Ep 135 | Mike Rowe’s Favorite Four-Letter Word | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Today I have a guest that is interested in the moments that changed human history, which is why he owes a special gratitude to sheep testicles.

If you're a fan of this show

and the show Dirty Jobs, you know what I'm talking about.

It's ugly.

You know his voice from The Deadliest Catch, How the Universe Works, and Shark Week.

His new show, Six Degrees, focuses on the synchronicity of history, the way it's all connected in its own way, from the death of Ned Kelly to a super colossal volcano.

He tells the unknown stories of people who have worked their butts off, the innovators and the everyman who followed opportunities.

He tells us stories in a way that you don't hear these days very often.

He tells American stories.

He's dedicated to America.

He offers solutions to the problems of our time.

Because what's truly impressive about him is the way he has affected our society, the way he inspires individualism.

He goes on and on and on in this podcast about a virtue that most people avoid, risk.

Today on the Glenbeck podcast, welcome Mike Roe.

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It's been how long since you sat on this set with me.

I think I was, it feels like seven years.

Yeah,

you were early on.

And I've watched you grow and change.

And

you've grown this little empire of yours that is just remarkable.

Thanks.

You did two things

that helped me double down on it.

The first was, you won't remember this, but we auctioned off a poster.

I was doing all kinds of different things to raise money for the foundation, and I had this

work smart and hard poster.

You autographed it, I autographed it.

We put it up for auction and one of your viewers or listeners paid like $16,000 for it.

And that made me think, you know what?

We can raise a lot of money doing non-traditional things for the foundation.

And the second thing you said was, hey, the social media thing, it's kind of a nightmare, but don't be an idiot.

Okay.

Get a Facebook page.

Well, I had it, and I wasn't really tending to it

the way I could.

But it was an easy transition for me because, like you,

I always thought my real boss were the people who watched and listened.

And so I just started using Facebook

as a focus group of sorts.

And I woke up,

I don't know, a few months later and there were six million people on there.

Amazing.

So it's made a huge difference.

Yeah.

Are you ever concerned about

saying something and being banished?

Because you really, you are very frank on things.

Right now, I'm thinking.

Yes, I mean, I'm concerned in the sense that we're living in a time, obviously, when the consequences for wandering too far out of your lane or saying a magical word can be dire.

Not even wandering out of your lane.

I don't know what my lane is.

You take up half the pool, my friend.

Your lane is wide and deep.

But so you are worried about it.

Have you had any?

Oh, sure.

Sure.

I mean,

my first real brush with cancellation came before the cancel culture thing was a thing.

I narrated a Walmart commercial.

And the Walmart commercial...

basically announced the reopening of factories and trumpeted the company's intention to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next 10 years in supply chain.

I don't work for Walmart, didn't have a deal with them, but I agreed to narrate the spot because I thought it was really simpatico with my foundation.

And I liked the idea of a big American company investing in American manufacturing.

And so I narrated this thing, a beautiful spot, aired during the Olympics, in fact, about eight years ago, I guess.

And,

well,

before I went to bed, I, you know, I posted something, shared a copy of the spot.

Some people loved it, but the union issue.

Oh, my God.

People were like, how could you?

How could you get in bed with a company that treats its workers so poorly?

And so I thought, whoa, you must be this tall to get on that ride, right?

I didn't sign up for that.

I just had a glass of wine, wrote a post, and was going to bed.

Well, I got up in the middle of the night, as men of our age do, to take care of business.

I looked again at the Facebook page, and this thing had gone around the world.

What happened next was incredible.

I was boycotted by an organization called Jobs for Justice

and they were challenging me to come out and meet with Walmart workers.

Meanwhile, like I said, I have no relationship with the company.

I just did the voice work.

I need a labor nightmare.

Like I need a hole in the head, right?

So I'm like, I can't really deal with that.

But they crashed my website.

They had thousands of people writing letters, and they were calling for boycotts of everything that I was involved in.

I didn't even know who these people were.

Meanwhile, I'm out in the press defending both myself and, weirdly enough, Walmart, right?

And so the next night I'm on CNN, then I'm on Fox News, and we're having this giant conversation about work

and about

unions.

and about manufacturing.

And suddenly I realized, wait a second, there's a weird upside upside to this because I'm in the midst of something, but I'm also using it to promote my foundation.

Meanwhile, Walmart's getting all kinds of tailwind because the dirty jobs guy is out there in the world talking about the importance of revitalizing the supply chain.

Next thing you know, we got a call from the president of Walmart and his head of PR saying,

in no uncertain terms, what the hell are you doing?

You're out there speaking on our behalf.

I'm like, well, somebody should.

And I'm not really speaking on your behalf.

I'm speaking on my behalf.

Right.

So

were they kind of mad at you?

They weren't mad because on the one hand, they loved this commercial and their initiative, I believe, was sincere.

And they were getting more unearned media and attention than they ever imagined.

I was getting boycotted, on the other hand.

And so Mary, my partner and I, we just decided, you know what?

We have to get in front of it.

We scheduled our own satellite media tour.

We called our own press people and I went out in the world to have the conversation.

And

it was the craziest thing, right?

But I could, it was like stepping off the curb and having someone grab you at the last minute when the big blue bus goes by.

Right.

Because it could have tilted, right?

So what I wound up doing was writing an open letter to Jobs with Justice, and I explained that they crashed our website, and we're a small Mon Pa company.

And I further explained that the people you're representing who work for Walmart, what are you doing?

You're trying to get them another eight or 10 cents an hour.

I'm offering to train them how to weld or how to learn a skill that's actually in demand, double, maybe triple their salary.

So that conversation took a whole different turn.

But that's a long way of saying, yeah,

I'm mindful of it.

Yeah,

I've seen your

pushbacks, and they're brilliant.

I mean, they're really, really brilliant.

Thanks.

Let me stay with unions for just a second.

There's a goal now of

tripling the union membership in the next few years by the administration.

They're pushing good union jobs.

