In this video, Patrick Bet-David details the future of education and the college monopoly system. Check out Pat's Top Udemy Courses here: https://bit.ly/3Aic5Yz
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PBD Podcast Episode 206. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Mike Rowe & Adam Sosnick.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
0:00 - Start
2:06 - How Mike Rowe became the #1 personality on TV
19:16 - Top 10 most dangerous jobs in the world
32:11 - The concept of Altruism
39:41 - Why Mike Rowe never had kids
1:09:14 - The 'Mike Rowe Works' foundation
1:19:47 - Reaction to the FTX collapse
Why would you bet on Goliath when we got pet David?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to hate it.
Howdy, running, homie, look what I become.
I'm the humble one.
That's face for radio.
So let's, okay, so by the way, you know, for the folks that are still waiting, you're with us.
Appreciate you.
We thought this was not going to happen.
This is the benefits of talent release form.
Lawyers, when they get involved, life gets more exciting.
You sit there, you go back and forth, and I'm sure you love that part of the game.
You know what, man?
I apologize.
We're down here in Florida, my partner and I, we were at the Patriot Awards last night.
That's right.
And I've been wanting to hook up and do this show with you for years.
But, you know, the schedule really is a hot mess.
And we got here.
And there's the release, right?
And I mean, I've signed a thousand releases in my life, but the rule we have is I got to see it in advance, but we didn't see it.
And so it's like, oh, we better read it.
And then you know the rest of the story.
So apologies for the fine person.
So in other words, a guy named Robert is going to have a meeting afterwards.
We already had a meeting with Robert, but it's a great way to start his weekend.
When you say that comment on the podcast, he knows what's going to happen.
Never a good meeting.
But listen, the fact that we're getting started with possibly, you know, maybe the greatest voice we have in America.
And Adam said it best.
He says, you have a voice for radio, but you have a face for Hollywood with TV is what you said.
He said, now you're making it awkward.
And then weird.
Adam made it weird right out of the gate.
There you go.
Welcome to the show.
By the way, we've had a lot of different things that we've been talking about.
Obviously, you're probably one of the most beloved TV personalities in America.
And I would say it's hard to do because people from left, right, and middle like you.
And that's not an easy thing to do when your messaging is hard work, dirty jobs, don't chase your passion.
Some of the stuff that you say could piss off the other side, but they still like you.
How are you so likable where people want to hear from you, even though they disagree with you?
That's an extraordinarily nice way to frame a really thoughtful question.
Thank you.
I don't really know, except to say that part of it has to do with optics.
And, you know, I freelanced in this crazy business for 20 years before Dirty Jobs became a thing.
And when it became a thing, the optics of that show, at least in the first season, it was just feces from every species, right?
I mean, most people in the country got to know me as a guy crawling through a sewer.
And so they saw me literally covered in other people's crap with condoms stuck to my rubber suit as I attempted to do whatever the god-awful job was.
And so I think part of it was, well, whatever this guy has to say, whatever it is he's selling, whatever it is he wants me to think or believe or do, he's covered with other people's crap.
So how full of crap can he really be?
You know what I mean?
It's like there was so much baked in humility for that show.
And I'm not saying it's because I'm a humble guy.
I'm not, frankly.
In fact, for 20 years, I was impersonating a host and pretty good at it.
And in my world, you get paid based on your ability to create the illusion of competence and knowledge in short bursts.
That's what hosts do.
Dirty jobs simply required me to stop doing that, take the pie in the face, let the person I was with be the expert and assume the role, not of a host or an expert, but as an avatar, as an apprentice, frankly.
So that's the long answer to your question.
I think people got to know me as a guy who came out of the gate saying, I don't know, could be wrong, probably am, but here's what I think.
And so I got a certain amount of permission as a result of that show to weigh in on things that, frankly, I'm really not that qualified to talk about.
How do you view people you disagree with, you know, for yourself?
Like if you, what is this here?
You just pop up.
I found this on, to your point, Pat.
We're such at a divided time in America today, right?
I mean, possibly and definitely in our lifetime.
And we talk about being a unifier versus being a divider.
Sure.
And we had this conversation yesterday and we were like, well, is he more right?
Is he more left?
And Pat looked into who's following you and it was people all across the aisle, not even politically, just across the media spectrum, across everything, Ellen and then Mike Hunkabee and all wide range.
And here I just looked at this article.
Micro hits number one on top TV personality social media.
Meaning somehow you're a very beloved figure.
You're not a divisive figure.
Well, I mean, I'm just looking at the stats here, brother.
I mean, this ain't my opinion.
Hey, man, it's on the internet.
It's got to be true.
Look at that hair, by the way.
That's true.
Holy cow.
Yeah.
This must be amazing.
Well, Mike, let me ask this.
Here's a question I wanted to ask.
And I know this is really hard to get something like this to happen, but we're living in a time where the last two and a half years, if you want to talk about divide and conquer, you know, split the country, you know, MAGA crowd hates the other side.
The other side hates MAGA crowd.
Look at these Republicans, these Democrats, pro-vacs, anti-vax.
It's so much about, you know, I was on a flight the other day.
Guy sitting next to me on the flight back from D.C., the entire time he had his mask on.
In your mind, you already can say this person voted for, you know, what kind of channel he watches.
You can probably list 20 things this guy does.
And then, you know, it's unfortunate, but we kind of are doing that.
So for you, whether it's, I know you're an Ayn Rand guy.
I know you're a big reader.
You quote philosophers.
You're a guy that was, you know, big on self-development.
Was the concept of how to win friends and influence people a natural thing that you grew up with?
Or was it something your mom taught you, your dad taught you, a book you read?
How did that personality come about to learn how to get along with people you disagree with?
It was probably a little bit of all of it, but your example is so insanely relatable.
I mean, I sat next to a guy coming out here with two masks on, right?
And when I sat down, he offered me a mask.
And I said, hey, thank you, but I'm going to go ahead and...
And he had already warmed it up.
I...
I mean, he pulled it out of his pocket.
Not the extra one on his face.
Not what he was wearing.
Oh, okay.
And so naturally, I offered him my underpants.
No, I just said, thank you, but I'm going to, you know, I'm good.
He said, okay.
And I sat there and I thought, what do I say to him next?
I mean, we're going to spend six hours together.
And it's not like we have to have a conversation.
But to your point, I didn't see a mask.
I saw a talisman.
I saw an indicator of some other set of beliefs.
So I stepped back from that and I said, well, wait a minute.
Is it just a mask?
Is it something else?
And then I thought, well, what if, what if he doesn't feel well?
What if he thinks he might be running a low-grade fever?
What if he's actually not scared, but trying to be as considerate as he possibly can to the people in this pressurized aluminum tube that are about to defy the laws of gravity?
And what if he's just offering me a mask?
I might offer somebody a breath mint if I had an extra one.
You know what I mean?
Now, do I believe that's where he was coming from?
Actually, no, I don't.
I think he was probably coming from where you think he was coming from.
But I felt better thinking that I was sitting next to a guy who was concerned about me.
Optics.
And then I just went on with my life.
Yeah.
You know, so look, you can assign any meaning to anything, whether it's a mask or the release I just looked at for the first time that I wasn't able to immediately sign because I wasn't sure what I was doing.
Right.
And so in those moments where you're not quite sure what's happening, you either just stick your head in the sand and go la la la and sign it and hope for the best, or you put yourself in the other person's place and say, well, why would they, why would they ask me to sign this?
Maybe they're worried that I'm going to bitch them up somewhere down the line by withholding a permission or something, right?
And so it's all that.
If you're able and willing and interested to look at the man behind the mask and ask yourself a slightly different question, then study after study shows you might not be an asshole.
That's a very good system to consider.
So the next time I'm going to sit next to a person with a mask, I'm going to be asking myself and processing it that way.
But you know the whole thing with the talent release form and why you maybe don't sign it or why we want people to sign it?
I remember I'm in the army and I'm a hummer mechanic.
When you have an ASVAB of 31, they typically don't put you as MI.
So the recruiter says you can be infantry or Hummer mechanic shoes.
I said, I'll be a Hummer mechanic.
And I see next to this fan in the Hummer that I'm fixing, there's a sticker with a warning sign on it that says, don't put your finger in the fan while it's running.
So I look at the guy.
I'm like, what an idiot.
Who would put a sticker like this on it?
And Sergeant Braxton says, the only reason there's a sticker there is because some idiot put a sticker there.
They got sued.
The army did.
And then they said, we got to put the sticker here.
Do not put your finger here.
So for you and for us, I mean, you know, we had a wonderful, just a delightful sweetheart of a guest on a podcast three weeks ago, a guy named Antonio Brown.
And it was just, you know, the entire unbelievable from the beginning to the end, laughter, joy.
You know, it's like the Christmas morning when you wake up, the feeling was very similar.
But, you know, this is when you run a business for 21 years and you come in initially, you're very naive and you're like, man, everybody wants me to make it.
And then you get big, you're like, holy shit, these lawyers, one after another, after another.
You got to be a little bit prepared for it.
Anyways, that was very helpful.
Look, a couple things.
So we got some stories I want to go in because I like the way you process issues.
We want to talk Musk with you.
We want to talk FTX with you.
We want to talk dirty jobs with you.
We want to talk a few different things about economy with you.
We want to talk to you what's going on with Starbucks.
I don't know if you're following this, you know, what happened with Starbucks.
Oh, the union thing?
Yeah, yeah, the union thing.
Look, I want to talk about everything.
I'll sit here as long as you want to talk because I feel bad about that release crap.
But one quick point to your point, when you see a sign that says don't stick your finger in the fan, it does something to your soul and it does something to the culture at large that's not good.
It's kind of like when you unpack something and you see this bag is not a toy.
Yeah.
Right.
It makes you crazy because you know that bag is not a toy.
And in so many ways, that's happening all of the time right now.
I think part of the problem with Black Lives Matter and that whole push and why it rankled so many people is because we knew it.
Millions and millions and millions of people know it.
And so to be told it presupposes the fact that you don't know it.
Now, some people might not know it.
Some people might think that bag is a freaking toy.
Some people might think that fan would be a fun thing to stick their tongue in or their finger.
Now, these people, I don't know what to tell you about these people.
They're going to be in for a rough time.
But when we are surrounded and peppered with idiotic advice, platitudes, bromides, and all of that, I think it collectively lowers our IQ and it worries me.
Yeah, you know, at least Black Lives Matter was a noble cause where the founders used the money to put it into good charities and not buy houses and all.
And you know that.
I mean, it's just very noble.
But I think before we get into all these stories, that was my signal because today's podcast is sponsored by Udemy.
Let me give our sponsors a quick shout out.
We love Udemy.
I think it's a, when we go through companies we choose to bring in as sponsors, we vet them out.
I love the product that they have.
We went one time, you and I, to Utah.
There was an event about online courses.
They were there.
We spent a bunch of time with their executives.
They are the largest online education technology platform in the world.
They have 50 million students, 70,000 instructors, 200,000 courses, 65 languages.
80% of Fortune 100 companies use Udemy to upscale their employees.
A couple of things.
One, they have an MBA course.
I highly recommend.
Two, my son, both of my sons, they want to learn how to edit and make videos.
