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- Exploring the unintended consequences of a safety-first
culture, through the lens of quarantine, was to me,
a really interesting rumination,
because we can be a safety-first country,
but only for very, very, very short periods of time.
And then we're reminded that the chief goal of living
is not to merely stay alive.
(digital music)
- I'm Dave Rubin, and this is The Rubin Report.
We're still in lock-down mode.
Joining me today is a true renaissance man, an author,
a podcaster, a narrator, and a guy who has done an awful
lot of dirty jobs.
Mike Rowe, finally I can welcome you to The Rubin Report.
- And finally I can say it's great to be here.
I'm sorry it took so long,
but you know, jobs, stuff, whatever.
- That was a big intro that I gave you there
because there's a lot of things
that I could call you, I suppose.
Or that someone reading your bio could call you.
What would you call yourself first and foremost?
- A good natured model to vocational schizophrenia.
(Dave laughs)
I don't know, that's not bad.
- That was pretty good.
- You know, I mean, it's such a huge question really.
I mean you came right out of the gate with a giant,
existential query, you know,
how do I actually identify myself?
For a long time I would have said, "I'm a host".
And then I went through this phase where I said,
"Well, I get paid to impersonate hosts on television shows",
and I became fairly facile at it.
But today, honestly, thanks to Dirty Jobs, and a bunch
of other stuff that happened in its wake, I've adapted
the mindset of a guest.
Part guest, part avatar, part cipher.
So, I see my role today, not to be too grand about,
but I tap the country on the shoulder from time to time
and say, "Hey, what about him?"
Or, "What about her?"
Or, "Get a load of this."
So I'm a curious guy with a number of platforms
that allow me to indulge myself at every turn.
- All right, well now that we got the existential stuff
out of the way (laughs), I'm gonna stroke your ego
for a second and then we'll get into the other stuff.
So, I didn't tell you this in the minute or two
that we talked before the cameras turned on,
but when the first episode of Dirty Jobs came out,
I saw it, and I was like, do you remember what jobs
you were doing in that, what job you did in that first one,
by any chance?
- Well, there's the first one that aired,
and there were the first ones we shot.
And in my mind--
- The first one that aired.
- The very first Dirty Jobs to air
featured me in a bat cave,
Bracken Cave outside of Austin, Texas.
40 million Mexican free-tailed bats in a very contained,
creepy, horrific place.
Literally wading through guano as these bats
hung upside-down, defecating, urinating, and giving birth.
Little tiny placentas showering down upon us as dermastid
flesh-eating beetles, living in the guano,
crawled slowly up our willfully inadequate Tyvek suits
to dine on our happy flesh.
- So you got the answer correct there.
The reason I know that, is because I saw the very first
episode of Dirty Jobs and I went on, like, the official
Dirty Jobs message board, this was before
we were all Tweeting and all this stuff,
and I wrote something like,
"This Mike Rowe is completely insane, this show is crazy,
"it's amazing, I couldn't stop watching."
And guess what?
Mike Rowe responded to me that very night.
You were on the message board, on the Dirty Jobs
message board, and you responded to me.
So this is not the first time we've communicated.
- Well then, let me just say--
- I'm sure you remember that well.
- It's seared into my retina, Dave.
I'll never forget that night.
I was in a Motel Six, I was alone.
No, it's so fortuitous looking back, 'cause I'm a late
adaptor, I didn't do the Facebook or the Twitter.
In fact, I said to Jay Leno and somebody posted this video
not long ago, "I would rather stick hot needles in my eye
"than Tweet or book a face".
I was just always, always, always late.
But, the Discovery Channel in 2003 said,
"Listen, if we're trying this thing,
"and we'll build you a chat room."
And I said, "If you call it the Mud Room,
"call it the Mud Room and I'll go in it."
Those early days, talking with fans,
literally from Motel Sixes and Super Eights,
and just, you know, shooting the shit with people
in the middle of the night, really formed the foundation,
not just for the show and my interaction with the people
who watch, but the program itself.
The show was programmed from that chat room.
All of the ideas after season one came from guys like you,
sitting up too late, you know,
sending off illicit texts and whatnot.
- There you go, there you go.
So we have communicated before.
I will try to keep this in the same level of respect
that I communicated, I'm sure anonymously,
on an odd chat board.
So there it is.
Okay, before we do anything else, there's a million things
that I want to talk to you about, but we're in this strange
covid time obviously.
We're both in California, not in the same town,
but we're both here in California where it does seem
like we're gonna be one of the last to open up,
and we've got a lot of, kind of, big government officials
here that seem to be, at least from my position,
encroaching on our rights at this point.
Well, first off I guess, just what's your take
on the lock-down specifically?
Maybe a bit about California, since you live here.
And then I wanna talk about getting back to work
and the importance of working and things like that.
- Sure, sure.
I've been comparing it to the Kubler Ross,
"Five Stages of Grief", right?
I mean, the country's grieving, in a sense,
but we're all at different levels, and we're all grieving
at different speeds, and we're trying to process
a lot of information and a lot of data without a ton
of context or perspective.
And so what you wind up getting with that, in my view
anyway, is the opportunity to look around and go,
"Oh, look he's in denial, and he's bargaining,
"and she's depressed, and she's angry,
"and that one's accepted it."
But what have they accepted exactly?
Have they accepted the reality of the virus?
The reality of the lock-down?
Or this weird space that requires us to somehow
navigate both?
And so I, early on, wrote a piece called "Safety Third"
which borrowed the title from a special I did for Discovery
back in 2008 where I ruminated on the unintended
consequences of a culture that truly elevates safety
to an unrealistic place on some hierarchy.
The safety-first culture, the safety-first mentality,
with regard to vocational work, is fascinating
because it's rife with unintended consequences.
