into Jiu -Jitsu.

53:04Yeah. 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 UFC and he's like, this is fucking great. And then he came to one of my comedy shows. We became friends. Started going to dinner by the way with Anthony Bourdain. It's the coolest fucking thing in the world. It's got to be. Because you go to dinner with him and all the chefs freak out. And so they just want to feed you. They just want to like, don't touch the menu.

53:31We got you and they come over and bring food. I wrote a eulogy for him that crashed my website. Oh wow. It's really funny. I only met him twice and each time it was fairly brief. But there was a time when he was doing no reservations, dirty jobs was early on. I bet your fear factor was still in production then too. Yeah. Yeah. Fear factor was maybe, it was probably at the, the fear factor stopped in 2007. And no reservations. I think was around that time. Yeah. He was on in six. For sure, dirty jobs went on in 03. Yeah. And then the CNN show, which is I think like CNN's highlight of their time.

54:21And 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 wonder lust. But also with this like real fascination with people and cultures and just really loved it. He just loved going to Vietnam. He loved going wherever he could go. He loved to eat their street food. He loved to talk to them. He really wanted to know what these people were all about. You know. I've never with the pot. This will sound vein glorious. I don't mean it too. But with the possible exception of, of me on discovery in 2010 narrating half their shows and hosting dirty jobs, which was a thing, you know, I felt really triangulated then.

55:14But then when I met Tony and I had a show on CNN at the same time, actually it was a companion show. What was your show? It was called Somebody's Got to Do It. Oh, that's right. That's right. 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 me a lot. And I was commiserating with Tony about this once. And that's when we had the conversation where I said, look, I just got to tell you, man, I've never in my life seen anybody doing the right show for them at the right time on the right network for them.

56:07Yeah. I've never seen that like that before. Yeah. And that never mind the, yeah, P, it was the P bodies that got me, actually, I don't know who cares about the Emmys. They're easy. But Jesus, he was just 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. 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 channels. Sure. Oh, we used to, when I was on news radio, everybody wanted the shot, the spot after sign fell because there was sign, there was sign felled in friends were on the same night and it was just this murderous Thursday night lineup.

56:49It was an unbelievable lineup. And if you got lucky, you were sex in the city or the single guy and what Paul Sims, the producer of news radio, he would call a shit sandwich because you had your brilliant show and then a 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 tune in for news radio. News radio wasn't really successful after it was off the air. You were in the slipstream. Yeah. You were in the war, but we weren't owned by NBC. So it was a different production company.

57:21It was pristine 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 88. And I was like, for real, he's like, yeah, I was like, oh no. With a bullet. We thought we were going to cancel 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 Loveitz 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 the 100 episodes for syndication.

58:03They had a sell at like 98 episodes. That was like our show. It's like we were always like barely hanging on. It was just, it was a funny show. It was a really good show with talented people. I love that show. The people I was super lucky to work on. And it ruined me because I could never work on another show after that. What did you look? What was the big lesson from News Radio if there was one for you? Well, it was just fortune. The lesson is that you could just be fortunate. 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.

58:44And then my manager said, this is terrible money. They're going to lock you up for like three years, for like $500. It was crazy, ridiculous bad money. He said, I'm going to take your tape and tell all these other production companies that MTV wants to sign a deal with you and it'll start abiding 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 would just call me. Like some guy called me from Universal's like, what the fuck is going on? So this shitty apartment on my way out the door to play pool.

59:17And this guy is telling me he wants me to get on a flight that night. We have a flight at 10 p .m. leaving out of the party. I was like, what are you talking about? And so then I call my manager, this guy just fucking called me for me. He was like, don't answer your phone. Just like, go play pool. Get out of here. I'll take care of it. Next thing you know, I was in Hollywood. It was like that quick. And I was on a show called Hardball when 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.

59:45They were these weird, phony people. They would say, good to see you because they couldn't remember if they met you. So instead of saying nice to meet you and fucking up, I'm sorry I met you. I'm sorry I fucked up. They didn't want to be real. So they everyone said, good to see you. Good to see you. Everyone was good. And it was super uncentier. I was like, this is so weird. 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 Kern, super funny talented guys who had worked on Married With Children in The Simpsons.

1:00:12Brilliant. 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 stayed is because I had a lease. So I got a nice apartment. I'm like, the first apartment I ever had. I was like, I thought I was going to be on TV forever. Like this is going to be easy. And now fuck, I got to get out of here. I was like, 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 roles.

1:00:45Do you want to come in? So I came in and auditioned for it and the next thing I 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 and Phil Hartman and Moratirney and Candi Alexander Vicki Lewis and Dave Foley. Oh, like this is crazy. From the kids not from Second City. Yeah, he was brilliant. Dave Foley, by the way, was the secret producer of News Radio because they would give him full autonomy. So he had completely rewrite scenes like on the spot, come up with punch lines for everybody. We all did that for everybody.

1:01:18Like we would all come up like maybe you should say this. Maybe you should say it was like super collaborative. So just fortune, complete, utter good fortune 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 they were living in hell. And I was like, look, I'm on a show that nobody watches, but it's fun as shit. And I can't believe on TV. This is nuts. Yeah, you're in on the joke. 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. 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.

1:02:04If it's a good sitcom, if it's a good set, if it's a bad sitcom, it's hell. Sure. Those guys who do a lot of coke and buy nice cars, those are all bad shows. They just want to give themselves something to reward themselves for this fucking slave slave work. I just say it's like you're a slave to money. It's not your, your compromising 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. 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.

1:02:45I never saw that show. That was a weird one, right? Because they got mad at him because he was right. Yeah, yeah. It was so crazy. Didn't they cancel it? It was the number one show they canceled and Fox picked it up. That's so nuts. They canceled it because they didn't like his politics. Yeah. Wow. That means 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 don't want to gloss over that. I don't want to come back to that show. Okay. All right. Yeah. Now that's a great one. You'll, you'll love this.

1:03:16But, but to Tim is great, by the way, and we became friends and, and chemistry on camera, everybody loved it. And when it was over, I was like, well, you know, doing honest inventory, Mike, like what, what did you love? What, what didn't you love? And really the only thing I loved was, was seeing people who loved each other and being welcomed into their little world. Yeah, the plan. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Everything like the idea that somebody else is writing lines for me, I know that sounds impossibly arrogant, but I was so used to, nobody writes for me, dirty jobs was truly unscripted. Everything I ever did, there were never any lines.

1:03:59Wow. And also that's an alien experience for you. Yeah. I mean, I had done plenty of plays as a kid and stuff, but that's different. You know, that's a, that's different. That once you're in Hollywood and once you're sort of in the machine, it's 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'd been prior to that and how, here you want this. And, and how crap, man, you know, a thing can live in your mind so much bigger than it is in, in reality.

1:04:37And so while I love doing it for that week, I said to my business partner over it, that, this thing that I used to think of as the single most efficient way to make a living was so wildly inefficient. You, it takes four days to rehearse for a half hour thing you got to be kidding me. I could do five one hour shows in the same period of time. 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. You know, we all hung out together and drunk together. And that's important, you know. Oh, yeah, yeah, it is important.

1:05:12It 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 it. Like he was a character. He was the only one of us that wasn't really himself. Like he was this one guy who's 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 of a wild west Netflix thing? He played on that. He was fucking genius.

1:05:45Wasn't he an O 'Brother? Did he have it? Yeah, I think he was an O '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 want, 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 I'll set them on a show. It was like just fortune. 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 other one?

1:06:16Hardball, the first one that I went for. That was terrible. Yeah. That was the baseball show that got canceled. And then I auditioned for Newsradio. So it was, it was nuts. It was just, I was just stepping in shit every step of the way. That's hysterical. Did it make any sense? So I never had an agent except for a very brief period when I did. And it was, you know, Sean Perry over at Endeavor. You guys ever crossed paths? I know. His, 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.

1:06:48I mean, how's it, how's it work with your former assistant? How's it work? That, that's one of my business. That's a dangerous undertaking. She called me one day. And I was in my, in my full on freelance world. I hadn't had a job since, since QVC. It says, like 1999. And she says, I just want to, I just want to send you out for, for something. Because 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, you should read for Craig Polygian over at Pilgrim Films. He's doing something called Worse Case scenario. And he's looking for a host.

1:07:24And so I audition 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 the 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 sack and all the other crap. That's, that was, I dare you to hire me. I got hired for both jobs that week, both jobs.

