Mike Rowe: How To Make $10,000 Per Month In 90 Days - No Degree Required!

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  People say to me, "Mike Rowe, are you ever going to run out of dirty jobs?" And I say, "Not this season." I know you love that, America.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  The great dirty secret of dirty jobs: We probably featured 45 multimillionaires on that show. You would have never known it, because they were covered in [BLEEP] or something worse.

• 0:50Graham Stephan?

  You became famous showing America the jobs that we all depend on. Why did we stop respecting these jobs?

• 0:58Speaker 02

  I think the fault has to do with our tendency to resent that which we rely upon. What about the fact that for every five tradespeople who retire to replace them? I don't have to be an economist to tell you that. That's not sustainable. There are 7 million able-bodied men right now who are not only not working, they're not looking for work. That's never happened in our country, not in peacetime. Anyway, 7 million men.

• 1:27Graham Stephan?

  What do you think happened?

• 1:34Graham Stephan?

  Mike Rowe, thank you so much for coming on the Iced Coffee Hour.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Well, you're welcome. But did I really come on your hour? Or did you come to the place where I record?

• 1:42Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, we came to San Francisco just for you, just because we were so excited for this.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Then let me officially thank you for doing that. I know it's a pain in the ass to travel these days, especially into San Francisco, where half the runways are closed for no good reason.

• 1:55Graham Stephan?

  Well, for me, this is big because I've been a huge fan of you and Dirty Jobs. I grew up watching Dirty Jobs. And in fact, you inspired this, I kept it up briefly on my channel. It was called Undercover Millionaire. Where what I did is I worked these jobs that you would have no idea made a whole bunch of money.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15Graham Stephan?

  Window washing, this kid made a thousand dollars a day. Car washing, this kid made five hundred dollars a day. Dog walking and running a dog business that was making fifteen hundred dollars a day. And so I found these jobs that were making a whole bunch of money. And then from doing that, people would reach out to me.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34Graham Stephan?

  Incredible businesses and you were the inspiration for that.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Well, wow, thank you. You know, that was a big part of the thesis of the show that didn't get talked about enough. It was the underpinning of entrepreneurship. Like first and foremost, it was a TV show, right? Like it had to have some entertainment spectacle to it. So it was always an exploding toilet or some misadventure in animal husbandry. Or, you know, some crazy thing that would get you to watch. But if you really paid attention, as you obviously did over time, you know, we did 350 of those things. And you would almost always find in every episode, not in every segment, but in every episode, you would find a buried love letter to entrepreneurship.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  And you would find a rumination on the dignity of work. And you would find humor that often exists on job sites, but doesn't get baked into a lot of popular portrayals of work. The great dirty secret of Dirty Jobs, which nobody really believes to this day, but, but you will, because you watched for all these reasons. We probably featured forty to forty-five multimillionaires on that show.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  You would, you would have never known it. Cause they were covered or something worse.

• 3:56Graham Stephan?

  What's the job that made the most money? That would shock people?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  The answer will be one of the segments that was really about entrepreneurship. Again, it's the, it's the story nobody tells, but the business of mastering a trade. And, you know, taking the reverse commute, right? In other words, seeing where everybody else is going and totally taking your, your passion and your dreams and, and setting them off to the side and saying, no, I'm going in the other direction. I'm going to find the opportunity. I'm going to get great at it.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  And then I'm going to find a way to love it. You know, the answer to your question is probably Les Swanson comes to mind. He was a guy in Wisconsin who I met in the pilots, like in the very, very, very early days. He pulled me in his honey wagon. This is outside of Madison and, and we went to clean out a pumping station on the side of the road, which you would never recognize as a thing. It's just a, it looks like a concrete bunker. You, you probably drove past a couple on your way in, but when you go in, they go down four or five stories sometimes. And that's where all the, the crap accumulates in a given zip code. And it's just an unspeakable level of, of hell at a glance, right?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  It's like 104 degrees, crazy hot in Wisconsin. We were standing up to our nipples in the, the filthiest of the filth, knocking cholesterol off the walls, talking. That's really what Dirty Jobs was. It was, it was an interview. It was a talk show in a sewer, you know, nine out of 10 times. And Les, uh, at one point it was just so hot and so miserable. And, and there was really nothing to do, except what I did, which was look at him and say, how did you wind up here, man? Like, what happened to you? And his answer was, he was a guidance counselor for years. And then he had a, um, he had a practice, like a, like a psychiatric practice.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  And then he turned 50 or so and and he just went in another direction. And I said, but why? You know, I mean, remember, we're literally covered in crap like working in the most inhospitable environment you can imagine. And without missing a beat, he said, I got tired of dealing with other people's shit. And, you know, it was one of those unscripted moments. And you start thinking, so wait a minute, turns out he owns three or four honey wagons. Turns out he's got, you know, a dozen people working for him. Turns out he's got a summer house. Turns out he's got a margarita machine by his built in swimming pool. Turns out. He's living a pretty great life. Anyway, sorry for the rant, but that's the it's that's the the the answer are men and women like that.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Who actually used a dirty job to build a going concern.

• 6:49Jack Selby?

  What makes a trade higher or lower earning? Is it the obstacle to enter the trade? Is it how dirty a trade is? Is it just like how many?

• 7:00Graham Stephan?

  Operator.

• 7:01Jack Selby?

  Yeah, how many people want to get into it? What what what determines the pay of a trade?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  So many things. The time in the century to which you're referring. The day of the week, the state that we happen to be in. Was it union? Was it non-union? I mean, there's a long, long list like my foundation has helped train hundreds of welders. Some of them are making $300,000 a year right now. Others are making $58,000 a year. So the thing about the trades, and I think it's probably true of everything else, too, is you can't paint with too broad a brush. Actually, you can, but you shouldn't. I was just in Plano, Texas, and touring a data center.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  I met three electricians, all making north of $240,000 a year, 240 to 280. Electricians, no college. Two of them were former submarine guys out of the Navy. And the other just went through the typical trade school process.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  No debt. And the craziest part of the stat is they were all poached three times in the prior eighteen months. Now, what's true in Plano right now with data centers might not be true in Boise, might not be true in Tallahassee. I, I don't know. But what I can tell you is the, uh, the entire economy is flipped with regard to job security and with regard to the definition of a, of a good job.

• 8:40Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. Now, a lot of people believe that the jobs market is weak and the average American can't pay a thousand dollar emergency. From your perspective, what's the reality on this?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  I think that's probably true, but I don't spend a lot of time agonizing over the plight of the average American. And I know that sounds kind of crappy, but I'm not running for office, right? I, I don't, I'm not even running for a renewal on a, on a show. You know what I would do? I would refer you to a terrific book. I bet your viewers would dig it. It's by a guy called Todd Rose. He runs a think tank up in Boston. He's written three amazing books. The first is called The End of Average. And it goes to your question, right? It goes to this idea that we have it in our heads that there

• 9:26Speaker 02

  is this, this state that most people fit in. That's the average state. It could be average intelligence. It could be average height. It could be so many different things. But what Todd basically argues is that it's all nonsense. It's all rooted in a fallacy. And he gives lots of examples, like the Air Force spent a fortune trying to build a cockpit in their fighter jets that suited the average fighter pilot. And what they wound up building was something that wasn't comfortable for anyone at all. The whole thing is a misnomer. How that applies to work, how that applies to education. There

• 10:07Speaker 02

  are a lot of lessons in there. Of course, the key to a successful cockpit is maximum adjustability on every single angle, right? So again, it's back to the painting with a broad brush. You can't, you can't really do it. Um, but.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Since you asked, yeah, I, I think the average American is confronted with a list of serious problems that manifest in the circumstances that you outline. They're living paycheck to paycheck. How did they get there? Why are they there? Can the trades offer you a way out?

• 10:43Jack Selby?

  What are the biggest problems pushing Americans to this low average American status? And how do they get out of that?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Interestingly, I think the hinge upon which your question relies is, is status. You know, we are beset today with constant reminders and challenges and invitations to up our game, whether it's the color of our credit card or the type of vehicle we're driving. It's the oldest story in the world, but the, the status is

• 11:19Speaker 02

  this idea, whether it's caused by an influence or whether it's just caused by the proliferation of, of proof. I mean, it's, it's everywhere around us. And so people are feeling lesser than all the time, constantly. That's, that's the message that I think we're sending. Maybe unintentionally or intentionally, it doesn't really matter, but the country's filled with people who feel like they're not participating in the dream somehow or another. And I think it's, I think it's self inflicted by and large. I think they've confused living life to the hilt with living life to the hilt of spending.

• 12:01Jack Selby?

  Explain that.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Well, what's in your garage right now that you're not using?

• 12:05Jack Selby?

  Me?

• 12:06Speaker 02

  No, not you, but metaphorically.

• 12:08Jack Selby?

  I have a 2000 Mazda Miata that I should drive more often.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Well, I don't mean the car. I mean, all the other stuff. I mean, if you go into the average garage today of the average American, I'm making it up.

• 12:21Jack Selby?

  Sure.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  I don't know that this is true, but anecdotally, I mean, there's ski equipment. There's a snowmobile. Maybe there's a kayak. Maybe there's a bow and arrow. Maybe there's, I guess just go down the list. I mean, the stuff we buy. And use once or twice and then store, right? I mean, I I've just seen it so many times over and over and over. People who are living some kind of status life, some version of prosperity that's defined by the stuff that's in their garage that they rarely use. It's not just a car. It could be the size of the garage itself. It could be the house itself. But look, I'm a capitalist through and through, but our relationship with spending.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Is problematic.

• 13:08Jack Selby?

  If someone's not where they want to be in life financially, would you mostly attribute it to an earning problem or a spending problem?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Spending.

• 13:17Jack Selby?

  What, like 90% of the time, 80% of the time? Like, like by and large, you would say that people have a much greater spending problem than it is an earning problem.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Well, I would start by saying, what's more in control of the average American's life right now? How much they're earning in whatever job they happen to be in? Or how much they're spending in whatever lifestyle they've chosen to embrace? Again, apologies. I'm not talking about people who are who are in poverty or who are literally struggling to get their next meal or their basic needs met. I'm talking about, you know, the poor sucker. If your whole personal economy is rooted in your W two.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  And you and you continue to grow and and prosper and maybe your wife's a baller. She's killing it too. You know, she's making a few hundred grand and you're making a few hundred grand. And now you're making six, $700,000 a year. And maybe you're living in this town or maybe you're in New York. You know, the average American can't conceive of the fact that you're living paycheck to paycheck. But so many people are. So, you know, I mean, it's a really good question, but I don't know what the average American really is. I know there's a big cohort of people who look at a big chunk of people who are making five, six, $700,000 a year. And they can't imagine making that kind of dough.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  But at the same time, they can't believe that that person is somehow living month to month and this close to something that feels like oblivion. So, look, I there is no new advice, at least. That I've heard recently that that can trump the idea of paying yourself every week, every month, investing broadly with a diversified portfolio with an eye towards asset allocation and a real discretionary bent toward fees and costs. You start doing that when you're 22.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  I don't care if you're making 50,000 or 500, you know, when the dust settles down the line, you're gonna have a bunch of money socked away.

• 15:31Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. Now, you became famous showing America the jobs that we all depend on, but rarely respect. We're talking sanitation, farming, roadkill. Why did we stop respecting these jobs? It seems like a lot of times we look down on these jobs. Now, most people don't know this, but the second you file an LLC, your home address becomes part of the public record. Anyone's able to pull it up. We're talking vendors, customers, even random people online. That's why we partnered with Northwest Registered Agent, because they help keep your personal information off the public record completely. Instead of using your home address when filing, which is public information, by the way, Northwest uses theirs, so your privacy stays intact from day one.

• 16:13Graham Stephan?

  And their offices aren't some rented mailbox either. They actually own the buildings, so that address isn't disappearing on you a year from now. Plus, you get a free domain, website, email, and phone number when you file your LLC through Northwest, which means your business is ready to operate right away. They also include brand protection as part of the package, so you're not just protecting your home address, you're protecting your business name too. So file your LLC today and get your home address off of public record. Just go to northwestregisteredagent.com to get started today. That's northwestregisteredagent.com, or click the link down below in the description to get your LLC filed. Thank you so much to Northwest Registered Agent for sponsoring this episode. Why did we stop respecting these jobs? It seems like a lot of times we look down on these jobs.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  I think the fault in our stars has to do with our tendency to resent that which we rely upon.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  In a very basic way, um, we don't like to be reminded of our own shortcomings. And I used to be able to change my brakes. I used to be able to change my oil. I used to be able to tend to my car. Well, I can't do it now. I open the hood. I don't know what the hell I'm looking at. I need it. What I'm, I gotta be a rocket scientist. I need a, I need a software. I, I can't do anything. So I have to take it to an expert and the expert is actually the kind of person I admire. My foundation helps train those people, but if I'm being honest, you know, I'm standing there in the lobby, looking through the glass, watching somebody do something that I used to be able to do, but now I can't.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  And it's not their fault, obviously, but somewhere in there is like this reminder that I can't do that. But in the end, Dirty Jobs was a love letter to two industries, right? And they're only two industries in the whole world. There's mining and agriculture. Everything else is a, is a version of those two industries. Everything in this room, you know, was either grown from the ground and, and fashioned into something useful or pulled out of the earth and, and fabricated and into something important. So those are the only industries we have.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  All the jobs in the country, you know, you can draw a, a line, direct or indirect, back to those. So the, the point of the show was really just to elevate those two industries. And what it turned into was just a long and smelly odyssey from sea to shining sea.

• 18:54Jack Selby?

  Speaking of smelly, what was the worst smell you ever encountered in Dirty Jobs?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  There's a thing called a boil, which they'll do at Skulls International, where they prepare skulls for public display and they'll articulate entire skeletons of creatures. Uh, sometimes humans too, but like when you put a buffalo into a, a kettle, the size of this room and bring it to a boil and then throw in some oils and things and just put the whole carcass in there. And then pull it out and start to flens off the. Off the flesh. Oh, it it hits you like a like a sponge.

• 19:39Graham Stephan?

  It's what is it? What is the smell like?

• 19:43Jack Selby?

  It's like you after going to the gym, walking on an inclined treadmill for 15 minutes.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Well, dude, no, it's it's it's closer to like a double hockey workout. You take the hockey jersey and then you throw it in the hamper and then two days later. You know, there's things growing on it, you know, that weren't designed to grow. It's it's it's like what what does blue look like to a a person who's never seen anything? The thing about smells, you gotta remember.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  And I I read this in like a crime novel. It really stuck with me years ago, but all smells are particulate.

• 20:18Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  So what's really going on when you get? That kind of smell, whether it's from a sewer or whether it's chemical or whether it's just a fart from the guy sitting across from you. I'm not implying anything, but I'm saying like when that happens and you smell it, it's not like, oh, boy. That my nose is filled with something unfortunate and it's unpleasant. It's like that's it. That's a particle. It's a tiny particle and it gets in your blood and it goes to your brain. Like, that's what's happening. So it's like.

• 20:51Jack Selby?

  You're ingesting it.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Something that just flew out of your ass seconds ago is now like in my brain.

• 20:58Graham Stephan?

  Is that harmful?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  It can't be good. I'm not an expert in this area.

• 21:03Graham Stephan?

  I'm wondering, yeah, that.

• 21:05Jack Selby?

  That's probably for everything. It's probably some candles, you know?

• 21:09Graham Stephan?

  True.

• 21:09Jack Selby?

  It's probably like walking on the dirty streets.

• 21:12Graham Stephan?

  Some candles, believe it or not, in a closed room are not safe.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Why is the sense of smell far and away the most powerful? More so than taste, more so than sight, more so than hearing. It's it's the most primal sense that we have. Nothing can evoke a memory faster than.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  The perfume she used to wear.

• 21:38Jack Selby?

  That's interesting. I think that there's more diversity in terms of what you can smell than the things that you can taste, but also your nose is only ever assaulted. It's never like, it's very rare that you go out actively seeking out different smells. Your mouth, like if you want to taste something, you only ever really choose what you want to eat.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Interesting. I think you're right, but I think that again is, you know, back to the spending question. It's like, it's just a choice.

