The Megyn Kelly Show - Mike Rowe on Patriotism, the Value of Authenticity, and COVID Hypocrisy

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00:00:31.140 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest and provocative conversations.

00:00:42.560 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.780 Today on the program we've got Mike Rowe.

00:00:48.960 You know him from Dirty Jobs, among many other successful television shows.

00:00:54.180 He's called the dirtiest man in TV, but he has the clearest heart.

00:00:59.320 And today he's talking about, well, a new show that he's going to be having out in just a couple of days.

00:01:04.520 But the thing about Mike Rowe is he's got a lot of smart insights on this country and its backbone.

00:01:10.680 In the same way that people have called J.D. Vance the working class whisperer,

00:01:14.720 you could say that about Mike.

00:01:16.060 He's not a partisan guy, but he's one of those big picture guys who can see the country for what it is,

00:01:23.540 where it's come from, and where it's going.

00:01:26.820 Understands the Trump voter in a profound way and isn't judgmental, but is insightful.

00:01:32.900 So I think you're going to love him.

00:01:35.100 There's not a dirty moment, but there's a couple of R-rated moments that you're going to laugh at.

00:01:39.860 We'll bring that to you in one second.

00:01:41.480 But first, let's talk about good skin care.

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00:02:42.960 You got to like resurface the skin so that it's not like the sandy desert so it can take the hydration and then protection with some SPF.

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00:03:56.160 Mike Rowe, thank you so much for being here.

00:03:59.060 Well, thank you for having me.

00:04:00.800 It's an honor and full disclosure, I got nowhere else to go.

00:04:04.300 It's perfect.

00:04:05.020 I'll take you however I can get you.

00:04:06.180 I'm not proud.

00:04:08.740 You're a very kind man, very generous beginning.

00:04:11.760 And you're also a very successful one, in part because of your honesty, your self-deprecating nature, which I love.

00:04:19.000 And let me just tick through a couple of things that you've been doing and are about to do, just so the audience understands.

00:04:24.700 So not only did you host the hugely successful Dirty Jobs on Discovery, which is how most of us got to know you,

00:04:32.040 also had a show on CNN and TBN, Somebody's Got to Do It.

00:04:36.560 And now you're hosting a very successful show on Facebook Watch, Returning the Favor.

00:04:42.960 It's been a big hit.

00:04:44.460 You got a mysteries pod, which I listen to in the car sometimes, called The Way I Heard It.

00:04:49.040 You got the Mike Rowe Works Foundation, which awards scholarships to students pursuing careers in skilled trades.

00:04:55.100 And now on January 4th, a new show on Discovery called Six Degrees with Mike Rowe.

00:05:00.640 I can barely keep, I'm exhausted just thinking about this.

00:05:03.760 But I got to start with that because I read the description.

00:05:06.680 It said it's going to have questions and answers on issues like how a mousetrap can cure your hangover.

00:05:12.140 So let's start there.

00:05:13.520 How?

00:05:14.000 Help me.

00:05:15.560 Well, clearly I can't hold a job, but thank you for walking me through my misspent career.

00:05:21.420 It's been a lot of fun.

00:05:23.020 And you're right.

00:05:24.020 The next endeavor is called Six Degrees.

00:05:26.340 And basically it happened, I guess, you remember the old parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, right?

00:05:34.000 Yep.

00:05:34.680 Where you have to connect six movies to get to him or less.

00:05:39.340 Yep.

00:05:39.520 Um, that's kind of what started it years ago.

00:05:43.200 One of my bosses at Discovery said, if you can ever make a history show for people who don't watch history shows, you can probably write your own ticket.

00:05:50.720 So I've been thinking about that for a long time.

00:05:53.480 And Six Degrees with Mike Rowe is just an attempt to connect two seemingly disparate objects, as you suggest in this case, how a mousetrap can cure your hangover, how a horseshoe can find your soulmate, how a sheep can do your taxes.

00:06:08.400 The weirder, the weirder, the better.

00:06:10.280 And, um, I get an hour to try and figure out how those two things, in fact, are connected.

00:06:16.760 And, uh, I get to use any production device, no matter how cheap, contrived, or ill-conceived.

00:06:24.080 We use puppets, we use animation, we use modestly priced recreations with actors of dubious talent.

00:06:32.640 We use archival footage.

00:06:34.540 And it's basically me walking through time on a budget with a little help from my best friend, Chuck, who's a guy I went to high school with, a very talented actor who's about my age, but, uh, continues to push the boulder up the hill here in Los Angeles.

00:06:50.540 So I hired him to play 40 or 50 different historical characters.

00:06:55.700 So the two of us have a great time putting together a show with Kleenex and spit and somehow or another, what came out the other end was a, was a fun look at the surprising ways people are connected through space and time.

00:07:11.820 And, uh, the Discovery Channel picked it up, they're putting it on their new streaming service, and if I can believe the press release, uh, it starts on the 4th of January.

00:07:23.520 And I don't want to overstate it, Megan, but I think it's going to be the, uh, feel-good hit of the winter.

00:07:29.240 Wow.

00:07:30.040 Well, congratulations to Chuck on finally making his friendship with you pay off.

00:07:33.960 I mean, first of all, that's smart.

00:07:35.780 40 years the hard way, right?

00:07:37.440 That's good work.

00:07:38.420 But, so is there, do I have to watch the show?

00:07:41.500 You're not going to tell, is there actually a way in which, you know, cause like I dealt with a lot of mousetraps.

00:07:46.000 I know you're from Baltimore.

00:07:46.960 I lived there for a year and we killed 21 mice in one year.

00:07:50.440 Uh, we were right by the Harbor.

00:07:51.940 It's a problem.

00:07:53.120 And, uh, I use a lot of mousetraps while there, but, and I was also hung over many times.

00:07:58.120 So I, I am genuinely curious whether there's a connection between those two things.

00:08:02.220 Well, there's a connection between everything.

00:08:03.900 I don't care how convoluted it is.

00:08:05.780 If you have enough time and enough wine, um, and enough, you know, producers around you.

00:08:10.980 You, I get, I promise you, you can make a show.

00:08:13.320 Now I can tell you how it works, but it's kind of like my podcast.

00:08:18.000 You know, I don't want to wreck it because part of the, what I hope is the fun of the show is having viewers right from the start.

00:08:25.940 Say, Oh, what?

00:08:28.440 No way.

00:08:29.400 How can you possibly land that plane?

00:08:32.980 But, um, but you can, because the mousetrap, you know, the search for a better mousetrap is universal.

00:08:39.180 And we began our story with a guy named Hiram Maxim, who's a very famous inventor, who as a kid was working in a shop up in Maine that was overrun with mice.

00:08:49.160 And he literally went on a quest to build a better mousetrap.

00:08:52.220 This guy patented or should have patented everything from the mousetrap to the light bulb.

00:08:58.620 He didn't consequently, he lost out on a lot of opportunity, but he did invent the Maxim machine gun, which changed the course of the first world war, which also produced war tubas, which, uh, allowed us to, you know, search for oil.

00:09:14.100 Well, ultimately war tubas were these things that you pointed toward the ground to figure out where the gunfire was coming from, from your enemy.

00:09:22.420 One thing leads to the next.

00:09:24.160 And before you know it, uh, well, I'm just not going to tell you how it ends, Megan.

00:09:28.960 I'm, I'm going in, in the business.

00:09:31.780 We would call that a tease.

00:09:33.700 So I love it.

00:09:34.640 I'm trying to work.

00:09:35.980 I'm in, you're good at it.

00:09:37.260 I, I didn't realize until I read up on your bio before today that you had worked at QVC for three years on the overnight shift as a result of your ability to spend eight minutes talking about the values of a pen.

00:09:48.740 So I, you were meant to succeed in this kind of a career and your tease is further evidence of that.

00:09:55.580 Can we, can we spend one minute on QVC?

00:09:57.700 Cause I actually have a friend who does some work on QVC right now.

00:10:00.060 I find it fascinating.

00:10:01.440 It is a skillset.

00:10:03.700 Well, it's a weird muscle.

00:10:05.200 And, um, back in 1989, 1990, when I Forrest Gumped my way onto the air, there was no real playbook for how to hire a host.

00:10:16.240 No one, no one really knew what to look for.

00:10:19.300 You know, people with TV experience didn't necessarily know how to sell and professional salespeople weren't necessarily good on TV.

00:10:26.100 So they determined the only way to logically cast was to go around the country and set up cameras and ask people to talk about a pencil until they told them to stop.

00:10:39.420 And I didn't know it, you know, but that, that was the audition.

00:10:43.140 I was singing in the Baltimore opera at the time and I crashed a national talent search for QVC host really to settle a bet.

00:10:51.820 Anyway, I talked about a pencil for eight minutes.

00:10:55.040 They gave me a job on the spot.

00:10:57.220 I took it and entered a three month period of double secret probation where from three to 6 a.m. every morning, I tried to make sense of a, just a bottomless bin of doomed products that had failed to sell in prime time.

00:11:12.600 That's how you learn, right?

00:11:13.620 And so you sit there in the middle of the night talking about the various features and benefits of the health team infrared pain reliever or the Amcor negative ion generator, whatever that is.

00:11:25.000 Oh, oh wow.

00:11:25.920 And yeah, long story short, I made fun of the products I didn't understand, sparred with the viewers who at that hour were mostly an assortment of narcoleptic lonely hearts and turned my shift into a weird talk show, which went on for three years.

00:11:43.820 So as much as I make fun of those crazy days and the incredible weirdness of the whole home shopping industry, the truth is I learned everything I ever needed to know about TV in the middle of the night, selling products I didn't understand to an audience I couldn't relate to.

00:12:04.640 You know, but it does underscore sort of the paucity of options we had in television back then.

00:12:09.900 And I grew up at the same time and that, that would pass as entertaining back then there, you know, especially overnight.

00:12:16.160 We didn't have the ability to download anything we wanted.

00:12:18.700 You were stuck with what was on television and somehow at those hours in particular, whatever you talk, the ionic, whatever is a lot more interesting than the bag of your eyelids at two in the morning when you can't sleep.

00:12:30.400 So on behalf of all those who suffered alongside me, thank you.

00:12:34.020 Well, look, you know, you probably remember the moment in your life on TV when you, when you learned a lesson or two that, that changed everything.

00:12:46.980 I had a few of those moments.

00:12:48.540 And, and for me, the first one was on QVC where I realized, you know, the most important thing to do is not to entertain the audience.

00:12:58.780 It's to, it's to entertain me, you know, I mean, you have to amuse yourself.

00:13:04.960 I think my favorite comedians, you know, when, when I watch them work, I don't, I don't see people trying to make me laugh.

00:13:12.060 I see people trying to make themselves laugh.