I had them take a course on Udemy on how to edit and make videos.
One of them is 10.
The other is 9.
They learned.
A 10-year-old and a 9-year-old learn how to edit videos, at least at the beginning as a beginner, but they took that course.
Another one is a course that they have for digital media.
If you're a salesperson or running your own business, I highly recommend you check it out as well, specifically at a time like this where we don't know what's going to happen with recession.
Some of the indicators are showing that unemployment is going to go high next year.
We're seeing people getting laid off left and right with a lot of these big companies.
This is a great time and a great season for you to recreate yourself and to have a holiday deal going on right now.
Perfect time with courses on sale for the holidays.
Being part of Ayatainment Family, you do get a discount.
So click on a link below to take any of these three courses or some other courses that might interest you.
Tyler, let's put those links below in the chat and description.
Go there, take advantage of these courses.
Fantastic.
Okay.
Dirty jobs.
I had the guys pull up two things, top 10 most dangerous jobs and top 20 dirtiest jobs.
So let's, which one do you want to go first?
You want to go dangerous because you're the dirty a lot, right?
Yeah, sure.
So let's go dangerous first.
Okay, so apparently, according to a study, OSHA, which I know you work very closely with, OSHA, the most dangerous job in America is fishing and hunting workers.
Okay, number two is logging workers.
It tells you fatality, look fatal injury, 132 out of 100,000.
It's pretty interesting, by the way, fishing and hunting.
So logging workers, 91.7 out of 100,000.
Roofers, 47 out of 100,000.
Construction workers, 43.3 out of 100,000.
Aircraft pilot and flight engineers.
You know why that concerns me?
If you put 34.3 out of 100,000, if the pilot is going down, doesn't he?
Wait a minute.
They're not flying alone.
Aircraft pilots and flight engineers were listed as two most dangerous jobs in 2018, but have since dropped in terms of profession with the highest fatal injury rate, fatal accidents.
And these profession commonly occur because of transportation incidents.
While commercial airplanes remain to be incredibly safe, the most dangerous aspect of the job is, oh, private aircraft.
Correct.
Wow.
And helicopters.
Guys, that's a big number, though.
This is not commercial.
This is not American Airlines.
This is not.
You need to tell me, this is 3.4 out of 1,000.
I feel like every time I turn on the news, a plane crashed today and just some dude in a field out there.
Like, I feel like that's every day.
And you introduced me to your friend to buy private jobs.
You're so funny.
That's not a private.
Private jets aren't.
This is one-man, two-man planes.
Refuse waste and recyclable material collectors, structural iron and steel workers, delivery and truck drivers.
Number nine, underground mining machine operators, farmers and agriculture workers.
So those are known as the toughest jobs.
Here's my question for you.
We can take this any angle we want, but I'd love to see if CNN has done a survey because I know they're all for equal opportunity in MSNBC to find out what percentage of these dangerous jobs are being done by men versus women.
What do you think, since you're in this space a lot?
Well, every single one of those jobs has been featured on Dirty Jobs.
Most of them, I think in the first two seasons.
And yeah, I'd say the overwhelming majority are performed by men.
Why do you think that is?
Well, part of it has to do with inertia.
You know, you start doing a thing, then you do the thing again, and it gets easier and easier to keep doing the same thing.
That's always part of it.
But personally, if you go back up to the first one, you're talking about basically hunting and gathering, right?
I mean, that's what fishing, hunting.
You leave the cave, you find the creature, you hit it over the head, you drag the meat back to the cave, you eat what you kill, you feed your family, and your identity comes from your ability to do that in some way, shape, or form.
Shows like Deadliest Catch, Dirty Jobs, you know, they launched an entire world of new programs that tapped in to that basic primal thing to some degree.
And they awakened in our gender.
They awakened in men.
They reminded men in many, many cases, in my view, that thing had not been arbitraged out of our species yet.
And we show you again and again men leaving the cave to hit the thing over the head, to eat what they kill and bring the food back home.
Even in refuse workers, even in you can go down any job on that list.
And most of the 300 jobs I did on dirty jobs.
But what's interesting about this list is the very, very first one.
Fishing.
There's a very first word up there, even before hunting.
It's a very specific kind of hunting, and it's a very specific activity.
You know, they don't call it catching, right?
It's fishing.
There is no guarantee.
It's interesting to be the most dangerous job.
I was trying to sell dirty jobs in 2003 with no real success.
And the network said, we do have something, though, that we're kind of curious about, which is crab fishing in the Bering Sea.
Would you be interested in exploring that?
And I said, yeah, sure.
And they showed me some footage.
Little boats, big water, cold, right?
And so I flew from San Francisco to Seattle, Seattle to Anchorage, Anchorage, one of those little planes that become a statistic down in job number seven or eight there called Pen Air.
they fly you to the middle of the Aleutian chain and you land at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and you get off the plane and you check into what looks like it might have been a motel once upon a time.
And then you get on one of these boats and you start fishing and then you realize what actual fishing really and truly is.
20, 30 foot seas, temperatures that can swing 40 degrees in five minutes.
You want to talk about danger.
I actually thought this was a misprint.
You'll love this.
They gave me an actuarial chart before I went out on the boat.
Three columns, injury rates, catastrophic injury rates, and mortality rates.
Now, I'm on this little Pen Air flight from Anchorage to Dutch, and it's sporty, right?
I got a bush pilot up there and he's like saying, all right, folks, hang on.
We're going to give.
Whenever you're landing and the pilot comes on and says, ah, you know what?
Let's give it a shot.
You can hear the sound of your sphincter slam shut and you're just like, the pilot's going to give it a shot because like 40% of the flights that come into Dutch, they abort.
They just turn back around and they land in Cold Bay or some other place because you're flying in between mountains and the wind is crazy.
So I'm on this plane being up and down and back and forth.
And I'm reading these actuarial charts and I'm thinking somebody's just fucking with me.
This can't be true.
What do you think the injury rate is for a man who works on a crab boat for a full season, which is about at that time in 2003 is six weeks.
The injury rate.
20%?
Higher.
50.
Higher.
100%.
Yeah, you're going to get injured on those type of jobs.
Or correct, Adam.
One, 100%.
Yeah, that's why I don't do those kind of things.
I stay here on podcasts.
And to be clear, a couple of stitches, broken finger, right?
A mild contusion.
You're going to get knocked around.
For sure.
Guaranteed.
Catastrophic injury rate.
8%.
Wow.
Six weeks.
So, yeah, an iron pot's going to slide across an icy desk and shatter your pelvis.
All right.
Jesus.
You're going to lose an eye.
You're going to dislocate an elbow.
A helicopter is going to come, again, flown by one of these poor bastards down in category number seven, who's probably not going to make it back, to drag your ass off the boat, right, to some hospital.
8%.
Yeah.
Okay.
The mortality rate, column three, it's not even a percentage.
They don't even give it a percentage number.
One a week.
One a week.
Right.
Now, one a week.
So again, one person statistically is going to die every week during the six-week period of crab fishing on the Bering Sea.
Now, people who watch that show, which, by the way, is now in its 20th season.
This is the deadliest catch.
This is a show I've been narrating from the gym.
They know you can't script the Bering Sea.
We know something bad is going to happen, but we don't know when.
And in that first season, I spent six weeks up there.
When I left, everybody I met, including me, had gotten injured.
One, eight in 10 or 8 out of 100, 8% had gotten seriously hurt.
And I went to six funerals.
Wow.
The actuarial chart in 2003 for injury rates and mortality rates on the Bering Sea was not, in fact, an actuarial chart.
It was a prophecy.
And it came true 100%.
And when I got back to the States and talked to my friends at Discovery and we all looked at this footage, we realized that the question you're asking is not so different than what do people want to watch?
Like, what is satisfying curiosity really mean?
What does discovery really mean?
Is it limited to how the universe works and planet Earth?
Or can we look at what it means to leave the cave and bring home the meat?
Like, is that actually a thing you can do on television?
And when we saw that footage and we saw real men, most of whom, you know, the lower 48 doesn't know exist.
I mean, nobody had ever gone up there with cameras before, much less put them on a boat, much less get to know the deckhands and the greenhorns and the captains and live in the midst of that shitstorm.
Nobody even knew what was happening.
The Pribilov Islands, what are those?
What do you mean you're 50 miles off the coast of Russia with 800-pound crab pots going over the rail?
What do you mean you don't sleep for 48, 58, 70 hours at a time?
What do you mean six people are going to die in the next six weeks?
Like all that stuff was unknown.
And then all of a sudden it was self-evident.
And that show, in my view, is the granddaddy of the shows that answer the question you're asking, which is, why do men do these jobs?
Why do men watch these shows?
Why do women watch these shows?
You'd be amazed at the number of women watching.
What is it actually?
I'd be curious.
It's not quite half.
Is it 70, 30?
It's more like 60, 40.
That's great.
I think that's great.
Not even 55, 45.
Because women are intrigued by these type of men?
Because I doubt they're watching it because they want to pursue that type of career.
They want to see what a man has to deal with.
What is the mindset of a woman watching that?
So that's me going way out of my lane.
Let's go there, baby.
Let's go there.
Look, I'm going to stay in my lane and look at it and say, I don't know, but I think when we see something that is undeniably true, it resonates with you regardless of your chromosome makeup.
When I see women behaving in a way that strikes me as classically feminine, I love that.
That excites me.
It makes sense to my brain in a way that...
100%.
Right.
But I feel the same way when I see men doing these things that lift them up and the species up.
And I know that's not very correct right now.
No, it is.
But it's real, bro.
Yeah.
Well, I have one question for you.
This is like the biggest question I had for Mike Rowe.
Today, I mean, you just did an episode on this on like what it means to be a man today, be a man's man, right?
So when I think of Mike Rowe, I'm thinking, that's a man's man.
I mean, he's doing dirty jobs.
He's doing the deadliest catch.
Like he's doing some manly shit.
All right.
But at the same token, like I'm reading your bio, you are an opera singer.
You're an actor.
You're a writer.
You're a TV host.
You have, you know, these qualities that are, you know, maybe, you know, more liberal arts-ish.
Sure.
So there's a conversation.
You leave the most important part.
The guy sold $100 million on QVC.
That too.
That too.
Salesman.
Yeah.
But, you know, the conversation that we're having, you know, Pat just did an episode on this.
I have an entire show sort of dedicated to the role of a man in feminism and what the man bringing home the bacon and all that.
We're seeing what's happening with transgender, and men are becoming softer, and women are becoming stronger, and boss babes, and you can be a CEO, and men, you can just kind of chop your dick off and be a female, like whatever, not to go there.
No, you went there, man.
Yeah, I went there.
From Mike Rose's perspective, what does it mean to be a man today?
Well, for starters, we don't use words like chop and dick in the same sense.
We just don't do that.
I agree.
That's probably a job on your list, too.
That sounds like a deadliest catch right there.
I think, you know, Lorraine and Bobbit.
I think two sides of the same coin is like an old adage that's important because coins are important and coins make sense to our brain because they're fundamental to our currency.
But a head is different than a tail.
You know, in fact, sometimes we'll flip the damn thing in order to solve a disagreement.
This is what we do.
It's a very important metaphor, the coin.
