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- [00:02]
A
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
- [00:06]
B
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. We got scars, we got coffee. We got Mike Rowe. Carl's over there snoring. So what were you doing on qvc? What are you selling?
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A
That was the greatest line from Blazing Saddles, by the way. When Gene Hackman.
- [00:28]
B
Which line?
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A
He says, cigars. Remember? Peter Boyle has come. He had just left, and Gene Hackman is there after getting the soup spilled in his lap, and he's basically saying, I had cigars. As the creature stomps off in Frankenstein.
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B
I don't remember that tiny little moment too long since I've seen that movie best. He's a little bit of a distraction. Can he calm down? I don't hear him on the track.
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A
Him.
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B
I don't hear him at all. Oh, we hear him because we don't have our headphones on. Maybe she put our headphones on.
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A
I thought you were talking about me.
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B
No, Carl.
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A
For an awful moment, like, we.
- [01:07]
B
We wore him out. Jamie was throwing the toy for Carl, and now he's.
- [01:13]
A
He's such a great dog. He's got. I mean, he's adorable. I mean, it's. It's such a personality thing at that for me, with dogs and pets in general, you know, like, you know, right away, if this thing has a personality.
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B
Oh, he's got a lot of. Carl's got a lot of personality.
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A
Yeah.
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B
There's no doubt about that.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And he's a little kid and a.
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A
Person name, which I think is super interesting. Mine's Freddy. He's a terrier.
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B
I like a dog with a person name.
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A
Yeah, me too.
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B
Like Fido. What the is a Fido?
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A
No one knows.
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B
Unless. Well, actually. Oh, no, that's Philo. I was thinking of Clint Eastwood in Every which Way But Loose. He was Philo.
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A
Beto could also be Philo Farnsworth, who created the television.
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B
For real?
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A
Yeah.
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B
Did only one guy do it? It was one of those, like, light bulb type deals where, like, a bunch of people are scrambling for it.
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A
And what do they call that? Like a. Like a hive mentality?
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B
Right, right.
- [02:05]
A
Like that happened with the integrated circuit. Right. When Kilby at Radio Shack was doing the same basic work, I think, that Robert Noyce was doing for intel. And one was here in Texas, and the other was in California. And they had never met and they had never compared notes, but the work on the circuitry was so close that they wound up sharing the Nobel Prize.
- [02:32]
B
Oh, that's interesting.
- [02:33]
A
Super. Super strange. But that, you know, I don't know.
- [02:36]
B
Common thing with human beings. And it's this concept of morphic resonance. Have you ever heard of that concept? Rupert Sheldrake, he wrote about this. And the idea is, and it's based on some actual facts, too, about. There's some real statistics about rats. Like, if you teach a rat how to run a maze on the East Coast, a rat on the west coast will run it faster. It's like they learn the pattern somehow or another. It's very bizarre. There's, like, information that's apparently shared across species. And the idea is that somehow or another they're quantumly entangled like that the entire group of these specific types of animals are quantumly entangled or entangled in some way that we don't understand.
- [03:27]
A
So it's a kind of. I mean, I would think biological evolution might flirt with that. I read a paper a guy wrote, name was Patrick House. This was his PhD, and he was talking about Toxoplasma gondii and histoplasmosis. And it was a crazy paper. His real premise was trying to understand the phenomenon of the cat lady and why every culture. This isn't unique to America. In every culture, you can find a woman who, you know, two cats, three cats, maybe, but, like, went all the way to 38, right? And just was like, this is perfectly normal. So his paper was, what happens to a person's brain to tell it it's normal to have 38 cats? And then it gets super complicated because he identifies a gondii that lives in the cat's gut and basically breeds there. And what he learned was when the cats were crapping, the gondii would come out, and then the rats and the mice that ate the cat crap. Something was happening to their brains. On a neurological level. This gondii basically disabled the part of the brain that would tell an otherwise sentient rat to run from the cat. But suddenly they weren't running. They became prey, and they became docile. And the cats started obliterating the mice and rat population because this thing that was breeding in its ass was effectively making its prey easier to catch. So Dr. House thought, well, you know, we've all heard about why pregnant women should stay away from cats, because they. That can have an effect. And a rat's brain and a human brain have a surprising number of parallels. So he basically postulated that, you know, Doris, the cat lady, was living a fairly normal life until she got just a little bit of catch on her fingers and ate it. And the Gandhi disabled the part of her brain that said, hey, maybe two cats is enough.
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B
It's worse than that. It actually makes the rats sexually attracted to the smell of cat urine.
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A
Exactly. Right.
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B
Yeah. It actually makes them aroused.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Now, I don't know if Doris went that far.
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B
Have you ever seen them, like, run up to cats, the toxo infected rats? It's bizarre.
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A
Yep.
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B
They run right up to them and the cat's like, what the is going on? The cats, like, bounce away from the rat.
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A
No, it's like. It's like watching the Beatles at the Ed Sullivan Theater. You know, people like, what do you. What's wrong with you people? Why?
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B
What's happening? Psychosis.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. That's super interesting.
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B
You know, there's also a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims that test positive for toxo.
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A
Did not.
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B
Yeah, it makes people more impulsive. It makes them more reckless and impulsive. And countries that have high rates of toxoplasma have more successful soccer teams.
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A
I read, and I think this.
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B
I got more of these, too.
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A
I don't want to compete. I'm going to lose. But you'll love this. You probably already know it. Homeostatic risk and risk equilibrium and the unintended consequences, especially with motorcycle riders that emanate from safety protocols gone too far.
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B
Really?
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A
Yeah. So, like every. Like if you study the way you drive your motorcycle, like, you measure every decision that you make in terms of cornering and speed and braking and all that stuff, and then you measure the same things with all the safety gear employed, including a helmet. Especially a helmet. You drive faster, you corner tighter, you take more chances. Because the risk equilibrium that we all have in our brain is different from one person to the next. But what's the same is our desire to compensate for the environment around us. So compensatory risk and the subconscious decisions that we might make behind the wheel when we're buckled up versus not buckled up when we have ABS brakes as opposed to not having them. They did a big survey in Berlin years ago where they took half of the taxis and they put in state of the art braking systems and half of them and left the others the same. And then they hooked up the cars to monitor every driver decision. And in virtually every case, the drivers with the better safety gear took more chances because their brain is subconsciously compensating.
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B
Right. It's the same sense.
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A
Yeah. I mean, it's controversial, but I understand it. It's why the most dangerous intersections have signs that tell you when to walk and when not to walk and have crosswalk, because the little man is walking, it says go. So you step off and there's the big blue bus, and then you're spattered. So. Yeah. The unintended consequences of following traditional safety protocols has always really been interesting.
- [08:46]
B
Well, it completely makes sense. If you have a vehicle that's more able and capable, you're going to probably drive it faster, and you're probably gonna take more risks because it can do stuff like I used to think. I used to have a Lexus suv, this big boat, Lex. And you know what I loved about it? I drove slow in it. I was just like, real. Because it doesn't stop that good. It's not that fast, but it's just. It's big and comfortable, and it just chilled me out. And then I had an M3. I had two cars at the time, and my M3 was a zippy little thing. And I was flying around that thing. I was like, why do I drive different in this fucking car than I do in the big car? The big car would just chill me out. I just get in that big old boat and I just.
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A
Sure.
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B
The world was, like, quiet out there. It's nice and relaxed.
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A
I think it's a slightly different analysis. Like, if you're going to adjust your behavior consciously to adapt to the externality, right? Like, you're going to drive faster if you have a fast car, because, you know, that's why the guy built the thing. And it would almost be rude, right? It would be rude to drive a hot rod like a boat. It's the unconscious things that you do when you assume or mitigate risk as a result of employing an externality that I think is just super interesting.
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B
It is interesting.
- [10:14]
A
Well, because if it's right, Joe. If it's right, what it does is it turns all the safety first protocols, not necessarily on their head, but this happened in Dirty Jobs. I did a whole special called Safety Third. Because safety isn't really first. Not really ever.
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B
Because if it was, you would never get a lot of things done well.
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A
You'd never get out of the studio.
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B
You would definitely never do construction.
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A
Heck, no. No, you wouldn't do anything. Yeah, you. You wouldn't know anything. It's, you know, I.
- [10:45]
B
How you gonna move steel girders if safety's first? You'd be like, first thing we should do is not move this fucking girder.
- [10:50]
A
That's right.
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B
This thing's too big.
- [10:52]
A
That's right. Look, I mean, for me, it was really a. It it took two years to kind of puzzle it through because on Dirty Jobs for the first two years, nobody got hurt. You know, we were. And, and we sat through probably 50 mandatory safety briefings. Whether it's mines or confined spaces or high spaces or, you know, lockout tag out, all those protocols and procedures were super intense. And we were really, really focused on coming home alive and in one piece. So we, like, really paid attention. But after two years of these mandatory compulsory meetings and all of these procedures, we all started getting hurt. I mean, nothing serious, but broken fingers and, you know, a cracked rib and singed off my eyebrows and my eyelashes and mild concussions and things like that. I was like, what the hell's happening? What was happening is the safety experts in all of these mandatory meetings started to sound like, remember Charlie Brown's teacher, Mrs. Othmar? We were just falling asleep, right? So it was like, holy crap, we're in compliance, but we are not out of danger.
- [12:11]
B
Got it.
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A
And so that begs the question, what happens to a normal person who actually comes to believe, either on the job site or just in life, that somebody else cares more about their well being than they do? And it's like, that's when complacency rears its ugly head. So on Dirty Jobs, we just, it was just shorthand among the crew, but it was always safety third, which meant, heads up, man. Keep your head on a swivel. You can be in, you can be as compliant as you want, but in the end, if you don't want to fall off the bridge, that's. It's kind of on you.
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B
Is there also a factor when you have a person who's the safety officer who's kind of annoying and they're like really like super interested and maybe you kind of like pawn off the safety aspect to them and then you don't think about it as much because someone's supposedly looking out for you.
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A
How much do you think about proper driving technique when you're sitting in the back on your laptop or even up front? Next.
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B
Depends on who's driving for sure. If my, if I was driving and my wife was in the backseat, she'd be paying attention a lot.
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A
Shout out your. Your guy. What was his name? Ashton, who picked me up this morning. Excellent driver, man.
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B
Oh, glad you're happy with it.
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A
Just so you know. I mean, I know he drives a lot of your guests and I. This is a feedback I want to pass along. He was, you know, very frosty. But yeah, look, I think anytime, anytime that we abdicate responsibility yeah, yeah, there's going to be. It's like whack a mole, it's going to pop up someplace else and, and it's probably not going to be in your interest.
- [13:53]
B
Well, your show like sort of illuminated a lot of really crazy jobs that people probably weren't aware of that you go, oh yeah, if this guy didn't do this, we'd kind of be.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And you don't even think about it. Yeah, it's just a thing that's going on behind the scenes or, you know, out of your radar.
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A
Yeah, that was it, man. It was.
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B
How did you get started in that? Like what. Who came up with the concept?
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A
Well, I mean, technically I guess I did, but I mean, I honestly, there are no new ideas. This, I stole this from George Plimpton, Studs Terkel a little bit, Charles Kuralt, some Paul Harvey a little bit. You know, that kind of storytelling was always kind of interesting to me. And I freelanced for years, probably 20 years in the entertainment business, working pretty much whenever I wanted on shows that I didn't care about at all. And I was, I was taking my retirement in early installments and really happy with the model. You know, I'd been fired a few times from QVC and hired back. And it was 1993 when I finally left and I had a decent toolbox. I was great in auditions so I could get cast. But I didn't, I didn't really much care about the nature of the work and had a pretty good balanced life, really. And then I was in San Francisco working for a CBS on a show called Evening Magazine. You know the show, it comes on after like the local news and I was a host and I would go every day. This is a cushy gig. Nobody watched the show, but it was fun to work on. It was. You go to museums, you go to wineries, and then you throw to these wrapped packages, right? It's all just if there's a three legged dog in Marin overcoming a heart tugging case of canine kidney failure. You know, that was like an evening magazine story. We did these all the time. And my mom called me and I was in my cubicle at CBS and she says, Michael, your, your grandfather will be 90 years old tomorrow. And not my granddad by the way. Seventh grade education, electrical contractor by trade, but also a plumber and a steam fitter, pipe fitter. He could fabricate, fix anything. He had that chip, you know, and he, I grew up next to him on this little farmstead north of Baltimore. And I, I Knew I was going to follow in his footsteps. I knew it. But the handy gene is recessive, right? I didn't get that. And it was my pop who got me. He basically said, dude, just get a different. You can be a tradesman. I know you're enamored of being a tradesman. Just get a different toolbox. So that's what got me into Entertainment. And 20 years later, I had completely run amok. I had sung in the opera. I'd sold stuff on qvc.
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B
You sung opera?
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A
Eight years, man.
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B
Did you. Were you classically trained?
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A
Not really.
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B
How did you get. How do you get involved in opera singing?
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A
Well, it's a weird sidebar. You go to the Rosedale Public Library and you ask the librarian for the shortest aria they have, like, ever written, which happened to be by Giacomo Puccini.
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B
Is an aria.
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A
A song aria is a song. It's the. They're in an opera. Most of the big moments are arias, right? And most of the arias are, you know, I mean, they're sung by the main characters. And there are lots of ones that you would recognize. And German. They're in Italian for the most part. This one was Italian. It was from La Boheme, which is just another version of Rent, essentially. But. But it was called the Coat Aria, and it was only two minutes long, and it was in Italian. So I walked around Baltimore with. You remember the Sony Walkman?
- [18:03]
B
Yeah, I remember I had one of those.
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A
I had one, too. And I listened to a guy named Samuel Raimi singing the coat Aria about 2 minutes and 40 seconds. And the words didn't mean anything to me, but the sounds did. And I can carry a tune, so I just memorized the sounds. And then I crashed an audition for the Baltimore Opera in 1903.
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B
No classic training at all. Just a Walkman and a cassette.
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A
Yeah, I'd had a music teacher prior to that, like a Mr. Holland type of guy who actually changed my life. He kind of fixed a stammer that I had, and then he forced me to audition for plays that I didn't really want to be in. And then the craziest thing ever, this guy, his name was Fred King. He was known as King of the Barbershoppers. He was, like, a legend in this weird world of acapella singing. And he put me in a barbershop quartet when I was in high school and opened up, like, this very weird world of music written long before I was born that I found super interesting. And so my best friends and I, we just started learning these Ancient songs and singing for people usually unsolicited from nursing.
- [19:27]
B
What kind of fucking dudes are you hanging out with that were interested in doing this with you?
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A
Well, one of them is basically my producer guy called Chuck Klausmeyer, who I went to high school with. Produces my podcast and we still write. We'll write unauthorized jingles for our sponsors in singam and Four Part Harmony. I'm not saying it's cool. I'm just saying it's a thing that I did when I was young and I never really shook it because, like, way leads on to way.
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B
Right. So you knew how to sing?
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A
I could carry it, too.
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B
So you had some experience singing? Kind of, yeah. And then you decided you were going to learn how to sing opera?