When you put safety at the top of the thing,
and when you tell your employees, or your customers,
that their safety is your top priority, you set the table
in a very strange way, and it's a way that often times,
in my view anyway, fosters complacency
among the very customers and employees
who should be really taking a measure of personal
responsibility for their own actions.
So, exploring the unintended consequences of a safety-first
culture through the lens of quarantine, was to me,
a really interesting rumination,
because we can be a safety-first country,
but only for a very, very, very short periods of time,
and then we're reminded that the chief goal of living
is not to merely stay alive, at least not for most people.
And then this fascinating conversation starts to unfold.
So that's a long way of saying that for the last 60 days
or so, I've seen a lot of conversation right around
a couple of topics that I love.
Specifically, homeostatic risk, compensatory risk,
risk equilibrium, and all the subconscious things
we do to maintain our own illusory relationship
with the illusion of safety.
- So let's talk about those type of risks a little bit,
'cause you've worked with a ton of people who take all sorts
of crazy risks in their day-to-day jobs all the time.
Do you sense that maybe we've hit the limit,
as we enter now, sort of, two months,
or roughly eight weeks, of lock-down, that we've sort of hit
the limit where now it's like, okay,
we did what we had to do, but what I'm sensing,
at least here in LA where, you know, it's pretty leftie,
people are willing to accept, you know, a lot of government.
But now, when I'm walking my dog, my neighbors,
you know, they're suddenly going, "We gotta be outside now.
"Like, it's 85 and sunny,
"why am I not at the beach right now?"
That something, I'm not even talking about the people
that have had their lives destroyed and lost jobs
and everything else, I'm talking just the sort
of the regular people who walk around in a sort of daze
about what reality is all the time.
But even they're starting to tilt now.
Are you, sort of, amazed at the way we don't look at risk
normally until suddenly it smacks us in the face?
- Well, yes, because look, we're just not used to it yet.
And part of the reason
we're not used to it is because it's just a staggering
new thing to get your head around.
But it's also hard to get used to a thing
when the goal posts are constantly moved,
when the data is constantly shifting, and most of all,
when the experts themselves are in violent disagreement.
This is the most disconcerting thing to people,
and I'm sure you've spoken about it.
In that same article that I wrote early on was this idea
that, I mean, here's Neil Ferguson, right?
He's very, very clear in his projections and his modeling,
and here's John Ioannidis, down at Stanford,
and he's saying, "Look, I just don't,
"I'm looking at the same data, I'm not disputing the data
"but I just don't think it's reliable."
And these two big-brained guys, you know, one's predicting
80,000 fatalities in this country, the other's 2.2 million.
Somebody's not just wrong, somebody's very, very, very,
very wrong, and so you know, when you look at that through
the lens of a fake news culture where sources are inherently
unreliable and where everything is politicized, you know,
it's not unreasonable for the average American to look
around and be skeptical, you know?
And it's not unpatriotic to wanna look at this thing
from all sides and kick the tires.
And to your question, we're creatures of visual stimulation,
you know, we take our cues from a thousand different things
that happen around us all of the time.
And you're right, when the sun goes out, and the breeze
is warm, and this is when we're supposed
to be doing X,Y and Z.
But we can't, and we don't, because time is somehow bent.
It's been hard for me personally to concentrate.
I thought when this happened, I was gonna sit down
and take a few months and write.
I love to write.
I write mostly on planes.
Now finally I have a chance to do this.
I can't.
It's all I can do to get my podcast up once a week now.
And part of the reason is because I'm genuinely curious
to stay informed, or at least try
to make sense of the next deal.
It's like somebody's dealing the cards, Dave,
and they just don't stop.
They just keep coming.
And you think you're playing one game, and now you're
in a completely different game.
It's back to the stages of grief, everybody is always
starting over and trying to figure out where they are.
And when 330 million people
are doing that contemporaneously, it's a hell of a thing.
- Yeah, I love that analogy, 'cause it's not only
as if they're playing with unlimited cards,
but it's also that you don't know whether you're playing
poker or some other game, or they're gonna flip
it in the middle, or something else.
Like, we're just sort of stuck in this endless thing.
So then, how does a guy like you, who has, I assume
you consider yourself someone with a pretty high risk
threshold, I mean, how do you decide when you have to now
start taking risks and going out, either with or without
a mask, or just not listening to whatever that,
as you described, we have this fake news thing out there,
when you're not gonna listen to the narrative anymore?
- Well, this is the eternal paradox
because the honest answer, in normal times,
to your question is deeply personal.
Risk is personal, right?
This is why risk compensation is so interesting.
You get 100 people in a room, everybody has a slightly
different tolerance for risk, and when you introduce
protocols, safety features for instance, the theory
goes that your behavior will change
to suit the measures you take.
For instance, if you wear a seat belt,
studies show you drive faster.
If you wear a helmet on your motorcycle,
studies show you corner faster.
The more safety features you put on a machine,
the more likely the operator is to assume a level of risk
that is slightly heightened.
Why?
Because there's a thing in our brain that wants to keep
the risk homeo, in a homeostatic state, right?
So risk equilibrium is the thing that says
you subconsciously adjust your behavior to adapt
to your circumstances, which is perfectly rational.
But as you start to introduce new safety protocols,
subconscious things start to happen.
Why, for instance, are the most dangerous intersections
in the world the ones that have the crosswalks
and the little guy telling you when to walk?
In part, it's because it trains us to look at the little
guy walking, and when we see him walking, we step
off the curb, and then the big blue bus takes us out, right?
'Cause we've been trained not to look.
So, something is happening right now with regard to public
safety, and individual responsibility.
It's a collision.