00:13:14.980 Same thing with writers, you know, it's a, it's a subtle distinction, but, but it matters.

00:13:21.460 And I remember really the first big lesson for me was the first night I was on the air and they, they, they brought me that thing.

00:13:31.500 I mentioned the health team infrared pain reliever, which, which looks like a small flashlight with a small red knob on the end that emits infrared light that purportedly relieves your arthritis.

00:13:43.640 You know, you're selling millions of them right now.

00:13:46.420 I thought it was a joke.

00:13:47.840 It was 1999.

00:13:48.920 I couldn't believe it was real.

00:13:50.200 So I looked into the camera and I held this thing up in my hands and I said, hi, everybody.

00:13:54.920 I'm Mike.

00:13:55.440 I'm the new guy.

00:13:56.320 This is the health team infrared pain reliever.

00:13:58.300 I don't know what it does.

00:13:59.920 If you have one, um, could, could you call the number on the screen and maybe explain it to me?

00:14:06.760 Do my job for me.

00:14:08.340 I mean, honestly, it was very much a Mark Twain, you know, helped me paint the fence kind of thing.

00:14:12.960 Um, but the phone lines exploded and I spent three hours literally sitting there listening to viewers explain to me what the various widgets were that they brought me.

00:14:27.540 And that was a big lesson too.

00:14:31.320 That is brilliant.

00:14:33.020 And did you wind up going home with all the products?

00:14:36.300 Oh yeah.

00:14:36.980 I mean, to this day, my garage is full of so much crap from not just from QVC, from, from dirty jobs.

00:14:44.200 And when I say crap, Megan, I mean, literally I used to do these weekly auctions called collectibles, rare and precious, which of course stood for crap.

00:14:55.760 And I would auction these things off usually with a story and an autograph to raise money for my foundation.

00:15:01.480 But some of the stuff from the old days at QVC went for thousands of dollars, like a doll.

00:15:08.700 We used to sell collectible dolls.

00:15:10.820 I didn't know people collected dolls, but they do.

00:15:13.800 And, um, somehow or another, I wound up on the doll collector hour.

00:15:18.120 There's still footage out there of this, but when I tell you things went wrong, I mean, they went so breathtakingly, gobsmackingly, horrifyingly wrong that, um, you just have to refer to the video.

00:15:30.800 But to see a grown man with a nun doll in his lap, trying to wind her up so she can sing, climb every mountain, it's, it doesn't get much weirder than that, really.

00:15:41.180 I heard you tell a story on Ben Shapiro about, uh, your, about that crap.

00:15:46.200 Um, and it involved Donald Trump that you reached out to him, uh, among others to try to make a donation, to get, to get them to make a donation.

00:15:54.380 Can you, can you enlighten the audience on what we're talking about?

00:15:57.860 What happened?

00:15:58.200 Like, yeah, in fact, that story, uh, had an unexpected chapter two, which just came to a close, but it started in 2015 when I had a show on CNN that was getting preempted every week, you know, because the world was heating up and the election was coming and the show was called somebody's got to do it.

00:16:17.180 And it like every single week I changed the title to somebody's got to find it because Jeff Zucker kept moving the thing around because I'm constantly preempted by all the trouble in the world, you know?

00:16:26.760 And so eventually he said, Mike, just take the show back.

00:16:30.400 The election's coming.

00:16:31.380 We're going into the Donald Trump business full time.

00:16:34.360 And I said, all right.

00:16:35.360 So I wrote an open letter to all the candidates at the time, Hillary, Bernie, and Donald.

00:16:40.820 And I said, look, guys, thanks to y'all.

00:16:42.920 I just got booted off CNN to make it up.

00:16:46.180 Why don't you each send me something I can auction off for my foundation?

00:16:49.360 I said, Hillary, why don't you send me one of your pantsuits?

00:16:52.640 You know, sign the, uh, sign the pants, right?

00:16:56.260 I said, Bernie, send me one of those, one of those awful wrinkled tweed jackets you always wear, you know, sign the inside pocket.

00:17:03.120 And then to Trump, I said, sign me, send me a bathrobe.

00:17:06.440 Just grab a bathrobe from one of your gajillion hotels and autograph the thing and I'll auction it off and the money will go to our work ethic scholarship program and it'll be fun.

00:17:14.840 Well, I didn't expect to hear from any of them, but Donald Trump sent me an autographed bathrobe two days later and two days after that, I'm wearing the thing, making a video for Facebook.

00:17:30.340 I got 5 million people on his Facebook page and I know half of them are going to lose their minds, but I say, look, a deal's a deal.

00:17:36.340 It's an autographed Donald Trump bathrobe.

00:17:38.820 I'm auctioning it off the highest bidder.

00:17:40.740 Uh, within 24 hours, a woman named Angela Phillips bid $15,550.

00:17:50.080 No, I swear to God.

00:17:52.500 So the bath, the Donald Trump bathrobe became a thing.

00:17:56.840 And so I sent it to her and she sent me the money and it took our, our whole crap auction thing to a, to a new level.

00:18:04.740 But then this year, because I got so much crap from people who are upset, you know, that I would do or say anything remotely complimentary to Trump.

00:18:15.940 I said, look, I'll do it again next year and I'll make the same offer to all the candidates.

00:18:20.020 So I wrote an open letter to Joe Biden and I said, look, man, fair is fair.

00:18:24.220 Send me an autographed robe and I'll auction it off.

00:18:26.980 I had, I never heard from him, but Angela Phillips.

00:18:30.560 Sent me the robe back and said, Mike, I have a feeling it's going to go for more this year.

00:18:37.600 I love your foundation and I hate to partner with it, but why don't you auction it off again?

00:18:42.920 Right.

00:18:43.200 I mean, amazingly generous.

00:18:44.660 So I put the thing on, sat in the same place, auctioned it off.

00:18:48.780 It went for $45,000.

00:18:52.600 Oh, M G.

00:18:54.720 Now here's the crazy part.

00:18:56.220 You are kidding me.

00:18:56.840 Who?

00:18:57.160 What?

00:18:57.260 She was Stormy Daniels.

00:18:59.140 Stormy Daniels.

00:18:59.940 No, she already has one.

00:19:01.780 She had one.

00:19:02.260 What am I saying?

00:19:03.320 No, she's got the slippers.

00:19:06.860 No, Angela Phillips bought it back.

00:19:10.180 Oh, God bless her.

00:19:12.380 Right?

00:19:12.740 Oh, I love Angela Phillips.

00:19:14.520 This woman.

00:19:15.520 Who is she?

00:19:16.020 Do we need, am I supposed to know her?

00:19:18.020 Well, no, I didn't know her, but I just zoomed her the other day because enough already.

00:19:22.320 Like, I got to know who you are.

00:19:23.580 Angela Phillips lives in Ohio and she runs a terrific club.

00:19:29.940 Company called the Phillips tube group.

00:19:34.100 They make, they make tubes like pipes, you know, for the inside of, you know, and so just

00:19:40.980 another one of those companies you would never think about.

00:19:43.540 I mean, who makes tubes, right?

00:19:45.160 But tubes and pipes hold civilization together and Angela Phillips happens to own a going

00:19:52.160 concern in that vertical and she loves my foundation.

00:19:57.820 And so rather than just write me a check for 60 grand, she bought Donald Trump's bathrobe

00:20:03.100 twice.

00:20:03.880 I mean, that's just not a sentence you would think you'd ever say in the course of life,

00:20:07.740 but there it is.

00:20:08.720 So I, I wouldn't describe this as crap exactly, but I do, I do have something, uh, that you

00:20:16.580 could potentially auction off one of these days, which is, uh, I, I interviewed Dennis

00:20:21.740 Rodman, the Henry Kissinger of our time.

00:20:23.920 And, um, he gave me a basketball with his picture, Donald Trump's picture and Kim Jong-un signed

00:20:34.760 by him.

00:20:35.120 Holy smokes.

00:20:36.280 I mean, I think we could get big bucks for that.

00:20:38.560 That is a major trifecta.

00:20:40.520 You and I together hawking that thing for a week between Facebook and our podcasts, man,

00:20:45.940 we could probably close the skills gap single-handedly.

00:20:48.300 That could be a seven figure payoff for people who really could use it.

00:20:54.980 Had we had more time with this last bathrobe and the election hadn't gone so completely

00:21:00.920 berserk, I was going to reach out to his campaign and say, Donald, if you want some, I mean, the

00:21:07.680 kind of press you can't buy, not that you need it, but why don't you buy your own autograph

00:21:12.900 bathrobe back for a million bucks, it'd be a great donation and people would love you,

00:21:20.200 but I never had time to do it.

00:21:21.940 I don't think that would have gone as well as you would have hoped.

00:21:25.340 No.

00:21:25.800 Um, one of the things I laughed about on your, on your list of many accomplishments, I mean,

00:21:31.080 cheered and then laughed was you listed that, um, Forbes has identified you as one of the

00:21:36.240 countries, 10 most trustworthy celebrities in 2010, 2011, and 2012, which led me to ask what

00:21:44.380 happened?

00:21:45.300 What did you do in 2013?

00:21:47.740 It was a rough year, Megan.

00:21:49.520 Lots of, lots of your choices.

00:21:52.000 That's kind of hurt.

00:21:53.680 Yes.

00:21:54.220 I was, I was number four, I think on the list of most trusted celebrities, which is kind of

00:22:01.260 backhanded compliment if I ever got one, but, um, you know, I, I don't know that anything

00:22:07.260 completely crapped the bed in 2013, but, but what happened in the five or six years prior to that,

00:22:15.640 you know, I, I was the discovery guy for a long time.

00:22:20.000 In fact, you know, you could make a case.

00:22:22.360 I still kind of am because the show still airs every day and will continue to for the rest of my

00:22:27.360 life. But, you know, discovery is a big blue chip brand. It's a big family brand. And, um,

00:22:34.260 you know, people trust that brand. And at the same time, I was also up to my neck with Ford.

00:22:39.680 I probably did 300 commercials for Ford and Ford also had a great, great reputation at the time.