- [20:04]
A
Well, what really happened was I decided that my toolbox wasn't going to let me work in the construction trades or do anything my pop could do. And he really was a magician, and I really took his advice seriously. So I wanted to be in entertainment. I didn't want to be in the opera. I wanted to be on tv. But I needed an agent, and I couldn't get an agent unless I had my Screen Actors Guild card, and I couldn't get my SAG card unless I had an agent. So I couldn't audition for things that I wanted to do unless I found a way around this weird tautology. And a friend of mine, guy called Mike Gellert, told me, he said, hey, so there's the Screen Actors Guild. At the time, there was after a. And I'm sure you were part of both.
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B
Yeah.
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A
The thing you didn't know about was agma. The American Guild of Musical Artists is a sister union to the Screen Actors Guild and to aftra, who have since combined. And the rule back then was if you could. If you could get into any of them, you could simply pay your dues to the other, and then you'd. You were in. So for me, it was easier to kind of fake my way into the opera than it was onto a sitcom. So my plan.
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B
This is all diabolical. Well, I mean, great plan. I mean, it's like that kind of strategic thinking is very valid. You should be in the Navy or something.
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A
Well, look, I was just. I was just trying to get a job.
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B
I know, but it's clever.
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A
Well, there's always a stage door, right? I mean, there's always a back way in.
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B
Right.
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A
And so I thought, you know, I memorized the aria I auditioned. I was stopped halfway through it by the musical director, a guy named Bill. You know who's like, Mr. Rowe, you. You have no idea what you're saying at all. Do you.
- [22:01]
B
Say the words wrong. You're just repeating the sounds.
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A
I was singing it loud, and I was singing it like I understood what I was saying.
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B
Right.
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A
All I really understood was the repertory company was desperate for young men with low voices. I knew that, and so I kind of looked the part. So whatever, I got into it. And my plan was to do one production or one season. Like, they would do three shows in a season. And I had some friends who were in the chorus, and I was just a chorus member. I'm just holding a spear and just singing along with the rest of the chorus. And my plan was to do one or two of those. Get my card and then buy my SAG card, and then go about the business of being a famous TV star. Right. Simple. Well, the music, man, the music was so much better than I. Than I imagined it might be. And, like, when you get up in the catwalks of, like, a real theater, you know, I mean, you've done shows in these theaters. It's just. Nothing magically different about them. But when there's a full orchestra playing the hell out of Verdi or Rachmaninoff, and you're looking down on the scene and you're looking out at the audience, and the sound is just. Just amazing. And the girls, so, like, they're. There were 80. 80 people, I guess, in the Republic Company, more or less 45 women, 35 guys. 30 of the guys had zero interest in 100% of the women. And of the remaining five straight dudes, three were married. And the only other single guy had a. Had a mole the size of your thumb on his eyelid with thick black hair, like, growing out of it. It was just. I was the really. The only straight dude.
- [23:52]
B
You were the bell of the ball.
- [23:54]
A
And I'm dressed like a Viking or a pirate, and I'm going on stage, and I'm a fake. I mean, I admit it. I barely learned the language enough to kind of keep up. And people in the chorus took pity on me, you know, and it was a world, really. It was a world that I didn't know existed. And once I saw it, I didn't fall in love with it, but I fell in love with the idea that there were worlds out there that I didn't know anything about and that were maybe more interesting than I thought. And so I stayed for eight years.
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B
Wow.
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A
Yeah. I mean, I never got out of the chorus. I never had, like, a, you know, A featured role. I had a couple lines here and there, but the Baltimore Opera was a big deal. Looking back at it. And that was for me, 80, 83 to 90.
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B
Wow.
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A
Yeah. And then since we're talking. Well, it was a Sunday, and during the intermission of something, I think it was during this Neibel Lundgen, this giant Wagner epic, torturous thing. And the, the chorus didn't have to be. This is the one. You saw it on Bugs Bunny. Killed a wab. It killed a W. It's that one. Right, right. So there's an intermission and I'm, I, I'm not needed on stage for like 40 minutes after the intermission. So I go across the street to the Mount Royal Tavern to drink a beer and watch the football game dressed as a Viking, which I, which I recommend, by the way, when you walk in a bar with the horns and the spear. The bartender knew me. Everybody laughed and I sat down, but the game wasn't on. The bartender was watching a fat guy in a shiny suit selling pots and pans. And it was the early days of the QVC cable shopping channel. And I'm like, Rick, why are we, why are we watching this? And he says, because I'm auditioning for that guy's job tomorrow morning. QVC was doing a national talent search. Anyway, we had a conversation about the end of Western civilization and what it meant for polite society to have a 24 hour infomercial that just never went away and whether or not, you know, there was any honor at all in auditioning for such a thing. And at that point I thought it'd be great to have some money, you know, I hadn't had any before. And I'm sitting there drinking this beer dressed as a Viking, thinking I, I could probably do that job if I had to. So I went with him the next day and auditioned and got hired.
- [26:46]
B
Wow. Was he mad, the bartender? Yeah, you got the gig, you know, because you didn't even know about it.
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A
Well, it's a good question. I don't know what became of him.
- [26:57]
B
We had a friendly voodoo doll of Mike Rowe, a bunch of pins in.
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A
It, had a wager. I said, look, I don't know if I'll get the job, but I, but I bet I'll get a call back. He was like, you're not going to get a call back for this thing. You know, we were just actors at the time, or like people pretending to be actors trying to find, you know, he was nice enough. He sang in the opera with me, too. Actually he also attended bar. He just. He just wasn't in that one. But yeah, it. It was a very strange thing, man to that. That was my first job in tv. Look, I've done some minor local commercial stuff, but I talked about a pencil for eight minutes. That was the audition. It was so strange. In those days they didn't have a. Like there's no playbook to see who can sell stuff on tv. You know.
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B
Do you have a script or are you kind of like. You have this facts about the pencil?
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A
No, nothing, Nothing. Here's what happens again. It's probably changed today. I think QVC did $8 billion last year back in 1989, 1990. It was nothing like that. And if they hired a salesman, that didn't mean you had anybody who understood really how to behave on tv. And if you hired a TV person, that didn't really mean you.
- [28:18]
B
Look at you.
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A
Oh Jesus. That's the cat sack right there, dude. That's a sack for your cat.
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B
What are you selling? Let me hear this. A sack for your cat. What the.
- [28:29]
A
Just crazy. They just love it. That's why this is a cat toy.
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B
So the cats play with it.
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A
Yeah. They crawl inside it and they just go nutty.
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B
Cuz it makes a lot of noise.
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A
Cost 25 bucks.
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B
That's 25 bucks.
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A
Just roll around and sort of wrestle with the bag and just really experience.
- [28:49]
B
So this is like sort of just personality around having fun with the toy and selling it.
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A
Well, that's what I did. I. Look remember, that's what you did.
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B
Was that novel that you were doing it that way?
- [29:03]
A
Yeah, yeah. And in relative terms, like that was actually one of the great. One of the. One of the true great life lessons. You know, you don't have to be outrageous to stand out. You just have to be relatively outrageous. So QVC was a steady diet of men and women doing the same exact thing all the time. And then at midnight or 3am I showed up and put a cat bag over my head or busted open a lava lamp.
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B
So you were like a morning dj kind of.
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A
Except.
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B
Right. Because they're kind of fun. And that was different than the regular radio guy.
- [29:45]
A
You know, I would. I mean for me I thought of it more like. Like my favorite comedians. And by the way, I. I saw one last night. Thank you. Ron White was over at the Mothership.
- [29:59]
B
He's there tonight too.
- [30:00]
A
I stopped by last night.
- [30:01]
B
Are you around tonight?
- [30:02]
A
No, I gotta get back tonight. Something about Thanksgiving. But I watched his set last night.
- [30:06]
B
He's awesome.
- [30:07]
A
He Was, he was great.
- [30:08]
B
And the thing, he's never been funnier. He's. He's in top form right now and he's gone.
- [30:12]
A
He's gone full messiah dude. He's. I mean, I didn't recognize him.
- [30:16]
B
Oh, with the look. Yeah.
- [30:16]
A
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.
- [30:38]
B
Right.
- [30:39]
A
And I. 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, you know, 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.
- [31:04]
B
But you intuitively knew something.
- [31:07]
A
I knew in the middle of 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 shifts. So three hours at a time, usually over the course of 24 hours. So call.
- [31:31]
B
So you would be on three hours at a time?
- [31:33]
A
Yeah.
- [31:34]
B
Would you come back again? Or would you only do three hours?
- [31:37]
A
I do three hours and I go home and I mean, have you done overnights before?
- [31:42]
B
No.
- [31:43]
A
So I guarantee you there are a lot of people listening who have worked an overnight shift in their trade, in their vocation. It changes you just as surely as Doris the cat lady's brain was scrambled by the Gandhi and the Toxo. It does something, your circadian rhythm.
- [32:02]
B
Yeah.
- [32:03]
A
It's not just that it is that, but it's. It's something primal. Even more primal than that. It just messes with you and it forces you. For me, it 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 Amkor negative ion generator. Like, what the hell?
- [32:40]
B
Did they give you a rundown of what these products were at all?
- [32:44]
A
It was up to you. If you came in a couple hours early and you took the time to look through, like there was a table like this with all of the stuff on it that you were going to be selling. And you could take the time to.
- [32:55]
B
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.
- [33:01]
A
No, what you got was a blue card, usually from the manufacturer that said a couple of sentences about what the thing was. You had an item number, you had the price, the retail price, the 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 benefit selling. And 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 proportion necessary to last for the life of the pencil. So when this thing is down to a nub, you'll still have enough eraser. Left. 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. You want that canary yellow to pop and you can pick it up. Right. And it's not. It's a number two pencil. It's not three with that thin, wispy line that you can't read or. Or that thick, disappointing skid mark of a number one. Right. So you just, like, train yourself to fill dead air with nonsense while you're.
- [34:40]
B
Up your circadian rhythm.
- [34:42]
A
Yeah. While you're wondering, like, when your next meal is and who 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 shadowland.
- [34:59]
B
Yeah, Shadowland. That's a good way to put it. I have kind of an experience with overnight, but it's not the same. I delivered newspapers. And so at least one day a week on Sunday, I would basically show up Saturday night at 3 in the morning.
- [35:14]
A
Right.
- [35:14]
B
Because you would. I would deliver Sunday papers. And the Sunday papers were. It was a huge under you could flip the top, flip.
- [35:21]
A
Oh, I forgot to flip the top.
- [35:22]
B
Flip the top and then hit the button. There you go. Hit it again. And so I was all fucked up from that. I would get up every day at 5:00 in the morning normally to deliver papers because I had a large route. It was my way to make money without having to do a job where I had to listen to anybody.
- [35:41]
A
It's also a perfect example of a kind of job where you always know how you're doing while you're doing it. Like lots and lots of little visual undeniable cues. Right. You got a. 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.
- [36:01]
B
Yep.
- [36:02]
A
You know you're making progress. You know the progress you're making as you make it.
- [36:07]
B
Right.
- [36:08]
A
You know, it's, you know, you only.
- [36:10]
B
Have 120 houses to go.
- [36:12]
A
That's right. And then it's 110. And then it's like people always go to Dunkin Donuts.
- [36:17]
B
Get yourself a nice donut and a coffee. Reward yourself. Days over. Yeah, my day would be done work wise by, you know, 8:00am, 9:00am on a Sunday. Nine. Nine was rough.
- [36:29]
A
Yeah.
- [36:30]
B
Occasionally they would make enormous Sunday papers. They would have like. And that'd 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 van.
- [36:48]
A
But see, you remember. And you knew. 350, that's an interesting number.
- [36:54]
B
I had bigger routes, but 350 was manageable.
- [36:58]
A
How old were you?
- [36:59]
B
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. So it's probably 17 or 18. I started driving and I drove till I was 22. I just started doing standup 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, 365 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 gotta deliver newspapers. And if they did delay it, you would just, it would delay your delivery of the paper. So you'd have to call the depot, you know, hey, are we delivering yet? Because they didn't want to be responsible if it was a blizzard for people dying and get lawsuits. So they didn't make you deliver papers if it was unbelievably bad out. But for the most part, you drove every day.
- [38:01]
A
So you had a sense of consequence to this.
- [38:04]
B
Like you, Discipline, consequence. You didn't deliver the papers, you didn't get paid. It was very simple. It was a very simple job. You would show. I don't even remember how they trained us. I think that maybe they trained us for like one day. You were taught how to fold the paper. One, two, stuff it in the bag. Yet plastic bags were great because you could chuck them out the window and it never damaged the paper. Rubber bands are a real pain in the ass because you could hit a corner on the concrete, it would rip the corner of the paper and then the customer would complain because they're trying to read about what's going on in Syria. And then there's this 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 get the biggest route. And then the Boston Herald because I wanted more papers to deliver. So I would do two papers and then New York Times. The New York Times is a pain in the ass because it would be like one every 10 blocks. You'd have an enormous route. If you had 150 New York Times, that's an all day excursion.
- [39:03]
A
Did you start to equate the type of home you were delivering the type of paper to?
- [39:08]
B
Yes. The New York Times people took themselves very seriously. They were very serious people. They would ask me what I'm doing with my life. I remember this lady, I was, I was taking courses at Boston University just so people wouldn't think I was a loser. It was literally the only reason why I was going to college. And, you know, she's asking me, I was, what are you, what are you going to. What are you planning on doing with your career? I'm like, I have no idea. Like, and she didn't like it. She didn't like that I had no idea.
- [39:34]
A
Yeah, it makes people uncomfortable.
- [39:36]
B
She liked me, but she didn't like that. I had no idea. She was like, very motherly to me, I guess.
- [39:40]
A
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 a 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.
- [40:07]
B
And you lay the newspaper out.
- [40:09]
A
But which one, Joe?
- [40:10]
B
Oh, which one matters?
- [40:12]
A
I don't know why it does.
- [40:14]
B
So is it disrespectful to use the paper of note? No, no, it's better.
- [40:19]
A
No, I think it's a mark of respect. It's like, oh, we're having crabs. Get the News American.
- [40:26]
B
Oh, that's so silly.
- [40:27]
A
Get the News American because, you know, it's all spread out in front of you. And you got the crab guts and the old bay and the JO2 and the National Bohemian be. And maybe you can glance down and get informed as you.
- [40:39]
B
Isn't it interesting that there are newspapers like that, right? Like, there's the New York Post. You want a fun headline. You want all the crazy shit like, what 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?
- [41:00]
A
Have you ever walked through the offices of the Post?
- [41:03]
B
No.
- [41:04]
A
By any chance? Oh, dude, it's amazing. It's amazing. I had a old girlfriend whose sister worked there, worked for Page Six.
- [41:15]
B
Oh, boy. Yeah, that's the fun one.
- [41:17]
A
Yeah. So much fun.
- [41:18]
B
So that's like all the gossip and the craziness and person's getting arrested and.
- [41:23]
A
Right, right.
- [41:24]
B
Drunk driving and hookers.
- [41:26]
A
And they have a hallway. It's like this place in the center. There's so much on the walls, but it's all front pages. And it's the best headlines.
- [41:34]
B
Ah, so it's the best ones they've ever come up with.
- [41:36]
A
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.
- [41:46]
B
I love the Post. I've always loved the Post. I love the. Just the fun nature of the news. That was like the working person's newspaper.
