#2235 - Mike Rowe

Mike Rowe is the creator and host of "Dirty Jobs," "Somebody’s Gotta Do It," and Facebook’s "Returning the Favor." He is also the CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, a nonprofit championing the importance of skilled labor and addressing the critical workforce gap, and host of the podcast "The Way I Heard It." www.mikerowe.com www.mikeroweworks.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  We got stars, we got coffee, we got Mike Rowe, we got Carl, Carl's over there snoring. So what were you doing on QVC? What are you selling?

• 0:23Speaker 02

  That was the greatest line from Blazing Saddles, by the way, when Gene Hackman.

• 0:28Joe Rogan?

  Which line?

• 0:29Speaker 02

  He says, "Cigars, remember? Peter Boyle is coming." He had just left and Gene Hackman is there after getting the soup spilled in his lap. And he's basically saying, "I had cigars," as the creature stomps off in Frankenstein.

• 0:45Joe Rogan?

  I don't remember that.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 0:47Joe Rogan?

  It's been too long since I've seen that movie.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Best, uh...

• 0:53Joe Rogan?

  He's a little bit of a fucking distraction. Can he calm down? I don't hear him on the... Trank him. I don't hear him at all. We hear him, because we don't have our headphones on. Maybe we should put our headphones on.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  I thought you were talking about me.

• 1:04Joe Rogan?

  No, Carl.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  For an awful moment, like, huh.

• 1:06Joe Rogan?

  We wore him out. Jamie was throwing the toy for Carl, and now he's...

• 1:12Speaker 02

  He's such a great dog. He's got, I mean...

• 1:15Joe Rogan?

  He's adorable.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  I mean, 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.

• 1:25Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he's got a lot of... Carl's got a lot of personality.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28Joe Rogan?

  There's no doubt about that.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and...

• 1:30Joe Rogan?

  He's like a little kid.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  And a person name, which I think is super interesting. Mine's Freddie. He's a terrier.

• 1:37Joe Rogan?

  I like a dog with a person name.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:39Joe Rogan?

  Like, Fido? What the fuck is a Fido?

• 1:41Speaker 02

  No one knows.

• 1:42Joe Rogan?

  Well, actually, oh, no, that's Philo. I was thinking of Clint Eastwood in Every Which Way But Loose. He was Philo Beddo.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Could also be Philo Farnsworth, who created the television.

• 1:52Joe Rogan?

  For real?

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54Joe Rogan?

  Did only one guy do it, or was it one of those, like, lightbulb-type deals where, like, a bunch of people are scrambling for it and...

• 1:59Speaker 02

  What do they call that? Like a, like a hive mentality.

• 2:03Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, yeah, right, right.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Like, that happened with the Integrated Circuit.

• 2:07Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Right? When Kilby at Radio Shack was doing the same basic work, I think, that Robert Noyce was doing for Intel.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:31Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Super, super strange, but that, you know, I don't know.

• 2:36Joe Rogan?

  That's a common thing with human beings and, and it's this concept of morphic resonance. Have you ever heard of that concept? Uh, Rupert Sheldrake, he wrote about this and the ideas and it's based on some actual facts too about, there's um, some real statistics about rats. Like if you teach a rat how to run a maze in, on the east coast, a rat on the west coast will run it faster.

• 3:04Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  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, he, this was his PhD. And he was talking about toxoplasma gondii and histoplasmosis. And it was a crazy paper. His, his real premise was trying to understand the phenomenon of the cat lady. And why, like, why, why, why every culture, like this isn't unique to America. In, 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.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  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, and basically breeds there. And what he learned was when the cats were crapping, the, the gondii would, would come out. And then the rats and the mice that ate the cat crap.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Something was happening to their brains on a neurological level. This Gandai 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 that that can have an effect.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  And a rat's brain and a human brain have a surprising number of 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 cat on her fingers and and ate it. And the Gandai disabled the part of her brain that said, hey, maybe two cats is enough.

• 5:41Joe Rogan?

  It's worse than that. It actually makes the rats sexually attracted to the smell of cat urine.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Exactly. Right.

• 5:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it actually makes them aroused.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Now, I don't know if Doris went that far.

• 5:53Joe Rogan?

  Have you ever seen them like run up to cats? The toxo-infected rats? It's bizarre.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:59Joe Rogan?

  They run right up to them. The cat's like, what the fuck is going on? The cats like bounce away from the rat.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  No, it's like it's like watching the Beatles at the Ed Sullivan Theater. You know, the people like, what are you, what's wrong with you people? Why?

• 6:10Joe Rogan?

  What's happening? Mass psychosis.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's super interesting.

• 6:14Joe Rogan?

  Do you know there's also a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims that test positive for toxo?

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Did not.

• 6:19Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  I read, and I think this-

• 6:33Joe Rogan?

  I got more of these too.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Look, I don't want to compete, I'm gonna lose, but you'll love this. You probably already know it.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Homeostatic risk and risk equilibrium and the unintended consequences, especially with motorcycle riders that emanate from safety protocols gone too far.

• 6:50Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  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 in 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, right? It's the same-

• 8:16Joe Rogan?

  Makes sense.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  It's, yeah, I mean, it's controversial, but I I understand it. It's why the most dangerous intersections-

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Have signs that tell you when to walk and when not to walk.

• 8:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  And have crosswalk, because you, it, the little man is walking, it says go. So you step off and there's the big blue bus and then you're, and then you're spattered. So yeah, the unintended consequences of following traditional safety protocols, you know, has, has always really been interesting.

• 8:46Joe Rogan?

  Well, it completely makes sense if you have a vehicle that's more able and capable, you're gonna probably drive it faster. And you're probably gonna take more risks, because it can do stuff. Like, I used to think, I, I used to have a Lexus SUV, this big boat Lexus, 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 this 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? This episode is presented by Searchlight Pictures' Wild Horse 9. Shortly before Chile's 1973 coup,

• 9:29Joe Rogan?

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• 10:12Joe Rogan?

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• 10:55Joe Rogan?

  guarantee that's drink AG one.com slash Joe. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right. Joe Rogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace.com slash Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code Rogan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The big car would just chill me out.

• 11:39Joe Rogan?

  I just get in that big old boat and I just.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 11:42Joe Rogan?

  The world was like quiet out there. It's nice and relaxed.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  I think it's a, I think it's a slightly different analysis. Like if, if you're going to adjust your behavior consciously to adapt to the, uh, to the externality, right? Like, you know, you're going to drive faster if you have a fast car because you know that's why the guy built the thing.

• 12:07Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  And it would almost be rude, right? It would be rude to drive a hot rod like a boat.

• 12:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  It's the unconscious things that you do, uh, when you assume or mitigate risk as a result of employing an externality that I think is, is just super interesting.

• 12:28Joe Rogan?

  It is interesting.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Well, cause if it's right, Joe, if it's right, what it does is it turns all the safety first protocols, not necessarily on their head, but this happened in Dirty Jobs. I did a whole special called Safety Third. Because, because safety isn't really first, not really, ever. And-

• 12:49Joe Rogan?

  Cause if it was, you would never get a lot of things done.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Well, you'd never get out of the studio.

• 12:53Joe Rogan?

  You would definitely never do construction.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Heck, no. No, you wouldn't do anything.

• 12:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  You, you wouldn't do anything. It's a, you know, I-

• 13:01Joe Rogan?

  How are you gonna move steel girders if safety's first? You'd be like, "First thing we should do is not move this fucking girder."

• 13:06Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:06Joe Rogan?

  This thing's too big.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  That's right. Look, I mean, for, 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 fifty mandatory safety briefings, whether it's mines, or confined spaces, or high spaces, or you know, lockout, tagout, all those protocols and procedures were, you know, 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,

• 13:52Speaker 02

  um, we all started getting hurt. I mean, not, nothing serious, but broken fingers and, you know, cracked rib and singed off my eyebrows and my eyelashes and, and mild concussions and things like that. I was like, "What the hell's happening?" What was happening is the, the safety experts in all of these mandatory meetings started to sound like, remember Charlie Brown's teacher?

• 14:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Mrs. Othmar. Wah, wah, wah. We were just falling asleep.

• 14:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  So, it was like, "Holy crap, we're in compliance, but we are not out of danger."

• 14:27Joe Rogan?

  Got it.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  And so, that begs the question, what, you know, what happens to a normal person who actually comes to believe, either on the job site, or, or just in life, that somebody else cares more about their well-being than they do? And it's like, that's when complacency rears its ugly head. So on Dirty Jobs, we just, it was just shorthand among the crew, but it was always "Safety third," which meant-

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Heads up, man. Keep your head on a swivel. You can be and you can be as compliant as you want. But in the end, if you don't want to fall off the bridge, that's it's kind of on you.

• 15:08Joe Rogan?

  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 the safety aspect to them and then you don't think about it as much? Because someone's supposedly looking out for you?

• 15:26Speaker 02

  How much do you think about proper driving technique when you're sitting in the back on your laptop? Or even up front next to it?

• 15:34Joe Rogan?

  Depends on who's driving.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 15:36Joe Rogan?

  If my if I was driving and my wife was in the backseat, she'd be paying attention a lot.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Shout out to your guy, what's his name? Ashton, who picked me up this morning. Excellent driver, man.

• 15:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, glad you're happy with it.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:00Joe Rogan?

  Responsibility.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:08Joe Rogan?

  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 fucked.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:21Joe Rogan?

  And you don't even think about it.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:23Joe Rogan?

  It's just a thing that's going on behind the scenes or, you know, out of your radar.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was it, man. It was.

• 16:30Joe Rogan?

  How did you get started in that? Like what? Who came up with the concept?

• 16:34Speaker 02

  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 that kind of storytelling was always kind of interesting to me. And I I freelanced for years, probably 20 years in the entertainment business, working.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Pretty much whenever I wanted on shows that I didn't care about at all. And I was, uh, 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, uh, had a pretty good balanced life, really. And then I was in, uh, San Francisco, working for a CBS on a show called Evening Magazine. You know, the show, it comes on after like, like the local news.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  And I was a host and I would go, um, every day, this is a cushy gig. Nobody watched the show, but it was fun to work on. It was, um, you go to museums, you go to wineries and then you throw to these wrapped packages. Right? It's all just, it's, if there's a three-legged dog in Marin overcoming a heart tugging case of canine kidney failure, you know, that, that was like an Evening Magazine story. We did these all the time.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  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, uh, electrical contractor by trade, but also a plumber and a steam fitter, pipe, he could fabricate, fix anything. He had that, 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 gonna 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, he basically said, dude, just get a different, you, you can be a tradesman. I know you're enamored of being a tradesman. Just get a different toolbox.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  So that's what got me into entertainment. And 20 years later, I, I had completely run amok. I had sung in the opera, I'd sold stuff on QVC.

• 19:14Joe Rogan?

  You sung opera?

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Eight years, man.

• 19:16Joe Rogan?

  Did you, were you classically trained?

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Not really.

• 19:19Joe Rogan?

  How did you get, how do you get involved in the opera scene?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Well, it's a weird, look.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:37Joe Rogan?

  Is an aria a song?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  An aria is a song. It's the... They're in an opera, most of the big moments are arias, right? And, and most of the arias are, you know, I mean, they're, they're sung by the main characters and there are lots of ones that you would recognize. And they're German, they're in Italian for the most part. Uh, this one was Italian. It was, uh, from La Boheme, which is just another version of Rent, essentially. But, uh, it was called The Coat Aria. And, uh, it was only two minutes long and it was in Italian. So I walked around Baltimore with, you remember the Sony Walkman?

• 20:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I remember. I had one of those.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  I had one too. And I listened to a guy named Samuel Ramey singing The Coat Aria, about two minutes and forty seconds. And the words didn't mean anything to me, but the sounds did. And I can carry a tune, so I just memorized the sounds. And then I crashed an audition for the Baltimore Opera, uh, in nineteen eighty-three.

• 20:43Joe Rogan?

  So no classic training at all, just a Walkman and a cassette?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd had a music teacher prior to that, like a, like a Mr. Holland type of guy, who actually changed my life. He kind of fixed a, 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 Barber Shoppers. He was like a legend in this weird world of a cappella singing. And he put me in a barber shop 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.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  And so my best friends and I, uh... We, we just started learning these ancient songs and singing for people, usually unsolicited.

• 21:42Joe Rogan?

  What kind of fucking dudes are you hanging out with that were interested in doing this with you?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Well, one of them is basically my producer, a guy called Chuck Klausmeyer, who I went to high school with, produces my podcast. And we still, we'll write unauthorized jingles for our sponsors and sing them in 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. Cause like way leads on to way.

• 22:09Joe Rogan?

  Right. So you knew how to sing.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  I could carry it too.

• 22:12Joe Rogan?

  So you had some experience singing, kind of?

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:15Joe Rogan?

  And then you decided you were gonna learn how to sing opera?

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Well, what really happened was I decided that my toolbox wasn't gonna 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, 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, a guy called Mike Geller, told me, he said, hey, so there's the Screen Actors Guild. There, at the time, there was AFTRA.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  And I'm sure you were part of both.

• 23:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  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, you were in.

• 23:28Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  So for me, it was easier to kind of fake my way into the opera than it was onto a sitcom. So my plan.

• 23:40Joe Rogan?

  This is all diabolical.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Well, I mean.

• 23:42Joe Rogan?

  It's a great plan. I mean, it's like, that kind of strategic thinking is very valid. You should be in the Navy or something.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Well, um, look, I was just, I was just trying to get a job.

• 23:52Joe Rogan?

  I know, but it's clever.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Well, there's always a stage door, right? I mean, there, there's always a back way in. And so I thought, you know, I memorized the aria. I, uh, I auditioned. I was stopped halfway through it by the musical director. Guy named Bill Yonutsi, who's like, uh, Mr. Rowe, you, uh, you have no idea what you're saying at all, do you?

• 24:16Joe Rogan?

  Cause you're saying the words wrong. You're just repeating the sounds.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I was singing it loud and I was singing it like I, like I understood what I was saying.

• 24:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  All I really understood was the repertory company was desperate for young men with low voices. I, I knew that. And so I kinda looked the part.

• 24:34Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  So, whatever. I got into it and my plan was to do, uh, 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? Hmm. 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.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  But when there's a full orchestra playing the hell out of Verdi or Rachmaninoff. And, and, and you're looking down on the scene and you're looking out at the audience. And the sound is just, it's just amazing.

• 25:32Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  And the girls. So like there, oh, there, there were, uh, 80, 80 people, I guess, in the rep 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.

• 26:08Joe Rogan?

  You were the belle of the ball.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  And I'm dressed like a Viking. Or a pirate.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  And I'm going on stage and I'm I'm a fake. I mean, I admit it. I I I barely learned the language enough to kind of keep up and people in the in the chorus took pity on me, you know, and it was a world, really. It was 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.

• 26:46Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  And that were maybe more interesting than I thought. And so I stayed for eight years.

• 26:51Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  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 eighty eighty-three to ninety.

• 27:10Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, Christ, since we're talking, well, it was a Sunday and during the intermission of something, I think it was the Ring des Niebel Lungen, 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 rabbit, killed a what? It's that one, right?

• 27:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Um, so there's an intermission and I'm I I'm not needed on stage for like forty minutes after the intermission. So I go across the street to the Mount Royal Tavern to drink a beer and watch the football game, dressed as a Viking, which I which I recommend, by the way. Would you like, would you walk in a bar with the horns and the spear? The bartender knew me. Everybody laughed and I 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. 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.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  QVC was doing a national talent search. Anyway, uh, 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.

• 29:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Was he mad?

• 29:03Speaker 02

  The bartender?

• 29:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that you got the gig?

• 29:05Speaker 02

  You know?

• 29:06Joe Rogan?

  Because he didn't even know about it.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Well, it's a good question. I, I don't know what became of him. Um, we had a friendly-

• 29:13Joe Rogan?

  He's probably got a fucking voodoo doll of Mike Rowe. Got a bunch of pins in it.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  We 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. We're like people pretending to be actors, trying to find work. 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, um, 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, um,

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Like, there's no playbook to see who can sell stuff on TV, you know?