I don't have a problem with unions when unions are needed.

You know, it's always the balance.

Sometimes people get too greedy at the top, and that's when a union needs to pull them back.

Sometimes the unions get too greedy, and they need to be pulled back.

Why is it we can't ever find

the reasonable middle ground?

Because everything is always changing.

You're nailing Jell-O to a tree, right?

The times are different.

When the unions, the trade unions anyway, when they came about in the turn of the century, I don't know that anybody would have argued or disputed their relevance from everything from safety to working conditions, all that stuff.

They made their point in some areas, in some areas they didn't, right?

And so everything was always constantly evolving.

I wandered into this morass, this miasma,

and was in a really odd position because my foundation makes no distinction between right to work and union.

I've trained lots of people who are happy in unions, and I've trained lots of people who are working in non-union states.

But for my own self-clin, right?

And I think we're probably, we've probably been in the same unions.

Screen Actors Guild, AFTRA, AGMA.

I've been in those unions for decades.

And I'll tell you a true story.

When I auditioned for QVC,

very first job in television, unions told me not to take it.

It wasn't a union shop, right?

And they told me that there would be serious consequences.

I had no choice.

I needed to work, and it was a steady paycheck, so I violated Global Rule 1, and they didn't throw me out, but they didn't like it.

And a couple of years later, when I started a show called Your New Home in Baltimore that ran for 15 years, they said, You can't do that, you're not a signatory.

And I said, Well, I don't really have much of a choice.

And they said, We're gonna, you know, big con.

I did it, I had to do it.

They told me not to do dirty jobs.

So,

look, that's crazy.

The union has done a lot of good.

The unions I belong to, but they affirmatively, at the three most important points in my life,

affirmatively discouraged me from taking a risk.

And risk is really the four-letter word we should probably concern ourselves with most these days.

And I feel like,

you know, everybody's searching for progress.

But I feel like we're being pulled back into all of the old systems.

All the old systems are saying, no, no, no, we got to do it my way, got to do it my way.

I feel like our government all over the world is like living in the 1950s,

mainly because a lot of our politicians were there in the 1950s.

I feel like the big media corporations are doing everything they can to hold onto their power.

And it's a weird thing to have progress be

labeled progress when it's actually

taking us back the other direction.

Sure, because people are, it's water in their hands.

You know, you can hold it for a while.

but look what we're doing right here right 10 years ago when

a podcast wasn't a thing like you you built this studio you you got out from fox and you just said wait a second it was madness when we did it there's risk

you you know you saw the risk but like a lot of successful people you you didn't run from it you actually used it you know and and That's the thing I worry most about today.

And

it is germane to the union conversation, conversation, but it's also relevant to everything from masks.

Our risk-averse nature, I believe, is the answer to your question.

That's the thing that holds us back.

It's the fear of trying a new thing.

It's the fear of consequences.

It's our desire for certainty.

Boy, there's been a lot of certainty over the airwaves in the last couple of years.

A lot of certain-sounding experts, a lot of certain-sounding politicians.

We're long on certainty, but we're very, very short in authenticity and in facts.

It's funny.

I said about five, six years ago, the one thing I'm certain of is that I am no longer certain of anything.

And you don't see that from people.

We are all.

You're exactly right.

Everybody is certain.

Let me go to the mass for a second.

Because at the beginning, you were, you were, I think everybody can give a pass at the beginning of the, of COVID because we had no idea what we were dealing with.

And we all wanted to do the right thing.

You know, nobody wants to kill anybody and nobody wants to die.

When did you change on that?

What is what's

how have you evolved on that?

Because you were.

I gave, I was the last public speaker at the last large public event in the country.

started on March 9th.

It was the Construction Expo in Las Vegas.

And had it started on the 10th, they would have canceled the whole thing.

But once you get 300,000 dirty jobbers in Vegas to buy heavy equipment,

that party doesn't end.

Right.

And so it was the strangest thing.

You know, Monday, NFL starts canceling, and then

the NBA, and then baseball, and then Broadway closed.

And meanwhile, my job there is to shake hands.

And every 10 minutes, the loudspeaker says, avoid all contact, don't touch anybody.

When I went home after five days of shaking tens of thousands of hands, I was pretty sure I was riddled with it.

Got home on Friday the 13th, just in time for

the governor to lock California down.

And like everybody else, obviously, I was, you know, I'm washing vegetables.

I'm looking at the news.

I'm trying to make sense of all this.

And

two weeks to flatten the curve made me nervous, but it also made sense.

Our health care system is either overrun or it's not.

And we don't want it overrun.

So I was on board with all that.

Me too.

I participated in PSAs.

You know what I regret most, Glenn?

I said

about

probably very, very early in April, I was doing the first Zoom show.

in prime time.

I was interviewing the captains on Deadliest Catch, and we were doing it long distance.

And I thought it was terribly clever for me to tell these captains, you know, guys, for the first time in my lifetime anyway, we're all in the same boat.

And everybody nodded and everybody agreed.

Later, I thought about it.

We're not in the same boat.

We're in the same storm.

What does that mean?

It means your boat may vary.

That guy's in a dinghy.

That guy's in a yacht.

That guy's on a barge.

That guy's holding on for dear life to a piece of floatsum or jetsum.

You know, that guy's on a pleasure cruise.

And the way we weathered the storm started to become really interesting to me.

And then the way we processed the risk.

And then, like the frog in the boiling water, the more we got used to being told by certain sounding people, you know,

we began to crave certainty.

And of course, that's what happens when we're scared.

And I was scared.

I was scared for my mom and dad, you know, who were in their 80s, who got it, by the way.

They're fine.

And I was scared for myself.

And

I was scared because I couldn't, for the life of me, understand how it was going to end.

And when you take the measures that we were taking with no clear rubric for success or termination, then it's just very, very difficult to feel good about the terminus.

And there was just no terminus in this thing.

If the last two years have taught us anything,

is it that we have to take control of our own health and our own lives?