And, on the one hand, you've got a lot of people,
like myself, and probably you,
who think I'm gonna do this when I'm comfortable.
I'm gonna take the risk and assume more risk,
when I'm comfortable, and when my equilibrium re-balances.
On the other hand, we're being told
by our employers when to come in.
We're being told by the state
when to stay home and for how long.
And now, in a thousand other little ways we're being told,
sometimes by being scolded, other times by being shamed
in whatever way, shape or form,
the mask is going to become a dog whistle.
It's already started to.
I walk around my neighborhood,
half the people don't wear masks.
Half are.
Those who are, the waves of disapproval
are coming off of them.
And they have science and research and they have proof
to show me why I'm being irresponsible.
Well, the mask-less crowd has their experts,
and they have their research, and so it goes.
And my answer to your question is, I don't know,
other than to say that we can't completely arbitrage
personal responsibility out of the equation.
- Yeah, arbitrage is the right word there.
That was a good word and it's exactly the right one there.
You know, I don't want to get myself in any trouble here,
but my hair is a little shorter than it was two days ago.
Do you know what I mean?
- You--
- I'm not saying anything. - Are mistaking--
I think what you're saying is you invested in a Flowbee
and spent some quality time alone.
- You have a Flowbee yourself, it ain't easy, my friend.
I now know that.
- Twice this morning.
- (laughs) Okay, so the main question that I think
I wanted to ask you, that I think will, sort of, frame
everything else we're gonna talk about is that there seems
to be a narrative out there from a certain set of people
that it's like, oh going back to work, it's just too risky,
and no one really wants to work anyway, and you know,
AOC had some version of this sort of thing.
Like, only in America would be value work so high.
And as a guy that I have seen do the craziest jobs,
you know, where you're stepping in shit, your hand's
in this animal, the bats, electricity, water,
you can give me ten other examples of the crazy things
that you've had people do, you work with people
who do this for a living.
Can you just talk about, just broadly, like, the importance
of work, relative to finding purpose in life,
relative to just setting up the rest of the things
that you want out of life?
'Cause that actually is one of the things that I'm most
worried about right now, that as we, sort of, give away
our day-to-day lives, that we're gonna forget
that work is important.
I'm not talking about slavery, but I'm just talking
about the getting up with something to do because it makes
you some money so you can do everything else with your life
that you want to do.
- So, it's the frog in the boiling water.
I share your fear.
It's not gonna happen like a light switch though.
What's the old poem?
"Not with a bang, but a whimper."
And the way it'll happen here is people like AOC
and others who genuinely, or maybe not so genuinely,
believe that work is fundamentally another expression
for drudgery, are going to make those points.
They're going to reduce it to something
that's purely transactional.
That's the first step.
And if you only look at what you do as a means to make money
then you're not an interesting person (laughs), okay?
- Yeah, yeah, I hear ya.
- It's such a one-dimensional way to look at something
that should, in my view, and often times does, define us,
you know, it's our work.
It's the thing we choose to do with the most conscious
chunk of our life.
And so to reduce it to a paycheck is dumb.
Obviously, there's a giant transactional element involved
in it, but there's so much more.
Dirty Jobs happened because (laughs) I couldn't follow
in my grandfather's footsteps,
which I very much wanted to do.
My Pop was a guy who could build
a house without a blueprint.
He only went to the 7th grade, but he had the chip, right,
in his brain that he could take your watch apart
and put it back together blindfolded.
He could build a house.
He could run pipe.
He was a master electrician, steam fitter, pipe fitter,
mechanic, architect, all of that.
Well, he was heroic in his youth, in his time,
for those things.
Today, he'd be a Mr Cellophane, you know, he's transparent.
And so many of those trades, so many of those vocations
have fallen into this gap between blue and white collar,
they've lost their luster, and we've simply not properly
gobsmacked, the way we used to be, about the miracle
of modern plumbing, or the miracle that happens
when you flick the switch and the light comes on.
So, Dirty Jobs was meant to be a tribute to my grandfather,
initially, and it was, and then it became a rumination
on essential work which is interesting, right,
because obviously the headlines have caught up with that.
And that's really been my great good fortune over the years.
I do average shows with low production value,
but big themes, and I stick with those themes,
and every couple of years,
the headlines will catch up with them.
Dirty Jobs and the people we featured, became weirdly
relevant when the economy crashed in 2009,
and it's become weirdly relevant this month.
I've been on every talk show
there is to talk about essential work.
And it's funny, I'll tell you what happens.
I mean, look, there's a poster, I keep it on my wall
to remind me, I put a pig on a pedestal many years ago
for a lot of reasons.
And when people have me on they expect me to make the case
for essential workers, and of course I do, because everybody
understands that case.
Now, when Dirty Jobs went on, nobody was making that case,
so I felt special, and I felt like, you know, iconic-classed
out there saying, "Hey, don't forget about this one
"and this one and this one."
Right now, while I still hold them in the absolute
highest esteem, I'm amazed at how we've taken 35 million
people and deemed them unessential.
That, to me, is something I reckon we're gonna look
back on with great linguistic embarrassment because--
- That's exactly what I wanted to ask you next.
So, continue, continue.
- Nah, it's your turn.
I just really--
- But that was the question really.
Once we say to 35 million people, you're not essential,
it's not just about the job that they do, it's the message
that's getting across to their lives, which in some ways,
I actually think in some ways, if they can get through it,
and then rethink what they do, maybe there is something
else they want to do, but I don't think that's the message
that most people are gonna get.
I think we're gonna leave people
with some sort of existential crisis.
- We're doing it.
It's part of the grieving process I was saying earlier.
People are coming to terms with the fact
that their vocations don't matter in the eyes
of virtually everyone who has a show to host
because in our well-intended enthusiasm to celebrate
the essential workers, we've done a thing
we always do with the language,
and I am not a politically correct person,
at least I try not to be, but language does matter a lot.