00:22:46.860 That was back when Mulally famously didn't take the money when everybody else did. And I was out

00:22:54.260 there on his behalf, telling the story of Ford, a company that basically, you know, it's just a

00:23:00.040 great comeback story. So between discovery and Ford, I was associated with some pretty, uh, likable

00:23:07.420 brands. Plus if you knew me in those days, it was probably because, you know, I was crawling through

00:23:13.940 a sewer once or twice a week and studies show Megan, when you see a guy on the TV covered in other

00:23:20.420 people's crap, he he's probably not trying to sell you anything. You know, I mean, that's a guy you can

00:23:27.180 trust. And so sadly people did not have the same reaction to my experience in cable where I was also

00:23:36.900 covered in crap for many, many years, but did not emerge in the same way. Well, look, there's some

00:23:41.740 showers that can actually cleanse you. Um, I'm afraid that the, uh, that the world from which you

00:23:49.100 emerged, uh, you know, it was a different kind of poo, a metaphorical poo. Um, but I hear you,

00:23:56.740 you know, I mean, and it's fascinating. I, I remember watching you every day and thinking,

00:24:01.860 you know, this woman is completely in on the joke. And, and that's something that I used to say

00:24:09.280 about the people we featured on dirty jobs, you know, in a very general way, you know, there's some

00:24:16.840 people who have their tongue in their cheek and they get it. And, and for me, you know, when you

00:24:23.840 were really blowing up on Fox in the early days, I really enjoyed watching you because I, it felt to

00:24:30.500 me like you were a reformed lawyer who was having to go at the TV thing and just laughing yourself sick

00:24:38.660 as soon as the camera stopped rolling because you were figuring it out, you know?

00:24:43.240 Well, you're not wrong. I mean, I do think there's a lot of value for any media person in having done

00:24:48.880 another job, a quote, real job prior to going into media. Cause it's like the, the media navel gazing

00:24:56.500 and the willingness to take themselves so seriously is laughable. You know, it's like you're on the

00:25:03.360 sidelines, you're not on the playing field. So don't act like you're the star quarterback. You're not

00:25:07.840 right. Like that's how I always thought. And don't act like you're a paragon of authenticity.

00:25:14.680 I mean, every single thing about our stupid industry is an artifice. It's all pretense from

00:25:24.700 the prompter to the makeup, to the, I mean, all of it, you know, and, and it's so ironic to me

00:25:32.160 because today it seems like authenticity is for sale, like, like never before. And yet from a

00:25:39.080 production standpoint, when I look around, you know, and I put myself in this category too, the,

00:25:44.600 the barriers to authenticity that we build ourselves are, are mind boggling and endless.

00:25:54.660 And, and, and we do it all the time. And I, I just think part of what's gone on in the country

00:25:59.760 these last few years and, and part of what's happening right now on a communications level

00:26:04.480 is people's patients, their BS meter is, is so finely tuned that skepticism. And I think this is a good

00:26:16.260 thing, you know, cynicism, not so much, but we have to be a more skeptical people. If we're ever going

00:26:23.840 to get to a place where we can be more discerning and, and hold people's feet to the fire, experts

00:26:31.380 are under siege, like never before. And rightfully so, because you know what, they all sound this,

00:26:38.360 they sound when they're wrong, they sound the same way they do as when they're right.

00:26:44.820 And scary. I mean, it's, it's so fundamental, but you can't blame a reasonable person for saying,

00:26:52.000 you know, Dr. Fauci, when you told me the mask was a bad idea, you sounded just as credible as you do

00:26:59.140 when you tell me it's imperative. And I believed you. I believed you. I believed you. And now,

00:27:07.000 and now what I'm being told, I have to believe you again, because science, because initials after your

00:27:14.180 name, because you're telling me what you're telling me on a name in news that's most trusted,

00:27:21.920 or fair and balanced, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. People are right to be skeptical.

00:27:27.840 Yeah. Or I'm a bad person. Well, I don't, you know, you, you sort of sacrifice that credibility

00:27:32.020 early on. So I don't feel bad. I will say one, one word in defense of cynics. They're very fun to

00:27:37.800 have around. I love having a drink or a dinner with a cynic at the table, because I just love that sort of

00:27:43.760 dark outlook every once in a while from, as opposed to, I'll give you one example. When I was on the

00:27:48.980 Today Show, I went, we did like this round table. It was Hoda Copy, Savannah Guthrie. I can't remember

00:27:55.780 a couple of other folks, maybe Jenna. And there was a question that was circulated, like, on a scale of

00:28:01.640 one to 10, how happy are you? And on a day to day basis, and literally, they were like, 10, 10,

00:28:07.840 10, 10, 10. I was like, maybe six. I'm coming in about four today.

00:28:14.960 Yeah, like a four, sometimes nine, like amazing, you know, the birth of my child. And they were

00:28:21.640 looking at me like I was nuts. I'm like, this is bullshit. Nobody is a 10 out of 10. Like,

00:28:27.300 come on, that's nonsense. And so I always love the cynic who's like, two, fuck off.

00:28:33.020 Right. They're just fun to spend time with. Right. But the cynic, you know, is just kind of

00:28:41.020 another word for the devotee of the reverse commute. If everybody at that dinner party had said four

00:28:48.060 or five, well, then what would the cynic do? One. I mean, where do you go when, you know,

00:28:56.140 the consensus is, is, is clear. The cynic goes the other way. Usually, you know, it's,

00:29:04.600 it's the contrarian. So, you know, it's kind of like salt, you know, it's a, it's a really important

00:29:11.300 part of the meal. But, you know, when you're surrounded by cynics, then you're going to need

00:29:16.180 a vacation real soon. Yeah, it's true. You can't have too many at one dinner table. No, but I, I,

00:29:21.760 I, I think your point about authenticity is a good one. We, that word gets used so much.

00:29:27.840 But I, I, one of the things I love about you is I feel that you have it. I can tell in the way you

00:29:33.440 talk about yourself. And I have it now, but I didn't always, I had to work at it. And one of the

00:29:41.140 gifts that I received from Roger Ailes, with whom I, you know, now infamously have documented,

00:29:46.900 had a strange and, you know, tough relationship in many ways. But one of the gifts he gave me was

00:29:53.000 honest feedback about how I did not appear authentic at all. And about how it was very

00:29:57.980 clear to him when I first started on the air at Fox, I had these walls up around me meant to protect

00:30:02.280 myself, which is a human thing. Most of it, most of us have those walls. And certainly if you put

00:30:06.880 most people up in front of millions of other people, you know, just, just take a fraction of

00:30:11.600 that, take a football stadium, you know, let's say 130,000 people, um, they're going to freeze

00:30:16.920 up. They're not going to want to show their weaknesses or talk about themselves in a way

00:30:21.240 that reveals any vulnerability. And I a hundred percent had that, especially coming out of the

00:30:26.380 law where it was like killer adversaries everywhere, you know, who, who are, I think are smarter than I

00:30:31.380 am. And I'm, I don't know if I can measure up and I've got to put on my, my warrior gear.

00:30:36.100 Yeah. Well, it took a while, took a while to dismantle. Well, the stakes, the stakes of being

00:30:41.980 wrong as a lawyer are very, very high. You know, the stakes of being wrong as an anchor are, are

00:30:49.700 also high, but at least you can, you know, there are a whole bunch of people you can blame.

00:30:56.160 And it's just TV. It's just, in the end, it's just TV. It is just TV. But, you know, the more we

00:31:03.240 crave authenticity, the more I think socially we become, uh, pedants, you know, we, we are a nation

00:31:12.300 of correctors right now. And people are, you know, sitting there on the edge of their seat,

00:31:17.860 waiting to scamper off to their little piece of social media to explain why Megan got it wrong

00:31:25.260 or how Mike got it wrong. You know, that, that participle was dangling, right? This, I mean,

00:31:31.100 it can be anything, you know? And so true on the one hand, I do applaud a heightened level of

00:31:38.680 skepticism. On the other hand, I bemoan this obsession with correction.

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00:32:34.460 that's truthfinder.com slash Kelly.

00:32:40.980 With regard to authenticity, the most confusing thing for people is to conflate it with being

00:32:47.680 correct. You can be authentic and be dead wrong. You know, that same Forbes piece that you referenced

00:32:56.980 in that same year anyway, Jon Stewart, at the height of the Daily Show, was evaluated, weighed and measured

00:33:06.880 by all kinds of pollsters and determined to be the most trustworthy name in news, more so than any of the

00:33:15.940 any of the anchors, you know. And it's not because he was more accurate. It was because he made a lesser

00:33:26.860 claim. You know, he didn't claim to always be right. And the lesson in that, you know, I mean, on Dirty

00:33:35.420 Jobs, the mission statement, you know, I wrote it very, very specifically. This was before Jon was on,

00:33:42.900 but, you know, it's just managing expectations was the whole thing. That's why your industry is so

00:33:49.120 screwed, you know, because there is no management of expectations. Fair, balanced, most trusted,

00:33:57.320 you know. It's like, okay, that's some pretty tall cotton. On Dirty Jobs, I said, my name is Mike Rowe

00:34:04.220 and this is my job. I explore the country looking for people who aren't afraid to get dirty. Hardworking

00:34:08.740 men and women who do the kinds of jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us. If

00:34:13.660 you really look at that claim, what did I say? My name's Mike. I'm going to explore the country

00:34:20.160 looking for people. Not, not, I didn't even promise to find anybody, much less do a good show.

00:34:26.440 I mean, and so. It's good. Yeah. Expectation setting. Yeah. It's, I'm not saying anything new

00:34:35.080 or revelatory, but it just seems like so many people who fall from grace do so because they,

00:34:42.080 they hoist themselves up there, you know, and in my industry and nonfiction, you know,

00:34:47.840 these survival experts will tell you, I've got information that can save your life.

00:34:51.700 Well, Jesus Christ, really? All right. Show me, show me how you're going to save my life.

00:34:57.240 We're over here. Mike is saying, look, I'm just going to crawl through this river of shit with a

00:35:03.460 sewer inspector and maybe learn a thing or two about the second law of thermodynamics vis-a-vis the

00:35:09.840 disintegration of the bricks. Oh, wow. Yeah. It could, it could be fun. It could be entertaining. And

00:35:15.580 maybe, maybe you'll learn something. Maybe you won't. Maybe you just have a good time. I mean,

00:35:19.040 I'll steal the last word on Jon Stewart though. I have to tell you, it always bothered me when

00:35:23.280 people would celebrate him in that way, because having been the target of his attacks many times,

00:35:29.120 they were not every time, but they were so frequently dishonest, like completely invented

00:35:35.480 and out of context. And one time on the air, I actually said, he's mean. I thought he was mean.

00:35:40.980 And he, he called me, he called me because he didn't like the fact that I said that.

00:35:45.000 And I, and my assistant Abby, who I love, she was outside my desk and she took the call and she

00:35:49.560 said, Oh my God, if he says he's Jon Stewart, I don't think it's Jon. It couldn't possibly be

00:35:53.120 Jon Stewart. Is it Jon Stewart? And, um, I took the call. We had a long talk about it and he didn't

00:35:57.660 want to be called mean. Uh, he sort of fell back on the old, like I, I follow a cartoon, you know,

00:36:04.000 that's kind of my gig. And I was like, that's bullshit. You know, you're being taken. Yeah.

