After pushing the extreme TV envelope as producer of the popular favorites Ice Road Truckers and The Deadliest Catch, Thom Beers is bringing his gritty brand of reality to NBC with America's Toughest Jobs, which makes its debut August 25 at 9pm. If you think your job is tough, try going from the frigid cold of Alaska to the sweltering hear of Texas within 24 hours. In fact, the crew of America's Toughest Jobs might just have the toughest jobs of all as they follow a series of average Joe contestants thrust into big-risk, big-reward jobs.

"From logging high in the Oregon Forest to oil drilling on the Texas range, or from driving icy roads to extreme fishing -- each job requires guts and stamina, and they'll have to live up to the same standards as the pros. Their new boss and co-workers will determine success or failure, and those who don't make the grade get sent home. Upping the ante, the annual salary of each job will be thrown into the pot until the finale, where one rookie will take home the well-earned cash."

Last week The Deadbolt caught up to producer Thom Beers and show host Josh Temple who filled us in on everything from the logistical challenges of making the show and whether the jobs were too tough to the toughest jobs of the run and how they picked the contestants.

THE DEADBOLT: What are some of the logistical challenges associated with the show?

THOM BEERS: Oh, god. Boy, I tell you: We went in one day alone; literally in 24 hours we were at 20 degrees in Deadhorse, Alaska and within 24 hours we were in Midland, Texas, in Odessa and it was 104. I mean literally 90 degree temperature swings. So literally grabbing a whole army of production teams and going from one extreme to another. We went through a lot of that. Temperature extremes, job extremes - I mean you got a crab boat, which I love by the way, the cool part about that is it really validated Deadliest Catch, because these guys, the cameramen and the sound guys, I mean nobody - clearly our group of 13 workers couldn’t believe how difficult the job was. It was long hours. Literally the four worst who went back out on the boat, they were working for 56 hours with nothing more than 4 hours of sleep. But our film crew and all of the production crew had to have that same issue.

These poor guys were working with very short hours of sleep and so that and temperature and cameras. Luckily again, we know because of the number of productions we’ve done [and] know that we've got to use certain cameras and change out cameras. We're using disc cameras in extreme cold, taking the HD tape away, so literally we change gear going from the Sony to the Panasonic. All of the technological issues that we would be facing, that was a huge challenge and to try to move that many production people around. But, boy, we had a great team and there were people who worked with me for years [who] understand the challenges.

THE DEADBOLT: If two or more contestants do really well, how do you determine the winner if there is a tie?

BEERS: There was no difficulty in determining the winner in this series. What we did was, we allowed decisions to be made not by the production, we didn’t make the decisions. In every show we brought on professionals that actually do this for a living. It was if you were a first day employee. It was like every job, "Okay, you guys. Here’s the real bosses. The people who do it day in and day out, they’ll teach the job to you and they’ll judge you by your performance. You’ll be judged by your own personal performance."

It was great because it took us out of the mix, the producers, and allowed real bosses to make decisions on who was good and who was bad. Now some of that could it be arbitrary, could somebody have ended up in the final four just because they didn’t like their attitude? Absolutely. But isn’t that the real world? It’s not always the hardest worker that gets the job done. But this was not a game of psychology here, this is actually - you’re working at a job too damn hard, the job is too difficult for you to actually spend a whole lot of time trying to psych somebody out.

THE DEADBOLT: What was the most common thing that most contestants did? For example, did any of them want to quit after an hour or something like that?

JOSH TEMPLE: No, none of them quit ever. I never saw an once of quit. I saw a lot of exhausted. They all wanted to do right by the job. They were all looking to be the "atta boy". They were all looking for the "I’m doing a good job" stuff. I mean, they were looking to the crews and the bosses for the, like I said, the "atta boys". So no, none of them quit. They were all tired and you could see it. You could see as it went how tired they were, how beat they were physically. They all had limps and cuts and bruises and grimaces, but none of them quit.

BEERS: And also, Josh played a really integral part in this, because what he would do is - there’s an old saying, you know, in being a boss, "Some people you gotta push, some you gotta pull." And his job also was to kind of get in there, give this people a pat on the back once in awhile, but also kick their ass if they’re wussing out. He was really good and instrumental in letting people know, "Hey, you ain’t doing the job."

THE DEADBOLT: What do you think is the most underrated job in America, danger wise?

BEERS: I’ll always say fireman. Fireman and cops. Anybody with a gun whose real lives are in danger, soldiers.

Other Conference Call Highlights

Thom Beers on the strangest ideas he’s been pitched:

"Oh, I get a lot to be really honest. I mean, I’ve actually been getting a lot of TV critics actually writing and saying, you got to do critics as the toughest job. It’s true! But listen, every job has got its up or its positive side. But I have to be honest, what I look for in jobs that I think that would make it, that really resonate, is I look for jobs with big risk and big reward. And I think that’s the key to it. These jobs are not jobs that you’d normally [do]. Most of them, you don’t know how much you’re going to make every week. Most of us go to work and every two weeks we get a paycheck, and that paycheck we know exactly within about three pennies what that paycheck is going to be. But these are jobs, most of these jobs are jobs that literally you don’t know what the reward is. But with big risk comes big reward. Usually it’s a lot more than anybody else makes."

Beers on tough jobs he discovered while doing the series:

"Well, (rodeo) clowns is one of them. And I have to be honest with you, that show was the most brutal show I’ve ever taped in my life. I’m not kidding. I mean nobody came out of that unscathed. Obviously Deadliest Catch, when we were out in those boats, I mean, it was really cold and gnarly and icy, and the work was just really tough. But the one thing that was, was nature at its worst. But animals are different. That’s a big wild card and, man, we knew going in we had the best rodeo guys in the world with our people, and our people were literally covered in Kevlar suits from neck to ankle."

Beers on the contestants for America’s Toughest Jobs:

"People that basically worked as a corporate recruiter. We cast a guy who drives and sells pharmaceutical drugs to hospitals and doctors. He was an ex-football star who basically thought, 'Is this my lot in life?' A corporate assistant and Wall Street brokers, they’re like, 'Is this my lot in life?' So we gave them an opportunity to step out of that. But what I was going to say is this, and this is really important, that after about Episode 2, all of a sudden half these people had that weird thousand mile stare. It’s just like, "I don’t know if I’m even alive. I’m just a drone. I’m just working." And all of a sudden, man, they all spark to life. I mean, they had a look in their eye. There was passion in there and all of a sudden, man, it was like game on. It was really cool, as if they shed their kind of strangely corporate mortal coil and all of a sudden they all became wild men and women. It was like, 'This is cool!'"