May 17, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:00:58
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Exploring the unintended consequences of a safety-first culture through the lens of a quarantine was, to me, a really interesting rumination. | ||
| Because we can be a safety-first country, but only for very, very, very short periods of time. | ||
| And then we're reminded that the chief goal of living is not to merely stay alive. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| We're still in lockdown mode. | ||
| Joining me today is a true renaissance man, an author, a podcaster, a narrator, and a guy who has done an awful lot of dirty jobs. | ||
| Mike Rowe, finally, I can welcome you to The Rubin Report. | ||
| And finally, I can say it's great to be here. | ||
| I'm sorry it took so long, but, you know, jobs, stuff, whatever. | ||
| That was a big intro that I gave you there, because there's a lot of things that I could call you, I suppose, or that someone reading your bio could call you. | ||
| What would you call yourself first and foremost? | ||
| A good-natured model to vocational schizophrenia. | ||
| I don't know, that's not bad. | ||
| That was pretty good. | ||
| I mean, it's such a huge question, really. | ||
| I mean, it's just, you came right out of the gate with a giant existential query. | ||
| You know, how do I actually, how do I actually identify myself? | ||
| For a long time, I would have said, I'm a host. | ||
| And then I went through this phase where I said, well, I get paid to impersonate hosts on television shows. | ||
| And I became fairly facile at it. | ||
| But today, honestly, Thanks to Dirty Jobs and a bunch of other stuff that happened in its wake, I've adapted the mindset of a guest. | ||
| Part guest, part avatar, part cypher. | ||
| So I see my role today, not to be too grand about it, but I tap the country on the shoulder from time to time and say, hey, what about him? | ||
| Or what about her? | ||
| or get a load of this. | ||
| So I'm a curious guy with a number of platforms that allow me to indulge myself at every turn. | ||
| All right, well, now that we got the existential stuff out of the way, I'm gonna stroke your ego for a second, and then we'll get into the other stuff. | ||
| So, I didn't tell you this in the minute or two that we talked before the cameras turned on, but when the first episode of Dirty Jobs came out, I saw it, and I was like, do you remember what jobs you were doing in that, what job you did in that first one, by any chance? | ||
| Well, there's the first one that aired, and they're the first ones we shot. | ||
| The first one that aired? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The very first Dirty Jobs to air featured me in a bat cave. | ||
| Bracken Cave outside of Austin, Texas. | ||
| 40 million Mexican free-tailed bats in a very contained, creepy, horrific place. | ||
| Literally wading through guano as these bats hung upside down, defecating, urinating, and giving birth. | ||
| The little tiny placentas Showering down upon us as dermested flesh-eating beetles living in the guano crawled slowly up our woefully inadequate Tyvek suits to dine on our happy flesh. | ||
| So you got the answer correct. | ||
| And the reason I know that is because I saw the very first episode of Dirty Jobs and I went on like the official Dirty Jobs message board. | ||
| This was before we were all tweeting and all this stuff. | ||
| And I wrote something like, this Mike Rowe is completely insane. | ||
| This show is crazy. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| I couldn't stop watching. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Mike Rowe responded to me that very night. | ||
| You were on the message board, on the Dirty Jobs message board, and you responded to me. | ||
| So this is not the first time we've communicated. | ||
| I'm sure you remember that well. | ||
| It's seared into my retina, Dave. | ||
| I'll never forget that night. | ||
| I was in a Motel 6. | ||
| I was alone. | ||
| No, it's so fortuitous looking back, because I'm a late adapter. | ||
| I didn't do the Facebook or the Twitter. | ||
| In fact, I said to Jay Leno, and somebody posted this video not long ago, I would rather stick hot needles in my eye than tweet or book a face. | ||
|
unidentified
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Always, always, always late. | |
| But the Discovery Channel in 2003 said, listen, if we're trying this thing, and we'll build you a chat room. | ||
| And I said, if you call it the Mud Room, call it the Mud Room, and I'll go in it. | ||
| Those early days, talking with fans, literally from Motel 6s and Super 8s, and just shooting the shit with people in the middle of the night, Really formed the foundation, not just for the show and my interaction with the people who watch, but the program itself. | ||
| The show was programmed from that chat room. | ||
| All of the ideas after season one came from guys like you sitting up too late, you know, sending off illicit texts and whatnot. | ||
| There you go, there you go. | ||
| So we have communicated before. | ||
| I will try to keep this in the same level of respect that I communicated, I'm sure, anonymously on an odd chat board. | ||
| So there it is. | ||
| Okay, so before we do anything else, there's a million things that I want to talk to you about, but we're in this strange COVID time, obviously. | ||
| We're both in California, not in the same town, but we're both here in California where it does seem like We're gonna be one of the last to open up, and we've got a lot of kind of big government officials here that seem to be, at least from my position, encroaching on our rights at this point. | ||
| Well, first off, I guess just what's your take on the lockdown specifically, maybe a bit about California since you live here, and then I wanna talk about getting back to work and the importance of working and things like that. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I've been comparing it to the Kubler-Ross Five stages of grief, right? | ||
| I mean, the country's grieving in a sense, but we're all at different levels and we're all grieving at different speeds. | ||
| And we're trying to process a lot of information and a lot of data without a ton of context or perspective. | ||
| And so what you wind up getting with that, in my view anyway, is the opportunity to look around and go, oh, look, he's in denial. | ||
| And he's bargaining, and she's depressed, and she's angry, and that one's accepted it. | ||
| But what have they accepted exactly? | ||
| Have they accepted the reality of the virus, the reality of the lockdown, or this weird space that requires us to somehow navigate both? | ||
| And so I, early on, wrote a piece called Safety Third. | ||
| Which borrowed the title from a special I did for Discovery back in 2008, where I ruminated on the unintended consequences of a culture that truly elevates safety to an unrealistic place on some hierarchy. | ||
| The safety-first culture, the safety-first mentality, with regard to vocational work, is fascinating because it's rife with unintended consequences. | ||
| When you put safety at the top of the thing and when you tell your employees or your customers that their safety is your top priority, you set the table in a very strange way. | ||