00:36:08.800 You're being taken seriously. You're putting out this messaging as though it is real, except you

00:36:14.040 don't have the balls to own it. Like you got to own it. If you're at least I go out there and I

00:36:18.220 say that I'm doing my best to tell you what the news is, what I see as true. You can try to check

00:36:22.920 me. You can challenge me, but this is how I see it. He, he wouldn't do that. He'd always fall back

00:36:27.860 on comedy into a dangerous place. No, it's look, I wasn't trying to compliment him specifically

00:36:37.180 for the level of trust he garnered. I'm really just saying that when the landscape is so saturated

00:36:46.340 by people who are promising you the absolute truth and a guy comes along and says jokes, comedy,

00:36:53.720 but by the way, all of a sudden that cuts through, that's the reverse commute. That's the cynic at your

00:37:00.440 dinner party, you know? And by the way, not to make it all about me, but they hired me to do that job

00:37:08.360 twice, twice. What do you mean to sit in for Stuart? No. When comedy central launched the daily show,

00:37:17.180 they did an exhaustive search and I auditioned two times and they hired me. They hired me on a,

00:37:25.900 on a Friday and said, come on in Monday, meet the writers. The job is yours. And over the weekend,

00:37:33.740 uh, I think it was Doug Herzog, uh, who really wanted Craig Kilbourne to do that show, uh, called ESPN

00:37:43.460 and ESPN relented and let Craig out of his contract. I went in Monday to meet the writers and there was

00:37:50.160 nobody in the writer room except Madeline Smith. Yeah. So this is funny. They offered me a correspondent

00:37:57.480 role and I was like, ah, God, that's frustrating. And at the same time, Dick Clark hired me to host

00:38:04.460 a game show out in LA. So I took the game show. And then a year later, of course, Kilbourne just eats

00:38:12.660 their lunch, quits, goes off to do his thing. And they call me back, Megan. And I swear to God,

00:38:18.780 this is true. They call me back and they say, Mike, we're sorry about last time. You're our guy.

00:38:25.540 The job is yours. If you still want it. I said, of course I want it. Of course I want it. And they

00:38:31.100 said, the only way this isn't going to work out. And this is a direct quote is if our cheap ass network

00:38:39.400 comes up with a big pile of money for a Dennis Miller or a Norm Macdonald or a Jon Stewart, but that's

00:38:47.120 never going to happen. Two days later, Stewart signs a $4 million deal and I'm still hosting game

00:38:54.460 shows. See, I told you, Jon Stewart is mean. That was mean too. Wait, what was the game show?

00:39:02.160 It was called No Relation and it was actually pretty good. It was sort of a ripoff of the old

00:39:09.180 to tell the truth. So you'd have a family on, right? The Johnsons and three B-list celebrities

00:39:17.940 questioned the Johnsons because one of them is actually impersonating a Johnson. The real Johnson

00:39:25.280 is backstage watching. So the celebrities have to figure out who the fake Johnson is through a series

00:39:31.660 of insightful queries. I was the host and we did 40. It was, it was, it was pretty good. And we did

00:39:39.380 that. We did 40 episodes and we would have done a lot more except, except the celebrities were so

00:39:45.480 damn dumb. They couldn't figure it out. They could never figure out who the missing Johnson was.

00:39:51.400 And so I gave away all our grand prizes in the first week.

00:39:58.100 And then you were out of budget.

00:40:00.060 We, we totally, I spent the whole budget, like every single contestant won. So every family wound

00:40:06.780 up with an all expense paid trip to Mexico. I changed the name to Hello Mexico because everybody

00:40:13.840 on No Relation was a winner. It got so bad.

00:40:17.340 The families won if they fool the celebrities and the families won every time. It's your point.

00:40:20.680 Right. Now, you know, the only rule was you can't lie and the celebrities have to try and find who

00:40:26.960 the imposter is. They couldn't do it. It got to the point where I was, we were hiring black imposters

00:40:34.940 to sit in a white family. Right. But the celebrity's like, no, no, no. You're trying to fool us. It can't

00:40:41.040 be that one. So anyway, that's, but that is, what's amazing. If you spend time with celebrities,

00:40:48.960 not all of course, but a large amount, you realize there it, I think in many cases, it takes

00:40:56.180 an empty noggin to be this amazing actor. You need somebody else to fill it up in the emptier,

00:41:04.440 the better, because you go out there with somebody else's words and motivation and you can make it

00:41:09.040 happen. Not all, some are brilliant, but some are completely numbskulls. And you, you think

00:41:15.120 immediately where like Doug and I would go to these events, you know, with like whatever the

00:41:18.740 Met Gala or what have you. And nine times out of 10, we'd find ourselves talking to like the security

00:41:23.060 guard or, you know, some, some guy who works for the city, you know, sanitation department who just

00:41:29.320 got asked there to make some rich person look good. You know, you, it was really hard to find

00:41:35.140 substance there other than someone who's going to talk to you and look beyond your shoulder for

00:41:39.300 somebody who's more famous or more rich. Well, you spend your whole life, you know, memorizing other

00:41:45.220 people's words. You know, I acted for maybe 20 years before I stumbled into this nonfiction

00:41:53.020 unscripted world. Thank God. And I mean, I say that it's, it's not, I enjoyed it. You know, I had a lot

00:41:59.840 of acting gigs and, uh, but, but fundamentally, you know, everything in fiction starts with the writer

00:42:06.820 and everything in nonfiction starts with the principle. And so, you know, if you don't have

00:42:15.240 anybody telling you where to stand or what to say or what to read or how to behave, well, then you'll

00:42:22.800 either find that incredibly liberating or, or deeply terrifying. And, you know, most actors, when you

00:42:31.200 really see them out there without a net, you know, it's not pretty. No, it's not. It's not.

00:42:37.440 So let's talk about, it's interesting because as you were saying that I was thinking that I I'm of

00:42:41.940 course a journalist and my, my husband is a writer. He's, he writes novels and now he's actually

00:42:47.960 working on a nonfiction book, but that's probably why we get along so well because he's substantive.

00:42:52.760 He has ideas, he has thoughts, and it's, he's an interesting person to sit across the dinner table

00:42:56.760 from and will be even when he's old and gross, which I don't ever see happening to Doug, but it's,

00:43:02.800 it's one of the things you got to think about when you choose your mate, you know, because

00:43:05.380 that, once that initial infatuation period wears off, you better need, you better have

00:43:09.740 somebody who can make good conversation and ideally make you laugh.

00:43:13.100 Yeah. Can I sit across from this dude eating my favorite food with my hands, you know, and

00:43:18.460 is he going to be okay with that? And am I going to be okay with that? Yeah.

00:43:21.380 Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about, uh, working because this is one of the themes of your life,

00:43:26.960 your professional life, personal life, all of it. And I feel like we're both from an era that

00:43:32.380 prized and continues to prize people of our generation working hard. Um, I have seen something

00:43:38.620 very different with the young people today, not to sound like that old stodgy crotchety lady on the

00:43:43.780 corner. Right, right now. Um, but I'm right. I know I'm right that, that there is something going

00:43:54.460 on with the work ethic in our country right now. There was a poll not too long ago showing fewer

00:44:00.640 high school and college students are want to work and do work during the school year. Um, you know,

00:44:06.060 we've gone from just wanting, wanting to work and work hard and make a name for ourselves to feeling

00:44:11.440 entitled to advancement within our, within our companies. And, and the, I'm like the, the ever

00:44:18.780 focus now on work-life balance, which I feel like, dude, you got to earn that you got to work your ass

00:44:23.560 off. And once I really prize you, then you can come talk to me about work-life balance, but don't

00:44:27.240 talk to me about work-life balance when you're in your twenties. And the attitude today is totally the

00:44:31.660 opposite. Well, there's an impatience, you know, which of course is the opposite of delayed

00:44:38.600 gratification, which is a basic tenant of most definitions of work ethic. Um, I've got eight

00:44:45.060 people who work for me. Um, half of them are millennials and they're terrific. You know, I don't

00:44:51.640 want to paint with too broad a brush, but if I were to criticize or at least generalize, I do think

00:44:58.920 that it's the impatience that is, is the most interesting because it's not necessarily, or not

00:45:06.340 always a bad thing, but it is a thing, you know, I mean, my foundation exists to help close the skills

00:45:14.940 gap and to make a more persuasive case for seven or 8 million good jobs that pre pandemic anyway,

00:45:21.880 were open and didn't require a four-year degree. So when I hire people to work with me on that

00:45:29.200 endeavor, um, you know, four or five months go by and they'll, they'll call me or come into the office

00:45:35.500 and say, yeah, you know, I mean, it's going okay. I, I, I like what we're doing, but, um, you know, the

00:45:40.260 skills gap, it's not closed yet. Like, yeah, well, guess what? It's never going to close. This is,

00:45:48.280 you know, people I think who have a solid work ethic understand there, there's a certain futility

00:45:58.520 and that's probably the wrong word because it sounds depressing, but there's a futility to most

00:46:04.980 jobs and to most great notions. You know, we're pushing the rock up the hill. It's Sisyphean,

00:46:11.120 it's quixotic. You're never going to be done. The work is never going to end. And if you measure

00:46:18.560 your own success and happiness by your ability to complete a thing, then you're not going to be very

00:46:24.380 satisfied and you're not going to be very patient. So if I were to throw a dart at the millennial target,

00:46:32.860 I would say, yeah, that's a, um, that's not a great thing, but it can, it can be a good thing.

00:46:40.320 You know, it can, the, the people I work with are very ambitious, you know, their, their bullshit

00:46:47.600 meters are, are highly tuned. They don't want to be marketed to, they, they want to be persuaded.

00:46:54.560 Unfortunately, they don't know oftentimes how to be persuasive themselves. And, um, you know,

00:47:04.540 I don't know if that's a product of being a millennial or a generation Z or, you know,

00:47:10.400 how persuasive was I when I was 20? You know, I thought I had it all figured out. Maybe you did too.

00:47:16.700 You know, it's, but you're either, I mean, I, I was more along the lines of put your head down,

00:47:24.200 keep your mouth shut and work your tail off. And hopefully your work product will get you

00:47:28.740 noticed. And today, you know, there was an SNL skit called the millennials where they had this

00:47:34.060 clueless millennial young woman demanding a promotion after three days on the job, right?

00:47:37.840 That's, there was a, there was a, um, he was a couple of years ago. There was a, there was a

00:47:42.820 young woman. She was like mid twenties and she now infamously wrote a letter to the Yelp CEO

00:47:48.780 complaining. She was angry that she was going to have to work in an entry level position

00:47:54.060 for an entire year, which she italicized and bolded. And it was actually a great story because

00:48:00.720 then Yelp fired her ass. I'm like, yes, good for Yelp. But I just think like it's shifted now to like,

00:48:08.200 what are you going to do for me? I'm, I'm entitled to be the CEO by the time I'm 25 and I'm entitled to

00:48:12.980 a seven figure salary because I'm special. And, um, you know, I'm, I'm in a position and always have

00:48:19.300 been, when I'm looking at people who want to work with me saying, prove it, prove you deserve it.

