Mike Rowe and Joe Rogan explore bizarre parallels between human behavior and parasites like Toxoplasma gondii, linking reckless driving to "compensatory risk theory" while debating media authenticity—from canceled sitcoms like NewsRadio to unscripted shows like Dirty Jobs. They dissect cultural shifts favoring college over skilled trades, citing 1950s–70s PR campaigns that mocked vocations like plumbing, and praise niche athletes like Louis Tian’s back-turning baseball pitch. Rogan highlights vitamin D, magnesium, and adversity (e.g., rucking) for brain/body growth, while Rowe admires Richardson’s 27-specialist garage turning 9,000-hour vintage car restorations into $2M art—proving craftsmanship rivals academia in creativity and value. [Automatically generated summary]
the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day we got stars we got coffee we got mike roe we got carl's over there snoring i So what were you doing on QVC? What are you selling?
So it's a kind of, I mean, I would think biological evolution might flirt with that.
I read a paper.
A guy wrote, name was Patrick House, this was his PhD, and he was talking about Toxoplasma gandii, and histoplasmosis, and it was a crazy paper.
His real premise was trying to understand the phenomenon of the cat lady, and why every culture, like this isn't unique to America, in every culture you can find a woman Who, you know, two cats, three cats maybe, but like went all the way to 38, right?
And just was like, this is perfectly normal.
So his paper was what happens to a person's brain to tell it it's normal to have 38 cats.
And then it gets super complicated because he identifies a gandhii that lives in the cat's gut and basically breeds there.
And what he learned was when the cats were crapping, the gandhii would come out.
And then the rats and the mice that ate the cat crap, something was happening to their brains on a neurological level.
This gandhii basically disabled the part of the brain that would tell an otherwise sentient rat to run from the cat.
But suddenly they weren't running.
They became prey and they became docile and the cats started obliterating the mice and rat population because this thing that was breeding in its ass...
Was effectively making its prey easier to catch.
So Dr. House thought, well, you know, we've all heard about why pregnant women should stay away from cats, because that can have an effect.
And a rat's brain and a human brain have a surprising number of parallels.
So he basically postulated that, you know, Doris the cat lady was living a fairly normal life until she God, just a little bit of cat shit on her fingers and ate it.
And the Gandhi eye disabled the part of her brain that said, hey, maybe two cats is enough.
Homeostatic risk and risk equilibrium and the unintended consequences, especially with motorcycle riders that emanate from safety protocols gone too far.
So like if you study the way you drive your motorcycle, like you measure every decision that you make in terms of cornering and speed and braking and all that stuff...
And then you measure the same things with all the safety gear employed, including a helmet, especially a helmet.
You drive faster.
You corner tighter.
You take more chances because the risk equilibrium that we all have in our brain is different from one person to the next.
But what's the same is our desire to compensate for the environment around us.
So compensatory risk and the subconscious decisions that we might make behind the wheel when we're buckled up versus not buckled up when we have ABS breaks as opposed to not having them.
They did a big survey in Berlin years ago where they took half of the taxis and they put in state-of-the-art braking systems and half of them and left the others the same.
And then they hooked up the cars to monitor every driver decision and in virtually every case.
The drivers with the better safety gear took more chances because their brain is subconsciously compensating.
If you're going to adjust your behavior consciously to adapt to the externality, you're going to drive faster if you have a fast car because you know...
You know, it's the unconscious things that you do when you assume or mitigate risk as a result of employing an externality that I think is just super interesting.
Well, because if it's right, Joe, if it's right, what it does is it turns all the safety-first protocols, not necessarily on their head, but this happened in Dirty Jobs.
I did a whole special called Safety Third because safety isn't really first, not really, ever.
What happens to a normal person who actually comes to believe, either on the job site or just in life, that somebody else cares more about their well-being than they do?
And it's like, that's when complacency rears its ugly head.
So on Dirty Jobs, it was just shorthand among the crew, but it was always safety third, which meant heads up, man.
Keep your head on a swivel.
You can be as compliant as you want, but in the end, if you don't want to fall off the bridge, it's kind of on you.
Is there also a factor when you have a person who's the safety officer who's kind of annoying and they're like really like super interested and maybe you kind of like pawn off the safety aspect to them and then you don't think about it as much because someone's supposedly looking out for you?
I stole this from George Plimpton, Studs Terkel a little bit, Charles Kuralt, some, Paul Harvey a little bit.
You know, that kind of storytelling was always kind of interesting to me.
And...
I freelanced for years, probably 20 years in the entertainment business working Pretty much whenever I wanted on shows that I didn't care about at all.
And I was taking my retirement in early installments and really happy with the model, you know?
I'd been fired a few times from QVC and hired back and it was 1993 when I finally left and I had a decent toolbox.
I was great in auditions so I could get cast.
But I didn't really much care about the nature of the work.
And I had a pretty good balanced life, really.
And then I was in San Francisco working for CBS on a show called Evening Magazine.
You know the show.
It comes on after the local news.
And I was a host, and I would go every day.
This is a cushy gig.
Nobody watched the show, but it was fun to work on.
You'd go to museums, you'd go to wineries, and then you'd throw to these wrapped packages.
If there's a three-legged dog in Marin overcoming a heart-tugging case of canine kidney failure, that was like an Evening Magazine story.
We did these all the time.
And my mom called me, and I was in my cubicle at CBS, and she says, Michael, your grandfather will be 90 years old tomorrow.
And my granddad, by the way, 7th grade education, electrical contractor by trade, but also a plumber and a steam fitter, pipe fitter.
He could fabricate, fix anything.
He had that chip.
I grew up next to him on this little farmstead north of Baltimore.
In an opera, most of the big moments are arias, right?
And most of the arias are, you know, I mean, they're sung by the main characters, and there are lots of ones that you would recognize.
In German, they're in Italian for the most part.
This one was Italian.
It was from La Boheme, which is just another version of Rent, essentially, but it was called the Cote Aria, and it was only two minutes long, and it was in Italian, so I walked around Baltimore with, you remember, the Sony Walkman?
Yeah, I'd had a music teacher prior to that, like a Mr. Holland type of guy, who actually changed my life.
He kind of fixed a stammer that I had, and then he forced me to audition for plays that I didn't really want to be in.
And then, the craziest thing ever, this guy, his name was Fred King.
He was known as King of the Barbershoppers.
He was like a legend in this weird world of acapella singing.
And he put me in a barbershop quartet when I was in high school and opened up like this very weird world of music written long before I was born that I found super interesting.
And so my best friends and I We just started learning these ancient songs and singing for people, usually unsolicited, from nursing.
Well, what really happened was I decided that my toolbox wasn't going to let me work in the construction trades or do anything my pop could do.
And he really was a magician, and I really took his advice seriously.
So I wanted to be in entertainment.
I didn't want to be in the opera.
I wanted to be on TV. But I needed an agent.
And I couldn't get an agent unless I had my Screen Actors Guild card.
And I couldn't get my SAG card unless I had an agent.
So I couldn't audition for things that I wanted to do unless I found a way around this weird tautology.
And a friend of mine, a guy called Mike Gellert, told me, he said, hey, so there's the Screen Actors Guild.