• 30:05Joe Rogan?

  Do you have a script, or are you just kind of like, you have this fax about the pencil?

• 30:09Speaker 02

  No, no, nothing. Nothing. Here's what happens. Again, it's probably changed today. I think UVC 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...

• 30:33Joe Rogan?

  Look at you.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Oh, Jesus. That's the cat sack right there, dude. That's a sack for your cat.

• 30:39Joe Rogan?

  What are you selling? Let me hear this. A sack for your cat? What the fuck?

• 30:44Speaker 03

  It's just crazy. They just love it. That's why this is a cat toy.

• 30:49Joe Rogan?

  So the cats play with it?

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, they crawl inside it.

• 30:52Joe Rogan?

  And they just go nutty because it makes a lot of noise? Yes, $25. That's $25?

• 30:58Speaker 03

  And they'll just roll around and sort of wrestle with the bag.

• 31:05Joe Rogan?

  So this is like, sort of just personality, fucking around, having fun with the toy, and selling it?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Well, that's what I did. Look, remember...

• 31:16Joe Rogan?

  That's what you did. Was that novel, that you were doing it that way?

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:20Joe Rogan?

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• 32:00Joe Rogan?

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• 32:43Joe Rogan?

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• 32:58Speaker 02

  In relative terms, like that was actually one of the great, one of the, one of the true great life lessons, you know? You, you don't have to be outrageous to stand out. You just have to be relatively outrageous. So QVC was a steady diet of, of men and women.

• 33:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Doing the same exact thing all the time.

• 33:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  And then at midnight or 3 a.m. I showed up and put a cat bag over my head or busted open a lava lamp.

• 33:29Joe Rogan?

  So you were like a morning DJ.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Kind of, except.

• 33:33Joe Rogan?

  Right? Because they're kind of fun and that was different than the regular radio guy.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  You know, I would, I mean, for me, I thought of it more like, um, like my favorite comedians. And by the way, I, I saw one last night. Thank you. Ron White was over at the mothership.

• 33:52Joe Rogan?

  He's there tonight, too.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  I stopped by last night.

• 33:54Joe Rogan?

  Are you around tonight?

• 33:55Speaker 02

  No, I gotta get back tonight. Something about Thanksgiving, but I watched his set last night.

• 33:59Joe Rogan?

  He's awesome.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  He was, he was great. And the thing I love.

• 34:02Joe Rogan?

  He's never been funnier. He's, he's in top form right now.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  And he's gone, he's gone full Messiah, dude. He's, I mean, I didn't recognize him.

• 34:09Joe Rogan?

  Oh, with the look?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  He said hello and I'm like, hey, how are you? I mean, you're back. Jesus, good to see you. Um, he was great. And, 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.

• 34:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:57Joe Rogan?

  But you intuitively knew something.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  I knew in the middle of the, like, everything that it turned out that I needed to know about this crazy business, I learned in the middle of the night on the QVC cable shopping channel over a three-year period, trying to make sense. So, three hours at a time, usually, over the course of 24 hours.

• 35:23Joe Rogan?

  So, you would be on three hours at a time?

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:27Joe Rogan?

  Would you come back again, or would you only do three hours?

• 35:30Speaker 02

  I do three hours, and I go home, and, I mean, have you done overnights before?

• 35:35Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  So, I guarantee you, there are a lot of people listening who have worked an overnight shift in their trade, in their vocation.

• 35:44Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  It changes you, just as surely as Doris the Cat Lady's brain was scrambled by the Gandhi eye and the Toxo. It does something.

• 35:54Joe Rogan?

  Your circadian rhythm, yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  It's not just that. It is that, but 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, cuz I'd 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 3:00 in the morning. Trying to make sense of the health team infrared pain reliever. And the Amcor negative ion generator. Like, what the hell? Like, and-

• 36:33Joe Rogan?

  Did they give you a rundown of what these products were at all?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  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 gonna be selling and you could take the time to prepare.

• 36:49Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  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, all the stuff, right? But it was just a blue card. And then you would kinda go off and think about how you would make sense out of this skull. Uh, and where it came from and why it's interesting and you'd- It's feature benefit selling, you know, and if you understand that, you can talk about anything for as long as you need to. You know, you never talk about a feature without talking about its benefit. And so that's kinda how that world worked.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  So, you don't say it's a pencil for 99 cents, you say it's a, it's a yellow number two pencil.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  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. 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?

• 38:26Speaker 02

  So you just, it's like, train yourself to fill dead air with nonsense.

• 38:33Joe Rogan?

  While you're fucking up your circadian rhythm.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. What, while you're wondering, like- When your next meal is and who you're gonna have it with. And you wind up making friends and essentially hanging with with other people who live in that same weird like shadow land.

• 38:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, shadow land. That's a good way to put it. I have kind of an experience with overnight, but it's not the same. I delivered newspapers. And so, uh, at least one day a week on Sunday, I would basically show up Saturday night at three in the morning.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:07Joe Rogan?

  Cause you would, I would deliver Sunday papers and the Sunday papers were, it was a huge under, you'd flip the top.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Oh, I forgot to flip the top.

• 39:15Joe Rogan?

  Flip the top and then hit the button. There you go. Hit it again. There you go. Um, and so I was all fucked up from that. I would get up every day at five o'clock in the morning. Uh, normally to deliver papers cause I had a large route.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:29Joe Rogan?

  It was my way to make money without having to do a job where I had to listen to anybody.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  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 gotta 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.

• 39:54Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  You know, you're making progress. You know the progress you're making. As you make it.

• 40:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  You know, it's.

• 40:02Joe Rogan?

  You know, you only have a hundred and twenty houses to go.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  That's right. And then it's a hundred and ten. And then it's like.

• 40:08Joe Rogan?

  And then it's go to Dunkin' Donuts, get yourself a nice donut and a coffee, reward yourself, day's over. Yeah. My day would be done work wise by, you know, eight AM, nine AM on a Sunday. Nine, nine was rough.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:23Joe Rogan?

  Occasionally they would make enormous Sunday papers. They'd 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 three hundred and fifty Sunday papers in the back of that van.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  But see, you remember and you knew. Three hundred and fifty, that's an interesting number.

• 40:47Joe Rogan?

  I had bigger routes, but three fifty was manageable.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  How old, how old were you?

• 40:51Joe Rogan?

  I started when I was just driving. So I was in high school still. So I think I started delivering papers when I was seventeen or eighteen, whatever the legal age they allow you to do it.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:04Joe Rogan?

  So it was probably seventeen or eighteen. I started driving and I drove till I was twenty-two. I just started doing stand-up comedy. I drove all throughout my competitive martial arts career. I drove in the morning. It was good because it gave me discipline. Cause I had to do it seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five 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 it, if they did delay it, you would just, it would delay your delivery of the paper. So you'd have to call the depot, you know, hey, are we delivering yet? Cause they didn't want to be responsible. It was a blizzard for people dying and get lawsuits.

• 41:47Joe Rogan?

  So they, they didn't make you deliver papers if it was unbelievably bad out. But for the most part, you drove every day.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  So you had, you had a sense of consequence too?

• 41:57Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Like you, you know.

• 41:58Joe Rogan?

  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. You had plastic bags, you're great, because you could chuck them out the window and it never damaged the paper. Rubber bands were a real pain in the ass. Cause you could hit a corner on the concrete, it would rip the corner of the paper and then the customer would complain. Cause they're trying to read about what's going on in Syria and then there's this fucking broken piece of paper. I delivered the New York Times only because it was cool. Like I delivered the Boston Globe, because that was the biggest distribution. Like I could get the biggest route. And then the Boston Herald, because I wanted more papers to deliver, so I'd do two papers.

• 42:44Joe Rogan?

  And then the New York Times. The New York Times is a pain in the ass, because it would be like one every ten blocks. You'd have an enormous route. If you had a hundred and fifty New York Times, that's an all-day excursion.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Did you start to equate the type of home you were delivering the type of paper to?

• 43:01Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yes. The New York Times people took themselves very seriously. They were very serious people. They would ask me what I'm doing with my life. I remember this lady, I was, 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, uh, you know, she's asking me, I was like, what are you good, what are you gonna, 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.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Hmm. Yeah, it makes people uncomfortable.

• 43:29Joe Rogan?

  She liked me, but she didn't like that I had no idea. She was like very motherly to me, I guess.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  It's funny, we had the, uh, 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, uh, 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.

• 44:00Joe Rogan?

  And you lay the newspaper out.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  But which one, Joe?

• 44:03Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Which one?

• 44:04Joe Rogan?

  It matters.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know why it does.

• 44:07Joe Rogan?

  So, is it disrespectful to use the paper of note?

• 44:10Speaker 02

  No.

• 44:11Joe Rogan?

  No, it's better.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  No, it's, it's, I think it's a mark of respect. It's like, oh, we're having crabs, get the News American.

• 44:18Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, oh, that's so silly.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Get, 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 J O number two and the National Bohemian Beer, and maybe you can glance down and get, get informed as you go.

• 44:32Joe Rogan?

  Isn't it interesting that there are newspapers like that, right? Like, there's the New York Post, you want a fun headline.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:39Joe Rogan?

  You know, you want all the crazy shit, like, what happened? Who got pregnant?

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:42Joe Rogan?

  You know, what's going on with this? What's going on with that? And then you have the New York Times where, you know, it's important to put tampons in the boys' room. It's like, like, what is, what is happening?

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Have you ever walked through the, the offices of the Post?

• 44:56Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Any chance?

• 44:57Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Dude, it's amazing. It's amazing. I had a, uh, old girlfriend whose sister worked there, worked for, uh, Page Six.

• 45:07Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:09Joe Rogan?

  That's the fun one.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so much fun.

• 45:11Joe Rogan?

  So that's like all the gossip and the craziness and this person's getting arrested and...

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 45:16Joe Rogan?

  Drunk driving and hookers and...

• 45:19Speaker 02

  They have a hallway. It's like this place in the sense that there's so much on the walls, but it's all front pages, and it's the best headlines.

• 45:27Joe Rogan?

  Ah, so it's the best ones they've ever... Come up with.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  The best ones ever, starting with the classic, um, headless body found in topless bar. Which is still tough to beat.

• 45:37Joe Rogan?

  That's great.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  But so many of them.

• 45:39Joe Rogan?

  I love the post.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:41Joe Rogan?

  I've always loved the post. I love the, uh, just the fun nature of the news. That was like the working person's newspaper.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Before he sells the thing. That's how I felt reading the post. It was like, these guys. Somehow I'm imagining a meeting.

• 46:08Joe Rogan?

  Laughing.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  They're laughing, their cigars, and they're all in on the joke.

• 46:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  They're like, yeah, we're gonna report the news, but, you know, 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.

• 46:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  You know, how could, whether you're publishing a paper or eating a blue crab.

• 46:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  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 their, from your friends.

• 46:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  That's the, that's the trick, man.

• 46:51Joe Rogan?

  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, very smart people, keep up to date.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. I said to, uh, Ashton, your very excellent driver, who brought me here, uh, I said, uh, you know, it's been fun, um. 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, no, I take it back. What's been fun is watching, uh.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  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, to watch people realize, oh, we're, we're gonna do it this way now. You know, we're gonna do it this way now. And, and, and that's been, whether it's comedy, or whether it's music, you know, it's, when culture changes, it feels like there's some instigator, some jagged little pill who's pushing it forward. And I guess maybe that's, that's true. But I also think there's this, this larger hive mentality in the audience.

• 48:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:25Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you make-

• 48:33Joe Rogan?

  I enjoy it.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Good.

• 48:35Joe Rogan?

  I'm a curious person, and I like talking to people. But that's, it's real simple.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's just 'cause it's simple, right? You make it sound like a parenthetical. Oh, it's just a conversation.

• 48:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  That's only just the hardest thing there is to do.

• 48:49Joe Rogan?

  But it's not really. It's not-

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Then why don't more people do it?

• 48:53Joe Rogan?

  Because they don't enjoy it. They don't enjoy it like I enjoy it. Like, some people genuinely don't like talking to people. You know why? Because they're interested in themselves.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 49:03Joe Rogan?

  You have to be interested in other people. I think we're all connected. I really firmly believe this in a non-hippie way. I think it's like a scientific reality. I mean, if, I think if we could figure out a way to study it, we would recognize that we were psychically all connected in some strange way. And I, I am curious as to how someone from, with a, a different biology, uh, 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-

• 49:44Joe Rogan?

  Painting, what, what, what made you start writing music like I'm interested?

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:49Joe Rogan?

  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 could have the same exact conversation if we're having dinner somewhere.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 50:02Joe Rogan?

  Same conversation. Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:18Joe Rogan?

  I think that's what it is.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  You're probably right.

• 50:20Joe Rogan?

  Got lucky. I think I just got lucky and I found a job that I would be doing anyway.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Well, here's what I don't understand. And maybe this is not even relevant, but we did 350 dirty jobs. Probably 60 some of this thing called Somebody's Got to Do It. I don't even know. Returning the Favor. I think we did 100 episodes of that. I 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?

• 50:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Like, if I could remember every episode of How the Universe Works, 10 years of this stuff. If, if, if I could remember half of what I narrated.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  That would be something. Um, I can remember a chunk, but my sense is that. Like, I can't even remember the last 20 guests I had on my podcast. And, 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.

• 51:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  So you just talked to Josh Brolin.

• 51:33Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  And then you talked to the musician guy, Storch?

• 51:37Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, right?

• 51:37Joe Rogan?

  Scott.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, Scott.

• 51:39Joe Rogan?

  Storch.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  And then before that, our friend Evan was in.

• 51:42Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Right? So, like, I have a better.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  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 i- if sometimes you get over your skis to the point where you where you've started to forget what you've done yourself.

• 52:03Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, there's no way to keep it all. Um, uh, I have a bucket that's overflowing with information. It's overflowing. My, 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.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Is it conscious? Like, can you choose to be interested in a thing enough to know that you're not gonna forget it? Or does the interest just kind of bubble up and certain things stick to you?

• 52:42Joe Rogan?

  The interest bubbles up and they stick. Yeah, totally. Yeah, like, my, my daughter asked me a question the other day. I don't even remember what the question about, but it's a very technical thing. And I said, no, that's not exactly it. It seems like that, but this is the reason why. And they figured this out because of this, and I started rattling off. And she's like, how the fuck do you know this? She was laughing. And I was like, I don't know everything. I forget things. I forget my own birthday. But I do remember things that 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.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:19Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  I did.

• 53:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  But ten 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.

• 54:00Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's a big, giant difference between being a former competitor. And, and also like dedicated decades of my life to martial arts. It's not as simple as like, I go and I do commentary. Like, I started doing martial arts when I was fifteen and it changed my life. It, 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 fifteen years old. And so we were traveling all over the country. And so my social life from like fifteen to twenty-one was completely retarded.

• 54:45Joe Rogan?

  It was like, retarded as in slowed down, like the, 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, I had my own school by the time I was twenty.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Taekwondo?

• 55:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  So this is my point. You take a deep dive. When you get interested in a thing.

• 55:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  You go into the thing. Comedy wasn't a hobby. It became, I think, as important.

• 55:31Joe Rogan?

  It becomes everything.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  It becomes everything. Almost nothing I do becomes everything.

• 55:36Joe Rogan?

  Nothing?

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Almost nothing.

• 55:37Joe Rogan?

  But what are the things? What becomes everything?

• 55:40Speaker 02

  I'm not sure yet. Let me think about it.

• 55:42Joe Rogan?

  Is there one thing that if you have like free time, you super look forward to doing?

• 55:48Joe Rogan?

  Like, do you have a hobby? Do you play golf?

• 55:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 55:50Joe Rogan?

  Nothing?

• 55:50Speaker 02

  I don't have hobbies and I don't collect things.

• 55:52Joe Rogan?

  No hobbies?

• 55:52Speaker 02

  No, no hobbies.