00:48:24.560 Don't, don't be a whiner and, and stop thinking I owe you anything at all.

00:48:30.300 Right. Look, I, I, you'll get no disagreement from me. I mean, the scholarships we offer are called work

00:48:36.800 ethic scholarships and the people who apply need to jump through some hoops. And I've been doing this

00:48:42.960 since 2012 through micro works and we've assisted a little over a thousand people and given away

00:48:51.140 between five and $6 million modest by foundation standards. But my point is it's hard to find

00:48:58.380 people with the qualities that you're talking about. And part of what I try and do with the

00:49:05.320 scholarship fund is affirmatively test for work ethic. And it's not easy. And as I'm sure, you know,

00:49:12.160 there are lots of scholarship funds out there. Most of them look for either academic achievement

00:49:17.160 or athletic achievement, or maybe talent, but who's affirmatively looking for and rewarding

00:49:24.720 work ethic. So that's why I'm in that space. And the reason I'm, I pull my punches a little bit

00:49:32.580 when we talk broadly about millennials is that of the thousand or so people that we've helped,

00:49:37.760 all of them are going into a trade school or a certification program where they can learn a

00:49:44.560 skill that's in demand. None of them are going to a four-year university. Now, if you want to talk

00:49:51.700 broadly about what's wrong with, with college graduates, and again, I'm still painting with a

00:49:59.400 very broad brush. I understand that, but that's a lot easier for me to do because when I get on my

00:50:05.580 soapbox, I look around and I see $1.6 trillion in student loans, I see 7.8 million open positions

00:50:14.880 that don't require a four-year degree. And I see our country still furiously lending money we don't

00:50:21.440 have to kids who are never going to be able to pay it back to educate them for jobs that don't exist

00:50:26.880 anymore. Now that's just a straight up tautology. It's crazy, but we're still doing it. And now people

00:50:34.640 are promising to forgive student loans, which is just straight up batshit crazy. It's crazy.

00:50:42.940 And, and I'm worried, you know, I'm really worried about our relationship, not just to debt in a

00:50:50.060 general way, but our addiction to this idea that the best path for the most people when it comes to

00:50:57.960 education just happens to be the most expensive path. And when people say, you know, how did college

00:51:05.640 get so expensive so fast, you know, in the history of anything valuable, nothing has ever increased in

00:51:13.080 price faster, not, not real estate, not energy, not healthcare, not food, nothing. The price of a

00:51:21.360 four-year degree has risen faster than anything else in the last 40 years. Why? Because we freed up a

00:51:29.460 bottomless well of money, for one thing. Then we told an entire generation of kids that they'd be

00:51:36.000 completely screwed if they didn't borrow some of it. It's no wonder universities can charge whatever they

00:51:44.140 want. They've been financed, backed by government money. And more importantly, there's this giant

00:51:52.580 list of stigmas and stereotypes and myths and misperceptions that surround the jobs that are

00:51:58.580 actually available. That's, I think, that's why we have a skills gap. That's why we've got monstrous

00:52:05.120 college debt. And that's why we have a lot of people who are perfectly educated for jobs that

00:52:12.800 don't exist anymore, living in their parents' basements. Like what? What are the jobs that

00:52:17.680 don't exist anymore that people are spending all the money on? Well, again, I always get pushback for

00:52:24.840 this because I am the product of a liberal arts education. It served me really well. Two years in a

00:52:31.520 community college, another couple years at Towson University in Maryland. But that was 1984. And

00:52:40.520 the entire experience cost me between $11,000 and $12,000. The exact same experience today would

00:52:47.900 come in at around $90,000. So I'm not just saying a liberal arts education is bad. I'm not saying that

00:52:56.000 at all. I'm just saying that at some point, it's too expensive. And I was a communications major with

00:53:03.580 a little bit of music and speech thrown in. I checked the one ads, Megan. Nobody's hiring communicators

00:53:09.940 right now. You know, no one's... Nor do you need to go to college for that. Correct. Correct. And so

00:53:17.160 it's my truck is not against a liberal arts degree. I just feel like now, you know, in my hand is my

00:53:29.360 iPhone 11 and my internet connection is stable, which means I have access to 99% of all the known

00:53:36.080 information in the world. I can hop on this computer right now, as I did last week, and watch free

00:53:42.520 lectures from MIT, Harvard, Yale, Brown. All the information is out there. It's all accessible

00:53:49.580 in ways that it's never been before. And yet for reasons that are hard to articulate and comprehend,

00:53:56.640 it's more expensive than ever. And so, you know, I don't want to say specifically that this job or that

00:54:05.920 job is, you know, overrated or inflated or whatever. Opportunities are what you make and where you find

00:54:14.200 them. But in a general way, if we're going to have a conversation about job satisfaction, and if we're

00:54:21.500 going to try and have a balanced workforce, then we have to have a different conversation about,

00:54:30.060 you know, the typical blue and white collar. It's not the color of collars anymore. It's, you know, being able

00:54:38.200 as a worker to live in both environments. That's what my foundation tries to do. You know, that's why, by and

00:54:47.000 large, we train welders. If you want to weld, and you get good at it, I can list you dozens of people who are

00:54:56.220 making six figures a year with that one skill. Many others morph and matriculate and pick up a plumbing

00:55:04.820 certification, heating, air conditioning. You know, it's a long list of useful skills. And nobody ever

00:55:13.360 talks about this, but the number of small businesses that are out there that are run by men and women

00:55:19.140 who began their careers, not with a four-year degree, but with the mastery of a skill, it's significant.

00:55:26.220 And, honestly, you know, I worry for those businesses today. They're headline news right

00:55:32.800 now. And, yeah, I would count bar and restaurants among them. You know, there's so many people out

00:55:39.540 there who are really, really hurting right now because they have been deemed incredibly

00:55:43.460 non-essential. It'll break your heart. Do you think some of the pushback we're seeing

00:55:50.560 from conservatives, at least on the far left turn these universities have taken,

00:55:57.140 might help? You know, I talk to conservatives every week who don't know what to do with their,

00:56:03.280 they don't want their kids going to a four-year university because they think they're going to

00:56:06.980 be pushed to become, you know, woke, far left ideology, embracing people who don't like their

00:56:14.240 parents. And, uh, and I understand that there isn't, there aren't a lot of great alternatives.

00:56:20.220 You know, you've got some colleges out there, Liberty, which is more religious. You've got

00:56:23.800 Hillsdale, but there's, you know, let's face it. The vast majority of universities are controlled by

00:56:28.000 the left and, um, and do support that ideology. Very few conservatives in the, in the faculty ranks

00:56:33.060 there. Do you think that could help? You know, that, that this is a meaningful alternative. You don't

00:56:37.160 have to spend the money. You don't have to subject yourself or your kid to that kind of

00:56:41.520 four-year experience. And they can actually still make a lot of money by learning a trade

00:56:46.060 and educating themselves in other ways. Yeah. Well, look, the question is, what is

00:56:52.180 persuasive? What's persuasive to a kid? What's persuasive to that kid's parents? What's persuasive

00:56:59.000 to a guidance counselor? If we're going to talk about the definition of a good job, then we have

00:57:03.780 to talk about the path to that job. And if we still believe the only path to that job or the best path to

00:57:10.840 that job requires us to sign on a dotted line and, and go off to a university, then that,

00:57:17.920 then you're going to have that disconnect. I mean, to answer your question. Yeah. I think that,

00:57:22.900 I think that among the conservative, the conservatives in the country, that realization is,

00:57:30.320 you know, what your former profession would call prima facie, right? I mean, it's self-evident.

00:57:35.580 We can see it. It's not going to tip though, until the liberals see it. And, you know,

00:57:43.820 in a weird way, and this is probably a sloppy corollary, but you know, I, most of my friends

00:57:50.060 here in Northern California are to the left of, of center. And many of them, the vast majority are

00:57:57.060 in lockstep to their opposition to Trump and to the conservative party. However, something really

00:58:05.920 interesting has happened in the last couple of weeks. And this is just anecdotal. This is what

00:58:11.220 I'm seeing in my neighborhood of well-appointed homes and successful people. This business with

00:58:19.380 Gavin Newsom dining out at the French Laundry. It's not a small thing that that moment with Nancy

00:58:28.380 Pelosi, getting her hair blown out after closing salons, not a small thing. It's happening now in

00:58:34.980 Santa Monica, not far from my office. Sheila cool. I think her name was a supervisor, you know,

00:58:40.720 shuts down the restaurants and then goes out to eat. I mean, they're all everywhere you turn.

00:58:45.540 And we're seeing people in positions of power, uh, contradicting themselves. And, you know,

00:58:53.700 my liberal friends are horrified by that and they're starting to talk about it. And it's really

00:59:01.300 interesting to me because they've never acknowledged it before. And it just proves that I don't know who

00:59:08.480 said it, but you know, it's, it's, it's easy to forgive people for being wrong and it's, it's easy

00:59:16.180 to forgive them for being stupid, but it's hard to forgive hypocrisy, especially when it's that rank.

00:59:24.760 And when you see people who are being told to shut down and basically just shutter their businesses,

00:59:32.680 you know, it's, it's catastrophic. And when the people who are telling them to do that are simply

00:59:39.260 not following the same rules. Did you see what happened with the Waffle House? Just, just, uh,

00:59:45.200 just the other day, the Waffle House CEO came out and said, basically, you know, this is nuts.

00:59:50.900 He said, um, you know, none, none of the people making these decisions to shut down the businesses

00:59:55.080 ever have their own livelihood impacted. His point was, you can't value enough someone's peace of

01:00:03.220 mind and security in having a job that they can count on. The stimulus checks aren't going to do

01:00:08.800 that. And the people making the decisions, you know, these politicians aren't going to be affected

01:00:13.500 in their pocketbook by shutting down the Waffle House in Orlando or, or whatever it is. You know,

01:00:20.340 we see it on the streets of New York city is, as our mayor de Blasio is telling everybody they've

01:00:24.940 got to shut down and then sneaking off to the gym in Brooklyn so that he could work out just one more

01:00:28.740 time. You know, they, they don't think about him. What do you think has changed fundamentally

01:00:34.720 vis-a-vis our relationship with fear? When I look at the, the 1918 pandemic, when I look at,

01:00:44.800 you know, any number of events over the last hundred years and the threat and the risk that they pose

01:00:53.660 to us as a people, I've never seen us respond to, to a threat with, with this level. It's,

01:01:05.620 it's almost like we, we were just told that we're not immortal.