At the time, there was AFTRA, and I'm sure you were part of both.
The thing you didn't know about was AGMA. The American Guild of Musical Artists is a sister union to the Screen Actors Guild and to AFTRA, who have since combined.
And the rule back then was, if you could get into any of them, you could simply pay your dues to the other, and then you were in.
So for me...
It was easier to kind of fake my way into the opera than it was onto a sitcom.
I was stopped halfway through it by the musical director, a guy named Bill Yannutzi, who's like, Mr. Rowe, you have no idea what you're saying at all, do you?
The bartender knew me, everybody laughed, and I sat down, but the game wasn't on.
The bartender was watching a fat guy in a shiny suit selling pots and pans.
And it was the early days of the QVC cable shopping channel.
I'm like, Rick, why are we watching this?
And he says, because I'm auditioning for that guy's job tomorrow morning.
The QVC was doing a national talent search.
Anyway...
We had a conversation about the end of Western civilization and what it meant for polite society to have a 24-hour infomercial that just never went away and whether or not there was any honor at all in auditioning for such a thing.
And at that point, I thought it'd be great to have some...
Money, you know, I hadn't had any before.
And I'm sitting there drinking this beer dressed as a Viking thinking, I could probably do that job if I had to.
So I went with him the next day and auditioned and got hired.
And that's what makes it comfortable for me to be in the audience, to see somebody who, you know, hey, if I laugh, that's just a happy symptom of whatever it is you're going to do anyway.
It makes me comfortable.
And that's why he's fun to watch.
That's why this podcast is fun to listen to.
Same reason.
I couldn't have articulated that 35 years ago, sitting there selling a cat sack.
I knew in the middle of the—like, everything that it turned out that I needed to know about this crazy business, I learned in the middle of the night on the QVC Cable Shopping Channel over a three-year period, trying to make sense.
It is that, but it's something primal, even more primal than that.
It just messes with you, and it forces you...
For me, it changed colors.
It changed taste.
It changed...
Yeah, because I had never...
I mean, I was upside down.
After I talked about a pencil for eight minutes, I was on the air 48 hours later at 3 in the morning trying to make sense of the health team infrared pain reliever and the Amcor negative ion generator.
If you came in a couple hours early and you took the time to look through, like there was a table like this with all of the stuff on it that you were going to be selling and you could take the time to prepare.
No, what you got was a blue card, usually from the manufacturer, that said a couple of sentences about what the thing was.
You had an item number, you had the price, the retail price, the QVC price, and maybe some easy payment terms.
All the stuff, right?
But it was just a blue card.
And then you would kind of go off and...
Think about how you would make sense out of this skull and where it came from and why it's interesting.
It's feature-benefit selling.
And if you understand that, you can talk about anything for as long as you need to.
You never talk about a feature without talking about its benefit.
And so that's kind of how that world worked.
So you don't say it's a pencil for 99 cents.
you say it's a yellow number two pencil with an eraser that is of the exact proportion necessary to last for the life of the pencil so when this thing is down to a nub you'll still have enough eraser left it's really a monument to efficiency and ingenuity and it's not just yellow it's yellow because you're a busy professional and when you need a pencil Joe when you open up your drawer you don't have time to root around for some vaguely beige colored writing implement you
You want that canary yellow to pop and you can pick it up, right?
And it's a number two pencil.
It's not three with that thin, wispy line that you can't read or that thick, disappointing skid mark of a number one, right?
So you just train yourself to fill dead air with nonsense.
I think that maybe they trained us for like one day.
You were taught how to fold the paper.
One, two, stuff it in the bag.
You had plastic bags were great because you could chuck them out the window and it never damaged the paper.
Robber bands were a real pain in the ass because you could hit a corner on the concrete, it would rip the corner of the paper, and then the customer would complain because they're trying to read about what's going on in Syria, and then there's this fucking broken piece of paper.
I delivered the New York Times only because it was cool.
I delivered the Boston Globe because that was the biggest distribution.
I could get the biggest route.
And then the Boston Herald because I wanted more papers to deliver, so I would do two papers.
And then the New York Times.
The New York Times is a pain in the ass because it would be like one every 10 blocks.
You'd have an enormous route.
If you had 150 New York Times, that's an all-day excursion.
This is the point I was trying to make about the comedian who entertains himself first and the schmuck on QVC who tries to keep himself awake before he sells the thing.
That's how I felt reading the post.
It was like, these guys, somehow, I'm imagining a meeting.
They're laughing, they're cigars, and they're all in on the joke.
And they're like, yeah, we're going to report the news, but...
It's a lot of sharp elbows out there, and it's a very competitive world, so what can we do to maybe get the stick a little out of our ass?
Just a little bit.
How can we be different?
That's what fascinates me.
Whether you're publishing a paper, or eating a blue crab, or writing a book or a song, How can you, in relative terms, distinguish yourself, not from these other worlds and other categories, but from your friends?
I said to Ashton, your very excellent driver, who brought me here, I said, you know, it's been fun watching Joe do this thing over the last five or six years.
And then I kind of stopped myself in the middle and I said, actually, you know, I take it back.
What's been fun is watching Joe.
Watching the world catch up to it, like watching the headlines catch up to you or whoever, you really haven't changed.
Man, it's so interesting to watch people realize, oh, we're going to do it this way now.
We're going to do it this way now.
Whether it's comedy or whether it's music, When culture changes, it feels like there's some instigator, some jagged little pill who's pushing it forward.
And I guess maybe that's true.
But I also think there's this larger hive mentality in the audience.
And they start to realize, oh, there's another way to deliver a paper.
There's another way to do a thing.
And it feels new, but it's probably what you've been doing for the last 12 years.
Some people genuinely don't like talking to people.
You know why?
Because they're interested in themselves.
You have to be interested in other people.
I think we're all connected.
I really firmly believe this in a non-hippie way.
I think it's like a scientific concept.
I mean, I think if we could figure out a way to study it, we would recognize that we're psychically all connected in some strange way.
And I am curious as to how someone with a different biology, different life experiences, different geographic location in which they were raised, like, how are they navigating the world and why are they interested in opera?
What is it?
What got you to be a beekeeper?
Why are you so fascinated with painting?
What made you start writing music?
I'm interested.
I like talking to people.
So for me, it is easy.
It really is.
It's just talking to people like I would talk to people.
You and I could have the same exact conversation if we were having dinner somewhere.
And maybe this is not even relevant, but we did 350 dirty jobs.
Probably 60-some of this thing called Somebody's Gotta Do It.
I don't even know.
Returning the favor, I think we did 100 episodes of that.
I couldn't tell you how many things I've narrated.
Hundreds.
If there's a wildebeest trying to get across the vast reaches of the barren Serengeti, right?
If I could remember every episode of How the Universe Works, 10 years of this stuff, if I could remember half of what I narrated, that would be something.
I can remember a chunk.
But my sense is that I can't even remember the last 20 guests I had on my podcast.
And the reason isn't because I'm not curious.
And it's not because I lack the requisite intelligence to remember.
For me, it's just so much.
There's been no time.
To think about what I'm going to do next, and even less time to think about what I just did.
I think it let me get really good at things, too, because I can remember like technical – like it was really good for martial arts because I can remember technical details.