- [41:55]
A
This is the point I was trying to make about the comedian who entertains himself first and the schmuck on QVC who tries to keep himself awake before he sells the thing. That's how I felt reading the Post. It was like these guys, somehow I'm imagining Amelia.
- [42:15]
B
They're laughing.
- [42:15]
A
They're laughing. Their cigars. And they're all in on the joke. And they're like, yeah, we're gonna report the news. But it's a lot of sharp elbows out there, and it's a very competitive world. So what can we do to maybe get the stick a little, you know, out of our ass just a little bit? You know, how can we be different? That's what fascinates me.
- [42:36]
B
Yeah.
- [42:36]
A
You know, how could. Whether you're publishing a paper or eating a blue crab, you know, or writing a book or a song, you know, how can you. How can you, in relative terms, distinguish yourself not from these other worlds and other categories, but from your friends?
- [42:54]
B
Right?
- [42:55]
A
That's the. That's the trick, man.
- [42:58]
B
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.
- [43:14]
A
Yeah. I said to Ashton, your 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. Watching the world catch up to it, like, watching the headlines catch up to you or whoever. You really haven't changed. And, man, it's so interesting to watch people realize, oh, we're gonna do it this way now. We're gonna do it this way now. And that's been. Whether it's comedy or whether it's music, 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. This larger hive mentality in the audience, and they start to realize, oh, there's a. There's another way to deliver a paper. There's another way to do a thing. And it feels new, but it's. It's probably what you've been doing for the last 12 years.
- [44:32]
B
Yeah, it's definitely the same way I've always done it. It's just having conversations with people. I like talking to people. It's fun.
- [44:40]
A
Yeah, but you make.
- [44:40]
B
I enjoy it.
- [44:41]
A
Good.
- [44:42]
B
I'm a curious person, and I like talking to people. But it's real simple.
- [44:47]
A
Yeah, but it's just because it's simple. Right. You make it sound like a parenthetical. Oh, it's just a conversation.
- [44:54]
B
Yeah.
- [44:54]
A
That's only just the hardest thing there is to do, but it's not.
- [44:57]
B
Really, it's not.
- [44:59]
A
Then why do more people do it?
- [45:00]
B
Because enjoy it. They don't enjoy it. Like I enjoy it. Like some people genuinely don't like talking to people. You know why? Because they're interested in themselves. You have to be interested in other people. I think we're all connected. I really firmly believe this in a non hippie way. 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're psychically all connected in some strange way. And I am curious as to how someone with a different biology, different life experiences, different geographic location in which they were raised, like, how are they navigating the world? And why are they interested in opera? Like, why? What is it? Why? What got you to be a beekeeper? Why. Why are you so fascinated with painting? What. What made you start writing music? Like, I'm interested.
- [45:56]
A
Yeah.
- [45:56]
B
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 can have the same exact conversation if we're having dinner somewhere.
- [46:08]
A
For sure.
- [46:09]
B
Same conversation. Yeah.
- [46:10]
A
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.
- [46:26]
B
I think that's what it is.
- [46:27]
A
You're probably right.
- [46:27]
B
I think I just got lucky. I think I just got lucky and I found a job that I would be doing anyway.
- [46:32]
A
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 gotta do it. I don't even know. Returning the favor. I think we did 100 episodes of that. I don't even. I couldn't tell you how many things I've narrated. Hundreds. If there's a wildebeest trying to get across the vast reaches of the barren Serengeti. Right, right. Like if I could remember every episode of how the Universe Works. Ten years of this stuff. If I could remember half of what I narrated, that would be something. I can remember a chunk. But my sense is that I can't 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 gonna do next and even less time to think about what I just did. Right, so you just talked to Josh Brolin and then you talk to the musician guy, Stork. Yep. Yeah. Right, Scott. Yeah, Scott Storch. And then before that, our friend Evan was in. Right. So, like, I have a better. It's easier for me to remember what you've done in the last two months 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. Where you've started to forget what you've done yourself.
- [48:10]
B
Oh, yeah. There's no way to keep it all. I have a bucket that's overflowing with information. It's overflowing. My hard drive is not capable of retaining all of it. It's not possible. I retain a lot, though. A lot more than I ever would know. I got an unexpected education doing this show for sure. Like, I never anticipated it.
- [48:34]
A
Is it conscious? Like, can you choose to be interested in a thing enough to know that you're not going to forget it, or does the interest just kind of bubble up and certain things stick to you?
- [48:50]
B
The interest bubbles up and they stick. Yeah, totally. My daughter asked me a question the other day. I don't even remember what the question about, but it's a very technical thing. And I said, no, that's not exactly it. It seems like that, but this is the reason why. And they figured this out because of this. And I started rattling off and she's like, how the fuck do you know this? She was laughing and I was like, I don't know everything. I forget things. I forget my own birthday. But I do remember things that 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.
- [49:25]
A
Yeah, Yeah.
- [49:26]
B
I think it let me get really good at things too, because I can remember, like, technical. Like, it was really good for martial arts because I can remember technical details. Like, really, like. Like, I don't forget things.
- [49:36]
A
See, you, to me, are the. Are the deeper end of the pool. I'm more the. The shallow end. Not. I. 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.
- [49:56]
B
Right, I did, yeah.
- [49:57]
A
But 10 seasons of it. But like, that's sort of the extent. Like, I, 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.
- [50:08]
B
Giant difference between being a former competitor and also like dedicated decades of my life to martial arts. It's not as simple as, like, I go and I do commentary. Like, I started doing martial arts when I was 15 and it changed my life. It gave me discipline and a will to overcome uncomfort 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. And 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.
- [51:24]
A
Taekwondo.
- [51:25]
B
Yeah.
- [51:26]
A
So this is my point. You take a deep dive when you get interested in a thing.
- [51:31]
B
Yeah.
- [51:31]
A
You go into the thing. Comedy wasn't a hobby. It became, I think, as important.
- [51:38]
B
Becomes everything.
- [51:39]
A
It becomes everything. Almost nothing I do becomes everything.
- [51:43]
B
Nothing.
- [51:43]
A
Almost nothing.
- [51:44]
B
But what are the things? What becomes everything?
- [51:47]
A
I'm not sure yet. Let me think about it.
- [51:49]
B
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?
- [51:57]
A
No.
- [51:57]
B
Nothing.
- [51:58]
A
I don't have hobbies and I don't collect things.
- [51:59]
B
No hobbies?
- [51:59]
A
No. No hobbies.
- [52:00]
B
Nothing.
- [52:01]
A
I don't collect things.
- [52:01]
B
Wow.
- [52:02]
A
I don't. I own very little. I never have owned.
- [52:04]
B
I wish I had a hundred lives to live simultaneously. I would have. I would do a hundred different things.
- [52:10]
A
This is the difference. You're insatiable in that way. You, you, you, you get a thing and you're gonna nail it to the wall, man.
- [52:19]
B
My late, great friend Anthony Bourdain. His headline, his bio on Twitter, it said enthusiast. And I really wish that I'd come up with that because that's what I am. I'm an enthusiast. I would. I wouldn't say it now because I would rip him off. And also now my bio says Dragon.
- [52:36]
A
Believer, because congratulations on that.
- [52:38]
B
The ladies, they said, I believe in dragons. She triple checked. She triple check. Mike.
- [52:44]
A
Got to be true.
- [52:45]
B
But. And I'm an enthusiast. That's what I am. I'm a person who is very fortunate and that I have a love of a lot of things.
- [52:54]
A
Well, you and Tony were similar, obviously, in that way. He took big bites, he took big swings.
- [53:02]
B
We became good friends when he really got into Jiu jitsu.
- [53:05]
A
Yeah.
- [53:05]
B
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 ocean. He's like, this is fucking great. And then, you know, he came to one of my comedy shows. We became friends, started going. Going to dinner, by the way, with Anthony Bourdain is the coolest fucking thing in the world. It's got him, 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. We got you. And they come over and bring food.
- [53:33]
A
And, you know, I wrote a eulogy for him that crashed my website.
- [53:40]
B
Oh, wow.
- [53:43]
A
It's really funny. I only. I 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 you Fear Factor was still in production then, too.
- [53:59]
B
Yeah, Fear Factor was. Nah, maybe it was probably at. The Fear factor stopped in 2007. And no reservations, I think, was around that time.
- [54:09]
A
Yeah, he was on in six for sure. Dirty jobs went on in 03.
- [54:15]
B
Yeah. And then the CNN show, which was, I think, like CNN's highlight of their time. And I think he really changed that network because all of a sudden that network was this fucking cool show where this guy had this brilliant narration and he had this wanderlust, but. But also. 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.
- [54:52]
A
You know, I've never. With the pot. This will sound vain, glorious, and I don't mean it to, 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. But then when I met Tony and I had a show on CNN at the same time, actually, it was a companion show.
- [55:21]
B
What was your show?
- [55:22]
A
It was called Somebody's Gotta Do It.
- [55:24]
B
Oh, that's right. That's right.
- [55:25]
A
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. And that's when we had the conversation where I said, look, I just gotta tell you, man, I. I have never in my life seen anybody doing the right show for them at the right time on the right network for them. Yeah, I've never seen that like that before.
- [56:10]
B
I mean.
- [56:11]
A
And never mind the award. Yeah, Peabody. It was the Peabody's that got me, actually. I don't. Who cares about the Emmys? They're easy. But Jesus, he was just one Peabody Award after the next.
- [56:21]
B
Yeah.
- [56:22]
A
And it wasn't a huge. The audience wasn't as big as people think. But they were engaged.
- [56:27]
B
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.
- [56:38]
A
Sure.
- [56:39]
B
We used to. When I was on News Radio, everybody wanted the shot. The spot after Seinfeld, because there was Seinfeld. There was Seinfeld and Friends were on the same night. And it was just this murderous Thursday night lineup. It 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 NewsRadio, would call a shit sandwich. Because you had your brilliant show and then your terrible show and then another brilliant show and another terrible show. But if you got in those time spots, oh, boy, you got a good spot. Because people are going to just keep tuning in. They didn't tune in for News Radio. News Radio wasn't really successful after it was off the air.
- [57:14]
A
You were in the slipstream.
- [57:16]
B
Yeah.
- [57:16]
A
You were in the orbit.
- [57:17]
B
Well, we weren't owned by NBC, so it was a different production company. It was Brillstein 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.
- [57:42]
A
With a bullet.
- [57:43]
B
We thought we were going to get canceled literally every year. Except the year we got canceled. The year we got canceled, I was shocked because that was like the year after Phil died. And then Jon Lovitz 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 hundred episodes for syndication. They had to sell it at, like, 98 episodes. That was like our show. It's like we were always, like, barely hanging on, you know, it was just. We. It was a funny show. It was a really good show with talented people.
- [58:13]
A
I love that show.
- [58:14]
B
The people I was super lucky to work on. And it ruined me because I could never work on another show after that.
- [58:19]
A
What did you learn? What was the big lesson from newsradio, if there was one for you?
- [58:26]
B
Well, it was just fortune. The lesson is that you could just be fortunate, you know, because I was not a trained actor at all. I did a set on mtv, Half hour, Comedy Hour. They had this comedy show. I did a set, and then MTV offered me a development deal. And then my manager said, this is terrible money. 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 a bidding war. And he was brilliant, and he did it. And that's exactly what happened. And the next thing you know, I couldn't answer my phone because my phone was just calling agents, and people would just call me. Like, some guy called me from Universal. I was like, what? What the fuck is going this shitty apartment. On my way out the door to play pool, and this guy is telling me he wants me to get on a flight that night. We have a flight at 10pm leaving out of LaGuardia. I was like, what are you talking about? And so then I called my manager. This guy just called me for me. He goes, hey, don't answer your phone. He's like, go play pool. Get out of here. I'll. 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. It went six episodes. And the only reason why I stayed in California, I wanted to go back to New York. I hated it. I hated actors. I just couldn't deal with being around these weirdos. There 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 and go, I'm.
- [59:53]
A
Sorry I met you.
- [59:54]
B
I'm sorry I fucked up. They didn't want to be real. So they. Everyone said, good to see you.
- [59:57]
A
To see you.
- [59:58]
B
Everyone was good. And it was super un sincere. I was like, this is so weird. Yeah, it was super uncomfortable experience. And it was the worst experience on a show because the people that ran the show, Jeff Martin and Kevin Curran, super funny, talented guys who'd worked on Married With Children and the Simpsons, brilliant. But the studio didn't think that they were good enough to run a show. So they brought in this hack, and this guy comes in and just butchers all the scripts. It was horrible. So that gets canceled. The only reason why I stay is because I had a lease. So I got a nice apartment. I'm like, the first apartment I ever had. 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. Wanted to go back to New York. I thought about breaking my lease, but then NBC contacted me and they said, we have the show. It's called News Radio, and we're recasting one of the. One of the roles. Do you want to come in? So I came in and auditioned for it, and the next thing you know, I'm working with Phil Hartman. It was bizarre. No aspirations whatsoever to be an actor. Never wanted to be on tv. And then I'm working with Andy Dick and Phil Hartman and Maura Tierney and Candy Alexander, Vicky Lewis and Dave Foley. Like, this is crazy.
- [61:03]
A
From the Kids from Second City.
- [61:06]
B
Yeah, he was brilliant. Dave Foley, by the way, was the secret producer of newsradio, because he would. They would give him full autonomy. So he would completely rewrite scenes, like on the spot, come up with punch lines for everybody. We all did that for everybody. Like, we would all come up, like, maybe you should say this, maybe. That was, like, super collaborative. So just fortune. Complete, utter good fortune. Because I had friends that were on terrible sitcoms and they were living in hell.
- [61:30]
A
Yeah.
- [61:30]
B
And we'd hang out at the Comedy Store and You know, 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 I'm on tv. This is nuts.
- [61:41]
A
Yeah, you're in on the joke.
- [61:42]
B
Yeah, it was fun. It was really fun. But it was just fortunate. I could have easily never done any of those things. Easily.
- [61:52]
A
I thought for years that really, a sitcom had to be the best gig in the world to have to do basically to do a play every week.
- [62:04]
B
If it's a good sitcom, if it's a good sitcom. But 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 on. But they're on bad shows. They just want to give themselves something to reward themselves for this.
- [62:16]
A
Sure.
- [62:16]
B
Fucking slave. Not. I wouldn't say slave work. I should say, like, you're a slave to money. It's not your. You're 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.
- [62:34]
A
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.
- [62:46]
B
I never saw that show. That was a weird one. Right? Because they got mad at him because he was right wing.
- [62:50]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [62:51]
B
That's so crazy. Didn't they cancel it?
- [62:52]
A
It was their number one show and they canceled and Fox picked it up.
- [62:55]
B
That's so nuts. They canceled it because they didn't like his politics.
- [63:00]
A
Yeah.
- [63:00]
B
Wow.
- [63:01]
A
Dude. I mean, that's. That basically happened to Dirty Jobs too. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's. It's mind boggling. But. But the point was I finally got a chance to.
- [63:11]
B
I don't want to gloss over that. I want to come back to that. Okay.
- [63:14]
A
All right. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's a great one. You'll. You'll love this. But. But to. Tim is great, by the way. And we became friends and. And chemistry on camera. Everybody loved it. And when it was over, I was like, well, you know, do an honest inventory, Mike. Like, what. What did you love? What didn't you love? And really the only thing I loved was seeing people who loved each other and being welcomed into their little world through. That's it.
