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March 9, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
44:28
20240309_mike-rowe-state-of-the-union
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Leaving CNN for Fox Nation 00:01:44
Well, millions know Mike Rowe as the host of Discovery's Dirty Jobs and the voice behind a multitude of hint documentaries like Planet Earth and Deadliest Catch.
He's also a philanthropist, producer, and a former opera singer.
Not to mention one of America's fiercest advocates for skilled trades.
He thinks hard work pays, that universities have a big PR problem and that cancel culture, well, needs to be cancelled.
I spent 20 years crawling through sewers on dirty jobs and I think when people see another fellow member of the species covered with somebody else's crap, well, they kind of trust them.
What is your assessment of where America is right now?
Like we're in a buffet line and there's just not a lot of choices in it.
When a country is constantly confronted with experts who can't agree, then we start to feel a bit like the kid in Hans Christian Anderson's great story, The Emperor's New Clothes.
And we're all just looking around at the other townspeople waiting for somebody to say, hey, that guy's naked.
We're so starved for common sense that when we hear it, it's almost stunning.
On your travels around America, do you understand the Trump appeal?
He stepped outside of the machine.
He was never really in the machine.
So I think Americans by and large are starting to see the political class as very transactional.
This is an extraordinary time to be walking around and breathing the air.
But man, if I have a crystal ball, it is some kind of cloudy.
Now, Mike Rowe, uncensored.
Mike, great to see you again.
A Cloudy Future Ahead 00:15:39
You too, Pierce.
It has been, as the kids say, a hot minute.
Do you know, it's over 10 years since we last spoke at CNN.
And within a few months of that interview, I had left CNN and you joined CNN.
And then about a year and a half after that, I left CNN and there you were on Fox Nation.
And then I wound up on Fox Business and then back on Discovery and round and round the wheel goes.
You know what?
I think you'll probably agree with me.
It's a hustle, our game, and you just got to stay in the game, right?
Well, you know what?
I think, Pierce, if you know who you are, and if you more or less know what you think, and mainly, I guess, if you have an understanding of who you're talking to, you know, the audience is a, it's such a tricky thing nowadays, but if you have an idea of all that in your mind, it doesn't much matter what channel you're on or what website you're on or what blog you're on.
People know you and they either like you or they don't.
I completely agree.
And in fact, the more you try and persuade people who don't like you to like you, the less successful you're likely to be.
Isn't that, I mean, it's one of the great tautologies and one other thing that's gotten stood on its head over the last couple of years.
The more persuasive you want to be, the less permission you have to say things like, trust me, or take it from me.
It's all the opposite.
You know, everything feels upside down, at least in the world of rhetoric and persuasion and just basic conversation.
Well, I think you basically have a choice, don't you?
You either go down the people-pleasing route or you go down the authenticity route.
And I always say to people that in life, if you're authentic, then the people that you really want to like you will end up gravitating to you.
They will.
But if you're authentic.
People pleasers tend to get people who end up that they don't want to have around them gravitate to them because they basically try to say all the right things to people that they have nothing in common with.
I was thinking of this the other day.
You know, who do I like to listen to on podcast?
Who do I like to watch perform musically?
And who makes me laugh comedically?
It's almost always the people who respect me for being in the audience, but aren't really trying to entertain me so much as entertain themselves.
And when I see that happening, I can go along for the ride as an audience member.
If I don't, then yeah, I feel like they're trying to sell me something.
As I listen to your melodious tones, I do think I was right 10 years ago when I suggested what you really should have done was become the world's number one movie announcer in Hollywood.
I mean, you have that voice.
I had a run.
There was a guy called Don LaFontaine, who was the original guy who he was actually a producer, and the voice talent didn't show up one day in the mid-80s.
So Don was the guy who went into the booth and said, in a world, one man facing down the odds.
And so for a couple of years, if you couldn't afford him, you got me.
But it's nice work if you can get it.
I've always thought, Mike, that you very much represent that weird amorphous phrase, middle America.
Before Donald Trump came along and kind of reinvented the middle America wheel.
I will come to him.
I do think that your litmus test instincts are really what middle Americans think.
I think you represent the values of middle Americans.
I mean, do you agree with that?
It's a compliment for sure, and I appreciate it.