01:01:11.340 Right. Right. We just learned this. Well, I'll tell you what I think. I, I know you're not a

01:01:15.980 political guy, but I'll tell you my view on it is somewhat political. I think over the past 20 years,

01:01:20.860 since nine 11, we haven't had a major catastrophic event happen in the United States, anywhere near

01:01:26.780 that until COVID. And over those past 20 years, we've been bathing in fake controversies over what

01:01:35.180 is unsafe. You know, you can no longer hear words that you don't like because you're unsafe. You have

01:01:40.960 at college campuses, you have to have safe spaces. You can go to, to avoid people who might

01:01:44.940 challenge your world outlook because that's now endangering and dehumanizing. And we've actually

01:01:52.100 let ourselves convince ourselves that that's, what's really dangerous. And so, and we have a

01:01:58.200 media that completely supports all of those notions and reinforces them. And so when something serious

01:02:03.500 actually hits, people hit the panic button, you know, and it's, and it's the same media deliverers who

01:02:08.740 have been telling us that words are dangerous. So when an actual virus comes that, that is dangerous

01:02:14.300 to the elderly, you know, they lose all perspective and it goes into gear 11, of course, as everything

01:02:21.860 was with Trump, another gear 11. So I just don't think we don't have, we don't have the resolve

01:02:26.400 anymore to say, I'm fine. We're fine. We're going to be able to handle this. Some of us do, but sadly

01:02:32.340 it's been going another direction. I think, I think you're right. And I don't think that's really a,

01:02:39.000 a political observation. I think the observation breaks down on political points when you start to

01:02:45.280 unpack it, but it's more an anthropological sociological phenomenon. In my view, I think

01:02:51.920 that, you know, on dirty jobs, we were in constant peril. Risk was everywhere. You know, we, we filmed

01:03:00.100 that show in the most hazardous places in the country and everywhere I went, I would see banners that said

01:03:06.960 safety first. And we would sit through these mandatory safety briefings all the time. And,

01:03:13.040 you know, the first couple of years of the show, nobody got hurt because we were very, very mindful

01:03:18.480 of our surroundings. Uh, and we were very, very careful by the third season, everybody on my crew

01:03:26.060 either broke a bone, got a concussion, you know, nothing really, really terrible, but a lot of near misses

01:03:36.340 and a lot of stitches, you know, and something had changed. And I realized what it was, or at least

01:03:43.120 what I thought it was, we had sat through so many safety first briefings that we had started to

01:03:50.200 believe that somebody else cared more about our safety than we did. And of course, the moment you

01:03:57.660 do that, you become complacent. And the moment you become complacent, at least with regard to vocational

01:04:03.340 safety, you get hurt. And so I started saying safety third, really just to remind my crew,

01:04:10.800 you know, that it was incumbent on us, not on our employer or our host, you know, we're in charge.

01:04:20.120 You know, there's a huge element of personal responsibility when it comes to going home in

01:04:24.040 one piece. Well, that led to a special called safety third on the discovery channel 10 years ago.

01:04:31.720 And ever since I've been speaking at, you know, railroads and, you know, big, big factories and

01:04:39.700 big companies who, who have a workplace occupational safety thing to consider. And when this pandemic

01:04:49.880 hit, it all kind of came back around to me, our country has actually bought into the idea

01:04:57.140 that safety is first, that safety is always the most important thing. And it's not, it's never been,

01:05:09.480 you know, it's ridiculous to try and rank it. Safety always is the sensible thing to say.

01:05:15.400 But when you're confronted with this kind of global decision, where somebody else is deciding the

01:05:25.200 most important thing is for everyone to survive, then you've entered a whole new, a whole new realm,

01:05:34.760 a whole new phase of living. Back to Mike in just one second. But first, it's officially the new year.

01:05:42.040 Yay. Happy new year, everyone. And we've got a lot planned for you here at the Megan Kelly show.

01:05:47.480 We're going to have a great new year right along with you. The response to the show has just been

01:05:51.760 tremendous, been very, very gratified to see how many people love it and all the downloads it's

01:05:56.240 gotten. It's been totally record breaking in terms of its success in such a short time.

01:06:00.940 So we've been inspired to try some new things, a lot of new things, actually, that I think you're

01:06:05.460 going to love. And that is what we call a tease because I can't reveal them yet, but they're ready

01:06:11.800 almost, almost going to happen very soon. So just keep your eye on megankelly.com because that's

01:06:18.320 where we're going to post new stuff. And then I'll, of course, bring them to you as well on the

01:06:22.040 podcast. But if you happen to miss something here, you can always go to megankelly.com for the updates.

01:06:27.200 And just know we were thinking about you over the holiday season because we got you some presents

01:06:31.100 and thinking about you in the new year and how we can make our relationship bigger, bolder, better.

01:06:37.680 And one of those things, actually, while I have your attention is I would love to hear from you on

01:06:41.960 features we do like Devil May Care All-Stars. If you have somebody you want to nominate as somebody

01:06:46.840 who's badass and not bowing to the mob on all this craziness happening in the country, you may submit

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01:07:17.620 something in the news you'd love to hear me address or have some curiosity about, would love to try to

01:07:22.960 handle that for you. So anyway, all those features are wide open for your input. Keep the guest

01:07:27.080 suggestions coming to. Those have been very helpful, actually. So we appreciate it. And again,

01:07:33.160 questions at devilmaycaremedia.com or any of the social media platforms. And while I've

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01:07:50.940 for you. All right. So there you go. Happy New Year. Stay tuned. A lot more coming your way.

01:07:56.560 Back to Mike.

01:08:00.460 I think for many years now, we've been easing our way towards softness in a way that's not healthy

01:08:08.380 and isn't going to sustain the human race. I think whether it's this business with COVID and,

01:08:16.040 you know, the complete assumption that there can be no personal responsibility that keeps anyone well,

01:08:21.080 right? Like that maybe if I live with an old person, I will choose not to go to the bar and the

01:08:25.360 restaurant because I understand I could endanger him or her, even though I'm I'm not in the risk

01:08:29.600 group. That's up to me. I can make that decision. But no, the government says no, it isn't. Everyone

01:08:35.440 has to wear the masks no matter how healthy you are. My seven year old has to wear the mask

01:08:38.920 while running around at resource at recess with a bunch of other seven year olds because

01:08:42.840 the government has has issued these mandates that, you know, now schools are just terrified to

01:08:48.020 disobey. But Mike, it's also when it comes to just mere words, right? Like we've gotten to the place

01:08:52.660 where we believe words are dangerous. Therefore, you must not speak them. And what happens as a

01:08:58.120 result of that people become weaker, they become dumber, they become less informed and less able to

01:09:04.240 understand other worldviews, which makes us more insular, more tribal. I think it's dangerous on a

01:09:09.920 number of levels.

01:09:10.620 And the language just becomes less interesting, less words. You know, I mean, I love our language.

01:09:18.680 There are a dozen ways to say any given thing. But if you deem most of those ways to be incorrect in

01:09:26.160 some way, you're right. It makes everything dumber. But look, I'll say something politically

01:09:33.520 stupid. This will come back to haunt me, I'm sure. But when I was listening to you,

01:09:38.400 welcome to my world. Oh, God. Well, you know, it's the it's the it's the sameness. It's the it's

01:09:47.060 the cookie cutter approach to living that, in my experience, has never, ever, ever, ever, ever,

01:09:54.560 ever worked. And to get elected politicians, they need to trade in bromides. They need to they need to

01:10:01.960 hand out the platitudes. They need to, you know, talk to the fat part of the bat. But that's not who we

01:10:07.920 are. We're a lot of different people. And, you know, when you tell a kid, for instance, you know,

01:10:13.040 that that college is good. Well, that doesn't mean college is good for him or her. So but having said

01:10:20.100 that, that why, why do we treat everybody the same with regard to the pandemic? And what if the answer

01:10:28.760 has something to do with racial profiling? And stop and frisk? It's a bit of a leap, but go with me

01:10:41.640 for a second. Some people, well-intended people, believe that fairness in a society happens when

01:10:51.680 everybody is treated the same way. That kind of equality, in other words. Consequently, when my mom

01:11:00.660 travels, this 82-year-old woman is subjected to the exact same rigor as a 30-year-old coming to the

01:11:11.180 country for the first time from Yemen. The TSA looks at both of them the same. And consequently,

01:11:20.600 everything is fair and we can all sleep soundly. Stop and frisk obviously had some problems, but

01:11:28.280 we don't do that anymore. Because if you're looking specifically at one group of people

01:11:34.380 in one way and not at another group in another way, that's bad. That's unfair. My point is not to say

01:11:42.340 that any of those things are good, bad, right, wrong, smart, or stupid. It's just to say that there is a

01:11:47.600 tendency, I know I'm generalizing, but there is a tendency among half the people in this country to default

01:11:55.400 to a kind of thinking that says, we need to treat everybody the same. Hotspot, cold spot,

01:12:04.380 doesn't matter. We're going to treat everything like a hotspot. Old, at risk, young, healthy,

01:12:12.080 doesn't matter. We're going to treat you all basically the same. Not because it's smart to do

01:12:17.700 that, but because the optics are just so jarring that we can't bring ourselves to discriminate.

01:12:25.800 And you want to talk about words losing meaning or taking on new heft? How about that one? How about

01:12:33.880 discrimination? Discrimination is a terrific word. It means discernment. It means, I look down the

01:12:42.680 alley, it appears to be dark. It appears to be populated by some unsavory looking types. So I'm

01:12:49.540 going to make a discriminating decision and not walk down the alley. It's not a bad word, but it's become

01:12:56.560 a bad word. And something you said, it just, it just made me think, you know, this is the, this is

01:13:04.480 what's happening in the reptilian part of our brain. And it's part of what's dividing us. So many people

01:13:10.640 don't believe that we should take an ad hoc Chinese menu approach to treating this thing. They believe that

01:13:20.820 a cookie cutter approach is the smart, fair, prudent thing to do. And, um, you know, that goes to

01:13:30.100 worldview and that's right. It's hard to change your worldview. We've gotten incredibly risk averse

01:13:37.440 and, and risk is not inherently bad. Risk can lead to great reward. Sometimes you can fall flat on your

01:13:44.860 face. Sometimes you can break the arm, but in my experience, usually succeed or fail. You emerge

01:13:51.520 the better person for having taken it. And we're, we're, we're sending different messages now.

01:13:57.080 If safety were truly first, if safety were truly first, what company would be in business?