| And it's a way that oftentimes, in my view anyway, fosters complacency among the very customers and employees who should be really taking a measure of personal responsibility for their own actions. | ||
| Exploring the unintended consequences of a safety-first culture through the lens of a quarantine was, to me, a really interesting rumination. | ||
| Because we can be a safety-first country, but only for very, very, very short periods of time. | ||
| And then we're reminded that the chief goal of living is not to merely stay alive, at least not for most people. | ||
| And then this fascinating conversation starts to unfold. | ||
| So that's a long way of saying that for the last 60 days or so, I've seen a lot, a lot of conversation right around a couple topics that I love, specifically homeostatic risk, compensatory risk, risk equilibrium, and all the subconscious things we do to maintain our own illusory relationship with the illusion of safety. | ||
| So let's talk about those types of risk a little bit, because you've worked with a ton of people who take all sorts of crazy risks in their day-to-day jobs all the time. | ||
| Do you sense that maybe we've hit the limit as we enter sort of now two months or roughly eight weeks of lockdown, that we've sort of hit the limit where now it's like, okay, we did what we had to do, but what I'm sensing, at least here in LA, where, you know, it's pretty lefty, people are willing to accept, you know, a lot of government, But now, when I'm walking my dog, my neighbors, they're suddenly going, we gotta be outside now. | ||
| It's 85 and sunny, why am I not at the beach right now? | ||
| I'm not even talking about the people that have had their lives destroyed and lost jobs and everything else. | ||
| I'm talking just sort of the regular people who walk around in a sort of daze about what reality is all the time, that even they're starting to tilt now. | ||
| Are you sort of amazed at the way we don't look at risk normally until suddenly it smacks us in the face? | ||
| Well, yes, because look, we're just not used to it yet. | ||
| And part of the reason we're not used to it is because it's just a staggering new thing to get your head around. | ||
| But it's also hard to get used to a thing when the goalposts are constantly moved, when the data is constantly shifting, and most of all, when the experts themselves are in violent disagreement. | ||
| This is the most disconcerting thing to people, and I'm sure you've spoken about it. | ||
| One of the, in that same article that I wrote early on was this idea that, I mean, here's Neil Ferguson, right? | ||
| He's very, very clear in his projections and his modeling, and here's John Ioannidis down at Stanford, and he's saying, look, I just don't, I'm looking at the same data. | ||
| I'm not disputing the data, but I just don't think it's reliable. | ||
| And these two big brain guys, you know, one's predicting 80,000 fatalities in this country, the other's 2.2 million. | ||
| Somebody's not just wrong. | ||
| Somebody's very, very, very, very wrong. | ||
| And so, you know, when you look at that through the lens of a fake news culture, where sources are inherently unreliable and where everything is politicized, you know, it's not unreasonable for the average American to look around and be skeptical. | ||
| And it's not unpatriotic to want to look at this thing from all sides and kick the tires. | ||
| And to your question, we're creatures of visual stimulation. | ||
| We take our cues from a thousand different things that happen around us all of the time. | ||
| And you're right, when the sun goes out and the breeze is warm, this is when we're supposed to be doing X, Y, and Z. | ||
| But we can't, and we don't, because time is somehow bent. | ||
| It's been hard for me personally to concentrate. | ||
| I thought when this happened I was going to sit down and take a few months and write. | ||
| I love to write. | ||
| I write mostly on planes. | ||
| Now finally I have a chance to do this. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| It's all I can do to get my podcast up once a week now. | ||
| And part of the reason is because I'm genuinely curious to stay informed or at least try to make sense of the next deal. | ||
| It's like somebody's dealing the cards, Dave, and they just don't stop. | ||
| They just keep coming. | ||
| And you think you're playing one game, And now you're in a completely different game. | ||
| It's back to the stages of grief. | ||
| Everybody is always starting over and trying to figure out where they are. | ||
| And when 330 million people are doing that contemporaneously, it's a hell of a thing. | ||
| Yeah, I love that analogy because it's not only as if they're playing with unlimited cards, but it's also that you don't know whether you're playing poker or some other game or they're going to flip it in the middle or something else. | ||
| Like we're just sort of stuck in this endless thing. | ||
| So then how does a guy like you, who has a pretty, I assume you consider yourself someone with a pretty high risk threshold, I mean, How do you decide when you have to now start taking risks and going out, either with or without a mask, or just not listening to whatever that, as you described, we have this fake news thing out there, when you're not gonna listen to the narrative anymore? | ||
| Well, it's the eternal paradox, because the honest answer in normal times to your question is deeply personal. | ||
| Risk is personal, right? | ||
| This is why risk compensation is so interesting. | ||
| You have 100 people in a room. | ||
| Everybody has a slightly different tolerance for risk. | ||
| And when you introduce protocols, safety features, for instance, the theory goes that your behavior will change to suit the measures you take. | ||
| For instance, if you wear a seatbelt, studies show you drive faster. | ||
| If you wear a helmet on your motorcycle, Studies show you corner faster. | ||
| The more safety features you put on a machine, the more likely the operator is to assume a level of risk that is slightly heightened. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because there's a thing in our brain that wants to keep the risk homeostatic state. | ||
| So risk equilibrium is the thing that says you subconsciously adjust your behavior to | ||
| adapt to your circumstances. | ||
| It was perfectly rational. | ||
| But as you start to introduce new safety protocols, subconscious things start to happen. | ||
| Why, for instance, are the most dangerous intersections in the world the ones that have the crosswalks and the little guy telling you when to walk? | ||
| In part, it's because it trains us to look at the little guy Walking. | ||
| And when we see him walking, we step off the curb and then the big blue bus takes us out, right? | ||
| Because we've been trained not to look. | ||
| So something is happening right now with regard to public safety and individual responsibility. | ||
| It's a collision. | ||
| And on the one hand, you've got a lot of people like myself and probably you who think, I'm going to do this when I'm comfortable. | ||