I've seen a couple, but it's like— Well, there's a big, giant difference between being a former competitor.
And also like dedicated decades of my life to martial arts.
It's not as simple as like I go and I do commentary.
Like I started doing martial arts when I was 15 and it changed my life.
It gave me discipline and a will to overcome uncomfort, discomfort and to push myself and to overcome fears and to do something that's very scary and to compete and that was like it formulated me as a teenager.
So I started competing competitively like Serious shit when I was like 15 years old and so we were traveling all over the country and And so my social life from like 15 to 21 was completely retarded.
Retarded as in slowed down, like the real term.
And it was mostly just training and competing.
That's all I did.
And the downtime, I was tired.
So I would just sleep a lot.
I was like eating, sleeping, working, and competing.
And then I started teaching.
So then I was making my living off of teaching, but not enough money, so I was still delivering newspapers.
I delivered newspapers in the morning and then I would teach and I was teaching at Boston University.
I was teaching, I had my own school by the time I was 20. Taekwondo?
I've never, this will sound vainglorious, and I don't mean it to, but with the possible exception of me on Discovery in 2010, narrating half their shows and hosting Dirty Jobs, which was a thing, you know, I felt...
Really triangulated then.
But then when I met Tony, and I had a show on CNN at the same time.
We thought we were going to get cancelled literally every year except the year we got cancelled.
The year we got cancelled I was shocked because that was like the year after Phil died and then John Lovitz took his place for a season and then they cancelled it after that.
And, like, the perfect thing for our show, we never even hit the 100 episodes for syndication.
They had to sell it at, like, 98 episodes.
That was, like, our show.
It's like we were always, like, barely hanging on.
The lesson is that you could just be fortunate, you know, because I was not a trained actor at all.
I did a set on MTV, Half Hour Comedy Hour.
They had this comedy show.
I did a set, and then MTV offered me a development deal, and then my manager said...
This is terrible money.
They're going to lock you up for like three years for like $500.
It was crazy, ridiculous bad money.
He said, I'm going to take your tape and tell all these other production companies that MTV wants to sign a deal with you and it'll start a bidding war.
And he was brilliant and he did it and that's exactly what happened.
And the next thing you know, I couldn't answer my phone because my phone was just calling agents and people would just call me.
Like some guy called me from Universal.
I was like, what?
What the fuck is going on in this shitty apartment on my way out the door to play pool and this guy is telling me he wants me to get on a flight that night.
We have a flight at 10 p.m.
leaving out of LaGuardia.
I was like, what are you talking about?
And so then I call my manager.
This guy just fucking called me for me.
He goes, hey, don't answer your phone.
He's like, go play pool.
Get out of here.
I'll take care of it.
Next thing you know, I was in Hollywood.
It was like that quick.
And I was on a show called Hardball.
It went six episodes.
And the only reason why I stayed in California, I wanted to go back to New York.
I hated it.
I hated actors.
I just couldn't deal with being around these weirdos.
There were these weird, phony people.
They would say, good to see you, because they couldn't remember if they met you.
So instead of saying, nice to meet you and fucking up, I go, I'm sorry I met you, I'm sorry I fucked up.
They didn't want to be real, so everyone said, good to see you.
And it was the worst experience on a show because the people that ran the show, Jeff Martin and Kevin Curran, super funny, talented guys who'd worked on Married with Children and The Simpsons.
Brilliant.
But the studio didn't think that they were good enough to run a show, so they brought in this hack.
And this guy comes in and just butchers all the scripts.
It was horrible.
So that gets canceled.
The only reason why I stayed is because I had a lease.
So I got a nice apartment.
I'm like, the first apartment I ever had.
I was like, I thought I was going to be on TV forever.
I was like, this is going to be easy.
And now, fuck!
I've got to get out of here.
I wanted to go back to New York.
I thought about breaking my lease.
But then NBC contacted me.
And they said, we have this show.
It's called News Radio.
And we're recasting one of the roles.
Do you want to come in?
So I came in and auditioned for it, and the next thing you know, I'm working with Phil Hartman.
It was bizarre.
No aspirations whatsoever to be an actor.
Never wanted to be on TV. And then I'm working with Andy Dick, and Phil Hartman, and Maura Tierney, and Candy Alexander, Vicki Lewis, and Dave Foley?
Everything, like the idea that somebody else is writing lines for me, I know that sounds impossibly arrogant, but I was so used to, nobody writes for me.
Dirty Jobs is truly unscripted.
Everything I ever did, there were never any lines.
Yeah, I mean, I had done plenty of plays as a kid and stuff, but that's different.
You know, that's different.
Once you're in Hollywood and once you're sort of in the machine, it still lingers.
I mean, that's the whole reason I crashed the audition for the opera.
I was just trying to find a sitcom at some point somewhere.
And then when I finally got it, you know, I realized just how lucky I'd been prior to that.
And how...
Here, you want this.
And how...
Crap, man.
You know, a thing can live in your mind so much bigger than it is in reality.
And so while I loved doing it for that week, I said to my business partner over it, this thing that I used to think of as the single most efficient way to make a living was so wildly inefficient.
Right.
It takes four days to rehearse for a half-hour thing?
You've got to be kidding me.
I could do five one-hour shows in the same period of time.
But just being with these people that, you know, like I said, I had no aspirations to act.
I was just a comic.
I just wanted to make a living doing comedy, and then somebody offered me more money than I made in a year for a week, and I was like, this is crazy, and then all of a sudden I'm on a show.
It was like, just fortune.
I auditioned for two shows ever, and I got both of them.
Those are the only two shows I ever auditioned for.
She called me one day, and I was in my full-on freelance world.
I hadn't had a job since QVC, so this is like 1999. And she says, I just want to send you out for something, because I know you're going to book it.
And I said, well, actually, yeah, I could use a gig.
So she sends me out.
In the same week, she says, you should read for Craig Peligian over at Pilgrim Films.
He's doing something called Worst Case Scenario, and he's looking for a host.
And so I auditioned for that.
And then later that week, she says, this guy from Nashville, Michael Orkin was his name, who I had worked with years earlier, not Nashville, Memphis, He was hosting the EP on that Evening Magazine thing that I mentioned.
And he's ready to hire you based off your blooper tape.
I never had a tape either.
My whole audition reel in those days was a compilation of every moment that went off the rails at QVC. All the things that led to my eventual firings as well as the cat sack and all the other crap.
I dare you to hire me.
I got hired for both jobs that week.
Both jobs.
And so suddenly I'm working for TBS hosting Worst Case Scenario, which lived up to its name.
And then I'm up in San Francisco hosting Evening Magazine.
Back in whatever it was, 2001, she was just a pain in my ass.
And she called me to say, you know, wouldn't it be great if your granddad, this guy whose shadow I grew up in, you know, could see you doing something?
Because like my pop, he'd seen the opera.
He'd seen QVC. He'd seen every godforsaken infomercial.
He'd seen...
I've done a lot of things, probably 200 jobs in the whole freelance world.
And so I was 42, and I took my cameraman from Evening Magazine into the sewer of San Francisco the next day to host the show from a sewer.
And what happened in the sewer joke was...