And, you know, in my own foundation,
when I feel most comfortably in my own lane,
I talk about education and the skilled trades,
and higher education is a turn of phrase
that has become inculcated.
And when we talk about the importance of higher education,
well, who would doubt it?
Of course we need big people
with big brains doing important work.
But what does higher education imply
if not the existence of many forms of lower education?
Subordinate education?
So the language bakes in a terrible kind of analysis.
If you don't get a four-year degree,
if you don't buy into the idea that the most expensive path
is the best path for the most people,
then you wind up doing something.
They don't call it lower education
'cause that would just be crazy,
but they call it alternative.
Ah, we have some alternatives for you, Dave.
Maybe you'd like it over here in a trade school.
Or, perhaps you'd be comfortable
over here in a community college.
Or, in a fellowship, or an apprenticeship.
So, we did that in education
and the unintended consequences are breath-taking.
We're doing it now with the very heart
of people's identities,
and we're doing it around the simple word.
We're not meaning to do it, but you watch.
It's gonna come back over the net with a lot of top spin.
People are already pissed off about it.
I just don't think they quite understand why.
- Yeah, let's actually back-up for a second and talk
about your foundation a little bit, because everything
you're saying right now, I think, does get to a trend
that I've been seeing for a while, which is I've had
so many guests who've come from academia, and you know,
so much of our national conversation is about outrage
culture and cancel culture and what's happening at colleges
and now because of YouTube, average people,
and I mean that in the best sense of average,
all of us, can watch incredible thinkers give lectures.
You can watch Jordan Peterson lectures on YouTube for free,
and maybe get more information from that than you can
from a semester that you're paying 25 grand for.
So talk about your foundation, and sort of,
can you just relate that little bit
to what you see happening with higher ed relative to,
if you have a trade right now, it's like, you are essential,
again, in the best sense of essential that's not,
we're not putting down the non-essential.
Maybe we can come up with a better word for it right now.
- Well, we should because everything has a season,
and part of the reason we're locked in this endless
feedback loop of nonsense is because we're in love
with cookie-cutter advice, and so we dispense
it with certainty (laughs),
and this is what politicians do to be elected.
They have to.
They have to say the thing that's going to resonate
with the most people, and so they wind up retrenching
to bromides and platitudes and tropes.
That's what safety-first is.
That's why Cuomo said, "No measure, no matter how draconian
"or drastic, could be deemed unjustifiable if it saves
"a single life."
Reasonable people, reasonable people know that's a lie.
Reasonable people know that when United Airlines
or American Airlines says, "Here at blankety-blank airline,
"your safety is our priority."
We don't really believe that because seconds later
they invite us to strap ourselves in to an aluminum tube
and defy gravity as 700 miles an hour, okay?
The truth is on the back of the ticket, rules of carriage.
Read that and you'll hear the truth.
So, we don't tell people the truth in a lot of ways,
but when we lie to them now,
the consequences are catastrophic.
So, we've gotta get past the cookie-cutter advice,
the bromides and the platitudes.
If there's a silver lining, to answer your question,
and I think there probably are a couple of them,
I don't know when we'll see them, but the way we learn
surely has to be among them.
What we're doing right now, I mean, opinions will vary
obviously, but this is meaningful, you know?
- No, no, everyone's on board
with what we're doing right now, trust me.
- And I mean, we're having a grown-up conversation,
I don't feel rushed to provide you with a sound bite,
you listen more than you talk, which most guests, most hosts
don't do, so you know, you're doing a bunch of stuff right.
And two weeks ago I watched on YouTube a lecture from MIT
for free, the same lecture that would have cost X-thousands
of dollars, right?
So, I think, when the dust settles, higher education
is going to be revealed for the luxury brand
that it truly is.
And when you take away all of the stuff that has nothing
to do with learning or connecting, you're gonna be left
with a breathtakingly over-priced product.
And when you look at the schools, like Harvard,
who didn't refund the tuitions for canceling classes,
they didn't even refund the room and board, you know?
Well, people are gonna get used to this screen.
They already are.
But I think more and more are gonna take deeper dives
into more interesting ponds, and they're gonna find
big thinkers with easily accessible ideas,
who are exponentially more interesting than professors,
and soon, I hope, our obscene love affair with credentialing
is going to stop.
We're going to pause in every imaginable way,
and look at what is essential.
Not just in workers, or in work, but in education,
in food, in fun, you know, everything is going to be forced
through a different filter.
And I wish I was smarter to say specifically, you know,
how that's gonna come out, but you never get to see
how the sausage is truly made, you know, in our industry
really, or in any, until the dust settles.
So we've gotta get through it.
But I don't know that we're gonna recognize the airline
industry, I don't know that we're gonna recognize
higher education, I don't know that we're gonna recognize
exercise, everything is going to change.
Some things for the better, some things not.
But that level of uncertainty through all of it,
is the reason why everybody's walking around like an extra
in the Walking Dead right now, waiting for clarity.
- Yeah, so even though we maybe didn't want this,
I'm pretty sure nobody wanted this to happen,
but to all of your points that lead to the silver lining
of this, do you think that in a weird way, this was almost
necessary, like, it almost feels like the old world
was just, sort of, caught in some weird, I guess,
the frog in the pot kind of thing?
Like, our institutions were not working properly,
we know how much money we were sending kids
out into the real world with debt, that the jobs
weren't quite there, that if anything,
maybe this toppled enough of the, just,
the grunge and grit that was on the machine.
Maybe it chipped off enough that we can start building
some new stuff so that's actually good.
- I think so.
Look, I liken it to, I mean, every major transformative
moment in your own life was probably preceded by something
akin to splat.