• 55:53Joe Rogan?

  Nothing?

• 55:53Speaker 02

  I don't collect things.

• 55:54Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  I don't, I, I own very little. I never have owned much.

• 55:58Joe Rogan?

  I wish I had a hundred lives to live simultaneously. I would have, I would do a hundred different things.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:12Joe Rogan?

  My late great friend Anthony Bourdain, his headline, uh, his bio on Twitter, it said enthusiast. And I really wish that I'd come up with that, cause that's what I am. I'm an enthusiast. I would, I wouldn't say it now, cause I'd rip him off. And also now my bio says dragon believer, cause the...

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Congratulations on that. The ladies have the view.

• 56:33Joe Rogan?

  They said I believe in dragons. She triple checked.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  It was great.

• 56:36Joe Rogan?

  She triple checked, Mike.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  It's gotta be true.

• 56:38Joe Rogan?

  But, and I'm an enthusiast. That's what I am. I am a person who, uh, is very fortunate and that I have a love of a lot of things.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Well, you and Tony were similar, obviously, in that way. Um, he took big bites. He took big swings.

• 56:55Joe Rogan?

  Well, we became good friends when he really got into jujitsu.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:58Joe Rogan?

  Cause I kinda got him into it and then his wife really got him into it. But he started going to the UFC. Uh, his wife was training in jujitsu and she got really into it. She was really loving it. And then she was like, let's go to the UFC. 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. It's the coolest fucking thing in the world.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  It's gotta be.

• 57:18Joe Rogan?

  Cause you go to dinner with him and all the chefs freak out.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:20Joe Rogan?

  And so they just wanna feed you.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:22Joe Rogan?

  You know, they just wanna like, don't touch the menu. We got you. And they come over and bring food and, you know.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  I wrote, uh, a eulogy for him that crashed my website.

• 57:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Um, it's really funny. I only, I met him twice and, uh, 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.

• 57:51Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was on in six.

• 58:04Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  For sure, Dirty Jobs went on in oh-three.

• 58:08Joe Rogan?

  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 with this like, real fascination with people and cultures and just really loved it. He just loved going to Vietnam. He loved going wherever he could go. He loved to eat their street food. He loved to talk to them. He really wanted to know what these people were all about, you know?

• 58:46Speaker 02

  I've never, with the, this'll sound vainglorious, 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.

• 59:14Joe Rogan?

  What was your show?

• 59:15Speaker 02

  It was called Somebody's Gotta Do It.

• 59:16Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's right, that's right.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  It followed Dirty Jobs.

• 59:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 59:39Joe Rogan?

  Mm.

• 59:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:00:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  I've never seen that like that before.

• 1:00:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  And then that never mind the award, yeah, Peabody, it was the Peabodys that got me, actually. I don't, who cares about the Emmys? They're easy, but geez, he was just one Peabody Award after the next.

• 1:00:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  And it wasn't a hu- the audience wasn't as big as people think, but they were engaged.

• 1:00:20Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:00:31Joe Rogan?

  But 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.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  I see.

• 1:00:43Joe Rogan?

  It was an unbelievable lineup. And if you got lucky, you were Sex and the City or the Single Guy. And what Paul Sims, the producer of news radio, would call a shit sandwich. Because you had your brilliant show, and then your terrible show, and then another brilliant show, and then another terrible show.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:57Joe Rogan?

  But if you got in those time spots, oh, boy, you got a good spot, because people are gonna just keep tuning in. They didn't tune in for news radio. News radio wasn't really successful after it was off the air.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  You were in the slipstream.

• 1:01:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  You, you were in the orbit.

• 1:01:10Joe Rogan?

  Well, we weren't owned by NBC, so it was a different production company. It was Pearlstein Grey. So, they didn't have a vested interest in us being successful. So,

• 1:01:21Joe Rogan?

  the, 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.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Joe Rogan?

  And one day it was eighty-eight. And I was like, for real? He's like, yeah. I was like, oh, no.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  With a bullet.

• 1:01:36Joe Rogan?

  We thought we were gonna 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 John 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 us sell it at like ninety-eight episodes. That was like our show. It's like, we were always like barely hanging on. You know, it was just, we, it was a funny show, it was a really good show with talented people.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  I loved that show.

• 1:02:07Joe Rogan?

  The people I was super lucky to work on, and it ruined me, because I could never work on another show after that.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  What, what did you, what was the big?

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Lesson from News Radio.

• 1:02:17Joe Rogan?

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• 1:03:23Joe Rogan?

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• 1:04:06Joe Rogan?

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• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  If there was one for you.

• 1:04:42Joe Rogan?

  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 gonna lock you up for like, three years for like, $500." It was crazy, ridiculous, bad money. He said, "I'm gonna take your tape and tell all these other production companies that MTV wants to sign a deal with you, and 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.

• 1:05:27Joe Rogan?

  Like, some guy called me from Universal. I was like, "What? What the fuck is going on in this shitty apartment on my way out the door to play pool? And this guy's telling me he wants me to get on a flight that night. We have a flight at 10:00 PM, leaving out of LaGuardia." I was like, "What are you talking about?" And so then I called my manager. "This guy just fucking called me from..." He goes, "Don't answer your phone." He's like, "Go play pool. Get out of here. I'll take care of it." Next thing you know, I was in Hollywood. It was like, that quick. And I was on a show called Hardball. It went six episodes. And the only reason why I stayed in California, I wanted to go back to New York. I hated it. I hated actors. I just couldn't deal with being around these weirdos. They were these weird, phony people. They would say, "Good to see you," because they couldn't remember if they met you. So instead of saying, "Nice to meet you," and fucking up, and go, "I'm sorry I met you. I'm sorry I fucked up."

• 1:06:12Joe Rogan?

  They didn't want to be real. So everyone said, "Good to see you." Everyone was good, and it was super unsincere. I was like, "This is so weird." It was a super uncomfortable experience. And it was the worst experience on a show, because the people that ran the show, Jeff Martin and Kevin 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 cancelled. The only reason why I stayed is because I had a lease. So I got a nice apartment. I'm like, the first apartment I ever had. I was like, "I thought I was gonna be on TV forever. Like, this is gonna be easy." And now, fuck, I gotta get out of here. I wanted to go back to New York. I thought about... Breaking my lease, but then NBC contacted me and they said, we have the show.

• 1:06:57Joe Rogan?

  Uh, it's called News Radio and we're recasting one of the, one of the roles. Do you want to come in? And so I came in and auditioned for it and the next thing you know, I'm working with Phil Hartman. It was bizarre.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  From the kids from Second City.

• 1:07:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he was brilliant. Dave Foley, by the way, was the secret producer of News Radio. Cause he would, they would give him full autonomy. So he would completely rewrite scenes. Like on the spot, come up with punchlines for everybody. And we all did that for everybody. Like we would all come up like, maybe you should say this, maybe you should that. It was like super collaborative. So just fortune, complete utter good fortune. Cause I had friends that were on terrible sitcoms and they were living in hell.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're in on the joke.

• 1:07:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it was fun. It was really fun, but it was just fortunate. I could have easily never, never done any of those things, easily.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  I thought for years that really a sitcom had to be the best gig in the world. To, to have to do a, basically to do a play every week.

• 1:08:21Joe Rogan?

  If it's a good sitcom.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  If it's a good sitcom.

• 1:08:23Joe Rogan?

  But if it's a bad sitcom, it's hell.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:08:25Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:08:33Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  That's what I'm getting at. See that it's the. For me, it came down to that. I finally got a chance to do one. Um, I played Tim Allen's younger brother on Last Man Standing for a turn.

• 1:09:03Joe Rogan?

  I never saw that show. That was a weird one, right? Cause they got mad at him because he was right wing.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:07Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy. Didn't they cancel it?

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  It was their number one show and they canceled. Then Fox picked it up.

• 1:09:11Joe Rogan?

  That's so nuts. They canceled it because they didn't like his politics.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:17Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  That mean that's, that basically happened to Dirty Jobs too.

• 1:09:21Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's, it was mind boggling, but, but the point was, I finally got a chance to.

• 1:09:28Joe Rogan?

  I don't wanna gloss over that. I wanna come back to that. Cause I wanna hear that.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Alright, yeah, yeah. No, 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, what didn't you love? And really, the only thing I loved was, was seeing people who loved each other and being welcomed into their little world.

• 1:09:58Joe Rogan?

  The clan.

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:09:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Everything, like the idea that somebody else is writing lines for me, I know that sounds impossibly arrogant, but I was so used to nobody writes for me. Dirty Jobs was truly unscripted. Everything I ever did, there were never any lines.

• 1:10:16Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so that's an alien experience for you?

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I had done plenty of plays as a kid and stuff, but that's different, you know, that's a, that's different. The, once you're in Hollywood and once you're sort of in the machine, it, 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'd been prior to that and how, here, you want this? And, and how. Crap, man. You know, a thing can live in your mind so much bigger than it is in, in reality. And so while I love doing it for that week, I said to my business partner over at that,

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  this thing that I used to think of as the single most efficient way to make a living was so wildly inefficient. Are you, 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.

• 1:11:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Completely different experience in that way. It's a collaborative, fun time and you do become like a little bit of a strange family. You know, we all hung out together and drunk together.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  And that's important, you know?

• 1:11:28Joe Rogan?

  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. He was like a super sweet guy when you meet him in real life. And then he was Jimmy James.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  My stapler.

• 1:11:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he becomes, did you see, what was that one? Coen Brothers had some Netflix thing, a Wild West Netflix thing. He played on that. He was fucking genius.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  Wasn't he in Oh Brother?

• 1:12:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he was in, I think he was in Oh 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, 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 of a sudden I'm on a show. It was like just fortune. I auditioned for two shows ever and I got both of them. Those are the only two shows I ever auditioned for.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  What was the other one?

• 1:12:33Joe Rogan?

  Hardball, the first one that I went for. That was terrible.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Joe Rogan?

  That was the baseball show. That got canceled. And then I auditioned for news radio. So it was, it was nuts. It was just, I was just stepping in shit every step of the way. Didn't make any sense.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:12:55Joe Rogan?

  I know.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  His, uh, his former assistant turned out to be his wife later, uh.

• 1:13:00Joe Rogan?

  How's that work?

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  Nicole Taylor. That's, man, they're, they're living great. They live up in the hills somewhere.

• 1:13:05Joe Rogan?

  I mean, how's, how's it work with your former assistant?

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Oh, dude.

• 1:13:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, how's that work?

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  That, that, that's none of my business.

• 1:13:10Joe Rogan?

  That's a dangerous undertaking.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  She called me one day and I was in my, in my full-on freelance world. I hadn't had a job since, since QVC. So this is like 1999 and she says, I just want to, I just want to send you out for, for something. Cause I know you're gonna book it. And I said, well, actually, I, yeah, I could use a gig. So she sends me out, uh, 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, uh, she says, this guy from, uh, Nashville, Michael Orkin was his name, who I had worked with years earlier, not Nashville, Memphis.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Uh, he was hosting, or, uh, 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, 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.

• 1:14:34Joe Rogan?

  And there was no conflict of interest?

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:14:36Joe Rogan?

  Like you, you were totally negotiated both of them at the same time?

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Joe Rogan?

  Wow, that's cool.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, um, Nicole switched agencies and I, and I, and I never really had an agent, you know? Prior to that.

• 1:14:48Joe Rogan?

  That's fortunate.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  Or since. Super fortunate.

• 1:14:51Joe Rogan?

  Financially, it's great.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  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, 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?

• 1:15:21Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. My mother's a savage.

• 1:15:25Joe Rogan?

  Jeez.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  She just finished her fourth book, by the way.

• 1:15:28Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's written three bestsellers after 80.

• 1:15:32Joe Rogan?

  That's incredible.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  She's out of control.

• 1:15:35Joe Rogan?

  That's incredible. So she was like, she wanted you to do something impressive.

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  My mother wrote every day for 60 years.

• 1:15:42Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  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 kinda growing up and uh, and her, her dream was to write. She finally got a book deal when she was 80. Went to a, a number four bestseller.

• 1:16:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  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?" Cause like my pop, it's, he'd seen the opera, he'd seen QVC, he'd seen every godforsaken infomercial, he'd seen, you know, I'd, 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.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  And what happened in the sewer joke was, I mean, it changed, it's, I wrote a book about it, it changed my whole life. Um, the roaches are the size of your thumbs, 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, in medicine cabinet, plastic products and rubber private condoms stuck to your rubber suit, you know, it's unspeakably vile, you can barely breathe. And what, and what happened to me down there is I...

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  Uh, I completely failed to like host the show. All the stand-ups 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. Oh. That crawled up my, I lost my footing, fell into, I was, I was baptized. Oh. I was baptized in a river of crap. (laughing). And at the end, my cameraman throw up at one point. Oh. An enormous puke. And I'm, I'm squatting in the filth, you know, looking at the camera, trying to open the show.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  And when you see, when you see your cameraman vomit float past you.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  As, as you're trying to articulate a thought. Oh my god. 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, it's 105 degrees. It's, it's the seventh level of hell. Oh. It's clear I can't do my job. So I, I go over to this guy, his name was Gene Cruz, and I say, hey, um, what are you doing? He's like, I'm putting bricks in. I said, you need a hand? So I start mixing the mortar and we start talking, just like people, you know, not like

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  a hosty thing, but like what you were saying, just what would happen if you had an honest conversation, totally unscripted with a guy who didn't really know he was gonna 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, um, I was fired. It's cause 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, they're trying to eat their meatloaf, you know? It was, it was the wrong segment for that, for that show, but.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  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, but the, the letters that changed my life were the ones that said, "You think that was dirty?"

• 1:19:55Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  "Wait till you see what my brother does." "Wait till you see what my cousin does." "My mom, my sister, my uncle, right?"

• 1:20:02Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  And I'm like, "Oh my God." There's, I mean, if, if the Bay Area is any kind of a, a microcosm for the country, and I'm not saying it is, but from a TV standpoint, I was like, "This is new." No, I, I've never seen feedback like this. I've never seen curiosity among the viewership like this.

• 1:20:26Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  And so that's, that's where the idea came from.

• 1:20:30Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  It was like, what, what if the viewer programs the show? A, and what if, B, the host of the show is the person that I meet, who welcomes me into their shithole, or wherever they work? And what if, what if I'm not a host after all? After 20 years of impersonating a host, what if I'm a, a guest, or an apprentice?

• 1:20:57Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  Or a, or an avatar, or a cipher, right?

• 1:21:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  Like, what if I just think of myself differently than this guy who hits the mark and looks at the camera and tells you the cat's act is 29, I mean,

• 1:21:09Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  What if you just let all that go? And, uh, you know, I, I don't know that I would have thought of it like that at, at 20, at 22, certainly not, not even at 32, but at 42, I was entering a more introspective kind of phase.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  And so I I was really just curious to see what would happen if I if I thought of myself as something different.

• 1:21:36Joe Rogan?

  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 it eighteen hundreds? Okay, and then you have television that kicks on in the fifties. And everyone's a presenter. Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles, right? Everyone's Ed Sullivan, everyone's Jack Car- Jack Parr. Like, there's these type of people that do this job. And it's like, you ever go to a, you ever do a morning radio show? I'm sure you have. Morning DJ voice, hey, five o'clock on the hour, let's go with Bon Jovi. There's a voice that they have, a strip club DJ similar. There's a voice.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  Anchorman.

• 1:22:21Joe Rogan?

  Anchorman.

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  But no, the news.

• 1:22:23Joe Rogan?

  Especially local news. They have a very specific thing that they're doing.

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Cadence.

• 1:22:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, it's fake. It's not a person. There's no people act like that. If you had a guy like that over your house for dinner, he'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'm, I can't do the host, but that's what it is.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  You're not unprofessional.

• 1:22:58Joe Rogan?

  But it's like, I mean, in that regard, like, I'm not, so I wasn't trying to do something that had already existed. I was just doing like, I was doing like a guest on Opie and Anthony Show. That's what it was like. Like, when you're a guest on Opie and Anthony, that's how you talk. Everybody would just hang out and talk.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  That's a fun show, it was anyway.