| I'm going to take the risk and assume more risk when I'm comfortable and when my equilibrium rebalances. | ||
| On the other hand, we're being told by our employers when to come in. | ||
| We're being told by the state when to stay home and for how long. | ||
| And now in a thousand other little ways, we're being told sometimes By being scolded, other times by being shamed in whatever way, shape, or form, the mask is going to become a dog whistle. | ||
| It already started to. | ||
| I walk around my neighborhood, half the people don't wear masks, half are. | ||
| Those who are, the waves of disapproval are coming off of them. | ||
| And they have science and research and they have proof to show me why I'm being irresponsible. | ||
| Well, the maskless crowd has their experts and they have their research. | ||
| And so it goes. | ||
| And my answer to your question is, I don't know, other than to say that we can't completely arbitrage personal responsibility out of the equation. | ||
| Yeah, arbitrage is the right word there. | ||
| That was a good word, and it's exactly the right one there. | ||
| You know, I don't want to get myself in any trouble here, but my hair is a little shorter than it was two days ago. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
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You? | |
| I'm not saying anything. | ||
| I think what you're saying is you invested in a Flowbee and spent some quality time alone. | ||
| You ever Flowbee yourself? | ||
| It ain't easy, my friend. | ||
| I now know that. | ||
| Twice this morning. | ||
| Okay, so the main question that I think I wanted to ask you that I think will sort of frame everything else we're gonna talk about is that there seems to be a narrative out there from a certain set of people That it's like, oh, going back to work, it's just too risky and no one really wants to work anyway. | ||
| And, you know, AOC had some version of this sort of thing, like only in America would we value work so high. | ||
| And as a guy that I have seen do the craziest jobs, you know, where you're stepping in shit, your hands in this animal, the bats. | ||
| Electricity, water, you can give me 10 other examples of the crazy things that you've had people do. | ||
| You work with people who would do this for a living. | ||
| Can you just talk about just broadly like the importance of work relative to finding purpose in life, relative to just setting up the rest of the things that you want out of life? | ||
| Because that actually is one of the things that I'm most worried about right now, that as we sort of So it's the frog in the boiling water. | ||
| I share your fear. | ||
| It's not going to happen like a light switch, though. | ||
| What's the old poem? | ||
| I'm not talking about slavery, but I'm just talking about getting up | ||
| with something to do because it makes you some money so you can do everything else with your life | ||
| that you wanna do. | ||
| So it's the frog in the boiling water. | ||
| I share your fear. | ||
| It's not gonna happen like a light switch though. | ||
| What's the old poem? | ||
| Not with a bang, but a whimper. | ||
| And the way it'll happen here is people like AOC and others who genuinely or maybe not so genuinely | ||
| believe that work is fundamentally another expression for drudgery | ||
| are going to make those points. | ||
| They're going to reduce it to something that's purely transactional. | ||
| That's the first step. | ||
| And if you only look at what you do as a means to make money, Then you're not an interesting person. | ||
| It's such a one-dimensional way to look at something that should, in my view, and oftentimes does, define us. | ||
| It's our work. | ||
| It's the thing we choose to do with the most conscious chunk of our life. | ||
| And so to reduce it to a paycheck is dumb. | ||
| Obviously, there's a giant transactional element involved in it, but there's so much more. | ||
| Dirty jobs happened because I couldn't follow in my grandfather's footsteps, which I very much wanted to do. | ||
| My pop was a guy who could build a house without a blueprint. | ||
| He only went to the seventh grade, but he had the chip, right, in his brain that he could take your watch apart and put it back together blindfolded. | ||
| He could build a house. | ||
| He could run pipe. | ||
| He was a master electrician, steam fitter, pipe fitter, mechanic, architect, all of that. | ||
| Well, he was heroic in his youth, in his time, for those things. | ||
| Today, he'd be Mr. Cellophane. | ||
| You know, he's transparent. | ||
| So many of those trades, so many of those vocations have fallen into this gap between blue and white collar. | ||
| They've lost their luster, and we're simply not properly gobsmacked the way we used to be about the miracle of modern plumbing, or the miracle that happens when you flick the switch and the light comes on. | ||
| So Dirty Jobs was meant to be a tribute to my grandfather, Initially, and it was. | ||
| And then it became a rumination on essential work. | ||
| Which is interesting, right? | ||
| Because obviously the headlines have caught up with that. | ||
| And that's really been my great good fortune over the years. | ||
| I do average shows with low production value, but big themes. | ||
| And I stick with those themes. | ||
| And every couple of years, the headlines will catch up with them. | ||
| Dirty Jobs and the people we featured became weirdly relevant when the economy crashed in 2009. | ||
| And it's become weirdly relevant this month. | ||
| I've been on every talk show there is to talk about essential work. | ||
| And it's funny. | ||
| I'll tell you what happens. | ||
| I mean, look, there's a poster. | ||
| I keep it on my wall to remind me. | ||
| I put a pig on a pedestal many years ago for a lot of reasons. | ||
| So people have me on, they expect me to make the case for essential workers. | ||
| And of course I do, because everybody understands that case. | ||
| Now when Dirty Jobs went on, nobody was making that case, so I felt special. | ||
| And I felt like an iconoclast out there saying, hey, don't forget about this one and this one and this one. | ||
| Right now, while I still hold them in the absolute highest esteem, Amazed at how we've taken 35 million people and deemed them unessential. | ||
| That, to me, is something I reckon we're going to look back on with great linguistic embarrassment. | ||
| That's exactly what I wanted to ask you next, so continue, continue. | ||
| It's your turn. | ||
| I just realized. | ||
| That was the question, really. | ||
| Once we say to 35 million people, you're not essential, it's not just about the job that they do, it's the message that's getting across to their lives, which in some ways, I actually think in some ways, if they can get through it and then rethink what they do, maybe there is something else they wanna do, but I don't think that's the message that most people are gonna get. | ||
| I think we're gonna leave people with some sort of existential crisis. | ||
| We're doing it. | ||
| It's part of the grieving process, I was saying, Earlier, people are coming to terms with the fact that their vocations don't matter in the eyes of virtually everyone who has a show to host. | ||