We can't rely on the government or the so-called exports.

We can look to science, but not the science.

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I remember thinking, why aren't more people saying, why can my

Home Depot open?

but my local true value hardware can't.

It was for a country that you know questions the big pharmaceutical companies and questions big business, we threw mom and pop down

way under the bus.

I spoke at a gathering of the

you'll laugh because this is just one more association.

Maybe you know about and maybe you don't, but the National Association of Hardwood Floor and Carpet Installers.

Okay, all right.

So 5,000 people show up at this thing and they're all mom and pa operations, and they do what their association's name would suggest.

But for the last two years,

they couldn't work.

To your point, all the big box guys did.

Now, this association needs to hire, in the next four to five years, 180,000 people.

They're paying $25 an hour to apprentice.

right, people that have no experience putting in a hard floor, and they've got a path to a really good career.

Glenn, they can't find anybody.

I know.

They can't find him.

And this is one association representing tens of thousands of people that have to hire a lot.

There are so many associations in the country right now.

The energy business has its back against the wall.

The cable business, the broadband business, everybody's looking for skilled labor, right?

And nobody can find it.

So that really started to worry me too.

as this went on.

You'll laugh at this too

regarding masks.

I...

Safety third.

Safety third.

I love that.

This crazy mask, look at this thing.

Right now, it's become, I think, like a collector's item.

We've sold tens of thousands of these, raised over $400,000 for the Microworks Foundation.

And we started doing this, I think it was in July of 2020, when it became clear to me that, okay, cloth masks don't work.

Don't work.

And we're being told that we have to wear a thing that doesn't work.

Correct.

That's what I believed then.

And today it seems self-evident.

And I thought, well,

what do you do for people who

have to wear a mask but don't want to?

And who understand that just because you're in compliance doesn't mean you're out of danger.

Correct.

Right?

So I wasn't taking the situation lightly or suggesting that the disease wasn't highly contagious and very, very serious.

I was just saying, wait a second.

This doesn't work.

This isn't going to work.

But if you're going to make me do a thing that doesn't work,

I kind of want to be able to at least give you half the finger.

Right.

Not the whole finger.

Right, right, right.

But right.

Maybe just a pleasant reminder.

Just the tip.

Right.

So, you know.

Explain safety third for people who don't know your rules.

So safety third

does not mean that safety isn't critically important.

It just means that there is an orthodoxy in our country that has become platitudinous, and that is based on the old trope safety first.

Safety First came out of the vocational world and it was an attempt and a pretty successful one to get workers more focused on the importance of being safe.

But like so many other campaigns, they overreached.

And in their attempt to get people more focused on safety, they said that there was nothing as important as safety.

And everywhere on Dirty Jobs that I went for the first couple of years, you know, I saw these safety first banners.

My crew and I sat through dozens of mandatory safety briefings, lockout tagout procedures, confined space procedures.

We went through all of it.

And believe me, Glenn, we paid attention because we wanted to go home with everything working, right?

And so first couple years, nobody got hurt.

Season three was craziest thing.

Broken finger here, broken toe there, cracked rib, singed off my eyebrows in a blast furnace.

A couple concussions, nothing serious.

Stitches, like the wheels came off the bus.

Why?

We were still going through all the safety first machinations.

We were just not paying attention.

It was like Charlie Brown's teacher.

You sit through 50 safety briefings,

right?

The idea that somebody can tell you that your safety is their top priority the minute you believe that

you're in danger because nobody can be more responsible for your safety than you and if if the real enemy is complacency and i believe that to be true then we have to say something to cut through all the platitudinous garbage that lulls us into a false sense of security.

Safety third became the rallying cry on dirty jobs.

It simply meant, be careful.

Be careful.

I was at the Grand Canyon and I went to the Native American side.

Not a fence to be found.

They built that huge glass platform out that you can walk on.

Isn't that

magnificent?

It's amazing.

It's amazing.

And if you've been there, you know, there's no safety anywhere.

There's no warnings.

Hey, a couple more steps, you fall off the cliff.

And I asked one of the guides, I said,

How many people fall off the cliff?

He said, We don't have any.

Correct.

There's a thing, it's somewhat controversial, but it's actually at the root.

This isn't just me being a smartass, right?

I actually read a paper, it was published in Canada years ago, by a guy who talked about risk equilibrium, homeostatic risk, and compensatory behavioral.

So basically, what all that means is everybody in this room has a different risk tolerance.

And when you introduce safety protocols, an interesting thing happens to your behavior.

For instance,

if I put a helmet on you, study after study after study shows you drive a little faster on the motorcycle.

I think that's why there's so many problems.

You don't have the problems in rugby that you have in the NFL.

Correct.

Correct.

I'm safe.

That's right.

I'm in compliance.

I got my gear.

I can go more.

Therefore,

let's rock it.

Right.

I'll never forget standing on the deck of a crab boat on the Bering Sea in 2004.

First time we were up there for deadliest catch.

And it was sporty.

I mean, 15-foot C's,

sideways sleep.

And we're still working at it, right?

We're hauling up pots.

We're doing the whole thing.

And I walked into the wheelhouse at one point and I'm like, hey, Captain,

OSHA?

And he like looks at me.

He got a cigarette burning in his mouth.

He's got one behind his ear, also lit.

And he's looking out the window and green water's coming over the bow.

And he says, OSHA,

Ocean.

I'm like, I get it.

We're all terribly brave, but I mean, at what point, at what point do we kind of wrap this up?

i got cameraman out there i got all sorts of stuff it's going off the rails and he says son

calls me he's my age basically he says son look i'm the captain of a crab boat my job is not to get you home safe my job is to get you home rich you want to be safe be safe that's on you

Now, nobody in the lower 48 would ever talk to anybody like that.

And I'm not even saying this was a good thing.

I'm just making the point that when somebody who you think is primarily concerned with your safety reminds you that they're not,

you make sure your life jacket is on properly.

You make sure you got three points of contact all of the time.