• 22:04Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Like people, right now, you know, food is having a moment. I guess maybe it's had a moment from the beginning, but look, for, for a long time, people thought of food is, it's, it's just fuel, you know, and now there's just the biggest section in any bookstores, what to eat, what not to eat, the evolution of nutrition, they got a cooking channel, you know, with hundreds of shows on it. They don't have a smelling channel. They don't have, they, they don't do that. I'm not saying it'd be great TV, but if you look back, look, metaphors are very powerful, right? Take time to smell the roses. You know, it's not like, take time to eat, you know, candy corn. It's a, smells are powerful and there's some great smells out there.

• 22:47Jack Selby?

  So you're still very involved in the trades within that community and outside of that community. Do you think people are just getting more lazy or they're valuing work-life balance?

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Nick Eberstadt, one of my favorite economists who wrote a great book called Men Without Work, talks about the fact that there are seven million able-bodied men right now who are not only not working, they're not looking for work. Right? That's never happened in our country, not in peacetime. Anyway, seven million men are not in the workforce.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  You're saying what's wrong with them?

• 23:25Jack Selby?

  Well, I'm not saying what's wrong with them. I'm just, I'm serious.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Where's the balance, dude? Where's the balance?

• 23:33Speaker 02

  This is really important. Nick answers that question. But the first thing he says is, let's look at what they're not doing. Okay. Seven million able bodied men not working. Okay. What are they doing? He says, well, they're not, they're not volunteering at their local church. They're not in the J C's. They're not in the Kiwanis Club. They're not in Lions Club. They're not helping out with Skills USA or the Boy Scouts of America or the Future Farmers of America. They're not engaged in any way in any kind of civic connective tissue, which for a long, long time was the thing that you would do if you had some spare time and you had something to contribute. Like, none of that is happening. What his research

• 24:14Speaker 02

  bears out, unfortunately, is an average of 2,000 hours a year on a screen. No judgments. But are they lazy? Or did we create an environment where we said it was okay to do that with your life? Are we incentivizing? Are we disincentivizing? You know? And that's when it gets political. Half the country right now is going to look at that cohort and say, good for them. Why should they work for these greedy, rapacious capitalists who are just out there to take and take and take on all the billionaires with all their money and the exploitive class and so forth? And then my buddies on the right will, will

• 24:58Speaker 02

  say, to your point, yeah, they're fundamentally lazy. Shame on them. Shame. Now, I'm somewhat right of center, I think. But I don't think it's as simple as writing them off as lazy. Something else has happened in the, in the culture. And we do, that sorting that out is important. It's got to be done because it doesn't reflect well on who we are as a, as a country or a species.

• 25:30Graham Stephan?

  What do you think happened?

• 25:32Speaker 02

  To all of them? I have no idea. But again, back to the broad brush thing. Look, I, I think they were told.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Collectively, that the system's rigged. And that life isn't fair. And that the only way to get ahead is to take from somebody else and that it's a zero sum game. Right? It's that. It's just this, you're never gonna make it. Because the game is rigged. I think that's, you know, one of the most self-defeating, greatest lies, you know, that we've, that we've told a whole generation.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  So, again, broad brush, but I, but it, but I think a lot of them genuinely feel that.

• 26:22Jack Selby?

  What are your thoughts on the consequences for mediocrity not being very great anymore? It's like back in the day, if you didn't go out and work, then you were stuck at home and you couldn't afford food for your family and, and really, or even have a home, maybe. Whereas now, you know, if you wanna kind of just do whatever, you can hang on on your phone and watch the most interesting YouTube videos for free.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Dirty Jobs. Now it's syndication.

• 26:50Jack Selby?

  You can live a pretty comfortable life doing not a whole lot.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Well, there's so much there. What's the upside of being comfortable?

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Where's the benefit?

• 27:02Jack Selby?

  I would say it's, it's very immediately gratifying. It's very easy.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Well, sure, it's easy, but where's the upside in doing something that's easy? Where's the benefit? Where's the, you know, iron sharpens iron, right? I mean, at least in my life, everybody I've ever admired was uncomfortable for most of their life. They looked for adversity. They didn't run from it. The really smart ones figured out a way to enjoy it, to welcome it, to bring it. You know, along with the end of average and everything Todd Rose has written, there's another great book by a friend of mine, Mike Easter, called The Comfort Crisis. I would refer you to that, man. It's, it's, if, if you're not willing to be fundamentally uncomfortable, then I, where is your,

• 27:52Speaker 02

  like? Well, how bad should should anyone feel for you if the thing that you're most interested in achieving is comfort and ease? Like, nobody in the history of the world ever wrote a song or a poem. Nothing good that I can think of was ever inspired by the individual who said, and so I set out to be as comfortable as I could, to do everything that's easy, to never really challenge myself, and now, look how, look how happy I am. I just have never seen it.

• 28:29Jack Selby?

  What's the most convincing thing that you could say to the average viewer listening to this right now that doesn't feel like they challenged themselves or seek out adversity to hopefully be able to hone that desire of wanting to challenge themselves?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  What are you scared of? You know, be honest, what do you, what do you really?

• 28:49Jack Selby?

  I'd say a lot of people just be failure.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:52Jack Selby?

  Humiliation.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Okay, you're scared of being humiliated and you're scared of failing.

• 28:57Jack Selby?

  Embarrassment.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Embarrassment, absolutely. All, all great motivators. How does pursuing a life of comfort and ease protect you from those things?

• 29:08Jack Selby?

  Well, it insulates you from feeling embarrassed or fearful.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Sure, in much the same way the ostrich insulates himself from the environment by sticking his head in the sand. You can get away with a lot of stuff for a while, and then you don't. And I think, I think it's really tempting, and I've, I've certainly made this mistake in my life more than once, but you, you look at your life like it's, like it's a snapshot. You know, it's like, this is what I'm doing, this is how, but, but, but you're not in a snapshot, you're in a movie, you know, and like, and there's stuff happening all around you all of the time. The chickens are gonna come home to roost for those seven million men who have chosen

• 29:56Speaker 02

  this life, and it's not gonna, it's not gonna be good. And, and I would love to help them. My foundation tries to help them. You know, if you start with this idea that, look, I'm not gonna do a thing that makes me uncomfortable.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Then, okay. Check back. Let me know how. Let me know how it goes for you.

• 30:17Graham Stephan?

  Terms of your own career, I'm curious. It seems very accidental and somewhat random from the outside looking in, from opera to QVC to Dirty Jobs to narration. What habits did you employ that led to that success?

• 30:33Speaker 02

  I can't choose what I look like, how tall I am, my race, my gender. I can't. There's a bunch of stuff out of my control. But I can choose to be curious. And I can choose to be uncomfortable. And I got very lucky. Growing up, those two things were always presented as wise choices. You know, if you're curious and uncomfortable, you're probably on the road to becoming, if not interesting, at least somebody who has some stories to tell, you know? So, so that was kind of burned in. The interesting thing, I think, for me, is it is the realization that curiosity has a, has a partner and the partner is humility.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  You, you can't be curious and arrogant at the same time. Or certain.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Right? Curiosity by definition means, I don't know. And I'm game to find out. And finding out might humiliate me. It might make me embarrassed. It might make me uncomfortable. So if you, if you really value curiosity as a, as a virtue, then, then all the other things we're talking about kind of fall in line. And I was always curious. I still am. The, the humility for me was I was sure I was going to follow in my granddad's footsteps. The guy I mentioned earlier, you know? And I spent a couple of years as a teenager, kind of working as his apprentice on a lot of different jobs. And just because I assumed I was so passionate about wanting to do what he did, that I would

• 32:11Speaker 02

  have inherited the, the skills necessary to allow my, my passion to, to unfold. But of course, the handy gene is recessive. And, and, you know, it was a very early, really important lesson to realize just because you love something, doesn't mean you can't suck at it.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  And conversely, just because you're not particularly interested in something, doesn't mean you might not have a, like a real facility for it. So when my granddad told me to get a different toolbox, he said, you can be a tradesman. You just need a different set of tools. You need to go a different way. That's what got me in entertainment.

• 32:54Graham Stephan?

  Now, one thing I really admire is how good you were on QVC and selling. And I'm so curious, what's the thing that you learned about selling that most entrepreneurs miss?

• 33:06Speaker 02

  If there were a host or expert playbook, it's to create and foster the illusion of knowledge and competence where, where it doesn't really exist. And, you know, the, the sales book is very similar, right? You know, I know the features and I know the benefits. Therefore, I can explain to you exactly in great detail, anything that you hand me. And in the course of that explanation, by employing various techniques, including a great level of empathy and enthusiasm, I can get you a yes. Okay, that's the, that's the basic idea. Tom Sawyer taught us something different. And I read that book when I was a kid.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Tom Sawyer, you know, didn't want to paint the fence and basically conned his friends into doing it for him. My first night on QVC was extraordinary, but I'd never been on live television before. I'm sitting there in front of, you know, four robotic cameras. There is no training program, at least there wasn't in 1990. You know, if you could talk about a pencil for eight minutes, you were hired.

• 34:11Graham Stephan?

  That's a skill in and of itself. I mean, I wouldn't be able to talk about a pencil for five minutes.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  I bet you could.

• 34:17Graham Stephan?

  I don't think I could.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Well, I can teach you how.

• 34:20Graham Stephan?

  How do you do it?

• 34:21Speaker 02

  You never say anything about the pencil that you don't follow with a reason. Every feature on the pencil has to have a benefit. So, okay, it's a yellow number two pencil with an eraser and that little silver thing that holds the eraser to the thing. Is it lead or is it graphite? Doesn't really matter, but you have to decide which one it is. And then you have to tell me, and then you have to explain that graphite from Madagascar is a far superior solution or alternative to lead, because a lot of people still lick the tip of the pencil and that's a stupid way to get lead poisoning, right? So. If you're going to tell me something about the product, tell me what the benefit is. Why is it yellow?

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Because you're busy, right? You open up your desk drawer. You don't have time to be rooting around for a beige writing implement. You want that yellow to pop out of there so you know right where it is. Why is the eraser as long as it is? Because after years of testing, we know that the life of that pencil, sharpened incrementally, as the data shows it will be, will coincide with the life of the eraser, which employed statistically from time to time, as we know it will be, will coincide. And that's why you get that little pencil down here and the eraser's been used. It's all perfectly engineered. Why number two? Why not number three? Why not number one? What's the difference? Well, number one leaves that big, fat, stupid skid mark. You look like a kid with a crayon.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Number three is all too fine and wispy. Now, number two is the perfect. It's the perfect amount of Madagascar graphite for your yellow pencil. And you just talk, man. You're just everything.

• 36:00Graham Stephan?

  That's crazy, though.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Everything you say is followed by a reason.

• 36:04Graham Stephan?

  And how do you make it sound exciting without lying about it?

• 36:08Jack Selby?

  Running a podcast is actually a lot more work than people may think. From sponsor contracts, invoices, show notes, research docs, it piles up incredibly fast. A few months ago, we started using Claude to help with all of that stuff. And that is exactly why we are so excited to be partnered with them.

• 36:22Graham Stephan?

  Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.

• 36:38Jack Selby?

  And cowork goes way beyond a chatbot. It's not just answering questions, it's actually doing the work. Real spreadsheets, formatted reports, organized files, directly on your computer with no uploads and no cleanup.

• 36:49Graham Stephan?

  You could even connect it to tools that you already use, like Google Workspace, HubSpot, Notion, queue up multiple tasks, step away, and come back to all of them done.

• 36:59Jack Selby?

  And fun fact, but we've actually replaced our entire invoicing system with Claude. Like, it used to take us forever to input everything manually, but now all we have to do is

• 37:07Graham Stephan?

  Do is upload a screenshot. Claude's able to get it all done for us and then draft an email that's ready to send.

• 37:13Jack Selby?

  Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at claude.com/icedcoffee.

• 37:18Graham Stephan?

  That's claude.com/icedcoffee and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Thanks again to Claude for sponsoring this podcast.

• 37:28Jack Selby?

  So I am always looking for little ways to save time. For example, every single day when I drive to the studio, I'll take a different route depending on whether I see a green light or a red light. Or whenever I'm listening to podcasts, I always do 2X speed just to save that time as well.

• 37:41Graham Stephan?

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• 37:49Jack Selby?

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• 37:56Graham Stephan?

  And right now you could try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/ICH.

• 38:00Jack Selby?

  Plus ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology helps you find quality candidates way quicker.

• 38:05Graham Stephan?

  Candidates could also tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job.

• 38:10Jack Selby?

  It's no wonder that ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2.

• 38:14Graham Stephan?

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• 38:26Jack Selby?

  That is ziprecruiter.com/ICH. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 38:30Graham Stephan?

  And how do you make it sound exciting without lying about it?

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Oh, well, that's that's a different matter. But but I'll tell you what I did. I mean, before I I fully employed the whole feature benefit approach to selling, I went to the Tom Sawyers method. The first product they brought me June 1990 was the Health Team Infrared Pain Reliever. What the hell is this? I couldn't. It was midnight. I worked the overnight shift for years. And it looked like a flashlight with a little red glowing ball at the end of it, from which infrared rays were emitted. So what you would do is you would you would rub this thing on your arthritis or or whatever hurt and through some miracle.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Right? Suddenly the the pain is gone. Now, you put yourself in my place. I'm 27 years old. I'm sitting there. I'm about to go live. It's the top of the hour and they bring me this thing with a little a blue card. It's got the item number, the price, couple of easy payment options. And a sentence describing what I've just shared. And now you have eight minutes. You have eight minutes to talk about this frickin' thing. And I didn't even know if it was real. I thought it looked like something you would get out of the, you know, the machines on the boardwalk with the mechanical claw, right? Right? It's just like, really, it's just stuff that hadn't sold in prime time and they would give it to the overnight guys

• 40:01Speaker 02

  because they're on a three month probationary period and that's how you find out if you, if you got the chops.

• 40:07Graham Stephan?

  Are you getting paid on a commission? Like the more of these you sell or just flat?

• 40:11Speaker 02

  It's a great question. It's a great money question. First of all, what I did is just say, folks, I'm Mike. I'm the new guy. Nice to meet you. Uh, if you're just joining us, this is the Health Team Infrared Pain Reliever. I've never seen one before. And I'll be honest with you. I'm a little nervous because I got eight minutes to kill, but there's an 800 number on the screen. And if you call it and ask for Marty, the producer, he'll put you through and maybe you can tell me how the hell this thing works on the air. Lines blew up. Like, people were on hold to tell me how to do my job. And I was like, oh, this is great. To answer your question, no, back in those days, I don't know how they do it today.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  But you weren't paid on commission, but what they would do was send out these extensive surveys to the audience. And they ask their most loyal customers to evaluate each host based on all sorts of things that didn't have anything to do with sales. In a way, it was the opposite of commission. Right? Do you trust them? Do you find them amusing? Would you trust them to do this or that? It's like a lot of trust questions. Would you like to hang out with them in real life? So the bonus was based on trust and likability, not sales. So

• 41:40Speaker 02

  when I realized that.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  I hijacked my three hour shift and I didn't worry about selling at all. Because back then, the network was saying, don't worry about the sale. The programmers know what they're doing and the items themselves are of quality. They'll sell themselves, you know, just talk about it, but your bonus will be based on your likability. And that, of course, was the recipe for a for a talk show.

• 42:13Jack Selby?

  So how do you increase trust and likability?

• 42:16Speaker 02

  With humility. I don't know what this is or how it works. Somebody call and help me. Somebody call and help me.

• 42:23Jack Selby?

  So people call with that exact item and say like, oh, here's how you use it. Did that increase sales by default?

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Well, not to the point, and this is the funny part of your your question, I think. My first year bonus check exceeded my my salary. I think they were paying me $50,000 a year in 1990.

• 42:46Jack Selby?

  That's decent. That's pretty good.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not bad. I mean, but more money than I'd ever seen and it was my first TV gig. But my bonus was like 60.

• 42:56Jack Selby?

  Wow.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  So it goes back to incentives, right? I was being incentivized not to sell the widget, but to keep the customers somewhat entertained. And because I was on at midnight and sometimes 3am, I had the graveyard shift. Nobody was really watching me. So I was largely unsupervised. My boss would look at the tapes the following day. But nobody really knew what I was doing in the middle of the night on the air. Four or five nights a week and and what I was doing was wildly inconsistent.

• 43:33Jack Selby?

  What's the worst you ever failed doing QVC?