| Because in our well-intended enthusiasm to celebrate the essential workers, we've done a thing we always do with the language. | ||
| And I am not a politically correct person. | ||
| At least I try not to be. | ||
| But language does matter a lot. | ||
| And, you know, in my own foundation, when I feel most comfortably in my own lane, I talk about education and the skilled trades. | ||
| And higher education is a turn of phrase that has become inculcated. | ||
| And when we talk about the importance of higher education, well, who would doubt it? | ||
| Of course, we need big people with big brains doing important work, but What does higher education imply, if not the existence of many forms of lower education, subordinate education? | ||
| So the language bakes in a terrible kind of analysis. | ||
| If you don't get a four-year degree, if you don't buy into the idea that the most expensive path is the best path for the most people, then you wind up doing something, they don't call it lower education because that would just be crazy, but they call it alternative. | ||
| Ah, we have some alternatives for you, Dave. | ||
| Maybe you'd like it over here in a trade school or perhaps you'd be comfortable over here in a community college or in a fellowship or an apprenticeship. | ||
| So we did that in education and the unintended consequences are breathtaking. | ||
| We're doing it now with the very heart of people's identities and we're doing it around this simple word. | ||
| We're not meaning to do it, but you watch. | ||
| It's going to come back over the net. | ||
| Yeah, let's actually back up for a second and talk about your foundation a little bit because everything you're saying right now I think does get to a trend that I've been seeing for a while. | ||
| Which is, I've had so many guests who come from academia and so much of our national conversation is about outrage culture and cancel culture and what's happening at colleges. | ||
| And now because of YouTube, average people, and I mean that in the best sense of average, all of us can watch incredible thinkers give lectures. | ||
| You can watch Jordan Peterson lectures on YouTube for free and maybe get more information from that than you can from a semester that you're paying 25 grand for. | ||
| So talk about your foundation and sort of, can you just relate that a little bit to what you see happening with higher ed relative to, if you have a trade right now, it's like, you are essential. | ||
| Again, in the best sense of essential, that's not, I'm not putting down the non-essential. | ||
| Maybe we can come up with a better word for it right now. | ||
| Well, we should, because everything has a season. | ||
| And part of the reason we're locked in this endless feedback loop of nonsense is because we're in love with cookie cutter advice. | ||
| And so we dispense it with certainty. | ||
| And this is what politicians do to be elected. | ||
| They have to. | ||
| They have to say the thing that's going to resonate with the most people. | ||
| And so they wind up retrenching to bromides and platitudes and tropes. | ||
| That's what safety first is. | ||
| That's why Cuomo said no measure, no matter how draconian or drastic, could be deemed Unjustifiable if it saves a single life. | ||
| Reasonable people. | ||
| Reasonable people know that's a lie. | ||
| Reasonable people know that when United Airlines or American Airlines says, here at blankety blank airline, your safety is our priority. | ||
| We don't really believe that. | ||
| Because seconds later they invite us to strap ourselves into an aluminum tube and defy gravity at 700 miles an hour, okay? | ||
| The truth is on the back of the ticket. | ||
| Rules of carriage. | ||
| Read that and you'll hear the truth. | ||
| So we don't tell people the truth in a lot of ways, but when we lie to them now, the consequences are catastrophic. | ||
| So we've got to get past the cookie cutter advice, the bromides and the platitudes. | ||
| If there's a silver lining, to answer your question, And I think there probably are a couple of them. | ||
| I don't know when we'll see them, but the way we learn surely has to be among them. | ||
| What we're doing right now, I mean, opinions will vary, obviously, but this is meaningful. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Everyone's on board with what we're doing right now. | ||
| Trust me. | ||
| I mean, we're having a grown-up conversation. | ||
| I don't feel rushed to provide you with a soundbite. | ||
| You listen more than you talk, which most hosts don't do. | ||
| So you're doing a bunch of stuff right. | ||
| And two weeks ago, I watched on YouTube a lecture from MIT for free. | ||
| The same lecture that would have cost X thousands of dollars, right? | ||
| So I think when the dust settles, higher education is going to be revealed for the luxury brand That it truly is. | ||
| And when you take away all of the stuff that has nothing to do with learning or connecting, you're going to be left with a breathtakingly overpriced product. | ||
| And when you look at schools like Harvard, who didn't refund their, the, the tuitions for canceled classes, they didn't even refund the room and board, you know, well, people are going to get used to this screen. | ||
| They already are. | ||
| But I think more and more are going to take deeper dives into more interesting ponds. | ||
| And they're going to find big thinkers with easily accessible ideas who are exponentially more interesting than professors. | ||
| And soon, I hope, our obscene love affair with credentialing is going to stop. | ||
| And we're going to pause in every imaginable way. | ||
| And look at what is essential, not just in workers or in work, but in education, in food, in fun, you know, everything is going to be forced through a different filter. | ||
| And I wish I were smarter to say specifically, you know, how that's going to come out. | ||
| But, um, you never get to see how the sausage is truly made, you know, in our industry really, or in, or in any until the dust settles. | ||
| So we've got to get through it, but I don't know that we're going to recognize the airline industry. | ||
| I don't know that we're gonna recognize higher education. | ||
| I don't know that we're gonna recognize exercise. | ||
| Everything is going to change. | ||
| Something's for the better, something's not. | ||
| But that level of uncertainty through all of it is the reason why everybody's walking around like an extra in The Walking Dead right now, waiting for clarity. | ||
| Yeah, so even though we maybe didn't want this, I'm pretty sure nobody wanted this to But to all of your points that lead to the silver lining of this, do you think that in a weird way, this was almost necessary? | ||
| Like it almost feels like the old world was just sort of caught in some weird, I guess the frog in the pot kind of thing. | ||
| Like our institutions were not working properly. | ||
| We know how much money we were sending kids out into the real world with debt, that the jobs weren't quite there, that if anything, maybe this toppled enough of the of just the grunge and grit that was on the machine. | ||
