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--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire. I'm your host, John Bickley.
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--:-- John Bickley: Mike Rowe became a national name as host of the massively popular reality TV show Dirty Jobs, in which he traveled around the country and got his hands literally dirty, learning what hardworking Americans do daily to make a living. He has since gone on to head up the nonprofit Mike Rowe Works, which has awarded millions in work ethic scholarships, and he's produced more widely popular content. Mike's latest labor of love is a feature-length film, part documentary, part narrative that's soon to be out in theaters. In this episode, we sit down with Mike in our Nashville studio to discuss his new film, Something to Stand For, and why he believes America is not just hungry, but starving for something to unite around.
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--:-- John Bickley: Joining us now to discuss his new movie, Something to Stand For and the Issues Driving It, is Mike Rowe.
--:-- Mike Rowe: Thanks for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, it's wonderful to have you here in the studio. First time that you've been here with us.
--:-- Mike Rowe: Thanks for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: I watched your film, and I got to say, I got a little teared up at times. I laughed a lot. But I came away thinking, you know, you present it as something that's going to unite the country. And what strikes me about it is the tone, which is that there's not a hint of cynicism in this film. And I thought maybe we could start by talking big picture. What was your vision for the film and why do you think it's so needed at this time?
--:-- Mike Rowe: Well, first of all, with regard to cynicism, I'll say it like this. I wrote a book a few years ago and the epigram was from John D. McDonald and his series of books about Travis McGee. This is a fictitious character upon whom most of my business model has been based, weirdly enough. But among many quotable things, McGee said, I'm wary of a great many things in this life. But above all, I am wary of all earnestness. And for a long time, that kind of informed my worldview, you know, in the 80s and 90s. And, you know, shows coming along that were always ironic and always kind of cynical about this, that or the other. And, you know, 20 years of Dirty Jobs, I always had my tongue in my cheek. And I was always open to the idea that we were going to debunk something. And I feel like I don't know when exactly, John, but I think we turned some kind of corner and we've left the age of irony. And things are brittle and people are looking for something they can trust. And that trust in the traditional institutions has eroded. And so there is an opportunity, I think, to be earnest in spite of McGee's warnings. And I think there's an opportunity to embrace a certain kind of sentimentality. You can't do it, you know, unctuously. It needs to be honest or at least personal. And so that's what the movie is. It's nine stories that I wrote over the years in the style of Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story. And because they're all patriotic in nature, I thought stitching them together with a field trip of sorts to DC might be a fun way to look at history and mystery and current events and storytelling and just kind of smear it all together into a bouillabaisse of, well, why not? It's Independence Day.
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah, to give the audience a sense of what the film is, like you said, there are nine stories, sort of vignettes. There's a mystery element to each of them. Can you explain the narrative approach to each of these stories?
--:-- Mike Rowe: Yeah. I mean, look, there are no new ideas. I would love to tell you that I've stumbled across some new way to tell a tale. Paul Harvey Jr. and Paul Harvey mastered this in the late 70s and throughout the 80s with the rest of the story, where essentially over maybe eight minutes, you learn something you didn't know about somebody you do. So they would just tell stories of famous people from the inside out. And I loved that format. I can still remember the transistor radio up in the wood pile where my dad and my grandfather and I were chopping wood. You know, our house was heated by those wood stoves. And Paul Harvey was always on that radio telling us stories. And I remember, I wrote about this in my book a few years ago, missing a flight. I was driving to BWI and I was in long-term parking and I was running late. And just before I got out, Paul Harvey comes on with one of his tales, right? And I have, I can't leave, man. I have to sit there and wait for him to say, and now you know the rest of the story. And I missed my flight. So that kind of storytelling, you know, brief mysteries for the curious mind with a short attention span. That interested me. And so what came out the other end was a podcast with about 250 stories in it called The Way I Heard It. That turned into a TV show that I didn't think anybody would watch, but was wrong. We did six seasons. And now we're looking at how to adapt these things to the big screen. And the first and most obvious thing to do was to try and make a good natured case for things that we can still agree are literally and figuratively worth standing for You know I wrote it for liberals or conservatives or Republicans or Democrats I wrote it for people who still see themselves first and foremost as Americans. And in that regard, it's not a political film by any stretch, but it is unapologetically patriotic. And that might create, for some, a measure of cognitive dissonance that's just too bad.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, there's quite a few stories about veterans in your film. There's also stories about people taking some of our great monuments and vandalizing them. That can be a pretty touchy subject for some people. You chose to highlight that now. Why?