• 43:36Speaker 02

  I got called in once. It was a Sunday afternoon. I'd only been there a month. I was still in my probationary period. So I was sleep deprived. I'd been a total vampire. And the woman.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Who was supposed to be on at like Sunday at 5pm was under the weather violently ill up in the green room. She couldn't go on the air. And so the guy that was on the air, he couldn't stay. He had like a wedding to go to or something. So I lived just a few minutes from the studio. And they called me to come in to fill in for this primetime shift. And when I got there, it was, it was called the QVC Dollhouse. And the whole, the whole stage was filled with collectible dolls, like sitting up all, all over the place. I didn't know people collected dolls. I thought it was just a

• 44:29Jack Selby?

  Children.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Well, I didn't think they were children up there, but I just, I just was like, what do you mean the doll collector? And, uh, you know, the producer told me dolls are the third most collected thing in the country behind stamps and coins, I think. It's a big deal. I'm like, what am I supposed to do? It's just, they're just like anything else. Just, just put them on your lap, just pick them up. Actually, he was like, don't, don't touch them, but they'll, they'll be next to you. Just describe them. Give them a little story, you know, like these little Victorian porcelain dolls that looked like they'd escaped from like a, a road show of little women or something. It was very strange. But anyway, to answer your question, it was easier than I thought. And everything was selling out because the doll collectors,

• 45:12Speaker 02

  they just sit there and they just, they buy them. Like I couldn't not succeed. And they brought a doll, a nun doll called Sister Mary Margaret, like a two foot doll dressed like a Benedictine nun with the glasses and everything else. And I mean, it was just so crazy. She was standing next to me.

• 45:30Jack Selby?

  That was the popular one?

• 45:31Speaker 02

  I didn't know. I had no idea if it was going to be popular or not, but it was creepy. It was like, like an angry looking nun.

• 45:37Jack Selby?

  Is that how you described it?

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Worse. I went through a basic presentation and I was making stupid puns, you know, it'd be a bad habit not to invest in a little lady like this, you know, it would be, uh, oh God, I had her over my head at one point singing the theme to an old song called The Flying Nun. I put a jewelry ruler in her hand, like those little six inch rulers, you know, and I would smack in my hand with her hand. And, you know, people were laughing and it was funny. And I was basically just trying to kill time. And we got to the end of the, We got to the end of the clock, right? And they dissolve to go to the next product. But the producer puts a new clock up on the screen. I mean, I have another four minutes to talk about this doll. I didn't have it.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  I'm a Presbyterian kid from Baltimore. I got, I don't know anything about Catholic nuns, much less in a doll form. And I have nothing to say. And the reason they came back to me is because we were in a queue, meaning all the order entry operators were taking calls. So they had to like vamp and wait for the calls to go down before they brought out a new product. So now I got this nun next to me for another four minutes. I got nothing to say. And I looked down at that blue card and the words, uh, the word musical is in quotes. And at the bottom of the card, it says climb every mountain. So I realized this is a musical nun, you know?

• 47:07Speaker 02

  And if you wind her up, I assume there's a music box in there somewhere. She plays climb every mountain and I'm thinking, oh, this will be great. We can sing along, like I'll do a sing along with climb every mountain. It'll, what, what a great way to kill four minutes. So I take the nun off the stand and I, I put it in my lap and I reach for the winder, right? And her back and it's not there, which is weird. Like why, where else would you put a winder? Now I'm on a camera, I'm on camera, basically like this, you know, facing the thing. And my producer is freaking out because you're not supposed to touch the doll, especially, you know, if it's a nun, it looks all like she's between my legs.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  And I'm looking for this winder, which I figure has to be somewhere on her back, but it's not. But it looks like I'm giving the nun a massage of some kind. So he's in my ear like, dude, don't touch the nun. And there are 150 order entry, uh, people in front of me who are like riveted to their monitors. Cause this is weird, dude. Like the new guy has a nun in his lap and he's rubbing her shoulders or something. And we don't quite know what to make of it. And I gotta find this winder. Now it's personal. So the DP, Director of Photography, all automatic switches from like this camera.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  To another camera that has a tight shot of the nun in a light box. Right. So this is the duplicate display nun where you got those long, slow tilts and pans of every little detail. So I'm off camera, but my mic is open. And now I can conduct the search for this winder properly. And I find it, I feel it and it's sticking. This is so jacked up. It's sticking out of the lowest possible part of the small of her back. It's basically in her ass, right? It's sticking, it's sticking out of the top part of the crack in her bottom. I can feel it through the habit, but I can't, you can't wind it from the outside. Now I'm off camera, so I pick up the nun.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  And now everybody, I mean, people are just freaking out and I take my hand up, all the way up there, you know? And by the way, way more detailed than you would imagine. This is not even necessary and I, and I get my hand on the winder. But I can't get any torque on it because her habit's too tight. So I, I turn the nun upside down and I push her habit down. So now her legs are sticking up in the air like this and my face is like between her legs. And I lean over and I start winding her up. Now, the DP has been on this shot over here for like a minute, which is way too long. Just tilts and pans.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  And I'm like, any minute now, folks, we're gonna, we're gonna wind up Sister Mary Margaret and we'll be treated to a, um, a special rendition of climb every mountain, you know, off camera, doing all this. But everybody, like I'm sitting on her head and I'm cupping her butt with my left hand and I'm winding her up with my right.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  And what happens next really wasn't my fault, but the DP didn't check his line monitor. All he's looking at is the preview. So he's seeing what the viewer has been seeing for the last minute, but he doesn't fully realize. The level of debauchery that's unfolding on that camera and he takes the shot. So I'm sitting there in this chair, looking at the monitors in front of me and I see the dissolve happen and I see what like a million people suddenly see in their living rooms. I'm sitting on a nun's head. My thumb appears to be somewhere in her bottom. I'm horrified by the image.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Everybody in the studio just gasps and I freeze and I like yank my hand out.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  And the nun falls forward from between my thighs and lands on the, on the floor. And starts to play climb every mountain. And in that moment.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  I sealed my fate and this is really, I shouldn't have told you the story, but when I yanked my hand out for reasons I can't even explain. I sniffed my finger.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  It just, it's just a nervous, stupid thing.

• 51:36Jack Selby?

  You got the particulate.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  I got the particulate. That nun was authentic, man. So she falls down, she plays climb every mountain and um.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  And they go to a break.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Anyway, I got through the rest of the hour. And I knew it was bad, but when I got home, I had one of those old style answering machines. You guys probably have never seen, I like you had 54 new messages and somewhere in those messages, my boss was saying, uh. So yeah, I caught the show this afternoon. Why don't you come on in tomorrow and, uh, you know, pick up your check. So that was the first time I was fired from QVC. For inappropriate relations with a porcelain nun.

• 52:18Jack Selby?

  You say first time.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  I was fired three times.

• 52:21Jack Selby?

  What happened the other two? Why do they keep firing you?

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Because I was being paid to be likeable, not to sell stuff. And so I would make fun of the products and sometimes the viewers, but I would always do it, you know, as kindly as I could and as honestly as I could. Um, and you know, things often went off the rails. I was a, um, what'd they call me? A management challenge.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  But you know, it was the viewers who saved me. Like literally, like after that incident, I went home, realized I was done and called a buddy of mine who I knew was on a shift later that evening and I told him what had happened. He on the air said, hey, if you caught Mike's show earlier today, I hope you liked it. He won't be back. And we got a lot of letters from viewers who were like, oh, you know, that was really funny. That wasn't his fault. Give him a break. So my boss hired me back. And so I got another shot, but it was, it was that kind of thing for three years. Really, you know, I was, I was, I was banished to overnights.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  I really never saw the light of day again, but I worked the midnight to three shift. And, you know, I didn't, it's funny, man. I didn't talk about this for years, but um, some, somewhere around 99, somebody started posting old videos, VHS videos of me on the air. Like cracking open a lava lamp to see if that was really lava inside. Like breaking unbreakable plates just to see if I could, you know, all this crazy stuff that would get me in trouble. And then people started asking me about those videos. Like you can Google the cat sack right now, which is pretty funny. It was like, we had a sack.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  It looked like a, like a grocery bag lined with Mylar and your cat would crawl into it.

• 54:21Jack Selby?

  Do you have the nun video?

• 54:22Speaker 02

  That I don't have. My mom might have it, but I do have videos of me interacting with dolls in an, in an odd way. The doll thing was like a leitmotif in those days in my career. But the real point is, you know, I, I got a thousand stories and you know, I can tell them if you want, but that was my first job in TV and I couldn't distance myself from it. Once I really started my career fast enough, but looking back,

• 54:50Speaker 02

  every useful thing I ever learned that served me well later. I learned in the middle of the night, selling stuff on the QVC cable shopping channel, including Dirty Jobs. All the ideas for the show were suggested by viewers.

• 55:05Jack Selby?

  When people come to you, what's the question you hate answering the most?

• 55:10Speaker 02

  So, uh.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  And you have to ask it the right way. You're like, like you have to ask it like, you've been thinking about this for a long time. And you've now you've got.

• 55:21Jack Selby?

  I already know what it is.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Hit me.

• 55:23Jack Selby?

  What's the dirtiest job?

• 55:25Speaker 02

  That's it, dude. That's it.

• 55:26Jack Selby?

  You know, it's the same exact thing. People come to me and they always like, yeah, I've been, I've been wanting to ask you, man, who's your favorite guest you've ever had on the podcast?

• 55:34Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, always.

• 55:35Jack Selby?

  I've had 350 people on, like so many people on this. I could not tell you who my favorite is out of seven years.

• 55:43Graham Stephan?

  Or what's the best piece of advice you've gotten on the podcast?

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:48Graham Stephan?

  And then it's always followed up with, how do you like Vegas? How do you like living in Vegas?

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:53Jack Selby?

  It's always those three.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  In the same way, you know, choosing to be curious or uncomfortable, like it is a choice, like, questions, it's a muscle. Like you, and you can work it out. You know, I'm sure you've guys, I mean, you've done a lot of interviews, so you can, like, you know, you know, when you're going down a road where it's like, I'm pretty sure the listeners heard this. I'm pretty sure they've heard this question. I'm pretty sure they've heard that story. Like it's, it's a real, it's a talent to ask a question that hasn't been asked before.

• 56:26Graham Stephan?

  What should they be asking instead?

• 56:28Speaker 02

  If I were interviewing me, I would want to know how you got away with it. You know, how'd you get dirty jobs on the, I couldn't sell that show today in the room. I couldn't get it made. I couldn't film it. Like, there's nothing, that show was so off-brand for the network at the time. And then it became the brand. I shot the pilots myself. And they rated very well, but they were put on the shelf because that wasn't the show that my bosses at the time wanted their viewers to like.

• 57:09Graham Stephan?

  What did they want the viewers, viewers to like?

• 57:11Speaker 02

  David Attenborough, Jacques Cousteau, Jane Goodall, the Discovery brand, which I still love very much. At the time was, was really rooted.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  In a different version of credibility, right? Like they, like you have to decide what's persuasive and what do the viewers, what will the viewers respond to? And um, at the time, you know, seventies, eighties, nineties, I think, I think most of TV was living in the age of um, of authority, where we took comfort in hosts who talked like this. They'd hit the mark and they'd say their line. Or like narrators who would tell you about the lone wildebeest traversing the vast reaches of the Serengeti. Like everything is measured, everything is,

• 58:08Speaker 02

  you know, all those tropes of, of hosting were like really alive and, and established. Somehow, I came along at a time, I think, when the audience was starting to feel like, well, that level of authority is, is not really as persuasive necessarily as, as maybe something authentic. And then the question is, well, what's authentic? And if you're in that model of like hosting or, or reading news or something like that, well, all you had to do was figure out a way to, to do the same basic job differently, right? Than everybody around you.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  And that's what Dirty Jobs really was, an attempt to say, look, maybe, maybe instead of a host, I can be a guest. Maybe the expert on my show is the guy you've never heard of, doing some weird job out of sight and out of mind. Maybe he becomes the credible source of factual information. I become his apprentice. The viewer becomes the programmer.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  So like, everything about that show was designed to poke at the bear of existing expectations in nonfiction TV. Why did you like it?

• 59:36Graham Stephan?

  I found it fascinating. I felt like I learned something from it.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you could have learned from every other show on the network. Why did you like Dirty Jobs?

• 59:46Graham Stephan?

  It was entertaining.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Why was it entertaining?

• 59:49Jack Selby?

  I think because you're

• 59:50Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but also I think your narration of it was fantastic.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 59:56Graham Stephan?

  Now, speaking of all these jobs that you've done, where do you see the trends going in the future for people who want to get in the trades? Like, what's something that they should start today that 10 years from now is going to be high-paying, high-demand?

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• 1:01:27Graham Stephan?

  Like, what's something that they should start today that 10 years from now is going to be high-paying, high-demand?

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  The unexpected answer is, don't ignore AI.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  It's not going away. Understand it. Don't be afraid of it. I don't care if you're a welder or an electrician or a plumber. Don't, don't let this thing get so far in front of you that you don't feel like you can, you can catch up to it. Having said that, um, right now, AI is not threatening any vocations that my foundation is typically concerned with. So it's not coming for the electricians or the plumbers or the steam fitters or the pipe fitters or the ship builders.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  Look, I would say if you're looking at a career in the trades, the most useful thing you can learn first is how to weld because that's, that, that, that's like the gateway trade. We've got thirty five hundred people who have gone through micro works. Probably, probably forty percent of them are welders.

• 1:02:32Jack Selby?

  Why does it pay so much?

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  At the moment, it's, it's supply and demand. It's, it's, it's really that simple. And certain elements, there's a danger premium. There's hazard pay. Underwater welding is about the most dangerous thing you can do.

• 1:02:48Jack Selby?

  Is that the most dangerous job?

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  It's up there, man. I mean, you've got to talk about like the show I was just narrating, Deadliest Catch. That's dangerous. Crab fishing on the Bering Sea is dangerous. Lumberjacking anywhere is dangerous.

• 1:03:03Jack Selby?

  What's the main threat in lumberjacking?

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  The chainsaws themselves are just giant, coiled, razor sharp, mechanical beasts.

• 1:03:12Jack Selby?

  It's not like bears though, right?

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  I don't think a lot of people are attacked by bears. Like, I mean, like

• 1:03:17Jack Selby?

  In general.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  I mean, I mean, really, like if I were a bear, you know, and I saw a lumberjack with a chainsaw, I'd be like, you know what? I'm gonna stick

• 1:03:25Jack Selby?

  Another day.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know what? I'm a, I'm a roots and berries kind of bear.

• 1:03:28Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  But no, I mean, you look, you can be a couple hundred feet underwater. You're like, you're at real depth sometimes in a dry suit. You've got air being pumped in compressed air.

• 1:03:39Jack Selby?

  How much do underwater welders make?

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Again, it's all over the map, but there was a guy a couple of years ago, who I gave.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Maybe $6,000 too. He filled out a work ethic scholarship, applied for money from my foundation and his resume was great. His references were great. Everything about it was great. I couldn't give him the money fast enough. And I stay in touch with a lot of these people because I want to interview them later. They can answer that question better than I can.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  But this guy fell off the radar. I didn't know what had happened to him. His name's Jake. And anyhow, he, he came back on the radar a few years later and I called him just to, because we were doing a new series of commercials for MicroWorks and I like to feature the people that we've actually assisted in these things. And I thought he'd be good. And I said, how's it going? He said, how's it going? I'll tell you how it's going. You gave me what you gave me. Mig welding and TIG welding for the first year I got promoted, then I got promoted again. And then about 14 months in, I fell in love with this girl and I wanted to marry her, but I was still,

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  you know, I was making maybe $70,000 a year. So I knew a guy who got me in an underwater welding program. And as it turns out, I was pretty good at it. And so I did that for a year and was making about 130, 140,000. And then something opened up overseas Gulf of Oman.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Pipeline underwater, 315, 320 grand, tax-free.

• 1:05:31Jack Selby?

  Wow.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  So he says, how's it going? I was over there almost three years. I got a million dollars in the bank. First, first kids on the way.

• 1:05:41Jack Selby?

  I'll tell you what, though. Like if anyone's gonna make that kind of money, like please take it. Like I, you know what? Like if I need a reduction in pay because some underwater welders, you know what I mean? I have no problem with those guys.