I do think there was a time, and hopefully I'm still in it, but when Discovery had me on every single day, when I was doing four or five shows for that brand, that was a big Middle of America brand.
And at the same time, I was doing a lot of work with Ford and Caterpillar and with my own foundation.
And it was a really fortuitous time for me because those big blue chip brands also represent, at least conceptually, a part of this country that once felt like the middle.
And for me, you know, I value that a lot.
I spent 20 years crawling through sewers on dirty jobs.
And I think when people see another fellow member of the species covered with somebody else's crap, well, they kind of trust them, right?
I mean, surely that guy is not good.
Why would he lie to me?
You know, how much worse could it get for him?
And so I did get a lot of permission over the years to talk pretty candidly, maybe not always to the middle, but from the middle.
And that has been important to me for all the objectives that I have in this crazy business.
What is your assessment of where America is right now?
If this country were a restaurant and the people who love the restaurant walked into it, I feel as if they picked up a menu and suddenly said, you know, I don't want to order either one of these things.
I don't, what happened to my favorite dish?
What, what happened?
Like we're in a buffet line and there's just not a lot of choices in it.
So I feel part like part of what's happening over here is that a lot of people are looking at both parties and saying, really?
That's the best.
That's the best you're going to give us.
And that's the best you're going to give us.
So there's this very strange moment right now where people are looking over their shoulder as if they're being punked, right?
And saying, are we seriously, this is it.
So on the political side, that's sort of how I feel.
People are beginning to seriously wonder why there are only two items on the menu.
On the education side, it's not so dissimilar.
A lot of people feel as if one way is being pushed down our collective throats.
And I think that in really general terms, Pierce, I would just say we're living in a time when two things.
Everything is being painted with a broad brush.
We're awash in cookie cutter advice, bromides, platitudes, and a lot of certain sounding people talking to us as if they have the answer.
And we're living in a time where it doesn't matter.
You can hop online, you can turn on the TV, you can turn on the radio, and five will get you 10, that you're listening to two experts who can't agree.
So when a country is constantly confronted with experts who can't agree, then we start to feel a bit like the kid in Hans Christian Anderson's great story, The Emperor's New Clothes.
And we're all just looking around at the other townspeople waiting for somebody to say, hey, that guy's naked.
Or, hey, no, that doesn't look like a secure border.
Or, hey, no, a whole class of kids graduating from high school in Baltimore who have zero proficiency in math, that's not good.
Or, hey, that woman sure looks like a man, right?
On every front, people have been asked to believe a bromide.
And I think the chickens are going to come home to roost somehow or another.
I completely agree with you.
I think when you look out and there's a blue sky and you have experts telling you, no, no, no, it's black, right?
Or it's yellow.
It's like, no, I can see it.
It's blue with my own eyes.
I think that when you reach that place in society, it's a very slippery slope to the whole thing just unraveling.
And if you start to deny obvious facts, obvious science, whatever it may be, I don't know where society goes.
I think sometimes things have to go splat before they get better.
And that's probably kind of a grim assessment.
And I don't know what splat really means.
I don't know what it means in the Mideast.
I don't know what it means for our skills gap problem over here.
I don't know what it means really for our faith in public institutions.
But since that's what we're talking about, you know, I think it's really important to think it through.
And the more I think about the emperor's new clothes, it just makes so much sense.
We're so starved for common sense that when we hear it, it's almost stunning to us because common sense itself has been under such an assault for the last three or four years that we've become kind of immune to it.
And so I just think we're in some very strange back and forth, and it's going to become accelerated, obviously, over the next eight or nine months.
I think we're probably, look, having said all that, I'm delighted to be alive.
This is an extraordinary time to be walking around and breathing the air.
But man, if I have a crystal ball, it is some kind of cloudy.
I mean, the interesting thing about what you just said about Glad to be alive, statistically, this is the best time to have ever been alive in recorded history.
People are living longer.
They're healthier than their previous ancestors.
There are actually fewer wars than there have ever been on planet Earth, although the perception fueled by social media is it's just constant warfare.
You know, there's less child poverty.
Water is cleaner.
You know, you go through all sorts of metrics for the life we're existing in, and we've never had it so good.