| Maybe it chipped off enough that we can start building some new stuff, so that's actually good. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Look, I liken it to... I mean, every major transformative moment in your own life was probably preceded by something akin to a splat. | ||
| Sometimes things have to go splat, you know? | ||
| Sometimes, in little ways, Sometimes in big ways. | ||
| This is a biggie. | ||
| This is the biggest thing I've ever lived through in terms of a, you know, a transformational event. | ||
| And so I, again, I don't know how it's going to shake out, but yeah, the machine just got shook. | ||
| We just, something grabbed us by the lapels with big muscular hands and shook really, it's still shaking us. | ||
| We're trying to make sense of the shaking while our glasses are flying off of our head and the change is coming out of our butt. | ||
| We're still being shook. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| I mentioned this, I think, to Glenn Beck the other day. | ||
| You know, the thing nobody is thinking about with regard to a premature opening versus an unnecessary sequestration is what happened to the Brits in 39, right? | ||
| I mean, Hitler dropped a lot of bombs on London every day, day after day, day after day after day. | ||
| For weeks, they stayed in, hunkered in the bunker, in the air raid shelters. | ||
| And then, about three weeks into it, they started venturing out. | ||
| Bombs were still falling, right? | ||
| Started opening shops. | ||
| The bombs were still falling. | ||
| They opened the schools. | ||
| The bombs were still falling. | ||
| They were cleaning up. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying, for a second, that we ought to do anything premature. | ||
| But I'm saying that no matter what we do first, it's going to feel premature. | ||
| Doesn't matter what it is. | ||
| It's going to feel reckless. | ||
| It has to, by definition. | ||
| But the thing is, what really drove the Brits out of their bunkers? | ||
| I wasn't there. | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| But from what I've read, my sense of it is, they got bored. | ||
| They got bored of being terrorized. | ||
| And they just said, No. | ||
| And they had enough time, as horrific as it was, they had enough time to let it sit for a minute. | ||
| There's no way you're coming out after day 2, or 5, or 8, or 12. | ||
| 14? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| 20? | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so, it's very personal, and there's a herd mentality, just as surely as there's a herd immunity. | ||
| And the first ones to go will look reckless and crazy. | ||
| But then others will follow. | ||
| And then pretty soon, you're a guy who gets behind the wheel of your car and drives across the state knowing full well that 40,000 people are going to die this year as a result of traffic fatalities. | ||
| But you get in, and you strap up, and look, you do a lot of things. | ||
| I mentioned Cuomo earlier, and I'll circle back. | ||
| If you really believed it, if you really believed it, then why not get together? | ||
| Just get together with the governors and say, look, we're lowering the speed limits to 20. | ||
| We're all wearing helmets and we're outlawing left turns. | ||
| You could save 40,000 lives this year, but you won't do that because we have baked the risk into our lives. | ||
| And at base, we are a safety third kind of people. | ||
| We know that there are other things more important. | ||
| Safety always is the rational thought, but I think Really, not to make it all about me, but I was right in 2008. | ||
| Safety first is a bromide, and that platitude, it sinks in to the point where a lot of us believe it reflexively, but we don't really believe it, and we are right now waking up to the fact that we've been living with all forms of attendant risk for a very, very long time. | ||
| We're just not used to this, and it's going to take a while to get used to it, but we will. | ||
| And if getting used to it means masks, and temperature checks, and cavity searches, or God knows what else, I don't know. | ||
| But there will be protocols, and they will be accepted, and we will get used to them, just as surely as we're used to taking our shoes off at the airport. | ||
| Is the X factor of all of this, though, that while in 1930s Britain they had newspapers that were still being delivered to their house, that we're all in our house being under a different type of onslaught, which is an information onslaught, and as you said, our sort of Our journalist class and our protected academia class, whatever that is, it's getting almost impossible to figure out who to trust these days. | ||
| You may know, I'm in the midst of my first book tour right now, and one of the questions that almost everyone has asked me, so I've probably been asked this about a hundred times in the last week, is, Dave, who do you trust? | ||
| And I'm running out of good answers on that. | ||
| Like, I can pick a couple people that I kind of trust, but I don't really trust institutions. | ||
| I wouldn't just say the New York Times, certainly, you know what I mean? | ||
| That we're under another type of attack in a weird way, that it's not just what is actually happening or what's not happening, it's that there's a constant narrative being slammed at us from whatever your preconceived notion is. | ||
| You know Mike Shermer, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| He's one of the best. | ||
| I had him on two weeks ago. | ||
| He's one of the best. | ||
| The best of the best. | ||
| Look, I've never met him. | ||
| Give him my regards. | ||
| Oh, I will. | ||
| He's great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He wrote a book years... I'd be happy to connect with him. | |
| That'd be terrific. | ||
| I'd love to meet him because he did write a book years ago that had a huge impact on me. | ||
| It was called Why People Believe Weird Things. | ||
| And it was such a simple look. | ||
| I was fascinated at the time with clubs and groups and organizations and cults. | ||
| And passwords, right? | ||
| All of that stuff, you know? | ||
| And I had some friends who had been, in my view, inculcated. | ||
| And this business of deprogramming people and talking to people rationally. | ||
| He was the guy that really got me most interested in thinking that way. | ||
| So, you know, the answer to your question is to be skeptical without being cynical. | ||
| And we're living in a time of great confusion, I think, and great cynicism. | ||
| And we shouldn't forego our skeptical nature in order not to be, well, look, we need to be skeptical is the answer. | ||
| We need to trust and verify. | ||
| And we need to We need to question our own assumptions, I think, first and foremost. | ||
| We can't simply preach to the choir, as pleasing as it is to do so. | ||
| We need to be challenged. | ||
| We need to be out of our comfort zone. | ||
| But we also need to be honest. | ||
| Look, I thought, I haven't read your book yet, but I read your first chapter, and I'm looking forward to finishing it. | ||
| But you write about coming out, you know, in a really honest way, and coming out politically, In so many ways, I suspect is probably, you know, more difficult than it's ever been. | ||