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  So here's the, the better answer to your earlier question. And then don't, don't let me boomer out on your audience, but that guy compared to any one of the seven million we were discussing before.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Who do you want to help?

• 1:06:10Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, even if he makes $300,000 more a year than those, it's like.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  Again, no lectures, no sermons, but man, it's a scary, uncertain time for a lot of people. I get it. But, you know, to find men and women who are affirmatively,

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  it's the bottom of the ninth, the bases are loaded, you're up by one, you want the ball. I want that guy. I want that. I want to do what I can to help those people. Because, look, there are lots of scholarship programs out there. Geez, for everything, you know, academic, artistic, athletic.

• 1:06:47Graham Stephan?

  So what should the role of government be in helping and supporting those people? Because it seems like, at the same time, if there's too much of a safety net, it might discourage some of that risk-taking.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  So this is the essential problem.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  If everybody was like Jake, or if everybody was like the 7 million who have just clocked out, I can answer the question and say, all right, as an elected official, I got to figure out how to fix a problem that could likely lead to some kind of existential thing. I'm not in that position. And the state of play is not that codified, right? So I'll tell you what I told the feds 15 years ago. I started MicroWorks 18 years ago on Labor Day. I went to Congress 15 years ago and said, look, guys, I'm not an expert, but Obama had just announced 3 million shovel-ready jobs.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  So this was in 2009. And you can find this online. I wrote an open letter to President Obama and I said, look, I love the idea that, you know, you're going to create 3 million shovel-ready jobs, but from what I've seen, it's going to be a hard sell to a country that's not currently super excited about picking up a shovel. Like you need better PR. You're going to need to explain what these jobs are. You're going to need to explain why they're valuable and how they can get you to a six-figure income quick because they can, but you're going to have to sell that. You gotta sell the jobs. You can't just create them and wait for them to be filled. And around the same time, I went to Congress to say, look, I don't think the ultimate solution to the

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  skills gap is going to be .gov, but I don't think there's going to be a solution without it. So there's so many things you guys can do to reinvigorate the trades. And to the extent that my foundation can help, I'm at your disposal. It's funny. No one disagreed with me. I got calls from both sides of the aisle going, hey, man, yeah, we, we dig what you're screaming, you know, let's, let's stay in touch, whatever. Uh, two years later, I went back to the Senate, same basic pitch. Um, didn't go anywhere. Last week, I was in the Pentagon. It took 15 years, but they got back to me with an answer to your question, which was basically, here's what the government can do. They, they've launched a, their own

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  site called buildfreedom.us. It has like 400,000 open positions there, many of which are AI-proof, six-figure jobs. They gave me $10 million from my foundation and I had a bunch of money saved up over the years. So we have millions of dollars earmarked for men and women who specifically want to learn a skill that's in demand. And the government is throwing gas on that fire and saying, as you look at all the opportunities in the skilled trades all over the country, don't forget about the ones in the DIB, the defense industrial base. Because I got news for you, man. The people who build our submarines,

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  they're freaking out. They need 400,000 welders in the next seven, eight years. They have no idea where to get them. Should we be concerned about competing with other countries like China? Yeah. China built a thousand ships last year. We built three. And why is that? Is that a work ethic thing? Is that a cultural thing?

• 1:10:19Graham Stephan?

  Maybe those skills are more appreciated over there, or is it just like a red tape policy issue?

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  I think that is a government question. You know, because shipbuilding is its own very specific thing, and those contracts can can go to any number of places. For a lot of reasons, um, and you could look at organized labor, unions, you can look at importing steel. You can look at all kinds of different factors that might make it a lot more efficacious to give the business to South Korea. China's not building our ships, South Korea is. So getting that industry back in this country is something this administration wants to do. They want to reshore, they want to reindustrialize.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  And look, just to be clear and not make it too political, I I told President Obama 15 years ago, I'm like, look, man, I'm rooting for you. I I want to see this work. I I care about our country and I I love the idea of closing the skills gap and making a more persuasive case for the trades. Seven months ago, I was with this president in Pittsburgh for this energy conference, along with 35 CEOs who basically run the country right now. I was literally in the room when those CEOs pledged $92 billion to Pennsylvania alone to build out data centers primarily in the next few years.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  And uh, and when it was my turn to talk, I I said the same thing, like, you know, I'm I'm rooting for this president. I want to see manufacturing reinvigorated. I want to see all this work brought back. But, and this is where I'm, but you know, I don't know if I'll be invited back, but I said, you're going to create 2 million jobs in manufacturing. What about the 480,000 jobs in manufacturing right now that we can't fill?

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  What about that? What about the fact that for every five tradespeople who retire to replace them? It's been that way for 12 years, five out, two in. I don't have to be an economist to tell you that that's not sustainable.

• 1:12:27Graham Stephan?

  So it seems like those are really good jobs to get into. Like, what was it? It was like home inspectors and home appraisers. They're all aging out and no one's replacing them.

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. Look, again, the the guys who built my house.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

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• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Uh, there were seven people in the crew. The youngest one was 50.

• 1:13:17Graham Stephan?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  And that was 11 years ago.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  So, you know, every general contractor I know, and I know a bunch of them, are agonizing over workforce. I mean, not to overstate it, but I mean, there is not a week that goes by that I don't hear from the leader of some consequential industry or company who is freaking out in the exact same way. I mean, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, Ford. Jim Farley's talking about building automotive repair facilities like with, within his own company. Lowe's has committed $250 million to workforce training. Home Depot's right behind him at 100 million.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  BlackRock's like at 150 million. This is how crazy it's gotten. America's Workforce Academy is a five-week pre-apprenticeship program on steroids, right? This is how desperate Meta is for skilled workers. They will pay you to go through the course. Could be fiber optic, could be basic electric, all the construction trades. They'll pay you, cover all your expenses, plane travel, food, everything. Plus, they'll pay you, and at the end of five weeks, they'll guarantee you a job. Guaranteed. And if you decide, eh, I don't want to work for Meta, or I don't want to work on that project, you can leave with your certifications.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  So, I think what's coming is a completely...

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  New way to think about vocational training. I think it's going to be like a Manhattan Project type thing. It's gonna, it's gonna just change the way we think about certifications, requirements, training and money.

• 1:15:14Graham Stephan?

  Based on that, I'm curious, what do you think we have too much of in terms of jobs or employees that are getting into an industry?

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  I wouldn't second guess the market.

• 1:15:27Graham Stephan?

  Seems like everyone want to be a software engineer. And that was seven years ago when that became very popular. Now we have a glut of software engineers and AI seems to be

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Graham Stephan?

  Taking

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Graham Stephan?

  Quite a bit away from that.

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  We're not suffering from too few influencers. We're not suffering as a country from too few American idols. We're not suffering. I mean, like you can go down the list of things, right? Again, it's basic supply and demand. Sorry to beat a dead horse. And with respect to Marco Rubio, who I think is doing a terrific job, but 10 years ago, there was a moment on the debate stage. As remember there were 17 candidates in the GOP. I mean, 17. And he was up there. This also goes back to, you know, what happens when an organization realizes its customers want something they don't want them to want?

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  I still remember, I think it was Reince Priebus, head of the GOP going, look, look at all these amazing choices up here. You know, we have him, we have her, this doctor of color, we have this, we have that. So many, anybody but the guy in the middle. Right? He's like, anybody, not, not, not that guy. Well, we all know what, what happened to that guy. But the point is, in the middle of that debate, I forget what the question was, but Marco said, and I'll tell you something else, what our country needs are fewer philosophers and more welders. And the crowd, a big applause line, and I'm watching, I'm like, oh boy. So like an hour later, I go on my social channels, such as they were, like seven, eight million people there.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  And most of them were like, hey, man, did you hear that? He's singing your song. I'm like, no. Actually, it's not. It's not. I've, I've never meant to suggest that what's plaguing the country are too many philosophers. That's not the way to think about it. You know, what we need are more philosophers who can run an even bead and understand the mechanics of, you know, fabricating steel. And we need more welders who, who can talk intelligently about the Stoics and about, uh, logic and reasoning and Aristotle and Nietzsche and Descartes and Kant.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  And like, why does it have to be one or the other? You know, that, that I think, that's what I meant by, I think we're gonna have to reimagine education because we're like stuck in this prison of two ideas where we got, we got too much of this and not enough of that. And therefore, we gotta get rid of some of this. But that's the real message of the skills gap, too. Like, why do we still talk about unemployment as if it matters? You know, that Nick Eberstadt guy, same guy, the Men Without Work book? He says, pretty persuasively, I think, that you'd be hard pressed to find a more meaningless statistic

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  than the number of people who are unemployed. That's a, that's an artifact of the Great Depression. Cause in those days, you know, if you had 12 million people out of work, you could create jobs and those people would take them. Today, the unemployment rate is what it is, but you've got 7.2 million open jobs. Most of them don't require a four-year degree. Then you've got this other cohort, cohort of 7 million men who are just not impressed or not interested. And so this, this idea that the number of people who aren't working...

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  Are not working because there's no opportunity. That it's just not, it just doesn't hold up anymore.

• 1:19:14Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  So that's what I, you know, I'm just suspicious of anything that's like too much of this, more of that.

• 1:19:20Graham Stephan?

  That's fair.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  It's, it's, that's not how the pie works, you know?

• 1:19:23Graham Stephan?

  What are the skills that everyone should know how to do? Like I'm talking changing a tire, being able to cook a steak, throw a punch. Like what are things that universally?

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  That's a good start. All those things, you know? Look, I, I think.

• 1:19:40Graham Stephan?

  Plunge a toilet would be.

• 1:19:41Jack Selby?

  Should every man know how to jump a fence?

• 1:19:44Speaker 02

  Well, it's not going to hurt you to know how to do it. You might get.

• 1:19:48Graham Stephan?

  For what purpose, Jack? And it's just like jump a car, maybe.

• 1:19:51Jack Selby?

  I'm just saying.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  What are you running from, Jack?

• 1:19:52Jack Selby?

  Maybe run into something, who knows? Maybe there's opportunities and you, there's a fence in the way. You gotta jump the fence. I, I think it's a testament to just overall, you know?

• 1:20:01Graham Stephan?

  That's more of a physical ability to be able to jump a fence.

• 1:20:04Jack Selby?

  Ability which you'd probably agree that also is important.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  No, I mean, look, anything that bolsters confidence and competency is important. We made the point earlier, I think that, you know, our frustration with the trades sometimes is rooted in our inability to do the work ourselves. So I don't know if there's a corollary between jumping a fence or throwing a punch or changing a tire with being able to change your brakes. You know, like I can still change a tire. That, like the mechanics of that haven't really evolved to leave me in the dark yet. And I think I know how to throw a punch and speaking of fences, man, quick sidebar.

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  My favorite moment in Dirty Jobs, I don't know if you saw this one, but it was, it was one of the things we were able to get away with that you couldn't ever, ever, ever, ever do today. But I was, I was putting in a protective fence around a sinkhole in the middle of the forest somewhere. That was like 90 feet deep and easy to fall into. And in the course of doing this, I had to remove a pre-existing iron fence pole that had been hammered into the ground. And I couldn't get it out. It just, it just wouldn't budge. It was like the sword in the stone. And so. One of the rules on that show was never cheat. And so all I had was a shovel and a pulley and a rope. And I was determined to get this fence post

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  out of the ground, this piece of iron that had been hammered in about three feet deep. It took an hour and a half of digging and, and, and nobody would help me, but my, my crew filmed it like it mattered. And it did. But nobody really knew it at the time. So there, there's literally a 15 minute segment in an old episode of Dirty Jobs where nothing happens at all. Except Mike tries to get a single fence post out of the ground. And, um, I don't know if that in any way is adjacent to a decent answer to your question. But in the same way, you ought to know how to jump over that fence. You ought to know how to build it. And you ought to know how to deconstruct it.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  And if you're going to take the time on an international television show to so, to illustrate how difficult that is, that's a very conscious choice to make. And I was so lucky to be able to make that case 20 years ago and to have that fight and to get the network on board. And to have that as like proof of the day that I had, it was very, very gratifying to look back at a scene that would never make it into any other show, under any other circumstance. But it, it does, I think rhyme in a way with what, what you're asking.

• 1:22:55Jack Selby?

  It's weird and random, but it's also just adversity. Like we were talking about earlier, it was like you have the protagonist, you and you have the antagonist, that fence that's three foot in the soil.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 1:23:04Jack Selby?

  And you just kept fighting.

• 1:23:05Speaker 02

  And you also have, since you're throwing around the fancy literary words, you've got the, uh, the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy hanging over the whole thing, which is that moment in any narrative, when the protagonist comes face to face with the undeniable truth of his own identity. And in order to get to that place in a play. You have to be very patient through a number of what they call anagnorisis, discoveries along the way. Same is true in TV. The reason most TV sucks is there's no patience for it. You just cut, cut, cut. Oh, the fence post is out. Now what happens next? In reality, what happens next is you're going to spend another hour and a half on that fence post. Right?

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  And so, well, why would we put that in a show? 20 years ago, I won the argument because I said, A, you're a nonfiction network, and B, this is a reality show. And those words back then both literally meant what they mean. They don't mean that today. That they don't mean it today. You can't find a show on a nonfiction network that doesn't have a cut every three seconds. Watch them, any of them. Scenes, cut. Cut. Can't do it.

• 1:24:26Jack Selby?

  Speaking of the skills, what's the best skill to impress a first date?

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  Our manners? A skill?

• 1:24:33Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Jack Selby?

  Should you always open up the car door for her on a first date?

• 1:24:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Absolutely.

• 1:24:41Jack Selby?

  What about remove a fence post?

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  Look, you gotta ask yourself, why is this fence here in the first place?

• 1:24:49Jack Selby?

  Like, what is it, what is it keeping you from?

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Well, I think it was Robert Frost who said, uh, good fences make good neighbors. Famous poem called, uh, Mending Wall. It's a good one.

• 1:25:00Jack Selby?

  Yeah. Where are you investing?

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  I'm still basically all over the Wilshire.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  I've, I've been, I mean, my, my investing

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  career is

• 1:25:16Jack Selby?

  Oh, no.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  complicated.

• 1:25:18Jack Selby?

  Sounds like Jack.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  Um, no, I, um,

• 1:25:22Jack Selby?

  Imagine he's just like covered calls. Unrobin.

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  No, I'm boring. Um, least I was. Uh, uh, there was a book. Well, anything Jack Bogle wrote when, when, when he was running Vanguard, Burton, Malakil, Random Walk Down Wall Street. All of those. I, I got religion in 99. Uh, when through a crazy disastrous scandal, um, I, I lost everything.

• 1:25:53Jack Selby?

  What happened?

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  Do your, do your viewers care about this kind of thing?

• 1:25:57Jack Selby?

  Well, we're mostly a finance podcast, so a lot of people.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  Oh, all right. Well, you buried the lead. All right. Yeah, no, let's talk about money. I am a, uh, inveterate saver, as we've established. I've, I

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  until

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  until I got older, I didn't own anything. I mean, virtually nothing. I lived in hotels because most of the work I was doing, uh, had was on the road. So some network somewhere was paying for it. I didn't own any clothing because the shows all came with some kind of clothing deal. You know, um, I, I didn't live, I didn't have a, I didn't have a rental. I didn't own a home. I, I literally lived on the road and I had nothing and I saved every penny I could.

• 1:26:49Jack Selby?

  And did you invest it or did you just hold it?

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  I invested it. Um, as best I could, you know, I started investing when I was 22. I bought a house in Baltimore for like $48,000 and sold it a couple of years later for like 70 and felt, and felt smart. I took that money and, um, put it in the market broadly, low cost indexing, you know? And then I met a broker uh, who became a dear friend. And, uh, this broker worked for a big investment company. They became kind of the golden child. And, uh, quickly amassed a lot of, a lot of clients.

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  And long story short, we, we became very, very good friends. This is a woman. And, um, she left the firm to start her own firm. And, um,

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  Wound up

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  building a house of cards that collapsed in the most spectacular fashion.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  This uh, this was extraordinary for me because I was living and working on the road and not and not back in Baltimore. So I didn't have a front row seat to I was literally reading about it in the headlines. And um, the entire thing, uh, when it collapsed, the, the firm that she launched had, I don't know how many investors, but almost all were doctors and lawyers. There were no other TV dudes freelancing in there. So everybody lost everything.