- [63:42]
B
Yeah.
- [63:43]
A
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.
- [64:00]
B
So that's an alien experience for you.
- [64:02]
A
Yeah, I mean, I'd done plenty of plays as a kid and stuff, but that's different, you know, that's a. That's different. Once you're in Hollywood and once you're sort of in the machine, it still lingers. I mean, that's the whole reason I crashed the audition for the opera. I was just trying to find a sitcom at some point somewhere. And then when I. When I finally got it, you know, I realized just how lucky I had been prior to that and how. Here, you want this? And how. Crap, man. You know, a thing can live in your mind so much bigger than it is in reality. And so while I love doing it for that week, I said to my business partner over that this thing that I used to think of as the single most efficient way to make a living was so wildly inefficient. It takes four days to rehearse for a half hour thing. You gotta be kidding me. I could do five one hour shows in the same period of time.
- [64:58]
B
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.
- [65:08]
A
And drunk together, and that's important, you know.
- [65:11]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah, it is important. It's. It was like we, you know, it was a lot of fun, man. You know, and meeting people like Steven Root, who, you know, went on to do a million different things. Brilliant, brilliant guy. You get to see people that are like, really good at, like, he was a character. He was the only one of us that wasn't really himself. Like, he was this one guy. It was like a super sweet guy when you meet him in real life. And then he was Jimmy James, my stapler. Yeah, he becomes. Did you see what was that one? Coen brothers had some Netflix thing of Wild West. Netflix thing. He played on that. It was genius.
- [65:45]
A
Wasn't he an oh brother?
- [65:47]
B
Yeah, I think he was in 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 all sudden, I'm on a show. It's 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.
- [66:15]
A
What was the other one?
- [66:16]
B
Hardball, the first one that I went for. That was terrible. Yeah, that was the baseball show that got canceled. And then I auditioned for news radio. So it was, it was nuts. It was just. I was just stepping in shit every step of the way.
- [66:27]
A
That's astute.
- [66:27]
B
Didn't make any sense.
- [66:28]
A
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 former assistant turned out to be his wife later.
- [66:43]
B
How's that work?
- [66:43]
A
Nicole Taylor, man, they're living great. They live up in the hills somewhere.
- [66:48]
B
I mean, how's it work with your former assistant?
- [66:50]
A
How's that work? That's none of my business.
- [66:53]
B
That's a dangerous undertaking.
- [66:55]
A
She called me one day and I was in my full on freelance world. I hadn't had a job since QVC, so this is like 1999. And she says, I just want to. I just want to send you out 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 Peligian over at Pilgrim Films. He's doing something called Worst Case Scenario and he's looking for a host. And so I auditioned for that. And then later that week, she says, this guy from Nashville, Michael Orkin was his name who I had worked with years earlier. Not Nashville. Memphis he was hosting or the 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. It was, I dare you to hire me. I got hired for both jobs that week. Both jobs. And so suddenly I'm working for TBS hosting Worst Case Scenario, which lived up to its name. And then I'm up in San Francisco hosting Evening magazine.
- [68:17]
B
And there was no conflict of interest?
- [68:19]
A
Oh, no.
- [68:19]
B
Like you totally negotiated both of them at the same time?
- [68:23]
A
Yeah.
- [68:23]
B
Wow, that's cool.
- [68:24]
A
Yeah. And then Nicole switched agencies and I. And I. And I never really had an agent, you know, prior to. That's fortunate. Or since.
- [68:33]
B
Super fortunate financially. It's great.
- [68:36]
A
You know what's fortunate? Man? Remember? Okay, so my mother calls me. I'm at Evening Magazine, sitting in my cubicle. My dad. My granddad's 90 years old. Remember this? I didn't close the loop on this, but that's to answer your first question. What happened was my mom called me and said, your grandfather's gonna 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?
- [69:05]
B
Whoa.
- [69:06]
A
Yeah. My mother's a savage.
- [69:08]
B
Jeez.
- [69:09]
A
She just finished her fourth book, by the way.
- [69:12]
B
Wow.
- [69:13]
A
Yeah. She's written three bestsellers after 80.
- [69:15]
B
That's incredible.
- [69:16]
A
She's out of control.
- [69:18]
B
That's incredible. So she was like, she wanted you to do something impressive.
- [69:22]
A
My mother wrote every day for 60 years. Wow. 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 her dream was to write. She finally got a book deal when she was 80, went to a number four bestseller.
- [69:44]
B
Wow.
- [69:45]
A
And everything she's written so far, so that's recently back in whatever it was, 2001, she was just a pain in my ass. And she called me to say, you know, wouldn't it be great if your granddad, this guy whose shadow I grew up in, you know, could see you doing something? Because, like, my pop, he'd seen the opera, he'd seen qvc, he'd seen every God forsaken infomercial he'd seen. You know, I'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, Judge, was. I mean, it changed. It's. I wrote a book about it. It changed my whole life. The roaches are the size of your thumbs. There are 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 condoms stuck to your rubber suit. You know, it's unspeakably vile. You can barely breathe. And what happened to me down there is I completely failed to, like, host the show. All the standups went wrong, laterals exploded. We were all getting hit in the head with it's. Like a shooting gallery. There was a rat the size of a loaf of bread that crawled up my. I lost my footing, fell into. I was. I was baptized. I was baptized in a river of crap. And at the end, my cameraman threw up at one point, an enormous puke. And I'm squatting in the filth, you know, looking at the camera, trying to open the show. And when you see, when you see your cameraman vomit float past you.
- [71:57]
B
As.
- [71:57]
A
You'Re trying to articulate a thought. And 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 105 degrees. It's the seventh level of hell. It's clear I can't do my job. So I go over to this guy, his name was Gene Cruz, and I say, hey, what are you doing? He's like, I'm putting bricks in. I said, you need a hand? So I start mixing the mortar and we start talking just like people. Not like a hosty thing, like what you were saying. What would happen if you had an honest conversation, totally unscripted, with a guy who didn't really know he was going to be on camera? But what if you film it and put it on TV anyway? What would happen? Well, what happened a week later when this thing finally aired was I was fired because people sitting down to hear their heart tugging story of the three legged dog up in Marin overcoming canine kidney failure. And it's me, the smart ass 42 year old, crawling through a river of crap. I mean, they're trying to eat their meatloaf. You know, it was the wrong segment for that show. But talk about fortunate. The mail that came in as a result, some people said it was funny and they liked it. Some people were repulsed. But the letters that changed my life were the ones that said, you think that was dirty? Wait till you see what my brother does. Wait till 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. I've never seen feedback like this. I've never seen curiosity among the viewership like this. And so that's where the idea came from. It was like, 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? And 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 a. Or an avatar or a cipher, right? Like, what if I just think of myself differently than this guy who hits the mark and looks at the camera and tells you the cat 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 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.
- [75:19]
B
Well, 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 Carr, Jack Parr. Like, there's these type of people that do this job. It's like, you ever. You go to a. You ever do a morning radio show?
- [75:54]
A
Oh, yeah, sure.
- [75:54]
B
You have morning dj voice. Hey, 5:00 on the hour. Let's go with Bon Jovi. There's a voice that. They have a strip club dj, similar. There's a voice.
- [76:04]
A
Anchorman.
- [76:04]
B
Anchorman.
- [76:05]
A
But now, yes, the news, especially local.
- [76:08]
B
News, they have a very specific thing that they're doing.
- [76:12]
A
It's cadence.
- [76:12]
B
Yeah, well, it's fake. It's not a person. It's. No, people act like that. If you had a guy like that over your house for dinner, you'd 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. But that's what it is.
- [76:40]
A
You're not unprofessional, but it's like.
- [76:42]
B
I mean, in that regard, like, I'm not. So I wasn't trying to do something that had already existed. I was just doing like. I was doing like a guest on Opie and Anthony show. That's what it was like when You're a guest on Opie and Anthony. That's how you talk. Everybody would just hang out and talk.
- [76:59]
A
That's a fun show. Wasn't.
- [77:00]
B
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 he sing karaoke holding 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 talk show that he did out of his house.
- [77:22]
A
Sure, I remember that.
- [77:24]
B
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.
- [77:34]
A
Quick sidebar. I don't know if this is of interest, and, Jamie, forgive me, because I don't know if I'm supposed to ask you to do things, but I sold the first karaoke machine ever in this country on qvc. Yeah.
- [77:46]
B
Oh, let's see that.
- [77:48]
A
It's out there. I'm not proud of it.
- [77:50]
B
You should be proud of that. It's a statistic.
- [77:53]
A
It was, like, 12:15 in the morning, you know, and they. They sent me one of these things to my apartment, and I'm like, what. What is this? Is this even, like, look, they're everywhere now. Obviously, we. We've gone through.
- [78:06]
B
It's kind of crazy, though, that you're like the godfather of karaoke.
- [78:09]
A
Well, I'm among them.
- [78:11]
B
So what year is this? What are we talking? Look at you.
- [78:13]
A
91. This is 91.
- [78:14]
B
92. Wow. 99.95.
- [78:23]
A
99.95. Yeah.
- [78:25]
B
Yeah. It's hard to see. It's so blurry. Isn't it interesting, like, how bad television looked back then in comparison now? Like, just the resolution.
- [78:36]
A
Yeah. But you know what? There's something. There's something more trustworthy about rudimentary production value.
- [78:45]
B
Right. You can't. Like. Yeah.
- [78:47]
A
I was talking to your guy Bruce about this earlier. He was saying how much he loves, like, Antique Roadshow and this old house, you know? And I said, wow, I used to.
- [78:58]
B
Love this old house.
- [78:59]
A
I still. I was on this old house.
- [79:02]
B
Were you?
- [79:02]
A
Yeah, man. They invited me on. They wanted to raise money for the. To reinvigorate the trades. They had a very similar cause as I do today, 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 old. It's like, there's an entrance, there's an exit, right? When's the last time you saw it dissolve? All that stuff? And I used to make fun of it. I used to make fun of qvc. I still do. But in reality, man, 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 selling karaoke machines.
- [80:15]
B
Thing about something that's overproduced, that kind of dissolves some of its authenticity because there's too much thought put into each and every shot. Everything about. There's too much coordination. It's almost like you lose a comfort. Like, I might be entertained by it. It might be fascinating, like. Like Keeping up with the Kardashians. You ever notice, like, they change scenes every five seconds? Just like, keep you, like. Yeah, 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.
- [80:56]
A
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, but when you get in your own way, then you get in the viewer's way, right? And 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 a behind the scenes camera that never stopped rolling. And so if my mic pack went out or if a plane flew over, or if somebody screwed something up or if we had to stop for whatever reason, I always knew there was a truth cam. That's what I called it. And I could always look to it and I could say, all right, well, what happened here? Blah, blah, blah.
- [81:57]
B
Right.
- [81:57]
A
And 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.
- [82:09]
B
You know, he's.
- [82:10]
A
He's letting us see the sausage.
- [82:12]
B
Yeah.
- [82:12]
A
And that was new in nonfiction, you know, that was a whole new way to think about authenticity. Vivek Ramaswamy was the only. The only candidate I invited onto my podcast because he. I read somewhere that he said if he was nominated, he vowed to never use a teleprompter to deliver a speech. Well, he could pull it off, 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. And then it's funny, a year later, you know, I think the teleprompter is probably the best example of one forced error after the next. Like, when you think about the anchor who just wants to be believed, the spokesman who just wants to be seen as credible, the politician who just wants to be. Just wants it just so. It's like they want to be authentic, and yet they do the single most inauthentic thing you can possibly do, which is pretend to not read a thing that everyone can see you're reading.
- [83:24]
B
Right?
- [83:26]
A
And so, like, the cognitive dissonance is rich, you know? And I just think we've entered into this world where, like, the least persuasive thing you can do is say, trust me or take it from me. You know, people have just been burned so much, right, that they're gonna 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.
- [83:55]
B
Fuck it, we'll do it live.
- [83:58]
A
Bill O'Reilly, of all people, do it live.
- [84:01]
B
That's the real Bill.
- [84:02]
A
Yeah, that's it.
- [84:03]
B
That's the real Bill.
- [84:04]
A
That's it.
- [84:05]
B
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.
- [84:17]
A
They're the mainstream.
- [84:18]
B
It is.
- [84:19]
A
They're the mainstream.
- [84:20]
B
It's the new source of the world. You and these people that want to cling to authority and say, no, you're not. You're. Goddamn it, you're not the fucking. You're not a journalist. You're not this. That. 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, 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. But meanwhile, they're fact checking RFK Jr. So now I don't trust you anymore either.
- [85:03]
A
You can't.
- [85:04]
B
So it's like, that's what's going on.
- [85:06]
A
You can't gloss over the community notes.
- [85:09]
B
You can't.
- [85:09]
A
That's it.
- [85:10]
B
That's it.
- [85:10]
A
That. That's the truth, Cam. It's a solution on Twitter.
- [85:13]
B
It's the 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 who's going to say, this is why this is incorrect, and this is how you're supposed to read it. And then everybody goes, oh, okay, this is wrong. And 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 right and who's wrong.
- [85:49]
A
It's a weird dichotomy, though, right? Like skepticism. Look, 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 really blame people for, you know, considering what we used to dismiss as a conspiracy theory. When the theories start to get borne out and when there's such a level of eroded trust in once credible institutions like.
- [86:29]
B
Well, that's also the whole reason for the disdain for conspiracy theorists in the first place, is that, no, you're not an expert. I'm the expert, and you're wrong. But then when they're wrong, there's no repercussions. They never want to say, you know, we were wrong about all this. We're sorry. We were wrong about masking. We were wrong about social distancing. We were wrong about all of it.
- [86:49]
A
Where's the Humility, man.
- [86:50]
B
Yeah, no humility because. Because they're not humans. And that's why you don't believe them, because, you know, they're just people reading off bullshit off a teleprompter. That's it. That's it. That's all it is. And nobody wants that anymore. You don't have to have that anymore. And that's why X is emerged 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. And Carl. Carl's out cold now. But the numbers of people that are listening, it's like it's just this crazy number that are all just listening to three people. So there's no producer, there's no. All that shit that gets in the way of things has been removed.
- [87:33]
A
It's actually for 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 just build.
- [87:54]
B
Certainly at a club. Yeah, at a club, it's everything.
- [87:57]
A
It's everything. But why is it different?
- [88:00]
B
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. All I'm interested in, I think about it in terms of like, if I'm bored, they must be bored. Like, let me pick this up a little bit. Let me move this around a little bit. Let me figure out a way to. You got to move a conversation. It's like sometimes I've talked to like very old scholars, like very old. And it's like sometimes like, okay, right, we gotta focus you here. Like, we gotta get you on this.
- [88:28]
A
Like we're gonna land this a little bit.
- [88:30]
B
In the beginning, when he was telling me the story with Lincoln's bedroom, I was at the bed was. He was a long man. He was at Target.
- [88:36]
A
Very tall.
- [88:36]
B
Very tall. So I was like, okay, we got to figure out a way to. What's it like to be the fucking president? What does that feel? And 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.
- [89:02]
A
But don't you think that that's. You are the proxy for the audience when you're at your best?
- [89:10]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [89:10]
A
In my view.
- [89:11]
B
Yes, for sure.