• 1:23:17Joe Rogan?

  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'd sing karaoke, holding a machine gun, that fucking maniac. And then, um, the other big one was, uh, doing a Tom Green show. Because Tom Green had his own sort of internet talk show that he did out of his house.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Sure. I remember that. That was huge.

• 1:23:42Joe Rogan?

  So that also helped too. And I actually was in negotiation with the people that were doing his show. And I was thinking about doing something my own, but then I was like, I can't work with anybody. I gotta do this on my own.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Quick sidebar. I don't know if this is of interest, and Jamie, forgive me. Cause I, I don't know if I'm supposed to ask you to do things, but I sold the first karaoke machine.

• 1:24:00Joe Rogan?

  Ever?

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  In this country.

• 1:24:02Joe Rogan?

  On QVC?

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Joe Rogan?

  Oh, let's see that.

• 1:24:05Speaker 02

  It's out there. It's out. I'm not proud of it.

• 1:24:07Joe Rogan?

  You should be proud of that. That's a statistic.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  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 po- like, look, they're everywhere now, obviously. We, we've gone through.

• 1:24:23Joe Rogan?

  It's kinda crazy though, that you're like the godfather of karaoke.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  Well, I'm among them.

• 1:24:27Joe Rogan?

  So what year is this? What are we talking? Look at you.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  91.

• 1:24:30Joe Rogan?

  This is 91, 92. Wow.

• 1:24:39Joe Rogan?

  99, 95.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  99, 95, yeah.

• 1:24:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It's hard to see. It's so blurry. Isn't it interesting, like, how bad television looked back then in comparison to now? Like, just the resol- resolution?

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know what? There's something, um, there's something more trustworthy about rudimentary production value.

• 1:25:02Joe Rogan?

  Right. You can't, like, yeah.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  I was talking to a guy, Bruce, about this earlier. Um, he was saying how much he loves, uh, like, uh, Antique Roadshow and This Old House. You know, and I said, why?

• 1:25:15Joe Rogan?

  I still love This Old House.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  I still, I, I was on This Old House.

• 1:25:18Joe Rogan?

  Were you?

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. They invited me on. They wanted to raise money, uh, for the, to reinvigorate the trades. They had a very similar cause as, as I do today. And, um, 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 went, 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.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  It's, it's old, it's like, there's an entrance.

• 1:26:07Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  There's an exit.

• 1:26:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  What's the last time you saw it dissolve?

• 1:26:11Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  Right? Like, all that stuff. And, and I used to make fun of it. I used to make fun of QVC. I still do. But, but in reality, man, that- There was something strangely comforting about that kind of production value. And everything I learned that turned out to be useful. You know, I learned in the middle of the night selling karaoke machines.

• 1:26:32Joe Rogan?

  There's a thing about something that's overproduced that kind of dissolves some of its authenticity. Because there's too much thought put into each and every shot. Everything about, there's too much coordination. It's almost like you lose a comfort, like I'm, I might be entertained by it. 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, keep you tuned in. There's something smart about that because it does keep you engaged. But it doesn't feel as authentic as if it was just like one person following them around in real time with no edits at all, just one camera on them.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  Here's, here's a thesis.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  At least in the world of nonfiction, this doesn't apply to scripted. Uh, but production is by definition, the enemy of authenticity. Right? It's the enemy of it. Um, 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.

• 1:27:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  And one of the, one of the things that kept Dirty Jobs on the air for 20 years. Early on, I kind of realized that. And, 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, 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. And so it was those moments where I think the viewer realized, oh.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  Oh, he's not, he's not trying to sell me anything, at least not here. Right, right, right. He's letting us see the sausage. Yeah. And that was new in, in nonfiction, you know? That was a whole new way to think about authenticity. Vivek Ramaswamy was the only, um, 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. I, whether you can pull it off or not, I just thought that was so interesting. And I, and I wanted to talk to him about that specifically. And then it's funny, a year later, you know?

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  I think, I think the teleprompter is probably the best example of one forced error after the next. Like when you, when you think about the anchor, who just wants to be believed? The spokesman who just wants to be seen as credible? The politician who just wants to be, just wants it just so. It's like they, they want to be authentic. And yet they do the single most inauthentic thing you can possibly do, which is pretend to not read a thing that everyone can see you're reading. Right. And so, like, the cognitive dissonance is rich, you know?

• 1:29:47Speaker 02

  And I just think we've entered into this world where, like, the, the least persuasive thing you can do is say, "Trust me," or "Take it from me." 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, we need it everywhere. Fuck it, we'll do it live. Bill O'Reilly. Of all people. I'm going live!

• 1:30:18Joe Rogan?

  That's the real Bill.

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20Joe Rogan?

  That's the real Bill.

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:30:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. That's what's interesting about, um, social media and social media, like, there's this giant resistance right now to the idea that X is the new source of the world.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  They're the mainstream.

• 1:30:35Joe Rogan?

  It is.

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  They're the mainstream.

• 1:30:37Joe Rogan?

  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, goddammit, you're not the fucking, you're not a journalist, you're not this, that. You guys fucked us too many times."

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:52Joe Rogan?

  And we don't believe you anymore. And so, the only way for us to find out what's real and what's not real is someone posts it online, and then everybody looks at it, and then you get the community notes. And that's way better than the New York Times telling me that the Fruit Loops in Canada are exactly the same as the Fruit Loops in America, except for a bunch of shit that's banned. And that's the whole point of the whole fucking thing. But meanwhile, they're fact-checking RFK Jr., so now I don't trust you anymore either.

• 1:31:20Speaker 02

  You can't, um...

• 1:31:21Joe Rogan?

  So it's like, that's what's going on.

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  You can't gloss over the community notes.

• 1:31:25Joe Rogan?

  You can't.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:31:27Joe Rogan?

  It's it.

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

  That's the truth cam.

• 1:31:29Joe Rogan?

  That's the solution.

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  On Twitter.

• 1:31:30Joe Rogan?

  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 gonna get, out of the hundreds of millions of people on X, you're gonna get an expert. Who's gonna say, "This is why this is incorrect, and this is how you're supposed to 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.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  It's a weird dichotomy, though, right? Like, skepticism, like, we have to be skeptical.

• 1:32:12Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  But part of the reason we have to be as skeptical as we are is because so much of the media has abdicated on skepticism. And they've become something else. You know, something else. And so, you know, you can't, you can't really blame people for, you know, considering what we used to dismiss as a conspiracy theory. When the theories start to get borne out and when there's such a level of eroded trust in in once credible institutions like.

• 1:32:45Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Joe Rogan?

  We're sorry. We were wrong about masking. We were wrong about social distancing. We were wrong about all of it. It's all bullshit.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Where's the humility, man?

• 1:33:07Joe Rogan?

  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 has emerged and 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. Whoever is the numbers of people and Carl. Carl's out cold now. But the numbers of people that are listening is like it's just crazy number that are all just listening to three people. So there's no producer. There's no all that shit that gets in the way of things is been removed.

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  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 audiences. I mean, without the audience, what are you doing? You know, you're just building.

• 1:34:11Joe Rogan?

  Certainly at a club. Yeah, at a club, it's everything.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  It's everything, but but why is it different?

• 1:34:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, because you can't think about it that way. Because the best way to do it, in my opinion, the best for me, the best way I've found to do it is to never think about the audience. All I'm interested in, I think about it in terms of like if I'm bored, they must be bored. Like, let me pick this up a little bit. Let me move this around a little bit. Let me figure out a way to you got to move a conversation.

• 1:34:36Speaker 05

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• 1:35:08Joe Rogan?

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• 1:35:51Joe Rogan?

  There's even an option for candidates to explain why they want the job. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Very old scholars, like very old, and it's like, Tom, sometimes like, okay. Right. We gotta focus here. Like, we gotta get you on this. We're gonna land this plane, baby. A little bit in the beginning when he was like telling me the story with Lincoln's bedroom. I was at the bed was, he was a long man. He was at.

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Very tall.

• 1:36:28Joe Rogan?

  Very tall. So I was like, okay, we gotta figure out a way to, what's it like to be the fucking president? What is that feeling like? How crazy is it on the first day? That's what I really wanted to know. So it's like, you gotta 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's talking about.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  But don't you think that that's, you, you are the proxy for the audience? When you're at your best.

• 1:37:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:37:01Speaker 02

  In my view.

• 1:37:02Joe Rogan?

  Yes, for sure.

• 1:37:03Speaker 02

  When I'm listening to you, when I like, high five you virtually, it's when you ask the question I was thinking.

• 1:37:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  And I, I really tried to do that in the sewer. I really tried to do that on Dirty Jobs. I really tried.

• 1:37:17Joe Rogan?

  I think you did. I think that's why it resonated so much with people.

• 1:37:19Speaker 02

  Well, I hope so.

• 1:37:20Joe Rogan?

  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 people like, what, how do you do this? Like, what is this?

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  The stakes around me, right?

• 1:37:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:38:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I'm a little bored. Let's move it along.

• 1:38:08Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. So, I mean, you can say that, hey, that's Joe being a good host. Or that's Joe being super honest in a conversation where he's starting to, to drift a little bit.

• 1:38:20Joe Rogan?

  I'm, 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, a 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, but 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, 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 ti, that's just like, I'm just doing my job.

• 1:39:05Joe Rogan?

  But mostly, all I'm trying to do is be 100% locked in.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:10Joe Rogan?

  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 gonna be good for the audience.

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  What was more consequential? Him coming on? Or her not coming on?

• 1:39:28Joe Rogan?

  Him coming on.

• 1:39:30Speaker 02

  Why do you say that?

• 1:39:31Joe Rogan?

  Well, because, realistically, like, okay. My thought about her coming on was, I would just, I was gonna be very nice. I always, I wanted to have fun with her. I wanted to just be able to talk to her, and ask her que, I want to get a sense of her as a human being. And if it's policy talk that bothered them, like, there was a few things they didn't want to talk. 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. And I was, 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 she want to talk about. I want to talk about cooking, rock climbing. I just want to just get a sense of her as a human being. That's just as a human being.

• 1:40:15Joe Rogan?

  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 just sort of repeat these key lines, or this, maybe there's some new word you become enamored with. You know, you want to say that over and over again.

• 1:40:35Speaker 02

  When you realize you're in the middle of a sentence, with, with no obvious ending.

• 1:40:39Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

  That's a, that's QVC, in a nutshell.

• 1:40:42Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  Okay, that's what it is, right? And when the teleprompter breaks, that's when you get to know the person.

• 1:40:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  And so, and so that's why I'm asking. I, I don't, I wonder, you know, I mean, I, I listened to the interview, and, and... And I ask myself, well, is anybody gonna vote differently as a result? I don't think so. Are some people gonna vote who otherwise might not have voted? Maybe. But for me, when you started to talk very casually about the fact that that that that her campaign had stipulations, they had demands.

• 1:41:18Joe Rogan?

  I think there was a lot of people that were, she had made some, a bunch of blunders. And there was a lot of concern that she was gonna make blunders here. This is what I was gonna get to. She might have. It might have been a mess.

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Joe Rogan?

  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 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.

• 1:41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:50Joe Rogan?

  Okay, if that's happening, how come this can't be fixed? Cause this didn't used to be like this, why is it like this now? Why does the Red Cross have these stations set up where they're giving people maps and instructions? Why does China have these places in Mexico where they only have Chinese menus, Chinese writing, Chinese everything? And these people are coming from China specifically to the spot and then making it across the country? What's the purpose of this? Has anybody ever examined what these people are up to? Why they're doing this? How is it so organized? Like, what is that about? Maybe that would have been a disaster. Cause that, that's something that I felt like if, if she didn't wanna talk about marijuana and didn't wanna talk about internet censorship. Immigration's an interesting one, right?

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:32Joe Rogan?

  It's very interesting. Cause 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. Every, we are a country of immigrants. So, we should have some stipulations, though, about who gets in and how you get in and where are you coming from? And what is your past like? Are you a murderer? Are you a gangbanger? Have you been selling fentanyl for the last 20 years? Like, what are you doing with your life, Bob?

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  Inquiring minds wanna know.

• 1:43:09Joe Rogan?

  We wanna know. I think that's reasonable.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  Do you see a difference between an immigrant and a settler?

• 1:43:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, it all's a timeline, right?

• 1:43:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:20Joe Rogan?

  It's a timeline thing.

• 1:43:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:22Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:43:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:34Joe Rogan?

  You're in their yard. You're some fucking weird, scruffy, American looking for gold.

• 1:43:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:43:40Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:43:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:43:48Joe Rogan?

  This is where I live.

• 1:43:48Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 1:43:49Joe Rogan?

  Shut the fuck up. I got this now.

• 1:43:50Speaker 02

  Well, look, I mean-

• 1:43:51Joe Rogan?

  You know, it's weird, 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.

• 1:44:00Speaker 02

  Every freedom fighter's a terrorist.

• 1:44:02Joe Rogan?

  Yes, right. It depends on who wins.

• 1:44:05Speaker 02

  History gets to decide all that.

• 1:44:07Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:44:18Speaker 02

  So, yeah, man, there are a lot of ways to go with all this, but I'll, I'll just come back to the teleprompter and say, i-if that's an essential part of how you communicate, and if that's an accent, if that's part of your image-

• 1:44:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:44:37Speaker 02

  You know, then you, you can't be on this show.

• 1:44:39Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  You, you, you can't. You, you, you can't join me in the sewer, either.

• 1:44:45Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  There's, there's no room for the contrivance. There's just no room. There's just no time.

• 1:44:50Joe Rogan?

  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, I can't read off a teleprompter.

• 1:44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it-

• 1:44:58Joe Rogan?

  I'm not, I'm not interested in doing that. It's not my thing. But if you make a person do that, like, if, if you're going to be a politician, right? Okay, and you were a senator, and which is, you know, you don't get that, that kind of exposure that you get if you, 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, 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 fourteen years. Like, he's, he's used to being in front of the camera. It's a normal experience for him. He has a massive advantage.

• 1:45:41Speaker 02

  That's what I meant by production becomes the enemy of authenticity.

• 1:45:45Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:45:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:45:55Speaker 02

  You know, and I, and I think the audience, not just yours, but the country, I just think they're just exhausted. By, by people who have been managed and focus grouped and weighed and measured and tested and then put out there.

• 1:46:10Joe Rogan?

  I think it's also the evolution of culture in general, because if you just go back to, we were talking about media. You go back and watch a film from nineteen fifty versus a film from twenty twenty four. The way people communicate now is much more realistic.

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:46:26Joe Rogan?

  There was a way of talking, like, Hannah, what did you do?

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:46:31Joe Rogan?

  You know, there was a weird performative aspect to it because they didn't know how to do it right.

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  In sitcoms, too.

• 1:46:36Joe Rogan?

  In everything.

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  Father Knows Best, all that stuff.

• 1:46:38Joe Rogan?

  All that stuff. And then as time moved on, it changed, like All in the Family was all of a sudden this realistic portrayal.

• 1:46:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:45Joe Rogan?

  Of an, of a family where you got a racist dad and the son is, you know, the, the meathead, the son-in-law. And the, the daughter's a hippie.

• 1:46:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Joe Rogan?

  And the, the mom just can't, what are you doing? What are you, it was a fucking amazing show. Oh, watchy. It was an amazing show. You had 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 tried 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.

• 1:47:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:47:33Joe Rogan?

  Right? And that's not acceptable anymore. So the culture's moved on.

• 1:47:38Speaker 02

  So for sure, but it moves on and fits and starts and it's not a line.

• 1:47:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  Right? It's, it's this, right?

• 1:47:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like the climate.

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:47:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:57Speaker 02

  See so many different kinds of scripted dramas. I mean, oh my God.

• 1:48:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  Can you imagine Breaking Bad?

• 1:48:03Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Thirty years ago?

• 1:48:05Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  It's impossible.

