Mike Rowe
Mike Rowe expounds on American history, his disdain for teleprompters, and the value of “the strenuous life.” He’s the former host of Discovery’s “Dirty Jobs” and a leading advocate for the skilled trades.
Transcript
Mike Rowe:
If you've got the guts to be honestly vulnerable, whether you're a scientist, a journalist, or a politician, the country is in a mood right now to reward that.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today I'm excited to share my wide ranging conversation with the engaging Mike Rowe, perhaps best known for hosting discoveries Dirty Jobs. He now leads the foundation, mikeroweWORKS, which he calls a national PR campaign for skilled labor. We discuss his passion for the skilled trades and the value of the strenuous life. We delve into the complex issue of preserving our monuments and why Mike made a film about American history. Plus, you'll hear what he learned singing with a barbershop quartet. There's a lot here, and Mike's wit and wisdom shine throughout. I hope you enjoy it.
Mike, thank you for joining us today. We're thrilled to have you on the podcast. As I was prepping for this, I realized there's a tremendous amount of really exciting stuff for us to talk about today.
Mike Rowe:
An embarrassment of riches, Ted.
Ted Roosevelt V:
An embarrassment of riches is right, and I want to start---I don't always start in this place, but it was so applicable, it felt like the right place to start with a TR quote, because I think it'll resonate if you haven't heard it before. He said,: "Far and away, the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." And it's that focus on the chance to work hard that I thought might resonate with you because it's something that you speak of so often.
Mike Rowe:
Well, we can certainly riff on "work" for every minute of time you've set aside, but it's the word "chance" that always struck me in that quote, and for me, it rhymes in a way with the pursuit of happiness, right? Not the guarantee of it, but the "pursuit," the "chase," the "opportunity," the "chance"---all of that stuff sort of fits in the thesaurus for that word. And I wish I would've said that, and I can't tell you how many TR quotes I've heard that left me shaking my head going, where did he come up with that one? That was a good one.
Ted Roosevelt V:
What is it that is so important that you want to make that distinction between the pursuit of happiness, not the guarantee of happiness? Why is that such an important distinction for you to highlight?
Mike Rowe:
Because it's fundamentally... how do you say it? Meritocratic, I suppose. It's a choice. It seems that a lot of what's getting discussed today, and this comes up in my own foundation a lot and certainly in the context of our work ethic scholarship program, but the stuff you can choose and the stuff you can't, the things that are within your control to guide and shape, and the things that aren't. It feels like the country might benefit from just stepping back a bit and making two columns, right? And over here we've got race and we've got sex and we've got hair color and we've got ethnicity and we have star signs and blood type and so forth, and maybe even IQ. That stuff is sort of baked into the cake. And then over here we have the chance to work hard. We have the chance to show up early, the chance to stay late, the chance to master a skill that's in demand, the opportunity to deliberately step outside of our comfort zone. All of those things are within our control. And sometimes, for me anyway, when I feel a little lost or unsure, it's useful to step back and go, "okay, that's actually in column B, Mike, that's within your control." And of course, the truth, and I would never deign to assume what TR would assume, but it certainly seems to me that he had more things in column B than column A.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I think that's right. And I'm curious because sort of implied in your statement that something's changed in column B, how Americans are approaching column B is not the same way that they have in the past, that they're not approaching hard work the same way that they have.
Mike Rowe:
I think that there's truth to it. I also think that--- from everything I've read about TR, if I'm remembering it right, I mean, he wasn't supposed to be a boxer. He wasn't supposed to be swimming the Potomac. People looked at the column A cards he was dealt and he was infirmed and he was weak, and the expectations were adjusted in many ways, I would imagine. But I wonder if they were adjusted to the degree we would adjust them today. I wasn't there. I don't know. But whatever he had in column B or whatever those closest to him thought to inspire or challenge, that surely must have been one of the great gifts he received. He seemed to be the original advocate for the strenuous life, and I think first of all, that word--- like, so many great words has kind of slipped through the cracks of our lexicon. I can't remember the last time somebody talked about, "oh, that was a strenuous ruck I just took." Well, it was, but it's more often than not, I think relegated to something unfortunate or not aspirational.
"Oh, that was strenuous." You know what? I'm going to need some ointment. I'm going to need some Ben Gay. I think to some degree we have made work into the enemy, into the proximate cause of so much of our misfortune, and I think it's a misguided villain. It's not a villain at all.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I think you talk about this is that work can maybe counterintuitively in the modern era be a source of great happiness. It can be the source of pride, the source of respect, not the source of hardship, which I think is the connection that you're suggesting is one that gets drawn more often these days.