- [89:11]
A
When I'm listening to you, when I, like, high five you virtually. It's. When you asked the question, I was thinking. And I really tried to do that in the sewer. I really tried to do that on Dirty Jobs. I really tried.
- [89:25]
B
I think you did. I think that's why it resonated so much with people.
- [89:28]
A
Well, I hope so.
- [89:29]
B
No, for sure. Because you didn't ever seem like a fake guy doing a thing. You seemed like a fun guy, like a regular guy who's doing this thing where you're interacting with. How do you do this? Like, what is this?
- [89:39]
A
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. So 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, has a fly on the wall. I'm getting a little lost.
- [90:15]
B
Yeah, I'm a little bored. Let's move it along. Right, Right.
- [90:18]
A
So, I mean, you can say that, hey, that's Joe being a good host, or that's Joe being super honest in a conversation where he's starting to drift a little bit.
- [90:29]
B
I'm most certainly aware that people are going to listen to it, don't get me wrong. But I don't think, like, the questions, like, maybe the audience would want to know this. I do do this one thing. Even if I know that some. I know how this thing works. I will ask a person how a thing works so that the audience can hear it from them rather than from me. I don't want to be Mr. Smarty Pants. I don't have to be. But that's one thing that I do where I'm aware that people probably don't know what we're talking about. So let's look. 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. So that in that way, I do think about the audience, but most of the time that's just like, I'm just doing my job. But mostly all I'm trying to do is be 100% locked in.
- [91:18]
A
Yeah.
- [91:19]
B
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.
- [91:31]
A
What was more consequential, him coming on or her not coming on?
- [91:37]
B
Him coming on.
- [91:39]
A
Why do you say that?
- [91:40]
B
Well, because realistically, like, okay, my thought about her coming on was I just. I was going to be very nice. I want to have fun with her. I wanted to just be able to talk to her and ask her questions. I want to get a sense of her as a human being. And if it's policy talk, that. That bothered them. Like, there was a few things they didn't want to talk. 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. Almost great. Internet censorship is important. Let's talk about it. But whatever. She wanted to talk about fucking riding bikes. I don't give a shit. I don't give a fuck what you want to talk about. Want to talk about cooking, rock climbing? I 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 when people get mad at you? Does 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 gotta fucking bring this home, and I don't know how to. And you sort of repeat these key lines or this. Maybe there's some new word you become enamored with. You know, you realize over and over.
- [92:44]
A
Again when you realize you're in the middle of a sentence with. With no obvious ending. Yes, that's a. That's QVC in a nutshell.
- [92:50]
B
Yes.
- [92:51]
A
Okay. 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 don't. I wonder, you know, I Mean, I listen to the interview 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 her campaign had stipulations, they had demands.
- [93:26]
B
I think there was a lot of people that were. She had made a bunch of blunders, and there was a lot of concern that she was going to make blunders here. This is what I was going to get to. She might have. It might have been a mess.
- [93:37]
A
Yeah.
- [93:38]
B
I might have asked her about immigration. We might have had a conversation about, like, what is the goal? Like, why hasn't this been. This doesn't. If we can, you know, launch rockets and land them at the same time as we can't control a border, that seems not real, that doesn't seem real. One seems way harder. And that's happening. He's fucking catching rockets with robot arms. 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? Why 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? Like, what's the purpose of this? Has anybody ever examined what these people are up to, why they're doing this? How is it so organized? Like, what is that about? Maybe that would have been a disaster because that. That's something that I felt like if. If she didn't want to talk about the marijuana and didn't want to talk about Internet censorship. Immigration's an interesting one, right? Yeah, 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 are you. 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?
- [95:16]
A
Inquiring minds want to know.
- [95:18]
B
We want to know. I think that's Reasonable.
- [95:20]
A
Do you see a difference between an immigrant and a settler?
- [95:26]
B
Well, it all's the timeline, right? Yeah, it's a timeline thing.
- [95:30]
A
Yeah.
- [95:30]
B
Not only that you're an invader. Like, 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, right? You know, what are you doing here, bro? You're the problem, you know? And now all of a sudden, that's Texas, right? That's where we are. We live here now. This is my land, bitch.
- [95:56]
A
Right?
- [95:56]
B
This is where I live. I got this now. Well, we're all invaders in one at one point in time. Every human being that's a nomadic person that's made their way across the country, you've probably entered a place where people were before.
- [96:09]
A
Every freedom fighter is a terrorist.
- [96:11]
B
Yes. Right. It depends on who wins.
- [96:14]
A
History gets to decide all that.
- [96:16]
B
Sure. If we didn't actually. If the Founding Fathers didn't pull it off, you know, we would be these wild, renegade English people that decided to come over here and just fucking create havoc.
- [96:27]
A
So, yeah, man, there are a lot of ways to go with all this, but I'll just come back to the teleprompter and say if that's an essential part of how you communicate and if that's an. Except, if that's part of your image, you know, then you can't be on this show.
- [96:48]
B
Right, Right.
- [96:49]
A
Right. You can't. You can't join me in the sewer either. There's no room for the contrivance. There's just no room. There's just no time.
- [96:58]
B
I just wonder if that's what they make them do. Like, if you make me do that, I'll suck, too. You know, I can't read off a teleprompter. I'm not interested in doing that. It's not my thing. But if you make a person do that, like if you're going to be a politician. Right, okay. And you were a senator and. Which is, you know, you don't get that kind of exposure that you get if you're a vice president or you're running for president initially. Right? Like, that's a totally different scene. And there's probably a bunch of people that coach you how to do it. Right. And you don't know what the fuck you're doing. And if you're not a powerful person, like a big personality like Donald Trump, who could just do it, but also coming from a world of entertainment, for most of his life, he's been in the public eye and hosting the apprentice for 14 years. Like, he's, he's used to being in front of the camera. It's a normal experience for him. He has a massive advantage.
- [97:50]
A
That's what I meant by production becomes the enemy of authenticity.
- [97:54]
B
Yes.
- [97:54]
A
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.
- [98:04]
B
Right.
- [98:04]
A
You know, and I, and I think the audience, not just yours, but the country, I just think they're just exhausted by people who have been managed and focus grouped and weighed and measured and tested and then put out there.
- [98:19]
B
I think it's also the evolution of culture in general because if you just go back to. We were 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 like, Hannah, what did you do?
- [98:39]
A
Right.
- [98:39]
B
You know, there was a weird performative aspect to it because they didn't know how to do it. Right.
- [98:43]
A
In sitcoms, too.
- [98:44]
B
In everything.
- [98:45]
A
Father Knows Best. All that stuff.
- [98:47]
B
All that stuff. And then as time moved on, it changed. Like all in the Family was all of a sudden this realistic portrayal of an. Of a family where you got a racist dad and the son is, you know, the meathead, the son in law and the daughter's a hippie and the mom just can't. What are you doing? What do you do? It was a fucking amazing show. Oh, watching. It was an amazing show. 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. Like you would. It would be weird. You would be. It would be like a weird Tim and Eric type thing. Like you're doing something weird on purpose. Right, right. And that's not acceptable anymore. So the culture's moved on.
- [99:47]
A
So for sure. But it moves on in fits and starts. And it's not a line.
- [99:51]
B
Right.
- [99:52]
A
It's.
- [99:52]
B
No, just like the climate.
- [99:55]
A
Right, 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.
- [100:05]
B
Yeah.
- [100:06]
A
See so many different kinds of scripted dramas. I mean, oh, my God, look at. Can you imagine Breaking bad?
- [100:12]
B
Right, right.
- [100:13]
A
30 years ago.
- [100:13]
B
Right, right, right.
- [100:14]
A
It's impossible.
- [100:15]
B
Right.
- [100:15]
A
A whole lot of things had to happen in front of that for. For that thing to.
- [100:19]
B
The Sopranos had happened.
- [100:21]
A
That's right. And something had to happen before that.
- [100:23]
B
Yeah.
- [100:24]
A
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.
- [100:33]
B
Yeah, like.
- [100:35]
A
Like Discovery is a. Is a good example. You asked about it, and I'll. I'll tell you. First of all, John Hendricks, a friend of mine who created that channel you would love, he did this in his garage, basically. I mean, the story is incredible how he talked Malone into getting some transponder space or maybe his Westinghouse, and mortgaged his 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 business model? And of course, you know, Discovery has since purchased Warner Brothers. You know, they're the biggest entertainment company in the world today. And it started with John Hendricks saying, one goal, to satisfy curiosity. That's it.
- [101:31]
B
Discovery.
- [101:32]
A
Everything I do must line up with a traditional definition of what a discovery is. It's the. It's the satisfying of curiosity.
- [101:42]
B
Yeah.
- [101:43]
A
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 naturalists 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 had this dance, this production dance, where you had a credible sounding voice and an expert at the center of the thing. Dirty Jobs was not that Dirty Jobs was, what if the expert is a septic tank technician or a welder? What if the expert is a skull cleaner or a golf ball retrievist? It's a job. Or a sheep castrator, an oral sheep castrator, which we can get into if you want. Like, what if they become your source of credible information? And what if 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 2003, and they bought it. They didn't buy Dirty. They didn't like Dirty Jobs. They took it really, to shut me up. They wanted three episodes and out. The deal I made with these guys was rooted in this paradigm of me saying, send me out into the world to go on adventures and don't ask me to know more than I know, but just let me look under the rock and let's learn together.
- [103:35]
B
Yeah.
- [103:36]
A
And so they said, okay, we're going to. You know, you'll go to the Titanic with James Cameron. You'll climb Kilimanjaro.
- [103:43]
B
You went to the Titanic?
- [103:44]
A
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 Hawass. I was at the pyramids. I was in some of the greatest. The largest undiscovered graveyard in Bawiti, the Sands of the Dead, where they found the mummies with the golden masks. And nobody knew who the hell they were because it wasn't attached to any dynasty. And who are all these people with golden masks on their faces? And so Discovery would send me to do these shows, and they were great. Meanwhile, 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. That's amazing, right? And it happens all the time. And most of the time when it happens, you know, the. The. You just walk it 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.
- [105:26]
B
Why was it shelved?
- [105:27]
A
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. But it was shelved because it was an unscripted, random romp we never did a second take on the show.
- [105:53]
B
It didn't look like everything else on the network.
- [105:55]
A
It didn't look like anything else on the network. It was just a jagged little pill. But they liked me, and they like this idea of a more unscripted look at the world. And so we reached this kind of detente, and I started narrating all their tentpole shows. And then I went to Alaska to host Deadliest Catch, which is a whole nother story. That crab fishing show, that's 21 years now, right. And up there, people died. You know, that's a crazy job. People died. And I went to six funerals in six weeks. And 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 hosting two shows at the same time, so pick one. So Dirty Jobs came back, went into full production late in 2004, and Deadliest 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. And ever since, nonfiction 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 a sliding scale.
- [107:35]
B
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 were talking about why, like, mainstream news is failing, but individuals.
- [107:51]
A
You know it when you see it.
- [107:52]
B
Yeah.
- [107:53]
A
You know it when you see it.
- [107:54]
B
Yeah. You could tell the difference.
- [107:56]
A
Oh, Bourdain.
- [107:59]
B
Yeah.
- [108:00]
A
Okay. 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. We were constantly at each other's throats trying to navigate this weird line of reality and authenticity. And there's a scene in Parts Unknown. I think he's in. Might be Sardinia. He's diving. Oh, yeah.
- [108:37]
B
When they're throwing the fake octopuses in.
- [108:39]
A
It'S one of the single greatest moments in the history of nonfiction.
- [108:43]
B
It shows you exactly how the sausage is being made. But it's also like, now you can trust him because, you know, he's kind of sabotaging the narrative that they've created for his own show, for his authenticity.
- [108:53]
A
I would do that for a scene, maybe even for an act, maybe even for a whole segment, maybe if I got like a bee in my bonnet and I really just couldn't, you know, I got angry every now and then and I. You know. But Tony, dude, he went out and got drunk. I mean, drunk drunk and shot the whole show smashed. And he made them cut it in. And you can see him, he's. He's so disgusted. Just so you're. Just so the audience understands, right? 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 frozen squid just start to come by him. And in narration, this is where he really owned it, because he owned that show. Like he could. Nobody's going to tell him what to say. So his real rant happens months later in the VO booth when he's just describing the heartbreaking insincerity. Don't they know who I am? What did they think I was going to do? So he says something like, 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 rest of the show. And it airs. Yeah, it airs on cnn.
- [110:38]
B
Yeah.
- [110:38]
A
And I think it won a Peabody.
- [110:41]
B
Was that the CNN one, or was that no Reservations?
- [110:43]
A
That was cnn, Was it?
- [110:45]
B
Yeah, it was parts unknown.
- [110:46]
A
Look, I'm pretty sure it was parts unknown. I'm pretty sure I could be wrong.
- [110:52]
B
But I think you might be right.
- [110:54]
A
Yeah. And, God, I just. I mean, that's what I. That's what I wrote about when he died. It was that.
- [111:02]
B
Parts unknown.
- [111:03]
A
Yeah, because I meant 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.
- [111:22]
B
Also, these guys, they probably didn't know. These Italian guys, like, these fucking guys aren't gonna find the octopus. We've killed them all, probably.
- [111:28]
A
Right. But I gotta think there's somebody there in his crew. Somebody over from 0.0, the production company. Somebody must have, you know.
- [111:36]
B
Who knows?
- [111:36]
A
Who knows, man?
- [111:37]
B
Who knows?
- [111:38]
A
But, look, the fact that that Happened is wonderful. The fact that he was able to insist that at air. That was important. Yeah, that was important.
- [111:51]
B
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.
- [112:01]
A
Fly on the wall.
- [112:02]
B
Yeah. Yeah. That was a very unique show, too, because it taught me that food is art. I really learned that from no Reservations, but it followed over through parts unknown. Food is art. I didn't think of it as art until I saw his show. And then I was like, oh, okay, that's right. Because I just thought of art as being, like, a thing that people make that you look at or touch. I never thought it would be a thing you make or you hear. Right. I never thought it would be a thing you make where you eat. And then I saw. I'm like, oh, these are artists. These are artists. All these people, they've discovered these different ways to make things delicious and.
- [112:39]
A
Okay, their medium's different.
- [112:40]
B
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 covered in tattoos. They're fucking weirdos. They like to do drugs. They're all listening to crazy music, you.
- [112:53]
A
Know, they're also craftsmen. Like, I mean, to me, yeah, food is art. It sure can be. And it can also be fuel.
- [113:04]
B
Yeah.
- [113:05]
A
You know, it's actually both. It's kind of perfect.
- [113:09]
B
Yeah, you could have both. It could be art and fuel. You just gotta pick what you eat.
- [113:14]
A
Is hunting art?
- [113:20]
B
Hmm. It's a discipline. It's a primal discipline. It's a discipline that connects you with life and death in a very unique way that I don't think anything else does where you. It's very. If you do it correctly. Right. I'm talking about, like, mountain hunting. Like, mountain elk hunting 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 back up because I was developing, like, tendinitis in my lower back, and I just ignored it.
- [113:58]
A
Yeah, shut up. Yeah, yeah.