But the head and the tail don't appear on the same side.
And if you were to try to make it so, you would have a very confusing piece of currency and you wouldn't quite know how to talk about it.
Metaphorically, I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say.
All right.
Right now is one of those moments on QVC where I would just keep making sounds, hoping that my brain would come up with a really great point.
What you're talking about, I think, is polarity.
I'm thinking he's about to make a key point.
I don't want to dismiss it.
Sometimes it works out, Patrick, and sometimes it's just a sinkhole.
And for the next 15 minutes, you can get this United States government proof set of coins.
What you're talking about is polarity.
40 of them left.
Duality.
Duality.
Correct.
That's right.
Yin and yang.
Sun and moon.
Light and dark.
I mean, black and white.
This is duality.
Polarity.
Things are not the same.
Heaven, hell.
Continue with your coin metaphor.
Well, and thank God.
Thank God we have duality.
Thank God there's polarity.
Thank God we live in a world where the physical universe still demands that when the coin is flipped, it's going to be one or the other.
Now, there are a lot of things that I hate about binary choices.
Let's make a deal was always door number one, door number two, or door number three.
And the existence of door number three is the thing that makes life interesting.
The gray area, not the black and the white.
It's the basis for our conversation.
Door number three is always the basis for a conversation.
But in matters of clarity, in matters of purpose, when we need to have a quick yes or no, then the flip of a coin is something we can still rely upon because heads are heads and tails are tails, right?
And so there is, again, not to torture the metaphor, but to kind of land the plane, what you're asking goes to his question, too.
That's why people watch Deadliest Catch.
You can't know if it's going to be a head or a tail.
You can't script the Bering C. You can, as a producer, have all sorts of ideas about what you want to do.
And then a rogue wave comes out of nowhere and makes a fool out of you, right?
It's the same thing on dirty jobs.
You can go into the sewer to do a job, and all of a sudden you can find yourself subsumed in a chocolate tide of disappointment because something happened.
And look, the viewer wants an unpredictable thing.
We crave certainty, but what we really want is the uncertainty of not knowing is it going to be a head or a tail?
Is the rogue wave coming?
Is Mike going to get a face full of crap in the sewer when the lateral explodes next to his head?
Which, of course, it's going to do, as it always does, just a question of when.
And so all these things come together.
And hopefully, in the TV world, if you do your job right, you give people enough to feel certain about that they're comfortable to spend time with you, but enough uncertainty to keep you watching because you don't really know if it's going to be a head or a tail.
You just don't know.
So, anyway, that's a long way.
I appreciate that metaphor, and I actually think it's spot on.
Pat, when you did the episode about being a man's man and being an alpha, you referenced the Scott Galloway, NYU professor.
He was on Bill Maher.
It was awesome.
What was your takeaway from that?
The what?
Make money, have sex, and work out, like those three things he talks about, Galloway.
Well, about young men today, about how like young, lonely men are the most dangerous men on the planet.
Essentially, your entire premise that you did in your episode.
No, it's a great article.
You know, I guess the question I would have for you is, how much did Ayn Rand have an influence over you?
Was it something you read very, very early on or no?
I read Atlas Shrugged when I was young.
Yeah.
How old is Young?
I was a teenager.
I was probably 18.
I was probably 18 when I read it.
Did you do Fountainhead as well, or was it more Atlas Shrugged that?
A Fountainhead later.
Okay.
Atlas Shrugged first.
Who gave it to you?
Was it a friend, a teacher?
Was it a parent?
A librarian.
A librarian gave it to you.
A librarian had to do.
And what did she say to you when she gave it to you?
She was a woman who actually sort of eavesdropped on a conversation I was having with a friend of mine in the library.
And we were talking about.
Is this in Baltimore?
This is in Baltimore.
Okay.
Yeah.
And we were talking about why people do good things and selfishness and so forth and so on.
And I used the word altruistic.
And my friend wasn't familiar with the term.
And the library came over and said, the librarian came over and said, look, if you're going to talk about altruism, you should read this book.
Because in it, the author essentially argues that altruism is a false God.
And the real key to doing a selfless thing, a good thing, is if it's in your interest, first and foremost.
And I just thought the duality of that was super interesting.
You know, when a mask comes down in one of those aircrafts on that list because suddenly there's danger, what are we told to do?
No matter how much you care about the person next to you, the first thing you do is you put it on yourself.
You're of no use to them otherwise, right?
That metaphor was really powerful in my life.
And I saw it through her writings, you know, again and again.
Now, at the time when you were talking about altruism, were you a believer of that?
Or were you for the most part, or were you kind of trying to figure yourself out?
Were you, okay.
Well, I'm still trying to figure myself out.
I'm talking about more like philosophy in life.
You know, do I go, am I going to be a capitalist?
Are rich people bad?
You know, or, you know, should I be the one that I should give everything I have?
Who cares about being a millionaire?
Are you going through that?
Or you kind of already are a pretty driven, self-sufficient type of a guy.
I was a little suspicious of who I thought I was becoming.
I was in the Scouts as a kid.
In fact, I was...
79, what's the year?
I think it was.
79.
79.
Yeah.
So it's about the same time, right?
I'm a senior in high school, and I had just done, do this Eagle Scout project, and a lot of people were thanking me, and I was getting a lot of compliments for being a nice guy and doing this, doing good things.
You know, one of the things I did for my project back then was I read to blind people at the Maryland School for the Blind.
I'd read the newspapers.
I'd read them famous classical works.
And I also helped build a bridge over at the blind school that my grandfather helped build with the Lions Club.
Anyhow, and I like the way I felt when people congratulated me and thanked me for doing a good thing.
But the truth is, for me, I had a weird stammer when I was a kid, a stutter, really.
And I was very shy as a teenager.
And part of what I did to try and get past that was just put myself in awkward situations and situations where I had to talk.
So the truth is my Eagle Scout project was really very selfish.
It was great training for me to read out loud to people who couldn't see me, right?
Wow.
And so I did that for months after school.
I would go there and they loved it.
And I had a, you know, once I got over this weird hitch in my voice, my voice changed early on.
You know, so people always, I sound older.
Like when I was 18, 19 years old, I sounded like I was 35 or 40.
And so I was able to narrate shows early on and I was able to do a lot of things that I maybe otherwise couldn't have done.
But my training really came reading the blind people.
And I made a lot of progress doing that.
The point is, that was rather selfish of me, really.
I was, you know, I had to do a public service in order to check that box at that point in the scouting program.
But the service I chose to do was one that benefited me enormously.
It also benefited the people who, you know, were listening.
And so that's what appealed to me about Ayn Rand.
So when you read Atlas Shrugged, is that where the whole concept of it's okay to be selfish, I mean, she wrote a book on purely being selfish.
I think there is a book titled Selfish, if I'm not mistaken.
She wrote a bunch of different books.
It made you think, what?
It's okay for me to make decisions that make me happy.
That's how I'm able to benefit other people.
Is that kind of how you processed it?
That's exactly how I processed it.
And how much do you think where we are today, you know, because when you, I don't know if you've watched her interviews with Phil Donahue, I can watch it on repeat.
I mean, I just love the way she pushed back and she, you know, some of the arguments.
She was a little bit weird herself.
I went to the restaurant where she would go and write.
It's in New York.
It's the Russian tea Russian restaurant.
I would say, take me to the table where she sat when she would write.
She would sit right here.
So fantastic.
I did the same thing at the Algonquin with Dorothy Parker, where she used to write all of her stuff.
That's cool.
Anyway, God, sorry.
Yeah.
So I just kind of wanted to see what was the wiring of this lady who wrote this book.
And it's unfortunate that the movie was never properly made.
That was supposed to be made by the same folks that made Godfather.
So let me take this to a different, because I'll tell you how she influenced me.
When I read it, I thought about it and I said, man, what's the purpose of getting married?
You know, and I know, you know, one of our girls came in who was talking to you.
And she says, you know who I'm talking about.
Kelly, who is here, she says, he's with his wife.
I said, I promise you, he's not with his wife.
That could be his girlfriend, but it's not his wife because he's never been married.
Correct.
And he's never had kids.
So I'm sitting there at 27 years old.
And obviously, I had read this book early in my 20s.
And I said, I'm like, what is the purpose of marriage?
Do I really want to get married?
My parents got a divorce twice to the same.
They married each other and divorced twice.
And I said, I've never seen a successful marriage.
Do I really want to deal with, you know, one guy I spoke to about marriage?
She had four kids, and he says, You know, if you really want to be a billionaire and be super, super successful, get if you are going to get married, get married to somebody who already has three kids.
I said, What?
I asked another guy.
No, the people that get married and have, you know, family are the ones that have the highest chance of succeeding in business.
Guys I would talk to were playboys.
No, listen, man, you don't want to deal with this.
Just stay single and you can have a good time.
And later on in your life, if you want to have some kind of companion, you should do it.
But here's a guy who's a startup starts, you Eagle Scout, got the voice, got the look, got the height, you know, is gone around the world.
You've done good for yourself.
I am sure you've had tens of thousands of options to say yes.
What was your processing?
And I've read the articles on you to see what you know when you explain why you didn't.
But was there a moment where you're like, yeah, I'm just not going to do it?
I don't think I want to get married and I want to have kids.
What was that conversation like?
Jesus, that's a lot, man.
But let me start by saying that, again, I think the first thing we said when we sat down was you can assign any meaning you want to anything that happens.
And so for me, I was surrounded by perfect examples of the institution working ideally.
Never mind Ayn Rand.
I mean, in general, I like a lot of what you said, and some of it I thought was crazy town.
I just dismissed it.
I have no problem taking the stuff that I think is useful and dismissing the things that don't work for me.
But my mom and dad, in fact, when I leave here, I'm going up to Baltimore.
They're celebrating their 62nd wedding anniversary tomorrow.
Wow.
The day after my dad turns 90.
Okay.
They've been in love for 63 years.
That's crazy.
Right?
It's crazy.
Now it gets crazier than that.
I grew up on a little farm in northern Baltimore County.
And next to us was another couple, Carl and Thelma Noble.
They happened to be my grandparents.
And they were madly in love till the day they died.
Is this the grandfather that influenced you to be an Eagle Scout and Build a Bridge?
Same one?
Okay.
Correct.
And so I had a mom and dad who walked the walk and talked the talk.
And so I knew exactly what that sort of marriage and relationship looked like.
And next door, I had this other example, this beautiful marriage of these beautiful people.
And so there was never any doubt in my mind that this is a great institution.
I did have some doubts as to whether or not I could measure up.
And so the meaning I assigned to it was: look, if it happens, it'll happen.
If you're going to make it happen, if you're going to force it to happen because you're coming from some sort of place where it's been written in the stars that this is what you ought to do, well, then you can make that happen too.
But I just didn't want to.
I just didn't want to force it.
And so for a whole bunch of weird reasons, the various relationships I've had combined with the trajectory of my career, I really kind of stepped back from all of it and said, I'm not going to abdicate my responsibility in making choices, but I do not have a plan.
I'm not writing this down.
This is not step one, step two, step three.
I wanted to be, I wanted to be conscious about what I was doing and about the choices I was making, but I also wanted to be a little bit of that feather in the beginning of Forrest Gump.
