June 25, 2024 • 49 mins
Like most people, you’ve probably heard of Mike Rowe because of his willingness to do over 300 strange, disgusting and unique jobs like – sewer inspector – cow inseminator and shark suit tester as the creator and host of Discovery Channel’s popular show “Dirty Jobs”.
But when Jason and Peter heard about his unusual start in the entertainment business, they invited him to discuss that…AND…the secret sauce that made Dirty Jobs a phenomenon. His podcast, “The Way I Heard It”, which has been downloaded nearly 300 million times. His new movie, “Something to Stand For” in theaters June 27th and available HERE. And his dirty joke... on Sesame Street! Really, no Really!!!
IN THIS EPISODE:
- Joan Rivers impact on Mike Rowe, Howie Mandel and many others.
- Hear Mike’s mother’s criticism led to his creation of Dirty Jobs.
- Why Mike demanded no “second takes” on any of his shows.
- The dirty joke on Sesame Street that polarized the audience.
- How Mike’s became a professional opera singer.
- Deadliest Catch taught him hammer fighting, yes, hammer fighting!
- The lost promos that Mike Rowe voiced for the Spice Channel.
- How many ways can someone say… Mazda?
***
FOLLOW MIKE:
Website – www.MikeRowe.com
Facebook – Mike Rowe
X - @MikeRoweWorks
YouTube - @TheRealMikeRowe
Instagram - @MikeRowe
Podcast – The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
Movie – “Something to Stand For”
Foundation - Mike Rowe WORKS
***
FOLLOW REALLY NO REALLY:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Really Now, really.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Really now, really well and welcome to Really No Really
with Jason Alexander and Peter Tilden, who asked you to
dig down deep and please subscribe.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
And speaking of dirty jobs, you may have heard of
Mike Rowe, the host of Discovery Channel's popular show Dirty Jobs,
on which he volunteered to do over three hundred strange,
disgusting and unique jobs like sewer inspector, cow inseminator, and
sharksuit tester.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
But when Jason and Peter.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Heard about Mike's unusual start in the entertainment business, they
invited him to discuss that and the secret sauce that
made Dirty Jobs such a phenomenon, plus his time on
Deadly's Catch, his new movie Something to Stand For, which
is in Theater's June twenty seventh, and the dirty joke
he told on Sesame Street.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Really No Really, here's Jason and Peter.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Because I haven't actually can should we be behind the
scenes of the Really No Really experienced so exciting for
that I haven't actually put eyes on you for two months.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
We have. We recorded a bunch of shows. Two months ago.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
I went away to do other work, and now here
you are live in front of them.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
So if we're going to really rip the the behind
the scenes, I miss you a lot when you're away.
We're best friends. When your best friend goes away, Yes,
it is odd, It's really odd. I got nobody can
tell distacful things to secret stuff too.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
So you're missing were I'm married. You know that you can't.
You can't share those things.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
But I can't share with her the same things I
share with you, or I wouldn't be married. You can't
share with the things you share with me. There's nothing
I don't share with Okay, but you want to do
Mike Rosen here where you're going? You want to blow
that off and just do let's test your marriage.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
I'm just starting to feel like I've been true. Yes,
I'm sorry to break this up.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
We haven't actually introed you yet. Oh please don't break
the illusion that.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
By his voice listening to that, I know how much
do you think we'd have to pay him to? Can
I tell you something? I would never have to shave again.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
If if my voice sounded anything like that.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
I'd sit at home.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
I would I would speak into things, and I would
take the checks.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
You'd you'd spend your day going a comic is racing Twitter,
and that'd be the end of it. This man makes people.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
We get excited when he goes there's five crab in
the pod.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
I mean that's you know, well, he does a lot
of let's let's intro him. He does a lot of narration.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
I can't intro him because this is so this is
you and Mike met, and you've been like like a
little bride ever since. You were so titillated, you were
so enthralled. Good lord, you were so fulfilled. Guys, I
am seconds away from introducing myself, you know, probably sam
Ba by the way. The other thing I learned about
Mike he gets really annoyed. He's much more professional we are.
(02:50):
And his podcast gets eight billion more uploads.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I don't know why. I don't know why, and that
what are we doing Here's he's so much more successful
podcast and than we are. Really really who with us?
Micro's here you know for dirty jobs and a million
other million other shows.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
A million other that's the resume. That's the box. I'll
get some dirty jobs and other things. Micro ladies and gentlemen.
It's that good, fantastic I'm not glad he drove in
bogged down in the minutia he could, he couldn't get
that bio over the actually came in.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
We'll have it, we'll have it. Let them do some
work on let's leave. Let's leave the treasure Hunt to
the listeners. But Mike's also got his own movie coming
out on June twenty seventh. I want to talk about that.
I watched and that is really fascinating. He really did
a great job. I don't know if people remember Paul
Harvey the rest of the story, but he always had
a twist. Whether he's nobody who listens to podcasts. Another
(03:47):
movie is well, there's a big twist in every story
and the great story and they take you down a
road and I loved it grown up because the audio.
Nobody did that, and Mike does it better than Paul
Harvey did. Saw him the sus Harvey or the remainders
of this family. You did a great job, So welcome
first of all to here. Thank you. And the really,
no really, which I didn't realize when I picked to Jason,
(04:09):
was that Joan Rivers actually changed your life in a
big way. And I was talking to Howie Mandel Who's studio.
This is earlier. Howie's life was changed by John. She
gave him his first job. No kidding, Joan put him
on how he looked at me today and said, don't
forget she changed my life. So the really, no, really
is people probably don't know that you were at QVC.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Yeah, that's what I don't understand how that happened.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
What now?
Speaker 4 (04:33):
I don't watch QVC. I'm not a regular viewer. But
QVC is a selling network, right, it's a product. What
were you selling product? Is that what you were doing?
Speaker 5 (04:42):
Oh? Yeah, yeah, well actually I was. I was singing
in the opera in Baltimore, and that.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
I also want to talk about it.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
Oh, nineteen eighty nine, I'd been doing that for a
few years and I crashed an audition. QVC was in
Baltimore doing these national right, looking for hosts because in
those days it was very strange. There there was no playbook.
They didn't know what to do right. Actors didn't necessarily
know how to sell. Salesmen sometimes you know, didn't really
(05:12):
know how to behave in front of the cameras. There
were five robotic cameras. Right, this is live Broadcasting No.
Seven second delay nothing, So you're out there for three
hours at a time. And so the way they used
to audition talent in those days was they would literally
sit at a table like this. They'd turn on a
camera and they'd roll a pencil across it and they'd say,
(05:36):
mister Rowe, when I asked you to please pick up
the pencil and begin to discuss it. And by discuss
I mean just tell me about it. Don't stop talking
until I tell you to stop. Make me want the pencil.
And what they don't tell you is if you can
do that for eight minutes, this is the entire audition, Jason,
I swear to God. If you do it for eight minutes,
(05:57):
you're hired and put on a kind of obationary three
month period. There's no training, at least there wasn't in
nineteen eighty nine. They put you on the air in
the middle of the night. There are four to five
thousand products in the inventory. You have no idea what
they're going to bring to you, and you have no
hope of possibly preparing right.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
So you sit there so far sounds like this show
go ahead.
Speaker 5 (06:18):
You sit there and you wait wait for somebody to
bring you the health team infrared pain reliever or the
amcore negative ion generator, or an.
Speaker 6 (06:28):
Eel skin wallet.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
We're plus size fashions for her, We're fishing gear for him.
It could be anything, sure, And that's what I did
for three years, and that's where I met.
Speaker 6 (06:38):
Jonah and you.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
The barometer for how well you were doing, I imagine
was because the sales are live, right, everything they see
if people are buying, yeah, and are you taking calls?
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (06:49):
Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
I had an IFB in each year. I had a
director telling me I sucked in my right ear. I
had Joan from Cleveland in my left ear telling me
she's lonesome and I seem like a nice boy. It's
three thirty in the morning. Most of the audience is
either hungover or getting drunk or some kind of reprobate,
you know, some sort of lonely heart in the middle
of the night tuned into this crazy connection, this totally
(07:13):
live connection. And I was pretty young at the time,
and I didn't know much about TV, but that you know,
I didn't talk about it for years. I was fired
a few times, and they hired me back and way
led onto WIGH and for a long time I never
talked about it. But in hindsight, and I know we
talked about this too. We've all had jobs that you know,
we just think, well that that's not a thing I'm
(07:35):
ever going to share. But then when you look back
at it, you realize, Ay, it wasn't so bad. And
b I actually learned everything I needed to know about
TV in the middle of the night trying to figure
out how to handle Joan in one ear in the
other one and the health team negative I am general, right,
And so yeah, it was a It was just a
(07:56):
wonderful time to be around. And it was not yet
Jit like, no one really knew it. Joan was one
of the first, Right, we got a big deal with Craftsmen,
and that kind of legitimized things from a product standpoint, right,
But then Joan Rivers came in who literally sold a
billion dollars, she did.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Over a billion. To talk about your because you were
at a point where a lot of people are you go,
I want to be an actor, I want to do
all this stuff. This is so not legitimate, and I'm
at the dregs of the entertainment business or adjacent to
the entertainment business. I love her appearance with you, my God,
and then what she did to give you a shot.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Yeah, Well, I was firmly and justifiably consigned to the
overnights because my strategy really wasn't to sell stuff so
much as it was to keep myself awake and amused.
And I treated it like a talk show, right, Like
I invited viewers to call in, not to buy stuff,
(08:53):
but to tell me what the product was and how
it worked, right, right, And so I was very it
was a very very different kind of shift, And unbeknownst
to me, Joan had had watched it. You know, she
didn't sleep a lot, and she was up at night
and she had this opinion of me. Again, I had
no idea. What happened was I got called in on
(09:15):
a Sunday afternoon. Somebody was sick, and so prime time
never happens, you know, for an overnight guy. And so
it's prime time and Joan is in the studio, and
she had been there for a couple of weeks, right,
she had just kind of really established the fact that
she was going to be a game changer. And she's
(09:36):
walking into prepare for her shift, which is after mine, right,
and she's walking in front of the set, and she
looks up at me and starts yelling at me like
she's like, where'd you get that tie?
Speaker 6 (09:50):
You look like an unmade bed.
Speaker 5 (09:51):
And she walks onto the set, right cameras, live everything,
and she and she gives me a tie button tie.
Speaker 6 (09:58):
She was selling these things.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
It's a it's a regular tie, but it had a
clip behind a little buttonhole. Or in her words, she said, here,
you know, next time you take one of your special
ladies to the olive garden and you lean forward, your
tie won't swing through your marin aerosauce. She tells me,
I look nice. I say, you look terrific for a
(10:21):
woman of your experience. She gives me the finger on
the air and then she says, if I have one more,
one more face lift, I'll have a goatee.
Speaker 6 (10:30):
Okay li Live TV.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
And and it just degenerated from there. And and what
what filled me with so much glee was that I
knew my masters were home watching this. And you know,
if you listen carefully, you can hear there's Finer slamming
shut in the distance. Because Joan was a jagged little pill.
She's a billion dollar baby, but she was unpredictable. In
(10:58):
a in a in an aggressive rated thing, and I
was kind of unpredictable too, flashing forward.