Mike Rowe:
The thing that I kind of Forrest Gumped my way into with Dirty Jobs in particular was that exact juxtaposition. That show was a tribute to my granddad. He only went to the seventh grade, but he was an electrician by trade, but also a plumber and a steam fitter and a pipe fitter and a guy that could build a house without a blueprint, which I saw him do. He had that amazing chip combined with a real work ethic, and as a result, he prospered. And I wanted to do a show that elevated those things, but I was also haunted by a great quote from John D. McDonald and his Travis McGee Mysteries who said, "be wary of all earnestness."
In my industry, Ted, that quote rises somewhere near the top because earnestness is easy to fake. And so when Dirty Jobs started, I realized back in 2003, I guess it was, the first order of business on the TV is to entertain if you can, and nobody wants a lecture and nobody wants a sermon. So how can you talk about these qualities that I think are important and in short supply without coming off like a scold? And the answer was to crawl through a river of crap with people who make their living down there. The answer was to not even try to be a host, but to be an apprentice, to be a guest, and to let the regular people who did the strenuous work, let them make an account for themselves. Let them be my guide and take me on a tour of the wastewater treatment plant or the garbage route or the business of building a bridge or a submarine, whatever it was, and let the viewer connect the dots. That's where the juxtaposition is. You can't merely talk about these important virtues and expect people to beat a pathway to your door. You have to somehow get their attention, maybe even with a little bit of vice, but in my case, a little bit of dirt.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Mike, it seems like given your journey, you didn't just find the value of hard work, but you found something truly American. Did you find a piece of America in that journey?
Mike Rowe:
No, not just a piece. A lot of pieces. As you probably noticed, the country's a bit divided here of late, and there's not much that both sides can still generally agree on, but I hope the importance, I hope the chance to work is still one of those things, and I hope the projects I work on still elevate that. The best part about Dirty Jobs and the shows that followed and the foundation today is that for me, it's raggedy around the edges. It's a mosaic, and if you spend too much time looking at one tile, you'll lose sight of the fact that the other tiles are actually pretty different, and you'll also lose sight of the fact that it's the grout between the tiles that was doing most of the work. Dirty Jobs was a celebration of the grout.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You recently put out a film called "Something to Stand For," and in it, you narrate a series of stories from American history, which are interwoven with footage of you speaking with people at historical landmarks. How did this movie come about?
Mike Rowe:
Well, first of all, doing a history show for people who don't like history has always been a really interesting challenge for me. My dad was a history teacher, so I was always interested in the idea of making history accessible in small doses. I wanted to do something for the curious mind with a short attention span, a mystery essentially where you learn something you don't know about somebody you do. So I wrote about 300 of these things, and in fact, I wrote one about TR. I had begun bringing them to life for a TV show called "The Story Behind The Story." I'm on stage in an empty theater looking straight into the lens telling you this story, and we intercut to these fairly elaborate recreations, but I got a call from some guys who ran a theater chain and said, "look, we love these stories. Pick nine of the most shamelessly patriotic stories you can and cobble them together in some way."
So I took a road trip to D.C., visited some of our famous statuary memorials and monuments, and told a larger story that connected these smaller mysteries. That's what the movie was all about. It was called "Something To Stand For" because, well, there's been some confusion here of late about when to stand and when to kneel and how to behave around statues and how to think about the past through the lens of the present. All those things I thought were worth ruminating on. Here's a movie for people who still see themselves as Americans. And that's all there was to it, and I had no idea what was going to happen, Ted, but it's sitting right there on Rotten Tomatoes with a 98, so I got that going for me.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That's pretty good. I don't think there's a lot of room for improvement on that. I'm curious about what you felt was the power of these stories and why now?
Mike Rowe:
I thought it was important, maybe even terribly important, to remind the country that even though we were founded by imperfect men, and even though we still have a ways to go in any number of categories, we still have so much to celebrate and so much to be proud of. It's difficult for whatever reason, I think, nowadays for a lot of people to hold two thoughts at the same time. But those two thoughts, contradictory though they might be, are equally important to acknowledge.