Just kind of like, well, let's see where it goes.
Because to me, the world is big and interesting.
And, you know, people who are certain about what they want to do and write books about how to achieve all of those things, that's cool.
That's interesting.
Ayn Rand did that.
You know, her whole, she created a philosophy about this whole thing.
So, you know, I, in the end, just decided I was going to take my cue from the next day and play the cards I got as best I could.
And it served me pretty well professionally and personally, frankly.
You don't think, you know, like sometimes we sit there and we're like, well, you know, what would have happened if I would have actually taken school seriously, become a lawyer?
You know, you're pretty good at debate.
What kind of a lawyer would you have been?
Would you have been running a law firm?
Well, no, it kind of worked out for you.
So stop talking about what if you would have done this.
Life's been okay with you getting into the insurance industry, which, you know, you did okay there.
Well, what if this?
And what if that?
You seem like a very deep value, a meaning of a life, contribution, understanding.
Like you're the kind of guy that if we had dinner with, I would just want to sit there and you talk 99% of the time telling stories.
I'm probably going to walk away learning so much from you.
There's a lot of depth.
Well, look, depth in you.
And it's just felt.
It's not even like, this isn't like a, you know, I'm complimenting to compliment.
It's felt and I'm not the only one.
It's very natural.
It just comes out of you, right?
Do you sit there and you say, you know, like, you know, the Jewish proverb?
I'm sitting there like, dude, I just want to, I just want to, I'm the guy that goes to movies by myself and I enjoy it.
I'm telling you.
I would go to movies.
I'd say to my assistant, I got an appointment to run.
Okay.
And she'd come, where were you at?
She said, I had an appointment.
Why do you have popcorn on your top?
I'm like, well, you know, I had an appointment.
I told you I had an appointment.
And I would watch movies with Anne, an 85-year-old woman at 10 o'clock in the morning, you know, and these people would be lined up.
Hey, Patrick, what are we going to watch today?
I'm like, I don't know, whatever.
Let's just go sit there and watch a movie.
So I enjoy my own company.
But then I read this Jewish proverb, you know, three things man should do, you know, plant a tree, which I haven't done yet, but very disappointing.
Yeah.
Number two on the most dangerous list, by the way.
Logging.
Yeah, logging.
Planting's easy.
I'm going to stay away from that.
You know what he talks about when it falls on your house.
Right.
So plant a tree.
The other one is what?
Write a book and then, you know, have it, have a son, right?
Because it continues and you're able to do that.
Do you sit there and you say, man, I got so much to offer, you know, what would it look like?
And by the way, you're living at a time where I'm sure you could have a kid or two or three.
I think some people we know have kids in their mid-60s.
Do you think about there and say, maybe, you know, it'd be kind of cool.
Because at a time like this where we're seeing some troubled teenagers, what statistics of a bad father or, you know, not even a bad father, somebody that's not even in the picture, what that impacts.
What could a, you know, Mike Row raise shit.
I mean, that kid is going to be a positive net positive to society.
Do you think about that at all?
No, not much.
Really?
Not much.
I used to a little bit, but you just can't know that.
By the way, if you're sitting in the theater by yourself, you're not alone.
You're there with the film.
You're there with the people on the screen.
And that can mean as much to you as you want it to.
I get lost in movies.
I get lost in books.
And I like being lost in those things because I don't like to be alone.
I like to be by myself, but I like to be alone.
Right.
So the movie is a powerful metaphor.
It's my first job.
The first paycheck I ever got was a projectionist for United Artists.
Actually, it was for an usher.
Then it was for a concessionaire.
Then it was for a cashier.
Then it was for a petition.
Peltriist.
I was still in high school.
I started there when I was 17.
And yeah, $2.10, minimum wage, 1978.
But I'm sorry, what was the other part?
The whole question about the fact that you sit there and saying, hey, you know, the kid part, just purely the kid part.
By the way, to me, it's not even marriage.
It's purely the kid part.
Yeah.
My foundation has helped 1,700 kids at this point getting scholarships to weld and plumbing and steam fitting, pipe fitting, and so forth and so on.
I'm not saying that that's the same as having a kid.
It's not.
it's not even close but the i think the reason having a son is on that checklist that you just went down is because because a man ought to be able to see the needle move A man ought to be able to see an impact on another man, a boy.
You know, you want to be able to make a difference.
You want to think that your ideas and your beliefs and your words and your deeds can help shape something.
And so that is not something I'm willing to give up.
But I really wonder, you know, I mean, Gerald Ford was adopted.
You know, the president of the United States had one of the worst fathers you could possibly have.
And his mom, Dorothy, finally got out of there.
And the paint salesman who married his mom, his name was Gerald Ford.
He gave the boy his name and he raised him like a man ought to raise a son.
And if you ever read what Gerald Ford went on to say about his adoptive father versus his actual father, then you're left with no choice but to ask, what is the real relevance of the DNA?
What is the real impact?
I mean, I just don't think there's ever, I don't think there's a better example of an easy thing juxtaposed with a hard thing.
How easy is it to slip it in there, have the kid?
How easy is it to make a woman pregnant?
And how hard is it?
No question about it.
How hard is it, right?
Yeah.
For the next 18, 20, or you've asked my dad today, he'd say, yeah, man, he's still my dad.
60 years later, he's still being a dad.
So, yeah, having a kid, peacekeep.
But that's coming from a guy.
Your shows are based on the hardest job and the dirtiest job.
And I don't know a harder job or a dirtier job than being a parent.
You know, I don't know if they put that at the top of the list.
But no, I just thought about you and I'm like, you know, you know, there's certain people that you're like, dude, like you're getting a little too much attention right now.
And you should not be a celebrity because you're bad for society.
Dude, this guy should have 50 million followers.
He's a talent.
He would be a freaking awesome net positive for society.
I just think about it.
I'm like, you know, because me at 27, I went to dinner one time at this one restaurant in Beverly Hills.
It's one of the top restaurants.
I forgot the name of the waiter comes, extremely flamboyant personality, mid-50s, good-looking guy, you know, sharp, joke, stories, has been there for 30 years.
So I said, so he says, so what's this date all about?
I said, well, you know, I think we're at a phase right now where we've been dating for about a year.
I don't know if I want to get married or not.
I'm sitting on my date.
He says, you want to tell you my lesson?
I said, what's that?
He said, I got nine kids and I've never been married before.
Everybody that I got pregnant that has one of my kids, they sign a contract that I have zero responsibility for it.
And they agree to it.
I said, why the hell would somebody do that with you?
Like, you're not that, you're a waiter.
Like, why would you, that's not even a believable story.
You know, it's like hell of a waiter.
I understand if somebody's, yeah, hell of a waiter.
Says, well, let me tell you, if you only knew on Dallas stories, just tell me, I'm like, God, I'm sitting there saying, I don't know.
You know, I don't know.
I don't know.
Obviously, people make impacts in a different way, but I only ask that question for my own selfish reason because when I was 27, I almost chose that route.
Oh, me too.
Yeah.
Oh, many, many, many close ones.
Very, very close.
Right?
I mean, I never ruled it out till today.
I'm still not.
Not now.
No, I'm okay.
Cool.
It's still open on the agenda.
I don't ruled it open.
By the way, let me just tell you, our real sponsor today is Bumble and Tinder.
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I've got a question.
So I'm sort of in the middle of all, like, Pat's a father of four.
Okay.
He was a former bodybuilder, good-looking guy, Hummer mechanic, you know, playboy, businessman, entrepreneur.
Now he's an amazing father, amazing husband.
He's a leader, right?
You have Tom the Bizdock over there, two wonderful daughters.
You guys are very similar age, right?
Very good father.
Pat tells the story of how every night he calls his wife and calls his kids and prays with them.
You know, I'm in a phase of my life.
I'm in my early 40s where I've done the relationship things over and over and over again.
Whether I get married or not, especially to the government, remains a question.
Whatever.
I like women.
But being a father is 100% on my agenda.
Like, I look at Pat's relationship with his kids, specifically Dylan.
What a stud.
He's what, nine years old, eight years old?
Oh, I love this kid.
My nephew, Rory, 10 years old.
I love this kid.
He's awesome.
My guy, Fabian, over here, okay?
He came in yesterday.
Did you meet Fabian's four-year-old?
He likes onions.
That's my only concern.
He likes what?
Onions.
He was having onions.
We'll make it work, though.
But it's like I see.
I said, Fabian, like, I understand you a little bit better now.
Like, I look at someone like Bill Maher, who's definitely a mentor, role model.
I look at him, especially politically and being a former comedian and offering insight and wisdom.
And I look at him and he's very selfish.
And we just talked about that with Ayn Rand.
Be as selfish as you want, bro.
I'm sure he's had a ton of women and smoked a ton of weed, done a ton of drugs, made a lot of people laugh.
But for someone like Bill Maher to not have that legacy, like a kid, and he seems very comfortable with that.
Sure.
I don't, like, I don't think I would be very comfortable, me, not leaving the legacy of having a kid.
That's very important to me.
But like what you said about, well, I've, you know, 1,700 kids.
And that was the moment I was like, he's done something very unique that most men can't do.
You know, they say like any man can be a father, but it takes a real man to be a dad, right?
Like to be there, to be present.
He was talking about, but you seem very, you're 60 years old, bro.
You look great, but you know, you're on the second half of life, so to speak, even though you look awesome.
There's nothing in your DNA saying, all right, got to pop one out.
Like, got to have one kid, nothing.
I mean, maybe something, but there's a lot of space between nothing and something.
Zero to one, right?
Peter Thiel.
I mean, it's not, I'm hesitant to use words like nothing, never, always.
All, always, never.
Yeah.
I just don't, I just don't buy it.
But yeah, so I guess I'm a Mamby Pamby, never say never guy in that space.
But, you know, your earlier question, I thought was even better.
You know, you mentioned the opera.
Right.
And I only bring it up because I think part of what's happening today is there's, we don't do well with cognitive dissonance.
And if you know me as the Dirty Jobs guy, and if you've seen me crawling through the sewers, and if you've seen Deadly Scotch and solo and then you learn I sang in the opera, you got a problem, right?
It's like, wait a second, one of these things is not like the other.
You're supposed to be the manly guy.
Why are you singing in the opera book?
So if you're singing the opera, you know, so would and you were on QVC for three years.
So you're a salesman, which means you're an opportunist, and you sang in the opera, which means you're maybe super in touch with your feminine side.
And like, like, and so all of a sudden, all of these things are on the page, and that page is under the light of some level of publicity and celebrity.
And people start drumming their fingers.
I had a show on CNN for three years.
I just presented an award last night at the Fox Patriot Awards.
I'll be on CNN next month promoting the return of dirty jobs.
And then I'll walk across the street and sit down on Fox and talk about how America works on Fox Business, right?
So, you know, you started off very kindly by talking about this weird space that I'm occupying on the Venn diagrams that typically don't overlap.
And I'm so grateful to be in that space, you know, because it's hard to find it and no one wants you there.
And, you know, the people from the old days who I sang with, the people who I did theater with, they look at this whole persona thing and they're like, what?
How did that happen?
Right.
And the people who know me best from my foundation and the people, you know, who I've in the last 20 years, they, they can't reconcile what I did in my youth for money.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, I sold everything.