| And so, sorry, I'm free associating, but to be skeptical of your own truth, your own beliefs, I mean, I don't know about this whole, your own truth thing never really resonated with me, but to be skeptical, not just about what you believe, but why you believe it. | ||
| And then, you know, to share that skepticism requires a measure of, And that's what I liked about what I've read of your book so far. | ||
| You can't be enlightened without being humble, and you can't be humble without being wrong, which is dangerous for people. | ||
| I assure you I've been wrong a couple of times, and it's been public. | ||
| But to be wrong and not be humbled by it is to have a quality. | ||
| That is not, what's the word, good. | ||
| It is not good to have the capacity to be wrong but not humbled. | ||
| It's the beginning of the death of shame. | ||
| See, I know you're not part of the academic class there because you went into the depths of your mind to find the right adjective and you came up with good. | ||
| My second favorite four-letter word. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| All right, so let's back up because a lot of the stuff you're giving me sort of jives to me as someone that got a decent upbringing, that got some of the right things handed to them. | ||
| And since we just had Mother's Day just this past weekend, your mom, according to this paper in front of me, is a two-time New York Times bestselling author. | ||
| Her last book, it's from two weeks ago, she was on the list. | ||
| I might be on the same list as your mom, which would be pretty spectacular. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about your upbringing, your relationship with your mom, how she sort of stepped into this. | ||
| Is she 82 now? | ||
| She's 82, I think. | ||
| She's 82. | ||
| She's 82 and has sort of stepped into this other life, as if what you were doing kind of wasn't enough. | ||
| It's the most enjoyable thing I've ever watched, and it's probably the best thing I've ever done in terms of being a son. | ||
| My mom and I are very close, so are my dad and I, and she's been writing me stories for years. | ||
| We critique each other's work. | ||
| She writes me stuff, she reads it, and so forth. | ||
| A couple years ago, she wrote a very funny story about losing her purse at the local Walmart, and the hilarity that ensued as my father, who doesn't hear so well, didn't have his hearing aids, and was trying to call her phone that was in the purse, and was dumpster diving, and it was pandemonium. | ||
| Like, pee your pants funny. | ||
| I read it on Facebook, and I posted it, and I went to work. | ||
| And two days later, I came home, and 71 million people had watched the video of me reading my mother's story. | ||
| This is where it goes off the rails. | ||
| Publishers call, and they're like, Mike, if your mom can write a couple dozen of those, she's got a book. | ||
| And just make sure you're in them so we have a hook, right? | ||
| We need the mother of the dirty jobs. | ||
| Gotta have the hook. | ||
| So I say, mom, here's what you do. | ||
| We need 20 stories. | ||
| I gotta be in them. | ||
| She says, oh gosh, that's terrific. | ||
| But you know, Michael, I have two other sons, like mom. | ||
| Look, it's not about them, it's about your book. | ||
| Just do what you're, okay. | ||
| She goes away and she writes this book about my mother. | ||
| I'm not in any of these stories. | ||
| There are 30 stories about my Nana, my grandmother. | ||
| Now, they're hysterical, but nobody's gonna publish them. | ||
| So I printed 10,000 copies, put them out on Facebook, sold out in two days. | ||
| Then the publishers called and said, oh my God, you didn't tell us she could write. | ||
| So they reprint her first book, And she just finishes her second book about your father and other celebrities I have known, Pee Your Pants Funny. | ||
| That's the book that's on the list right now. | ||
| And it's just a few dozen very funny essays she wrote to me over the years about the incredibly odd, quirky, and brilliant man that is her husband, my dad. | ||
| And, you know, of course she writes this very funny book at the height of the plague. | ||
| And it falls to me to try and promote it around the same time your book hit, in fact. | ||
| And look, I've been watching you, man. | ||
| It's really been fun because we're not all in the same boat, but we're all in the same storm, right? | ||
| And we're playing the cards we have, and we're trying to sell our books. | ||
| I'm trying to help my mom. | ||
| And it's just, I mean, how much more adaptable, and this is a compliment to the species, but you're seeing people adapt right now to this entirely new world. | ||
| In every imaginable way. | ||
| And regarding my mom's book, she's 82 and completely become a new person. | ||
| I'm 58 and now saddled with marketing her book in a way that hopefully works in the age of Corona. | ||
| All the rules are gone. | ||
| Everything is different. | ||
| And while that's unsettling, it is, I don't know, what do you, I mean, are you weirdly liberated by all that's suddenly possible? | ||
| Well, it is weird because, as you know, this is my garage and I'd love to get you here sometime because I can show you some of the dirty jobs we had to do to make a garage in L.A. | ||
| with our regulations here work as a TV studio. | ||
| But look, I was supposed to be on a book tour right now. | ||
| I was supposed to be going across the country. | ||
| I think I was in Grand Rapids tonight. | ||
| That's where I was supposed to be. | ||
| Now you can't even plant seeds in Grand Rapids. | ||
| That's a whole other thing with the governor over there. | ||
| But yeah, one of the things I'm most interested in, you may have heard me say this a couple times, | ||
| but the people who bore me the most right now are the people who just view the world through politics. | ||
| Like I'm really interested. | ||
| That's why I think what you've been doing all these years is so interesting, because it was like, obviously you have some political lens on the world, but it's through the work that you do, or the people that you meet, that's way more interesting to me than just the people who are like, Democrats this, Republicans this, you know, some of those. | ||
| But wait, I don't want to get off the topic of your mom for a second, because as we talk about this- Hey, get off my mom! | ||
| Yeah, whether you want to or not. | ||
| But you know, there's been this whole thing about, you know, people of a certain age now with Corona and all that. | ||
| So as you watch your mom at 82 find this career, now in a way you're kind of like working for her, what do you think it's actually done for her? | ||
| I don't mean in terms of sales or celebrity or any of that stuff, but what do you think it's just done for like an 82 year old woman to like be able to put something into the world at that age that's just relevant and sort of probably needed right now? | ||
| I mean, there's probably a reason it's selling. | ||
| Has something to do with, we could use a little humor these days, right? | ||
| Well, look, what's, I mean, in our world, what's more gratifying than moving the needle in a measurable way? | ||
| Whether it's the ratings, right? | ||