Speaker 6 (11:05):
I got fired a couple more.
Speaker 5 (11:06):
Times over a two or three year period, and at
the very end of my tenure, Joan made a deal
with CBS and CBS and QVC and something called Regal
had greenlit a terrible idea for the holidays called can
We Shop, which was all about her. It's like her
version of QVC. And part of the deal was my
(11:27):
boss said, look, you can have any of our hosts
to come and work with you as kind of a
second and there were people like Kathy Levin and Jeff
Hughes and big stars believe it or not in the
home shopping world. She picked me. He said, I want
that want that guy in the middle of the night
who's always a little hungover or a little loopy, who
(11:49):
who makes fun of the products and the viewers.
Speaker 6 (11:52):
I want him.
Speaker 5 (11:52):
And they were like, we just fired him, Can you
get anybody else. She's like, nope, I want him. They
had to hire me back, and Joan took me to
New York and just like that, I was at McMahon
and that was it.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I didn't know her well Peter used to tell me that,
you know, she would She'd go to London.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
She'd fly on a red eye to London, do a
commercial all day, do either a talk show or a
comedy set that night, get on the red eye again,
fly back and have you know QVC for half a day.
I mean, she would accomplish more in her sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yeah, than I can do. You know that I could
do in my prime. It just she was unrelentless.
Speaker 5 (12:33):
But it's the little moments too, man I One of
my favorite moments, just really in life of all times,
just a little, tiny moment. She was with me at
a dinner in a fancy restaurant in Philly called Lebec
Finn right, five star, the whole routine, white Linen's.
Speaker 6 (12:50):
I'm down there and there are.
Speaker 5 (12:51):
A couple of big shots at the table and I
got invited somehow, maybe maybe eight of us sitting there
and the waiters going around, and it's all very French,
and it's all just terrible blea, just just everybody's got
the stick up there butt, you know. And they come
to me and I order, and as I'm talking, I'm
looking at the waiter and out of the corner of
my eye, I see something extraordinary. I'm sitting next to
(13:14):
a white wall, and on the white wall, in motion
is a roach about half the size of my thumb,
moving with alacrity. Yeah, all right, And I don't know
why I did it. I never could have done it
again had I had, I thought about it. But without
even taking my eyes off the waiter, I took my
(13:34):
fist and I smashed the thing. Okay, And I finished
with the order, and Joan made a sound.
Speaker 6 (13:42):
It wasn't quite a bark or a laugh, it was
just a wa.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
And then I said, and if we could have somebody
to clean this up, that'd be terrific. And oh my god,
making her laugh in that moment, and making everybody else
at the table, including the made horrified, I mean horrified.
This kid just killed a roach in a crowded dining
room of the best restaurant.
Speaker 6 (14:08):
In phil Phillip.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
That was the year that they lost that star. Yeah,
she loved that stuff. And moving again, moving on from Joan,
you do a lot of voice, You've launched a lot
of shows. You sold this movie without a distributor. But
like with dirty jobs, you sell stuff. You're always selling stuff.
But you seem like a mellow kind of guy, and
Dirty Jobs was only going to be three episodes special.
Speaker 5 (14:31):
Right, Oh yeah, Well, you know, Dirty Job is very
personal to me because I had done a lot of
TV and a lot of stuff prior to that, and
I wasn't terribly interested in breaking the mold. But it
was my granddad who I grew up next to. He
was a magician, not by trade, he was a tradesman,
but he could build a house without a blueprint. Carl
(14:54):
Noble was he only went to the seventh grade, but he
was a mechanical genius. And when he was ninety, my
mother called me at CBS where I was working in
San Francisco, and she says, Michael, your grandfather turned ninety yesterday,
and you know he's not going to be around forever.
And I was thinking, wouldn't it be great if before
he died he could turn the TV on and see
you doing something that looked like work, Like Jesus, Mom.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Ruddle wow.
Speaker 6 (15:19):
But she was right.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
So I took the cameraman from Evening Magazine, a terrible
show I was hosting at the time, and we went
into the sewers. The next day of San Francisco to
host this episode, and while I was in there, a
whole list of things happened that turned into a book.
But essentially I was prohibited from doing my job as
a host, and I wound up becoming a guest working
(15:42):
with a sewer inspector replacing the bricks right in this
river of filth and the roaches and the rats and
the whole thing was like some sort of German porno
and it was awful and funny, and I put it
on the air, and that basically became Dirty Jobs. It
took a while, but in the pitch, the executive was like, well,
(16:03):
what the what is the point of this? I mean,
it's not really on our brand. I mean, it's sort
of maybe interesting, but it sounds like a talk show
and a sewer. I said, well, it kind of is,
but it's a metaphorical sewer and a literal one. We'll
go someplace different every day. And basically I pitched the
show with a behind the scenes camera that never stopped rolling,
(16:25):
that never did a second take. I said, let's just
show the viewer what it takes to make a show,
and at the same time, let's make the let the
viewer program the show. All the ideas come from the viewers,
and let's let these people that we feature, let them
be the star. I'll just be the dileton, I'll be
the apprentice. And they were like, that is a terrible
(16:47):
idea that will never ever work. But we already had
a deal and I owed them three and I was
doing a bunch of other stuff for them anyway, so
they let me do it. And when we put that
thing on the air, it wasn't that we got great feedback.
It's not like people said, my god, that show is amazing,
or you're so funny or what I got. We're thousands
(17:09):
of letters from people saying you think that was dirty?
Where do you meet my dad, my brother, my cousin,
my uncle, sister. Why do you see what they do?
And that was the moment I was like, oh, I'm answer, Oh,
you're going to be a better guest than you are
a host. And twenty two years later, that show has
been on the air every single day.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Here's what's crazy about the pushback.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
When you pitch, essentially when it's dirty jobs and they go, oh,
what is that?
Speaker 1 (17:38):
I was going to watch that?
Speaker 4 (17:40):
This executive must know that we live in a world
where there's a show called How It's Made, where he's
like bed springs. Well, we think, and there's not a host,
there's not a thing, there's a disembodied voice, there's never dialogue.
It's like, here's a cup, we take cardboard. This is
the glue machine. It runs to a thing, it cuts it.
(18:02):
Here's the shapeer. Here's a cup, and that's it. That's
the show. And this guy's going, how are you with
rats and a sewer? Going to be fascinating?
Speaker 5 (18:12):
And you go, well, I mean, look everything, everything's connected, right,
And this will sound more grandiose than I mean it too,
but I control a fairly straight line from Dirty Jobs
to about forty one or forty two shows.
Speaker 6 (18:28):
Yeah, that made it on the air.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
How It's Made is a bit of a stretch, but
it's adjacent, right, because people by that point had become
so exhausted by the focus grouped careful testing, right by
all of the you know, there's a big writer strike
in two thousand. I guess it was that that opened
the door to a lot of this kind of programming too, right,
(18:50):
So a lot of things had to happen at the
same time in a weird way.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
You've now represent something. You became a brand based on
the authenticity of what you're doing.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
I'm guests based on my mother calling me and begging
me to do something that looked like work before the
old man.
Speaker 6 (19:05):
Did you get to see it one episode?
Speaker 5 (19:07):
Yeah, yeah, he saw me coax the uh the semen
out of a bull.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Oh man, by the way, one of my favorite episodes.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
Thanks that bull still calls, by the.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Way, and I'm tearing up. I'm tearing up because your grandfather.
Speaker 6 (19:20):
Went, that's my voice. That's my voice, if.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
You honor him.
Speaker 5 (19:26):
Was a liquor too, right, Yeah, noble Tennessee whiskey is
out there too.
Speaker 6 (19:30):
No, look, man, it's it's I.
Speaker 5 (19:31):
I would love to tell you that that that that
it's all the result of a carefully calculated plan that
was well executed by like minded people. It wasn't it
was it was Joan giving me a break. It was
my mom giving me a challenge. It was a river
of crap. It was a sewer inspector who who we.
Speaker 6 (19:52):
Simply didn't edit. You know, we didn't.
Speaker 5 (19:55):
I wasn't kidding when I said no second takes and
and you you could never sell a show like this again.
It was just that Overton window stays open for for
a very short period and most of the time you
don't even know it when you're crawling through it. But
back in two thousand and two, reality meant reality. There
was nothing on the air except Jesse James was building
(20:18):
motorcycles and Jeff Probes was hosting a Survivor, which is
a competition show.
Speaker 6 (20:23):
That was it.
Speaker 5 (20:25):
So when I said, look, guys, I really really really
want camera A to be the behind the scenes camera no.
And that's the thing. I called it the Truth Camp
because when a plane flies over and the sound guy goes, ah,
this is no good. Well, I mean that might not
be terribly entertaining, but it's terribly honest. And when I
(20:47):
turned to the Truth Camp and say, god, this sound
guy sew up my end. I mean, we're right in
the middle of a thing, you know. I mean, like
I'm trying to weld a strut on a bridge, and
now we have to stop and wait for a plane.
You know, you don't stop and wait for a plane
in life. You know, you only do that when you're
making a show. And you know, what's the old expression,
(21:10):
if you're cutting, you're lying, right, So I didn't want
a lot of edits in the show, and I wanted
the viewer to at least understand that good bad are indifferent.
We're not going to bullst No, this is what my
day was like, you know, at the Ostrich farm. This
is what my day was like, right, cleaning skulls. This
is my day was like putting in a road and
(21:31):
Alliance Nebraska. We're working with linemen and so forth, and Peter.
I got so much permission as a result of that
to do whatever I wanted to do with the show.
And then I got a whole new level of permission
with big brands Caterpillar, Ford, Kimberly Clark. And that's when
(21:51):
I started this foundation that came out of Dirty Jobs.
And you mentioned my guidance counsel. It goes back to
that too. It was like, wait a second, I thought
I wanted to be an actor Artemye still kind of does,
maybe a little. But the thing that I'm most grateful
for today is that, for better or worse, the guy
on Dirty Jobs is me, and and I didn't have
(22:12):
the energy, or the time or the desire to pretend
to be somebody else. So as a result, when people
meet me and say great things like, man, I feel
like I know you. I can tell him with a
straight face, you do. Yeah, But for better or worse,
that was it. It was the same guy on QVC, the
same guy on Dirty Jobs.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
It's the same guy on Sesame Street. You know what
he did on Sesame Street. I don't, okay, he was
really being him. It was probably the first time on
Sesame Street that anybody did a dirty joke.
Speaker 5 (22:47):
Well, we set a new bar. It's very low. But
Oscar the Grouch invited me.
Speaker 4 (22:51):
I worked with Oscar when I got same Carol Spiney
with Carol Oscar, I know he was in the bird outfit.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Oh I didn't you know what. I never looked below
the well.
Speaker 5 (23:02):
Well I looked below the thing. Let me tell you
what I saw. I'm there as the Dirty Jobs guy,
teaching kids how to count stinky cheese, which is the
stuff in Oscars can. He's in the can and I'm
outside of the can, and we're and we're just doing
the Sesame Street thing. And then nobody had ever been
invited into Oscar's house before, right, and so he says,
you know, would you like to come in here with me?
Speaker 6 (23:24):
Have a look.