And yet, young people in particular, and by young, I mean, you know, from sort of early teens to mid-20s, are in the grip of a collective anxiety epidemic, which is almost inexplicable,
except that I think they're being constantly exposed to so much negative dopamine rush stuff through their phones, whatever it may be, that their perception of what the world is is completely out of kilter with the reality.
And really, their understanding of history, and I don't mean to talk about them like they're not in the room.
I'm sure there are many intelligent Gen Zers watching and listening right now, but what can they possibly understand?
There was no rotary phone when they grew up.
They didn't live through 9-11.
They didn't experience enough history, or probably they haven't traveled enough.
They haven't seen enough of the world to be able to understand what they have in some sort of meaningful context.
And so everything you just said, I believe to be true.
But I also believe you probably just triggered a few million people around the world.
Yeah.
Because when you optimism itself has become the proximate cause of people's outrage.
How dare you be optimistic?
How dare you tell me that things aren't as bad as I know they are?
Don't you know how much I'm suffering?
You know, we are living in a victimhood society where actually being a victim, even if you're not a victim, but being a victim is celebrated.
People put you on a pedestal if you can play that victim card.
And I see it with people who should know better, you know, who are incredibly privileged, but allow themselves to wallow in self-pity and victimhood.
And then it feeds down into the Gen Z brigade.
And I feel, in a way, I feel sorry for them because so many of them are incapable of dealing with normal life.
And they resort to, you know, sort of thinking, well, obviously the world's never been worse.
So that's why I'm feeling so insecure.
That's why I'm feeling so anxious.
And I try and explain to them, no, no, no, you got this completely wrong.
You're very, very lucky to be alive right now.
You know, there's a statistic in Britain.
Gen Z employees miss a day's work a week due to mental health concerns, new research showed.
Costing the economy in the UK, £138 billion a year.
I mean, this is completely, well, ironically, it's completely insane.
And the truth is, most of them do not have any mental illness.
And I don't say this to belittle those who do.
I think mental illness is a real thing and it needs to be dealt with properly by professionals.
But most people in these numbers are not actually mentally ill.
They've just basically found themselves incapable of dealing with life.
And you're someone that has literally wallowed through sewers to show the reality of what a tough job can be.
What do you say to these people?
What do you say to the Gen Zers who are almost giving up on being able to deal with life?
I say that you can't hope to define terms or treat conditions like mental illness until you define the term.
To your point, the language itself is under assault.
And so it's very similar.
If you don't have a cursory understanding of history, it's like not having a real understanding of language.
The terms are being redefined in real time.
So everything you just described, for instance, my foundation awards work ethic scholarships because we want to elevate work ethic.
Because in the history of the world, no one has ever been hurt.
No one has ever done themselves any disservice by showing up early, staying late, adopting a cheerful attitude, taking a bite of the crap sandwich when it comes around to them, volunteering for all of the lousy tasks, and making a case for personal responsibility.
No one has ever been hurt by doing any of those things.
But today, every one of those things is under assault.
Every one of those terms is problematic.
We have big companies over here, giant companies like Corn Ferry and Lockheed Martin and surprisingly huge companies who have come out with a whole new list of terms that are simply being redefined right in front of us, including all of the ones I just mentioned.
The Entitlement Problem 00:12:12
So it's difficult to know what to say to a generation who feels that way when we're not using the same language.
Final thought with regard to another term that I think is linked to virtually everything we're discussing, and that's gratitude.
That's another thing you're really not allowed to talk about anymore.
The people who apply for my scholarships have to sign a sweat pledge.
And the very first pledge in this 12-step thing says, I am grateful above all things.
I realize that I have hit the lottery.
I am alive.
That in itself is a miracle.
I'm walking around free.
Above all things, I'm grateful.
If you don't believe that, I can't help you.
If you don't fundamentally feel that in your soul, then to your point, the road to victimhood, the door to victimhood has just been kicked open, right?
It's just been kicked open.
And it's so easy to get pulled in that direction if you can't find it in yourself to be fundamentally grateful for being able to breathe, for being able to chew and swallow, for being able to be free and laugh and surf the internet and do all of these different things.
I know I sound like, you know, a grumpy old man screaming at the kids to get off the lawn.
I don't mean to.
What I mean to say is if we don't come to a collective understanding of what our language means, we're never going to be able to talk to each other.
Yeah, I completely agree.
I also would add a word to the mix, entitlement.