It's just like being at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

There's no fence to lean against,

right?

And so somewhere in all of that, again, I'm not.

But see, this goes back to that, because it goes back to risk.

Everything goes back to this.

I mean, if you're not,

you know, there's people who I'm sure will say this to you, oh, you got a great job.

I wish I had your job, blah, blah, blah.

Do you?

Because I can sit down and I can tell you about what I do and the risks that I have to take every day and everything else.

And you'll probably say, I don't want to do that.

You know, that's correct.

Right.

With everything, there is risk and there's a bunch of dirty jobs you don't want to do, but that's what takes you there.

Correct.

Look, if anybody takes anything from this, I think the whole safety third conversation really comes down to just rattling your cage and

doing something to break your pattern.

Something that scares you.

Right.

Like,

I probably have signed 200

Well, probably a thousand general releases.

You know, you're on a TV show.

You got to sign a release.

Although you didn't give me one.

That's weird.

That's right.

What are we doing here?

That's right.

No, you have to sign the release.

And the more hazardous the activity, typically, the thicker

the release.

And the finer the print.

Correct.

Right.

When I tested a shark suit, we made a stainless steel shark suit a few years ago with the inventor.

And then we chum the water.

dozens of reef sharks come in, and I'm dressed up like Ivan Hoe, and this guy's dressed up like Sir Gallagher, and we jump in to deliberately get bitten to test the suit.

Crazy job.

Well, his release said,

I, blank, do hereby understand that I'm about to engage in an activity that is stupid on its face.

The idea that I'm going to survive this is wishful thinking.

It's going to hurt.

I'm going to get bit by a shark.

I know this is going to happen.

Sincerely, right?

I mean, it was the most straight-up.

That's what it should be.

And I was like, huh.

So if I sign this now,

I'm very, very, very clear-headed about it.

We would be so much better off

to tell the truth in releases, to tell the truth about safety.

And

if you look at our relationship to risk over the last couple of years, the whole notion of COVID-0, the whole notion of eliminating it, you know, it began with...

What's his name, that genius?

Cuomo, right?

That genius.

This guy, I mean, look,

again, I'm trying to stay in my lane, but we're on this.

You're right.

I know.

I know.

No, I know.

You'll remember the moment.

No measure, he said, no matter how draconian, can be deemed an overreach if it saves a single life.

That is when I started making safety third masks, honestly, because good grief.

The number of people who believed that, Glenn.

Oh,

that is incredible.

We've lost all sense of balance between freedom and safety.

All sense.

So where is it?

How do we gain that back?

I want my freedom.

You know, it's not, where in the Constitution does it say the government's supposed to keep us safe, except for guarding our borders, which they don't do, and making sure that we have a military for anybody that comes in to evade.

That's it.

Right.

That's all.

It's almost as if we realized at some point over the last couple of years that we were mortal.

It's like, what do you mean?

No, no, no.

We're living forever, right?

This is

what are you, what are you telling me about

this new danger thing?

It was the novelness of the novel coronavirus that also made me say, wait a second, what's really novel here?

I suspect you're a fan of C.S.

Lewis.

He wrote,

and this is worth a Google too, if you haven't seen this.

In 1948, he answered a question, and the question was, how am I to live in the atomic age?

And people were just getting their heads around the novelness of the fact that a bomb, a missile, could land.

I mean, a terrible, terrible thing.

And I didn't live through it.

But can you imagine the anxiety of living in a world where you suddenly realized that there was a nuke pointed at you, right?

We're freaked out with masks and kids in schools right now.

They were diving under chairs.

I remember, Mike, you and I are approximately the same age.

I remember waking up in terror because we'd have these instructional films shown at school and be like, wait, the whole world can be gone tonight in 11 or 18 minutes?

That's crazy.

I remember that too.

We would have been in grade school,

right?

But our parents in 1948 were three years after Hiroshima.

Correct.

And they were all grown up.

And they were looking around going,

that was a big bomb.

And it's only a matter of time until the Soviets get it and so forth.

And so what C.S.

Lewis says in this is how to live in the atomic age.

It's the same way you lived when at any moment the Vikings could arrive on the shore, rape and plunder and do whatever the way.

The same way the next smallpox could come, the next black death.

He goes down the list.

He says, look, it always feels different.

It always feels new, especially when you give it a new name, the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.

Well, guess what?

Now it's 22,

right?

Right.

And people are starting, I think, to,

I think.

It's only a matter of time until you get bored with being scared.

You're still there.

We're already there.

I think America has changed.

I think the whole world has changed.

Enough.

Enough.

We got it.

You know, when you get to the point, because,

you know, as a student of history, I know what happened in 1918.

And it was much worse than what just happened.

And when this was coming down, I was one of the first people talking about it really early in January.

And I said, don't fear the virus.

Even though we don't know what it is, they're welding people into their houses.

Don't fear the virus.

Fear what the consequences are of the virus economically and to our nation.

And that's what we've seen.

You know, you're going to deal with it.

We're going to deal with it.

And we're going to survive.

Or fear both, but

prudence, right?

Prudence.

You don't drive at 55 miles an hour simply because the sign says you can when it's snowing.

But see, but this is the thing, right?

But this is the thing.

We weren't.

People were already self-isolating.

They were already saying, I remember when the president said we're going to close everything for 15 days.

And I was like, well, join the club.

I mean, because we were already self-isolating.

Sure.

People, that made sense to people.

What didn't make sense is how long it went on and still going on in some places, Canada.

Look, if there's no exit strategy, then there's no exit.

Talk to the people as we're here on fear for a second.

We're entering a time that we haven't seen maybe since World War II, the Civil War, revolutionary,

where there are right now serious consequences for going against

the

accepted narrative, whatever that narrative is.

It's changed, I don't know how many times here.

But Canada, we have a woman who was one of the main organizers.

She's facing 10 years in prison in Canada.

They've lost their livelihood.

They lost everything they had in the bank.

They lost their truck.

Because she contributed a couple hundred bucks to avoid the business.