• 1:48:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:48:07Speaker 02

  A whole lot of things had to happen in front of that for, for that thing to-

• 1:48:11Joe Rogan?

  The Sopranos had to happen.

• 1:48:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:48:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13Speaker 02

  And something had to happen before that.

• 1:48:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:15Speaker 02

  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-

• 1:48:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:25Speaker 02

  Like, like Discovery is a, is a good example. You asked about it, and I'll, I'll tell you, first of all, John Hendrix, a friend of mine who created that channel, you would love. He did this in his garage, basically. I mean, the story's incredible, how he talked Malone into getting some transponder space, or maybe his Westinghouse, and, and leb- 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, this business model? And of course, you know, Discovery has since purchased

• 1:49:07Speaker 02

  Warner Brothers, you know, they're the biggest entertainment company in the world today. And it started with John Hendrix saying, one goal, to satisfy curiosity.

• 1:49:19Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:20Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:49:21Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:22Speaker 02

  Everything-

• 1:49:22Joe Rogan?

  Discovery.

• 1:49:23Speaker 02

  Everything I do must line up with a traditional definition of what a discovery is. It's the, it's the satisfying-

• 1:49:32Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  -of curiosity.

• 1:49:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:35Speaker 02

  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, the greatest naturalists and historians and, uh, you know, astrophysicists in the world. They, they deferred to experts. And then they hired guys like me to narrate shows and we could sound even more official. And so you, you had this dance, this production dance where you had a credible sounding voice,

• 1:50:17Speaker 02

  uh, 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 retriever? It's a job. Or a sheep castrator, an oral sheep castrator, which we can get into if you want. Um, 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?

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  So this conversation happened between me and some of the guys over there in, in 2003. And they bought it. They didn't buy, they didn't like Dirty Jobs. They took it really to shut me up. They wanted three episodes and, 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, and, and don't ask me to know more than I know, but just let me look under the rock and let's learn together.

• 1:51:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:27Speaker 02

  And so they said, okay, we're gonna, you know, you'll go to the Titanic with James Cameron, you'll climb Kilimanjaro.

• 1:51:34Joe Rogan?

  You went to the Titanic?

• 1:51:35Speaker 02

  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, uh, tombs with Zahi Hawass. I was at the pyramids. I was in the, some of the greatest, the largest undiscovered graveyard in Bowiti, 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, these shows and they were great.

• 1:52:14Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, this, this hot mess that looked like a German porno called Dirty Jobs winds up on the air and it rates like through the roof. But the problem in 2004 was that, and this is a kind of cognitive dissonance that always is super interesting, right? When a, when a big company or a brand or a political party, or really anybody realizes that the thing their audience wants is not the thing they want them to want. Hmm. That's amazing. Right. And it happens all the time. Sure.

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

  And most of the time when it happens, you know, the, the, uh, you just walk up behind the barn and shoot it and you, and you never hear about it. But Dirty Jobs actually got on the air before it was shelved for a year. And it was during that year that I went on a series of adventures for the network, doing this other thing. Why was it shelved? It was shelved because it was deemed off-brand. It was shelved because I was biting the testicles off of lambs with ranchers. And that's how they castrate their lambs and they have for hundreds of years. It was not, not that specific episode that, that got me in trouble later, but it was, it was shelved because it was an unscripted, random romp.

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  We never did a second take on the show. It didn't look. Like everything else on the network. It didn't look like anything else on the network. It was just a jagged little pill. But they liked me and, and, and they liked this idea of, of a more unscripted look at the world. And so we reached this kind of détente and I started narrating all their tent pole shows. And then I went to Alaska to host Deadliest Catch, which is a whole nother story, that crab fishing show. Yeah. That's 21 years now, right? And up there, people died, you know? That's a cool.

• 1:54:18Joe Rogan?

  Crazy job.

• 1:54:19Speaker 02

  People died and I went to six funerals in six weeks. And when they, when we looked at the footage of that and somebody up the food chain eventually decided, okay, this is a world we have to get into, but Mike, you're not, you're not hosting two shows at the same time. So pick one. So Dirty Jobs came back, went into full production 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

• 1:54:59Speaker 02

  world in nonfiction anyhow began this migration from the age of authority into the age of authenticity.

• 1:55:09Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:55:10Speaker 02

  And ever since, um, nonfiction has been, has been grappling with that just as surely as every other vertical because people want to see something that feels like the truth. And that's, that's a sliding scale.

• 1:55:27Joe Rogan?

  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 independent news is succeeding.

• 1:55:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know it when you see it.

• 1:55:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. You could tell the difference.

• 1:55:48Speaker 02

  Oh, Bourdain.

• 1:55:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:55:53Speaker 02

  Uh, I think for me, the moment that crystallizes all of this, and he and I were on parallel paths, I think he was dealing with his network, the travel channel at the time, the same way I was dealing with discovery. We were, we were constantly at each other's throats trying to navigate this, this weird line of reality and authenticity. And there's a, there's a scene in Parts Unknown, I think he's in, um, might be Sardinia, he's diving.

• 1:56:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh yeah, when they're throwing the fake octopuses in.

• 1:56:30Speaker 02

  It's one of the single greatest moments in the history of of

• 1:56:34Joe Rogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:56:34Speaker 02

  nonfiction.

• 1:56:35Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:56:44Speaker 02

  I would do that for a scene, maybe even for an act, maybe even for a whole segment, maybe. If I got a like a like a bee in my bonnet and I really just couldn't, you know.

• 1:56:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:56:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:57:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:15Speaker 02

  He's so disgusted, just so you're, just so the audience understands.

• 1:57:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:57:20Speaker 02

  They're supposed to be spearfishing for octopi. And the local handler wasn't sure that they were gonna find any, so he bought some at the market. But they were frozen and dead. And so Tony's down there with his spear gun with some other diver. And these these frozen squid, right, just start to come by him. And in narration, this is where he really owned it because he he owned that show like he could.

• 1:57:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:54Speaker 02

  Nobody's gonna 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 don't they know who I am?

• 1:58:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:07Speaker 02

  What did they think I was gonna do?

• 1:58:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:09Speaker 02

  So it's like 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.

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  And it airs.

• 1:58:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  It airs on CNN.

• 1:58:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:30Speaker 02

  And I think it won a Peabody.

• 1:58:32Joe Rogan?

  Was that the CNN one, or was that No Reservations?

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  That was CNN.

• 1:58:35Joe Rogan?

  Was it?

• 1:58:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:36Joe Rogan?

  It was Parts Unknown?

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  Um, look, I'm pretty sure it was Parts Unknown. I'm pretty sure. I could be wrong, but he-

• 1:58:44Joe Rogan?

  I think you might be right.

• 1:58:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, a- a- and, God, I just, I mean, that's what I, that's what I wrote about when he died. It was that-

• 1:58:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, Parts Unknown.

• 1:58:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause I've been, man, I've been sitting on a Zodiac, I've done that, I've been in these, in this world where you're nervous, you've got a lot of stuff to worry about, and then somebody just comes along and tries to produce a moment.

• 1:59:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  You try to produce a moment.

• 1:59:13Joe Rogan?

  Well, 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.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably 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-

• 1:59:27Joe Rogan?

  Who knows?

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  Who knows, man?

• 1:59:28Joe Rogan?

  Who knows?

• 1:59:29Speaker 02

  But, look, the fact that that happened is, is wonderful, the fact that he was able to insist that it air, that was important.

• 1:59:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  That was important.

• 1:59:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:44Joe Rogan?

  Well, certainly important for how you trust him, and you had to trust him, I mean, he, that was his whole thing, you know, you're coming with me, this is actually me. Here we go.

• 1:59:53Speaker 02

  Fly on the wall.

• 1:59:53Joe Rogan?

  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 ju- 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 that you, or you hear, right? I never thought it would be a thing you make where you eat, and then I saw, I'm like, oh, these are artists. These are artists, all these people, they've discovered these different ways to make things delicious, and, okay.

• 2:00:31Speaker 02

  Their medium's different.

• 2:00:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's just different, it's a different kind, but they, then hanging out with them, it's like, yeah, they're all artists, they hang, they talk like artists, they're, they're covered in tattoos, they're fucking weirdos, they like to do drugs, they're all listening to crazy music, you know?

• 2:00:45Speaker 02

  They're, they're also craftsmen.

• 2:00:46Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:00:47Speaker 02

  Like, I mean, to me-

• 2:00:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, food is art. It sure can be, and it can also be fuel.

• 2:00:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:56Speaker 02

  You know, it's it's it's actually both. It's kind of perfect.

• 2:01:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you could have both. It could be art and fuel. You just gotta pick what you eat.

• 2:01:06Speaker 02

  Is hunting art?

• 2:01:08Joe Rogan?

  Um.

• 2:01:12Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:15Joe Rogan?

  It's a discipline. Um. 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 ver- 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 I have to get in really good shape. I practice. So I practiced so much I fucked my back up because I was I was getting developing like tendonitis in my lower back and I just ignored it.

• 2:01:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:49Joe Rogan?

  Shut up.

• 2:01:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:50Joe Rogan?

  We got we got work to do. And so it's it's it's a discipline more than it is anything. But it's like, um. I don't know. Some people call it a sport. I find that wrong. It's not the right. It does take like physical energy. You have to be in shape to do it. You have to be in great fitness. But it's not a sport. It's a it's a it's a discipline. It's a discipline that's very, very, very primal. It taps into something you didn't even know was there. It 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.

• 2:02:35Joe Rogan?

  And you don't know it's there until you go fishing. And then you're like, whoa, oh, oh, oh, here he is. Get him. Get him in the net. Get him in the net. Oh, we got him.

• 2:02:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:43Joe Rogan?

  And uh, 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.

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  I think that's art.

• 2:03:05Joe Rogan?

  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 fifty yard shot in the vitals. And that broadhead sinks in, I know that animal's gonna die very quickly. It's a quick humane death. And that's what you practice for.

• 2:03:27Speaker 02

  You know Josh, Josh Smith, over at Montana Knife, might he chance?

• 2:03:30Joe Rogan?

  Sure, very well.

• 2:03:32Speaker 02

  He sent me a video the other day. He went on a big hunt with his boy.

• 2:03:35Joe Rogan?

  Moose hunt? Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, his boy got one at about, at a few hundred yards.

• 2:03:40Joe Rogan?

  Huge moose.

• 2:03:40Speaker 02

  Big moose.

• 2:03:41Joe Rogan?

  Fucking huge. For a first moose, that's so crazy. That kid hit the jackpot.

• 2:03:46Speaker 02

  But the excitement on the video.

• 2:03:48Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:03:49Speaker 02

  That he sent me.

• 2:03:50Joe Rogan?

  It's primal.

• 2:03:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:51Joe Rogan?

  And bow hunting is even more primal than that. Bow hunting is that times a hundred. So it's, uh, regular hunting is fishing times a hundred, then bow hunting is regular hunting times a hundred.

• 2:04:03Speaker 02

  I just think, you know, if you're, whatever canvas you're in front of. Whether you're painting, or whether you're cooking, or whether you're stalking, like you can, like, the muse, like, does the muse come to you? When you're stalking, does it come to you? You know, I don't have an answer for it, but I, but I, but I know that people talk about it, like, some people say, well, you're in the zone. You know, sometimes when I write, uh, I'm surprised, like, I, just the other day, I started, I started writing something on the tarmac of SFO. And when I looked up, I was, I was at JFK. It was like that.

• 2:04:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you got into it.

• 2:04:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:43Joe Rogan?

  Airplanes are great for that.

• 2:04:44Speaker 02

  Oh, my, they're the best.

• 2:04:44Joe Rogan?

  They force you into that seat.

• 2:04:46Speaker 02

  They're the best.

• 2:04:46Joe Rogan?

  You can't get up because there's a guy next to you. It's, you get that laptop open and it just comes out of you.

• 2:04:52Speaker 02

  And I like a little distraction.

• 2:04:54Joe Rogan?

  Look, let's go.

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  I, I, I wrote a book on a plane.

• 2:04:57Joe Rogan?

  I believe it.

• 2:04:58Speaker 02

  I, I really did. And, and I did it mostly in moments that I don't really remember when, when time gets compressed.

• 2:05:07Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 2:05:08Speaker 02

  And I, and I think that, that can happen when you're fabricating something, when you're hunting something, when you're painting something, maybe in the middle of a set, maybe in the middle of a fight.

• 2:05:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:17Speaker 02

  You know, I talked to boxers who say that, that it's, it's so odd the way. Things will sometimes almost feel like they're in slow motion.

• 2:05:25Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:05:25Speaker 02

  Even though they're happening so fast.

• 2:05:27Joe Rogan?

  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, you, you know who Emmanuel Augustus is?

• 2:05:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:38Joe Rogan?

  Okay. That guy is an artist. That guy's an artist.

• 2:05:42Speaker 02

  What makes him an artist?

• 2:05:43Joe Rogan?

  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, head movement, even with this unorthodox dancing style, is fantastic.

• 2:06:03Speaker 02

  He's stalking.

• 2:06:04Joe Rogan?

  He's doing something. Like, here's, here's Emmanuel. Like, look, look at 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, look, he just punched him with two hands at the same time. Floyd Mayweather said he was the most skilled opponent he ever fought.

• 2:06:20Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:06:20Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:06:31Speaker 02

  It's like boxing a bobblehead.

• 2:06:33Joe Rogan?

  Right. Like Prince Nassim Hamid had a kind of a similar thing going on when he was in his prime. Nassim Hamid was, uh, very, very unorthodox. See, see, here's, here's fighting Floyd. He gave Floyd a hard fucking time. Because he's so difficult to fight. Like, look, how do you deal with that? And when you're a guy like Floyd and you're getting clowned, here he's, 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 and skill.

• 2:07:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:17Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:07:25Speaker 02

  Who was his trainer?

• 2:07:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh, man, I don't think anybody trains you to do that.

• 2:07:29Speaker 02

  I don't either.

• 2:07:29Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 2:07:29Speaker 02

  Like, what does Custom Auto say to that?

• 2:07:32Joe Rogan?

  He would never.

• 2:07:32Speaker 02

  Wouldn't allow it.

• 2:07:33Joe Rogan?

  No, he, you know, he was, but maybe, maybe if the guy started winning like that, he would change his tune.

• 2:07:38Speaker 02

  So maybe.

• 2:07:39Joe Rogan?

  People change their tune when they see something extraordinary.

• 2:07:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:07:42Joe Rogan?

  When 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 gonna work? Like, you know who Shawn Strickland is?

• 2:08:00Speaker 02

  Hmm, I don't think so.

• 2:08:01Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:08:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:09Joe Rogan?

  Stands straight up. Everybody else is down, everybody else is moving, Shawn, Shawn straight up, moving towards you, phenomenal head movement, awesome timing.

• 2:08:17Speaker 02

  They're out there, though.

• 2:08:18Joe Rogan?

  And walks people down in a weird style. There's a bunch of guys that fight weird, but they're really good at it.

• 2:08:23Speaker 02

  Well, think baseball, too. I mean, it's everything. Louis Tien. Remember the pitcher?

• 2:08:28Joe Rogan?

  I don't really follow baseball.

• 2:08:30Speaker 02

  You'll love this, Jamie.

• 2:08:31Joe Rogan?

  I know almost nothing about sports, believe it or not.

• 2:08:35Speaker 02

  Huh, you know, I mean, you will. One day, you're gonna look at a baseball game and go, hey, you know what I need to do? I need to play professional baseball. And then five years later, you're, we're gonna be reading about it, because you're gonna go crazy with it, the same way you do everything.

• 2:08:48Joe Rogan?

  I'm too old for that, but, but this Louis Tien, what did he do differently?

• 2:08:51Speaker 02

  Louis Tien was a pitcher, and his wind-up was such that it looked sort of traditional, but then he'd turn his back to the batter without leaving the rubber, right? So, this guy would spin all the way around before he threw. And he'd go further than that sometimes.

• 2:09:14Joe Rogan?

  Is that really unusual?

• 2:09:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's unusual.

• 2:09:20Speaker 02

  That's unusual.