The sense of entitlement that so many young people seem to have.
And it may be this, again, is not their fault.
It's driven perhaps by Instagram, you know, where everything is perfect, where they have this fear of missing out.
They see everyone leading seemingly perfect lives of fast cars and fabulous holidays and amazing clothes and 100 grand watches and so on.
And they think that this is something they should all be getting.
And so they have a sense of entitlement, which of course, for the vast majority of people, is simply not met by reality.
I mean, I always say that I come from a little village in the south of England and 1,500 people.
Some of the happiest people I've met in my life to this day are people I met in the village pub who have a very like limited expectation of what life owes them, right?
They put a hard graft in.
They might be carpenters, they might be builders, they might be decorators, they might be accountants, lawyers, whatever it may be.
They haven't gravitated perhaps very far from the village.
They have less expectation and less a sense of entitlement about what life owes them.
And more, what can I get out of my life that's actually going to make me happy?
And they are very happy people.
Now, I also know people who are the complete opposite.
And it's got very little to do actually with money, I find.
It's got more to do with just a mental attitude.
Maybe it's from parents, maybe it's from friendship groups, whatever it may be.
But this sense of entitlement that the world owes me a living, owes me a favor, owes me all these great things.
I don't know how we got to that place.
Well, like the frog in the boiling water, it happens a little bit at a time.
You start to confuse the right to pursue happiness with the right to be happy.
That's a massive distinction, but it's one that we can gloss over very easily if we just turn the heat up a little more and more and start to confuse everything on the landscape.
It all gets blurry, right?
I think your little village is a great metaphor for dirty jobs.
The question I get most often to this day, and that show's been on every day for 20 years, is what do they know that we don't?
And why is everybody on your show so damn happy, right?
What is that?
And part of it is the phenomenon you're describing from the village pub.
It's an awareness that you're a part of something, you're a part of doing something that needs to be done, right?
Meaningful work.
Dirty jobbers, by and large, always know how they're doing.
They can look around and see their progress, not just week over week or month over month, but hour over hour.
That matters.
And that's something that gets really lost in this world of tech and AI and all of these other things, the sense that there's something happening up in the cloud.
There's something happening in the blockchain.
There's something happening in all these places that we can't actually go and bear witness.
Well, guess what?
There's something happening in the sewer, too.
It's not necessarily pretty, but it is primal to your existence.
So if you combine those two things, the business of doing meaningful work, which would happen on what I'll call the front end of the work continuum, and then the capacity to feel gratitude that that work is being done, that falls on the rest of us, right?
If we don't walk into a room and flip the switch and feel grateful when the light comes on, we've become disconnected from something really important.
If we don't flush the toilet and stand there and wonder as the crap goes away, then we've lost our appreciation for a great many things.
And if you think about, going back to your first question, Pierce, what's going on in this country?
That's another thing that's happened.
We have become disconnected, profoundly disconnected from a great many of the things we rely upon.
And I just think this is the fault in our stars.
And it's not unique to this country, but people, in my experience anyway, we not only, once we lose our gratitude for a thing, it doesn't just stop there.
We eventually start to resent the fact that we can't do the very thing we depend on, which is why we shake our fist at construction workers who are trying to fix our roads, which is why we shake our heads at the men on the power lines trying to get the power back on because we're impatient and we can't believe we lost the power in the first place.
So, what's the holdup?
We're pissed off that it takes two or three days to get a plumber.
We're upset that electricians aren't a dime a dozen.
We're starting to resent the very things that we weren't grateful for.
And now the divide grows wider in so many different ways.
Sorry, that's a lot of armchair philosophy.
No, no, it's actually as you were talking, what's the dirtiest job I've ever done?
And I actually know what it was.
I was about 18, and there was a field opposite the house I was living in in the village.
And my brother, who went on to become an army colonel and still describes this as by far the most difficult thing he ever had to do, despite serving tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, we had to go and basically bag up stinking mushroom compost during a hot English summer, which made the stink immeasurably worse.
I'm talking to a man who's been in some of the most pungent hellholes in the world.
So you can empathize.
But I remember to start with, it was disgusting and awful.
And we would go back home normally after fighting at some stage and wash it all off us and feel disgusting.
But as it went on, an interesting thing happened.