1:08:08And so suddenly I'm working for TBS hosting Worse Case scenario, which lived up to its name. And then I'm up in San Francisco hosting evening magazine. And there was no conflict of interest. Oh, no. Like you know, totally negotiated both of them at the same time. Yeah. Wow, that's cool. Yeah. And then Nicole switched agencies and I, and I, and I never really had an agent, you know, prior to that, or. That's fortunate. Or since super fortunate. It's financially, it's great. You know what's fortunate, man. Remember, okay, so my mother calls me on an evening magazine sitting in my cubicle, my dad, my granddad's 90 years old.

1:08:44Remember this? I didn't, 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's going to be 90 tomorrow. And before he dies, 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. Geez. She just finished her fourth book, by the way. Wow. Yeah, she's written three bestsellers after 80. That's incredible. She's out of control. That's incredible. So she was like, she wanted you to do something impressive. My mother wrote every day for 60 years.

1:09:25Wow. No agent, no. Got published in like the news American and the Baltimore Sun, you know, local stuff, some horse magazines. We were horse people kind of growing up and, uh, and her, her dream was to write. She finally got a book deal when she was 80. Went to, uh, number four bestseller. Wow. And everything she's written so far. So that's recently back in whatever was 2001, she was just a pain in my ass. And she called me to say, you know, wouldn't it be great if you're granddad? This guy who's shadow I grew up in, you know, could see you doing something. Cause like my puppets, he'd seen the opera.

1:10:03He'd seen QVC. He'd seen every God forsaken infomercial. He'd seen, you know, he'd done a lot of things, probably 200 jobs in the whole freelance world. And so I was 42 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 job was, I mean, it changed, it's, I wrote a book about it. It changed my whole life. Um, 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 stuff that comes out of your medicine cabinet, plastic products and rubber private condoms stuck to your rubber suit, you know, it's unspeakably vile.

1:11:01You can barely breathe. And what happened to me down there is I, I completely failed to like host the show. All the stand -ups went wrong, laterals exploded, because we were all getting a 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 threw up at one point, an enormous puke. And I'm, 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 cameraman's vomit, float past you as, as you're trying to articulate a thought.

1:12:00And meanwhile, the guy 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 a, it's 105 degrees. It's, it's, it's this seventh level of hell. It's clear I can't do my job. So I, I go over to this guy's name was Jean Cruz and I say, hey, um, what are you doing? He's like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm saying, you need a hand. So I start mixing the mortar and we start talking just like people, you know, not like a hosty thing. Right. Like what, what you were saying, 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.

1:12:50But what if you film it and put it on TV anyway, what would happen? What would happen a week later when this thing finally aired was, um, I was fired because people sitting down to hear their heart tugging story of the three -legged dog up in Marin over coming canine kidney failure and it's me a smart ass 42 year old crawling through a river of crap. I mean, they're, they're trying to eat their meatloaf, you know, it was, it was the wrong segment for that, for that show. But talk about fortunate, the male that came in as a result. Some people said it was funny and they liked it. Some people were repulsed, but, but the letters that changed my life were the ones that said, you think that was dirty?

1:13:38Oh, wait, do you see what my brother does? Wait, do you see what my cousin does? My mom, my sister, my uncle, right? And I'm like, 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 like this. And so that's, that's where the idea came from. I was like, what, what if the viewer programs the show, A, and what if B, the host of the show, is the person that I meet, who welcomes me into their shithole, or wherever they work?

1:14:30And what if, what if I'm not a host after all, after 20 years of impersonating a host? What if I'm a guest or an apprentice or an avatar or a cipher? 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 sack is 29. I mean, 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 20 at 22, certainly not, not even at 32, but at 42, I was entering a more introspective kind of phase. And so I was really just curious to see what would happen if I, if I thought of myself as something different.

1:15:19Well, if we think about the history of just media, it's, it's very recent, right? You have radio, which is like, when, when did people start listening to radio? Was the 1800s? Okay. And then you have television that kicks on in the 50s. And everyone's a presenter. Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles, right? Everyone's Ed Sullivan, everyone's Jack Car, Jack Par, like, there's these type of people that do this job. And it's like, you ever, you go to, you ever do a morning radio show? Oh, yeah. Morning DJ voice. Hey, five o 'clock on the hour. Let's go with Bon Jovi. There's a voice that they have a strip club DJ similar.

1:16:02There's a voice. Anchorman, Anchorman. I know. Yes. The news, especially local news. They have a very specific thing that they're doing. It's cadence. Yeah. Well, it's fake. It's not a person. There's no people act like that. If you had a guy like that over your house for dinner, 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? And so I think the internet opened up a lot of room for unprofessional people to thrive. That's me. So like, I can't do that. No, man. No, no, no, no, no, I can't. You're not unprofessional.

1:16:41But it's like, I mean, in that regard, like, I'm not, so I wasn't trying to do something that are already existed. I was just doing like, I was doing like a guest on the Opian Anthony show. That's what it was like. Like, when you're a guest on Opian Anthony, that's how you talk. Everybody would just hang out and talk. That's a fun show. It wasn't anyway. That 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 you sink karaoke, hold it a machine gun. That fucking maniac. And then the other big one was doing a Tom Green show because Tom Green had his own sort of internet talks, so they did out of his house.

1:17:22Sure. I remember that. 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 got to do this on my own quick sidebar. I don't know if this is adventurous. 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. It's out. I'm not proud of it. You should be proud of that. But it was it was statistic.

1:17:52It was like 1215 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 all the crazy, though, that you're like the godfather of karaoke. Well, I'm among them. So what year is this? What do we talk? Look at you 91. 91 92. Wow.

1:18:2299 95. 995. Yeah. It's hard to see. It's so blurry. Isn't it interesting? Like how bad television looked back then? You're comparison now? Like just a resolution? Yeah. But you know what? There's something, there's something more trustworthy about rudimentary production value. Right. You can't like, yeah. I was talking to your guy Bruce about this earlier. He was saying how much he loves like an antique road show and this old house. You know, I said, I love this old house. I still I was on this old house. Where you? Yeah, man. They invited me on. They wanted to raise money for the to reinvigorate the trades.

1:19:09They had a very similar cause as 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 do that. Sure. But I'd like to be on your show and they look 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.

1:19:50There's an exit. Right. What's the last time you saw it dissolve? Right. Right. Like all that stuff. And and I used to make fun of it. I used to make fun of QVC. I still do. But 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. So there's a thing about something that's overproduced that kind of dissolves some of its authenticity because there's too much thought put into each in ed every shot, everything about there's too much coordination. It's almost like you lose a comfort like I'm I might be entertained by it.

1:20:33I might be fascinating like like keeping up with the Kardashians. You ever notice that like they change scenes every five seconds. Just like keep you like yeah, keep it tuned in. There's something smart about that because it does keep you engaged. But it doesn't feel as authentic as it was just like one person following them around in real time with no edits at all. Just one camera on them. Here's 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.

1:21:15But when you get in your own way, then you get in the viewers way. Right. And one of the one of the things that kept dirty jobs on the air for 20 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 stopped rolling. And so if my 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 cam. That's what I called it. And I could always look to it. I could say, all right, well, what happened here?

1:21:56And so it was those moments where I 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. Yeah. And that was new in in nonfiction. You know, that was a whole new way to think about authenticity. But vague. Ramaswami was the only the only candidate I invited on to 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. Well, he could pull it off. I, whether you can pull it off or not, I just thought that was so interesting. And I and I wanted to talk to him about that specifically.

1:22:46And 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 when you think about the anchor who just wants to be believed, the spokesman who just wants to be seen as credible, the politician who just wants to be just wants it just so it's like they 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 your reading. Right. And so like the cognitive dissonance is rich, you know, and I just think we've entered into this world where like the the least persuasive thing you can do is say, trust me or take it from me.

1:23:42You know, people have just been burned so much. Right. That they're going to need we need a truth cam. We need it in the newsroom. Not just in a sewer. I mean, it worked there, but we need it everywhere. Fuck it. We'll do it live. Bill O 'Reilly, all people. That's the real bill. Yeah, that's it. That's the real bill. That's it. Yeah, that's what's interesting about social media and social media. Like it's there's this giant resistance right now to the idea that X is the new source of the world. They're the mainstream. It is. They're the mainstream. It's the new source of the world. You and these people that want to cling to authority and say, no, you're not.