Ted Roosevelt V:
And Mike, I totally agree, and one of the topics that we talk about fairly often on this podcast is that you have this, as you talked about, this divide in this country, and there's so much focus on what makes us different and what has been lost in a lot of ways is all the shared values that we have right now, and my view is that it's appropriate to revisit these stories. It's appropriate to say, hey, the founding fathers, to your point, were imperfect and that the mythology that we've told ourself may not be the exact right mythology that represents the country today. And so there's a huge value in reminding ourselves that one, America is a great country, and two, there are a lot of very critical shared values because that is what creates the space for agreement, for us to say, "Hey, we have this thing we really care about." Whether you're a Republican or Democrat, one way to bring us back together is to refocus on those shared values that we have.
Mike Rowe:
It's hard to know exactly where the line is because the line is always changing. We've lost our ability to deal with the cognitive dissonance that comes with trying to understand the fact that this man held slaves and also did this great thing,
Ted Roosevelt V:
Wrote the Declaration of Independence, yeah.
Mike Rowe:
What are we to make of it? Well, that's a bad question. The better question is what would you have made of it 270 years ago? Because 270 years from now, our great-great-great-greats are going to be looking back and how are they going to judge us? "Oh, those meat eaters, oh my God, what were they thinking?" What statues will come down 150 years hence? I'm not making excuses for anything. I'm simply saying that the choice to judge the past through the lens of the present is precisely that, it's a choice. We don't have to do that. We don't have to think of it that way.
Ted Roosevelt V:
To a certain degree, to judge the past with an absolute lens is to presume that the current moral status is the end of the moral journey, that we will never move forward in a positive way or change our views of what's okay. I'm curious about monuments because they're frozen in time. It's sort of a physical example of what we're talking about. How do you think we should as a country be thinking about monuments?
Mike Rowe:
That's a great question. I just had a really terrific conversation with a sculptor called Sabin Howard. He won the commission to create, I think, one of the most ambitious sculptures ever. 38 figures, cast in bronze in the National Mall. It's the World War I memorial.
And as I was talking to him at some point I said, I think I introduced you improperly. I think I described you as an artist and a sculptor who works in bronze, but I think maybe you're a filmmaker who works in bronze. And I think I made him cry because he said, look, that's exactly what I am. And that spun off to a conversation about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel and all of these other great artists who managed to capture a moment in time in that particular medium. Well, that's what film is too, but when you look at a great monument, then by definition, you're looking at great art, and so it's now incumbent on you to understand the time in which it was made as well as the time it's attempting to depict. That moment, captured in time, frozen in bronze, is history, beauty, art, passion, it's everything. And best of all, it's out there in the elements. It's not in the Louvre, it's not in climate control. It's not behind glass. It stands there 24/7. There's something... well, there's something eternal about a great memorial.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, and that's a little bit the juxtaposition, at least in terms of the recent conversations around monuments, of the permanence of them, which is some of the beauty, some of the art to it, and that we're living in changing times. Confederate monuments are certainly the ones that have gotten the most attention. How do you think about something like Confederate monuments?
Mike Rowe:
It's an impossible question to answer honestly without offending somebody, and I'd prefer not to offend anybody, but again, it's that same challenge. How do you take a thing that is so completely rooted in permanence and then look at it through the lens of time, that does anything but stand still. But, you can always make new monuments.
There was a thing---oh, I want to get it--- in ancient Rome... I think they called it damnation memoriae, maybe? Or something like that, where your memory is damned. And what they did, they didn't pull down monuments or statues. They just defaced them and let them stand, which is a super interesting way to think about it. They didn't want people to forget, but a disgraced emperor, for instance, might have his eyes gouged out in bronze. You might have the graffiti on it intentionally or some version of a vandalism, but you let it stand. I always thought that was interesting.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, I think what I hear you saying or what you've said actually quite explicitly is this idea that you're asking people to hold contradictory ideas in their head at the same time. It's sort of the initial baseline. It's the expectation. I totally agree with that, and I also sort of wonder if we're up to it as a people is that it's easy to feel righteous. It's easy to feel that you are absolutely right and---
Mike Rowe:
It's easier to judge than think.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, there you go. Thank you. I was trying to find the words, and that is actually the words that I was looking for. Thank you. But it does kind of root back to this kind of core issue of how do we think about the stories that are American, that we're going to hold up and that we're going to idealize and that we know no person is perfect and we should humanize and not lionize these people, but not throw out the things that made them great, that they hopefully had a positive impact on our country. Confederate statues I think gets a little bit more complicated. In the history of Confederate statues, they weren't always put up for the best reasons. Mike, I hear you in your answers. You're being very politic in your answers, and---
Mike Rowe:
I thought you were going to say recorded.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You are being recorded. Because there was a report that you actually, that RFK Junior reached out to you, and I'm curious about that conversation and your thinking after that conversation.