• 1:28:32Jack Selby?

  What was she doing? Was she just paying herself, taking vacations?

• 1:28:36Speaker 02

  No, it was, it was a little more involved. She had private investments and private opportunities. And she was using money that a lot of people assumed was still under the imprimatur of a big firm was in fact invested in some of these other ventures. I kinda knew some of this was going on, but the thing is over the years, um, I had made a lot of money with this strategy. I mean, I was, it's a very consistent bunch of money. And for a freelancer who saved all his money. So I own nothing. I'm living on the road. I've got

• 1:29:18Speaker 02

  a nest egg that I'm super comfortable with, about a million dollars.

• 1:29:23Jack Selby?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I, we had done really, really well and I, and I felt really, um,

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  I mean, like, I felt like I had cracked the code. Like when my pop told me to get a different toolbox and get in the entertainment business, like the only way that makes sense is if you do it differently. So I'd spent at that point, 15 years. I like, I never swung for the fences. I, I wasn't trying to get a hit show. I was hosting so many weird, random little talk shows and maybe a guest appearance on a sitcom or.

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  Pilots and infomercials. See, the thing about QVC is they it taught you how to audition. And I was, I was really good in the room. So I could book way more gigs than a lot of people I was competing with. And I did. And so I had a really interesting business model in those days. I kind of based it on this fictitious character that I still love called Travis McGee, who took his, took his retirement in early installments, right? So he was a, he was sort of a detective, called himself a salvage expert, lived on a barge down in

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  Fort Lauderdale called the busted flush that he won in a card game. And this guy, and these great books by John D. McDonald, would come out of retirement every few months when he needed money to solve a case, get back something that had been taken from someone. He would keep 50%. I'm telling you, it's funny because like everything I thought about business back in those days was sort of based on that model. So I'm freelancing six months a year. I'm taking, I'm taking my retirement in advance. I don't have any encumbrances. I don't own anything. I got a million bucks in the bank and my secret weapon goes up in flames. And I, I lost everything.

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

  So the good news for me was

• 1:31:31Speaker 02

  because my relationship went way back with the broker, I was able to go back to the original investment house and say,

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  was there anything about this person that I should have known? Like, is there? And I, and I had a lawyer. Everybody else was represented by a, by a bankruptcy trustee. But I was different. I was outside of that group and I had a lawyer. And as it turns out, There were some things that the brokerage should have known and should have been a bit more circumspect about. So after two and a half years of crazy drama, I got my money back.

• 1:32:15Graham Stephan?

  Wow.

• 1:32:16Jack Selby?

  You got it all back?

• 1:32:17Speaker 02

  Not all of it, but a chunk enough. And the crazy thing was, at the same time, like, my whole business model had collapsed because I lost my safety net, which is really kind of, you know, this is a, this is a very personal thing, but like, what, you find out who you are pretty quick, you know? And the thing is, like, if you're up on the tightrope and you look down and you see the safety net, you know, and you don't fall, like, nothing changes. It's just that the net's gone. It only changes if you fall. But I was just, I, I did something that I didn't think I would ever do after the third firing from

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  QVC all those years before. I was like, I got a job, you know? I took a job hosting a show called Evening Magazine right here in San Francisco, which brought me right here into this recording studio 22 years ago because I felt like I needed to work. And I also took another job hosting a show called Worst Case Scenario. And all that, it, as soon as I took those gigs, neither one of which I really, really, really wanted, the case settled. So all of a sudden, I'm back here in San Francisco, working at this job that I, wasn't really my wish fulfillment. I got my safety net back, but it would have

• 1:33:39Speaker 02

  been to quit the job. They just hired me and I liked the people. So I wound up staying with that job. And it was during that job that I came up with a segment called Somebody's Got to Do It, which became Dirty Jobs. But to answer your question, while all that was happening, that's when I got religion with investing. And I went to low-cost, highly diversified index funds with a little bit of international exposure, a little bit of REIT here and there. And I took the rebalancing very seriously. And I, and I, I did that

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  and I, I read all the books. And that's what I did for probably another 10 years.

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  And um, and I was a hardcore, full on, it's like, look, Jack Bogle got it right. In the end, you might find a stock picker, you might find an advisor, and they might turn you on to this, that, and a bunch of other stuff, but long, long term, when the dust settles, you run those numbers against a low cost, blah, blah, blah. And I think the average American is gonna do a whole lot better over there. And I believe that right up until Dirty Jobs became a giant hit. And I started working in a different way.

• 1:35:06Graham Stephan?

  How did that financially change your life? Hey, by the way, really quick, if you want extra content just like this, as well as early access, and a bonus post show posted every single week, feel free to join as a channel member to get immediate access to all of that, as well as early access to everything else that we post, along with priority responses to all of your comments. So if that sounds cool, feel free to join, would love to have you on board, thanks so much. We'll get back to the podcast now. How did that financially change your life?

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  Well, financially, it didn't. Emotionally, it did. The, the thing about me is that I, I've never, I've never lived beyond my, my means. And that was true when I was making 20,000 a year, and 50, and a lot more, and then a lot more. It never, the, the only thing I've done that's out of character in the last 60 years is I bought a house. You know, like a proper house. And um, yeah, over time, I've started to acquire some things, but like, no collectible dolls, no, uh, no.

• 1:36:18Jack Selby?

  It seemed like you liked it.

• 1:36:19Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, you're very, is it more of them? You sniffed it.

• 1:36:21Speaker 02

  I, I, I collect memories.

• 1:36:24Graham Stephan?

  You got the particles.

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  No, man, I, I really, um, I'm still enamored with that whole Travis McGee model. I still love that guy. I still love like his, his whole business philosophy and, and life philosophy. But the trade off was after.

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

  What 15 years of not really caring about the work that I did. I was more enamored of being in this industry and and enjoying it on my terms than I was with the work. Consequently, I did lots and lots of things that I'm not terribly proud of. Dirty Jobs was the first thing I ever did on TV that I was proud of. And once that happened, the whole model went to hell. And then I then I worked 300 days a year.

• 1:37:20Jack Selby?

  How did Dirty Jobs financially affect your life?

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  You know, the first couple of years were not particularly wow. You know, it was like you just you've got to make a very specific type of deal to get a show on the air. And you're not going to get rich at all from that deal. The only way you do well specifically on the show is if it's a hit. And then they'll renegotiate with you. And that's basically what happened. So when the show turned out to be a hit, it was radically unnerving. Like I I'd never I I swung for singles and doubles.

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  And so when the network finally got behind it in a meaningful way, they ordered like 39 episodes. And I realized, oh, you know, I hate this deal I made. I got it. It's not a fair deal and I needed some help. So I wound up hiring this woman, an attorney. And she kind of took pity on me. She was a powerhouse and with a really good firm. But she liked me and and and she saw something in the show. Maybe something different than you did when you were a kid, but she saw something universal in it. She was very impressed by the fact that.

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  The viewers were so engaged that they were programming the show. She was like, that's, that's rare. And I said, yeah, it is rare, you know? And it's also personal, you know? The show happened because my mother called me. I was right across the, right across the street here at CBS. Literally, you, you drove by it when you came in. KPIX, I was sitting in my cubicle.

• 1:39:14Speaker 02

  Uh, in 2001. And my mom called me about my grandfather, who I mentioned and said, he's turning 90. This Friday, and I've got the perfect gift that you can get him. I said, what? She said, how great would it be, Michael? If before he dies, he turns on the TV and sees you doing something that looks like work?

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  So the next day, I take a cameraman into the sewers of San Francisco. And that's what starts dirty jobs. But to answer your question, um, Mary and I started looking at the show really, really early. And thought, yeah, there's a lot of exploding toilets and misadventures and animal husbandry. But under it, this thing is a real powerful rumination on American work ethic. And can you build a business around that theme?

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  Not around the show, but around the themes that are like pregnant in the program. And if you can, how, how would you do it? And what would that look like? And the answer was, well, I don't really know, but part of it would be a nonprofit. Part of it would be a genuine attempt to shine a light on the industries that are making this show prosperous. And another part would be a scholarship program to help people get the training they need to do these jobs. If we do that legitimately, and this is probably a bit selfish, but looking back,

• 1:40:59Speaker 02

  if I'm being honest, I was like, I want a better way to promote the show. I want to be able to talk about more than, oh yeah, and Les Swanson, you know, went up to his nipples and just this giant container of crap. Or yeah, today we boiled a bison, you know, it's like, what's the point? You know, so MicroWorks, the foundation, gave me permission to promote the show in a way that the network didn't really care about and in ways that most other shows weren't being talked about. As a result, a lot of big companies came sniffing

• 1:41:39Speaker 02

  around to say, hey, do you mean what you're saying? Because here at Caterpillar, here at Ford, here at Kimberly-Clark, we wrestle with this every day. So we started making deals, good deals with big blue chip companies. They would support my foundation. I would speak on their behalf and not like a yellow number two pencil or a collectible doll. Like, I did 300 commercials for Ford in six, seven years. I worked for some of the biggest companies in the country. They supported my philanthropic effort. Mary would make deals. And so I found

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  a way to function, not quite as a pitchman, because my whole argument was still, it's like, look, man, your company doesn't need a spokesman. Your satisfied customers are your spokespeople and your own employees. What you need is a fan of your brand. So that's what I started selling. I started saying, look, Dirty Jobs is real. It's personal. I'm the spokesman for MicroWorks and nothing else, but there are a lot of brands I admire. And if I can find a way to talk on your behalf through the lens of the show that you know me for, that'll be authentic. And if it works, maybe, maybe we can make some money.

• 1:43:08Speaker 02

  And so we began to build this business around the ideas of Dirty Jobs and around the foundation that inspired it.

• 1:43:20Jack Selby?

  So it sounds like then the biggest financial impact on you were the actual brand deals with companies like Caterpillar, Ford, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:43:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's not, I never really looked at it like, okay, you know, we killed it over here, this one out, it was, Mary talked me in to doing something I swore I would never do, and that was start an actual business, like hired people. I've had like 10 or 11 people that, that work with us today. I never wanted that. I wanted to live on a houseboat, solve crimes, take my retirement in early installments and not own anything, you know, and that worked great till I was, till I was 30, 30, well, 42, really.

• 1:44:08Jack Selby?

  Have you made more money investing or from your work?

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  That's the answer I was getting at. The reason I can't tell you, you know, Ford versus Caterpillar versus Groundworks versus Pure Talk for, I mean, I've, I've been in business with a lot of companies. I'm still curious about the deal and we're, you know, we do the best we can and, but it's never about the money entirely. It's, I only partner with brands that share my sensibility, right? But to answer your question, yes, in the end, the dust settles. I take my chunk of the business and I invest it.

• 1:44:46Jack Selby?

  What I'm curious about is because we love promoting financial literacy here and financial literacy mostly meaning exactly as you've described it, which is low cost index funds. I always like to say, as, as does Graham, that like, hey, you can make, realistically, if you're not like a high earner, you're making like the average income or maybe a little bit below the average income, your net worth will mostly be accumulated from your investments and not from like an active income, which we also discussed early on, which is like you can be making $300,000 a year, doesn't necessarily mean that you're becoming wealthy. Right? Because you're spending it all, but instead like your wealth is truly built from buying assets from buying investors.

• 1:45:23Speaker 02

  I didn't know you guys were that that value oriented.

• 1:45:25Jack Selby?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:45:26Jack Selby?

  All I do is index funds. You see my portfolio, it's 99.9%. But we try to provide value in that sense. It's not financial advice because we're not legally allowed to provide that. But we like to talk about low cost index funds.

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  Listen.

• 1:45:40Jack Selby?

  And cover calls.

• 1:45:40Speaker 02

  I it's so funny, I'm gonna I'm gonna contradict myself all over the place, but you know, you're I'm not adverse to the average American that you described, you know, earlier. Because in this case, I think that's the best possible advice you could give them. I assume you know Dave Ramsey?

• 1:45:58Jack Selby?

  Yeah, of course. We've had him on the show by three times.

• 1:46:00Speaker 02

  Sure. I've been on Dave's show probably three times. He's been on mine. We don't agree on every single thing, but we sure agree on that. And, you know, my dad and my mom raised three boys. My mother taught school for a couple of years. My dad taught for 28 or 29 years. I don't think he ever made more than 50 grand a year. He's 93 now. She's 88. She's writing her fifth best seller. You know, if he watches this, he'll he'll blush, but, you know, he it's the American dream. You know, you there's simply no way you can't wind up with millions of dollars

• 1:46:45Speaker 02

  over time if you do what you're talking about. I know that to be true. Now, full disclosure, I am a proponent of all of that, but I did get to a point where I started looking at deals and opportunities that I couldn't get to that I liked, right? That I couldn't get to through indexing. So I started to hedge and I started I kept my indexes and I and I'm still a very conservative investor. But I did find a guy who does the thing.

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  You know, and he's terrific. And

• 1:47:29Jack Selby?

  What does that mean? Does the thing and what does it mean to be terrific? Like, what's he returning you? Is he just a financial manager, manager, a financial advisor?

• 1:47:37Graham Stephan?

  Sounds like he's hedging against a maybe overvalued market.

• 1:47:41Speaker 02

  He has the breakfasts and and the dinners with the people you would love to interview. And they talk all the time. He it's really at that level. It's just a question of of access. I don't time. I don't buy anything that I have any intention of ever selling. I should be clear about that. I don't sell stocks unless there's a tax situation.

• 1:48:06Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:07Speaker 02

  And it makes sense to harvest. You know? But no, I'm I'm still very much about buy it, hold it, rebalance your portfolio. But you do get to a point where now for me, the bigger, the bigger question is, well, how much powder really do you want dry in a market like this? And and and why? Why do you want the dry powder? Do you want it dry so that when things truly crap the bed? And we and we see the 30 or 35% correction that your portfolio only corrects 18? 16%? Is that why you got all that? Or do you just like a sale?

• 1:48:51Speaker 02

  Are you just waiting to go shopping? And a 30% correction? Most people I know, they they kind of know it's coming. They of course don't know when. But how do you think about it? That's why that's why cookie cutter advice sucks so hard. That's why it's so dangerous. What you guys do is so important, but it's also dangerous because I don't know who's listening. And if Mike Rowe circa 1990 QVC days is listening. I don't want to fill his head with anything other than patience, low cost indexing. I just, I just wouldn't want to do it.

• 1:49:35Speaker 02

  But I'm older than I've ever been. And I I'm I'm well set. My charitable giving is is locked in. My foundation is solid. I will never spend the money that I've that I've earned. So should that change something?

• 1:49:54Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:49:56Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  We get to decide. We we get to decide.

• 1:50:00Jack Selby?

  What percentage dry powder do you keep in your portfolio?

• 1:50:04Speaker 02

  I have to call my guy.

• 1:50:05Jack Selby?

  Is that how it is?

• 1:50:06Graham Stephan?

  Who does the thing?

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  No, it's not that. It's, well, you know what, ma'am? To my, I am not as focused as I was. And maybe you used the C word earlier. Man, it's it's it's the only, aside from character, the only other C word that really matters is complacency. And, uh, look, the mistake I made years ago was rooted in trust and judgment. And

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  I I can't tell you I've learned from it. I've learned that I don't like when it goes sideways. And I've learned that there are several ways that I can hedge along the way and feel and feel better about assuming more risk. But for me, the exit door has always been the same. I'm living right now. Like I make maybe a couple hundred grand a year. I own four pair of pants and like five shirts. And most of those I stole from wardrobes on various shoots. I have a nice house, but I don't, I I drive a Ford Bronco. I've driven Fords all my life.

• 1:51:18Jack Selby?

  Are you intentionally frugal? Or is this just what comes naturally to you?

• 1:51:21Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, it seems like you don't like owning things.

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  I hate it.

• 1:51:24Graham Stephan?

  Why?

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  Well, in the words of Tony Robbins, I believe the more things you own.

• 1:51:30Jack Selby?

  The more things own you. There you go.

• 1:51:32Speaker 02

  Where are you gonna put them? In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, it's just stuff, you know? You got a bigger house now because you have more stuff. You gotta put your stuff somewhere. We have so much stuff, we have to go to, you know, private storage to put our stuff. We just have stuff.

• 1:51:48Graham Stephan?