1:24:26You're God damn it. You're not the fucking you're not a journalist. You know, this you guys fucked us too many times. Yeah, and we don't believe you anymore. And so the only way for us to find out what's real 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. Yeah, I mean, while they're fact checking RFK Jr.

1:25:00So now I don't trust you anymore either. You can't. So it's like that's what's going on. You can't gloss over the community notes. You can't. That's it. It's it. That's the truth, Cam. It's a solution. Twitter gets 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 going to get out of the hundreds of millions of people on X. You're going to get an expert. You're going to say, this is why this is incorrect and this is how you're supposed to read it.

1:25:35And 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 you'll, if you're an objective person, you'll probably get a good sense of who's writing is wrong. It's a weird dichotomy though, right? Like skepticism. Like 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 you know, you can't you can't really blame people for, you know, considering what we used to dismiss as a conspiracy theory.

1:26:19When the theories start to get born out and when there's such a level of eroded trust in in once credible institutions like. Well, that's also the whole reason for the disdain for conspiracy theorists in the first place. There's a 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. We're sorry. We were wrong about masking. We were wrong about social distancing. We were wrong about all of it. Where's the humility, man? Yeah. No humility because because they're not humans.

1:26:53And 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 exes emerged in substack and all these different things as like the place where people go to get actual information. And that's why they like podcasts because it's just the three of us in this room. That's it. The whoever is the numbers of people in Carl's out cold now. But the numbers of people that are listening is like it's just crazy number that are all just listening to three people.

1:27:26So there's no producer. There's no all that shit that gets in the way of things has been removed. 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? You know, you know, you're building a club. Yeah, the club. It's everything. It's everything. But why is it different? Well, because you can't think about it that way. Because the best way to do it in my opinion, for me, the best way I've found to do it is to never think about the audience.

1:28:10All 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 conversation. Sometimes I've talked to like very old scholars, like very old in this like time. Sometimes I'm like, okay, we got to focus here. We got to get you on this. Like I'll land this like maybe a little bit in the beginning when he was telling me the story. Lincoln's bedroom. I was at the bed was he was a long man. He was at talking very tall. So they told so I was like, okay, we got to figure out a way to what's it like to be the fucking president.

1:28:41What does that feel? I'm like, 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 100 % be engaged and interested in what this person is talking about. But don't you think that that's you are the proxy for the audience. When you're at your best, for sure. In my view. Yes, for sure. When I'm listening to you, when I like high five you virtually, it's when you asked the question I was thinking.

1:29:19And I really tried to do that in the sewer. I really tried to do that on dirty jobs. I really tried. I think you did. I think that's why I resonated so much with people. Well, I hope so. No, 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 you. Like, how do you do this? Like, what is this? So yes, thanks. But then all of a sudden, I look up and Donald Trump's in the sewer with me. Oh, shit. And there's an election in a week. Oh, the stakes around me, right? All of a sudden have changed.

1:29:55So it's so interesting that he was sitting right where I'm sitting. And you feel the need to kind of 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. Yeah, I'm a little bored. Let's move it along. Right. 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. 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.

1:30:37I do do this one thing. Even if I know that some I know how this thing works, I will ask a person how thing works so that the audience can hear it from them rather than from me. I don't want to be Mr. Smarty pants, but I don't have to be. But that's one thing that I do where I am 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 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.

1:31:08So that in that way, I do think about the audience. But most of the that's just like I'm just doing my job. But mostly all I'm trying to do is be 100 % 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. What was more consequential him coming on or her not coming on him coming on. Why do you say that? Well, because realistically, like, okay, my thought about her coming on was I would just I was going to be very nice. I was I want to have fun with her.

1:31:49I wanted to just be able to talk to her and ask her quite 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 about marijuana legalization. They initially didn't want to talk about internet censorship. And then they changed their tune and then they wanted to talk about internet censorship. It's 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.

1:32:18I just want to just get a sense of her as a human being. That's just as a human being. What is it like? Like does it freak you out and people get mad at you? Is it freak you 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 the people are listening and you're like, I got a fuck and bring this home and I don't know how to and you sort of repeat these key lines or this maybe this new word. You become a enamored with when you realize when you realize you're in the middle of a sentence with no obvious ending. Yes. That's that's QVC in a nutshell.

1:32:50Yes. Yes. That's what it is. Right. And when the teleprompter breaks, that's when you get to know the person. Right. And so and so that's why I'm asking. I I don't I wonder, you know, I mean, I listen to the interview and and and I ask myself, well, is anybody going to 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 that that her campaign had stipulations, they had I think there was a lot of that where she had made some a bunch of blunders and there was a lot of concern that she was going to make blunders here.

1:33:33This is what I was going to get to. She might have. It might have been a mess. Yeah. I might have asked her about immigration. We might have had a conversation about like, what is the goal? Like what? Why hasn't this been this doesn't if we can, you know, launch rockets and land them at the same time as we can't control border. That seems not real. Yeah. 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. So why is it like this now?

1:34:05Why does the Red Cross have these stations set up where 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? Is anybody ever examined what these people are up to? Why they're doing this? How is it so organized? Like what is that about? Maybe that would have been a disaster because that's something that I felt like if she didn't want to talk about marijuana and didn't want to talk about internet censorship.

1:34:38Immigration is 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. 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. 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 selling fentanyl for the last 20 years? Like what are you doing with your life, Bob?

1:35:16And wiring mines want to know. We want to know. I think that's reasonable. Do you see a difference between an immigrant and a settler? Well, it all is the timeline, right? It's a timeline thing. Not only that, you're an invader. If you're one of those people that comes over in 1820 and you're making your way across the plains 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. What are you doing here, bro? You're the problem. Now all of a sudden, that's Texas.

1:35:53That's where we are. We live here now. This is my land, bitch. That's where I live. I got this now. Well, it's where we're all invaders. In 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. Every freedom fighters at terrorist? Yes. Right. It depends on who wins. History gets to decide all that. Sure. If we didn't actually, the founding fathers didn't pull it off. We would be these wild, renegade English people that decided to come over here and just fucking create havoc. 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 accept, if that's part of your image, then you can't be on this show.

1:36:48Right. You can't join me in the sewer. There's no room for the contrivance. There's just no room. There's just no time. I just wonder if that's what they make them do. If you make me do that, I'll suck too. I can't read off a teleprompter. I'm not interested in doing that. It's not my thing. But if you make a person do that, if you're going to be a politician, and you were a senator, which is, you don't get that kind of exposure that you get if you're a vice president or you're running for president initially. That's a totally different scene. There's probably a bunch of people that coach you how to do it right.

1:37:28You don't know what the fuck you're doing. If you're not a powerful person, a big personality like Donald Trump, who could just do it. Also, coming from a world of entertainment for most of his life, he's been in the public eye and hosting the apprentice for 14 years. He's used to being in front of the camera. It's a normal experience for him. He has a massive advantage. 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. Right. You know, and I think the audience not just yours, but the country.

1:38:08I just think they're just exhausted by people who have been managed and focused grouped and weighed and measured and tested and then put out there. I think it's also the evolution of culture in general. Because if you just go back to where we're talking about media, go back and watch a film from 1950 versus a film from 2024. The way people communicate now is much more realistic. There was a way of talking. Hannah, what did you do? There was a weird, performative aspect to it because they didn't know how to do it right. And Sid comes too. And everything. Father knows best. All that stuff. And then as time moved on, it changed.

1:38:50All in the family was all the sudden, this realistic portrayal of a family where you got a racist dad and the son is, you know, the meat had the son -in -law and the daughter is happy. And the mom just can't feel what do you do? What do you do? It was a fucking amazing show. Well, watchy. It was an amazing show. Yes, Sanford and Son. Sanford and Son is another one. You know, it was a comedy, but people talked 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 had a show and you try to do a father knows best today, it would almost be like you were putting on like a parody.

1:39:35Like it would be weird. It would be like a weird tim and airy type thing. Like you're doing something weird on purpose, right? And that's not acceptable anymore. So the cultures moved on. So for sure, but it moves on in fits and starts and it's not a line. Right. No, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like the climate. Right. So like the, even the 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, can you imagine breaking bad? Right, right. 30 years ago.

1:40:13Right, right, right. It's impossible. Right. A whole lot of things had to happen in front of that for for that thing to the sopranos had to happen. That's right. Yeah. And something had to happen before that. Yeah. Well, in my world and in the world you're describing, that was the age of authority. That's when Eric Severide could talk to you like this. That's when yeah, like, like discovery is a is a good example. You asked about it. And I'll tell you first of all, John Hendrix, the friend of mine who created that channel. You would love. He did this in his garage, basically. I mean, the story is incredible.