Mike Rowe:
I have a foundation, it's called mikeroweWORKS. We award work ethic scholarships, and for 16 years I've been making the case that we got some terrible math that we're dealing with for every five tradesmen who retire to replace them. The skills gap is real, the opportunities in the trades are going unrealized, and we're still pushing many, many, many, many, many kids into a four year system who, A, aren't being served by it and B, can't afford it. Consequently, 1.7 trillion in student loans, 10 million open jobs that don't require a four year degree and a fair amount of stigmas and stereotypes confusing a big part of our workforce. Bobby Kennedy heard me say that, and he just called to tell me that we were in violent agreement on that particular point, and I said, great. And then he said, you want to be vice president? And I laughed and I said, seriously?
And he was like, yeah, let's meet. I was candid. I said, look, I don't see eye to eye with you on this, this and that. I think we'd probably agree on this, and he was like, good. I don't want somebody that agrees with me on everything. But the truth is I'm a one trick pony. The foundation... I don't know when this happened, but sometime in the last couple of years, I woke up and it had become the sun in my solar system. I don't like multitasking and worse, I don't think I'm very good at it, and I think the country deserves somebody who is.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'm curious what you think politicians are missing because it appears you're speaking with a voice that politicians find extremely compelling. What would you tell politicians that they don't understand now?
Mike Rowe:
I'll answer it this way. I've only interviewed one politician in my life. I called Vivek Ramaswamy about a year ago, and I called him because I heard him say something, almost as a parenthetical. "If I'm ever elected," he said, "you'll never see me use a teleprompter." The teleprompter is the great enabler of earnestness. It's the thing that will let the salesman become even slicker than he is. It's the opposite of authenticity. Stop pretending, stop acting like you're not reading. Oh, God, it all just drips with performance. So that's what I'd say to him. I'd say, stop acting. Don't be scared of silence. Don't be scared of standing there for a minute because you're trying to collect your thoughts.
Ted Roosevelt V:
There's a lot of value to vulnerability from politicians, which is another way of being more authentic, I think in the political realm as being a third rail. To say, I don't know, or this is just a very heavy topic and I am experiencing the emotions associated with it as well. That to me is something that the political realm is really missing, and I don't know how to bring it back in. I've talked to other politicians about it and they sort of say, yeah, it's a nice idea, but it's just there's no place for it right now.
Mike Rowe:
Well, what's going to happen is somebody's going to focus group it, and then they're going to rehearse it and---
Ted Roosevelt V:
Right. [laughter[
Mike Rowe:
---somebody's going to say, okay, this is where you manufacture the tear. In the many nature films, I've had the privilege of narrating what you're talking about, that vulnerability, is called the submissive posture. Little wolf runs into a big wolf. The little wolf lies down and shows his belly. "I get it. You could eat me. We fight, I lose. Can we just get past all that maybe and maybe be friends?" It's like in my own life, the first time the submissive posture really saved me, I mean, years before Dirty Jobs--- I was on QVC, selling things in the middle of the night. It was my first job in TV. I didn't know anything about it. I never should have been hired for that job, but I'm sitting there at midnight and somebody brought me the health team infrared pain reliever. Infrared light on your arthritic knuckles---make you feel like a million dollars, right?
Ted Roosevelt V:
Right.
Mike Rowe:
This is live TV. I got a blue card that says two payments in 1999, and I literally rolled over and showed my belly, not literally, but I said to the lens, "hey, I'm the new guy. I don't really know what this is. If you're watching right now, there's an 800 number on the screen, do me a favor, call it. Ask to talk to Marty. He's the producer. He'll put you through and maybe somebody could tell me what the hell this thing is." Phone lines exploded. I mean, for the next three hours, all I did was take calls from lonely hearts, reprobates, and drunks up in the middle of the night, trying to help me do my job. If you've got the guts to be honestly vulnerable, whether you're a scientist, a journalist, or a politician, the country is in a mood right now to reward that because they're so sick and tired of being focus-grouped, and earnest-ed. At least I am, and from what I've seen, I'm not alone.
Ted Roosevelt V:
No, I think that's right, and I think people are getting increasingly savvy to it. I mean, they see it and they know when they see it, even if it's explicitly or something that's happening in their subconscious and they're turning away from it in a way that I think is... It feels like there's a huge demand for it right now.