--:-- Mike Rowe: Well, I've been fortunate over the years in a couple of occasions where the headlines catch up to whatever it is I'm involved in and make it relevant in ways that I didn't really anticipate. happened with dirty jobs when our country recessed back in 2009. And all of a sudden, we were desperate to have a conversation about the definition of a good job. And I just happened to be a guy on the TV and people were asking my opinions and well, I shared them. Same thing with my foundation today. And to your point, we saw the craziness in Lafayette Square. We've been reading about it for the last couple of years and, and struggling, I think as a people to try and get our heads around the fact that two things can be true at the same time. We we've always known that the right to burn the flag has to exist in order for the flag to mean anything at all. Like We get that. But it feels like if you're going to do that, you really need to be able, you should be able to explain why you're doing it. And the thing that rankled me was that I'm not hearing cogent explanations for the vandalism, for the defacement, for the rage. I'm open to it, but I haven't heard it. And so I didn't really write the movie for those people, but I did write it because of them. Because I think the fat part of the bat, most of us, most of us 330 million people, no matter how we vote, still know in our bones that something extraordinary happened that gave us the right to deface our statuary and burn the flag and do all of these other things. And so we owe it to ourselves, I think, and to our forebears to at least understand what the price was that was paid. And to your point, it's not just founding fathers. It's not just famous people who we kind of look back at through the mists of time. It's the 13 guys who died during the Afghan withdrawal. It's any man or woman who ever wore a uniform, whoever raised their hand, whoever took an oath, and whoever meant it. Surely we can stand for them.
--:-- John Bickley: On the topic of monuments, actually it strikes me that the way you piece together these stories of famous figures from our past, in many ways you're creating little mini monuments to some of these folks and highlighting in these stories the fact that they are flawed. I'd love to hear, for the audience's sake, maybe one or two of those stories that you decided to tell. Jack Lucas got me. I'd love to hear you talk about that. Some of these flawed figures that are ultimately worth celebrating.
--:-- Mike Rowe: Well, spoiler alert, this will wreck the mysteries for a couple of these stories, but I'm happy to do it. I also want to say before I do it that when you build a monument to a thing, it can be very tangible. I mean, you can literally be a sculptor. You can literally physically create a work of art for that purpose. But, you know, you guys do it every day, depending on who you point your microphones at. And I did it for a long time on Dirty Jobs, depending on who we point our cameras at. You know, that's the modern state of statuary. You know, we get to decide what we want to elevate by what we share and obviously by the stories that we tell. Jack Lucas was a guy who I read about when I was a kid. The short version is like a lot of people after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted to fight for his country and he wound up in Hawaii. And then he wound up on a carrier headed to Iwo Jima. And then it was discovered that he was a deserter. And he was called in to basically be court-martialed on the ship. You know, the captain's there. He's livid. What did this guy do? What was his crime? What led him to desert his post? Well, the story essentially reveals that when he enlisted, he lied. He lied to his mother. He lied to his family. He lied to his enlistment officer. He lied to everybody. And he lied because he was 14. And he got stationed in spite of that, and he kept up the ruse. And then he stowed away. He left his post to get on the carrier. to go to Iwo Jima. Okay. Into hell. Into hell. And by that point, I think he was maybe 16. And what he said to his commanding officer persuaded him, the officer, to let him fight. And what he did on Iwo Jima, and this I won't spoil, but what he did turned him into the youngest person ever to win the Medal of Honor. So that story is not entirely new, but I would say that the vast majority of people even listening to this show didn't know it. So when I looking around for things that the most strident opponents might be able to agree upon surely we can agree that that thing in Jack Lucas surely we can look at that and go all right, that's something.