Speaker 5 (23:24):
I said, you're inviting me into the trash can and
he said, yeah, I am. And I said, so what
do I do? Just just like crawl in. He goes, no, no, no,
come on around through the back door. And I said, oh,
I've always wanted to go on through the back door.
And they left it in because it's right innocent. Yeah,
And I didn't, like, you know, I didn't lean lean
(23:49):
I I always wanted to go to the back door.
And I cut out of the frames and they wipe
and just like that.
Speaker 6 (23:54):
You know, Oh my.
Speaker 5 (24:00):
God, when this thing aired, I mean, oh my god,
when this thing aired. I mean, look, I got a
lot of male from dirty jobs over the years, but
(24:22):
this thing, you know, suddenly, like you know, young moms
and dads they're watching with their parents. Half of them
were positively scandalized and the other half were profoundly delighted.
Speaker 6 (24:34):
And that's that, of course. And you never came back
to Oddly, I've never been asked back that was it.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
But here's here's what I'm because you were talking about.
You know, people come up to you and they say,
I feel like I know, and you say what you do,
But I'm trying to I'm trying to get the picture
of you coming up into this because you do feel
to me a authentically and genuinely like ay, and I
(25:03):
mean this, you know, I mean this in the best
way a working guy.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
I think that's one of.
Speaker 4 (25:08):
The reasons we loved dirty jobs so much is you
were never condescending to any of these guys. It was
I know, I do dirty work, I do this kind
of stuff. This is what I do, and now you
do something that's even more. But at the same time,
you tell me that you were singing opera and I go,
that's where I have trouble going who is this guy?
(25:29):
And you wanted to be an actor and I think
you'd probably be a very good actor, and yet you
make your living now. I could not do what you
do even here doing this. This is why I'm still
in therapy. When I turned sixty, I said to my therapist.
She says, what do you want to work on now?
And I go, well, you know, I've been so many
avatars of myself in sixty years. I'm not sure I
(25:51):
know which one the real one is. I don't know
what is authentically me, and I think before I die,
I'd like to at least meet him. Then I can
decide whether I want to stay in that one.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
I would like to.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
I'd like to know what the real deal is. It
seems like you have stumbled into this kind of authenticity
but that but it leaves parts of you behind.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Do you feel that? Do you feel like you are
not allowed to be that opera singer?
Speaker 4 (26:18):
Do you do you feel like if you walked into
a scripted series or a film at this point playing
a character that people would go bullshit.
Speaker 6 (26:25):
No, I don't.
Speaker 5 (26:27):
And actually the reason I feel pretty good about that
is because I played Tim Allen's younger brother on an
episode of Last Man Standing and and the response was
really gratifying and nice and fun. But to your point,
I think, I think we're living in this uh in
a pretty binary time where people have been trained to
(26:50):
put us in our proper place and to see people
in their proper lane, and we get really confused when
people UH force us to embrace a kind of cognitive dissonance,
like what the hell is Jim Carrey doing with eternal
sunshine of the spotless mind?
Speaker 6 (27:07):
Make me laugh? What are you doing?
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Right?
Speaker 5 (27:09):
So actors deal with that all the time, but so
do does everybody else today? And so look The truth is,
while Dirty Jobs was a tribute to my granddad, I
didn't inherit his abilities. The handy gene is quite tragically recessive,
and it took me a long time to figure that out.
(27:31):
And it was him who told me. I was sixteen
and I had completely bitched up. I was working as
his apprentice and we were putting in a patio and
I got the whole concrete mix wrong, disaster right, And
I've been making all kinds of I'm not a total
disaster in that world. I just don't have the natural
(27:52):
propctivity that is magician like you know, and I never will.
But he pulled me aside and said, Mike, look, you're
not really enamored of what I do. What you're enamored
of is how I do it. You're you love this
tradesman mentality. Well, guess what, We're all tradesmen. Just get
(28:13):
a different toolbox. Approach your work like I do, a
beginning in a middle and an end a jobber, right.
And so that made perfect sense to my brain. Unfortunately,
or maybe fortunately, the tools that we most often associate
with that mindset were not in my possession. So the
new toolbox was figure out something that you can do,
(28:38):
and frankly, between us chickens, nobody gives a sord.
Speaker 6 (28:42):
You like it, just to figure out what you're good at.
Speaker 5 (28:45):
And as it turns out, I could carry a tune,
and as it turns out, I could write, Because it
turns out, when I was young, my voice had changed early,
so I sounded a lot older than I was. So
suddenly I'm I'm narrating nature specials high above the vast
reaches of the Baron Serengetti, the wildebeast wanders off to
(29:05):
the watering hole, where, of course a crocodile is going
to tear his throat out right. And so I started
doing those kinds of things, and I developed a toolbox.
But it was a weird one. It got me into
the opera. I had no great desire to be in
the opera, but couldn't get my sag card. You'll appreciate this, right,
I couldn't get an agent in Baltimore or DC if
(29:28):
I wasn't in the Union, and if I wasn't, if
I didn't have an agent, I couldn't audition for the
work I.
Speaker 6 (29:33):
Wanted to do.
Speaker 5 (29:34):
It's a terrible, terrible tautology, right, But there was a loophole.
If you could get your AGMA card American Guild of
Musical Artists, you could buy your Screen Actors Guild. Just
pay your dues. It's a sister union. So for me,
the calculus was simple. I went to the toolbox. It's like, okay,
you can carry a tune. I learned that the Baltimore
(29:58):
Opera was holding audition last Thursday of every month open calls. Right,
every every good thing that's happened to me has happened
as a result of an open call. I had a
buddy that I used to sing with in a barbershop quartet,
who was also in the opera, and he helped me
learn the shortest aria ever written, the Coat Aria from Pouccini,
two and a half minutes long in Italian. I memorize it.
(30:20):
I crashed the audition and I get in, and that's
what happens. I'm twenty one years old, I don't I
don't know anything about opera, but they were desperate for
young men with low voices, and I got in, and
so right, I get it. That guy doesn't have much
in common with the Dirty Jobs guy, except for the
(30:43):
fact that neither one of them really know what they're doing,
and both of them are showing up on the first
day of work, depending like Blanche Dubois on the kindness
of strangers and willing to take a pie in the face,
you know, and thank you for what you said about,
you know, not making these guys the brunt of the joke.
I never do that, But there are jokes and there's
(31:05):
great good humor on every work site, and so I
my job really once I got once I got it
straight in my head that I was no longer a host,
and then I was no longer going to get paid
to create the illusion of competence and short bursts. No
more was I going to look at the camera and
talk earnestly about, you know, the charge of the light Brigade,
(31:28):
as if I know what hell I'm talking about. Once
I let all of that go, everything fell into place,
and then suddenly I just got out of that world
of having to pretend. And it was again when it happens,
you don't always know it, but when you look back
(31:49):
and you start to connect the dots, you realize that
that's the gift. You know, if you get paid to
try not succeed, like all I had to do for
twenty years on Dirty Jobs was show up and do
my best, be respectful, try and learn. If you're going
to make a joke at somebody else's expense, make it
(32:10):
the director or somebody on the crew, or yourself. But
elevate the work. Yeah right, and yeah, that's what I've
tried to.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
By the way, I can't pinch me. You turned down
being on Deadly at Catch. You don't want to be
in the baring sea at minus forty below with a
chance of getting killed.
Speaker 5 (32:25):
I hosted that first season. Oh yeah, they gave you
a chance to be on the boat, didn't they. Oh yeah, yeah.
And then I was trying to sell Dirty Jobs, but
it was a talk show and a sewer, so they
didn't want it. They sent me up to Alaska. They said, well, look,
if you like this kind of thing, you'll probably like
working as a greenhorn on a boat. I went up
there in two thousand and three and worked on a
boat called the Bountiful and tried to figure out what
(32:49):
this show was. And while we were doing that, six
men died. And the course is filming this thing, and
it was truly unlike anything I had seen, and it
was true reality. I mean, you can't script the bearing seat.
And so when they saw that footage and when they
(33:10):
understood what the stakes really were, I think they thought
a little differently about Dirty Jobs too, and they were like,
you know something, go ahead, and well you pick one.
You can't host both, that's crazy, so you know, when
in doubt, choose the one with your name in the title.
So Dirty Jobs with Micro goes on the air around
the same time as Deadliest Catch from Meieres. But they
(33:33):
took me out of the first season and just let
me narrate, right. It was the right move. That show
didn't need a host.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
I've played poker with Captain Keith.
Speaker 6 (33:41):
Yeah, Keith goverd brisk Taker.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
These guys are the real deal man. I mean they
don't kid around. That is a crazy job. You know what.
I think of this as horrible because I can't help
my brain where it goes. How much do you hate
your family? I'm willing. So you're going out. You could die.
You're in the barring seat. It's got waves are going
to hit you. There's rogue waves, there's all kinds of shit,
and one of the other guys may turn on you
(34:05):
and slit your throat in your sleep that your hatred got.
You know, when is that Tuesday? Can we move that up?
Speaker 4 (34:09):
They take their kids, you know, the kids are all
in the business, the kids.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
The question is how bad are things at all that
the kids follow them. I don't want to go out,
Please God, let me go with you.
Speaker 5 (34:20):
Nobody nobody believes this. But but that year, as we
were trying to figure out what Dutch Harbor was, because
this is a you know, the illusion chain comes, you know,
way off Alaska and Dutch Harbor is about halfway down.
So you've got the whole Bearing Sea up to the
north in the North Pacific to the south, and you're
totally isolated. And the cast of characters that comes to
(34:40):
this tiny little fishing port, right, I mean, you got
people on the lamb, you got people from all it's
the wild West. It's not there anymore more. But there
was a bar called the Elbow Room. And I walked
into the Elbow Room. I'd been there twenty four hours
and there were just a couple of guys sitting around
drinking those old juke box playing some Sinatra thing, and
(35:00):
the bar maid was sweeping stuff up and it looked
like blood, you know, and it looked like some bits
of matter in the blood.
Speaker 6 (35:10):
It was hard to say for sure.
Speaker 5 (35:12):
So I sat down and I ordered a beer and
I started chatting with her. So I said, uh, did
I miss some excitement? What happened here? She goes, ah,
you know, hammer fight? What it proceeded with, there's like
another I said.
Speaker 6 (35:30):
What what do you mean a hammer fight?
Speaker 5 (35:32):
And then like so the first thing you have to
realize is, oh, so men are walking around with hammers.
Why is that happening? But yeah, so it was. It
was a violent place.
Speaker 6 (35:43):
It was.
Speaker 5 (35:44):
It was it was a world right, it was a
world of itself right, And that's also what.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
The rules and codes and guys who bring hammer hammer
did you break? Don't forget the hair, don't you leave
the house.
Speaker 6 (35:54):
Don't get her a hammer fight. You can't finish.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
You saw a movie, Mike's got a movie coming out.
I'm in June twenty seven that you sold yourself. There's
no studio, you know the stuff we have to go
through to just hoops we have to jump through to
get a TV show.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
So we might have to start trying to sell to
micro I think that is the do you think you
know that's the way to go because this guy. First
of all, you'll go for anything that's a job about sewers.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
We got we got better than sewers. We go belowsers.
We're going to hell. We're digging down. We're looking for
hell with Micro trying to look the hell with Mike Blow.