1:40:48How he talked Malone into getting some transponder space for maybe his Westing house and and left mortgages house to buy some documentaries from Australia and started beaming all that stuff down. I asked him years ago, I'm like, what was the like what was the guiding principle behind this this business model? And of course, you know, discovery is since purchased Warner Brothers, you know, they're the biggest entertainment company in the world today. And it started with John Hendrix saying one goal to satisfy curiosity. Hmm. That's it. Hmm. Everything. Everything I do must line up with a traditional definition of what a discovery is.

1:41:38It's the, it's the satisfying of curiosity. Yeah. And so when I pitched dirty jobs, I was coming in on the 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 naturalist and historians and, you know, astrophysicists in the world. They, they deferred to experts. And then they hired guys like me to narrate shows and we could sound even more official. And so you, you had this dance, this production dance where you had a credible sounding voice and an expert at the center of the thing.

1:42:29Dirty jobs was not that 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 retrievest at a job or a sheep cast or a oral sheep castrator, which we can get into if you want? Like what if they become your source of credible information? And what if 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 in 2003. And they bought it. They didn't buy dirt. They didn't like dirty jobs. They took it really to shut me up.

1:43:17They 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. 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, we're going to, you know, you'll go to the Titanic with James Cameron, you'll climb Kilimanjaro. You went to the Titanic? No, and I'll very nearly. It was canceled a month before because dirty jobs finally hit. But prior to that, I went to Egypt. I was exploring tombs with Zahi Hawas. I was at the pyramids. I was in the some of the greatest, the largest undiscovered graveyard in Bawiti, the sands of the dead, where they found the mummies with the golden masks.

1:44:10And nobody knew who the hell they were because it wasn't attached to any dynasty. And who were 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, this hot mess that looked like a German porno called dirty jobs, winds up on the air. And it rates like through the roof. But the problem in 2004 was that, and this is a kind of cognitive dissonance that always is super interesting, right? When a, when a big company or a brand or a political party or really anybody realizes that the thing their audience wants is not the thing they want them to want.

1:44:59That's amazing. And it happens all the time. And sure. And most of the time when it happens, you know, the, you just walk behind the barn and shoot it. And you, 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. Why is it shelved? It was shelved because it was deemed off brand. It was shelved because I was biting the testicles off of lambs with ranchers. And that's how they castrate their lambs. They have for hundreds of years. It was not, not that specific episode that, that got me in trouble later.

1:45:42But it was, it was shelved because it was an unscripted random romp. We never did a second take on the show. It didn't look like everything else on the network. It didn't look like anything else on the network. It was just a jagged little pill. But they liked me. And, and, and they liked this idea of, of a more unscripted look at the world. And so we reached this kind of day -tunt. And I started narrating all their tent pole shows. And then I went to Alaska to host Deadly's Catch, which is a whole another story that crab fishing show. Yeah. That's 21 years now, right? And up there, people died.

1:46:24You know, that'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 food chain eventually decided, okay, this is a world we have to get into. But Mike, you're not, you're not hosting two shows at the same time. So pick one. So dirty jobs came back, went into full production, laid in 2004, and Deadly's Catch went in full production about the same time. But I just narrated. Moral 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.

1:47:18And ever since, nonfiction 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. 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. But in the night when you see it, yeah, you know, when you see it, yeah, you could tell the difference. Oh, Bourdain. 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 way I was dealing with discovery.

1:48:17We were, 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, um, might be Sardinia. He's diving. Oh, yeah. And the throne of the fake octopus is in. It's one of the single greatest moments in the history of, of nonfiction. He shows 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. I was authenticity. 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 B 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.

1:49:14I mean, drunk drunk and shot the whole show smashed. And he made them cut it in. And you can see him. Yeah. 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. 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, right, just start to come by him and in narration, this is where he really owned it because he, he owned that show like he could, yeah, nobody's going to tell him what to say.

1:50:04So his real rant happens months later in the VO booth when he's just describing the heartbreaking insincereity. Don't they know who I am? What did they think I was going to do? So that's like he says something like it in the face of this kind of wanton deception. A reasonable man can turn to nothing but the elixir of distilled alcohol. And he just drinks for the ears. Yeah. It aerosol and CNN. Yeah. And I think it won a P body. Was that the CNN one or was that no reservations? That was CNN. Was it? Yeah. It was parts unknown. I'm, look, I'm pretty sure it was parts unknown. I'm pretty sure I could be wrong.

1:50:52But he, I think you might be right. Yeah. And God, I just, I mean, that's what I, that's what I wrote about when he died. It was that parts unknown. Yeah. Because I've been, man, I've been sitting on a zodiac. I've done that. 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. Well, also these guys, they probably didn't know. Is it telling you guys like this fucking guys aren't going to find the octopus we've killed them all? Probably right. But I got to think there's somebody there and his crew, somebody over from 0 .0, the production company, somebody must have, you know, who knows, who knows, man?

1:51:37Who knows? But look, the fact that that happened is, is wonderful. The fact that he was able to insist that it air, that was important. Yeah. That was important. Yeah. Well, certainly important for how you trust him. You had to trust him. I mean, that was his whole thing. You know, you're coming with me. This is actually me. Here we go. Fly on the wall. 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. The 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.

1:52:19Because I just thought of art as being like a thing that people make that you look at 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 him like, oh, these are artists. These are artists. All these people, they've discovered these different ways to make things delicious and okay. Their mediums different. 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 hang, they talk like artists. They're, they're covered in tattoos.

1:52:48They're fucking weirdos. They like to do drugs. They're all there also craftsmen. Mm -hmm. 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. Yeah, you can have both. It could be art and fuel. Just got to pick what you eat. Is hunting art?

1:53:23It'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 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 I practice so much. I fuck my backup because I was getting developing like tendonitis in my lower back and I just ignored it. Yeah. Shut up. Yeah. Yeah. We got it. We got work to do. And so it's it's a discipline more than anything.

1:54:04But it's like, I don't know. Some people call it a sport. I find that wrong. It's not the right. It does take like physical energy. You have to be in shape to do it. You have to be in great fitness. But it's not sport. 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 was there. It's like there are 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 going to feed your family and stay alive. That's what that excitement is because that excitement's like hardwired in your human reward systems.

1:54:43And you don't know it's there until you go fishing. And then you're like, oh, here he is. Get him. Get him in the net. Get him in there. Oh, we got him. Yeah. And hunting is that time's a hundred. Hunting is that is 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. I think that's art. I don't know, man. I mean, it's a shot is art. I'll tell you that archery is art.

1:55:18A 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 50 yard shot in the vitals and that broad head sinks in. I know that animal's going to die very quickly. It's a quick, humane death. And that's what you practice for. You know, Josh, Josh Smith over at Montana Knife. My name is sure. Very well. He sent me a video the other day. He went on a big hunt with his boy. The moose hunt. Yeah. Yeah. His boy got wanted about that a few hundred yards. You use it. Fucking use for a first moose. That's so crazy. That kid hit the jackpot.

1:55:54But the excitement on the video. Oh, yeah. That he sent me in Josh. Yeah. And bohunting is even more primal than that. Bohunting is that times a hundred. So it's regular hunting is fishing times a hundred than bohunting is regular hunting times a hundred. 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, like the moose, like, does the use come to you when you're stalking? Does it come to you? You know, I don't have an answer for it. But I, but I know that people talk about it. Like some people say, well, you're in the zone.

1:56:35You 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. It was like that. Yeah, you got into it. Yeah. Air planes are great for that. Oh my, they're the best. They force you into that seat. They're the best. You can't get up because there's a guy next to you. You get that laptop open and it just comes out of you. And I like a couple of bars. Look, I go. I, I, I wrote a book on a plane. I believe it. I really did. And, and I did it mostly in moments that I don't really remember when, when time gets compressed.

1:57:15And I, 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. Yeah. You know, 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. Mm -hmm. Even though they're, they're happening so fast. Some fighters, it's art. Well, I think martial arts are art for people that understand it. If you watch it, it's beautiful. But there's some fighters that are just so artist. You know, a manual Augustus is?