Sometimes things have to go splat, you know?
Sometimes in little ways, sometimes in big ways.
This is a biggie.
This is the biggest thing I've ever lived through
in terms of a, you know, transformational event.
And so, again, I don't know how it's going to shake out,
but yeah, the machine just got shook.
We just, something grabbed us by the lapels with big,
muscular hands and shook really, it's still shaking us,
and we're trying to make sense of the shaking
while our glasses are flying off of our head
and the chains is coming out of our butt.
We're still being shook.
But here's the thing, I mentioned this, I think,
to Glenn Beck the other day, you know, the thing nobody
is thinking about with regard to a premature opening
versus an unnecessary sequestration, is what happened
to the Brits in '39, right?
I mean Hitler dropped a lot of bombs on London every day,
day after day, day after day after day.
For weeks they stayed in hunkered in the bunker,
in the air raid shelters, and then about three weeks
into it, they started venturing out,
bombs were still falling, right?
Started opening shops, the bombs were still falling.
They opened the schools, the bombs were still falling.
They were cleaning up.
Now, I'm not saying for a second that we ought to do
anything premature, but I'm saying that no matter
what we do first is going to feel premature.
Doesn't matter what it is, it's going to feel reckless.
It has to, by definition.
But the thing is, what really drove the Brits
out of their bunkers?
I wasn't there.
I don't really know.
But from what I've read, my sense of it is they got bored.
They got bored of being terrorized, and they just said, no.
And they had enough time, as horrific as it was,
they had enough time to let it sit for a minute.
There's no way you're coming out after day two, or five,
or eight, or 12, 14 meh, 20 mm-hmm, right?
And so, it's very personal and there's a herd mentality,
just as surely as there is a herd immunity,
and the first ones to go will look reckless and crazy,
but then others will follow, and then pretty soon,
you're a guy who gets behind the wheel of your car
and drives across the state knowing full well that 40,000
people are going to die this year as a result
of traffic fatalities, but you get in and you strap up,
and look, you do a lot of things.
I mentioned Cuomo earlier, and I'll circle back.
If he really believed it then why not get together,
just get together with the governors and say,
"Look, we're lowering the speed limits to 20,
"we're all wearing helmets, and we're outlawing left turns."
You could save 40,000 lives this year, but you won't do that
because we have baked the risk into our lives,
and at base we are a safety-third kind of people.
We know that there are other things more important.
Safety always is the rational thought, but I think,
really, not to make it all about me, but I was right
in 2008, safety-first is a bromide, and that platitude
it sinks in to the point where a lot of us believe
it reflexively, but we don't really believe it,
and we are right now waking up to the fact
that we've been living with all forms of attendant risk
for a very, very long time.
We're just not used to this, and it's gonna take a while
to get used to it, but we will.
And if getting used to it means masks and temperature checks
and cavity searches, or God knows what else, I don't know,
but there will be protocols, and they will be accepted,
and we will get used to them.
Just as surely as we're used to taking our shoes off
at the airport.
- Is the X-factor of all of this though,
that while in 1930s Britain, you know,
they had newspapers that were still being delivered
to their house, that we're all in our house
being under a different type of onslaught
which is an information onslaught?
And as you said, our sort of, our journalist class,
and our protected academia class, whatever that is,
it's getting almost impossible
to figure out who to trust these days.
You may know, I'm in the midst of my first book tour
right now, and one of the questions that almost everyone
has asked me, so I've probably been asked
this about a hundred times in the last week,
is "Dave, who do you trust?"
And I'm running out of good answers on that.
Like, I can pick a couple of people that I, kind of, trust,
but I don't really trust institutions.
I wouldn't just say, the "New York Times", certainly,
you know what I mean?
That we're under another type of attack in a weird way,
that it's not just what is actually happening,
or what's not happening, it's that there's a constant
narrative being slammed
at us from whatever your preconceived notion is.
- You know Mike Shermer right?
- Of course, he's one of the best.
I had him on two weeks ago, he's one of the best.
- I've never met him, give him my regards 'cause he--
- I will, he's great.
I'd be happy-- - That'd be terrific.
I'd love to meet him 'cause he did write a book years ago
that had a huge impact on me.
It was called, "Why People Believe Weird Things",
and it was such a simple look, I was fascinated at the time
with clubs and groups and organizations and cults
and passwords, right, all of that stuff, you know?
And I had some friends who had been, in my view,
inculcated, and this business of deprogramming people
and talking to people rationally.
He was the guy that really got me most interested
in thinking that way.
So, you know, the answer to your question is to be skeptical
without being cynical, and we're living in a time
of great confusion, I think, and great cynicism,
and we shouldn't forgo our skeptical nature
in order not to be, well look,
we need to be skeptical is the answer.
We need to trust and verify, and we need to question
our own assumptions, I think, first and foremost.
We can't simply preach to the choir, as pleasing
as it is to do so.
We need to be challenged.
We need to be out of our comfort zone.
But we also need to be honest.
Look, I thought, I haven't read your book yet,
but I read your first chapter, and I'm looking forward
to finishing it, but you write about coming out, you know,
in a really honest way.
And coming out politically, in so many ways, I suspect,
is probably, you know, more difficult than it's ever been.
And so, sorry, I'm free associating, but to be skeptical
of your own truth, your own beliefs I mean, I don't know,
this own truth thing never really resonated with me.
But to be skeptical, not just about what you believe,
but why you believe it.
And then, you know, to share that skepticism
requires a measure of humility.
And that's what I liked about what I've read of your book
so far, you can't be enlightened without being humble,
and you can't be humble without being wrong (laughs).
What's dangerous for people--
- I assure you I've been wrong a couple of times,
and it's been public (laughs).