The franchise. The movie is called Something to Stand For.
I watch it. I don't want to talk too much
about it because I don't want to give away all
the twists they're in there, twists and turns. Each story
is about a patriot to change America and helped us
become a great nation. And there's humor in it because
(36:45):
Bike's never far from the word sphincter. He worked it
in today too. But there's intelligence to it and there's
stories just slammed by the way Sam shut. I'll usually go.
Speaker 5 (36:55):
Couldn't get a pin Robert Frost, but the woods are lovely,
dark and deep.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
With bad voice? Did you you could be the largest
porn narrator narrator in the country.
Speaker 5 (37:09):
I did the promos for the Spice Channel when they
watched God, Oh my God. There was so much fun
because they let me write them too. It was like, uh,
Jane had a problem in the fireplace and made the
appropriate call and when Frank showed up. Let's just say
that her ashes were whole and the direction was always
(37:33):
lower and dirtier.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Oh it's brilliant, but none of that is in this movie.
Speaker 6 (37:40):
None of that the movie. Don't have to take it.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Did you ever watch Toast of the Town?
Speaker 6 (37:46):
Oh yeah?
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Did you ever have one of those guys? I had one.
Speaker 4 (37:50):
That'dango? Oh oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Did you ever
have one of those?
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Mike? Can you hear me? Mike?
Speaker 4 (37:56):
So this is this is a British show about a
voice over Clem fandango Mike.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
It's a voiceover guy whose job it is.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
It's Hum Ferry who's on the Vampire showing shadows, and
he's one of the funniest guys in the world.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
And most of the show is him doing insane stuff,
trying to be a regular. But the open and clothes
I would watch a show just about that is him
in the booth, him in the booth trying to read
copy with a guy named Clem in the other room.
It always starts with can you hear me Clem? Fandango
because the guy never respond respond but he'll do things
(38:31):
like Stephen. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes?
I can hear Steven. It's clem fandango. Can you hear me? Yes?
Speaker 4 (38:42):
No, there's an episode we had we had to record
the word yes, and they went, it's it's feeling too upbeat.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Can you say yes but think no?
Speaker 5 (38:51):
But I had the MASD account years ago and I
said Mazda three hundred and nine, three nine times, one word.
All I had to do. In fact, I walked in
and the engineer said, just give me a quick mic test,
and I said, Mazda, Mazda, Maasda.
Speaker 6 (39:09):
Now, thank you.
Speaker 5 (39:11):
I got a client, So I'm in New York, clients
in San Francisco, and the real client is in Tokyo
and somebody on Chicaigo. So they're all on there and
they're all listening to me say Mazda. And so we
start the thing, and I mean, I'm looking over my
shoulder because I think somebody's just messing with me, like
I'm on.
Speaker 6 (39:27):
An episode of bunk I get.
Speaker 5 (39:29):
You get thirty or forty into these things and then
the directors like, can you step are you gesturing when
you say it?
Speaker 6 (39:37):
I can't see you? And I'm like it's a what do.
Speaker 5 (39:39):
You mean, I say, I'd like to hear you just
step forward like you're handing yes, Mazda right, And then
it just goes on and on and on. I'm sorry
for the for the squirrel, but you'll love this. The
guy says this is going to air in Japan as well.
It's gonna er it han shu kyodo and up in
(40:00):
Ho kaya doo as well, where it's pronounced differently. So
I'm like, what are you talking about. Like, the Japanese
pronunciation is matsuda, So I say okay, like fifteen times
I say Matsuda, matsuda. And then he says this might
also air in the States, and if it does with
the Japanese pronunciation, we would like you to have a
(40:23):
Japanese AC set. And I like, are you kidding me?
That's how long ago this was. And sure enough, there
I was thirty fourth Street going oh my god, and
then it was Mazda da. So it just went on
and on and on. So when my friends say, yeah,
that voiceover thing that sounds by the way, they took
(40:45):
the second one on the micross, of course, that's what
they ran the redemption for me after Matsuda was when it's.
Speaker 6 (40:54):
Got to be deep and it's got to be thick.
It's got to be.
Speaker 5 (41:08):
When it's got to be deep and it's got to
be thick, it's got to be Dominoes.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
So talk about your movie because we'll never get to it.
Speaker 5 (41:16):
It's called something to stand for. You are correct. It
happened fast. There was no studio involved. There's a group
of people called Fathom that do these events right. And
like the last Fathom event was Andrea Bicelli riding a
horse through Italy, pausing every evening to do an impromptu
concert in the ruins, and they filmed it beautifully and
(41:37):
people love it.
Speaker 6 (41:39):
I swear to.
Speaker 5 (41:40):
God, is riding a horse alone? Oh no, No, he's
got a he's got his retinue. But they're all blind too. No,
I'm making that up. Yeah, no, what do you ask?
He loves horseback riding and he loves singing. So they
made a movie of this and it was a huge
hit over Christmas. So they came to me and said,
would you like to do something like that? I'm like,
(42:02):
uh no, I don't think.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
I don't.
Speaker 6 (42:05):
I don't I don't think. I don't think I do.
Speaker 5 (42:08):
But but they're like, but look, it can be anything
like pick an occasion.
Speaker 6 (42:14):
What do you think? And I'm like, all right, you
know what I'd like to do.
Speaker 5 (42:16):
And I went back to Paul Harvey and I'd written
a couple hundred of these stories for the podcast Something
you don't know about, Somebody you do. And I said,
you know, they're a fair amount of straight up patriotic
tales in here, and I think maybe for the fourth
of July Independence Day, maybe there's something we stitch them
together with a field trip of sorts to DC. I'll
go to monuments and I'll go to memorials, and we'll
(42:38):
have a thoughtful conversation about the fact that Democrats and Republicans,
at least the good ones are Americans first. And this
is a movie that'll that'll it'll make you smile hopefully,
and it'll make you think. And there's lots of history.
It's weird. They're three hundred actors in it, but they
don't have any dialogue. They're all essentially bringing these stories
(43:01):
the life. I'm on a stage in an empty theater
like Spaulding Gray, telling it straight to the camera, so
it's all intercut and what comes out the other end
really is a kind of love letter not just to
the country, but to Paul Harvey and that kind of storytelling,
you know, and you do.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
I gotta tell you when I teach the show to Jason,
when we pictured it to Ieheart, part of it was
the Paul Harvey thing, because I loved growing up listening
to those stories. You hear about a soldier who was
dedicated to getting a secret message across enemy lines and
was shot at and lost an eye in one foot
and this, and it was eventually celebrated with the Medal
(43:40):
of Honor in France. That and it was a pigeon.
There was a pigeon. But the story. If the story's
not compelling, it's not compelling. And your stories, there are
stories about famous people everyone will know that they've never
heard before. It will blow your mind. I mean, I
called Jason up and I said, all right, I didn't
know what this was going to be and and it's okay,
(44:01):
I'm watching it because I got a chance on mic
to his face, I would do that. And I called
him and I went through the first three saying, okay,
so this is what happened, and the twist is this,
And I was raving about it because it was not
so I really was.
Speaker 6 (44:13):
That's really a sweet man.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
Look, here's how I would promote it, because you can't
talk about it without pitching it up. But I'll just
tell you, just to bring my pop back into this,
that when I was a kid, chopping wood was was
our main chore. And we had a we had a
vegetable garden, we had a woodpile, and our house was
heated with a woodstove. And my granddad and I up there,
like the lessons from that woodpile were amazing. And there
(44:37):
was always a transistor radio and Paul Harvey was always
on there, and he was always telling us one of
these tales. And you know, sometimes it's a sound bite,
sometimes it's a smell, but you know the things that
can yank you back, right. So when we started doing this,
I was I missed a flight once at b W.
(44:58):
I I was dry, I drove myself the airport. I'm
in long term parking, I'm running late, and Paul Harvey's
on with his damn rest of the story, and I
couldn't get out of the car, the car until I
heard him say.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
And how many how many people can do that? Where
you don't get out of the car. That's the same
thing with me. I always had to hear to hear me.
Speaker 5 (45:16):
So so look, he's gone, and Charles Carralt's gone, and
Stud's Circle's gone, and George Plimpton is gone. And I
don't for a moment think I can fill their shoes.
But I can. I can follow in their footsteps, right
and I and I missed that kind of storytelling. I
missed that that part of my childhood, and I missed
that part of America and all of it together. Really really,
(45:40):
I hope will know you did you did.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Jason knows me well enough. If it wasn't great, I
just say, and you have the movies coming out whatever.
I was really moved by it. I was really moved
by them. And you're a really great storyteller. Was cursing
you out. You wrote it so well. So thanks man, Mike,
thank you for coming in.
Speaker 6 (45:55):
We appreciate it. Are we done?
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Oh we've done? Oh we stopped recording. Wait, the show started.
We're recording. In twenty minutes we start. This is a
warm wet to warmart little bit so that we know
that there's speed.
Speaker 6 (46:07):
I'm pretty freakin' one.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
There we go now really, as another episode of Really
No Really comes to a close. And now you're wondering
if Micro can make a success out of an idea
like dirty jobs, what other nutty ideas have found tremendous
commercial success. Well, we've got a collection of kooky for you.
But first let's thank our guest Micro. You'd have to
work hard to not follow him, Mike, but why work
(46:29):
that hard when you can find him at his website
Micro dot com, on Facebook and Insta. He is at
Micro on x, he is at micro Works on YouTube.
Speaker 3 (46:37):
He is at the Real Micro.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
His podcast is The Way I Heard It with Micro
and his new films Something to Stand For hits theaters
June twenty seventh. Find all pertinent links in our show notes,
our little show hangs out on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and
threads at Really No Really Podcast, And of course.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
You can share your thoughts and feedback with us online
at reallynoreally dot com.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
If you have a really some amazing factor story that
boggles your mind, share it with us and if we
use it, we will send you a little gift.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
Nothing life changing, obviously, but it's the thought that counts.
Check out our full episodes on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Hit that subscribe button and take that bells here updated
when we release new videos and episodes, which we do
each Tuesday, So listen and follow us on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And Now,
what are some offbeat ideas that actually attained considerable commercial success. Well,
how about the guy who got dumped by his fiance
(47:35):
and couldn't get full value for the now.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Useless engagement ring.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
He started the company I Do Now I Don't that
has become the Craigslist for fine jewelry. Or the beer
brewing company brew Dog that sales a super alcoholic ale
called the End of History. The brew is one hundred
and ten percent proof and costs twenty thousand dollars a bottle.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
But that's not the crazy part.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Each bottle is packaged in an actual time taxidermied road kill.
You heard me right, I'm guessing the packaging makes sense after.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
You've downed a few bottles.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Or how about the founder of didenhouse dot com who
discovered his new home was the site of a grizzly murder.
Somewhat taken aback at the news, he founded the website
where for twelve bucks, they tell you if the house
you're gonna buy was the scene of a murder, suicide,
or violent death. Or one guy who was put off
by having to take his dog outside in ten degree temperatures,
so he created the Petlu, a square of fake grass
(48:29):
that sits on a waste containment system so you can
take your dog for a walk in any weather, right.