--:-- John Bickley: 70% of Americans in 1998 describe themselves as intensely to extremely patriotic. That number today is 39%. And under 35, that number is closer to 18 or 19%. So Jack Lucas would not recognize these times. About this younger generation, a culture is created by the stories that are shared. And you're a storyteller. I feel like there's a great power in recognizing, first of all, the role that storytellers play and the responsibility they have to tell the stories that matter. When you went through the stories that you chose for this film and the stories you've chosen for your podcast and for Dirty Jobs, what was the process like for you in terms of weeding out who it is you should point the microphone toward and what stories you should tell? Is it complicated or is this usually pretty obvious to you?
--:-- Mike Rowe: Well, it's not complicated, but it's ephemeral. And it's always in most, it's very fluid. You know, in the same way the times are fluid. And going back to that earnestness beat, you know, I've always been wary of it. Because that's the quality that allows soap salesmen to succeed. It's the quality that allows news anchors to be believed even when they're dead wrong. And narrators to believe. Listen to how certain I sound when I tell you there are two trillion galaxies. Which I did on a show called How the Universe Works, only to go in two weeks later. to tell you that, in fact, it's only 100 million. So I'm basically off by 2 trillion, right? And I sound the same, by the way. I believe both statements simultaneously. The point is, when I'm off by 2 trillion, I sound just as sure of myself as when I'm not, right? And so being surrounded by all of that certain noise and knowing that earnestness is a part of that, yeah, man, it informed every single thing I did all the way up to the title. not of the film, but of the podcast that the stories were pulled from. It's called The Way I Heard It. And that title was my rejoinder to Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story. And I, you know, I didn't want to just shamelessly steal it from him, but I wanted to update it. And I asked myself in 2015, 2016, what's really emblematic like right now? What should the disclaimer be at the end of the news, for instance. Walter Cronkite used to say, and that's the way it is. August 12th, 1972. Well, you know something? That's not the way it is in 2024. In 2024, it's, well, that's the way I heard it. You may have heard it differently. In fact, I'm pretty sure you have. In fact, if you want to prove it, I'm pretty sure you can reach for your device, do a quick search and find half a dozen experts who agree with you. And I'll find the experts who agree with me. And maybe sometimes these experts are historians, maybe sometimes they're scientists, and maybe sometimes they're politicians or journalists or members of whatever institutions are now currently at all-time low trust levels, right? And so that's kind of a long way of saying I wanted to balance the earnestness of my own interest in the topic with something that looks like humility. I wanted to say I could be wrong. Probably am. I wasn't in the room when Lincoln signed the emancipation. You know, I wasn't there when Jefferson wrote the declaration. I wasn't there when Reagan said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. But I've seen the footage And I've heard the conflicting stories about what informed that moment. I don't want to be confused with going out into the world with some sort of declarative explanation of how it happened. What I want to say is what a wonderful thing to have enough information at our disposal to take a deep dive as we want and then and then put together something that most of us can agree looks an awful lot like what surely must have happened and rally around the idea.
--:-- John Bickley: Jack Lucas was real for sure. You know, we can prove it. But I wasn't on that troop transport and I wasn't there when his commanding officer dressed him down. But man, the cinema lover in me is there. And I can imagine that moment and bringing that to life, you know, for Independence Day. That's a consummation devoutly to be wished.
--:-- John Bickley: Every final statement you make in a question is a great ending for a podcast. I'm going to ask you one more question, though. With respect to Shakespeare. That might be the end. Sorry. I'm glad you brought up experts. There has never been a time, I feel, in recent history where the experts are so doubted and for such good reason. And you said it. There's experts on every side of every issue. There's not just two sides. There's infinite number of sides. And the end result is we trust none of the experts. And I feel like part of the power of you is you're an everyman going through life, observing, telling us how you saw it, and doing it in a way that is expert in every sense. Do you feel there is a hunger now for a different mode of engaging with information, how to make sense of the world, how to tell the story of the human experience, the American experience? Are people hungry for that? Do you find that there's an audience for that?