I had every sales job there was.
If there was any, any performing job, I would try it.
You know, I got in the opera because I lost a bet.
I got in QVC because I could talk about a pencil for eight minutes, right?
I didn't want the job, but once I got it, that was a new bunch of cards to play.
And I thought that was interesting.
I'm not a trained singer, but they gave me a shot and I got a foot in the door.
The opera was a world.
Broadway was a world.
Sales is a world.
The sewer is a world.
The deck of a crab boat is a world.
The flight deck on a plane is a world.
And the men and women who live in those worlds, they're more complicated than the one-dimensional identity we insist on handing them, right?
We all have some weird opera thing in our past.
And Adam, we all wonder, Jesus, am I really going to leave the world without leaving my mark on it?
But I would say, is that rooted in just simply self-preservation?
Is it rooted in selfishness?
Is it rooted in altruism?
Is it what the hell is it?
Well, doesn't it come down to legacy at the end of the day?
Yeah, but yeah, but you're not in charge of your legacy.
It's just like if you're in a theater watching a movie by yourself, you're not alone.
We'll decide what your legacy is.
Well, if I can give you a little pushback, I feel like you can control your legacy in the narrative.
So, for instance, when I started my whole social media escapade, I was a former nightlife guy in South Beach, party guy.
I said, I got to get out of this world.
It's crazy.
I'm going to end up an alcoholic, drunk, drug.
I've seen it too many times.
I got into the financial world.
I started off as a cold caller, paid my dues, met Pat in the insurance space.
I've been doing that for 15 years now, made a bunch of money, had success.
Life's good, right?
But five years ago, speaking of altruism, you know, I had a selfish gene.
I wanted to create a personal brand.
And I started a show basically interviewing a lot of financial types of people about money and basically specifically what young people should understand about money.
And I did, I mean, when I tell you, I did thousands of street interviews from financial advisors and CPAs and estate planners to college kids and people going to clubs and just party people.
And I remember I was at this one event.
It's called the Heckerling Estate Planning.
It's the top of the top of the top of the list.
It's the 1% of the 1%'s advisors who go there and they're dealing with eyelets and trusts and irrevocable trust, like the most heady, boring stuff ever.
And I'm not that guy.
Like I'm like, talk to me like I'm a fifth grader.
And I said, guys, let me ask you, you know, after you've done making the millions and the billions and this and that, I said, what's next?
And they said, well, leaving a legacy.
And that's while they're all doing philanthropic endeavors and starting charities and charitable funds.
Like you talked about the 1700 kids you've helped with your charity and all these people, they've already made an impact.
They've already made the money, but they want to be intentional about leaving a legacy.
But you can't, dude.
I'm telling you, I feel the same way.
I can go down my list of attempts, hopes, dreams, and accomplishments, you know, not to get biblical on it, but those would be described as a pile of dirty rags.
You know what I mean?
We all do what we do and we do our best at it.
But how I'm remembered, that's up to you.
That's not up to me.
How you're remembered, it's kind of, I look at it like once the pitcher lets go of the ball, it's truly out of his hands.
So his legacy regarding that pitch really is more up to the batter than it was to him.
Or it's up to the market.
Both of you guys are making me think because the way I see it is I fully agree with your point, but I also fully agree with you.
I think it's kind of like you're the lawyer making a case for your life and the jury and the judge is saying, yeah, now it was an okay life.
It's just like, no, you know, it's kind of like, you know, one of my favorite movies, The Judge, with Robert Downey Jr. where Robert Duvall, oh my God, I watched that movie on one flight back to back, like literally back to back.
By yourself, by myself.
And it was just a, it was a very, very, but I think that's what it is.
I think a part of it is, here's the other part.
Here's what matters to me.
I think I believe this is what matters to me the most.
So you're a salesperson.
You're a talent.
You're a philosopher.
You can be called seven different things is what you are.
You're not one person or the other, right?
You're creative.
And, you know, I can sell myself.
You know, you can sell yourself.
We all can sell ourselves.
Once you learn how to communicate, I remember John Maxwell in a book says, you know, there's a, once you learn how to persuade, be very careful because you're one step away from knowing how to manipulate.
You got to be very, very careful when you learn the art of persuasion.
Fine.
I can say whatever I say on that camera.
I can say whatever I can say in the crowd here.
We got, say, a thousand people we're speaking to.
Say we're at MGM Grand Arena, annual.
I can't give a message.
Then later on that night, when everybody's asleep and I'm sitting in the living room and nobody is there, no wife, no kids, no audience, no clients, no fans, no critics, nothing.
If I'm 100% cool with the decisions I make, who gives a shit?
But I better be 100%.
I think that's the one part.
I better be 100%.
When's the last time you were 100%?
I was about kids.
Marriage, you know, I always talk about marriage because you can't control the other person.
You don't know what's going to happen with marriage.
We've been married now for 13 years, going on 14 years.
And I read on the second book, we read a book called I had a, I bought a book for on our second date.
Second date, the book was called 101 Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged.
Second date, I give this to her at borders, when there used to be borders.
Week later, we go through the question at her place, six hours.
And I'm sitting there saying, 60% chance this could work.
I never said 100%.
I'm being serious.
I don't think you can say marriage 100% because it's the other person.
But forever, that person is going to be a partner of yours, a wife of yours, or an ex-partner or an ex-wife, or the mother or the father of your kids.
There is a partnership still that happens, right?
That part is 100%.
Could be an ex, could be a wife, could be a husband, could be an ex, 100%.
Starting a business, 100%.
I wasn't going to choose the alternative.
I couldn't do it.
It's very, very hard.
But it's not a lot of things that's 100%, just so you know.
And I would put the short list of, man, less than five that I would say 100%.
But you know what it is?
Here's the other part.
The other part is, say I make a decision that I'm not 100% about, but I'm by myself.
And I'm a guy that sleeps late.
And I like to, I like thinking.
I like, you know, I like sitting there and just kind of like, you know, processing issues.
How could I have done this differently?
And I'm that guy.
I'm the guy like.
What do you mean sleeps late?
Well, I mean, anyways, what are you going to say?
We have different definitions of sleeps late.
You sleep in, you mean?
No, no, no.
No, what I mean is I'm up when everybody's asleep and I'm thinking.
Oh, you go to sleep late.
Gotcha, gotcha.
No, no, I'm a six-hour guy.
I'm a four-six-hour guy.
Yeah, see, a vampire-ass guy.
Yeah, I thought you were saying, you know, I'll just lay in bed until 11 o'clock.
No, no, that's the opposite.
I was like, hold on, forgive my English, guys.
It's EFL.
English as a family.
You go to bed late.
I go to bed late.
Not sleep late.
No, no, I go to bed late.
Correct.
I go to bed late.
So I'm sitting there thinking.
I'm like, and, you know, I'm grew up in a family of paranoia, Iran, war.
So I'm naturally paranoid.
You know, you make investments.
Dude, investments?
You kidding me?
There's nothing 100%, right?
You know, you're saying like, hey, do we do the right decision here?
You know, do we do that?
I'm that guy, right?
You're constantly thinking, there's a certain things at core values I'm on 100% camp on, but it's not a lot of things.
You know, it's not a lot of things.
And it's tough.
That's the part that's tough.
You know, it's the part that's tough.
But again, if, you know, if a person can sit there and say, I'm cool with my decisions, who gives a shit about all the other parts of it?
If a person can sit there by themselves and say, I'm totally fine with what I'm doing, no problem.
But it's that battle of, you know, like, for example, when you were saying something, I used to hang out with some Seattle Seahawk back in the days.
When I say Seattle Seahawks, not Seattle Seahawks, Seattle Supersonics.
Supersonic.
You know, when you say Seattle Supersonics, people have no clue what Seattle is.
Sean, Oklahoma, Thunder.
So it was back in the day.
Saying, you know, you would look at the life and the party and you're like, dude, why the hell are you married?
I don't think NBA players, NFL players, Hollywood, I don't think you should get married for a minute because what are you talking about?
Like Tiger Woods.
Well, listen, did you hear what Tiger Woods did?
Yeah, bro, why don't you go become the greatest of all time and see what it's like to walk outside of Walmart?
Go to try it out.
Go do it.
Go golf since two, three years old, have a perfect swing and then go to Costco tonight and then see what happens when you go to Costco.
See what's thrown at you.
When you go to Costco, the customer service throws, you know, a towel at you.
When he goes to Costco, you get panties thrown at you if your name is Tiger Woods, right?
Go see what that life experience is like.
It's called a dirty job, right?
Okay.
Costco.
I love how that you're going to Costco.
I'm going nightlife bars.
But the point, this guy can't go to Costco.
He's not allowed in Costco.
Tiger can't go to Costco.
Can't go anywhere.
It's a catastrophe.
The owner of Costco, the manager of Costco, is going to say, get out.
We have protests outside, bro.
Get out.
We're having problems here, right?
But the point is, you know, when you think about this stuff is there are like when you're saying, oh, I went and I'm in Alaska for six weeks and I'm really trying to see exactly what their job is like.
What if you're outside of Russia and I'm here?
Yeah, not a good idea to be married.
If you're out there on the road, you know, military, I was in the military.
I'm in such and such place for 18 months.
Haven't seen my wife for 18 months.
That's probably not a good idea, right?
Yeah, it's probably not a good idea.
So in that part, I totally see the argument if that's the job.
There's a part of me that says, dude, you'd make one badass of a father, bro.
You would make one BMF of a father.
Like you would be, you know, you'd be God knows who you would raise.
God knows.
God knows.
He knows.
That's right.
God knows.
He knows.
Okay, so let's transition away from this and into other topics.
Tom, you look like you wanted to say something.
Yeah.
Tom, next time, honestly, let us speak next time when we're doing a podcast.
A little bit too much interrupting this time.
Next time, let us say something, boys.
But go ahead.
I'm warmed up inside.
Don't worry about it.
You know, Mike, you talked a little bit about the foundation.
What I'd like to see is you have this incredible macrame that kind of was woven out through all of these steps that happened through your life.
And at some point on there, obviously success brings financial enablement.
You decided to do the foundation.
And I'd love to understand the genesis of it because the premise of it I love.
It's like, hey, you're sold, go to college, get a good job, but that's not necessarily the only product on the shelf that you can buy.
You know, you're being sold that product, but there is other alternatives in life.
And you've dedicated yourself to building the foundation to show people that, you know, through trade school and other things, you might be surprised that the local plumber makes 50 bucks an hour, right?
There's a lot of things that people don't know about it.
I dedicated the second half of my career to teaching.
And that's, you heard the phrase BizDoc.
That's my alter ego.
And I have a simple credo.
It says, you know, I'm the BizDoc, and I hope I left you better than I found you.
I don't know.
I'm going to try, but I just hope.
But it doesn't make me better or worse if I don't.
I just hope that maybe I can impart something that gives you a hand and teaches you.
What was the genesis moment, obviously, with some financial enablement so you could create a foundation that led to, you know what?
I'm going to put this foundation together because I got some messages and I've got some assistance I can give these young men 2008.
Dirty Jobs is the number one show on Discovery.
Maybe the number one show on the network.