It became really satisfying work getting the job done, bagging the compost, getting money for it, you know, seeing a direct correlation between getting your hands dirty, literally, and actually achieving something and making money from it.
And I then progressed into a slightly cleaner job, which was logging a part of a forest, clearing it out for show jumpers, to jump horses.
And it was a completely dense forest, and I had to go and try and clear it out.
And I remember this feeling because to start with, I wasn't the strongest of guys, a bit muddy-coddled.
And I started trying to do this logging.
It was really hard graft.
And I was with a big guy who was paying me to do it.
But again, over time, I came to really enjoy the graft.
And by the end, I was chucking these logs around like Rambo and really enjoying the clearing that we were creating and loving the finished product.
And that comes back to your point: that we've forgotten about that journey of satisfaction, achievement, reward, and actually a happy state of mind.
Look, you can't arbitrage the difficulty.
You have to embrace it.
We've got it in our heads that when it comes to job satisfaction, right, I think we might have it all backwards.
This is another big, dirty jobs lesson, but it goes right to your point.
The people that I met on Dirty Jobs, by and large, and I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but they were all very passionate and very engaged and very proud of what they were doing.
But almost none of them, in fact, none of them, to my knowledge, set out to do the thing that they wound up doing with their life for money.
Septic tank technicians, sewage inspectors, and you just go down the list.
And it's not all that.
It could be bridge builders.
It could be skull cleaners.
It's just an endless list of people loving what they were doing who didn't set out to do that thing because they thought they wanted to do it.
They didn't, in other words, follow their passion.
They looked for opportunity.
They looked to see where everybody else was going and they went in the opposite direction.
And then they figured out how to get good at a thing.
Maybe it was composting mushrooms.
Maybe it was clearing the South 40 so the horses could jump.
Whatever it was, they figured out a way to get good at it.
Then they figured out a way to love it.
And when you meet people like that, Pierce, over and over, week after week, month after month, year after year, you begin to realize that there is something else going on in the country.
There's a different way to think about work.
There's a different way to think about education.
There's a different way to think about job satisfaction.
And once you get that in your head, you realize there's a different way to think about everything.
And then all of the bromides and all of the platitudes and all of the things we grew up being told, you realize, you know what?
There might be an alternative narrative to all of that.
And this is not just germane to our personal relationship with work.
This is germane to our country's relationship with work and education.
So when we tell a whole generation, the generation we were just talking about, for instance, that the best path for the most people is a four-year degree, that's powerful.
When your parents tell you that, when your guidance counselors tell you that, when all your friends tell you that, well, that's not just making a case for college.
That's saying if you don't go in that direction, you're screwed.
You're going to wind up composting mushrooms.
You're going to wind up working as a lumberjack or a fisherman.
You're going to wind up turning a wrench.
So in that moment, we turned hundreds of really important jobs into vocational consolation prizes.
Indoctrination in Education 00:06:05
So this generation that we've been talking about, they don't know you can make six figures welding.
They don't know you can set your own schedule as a plumber.
They don't know electricians are seen right now from sea to shining sea as superheroes.
They're in such demand.
They don't know this because they've been given a steady diet of tripe their whole lives.
They just don't know.
We're also in a weird era of cancel culture, for want of a better phrase.
It's a ridiculous phrase, really, but we know what it means.
It's where predominantly people on the left now, on the woke left, have decided that they're going to start behaving like the very fascists they profess to hate most.
And if you don't agree with their worldview, they're not just going to cancel you from the job you're in, and with a deliberate attempt to do it, you know, they'll contact your bosses, they'll bombard your board of your company with emails and so on and so on.
But they also want to destroy your life.
They want you to be ruined because you don't agree, for example, that it's unfair that a six foot four inch biological male should be dominating women's swimming.
They think that that belief that you have is so outrageous, even though it's obviously factually correct.
So outrageous that you must be destroyed.
And you see people like J.K. Rowling get absolutely eviscerated for standing up for women's rights to basic fairness and equality.
But this whole cancel culture is a really insidious thing, isn't it?
Well, look, it's tricky from my perspective.
I agree with you, by the way, but that's not to say that free speech is free of consequence.
You know, we've always had to endure to a certain degree the consequences of mouthing off.
Now, in this country, those consequences shouldn't include being thrown in jail.
They might include losing your job, depending on how badly you mouthed off, right?