- But to be wrong and not be humbled by it,
is to have a quality that is not, what's the word?
Good (laughs).
It is not good to have the capacity to be wrong
but not humbled. It's the beginning of the death of shame.
- I know you're not part of the academic class there
because you went into the depths of your mind to find
the right adjective and you came up with good (laughs).
- My second-favorite four-letter word.
- Yeah, exactly.
All right, so let's back up because a lot of the stuff
you're giving me, sort of, jives to me as someone
that got a decent upbringing, that got some of the right
things handed to them, and since we just had Mother's Day
this past weekend, your Mom, according to this paper
in front of me, is a two-time
New York Times Bestselling author.
Her last book, it's from two weeks ago she was on the list,
I might be on the same list as your Mom,
which would be pretty spectacular.
Tell me a little bit about your upbringing,
your relationship with your Mom, how she sort of stepped
into this, is she 82 now?
She's 82, I think. - She's 82.
- She's 82 and, sort of, stepped into this other life,
as if what you were doing, kind of, wasn't enough.
- It's the most enjoyable thing I've ever watched,
and it's probably the best thing I've ever done,
in terms of being a son.
You know, my Mom and I are very close, so are my Dad and I,
and she's been writing me stories for years.
We critique each other's work.
She writes me stuff, she reads it, and so forth.
A couple of years ago, she wrote a very funny story
about losing her purse at the local Walmart,
and the hilarity that ensued as my father,
who doesn't hear so well, didn't have his hearing aids
and was trying to call her phone that was in the purse,
and was dumpster diving.
It was pandemonium.
Like, pee your pants funny.
I read it on Facebook and I posted it and I went to work.
Two days later I came home and 71 million people
had watched the video of me reading my mother's story.
Now, this is where it goes off the rails.
Publishers called, "Mike, if your Mom can write a couple
"a dozen of those, she's got a book.
"And just make sure you're in them so we have a hook, right?
"We need the mother of the Dirty Jobs guy."
Gotta have the hook.
So I said, "Mom, here's what you do, we need 20 stories,
"I gotta be in them."
She says, "Oh gosh, that's terrific.
"But you know, Michael, I have two other sons."
I'm like, "Mom, it's not about them, it's about your book.
"Just do what you're--"
Okay, she goes away and she writes this book
"About My Mother".
I'm not in any of these stories.
There are 30 stories about my Nanna, my grandmother.
Now, they're hysterical but nobody's gonna publish them.
So I printed 10,000 copies, put them out on Facebook,
sold out in two days.
Then the publishers called and said, "Oh my God,
"you didn't tell us she could write."
So they reprint her first book, and she just finishes
her second book, "About Your Father and Other Celebrities
"I Have Known", pee your pants funny.
That's the book that's on the list right now.
And it's just a few dozen very funny essays
she wrote to me over the years about the incredibly odd,
quirky and brilliant man that is her husband, my Dad.
And, you know, of course, she writes this very funny book
at the height of the plague, and it falls to me
to try to promote it, around the same time your book
hit, in fact.
(Dave laughing)
And look, I've been watching you, man.
It's really been fun because we're all, we're not all
in the same boat, but we're all in the same storm, right?
And we're playing the cards we have,
and we're trying to sell our books.
I'm trying to help my Mom, and it's just, I mean,
how much more adaptable, and this is a compliment
to the species, but you know, you're seeing people adapt
right now to this entirely new world
in every imaginable way.
And regarding my Mom's book, she's 82 and completely
become a new person.
I'm 58 and now saddled with marketing her book in a way
that hopefully works in the age of corona.
All the rules are gone.
Everything is different.
And while that's unsettling, it is, I don't know.
Are you weirdly liberated by all that's suddenly possible?
- Well, it is weird because, as you know, this is my garage
and I'd love to get you here sometime because I could
show you some of the Dirty Jobs we had to do to make
a garage in LA with our regulations here,
work as a TV studio.
But look, I was supposed to be on a book tour right now.
I was supposed to me going across the country,
I think I was in Grant Rapids tonight, you know?
That's where I was supposed to be.
Now you can't even plant seeds in Grant Rapids,
that's a whole other thing with he governor over there.
But, yeah, like one of the things I'm most interested
in, you may have heard me say this a couple of times,
but like, the people who bore me the most right now
are the people who just view the world through politics.
Like, I'm really interested.
That's why I think what you've been doing all these years
is so interesting, 'cause it was like, obviously you have,
like, some political lens on the world, but it's through
the work that you do, or the people that you meet.
That's way more interesting to me than just the people
who are like, "Democrats this, Republicans this", you know?
But wait, I don't wanna get off the topic of your Mom
for a second because, as we talk about this thing--
- Hey, get off my Mom.
- Yeah, whether you want to or not.
But there's been this whole thing about people of a certain
age now, with corona and all that, so as you watch
your Mom at 82 find this career, now in a way
you're kind of like, working for her, what do you think
it's actually done for her, I don't mean in terms
of sales or celebrity or any of that stuff.
But what do you think it's just done for, like, and 82
year old woman to be able to put something into the world
at that age that's just relevant and, sort of, probably
needed right now?
I mean there's probably a reason it's selling.
Has something to do with we could use
a little humor these days, right?
- Well, look, I mean, in our world, what's more gratifying
than moving the needle in a measurable way?
- Yeah, that's it.
- Whether it's the ratings for a podcast, the ratings
for a show, the sales of a book, or just a letter
from somebody who says, "Dave, you know, I read your stuff
"and now I'm thinking differently."
I mean, that is truly transactional, right?
I mean, that matters.
And my Mom, at 82, gets, I think yesterday she got 1000
notes from people all over the country, you know,
just saying, "Peggy, I read your book and I saw my husband
"in it, I saw my sons in it, I saw."