Certainly on the network, maybe on cable.
The show was in 180 countries and I was doing great.
And everything, we'd been on five years and the country was going into a recession and it was shocking how quickly you guys will remember how fast things crapped.
September of October of 08, thud.
That's well.
So I started Microworks on Labor Day of 2008.
And I started it because we were on the road in those days living in Motel 6s and Super 8s and getting up every morning.
And, you know, I'd pick up the newspaper and I'd look at the headlines and it was just always, always, always unemployment numbers.
It was always how many people are out of work.
And I remember watching it go five, six, six and a half, seven, seven and a half, eight, you know, over 10% on dirty jobs everywhere we went.
I saw help wanted signs.
And so something was happening in the country that nobody was talking about.
And it had to do with what I thought at the time was a mismatch of skills.
So you had 2.3 million jobs that people couldn't seem to hire for.
And these jobs, by and large, didn't require a four-year degree.
They required training.
And, you know, after these jobs, I would always go out and have a beer with the people that I worked with.
And I'd always ask them the same question.
And it was always the same answer.
It was just we, our single biggest challenge is finding people willing to show up early, stay late, and take a bite of the crap sandwich when it comes along, learn a skill that's in demand.
We just can't find it.
Couldn't find them five years ago.
Now it's virtually impossible.
So the foundation started in a way, now that I think about it, for the same reason I read to the blind.
I wanted to do something good for somebody other than me, but I also wanted to benefit from it, to be completely honest.
So it began as a PR campaign for what I believed were a couple million opportunities that were going unloved, right?
And so I wanted to talk about those opportunities in the same way that Dirty Jobs was designed to shine a light on humans doing these kinds of jobs.
I just wanted to look at the jobs themselves and say, hey, America, not for nothing, but right, these guys are killing it as plumbers.
And here's how you do that.
So it began as a PR campaign.
It took me to Congress a few times.
We got some attention as a result of all that.
And then some companies who were struggling with their own recruiting challenges came and I started working with them because, you know, as you know, a company is its own least persuasive advocate.
And a recruiting message is not so different than a marketing message.
And the bullshit meter for people today is very, very high, right?
And so companies do a really poor job by and large of making a case for themselves.
So I became somewhat useful to big companies and helping them tell the story of the opportunities that existed underneath their own umbrellas.
And then it sort of morphed into a trade resource center.
Fans of Dirty Jobs helped me build an online resource that would just direct people to zip codes where these jobs existed.
And then we would attach things to that direction, like apprenticeship programs that were available and other ways to get the necessary training and so forth.
And then it was a scholarship fund.
And I guess it was maybe 2012, I started to raise money for that.
And we're modest by foundation standards, but we give away, we just gave away one and a half million dollars in work ethic scholarships, modest stipends, right?
But they're not for kids who want to go to a four-year school.
These are specifically for people who want to get trained for a skill that's actually in demand.
And so we've been at it now 15 years.
And what I learned along the way was this is making a difference in people's lives on a micro level, which is awesome.
It's making a difference in micro's life, which is awesome.
But on a macro level, it is having an impact on the skills gap and it is helping shape a broader conversation about the definition of a good job.
And so we're about $7 million in now.
And the biggest thing that's happened, Tom, that I didn't anticipate was that the stories I tell shifted from my own anecdotal experiences and suspicions and beliefs about what's going on in the workforce to actual testimonies from a welder who five years ago we assisted,
who now owns three vans, hired half a dozen people, heating, air conditioning, electric plumbing, has a mechanical contracting company, does a couple million dollars a year.
So it's this nexus of entrepreneurship, a willingness to get your hands dirty, an understanding that opportunity might not look like the thing you were told it looks like.
And all of that just kind of smeared together.
And so for me, the great good fortune is that my foundation rhymes perfectly with my identity in the industry.
Dirty Jobs and How America Works are the same basic show on two competitive networks, justified by an underlying foundation that actually gives me permission to come on shows like yours and say, I think you can still read to the blind, dude, in a way that helps everyone, the reader and the listener.
And that brings us back to Rand.
Powerful.
And it just brings us back to, look, here's what I don't want any of your listeners to be confused by.
It's tempting, really, really tempting to sit here and say, let me tell you how I did it.
Here was the plan.
And here were my action steps.
And here's my legacy that I've got my eye on, right?
None of that happened for me.
It was simply put your head down, do the next job, get in the hole, crawl through the sewer, get on the crab boat, crawl up the bridge, meet the men, shake their hands, listen to their stories, let them be the expert, and then get out of the way, go to another town, do it again.
And in doing that again and again, and then talking to the woman you mentioned earlier, Mary, who's with me now, who's the only business partner I've ever had.
Never had an agent, never had a manager, never had a public.
Really?
Yeah.
How long has she been with you?
18 years.
Damn.
So is it just business partner?
I mean, it's everything.
Okay, good.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not that.
Oh, okay.
It's not that, but it's bigger than that.
You know, Mary and I have a, we can communicate without talking.
You know, she was running a really, well, a boutique law firm representing some really big clients.
And she got a phone call from me from a sewer.
I negotiated my own deal with Discovery.
Right.
And in those days, I negotiated for failure because my business model wasn't based on success at all.
It was based on touch everything like it's hot.
I was a freelancer.
I had 100 jobs a year, by and large.
I wasn't looking for a hit.
And so I shrewdly negotiated my own deal, which gave them the right to do whatever they wanted in the advent or in the event of success.
Of course, there was no success.
In my mind, there's no way anybody's going to watch this show.
Anyhow, it blew up and I needed help.
So I found her.
And so, yeah, she looks at a release and says, hey, have you thought about this?
And I said, oh, okay, maybe I should think more.
We all need people like that.
We had a guy on our team.
I'm not going to say his name.
We just had a transaction five months ago.
We sold one of our insurance companies.
And we spent a few million dollars on legal fees, accounting, all this stuff just in the last six months.
Anyways, so we're going through the process and I'm interviewing our attorney who we've used for the last six years, five years.
We get a call from the other side attorney and they say, listen, man, we've never dealt with an attorney like this before.
And I said, let me give him a call.
This is no, we deal with a lot of attorneys.
This guy is a ridiculous attorney.
So I give him a call and we have a meeting together, our group, on how to manage this guy moving forward.
I said, guys, we just have to realize sometimes in life, be happy when the guy who's a pit bull is on your team.
This guy's a pit bull.
on our team were good.
The weirdest guy, most meticulous, detailed, annoying as hell for the opposition, but he got the things done in the contract that we needed it.
So when you find lawyers like that 18 years, we feel the same way as well.
We protect guys like that.
Having said that, there's a guy that needs lawyers right now.
I don't know if you guys know this guy or not.
Sam Bankman Freed.
Do you know this guy's story or not?
Are you following that story at all?
How awesome that his last name has the word bank in it.
Bankman Free.
Are you kidding me?
Yeah, yeah.
Do you know about the paper that his mom wrote?
Do you know the story that came out about the paper that his mom wrote?
So let me first read one of the stories of what happened and we'll do a couple stories here and then wrap it up.
So at this point, there is, go to page A, Tyler, if you can.
So page eight, with the number of people.
So more than a million creditors could be affected by the FTX fallout.
In its chapter 11 bankruptcy filing last week, FTX indicated that it had more than 100,000 creditors claiming this case.
In its updated filing on Tuesday, the company cited new estimates as set forth in the debtors' petitions.
There are more than, there are over 100,000 creditors in these chapter 11 cases.
In fact, there could be more than 1 million creditors in these chapter 11 cases, the updated court filing says.
Usually in such cases, debtors are required to provide a list with names and addresses of the top 20 unsecured creditors.
But given the large-scale FTX debts, the firm intends to provide a list of top 50 creditors by Friday.
During the weekend, FTX was also hit by a hacking attack, which resulted in a theft of $400 million worth of tokens.
Just accidentally, it just happened this week.
Random situation that obviously it's very random with this company.
And now the lawsuit is tying in names like Brady, Steph Curry, Giselle, Shaq, and a bunch of other guys that are part of this lawsuit.
But the part that was interesting was the mom's article that she wrote for Stanford in 2013.
Sam Bankman Freed's professor mother penned 2013 essay shredding philosophy of personal responsibility.
So you can tell she's a big Ayn Rand person.
If you want to go a little lower, go a little lower here to the article.
So the mother is a founder formercy of the new bankrupt FTX company, Stanford Law Professor, Penny 2013, arguing that it is time for Americans to ditch the philosophy of personal responsibility.
Well, trust me, your son ditched it.
Barbara Freed, who just resigned from the Democratic Super PAC, mind the gap as the board of directors chairperson, penned a 2013 essay in the Boston Review titled Beyond Blame, which argued in favor of harm reduction policies like rehabilitation over incarceration.
The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy.
It's time to move past blame.
Public reactions to wrongdoings have been studied most extensively in the context of crime.
Researchers have found that people evaluations of serious wrongfulness vary significantly across social conditions in individuals.
Tellingly, the more information people have about the context of the crime, the person who committed it, and the circumstances he or she came from, the more nuanced are their views of moral responsibility.
Yesterday, Yarn Fox, I think the question was being asked, I don't know if it was yesterday, maybe like nine days ago or so.
It could have been yesterday.
And the question was asked about what's going on.
And he said, listen, I just want us to follow the law.
What is the law that we have?
You know, if people are breaking the law, you know, we got to do something about it.
If these guys are stealing and getting away with it, we ought to do something about it.
What do you think about what's going on right now with FTX where a guy whose company was valued at $32 billion when he raised $2 billion, net worth $16 billion, takes the company from 32 to zero?
There's nothing new under the sun.
I mean, Enron, difference is, you know, Enron was in the energy space and we all knew that underneath all of this thing was a thing that we all desperately needed.
It was energy.
You know, what's under this thing?
All I see is hope and faith and a notion that something is going to be worth more today than it was yesterday.
I don't understand what the asset is, really.
So, you know, when there's nothing tangible to point to, you know, I mean, the thing about this story that interests me is, you know, what's Tom Brady thinking today?
And what's Bill Clinton thinking, right?
When you see that clip of him sitting there next to this guy in cargo shorts who's clearly on the spectrum, just babbling nonsense.
The number of credible people who sat next to this guy.
That's David Rubinstein from Carlisle Group.
He's going to be on the podcast in a couple of weeks.
Worth $4 billion, a guy sitting there, not shitting there.
He's sitting there with shorts.
It's like, hey, what's up, David?
Now, look, on the one hand, to our earlier point, I don't want my own cognitive dissonance to look at this guy and conclude that he's an asshat because he's jittery and he wears shorts and he's got a funny haircut.
Whatever.
What's really going on, what's really under a collapse of a $32 billion company is beyond my pay grade, other than a lot of people propped this guy up.
A lot of people, for whatever reason, said, yeah, him.
Yeah, yeah, let's do that.
And the next thing you know, it's collapsing under its own weight.
So, I mean, it's a horrible thing to watch, but it's funny what you said about Fox.
I was on there a month ago and they had a live audience and somebody asked me, what would you do if you were president?
Like, what one thing would you do?
And, you know, it's happening.
That's the one.
Yeah, that's the one.
Yeah.