- [113:59]
B
We got work to do. And so it's a discipline more than it is anything, but it's like. I don't know. Some people call it a sport. I find that wrong. It's not the right. But 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 a sport, 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 people who've ever gone fishing, there's a thing that happens when you catch a fish. There's an excitement that you're not prepared for. It's a weird excitement. That excitement is you're gonna feed your family and stay alive. That's what that excitement is. Because that excitement's like hardwired in your human reward systems. And 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.
- [114:51]
A
Yeah.
- [114:52]
B
And hunting is that times a hundred. Hunting is that. 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 gotta figure out a way to move through the trees. You gotta move very slowly, only moving their heads down.
- [115:12]
A
I think that's art.
- [115:14]
B
I don't know, man. I mean, it's a shot is art. I'll tell you that. Archery is art. A good archery shot on an animal, I watch it like 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 broadhead sinks in, I know that animal is going to die very quickly. It's a quick, humane death. And that's what you practice for.
- [115:36]
A
You know Josh, Josh Smith over at Montana Knife by any chance? Sure.
- [115:40]
B
Very well.
- [115:40]
A
He sent me a video the other day. He went on a big hunt with his boy.
- [115:44]
B
The moose hunt.
- [115:45]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. His boy got one at about a few hundred yards. Big moose, man.
- [115:50]
B
Fucking huge for a first moose. That's so crazy. That kid hit the jackpot.
- [115:55]
A
But the excitement on the video. Oh yeah, that he sent me and Josh.
- [115:59]
B
Primal.
- [116:00]
A
Yeah.
- [116:00]
B
And bow hunting is even more primal than that. Bow hunting is that times 100. So it's regular hunting is fishing times 100. Then bow hunting is regular hunting times 100.
- [116:11]
A
I just think, you know, if you're. Whatever canvas you're in front of, whether you're painting or whether you're cooking or whether you're stalking, like you can the muse. Like does the muse come to you when you're stalking? Does it come to you? I don't have an answer for it, but I know that people talk about it. Like, some people say, well, you're in the zone. Sometimes when I write, I'm surprised. Like, just the other day, I started writing something on the tarmac of sfo, and when I looked up, I was. I was at jfk. It was like that.
- [116:50]
B
Yeah, you got into it.
- [116:51]
A
Yeah.
- [116:51]
B
Airplanes are great for that.
- [116:52]
A
Oh, my. They're the best.
- [116:53]
B
They force you into that seat.
- [116:54]
A
They're the best.
- [116:55]
B
Can't get up because there's a guy next to you. You get that laptop open and it just comes out of you.
- [117:00]
A
And I. Like a little.
- [117:01]
B
Couple of Budweisers.
- [117:02]
A
Look.
- [117:03]
B
Let's go.
- [117:03]
A
I wrote a book on a plane.
- [117:06]
B
I believe it.
- [117:07]
A
I really did. And. And I did it mostly in moments that I don't really remember when. When time gets compressed. And I think that 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. I talk to boxers who say that it's so odd the way things will sometimes almost feel like they're in slow motion, even though they're happening so fast.
- [117:36]
B
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 artistic. You know who Emmanuel Augustus is?
- [117:47]
A
Yeah.
- [117:47]
B
Okay. That guy is an artist. That guy's an artist.
- [117:51]
A
What makes him an artist?
- [117:52]
B
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.
- [118:11]
A
He's stalking.
- [118:12]
B
He's doing something like, here's. Here's Emmanuel. Like, look. Look how he moves. I mean, imagine you're fighting a guy who's moving like this. It's so crazy. He was so hard. Floyd Mayweather said he was the most. Like, he just punched him with two hands at the same time. Floyd Mayweather said he was the most skilled opponent he ever fought.
- [118:28]
A
Wow.
- [118:29]
B
He. 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.
- [118:40]
A
It's like boxing a bobblehead, right?
- [118:42]
B
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, he'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're getting clowned, here he's fighting Mickey Ward. When you're a guy like Floyd and you're, you know, the cream of the crop, Olympian, I mean, a fucking phenomenal boxer. Just a fantastic boxer. And then you're fighting this guy who's dancing in front of you like, what the fuck? But also really good. He. It wasn't just that. Like, you rarely get a guy who's clowning like that. But also, like, those kind of. That kind of head 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.
- [119:34]
A
Who was his trainer?
- [119:35]
B
Oh, man. I don't think anybody trains you to do that.
- [119:37]
A
I don't either. Like, what does Custom Auto say? He never wouldn't allow it.
- [119:42]
B
No, he. You know, he was. But maybe. Maybe if the guy started winning like that, he would change his tune.
- [119:47]
A
So maybe people change their tune when.
- [119:49]
B
They see something extraordinary.
- [119:50]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [119:51]
B
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. Is this going to work? Like, do you know Sean Strickland is. He was UFC middleweight champion. Stands straight up, puts his hand like, one hand like this, one hand down here and beats the fuck out of everybody.
- [120:17]
A
Yeah.
- [120:17]
B
Stands straight up. Everybody else is down. Everybody else is moving. Sean, straight up moving towards you. Phenomenal head movement, awesome timing, and they lock people down in a weird style. There's a bunch of guys that fight weird, but they're really good at it.
- [120:32]
A
Well, think baseball, too. I mean, it's everything. Louis Tian, remember the pitcher.
- [120:37]
B
I don't really follow baseball.
- [120:39]
A
You'll love this, Jamie.
- [120:40]
B
I know almost nothing about sports, believe it or not.
- [120:44]
A
You know, I mean, you will one day. You're going to look at a baseball game and go, hey, you know what I need to do? I need to play professional baseball. And then five years later, we're going to be reading about it because you're going to go crazy with it.
- [120:56]
B
The Same way you do it for that. But. But this Louis Tian, what did he do differently?
- [121:00]
A
Louis Tian 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, and he go further than that sometimes.
- [121:23]
B
Is that really unusual?
- [121:24]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's unusual. That's unusual.
- [121:29]
B
Oh, so it freaks people out a little bit?
- [121:31]
A
Well, yeah, yeah, because he just breaks. He stops looking at you.
- [121:37]
B
Look his back, look at his ankle. That's crazy.
- [121:41]
A
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 pitchers. And I'll get used to this, and I'll get used to that. And then this guy comes along.
- [121:49]
B
That dude has flexible knees.
- [121:51]
A
Flexible everything.
- [121:52]
B
Because look at the angle his knee is in before he turns. That's crazy.
- [121:57]
A
Yeah, yeah. You would, actually. I'm surprised you're not into baseball, because I can't.
- [122:03]
B
I don't have any room.
- [122:05]
A
I know the bucket's overflowing.
- [122:06]
B
Yeah, it 100% is. You know, like, I watch football now. My wife's into football, but I can't. I can only pay attention so much. My head is filled with combat sports. There's. I have to follow Jiu jitsu, Muay Thai, mma in the UFC, MMA in the PFL, Bellator 1 FC. There's. I've 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, Barter Hari's fighting. Oh, you know, this guy's fighting. That guy's fighting. I know who these people are. I watch them fight. I'm watching fights just hours and hours in a day. I might watch. I might watch fights two hours every day.
- [122:57]
A
Is it work or fun?
- [122:58]
B
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 Conor McGregor in, like, 2013. He was fighting in Cage warriors. And I reached out, I said, dude, you're super talented. I hope I get to see in the UFC someday. And there's like, you know, kickboxers, like Alex Pereira. I follow him in glory, and then finally he comes over the ufc, and I was like, you gotta see this guy. This guy's 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 art, 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, now they're just. They're only focused on becoming a UFC champion, and this is their goal in Life. And 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 have room for baseball.
- [124:22]
A
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, the UFC in a really similar way. First.
- [124:39]
B
See, I was a fan of the UFC in the very, very beginning, and it got me into jiu jitsu. So in 96, I started taking Jiu Jitsu. 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 in Van Nuys before that went 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, and so I started working for the UFC in 97, and that was when it was banned from cable. You could only get it on DirecTV. And we had to do these shows in like, Dothan, Alabama, or you took a propeller plane. It was fucking hell. It was no Money.
- [125:28]
A
This is 97.
- [125:30]
B
97.
- [125:31]
A
And is Dana Bare knuckles Olden?
- [125:32]
B
Dana was not involved yet.
- [125:33]
A
When did Dana get involved?
- [125:34]
B
2001. So I'm on Fear Factor at the time, and one of the things, me and my friend Eddie Bravo, who's also a big fan from back in the day, and he taught me jiu jitsu when we were first really into it when we would go to, like, Louisiana. These the only places that would sanction these fights. They were bare knuckle. People wore shoes. You could grab their shorts. It was like, crazy rules.
- [125:59]
A
Yeah.
- [125:59]
B
And we said, you know what? It would take these billionaires who love the sport and dump a ton of money into it. That's what it would take. Like, someone would have to dump a ton of money. And then along comes Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta 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 meet Dana, and then I started asking Dana, like, have you ever heard about this guy? Did you ever see this guy fight in Japan? You ever heard this Russian dude? And I started asking him about fighters, like, you should try to get these guys. And then he's like, do you want to do commentary? And then next thing you know, I'm a commentator for the ufc.
- [126:40]
A
Okay, this is just a very weird triangulating, but they didn't even have any.
- [126:45]
B
Money at the time because they were hemorrhaging money. So I did the first 13 shows for free.
- [126:49]
A
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.
- [126:58]
B
Well, for me, money has always been fun coupons. And so I was on Fear Factor, so I had plenty of fun coupons. So my thought was, like, oh, I have money. I don't have to worry about money right now. Like, I'll just do this. Yeah, this would be fun to do.
- [127:11]
A
Nevertheless, you know, I mean, it was the same thing with Dirty Jobs. Once that thing lit up, I had to be willing to. To sign a contract that was probably illegal. I mean, it was such a ridiculous contract. The way they own you. It was preposterous.
- [127:24]
B
Isn't it crazy?
- [127:25]
A
It's like, no money. But, yeah, but if it's a hit, if it sticks, we have you for 10 years or you renegotiate. My ace in the hole with Dirty Jobs was technically, I was the host, and I can host that show without doing the thing in the show that made people watch, which was actually do the work. There's no contract that can force you to bite the balls off a sheep. 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 Peligian. 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. And Craig said, hey, this guy Mike, he's narrating American Chopper, American hot rod, he's narrating. He just goes down the list and. And Dana says, say something. And I. And I said. And I said, previously on the Ultimate Fighter. And he said, fine, you'll be great. I did, I did 10 seasons.
- [128:53]
B
That sounds like Dana.
- [128:54]
A
I said something.
- [128:55]
B
Yeah, that's hilarious.
- [128:56]
A
It's great.
- [128:57]
B
Yeah, that's hilarious. Yeah. That's interesting how things happen like that, you know.
- [129:04]
A
Well, you were gonna, you know, you wouldn't be sitting here now if your lease wasn't up or whatever.
- [129:09]
B
Yeah, I probably wouldn't. I would have gone back to New York.
- [129:12]
A
I think the art thing, we should not be done with that yet. There's something I'm thinking about the clips you were playing. What do they call boxing? The sweet science.
- [129:24]
B
Yeah.
- [129:24]
A
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.
- [129:40]
B
I think both.
- [129:42]
A
So, you know, I, I've got this, this foundation that evolved out of Dirty Jobs. It's called Microworks. And we award these scholarships to people who don't want to go to a four year school but who want to learn a trade. Right. We've been doing it for 16 years. And I started doing it in part for my granddad, but mostly because There are what, 8 million jobs now that don't require a four year degree and there's $1.7 trillion in student loans on the books. 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 before it was shop, it wasn't just VO Tech, it turned into VO Tech. But before it was votec, it was the vocational arts. That'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 VO Tech. And then there were a bunch of other acronyms and abbreviations and hyphenations and so forth.
- [131:10]
B
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, everybody needs a fucking house. Over being a plumber. And if you're a guy who can figure out how to do good carpentry, if you understand how to use tools, you're taught properly, you have a good apprenticeship, you can make 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. 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 and I'm doing a job that's not very satisfying and I'm kind of stuck. I'm working my way up, but it's going to take a long time before I make enough money where I'm not burdened by this. Or you could have a successful construction company by then. I mean, you could get a small business loan and you could start hiring other people. You could have trucks with your name on it. Like, I know people who've done that. They live very well. And, you know, it doesn't mean you're dumb. Like, a lot of these people that live very well are very self educated. They read books, they watch documentaries, they're.
- [132:59]
A
Interesting people and they're entrepreneurial.
- [133:01]
B
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.
- [133:15]
A
Well, you know, I very rarely play the devil's advocate in this argument, but I do think I know why it happened. Or at least how. And I was in high school in the late 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 ed over here, I guess we have lower ed over here.
- [133:39]
B
Right. You guys are.
- [133:40]
A
The language is awful, but the PR, I mean, to be fair, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, we needed more doctors, we needed more engineers, we needed more people matriculating through 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 trope. So it's 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.
- [134:28]
B
Especially where you grow up, like, you know, if you grow up in a place that's highly educated, like Massachusetts, where I was. Boston. Very, very educated place.
- [134:37]
A
Yeah.
- [134:37]
B
So if you were person that pursued the trades, you were, you know, probably a failure because this is like all you could do because you couldn't make it in school.
- [134:46]
A
And yet you loved this old house.
- [134:48]
B
Yeah.
- [134:49]
A
Which is a love letter to the trades.
- [134:50]
B
It really is.
- [134:51]
A
Every single one.
- [134:52]
B
I love watching people make things.
- [134:54]
A
Yeah.
- [134:55]
B
Even dumb things. Like there's a. There was a guy, I think it was a PBS show where he would make tools and like do like stuff the way people did like way back in the day. Like he'd make his own planer and all, you know.
- [135:07]
A
Oh yeah.
- [135:08]
B
And he would make furniture and shit.
- [135:09]
A
Yeah.
- [135:10]
B
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.
- [135:17]
A
He was.
- [135:17]
B
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 know what I'll do, I'll make. Take ancient tools and figure out. No, this guy really was into it.
- [135:32]
A
Well, what's happened there for me anyway is that, 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. And 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 H Vac guys and an electrician. We're doing three and a half million a year. Got no debt. And so, like, my job is to. Is to talk to that guy. 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. That's a big one, too. You know, where you go, where the work is or, you know, and so it's. 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 Macrow works? And I said, yeah, sure. What do you have in mind? And that's. I don't know how. I don't know if you knew this, but we had this whole conversation about, like, running together, you know?
- [136:57]
B
Really?
- [136:58]
A
Oh, yeah. No, he. He asked if I wanted to be vice president.
- [137:03]
B
Oh, geez Louise. What'd you say?
- [137:05]
A
Dude, I was in Munich. I was in Munich in January, and he had called me earlier just to talk really generally about the middle class, because he's like, look what you've done with the foundation. My campaign is a lot about that, and I'd love to talk to you more about it. So I kind of put him in the category of elected officials, politicians who might be useful. I'm not that guy. But I said, yeah, look, man, I'd be happy to chat. Well, he called back, and you know Gavin Becker, right? Yeah, yeah. So 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, he invited me down to his home to meet, you know, the cats. They were all there. And we talked for, like, three hours. And I'm looking over my shoulder, honestly, like, I'm being punked. Like, which one of my crazy friends put you up to this? But he was serious, and I was weirdly flattered maybe. Like, I knew I couldn't say yes, but I was so interested in what 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, Right. I'm, I would never do well in an office or in a bureaucracy.