• 2:09:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so it freaks people out a little bit?

• 2:09:23Speaker 02

  Well, it's, yeah, yeah, because he just breaks, he stops looking at you. Look at his, his back.

• 2:09:29Joe Rogan?

  Look at his ankle. That's crazy.

• 2:09:32Speaker 02

  That's exactly it. So it's like, oh, you know, if you're a batter, you're like, alright, 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.

• 2:09:40Joe Rogan?

  That dude has flexible knees.

• 2:09:42Speaker 02

  Flexible everything.

• 2:09:43Joe Rogan?

  Cause look at the, the angle his knee is in before he turns. That's crazy.

• 2:09:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, you would actually, I'm, I'm surprised you're not into baseball because.

• 2:09:53Joe Rogan?

  I can't. I don't have any room.

• 2:09:56Speaker 02

  I know the bucket's overflowing.

• 2:09:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it 100% is, you know, like, I watch football now. My wife's into football, but I, I can't, I can only pay attention so much. My, my head is filled with combat sports. There's, I have to follow jujitsu, Muay Thai, MMA in the UFC, MMA in the PFL, Bellator, 1 FC. There's, I have, I have to keep track of a thousand fighters, like literally a thousand fighters.

• 2:10:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:10:27Joe Rogan?

  Maybe casually some of them, like some of the Glory Kickboxers casually I'm watching, you know, oh, Botter 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've, I'm watching fights. Just hours and hours in a day. I might watch, I might watch fights two hours every day.

• 2:10:48Speaker 02

  Is it work or fun?

• 2:10:49Joe Rogan?

  It's fun. Yeah, it's only fun, but I do feel obligated to pay attention. Like, uh, there's guys that are coming up in other organizations. I see guys have like a specific skillset that's unique. Like I contacted Conor McGregor in like 2013. He was, uh, fighting in Cage Warriors and I reached out and I said, dude, you're fucking super talented. I, I hope, uh, I get to see in the UFC someday. And then he's like, You know, kickboxers like Alex Pereira, I follow him in glory. And then finally he comes over to the UFC and I was like, you gotta see this guy. This guy's fucking insane. It's like, you have to have some sort of an understanding of what's coming. You know, and also you have to like, kind of be tuned into the state of the art.

• 2:11:33Joe Rogan?

  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, 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, uh, 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.

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  It's interesting, man. You've had a front row seat to, to watching that sport become as dominant as it is, at the same time, you're watching the podcast world blow up.

• 2:12:27Joe Rogan?

  Well, the UFC blew up first. See, I was a fan of the UFC in the very, very beginning and it got me into jujitsu. So 96, I started taking jujitsu. 94, I found out about the UFC. I, 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 at a, 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.

• 2:13:11Joe Rogan?

  You could only get it on DirecTV and, uh, we had to do these shows in like Dothan, Alabama, where you took a propeller plane. It was fucking hell. It was no money either.

• 2:13:20Speaker 02

  This is 97?

• 2:13:21Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm, 97.

• 2:13:22Speaker 02

  And is Dana?

• 2:13:23Joe Rogan?

  Bare knuckled and Dana was not involved yet.

• 2:13:25Speaker 02

  When did Dana get involved?

• 2:13:26Joe Rogan?

  2001. So, I'm on Fear Factor at the time and one of the things, me and my friend Eddie Bravo, who was also a big fan from back in the day, and he taught me jujitsu. When we were first really into it, when we would go to like Louisiana, these were the only places that would sanction these fights. They were bare knuckle, people wore shoes, he could grab their shorts. It was like crazy rules.

• 2:13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:50Joe Rogan?

  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 into it. 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 started putting these shows together and then I met 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 of 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.

• 2:14:31Speaker 02

  Okay. This is just a very weird triangulating, but...

• 2:14:35Joe Rogan?

  They didn't even have any money at the time, because they were hemorrhaging money, so I did the first 13 shows for free.

• 2:14:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:14:49Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:15:02Speaker 02

  Nevertheless, you know, I mean, it was the same thing with Dirty Jobs. Once that thing lit up, I had to be willing to sign a contract that was probably illegal. I mean, it was such a ridiculous contract, the way they own you. It's so preposterous.

• 2:15:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, isn't it crazy?

• 2:15:16Speaker 02

  It's like, no money, but if it's a hit, if it sticks...

• 2:15:20Joe Rogan?

  We have you for 10 years. Yeah.

• 2:15:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:15:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:15:34Speaker 02

  Which was actually do the work.

• 2:15:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:36Speaker 02

  There's no contract that can force you to bite the balls off a sheep.

• 2:15:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:15:41Speaker 02

  Right? You, you have to be willing to do that. And so I, I was able to fix that. But Dana, I'm trying to remember what year this would have been. When did the Ultimate Fighter?

• 2:15:52Joe Rogan?

  2005.

• 2:15:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so in 2004, Dirty Jobs was on the air. It was in that weird space where we didn't know if it was gonna be a hit or what. But I was narrating all kinds of stuff for this guy, Craig, Polygian. 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, and Dana kinda 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

• 2:16:31Speaker 02

  says, say something. And I, and I said, previously on the Ultimate Fighter. And he said, fine, you'll be great. I did 10 seasons.

• 2:16:43Joe Rogan?

  That sounds like Dana.

• 2:16:45Speaker 02

  He says, say something.

• 2:16:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's hilarious.

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  It was great. Yeah.

• 2:16:49Joe Rogan?

  That's hilarious. Yeah. That's interesting how things happen like that, you know?

• 2:16:55Speaker 02

  Well, you were gonna, you know, you wouldn't be sitting here now if your lease wasn't up or whatever.

• 2:17:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I probably wouldn't. I would've gone back to New York.

• 2:17:03Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:17:14Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 2:17:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:17:26Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:17:27Speaker 02

  Or like an artist. Or maybe.

• 2:17:30Joe Rogan?

  Both.

• 2:17:31Speaker 02

  Or maybe both.

• 2:17:32Joe Rogan?

  I think both.

• 2:17:33Speaker 02

  So, you know, I-

• 2:17:36Speaker 02

  I've got this uh this foundation that evolved out of dirty jobs. It's called MicroWorks and we award these uh scholarships to people who don't want to go to a four-year school, but who want to learn a trade, right? We've been doing it for sixteen years. And uh I started doing it um in part for my granddad, but but mostly uh because there what eight million jobs now that don't require a four-year degree? And there's one point seven trillion dollars in student loans on the books, right? That is just bananas and we've got these huge shortages in in the skilled trades.

• 2:18:18Speaker 02

  So I spent a lot of time talking about how that happened and and what might be done to to fix it. But regarding art, it's like you're old enough to remember wood shop and metal shop and

• 2:18:32Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 2:18:33Speaker 02

  You know, before it was shop, it was it wasn't just VOTEC. It turned into VOTEC, 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 we started with the language and we and we took art out of it. And that's when it became VOTEC. And then there were a bunch of other acronyms and abbreviations and hyphenations and so

• 2:19:01Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:19:25Joe Rogan?

  Over building a house. Everybody needs a fucking house. Over being a plumber. And if 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 it's it's a job that is creative, it's skillful, and when you're done, you bring satisfaction to other people that live in that house. Like you, there's a great benefit to it. But our society has got this distorted view of tradesmen. And it's a really dumb thing because it fucks you up because if you're a kid And you go through the university system, you get a degree that's kind of useless,

• 2:20:09Joe Rogan?

  but then you get a job and you're making sixty thousand dollars a year and you're like, oh my god, I have two hundred thousand dollars in student loans and I'm doing a job that's not very satisfying and I'm kind of stuck. I'm working my way up, but it's gonna take a long time before I make enough money where I'm not burdened by this.

• 2:20:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:25Joe Rogan?

  Or you could have a successful construction company by then. I mean, you could, you could get a small business loan and you could, you could start like, like 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 interesting people.

• 2:20:51Speaker 02

  And they're entrepreneurial.

• 2:20:52Joe Rogan?

  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, it's not good for, for anybody to think that way.

• 2:21:06Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I, I very rarely play the devil's advocate in this argument, but, but I, I do think I know why it happened, or at least how. And I was in high school in the late seventies and there was a very concerted push for what we call higher ed, which by the way, already sets the table, right?

• 2:21:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:27Speaker 02

  If it's higher ed over here, I guess we have lower ed over here.

• 2:21:30Joe Rogan?

  Right, you, you guys are stupid.

• 2:21:31Speaker 02

  The language is, is, is awful, but the, but the PR, I mean, and to be fair, in the fifty, sixty, seventies, we, we needed more doctors, we needed more engineers, we needed more people matriculating through, you know, four-year schools. But what happens with PR, at least from what I've seen, is that it always goes too far. And it wasn't enough just to make a persuasive case for that path. We had to do it at the expense of the jobs you're talking about. So if, if you don't go this way, you're gonna 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...

• 2:22:16Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know when it happened, but I.

• 2:22:19Joe Rogan?

  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. So if you were a person that pursued the trades, you were, you know, probably a failure. Something goes right. This is like all you could do because you couldn't make it in school.

• 2:22:37Speaker 02

  And yet you loved this old house.

• 2:22:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:40Speaker 02

  Which is a love letter to the trades.

• 2:22:41Joe Rogan?

  It really is.

• 2:22:42Speaker 02

  Every single one.

• 2:22:43Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I love watching people make things.

• 2:22:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:46Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 2:22:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:22:59Joe Rogan?

  And he would make furniture and shit.

• 2:23:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23:01Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:23:08Speaker 02

  He was.

• 2:23:09Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:23:23Speaker 02

  Well, what's happened there, for me anyway, is that I, I mean, after 16 years of it, I can tell a 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 HVAC 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.

• 2:24:05Speaker 02

  And, and I do that a lot on my podcast. It's just like, I just want to hear your, I want to hear stories of people who prospered as a result of mastering a skill that's in demand.

• 2:24:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:24:16Speaker 02

  And then maybe applied some level of either artistry or entrepreneurship or the willingness to move. That's a big one too. You know, will you go where the work is or, you know? And so it's, it's really become, it's why Bobby Kennedy called me.

• 2:24:32Speaker 02

  Back in February, you know, he was like, hey, man, this micro works thing. You want to make it macro works? And I said, yeah, sure. What do you have in mind? And that's, I don't know how, I don't know if you knew this, but we had this whole conversation about like running together.

• 2:24:48Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:24:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. No, he, he asked if I wanted to be vice president.

• 2:24:54Joe Rogan?

  Oh, geez Louise, what'd you say?

• 2:24:56Speaker 02

  Dude. I was in Munich. I was in Munich in, in January and he had, he had called me earlier just to talk really, um, generally about, um, about the middle class. Cause he's like, look, what you've done with the foundation, this, my campaign is a lot about that. And, uh, and I'd love to talk to you more about it. So I, I kind of put him in the category of elected officials, politicians who might, who might be useful. You know, I, I'm not, I'm not that guy. But I said, yeah, look, man, I, I'd be happy to chat. Well, he called back and you know Gavin. To Becker, right?

• 2:25:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, they did a dive, dude. They, this was very strange for me. Uh, they did a deep dive and when I got back to the Bay area, um, he invited me down to his home to meet, you know, the cats. They were all there. And we talked for like three hours and I, I'm looking over my shoulder, honestly, like I'm being punked. Like, like which one of my crazy friends?

• 2:26:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:26:06Speaker 02

  Put you up to this? But he was serious and, and I was weirdly, um, flattered maybe like I knew I couldn't say yes, but I was so interested in what his thinking was.

• 2:26:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:26:24Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:26:35Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:26:36Speaker 02

  And it didn't fit, you know?

• 2:26:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:26:38Speaker 02

  I would never do well in an office or in a bureaucracy.

• 2:26:42Joe Rogan?

  He called me up once to ask me who I thought would be like good vice president. I was terrified he was gonna ask me.

• 2:26:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:26:49Joe Rogan?

  I was terrified. I was like, please don't ask that.

• 2:26:52Speaker 02

  I thought my-

• 2:26:53Joe Rogan?

  Cause I know he asked, uh, well, he asked Aaron Rodgers.

• 2:26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:57Joe Rogan?

  Which is crazy.

• 2:26:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I literally heard the sound of my sphincter slamming shut.

• 2:27:03Joe Rogan?

  Like, what the fuck, man?

• 2:27:04Speaker 02

  I like, I just tensed up and I was like, oh.

• 2:27:06Joe Rogan?

  Who wants that job?

• 2:27:07Speaker 02

  Like, whoa, whoa.

• 2:27:08Joe Rogan?

  Fucking job. That's jobs insanity.

• 2:27:11Speaker 02

  But man, I'll, I'll tell you, man, he, it was a really, um, he was very gracious and very direct. And I, I tried to be too. And I told him, I'm like, look, the infectious disease thing, I get that. The middle class thing, I totally get that. The forever wars, I get all that. And then he, he's like, Mike, do you, do you understand 77% of the youth today wouldn't, wouldn't qualify to get into the armed forces? Do you understand what the crisis is we face right now? Never mind health. Health is its own thing and I've got lots of things to say about it.

• 2:27:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:28:04Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:28:05Speaker 02

  You know, challenging. You know, I just talked to him, uh, the day before yesterday. And he said, you know, Google any photo of Yankee Stadium, sold out from the 60s or, 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.

• 2:28:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:37Speaker 02

  And I said, but-

• 2:28:38Joe Rogan?

  It's an important message.

• 2:28:39Speaker 02

  It is an important message.

• 2:28:40Joe Rogan?

  And it gets lost in this idea of being a compassionate person that allows people to just be their authentic self, you know, and there's nothing wrong with being fat, there's nothing wrong with being big. You're being lied to, okay? You're robbing your life of vitality. It's just, that's just the way it is. And I'm, 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 2024. What happened in the, well, we can figure it out. It's not Columbo. 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 what we've done. It's real, it's readily available. It's what you eat.

• 2:29:25Speaker 02

  When you say we, though, I mean-

• 2:29:27Joe Rogan?

  Human beings, collective, the collective intelligence-

• 2:29:30Speaker 02

  What percentage of this country do you think-

• 2:29:32Joe Rogan?

  What percentage has been informed? This is part of the problem. And this is why it benefits to have someone 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, what's important and what you need and, but what, what's good to thrive? What's optimum versus what is just gonna 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.

• 2:30:01Speaker 02

  What do I want to take with D, by the way? Is it magnesium?

• 2:30:04Joe Rogan?

  You want to take magnesium and you want to take K2. You want to take vitamin K, magnesium, and, you know, there's some arguments, some other stuff too, that, that would also enhance it. But you, you definitely need vitamin D. Almost everybody does. And, 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 they didn't supplement at all. And you know, there's some vitamin D in in in milk when they in Bridget 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 it's really important and there's a lot of other things that are really important.

• 2:30:49Joe Rogan?

  Vitamin C is really important. You know, vitamin B is very important, a bunch of different Bs. Um, 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.

• 2:31:00Speaker 02

  Do you think that the basic fear and conversation around skin cancer? Um, and the 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?

• 2:31:19Joe Rogan?

  There's a lot of that for sure. I mean, the best way to get vitamin D, most certainly, is from the sun. That's the way your body is naturally designed to get vitamin D. You're supposed to be outside all the time and it'll make you healthier. Physically, it's good for you. It's it's actually a hormone that your body produces when it's in the vitamin D is a hormone. It's a or a precursor to a hormone, I guess, if you take it orally. But what what it's doing to your body, like George 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.

• 2:31:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and there's there's a reality to that. That's why people are really fucking depressed when they live in the Pacific Northwest because it's 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, your your, again, overall vitality. If you want to have a strong vitality, you 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, one hundred percent.

• 2:32:24Speaker 02

  No shortcuts.

• 2:32:25Joe Rogan?

  No shortcuts.

• 2:32:26Speaker 02

  I don't know that probably not many silver linings to the lockdown, but I did. I started walking. I 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.

• 2:32:45Speaker 02

  He became a friend, uh, the comfort crisis. And I started, uh, rucking.