I mean, it changed...
I wrote a book about it.
It changed my whole life.
The roaches are the size of your thumbs.
There are millions of them, and they crawl all over you.
The shit comes at you in a chocolate...
Tide of unending disappointment.
And it's filled not just with all the stuff that comes out of your body.
It's filled with stuff that comes out of your medicine cabinet.
Plastic products and rubber private condoms stuck to your rubber suit.
You know, it's unspeakably vile.
You can barely breathe.
And what happened to me down there is I completely failed to host the show.
All the stand-ups went wrong.
Laterals exploded.
We were all getting hit in the head.
It's like a shooting gallery.
There was a rat the size of a loaf of bread that crawled up my...
And at the end, my cameraman threw up at one point.
An enormous puke.
And I'm squatting in the filth, you know, looking at the camera trying to open the show.
And when you see your cameraman's vomit float past you, As you're trying to articulate a thought.
And meanwhile, the guy who was like my minder was an actual sewer inspector.
And he's in the background trying to do his job, which is to hammer out the old bricks that are rotting and replace them with new ones.
Now it's 105 degrees.
It's the seventh level of hell.
It's clear I can't do my job.
So I go over to this guy, his name was Gene Cruz, and I say, hey, what are you doing?
He's like, I'm putting bricks in.
I said, you need a hand.
So I start mixing the mortar, and we start talking, just like people, you know, not like a host-y thing, but like what you were saying.
What would happen if you had an honest conversation, totally unscripted, with a guy who didn't really know he was going to be on camera?
But what if you film it and put it on TV anyway?
What would happen?
Well, what happened a week later when this thing finally aired was I was fired because people sitting down to hear their heart-tugging story of the three-legged dog up in Marin overcoming canine kidney failure, and it's me, a smart-ass 42-year-old crawling through a river of crap.
I mean, they're trying to eat their meatloaf.
It was the wrong segment for that show, but Talk about fortunate.
The mail that came in as a result, some people said it was funny and they liked it.
Some people were repulsed.
But the letters that changed my life were the ones that said, you think that was dirty?
Wait till you see what my brother does.
Wait till you see what my cousin does.
My mom, my sister, my uncle, right?
And I'm like, oh my God.
I mean, if the Bay Area is any kind of a microcosm for the country, and I'm not saying it is, but from a TV standpoint, I was like...
This is new.
I've never seen feedback like this.
I've never seen curiosity among the viewership like this.
I was like, what if the viewer programs the show, A, and what if B, the host of the show, is the person that I meet who welcomes me into their shithole, or wherever they work?
And what if I'm not a host, after all?
After 20 years of impersonating a host, What if I'm a guest or an apprentice or an avatar or a cipher, right?
What if I just think of myself differently than this guy who hits the mark and looks at the camera and tells you the cat sack is 29. I mean, what if you just let all that go?
And, you know, I don't know that I would have thought of it like that at 22, certainly not, not even at 32, but at 42, I was entering a more introspective kind of phase.
And then, you know, Anthony Cumia had his own show that he did in his basement, live at the compound, where he'd sing karaoke, holding a machine gun, that fucking maniac.
And then the other big one was doing the Tom Green show, because Tom Green had his own sort of internet talk show that he did out of his house.
And I actually was in negotiation with the people that were doing his show, and I was thinking about doing something on my own, but then I was like, I can't work with anybody.
I don't know if this is of interest, and Jamie, forgive me, because I don't know if I'm supposed to ask you to do things, but I sold the first karaoke machine.
Yeah, there's a thing about something that's overproduced that kind of dissolves some of its authenticity because there's too much thought.
Put into each and every shot, everything.
There's too much coordination.
It's almost like you lose a comfort.
I might be entertained by it.
It might be fascinating.
Keeping up with the Kardashians, you ever notice they change scenes every five seconds?
Just keep you tuned in?
There's something smart about that because it does keep you engaged, but it doesn't feel as authentic as if it was just like one person following them around in real time with no edits at all, just one camera on them.
At least in the world of nonfiction, this doesn't apply to scripted.
But production is by definition the enemy of authenticity, right?
It's the enemy of it.
You need it in order to have a finished product, but when you get in your own way, then you get in the viewer's way.
And one of the things that kept Dirty Jobs on the air for 20 years, early on, I kind of realized that, and I wasn't sure what to do about it, but I thought, Maybe we need to think of the show like a documentary.
So we got a behind-the-scenes camera.
That never stopped rolling.
And so if my mic pack went out, or if a plane flew over, or if somebody screwed something up, or if we had to stop for whatever reason, I always knew there was a truth cam.
That's what I called it.
And I could always look to it, and I could say, all right, well, what happened here?
Blah, blah, blah.
And so it was those moments where I think the viewer realized, oh, oh, he's not He's not trying to sell me anything, at least not here.
He's letting us see the sausage.
And that was new in nonfiction.
That was a whole new way to think about authenticity.
Vivek Ramaswamy was the only candidate I invited onto my podcast because I read somewhere that he said if he was nominated, he vowed to never use a teleprompter.
Well, he can pull it off.
Whether you can pull it off or not, I just thought that was so interesting.
And I wanted to talk to him about that specifically.
And then it's funny, a year later, you know, I think the teleprompter is probably the best example of one forced error after the next.
Like when you think about the anchor who just wants to be believed, the spokesman who just wants to be seen as credible, the politician who just wants to be – just wants it justified.
just so.
It's like they want to be authentic and yet they do the single most inauthentic thing you can possibly do which is pretend to not read a thing that everyone can see you're reading.
And so like the cognitive dissonance is rich, you know, And I just think we've entered into this world where, like, the least persuasive thing you can do is say, trust me, or take it from me.
You know, people have just been burned so much that they're going to need...
We need a truth cam.
We need it in the newsroom, not just in a sewer.
I mean, it worked there, but we need it everywhere.
That's what's interesting about social media and social media – like, there's this giant resistance right now to the idea that X is the new source of the world.
You're not this – You guys fucked us too many times and we don't believe you anymore.
And so the only way for us to find out what's real and what's not real is someone posts it online and then everybody looks at it and then you get the community notes.
And that's way better than the New York Times telling me that the Froot Loops in Canada are exactly the same as the Froot Loops in America, except for a bunch of shit that's banned, and that's the whole point of the whole fucking thing.
But meanwhile, they're fact-checking RFK Jr., so now I don't trust you anymore, either.
It's a solution to this thing that we're trying to figure out, how do we know what's true and what's not true?
You get a consensus.
There's enough people that actually can read scientific papers.
There's enough people that know the field that's being discussed.
Out of the hundreds of millions of people on X, you're going to get an expert.
Who's going to say, this is why, this is incorrect, and this is how you're supposed to read it.
And then everybody goes, oh, okay, this is wrong.
And now you know.
And if you can just do a little research and go through that paper or go through that thread, if you're an objective person, you'll probably get a good sense of who's right and who's wrong.
But then all of a sudden, I look up and Donald Trump's in the sewer with me.
Oh, shit.
And there's an election in a week.
Oh, the stakes around me, right, all of a sudden have changed.