  But it seems you're naturally like this. It didn't seem like you just listened to Tony Robbins.

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:51:52Graham Stephan?

  Oh, that clicked.

• 1:51:53Speaker 02

  No, I came by it.

• 1:51:55Jack Selby?

  I'm selling everything.

• 1:51:56Graham Stephan?

  All right, that's it.

• 1:51:56Speaker 02

  I came by it, honestly. My my my dad is very.

• 1:52:02Speaker 02

  Parsimonious, but the trick is it's like comfort. You know, if you have to teach thrift, if you have to teach it and, and you have to convince somebody, right, that they should hold their nose and endure it, you know, it might work. It might, but long-term it, it really doesn't. It's more like the seals, right? You know, when they talk about adversity, it's, it's not enough to endure it. You have to embrace it, man. You have to embrace the suck. And then really, I think I said it earlier, but I, but I believe it to be true.

• 1:52:42Speaker 02

  The code to crack is not the code that allows you to endure adversity or discomfort. It's the code that permits you to love it. Like really genuinely like it.

• 1:52:59Jack Selby?

  And how do you crack that though? How do you get to a point of wanting to seek out the hard stuff?

• 1:53:06Speaker 02

  You reframe it. It's not hard. It's, a lot of people would say, look, it's really hard to be able to afford my dream car and then affirmatively not buy it, but instead take that money and put it in a low cost indexed fund. What do you say to that person? You know, it's like you can hold your nose and do it and chalk it up to forbearance or discipline or some other thing that frankly is a tough sell in a world where nobody wants a lecture or a sermon, right? Or you can say, look, man, you need to rewire your, your whole deal.

• 1:53:49Speaker 02

  Like what do you associate winning with? When do you feel like the smartest guy in the room? And this is like, I'm not a shrink, but a lot of that comes down to living on the outside of cool. And growing up, I had no problem doing that. I was a boy scout, an Eagle Scout, not cool, but it gave me an incredible insight into all these things, you know? The Boy Scouts were the first guys who, who made me raise my hand and make a promise. It mattered, you know? So, yeah, I, I, early on.

• 1:54:31Speaker 02

  I stopped caring about what most of my friends thought. I sang in a barber shop quartet, dude. How uncool.

• 1:54:40Jack Selby?

  But you're a good singer.

• 1:54:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if you're looking to get laid, right? And you know, you don't, you don't put on a straw hat.

• 1:54:48Jack Selby?

  That didn't help.

• 1:54:49Speaker 02

  And hang out with a bunch of.

• 1:54:50Jack Selby?

  It has to have helped.

• 1:54:51Speaker 02

  It did.

• 1:54:52Jack Selby?

  I mean, that's the thing.

• 1:54:53Graham Stephan?

  It's so unique.

• 1:54:54Speaker 02

  But look.

• 1:54:54Graham Stephan?

  We're talking about skills to impress a first date.

• 1:54:56Jack Selby?

  I don't think it has, I don't, I could be wrong here and correct me if I am wrong. I don't think it has so much to do with your interests. I think it has more so to do with your approach towards your interests and your demeanor. Like if you have a certain level of candor and you don't, you don't care about things, you'll, you'll say things that you want to say, speak your mind, do the things you want to do. That's the best possible thing you could do.

• 1:55:20Speaker 02

  In general.

• 1:55:21Jack Selby?

  In terms of attracting people. Yeah.

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, look, I mean, you say it.

• 1:55:25Jack Selby?

  You're getting nipple deep in poop and feces and matter.

• 1:55:28Speaker 02

  Yes. Take the reverse commute. Be surprising. Not for the sake of being surprising, but that, that, that's the trick. Look, if you want to be truly authentic, you can't focus group the room and decide, okay, based on the research, here's what girls find authentic. Do this, this, this, and this. You'll just be another guy who wrote another book and maybe you'll sell some, maybe you won't. But that, that's not what authenticity is. It's, it's, it's something else and it's really hard to identify. Like I, I fumble around this a lot when I, like when people ask me, this is another great question. Who do you work for? Like who do you really work for? You start asking people

• 1:56:10Speaker 02

  that who sit here, you'll be amazed what you hear. Some will say, Jesus Christ. Some will say, my wife. Some will say, the man who signs my check. Some will say, the sponsors. You know, some will say, what I typically say, which is the audience. I work for the audience. I never really worked for CNN or Discovery, or for really anybody who ever paid me. That was just a, sort of a, a direct transactional thing.

• 1:56:42Speaker 02

  I work for the people who watch me and listen to me. And so if you believe that to be true, then how do you not annoy them? Well, if you work too hard to please them, they'll hate you. Because they'll see it as pandering and they'll see them trying to do a thing that you think they'll like. And they'll like it for a while, but ultimately it'll chap their ass. Now, if you ignore them, right? They'll take that to heart, too. Nobody wants to be ignored to that level. So all of it comes back to dating. All of it comes back to, you know, why do you admire the people you admire?

• 1:57:27Speaker 02

  Why do you like the comedians? You know, like, who's your favorite comedian?

• 1:57:32Jack Selby?

  Tim Dillon, Chris D'elia.

• 1:57:33Graham Stephan?

  Tim Dillon is funny.

• 1:57:34Speaker 02

  Tim Dillon is freaking funny. Here's what I think about Tim Dillon. I don't think-

• 1:57:40Graham Stephan?

  Eddie Murphy.

• 1:57:41Speaker 02

  Eddie Murphy at his heyday?

• 1:57:43Graham Stephan?

  Yes.

• 1:57:44Jack Selby?

  I'll, I'll send to Tim whatever you're gonna say.

• 1:57:47Speaker 02

  I don't think Tim Dillon is concerned with amusing anyone other than himself. And I think when he does it, people love him and they go along for the ride.

• 1:58:03Speaker 00

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• 1:58:33Speaker 02

  Now, I don't know if that's how he really thinks about it, but my hallucination with all my favorite comedians, when I watch them doing their thing, I don't think they're directly trying to make me laugh. I think they're trying to amuse themselves in a way that if I can relate to it, I've just become a fan. And that's the closest I can get to.

• 1:58:55Speaker 02

  Like what's persuasive? If you're trying to, to, to do a really meaningful podcast that could seriously impact the way a person invests for the rest of their life. What's your duty of care? How, how can you balance the challenge of being persuasive and honest without painting with too broad a brush and unintentionally causing some consequence? Because the person listening at this particular time didn't need to hear what you were saying. They needed to hear something else. Because you'll never know.

• 1:59:39Speaker 02

  You have to constantly kind of check yourself, I think. You know, and, and I think a good host, a good comedian, a good singer, a good performer, a good podcaster, they're, they're all going to wrestle with the relationship with their audience in some way.

• 1:59:59Jack Selby?

  If you are a young man and you feel lost, and this is typically, I know, associated with like the manosphere, red pill space, but this is definitely an issue that a lot of people are facing. They feel no purpose in life. They don't work a job. They don't have a relationship. If you're that person, you're listening to this right now. If they were to follow the micro method of how to get purpose in life, what to do, how to make the right decisions for themselves, who to listen to, how to find a mentor, what is needed to live a good life? Let's just say if you had to be dogmatic, what would you say?

• 2:00:35Speaker 02

  Well, that's a lot, dude. But again, with all the codicils and caveats baked in with the broad brush and so forth, I'll tell you that I wrote this thing about 12 years ago called the sweat pledge. Everybody who applies for a work ethic scholarship has to sign it. It's hokey. It's controversial. It's uncharacteristically earnest. But it's not negotiable. You have to sign it. 12 simple statements of belief that I genuinely feel helped me enormously along the way.

• 2:01:13Speaker 02

  Um, if you don't like something on the sweat pledge, which is not unusual. It's cool. We can still be friends and everything, but you know, this particular pile of free money is probably not for you. So the answer to your question is, is really what's on the sweat pledge. Like the very first tenant, just for instance, it says, uh, I believe I have won the greatest lottery of all time. I'm alive. I walk the earth. I live in America. Above all things, I'm grateful.

• 2:01:47Speaker 02

  So if you believe that, then the next 11 won't be too hard. But if you don't believe that,

• 2:01:59Speaker 02

  everything gets a little wobbly. And so the guy you just described,

• 2:02:06Speaker 02

  I don't think believes that. Because you can't feel lost or put upon or victimized. If you fundamentally feel grateful.

• 2:02:22Speaker 02

  And if you can't feel grateful

• 2:02:25Speaker 02

  because of the miracle of your existence, if you can't look around the world at all the other countries and all the other governments and all of the other attempts to create a civilization and feel grateful that you were born into this one. But I just start there. Like if you, if you literally can't wake up and go, my God, this can't believe this. Can you believe it? 10 fingers, 10 toes. I'm walking, I'm thinking, I'm singing. You know, I got it like if, if you just can't take a rational inventory of your blessings, then, uh,

• 2:03:12Speaker 02

  You are susceptible to all the things you've described. I've just never met anybody able, who's able to feel sorry for themselves, who fundamentally feels grateful.

• 2:03:25Jack Selby?

  I 100% agree with that. And that's the first thing that I usually tell people if someone confides in me or hey, I'm going through something. I always say, hey, look, it's really hard to feel sad for yourself and gratitude at the exact same time.

• 2:03:40Speaker 02

  It's not hard. It's impossible.

• 2:03:42Jack Selby?

  And when I practice gratitude, because I still do this quite often, actually, I make sure it's never anything that I could be susceptible to, to be removed from, to be parted with. So for example, like, I don't even go so far as like, hey, I have 10 fingers and toes because I could lose one.

• 2:03:59Speaker 02

  You bet.

• 2:04:00Jack Selby?

  You know what I mean? Like, I, I, I never, 100% never say, I'm so grateful that like, I make X amount of money. Of course I am. But that's not what I'm going to attach my gratitude to. Like, I want to attach to something like, I'm grateful that I exist. You know what I mean? That I have the parents that I have, or had the parents that I had, that, that I was born and raised in the way that I was.

• 2:04:19Speaker 02

  Look, man, I, I, I wish that were a new idea. I wish we could take credit for it. What we can do is say, that's not popular right now. It is not popular. I mean, this country just turned 250 and so many people are just twisted up. They can't feel good about it. They can't enjoy it. They've, they've bought into an idea that they're living in a, in a state of corruption. And that's not to say there's, we've got plenty of corruption to talk about. You want to talk about money, talk about fraud? I can't think of a more important thing to fix in the country than the squandering of taxpayer money, honestly.

• 2:05:06Speaker 02

  But I, it's just, it's, it's a choice, you know, and it's a choice. And if you can't, if you can't take a minute, like to really reflect on, I don't know.

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  The American Dream, do you guys talk about that on the show much?

• 2:05:23Jack Selby?

  Yeah. One question that we used to ask every single guest on the podcast, I suppose we could ask it to you as well. If you are broke between the ages of 25 and 40, you have no kids, no physical or mental disability. Whose fault is it?

• 2:05:38Speaker 02

  It's 100% mine. It's my fault. If I'm between 25 and 40 and I'm broke.

• 2:05:46Jack Selby?

  No physical, mental disability, no kids.

• 2:05:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:50Graham Stephan?

  Usually we get a range where people would say, oh, maybe it's 70%.

• 2:05:54Jack Selby?

  That was the most resolute answer I think we've ever had.

• 2:05:57Speaker 02

  The sweat pledge is not for everyone, but that's another, you know, tenet on there. I mean, it's, it's, my past does not equal my future. I am not. I am not the product of my circumstances. I'm the product of my choices. Now, I get it. It's easy to say, especially at this point in my life, given all the things that we've, that we've talked about. But what's more empowering? Like, what do you really want to tell somebody? Like, if you can really change somebody's state, do you want to convince them that they're in the condition they're in today because of their circumstances? Or because of their choices?

• 2:06:42Speaker 02

  Because

• 2:06:45Speaker 02

  it's very difficult to change your your circumstances and it's impossible to change your past. But your future has nothing to do with that. You are free to do all kinds of things. Now, to our earlier point, some of those things are going to make you humiliated. Some are going to be hard. Some are going to hurt. Some are going to make you just question everything. They're all going to make you uncomfortable. But if somebody's trying to live their life with a playbook that says discomfort is the enemy. And that your circumstances are to blame. How do you, like, how would they ever get out of it? It might take some.

• 2:07:29Speaker 02

  Personal responsibility out of the sting of the moment.

• 2:07:32Graham Stephan?

  Why do you think people don't want to hear your answer to that, though? That it's their fault?

• 2:07:37Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you'd have to ask them, I think. Look, nine out of 10 times, it's not the message. You know, it's the messenger. And I think maybe there's a lot of people who don't find me terribly persuasive, happily. Some do. But again, nobody wants a lecture. Nobody wants a sermon. And nobody wants to hear from a 60 year old guy. Who's closer to the end of his career than the beginning, but this is the way you've got to do it. Little camper, suck up and eat your peas. Nope, they don't want to hear it. It's exactly what we were talking about before, which I think is going to be the most. For me, the most important thing we've talked about, which is.

• 2:08:21Speaker 02

  What is persuasive? When is it persuasive? To what degree does the messenger affect? The message? I'll tell you when it like when the, when the scales fell from my eyes and I knew that we had entered a totally different time in this country. I could tell you the exact week. It was 2015. It was summer and I went and did an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. Killed it. Great crowd, big audience. Delivered my message. It was very much a MicroWorks message, reinvigorate the trades, et cetera, et cetera. Three days later, same exact conversation with Glenn Beck.

• 2:09:04Speaker 02

  Now, I went home at the end of that week and opened my computer and started looking at the socials. See what's up? Holy shit, man, I can't tell you.

• 2:09:17Speaker 02

  My buddies on the, on the right. Completely lost their minds when they saw me sitting next to Bill Maher. They just lost their minds. And my buddies on the left. Their heads exploded when they saw me sitting next to Glenn Beck. Nobody talked about what I said. Nobody talked about the fact that I reached millions of people in both of those audiences. With the message that was important to me and I think maybe important for the country. Nobody was interested in the message. They weren't even interested in the messenger, which was me, which was weird because these people follow me online.

• 2:09:57Speaker 02

  What they were interested in is the proximity of my interlocutor. And that was a problem. How could you sit next to that son of a b-? How could you sit next to him? How could you? How could you normalize blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? And that, to your question, that that's the world that guy's living in. You know, everything is toxic. Well, not everything, but half, half of everything is toxic. So, you know, those are the times. You know, you must be this tall to get on the ride, you know? And, and we are, we're on it. And now you have to think about who you're sitting next to, not just what you're saying.

• 2:10:40Speaker 02

  At least that's what you're told. I, I don't have the energy for it anymore.

• 2:10:46Graham Stephan?

  Do you think we've become more divisive?

• 2:10:49Speaker 02

  More divisive than what?

• 2:10:51Graham Stephan?

  The past?

• 2:10:52Speaker 02

  Like 1865, 1861?

• 2:10:55Graham Stephan?

  I would probably compare it to 20 years ago.

• 2:10:58Speaker 02

  No. Nope. I think the country was in much graver shape in 1860. I think at the height of the civil rights movement, we were really fractured. I think, um, oh, man. I think there are many, many, many, many occasions where things were much worse than they are now. What's different now, honestly, is, uh, access. Yeah, I can, I can pick up my phone if I can find it and I can, you know, I can tell you, I can, all the trouble in the world, man, it's right there. It's right there on your phone.

• 2:11:42Speaker 02

  And we can, we have a constant diet, endless reminders of how divided we are. That guy I mentioned before, Todd Rose, End of Average is great, but the one you want to read is called Collective Illusions. And Todd, again, his think tank excels in private opinion research. So he spends a lot of time trying to figure out. What you really think, not what you would say in a poll, not what you say when you're interviewed, but what you what you really and truly believe, right? And Todd reckons the biggest enemy we we face in this country right now

• 2:12:25Speaker 02

  is the threat of the manufactured consensus. Like, the idea that eighty percent of all the content on X is generated by twenty percent of the people there. And what you learn when you ask people, whether it's their investing thesis, or whether it's their views on sex, or or immigration, or down the list it goes. You can't trust them. You can't trust them to tell you the truth about how they really feel. And that's a shame, but the good news is that what comes out with all this research is how much we are not divided

• 2:13:06Speaker 02

  and how we have just been constantly reminded and and told that we are. Look, and I I think that's super encouraging. There's another book that makes the case really well, too. It's called Everybody Lies. And in this book, the author gets the keys to the kingdom of Google data. And he gets to look at the details of every search conducted over the last, however, many years it was, five years. There's hundreds of billions of searches, right? And the thing is, you can't lie to Google. When you go online to find something, you have to ask it specifically what what you want.