I said, well, for starters, let's enforce the laws on the books.
Because if you don't do that, then this $32 billion story is going to actually rhyme really easily with the videotapes of smash and grabs all over the place in the sense that we need to see a consequence for this.
And when you don't see a consequence, you know, when you're shown a border that's clearly insecure, when you're shown people falling from the sky during a withdrawal from a place like Afghanistan that was clearly botched, you know, when you can see clearly the fact of a thing, and then you're told definitively that it's something else, then you really do have a level of cognitive dissonance that goes way beyond, oh,
the Dirty Jobs guy used to sing the opera.
And it goes back to the very first thing we were talking about.
This bag is not a toy.
Don't stick your finger in the fan.
And you find yourself looking at the other people in the room going, are you kidding me?
So you're really going to tell me not to stick my finger in a fan?
Are you kidding me?
You're really going to tell me that I should put my retirement money into a pension plan that's going to invest heavily in a company based on that guy?
Really?
So for me, it all comes back to the absurdity of being told that the bag is not a toy.
This kid, right, you're going to tell me with a straight face that this kid ought to be running a $32 billion company.
You're going to print, all right, you're in charge of a newspaper, and you're going to print an article from a woman who says what we need in our country right now is less personal responsibility.
That's his mom.
That's his mom, right?
So look, things will fall into place.
Things will start to make sense.
But the bigger question is, what's the publisher thinking?
Who would print an article like that?
Why would you do that?
You know?
You mentioned that he's clearly on the spectrum.
No, apparently.
Well, can you go to that picture with the shorts?
This kid's been billed up for years, 30 under 30, right?
So for me, one of the cues on being on the spectrum is like your ability or your inability to take social cues.
Okay, so like you look at a picture like this.
You're sitting down with a full-on billionaire doing an interview for Bloomberg.
All right.
We're familiar with Mark Zuckerberg and he shows up in a t-shirt and what have you.
He's built up a legitimate business.
Whether it's controversial or not, we can have a whole discussion about.
Here's this kid.
Shows up looking like this, like just rolled up out of bed.
At what point in your life do you say, yep, I'm just going to show up in sweatpants cut off, socks, slippers, frazzled hair, the amount of disrespect it takes to show up to an interview like this with a credible businessman, to me, is like a telltale sign of, of course, something was off.
Yeah.
Okay, like the Zuckerberg thing, all right, t-shirt, you know, that's, you know, Silicon Valley.
But to try to pull off this look, not taking social clues.
It's not even, you want that from that.
That's what your expectation of this guy is.
He's not going to give it to you.
This is not a guy that sees himself, dude.
His girlfriend's father was the ex-SEC chairman.
There's so much stuff with this guy that people don't even know about what he was tied to.
Like the amount of protection this guy had.
But going back to it, there's a picture of him.
If you can pull up him with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on the same stage with this guy.
I don't know if you've seen that picture.
Now, that's really...
Yeah, yeah.
That's what I was talking about.
Yeah, that's the weird one.
That's when you see some like that.
You're like, what the hell is going on here, right?
I mean, I understand David Rubinstein, you want to come in and say, hey, I'm a bigger deal than you.
Fine.
That's Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
Look at the way he's dressed.
That's my point.
I'm with you.
I'm totally with you.
It's disrespectful.
But forget, let's forget that part.
Let's just say, okay, fine.
So this is your style.
No problem.
Fine.
The paper trail.
Mom says, let's avoid personal responsibility.
It's interesting how you mentioned Enron.
You know who was one of our keynote speakers?
I put an event together two months ago at the Diplomat, and a couple thousand entrepreneurs show up from around the world.
One of our keynote speakers was Andy Fastell.
You know who Andy Fastell is?
I know he is.
The CFO of Enron that went to jail for eight years.
I brought him up.
Everyone's like, we're still trying to figure out why you brought this guy here.
I said, I want to keep you out of jail because he got up and he says, one year, I was the CFO of the year.
Next year, this is my ID to the jail I lived in for eight years.
That's the opening speech.
Okay, Andy Fastell.
But can you bring up that, what is that?
Yeah, can you, Demonstration?
She was what?
Yeah, I just read that a minute ago.
Can you bring up the Instagram post of the comparison of this versus Lehman's brothers?
Go back to the first slide.
Go back all the way down to the first one.
Okay, so billions of dollars seem to have disappeared with the collapse of FTX.
How does this even happen?
Go to the next one.
The collapse of FTX was vaporized.
Billions of dollars in customers' money is shaking the confidence of a market that was already in thrones of a long and brutal downturn.
Okay, great.
Go to the next one.
Okay.
There are some useful historical comparisons, but none paint a complete picture simply because crypto's value is by nature derived purely from the speculative opinions that the traders and investors willing to buy and sell.
Okay, fine.
But watch this one here.
Go to the next one.
A big difference between the implosion of FTX and the downfall of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
Is shocking, Mike, when you see the stats, is that Lehman's brothers had more than $600 billion in assets that, while partially liquid at the time, were real assets and could be recovered.
In the aftermath of Lehman's collapse, its 111,000 customers received the $106 billion they were owed and secured creditors received full payouts.
Sure, Lehman Brothers, equity investors were completely wiped out.
You bought the stock, as will be the investors in FTX.
But that's the risk equity investors assume when they buy in.
Totally get it.
I bought a stock.
Go to the next one.
What can't be said in the FTX customers will be made whole on the billions of dollars evaporated from accounts in part driven by customer funds being used with leverage by FTX's sister company, Alameda, who he was dating the CEO, researched to make up for losses by trading liquid tokens.
According to a report from Financial Times, FTX had less than $1 billion on liquid assets against $9 billion in liabilities, compared that to Lehman Brothers, who went bankrupt with $639 billion in assets.
$613.
If you compare it to Lehman should have never gone out of business, they just tipped the scale.
That's insane to me when you see this comparison, Tom.
It is.
The comparisons are out there and consequences out there.
Like today is a very telling day.
We all know who Elizabeth Holmes is, the nice young lady who took nearly a billion dollars from investors in Photos, was it?
Yes, that's correct.
And put a Secretary of State on her board.
Yeah, that's right.
Secretary of State knows a lot about making medicine.
And her playbook, remember she blamed, oh, it's my lover, my COO, Sonny Balwani.
Remember that?
It was like 48 and she was like 26.
And she had that in there.
But today, today in Superior, right there in Santa Clara County, she is being sentenced today.
Her sentencing hearing is today.
It might be happening right now.
And we are going to find out: is there another set of laws for people who are well connected and can lawyer up?
Or is she going to get the sentencing that's due?
And we've seen during the year waiting for the sentencing, she's had one child and then got pregnant again.
And there is a leak of people close to her that said that was the plot to get married and then to have a child and a half in order to have some sort of an influence on the court as we come into the sentencing hearing.
True story.
And you know who he's blaming?
He's blaming.
The article reads: FTX claims to be releasing uncensored sex tape allegedly between disgraced Sam Bankman Freed and Alameda's CEO Caroline Ellison Soon.
This is a story that's coming out.
And he's blaming his ex-lover for FTX collapse and $32 billion loss, admits he lied about being moral.
There's a playbook.
There's a script.
Dumb game.
We woke Westerners play.
Here's a word he used.
A dumb game we woke Westerners play.
Gotta love this guy.
You read about this guy like, you know, I won, you know, a very inspirational type of a character.
Your Maxwell quote earlier, right?
Once you figure out how to persuade, now you have to decide what you're going to do.
Are you going to use your powers for good or evil?
And Adam, when you start talking about, you know, a sign of disrespect, it's interesting because Zuckerberg shows up in a t-shirt and this guy shows up in cargo pants.
And, you know, it doesn't quite land the same way, except that it did.
I mean, look at Bill Clinton.
Look at, is that that's Tony Blair, right?
Yes.
I mean, former prime minister of the Two of the most powerful men on the planet are sitting next to this guy, and they have to decide, you know, is he so incredibly comfortable in his own skin?
Is he so amazingly authentic that we're now feeling we're the establishment, we're stodgy, we're fake in our ridiculous suits and ties.
This guy's the real deal.
I guarantee you, a lot of people who invested in him saw him as authentic and persuasive precisely because he was disrespectful in the traditional way.
And I just, you know, every single day there's, in my life anyway, there's a moment where I have to like think about that.
Last night I presented an award at the Patriot Awards.
And right up to the last minute, I couldn't decide if I should wear a tie.
And I never really agonize over this stuff too much, but some people are in tuxedos.
And then they're at the next table are the guys from Duck Dynasty.
And they got their beards and their flannel shirts.
And they don't give a shit, right?
They don't care.
And then, you know, it's just very hard to know in this world where people have a perception of you.
How do you dress?
And when do you stop trying to fit in in that traditional sense?
In the end, I put a tie on just because, you know, I just thought that was a smart thing to do.
And frankly, my shirt didn't fit great.
Kind of bunching up a little bit.
But the point is, right now it's obvious.
Right now, there's nothing authentic.
Right.
Really?
There's nothing impressive here, you know?
But in the moment, with $32 billion behind you.
Sold the caricature of the mad scientist.
Correct.
I'll say one thing real quick.
For me, this comes down to knowing the difference between right and wrong.
So you use the coin analogy, right?
And you can be awkward and authentic and I'm just keeping it real and I'm showing up with shorts and cargo shorts and sitting with a former president of the United States and former prime minister.
Okay, cool.
But there's a track record here.
Okay.
The look, the hair, the shorts, to me, disrespectful, not reading the room, not just showing class.
All right.
What he's accused of is commingling funds, right?
And taking money from Alameda Capital and using it to fund FTX and whatever that was that was clearly wrongdoing.
Called fraud.
Fraud.
Okay.
Thank you.
The dating of the CEO and, you know, that whole thing and whether that was appropriate or not.
You know, this is, that's why I asked you sort of the on the spectrum thing.
The thing you hear about the spectrum is that you're not taking social cues and you're just sort of disregarding social norms and their traditions and norms for a reason, right?
And it just seems to me that, you know, he was hiding under the guise of I'm the smartest guy in the room.
Trust me.
All this biddy bobs and bad da-da-da and da-da-da and crypto and blockchain, like just trust me, I'm smarter than all of you.
But behind the scenes, it's kind of almost like behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz or the Emperor has no clothes on.
It turns out that he was actually just a fraudster and just completely being disrespectful.
Here's what else is missing, right?
I don't know exactly what that event was, but if those two guys were there, then there were a lot of other people there.
There was a lot of security there.
There was a lot of money there, right?
Everything was there except somebody in charge who had the balls to say, Sam, not in that outfit.
Right.
Okay.
It's called a dress code.
Right.
And we don't care what you've done or who you are, but it just, it's as simple as a dress code.
You know, there are many, restaurants that you wouldn't be allowed to walk into dressed like that.
You really think you're going to sit down here with two of the most powerful men on the planet, you know, looking like a skater?
No, you know, and guess what?
We just Googled you and it seems you can afford a jacket and tie.
Go get one.
Right.
There was no one there to say it because saying that would have been about the most uncool thing in the world.
So that guy doesn't have, he's not subjected to dress coats.
He's not subjected to what you said, Tom.
We're going to find out if the rules apply to Ms. Holmes.