Speaker 3 (48:34):
In the comfort of your living room.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
And lastly, my favorite, Kenna Roney, who was frustrated each
Thanksgiving because he never got a chance to break the
lucky wishbone, which we all know is the most surefire
way to ensure good fortune for the coming year. So
he founded the Lucky Break, his million dollar a year
company that manufactures plastic breakable wishbones so everyone in the
family can lose to someone else. The moral there are
(48:59):
no bad ideas, just incredibly dumb personally.
Speaker 3 (49:03):
I have invested in the Really No Really podcast.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
It hasn't quite paid off yet, but we're thinking about
packaging each episode in taxidermied roadkill. We figure the smell
will get our listeners primed for the rest.
Speaker 3 (49:15):
Of the episode.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
Really It Really is a production of iHeartRadio and Blase entertainment,
Really Now, really.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Really now, really well and welcome to Really No Really
with Jason Alexander and Peter Tilden, who asked you to
dig down deep and please subscribe.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
And speaking of dirty jobs, you may have heard of
Mike Rowe, the host of Discovery Channel's popular show Dirty Jobs,
on which he volunteered to do over three hundred strange,
disgusting and unique jobs like sewer inspector, cow inseminator, and
sharksuit tester.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
But when Jason and Peter.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Heard about Mike's unusual start in the entertainment business, they
invited him to discuss that and the secret sauce that
made Dirty Jobs such a phenomenon, plus his time on
Deadly's Catch, his new movie Something to Stand For, which
is in Theater's June twenty seventh, and the dirty joke
he told on Sesame Street.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Really No Really, here's Jason and Peter.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Because I haven't actually can should we be behind the
scenes of the Really No Really experienced so exciting for
that I haven't actually put eyes on you for two months.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
We have. We recorded a bunch of shows. Two months ago.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
I went away to do other work, and now here
you are live in front of them.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
So if we're going to really rip the the behind
the scenes, I miss you a lot when you're away.
We're best friends. When your best friend goes away, Yes,
it is odd, It's really odd. I got nobody can
tell distacful things to secret stuff too.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
So you're missing were I'm married. You know that you can't.
You can't share those things.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
But I can't share with her the same things I
share with you, or I wouldn't be married. You can't
share with the things you share with me. There's nothing
I don't share with Okay, but you want to do
Mike Rosen here where you're going? You want to blow
that off and just do let's test your marriage.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
I'm just starting to feel like I've been true. Yes,
I'm sorry to break this up.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
We haven't actually introed you yet. Oh please don't break
the illusion that.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
By his voice listening to that, I know how much
do you think we'd have to pay him to? Can
I tell you something? I would never have to shave again.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
If if my voice sounded anything like that.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
I'd sit at home.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
I would I would speak into things, and I would
take the checks.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
You'd you'd spend your day going a comic is racing Twitter,
and that'd be the end of it. This man makes people.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
We get excited when he goes there's five crab in
the pod.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
I mean that's you know, well, he does a lot
of let's let's intro him. He does a lot of narration.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
I can't intro him because this is so this is
you and Mike met, and you've been like like a
little bride ever since. You were so titillated, you were
so enthralled. Good lord, you were so fulfilled. Guys, I
am seconds away from introducing myself, you know, probably sam
Ba by the way. The other thing I learned about
Mike he gets really annoyed. He's much more professional we are.
(02:50):
And his podcast gets eight billion more uploads.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I don't know why. I don't know why, and that
what are we doing Here's he's so much more successful
podcast and than we are. Really really who with us?
Micro's here you know for dirty jobs and a million
other million other shows.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
A million other that's the resume. That's the box. I'll
get some dirty jobs and other things. Micro ladies and gentlemen.
It's that good, fantastic I'm not glad he drove in
bogged down in the minutia he could, he couldn't get
that bio over the actually came in.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
We'll have it, we'll have it. Let them do some
work on let's leave. Let's leave the treasure Hunt to
the listeners. But Mike's also got his own movie coming
out on June twenty seventh. I want to talk about that.
I watched and that is really fascinating. He really did
a great job. I don't know if people remember Paul
Harvey the rest of the story, but he always had
a twist. Whether he's nobody who listens to podcasts. Another
(03:47):
movie is well, there's a big twist in every story
and the great story and they take you down a
road and I loved it grown up because the audio.
Nobody did that, and Mike does it better than Paul
Harvey did. Saw him the sus Harvey or the remainders
of this family. You did a great job, So welcome
first of all to here. Thank you. And the really,
no really, which I didn't realize when I picked to Jason,
(04:09):
was that Joan Rivers actually changed your life in a
big way. And I was talking to Howie Mandel Who's studio.
This is earlier. Howie's life was changed by John. She
gave him his first job. No kidding, Joan put him
on how he looked at me today and said, don't
forget she changed my life. So the really, no, really
is people probably don't know that you were at QVC.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Yeah, that's what I don't understand how that happened.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
What now?
Speaker 4 (04:33):
I don't watch QVC. I'm not a regular viewer. But
QVC is a selling network, right, it's a product. What
were you selling product? Is that what you were doing?
Speaker 5 (04:42):
Oh? Yeah, yeah, well actually I was. I was singing
in the opera in Baltimore, and that.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
I also want to talk about it.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
Oh, nineteen eighty nine, I'd been doing that for a
few years and I crashed an audition. QVC was in
Baltimore doing these national right, looking for hosts because in
those days it was very strange. There there was no playbook.
They didn't know what to do right. Actors didn't necessarily
know how to sell. Salesmen sometimes you know, didn't really
(05:12):
know how to behave in front of the cameras. There
were five robotic cameras. Right, this is live Broadcasting No.
Seven second delay nothing, So you're out there for three
hours at a time. And so the way they used
to audition talent in those days was they would literally
sit at a table like this. They'd turn on a
camera and they'd roll a pencil across it and they'd say,
(05:36):
mister Rowe, when I asked you to please pick up
the pencil and begin to discuss it. And by discuss
I mean just tell me about it. Don't stop talking
until I tell you to stop. Make me want the pencil.
And what they don't tell you is if you can
do that for eight minutes, this is the entire audition, Jason,
I swear to God. If you do it for eight minutes,
(05:57):
you're hired and put on a kind of obationary three
month period. There's no training, at least there wasn't in
nineteen eighty nine. They put you on the air in
the middle of the night. There are four to five
thousand products in the inventory. You have no idea what
they're going to bring to you, and you have no
hope of possibly preparing right.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
So you sit there so far sounds like this show
go ahead.
Speaker 5 (06:18):
You sit there and you wait wait for somebody to
bring you the health team infrared pain reliever or the
amcore negative ion generator, or an.
Speaker 6 (06:28):
Eel skin wallet.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
We're plus size fashions for her, We're fishing gear for him.
It could be anything, sure, And that's what I did
for three years, and that's where I met.
Speaker 6 (06:38):
Jonah and you.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
The barometer for how well you were doing, I imagine
was because the sales are live, right, everything they see
if people are buying, yeah, and are you taking calls?
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (06:49):
Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
I had an IFB in each year. I had a
director telling me I sucked in my right ear. I
had Joan from Cleveland in my left ear telling me
she's lonesome and I seem like a nice boy. It's
three thirty in the morning. Most of the audience is
either hungover or getting drunk or some kind of reprobate,
you know, some sort of lonely heart in the middle
of the night tuned into this crazy connection, this totally
(07:13):
live connection. And I was pretty young at the time,
and I didn't know much about TV, but that you know,
I didn't talk about it for years. I was fired
a few times, and they hired me back and way
led onto WIGH and for a long time I never
talked about it. But in hindsight, and I know we
talked about this too. We've all had jobs that you know,
we just think, well that that's not a thing I'm
(07:35):
ever going to share. But then when you look back
at it, you realize, Ay, it wasn't so bad. And
b I actually learned everything I needed to know about
TV in the middle of the night trying to figure
out how to handle Joan in one ear in the
other one and the health team negative I am general, right,
And so yeah, it was a It was just a
(07:56):
wonderful time to be around. And it was not yet
Jit like, no one really knew it. Joan was one
of the first, Right, we got a big deal with Craftsmen,
and that kind of legitimized things from a product standpoint, right,
But then Joan Rivers came in who literally sold a
billion dollars, she did.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Over a billion. To talk about your because you were
at a point where a lot of people are you go,
I want to be an actor, I want to do
all this stuff. This is so not legitimate, and I'm
at the dregs of the entertainment business or adjacent to
the entertainment business. I love her appearance with you, my God,
and then what she did to give you a shot.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Yeah, Well, I was firmly and justifiably consigned to the
overnights because my strategy really wasn't to sell stuff so
much as it was to keep myself awake and amused.
And I treated it like a talk show, right, Like
I invited viewers to call in, not to buy stuff,
(08:53):
but to tell me what the product was and how
it worked, right, right, And so I was very it
was a very very different kind of shift, And unbeknownst
to me, Joan had had watched it. You know, she
didn't sleep a lot, and she was up at night
and she had this opinion of me. Again, I had
no idea. What happened was I got called in on
(09:15):
a Sunday afternoon. Somebody was sick, and so prime time
never happens, you know, for an overnight guy. And so
it's prime time and Joan is in the studio, and
she had been there for a couple of weeks, right,
she had just kind of really established the fact that
she was going to be a game changer. And she's
(09:36):
walking into prepare for her shift, which is after mine, right,
and she's walking in front of the set, and she
looks up at me and starts yelling at me like
she's like, where'd you get that tie?
Speaker 6 (09:50):
You look like an unmade bed.
Speaker 5 (09:51):
And she walks onto the set, right cameras, live everything,
and she and she gives me a tie button tie.
Speaker 6 (09:58):
She was selling these things.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
It's a it's a regular tie, but it had a
clip behind a little buttonhole. Or in her words, she said, here,
you know, next time you take one of your special
ladies to the olive garden and you lean forward, your
tie won't swing through your marin aerosauce. She tells me,
I look nice. I say, you look terrific for a
(10:21):
woman of your experience. She gives me the finger on
the air and then she says, if I have one more,
one more face lift, I'll have a goatee.
Speaker 6 (10:30):
Okay li Live TV.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
And and it just degenerated from there. And and what
what filled me with so much glee was that I
knew my masters were home watching this. And you know,
if you listen carefully, you can hear there's Finer slamming
shut in the distance. Because Joan was a jagged little pill.
She's a billion dollar baby, but she was unpredictable. In
(10:58):
a in a in an aggressive rated thing, and I
was kind of unpredictable too, flashing forward.
Speaker 6 (11:05):
I got fired a couple more.
Speaker 5 (11:06):
Times over a two or three year period, and at
the very end of my tenure, Joan made a deal
with CBS and CBS and QVC and something called Regal
had greenlit a terrible idea for the holidays called can
We Shop, which was all about her. It's like her
version of QVC. And part of the deal was my
(11:27):
boss said, look, you can have any of our hosts
to come and work with you as kind of a
second and there were people like Kathy Levin and Jeff
Hughes and big stars believe it or not in the
home shopping world. She picked me. He said, I want
that want that guy in the middle of the night
who's always a little hungover or a little loopy, who
(11:49):
who makes fun of the products and the viewers.
Speaker 6 (11:52):
I want him.