My Mom in a really kind of Miss Marple, Erma Bombeck
meets Betty White, America's grandmother, you know (laughs),
just, so earnest it makes your teeth hurt way, has somehow
found a way to move the needle with millions of people.
And so, you know, to do that in the prime
of your career is gratifying.
To do it in your 82nd year, is a consummation,
devoutly, to be wished.
She's done it.
And in doing it, she has inspired a lot of other people
to sit down and write.
People who would otherwise never try it.
I just think it's, I mean it's amazingly important,
and kidding aside, I'm grateful that you brought her up
because I think we need to find people, you know,
whether it's our Mom, or whomever.
People who are out there right now in the midst of this,
who have tuned out the noise
and actually focused on something transcendent.
- Yeah, it's kind of funny the way we, funny or depressing,
I'm not sure, in the way we talk about older people, right?
Remember in the first week of corona, there were like,
all these blue-check Twitter people who were like,
"Oh well, just some old people are gonna die and that's it."
And I just kept thinking, it's like, all my grandparents
are dead, but I had a great-grandfather
and great-grandmother for a long time also,
but it's like, I love them.
I always loved being with them.
And it's like, all these people,
"Oh, just old people are gonna die."
And it's like, you know, maybe we have something to learn
from old people, you think that's possible?
- Well, look, I reject the old young line.
I don't think that's quite, it's a, what do they call
it when the statistical causation is skewed, right?
Like, when ice-cream sales increase, rapes increase.
(Dave laughs)
And you can set your watch by it.
- Oh, causation, what is it?
Something that's not causation, that thing.
- Right, it's just irrelevant.
Obviously it's the heat.
It's the heat that drives sexual assault,
and ice-cream sales, it's not those two things.
I don't know that your age is the reason you're high-risk
in and of itself, I think these comorbidities
are really fascinating.
And, you know, personally I'm less interested in how old
a person is if they succumb to this disease,
than I'm desperate to know if they were hypertensive,
or diabetic, or fat, or you know,
what are these other things?
Is it, I mean, I'm gonna say something that,
taken out of context, will get me creamed out in the world,
but it's an honest question.
- Here we go.
- Is it the covid, did he or she die from the covid?
Or was the covid the straw that broke the camel's back?
You know, I know there are plenty of instances
where the disease killed an otherwise healthy person.
I wanna know that.
But I also really wanna know, how many camels backs
were broken as a result of this, because that matters.
And back to your earlier question,
what else can you be doing when you're cooped up
and losing your mind?
Maybe you don't wanna write.
How about you walk six miles every morning?
I've done it every day and I swear I've never felt better.
It's the first thing I do, I get up
and I drag my poor dog out six miles.
And I'm trying to eat better.
And I'm trying to drink less, you know?
These are the things, like, why not incorporate
that into every fatal statistic that pops up,
you know, on the screen on every single channel?
I don't care how many are infected and how many have died,
I want the context and the perspective.
I don't know what to do with those numbers in a vacuum,
except panic about it.
So, I just wish there were ways to,
and again this is why I enjoy this format,
you know, I can ramble.
I can zig, I can zag, and maybe eventually
land on something cogent.
Tough to do on Tucker, even though I like Tucker fine,
it's just tough to do with Anderson Cooper.
It's tough to be out there and say something
that is precisely what you mean to say in the allotted time,
that doesn't come back over the net, you know,
with exclamation points from some other magazine
that wants to take your words to make a larger point.
- Well, by the way, I know you'll love this one,
because Tucker walks into my house, and it's my garage,
and he opens up the door and I'm sitting here,
and you know, this guy's the highest paid cable news guy,
he's got, you know, a kajillion dollars or whatever,
he's riding high.
He opens the door, this is his exact quote when he looks
at my studio, "Holy fucking shit, you did it."
(laughs)
- Good, he and I have said the same thing to each other.
Look, you did it 10 years ago.
You guys put your finger in the air and felt which way
the wind was blowing, and you, everybody now, cable news
looks like your show, you know?
It's hysterical.
- Yeah, weird.
- I had a similar conversation with him about the unintended
consequences of production.
Production is the enemy of authenticity, in my view.
That's why the production values on shows like Dirty Jobs,
Returning the Favor, all the stuff I work on,
I always, always, always push back against the desire
to make them perfect because what the viewer, I think,
really wants today is something authentic.
Now there was a time, before we were in the age
of authenticity, I guess it was the age of authority,
and that's when all the newscasters talked like this,
and that's when everybody, you know?
Well, they didn't get that memo, nobody cares anymore.
People have stopped caring
about that stuff for years, you know?
They don't care that the anchor's wearing make-up,
they don't care that it's shot in HD,
they don't care that there's a teleprompter,
that by the way, the anchor's trying very hard
to pretend they're not reading from.
I mean, could there be a greater artifice, like,
we want you to trust us because we have information
you need, but what prompter?
No, I'm not reading from a prompter.
This is all coming from--
- There's also no one talking in my ear as I'm telling you
stuff that I'm just thinking of at the moment,
even though I'm talking like a robot.
An authentic robot.
- (laughs) A very authentic robot.
Look, I'd rather watch a robot that looks like a robot,
talking to me like a robot.
I'd be like, there, I'm getting my news
from a robot, that's okay.
- Actually, I think that's Wolf Blitzer, for the record.
- (laughs) Do you know what?
Do you remember, it was Walter Cronkite, right?
He had the glasses, and he's sitting there at the desk,
and we just landed on the moon, or maybe it was Kennedy
who had died--
- Yeah, I think it was the Kennedy one.
- Takes off the glasses and he looks at the lens
and he talks from his heart.