• 2:32:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:50Speaker 02

  And so.

• 2:32:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's great. Yeah, Mike's a big proponent of that.

• 2:32:53Speaker 02

  Big time.

• 2:32:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:55Speaker 02

  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 sixty-five pounds on my back, walking eight miles every morning. He was like, what are you doing? I'm like, dude, I'm dying. I'm dying.

• 2:33:10Joe Rogan?

  I'm rucking.

• 2:33:10Speaker 02

  I'm rucking. But, um, yeah, I just, I think it, I think there's really something important in that book that, that Easter wrote. And, and, and I think our, um, it's not the specifics of what we can do. This idea of, uh, what do the Japanese call it? A miso- a misogi. Uh, a quest or a, a challenge of sorts that you should, well, you should challenge yourself to do every so often.

• 2:33:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:40Speaker 02

  And one of the, uh, one of the criterion is you should have a fifty percent chance of failure. Right? So you, it's a, it's a real push into uncertainty and discomfort.

• 2:33:54Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:33:55Speaker 02

  And that, that's why I ruck. It's uncomfortable.

• 2:34:00Joe Rogan?

  Yes. Yeah. Yep. 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. And, you know, Andrew Huberman has talked about this. There's actually a specific area of the brain when you, um, enact voluntary discomfort and do things you don't want to do all the time. It actually grows. Remember what that is? Remember what he called that? Part of the brain? But, uh, you know, he speaks about it, of course, he's a neuroscientist, much more eloquently. But I think that's real. And I think, um, it also makes regular life a lot easier. That was one of my favorite things of jujitsu when I found out. It makes regular life easy because regular life is not anterior mid cingulate cortex.

• 2:34:45Joe Rogan?

  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 be 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.

• 2:35:16Speaker 02

  Well, anxiety is a form of discomfort.

• 2:35:18Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:35:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:35:37Joe Rogan?

  Especially today.

• 2:35:38Speaker 02

  Especially today. You could pick this damn thing up and, you know, instant access to 99% of the information.

• 2:35:43Joe Rogan?

  But you're robbing yourself of a lot of possible ideas.

• 2:35:45Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, because the best ideas come.

• 2:35:48Joe Rogan?

  When you're bored.

• 2:35:49Speaker 02

  When you're bored.

• 2:35:50Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:36:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:03Joe Rogan?

  You know, and when you're involved in, you know, an 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.

• 2:36:20Speaker 02

  Right, because.

• 2:36:21Joe Rogan?

  Sometimes you come up with great ideas.

• 2:36:22Speaker 02

  Your, your mind, your brain will find whatever you send it.

• 2:36:28Speaker 02

  Out to look for.

• 2:36:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:30Speaker 02

  It'll just search and search until it finds it. And if you don't give it anything, then it'll look inward.

• 2:36:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:36:36Speaker 02

  It'll find something, you know, cold plunges, not comfortable.

• 2:36:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:41Speaker 02

  But, you know, if you can find a way to, to like it.

• 2:36:46Joe Rogan?

  I don't like it.

• 2:36:47Speaker 02

  I don't like it at all.

• 2:36:48Joe Rogan?

  I do it every day. I hate it.

• 2:36:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:50Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 2:36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:57Joe Rogan?

  I don't want to do this.

• 2:36:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:36:58Joe Rogan?

  It's fucking cold outside. It's forty degrees outside. I'm climbing this thirty-four degree water. But, but, but because I do it, I know that I've already done something way more difficult than most of my day.

• 2:37:09Speaker 02

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

• 2:37:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:33Speaker 02

  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, and that, that's useful. That's been useful to me.

• 2:37:43Joe Rogan?

  That's useful, but it also is beneficial physically. So it's both things. And I think that's the case with exercise too. That's also the case with sauna. Difficult things that are also very beneficial physically. They seem to go hand in hand. Cause it's the hormetic effect. Your body's freaking out because of the cold and that's why it produces all these, um, cold shock proteins. And that's why, uh, it produces all these anti-inflammatories. Uh, your body just feels better when you get out. The endorphin rush you get, you know? The, um, norepinephrine, this, this, this flood of these chemicals that lasts for hours, ramps up your dopamine by like two hundred percent. And it lasts for hours.

• 2:38:23Joe Rogan?

  Like you genuinely feel better. So there's all that. It's also good for recovery, muscle soreness and just general inflammation. There's a lot of like benefits, but that's the same with exercise, right? It's difficult to do. It's hard to do, but if you can. Do it, man, you'll be stronger, healthier, you feel better. It's like, it's like you've gotta 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.

• 2:39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:05Joe Rogan?

  It's all, it's all a bunch of hogwash. It's the latest fad, it's this, it's that.

• 2:39:10Speaker 02

  And yet, look at the stadium 50 years ago and look at it today.

• 2:39:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:14Speaker 02

  The evidence demands a verdict. Something, something awful has happened.

• 2:39:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:19Speaker 02

  It's like, it's like the difference between, uh, being hungry and feeling hungry.

• 2:39:25Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:39:26Speaker 02

  You know, that's something else I, 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? Ah, I'm fucking, I'm famished. Like, no, you're not.

• 2:39:37Joe Rogan?

  You're really, you're really not.

• 2:39:38Speaker 02

  You can't possibly be.

• 2:39:39Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:39:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:46Joe Rogan?

  For the week before, they're living in hell. They're living in hell. Some of those guys, they start their cut like four or five days out. Crazy. They're like, that, that's starving.

• 2:39:56Speaker 02

  You gotta really love it, man.

• 2:39:57Joe Rogan?

  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, feed your kids. You're just using willpower to starve. That's so different than at any other time in history. It's a different feeling. You know, like if you're a person that's making your way across the country and, uh, you're the wag, the wagon breaks.

• 2:40:17Speaker 02

  Donner Party, table for two?

• 2:40:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. And, and that's real starving. Real starving.

• 2:40:22Speaker 02

  Did you ever read, there's a book by Nathaniel Philbrick, it's called In The Heart Of The Sea?

• 2:40:27Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 2:40:27Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 2:40:30Speaker 02

  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. It's 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.

• 2:41:00Joe Rogan?

  Jesus.

• 2:41:01Speaker 02

  Hunting right whales, which are just sperm whales.

• 2:41:04Joe Rogan?

  Years?

• 2:41:05Speaker 02

  Years. Yeah. They were called right whales because they were the right whales to kill, right? And in that time, uh, it was a great source of energy for the country. All the lamplights burned on whale oil.

• 2:41:18Joe Rogan?

  Imagine how many whales there were before they started doing this.

• 2:41:21Speaker 02

  They were like schools. There were so many. We, this book will, I mean, it's, it's rich in a, in a lot of different ways. It's where they got the expression steely dan, actually. It was, uh, because it was just the women. And it was a, a device used for pleasuring themselves. Cause the, the, the men were all out to sea.

• 2:41:46Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god.

• 2:41:46Speaker 02

  So they'd use a steely dan.

• 2:41:47Joe Rogan?

  Oh, you wanna talk about hard lives?

• 2:41:51Speaker 02

  The, the business, whatever it takes to shoot the elk and get it down from the mountain. I get it. That, that's a thing. But when you read through the real process of getting a sperm whale out of the ocean alongside the ship and then onto the ship. And the cutting of the blubber and the cauldrons that burned 24/7 on the deck. And the blubber that's put into the cauldrons.

• 2:42:21Joe Rogan?

  So they're just making this rendered fat?

• 2:42:23Speaker 02

  They're rendering the fat in the oil in real time.

• 2:42:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh wow.

• 2:42:27Speaker 02

  And, and.

• 2:42:28Joe Rogan?

  Cause they have to, or it'll rot.

• 2:42:29Speaker 02

  That's right. And so they just load up the boats.

• 2:42:32Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:42:33Speaker 02

  So what happens, and, and this is not really a.

• 2:42:36Joe Rogan?

  Eating the whales too?

• 2:42:37Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:42:37Joe Rogan?

  No?

• 2:42:38Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:42:39Joe Rogan?

  What are they eating?

• 2:42:40Speaker 02

  Well, they've got their, they got their hard tack mostly. Hardtack is just kinda like crackers, biscuits with no real taste at all. It was the currency. You're used to anything, but I 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 22 feet long, and men row them, right?

• 2:43:23Speaker 02

  And so you harpoon the whale, and then you hang on and go for what they called a Nantucket sleigh ride. So the whale would just drag the...

• 2:43:34Joe Rogan?

  What if the whale goes under?

• 2:43:36Speaker 02

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

• 2:43:50Joe Rogan?

  Do they kill it first?

• 2:43:51Speaker 02

  Uh, well, no. No, it's killed back at the, at the ship typically. You don't wanna kill it when it's, when you're a mile from the ship, cause you gotta drag it back.

• 2:44:01Joe Rogan?

  They didn't know how smart whales were back then either.

• 2:44:03Speaker 02

  We didn't know anything, but...

• 2:44:05Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that crazy that that's only a couple hundred years ago?

• 2:44:07Speaker 02

  1821.

• 2:44:08Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that nuts?

• 2:44:10Speaker 02

  Well...

• 2:44:10Joe Rogan?

  Couple hundred years ago, the ocean's filled with whales.

• 2:44:13Speaker 02

  Filled with them, and like that.

• 2:44:15Joe Rogan?

  Cause if you look now, they're hard to find, and nothing hunts them.

• 2:44:20Speaker 02

  No, sperm whales.

• 2:44:21Joe Rogan?

  I never even really thought about it.

• 2:44:23Speaker 02

  They were everywhere.

• 2:44:23Joe Rogan?

  I mean, I knew about it, but I never thought about it. I never, I mean, we've talked a lot about the, um, the decimation of the fish population in the ocean. About like 90 plus percent of all the big fish are gone.

• 2:44:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:36Joe Rogan?

  Which is really nuts, but I never really thought about it that way when it comes to whales.

• 2:44:41Speaker 02

  Well, you can make a really good and really controversial case. They made a movie, Ron Howard made a movie. Yeah, yeah, Ron Howard made a movie on this. Yeah, it's amazing. Look, I mean, they, they were everywhere. So these guys harpoon one.

• 2:44:55Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 2:44:56Speaker 02

  From, from the whale boat, then they get tugged along.

• 2:44:59Joe Rogan?

  Look at all these whales.

• 2:45:01Speaker 02

  And then, while they're out, maybe a mile from the ship, the mate of the whale that was harpooned, starts ramming the ship. Rams it three times.

• 2:45:18Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:45:19Speaker 02

  Sinks it.

• 2:45:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:45:20Speaker 02

  Now, you got a couple dozen guys in whale boats, 2,000 miles off the coast of South America, with no supplies.

• 2:45:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh, man.

• 2:45:34Speaker 02

  So, what happens? And this is all 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 gunnel of their boat, and in the whale boat, it's just like a giant carcass. It's just bleached bones, all in it, except for two quasi-humans. One in the stern and one in the bow. Each skeletons, huddled up, staring each other with wild eyes, just waiting to see who would die next.

• 2:46:14Joe Rogan?

  So they could eat them?

• 2:46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there were rules. There were almost like cookbooks, that were very common.

• 2:46:23Joe Rogan?

  How many people were on these boats?

• 2:46:24Speaker 02

  Hmm, double-check me, Jamie, but I think there were probably a dozen on each one. Many family members. There 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.

• 2:46:42Joe Rogan?

  And they ate each other?

• 2:46:44Speaker 02

  They ate each other, man.

• 2:46:46Joe Rogan?

  How long was it before they discovered them?

• 2:46:48Speaker 02

  They were at sea adrift, I think, for the better part of three months.

• 2:46:56Speaker 02

  Winner of 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.

• 2:47:08Joe Rogan?

  When did this movie come out? 2015 for the movie, the manuscript was found in 1960, verified in 1980. Oh my god. Released in 84.

• 2:47:19Speaker 02

  Dude, you want to take a deep dive, go to the like the whaling museum up in New England. The stuff is, this, I mean, in the day, there were strict protocols on how to eat your friend. How to prepare your friend for consumption.

• 2:47:36Joe Rogan?

  Did they devise them on the spot, or did they have them prepared, they devised it on the spot?

• 2:47:40Speaker 02

  There was, what, the rules? No, no, they were written. It was, it was like a maritime code.

• 2:47:46Joe Rogan?

  So, they kind of knew that this was a possibility?

• 2:47:49Speaker 02

  They knew it was a certainty, they just didn't know for whom. This was common. This, 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, 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.

• 2:48:16Joe Rogan?

  Oh boy.

• 2:48:17Speaker 02

  Who not to eat, based on the degree of your relation.

• 2:48:23Joe Rogan?

  Oh boy.

• 2:48:23Speaker 02

  So like brothers are definitely off. But cousins, not optimal. So like, people were being prepared for consumption.

• 2:48:34Joe Rogan?

  Eating them raw?

• 2:48:35Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, I, I can't imagine how you would make a fire out there.

• 2:48:39Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god.

• 2:48:41Speaker 02

  Un-speakable.

• 2:48:43Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god, oh my god.

• 2:48:44Speaker 02

  That's interesting. Owen Chase, right?

• 2:48:48Joe Rogan?

  The men spent over three months at sea and had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Captain Pollard and Charles Ramsdale were discovered gnawing on the bones of their shipmates in one boat. Owen Chase, Lawrence and Nickerson also survived to tell the tale, and all seven sailors were consumed. Whoa.

• 2:49:05Speaker 02

  Dude, and, see, this is why nonfiction is the best. I know it's nauseating, but I mean, that book.

• 2:49:15Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:49:24Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:49:32Speaker 02

  There's gotta, and then there was one.

• 2:49:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, gro- oh, god.

• 2:49:37Speaker 02

  Dude, I know, I know.

• 2:49:39Joe Rogan?

  Reality is so terrifying in that regard that we, we have, you know, we, we're so fortunate that there's so much food available, the poorest amongst us are fat.

• 2:49:51Joe Rogan?

  But the reality is, if that cut off, it would be real desperate, real quick. Most people get really hungry after five hours, you know?

• 2:50:01Speaker 02

  They feel really hungry.

• 2:50:02Joe Rogan?

  I found a description if you'd like to read it. No. No? Okay. It's not that bad. Okay. "The crew, according to Chase, separated limbs from his body and cut all the flesh from the bones, after which we opened the body, took out the heart, and then closed it again, 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.

• 2:50:43Speaker 02

  And this is why we have Moby Dick.

• 2:50:45Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:50:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:51:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I've heard this before.

• 2:51:15Speaker 02

  Because had, had that not happened in Pennsylvania, in Titusville.

• 2:51:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:20Speaker 02

  Not long after this, we'd have hunted them into absolute oblivion.

• 2:51:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, we almost did that to mammals in North America.

• 2:51:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:26Joe Rogan?

  Market hunting. Um, there, there used to be elk in every state in the country. There used to be deer everywhere, um, and we basically hunted them into oblivion. The buffalo is the best example of that, of course.

• 2:51:39Speaker 02

  The hell does it matter what this meant?

• 2:51:41Joe Rogan?

  Oh, we're fucked up. We can't, we don't see consequences. We see what's in front of us right now and what we need to do. And back then, they didn't really have a real understanding of what would happen. That had never been done before. No one had just showed up at a continent filled with mammals and just started decimating them. There wasn't like a history 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 they had long range rifles. So they were able to shoot buffalo from a distance and and then they, you know, for a lot of them, they only use their tongues. They pickled their tongues and sent them back east.

• 2:52:15Speaker 02

  And that is, I was in Custer a couple of weeks ago for a buffalo roundup.

• 2:52:20Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:52:21Speaker 02

  Man, this was a kick. This is, um, so this is western South Dakota, not far from Crazy Horse and, um, Rushmore. You know, we worked on Crazy Horse for Dirty Jobs. We did an episode.

• 2:52:37Joe Rogan?

  Mean the sculpture?

• 2:52:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:39Joe Rogan?

  Sculpture is weird because there's no real drawing or painting or anything, no photographs of Crazy Horse.