Speaker 5 (11:52):
And they were like, we just fired him, Can you
get anybody else. She's like, nope, I want him. They
had to hire me back, and Joan took me to
New York and just like that, I was at McMahon
and that was it.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I didn't know her well Peter used to tell me that,
you know, she would She'd go to London.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
She'd fly on a red eye to London, do a
commercial all day, do either a talk show or a
comedy set that night, get on the red eye again,
fly back and have you know QVC for half a day.
I mean, she would accomplish more in her sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yeah, than I can do. You know that I could
do in my prime. It just she was unrelentless.
Speaker 5 (12:33):
But it's the little moments too, man I One of
my favorite moments, just really in life of all times,
just a little, tiny moment. She was with me at
a dinner in a fancy restaurant in Philly called Lebec
Finn right, five star, the whole routine, white Linen's.
Speaker 6 (12:50):
I'm down there and there are.
Speaker 5 (12:51):
A couple of big shots at the table and I
got invited somehow, maybe maybe eight of us sitting there
and the waiters going around, and it's all very French,
and it's all just terrible blea, just just everybody's got
the stick up there butt, you know. And they come
to me and I order, and as I'm talking, I'm
looking at the waiter and out of the corner of
my eye, I see something extraordinary. I'm sitting next to
(13:14):
a white wall, and on the white wall, in motion
is a roach about half the size of my thumb,
moving with alacrity. Yeah, all right, And I don't know
why I did it. I never could have done it
again had I had, I thought about it. But without
even taking my eyes off the waiter, I took my
(13:34):
fist and I smashed the thing. Okay, And I finished
with the order, and Joan made a sound.
Speaker 6 (13:42):
It wasn't quite a bark or a laugh, it was
just a wa.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
And then I said, and if we could have somebody
to clean this up, that'd be terrific. And oh my god,
making her laugh in that moment, and making everybody else
at the table, including the made horrified, I mean horrified.
This kid just killed a roach in a crowded dining
room of the best restaurant.
Speaker 6 (14:08):
In phil Phillip.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
That was the year that they lost that star. Yeah,
she loved that stuff. And moving again, moving on from Joan,
you do a lot of voice, You've launched a lot
of shows. You sold this movie without a distributor. But
like with dirty jobs, you sell stuff. You're always selling stuff.
But you seem like a mellow kind of guy, and
Dirty Jobs was only going to be three episodes special.
Speaker 5 (14:31):
Right, Oh yeah, Well, you know, Dirty Job is very
personal to me because I had done a lot of
TV and a lot of stuff prior to that, and
I wasn't terribly interested in breaking the mold. But it
was my granddad who I grew up next to. He
was a magician, not by trade, he was a tradesman,
but he could build a house without a blueprint. Carl
(14:54):
Noble was he only went to the seventh grade, but he
was a mechanical genius. And when he was ninety, my
mother called me at CBS where I was working in
San Francisco, and she says, Michael, your grandfather turned ninety yesterday,
and you know he's not going to be around forever.
And I was thinking, wouldn't it be great if before
he died he could turn the TV on and see
you doing something that looked like work, Like Jesus, Mom.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Ruddle wow.
Speaker 6 (15:19):
But she was right.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
So I took the cameraman from Evening Magazine, a terrible
show I was hosting at the time, and we went
into the sewers. The next day of San Francisco to
host this episode, and while I was in there, a
whole list of things happened that turned into a book.
But essentially I was prohibited from doing my job as
a host, and I wound up becoming a guest working
(15:42):
with a sewer inspector replacing the bricks right in this
river of filth and the roaches and the rats and
the whole thing was like some sort of German porno
and it was awful and funny, and I put it
on the air, and that basically became Dirty Jobs. It
took a while, but in the pitch, the executive was like, well,
(16:03):
what the what is the point of this? I mean,
it's not really on our brand. I mean, it's sort
of maybe interesting, but it sounds like a talk show
and a sewer. I said, well, it kind of is,
but it's a metaphorical sewer and a literal one. We'll
go someplace different every day. And basically I pitched the
show with a behind the scenes camera that never stopped rolling,
(16:25):
that never did a second take. I said, let's just
show the viewer what it takes to make a show,
and at the same time, let's make the let the
viewer program the show. All the ideas come from the viewers,
and let's let these people that we feature, let them
be the star. I'll just be the dileton, I'll be
the apprentice. And they were like, that is a terrible
(16:47):
idea that will never ever work. But we already had
a deal and I owed them three and I was
doing a bunch of other stuff for them anyway, so
they let me do it. And when we put that
thing on the air, it wasn't that we got great feedback.
It's not like people said, my god, that show is amazing,
or you're so funny or what I got. We're thousands
(17:09):
of letters from people saying you think that was dirty?
Where do you meet my dad, my brother, my cousin,
my uncle, sister. Why do you see what they do?
And that was the moment I was like, oh, I'm answer, Oh,
you're going to be a better guest than you are
a host. And twenty two years later, that show has
been on the air every single day.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Here's what's crazy about the pushback.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
When you pitch, essentially when it's dirty jobs and they go, oh,
what is that?
Speaker 1 (17:38):
I was going to watch that?
Speaker 4 (17:40):
This executive must know that we live in a world
where there's a show called How It's Made, where he's
like bed springs. Well, we think, and there's not a host,
there's not a thing, there's a disembodied voice, there's never dialogue.
It's like, here's a cup, we take cardboard. This is
the glue machine. It runs to a thing, it cuts it.
(18:02):
Here's the shapeer. Here's a cup, and that's it. That's
the show. And this guy's going, how are you with
rats and a sewer? Going to be fascinating?
Speaker 5 (18:12):
And you go, well, I mean, look everything, everything's connected, right,
And this will sound more grandiose than I mean it too,
but I control a fairly straight line from Dirty Jobs
to about forty one or forty two shows.
Speaker 6 (18:28):
Yeah, that made it on the air.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
How It's Made is a bit of a stretch, but
it's adjacent, right, because people by that point had become
so exhausted by the focus grouped careful testing, right by
all of the you know, there's a big writer strike
in two thousand. I guess it was that that opened
the door to a lot of this kind of programming too, right,
(18:50):
So a lot of things had to happen at the
same time in a weird way.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
You've now represent something. You became a brand based on
the authenticity of what you're doing.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
I'm guests based on my mother calling me and begging
me to do something that looked like work before the
old man.
Speaker 6 (19:05):
Did you get to see it one episode?
Speaker 5 (19:07):
Yeah, yeah, he saw me coax the uh the semen
out of a bull.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Oh man, by the way, one of my favorite episodes.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
Thanks that bull still calls, by the.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Way, and I'm tearing up. I'm tearing up because your grandfather.
Speaker 6 (19:20):
Went, that's my voice. That's my voice, if.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
You honor him.
Speaker 5 (19:26):
Was a liquor too, right, Yeah, noble Tennessee whiskey is
out there too.
Speaker 6 (19:30):
No, look, man, it's it's I.
Speaker 5 (19:31):
I would love to tell you that that that that
it's all the result of a carefully calculated plan that
was well executed by like minded people. It wasn't it
was it was Joan giving me a break. It was
my mom giving me a challenge. It was a river
of crap. It was a sewer inspector who who we.
Speaker 6 (19:52):
Simply didn't edit. You know, we didn't.
Speaker 5 (19:55):
I wasn't kidding when I said no second takes and
and you you could never sell a show like this again.
It was just that Overton window stays open for for
a very short period and most of the time you
don't even know it when you're crawling through it. But
back in two thousand and two, reality meant reality. There
was nothing on the air except Jesse James was building
(20:18):
motorcycles and Jeff Probes was hosting a Survivor, which is
a competition show.
Speaker 6 (20:23):
That was it.
Speaker 5 (20:25):
So when I said, look, guys, I really really really
want camera A to be the behind the scenes camera no.
And that's the thing. I called it the Truth Camp
because when a plane flies over and the sound guy goes, ah,
this is no good. Well, I mean that might not
be terribly entertaining, but it's terribly honest. And when I
(20:47):
turned to the Truth Camp and say, god, this sound
guy sew up my end. I mean, we're right in
the middle of a thing, you know. I mean, like
I'm trying to weld a strut on a bridge, and
now we have to stop and wait for a plane.
You know, you don't stop and wait for a plane
in life. You know, you only do that when you're
making a show. And you know, what's the old expression,
(21:10):
if you're cutting, you're lying, right, So I didn't want
a lot of edits in the show, and I wanted
the viewer to at least understand that good bad are indifferent.
We're not going to bullst No, this is what my
day was like, you know, at the Ostrich farm. This
is what my day was like, right, cleaning skulls. This
is my day was like putting in a road and
(21:31):
Alliance Nebraska. We're working with linemen and so forth, and Peter.
I got so much permission as a result of that
to do whatever I wanted to do with the show.
And then I got a whole new level of permission
with big brands Caterpillar, Ford, Kimberly Clark. And that's when
(21:51):
I started this foundation that came out of Dirty Jobs.
And you mentioned my guidance counsel. It goes back to
that too. It was like, wait a second, I thought
I wanted to be an actor Artemye still kind of does,
maybe a little. But the thing that I'm most grateful
for today is that, for better or worse, the guy
on Dirty Jobs is me, and and I didn't have
(22:12):
the energy, or the time or the desire to pretend
to be somebody else. So as a result, when people
meet me and say great things like, man, I feel
like I know you. I can tell him with a
straight face, you do. Yeah, But for better or worse,
that was it. It was the same guy on QVC, the
same guy on Dirty Jobs.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
It's the same guy on Sesame Street. You know what
he did on Sesame Street. I don't, okay, he was
really being him. It was probably the first time on
Sesame Street that anybody did a dirty joke.
Speaker 5 (22:47):
Well, we set a new bar. It's very low. But
Oscar the Grouch invited me.
Speaker 4 (22:51):
I worked with Oscar when I got same Carol Spiney
with Carol Oscar, I know he was in the bird outfit.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Oh I didn't you know what. I never looked below
the well.
Speaker 5 (23:02):
Well I looked below the thing. Let me tell you
what I saw. I'm there as the Dirty Jobs guy,
teaching kids how to count stinky cheese, which is the
stuff in Oscars can. He's in the can and I'm
outside of the can, and we're and we're just doing
the Sesame Street thing. And then nobody had ever been
invited into Oscar's house before, right, and so he says,
you know, would you like to come in here with me?
Speaker 6 (23:24):
Have a look.
Speaker 5 (23:24):
I said, you're inviting me into the trash can and
he said, yeah, I am. And I said, so what
do I do? Just just like crawl in. He goes, no, no, no,
come on around through the back door. And I said, oh,
I've always wanted to go on through the back door.
And they left it in because it's right innocent. Yeah,
And I didn't, like, you know, I didn't lean lean
(23:49):
I I always wanted to go to the back door.
And I cut out of the frames and they wipe
and just like that.
Speaker 6 (23:54):
You know, Oh my.
Speaker 5 (24:00):
God, when this thing aired, I mean, oh my god,
when this thing aired. I mean, look, I got a
lot of male from dirty jobs over the years, but
(24:22):
this thing, you know, suddenly, like you know, young moms
and dads they're watching with their parents. Half of them
were positively scandalized and the other half were profoundly delighted.