So it's so interesting that he was sitting right where I'm sitting, and you feel the need to kind of put some sides on this thing because you understand, first and foremost, that as an audience member, Right?
As somebody who's just listening to this as a fly on the wall, I'm getting a little lost.
So, I mean, you can say that, hey, that's Joe being a good host, or that's Joe being super honest in a conversation where he's starting to drift a little bit.
I'm most certainly aware that people are going to listen to it.
Don't get me wrong.
But I don't think, like, the questions, like, maybe the audience would want to know this.
I do do this one thing, even if I know how a thing works, I will ask a person how a thing works so that the audience can hear it from them rather than from me.
I don't want to be Mr. Smarty Pants, but I don't have to be.
But that's one thing that I do where I'm aware that people probably don't know what we're talking about.
Could you explain where this came from or why this?
Because sometimes people, especially if they have an area of expertise, they just assume that people know what they're talking about when they're talking about specific techniques or Ways they do things.
So in that way, I do think about the audience.
But most of the time, that's just like I'm just doing my job.
But mostly all I'm trying to do is be 100% locked in.
And I feel like if I'm locked in and I'm just real honest and just try to be really curious and really just try to get the most out of this person, that's going to be good for the audience.
Well, because realistically, like, okay, my thought about her coming on was I was going to be very nice.
I wanted to have fun with her.
I wanted to just be able to talk to her and ask her a question.
I want to get a sense of her as a human being.
And if it's policy talk that bothered them, like there was a few things they didn't want to talk, marijuana legalization, they initially didn't want to talk about internet censorship, and then they changed their tune, and then they wanted to talk about internet censorship.
Great.
Internet censorship is important.
Let's talk about it.
But whatever.
She wanted to talk about fucking riding bikes.
I don't give a shit.
I don't give a fuck what you want to talk about.
I want to talk about cooking, rock climbing.
I just want to just get a sense of her as a human being.
Just as a human being.
What is it like?
Does it freak you out when people get mad at you?
Does it freak you out when you fuck up a sentence and you ramble?
I know what it's like when you know the people are listening and you're like, I gotta fucking bring this home and I don't know how to.
And you just sort of repeat these key lines or maybe some new word you become enamored with.
Blunders, and there was a lot of concern that she was going to make blunders here.
This is what I was going to get to.
She might have.
It might have been a mess.
I might have asked her about immigration.
We might have had a conversation about, like, what is the goal?
Why hasn't this been...
If we can launch rockets and land them at the same time as we can't control a border, that seems not real.
That doesn't seem real.
One seems way harder.
And that's happening.
He's fucking catching rockets with robot arms.
Okay, if that's happening, how come this can't be fixed?
Because this didn't used to be like this, so why is it like this now?
Why does the Red Cross have these stations set up where they're giving people maps and instructions?
Why does China have these places in Mexico where they only have Chinese menus, Chinese writing, Chinese everything, and these people are coming from China specifically to the spot and then making it across the country?
What's the purpose of this?
Has anybody ever examined what these people are up to?
Why they're doing this?
How is it so organized?
Like, what is that about?
Maybe that would have been a disaster.
Because that's something that I felt like if she didn't want to talk about marijuana and didn't want to talk about internet censorship, Immigration is an interesting one, right?
It's very interesting, because, like, first of all, I am pro-immigration.
I am the grandson of immigrants.
My grandparents came over here during the Depression.
If they didn't do it, I wouldn't be here.
The entire country, other than the Native Americans, are immigrants.
That's all of us.
We are a country of immigrants.
So we should have some stipulations, though, about who gets in, and how you get in, and where are you coming from, and what is your past like?
Are you a murderer?
Are you a gangbanger?
Have you been selling fentanyl for the last 20 years?
If you're one of those people that comes over in 1820 and you're making your way across the plains and you encounter the Comanche, you're the piece of shit.
You're not supposed to be there.
That's where they live.
You're in their yard.
You're some fucking weird, scruffy American looking for gold.
What are you doing here, bro?
You're the problem.
And now, all of a sudden, that's Texas.
That's where we are.
We live here now.
This is my land, bitch.
This is where I live.
Shut the fuck up.
I got this now.
It's weird.
We're all invaders.
At one point in time, every human being that's a nomadic person that's made their way across the country, you've probably entered a place where people were before.
If we didn't actually, if the founding fathers didn't pull it off, you know, we would be these wild renegade English people that decided to come over here and just fucking create havoc.
So, yeah, man, there are a lot of ways to go with all this, but I'll just come back to the teleprompter and say, if that's an essential part of how you communicate, and if that's part of your image, then you can't be on this show.
But if you make a person do that, like if you're going to be a politician, right, okay, and you were a senator, which is, you know, you don't get that kind of exposure that you get if you're a vice president or you're running for president initially.
Right?
Like that's a totally different scene and there's probably a bunch of people that coach you how to do it right and you don't know what the fuck you're doing and if you're not a powerful person like a big personality like Donald Trump who could just do it but also coming from a world of entertainment for most of his life he's been the public eye and hosting The Apprentice for 14 years like he's used to being in front of the camera it's a normal experience for him he has a massive advantage That's what I meant by production becomes
When you rely upon it to the point where you can't function in the midst or in the wake of a glitch, well, in a world of glitches, you're in trouble.
And I think the audience, not just yours, but the country, I just think they're just exhausted by people who have been managed and focus grouped and weighed and measured and tested and then put out there.
I think it's also the evolution of culture in general, because if you just go back to, we were talking about media, you go back and watch a film from 1950 versus a film from 2024, the way people communicate now is much more realistic.
There was a way of talking, like, Hannah, what did you do?
There was a weird performative aspect to it because they didn't know how to do it right.
Like All in the Family was all of a sudden this realistic portrayal of a family where you've got a racist dad and the son is, you know, the meathead, the son-in-law, and the daughter's a hippie, and the mom just came from, what are you doing?
It was a fucking amazing show.
I'm watching.
It was an amazing show.
You had Sanford and Son.
Sanford and Son is another one.
You know, it was a comedy, but people talked like people would talk in real life.
And then as culture moves on, songs change.
Books change.
Everything sort of, like, moves into the...
There's a much greater understanding.
If you had a show and you tried to do a father known as best today, it would almost be like you were putting on, like, a parody.
Well, in my world, and in the world you're describing, that was the age of authority.
That's when Eric Severide could talk to you like this.
Discovery is a good example.
You asked about it, and I'll tell you, first of all, John Hendricks, a friend of mine who created that channel...
You would love.
He did this in his garage, basically.
I mean, the story's incredible.
How he talked Malone into getting some transponder space for maybe his Westinghouse and mortgage his house to buy some documentaries from Australia and started beaming all that stuff down.
I asked him years ago, I'm like, what was the...
What was the guiding principle behind this business model?
And of course, you know, Discovery has since purchased Warner Brothers.
You know, they're the biggest entertainment company in the world today.
And it started with John Hendricks saying, one goal, to satisfy curiosity.
That's it.
Discovery.
Everything I do must line up with a traditional definition of what a discovery is.
I was in some of the greatest, the largest undiscovered graveyard in Bawiti, the Sands of the Dead, where they found the mummies with the golden masks.
And nobody knew who the hell they were because it wasn't attached to any dynasty.