• 2:52:44Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:52:45Joe Rogan?

  Nobody knows really what he looked like.

• 2:52:46Speaker 02

  Well, they're working from a, 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.

• 2:53:03Joe Rogan?

  What does it look like now? I haven't seen it in a long time.

• 2:53:06Speaker 02

  You'll love this, Jay. It's, it's, it's so mine, but you, you can take all of Rushmore, all foreheads, and put it on the forehead of Crazy Horse.

• 2:53:16Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:53:17Speaker 02

  That's how big this thing is. And

• 2:53:19Joe Rogan?

  Wasn't it like one family's undertaking?

• 2:53:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, Korchak.

• 2:53:24Joe Rogan?

  Go to that last picture that you just had, that one right there. So that shows before and after. That shows where it was a while back and where it is now.

• 2:53:31Speaker 02

  Look at it, look at his finger in the lower right.

• 2:53:34Joe Rogan?

  That's what you worked on?

• 2:53:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I scaled down his, uh, forehead to do basically some tidying up of his nostrils and whatnot when we were there. It's

• 2:53:44Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy how big that is.

• 2:53:46Speaker 02

  It's massive. It's absolutely massive. And yeah, this, there was one guy, uh, Korchak was his name.

• 2:53:55Speaker 02

  And he was an immigrant and he loved the Indian people and that's that's the model there at the right yeah.

• 2:54:02Joe Rogan?

  That's what it's gonna look like.

• 2:54:02Speaker 02

  That's what we're shooting for.

• 2:54:04Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:54:05Speaker 02

  And it's it's it's gonna take another half a century probably, but.

• 2:54:09Joe Rogan?

  That's incredible.

• 2:54:11Speaker 02

  You know, it's funny man.

• 2:54:12Joe Rogan?

  It's very controversial and amongst Native American communities though, right?

• 2:54:16Speaker 02

  I don't know. It is, you know, some.

• 2:54:18Joe Rogan?

  I think there's a there's a part of it is the thing that Crazy Horse didn't want to be photographed.

• 2:54:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:23Joe Rogan?

  You know, he really believed that cameras were like stealing.

• 2:54:26Speaker 02

  Stole your soul.

• 2:54:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. That was a belief back then, which is. I mean.

• 2:54:32Speaker 02

  Might be on to something.

• 2:54:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, you have this novel thing where no one's ever seen it before and you take an image of someone like that.

• 2:54:39Speaker 02

  Like it diminishes you.

• 2:54:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Also, human beings at that point in time were so horrible to each other and these settlers had done essentially demonic things.

• 2:54:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:49Joe Rogan?

  To the population, just with diseases, just bringing diseases.

• 2:54:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:53Joe Rogan?

  So of course they would say, what are they doing now? Oh, this is the fucking coup de grace. They're gonna steal our soul with this fucking box. Big thing goes off. You gotta stand still.

• 2:55:04Speaker 02

  This guy Korchak, he was so brilliant on so many levels. Yeah, 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.

• 2:55:20Joe Rogan?

  Jeez.

• 2:55:21Speaker 02

  Space. The like the work ethic is mind boggling what they did and he was a he was a real friend. To the Native Americans and he and this was a love letter for them and to them and. And who was Crazy Horse's, 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.

• 2:55:47Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think anything anytime you have some enormous thing, you're gonna have controversy. You're gonna have people that don't like it, that do like it, you know, there's

• 2:55:56Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 2:55:57Joe Rogan?

  Depending what you do.

• 2:55:58Speaker 02

  But the difference, I mean, for me, I called when we brought, um, we brought Dirty Jobs back during the lockdowns. Cause I just felt like I wanted to be, I wanted to be the first show back on the TV. You know, that was, that was shooting and this was one of the first things that, that we did. But I started by calling Rushmore and I'm, 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, I want to bring my crew and, and I, I'm really, I want to tend to this statue. This statuary, this monument.

• 2:56:36Speaker 02

  At the time, you know, the headlines were filled with statues being pulled down and being disrespected for any number of reasons. Right?

• 2:56:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:56:45Speaker 02

  I'm like, look, I think the, I think the park service does an amazing duty and I, and, and I, I want to meet the caretakers of our statuary. And I would love, you know, to work on this with the people who work on it and, and they not only said no, they were like, are you, are you crazy? We would never, we would never permit anything like that. Like, I think they thought it was exploitative somehow. And I'm like, I want America to, to learn the story of Rushmore. I want them to learn something about the people memorialized on it. I, I want them to meet the people who care for it. It's, 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.

• 2:57:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:58:03Joe Rogan?

  Monumental in reality.

• 2:58:05Speaker 02

  Monumental monuments.

• 2:58:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:58:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:58:23Speaker 02

  More people will have just seen what Jamie put up here as a result of this, probably, than will, than will visit in person. And that's amazing, dude.

• 2:58:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that is amazing.

• 2:58:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:59:08Joe Rogan?

  Do you know, um, Dan Flores? Do you know who he is?

• 2:59:11Speaker 02

  Tell me.

• 2:59:12Joe Rogan?

  He wrote, uh, American Coyote and he wrote, what is it? Uh, Buffalo Diplomacy, Buffalo Ecology? Is that what it was? I for, I forget, but the buffalo premise is very fascinating. Cause the numbers of buffalo, he believes, but they were in such large numbers because so many Native Americans died out because of diseases.

• 2:59:34Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:59:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59:45Joe Rogan?

  But if the Native Americans, ninety percent of them were wiped out by disease when the settlers came here. So there's no one hunting them for a long time. And so the populations grew immense.

• 2:59:55Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:59:56Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 3:00:18Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 3:00:18Joe Rogan?

  And became overpopulated, in a sense. An unnatural popu- 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 sixty-five percent 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 about-

• 3:00:44Speaker 02

  The Cambrian thing, or was it-

• 3:00:46Joe Rogan?

  It's a eleven, well, there's two different time periods that they attribute to, um, there's a shower, an asteroid shower that we go, if you really want to get into this, you should really look up the 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. Sixty-five percent of North American mammals died off during this time period.

• 3:01:30Joe Rogan?

  And you've got to think, like, when the buffalo existed back then, they existed with the North American lion, which was bigger than the African lion. It's the biggest lion ever. So they're getting jacked by these massive predators. And then you have this extinction event, and then you have humans start hunting them. And so humans now, horses have been reintroduced to North America by Europeans. Humans are on these horses, and then they're hunting these animals. Reintroduced, by the way, because horses originated in North America, including zebras. All horse species came from here. But that was the bearing land bridge, and things moved around. And when the mass extinction event happened,

• 3:02:13Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 3:02:44Speaker 02

  1830, 40?

• 3:02:47Joe Rogan?

  You'd have to go to whatever his paper.

• 3:02:49Speaker 02

  1850 is what it's. Yeah. Here's the tragedy for me. I narrated a special about all that.

• 3:02:57Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:02:58Speaker 02

  I can't remember it, man.

• 3:02:59Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 3:03:00Speaker 02

  I mean, I remember enough of it to know that I narrated it. That's what I told you three hours ago. I'm...

• 3:03:06Joe Rogan?

  Is that the Ken Burns one? Is that what you?

• 3:03:08Speaker 02

  Could have been. Could have been. No, if it was Ken Burns, he always hires Peter Coyote.

• 3:03:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 3:03:14Speaker 02

  Peter does all of his stuff.

• 3:03:16Joe Rogan?

  Peter Coyote's great. Yeah.

• 3:03:17Speaker 02

  But I, um, 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.

• 3:03:41Speaker 02

  And, um, you know, he, he, he, he knows all of the information in the show, but he thinks because he heard me tell it to him that I know it too, but I don't. I'm just adjacent to it.

• 3:03:53Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:03:54Speaker 02

  I know, I know just enough to, you know, to keep a conversation on its feet. But it's like, it's this constant thing, man. I'm, I'm, I'm older than I've ever been and it's just nagging at me now. Cause it's like, god damn, I should know. I, I should remember more that I, I should, I should have remembered more about Philbrick. I should have remembered more about, um.

• 3:04:17Joe Rogan?

  I don't think we're designed for it.

• 3:04:19Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 3:04:20Joe Rogan?

  And I think the humans like yourself is, this is kind of a new thing. Like 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?

• 3:04:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:04:41Joe Rogan?

  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, we essentially have the same brains and the same capacity, same hard drive as people who lived in tribes 10,000 years ago.

• 3:04:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:59Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 3:05:09Speaker 02

  I read that like Bill Clinton's number is way high, like certain people's numbers.

• 3:05:16Joe Rogan?

  Oh, who they can keep in their head?

• 3:05:17Speaker 02

  Like the number of people you can, you can keep.

• 3:05:20Joe Rogan?

  It probably expands just like the part of your brain expands when you do difficult things. It probably expands.

• 3:05:25Speaker 02

  There's a podcast, as you know, dedicated to what happened on your podcast.

• 3:05:30Joe Rogan?

  I didn't know that.

• 3:05:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's a podcast out there basically called experi, 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.

• 3:05:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:05:41Speaker 02

  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 gonna go to an art museum. You need somebody to lead you through. I do, anyway. Somebody who can.

• 3:06:07Joe Rogan?

  It helps.

• 3:06:08Speaker 02

  It helps, man. If you're gonna go see, if you're, if you're gonna go see a martial arts fight for the first time, if you're gonna go to the octagon, it'd be better to sit next to you than, than me. Right?

• 3:06:22Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:22Speaker 02

  So everybody.

• 3:06:23Joe Rogan?

  But you'd be annoying. I'd have to say you don't, okay.

• 3:06:27Joe Rogan?

  How much do you know why that hurts?

• 3:06:30Speaker 02

  Here, let me, let me show you. Can you feel that? I, I'm just saying that I think more than ever before,

• 3:06:39Speaker 02

  people need a guide. They need somebody to make sense out of all the information. Cause I don't think there's any, there's not much new information. It's just accessible in ways we've never seen.

• 3:06:50Joe Rogan?

  There's new information too.

• 3:06:52Speaker 02

  How can there be?

• 3:06:53Joe Rogan?

  Because it's, 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, 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.

• 3:07:22Speaker 02

  Well, it's, there's no such thing as an old joke, if you hear it for the first time.

• 3:07:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:07:28Speaker 02

  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 you would go, no dude, that's old information. You're just learning it.

• 3:07:41Joe Rogan?

  Right, 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, like, and what, what enhances that? What, you know, enzymes, different things that you eat.

• 3:08:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:08:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:08:18Speaker 02

  And the body of, the stuff that I don't know yet, that's been around forever, is massive.

• 3:08:25Joe Rogan?

  Massive.

• 3:08:25Speaker 02

  The new stuff is new. And I don't know how big it is, but it's not as big

• 3:08:30Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 3:08:30Speaker 02

  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's like, oh my god. If I have an internet connection, I have access to ninety-eight percent

• 3:08:43Joe Rogan?

  Of everything.

• 3:08:44Speaker 02

  that we've ever known.

• 3:08:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:46Speaker 02

  Now, that either makes you intensely curious or intensely uneasy, because now you know.

• 3:08:53Joe Rogan?

  Maybe both.

• 3:08:53Speaker 02

  Maybe. But you have it now. You're like, if you're not, like, what are you doing? Like, you're sitting on the toilet. Are you, are you reeling? TikTok. Are you TikToking? Like, how are you spending the one truly finite resource you have?

• 3:09:06Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 3:09:07Speaker 02

  Your time? What are you doing with it, man?

• 3:09:08Joe Rogan?

  A lot of us getting distracted.

• 3:09:10Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 3:09:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:11Speaker 02

  But they're stories. They're buffalo stories and whale stories. They're out there, man.

• 3:09:16Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 3:09:26Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 3:09:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:27Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 3:09:27Joe Rogan?

  That's how we make a living, Mike.

• 3:09:29Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, Joe, it is.

• 3:09:31Joe Rogan?

  That's what we've done.

• 3:09:32Speaker 02

  It's a pleasant living.

• 3:09:33Joe Rogan?

  Listen, man, it's been awesome talking to you. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.

• 3:09:37Speaker 02

  Uh, you know what?

• 3:09:37Joe Rogan?

  Three hours just fucking flew by.

• 3:09:40Speaker 02

  I'm just, I mean, full disclosure, I'm, I'm kinda relieved. I mean, I was getting so annoyed with friends of mine who were like, hey, man, why haven't you been on the show? What's, I'm like, maybe, my mother said, maybe he's not that into you.

• 3:09:54Joe Rogan?

  It's just a time thing.

• 3:09:55Speaker 02

  He'll, he'll call you one day.

• 3:09:57Joe Rogan?

  There's a lot of people out there, but I, but I really did wanna talk to you.

• 3:10:01Speaker 02

  Can I show you a truck before we go?

• 3:10:02Joe Rogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 3:10:04Speaker 02

  Cause I know you're a car guy.

• 3:10:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:06Speaker 02

  So, this company called Sugar Creek up in Ohio made me a truck.

• 3:10:12Joe Rogan?

  Ooh, what kind?

• 3:10:13Speaker 02

  Well, it it started as a 1964 Dodge Power Wagon.

• 3:10:18Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 3:10:19Speaker 02

  It ended up as this.

• 3:10:21Joe Rogan?

  Dude, I've seen that online. That's yours.

• 3:10:23Speaker 02

  That's mine.

• 3:10:23Joe Rogan?

  Ah, that's crazy. I love those old power wagons. Dude, that thing looks incredible. What a great job they did on that.

• 3:10:31Speaker 02

  It's it's unbelievable. Twenty seven, it's about nine thousand man hours.

• 3:10:36Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God. That thing looks fucking incredible. Oh, you got a Hellifant engine in it.

• 3:10:41Speaker 02

  Eleven hundred horsepower.

• 3:10:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my goodness. Look at that. So it's got a TRX hood.

• 3:10:45Speaker 02

  It's it's.

• 3:10:46Joe Rogan?

  Wow. That's cr- that's fucking great.

• 3:10:51Speaker 02

  I know.

• 3:10:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh, do you drive that?

• 3:10:54Speaker 02

  Uh, Barrett Jackson is gonna auction it off.

• 3:10:58Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 3:10:59Speaker 02

  In January.

• 3:11:00Joe Rogan?

  Why? Why don't you keep it?

• 3:11:02Speaker 02

  Because my foundation needs money.

• 3:11:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 3:11:05Speaker 02

  And right, so it's it's gonna get a, I don't know what it'll go for. He says a bunch, but.

• 3:11:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that'll go for a lot of money, man.

• 3:11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:11:13Joe Rogan?

  That's probably gonna go for half a million dollars at least.

• 3:11:15Speaker 02

  No, he says two.

• 3:11:16Joe Rogan?

  Two million? Two million dollars?

• 3:11:19Speaker 02

  Probably cost half a million to make.

• 3:11:20Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 3:11:21Speaker 02

  Beats me. You know, this is another one of those worlds.

• 3:11:24Joe Rogan?

  Maybe. Auctions are crazy, cause a bunch of rich guys get in there and go, I want it.

• 3:11:28Speaker 02

  I know.

• 3:11:28Joe Rogan?

  And then they start feeding off each other. Look at this fucking thing. That's incredible. Two million dollars? Jesus Christ.

• 3:11:33Speaker 02

  Who knows? But I I 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. Cause 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 twenty seven savants. And all they do is take classic cars from his sort of quasi junkyard and turn them into these gems.

• 3:12:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:12:06Speaker 02

  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,

• 3:12:16Joe Rogan?

  I would never be able to let that thing go.

• 3:12:17Speaker 02

  It's the art we were talking about. It's, it's, that's artistry.

• 3:12:21Joe Rogan?

  That's art, yeah. Oh, 100%, that's art.

• 3:12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:12:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Mike, appreciate you very much, man.

• 3:12:26Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:12:27Joe Rogan?

  Thank you for being here.

• 3:12:28Speaker 02

  It was a lot of fun.

• 3:12:29Joe Rogan?

  All right, bye, everybody.

• 3:12:29Speaker 02

  See you.