Mike Rowe:
I was just going to say in super recent memory, I was watching when the bullet clipped his ear and what happened in the next 30 seconds was really was remarkable. Not since TR took one in the chest when he was doing the Bull Moose thing, remember?
Ted Roosevelt V:
Yeah. Oh yeah. Of course.
Mike Rowe:
The bullet, like--the speech, right? Didn't the bullet hit his speech?
Ted Roosevelt V:
The speech is what saved his life. He had a speech and a spectacle case in his pocket. It went through there and the bullet landed three centimeters from his heart, but had the speech not been there, it would've pierced his heart, and that would've been the end of days.
Mike Rowe:
Proving once again, that had the teleprompter been around back then, TR never would've made it.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That's so interesting. Yeah.
Mike Rowe:
Yeah. Oh my God. I dunno how you land the plane on a conversation like this, but that's pretty great.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Yeah. Well, the other piece of that puzzle is that he actually talked to the would-be assassin before they took him off and said, why did you do this? Help me understand where you're coming from. Even though the guy had just tried to kill him, his first instinct wasn't Go, let's go beat this guy to death. The crowd was all over him. He said, hold on. Let's figure out what this guy's up to. Let's learn more. When he figured out he wasn't going to learn more, he went up and gave the speech for an hour and a half afterwards, which is sort of an amazing example of the strenuous life.
Mike Rowe:
It's without parallel. Can you imagine anything it approaching that today? It's like another planet and another species and politics was---it was still bare knuckles, sharp elbows. It was a---
Ted Roosevelt V:
For sure.
Mike Rowe:
I don't even know how to think about that.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I want to ask you one question that we ask everybody on this podcast, and it's an open-ended question, but what does it mean to be a good citizen?
Mike Rowe:
I think that back to the grout for a moment that holds the mosaic or the mortar that holds the brick wall together, the Boy Scouts and the JCs and the Rotarians and Skills USA and Future Farmers of America and the Lions Club, that's grout. And good citizens who are trying to make a difference, trying to make their street better, trying to make their zip code better. Those organizations were immensely useful in elevating that. I'll leave you with this. My favorite example of acronyms, institutions, clubs, groups, and so forth, I've only belonged to two: the Boy Scouts of America, once upon a time, and around the same time, this thing that used to be called SPEBSQSA, S-P-E-B-S-Q-S-A, Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America. It was formed back in the thirties by a couple of guys in, I think it was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they called it that because A, that's what they wanted to build. They just wanted to attract people who love to sing and harmonize and have themselves a club. But Franklin Roosevelt was in the midst of the New Deal, and everything was an acronym, and everything was a government program with a lot of letters and abbreviations, and so these two guys were like, we're going to have the longest one of all. So SPEBSQSA, I joined when I was a kid, cuz I had a stutter, and you can't stutter when you sing.
And so I wound up in this barbershop quartet for a while and had a ball. That group gave me a front row seat to older men who would get together once a week in this giant chorus that competed internationally, and they would sing songs of patriotism and pals who would never let you down and sweethearts who would love you to the bitter end and that unapologetic sentimentality and schmaltz and nostalgia, and I'll never forget that. Yeah, it was earnest to a point, but that was the group that when I was 17, got me into a bar and gave me a picture of beer and taught me the old songs, and I'll forever be grateful for that too.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, Mike, I'm going to wrap up, but I can't let this go without, because you mentioned you had a stutter, which I didn't realize, as a child, and you talked about adversity. You found your way through that and have made a heck of a living in part on your voice, in part on your ability to speak so eloquently. So this is a conversation that I could continue for many more hours with you, but I very much appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today.
Mike Rowe:
Well, if you join me on my little attempt to keep the conversation lively, I'll tell you the true story of the man who fixed my stammer, a music teacher who literally grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and said, do this and then do that, and you'll be better. And he was right.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, I look forward to hearing that story. Thank you very much.
Mike Rowe:
That's called a tease, Ted. That's called a tease, by the way.
Ted Roosevelt V:
[laughter] There's a reason you're a pro. I love it.
Mike Rowe:
Hey, thank you for having me on.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Thank you, Mike, for taking this discussion down so many interesting paths with me. And listeners, be sure to check out Mike's foundation, mikeroweWORKS. He's given out over $8 million in work ethic scholarships so far in his effort to close the skills gap and make work cool again. If you enjoyed this conversation, please spread the word about this podcast and thank you for listening. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.