--:-- Mike Rowe: not hungry starving ravenous i think the best way to explain the fact that there are three and a half million podcasts today where there were none 20 years ago have you ever gone through a museum for the first time and not really know where to go and and looking at things but not quite understanding For sure What you need in a moment like that is a is a docent I was in Munich not long ago and I I went to the Munich museum which is a wonderful and really detailed look at everything that led right up to the first world war, right up to the end of the second five floors, panoramas, so much, so much history and so much to take in. And I, I would have been lost had one of their experts not taken me by the arm and spent three hours walking me through it. That's what we need. We have now at our disposal for the first time in history, 98% of all the known information in the history of the world. It's right there. It's right there on your device. It's right there on mine. But we, we lack, right? We lack the compass. We're like Magellan with no sense of direction out in the middle of the North Atlantic with no sextant, no star. We're all trying to dead reckon in the middle of a rough tempestuous sea. And it's, it's scary. And so, yeah, we, we look for stars. We look for harbingers. We look for guides. Sometimes it looks like Rogan. Sometimes it looks like Malcolm Gladwell for some. Other times it looks like Douglas Murray for others. And if you haven't seen that debate at the Oxford Union, I highly recommend it. Indeed. So, right. I mean, what a great example of exactly what we're talking about to certain sounding people coming from completely different places and having a chance. You might as well say pistols at dawn. That's what that debate was. But what a wonderful opportunity for thousands of curious, mildly confused people to sit back and watch and then think about it and then say the way they heard it. it's not going to be easy, John, this landscape of opinions. But what it really means, I believe, is that the rules of persuasion are going to evolve. And we're going to look for our docents. And we're all going to have to balance this weird measure of earnestness and skepticism. Because if I heard what I think was implicit in your question, we have to be skeptical. skeptical skepticism is the armor to keep us from buying all of the soap from all of the soap salesmen but the minute that skepticism is perceived by maybe someone who disagrees then we don't become skeptical we become deniers just like that and so that's where we are today in the headlines today. My hope is that by looking at the headlines 160, 150, 80 years ago, we can start to see that we have been here before. Different tools, but same stakes, same species. And we made it through stronger often.
--:-- John Bickley: Here we sit, cogitating, navel glazing, reflecting. Right. Now your film is making its way into theaters, which is a major step. And we're starting to see this with more independent media companies getting their films on the big screen. In fact, The Daily Wire is partnering with Angel Studios to release The Sound of Hope on July 4th. Where can people see your film and where can they find it online?
--:-- Mike Rowe: So we're looking at about a thousand theaters on June 27th that'll premiere the film, and it will run through the 4th of July, thankfully, because that's really why we did it. And the trailer will give you a good sense. It's something to stand for dot movie. You can get tickets there, look at some behind-the-scenes photos.
--:-- John Bickley: How much time do we have? Because I'd be remiss if I didn't share one quick thing with you. Please do it.
--:-- Mike Rowe: I spent a lot of time working in the medium where no second takes were allowed. That was Dirty Jobs. That kind of shooting was blisteringly honest and the opposite of deliberate. Making a movie is not. Making a movie is a script. And in this case, a script that revolved around nine pre-existing scripts that were all brought to life. In other words, everything was super intentional. And when I went to stitch it all together in D.C., we had a shot list and I had a director and there was a crew. And we knew exactly what we needed to get before we got out of Dodge. And standing there in the World War II memorial, waiting for my cue, everything's set up. We got the lights set up. I'm going to walk and talk and make some sounds, and it's going to be lovely, right? An honor flight shows up on the other side of the memorial. A dozen old men in wheelchairs, and their families are with them, and volunteers are there, and they're being wheeled in. And I just couldn't take my eyes off one of these guys. And I said to the director, follow me over here. Grab the camera. And his name was Andy Michael. He was 91. He was in Korea. same time my dad was. And he'd never been to this memorial. And John, when you see tears streaming down a 91-year-old face, I ask him what it meant to be there, right? And the old guy looks around at all the stars that are on that wall, and he looks back at me, and he says what he says. You saw it. You saw the movie. So I'm telling you this because, you know, even now, I'm out there with my plan. I'm pretty sure I know what I'm doing. I've been at this a long time. And the whole point of the movie, the whole purpose of the movie reveals itself in a completely unplanned moment. Now, what kind of schmuck would not put that in the film? I had to. And so once again, it's so humbling to find the thing you need in a place you weren't even looking. and a beautiful, a beautiful moment. I can't actually speak about it. It gets to me too much.
--:-- John Bickley: Mike, thank you so much for coming on. Pleasure. Great luck with this film. Thank you.
--:-- Mike Rowe: Thanks for having me.
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