No, because she was an organizer.

But it was peaceful.

Everything she did was square within the law, except maybe parking fines.

That scares a lot of people.

You see this government come down, Canadians right now, but we're having having it here too.

The government comes down.

They're coming down to make sure you understand.

Don't screw with us.

How do you

what would you say to people about the fear of government coming down on you at this time, losing your job, losing everything?

There's no mask to protect you from that.

There's no PPE to protect you from that.

There's no vaccine to protect you from that.

The only thing that can protect you from that are your neighbors and

your willingness to stand up.

It's very, very hard, as you know, to be the first one to stand up.

And so much of what we've seen over the last couple of years down here, I think, reminds me of that old Hans Christian Anderson, you know, the emperor's new clothes.

Oh, yeah.

When the emperor is told that his garments are fantastic, and of course the tailors haven't made any garments at all, but they convince him that he's clothed.

And he sits there in his chair and he's paraded through town naked.

And all the townspeople are like, oh, well, yes, those are amazing clothes.

Ooh, and on.

And it was the kid.

It was a kid who finally says, hey,

that dude is naked, man.

And then some adults started nodding like you are going, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's naked.

And then pretty soon, okay, we all see it.

And, you know, you can't arrest the whole town, right?

So I don't know where it tips exactly, but I would say to people that in so many ways, speaking only for myself, I have felt like that kid.

And I've also felt like a bystander in the crowd.

You know, I wasn't the first to do or say anything.

I got a lot of pushback on Safety Third.

I believe you.

I bet you did.

And had I not donated the proceeds to my foundation,

I'm not quite sure how I would have positioned that publicly.

But to answer your question, I just think that when it tips is when we can no longer bear to be told the thing we're looking at is not the thing that's happening.

It's happening a lot now.

Everywhere you look.

Everywhere.

It's happening with the language.

That protest was mostly peaceful.

I saw someone on CNN.

It was on a Saturday morning.

It was completely peaceful.

I mean, the birds were chirping in the background, practically.

Nothing happening.

And they said, this may look like a peaceful rally.

But don't be fooled.

But don't be fooled.

Yeah, this is

sacrificing virgins right around the corner.

And it was the exact opposite of when they were reporting with five, with the whole city burning down.

It's mostly peaceful.

But it's not just that.

The border's secure.

Never mind the thousands of people you can see running over it.

Afghanistan was a success.

Pay no attention to those bodies falling from the sky.

And don't worry about the 14,000 still over there with green cards who are screwed, right?

On and on and on and on and on.

You know, that's actually, that's what I think the let's go Brandon thing was, that's not what it was about when it started, but that's what it became.

Because everybody in that crowd could hear what was being chanted.

Yes.

But the nice lady in front of the camera said, oh, can you hear them?

They're saying, let's go, Brandon.

And you're sitting right there, awash in a level of cognitive dissonance that's almost impossible to overstate.

And you say, no, actually, that's not what they're saying.

So, what we're going to do now, it was kind of a serious thing.

Do you think that's what she heard?

Or do you think that was a brilliant, I mean, that was a brilliant cover?

It was a nice cover, and I thought she did it with kind of a smile and a wink, as if to say, I guess we all know what's happening, but she sold it.

And

if you look at the transcript, she's clearly saying, and the crowd is so behind you.

Let's go.

Let's go, Brandon.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I, you know, the people I've talked to since that happened have adopted that expression, not to say F.

Joe Biden.

They adopt that expression whenever they're asked,

whenever they're asked to be a townsperson in the emperor's new clothes and just nod and go, yep, those clothes sure are pretty.

Let's go, Brandon.

Let's go, Brandon, because here we go again.

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um i had a job for you to do and i think it's a dirty job but i think you'd be great at it i think that you should become the new cnn ombudsman

that you just watch cnn and every couple of weeks you just come in and tell them what they've done you know it's so funny you said that somebody the other day was talking about

like they they didn't really replace larry king No, they didn't.

You know, and part of the reason, I think, was because they were pretty sure that

people didn't have the attention span or the appetite for a longer form.

Hello, Joe Rogan.

Hello, podcasting.

Oh, I know.

People are starving for it.

They're starving for it.

And so it's...

It's not just the long form, but they're starving for authenticity.

Which is really hard to do in short bursts.

Yeah.

Look, very hard to fake.

But if you can

fake it, if it's correct.

Once you dig back, then the world's your oysters.

Right.

I have an epigram in my book

that's a quote from my favorite fictitious character, Travis McGee,

who lives on a houseboat and solves crimes.

John D.

MacDonald created him back in 1964.

And among many other quotable things, McGee said

in a big, thick paragraph full of all the things he's suspicious of and all the things he's wary of.

It ends with, but most of all, I am wary of all earnestness.

And

that

right now, we were talking about certainty before, being long on certainty.

This is, there's never been a time, in my view, when Americans should be more skeptical of every single thing.

Everything.

Everything, including everything I'm saying right now.

Every single thing ought to be held up, weighed and measured, and evaluated as best an individual can do it.

But rather than being encouraged to be skeptical,

we are told by our journalists to trust us.

Trust us.

And certain sounding people in a crisp, well-modulated baritone will sit behind their microphone and tell you the way it is.

Trust us, they say.

And the experts in the lab coats, they say, trust us.

It's science.

I'm science, right?

well not science notice it's there's the science whenever yeah you know what whenever you put the in front of something somebody's trying to sell you something that's exactly right so instead of being wary of earnestness we are told we are it we are cajoled we're challenged if you question Glenn you're a denier

skepticism which is not cynicism, by the way, or insanity, it's just skepticism.

It's healthy.

Here we are surrounded by ambiguity and experts that can't agree on all sorts of things.

And we are told that if we're skeptical of anything, then we're just a denier, a fill-in-the-blank, a science denier, a climate denier, a mask denier.

So rather than encouraging a skeptical mind, we seem, our institutions in particular seem

convinced, seem dedicated to the proposition of erasing that, right?