1:57:46Yeah. Okay. That guy is an artist. That guy's an artist. What makes him an artist? Because he's, first of all, completely unique. Okay. Doing a thing 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. He's stalking. He's doing something. Like, here's, here's a manual. Like, look, look at him. Yes. I mean, imagine you're fighting a guy who's moving like this. It's so crazy. He was so hard. Floyd made with his head. He was the most, look, he just punched him with two hands at the same time.

1:58:25Floyd made with his head. He was the most skilled opponent he ever fought. Wow. And his record didn't indicate his actual physical ability. His abilities were incredible. But it's just like, it was such a wild style, so unusual. It's like boxing a bobble head. Right. Like, Prince Nassim Hamed had a kind of a similar thing going on when he was in his prime. Nassim Hamed was very, very unorthodox. See, here's, here's 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 get in clowned, here he's, he's fighting Mickey Ward.

1:59:03When you're a guy like Floyd and you're, you know, the cream of the crap, 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, what the fuck? But also really good. He 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 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. Who was his trainer? Oh, man, I don't think anybody trains you to do that.

1:59:37I don't either. Do you know what this custom auto say? He would never wouldn't allow it. 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. 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 in fighting in particular that have styles that are so weird and so unique. You go, wait, wait a minute. How come nobody else is doing it like this?

2:00:06Is this going to work? Like, you know, Sean Stricklet is. You see middleweight champion stands straight up puts his hand like one hand like this, one hand down here and beats the fuck out of everybody. Yeah, stands straight up. Everybody else is down. Everybody else is moving Sean, Sean straight up, moving towards you. Phenomenal head movement, 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. Well, think baseball too. I mean, it's everything. Louis T. Remember the pitcher? I don't really foul baseball. You'll love this, Jamie.

2:00:40I know almost nothing about sports. Believe it or not. You know, you will one day you're going to look at a baseball game. We go, Hey, you know what I need to do? I need to play professional baseball. And then five years later, you're going to be reading about it because you're going to go crazy with it. The same way you do that. But, but this Louis T. What did he do differently? Louis T. Out was a pitcher 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.

2:01:20And he go further than that sometimes. Is that really unusual? Yeah. Yeah. It's unusual. That's unusual. Oh, so it freaks people out a little bit? Well, it's yeah. Yeah, because he just breaks. He stops looking at you. Look his back. Look at his ankle. 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. That dude has flexible knees flexible everything. Because look at the angle his knee is in before he turns. That's crazy.

2:01:56Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you would actually, I'm surprised you're not in the baseball because it's I don't have any room. I know the bucket's overflowing. Yeah, it's 100 % is, you know, like I watch football now. My wife's in the 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 jujitsu, moitai, MMA in the UFC, MMA in the PFL, Bellator, one FC, there's I have to keep track of a thousand fighters, like literally a thousand fighters, right? Maybe casually some of them, like some of the glory kickboxers, casually I'm watching, you know, oh, butterhaw is fighting.

2:02:43Oh, you know, this guy's fighting. That guy's fighting. I know these people are watching fight. I've I'm watching fights. Just hours and hours in a day. I might watch, I might watch fights two hours every day. Is it work or fun? 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 Khan McGregor in like 2013. He was fighting in cage warriors and I reached out and I said, dude, you're fucking super talented. I hope I get to see in the UFC someday.

2:03:22And there's like, you know, kickboxers like Alex Pereira, I follow him and 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 be tuned into the state of the yard because the state of the art is very different in 2024 than it was in 97 when I first started working for the UFC. The state of the art is elite now. You're getting these 18 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 or instead of going into football.

2:04:02Now they're just they're only focused on becoming a UFC champion. And this is their goal in life and they're they're 18. 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 room for baseball. 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 really see the way first. So I was a fan of the UFC in the very, very beginning.

2:04:42And it got me into jujitsu. So 96, I started taking jujitsu. 94 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 and Van Ayes before that one under. So I was just 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, I was on news radio at the time. It was very difficult to have the time to start training. Then 96, I started training.

2:05:13And so I started working for the UFC in 97. And that was when it was banned from cable, you could only get it on direct TV. And we had to do these shows like Dothanallah Bam, where you took a propeller plane. It was fucking hell. It was no money. This is 97 and his Dana. Bare Knuckle Dana was not involved yet. When did Dana get involved? 2001. So I'm on Fear Factor at the time. And one of the things of me and my friend Eddie Bravo, who was also a big fan from back in the day. And he taught me jujitsu. When we were first really into it, when we would go to like Louisiana, these were the only places that was sanctioned these fights.

2:05:52They were bare Knuckle, people wore shoes, you could grab 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. Someone would have to dump a ton of money into it. And then along comes Lorenzo and Frank Fertida in 2001, these billionaires that happened to get in love with the sport. And so they buy the UFC. And then they start 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?

2:06:27Have you ever heard this Russian dude? And I started asking about fighters. I was like, you should try to get these guys. And he's like, do you want to do commentary? And then next thing, no, I'm a commentator for the UFC. Okay. This is just a very weird triangulating. They didn't even have any money at the time because they were the emerging money. So I did the first 13 shows for free. 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. Well, for me, money has always been fun coupons. And so I was on fear factor.

2:07:02So 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. Nevertheless, you know, I mean, it was the same thing with 30 jobs. Once that thing lit up, I had to be willing to to sign a contract. It was probably illegal. I mean, it was such a ridiculous contract the way they own you. So it's crazy. It's like no money. But yeah, but if it's a hit, if it sticks, we have you for 10 years. Yeah. Or you renegotiate my ace in the hole with 30 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.

2:07:44Yeah. There's no contract that can force you to bite the balls off a sheet. Right. 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 year this would have been. When did the ultimate fighter 2005? Okay. So in 2004, 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, Palligian. And I walked into Craig's office in Hollywood and Dana was sitting in there. I had no idea who he was. I just walked in to say hi and Dana kind of knew me or recognized me.

2:08:30And Craig said, hey, this guy, Mike, he's narrating American Chopper, American Hot Rod. He's narrated. He just goes down the list and Dana says, say something. And I said, and I said previously on the ultimate fighter. And he said, fine, you'll be great. I do, I do dance seasons. That sounds like Dana says something. Yeah. That's hilarious. This is great. Yeah. That's hilarious. Yeah. That's interesting how things happen like that. You know, well, you were going to, you know, you wouldn't be sitting here now if your lease wasn't up or whatever. Yeah, I probably wouldn't. I would have gone back to New York.

2:09:11I 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. Mm -hmm. Yeah. So like art and science, I think, I think anybody who's passionate about what they do can approach what they do like a scientist or like an artist or maybe both or maybe both. I think both. 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 to trade. Right?

2:09:57We've been doing it for 16 years and I started doing it in part for my granddad but, but mostly because there are what eight million jobs now that don't require four -year degree and there's $1 .7 trillion in student loans on the books, right? That is just bananas and we've got these huge shortages in 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 so on. You know, before it was shop, it was, it wasn't just Voteque. It turned into Voteque but before it was Voteque, it was the vocational arts.

2:10:53That's what they called it. 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 Voteque and then there were a bunch of other acronyms and abbreviations and hyphenations. Well, 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.

2:11:34Everybody 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 an incredible living. It's very satisfying. It's skilled. It's a job that is creative. It's skillful. And when you're done, you bring satisfaction to other people that live in that house. Like 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 you're making $60 ,000 a year and you're like, oh my god, I have $200 ,000 in student loans.

2:12:23And 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 that. I mean, you could get a small business loan and you could start hiring other people, you could have trucks with your name on it. I know people who've done that. They live very well. And it doesn't mean you're dumb. A lot of these people that live very well are very self -educated. They read books. They watch documentaries. They're interesting people.

2:12:59And they're entrepreneurial. But 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. 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. I was in high school in the late 70s and there was a very concerted push for what we call higher ed, which by the way already sets the table, right? If it's higher right over here, I guess we have lower ed over here. The language is awful. But the PR, and to be fair, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, we needed more doctors.

2:13:48We needed more engineers. We needed more people matriculating through, you know, four -year schools. But what happens with PR, at least from what I've seen, is that it always goes too far. 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 going to wind up turning a wrench with a giant plumber's butt crack and some other ridiculous stroke. So it was a lot of stereotypes and stigmas and myths and misperceptions that started to swirl around the trades. And that, you know, I don't know when it happened, but I - Especially where you grow up.

2:14:29Like, you know, if you grow up in a place that's highly educated, like Massachusetts where I was Boston, very, very educated place. So if you're 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 school. And yet you loved this old house. Yeah. Which is a love letter to the trades. It really is. Yeah. Every single one. 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 plainer and all, you know, yeah.

