#2235 - Mike Rowe

Mike Rowe (0:01)

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Jamie (0:06)

Shrain by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

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

Mike Rowe (0:24)

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

Jamie (0:28)

What's the line?

Mike Rowe (0:29)

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

Jamie (0:45)

I don't remember that. It's been too long since I've seen that movie.

Mike Rowe (0:52)

Best...

Jamie (0:53)

He's a little bit of a fucking distraction. Can he calm down?

Joe Rogan (0:58)

Trank him. I don't hear him at all.

Jamie (1:00)

We hear him. We don't have our headphones on. Maybe we should put our headphones on.

Mike Rowe (1:03)

I thought you were talking about me.

Jamie (1:04)

No. Carl.

Mike Rowe (1:05)

For an awful moment.

Jamie (1:07)

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

Mike Rowe (1:12)

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

Jamie (1:15)

He's adorable.

Mike Rowe (1:16)

I mean, it's such a personality thing at that... For me, with dogs and pets in general, you know? Like, you know right away if this thing has a personality.

Jamie (1:25)

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

Mike Rowe (1:27)

Yeah.

Jamie (1:28)

There's no doubt about that.

Mike Rowe (1:30)

Yeah, and...

Jamie (1:30)

He's like a little kid.

Mike Rowe (1:32)

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

Jamie (1:36)

I like a dog with a person name.

Mike Rowe (1:37)

Yeah, me too.

Jamie (1:38)

Like, Fido? What the fuck is a Fido?

Mike Rowe (1:40)

No one knows.

Jamie (1:41)

Well, that's... Well, actually... Oh, no, that's Filo. I was thinking of Clint Eastwood in Every Which Way But Loose. He was Filo Beto.

Mike Rowe (1:48)

Could also be Filo Farnsworth, who created the television.

Jamie (1:53)

For real?

Mike Rowe (1:53)

Yeah.

Jamie (1:54)

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

Mike Rowe (2:00)

What do they call that? Like a hive mentality?

Jamie (2:03)

Mm, yeah, right, right.

Mike Rowe (2:05)

Like, that happened with the integrated circuit, right? When Kilby at Radio Shack was doing the same basic work, I think, that Robert Noyce was doing for Intel. And one was here in Texas, and the other was in California. And they had never met, and they had never compared notes, but the work on the circuitry was so close that they wound up sharing the Nobel Prize.

Jamie (2:31)

Oh, that's interesting.

Mike Rowe (2:33)

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

Jamie (2:35)

That's a common thing with human beings, and it's this concept of morphic resonance. Have you ever heard of that concept? Rupert Sheldrake, he wrote about this, and the idea is... And it's based on some actual facts, too, about there's some real statistics about rats. Like, if you teach a rat how to run a maze on the East Coast, a rat on the West Coast will run it faster.

It's like they learn the pattern somehow or another. It's very bizarre. There's, like, information that's apparently shared across species. And the idea is that somehow or another they're quantumly entangled, like that the entire group of these specific types of animals are quantumly entangled or entangled in some way that we don't understand.

Mike Rowe (3:27)

So it's a kind of, I mean, I would think biological evolution might flirt with that. I read a paper a guy wrote named was Patrick House. This was his Ph.D. And he was talking about toxoplasma gondii and histoplasmosis. And it was a crazy paper. His real premise was trying to understand the phenomenon of the cat lady and why every culture, like this isn't unique to America.

In every culture, you can find a woman who, you know, two cats, three cats, maybe, but like went all the way to 38, right? And just was like, this is perfectly normal. So his paper was what happens to a person's brain to tell it it's normal to have 38 cats. And then it gets super complicated because he identifies a gondii that lives in the cat's gut and basically breeds there. And what he learned was when the cats were crapping, the gondii would come out. And then the rats and the mice that ate the cat crap, something was happening to their brains on a neurological level. This gondii basically disabled the part of the brain that would tell an otherwise sentient rat to run from the cat. But suddenly they weren't running. They became prey and they became docile. And the cats started obliterating the mice and rat population because this thing that was breeding in its ass was effectively making its prey easier to catch. So Dr. House thought, well, we've all heard about why pregnant women should stay away from cats because that can have an effect. And a rat's brain and a human brain have a surprising number of parallels. So he basically postulated that Doris the Cat Lady was living a fairly normal life until she got just a little bit of cat shit on her fingers and ate it. And the gondii disabled the part of her brain that said, hey, maybe two cats is not.