The trick is there's no protocol.
There's no playbook.
The rules, like the language, have changed before our wondering eyes.
And so this whole topic, understanding it is like nailing jello to a tree.
You can do it, but it just doesn't stick, right?
And so everything is constantly morphing.
I'm a little out of my lane with this, but I'll tell you what I've done in my foundation.
And I'm really excited by this because last week we turned a corner.
I thought privately, I didn't talk a lot about this out loud, but acronyms make me nervous.
CRT made me nervous.
ESG made me nervous.
DEI makes me very nervous, especially when it seeps into public education.
And so I put together a work ethic curriculum based on this sweat pledge that governs my entire MicroWorks foundation, which is now 16 years old.
Shameless plug, we're giving away a couple million dollars this month right now for these work ethic scholarships, these full rides to trade schools and so forth.
Not necessarily full rides, sometimes, sometimes just a little bit.
But here's what just happened in Vegas that you'll love.
I finally got this work ethic curriculum into a big public high school, Western High.
They've got 750 kids in the freshman class, and they're all going to go through this curriculum.
Now, this isn't marketed as an antidote to DEI or ESG or CRT.
It's simply a way to inject a different conversation into our high schools so kids can at least have a chance to talk about things like work ethic and a positive attitude and delayed gratification and personal responsibility and so forth.
But here's the headline.
At the end of their high school experience, the people, the top 50 or possibly the top 100 kids who go through this program will all get full ride scholarships to any trade school in this country.
Now, look, I know I can't boil the ocean.
I'm one guy, I'm one foundation.
But what's exciting about this program, Pierce, is that it's duplicable.
You can do this in any state, any zip code.
Hell, you could do it in the UK.
Linking work ethic to a curriculum that is tied to full ride scholarships to help train the next generation of tradespeople.
That's a long way of saying, yeah, I'm worried about cancel culture too.
I'm worried about this army of angry acronyms.
And I am very worried about a kind of indoctrination that can, it seems to be happening on all levels of education.
The best I can think to do is shoehorn work ethic back into that somehow and encourage an honest conversation about it and about the many benefits that can come from embracing it.
One person who has an undeniable work ethic for a guy in his late 70s is Donald Trump.
He seems to be heading to win the Republican nomination.
And I got to say, in a matchup with Biden, looking at all the polls, he's got a very good chance of winning back the White House.
Power Hungry Politics 00:04:40
On your travels around America, do you understand the Trump appeal to so many Americans?
Because outside America, people find it pretty baffling.
I've traveled around a lot of middle America, and I do get it.
I do feel the reasons why, in many cases, they might want to hold their nose about what he says and the stuff that comes out of his mouth, but I actually think, you know what, he's a disruptor, but he's got our backs.
Yeah, I think all that's true to an extent.
For me, it was as simple as saying he stepped outside of the machine.
He was never really in the machine.
And when he came down that escalator, yeah, that was a thing.
But it really wasn't for me until I forget what debate it was, but I think he was accused of paying as little amount of taxes as he could or something like that.
And he just shrugged and laughed and said, well, of course.
We all do.
Of course.
Well, I know how the game is played, right?
And so does she, he said, pointing to Hillary, and so do they all.
You know, the only difference between me and them is I'm going to tell you the truth.
I'm going to tell you how the game is played.
I'm going to tell you how I made a bunch of money.
I'm going to tell you what they won't.
And I think it was a combination of that combined with, at the time anyway, I mean, I have no idea what the man's finances are, but these last couple of judgments don't look good.
But he didn't need it.
You know, he didn't need it.
And look, I'm not sure this is really a Trump thing.
It might be a Bobby Kennedy thing.
It might, it really anybody who steps into the fray right now and says, look, you'd have to be crazy or power hungry to want this job.
And I'm not crazy and I'm not power hungry, but I'll take the job.
I'll take it for a term and I'll tell you exactly what I'm going to do.
And when that term's up, I'm going to leave, just like the founding fathers said.
You know, this is, you know, we're not supposed to have people in office for 50 years.
I don't care what office it is.
I don't care how great they are.
You know, for the same reason, we don't, you know, we don't put, we don't have kings on our, on our coins.
George Washington didn't want to be on the coin because the only people to have ever been on a coin before that were kings and monarchs.