And you know, it's just every time I see somebody
doing that now, who's delivering the news,
I just see a performance, you know?
That wasn't a performance.
That was Walter fricking Cronkite delivering
some very sad news, and doing it in a way that, you know,
it's seared into my retina.
- Man, you've given me a lot here, Mike Rowe.
- I'm a giver.
- I think I could have added, like, modern day philosopher
to the intro at the beginning of this thing.
- I'd prefer philosopher king, but I don't wanna over-reach.
- (laughs) I wanna wrap this in a nice bow.
It's interesting because it's like, we come from very, very
different worlds, but you've sort of hit, like, everything
that I've been thinking about, and all the things
that I talk about on this show,
and that's why I love doing this.
When I find someone who's, like, doing some other stuff
and yet, actually can make sense through the other stuff.
So I guess, I've got a good one for you.
So, for all the stuff that we talked about here,
how do you think we actually fix it?
And by it, I mean the political class that's broken,
the media class that's broken, the inauthentic class
that is broken, I mean, is it really just, like,
a whole bunch of us have to find whatever our dirty job
is and just do it and do it and do it until, yeah?
Is that it?
Did I get it?
- It's that, it's that, because look, we're in our own world
here, we're way too inside to be dispensing advice.
You know, besides if we did, you know, how do we know
who's listening, you know?
That's the thing I wanted to riff on earlier,
that we kind of talked around a little bit, but really,
I mean, not a day goes by on my Facebook page
when somebody doesn't encourage me to encourage
six million people to go out and vote, right?
And I'm like, well, why would I do that?
I don't know them.
I don't know how they're going to vote.
I don't know if they're informed.
I don't know, I don't think voting is a thing
that you ought to be persuaded to do.
I would no more recommend somebody I didn't know cast a vote
than I would recommend they buy a gun.
You have the right to do it, but that in and of itself,
is not enough for me, personally, Mike Rowe, to say,
"Hey, take it from me, get out there and vote.
"Exercise your right to bear arms."
No, no, I don't know who's listening so I try and stay
in my lane with that kind of stuff.
But to answer your question, for me, it was an equal
measure of humility and discomfort.
I had a pretty good career right up to the point
where I was willing to become uncomfortable,
and then I had a great career, you know?
I impersonated a host for 20 years
on a lot of different shows, and I narrated everything.
If there was a wilderbeest trying to get across the vast
reaches of the baron Serengeti, I was telling you about it.
And it never works out for the wilderbeest, Dave.
- (laughs) I thought that was just selective editing.
It never works out?
- Never once, no.
I mean, sooner or later they're all gonna get eaten.
You know, they're gonna stop, they're thirsty,
they put their face in there and the crocodile's
gonna get them, and then the hyena's gonna take.
It just always, always happens this way.
So, never leave the herd, all right?
That's the advice that one would give visa vi
the wilderbeest paradigm, but of course, we're also talking
about the essential importance of leaving the herd.
Somebody has to go first.
Somebody always has to go first.
So, man, this is like a shotgun coming back at you,
but the answer is we need a peripeteia, the Greek word
for a realization, right?
We need a peripety.
And peripeteia's are a form of anagnorisis.
Peripeteia's are that moment in the narrative
when we realize everything we thought we knew was wrong.
When Oedipus realizes the beautiful woman he's sleeping
with and having kids with is his mother, right?
It changed the course of his narrative.
My little life changed in a sewer in San Francisco
when I realized that I was a better guest than I was a host.
And when I looked at myself differently.
Dave, I'm gonna put a bow on this the way few of your guests
ever have, are you ready?
- Bring it home, Rowe.
Come on, man.
- To bring this back to the very first question
you asked me, how do I see myself?
I see myself, what did I tell you?
As a guest, as an avatar, and a cipher.
Prior to that I saw myself
strictly as a host and a narrator.
That little adjustment brought about by a very strange
day in the San Francisco sewers, with a sewer inspector,
and a little help from a rat and a couple of hundred
metric tons of human shit, made me think differently
about how to work in television.
The country needs a peripeteia.
We need, I think, with a little humility,
and a willingness to be uncomfortable, to reconsider
our own deeply held beliefs, get out of our comfort zone,
try things that we normally wouldn't try, be open to ideas
and thoughts that we would normally dismiss,
and look at the evidence that demands a verdict,
and be skeptical, you know?
Look at Neil Ferguson's model.
Then look at John Ioannidis.
And be okay with the fact that sometimes experts
with lots of initials after their names are wrong.
It doesn't mean they're all wrong,
it just means they're all human.
- Rowe, this is why I do this show.
You did it, you did it.
- I landed the plane.
- I'm not even gonna end this in any sort of professional
way because professionalism is the old world.
The new world is we just shoot the shit
until the cameras stop, so it has been a serious pleasure.
I hope we can eventually do this in real life,
maybe with masks, maybe not.
And I look forward to continuing the adventure with you.
- Hey man, if I ever attempt to follow in your footsteps,
visa vi this format, you'll be my first guest,
but until that great getting up morning,
I'm coming to your garage
as soon as the authorities bless it.
- If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful
conversations about lifestyles, instead of non-stop
yelling, check out our lifestyle playlist.
And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety
of topics, check out our full episode playlist.
They're both right over here.
And to get notified of all future videos,
be sure to subscribe and click the notification bell.

- Exploring the unintended consequences of a safety-first

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peripety::noun | Spocien Dictionary

peripety

noun

/pə'rɪpɪti/

a sudden and unexpected change of fortune or reverse of circumstances (especially in a literary work)

Type	Words
Synonyms	peripeteia, peripetia
Type of	surprise

How to pronounce peripety in English?

peripety::noun | Spocien Dictionary

abandonment

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