All right.
The rules don't apply to him.
Not yet.
They're about to.
They're going to.
Well, I mean, listen, again, it goes back to how certain people on how they raise kids.
I'm now not surprised when I read an article like that.
When your mom says we got to get away from personal responsibility, who else do you have left to impress on the world?
You know, when your mom's like, don't worry about it, son.
It's, you know, if my mom says this, I'm going to do this.
Anyone surprised?
I'm not surprised.
You know, the biggest pushback I get from people today is the fact that the scholarship program we run is called a work ethic scholarship.
And one of the things you have to do to apply is you have to sign a document called the Sweat Pledge, which I wrote 12 years ago.
It stands for skills and work ethic aren't taboo.
Yeah, I had had some wine beforehand, and I was trying to articulate the basic principles that had been important to me growing up and it had helped me achieve some measure of success and the same principles that every employer I know quietly craves in the workforce.
And the pushback today is, you know, work ethic has become a bad word.
Personal responsibility has become a triggering word.
A positive attitude, you know, you start preaching that stuff, then you're part of the patriarchy.
You're part of the problem.
You talk about delayed gratification.
Well, then you're just in the pocket of the man.
So all of these traditional tropes have become weird targets today.
And I just think that part of that's going on here too, for her to take it to the point that she's saying not only is personal responsibility not the most important thing, but it's the enemy.
It's the enemy.
Dude, Lockheed Martin of all companies, about a year ago, came out with a statement that identified certain words as no longer appropriate to be used within their protocols, within their training materials and so forth.
Work ethic was on the list.
Get out of here.
Ambition was on the list.
When you start, right?
And so the language is shifting under our feet.
And Adam, you said it perfectly before.
The emperor has no clothes.
This is the world we're living in right now, where we're being shown a thing that's crystal clear, and we're being told that it's not there.
And if you remember the end of Hans Christian Anderson's great story, you know, it was a kid.
It was a kid in the crowd who finally said out loud, you know, the emperor.
The emperor has no clothes.
That dude's naked.
Yeah.
Exactly.
That dude's naked.
Hey, I don't, and then people start to nod their heads.
Right.
But it's amazing how he was able to fool even the smartest people in the world.
Everyone who was so used to traditional norms, traditional, what's the quote by Jim Kramer, who's been wrong on a bunch of things lately, and though he's very entertaining.
Jim Kramer, JP Morgan of this generation, is Sam Bankman Freed.
That's the thing.
How did not meet your word?
Exactly.
So it's like he even fooled some of the smartest people because they're like, oh, this is new.
This is like totally different.
Like, we got to go with this.
That's the thing, right?
The smart people want to be fooled.
They want to be fooled.
Except for Warren Buffett.
What do you think about Elon Musk?
I'm pro-Musk.
You know, I'm glad he's out in the world.
I'm glad he's taking big swings.
You know, I don't agree with him on everything, but he'll get us to Mars.
You know, far as the electric cars and all the other stuff beats me.
I don't know.
I'm a classic energy guy.
Personally, I don't think we have any hope if we make fossil fuels the enemy.
I think there's great hope in exploring all kinds of alternatives.
But I'm up to my neck in this conversation, you know, big time.
Really?
There are 3 billion people on this planet whose primary source of energy is burning wood and dung.
3 billion.
China and India combined are opening a coal-fired plant every week and have plans to continue doing so for the next 30 years.
So when I look at our energy policy, absolutely explore and develop every alternative you can.
But when we make energy, when we make fossil fuels the enemy, good God, man, we're opening a Pandora's box that's going to make this thing look like small potatoes.
The dinosaurs had it coming.
Let's use them up.
They're making a great case for it, though.
And then anytime you, I mean, at this pace, I don't know if you are aware of this or not, based on what many scientists and Congresswomen from New York are saying, we only have 12 more years left to live.
Oh, Jesus.
By the way, you know, the two girls that threw tomato soup against the Picasso painting?
We had them on the podcast.
No.
No joke.
Just two weeks ago.
Oh, no joke.
I'm telling you, life on the podcast.
And I said, so tell me, what are you really afraid of?
And it's like, what do you mean we're really afraid of?
I said, you really believe you could like what?
I'm afraid I'm going to lose the right to live a full life.
I said, so you, so I said, why do you think insurance companies are still insurance people, insuring people saying you're going to live to 90, 95 years old?
Why do you think life insurance is getting cheaper?
Don't you think these people who are smart people would underwrite it saying they're going to die in 12 years?
The other girl says, no, I think people are dying now.
We may not see next year.
And she's straight up serious.
The current educational system, you said something about college when you said education, is it valuable?
Sure.
Is it worth at any cost?
Well, of course not, right?
Of course not said about it.
It's a cost for everything.
Yeah, so it's interesting seeing how these kids are coming out of college and they're afraid that the world's coming to an end.
It makes a parent wonder if you want to send your kids to some of these institutions because you may lose them if they go to some of these institutions.
I'll tell you who'd be a terrific guest for you.
Michael Schellenberger, if you haven't talked to him already, he was on my podcast about two months ago.
I love his Twitter feed.
Oh, it's terrific, man.
It's so good.
Empathy, quick, and right.
Yeah.
And he was a couple minutes late to the podcast because he was watching a guy run onto the tennis court and lit his arm on fire during a Roger Federer thing.
And it was a climate activist who he described as a climate narcissist, right?
And he said, that's what's going on.
If you're a person who glues their hand to the wall after throwing tomato soup on a priceless work of art, it doesn't matter why you did it or what your conscious explanation is for doing it.
What you really want is to be looked at.
You want to be seen.
And that's unfortunately how we reward those people.
You run on a tennis court and light your arm on fire.
You want to be seen.
And then you'll talk about whatever the cause of the day is.
But his journey is extraordinary because he was, he was kind of a hippie.
His parents were hippies and he was very, very much into the environmental movement and into the whole pushback against climate change.
But he just got to the point where he began connecting dots and came to the conclusion that what's good for the climate was very bad for the environment.
And he's looking at birds, millions of birds, not only being killed by windmills, but being killed by solar farms.
Calls them streamers, right?
And like Ivan Paul out in the desert, these large condors and eagles will be flying, and the reflection coming off of the panels, they explode in midair.
Happens every day, and they fall to the ground like fireworks.
So, you know, he just went on an odyssey and came to the conclusion that the only sensible way out of this really is going to be nuclear.
And the way to get to nuclear is going to be to help the world go through the hierarchical process of coal to gas, you know, oil, cleaner versions of all of those things.
And all of these things have to happen.
He ran for governor.
He only got a couple percent of the vote in California.
But his journey is incredible.
His TED Talk is amazing.
He's got his head screwed on in a really, really interesting way.
And he's become a jagged little pill for that side because he's of them and he wants what we all want, you know, a cleaner, safer, better planet.
But look, it's hard to argue with him when he points to France and talks about 98% of the energy that they're generating.
The electricity they're generating is nuclear.
And the dirty little truth nobody wants to know about is the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island reactors are seven generations back of the reactors, the small reactors that they have today.
Like in France, they're smaller and they don't have to be right next to the ocean to use 1 million gallons of pass-through water a day.
It's just amazing.
And nobody seems to understand that.
And it is actually clean, it's actually efficient.
It's not railroad cars full of rods that go on the death train and they're in the salt mines underneath Nevada.
I'm going to remember the Maxwell quote more than anything else from today, except for that release thing.
But you know what?
Once you have your powers of persuasion, what are you going to do with him?
You know, what are you going to do with him?
This guy's very persuasive.
I love what he's doing.
Well, I think you've talked about him before.
And I want to say I follow him on Twitter because it was a topic of discussion we had about him.
And I got curious and I started following what he has to say.
Interesting guy.
But it has been a pleasure to finally have you here on Link Up.
Truly, I've been looking forward to this for a long time.
Me too.
The conversation was unbelievable.
I learned a lot from you and your journey and what you've done.
And the audience obviously loved it.
How do we know they loved it?
Based on it's 100% fact.
100% facts because it's 100% fact.
There's certain things in life, Mike, is 100% fact.
It's on the internet.
This is one of them.
It's a hundred percent fact.
Good.
But next time, next time we do a part two of this, I want to coordinate a full day of our council meeting together.
I want them to go to dinner together, lunch, bring all the paperwork.
Or once upon a time during the shooting as somebody's got to do it, the same exact thing happened.
I was doing a story on a woman who had created basically the perfect chicken.
And we were going to meet her and talk to her about how all this breeding had led to this perfect, perfect chicken that high-end restaurants were selling for 70 bucks a platter.
And the farm that she had been leasing to raise these chickens was owned by some Mennonites.
And the production company had sent out the releases and everybody had signed them.
But we didn't realize that her farm, the farm where we were going to be shooting, was owned by these Mennonites.
And so we show up and we're ready to go.
And we're like, oh, you know what?
We need a location release.
And the guy looks at it.
He's like, I would never sign something like this.
Why would I ever sign something like this?
And my poor producer is like, well, you know, in order to be on TV.
And they're, why would I ever want to be on TV?
What's the TV?
What are you even talking about?
And so I finally step in.
I'm like, look, we're here to tell her story.
She leases your land and she's raising her chickens.
We think she's doing a cool thing.
And he says, I have no problem with that.
Please, you're welcome.
Be my guest.
I'm like, thank you.
It's just that, you know, we have to shove this nasty piece of paper up your ass, okay?
Because that's just how the business works.
And he's like, well, surely you understand that I would never, ever, under any circumstances, sign anything generated by anyone else, especially at the last minute.
And I looked at him and I said, I was like, you know what?
He's right.
Why?
We should have found a way to get to him earlier and sooner.
And so I handed him a pen and I said, could you just jot down what you would be comfortable with?
And he says, I, Josiah blankety blank, blank, welcome you to my land and promise not to sue you.
And he signed it.
And I called the production company.
I said, listen, we're either shooting or we're not.
This guy just wants to shake my hand.
And he wrote one sentence.
He said, you know, like, read the sentence again.
And I read it and they're like, could you put it?
I'm like, no, dude, I'm like, I can't put in anything.
This is it.
Yeah.
This is it.
Yeah.
So we shook hands and everything was fine.
Got it.
Right.
And so I'm not saying that as some sort of weird metaphor for what happened here, but it was a moment in time.
That's cool.
An odd story.
I'll never forget it.
Yeah, man.
I'll never forget it.
So in other words, he was a bad influence on you.
And he inspired you today.
It's a pilot.
I wouldn't be here without him.
This was a blast.
Hey, gang, I'm sure you guys enjoyed it today.
Have a great weekend.
We got a bunch of podcasts and stuff going on.
Go ahead.
You were going to say something?
Next week?
Next week, are we doing a podcast special?
Oh, shoot.
Next week, we're doing a JFK special debate.
Three people we have here that I'll be interviewing that is it two or three that they're going to be talking about.
One says the traditional story is right.
The other says no.
No, actually, the hardest thing to find was somebody that actually believes the traditional story.
That's what I'm saying.
One that's the hardest thing to find.
Yeah, so it's going to be a fun debate.
We'll have next week.
And if we don't talk between now and the podcast you missed next week for JFK, have a happy Thanksgiving.