And he didn't want that for this country.
So I think what our country's looking for over here in part, again, going back to your first question, is people who aren't crazy, who aren't power hungry, but who are nevertheless willing to serve.
Trump at the time checked a couple of those boxes, at least in the eyes of a lot of people.
And that suddenly made him interesting in ways that the others weren't.
So does that still exist today?
Will that still exist at the end of 2024?
I don't know.
Like I said, my crystal ball is pretty cloudy, but I do believe there was a guy over here.
I think his name was Mike Gallagher.
He was a Republican senator.
He served in the military and then he got elected.
I think he was a senator.
Forgive me if he's a congressman.
I don't remember.
I just know he just quit after one term.
And he quit because he said, you know, I think that the Republicans are wrong to impeach my Orcus.
I think it's a mistake.
I don't think it's constitutionally viable and I don't think it's going to work.
Well, the Republicans ate him alive.
So he said, fine, hell with you.
I'm out.
I did my time.
Good luck.
I looked, I read all that and I thought, you know, what's really happening there is a full-grown man is saying, I love this country and I'd like to help it, but not at any cost.
I'm going to go back to my life.
I'm not going to spend the precious years I've been given here doing everything I can to hang on to power.
I'm not going to spend all my intellectual IP trying to figure out how to get elected again.
So I think Americans, by and large, are starting to see the political class as very transactional, just filled with people who are willing to say or do whatever it takes to get elected.
Returning the Favor 00:04:06
And what we really want is a version of that old movie, Bullworth.
We really want, we want that kid in the crowd of Hans Christian Anderson's great story to say, no, no, that was not a successful withdrawal.
You can't have people falling out of the sky and call it successful.
You can't leave billions behind and call it successful.
Sorry, you can't do that, right?
And no, you can't tell me that the greatest female swimmer of all time is a Homo sapien standing there in a speedo with testicles I can see.
You just can't tell me that.
Okay.
We're desperate for somebody to stand up with kindness and persuasion and humor to say, look, we have been in the grip of some collective fever dream.
And we have let go of the basic definitions of our most fundamental terms and we have been punking each other, punking each other, trolling, double dog daring.
We've got to snap out of it.
And that's what I meant before.
Something's going to go splat.
We're going to wake up.
We're going to grow up.
And we're going to stop telling ourselves these little stories.
You know who the hero in the cape may be, Mike Rowe?
Who's that?
I might be talking to him.
Yeah.
Is that such a crazy idea that someone like you could actually come through and represent exactly what you've just depicted?
I don't know how to thread the needle because if I say, yeah, I'll give that a shot, then I'll just contradict everything I said.
We need people who say no.
No, I'm not going to get into that machine until you guys start doing something that is not completely soul-deadening and totally self-destructive.
In the meantime, I do think the good news, you know, George Bush got a lot of crap for this, but he was the guy who said he talked about a thousand points of light.
Remember?
And people were like, that's such a bunch of hippy-dippy crap.
But he was right.
The great thing about this country and the best hope that we have right now is not, it's just not going to be our political class.
And it's not going to be the next batch of senators or congresspeople.
It's going to be people who make an affirmative difference in their zip code in their region, in their state.
They're going to do something to move the needle in a way that the people around them can see.
I worked on a show for a couple of years.
You probably didn't see it.
It was called Returning the Favor.
I did it after dirty jobs.
In fact, I won an Emmy for it.
Can you see my Emmy pierce?
Congratulations.
I did 100 episodes of this thing.
It was on Facebook.
It was downloaded over 400 million times, and they canceled it after 100.
That's fine.
But the show itself was a love letter to good-natured service, do-goodery, right?
We just looked for bloody do-gooders who were making a difference in their towns, in their little village, right?
And we'd go into that place and we'd meet them, and then we'd give them some sort of reward, some sort of tool that would allow them to do more of what they were doing.
That's what makes our country great.
Yeah.
Those people are everywhere.
They're everywhere.
I completely, completely agree.
Mike, it's been great to catch up with you.
Let's not leave us alone next time.
Look, I got this podcast like everybody else on the planet.
You're welcome on anytime.
And I love uncensored.
Thank you.
I hope I was.
You were very much uncensored and a great guest.
And I really appreciate it.
Thanks very much, Mike Rowe.
Anytime.
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