Speaker 6 (24:34):
And that's that, of course. And you never came back
to Oddly, I've never been asked back that was it.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
But here's here's what I'm because you were talking about.
You know, people come up to you and they say,
I feel like I know, and you say what you do,
But I'm trying to I'm trying to get the picture
of you coming up into this because you do feel
to me a authentically and genuinely like ay, and I
(25:03):
mean this, you know, I mean this in the best
way a working guy.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
I think that's one of.
Speaker 4 (25:08):
The reasons we loved dirty jobs so much is you
were never condescending to any of these guys. It was
I know, I do dirty work, I do this kind
of stuff. This is what I do, and now you
do something that's even more. But at the same time,
you tell me that you were singing opera and I go,
that's where I have trouble going who is this guy?
(25:29):
And you wanted to be an actor and I think
you'd probably be a very good actor, and yet you
make your living now. I could not do what you
do even here doing this. This is why I'm still
in therapy. When I turned sixty, I said to my therapist.
She says, what do you want to work on now?
And I go, well, you know, I've been so many
avatars of myself in sixty years. I'm not sure I
(25:51):
know which one the real one is. I don't know
what is authentically me, and I think before I die,
I'd like to at least meet him. Then I can
decide whether I want to stay in that one.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
I would like to.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
I'd like to know what the real deal is. It
seems like you have stumbled into this kind of authenticity
but that but it leaves parts of you behind.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Do you feel that? Do you feel like you are
not allowed to be that opera singer?
Speaker 4 (26:18):
Do you do you feel like if you walked into
a scripted series or a film at this point playing
a character that people would go bullshit.
Speaker 6 (26:25):
No, I don't.
Speaker 5 (26:27):
And actually the reason I feel pretty good about that
is because I played Tim Allen's younger brother on an
episode of Last Man Standing and and the response was
really gratifying and nice and fun. But to your point,
I think, I think we're living in this uh in
a pretty binary time where people have been trained to
(26:50):
put us in our proper place and to see people
in their proper lane, and we get really confused when
people UH force us to embrace a kind of cognitive dissonance,
like what the hell is Jim Carrey doing with eternal
sunshine of the spotless mind?
Speaker 6 (27:07):
Make me laugh? What are you doing?
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Right?
Speaker 5 (27:09):
So actors deal with that all the time, but so
do does everybody else today? And so look The truth is,
while Dirty Jobs was a tribute to my granddad, I
didn't inherit his abilities. The handy gene is quite tragically recessive,
and it took me a long time to figure that out.
(27:31):
And it was him who told me. I was sixteen
and I had completely bitched up. I was working as
his apprentice and we were putting in a patio and
I got the whole concrete mix wrong, disaster right, And
I've been making all kinds of I'm not a total
disaster in that world. I just don't have the natural
(27:52):
propctivity that is magician like you know, and I never will.
But he pulled me aside and said, Mike, look, you're
not really enamored of what I do. What you're enamored
of is how I do it. You're you love this
tradesman mentality. Well, guess what, We're all tradesmen. Just get
(28:13):
a different toolbox. Approach your work like I do, a
beginning in a middle and an end a jobber, right.
And so that made perfect sense to my brain. Unfortunately,
or maybe fortunately, the tools that we most often associate
with that mindset were not in my possession. So the
new toolbox was figure out something that you can do,
(28:38):
and frankly, between us chickens, nobody gives a sord.
Speaker 6 (28:42):
You like it, just to figure out what you're good at.
Speaker 5 (28:45):
And as it turns out, I could carry a tune,
and as it turns out, I could write, Because it
turns out, when I was young, my voice had changed early,
so I sounded a lot older than I was. So
suddenly I'm I'm narrating nature specials high above the vast
reaches of the Baron Serengetti, the wildebeast wanders off to
(29:05):
the watering hole, where, of course a crocodile is going
to tear his throat out right. And so I started
doing those kinds of things, and I developed a toolbox.
But it was a weird one. It got me into
the opera. I had no great desire to be in
the opera, but couldn't get my sag card. You'll appreciate this, right,
I couldn't get an agent in Baltimore or DC if
(29:28):
I wasn't in the Union, and if I wasn't, if
I didn't have an agent, I couldn't audition for the
work I.
Speaker 6 (29:33):
Wanted to do.
Speaker 5 (29:34):
It's a terrible, terrible tautology, right, But there was a loophole.
If you could get your AGMA card American Guild of
Musical Artists, you could buy your Screen Actors Guild. Just
pay your dues. It's a sister union. So for me,
the calculus was simple. I went to the toolbox. It's like, okay,
you can carry a tune. I learned that the Baltimore
(29:58):
Opera was holding audition last Thursday of every month open calls. Right,
every every good thing that's happened to me has happened
as a result of an open call. I had a
buddy that I used to sing with in a barbershop quartet,
who was also in the opera, and he helped me
learn the shortest aria ever written, the Coat Aria from Pouccini,
two and a half minutes long in Italian. I memorize it.
(30:20):
I crashed the audition and I get in, and that's
what happens. I'm twenty one years old, I don't I
don't know anything about opera, but they were desperate for
young men with low voices, and I got in, and
so right, I get it. That guy doesn't have much
in common with the Dirty Jobs guy, except for the
(30:43):
fact that neither one of them really know what they're doing,
and both of them are showing up on the first
day of work, depending like Blanche Dubois on the kindness
of strangers and willing to take a pie in the face,
you know, and thank you for what you said about,
you know, not making these guys the brunt of the joke.
I never do that, But there are jokes and there's
(31:05):
great good humor on every work site, and so I
my job really once I got once I got it
straight in my head that I was no longer a host,
and then I was no longer going to get paid
to create the illusion of competence and short bursts. No
more was I going to look at the camera and
talk earnestly about, you know, the charge of the light Brigade,
(31:28):
as if I know what hell I'm talking about. Once
I let all of that go, everything fell into place,
and then suddenly I just got out of that world
of having to pretend. And it was again when it happens,
you don't always know it, but when you look back
(31:49):
and you start to connect the dots, you realize that
that's the gift. You know, if you get paid to
try not succeed, like all I had to do for
twenty years on Dirty Jobs was show up and do
my best, be respectful, try and learn. If you're going
to make a joke at somebody else's expense, make it
(32:10):
the director or somebody on the crew, or yourself. But
elevate the work. Yeah right, and yeah, that's what I've
tried to.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
By the way, I can't pinch me. You turned down
being on Deadly at Catch. You don't want to be
in the baring sea at minus forty below with a
chance of getting killed.
Speaker 5 (32:25):
I hosted that first season. Oh yeah, they gave you
a chance to be on the boat, didn't they. Oh yeah, yeah.
And then I was trying to sell Dirty Jobs, but
it was a talk show and a sewer, so they
didn't want it. They sent me up to Alaska. They said, well, look,
if you like this kind of thing, you'll probably like
working as a greenhorn on a boat. I went up
there in two thousand and three and worked on a
boat called the Bountiful and tried to figure out what
(32:49):
this show was. And while we were doing that, six
men died. And the course is filming this thing, and
it was truly unlike anything I had seen, and it
was true reality. I mean, you can't script the bearing seat.
And so when they saw that footage and when they
(33:10):
understood what the stakes really were, I think they thought
a little differently about Dirty Jobs too, and they were like,
you know something, go ahead, and well you pick one.
You can't host both, that's crazy, so you know, when
in doubt, choose the one with your name in the title.
So Dirty Jobs with Micro goes on the air around
the same time as Deadliest Catch from Meieres. But they
(33:33):
took me out of the first season and just let
me narrate, right. It was the right move. That show
didn't need a host.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
I've played poker with Captain Keith.
Speaker 6 (33:41):
Yeah, Keith goverd brisk Taker.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
These guys are the real deal man. I mean they
don't kid around. That is a crazy job. You know what.
I think of this as horrible because I can't help
my brain where it goes. How much do you hate
your family? I'm willing. So you're going out. You could die.
You're in the barring seat. It's got waves are going
to hit you. There's rogue waves, there's all kinds of shit,
and one of the other guys may turn on you
(34:05):
and slit your throat in your sleep that your hatred got.
You know, when is that Tuesday? Can we move that up?
Speaker 4 (34:09):
They take their kids, you know, the kids are all
in the business, the kids.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
The question is how bad are things at all that
the kids follow them. I don't want to go out,
Please God, let me go with you.
Speaker 5 (34:20):
Nobody nobody believes this. But but that year, as we
were trying to figure out what Dutch Harbor was, because
this is a you know, the illusion chain comes, you know,
way off Alaska and Dutch Harbor is about halfway down.
So you've got the whole Bearing Sea up to the
north in the North Pacific to the south, and you're
totally isolated. And the cast of characters that comes to
(34:40):
this tiny little fishing port, right, I mean, you got
people on the lamb, you got people from all it's
the wild West. It's not there anymore more. But there
was a bar called the Elbow Room. And I walked
into the Elbow Room. I'd been there twenty four hours
and there were just a couple of guys sitting around
drinking those old juke box playing some Sinatra thing, and
(35:00):
the bar maid was sweeping stuff up and it looked
like blood, you know, and it looked like some bits
of matter in the blood.
Speaker 6 (35:10):
It was hard to say for sure.
Speaker 5 (35:12):
So I sat down and I ordered a beer and
I started chatting with her. So I said, uh, did
I miss some excitement? What happened here? She goes, ah,
you know, hammer fight? What it proceeded with, there's like
another I said.
Speaker 6 (35:30):
What what do you mean a hammer fight?
Speaker 5 (35:32):
And then like so the first thing you have to
realize is, oh, so men are walking around with hammers.
Why is that happening? But yeah, so it was. It
was a violent place.
Speaker 6 (35:43):
It was.
Speaker 5 (35:44):
It was it was a world right, it was a
world of itself right, And that's also what.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
The rules and codes and guys who bring hammer hammer
did you break? Don't forget the hair, don't you leave
the house.
Speaker 6 (35:54):
Don't get her a hammer fight. You can't finish.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
You saw a movie, Mike's got a movie coming out.
I'm in June twenty seven that you sold yourself. There's
no studio, you know the stuff we have to go
through to just hoops we have to jump through to
get a TV show.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
So we might have to start trying to sell to
micro I think that is the do you think you
know that's the way to go because this guy. First
of all, you'll go for anything that's a job about sewers.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
We got we got better than sewers. We go belowsers.
We're going to hell. We're digging down. We're looking for
hell with Micro trying to look the hell with Mike Blow.
The franchise. The movie is called Something to Stand For.
I watch it. I don't want to talk too much
about it because I don't want to give away all
the twists they're in there, twists and turns. Each story
is about a patriot to change America and helped us
become a great nation. And there's humor in it because
(36:45):
Bike's never far from the word sphincter. He worked it
in today too. But there's intelligence to it and there's
stories just slammed by the way Sam shut. I'll usually go.
Speaker 5 (36:55):
Couldn't get a pin Robert Frost, but the woods are lovely,
dark and deep.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
With bad voice? Did you you could be the largest
porn narrator narrator in the country.