- [138:51]
B
He called me up once to ask me who I thought would be like, good vice president. I was terrified he was going to ask me. Oh yeah, I was terrified. I was like, please don't ask that. I might, because I know he asked. Well, he asked Aaron Rodgers.
- [139:05]
A
Yeah.
- [139:06]
B
Which is crazy.
- [139:07]
A
Yeah. I, I literally heard the sound of my sphincter slamming shut.
- [139:11]
B
Like, what the, man?
- [139:13]
A
Like, I just tensed up and I was like, who wants that job?
- [139:16]
B
Like, whoa, job. That's jobs insanity.
- [139:20]
A
But man, I'll tell you, man, he, it was a really. He was very gracious and very direct and I tried to be too. And I told him, I'm like, look, the infectious disease thing, I get that. The middle class thing, I totally get that. The forever wars, I get all that. And then he's like, mike, do you understand 77% of the youth today wouldn't qualify to get into the armed forces? Do you understand what the crisis is we face right now? Nevermind. 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. They're not there. And if they are, they're hard to find. Do it today. They're impossible to miss. Something colossally horrible has happened. Anyway, he was very passionate about all that.
- [140:45]
B
Yeah.
- [140:46]
A
And I said, but it's an important message. It is an important message and it.
- [140:49]
B
Gets lost in this idea of being a compassionate person that allows people to just be their authentic self, you know, and there's nothing wrong with being fat. There's nothing wrong with being big. You're being lied to, okay? You're robbing your life of vitality. It's just, that's just the way it is. And I'm sorry if you're already there, but it doesn't help anybody to pretend that you're not there. And the only way we get out of this is we try to figure out what happened between 1960 and 20, 24. What happened in the. Well, we can figure it out. It's not Colombo. This is a fucking. This is like the evidence is all there. We know what the ingredients are that are bad for you. We know what we've done to the food supply. We know we've done. It's real, it's readily available. It's what you eat.
- [141:34]
A
When you say we, though, I mean.
- [141:36]
B
Human beings collective, the collective intelligence.
- [141:38]
A
What percentage of this country do you think understands, transformed.
- [141:42]
B
This is of the problem. And this is why it benefits to have something like that in office. Most people aren't aware of it. You know, I've had a lot of conversations with people. They have this really distorted idea of nutrition and what's important and what you need and. But what. 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.
- [142:10]
A
What do I want to take with D, by the way? Is it magnesium?
- [142:13]
B
You want to take magnesium and you want to K2. You want to take vitamin K, magnesium, and, you know, there's some arguments from other stuff too, that would also enhance it, but you definitely need vitamin D. Almost everybody does. And if you live in a cold climate in the wintertime, you know, a buddy of mine did his residency in, 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 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. Vitamin C is really important. Vitamin B is very important. Bunch of different Bs. You need essential fatty acids. They're very important. You need all these things. If you don't have these things, your body won't function right.
- [143:09]
A
Do you think that the basic fear and conversation around skin cancer and the lotions and the coverings and the sunscreens and, I mean, to what extent do you think people are not getting vitamin D because they've been scared out of the sun?
- [143:28]
B
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 you healthier, it'll fit 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 or a precursor to a hormone, I guess, if you take it orally. But what it's doing to your body, like Georges St. Pierre, when he was fighting, would tan, and he would tan specifically, not to look good, because it's actually better for your health and fitness. You get more vitamin D that way. Yeah. And there's a reality to that. That's why people 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. Again, overall, vitality. If you want to have strong vitality, you need to eat nutritious food and take vitamins, and you need to exercise. There's no if, ands, or buts about it. You need those three things 100%.
- [144:33]
A
No shortcuts.
- [144:34]
B
No shortcuts.
- [144:35]
A
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.
- [144:58]
B
Yeah.
- [144:59]
A
And so that's great.
- [145:00]
B
Yeah. Mike's a big proponent of that.
- [145:02]
A
Big time.
- [145:03]
B
Yeah.
- [145:03]
A
In fact, when Bobby called, it was funny. He's hard to understand sometimes. And 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, dude, I'm dying. I'm dying. I'm rocking. 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 do the Japanese call it? A misogyny, a quest or a challenge of sorts that you should. Well, you should challenge yourself to do every so often. And one of the criterion is you should have a 50% chance of failure. Right. So it's a real push into uncertainty and discomfort. And that's why I rock. It's Uncomfortable?
- [146:08]
B
Yes. 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 exercise is a real thing. 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? Remember, 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 cingulate cortex. That's what it is. Engaging in 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 lack enough voluntary adversity to overcome uncomfortable moments. So uncomfortable moments are rare. And when you encounter rare things, generally people, like, kind of have anxious moments, encountering rare things.
- [147:25]
A
Well, anxiety is a form of discomfort.
- [147:27]
B
Yes.
- [147:27]
A
And it's not just pain. It's not, you know, that's. I think most people equate discomfort or uncomfortableness with, like, physical pain. But the way Easter talks about it, it's. It's also boredom. Like, being bored makes people super uncomfortable because we're so not used to.
- [147:46]
B
Especially today.
- [147:47]
A
Especially today, you could pick this damn thing up and, you know, instant access to 99% of.
- [147:51]
B
You're robbing yourself of a lot of possible ideas.
- [147:54]
A
Sure. Yeah. Because the best ideas come where you bored. When you're bored.
- [147:58]
B
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 while I was driving. So instead of being entertained, I would just be, like, thinking. Like, you're constantly thinking.
- [148:11]
A
Yeah.
- [148:12]
B
You know, and when you're involved in, you know, ordinary activity like driving, where you're just so 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.
- [148:29]
A
Right.
- [148:29]
B
Because sometimes you come up with great ideas.
- [148:31]
A
Your. Your mind, your brain will find whatever you send it out to look for.
- [148:38]
B
Yeah.
- [148:38]
A
It'll just search and search until it finds it. And if you don't give it anything, then it'll look inward.
- [148:44]
B
Right.
- [148:45]
A
It'll find something. You know, cold plunges, not comfortable.
- [148:49]
B
Yeah.
- [148:50]
A
But you know, if you can find a way to, to like it.
- [148:54]
B
I don't like it.
- [148:56]
A
I don't like it at all.
- [148:56]
B
I do it every day. I hate it.
- [148:58]
A
Yeah.
- [148:59]
B
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.
- [149:06]
A
Right.
- [149:07]
B
It's cold outside, it's 40 degrees outside. I'm climbing this 34 degree water. But because I do it, I know that I've already done something way more difficult than most of my day.
- [149:18]
A
I think there's a difference in knowing what the benefits are of a cold plunge, which would require you to do some research and do some reading and do some thinking and so forth, versus just saying, okay, I know there's some benefit. I don't actually need to know specifically what it is. I just need to know that there's a, an overarching benefit in embracing the suck. Yeah, I need, 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's useful. That's been useful to me.
- [149:52]
B
That's useful. But it also is beneficial physically. So it's both things. And I think that's the case with exercise too. It's also the case with sauna. Difficult things that are also very beneficial physically. They seem to go hand in hand because it's the hormetic effect. Your body's freaking out because of the cold and that's why it produces all these cold shock proteins and that's why it produces all these anti inflammatories. Your body just feels better when you get out the endorphin rush. You get the norepinephrine. This flood of these chemicals that last for hours ramps up your dopamine by 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 you've got to go through that suck to get those benefits and people don't like that. And so they come up with a bunch of reasons why you don't need that. That's just a fad. That's just a. This. They all look like shit. Everybody says that. They all look like shit. They all talk like pussies. They're all just. They're cowards. They're afraid to get in there. They don't like getting in there. They don't like that other people get in there every day, and they don't get in there every day. So they come up with a reason why getting in there is not really worth. It's all a bunch of hogwash. It's the latest fad. It's this, that.
- [151:18]
A
And yet look at the stadium 50 years ago and look at it today.
- [151:22]
B
Yeah.
- [151:22]
A
The evidence demands a verdict. Something. Something awful has happened. It's like. It's like the difference between being hungry and feeling hungry, you know? That's something else I think about a lot. I mean, how often do we say, maybe you don't, but how often do you hear, God, I'm starving. I'm famished? Like, no, you're not.
- [151:45]
B
You're. You're really not.
- [151:47]
A
You can't possibly be.
- [151:48]
B
Yeah. Talk to a fighter that's trying to make weight. Those guys are famished. Those guys are. They have no water in their body.
- [151:55]
A
Yeah.
- [151:55]
B
For the week before. They're living in hell. They live in hell. Some of those guys, they start their cut, like, four or five days out. Crazy that. That's starving.
- [152:05]
A
You got a really long time.
- [152:06]
B
That's only your voluntary, voluntarily starving, you know, it's not real starving. Real starving is like, you might not be able to eat. You might not be able to feed your kids. You're just using 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 you're the wag, the wagon breaks.
- [152:26]
A
Donner party. Table for two.
- [152:28]
B
Yeah. And that's real starving. Real starving.
- [152:31]
A
Did you ever read as a book by Nathaniel Philbrick, it's called in the Heart of the Sea?
- [152:35]
B
No.
- [152:36]
A
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. And what happened was in. I think it 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.
- [153:09]
B
Jesus.
- [153:10]
A
Hunting right? Whales, which are just sperm whales.
- [153:13]
B
Years.
- [153:14]
A
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.
- [153:27]
B
Imagine how many whales there were before they started doing this.
- [153:30]
A
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. It's where they got the expression Steely Dan. Actually, it was. Because it was just the women and it was a device used for pleasuring because the men were all out to see.
- [153:54]
B
Oh, my God.
- [153:55]
A
So they'd use a Steely Dan.
- [153:57]
B
But you want to talk about hard.
- [153:58]
A
Lives, the business, whatever it takes to shoot the elk and get it down from the mountain, I get it. 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.
- [154:29]
B
So they're just making this rendered fat.
- [154:32]
A
They're rendering the fat in the oil in real time.
- [154:35]
B
Oh, wow.
- [154:36]
A
And.
- [154:36]
B
And because they have to or it'll rot.
- [154:38]
A
That's right. And so they just load up the boats.
- [154:41]
B
Wow.
- [154:42]
A
So what happens? And. And this is not really eating the whales too. No, no, no.
- [154:47]
B
What are they eating?
- [154:49]
A
Well, 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. Oh, it was the currency. You're used to anything, probably get 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. And what happens is that it's. It's. The ship is the main ship with the guys on it. And then when you see a whale, right, you basically put the whale boats in the water. And these are smaller, maybe 22ft 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. Jesus Christ. So the whale would just drag the.
- [155:43]
B
What if the whale goes under?
- [155:44]
A
It can't go under much further. Can't pull two boats down. And it doesn't. They tend to swim in a straight line after they've been harpooned. So you just hang on. And then when it tires itself out, you row it and you back to the whale ship.
- [155:58]
B
Do they kill it first?
- [156:01]
A
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.
- [156:09]
B
They didn't know how smart whales were back then either.
- [156:12]
A
We didn't know anything.
- [156:13]
B
But isn't that crazy that that's only a couple hundred years ago?
- [156:16]
A
18, 21.
- [156:17]
B
Isn't that nuts? Well, a couple hundred years ago, the ocean's filled with whales.
- [156:21]
A
Filled with them and like that.
- [156:24]
B
Because if you look now, they're hard to find and nothing hunts them. No, I never even really thought about it.
- [156:31]
A
They were everywhere.
- [156:32]
B
I mean, I knew about it, but I never thought about it. I never. I mean, we've talked a lot about the, the decimation of the fish population in the Ocean. About like 90 plus percent of all the big fish are gone.
- [156:44]
A
Yeah.
- [156:45]
B
Which is really nuts. But I never really thought about it that way. When it comes to whales.
- [156:49]
A
Well, you can make a really good and really controversial case.
- [156:52]
B
They made a movie. Ron Howard made a movie.
- [156:54]
A
Yeah, yeah. Ron Howard made a movie on this. Yeah. It's amazing. Look. I mean, they were everywhere. Wow. So these guys harpoon one.
- [157:03]
B
That's so crazy.
- [157:05]
A
From. From the whale boat, then they get tugged along.
- [157:08]
B
Look at all these whales.
- [157:10]
A
And 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.
- [157:27]
B
Oh, no.
- [157:28]
A
Sinks it.
- [157:28]
B
Oh, no.
- [157:29]
A
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 one of the whale boats is discovered not far from, I think it's Venezuela. And the guys look over the gunwale of their boat, and in the whale boat, it's just like a giant carcass. It's just bleach bones all in it, except for two quasi humans, one in the stern and one in the bow. Each skeletons huddled up, staring each other with wild eyes, just waiting to see who would die next so they could eat them. Yeah. And there were rules that were almost like cookbooks that were very common.
- [158:32]
B
How many people were on these boats?
- [158:34]
A
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 were dear friends and family. They lived together on Nantucket.
- [158:51]
B
And they ate each other.
- [158:52]
A
They ate each other, man.
- [158:54]
B
How long was it before they discovered them?
- [158:57]
A
They were at sea, adrift, I think, for the better part of three months. Winning the National. That's him. Nate Philbrook. Fantastic. In 1820, the whale ship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale, leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than 90 days in three tiny boats.
- [159:17]
B
When did this movie come out? 2015. For the movie. The manuscript was found in 1960, verified in 1980.
- [159:25]
A
Oh, yeah. You want to take a deep dive, go to the, like, the Whaling Museum up in New England. This stuff is this. I mean, in the day, there were strict protocols on how to eat your friend, how to prepare your friends for concession.
- [159:44]
B
Did they devise them on the spot, or did they have them prepared? They devised on the spot.
- [159:49]
A
There was what, the rules? No, no, they were written. It was like a maritime code.
- [159:55]
B
So they kind of knew that this was a possibility.
- [159:58]
A
They knew 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.
- [160:31]
B
Oh, boy.
- [160:32]
A
So, like, brothers are definitely off, but cousins. Not optimal. So, like, people were being prepared for consumption raw. I mean, I can't imagine how you would make a fire out there.
- [160:48]
B
Oh, my God.
- [160:50]
A
Unspeakable.
- [160:52]
B
Oh, my God.
- [160:53]
A
That's interesting. Owen Chase, right?
- [160:56]
B
The men spent over three months at sea and had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Captain Pollard and Charles Ramsdell were discovered gnawing on the bones of their shipmates in one boat. Owen Chase, Lawrence and Nickerson also survived to tell the tale. And all seven sailors were consumed.
- [161:13]
A
Whoa, dude. Boy, seat. This is why nonfiction is the best. I know, it's nauseating, but, I mean.
- [161:23]
B
That book, at a point in time, you gotta go, I might wind up in hell before I starve to death because I've eaten everyone else, right? Well, you're knowing you're starving to death and you've already eaten everyone else. Oh, my God. Because there's gonna be one last person.
- [161:41]
A
There's got to. And then there was one.
- [161:43]
B
Oh, God.
- [161:46]
A
I know, I know.
- [161:48]
B
Reality is so terrifying in that regard that we have. You know, we're so Fortunate that there's so much food available. The poorest amongst us are fat. But the reality is, if that cut off, it would be real desperate real quick. Most people get really hungry after five hours.
- [162:09]
A
You know, they feel really hungry.