That quality.

That's what, that's what I think is under siege, and that worries me.

I saw an article this week in the New York Times.

It was about

the scandal of spying on the president and the reason why the New York Times hasn't covered any of that.

And first they said it was all misinformation.

And then the very next sentence was: and to be able to really tell this story, it's very complex with a lot of different names that people don't know.

And it would require an enormous effort

on the side of the reader to understand that, which makes us question whether things like this should be covered at all.

That's incredible.

The infantilization, infantilization.

Yeah, that's That's what it is.

It's, look,

we're not children.

And

we shouldn't be treated like children.

And the idea that somebody somewhere

doesn't trust us to sift through conflicting views, this business with Rogan fascinated me, you know, because the two doctors that caused all the problems,

I don't know them, you know, but

Robert Malone holds nine patents on mRNA vaccines.

I know.

And the other guy, McCullough, is the most published cardiologist in the world.

Now, maybe they're nuts.

Maybe they're wrong.

We should have caught that before.

But if you can't talk to people who are that credentialed.

Who can you?

Right.

And so for all of that pushback that he got,

I found that kind of chilling because somebody, Neil Young doesn't think I'm capable of listening to ideas that might be incorrect.

Mike, when did rock and roll

become become the man?

Yeah.

It's amazing to me.

All these, especially these aging hippies that were like, hey, fight the power, man, you got the right.

And now all of a sudden they're like, hey, shut up or we'll put you in jail.

It's crazy.

Misinformation, disinformation.

Malinformation.

Oh, is that the problem?

Malinformation.

You know what malinformation is?

Had to look it up.

Enlighten me.

It is when somebody knows that it's a lie and is spreading it just for malice.

Oh.

So misinformation is somebody who doesn't know that it's true, that it's not true.

Disinformation is somebody who knows it's not true.

And malinformation malinformation is somebody who knows it's not true and has a heart full of malice.

But don't forget the fourth.

Yeah.

The noble lie.

Okay.

The noble lie.

The noble lie is what we say

when

your best interests might be compromised by the truth.

Let's assume masks work.

To tell people that masks don't work at a time when there was a shortage of masks was deemed a noble lie in order to make sure

it was just a lie.

It was just a lie.

And we knew it was a lie.

And it infuriated me at the time because I'm like, you sons of bitches, you don't trust the American people.

I had a bunch of masks.

You know what I did?

I didn't hoard them.

I brought them to my local hospital.

And I know I'm not alone.

There were millions of people who did that.

You just didn't trust us.

When you don't expect the best from people, you're never going to get it.

Nope.

You're never going to get it.

Yeah.

It's a self-fulfilling kind of kind of prophecy, and it impacts public policy, but it also impacts the way

we disseminate risk.

And

I will always come back to that because it's our relationship with fear.

Do you think you are more of a risk taker because

I think your heart's always been into performance.

I mean, you were an opera singer.

So do you think, I mean, you have to risk.

If you're going to be good at something, you have to risk.

Well, I told you earlier on your radio show, when I was a host, Dick Clark gave me some really, really great advice, which was don't walk out and say hi, everybody, even though you're broadcasting.

Talk to one person at a time.

And so for 10 years or so, I...

I worked really hard at being the best host I could be.

And I got pretty facile at it.

But I didn't really have any success until I learned another lesson in the sewers of San Francisco

where I realized I was a better guest.

So

if I could be the titular figure in a program, but think of myself as a guest instead of a host,

that was a risk, right?

It was a big risk because on dirty jobs, if...

If there was a pie in somebody's face, it was their pie in my face, right?

If there's a brunt of a joke, it's me.

I'm the new guy every day working with an expert who has never been on TV before, but who is quite good at his or her job.

And so for me,

the willingness to be humbled on international television was the proximate cause of whatever success I've had.

But that was a risk.

And that's something I've wanted to ask you about, too.

As a performer, you know, there's a lot of risk risk in dirty jobs visually, but like the risk of leaving Fox,

the risk of building this,

right?

The risk of going, of taking the reverse commute in your chosen field,

that

you know, you were rewarded for it, but you could have just as easily been crushed.

You have to not want something so much.

You know,

this building, I bought it for 4.9 million.

You know what we started negotiating at?

19.

Okay.

19.

Took a year.

Yeah.

But I didn't want it that much.

And they were like, it's worth 19.

I'm like, well, go find that person that thinks it's worth 19.

Is it?

Yeah.

And I started it.

I said, it's worth five.

And they said, no.

And I didn't want it that badly.

And they kept coming back.

And I'd go,

okay, it's really great.

You're offering 12.

Five.

And I got it for $4.9.

They got to five.

I said, no, now it's $4.9.

Now is the is the operative word, right?

How much time did it take to get them where you needed to get them?

Year?

A year, year, couple months, maybe?

Yeah.

But it's the concept is, and this happens to TV people and stars, I think, all the time.

And you can see it in them.

They get some success and then they want it and they want it to stay.

And so they'll start compromising and doing anything to get it.

And that's, I think, what is happening all over the world.

People are willing to compromise because they just want this.

And what they don't realize is you're not going to have this.

It's not going to be the same.

Once you start compromising, you not only lose that, you lose everything.

It's to my mind, it's not just the compromise,

it's the

duplicativeness.

Why does so much news look the same?

Why does so much FM radio sound the same?

Why does so much music sound the same?

It's once you have a little bit of success

as a producer, as an executive producer, somebody who can make a call, right?

Dirty Jobs has been on the air 20 years.

The first three episodes that aired were the highest rated.

of the week, but the show was put on the shelf for a year because it wasn't consistent with what the network saw at the time as their core audience right this is not on brand so they so they put it on the shelf um

now

that

was a safe bet for somebody to do but

and probably made sense somewhat at the time it doesn't make sense now but somebody later took a risk and they put it back on the air knowing it wasn't quite consistent with the brand.

And guess what?

It became the brand.

39 shows have evolved out of Dirty Jobs over the last

39 shows.