• 2:13:48Speaker 02

  And if you can step back and like triangulate all that data with the demographic information of the person who's conducting the search, as well as their ethnicity and where they live and their economic strata, all that stuff. They have all that. When you start looking at what people truly think about a thing based on what they search for, you get a completely different template of who we are as a people and a country. And it's not it's not being reflected virtually anywhere.

• 2:14:25Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I would completely agree with you on that.

• 2:14:28Speaker 02

  So be of good cheer, you know? It's not it's not great right now. Obviously, people are, you know, twisted up.

• 2:14:37Speaker 02

  But it's not real. It's not as real as certainly as it was in 1859 and 1860.

• 2:14:43Jack Selby?

  How do you know how honest to be? Like, are you only ever maximally honest?

• 2:14:49Speaker 02

  No, I lie, I lie a lot personally. I mean, not not a lot.

• 2:14:53Jack Selby?

  How do you, how do you determine when you're going to lie versus when you're not going to?

• 2:14:57Speaker 02

  I don't consciously lie about anything consequential that I know of.

• 2:15:05Speaker 02

  But beyond that, you know, lies of omission are probably more telling than overt stories.

• 2:15:13Jack Selby?

  Is there anything you omitted from the podcast so far?

• 2:15:17Speaker 02

  This podcast? Oh, sure. I mean, we've only talked for what? Two hours? I've omitted a lifetime of truths. You know, look, think about, this is amazing, man. This is, I mean, this podcast landia, you know? I mean, it came along at such an interesting time. Actually, I take it back. It didn't come along. It was birthed as a direct result of endless soundbites and surfacey scratchings and curiosity being teased but never fulfilled. You can't do this. You couldn't even do this on Charlie Rose once upon a time. You certainly can't do it on the evening news.

• 2:16:00Speaker 02

  I don't know where the truth ultimately resides. But I tell you what, what I said to Joe Rogan last year was, you know, anybody can come on a podcast for a half hour and show you the version of themselves they would like you to see, maybe even an hour, hour and a half, two. After hour two, for better or worse, you, you get at something that I don't think most public people would ever, you know? They haven't been, at least until recently, they haven't been used to revealing.

• 2:16:39Speaker 02

  The kind of thing you can get in a long form conversation. So the positive news is like for the audience, that's great, man. There's a lot of truth out there to be had. The problem is they're five million podcasts. And now I think a lot of the anxiety that the guy you were describing before might feel, at least maybe I'm projecting, but it's, it's annoying, man. How much, how much I don't know. And it's, it's just a fire hose of information and, and a lot of it's really good. Just can't get to it.

• 2:17:14Graham Stephan?

  What's something that you wished that we asked you?

• 2:17:16Speaker 02

  I wish you'd asked me about my mother.

• 2:17:18Graham Stephan?

  What about her?

• 2:17:19Speaker 02

  It's none of your business.

• 2:17:25Speaker 02

  I'll tell you about my mom. You know, I, to the extent that I have a business and a career, I've spent it talking about work ethic and trying to shine a light on, you know, the people I meet who I,

• 2:17:39Speaker 02

  who I admire and the people in my life who have impressed me and have prospered as the result of being uncomfortable and, and mastering a skill that's in demand. Right? That, that, that's what I do. And I'm okay at it and I do it a lot. But my mom is a writer.

• 2:18:01Speaker 02

  Her name's Peggy Rowe and she wrote every day for 60 years. All she dreamt of was being a, um, a New York Times bestselling author.

• 2:18:11Speaker 02

  And she's a good writer and she wrote unauthorized biographies about strangers she ran into. She'd write them every single day. And that's her now calling me and she can wait.

• 2:18:24Graham Stephan?

  You could tell her that she could say hi on the podcast.

• 2:18:27Speaker 02

  That would, she's like, you never, my mom comes in hot. I wouldn't trust it.

• 2:18:32Speaker 02

  But.

• 2:18:34Speaker 02

  I mean, I watched her give up on her dream after maybe thirty years of writing. She got published in like newspapers and magazines once in a while, you know, she writes stories about horses, which she grew up with and people write those stories in these little horsey magazines. But she kind of gave up on on being a published writer, but she never gave up on writing. Every day, this woman wrote, when she was seventy nine, she wrote a short story to me because she was pissed off that I didn't take her phone call. And she had something funny she wanted to tell me. So she wrote this story about losing her her big blue purse at the local Walmart

• 2:19:17Speaker 02

  and the crazy hilarity that happened in the wake of my dad, who can't hear so good dumpster diving, trying to find this purse and all those crazy. So um, it's a funny story and I read it on my phone and posted it on Facebook. And then I flew off to do some dirty jobs or whatever. And when I came home, the story had been read seventy million times.

• 2:19:45Graham Stephan?

  Wow.

• 2:19:46Speaker 02

  Seventy million times. And so among the many calls that I got were publishers who were like, hey, your mom's a terrific writer. I'm like, I know. And one of them said, get her to write twenty or so stories like that. And just put you in them, right? So we have a hook, you know? And I called my mom and said, hey, you're not going to believe this, but I think I got a publishing deal. All you gotta do is write, you know, a couple dozen stories like that. Just put me in them. And she says, Michael, you know, I have two other sons, right? I'm like, Mom, give me a break. We'll deal with my brothers later. Do what the publisher says. She goes off and she writes twenty some stories.

• 2:20:30Speaker 02

  I'm not in any of them. They're all they're all about my grandmother, her mom. The book is called About My Mother and it was about growing up next to her parents and the impact that they had. And the stories are fricking funny, but publisher wouldn't touch them. Long story short, I printed ten thousand of them and put them on Facebook and they sold out in a week. Publisher called back and said, okay. All right, we'll take it. About my mother on her 80th birthday goes out. Simon and Schuster takes it. Goes to number six on the New York Times list. Number six. She's written four bestsellers since then. One every two years.

• 2:21:15Speaker 02

  So. Like today, sitting here and driving over, I was talking to her. And you know, you think it's like you got your business down. You got your whole, you got your stories down. You understand. Whether it's the foundation, like you. Like I got it. I cracked that code. And right in front of me the whole time. Is the ultimate work ethic story. The ultimate story of patience and discomfort. And persuasion. And stubbornness and disagreeability. And integrity. Is my mom. Of all places, my mom. A woman. Who finally gets what she always wanted at 80.

• 2:22:03Speaker 02

  So. I don't know. Investment advice, life advice, writing advice.

• 2:22:11Speaker 02

  Nobody's got a. Nobody's got a playbook, not really. All we can do is fumble around and look for the best examples we can find. And be as honest as we can. And. Share the stories you have.

• 2:22:26Graham Stephan?

  That's incredible. I don't know how we top that.

• 2:22:28Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:29Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I don't know. You've still got a lot of notes on your phone there. What else were you thinking?

• 2:22:34Jack Selby?

  Well, speaking of mothers, my mom, um, growing up, I would. Us as a family would watch a lot of Dirty Jobs. My mom had a huge crush on you.

• 2:22:43Speaker 02

  How huge?

• 2:22:44Jack Selby?

  Uh, I mean, enough to probably bother my dad.

• 2:22:47Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 2:22:47Jack Selby?

  But I don't actually think he cared. It was kind of like a joke, like me and my brother, when I was. Mom, Mike Rowe on the TV again.

• 2:22:55Graham Stephan?

  What's funny though, is he says this to me and I say, wait a second. Your dad kind of looks like you.

• 2:23:01Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:01Graham Stephan?

  A little bit.

• 2:23:02Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 2:23:03Jack Selby?

  And you guys are born.

• 2:23:04Graham Stephan?

  A little deeper.

• 2:23:05Jack Selby?

  And you're, I, I looked it up and I think you're like exactly 15 days younger than my dad.

• 2:23:11Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for sharing that. That's freaking awesome to hear.

• 2:23:14Graham Stephan?

  Could you FaceTime your mom? What would she do?

• 2:23:17Jack Selby?

  Yeah, yeah, I probably could.

• 2:23:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'd like to meet this woman. What's her name?

• 2:23:22Jack Selby?

  I don't know if this is a good idea. No, I don't have one. Uh, her name's Anne.

• 2:23:29Speaker 02

  How long ya guys been doing this?

• 2:23:31Jack Selby?

  Seven years.

• 2:23:32Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, seven years.

• 2:23:34Speaker 02

  Unbelievable.

• 2:23:35Jack Selby?

  They're in Hawaii right now, and in fact, I'm gonna go meet them.

• 2:23:38Graham Stephan?

  He's flying out after this to go to Hawaii.

• 2:23:40Speaker 02

  What island?

• 2:23:41Jack Selby?

  Maui.

• 2:23:42Graham Stephan?

  Oh, she better pick up. This is the, this is her opportunity.

• 2:23:46Jack Selby?

  She could be at the pool, and I hope she's enjoying her time if so.

• 2:23:50Speaker 02

  Well, if not, call her voicemail. Let me at least leave a message.

• 2:23:54Speaker 02

  Oh, actually, no, better yet. Let me make a video for her.

• 2:23:57Jack Selby?

  Yeah, yeah. Hey, Mom, I have, uh, someone who wants to speak to you.

• 2:24:01Speaker 02

  Anne, are you kidding me? Where you been? I can't believe I've been talking to these guys for over two hours and you don't, you don't show up. There's no appearance.

• 2:24:11Jack Selby?

  Hype up my dad. Say something about him. He's a good guy.

• 2:24:14Speaker 02

  Your dad? Here's the thing.

• 2:24:17Speaker 02

  He's no Mike Rowe.

• 2:24:19Speaker 02

  But he's a good guy. Stay with him. Just give it another 10 years or so. One of these days, you and me, our time will come, but for now, stay with the old man.

• 2:24:30Jack Selby?

  You heard it here. Amazing. She's gonna, she's gonna love that.

• 2:24:36Speaker 02

  We'll see.

• 2:24:37Jack Selby?

  They actually, you actually do look a lot like my dad, which is just also insane.

• 2:24:41Graham Stephan?

  We'll put a photo right here and be able to see the resemblance.

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  Dude, it's, I mean, I can't tell you how weird it is to be, like, walking through SFO yesterday, as I was. And, I mean, it's still super gratifying to meet people, you know, who, who like the show and they say, they say nice things. But to meet, you know, how, how old are you guys?

• 2:25:04Jack Selby?

  Twenty-seven?

• 2:25:05Graham Stephan?

  Thirty-six.

• 2:25:06Speaker 02

  Twenty-seven, thirty-six. Yes, you're twenty-seven, man. That, that, Dirty Jobs went on the air when you were five.

• 2:25:12Jack Selby?

  It was like, this is like, this is one of the first TV shows I watched. Like I, that's why I'm having a hard time remembering it as clearly as Grandma was. But I watched basically every episode as a family. We watched like reruns and everything.

• 2:25:24Graham Stephan?

  I would watch it with my grandma. It was one of her favorite shows and her and I would sit there watching this.

• 2:25:29Jack Selby?

  She probably had a little crush too.

• 2:25:31Graham Stephan?

  Oh, I bet.

• 2:25:32Jack Selby?

  I bet you drove a lot of middle aged women crazy.

• 2:25:35Speaker 02

  Well, dude, I mean, what, what is going on with the, with the female of the species? Like, why, why would it, why, I'm covered in other people's crap? Like 90% of the time, you know?

• 2:25:49Graham Stephan?

  It's the voice. It's gotta be the voice.

• 2:25:51Jack Selby?

  I think it's the voice, but I also think it's the demeanor. I think that it's like your, your lack of concern for whatever's going on. You know, you're, as they say, like you are the, the calm sand or rocks that the, you know, crazy waves crash upon and you just sit there.

• 2:26:08Speaker 02

  Like I was 42 when, when I pitched that show. Now, had I done it when I was 32 or 27, I would have been able to do it for a lot longer. It wouldn't have hurt nearly as much. But you know what? It would have, it would have consumed me. It would have, I wouldn't have been able to handle it.

• 2:26:31Graham Stephan?

  How so?

• 2:26:32Speaker 02

  I'd had 15 years of living like Travis McGee. I was very comfortable in my own skin. Like I had enough time to figure out for better or worse, who I was. And even though my whole business model went upside down, I was in a very like sanguine place when I was 42. When I realized that show was a hit and that it could be a big hit if I tended to it, I felt like I was able to make a really, um, grown up decision and just decide, look, you have a clear way forward, but it's going to require you to take the pie in the face.

• 2:27:17Speaker 02

  It's going to require you to stop being some version of a, of a host. And you're going to have to be the apprentice. You're going to have to be the guest. So you're going to have to step back from all of that. And you're going to have to live on the road for a couple of years. More than a couple, as it turned out, you know, like 300 days a year. So it was uncomfortable, but.

• 2:27:43Speaker 02

  Dude, I mean, if, look, if it took us over two hours to get to this place, then it was worth it because every single bit of misery, discomfort, all the concussions, the contusions, the stitches, the broken fingers, the crushed toes, like, that show was violent and it hurt. And I was away from people I loved a lot. Wouldn't trade a minute.

• 2:28:08Jack Selby?

  When's the last time you put yourself in serious discomfort?

• 2:28:12Speaker 02

  Counting today.

• 2:28:13Jack Selby?

  Sure.

• 2:28:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:28:16Jack Selby?

  Sitting across from this guy, too.

• 2:28:18Speaker 02

  Well, you know, serious physical discomfort, I'm shooting tomorrow all day outside in Las Vegas. It's gonna be 107. It's gonna be uncomfortable. It's gonna hurt. But, look, in relative terms, there's a long list of stuff I did on Dirty Jobs I'll never do again. You know, I'm never gonna test a shark suit. I'm never gonna go in an opal mine again. I'm never gonna do things that scared the absolute bejesus out of me, you know?

• 2:28:49Jack Selby?

  Was there anything you wouldn't do?

• 2:28:52Speaker 02

  The only thing I ever passed on, I passed because I, I couldn't see how there would be any opportunity for humor. And the job was a body farm technician.

• 2:29:07Jack Selby?

  What's that?

• 2:29:08Speaker 02

  CSI stuff. Like, what does a body look like that's been in the trunk of a Pinto for three and a half weeks, right? You need to know that if you're going to really investigate myriad crime scenes. So what you do is you get a Pinto and you put a body in the back of it and you put it in the Echapholae Swamp for three and a half weeks. And then you pull it up and then you look at it and start poking around. Like, that's a real job. And so body farms are these places where human cadavers are subjected to any kind of circumstance you

• 2:29:48Speaker 02

  can imagine, and plenty that you can't, for the purposes of experts coming in and evaluating the situation.

• 2:29:57Speaker 02

  I just didn't know how I could make that lighthearted.

• 2:30:01Graham Stephan?

  It's weird. You know what's so weird is that I remember hearing a story about this a few years ago where a family sued because their grandparent accidentally.

• 2:30:12Jack Selby?

  Got mixed in?

• 2:30:12Graham Stephan?

  Got mixed in and was blown up.

• 2:30:17Graham Stephan?

  I kid you not, you could, we're gonna.

• 2:30:19Jack Selby?

  That's of all of the things.

• 2:30:21Graham Stephan?

  But that's.

• 2:30:22Jack Selby?

  She was blown up?

• 2:30:23Graham Stephan?

  For science. It was for science.

• 2:30:26Jack Selby?

  Dude, that is not science. We know what happens when things get blown up.

• 2:30:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, like when I, when I checked the organ donor, I'm like, this is not what I had in mind.

• 2:30:34Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:34Graham Stephan?

  They were testing some explosives.

• 2:30:37Jack Selby?

  It was the terms and conditions on the new Apple update. That's what it was. You always have to read.

• 2:30:41Graham Stephan?

  I'm gonna show the article here, cause I believe they rightfully sued.

• 2:30:45Jack Selby?

  That literally sounds like, oh, we got all these extra bodies. Like, all right, let's just. Let's go out to the desert. Let's go out to BLM land. Yeah, just blow her up.