| Whether it's the ratings for a podcast, the ratings for a show, the sales of a book, or just a letter from somebody who says, Dave, you know, I read your stuff and now I'm thinking differently. | ||
| I mean, that, that is truly transactional, right? | ||
| That, I mean, that matters. | ||
| Um, and, and my mom at 82 gets, I think yesterday she got a thousand notes from people all over the country, you know, just saying, Peggy, I, I read your book and, and I saw my husband in it. | ||
| I saw my sons in it. | ||
| I saw my mom in a, in a, in a really kind of Ms. | ||
| Marple. | ||
| Irma Bombeck meets Betty White, America's grandmother, you know, just so earnest it makes your teeth hurt way, has somehow found a way to move the needle with millions of people. | ||
| And so, you know, to do that in the prime of your career is gratifying. | ||
| To do it in your 82nd year? | ||
| Is a consummation, devoutly, to be wished. | ||
| She's done it. | ||
| And in doing it, she has inspired a lot of other people to sit down and write. | ||
| People who would otherwise never try it. | ||
| I just think it's, I mean, it's, it's amazingly important. | ||
| And I, kidding aside, I'm, I'm, I'm grateful that you brought her up. | ||
| Because I think, I think we need to find people, you know, whether it's our mom or whomever. | ||
| People who are out there right now in the midst of this, who have tuned out the noise and actually focused on something transcendent. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of funny the way we, well, funny or depressing, I'm not sure, the way we talk about older people, right? | ||
| Remember in the first week of Corona, there were all these blue check Twitter people who were like, ah, well, just some old people are gonna die and that's it. | ||
| And I just kept thinking, it's like, All my grandparents are dead, but I had a great-grandfather and a great-grandmother for a long time. | ||
| Also, it's like, I love them. | ||
| I always love being with them, and it's like, all these people, oh, just old people are gonna die. | ||
| And it's like, you know, maybe we have something to learn from old people? | ||
| You think that's possible? | ||
| Well, look, I mean, I reject the old-young line. | ||
| I don't think that's quite, it's a, what do they call it, when the statistical causation is skewed, right? | ||
| Like when ice cream sales increase, rapes increase, and you can set your watch by it. | ||
| Oh, causation and, what is it? | ||
| Something that's not causation, that thing. | ||
| Right, it's like just the relevant, but you know, obviously, it's the heat. | ||
| It's the heat that drives sexual assault and ice cream sales. | ||
| It's not those two things. | ||
| I don't know that your age is the reason you're, High risk in and of itself. | ||
| I think these comorbidities are really fascinating. | ||
| Personally, I'm less interested in how old a person is if they succumb to this disease than I'm desperate to know if they were hypertensive or diabetic or fat. | ||
| What are these other things? | ||
| I'm going to say something that, taken out of context, will get me creamed. | ||
| out in the world, but it's an honest question. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Is it the COVID? | ||
| Did he or she die from the COVID, or was the COVID the straw that broke the camel's back? | ||
| You know, I know there are plenty of instances where the disease killed an otherwise healthy person. | ||
| I wanna know that. | ||
| But I also really wanna know how many camel's backs were broken as a result of this. | ||
| Because that matters. | ||
| And it goes, you know, back to your earlier question. | ||
| What else can you be doing when you're cooped up and losing your mind? | ||
| Maybe you don't want to write. | ||
| How about you walk six miles every morning? | ||
| I've done it every day and I swear I've never felt better. | ||
| It's the first thing I do. | ||
| I get up and I drag my poor dog out six miles. | ||
| And, um, and I'm trying to eat better. | ||
| I'm trying to drink less, you know? | ||
| These are the things, like, why not incorporate that into every fatal statistic that pops up, you know, on the screen on every single channel? | ||
| I don't care how many are infected and how many have died. | ||
| I want the context and the perspective. | ||
| I don't know what to do with those numbers in a vacuum, except panic about it. | ||
| So, I just wish there were ways to, and again, this is why I enjoy this format, You know, I can ramble, I can zig, I can zag, and maybe eventually land on something cogent. | ||
| Tough to do on Tucker, even though, you know, I like Tucker, fine. | ||
| It's just tough to do with Anderson Cooper. | ||
| It's tough to be out there and say something that is precisely what you mean to say in the allotted time. | ||
| That doesn't come back over the net, you know, with explanation points from some other magazine that wants to take your words to make a larger point. | ||
| Well, by the way, I know you'll love this one because Tucker walks into my house and it's my garage and he opens up the door and I'm sitting here and, you know, this guy, he's the highest paid cable news guy. | ||
| He's got, you know, a gajillion dollars, whatever. | ||
| He's riding high. | ||
| He opens the door. | ||
| This is his exact quote when he looks at my studio. | ||
| Holy fucking shit, you did it. | ||
| Dude, I've said the same thing to each other. | ||
| Look, you did it 10 years ago. | ||
| You guys put your finger in the air and felt which way the wind was blowing. | ||
| And you, everybody now, cable news looks like your show. | ||
| You know, it's hysterical. | ||
| But look, I had a similar conversation with him about the The unintended consequences of production. | ||
| Production is the enemy of authenticity, in my view. | ||
| And that's why the production values on shows like Dirty Jobs, Returning the Favor, all the stuff I work on, I always, always, always push back against the desire to make them perfect. | ||
| Because what the viewer, I think, really wants today is something authentic. | ||
| Now there was a time, before we were in the age of Authenticity. | ||
| I guess it was the age of authority. | ||
| And that's when all the newscasters talked like this. | ||
| And that's when everybody, you know, well, they didn't get that memo. | ||
| Nobody cares anymore. | ||
| People have stopped caring about that stuff for years. | ||
| You know, they don't care that the anchor is wearing makeup. | ||
| They don't care that it's shot in HD. | ||
| They don't care that there's a teleprompter that, by the way, the anchor is trying very hard to pretend they're not reading from. | ||
| I mean, could there be a greater artifice? | ||
| Like, we want you to trust us because we have information you need, but what prompter? | ||
| No, I'm not reading from a prompter. | ||
| This is all coming... There's also no one talking in my ear as I'm telling you the stuff that I'm just thinking of at the moment, even though I'm talking like a robot. | ||
| An authentic robot. | ||
| It's, you know, a very authentic robot. | ||
| Look, I'd rather watch a robot That looks like a robot, talking to me like a robot. | ||