2:15:07Oh, 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 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 know what I'll do. I'll make it and take ancient tools and figure out, no, this guy really was into it. Well, what's happened there for me anyway is that I, I mean, after 16 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.

2:15:49And it's amazing. When you say, hey, how's it going? And they say, how's it going? I'll tell you how it's going. 210 grand a year. I bought a van. I hired my buddy, who's a welder. Then I hired a plumber. Then I got two HVAC guys and 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, and I do 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. Right. And then maybe applied some level of either artistry or entrepreneurship or the willingness to move.

2:16:30That's a big one too. You know, where you go where the work is. And so it's 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 macroworks? And I said, yeah, sure. What do you have in mind? And that's, I don't know, I don't know if you knew this, but we had this whole conversation about like running together. You know, oh yeah. No, he, he asked if I wanted to be vice president. Oh, Jesus, Louise, what'd you say? Dude, I was in Munich. I was in Munich in, in January. And he had, he had called me earlier just to talk really, um, generally about, um, about the middle class.

2:17:19Because he's like, look, what you've done with the foundation is my campaign is a lot about that. And, uh, and I'd love to talk to you more about it. So I, I kind of put 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, I'd be happy to chat. Well, he called back and, you know, Gavin to factor, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, um, they did a dive. They, this was very strange for me. They did a deep dive. And when I got back to the Bay Area, um, he invited me down to his home to meet, you know, the cats.

2:18:02They were all there. And we talked for like three hours. And I, I'm looking over my shoulder, honestly, like I'm being punked. Like, like, like, which, which one of my crazy friends put you up to this? But he was serious. And, and I was weirdly, um, flattered. Maybe like, I knew I couldn't say yes, but I was so interested in what his thinking was. Right. 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, and I would never do well in an office or in a bureaucracy.

2:18:51He 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. I, because I know he asked, uh, well, he asked Aaron Rogers. Yeah. Which is crazy. Yeah. I, I literally heard the sound of my sphincter slamming shot. Like what the fuck man? I just tense up and I was like, oh, like, whoa, whoa, that's jobs insanity. But man, I'll tell you, man, he, it was a really, um, he was very gracious and very direct. And I, I tried to be too. And I told him, I'm like, look, the infectious disease thing, I get that.

2:19:36The middle class thing, I totally get that. The forever wars. I get all that. And then he, he, he's like, Mike, do you understand 77 % 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, his uncle was starring in commercials 45 years ago that were literally, we'd call it fat shaming today, you know, challenging. You know, I just talked to him the day before yesterday. And he said, you know, Google any photo of Yankee Stadium sold out from the 60s or even the 70s and try and find the fat people.

2:20:31They'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. 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 the 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 sorry if you're already there, but it doesn't help anybody to pretend that you're not there.

2:21:11And the only way we get out of this is we try to figure out what happened between 1960 and 2024. What happened in the, well, we can figure that out. It's not Colombo. This is a fucking, this is like the evidence is all there. We know what the ingredients are that are bad for you. We know we've done the food supply. We know we've done. It's real. It's readily available. It's what you eat. When you say we though, I mean, human beings, collective, the collective intelligence. What percentage of this country do you think understand? What percentage has been informed? This is part of the problem. And this is why it benefits to have something like that in office.

2:21:45Most people aren't aware of it. You know, I've had lot of conversations with people that we have that this really distorted idea of nutrition. 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 take vitamins. If you do not take vitamins, you will not have full optimization of your body. What do I want to take with D? By the way, is it magnesium? You want to take magnesium and you want to take K2. You want to take vitamin K, magnesium. And there's some arguments from other stuff too that would also enhance it.

2:22:22But you definitely need vitamin D almost everybody does. And if you live in a cold climate in the winter time, a body mind does residency. I think it was Boston. And he 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, it's imperative. It's really important. And there's a lot of other things that are really important.

2:22:58Vitamin C is really important. Vitamin B is very important. A bunch of different piece. You need essential fatty acids.

2:23:08They're 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? 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's naturally designed to get vitamin D. You're supposed to be outside all the time and it'll make your 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.

2:23:48It's or a precursor to a hormone. I guess we take it orally. But what it's doing to your body, like George St. Pierre when he was fighting with tan. And he would tan specifically not to look good because it's actually better for your health and fitness to you get more vitamin D that way. Yeah. And there's there's a reality to that. That's why people who are really fucking depressed when they live in the Pacific Northwest because it's raining 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 again, overall vitality.

2:24:20If you want to have a strong vitality, you eat nutritious food and take vitamins and you need to exercise. There's no ifans or butts about it. You need those three things. 100 % 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, Mike Easter. He became a friend, the comfort crisis. And I started rucking. Yeah. And so that's great. Yeah. It's a big proponent of that big time. Yeah.

2:25:03In fact, when Bobby called, it was fun. He's hard to understand sometimes. I was impossible to understand because I was gasping for breath. I got 65 pounds on my back, walking eight miles every morning. He's like, what are you doing? I'm like, do I'm dying? I'm rucking. I'm rucking. But yeah, I just I think it I think there's really something important in that book that that Easter wrote. And I think our it's not the specifics of what we can do. This idea of what are the Japanese call it? I'm a so I'm a soggy a quest or a challenge of sorts that you should well, you should challenge yourself to do every so often.

2:25:48Yeah. And one of the one of the criterion is you should have a 50 % chance of failure. Right. So it's a it's a real push into uncertainty and discomfort. And that that's why I rock. It's uncomfortable. Yes. Yeah. I think that is an exercise for that part of your mind. The same way cardiovascular exercise works for your cardiovascular system. I think the discomfort exercises a real thing. And you know, Andrew Huberman has talked about this. There's actually a specific area of the brain when you enact voluntary discomfort and do things you don't want to do all the time. It actually grows. Remember what that is?

2:26:32Remember what he called 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 regular life is not 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 is a nightmare, it's probably because you're lack enough voluntary adversity to overcome uncomfortable moments.

2:27:16So uncomfortable moments are rare. And when you encounter rare things, generally people have anxious moments encounter rare things. Well, anxiety is the form of discomfort. And it's not just pain. I think most people equate discomfort or uncomfortableness with physical pain. But the way Easter talks about it, it's also boredom. Being bored makes people super uncomfortable because we're so not used to - Especially today. You could just damp thing up and instant access to 99 % of your population. But you're roving yourself of a lot of possible ideas. Sure. Yeah, because the best ideas come. Where you board.

2:27:57When you're bored. I used 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 is driving. So instead of being entertained, I would just be like thinking like you're constantly thinking. Yeah. And when you're involved in an ordinary activity like driving where you're just sort of like plugged in, like hit your blinkers, 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 come up with great ideas.

2:28:31Your 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 like it. 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 myself out of doing this? Yeah. I don't want to do this. It's fucking cold outside. It's 40 degrees outside. I'm climbing this 34 degree water.

2:29:11But but but because I do it, I know that I've already done something way more difficult than most of my day. I think there's a difference in 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 an overarching benefit in embracing the suck. Yeah. I need, 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.

2:29:50That's been useful to me. 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. It's the whoramic 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 these anti -inflammatories. Your body just feels better when you get out the endorphin rush you get. The noripinephrine, this is flood of these chemicals that last for hours.

2:30:27Ramps up your dope, maybe like 200%. And it lasts for hours. Like you genuinely feel better. So there's all that. It's also good for recovery, 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 fact. That's just a this. They all look like shit.

2:31:00Everybody says that. They'll 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 a bunch of hogwash. It's the latest found. And yet look at the stadium 50 years ago and look at it today. Yeah. The evidence demands of verdict something something awful has happened. It's like it's like the difference between being hungry and feeling hungry.

2:31:34You 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? Got them starving. I'm famished. No, you're not. You're really not. You can't possibly be. Yeah. Talk to a fighter that's trying to wait. Those guys are famished. Those guys are they have no water in their body. Yeah. 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. They look that that's starving. You got to really love it. That's only your voluntary voluntarily starving. You know, it's not real starving.

2:32:09Real starving is like you might not be able to eat. You might not be able to feed your kids. You're just using willpower to starve. That's so different than 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 the wagon breaks. Donner party table for deal. Yeah. And that's real starving. Real starving. Do you ever read a book by Nathaniel Philbrick? 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 the Essex. Right. And the sinking of this ship inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick.