01:14:04.480 You know, if safety were truly first, our, our cars would be made of rubber. They would not

01:14:10.780 exceed speed, exceed speeds of 15 miles an hour. We would all wear helmets and we would eliminate

01:14:16.460 left-hand turns. If you did that, no more liquor stores, look, the things we could do to save

01:14:24.760 millions of lives every year are manifold. We don't do those things because we've made a calculation

01:14:33.900 and we've decided that the risk. And by the way, it's not even a risk. We've decided from an

01:14:40.420 actuarial standpoint that the certainty of 35,000 automotive deaths in the coming year,

01:14:46.460 the certainty of that is a fair trade for the ability to come and go as we like and drive our

01:14:53.840 vehicles at the posted speeds and so forth. It's, it's a bargain that we made 690,000 people died last

01:15:02.680 year of heart disease. We could stop a lot of that by dramatically changing the types of foods we

01:15:08.180 sell and implementing a mandatory exercise program. We're not going to do that because 690,000 deaths

01:15:15.080 is a fair trade for the freedom to live the way we want to do. Now, people don't like to say that out

01:15:20.800 loud, but how else can you conclude when you look at the reality of the data? 10 million people died of

01:15:29.880 cancer last year. They're going to die this year. 10 million people starved to death. You know, I read

01:15:37.660 something the other day and I, maybe you can verify it, but it, it, it seems, it seems real. It seems

01:15:44.020 in multiple places, the CDC has concurred that the number of starvation deaths likely to occur as a

01:15:53.920 result, not of the disease, but of the lockdowns will be between 80 and a hundred million around

01:16:00.460 the world because the logistic chain has been destroyed because trucks can't get where they

01:16:07.120 need to go with the food. This is what the red cross is saying. This is what a lot of organizations

01:16:13.300 are saying. We just have no real understanding of the unintended consequences on a global level

01:16:20.780 of shutting down the most powerful country in the world and every other country for that matter.

01:16:26.200 It's going to be mind boggling. Think about the split in how people are coming down on these harsh

01:16:32.360 shutdowns. And it does tend to be, you know, the media seems a hundred percent behind them.

01:16:37.280 And sort of the liberal elites seem to be the ones shaming others who tend to be more working class,

01:16:44.680 more dirty jobs, kind of people who say, I'll take the risk. I want to put food on my table.

01:16:49.980 I'll, I'll do what I need to do to protect myself and my family, but let me work. Let me work. It's

01:16:56.200 not the media people who are going to lose their jobs. You're not going to lose your anchor job

01:16:59.260 on CNN because there's a shutdown of bars and restaurants and other industries, as you point

01:17:04.920 out, that are deemed non-essential. And, um, like it, to me, it seems, it does seem like a class issue.

01:17:11.240 And I, you know, I think the dirty jobs are the noble jobs where you really do get your hands dirty

01:17:19.840 and you're, you're in the street all day and you don't mind it. And you're, you have a certain

01:17:24.480 mentality of my life may be risky and it may be dirty and that's okay. And, and sometimes you get

01:17:32.620 hurt. Sometimes not the perfect result happens. Sometimes it isn't perfectly equal back to your

01:17:37.900 other point. And that's the way America is and used to be. I don't know, Mike, I think maybe

01:17:45.080 you're right. Maybe they've overstepped to the point where there's going to be an uprising. And,

01:17:50.360 and I do think the political messaging is playing into this because that same group of people, many

01:17:54.440 of whom voted for Donald Trump has been told for four years that they're awful, that they are horrible,

01:18:03.920 that they, because they support this guy who seemed to reach out to them and say, I'll fight

01:18:08.140 for you. Not only are they just, you know, dumb and stupid and not worthy of celebrating, but they're

01:18:13.140 racist. They're sexist. They're xenophobic. God, it's the old truth. Look, this is a big generalization,

01:18:21.400 but I do find some, some truth in it. By and large, my, my friends on the right will look at my friends

01:18:28.680 on the left and conclude that they're mistaken. And my friends on the left will look at my friends

01:18:33.980 on the right and conclude that they are evil. And there's a big difference between being wrong and

01:18:41.480 wicked. And so that is an unfortunate way to set the table. And the word deplorable was an amazing

01:18:49.900 choice to make. And one of the truest things I think that was ever said, maybe not intentionally,

01:18:55.840 I'm sure she'd like to have that one back, but man, that set the table. And when Hillary Clinton

01:19:02.360 called half the country deplorable, half the country listened and, and they believed her.

01:19:09.280 And so, you know, ever since, I mean, that was one of many, but that was certainly a moment

01:19:14.660 where people looked around and said, wow, there's a line, there's a line in the country and it's being

01:19:21.900 drawn as we speak. Am I deplorable? I'm not, you know, people, I mean, I know a lot of people who

01:19:28.780 ask themselves that question. So, you know, it's a, it's a heck of a thing. And, um, do you think

01:19:37.560 we're, we're losing? Cause I think after Trump was elected, people started to see that, you know,

01:19:42.200 I think some of my liberal friends started to see, okay, there, there, we seem to be getting a

01:19:46.780 message from, you know, the work working class workers of America that we need to pay some

01:19:52.100 attention to them, that not every policy can be to please the chamber of commerce. Right. And then

01:19:57.560 that was a Republican problem, but I think sort of the more elite started to say, okay, let's listen.

01:20:01.660 But now, now just people are angry and they seem to be, I don't know when they, they're looking at

01:20:08.400 these Trump voters and the white working class and the black working class, they seem to be saying

01:20:11.940 something very different. I think it has to do with, I don't know, it's just like last week I

01:20:16.480 interviewed JD Vance and we were talking about his, the movie based on his book, Hillbilly Elegy,

01:20:22.260 that's come out. It's getting killed, killed in the reviews, which was completely predictable.

01:20:26.540 But I read those reviews and I think of the movie was great. And I think, you know what? It's okay to,

01:20:33.020 it's okay to go after deplorables again. And it's, and it's not okay to humanize them as he does.

01:20:37.840 Look, Megan, it's, it's, that's just straight up hubris. You know, I've spent the last nine months

01:20:45.060 working from home and, and prospering. And I know that, and I know a lot of people

01:20:51.240 haven't. So therefore, and for no other reason, I can't mouth off about a whole lot of things that

01:20:58.840 I might have an opinion on because I've been able to work. You know, the CNN and the Fox news anchors

01:21:05.300 have been able to work and yet they have opinions and they, and they just can't help but share them.

01:21:11.620 And so it's, it's, it's appalling to me, the lack of self-awareness among so many people who have a

01:21:18.900 platform. And look, I've been accused of it too. I suppose I'm guilty from time to time, but by and

01:21:23.280 large, you know, I try to stay in my lane and I try not to get over my skis with all this. But

01:21:28.720 do you remember when the smoking thing really tipped when, when, when public sentiment really,

01:21:38.180 really once and for all and forever turned against the cigarette industry? I, I think it was around

01:21:48.860 the issue of secondhand smoke. I, I think when people realized that it wasn't their decision to

01:21:59.120 smoke was not necessarily the proximate cause of them getting smoke into their lungs. And when that

01:22:06.780 happened, right, secondhand smoke became a thing and it became a deadly thing. Part of what's going on

01:22:13.040 right now, I think is that our breath has been deemed to be secondhand smoke. The mask argument

01:22:23.240 is no longer about whether or not I get to choose to assume a certain level of risk vis-a-vis my

01:22:31.400 decision to wear or not wear a mask. It's, oh, you selfish bastard. You're not wearing a mask.

01:22:37.600 Therefore you're filling the air with your own toxic breath and you're going to kill grandma.

01:22:43.040 Um, and that, you know, I understand that argument. It's the exact same argument I heard

01:22:51.500 persuasively made around why cigarettes ought to be outlawed. Unfortunately, we're not talking about

01:23:00.000 smoke. We're talking about breath. And we're talking about the fact that millions of viruses exist in a

01:23:07.760 drop of seawater. And the air is filled with things. The, the world is filled with things that

01:23:14.140 can kill us. You know, we live in a desperately dangerous place and nobody's getting out of it

01:23:20.320 alive, you know, but this new thing, this new thing has come along. And the idea that somebody can

01:23:27.120 breathe on us and infect us with a disease that has a 99% survival rate. If you happen to be under 70,

01:23:33.260 has for some reason, petrified us to the point where we're simply not thinking rationally.

01:23:43.780 And, um, you know, uh, sometimes things just have to go splat before they get better. And I don't

01:23:51.800 know what that means in this case, but we've just seen a lot of rioting. We've seen a lot of protesting

01:23:58.080 and I understand why it happened. We could see that again, times 10. If, if this goes too far and

01:24:09.740 people well and truly believe their liberties and their livelihoods and their country is being

01:24:15.440 transformed under their feet. Um, fascinated and, and a little frightened by what could happen.

01:24:25.680 Okay. Let's talk about freedom for a minute. There, um, there was a poll that recently came

01:24:31.500 out that said it was talking to young people. Um, as we've seen a lot with young people, the rise in

01:24:38.940 support for socialism is spiking. This, this is actually not particularly new. A lot of, a lot of

01:24:44.580 young people, when they go to these universities and they get told about how wonderful the communist

01:24:47.920 manifesto is, they suddenly say, Oh, it's a good idea. I'm going to be a Marxist. Sadly, that's the

01:24:52.900 truth, but then they tend to grow out of it. But anyway, um, the other, the, the other stat that

01:24:57.840 jumped out at me from this survey was that only 44% see the flag is representing freedom. I mean,

01:25:03.380 that to me is nuts and a little scary, like the, just the erosion of patriotism and love for the

01:25:10.180 country. What do you think? I think that, uh, I think that's symptomatic of something,

01:25:17.720 you know, I don't think it's a problem in and of itself, not to minimize it, but I just think

01:25:23.400 there's something under it, you know? And I guess maybe it's, maybe it's curiosity. Maybe we're less

01:25:32.640 curious than we used to be, you know? I mean, and maybe I'm just saying that because I work for the

01:25:40.320 discovery channel and satisfying curiosity is their mandate. And so I, I tend to look at everything

01:25:45.940 through the lens of you're either interested in it, curious about it, or persuasive, you know,

01:25:53.320 but you can't be persuasive until you're informed and you can't be informed unless you're curious.

01:25:58.320 And if you think socialism is a good idea, well then persuade me. And if you can't persuade me,

01:26:08.120 it's because you don't know anything. And if you don't know anything, it's because you're not curious

01:26:13.040 enough to go around the world or read and, and, and make, make a persuasive case for socialism.

01:26:21.420 Do that. I say that every day to people who, who take that view. I like to think my mind is open

01:26:27.860 enough to be persuaded. It's just that I can't find a single example in the history of the whole world

01:26:33.220 where socialism has worked. And no, I don't want to hear about Denmark or Sweden. That's not socialism.