| I'd be like, well there, I'm getting my news from a robot, that's okay. | ||
| Actually, I think that's Wolf Blitzer, for the record. | ||
| But you know what, do you remember, it was Walter Cronkite, right? | ||
| He had the glasses, and he's sitting there at the desk, and we just landed on the moon, or maybe it was Kennedy, who had died. | ||
| Yeah, I think it was the Kennedy one. | ||
| Takes off the glasses, and he looks at the lens, and he talks from his heart. | ||
| And, you know, It's just, every time I see somebody doing that now, who's delivering the news, I just see a performance. | ||
| You know, that wasn't a performance. | ||
| That was Walter freaking Cronkite delivering some very sad news, and doing it in a way that, you know, it's seared into my retina. | ||
| Man, you've given me a lot here, Mike Rowe. | ||
| I've been given. | ||
| I think I should, I think I could have added like modern day philosopher to the intro at the beginning of this thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I prefer philosopher king, but I don't want to overreach. | |
| I want to wrap this, I want to wrap this in a nice boat because you, you sort of, it's interesting because it's like we come from very, very different worlds, but you've sort of hit Everything that I've been thinking about and all the things that I talk about on this show, and that's why I love doing this, when I find someone who's doing some other stuff and yet actually can make sense through the other stuff. | ||
| So I guess I got a good one for you. | ||
| So for all the stuff that we've talked about here, how do you think we actually fix it? | ||
| And by it, I mean the political class that's broken, the media class that's broken, The inauthentic class that is broken. | ||
| I mean, is it really just like a whole bunch of us have to find whatever our dirty job is and just do it and do it and do it until, yeah? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Did I get it? | ||
| No, it's that. | ||
| It's that, because look, we're, in our own world here, we're way too inside to be dispensing advice. | ||
| You know, besides if we did, you know, how do we know who's listening? | ||
| You know, that's the thing I wanted to riff on earlier that we kind of talked around a little bit, but really, I mean, not a day goes by on my Facebook page when somebody doesn't encourage me to encourage six million people to go out and vote, right? | ||
| And I'm like, well, why would I, why would I do that? | ||
| I don't know them. | ||
| I don't know how they're going to vote. | ||
| I don't know if they're informed. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think voting is a thing that you ought to be persuaded to do. | ||
| I would no more recommend somebody I didn't know cast a vote than I would recommend they buy a gun. | ||
| You have the right to do it, but that in and of itself is not enough for me personally, Mike Rowe, to say, hey, so take it from me, get out there and vote, exercise your right to bear arms. | ||
| No, no, I don't know who's listening, so I try and stay in my lane with that kind of stuff. | ||
| But to answer your question, how do... | ||
| I, for me, it was, it was an equal measure of humility and discomfort. | ||
| I had a pretty good career right up to the point where I was willing to become uncomfortable. | ||
| And then I had a great career. | ||
| You know, I impersonated a host for 20 years on a lot of different shows and I narrated everything. | ||
| If there was a wildebeest trying to get across the vast reaches of the barren Serengeti, I was telling you about it. | ||
| And it never works out for the wildebeest, Dave. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| I thought that was just selective editing. | ||
| It never works out? | ||
| Never once. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, sooner or later, they're all going to get eaten. | ||
| You know, they're going to stop. | ||
| They're thirsty. | ||
| They put their face in there, and the crocodile's going to get them, and then the hyena's going to... It's just, it always, always happens this way. | ||
| Never leave the herd, all right? | ||
| That's the advice that one would give vis-a-vis the wildebeest paradigm. | ||
| But of course, we're also talking about the essential importance of leaving the herd. | ||
| Somebody has to go first. | ||
| Somebody always has to go first. | ||
| So, man, this is like a shotgun coming back at you, but the answer is we need a peripeteia, the Greek word for a realization, right? | ||
| We need a peripety. | ||
| Peripeteias are a form of anagnoresis, and peripeteias are that moment in the narrative where we realize everything we thought we knew was wrong. | ||
| When Oedipus realizes the beautiful woman he's sleeping with and having kids with is his mother, right? | ||
| It changed the course of his narrative. | ||
| My little life changed in a sewer in San Francisco when I realized that I was a better guest than I was a host. | ||
| And when I looked at myself differently, Dave, I'm gonna put a bow on this the way few of your guests ever have. | ||
| Are you ready? | ||
| Bring it home, Ro. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| To bring this back to the very first question you asked me, how do I see myself? | ||
| I see myself, what did I tell you? | ||
| As a guest, as an avatar, and a cypher. | ||
| Prior to that, I saw myself strictly as a host and a narrator. | ||
| That little adjustment brought about By a very strange day in the San Francisco sewers with a sewer inspector and a little help from a rat and a couple hundred metric tons of human shit made me think differently about how to work in television. | ||
| The country needs a parapetia. | ||
| We need, I think, with a little humility and a willingness to be uncomfortable, to reconsider our own deeply held beliefs, get out of our comfort zone, try things, That we normally wouldn't try, be open to ideas and thoughts that we would normally dismiss, and look at the evidence that demands a verdict, and be skeptical. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Look at Neil Ferguson's model, then look at John Ioannidis, and be okay with the fact that sometimes experts with lots of initials after their names are wrong. | ||
| Doesn't mean they're all wrong, it just means they're all human. | ||
| Ro, this is why I do this show. | ||
| You did it. | ||
| You did it. | ||
| I landed the plane. | ||
| I'm not even going to end this in any sort of professional way, because professionalism is the old world. | ||
| The new world is we just, you know, shoot the shit until the camera stops. | ||
| So it has been a serious pleasure. | ||
| I hope we can eventually do this in real life, maybe with masks, maybe not. | ||
| And I look forward to continuing the adventure with you. | ||
| Hey, man, if I ever attempt to follow in your footsteps vis-a-vis this format, you'll be my first guest. | ||
| But until that great getting up morning, I'm coming to your garage as soon as the authorities bless it. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about lifestyles instead of nonstop yelling, check out our lifestyle playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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