2:32:53And what happened was in I think was 1821 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. Years years. Yeah. They were called right whales because they were the right whales to kill. Right. And in that time, it was a great source of energy for the country. All the lamp lights burned on whale oil. Imagine how many whales there were before they started doing this. They were like schools. There were so many. We this book will, I mean, it's it's rich in a lot of different ways.

2:33:39It's where they got the expression steely Dan actually. It was a because it was just the women and it was a device used for pleasureing. Because the men were all out to see so they'd use a steely Dan. But you want to talk about hard lives. 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 cutting of the blubber and the cauldrons that burn 24 seven on the deck and the blubber that's put into the cauldrons.

2:34:29So they're just making this rendered fat. They're rendering the fat in the oil in real time. Oh, wow. And because they have to oral rot. That's right. And so they just load up the boats. So what happens? And this is not really a reading the whales too. No, no, no, no. What are they eating? No, 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 can use 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 couple thousand miles off the coast of Venezuela.

2:35:14And 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 22 feet long and men row them, right? And so you harpoon the whale. And then you hang on and go for what they called a nantucket sleigh ride. So the whale would just drag the what's the whale goes under? Can't go under much further. Can't pull two boats down. And it doesn't it they tend to swim in a straight line after they've been hard ponds. You just you just hang on. And then when it tires itself out, you row it and you back to the whale ship.

2:35:58Do they kill it first? Well, no, no, it's killed back at the 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. They didn't know how smart whales were back then either. We didn't know anything. But I didn't that crazy that that's only a couple hundred years ago. 1821. And then nuts? Well, a couple hundred years ago, the oceans filled with whales. Filled with them. And like that. Because if you look now, they're hard to find. And nothing hunts them. No, I never really thought about it. They were everywhere. I mean, I knew about it, but I never thought about it.

2:36:34I never I mean, we've talked a lot about the the decimation of the fish population in the ocean, about like 90 plus percent of all the big fish are gone. Yeah, which is really nuts. But I never really thought about it that way when it comes to whales. Well, you can make a really good and really controversial case. They made a movie run. I made a movie. Yeah, yeah, Ron Howard made a movie. I'm gonna love it. Yeah, it's amazing. Look, I mean, they're they were everywhere. Wow. So these guys harpoon one. That's so crazy from from the whale boat. Then they get tugged along. Look at all these whales.

2:37:09And then while they're out, maybe a mile from the ship, the mate of the male of the whale that was harpooned starts ramming the ship rams it three times. Oh, no, sinks it. Oh, no. Now you got a couple dozen guys in whale boats 2 ,000 miles off the coast of South America with no supplies. So what happens? And this is all in the in the preface. But the story basically starts when what of the whale boats is discovered not far from I think as Venezuela. And the guys look over the the gunnel of their boat. And in the whale boat, 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.

2:38:14Each skeleton's huddled up, staring each other with wild eyes, just waiting to see who would die next. So they could eat them. Yeah. And there were rules. They were almost like cookbooks that were very common. How many people are on these boats? 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 they there were dear friends and family. They lived together on Nantucket. And they ate each other. They ate each other, man. Who how long was it before they discovered them?

2:38:56They were at sea adrift, I think, for the better part of three months. When are the Nashabats? Him, Nate Philbrook. Fantastic. I was on it. In 1820, the whale ship assets was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale, leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than 90 days in three tiny boats. When did this movie come out? 2015 for the movie. The manuscript was found in 1960, verified in 1980. Oh, man. Yeah. You want to take a deep dive. Go to the like the Whaling Museum up in New England. The stuff is this. I mean, in the day, there were strict protocols on how to eat your friend. How to prepare your friend for consumption.

2:39:44Did they divide them on the spot? Or did they have them prepared the device on the spot? There was what the rules? No, no, they were written. It was like a maritime code. So they kind of knew that this was a possibility. They know it was a certainty. They just didn't know for whom. This was common 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 to draw lots to decide who would go first, how to kill the person who would go first, who not to eat based on the degree of your relation.

2:40:31Oh boy. So like brothers are definitely off. But cousins, not optimal. 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. Unspeakable. Oh my God. That's interesting. Owen Chase, right? The men spent over three months to see and had a resort to cannibalism or to survive. Captain Paul and Charles Ramz -Del were discovered gnawing on the bones of their shipmates and one boat. Owen Chase, Lawrence and Nickerson also survived to tell the tale and all seven sailors were consumed. Whoa. Dude, boy. See, this is why nonfiction is the best.

2:41:20I know it's nauseating, but I mean that book. At a point in time, you got to go, I might wind up inhale before I starve to death because I've eaten everyone else. Hmm. Right. Well, you're knowing you're starving to death and you've already eaten everyone else. Oh my God. Because there's going to be one last person. There's got to envy. And then there was one. Oh, God. I know. I know. Reality is so terrifying in that regard that we have, you know, we're so fortunate that there's so much food available.

2:41:59The poorest reality is if that cut off, it would be real desperate real quick. Most people get really hungry after five hours, you know, they feel really hungry. Yeah. Description if you'd like to know. No. Okay. I'm not that bad. 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, soared it up as decently as we could and committed it to the sea. They then ate the man's organs. Soon they began to draw lots to see who would be shot and eat next, a custom of maroon sailors dating back to the 17th century.

2:42:39Three men and one boat survived and two and another. The three men who remained behind on Henderson Island were also rescued after surviving on eggs and crabs for nearly four months. Boy. And this is why we have Moby Dick. Wow. 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 make a really interesting and controversial case around how the fossil fuel industry saved the whales. Yeah, I've heard this before because had that not happened in Pennsylvania in Titusville.

2:43:28Yeah. Not long after this, we'd have hunted them into absolute oblivion. Well, we almost did that to mammals North America. Yeah. 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, of course. The hell doesn't matter with this man. Oh, we're fucked up and 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 it had never been done before.

2:44:01No, it didn't just showed up at a continent filled with mammals and just are decimating them. There wasn't like a history of that. It was also the invent of the firearm was fairly recent. Yeah. So it was a lot easier to get these animals. You know, and then they had the Henry rifle. So the 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 use their tongues. They pickled their tongues and sent them back east. And then I was in a custer a couple of weeks ago for a buffalo round up. Oh, wow. Man, this was a kick. This is, so this is western South Dakota, not far from Crazy Horse and Rushmore.

2:44:40You know, we worked on a Crazy Horse for dirty jobs. We did an episode mean the sculpture. Yeah. Scubsures weird because there's no real drawing or painting or anything. No photographs of Crazy Horse. No, nobody knows really what he looked like. 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 50 years ago. And it's going to take another 40 before they're done. I worked on the fingernail of Crazy Horse with a whole crew. Was it look like now? I haven't seen it. Oh, you'll love this. It's, it's, it's so mind, but you, you can take all of Rushmore, all four heads and put it on the four head of Crazy Horse.

2:45:25Wow. That's how big this thing is. And it wasn't like one family's undertaking. Yeah. Court, Gore check. Go to the last picture that you just had that one right there. So that shows you four and after. That shows where it was a while back and where it is now. Look at, look at his finger and the lower right. That's what you worked on. Yeah. And I scaled down his forehead to do basically some tidying up of his nostrils. Wow. We were there. It's, that's crazy. How about this? It's massive. It's absolutely massive. And yeah, this, there was one guy. Uh, Court check was his name. And he was an immigrant and he loved the Indian people.

2:46:07And that's, that's the model there at the right. Yeah. That's what it's going to look like. That's what we're shooting for. Wow. And it's, it's, it's going to take another half a century probably. But that's incredible. You know, it's funny. It's very controversial and amongst Native American communities though, right? I don't know. It is, you know, some, 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, stole your soul. Yeah. That was a, a belief back then, which sure, we mean, might be on the sun. Well, you have this novel thing where no one's ever seen it before and you take an image of someone like that.

2:46:47Like it's like it diminishes you. Yeah. Also, human beings at that point in time were so horrible to each other. And these settlers had done essentially demonic things. Yeah. To the population just with diseases, just bringing diseases. Yeah. So of course, they would say, what are they doing now? This is the fucking coup d' -gra. They're going to steal our soul with this fucking box. Big thing goes off. You got to stand still. This guy, Core Check, he was so brilliant on so many levels. Yeah, I think at 13 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.

2:47:30The like the work ethic is mind boggling what they did. And he was a, he was a real friend to the Native Americans. And he, and this was a love letter for them and to them. And 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 to embark on this thing. 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. 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.