• 2:30:54Graham Stephan?

  Yo, get a load of this.

• 2:30:55Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:56Graham Stephan?

  Check this out.

• 2:30:57Jack Selby?

  Are you filming?

• 2:30:58Speaker 02

  Hey, how many, how many people in your audience typically listen all the way to the bitter end?

• 2:31:04Graham Stephan?

  Twenty one percent.

• 2:31:06Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:06Speaker 02

  That's not bad.

• 2:31:07Graham Stephan?

  It's pretty good.

• 2:31:07Jack Selby?

  But it's actually, it's, it's more if it's audio listeners. It's probably like about 50 to 60% on audio.

• 2:31:14Speaker 02

  Same with me.

• 2:31:15Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:15Speaker 02

  Isn't that crazy? Why, like, why is that? Why does the audio listener have a deeper commitment?

• 2:31:20Jack Selby?

  It's because of the different situations that the viewer is in. If you're, if you're watching the podcast, then realistically, you're gonna be sitting on the couch or, you know, watching it on a television. You're gonna be in, you're gonna be in a different.

• 2:31:33Graham Stephan?

  Or it just gets recommended and people say, oh, let me click on this. They watch the first minute and they bounce.

• 2:31:38Jack Selby?

  The continuous needs of a viewer are a lot lower if they're just listening. They'll just be at the gym. They'll be in the car, driving, commuting, something.

• 2:31:47Speaker 02

  Who do you listen to? Who do you like?

• 2:31:49Jack Selby?

  Tim Dillon, I would say. I love Chris D'elia. Um, I mean, I, the thing is, I went on such a huge podcast and like education binge for about five years that I felt like I read a lot of the things that I, that I kinda needed in order to like be.

• 2:32:07Jack Selby?

  Closer to self-actualized than I was, make enough progress there. And so I just did that for five years. Like I read a lot and I listened to like a bunch of like modern wisdom, Diary of a CEO, I don't even know, every podcast, Joe Rogan.

• 2:32:21Speaker 02

  Who started this?

• 2:32:22Graham Stephan?

  I would say we both did. It was Jack's idea initially. I had a YouTube channel talking about personal finance.

• 2:32:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:29Graham Stephan?

  And I did that since 2016. And then Jack and I started working together in 2019. And in 2020, he comes to me with the idea of starting the podcast. And I said, sure. We had a dining room table at the time and we would just put the mics on the dining room table. At first it was just him and I, and then we thought, let's get our buddies in here.

• 2:32:48Speaker 02

  Were you locked down at the time?

• 2:32:50Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:50Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. And so we got our friends. And so we started that and it started to get decent viewership.

• 2:32:57Jack Selby?

  Our friends were like YouTubers or they had some sort of like fan base that we could also tap into. But yeah, then it ended up growing and we did focus mostly in the beginning on finances, but then as time had, I mean, you can only talk so much about low cost index funds and the same thing over and over. So it's like, okay. I guess Dave Ramsey can, like he still has his fan base and all, but we decided to branch out and get a little bit more into like weightlifting or we talked to doctors on the podcast. We talked to psychiatrists. We talked to Eastern, Western medicine, a bunch of.

• 2:33:28Speaker 02

  It's so funny, I think, how, and by the way, not to hijack the interview, but you guys come on mine sometime.

• 2:33:34Jack Selby?

  Yeah, that would be really fun.

• 2:33:36Graham Stephan?

  And you film in Santa Monica, right?

• 2:33:37Jack Selby?

  Yes.

• 2:33:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, come by. No, that'd be great. I'm only doing one a week, but typically I'll come down and like do, you know, seven over four or five days. And it's really taken a crazy turn. I just had JD Vance on.

• 2:33:52Jack Selby?

  Yes.

• 2:33:53Speaker 02

  Which is bananas. And so I'm not, I'm not really sure where it's going, but. It started so differently, like I was writing these eight minute historical mysteries, like in the style of Paul Harvey's old show, something you didn't know about somebody you do when you get to figure out who I'm talking about as I'm reading you the story. And that's, that, that's how the way I heard it started. And then same thing, we were locked down and my producer's buddy I went to high school with. And we're like, you know, my man, it's, it's hard to write good stories, especially short ones. It's easy to bullshit for an hour. And so people started listening to us talk about the stories that I had written.

• 2:34:35Speaker 02

  And then I started to bring in guests to tell me what I got right and what I got wrong, like actual experts on the topic, right? And then it just kind of became, you know, this very similar to this. But it's a weird world and I didn't get into it on purpose, but I just don't think it's something you can ignore.

• 2:34:55Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I think what would do really well for you, and this is something I've wanted to do as well, is you do a Dirty Jobs, but like a podcast version of that, where you have people who come on, who talk about their careers and what they're doing, but in podcast format.

• 2:35:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:11Graham Stephan?

  And you just back and forth and you listen to their story. Had you, you know, be a, you know, a sheep shaver or like just random careers.

• 2:35:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:35:20Graham Stephan?

  That do well.

• 2:35:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:35:21Graham Stephan?

  And you get their story. That I would love to hear.

• 2:35:23Speaker 02

  You know, who did a pretty good take on that was Theo.

• 2:35:26Graham Stephan?

  Yes. Yeah, the garbage truck guy.

• 2:35:29Speaker 02

  It's great.

• 2:35:29Graham Stephan?

  Awesome.

• 2:35:30Jack Selby?

  Taxi driver needed one as well.

• 2:35:31Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah, you're right. I should probably, I, I, I should probably make it a little more, a little more targeted.

• 2:35:37Graham Stephan?

  I would be targeted, but focus on the education and just screen people who are good on camera.

• 2:35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:44Graham Stephan?

  And who just talk well.

• 2:35:46Speaker 02

  That's.

• 2:35:47Graham Stephan?

  And usually on a phone call, you could have a producer or something, weed through the people and get the, the ones who are just good.

• 2:35:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:53Graham Stephan?

  Who are funny, who are kind of interesting.

• 2:35:55Speaker 02

  You know, I think at the time when I, I did kind of look at that and think about it, but I, I felt like maybe it's Dirty Jobs light and maybe I don't, like real fans of that show.

• 2:36:08Speaker 02

  Believe me, the minute I started to step back and not let the shark actually bite me through the through the suit or whatever it was, people like, oh, okay, you're getting you're getting lazy, you know, and I thought that would probably be the ultimate capitulation. But screw them.

• 2:36:26Graham Stephan?

  I would just call it not as dirty jobs or not so dirty jobs or something like not as dirty jobs.

• 2:36:32Speaker 02

  Not as dirty.

• 2:36:33Jack Selby?

  I think I think it depends on your answer to the question we spoke about earlier, which is, who are you working for? Which you said the fans, but then again, or the audience, but then again, you just said screw them. So it's which I don't actually think you truly mean that, of course.

• 2:36:49Speaker 02

  Well, there's the audience who listens to your show and it like, and in my world, there is the the great unwashed. I mean, like, like, like the masses. And, you know, it's, it's hard to to separate them too directly, but you have to like you. You have your audience and then you have this giant ecosystem.

• 2:37:09Jack Selby?

  What would you be most interested in doing?

• 2:37:12Speaker 02

  Well, for me, I actually really like the format and I would like to be doing more of it, not less, but I'm still in the same business model that I've always been. And that that model is me and Mary keeping half a dozen plates spinning. So I'm the guy at the buffet that filled his plate. And then saw the prime rib at the end. It was like, oh, that's really good. But I got to throw something off the plate. You know what I mean? So if I assume this is a big rock in your world. Right? So, you know, the way I heard it gets its share.

• 2:37:52Speaker 02

  It's it's doing great, but it's as described, you know, I take it. I go down there for a week and I get a month's worth of stuff out of the way, maybe more. And then there's speeches and then there's books. And then there's endorsement deals. And then there's a TV show back in production. And then more than anything else, there's the foundation, which has become like the sun in my solar system. So.

• 2:38:24Speaker 02

  Everything is connected and I don't know how to make the podcast any bigger than it is without walking something else behind the barn and shooting it in the head. And then I don't really want to do that yet.

• 2:38:35Graham Stephan?

  I think you could take your existing format, but turn it into Dirty Jobs Adjacent. And I think it'll do really well.

• 2:38:42Speaker 02

  You know, you're probably right. And the lowest hanging fruit is just to go back and talk to like, where are they now? Like the sheep castrator.

• 2:38:53Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:53Speaker 02

  Who used his teeth. Bring him on to see what's up, what's new.

• 2:38:57Graham Stephan?

  Run it back, do it again. Find a sheep that needs it done.

• 2:39:01Speaker 02

  Bring him in.

• 2:39:02Graham Stephan?

  No, you don't even need him. You have the skill.

• 2:39:05Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 2:39:07Graham Stephan?

  Do it every Tuesday. And if there's anything we could help with, by the way, like I love anything podcast related. Like anything strategy, title, thumbnail, guest format, like all this, I love it.

• 2:39:18Speaker 02

  All right, you know what? I'll hook you up with my producer Chuck. We've been working together for years and you know, he's an old dog. He could use some new tricks and so could I, you know? I kind of Forrest Gump my way into this as well. But um, look, it's fun and it's the future. And I really do believe it. It's the place where people will, will come to find the truth. Whatever that is.

• 2:39:43Graham Stephan?

  Until AI just wipes us all out and takes over the podcast.

• 2:39:47Speaker 02

  Hey, have you listened to Andreessen on Rogan?

• 2:39:49Graham Stephan?

  Yes, I did.

• 2:39:50Speaker 02

  Like last month?

• 2:39:51Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, the recent one.

• 2:39:53Speaker 02

  I would recommend that to anybody who wants a, I guess, a slightly more bullish take on what might be happening. You know, back to that manufactured consensus thing. That's I think something's going on in this country where 75% of the people are basically holding a negative view about AI and data centers. And in China, it's 85% positive.

• 2:40:20Speaker 02

  And the senators I've been talking to, including the VP are like, oh yeah, there's a giant campaign driven by bots and all kinds of fake material that has inundated Tik Tok and other platforms that is designed to sow.

• 2:40:40Speaker 02

  A level of uncertainty around that topic in this country. And um, I don't know if it's true or not, but, but, but a lot of people are saying that you're looking at a manufactured consensus. Right now around that topic and we don't, we don't yet quite understand.

• 2:40:58Graham Stephan?

  There's so much out there though, that could be easily manipulated. And like half of it's just marketing and the other half is just like, oh, this, this group over here doesn't like this group and they could run ads or they could promote like Reddit. I believe is like half bots.

• 2:41:15Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 2:41:15Graham Stephan?

  And the front page is completely just manufactured stuff to get an idea across.

• 2:41:21Speaker 02

  Well, look, the thing that worries me more than anything is, is also the thing that encourages me. I think the greatest scene in the matrix is when Cypher is eating that steak. And he picks it up on the fork. He's like, I know, I know this is only in my mind, you know? I know that it's not real, but after, after 10 years of this bullshit, I want to stay right here because it tastes delicious. I think that a big part of AI is going to be about.

• 2:41:54Speaker 02

  I, I think it's going to usher in the age of the umpire. The, the authenticator, like we, we need a ref. And we're going to need to know if that steak is real or not. It doesn't mean that we're going to reject it if it's fake, but we're going to need to know. At least some people are. In fact, we may have already been there, like the whole impossible meat thing, right? The impossible burger didn't work, you know? But it might've had it tasted better and we're just not going to know. You know, the, what is it like 20 of the songs in the top Spotify?

• 2:42:32Graham Stephan?

  AI.

• 2:42:33Speaker 02

  That's not the creepy part. The creepy part is they all have artists attached to them with faces and Instagram pages with hundreds of thousands of followers. Now, do you care that the song you're? You know, jamming out with was AI or not? I don't know. But what about the picture on the wall? What about that Picasso? Hmm, turns out it's not. Do you care? Yeah, some people will, some people won't. Right now, there are five scams on Facebook alone with me in them. And like Morgan Freeman has the same exact thing going on. Where a brand aligns itself with me.

• 2:43:15Speaker 02

  Somebody puts words in my mouth and I announce that Yeti is turning 50 and the first hundred callers get a cooler packed with their favorite beverage. Giant fishing expedition, right? Facebook can't get them down. They just, they just can't make them go away. So there's scams now with like DeWalt and big tool companies and very familiar brands with familiar faces. And it's just all, just all bull crap. So my, my worry is that the default position online is going to become not why, why do you believe it? But why would you believe it?

• 2:43:58Speaker 02

  Like, why do you, why do you start with the assumption? That, oh, you know, that might be AI. You'll just get to the point soon where it's going to be, I have absolutely no reason to believe that anything I'm looking at is real. I mean, I, I

• 2:44:15Graham Stephan?

  That's why we need an authenticator online, like some sort of badge or like some sort of like

• 2:44:20Jack Selby?

  X has that. Like X has like the readers added context or the community notes that says this was this

• 2:44:27Graham Stephan?

  Well, of course, not always. It's pretty accurate. It's gotta be like a PSA though. Yeah, some grading company out there who just says, hey, we put our stamp on this. This is a hundred percent real.

• 2:44:37Speaker 02

  But you know what's funny, man? I was just in this booth narrating the last couple of episodes of Deadliest Catch for this season. And I had the same conversation with the producer. It's a big storm on the Bering Sea, big, big waves, you know? And I'm like, so.

• 2:44:54Speaker 02

  What are you gonna do to let the viewer know that you didn't mess with this? Like, that's your whole trust, your whole thing is like, like, you're getting, and he's like, I've already talked to the network and yeah, they're like, we should, we want to put up not a simulation. No AI was used in the making of this. I think you're right. I think that's, I think that's what it's gonna come.

• 2:45:15Jack Selby?

  Pretty soon, your voice could just be AI and then you license your voice out and then they don't even need you.

• 2:45:22Speaker 02

  Have you seen Speechify?

• 2:45:23Jack Selby?

  Yes.

• 2:45:24Speaker 02

  I mean, that's it. My like, voiceover that I made my living in voiceover years ago. Anonymous, like non-celeb voiceover work, make a great living. Those days are over, man. Non-celebrity voiceovers are, are finished. And somebody just sent me a, a file. They said, narrate, um, my, oh, it was a wedding speech. As Mike Rowe doing an episode of Deadliest Catch. And I listened to it and I swear, had I not known what it was and somebody said, here's something you did, like nine years ago, do you remember? I'd be like, I don't remember, but obviously I did it.

• 2:46:08Speaker 02

  That's, it's that good. And it's still early innings.

• 2:46:12Jack Selby?

  Yeah. Is there any chance we could do one last thing since you're here?

• 2:46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:16Jack Selby?

  I think it'd be really funny to have something like, here on the Ice Coffee Hour today, we have Mike Rowe. And then like some like, uh, you know, voice of Deadliest Catch.

• 2:46:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:46:27Jack Selby?

  Host of Dirty Jobs and now guest on the Ice Coffee Hour or something like that.

• 2:46:31Speaker 02

  You want me to do it?

• 2:46:32Jack Selby?

  I think that, yeah, something like that. Just, you don't have to like, I suppose you could look into the camera as you say it.

• 2:46:37Speaker 02

  Well, since they asked me real nice, next on Iced Coffee Hour. Mike Rowe stops by for three hours to talk about all of the trouble in the world. You'll laugh, you'll cry and you'll thrill as he talks to Anne, a secret admirer who somebody knows all too well.

• 2:46:58Jack Selby?

  Oh, God. Last one, if you could just say hit the like button and subscribe.

• 2:47:04Speaker 02

  Hey, you know what you do after you hit the like button? You subscribe. It's basic. Hit the like button, then subscribe. Did he still say smash that like button or just hit it?

• 2:47:12Jack Selby?

  Obliterate it.

• 2:47:13Speaker 02

  Obliterate it, man. Let's leave nothing but just a hollow smoking crater where that like button used to be. All right, then. Oh, by the way, you still rolling?

• 2:47:22Jack Selby?

  Yes.

• 2:47:23Speaker 02

  Work ethic scholarships available at microworks.org. We literally have like $20 million.

• 2:47:30Jack Selby?

  It'll be linked down below in the description. Just click the link right there.

• 2:47:32Speaker 02

  Do that.

• 2:47:33Jack Selby?

  Just do it.

• 2:47:33Speaker 02

  Click it, baby. Click it and lick it.