And Who are all these people with golden masks on their faces?
And so Discovery would send me to do these shows, and they were great.
Meanwhile, this hot mess that looked like a German porno called Dirty Jobs winds up on the air, and it rates like through the roof.
But the problem in 2004 was that And this is a kind of cognitive dissonance that always is super interesting, right?
When a big company or a brand or a political party or really anybody realizes that the thing their audience wants is not the thing they want them to want.
It was shelved because I was biting the testicles off of lambs with ranchers, and that's how they castrate their lambs, and they have for hundreds of years.
It was not that specific episode.
That got me in trouble later, but it was shelved because it was an unscripted Random romp.
And when we looked at the footage of that, and somebody up the food chain eventually decided, okay, this is a world we have to get into, but Mike, you're not hosting two shows at the same time, so pick one.
So Dirty Jobs came back, went into full production late in 2004, and Deadliest Catch went into full production about the same time, but I just narrated.
Moral of the story is, everything that happened After that and around that, I'm not saying because of it, but right around that same time, I think the media world, in nonfiction anyhow, began this migration from the age of authority into the age of authenticity.
And ever since, nonfiction has been grappling with that just as surely as every other vertical.
Because People want to see something that feels like the truth, and that's a sliding scale.
He shows you exactly how the sausage is being made, but it's also like now you can trust him because you know he's kind of sabotaging the narrative that they've created for his own show for his authenticity.
He's so disgusted, just so the audience understands.
They're supposed to be spearfishing for octopi.
And the local handler wasn't sure that they were going to find any.
So he bought some at the market.
But they were frozen and dead.
And so Tony's down there with his spear gun with some other diver and these frozen squid just start to come by him.
And in narration, this is where he really owned it because he owned that show.
Nobody's going to tell him what to say.
So his real rant...
Happens months later in the VO booth when he's just describing the heartbreaking insincerity.
Don't they know who I am?
What did they think I was going to do?
So it's like he says something like, in the face of this kind of wanton deception, a reasonable man can turn to nothing but the elixir of distilled alcohol.
I've been in this world where you're nervous, you've got a lot of stuff to worry about, and then somebody just comes along and tries to produce a moment.
Bowhunting is that times 100. So it's regular hunting is fishing times 100, then bowhunting is regular hunting times 100. I just think, you know, if you're – whatever canvas you're in front of, whether you're painting or whether you're cooking or whether you're stalking, like you can – the muse, like does the muse come to you when you're stalking?
Does it come to you, you know – I don't have an answer for it, but I know that people talk about it like some people say, well you're in the zone.
Sometimes when I write, I'm surprised.
Just the other day, I started writing something on the tarmac of SFO, and when I looked up, I was at JFK. It was like that.
And I did it mostly in moments that I don't really remember when time gets compressed.
And I think that can happen when you're fabricating something, when you're hunting something, when you're painting something, maybe in the middle of a set, maybe in the middle of a fight.
You know, I talk to boxers who say that it's so odd the way Things will sometimes almost feel like they're in slow motion, even though they're happening so fast.
Like, Prince Nassim Hamed had a kind of a similar thing going on when he was in his prime.
Nassim Hamed was very, very unorthodox.
See, here he's fighting Floyd.
He gave Floyd a hard fucking time because he's so difficult to fight.
Like, look, how do you deal with that?
And when you're a guy like Floyd and you're getting clowned, here he's fighting Mickey Ward.
When you're a guy like Floyd and you're, you know, the cream of the crap, Olympian, I mean, a fucking phenomenal boxer, just a fantastic boxer, and then you're fighting this guy who's dancing in front of you, like, what the fuck?
But also really good.
It wasn't just that.
Like, you rarely get a guy who's clowning like that, but also, like, that kind of head movement skill.
Phenomenal movement, but also can dance in front of you and land shit that you don't see coming, because it's coming at those weird angles.
Louis Tian was a pitcher, and his wind-up was such that it looked sort of traditional, but But then he'd turn his back to the batter without leaving the rubber, right?
So this guy would spin all the way around before he threw.
So it's like, oh, you know, if you're a batter, you're like, all right, there are a lot of different pitchers, and I'll get used to this, and I'll get used to that, and then this guy comes along.
I have to follow jujitsu, Muay Thai, MMA in the UFC, MMA in the PFL, Bellator, 1FC. I have to keep track of a thousand fighters, like literally a thousand fighters.
Maybe casually, some of them, like some of the glory kickboxers, casually I'm watching, you know, oh, Badr Hari's fighting, oh, you know, this guy's fighting, that guy's fighting.
Like there's guys that are coming up in other organizations.
I see guys have like a specific skill set that's unique.
Like I contacted Conor McGregor in like 2013. He was fighting in Cage Warriors and I reached out and I said, dude, you're fucking super talented.
I hope I get to see you in the UFC someday.
And it was like...
You know, kickboxers like Alex Pereira, I follow him in glory, and then finally he comes over to the UFC and I was like, you gotta see this guy.
This guy is fucking insane.
It's like, you have to have some sort of an understanding of what's coming, you know?
And also, you have to like kind of be tuned in to the state of the art.
Because the state of the art is very different in 2024 than it was in 97 when I first started working for the UFC. The state of the art is elite now.
You're getting these 18-year-old kids that can do everything at like a super high level.
And they're like these phenomenal athletes that instead of going into baseball or instead of going into football, now they're only focused on becoming a UFC champion.
And this is their goal in life.
And they're 18. And you get to see them in amateur organizations.
You get to see them in foreign organizations.
You get to see them travel overseas, compete in Japan.
You've had a front row seat to watching that sport become as dominant as it is at the same time you're watching the podcast world blow up in a really similar way.
2001. So I'm on Fear Factor at the time, and one of the things, me and my friend Eddie Bravo, who was also a big fan from back in the day, and he taught me Jiu Jitsu, when we were first really into it, when we would go to like Louisiana, they were the only places that would sanction these fights.
They were bare knuckle, people wore shoes, you could grab their shorts.
It was like crazy rules.
Yeah.
And we said, you know what it would take?
These billionaires who love the sport and dump a ton of money into it.
That's what it would take.
Like someone would have to dump a ton of money into it.
And then along comes Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta in 2001, these billionaires that happened to get in love with the sport.
And so they buy the UFC. And then they start putting these shows together and then I meet Dana.
And then I start asking Dana, like, have you ever heard about this guy?
Did you ever see this guy fight in Japan?
Have you ever heard of this Russian dude?
And I started asking him about fighters.
I'm like, you should try to get these guys.
And he's like, do you want to do commentary?
And then next thing you know, I'm a commentator for the UFC. Okay.
So, you know, I've got this foundation that evolved out of Dirty Jobs.
It's called Microworks, and we award these scholarships to people who don't want to go to a four-year school, but who want to learn a trade, right?
We've been doing it for 16 years.
And I started doing it In part for my granddad, but mostly because there are, what, 8 million jobs now that don't require a four-year degree, and there's $1.7 trillion in student loans on the books, right, that is just bananas, and we've got these huge shortages in the skilled trades.
So I spent a lot of time talking about Sure.
metal shop and sure you know before it was shop it was it wasn't just votech It turned into VoTech.