Speaker 5 (37:09):
I did the promos for the Spice Channel when they
watched God, Oh my God. There was so much fun
because they let me write them too. It was like, uh,
Jane had a problem in the fireplace and made the
appropriate call and when Frank showed up. Let's just say
that her ashes were whole and the direction was always
(37:33):
lower and dirtier.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Oh it's brilliant, but none of that is in this movie.
Speaker 6 (37:40):
None of that the movie. Don't have to take it.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Did you ever watch Toast of the Town?
Speaker 6 (37:46):
Oh yeah?
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Did you ever have one of those guys? I had one.
Speaker 4 (37:50):
That'dango? Oh oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Did you ever
have one of those?
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Mike? Can you hear me? Mike?
Speaker 4 (37:56):
So this is this is a British show about a
voice over Clem fandango Mike.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
It's a voiceover guy whose job it is.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
It's Hum Ferry who's on the Vampire showing shadows, and
he's one of the funniest guys in the world.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
And most of the show is him doing insane stuff,
trying to be a regular. But the open and clothes
I would watch a show just about that is him
in the booth, him in the booth trying to read
copy with a guy named Clem in the other room.
It always starts with can you hear me Clem? Fandango
because the guy never respond respond but he'll do things
(38:31):
like Stephen. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes?
I can hear Steven. It's clem fandango. Can you hear me? Yes?
Speaker 4 (38:42):
No, there's an episode we had we had to record
the word yes, and they went, it's it's feeling too upbeat.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Can you say yes but think no?
Speaker 5 (38:51):
But I had the MASD account years ago and I
said Mazda three hundred and nine, three nine times, one word.
All I had to do. In fact, I walked in
and the engineer said, just give me a quick mic test,
and I said, Mazda, Mazda, Maasda.
Speaker 6 (39:09):
Now, thank you.
Speaker 5 (39:11):
I got a client, So I'm in New York, clients
in San Francisco, and the real client is in Tokyo
and somebody on Chicaigo. So they're all on there and
they're all listening to me say Mazda. And so we
start the thing, and I mean, I'm looking over my
shoulder because I think somebody's just messing with me, like
I'm on.
Speaker 6 (39:27):
An episode of bunk I get.
Speaker 5 (39:29):
You get thirty or forty into these things and then
the directors like, can you step are you gesturing when
you say it?
Speaker 6 (39:37):
I can't see you? And I'm like it's a what do.
Speaker 5 (39:39):
You mean, I say, I'd like to hear you just
step forward like you're handing yes, Mazda right, And then
it just goes on and on and on. I'm sorry
for the for the squirrel, but you'll love this. The
guy says this is going to air in Japan as well.
It's gonna er it han shu kyodo and up in
(40:00):
Ho kaya doo as well, where it's pronounced differently. So
I'm like, what are you talking about. Like, the Japanese
pronunciation is matsuda, So I say okay, like fifteen times
I say Matsuda, matsuda. And then he says this might
also air in the States, and if it does with
the Japanese pronunciation, we would like you to have a
(40:23):
Japanese AC set. And I like, are you kidding me?
That's how long ago this was. And sure enough, there
I was thirty fourth Street going oh my god, and
then it was Mazda da. So it just went on
and on and on. So when my friends say, yeah,
that voiceover thing that sounds by the way, they took
(40:45):
the second one on the micross, of course, that's what
they ran the redemption for me after Matsuda was when it's.
Speaker 6 (40:54):
Got to be deep and it's got to be thick.
It's got to be.
Speaker 5 (41:08):
When it's got to be deep and it's got to
be thick, it's got to be Dominoes.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
So talk about your movie because we'll never get to it.
Speaker 5 (41:16):
It's called something to stand for. You are correct. It
happened fast. There was no studio involved. There's a group
of people called Fathom that do these events right. And
like the last Fathom event was Andrea Bicelli riding a
horse through Italy, pausing every evening to do an impromptu
concert in the ruins, and they filmed it beautifully and
(41:37):
people love it.
Speaker 6 (41:39):
I swear to.
Speaker 5 (41:40):
God, is riding a horse alone? Oh no, No, he's
got a he's got his retinue. But they're all blind too. No,
I'm making that up. Yeah, no, what do you ask?
He loves horseback riding and he loves singing. So they
made a movie of this and it was a huge
hit over Christmas. So they came to me and said,
would you like to do something like that? I'm like,
(42:02):
uh no, I don't think.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
I don't.
Speaker 6 (42:05):
I don't I don't think. I don't think I do.
Speaker 5 (42:08):
But but they're like, but look, it can be anything
like pick an occasion.
Speaker 6 (42:14):
What do you think? And I'm like, all right, you
know what I'd like to do.
Speaker 5 (42:16):
And I went back to Paul Harvey and I'd written
a couple hundred of these stories for the podcast Something
you don't know about, Somebody you do. And I said,
you know, they're a fair amount of straight up patriotic
tales in here, and I think maybe for the fourth
of July Independence Day, maybe there's something we stitch them
together with a field trip of sorts to DC. I'll
go to monuments and I'll go to memorials, and we'll
(42:38):
have a thoughtful conversation about the fact that Democrats and Republicans,
at least the good ones are Americans first. And this
is a movie that'll that'll it'll make you smile hopefully,
and it'll make you think. And there's lots of history.
It's weird. They're three hundred actors in it, but they
don't have any dialogue. They're all essentially bringing these stories
(43:01):
the life. I'm on a stage in an empty theater
like Spaulding Gray, telling it straight to the camera, so
it's all intercut and what comes out the other end
really is a kind of love letter not just to
the country, but to Paul Harvey and that kind of storytelling,
you know, and you do.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
I gotta tell you when I teach the show to Jason,
when we pictured it to Ieheart, part of it was
the Paul Harvey thing, because I loved growing up listening
to those stories. You hear about a soldier who was
dedicated to getting a secret message across enemy lines and
was shot at and lost an eye in one foot
and this, and it was eventually celebrated with the Medal
(43:40):
of Honor in France. That and it was a pigeon.
There was a pigeon. But the story. If the story's
not compelling, it's not compelling. And your stories, there are
stories about famous people everyone will know that they've never
heard before. It will blow your mind. I mean, I
called Jason up and I said, all right, I didn't
know what this was going to be and and it's okay,
(44:01):
I'm watching it because I got a chance on mic
to his face, I would do that. And I called
him and I went through the first three saying, okay,
so this is what happened, and the twist is this,
And I was raving about it because it was not
so I really was.
Speaker 6 (44:13):
That's really a sweet man.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
Look, here's how I would promote it, because you can't
talk about it without pitching it up. But I'll just
tell you, just to bring my pop back into this,
that when I was a kid, chopping wood was was
our main chore. And we had a we had a
vegetable garden, we had a woodpile, and our house was
heated with a woodstove. And my granddad and I up there,
like the lessons from that woodpile were amazing. And there
(44:37):
was always a transistor radio and Paul Harvey was always
on there, and he was always telling us one of
these tales. And you know, sometimes it's a sound bite,
sometimes it's a smell, but you know the things that
can yank you back, right. So when we started doing this,
I was I missed a flight once at b W.
(44:58):
I I was dry, I drove myself the airport. I'm
in long term parking, I'm running late, and Paul Harvey's
on with his damn rest of the story, and I
couldn't get out of the car, the car until I
heard him say.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
And how many how many people can do that? Where
you don't get out of the car. That's the same
thing with me. I always had to hear to hear me.
Speaker 5 (45:16):
So so look, he's gone, and Charles Carralt's gone, and
Stud's Circle's gone, and George Plimpton is gone. And I
don't for a moment think I can fill their shoes.
But I can. I can follow in their footsteps, right
and I and I missed that kind of storytelling. I
missed that that part of my childhood, and I missed
that part of America and all of it together. Really really,
(45:40):
I hope will know you did you did.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Jason knows me well enough. If it wasn't great, I
just say, and you have the movies coming out whatever.
I was really moved by it. I was really moved
by them. And you're a really great storyteller. Was cursing
you out. You wrote it so well. So thanks man, Mike,
thank you for coming in.
Speaker 6 (45:55):
We appreciate it. Are we done?
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Oh we've done? Oh we stopped recording. Wait, the show started.
We're recording. In twenty minutes we start. This is a
warm wet to warmart little bit so that we know
that there's speed.
Speaker 6 (46:07):
I'm pretty freakin' one.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
There we go now really, as another episode of Really
No Really comes to a close. And now you're wondering
if Micro can make a success out of an idea
like dirty jobs, what other nutty ideas have found tremendous
commercial success. Well, we've got a collection of kooky for you.
But first let's thank our guest Micro. You'd have to
work hard to not follow him, Mike, but why work
(46:29):
that hard when you can find him at his website
Micro dot com, on Facebook and Insta. He is at
Micro on x, he is at micro Works on YouTube.
Speaker 3 (46:37):
He is at the Real Micro.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
His podcast is The Way I Heard It with Micro
and his new films Something to Stand For hits theaters
June twenty seventh. Find all pertinent links in our show notes,
our little show hangs out on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and
threads at Really No Really Podcast, And of course.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
You can share your thoughts and feedback with us online
at reallynoreally dot com.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
If you have a really some amazing factor story that
boggles your mind, share it with us and if we
use it, we will send you a little gift.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
Nothing life changing, obviously, but it's the thought that counts.
Check out our full episodes on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Hit that subscribe button and take that bells here updated
when we release new videos and episodes, which we do
each Tuesday, So listen and follow us on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And Now,
what are some offbeat ideas that actually attained considerable commercial success. Well,
how about the guy who got dumped by his fiance
(47:35):
and couldn't get full value for the now.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Useless engagement ring.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
He started the company I Do Now I Don't that
has become the Craigslist for fine jewelry. Or the beer
brewing company brew Dog that sales a super alcoholic ale
called the End of History. The brew is one hundred
and ten percent proof and costs twenty thousand dollars a bottle.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
But that's not the crazy part.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Each bottle is packaged in an actual time taxidermied road kill.
You heard me right, I'm guessing the packaging makes sense after.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
You've downed a few bottles.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Or how about the founder of didenhouse dot com who
discovered his new home was the site of a grizzly murder.
Somewhat taken aback at the news, he founded the website
where for twelve bucks, they tell you if the house
you're gonna buy was the scene of a murder, suicide,
or violent death. Or one guy who was put off
by having to take his dog outside in ten degree temperatures,
so he created the Petlu, a square of fake grass
(48:29):
that sits on a waste containment system so you can
take your dog for a walk in any weather, right.
Speaker 3 (48:34):
In the comfort of your living room.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
And lastly, my favorite, Kenna Roney, who was frustrated each
Thanksgiving because he never got a chance to break the
lucky wishbone, which we all know is the most surefire
way to ensure good fortune for the coming year. So
he founded the Lucky Break, his million dollar a year
company that manufactures plastic breakable wishbones so everyone in the
family can lose to someone else. The moral there are
(48:59):
no bad ideas, just incredibly dumb personally.
Speaker 3 (49:03):
I have invested in the Really No Really podcast.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
It hasn't quite paid off yet, but we're thinking about
packaging each episode in taxidermied roadkill. We figure the smell
will get our listeners primed for the rest.
Speaker 3 (49:15):
Of the episode.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
Really It Really is a production of iHeartRadio and Blase entertainment,
Hosts And Creators
Peter Tilden
Jason Alexander
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