2:48:21And this was one of the first things that that we did. But I started by calling Rushmore. And I'm not telling you the story to make anybody sound bad, but it really just was kind of appalling. You know, I said, look, I want to bring my crew. And I, 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 of reasons, right? I'm like, look, I think the, I think the park service does an amazing duty. And I, and I want to meet the caretakers of our statue. And I would love, you know, to work on this with the people who work on it.

2:49:07And, and they not only said no, they were like, are you crazy? We would never, we would never permit anything like that. Like, I think they thought it was exploitative somehow. And I'm like, I want America to, 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. It's just a love letter to one of our monuments. But it was a hard no. And I really wanted to go to that part of the country. And so we, 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.

2:49:51It has no federal oversight. It's very personal 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, that means a lot to other people. Monumental in reality. Monumental monuments. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a, some, some people, I think, see it as a burden, 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, right, more people will have just seen what Jamie put up here as a result of this, probably, then we'll, then we'll visit in person.

2:50:40And that's amazing, dude. Yeah, that is amazing. 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, there were only a couple thousand of them. And when you think about the accounts of the, of the day, when, where the, where the buffalo realm was as far as you could see, just thick. Do you know, Dan Flores? Do you know who he is? Tell me. He wrote American coyote.

2:51:23And he wrote, what is it? 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, but they were in such large numbers because so many Native Americans died out because 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 Americans, 90 % of them were wiped out by disease when the settlers came here. So there's no one hunting them for a long time.

2:52:02And so the populations 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 to 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 became overpopulated in a sense, an unnatural property 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 the, there was a mass extinction of like 65 % of North American mammals that coincided with the end of the ice age and probably had to do with the younger dryest impact, which is a theory of...

2:52:53A Cambrian thing or was that? 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 dryest impact theory online 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 woolly mammal, the American lion, a lot of different animals that just died off 65 % of North American mammals died off during this time period.

2:53:39And you got to think like when the buffalo existed back then, they existed with the North American lion, which was bigger than the African lion. It's the biggest lion ever. So they're 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 from here, but that was the North, the bearing land bridge and things moved around.

2:54:18And 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 extropaded 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 a number where when people are making their way across the country, they're not seeing them everywhere. And then you have this mass event where 90 % of Native Americans die, then you have millions of buffalo. And this is what Dan Flores writes about. It's really interesting. 1830, 40. You'd have to go to whatever it's been.

2:54:571850 is what it's been. Yeah. Here's the tragedy for me. I narrated a special about all that. 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. I'm, I don't... 10 burns. One, is that what you could have been? Yeah. Could have been. I know if it was 10 burns, he always hires Peter Coyote. Oh, Peter does all this stuff. Peter Coyote is great. Yeah. But I am... 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 buck is full too. And it's so annoying. Like I was 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 10 years.

2:55:49And, you know, he, 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 to, but I don't. I'm just adjacent to it. Right. I know, 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, 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, I should remember more that I should remember, I should have remembered more about Philbric. I should have remembered more about, um, I don't think where's it designed for it. I don't, and I think the humans like yourself is, this is kind of a new thing.

2:56:32Like 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. That's a, it's essentially a new thing with human, human beings. You know what Dunbar's number is? No. Dunbar's number is the number of people that you can keep like in your mind, memory, memory, right? That's essentially born out of necessity and tribal life, right? So we, we essentially have the same brains and the same capacity, same hard drive as people who lived in tribes 10 ,000 years ago.

2:57:07Yeah. And but we're still stuck with this hard drive with this world that has an endless supply of information. And it's consistently bombarding you with new facts. I read that like Bill Clinton's numbers way high. Like certain people's numbers. Oh, who they can keep in their head? Like the number of people you can, you can keep it. It probably expands just like the part of your brand expands you do difficult things. It probably expands. There's a podcast as you know dedicated to what happened on your podcast. I didn't know that. Yeah. There's a podcast out there basically called experience. I don't know what it's called.

2:57:45Experiencing the Joe Rogan experience for something. Because because there's too much information on your show. Right. Right. There's just too 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 dosant to bring it back to art. This is what we need. I think more than anything today. We need somebody like if you're going to 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 going to go see if you're if you're going to go see a martial arts fight for the first time.

2:58:23If you're going to go to the octagon, it'd be better to sit next to you than than me. Do you know this is right? Sure. So everybody would be annoying. I'd have to say you don't okay. How much do you know why that hurts? Here, let me show you. Can you can you feel that? I'm just saying that I think more than ever before people need a guide. They need somebody to make sense out of all the information. Because I don't think there's any there's not much new information. It's just accessible. There's new information too. How can there be? Because it's information is acquired upon the consumption of all the other information.

2:59:07It's all exponential piles on top of each other. It's not just now we know because of the new information, because of the information that we've acquired. Now we have a new understanding. So that's new information. 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 it is new information. Well, 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 and K2, I might say that's some new information.

2:59:46But you would go no dude, that's old information. You're just learning it. Right, but it's fairly new anyway because nutritional science is really only able to around for what 100 plus years. And the understanding of it today is far greater than any other time in our life. Because of guys like you, Berman, because of these different scientists that have dedicated themselves to educating people about nutrition, the process that your body goes through and absorbs nutrients like and what enhances that? What enzymes, different things let me say it this way then. There's a body of information that exists that I don't know.

3:00:21And then there's a body of new information that I also don't know because it's new. And the body of the stuff that I don't know yet that's been around forever is massive. The new stuff is new. And I don't know how big it is but it's not as big as this incredible repository of stuff. Like when I walk in a librarian, look, just look at all that stuff man, look at this cursive thing here in my hand. It's like, oh my god. If I have an internet connection, I have access to 98 % of everything that we've ever known. Yeah. Now that either makes you intensely curious or intensely uneasy because now you know, both maybe, but you have it now.

3:01:04You like, like if you're not like, what are you doing? Like you're sitting on the toilet. Are you really? Or you're tick -tocking? Like how are you spending the one truly finite resource you have at your time? What are you doing with it, man? A lot of us get distracted. Jesus. Yeah. But there's stories. There are buffalo stories and whale stories. There are out there, man. 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.

3:01:35Yeah. For sure. For your own nature living. Mike. Yes. Yes, Joe, it is. That's what we've done. It's a pleasant living. Listen, man, it's been awesome. Doggady. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. You know, three hours just fucking flew by. I'm just, I mean, full disclosure. I'm kind of relieved. 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. It's just a time thing. Okay. I'll go. One day. There's a lot of people out there. But I, but I really did want to talk to you.

3:02:09Can I show you a truck before we go? Sure. Sure. Because I know you're a car guy. Yeah. So this company called Sugar Creek up in Ohio made me a truck. Oh, all right. Okay. Well, it started as a 1964 Dodge Power Wagon. Oh, it ended up as this. Dude, I've seen that online. That's yours. That's mine. Oh, that's crazy. I love those old power wagons. Dude, that thing looks incredible. What a great job they did on that. It's unbelievable. 2070. It's about 9 ,000 man hours. Oh, my God. That thing looks a fucking incredible. Oh, you got a elephant engine in it. 1100 horsepower. Oh, my goodness. Look at that.

3:02:52So it's got a TRX hood. It's, it's, wow. You will get that's cool. That's fucking great. I know. Oh, do you drive that? Barrett Jackson is going to auction it off. No. In January. Why? Because, because my foundation needs money. Oh, and right. So it's, it's going to get a, I don't know what it'll go for. He says a bunch, but oh, that'll go for a lot of money, man. Yeah. That's probably going to go for half a million dollars at least. No, he says to two million, two million dollars probably cost half a million to make. Wow. Beats me. You know, this is another one of those worlds. Maybe auctions are crazy because a bunch of rich guys get in there and go, I want it.

3:03:36I know. And then they start feeding off each other. Look at this fucking thing. That's incredible. Two million dollars. Jesus Christ. 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. He hired 27 savants. And all they do is take classic cars from his sort of quasi junkyard and turn him into these gems. Oh, wow. So he built this for me.

3:04:16And Barrett Jackson said, yeah, we'll auction it off. So I went up there with my crew just to look at it. These guys, man, it's what we're it's it's I would never be able to let that thing go. It's the art we were talking about. Yeah, it's that's artistry. That's art. Yeah, oh, 100 % that's art. Yeah, Mike, I appreciate you very much, man. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. Absolutely. A lot of fun. All right. Bye everybody.