But before it was VoTech, it was the vocational arts.
That's what they called it.
And so we didn't just get rid of the vocational arts.
We started with the language, and we took art out of it.
And that's when it became VOTEC. And then there were a bunch of other acronyms and abbreviations and hyphenations and so forth.
Well, there's also a weird distortion in our society where we have decided that we place a higher value on someone spending an enormous amount on education for a job that doesn't pay nearly as much as the education cost, where you're burdened with debt doing a job where you have to work your way up a corporate ladder that might be hell over becoming a carpenter.
Over building a house.
Everybody needs a fucking house.
Over being a plumber.
And if you're a guy who can figure out how to do good carpentry, if you understand how to use tools, you're taught properly, you have a good apprenticeship, you can make an incredible living, it's very satisfying, it's skilled, it's a job that is creative, it's skillful, and When you're done, you bring satisfaction to other people that live in that house.
There's a great benefit to it.
But our society has got this distorted view of tradesmen.
And it's a really dumb thing.
Because it fucks you up.
Because if you're a kid...
And you go through the university system, you get a degree that's kind of useless, but then you get a job and you're making $60,000 a year and you're like, oh my god, I have $200,000 in student loans and I'm doing a job that's not very satisfying and I'm kind of stuck.
I'm working my way up, but it's going to take a long time before I make enough money where I'm not burdened by this.
Well, you know, I very rarely play the devil's advocate in this argument, but I do think I know why it happened, or at least how.
And I was in high school in the late 70s, and there was a very concerted push for what we call higher ed, which, by the way, already sets the table, right?
But the PR, and to be fair, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, we needed more doctors, we needed more engineers, we needed more people matriculating through four-year schools.
But what happens with PR, at least from what I've seen, is that it always goes too far.
And it wasn't enough just to make a persuasive case for that path.
We had to do it at the expense of the jobs you're talking about.
So if you don't go this way...
You're going to wind up turning a wrench with a giant plumber's butt crack and some other ridiculous trope.
So it's a lot of stereotypes and stigmas and myths and misperceptions that started to swirl around the trades.
And that, you know, I don't know when it happened, but I... Especially where you grow up.
Well, what's happened there, for me anyway, is that I, I mean, after 16 years of it, I can tell a pretty good story anecdotally, but now I'm able to go back and talk to people who we helped, what, five, six years ago with, like, maybe a welding certification.
And it's amazing when you say, hey, how's it going?
And they say, how's it going?
I'll tell you how it's going.
210 grand a year.
I bought a van.
I hired my buddy who's a welder.
Then I hired a plumber.
Then I got two HVAC guys and an electrician.
We're doing three and a half million a year.
Got no debt.
And so, like, my job is to talk to that guy.
And I do that a lot on my podcast.
It's just like, I just want to hear your...
I want to hear stories of people who prospered as a result of mastering a skill that's in demand...
And then maybe applied some level of either artistry or entrepreneurship or the willingness to move.
That's a big one, too.
Will you go where the work is?
And so it's really become...
It's why Bobby Kennedy called me.
And back in February, you know, he was like, hey man, this micro works thing, you want to make it macro works?
And I said, yeah, sure.
What do you have in mind?
And that's, I don't know how, I don't know if you knew this, but we had this whole conversation about like running together, you know?
Oh yeah.
No, he, he asked if I wanted to be vice president.
You want to take magnesium, and you want to take K2. You want to take vitamin K, magnesium, and, you know, there's some arguments from other stuff, too, that would also enhance it.
But you definitely need vitamin D. Almost everybody does.
And if you live in a cold climate in the wintertime, you know, a buddy of mine did his residency in, I think it was Boston, And he was saying people would come in and they'd have undetectable levels of vitamin D because they were just never in the sun and they didn't supplement at all.
And, you know, there's some vitamin D in milk when they enrich it with vitamin D. But the reality is you need vitamin D and you need quite a bit of it.
And if you want an optimal immune system that's really healthy, it's imperative.
It's really important.
And there's a lot of other things that are really important.
Vitamin C is really important.
You know, vitamin B is very important.
A bunch of different Bs.
You need essential fatty acids.
They're very important.
You need all these things.
If you don't have these things, your body won't function right.
Do you think that the basic fear and conversation around skin cancer and the lotions and the coverings and the sunscreens and, I mean, to what extent do you think people are not getting vitamin D because they've been scared out of the sun?
I think that is an exercise for that part of your mind the same way cardiovascular exercise works for your cardiovascular system.
I think the discomfort exercise is a real thing.
And, you know, Andrew Huberman has talked about this.
There's actually a specific area of the brain when you enact voluntary discomfort and do things you don't want to do all the time.
It actually grows.
Remember what that is?
Remember what he called that?
Part of the brain?
But, you know, he speaks about it, of course.
He's a neuroscientist, so much more eloquently.
But I think that's real.
And I think it also makes regular life a lot easier.
That was one of my favorite things of jujitsu when I found out.
It makes regular life easy because regular life is not...
Anterior mid-cingulate cortex.
That's what it is.
Engaging in challenging activities can stimulate and grow this region, which is crucial for leaning into and overcoming difficulties.
Yeah.
And if your life is super easy and anything that comes up is a nightmare, it's probably because you lack enough voluntary adversity to overcome uncomfortable moments.
So uncomfortable moments are rare, and when you encounter rare things, generally people kind of have anxious moments encountering rare things.
I used to have some of my best ideas when I had no radio in my car because I would just be driving and my best ideas would come while I was driving.
So instead of being entertained, I would just be like thinking.
Like you're constantly thinking.
And when you're involved in...
Ordinary activity like driving where you're just so sort of like plugged in like hit your blinkers change lanes You're so plugged in so you're in like this weird mindset and then if there's no nothing entertaining you your mind just starts thinking about things right because sometimes you come up with great ideas your your mind Your brain will find whatever you send it out to look for.
I think there's a difference in knowing what the benefits are of a cold plunge, which would require you to do some research and do some reading and do some thinking and so forth, versus just saying, okay, I know there's some benefit.
I don't actually need to know specifically what it is.
I just need to know that there's an overarching benefit in embracing the suck.
That's useful, but it also is beneficial physically.
So it's both things.
And I think that's the case with exercise too.
That's also the case with sauna.
Difficult things that are also very beneficial physically.
They seem to go hand in hand because it's the hormetic effect.
Your body's freaking out because of the cold and that's why it produces all these cold shock proteins and that's why it produces all these anti-inflammatories.
Your body just feels better when you get out, the endorphin rush you get.
You know, the norepinephrine, this flood of these chemicals that last for hours, ramps up your dopamine by like 200%, and it lasts for hours.
Like, you genuinely feel better.
So there's all that.
It's also good for recovery, muscle soreness, and just general inflammation.
There's a lot of, like, benefits.
But that's the same with exercise, right?
It's difficult to do.
It's hard to do.
But if you can do it, man, you'll be stronger, healthier, you'll feel better.
It's like you've got to go through that suck to get those benefits.
And people don't like that.
And so they come up with a bunch of reasons why you don't need that.
That's just a fad.
That's just this.
They all look like shit.
Everybody who says that, they all look like shit.