That's crazy.

It became the brand.

The whole construct of a host as a guest or a guest as a host, you see it all the time now.

The whole device of bringing the behind-the-scenes guys into the show, that was Dirty Jobs, right?

That level of authenticity, that kind of shooting was risky.

We didn't do second takes.

That was one of my mandates.

It's like, look,

back then, I figured reality TV meant reality, right?

So let's show you a day on the job exactly as I see it.

Now, of course, we can edit, but I wanted the viewer to see a...

a linear chronological look at my day, not a montage of some stuff and fast cuts and everything else.

And you know what take two is.

Take two is a performance.

So

yeah, had a I called it the truth cam it's just a behind-the-scenes camera like a dock cam but the mandate was simple mandate geez am I even allowed to say that

the mandate was simple you never stop rolling so whatever else happens here you know

camera goes down plane flies over I could always look to the truth cam and tell the viewer what was happening in the moment and you used the word before if you're looking for authenticity you find it in those little moments

and it's worth its weight in gold.

Part of the problem with

what we're facing, and I think it's happening to our children,

and

if we keep paying people to stay home, we're going to have more and more problems.

I think

meaning has to change.

A lot of people get their meaning from their jobs.

I think it's why a lot of guys die after they

retire.

So

how do we find meaning?

And talk about the meaning of a job and the meaning beyond the job.

Well,

on the long list of things we can't control

is virtually everything.

On the short list of things we can is that.

Like there's no,

you can't find meaning in a job.

There's no meaning in a job.

There's a meaning in you.

And

the thing to which you assign your meaningfulness is 100% in your control.

This is why we have

wretched garbage men and happy garbage men and wretched actuarial accountants and happy actuarial accountants.

The job.

And wretched billionaires and happy billionaires.

Correct.

There is nothing inherently transformational

about a job beyond its existence.

Now, if they don't exist, then you don't have the opportunity to assign your meaning to a pursuit.

And that's tragedy, right?

But in the wide world of work, What we've done, I think somewhat stupidly, is elevate certain jobs at the expense of other jobs.

It's precisely what we've done with education.

We've said, look, there's higher education, and that's the thing we want to encourage people to do.

And then it's like there's this ellipses, right?

Because, well, if there's higher education, ipso facto, there must be

lower jobs.

Higher jobs, but lower education.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right?

We don't call it lower education.

We call it alternative, right?

So maybe the four-year thing is not for you.

So we've got a lovely trade school over here for you.

Or maybe this community college program, right?

Which seems like you're right.

It does seem like that's a consolation prize.

It's a vocational consolation prize.

These safety third masks led to an apprenticeship program at a little company that was on the verge of closing in North Carolina.

And the woman, Donna Brin, who runs it, went to the community college, hired four or five seamstresses, taught the craft.

Their whole business came back on its feet, starting around these goofy little masks as a fundraiser for my foundation.

So, look, elevating work, celebrating work, looking for opportunities in places where we're told that they might be subordinate,

it's important to do that.

That's why Dirty Jobs is still on the air.

Nobody knows it because I never talk about it, but the number of multi-millionaires on that show that we profiled,

40, maybe 50.

I bet.

You just didn't know it because they were covered in crap or something worse, right?

And so they didn't look like success.

So, this is our fundamental problem.

You know, if a good education can happen in a trench or through an apprenticeship program, or well, then that is perceived as a threat to people who are trying to control what higher education ought to mean.

And then, of course, you just follow the money.

So,

what are the secrets to success?

Well,

there's no real shortcut in my view.

Like the old Horatio Alger stuff, and my foundation talks a lot about it, and I know I sound like an old, wealthy white guy screaming from his porch at the kids.

I don't mean to, and I try really hard not to go there, but there's just no substitute.

You know, delayed gratification, a decent attitude, a sense of humor.

Why?

A sense of humor.

Well, because if you're not laughing, as my pop said, the joke's on you.

Yeah, okay.

Right.

I mean, that was such an important part of Dirty Jobs.

It still is.

You know,

I don't want to go to job sites

where there's no lightness.

It doesn't matter how grim the work is or how difficult or how dangerous.

The vast majority of those sites that I've been to always have

this element.

of camaraderie, this band of brothers, which is humor's neighbor, right?

And so it was really important for me on that show to make sure that we captured that in some way, shape, or form.

Because, I mean,

whatever version of success you have, how can it not include joy, cheerfulness?

Probably the most important scout law.

Cheerful, right?

So again,

that's in your control.

Your work ethic is in your control.

The affirmative decision to show up early, stay late, take a bite of the crap sandwich when it comes around to you, and laugh through it, those are all choices.

So our Work Ethics Scholarship program specifically looks for people who have those traits.

Those traits won't make you successful.

But I can go a long way.

I don't know any successful person who doesn't have them.

Yeah.

You know, absent some lotto winners and trust fund babies, but that, you know, that doesn't count.

Yeah.

Let me take you two two places.

First of all,

your favorite storyteller.

Well,

I mean, Paul Harvey,

Paul Harvey took risks.

He, as you know,

he's a radio guy.

Showed up every day in a suit and tie.

Yeah.

Every day.

At his own office with just him.

That's right.

Early.

Yeah, sure.

Early.

Really early.

Typed his own stuff.

You know, he and his boy developed the rest of the story,

which inspired my podcast the way I heard it, still does.

You know, Harvey, Studs Turkel,

oh gosh, Donald Blank, CBS This Morning

on the Road.

Yeah, yeah.

Keralt.

Charles Keralt.

Even George Plimpton.

You know, Plimpton was a guy who wanted to experience the thing before he wrote about it, which I admire a lot.

Keralt was a guy who would rather take the back road than the highway, which I admire a lot.

Paul Harvey was a guy who would tell you the end

in the beginning, which I thought was great.

He was, there's just nobody.

Did you ever meet him?

No, I never did.

But I'll tell you, it's funny.