- [162:11]
B
Description. If you'd like to. No. Okay. Okay. The crew, according to Chase, separated limbs from his body and cut all the flesh from the bones. After which we opened the body, took out the heart, and then closed it again, sewed it up as decently as we could and committed it to the sea. They then ate the man's organs. Soon they began to draw lots to see who would be shot and eaten next. A custom of maroon sailors dating back to the 17th century. Three men in one boat survived and two in another. The three men who remained behind on Henderson island were also rescued after surviving on eggs and crabs for nearly four months. Boy.
- [162:52]
A
And this is why we have Moby Dick.
- [162:54]
B
Wow.
- [162:55]
A
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. Yeah, had that not happened in Pennsylvania, in Titusville, yeah, not long after this, we'd have hunted them into absolute oblivion.
- [163:32]
B
Well, we almost did that to mammals. North America, market hunting. There used to be elk in every state in the country. There used to be deer everywhere. And we basically hunted them into oblivion. The buffalo is the best example of that, of course.
- [163:48]
A
What the hell is the matter with us, man?
- [163:49]
B
Oh, we're fucked up. We don't see consequences. We see what's in front of us right now and what we need to do. And back then, they didn't really have a real understanding of what would happen. That had never been done before. No one had just showed up at a continent filled with mammals and just started decimating them. There wasn't like a history of that. It was also the invent of the firearm was fairly recent, 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 used their tongues. They pickled their tongues and sent them back east bananas.
- [164:24]
A
I was in Custer a couple of weeks ago for a buffalo roundup. Oh, wow, man, this was a kick. This is. So this is western South Dakota, not far from Crazy Horse. And Rushmore, you know, we worked on Crazy Horse for Dirty Jobs. We did an episode.
- [164:46]
B
Mean, the sculpture.
- [164:47]
A
Yeah.
- [164:48]
B
Sculpture is weird because there's no real drawing or painting or anything. No photographs of Crazy Horse.
- [164:53]
A
No.
- [164:54]
B
Nobody knows really what he looked like.
- [164:55]
A
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.
- [165:12]
B
What does it look like now? I haven't seen it.
- [165:14]
A
You'll love this. It's. It's. It's so mind. But you can take all of Rushmore, all four heads, and put it on the forehead of Crazy Horse.
- [165:25]
B
Wow.
- [165:26]
A
That's how big this thing is.
- [165:28]
B
And wasn't it, like one family's undertaking?
- [165:30]
A
Yeah. Court Gorcheck, go to that last picture.
- [165:33]
B
That you just had, that one right there. So that shows before and after. It shows where it was a while back and where it is now.
- [165:40]
A
Look at it. Look at his finger in the lower. Right.
- [165:42]
B
That's what you worked on.
- [165:43]
A
Yeah. And I scaled down his forehead to do basically some tidying up of his nostrils and whatnot while we were there. It's.
- [165:53]
B
That's crazy how big that is.
- [165:54]
A
It's massive. It's absolutely massive. And, yeah, this. There was one guy, Korczak was his name, and he was an immigrant and he loved the Indian people. And that's. That's the model there at the right. Yeah.
- [166:10]
B
That's what it's gonna look like.
- [166:11]
A
That's what we're shooting for.
- [166:13]
B
Wow.
- [166:13]
A
And it's. It's. It's gonna take another half a century, probably.
- [166:17]
B
But that's incredible.
- [166:20]
A
You know, it's funny.
- [166:20]
B
It's very controversial and amongst Native American communities, though. Right.
- [166:25]
A
I don't know. It is. You know, I think there's some.
- [166:28]
B
There's a part of it is the thing that Crazy Horse didn't want to be photographed.
- [166:31]
A
Yeah.
- [166:32]
B
You know, he really believed that cameras were like.
- [166:35]
A
Stole your soul.
- [166:36]
B
Yeah. That was a belief back then. Sure.
- [166:39]
A
Wayne might be on.
- [166:41]
B
Well, you have this novel thing where no one's ever seen it before, and you take an image of someone 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.
- [166:57]
A
Yeah.
- [166:58]
B
To the population, just with diseases. Just bringing diseases.
- [167:02]
A
Yeah.
- [167:02]
B
So, of course they would say, what are they doing now? This is the fucking coup de Gras, they're gonna steal our soul with this fucking box. Big thing goes off, you got to stand still.
- [167:13]
A
This guy Korczak, he was so brilliant on so many levels. I think he had 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. Like, the work ethic is mind boggling what they did. And he was a real friend to the Native Americans, and this was a love letter for them and to them. And who was Crazy Horses? Was it Sitting Bear? Maybe I forget. But, you know, he. He had all of the. He had enough blessings of the requisite players to. To embark on this thing.
- [167:56]
B
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 what you.
- [168:06]
A
Do, but the difference, I mean, for me, I called when we brought. We brought dirty jobs back during the lockdowns because I just felt like I wanted to be. I wanted to be the first show back on the tv, you know, that was shooting, and this was one of the first things 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'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, right. I'm like, look, I think the Park Service does an amazing duty, and I want to meet the caretakers of our statuary, and I would love to work on this with the people who work on it. And they not only said no, they were like, are you crazy? We would never. We would never permit anything like that. Like, I think they thought it was exploitative somehow. And I'm like, I want America to learn the story of Rushmore. I want them to learn something about the people memorialized on it. I want them to meet the people who care for it. 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 anytime, man. And the difference, of course, was Crazy Horse isn't being built with a penny of federal money. It has no federal oversight it's very personal 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.
- [170:12]
B
Monumental in reality.
- [170:14]
A
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, more people will have just seen what Jamie put up here as a result of this probably, than we'll. Then we'll visit in person. And. That's amazing, dude.
- [170:42]
B
Yeah, that is amazing.
- [170:43]
A
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 roam was as far as you could see, just thick.
- [171:17]
B
Do you know Dan Flores? Do you know who he is?
- [171:20]
A
Tell me.
- [171:21]
B
He wrote American Coyote and he wrote. What is it? Buffalo diplomacy? Buffalo. Is that what it was? I forget. But the buffalo premise is very fascinating because the numbers of buffalo, he believes they were in such large numbers because so many Native Americans died out because 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. And 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 did they 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 population because they didn't have to worry about wolves. They didn't have to worry. So when they first were here. Right. Buffalo existed far back before 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 Dryas impact, which is a theory.
- [172:53]
A
The Cambrian thing, or was it.
- [172:54]
B
It's a 11. Well, there's two different time periods that they attribute to. There's a shower, an asteroid shower that we go. If you really want to get into this, you should really look up Younger Dryas 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. And you gotta 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 Bering land bridge. And things moved around. And when they. The mass extinction event happened, it killed off all the horses here. But then there was horses over there that they had kind of extirpated from America, brought them back in. And now Native Americans have horses. And so they are really effective at hunting buffalo. They get the numbers down to 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. This is what Dan Flores writes about. It's really interesting.
- [174:53]
A
1830, 40.
- [174:55]
B
You'd have to go to whatever.
- [174:57]
A
1850 is what it's. Yeah, here's the tragedy for me. I narrated a special about all that. I can't remember it, man.
- [175:08]
B
Really?
- [175:08]
A
I mean, I remember enough of it to know that I narrated it. That's what I would told you three hours ago. I'm.
- [175:14]
B
Is that the Ken Burns one? Is that what you could have been?
- [175:18]
A
Could have been. I know. If it was Ken Burns he always hires Peter Coyote. Oh, Peter does all of his stuff.
- [175:24]
B
He's great. Yeah.
- [175:26]
A
But I. That's what I meant earlier when I'm like, I feel. I don't think there's anything wrong with me yet, but my bucket's 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. And, you know, he knows all of the information in the show, but he thinks because he heard me tell it to him, that I know it, too, but I don't. I'm just adjacent to it.
- [176:02]
B
Right.
- [176:03]
A
I know just enough to, you know, to keep a conversation on its feet. But it's like, it's this constant thing, man. I'm older than I've ever been, and it's just nagging at me now because it's like, God damn it. I should know. I should remember more. I should have remembered more about Philbrick. I should have remembered more about.
- [176:26]
B
I don't think we're designed for it.
- [176:28]
A
I don't.
- [176:29]
B
And I think humans like yourself, this is kind of a new thing in terms of human history. People that are exposed to so many different things, so many different topics, so many different experts, so many different timelines and stories that you're dealing with. That's. It's essentially a new thing with human. Human beings. You know what Dunbar's number is?
- [176:50]
A
No.
- [176:50]
B
Dunbar's number is the number of people that you can keep, like, in your mind. Memory. In your memory. Right. That's essentially born out of necessity and tribal life. Right. So we essentially have the same brains and the same capacity, same hard drive as people who lived in tribes 10,000 years ago.
- [177:08]
A
Yeah.
- [177:08]
B
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.
- [177:18]
A
I read that, like, Bill Clinton's number is way high. Like, certain people's numbers.
- [177:24]
B
Oh. Who they can keep in their head.
- [177:26]
A
Like, the number of people you can. You can keep.
- [177:29]
B
It probably expands. Just like the part of your brand expands when you do difficult things. It probably expands.
- [177:34]
A
There's a podcast, as you know, dedicated to what happened on your podcast.
- [177:39]
B
I didn't know that.
- [177:40]
A
Yeah. There's a podcast out there, basically, called Experian. I don't know what it's called. Experiencing the Joe Rogan Experience or something. Because. Because there's too much information on your show.
- [177:50]
B
Right.
- [177:50]
A
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 docent to bring it back to art. This is what we need. I think more than anything today, we need somebody. Like if you're going to go to an art museum, you need somebody to lead you through. I do anyway. Somebody who can.
- [178:16]
B
It helps.
- [178:17]
A
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, if you're going to go to the Octagon, it'd be better to sit next to you than me, right?
- [178:30]
B
Sure. So everybody be annoying. I'd have to say. You don't? Okay. How much do you know why that hurts?
- [178:39]
A
Here, let me show you. Can you feel that? I'm just saying that I think more than ever before, people need a guide. They need somebody to 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 in ways.
- [178:59]
B
There's new information too.
- [179:01]
A
How can there be?
- [179:01]
B
Because information is acquired upon the consumption of all the other information. Like it's all exponential. It 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. You know, nutrition. There's constantly new information on nutrition. How's that possible? People have been eating forever because now we know more about it. So it is new information.
- [179:31]
A
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. But she would go, no, dude, that's old information. You're just learning it, right?
- [179:50]
B
But it's fairly new anyway. Because nutritional science has really only been around for what, 100 plus years. And the understanding of it today is far greater than at any other time in our life because of guys like Huberman, because of these different scientists that have dedicated themselves to educating people about nutrition. The process that your body goes through and it absorbs nutrients and what enhances that? Enzymes, different things that you eat.
- [180:17]
A
Let me say it this way. Then there's a body of information that exists that I don't know. And then there's a body of new information that I also don't know, because it's new, right? And the body of the stuff that I don't know yet that's been around forever is massive.
- [180:33]
B
Massive.
- [180:34]
A
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 library and look. I mean, just look at all that stuff, man. Look at this cursed thing here in my hand. It like, oh, my God. If I have an Internet connection, I have access to 98% of everything that we've ever known.
- [180:53]
B
Yeah.
- [180:55]
A
Now, that either makes you intensely curious or intensely uneasy, because now you know. Both, maybe, but you have it now.
- [181:04]
B
You.
- [181:05]
A
Like, like, if. If you're not, like, what are you doing? Like, you're sitting on the toilet. Are you. Are you reeling? Are you tick talking? Like, how are you spending the one truly finite resource? You have your time. What are you doing with it, man?
- [181:17]
B
Man, a lot of us getting distracted.
- [181:19]
A
Jesus. Yeah, but their stories, their buffalo stories and whale stories that are out there, man.
- [181:24]
B
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.
- [181:34]
A
For sure.
- [181:35]
B
Yeah, for sure. Make a living, Mike.
- [181:38]
A
Yes, yes, Joe, it is.
- [181:40]
B
That's what we've done.
- [181:41]
A
It's a pleasant living.
- [181:42]
B
Listen, man, it's been awesome talking to you. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.
- [181:46]
A
You know what?
- [181:46]
B
Three hours just flew by.
- [181:48]
A
I'm just. I mean, full disclosure, I'm. I'm kind of relieved now. 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.
- [182:03]
B
It's just a time thing.
- [182:04]
A
He'll call you one day.
- [182:06]
B
There's a lot of people out there. But. But I really did want to talk to you.
- [182:09]
A
Can I show you a truck before we go?
- [182:11]
B
Sure, sure.
- [182:13]
A
Because I know you're a car guy.
- [182:14]
B
Yeah.
- [182:15]
A
So this company called Sugar Creek up in Ohio made me a truck.
- [182:20]
B
Ooh, what kind?
- [182:22]
A
Well, it started as a 1964 Dodge Power Wagon. It ended up as this.
- [182:29]
B
Dude, I've seen that online. That's yours?
- [182:31]
A
That's mine.
- [182:32]
B
Oh, that's crazy. I love those old power wagons. Dude, that thing looks incredible. What a great job they did on that.
- [182:40]
A
It's unbelievable. 27. It's about 9,000 man. Hours.
- [182:45]
B
Oh, my God. That thing looks incredible. Oh, you got a helipan engine in it.
- [182:49]
A
1100 horsepower.
- [182:51]
B
My goodness. Look at that. So it's got a TRX hood.
- [182:54]
A
It's. It's. Wow.
- [182:56]
B
You will get. That's. That's great.
- [183:00]
A
I know.
- [183:01]
B
Oh, do you drive that?
- [183:03]
A
Barrett Jackson is going to auction it off.
- [183:07]
B
No.
- [183:07]
A
In january.
- [183:08]
B
Why?
- [183:09]
A
Because. Because my foundation needs money and. Right. So it's going to get a. I don't know what it'll go for. He says a bunch, but.
- [183:19]
B
Oh, that'll go for a lot of money, man. Yeah, that's probably going to go for half a million dollars at least.
- [183:24]
A
No, he says 2.
- [183:25]
B
2 million. $2 million.
- [183:28]
A
Probably cost half a million to make.
- [183:29]
B
Wow.
- [183:30]
A
Beats me. You know, this is another one of those worlds.
- [183:32]
B
Maybe auctions are crazy because a bunch of rich guys get in there and go, I want. And then they started feeding off each other. Look at this fucking thing. That's incredible. $2 million.
- [183:41]
A
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 them into these gems.
- [184:14]
B
Oh, wow.
- [184:15]
A
So he built this for me, and Barrett Jackson said, yeah, we'll auction it off. So I went up there with my crew just to look at it. Dude, these guys, man, it's what we're. It's.
- [184:24]
B
I would never be able to let that thing go.
- [184:26]
A
It's the art we were talking about. Yeah, It's. It's.
- [184:29]
B
That's.
- [184:29]
A
That's artistry.
- [184:30]
B
That's art. Yeah. Oh, 100. That's art.
- [184:32]
A
Yeah.
- [184:32]
B
Yeah, yeah. Mike, Appreciate you very much, man.
- [184:35]
A
Thanks for having me.
- [184:36]
B
Thank you for being here.
- [184:37]
A
A lot of fun.
- [184:37]
B
All right, Bye, everybody.
- [184:38]
A
See you.