They all talk like pussies.
They're cowards.
They're afraid to get in there.
They don't like getting in there.
They don't like that other people get in there every day, and they don't get in there every day.
So they come up with a reason why getting in there is not really worth it.
This is the true story of the sinking of a whale ship called the Essex, right?
And the sinking of this ship inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick.
And what happened was in, I think it was 1821, the whaling industry in Nantucket.
It's so fascinating.
Nantucket back then was basically run by women because the men would go out for two, sometimes three years at a time hunting right whales, which are just sperm whales.
The business, whatever it takes to shoot the elk and get it down from the mountain, I get it.
That's a thing.
But when you read through the real process of getting a sperm whale out of the ocean alongside the ship and then onto the ship and the cutting of the blubber and the cauldrons that burn 24-7 on the deck and the blubber that's put into the cauldrons.
Now, you got a couple dozen guys in whale boats 2,000 miles off the coast of South America.
With no supplies.
Oh, man.
So what happens, and this is all in the preface, but the story basically starts when one of the whale boats is discovered not far from, I think it was Venezuela, and the guys look over the gunwale of their boat, and in the whale boat, it's just like a giant carcass.
It's just bleached bones.
All in it, except for two quasi-humans, one in the stern and one in the bow.
Each skeletons huddled up, staring each other with wild eyes, just waiting to see who would die next.
They were at sea adrift, I think, for the better part of three months.
That's him, Nate Philbrook.
In 1820, the Whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale, leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than 90 days in three tiny boats.
They knew it was a certainty, they just didn't know for whom.
This was common.
To find yourself with a group of people, hopelessly marooned, whether you're on a boat or an island with nothing to eat at all, there were protocols, pretty strict protocols, on how to draw lots to decide who would go first.
The crew, according to Chase, separated limbs from his body and cut all the flesh from the bones, after which we opened the body, took out the heart, and then closed it again, sewed it up as decently as we could, and committed it to the sea.
They then ate the man's organs.
Soon they began to draw lots to see who would be shot and eaten next, a custom of maroon sailors dating back to the 17th century.
Three men in one boat survived, and two in another.
The three men who remained behind on Henderson Island were also rescued after surviving on eggs and crabs for nearly four months.
This is why the greatest American novel, arguably of all time, was written, because Melville came from that part of the world, and he understood the stakes of hunting whales, and he understood the absolute imperative need to get energy.
You can make a really interesting and controversial case around how the fossil fuel industry saved the whales.
Well, they're working from a model that seems to have been blessed by all the appropriate parties, but they started working on this thing 50 years ago, and it's going to take another 40 before they're done.
I worked on the fingernail of Crazy Horse with a whole crew.
Also, human beings at that point in time were so horrible to each other, and these settlers had done essentially demonic things to the population, just with diseases, just bringing diseases.
So, of course, they would say, what are they doing now?
This is the fucking coup de grace.
They're going to steal our soul with this fucking box.
When you think about a couple of guys smoking cigars and sipping a coffee and just passing the time, and all of a sudden you're able to learn about the way they drew lots and where we got our energy from just a little while ago.
He wrote American Coyote and he wrote, what is it, Buffalo Diplomacy, Buffalo Ecology?
Is that what it was?
I forget, but the Buffalo premise is very fascinating because the numbers of Buffalo, he believes, they were in such large numbers because so many Native Americans died out because of diseases.
So the Native Americans would follow the buffalo, hunt them, and kill them.
It takes a long time for gestation for a buffalo.
So when the buffalo have new buffalo, it's a long time to repopulate.
But if the Native Americans, 90% of them were wiped out by disease when the settlers came here.
So there's no one hunting them for a long time.
And so the populations grew immense.
And so this was not something that was reported when the first settlers got here.
When the first Europeans came to North America and made their way across the country, never did they describe massive herds of buffalo.
It wasn't a thing.
It wasn't a thing until after the Native American population had been decimated by disease.
And then the buffalo flourished and became overpopulated, in a sense, an unnatural population.
Because they didn't have to worry about wolves.
They didn't have to worry.
So when they first were here, right, buffalo existed far back before the – there was a mass extinction of like 65 percent of North American mammals.
That coincided with the end of the Ice Age and probably had to do with the Younger Dryas impact.
It's 11 – well – There's two different time periods that they attribute to...
There's a shower, an asteroid shower that we go...
If you really want to get into this, you should really look up Younger Dryas Impact Theory online.
And then there's a guy named Randall Carlson who's kind of dedicated his life to...
Showing that this is probably what ended the ice age.
There's a bunch of science behind it in terms of like core samples and stuff they do that shows that there's asteroid impacts that happened all over the world during this particular time period.
And he thinks that coincided with the extinction of the woolly mammal, the American lion, a lot of different animals that just died off.
65% of North American mammals died off during this time period.
And you got to think like when the buffalo existed back then, they existed with the North American lion, which was bigger than the African lion.
It's the biggest lion ever.
So they're getting jacked by these massive predators.
And then you have this extinction event and then you have humans start hunting them.
And so, humans, now, horses have been reintroduced to North America by Europeans.
Humans are on these horses, and then they're hunting these animals.
Reintroduced, by the way, because horses originated in North America, including zebras.
All horse species came from here, but that was the Bering Land Bridge, and things moved around, and when the mass extinction event happened, it killed off all the horses here.
But then there was horses over there that they had kind of extirpated from America, brought them back in.
And now Native Americans have horses.
And so they are really effective at hunting buffalo.
They get the numbers down to a number where when people are making their way across the country, they're not seeing them everywhere.
And then you have this mass event where 90% of Native Americans die.
But that's what I meant earlier when I'm like, I feel...
it's full too.
And it's so annoying.
Like I was talking to a friend of mine just yesterday about how the universe works, which is a show I've been narrating for the science channel literally for 10 years.
And, um, you know, he, he, he, he knows all of the information in the show, but he thinks because he heard me tell it to him that I know it too, but I don't.
I'm just adjacent to it.
I know just enough to keep a conversation on its feet, but it's like, it's this constant thing, man.
I'm older than I've ever been, and it's just nagging at me now, because it's like, God damn it, I should know.
And I think humans like yourself, this is kind of a new thing.
In terms of human history, people that are exposed to so many different things, so many different topics, so many different experts, so many different timelines and stories that you're dealing with.
But we're still stuck with this hard drive, with this world that has an endless supply of information and it's consistently bombarding you with new facts.
There's a podcast out there basically called, I don't know what it's called, Experiencing the Joe Rogan Experience or something, because there's too much information on your show.
Acquired upon the consumption of all the other information like it's all Exponential piles on top of each other.
It's it's not just Now we know because of the new information because of the information that we've acquired now we have a new understanding so that's new information You know, nutrition.
There's constantly new information on nutrition.
How's that possible?
People have been eating forever because now we know more about it.
Right, but it's fairly new anyway, because nutritional science has really only been around for, what, 100 plus years?
And the understanding of it today is far greater than at any other time in our life.
Because of guys like Huberman, because of these different scientists that have dedicated themselves to educating people about nutrition, the process that your body goes through and it absorbs nutrients, and what enhances that, what enzymes, different things that you eat.