I got, I had a fun conversation with his son, you know, because when I started my podcast, I said, look, this is...

This is straight up inspired by Paul Harvey.

He called it the rest of the story.

I call it the way I heard it.

And I wanted to tell stories about people you knew, but I wanted to share something you didn't know about them in that inside-out way.

So it was his formula, you know.

And the podcast went up and we were up for about a year and we were doing really great.

I mean, it was killing it.

And

my partner, Mary, called me one day and she's like, we got a

FedEx here from Paul Harvey Jr.

You know, it was dropped off.

And I'm like, oh, God,

it's an injunction.

It's a cease and desist.

It's a a lawsuit.

It was a very generous check for my foundation with a note that said, my dad is looking down at this right now.

Oh, and he's great.

How great.

He's loving it.

How great.

I'm not a sentimental fool.

I'm wary of all earnestness.

But it brought a tear to my eye.

You know, because

the rest of the story was probably as much Paul Harvey Jr.

as it was his dad.

Oh, yeah.

He pushed that thing forward.

Oh, yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

So yeah, it made me think of my own dad and the things we had worked on and all the stuff we're talking about right now.

Some days you think you're going to get sued and they send you a check.

Some days you think you're getting a check.

Let me, let's end it on

this.

The two or three times that you thought you were going to be the host of The Daily Show.

Yeah, it was twice.

In those days, I was still masquerading as a host and determined, you know, I hadn't had my dirty jobs epiphany in the sewer.

I was a good host.

And

this audition came along, and they saw everybody.

They auditioned over 15,000 people

in New York and L.A.

It was going to be a big show.

And yet, still, in the end, they've ended up with Trevor Noah.

He lets you know.

Wow.

It's an uncertain time.

But back then, in the late 90s, you know, I didn't know what it was.

I just knew that Comedy Central sounded like a fun place to work.

Sure.

And the Daily Show sounded like a show that was on every day.

Right.

So I'm thinking, okay, there's some job security.

And, you know, I can impersonate a news anchor.

And, you know,

they're in on the joke.

I auditioned.

They called me back.

I went back again, auditioned some more.

They called me back for a third time.

And I got the job.

They told me on a Friday, congratulations, come in Monday, meet the writers.

So I was very excited.

I was living in New York and had a great weekend, celebrated all weekend, went in Monday to meet the writers.

And there was just this one woman sitting in this room and she didn't look happy.

And I'm like, is this comedy central?

She's like, yes, but here's what happened.

Long story short, Doug Herzog, who was running the place at the time, really wanted Craig Kilbourne, who was working at ESPN.

They wouldn't let him out of his contract, but over the weekend, they relented.

They hired Craig.

I was out.

And And that, Glenn, that,

I mean, rejection is important, but wow.

Yeah.

And I was like, man, I could taste that one.

But they called me and they said, look, you know, you really,

you got something, kid.

You know, don't quit this.

You're good at this.

And we think our paths will cross again.

Well, son of a gun, a year later, old Craig Kilbourne gets the call, winds up doing the late show at CBS, I guess it was.

And

they call me back and they say, look, this job is basically yours.

We've looked at your tape from a year ago.

We'd like you to come in again, meet the folks, say hi.

So I did.

Were you skeptical the second time?

No, that's not.

No, no.

It was like, look, I mean, I just thought, there it is.

I thought it was Destiny.

I'm like, well, obviously, this is Maybe.

I come in, I meet everybody, and oh, the writers were so great.

And I met the director, and I actually did a show.

It never aired, but they said, Let's just sit down and have some fun.

And, you know, here's the prompter, and maybe you can write some stuff.

And I wrote a fun thing, and

I just crushed it.

It was one of those days when you go home, you're like, this is it.

You just know you did your best.

Yeah.

It's like if you're at the bat, you got every piece of it.

Yeah.

You know, it just felt so right.

And as I was leaving, Madeline Smithberg said to me, she said, Look, the only way this gig isn't yours is if this network, if this, her words, cheap ass network, coughs up a few million dollars for the likes of Norm McDonald or,

oh, who was the other guy?

Dennis Miller or Jon Stewart.

But that'll never happen.

She says, that'll never happen.

Bless it, great.

Three days later, John signed a $4 million contract.

Do you think you'd even be considered now?

Oh,

probably not.

I mean,

it wouldn't be funny, you know, to have a third whack at the end of the day.

I mean, I'm tempted.

I'm trying to think who I know over there that could give you a call and say, well, but, Mike,

we've got a game for you.

Are you sitting down?

You're sitting down.

Unless we can get anyone else.

Here's the truth.

And this is probably a good place for me to land the plane.

I don't think I'd take it, you know, if they offered.

And I don't say that because I think I'm above it or anything.

A daily show is a priceless opportunity to

influence and to push the rock up the hill and to do whatever it is you want to do.

God bless Trevor, Noah.

You know, if he's having fun and everybody's happy, I think it's great.

Never.

I went from that rejection to working for Dick Clark where I learned some interesting things.

And then I had maybe 100 other jobs.

But it wasn't until the sewer in San Francisco when I realized I was a better guest than I was a host.

And it wasn't until the risk came together and the stars lined up and dirty jobs got on the air and then off the air and then back on the air.

That's when my life changed.

That's when the foundation evolved.

That's when

every good thing that's happened over the last 20 years, that's when the die was cast.

And so it's, I haven't had the most glamorous career, but I've.

You've had a great career.

I've had a terrific run.

And I have a very unusual business with a really unique set of...

My best friend from high school is the producer on my podcast and is deeply embedded in my foundation.

Mary, who you know, has been with me from the start.

That woman, managing partner at a high-end law firm with a lot of clients, she left.

to work with a guy who crawled through a sewer as a guest in order to build a business that ultimately let me sit here with you talking about Safety Third and various other concepts that have allowed my foundation to give away a million dollars every year for work ethics scholarships.

So yeah, the daily show would have been great.

We wouldn't have gotten here.

Not here.

Mike, thanks.

Anytime.

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