01:26:40.680 That's, that's a kind of high tax capitalism. Um, I've just, I'm standing by, you know, I'm standing

01:26:51.520 by to look at the study and to, and to hear a case for it. And it can't just be, well, capitalism bad,

01:27:00.060 or look at, look at the bad things that happen in a cap. Capitalism is, is not perfect. In fact,

01:27:06.260 there's a lot wrong with it. I've just looked around and for the life of me, I can't find a

01:27:10.980 better plan. I can't, I can't find a, I can't imagine of a single thing in the history of the

01:27:17.420 world that has elevated more desperate people up from poverty than capitalism. It's, it's one of the

01:27:27.160 great success stories of all time. And conversely, socialism has got to be one of the greatest

01:27:33.700 and most impressive failures of all time. The guy from whole foods just wrote a terrific book.

01:27:40.500 John, uh, what's his name? Is it John McKay? John, uh, yeah, Mackie Mackie, right. Conscious

01:27:48.120 capitalism was his first when he wrote something called conscious of leadership, I think is his

01:27:53.480 second one. But, you know, he makes this point, you know, the evidence demands a verdict and there

01:28:00.640 is no shortage of evidence to make a case for capitalism, uh, or a case against socialism,

01:28:07.460 or you could say it the other way too, but you have to look at the evidence. And it's, to me, it's

01:28:14.700 just, it's just overwhelming. We're not a perfect country. We don't have a perfect system. The

01:28:21.660 constitution is not a perfect document. The flag has evolved just as surely as the bill of rights

01:28:29.380 has. It's changed. It's complexion is different and so forth. We're, we're a work in progress,

01:28:34.820 but to affirmatively look at the iconography, um, the symbols of our country, and to then just lean

01:28:45.300 back and evaluate the decisions made by our ancestors and look at them through the lens of

01:28:52.540 modern sensibility, that is the height of arrogance in my view, and the very definition of an incurious

01:29:00.980 mind. It's, it's, it's a, it's a statue to laziness is what it is. This is the thing for me,

01:29:10.640 the biggest difference. And again, I, I, I keep qualifying this in a stupid way. You know,

01:29:16.520 I have many liberal friends. I really do. My best friends are, are very liberal. And just the other

01:29:23.480 night we were sitting around socially distanced, naturally drinking beer in between the moments

01:29:28.920 where we lowered and raised our mask. Uh, and you know, I said to a group of my friends, it's like,

01:29:35.540 it's amazing what we agree on. In fact, I can't think of really a single big issue whose outcome

01:29:44.020 we, we wouldn't all like to see. It's just a matter of process. And in a general way,

01:29:52.160 if I'm going to say something critical to you, I would say that you're impatient in the same way

01:29:57.700 the millennials are that we talked about before you look for shortcuts. A high minimum wage is a

01:30:04.540 shortcut. Uh, rent control is a shortcut. Now we'd both like to see people paid fairly.

01:30:12.320 None of, none of us want to see people evicted from their homes. But if you look at the policies

01:30:18.960 that are either popular or not popular, then I think you can, in a very general way, say, well,

01:30:24.920 that's a shortcut or it isn't. Um, I think as I understand it, socialism is a shortcut.

01:30:33.020 Capitalism is not. Capitalism is messy because there's competition and people are going to fail.

01:30:41.360 Good people are going to fall short, you know? Uh, and so again, it's well-intended people can

01:30:49.620 disagree over the way to get to a place, you know, but the place that we're all trying to get to,

01:30:56.800 and I take some hope in this is by and large the same. So what are we arguing over really? It's

01:31:06.560 process, you know? Two, two points on that. One, I agree with everything you said. And I also think

01:31:13.660 you could expand it to what's happening right now. The discussion we're happening in the,

01:31:17.700 in the, we're having in the country over race. I think most people want the same thing, equality,

01:31:22.860 love, support, non-judgment opportunity. Uh, but there are real disagreements, I think in particular

01:31:29.080 between Republicans and Democrats on how we get there. How, how do we get there? Right. You can

01:31:33.580 just go back to the disputes we used to have over affirmative action. Now it's morphed into disputes

01:31:37.780 about, you know, should you be doing what Robin DiAngelo wants you to do, or should you be doing what

01:31:42.520 professor Glenn Lowry of Brown university wants you to do? But everybody wants equality and opportunity

01:31:47.660 and, and love and support, you know, it's just, but what we do in today's day and age is demonize

01:31:52.560 anybody who doesn't see the root there the same way we do. And, well, and yeah, go ahead.

01:32:00.540 Look at, to me, the entire race thing, and I'm going to really oversimplify this, um, but isn't the goal

01:32:09.500 of the entire conversation to become a colorblind society? I mean, it used to be, it seems like

01:32:21.440 ultimately the best world we could hope to live in would be a world where people look around and

01:32:29.600 truly do not give a tinker's damn what color your skin is. So it's a great example because

01:32:39.480 every thoughtful person I know loves that world. We don't, you know, we imagine a world where we

01:32:47.960 don't see color, but everything we seem to do in order to get to that place is accentuate color.

01:32:57.840 And so, you know, it, it, it's just a fundamental tautology, I think. I mean, how can you,

01:33:05.700 how can you correct a problem with affirmative action, for instance, you know, how can you hope

01:33:15.340 that the ultimate end result of that policy is going to get us to a colorblind place when the

01:33:23.400 very definition of that policy precludes certain people from participating in it?

01:33:30.360 Well, you know, the answer on these, on, on this general argument is only white people would say

01:33:36.660 such a thing, which isn't true. Of course, you know, many black intellectuals are saying exactly

01:33:40.420 the same thing, but it's your white privilege that makes you say, let's not make color a thing.

01:33:47.200 You know, these activists, white and black alike, these activists would say, um, it is an issue

01:33:54.600 because America is systemically racist and we have no, no choice, but to acknowledge that

01:33:59.760 and work past that. And I would buy that criticism because I just made it to you a half hour ago when

01:34:07.560 I talked about, you know, the hypocrites in the media who, who, who, who can't see their own place

01:34:15.720 of privilege and therefore hold forth with just delightful impunity. Um, what I'm saying here is that,

01:34:24.100 okay, if you want to take everything I just said and say, well, that's easy for you to say you rich

01:34:30.140 white guy in the middle of your life. All right. I'll, I'll accept for the purposes of the argument

01:34:38.000 being dismissed based on those things I can't control. But then what are you going to say to

01:34:44.060 Thomas Sowell? What are you going to say to Tim Scott? What are you going to say to Candace Owens?

01:34:50.960 What are you going to say to all of the black people who said the same thing I said? Well,

01:34:57.340 you're going to call them uncle Toms. You're going to criticize anything you don't agree with,

01:35:05.560 not based on the substance of the observation, but on the color of the observer, which is the precise

01:35:16.940 thing you're complaining about in the first place. And so if you can't see that, you know, then,

01:35:26.320 then I'd go back to my earlier point and say, you're not a genuinely curious person.

01:35:33.420 You're, you're something else. You're a, you're an advocate and that's okay too. You know,

01:35:40.220 the world needs advocates, but it's important to know when you're being sold something and when

01:35:46.820 you're going on an exploration, these people, they're not exploring the kind of society that,

01:35:54.920 that I would like to live in a colorblind society. They're exploring ways to gin up conflict,

01:36:02.500 to keep their thumb on the scale and keep us more and more divided.

01:36:09.380 You know, Oh, going back to something you said about, well, discovery and exploring, and that

01:36:14.760 really is how you've spent your life, but you were saying maybe it's because you're, you work for the

01:36:19.740 Discovery Channel that you have a different view of patriotism, America, capitalism, all these things.

01:36:26.280 I think it's also because you spend a lot of time with veterans and I do think you tend to love the

01:36:34.140 country and see the flag differently. If you spend a lot of time with veterans.

01:36:39.960 How do you not, you know, I mean, 1% of the population wears a uniform. Every single freedom

01:36:46.880 that we enjoy has been paid for in blood. People roll their eyes when I say that because it sounds like

01:36:52.800 a talking point off of a monument, but it's true. Every single thing we have was paid for by somebody

01:36:59.320 who either volunteered or answered the draft or put on the uniform and paid the ultimate price.

01:37:05.460 You're either impressed by that or you're not. If you're not, okay, but Jesus, what's it take to

01:37:12.300 impress you? Incidentally, one and a half percent of our country are farmers. One and a half percent

01:37:19.040 feed 330 million people three times a day. You're either impressed by that or you're not.

01:37:25.560 If you're not, okay, but Jesus Christ, what's it take? You know, our skilled workforce is a relatively

01:37:32.860 small percentage of our country. But when you flick on the switch and the light comes on

01:37:38.500 and flush the toilet and the poop goes away, you know, these are miracles. These are modern miracles

01:37:45.120 that we all take for granted and you're either impressed by that or you're not. So dirty jobs

01:37:51.360 and somebody's got to do it and returning the favor and the way I heard it. Every show I've ever worked

01:37:57.000 on is essentially the same show. I just changed the title every couple of years and their goals

01:38:03.740 are all interchangeable. My job, I think, to the extent I have one, is to tap the country on the

01:38:10.760 shoulder every so often and say, hey, get a load of him. Get a load of her. Look at what's going on

01:38:16.220 over here. So on returning the favor, you know, I get to do that a lot. And we've done a hundred

01:38:22.340 episodes and 14 or 15 have been based on veterans. Roughly the same number have been based on farmers.

01:38:31.780 And I didn't realize it when I was doing it, but when I look back on it, I think that in a really

01:38:38.640 general way, aside from our country's fungible, ever-changing definition and relationship with

01:38:45.680 risk, we have a similar fungible, ever-changing definition of gratitude. And if we're not a grateful

01:38:58.020 people, and I say this, you know, on a micro and a macro level, if we're not fundamentally grateful for

01:39:06.820 what we have, then we're essentially rolling out the red carpet to a long list of feelings that

01:39:13.420 that we're not going to enjoy. You know, I mean, it's, it's hard to be angry when you're fundamentally

01:39:19.640 grateful. It's hard to be bitter. It's hard to be suspicious and resentful. It's hard to be envious

01:39:25.680 when you're fundamentally grateful for what you have. But it just seems like, because we're not as

01:39:33.120 curious as we once were, we don't have an understanding of history the way we should.

01:39:39.200 And so we look around in relative terms, and we don't see our country for the miracle that it is.

01:39:45.880 We don't see our form of government for the singularly remarkable construct that it is.

01:39:52.720 Instead, we look at Mount Rushmore and go, probably be prettier without all those slave owners up there.

01:40:00.340 You know, it's an amazing thing, this ability to judge our ancestors based on

01:40:10.620 what we know to be true today. Can you imagine, imagine 150 years from now, whose statues are going

01:40:20.540 to be pulled down? That will depend entirely on how woke and how enlightened that generation is.

01:40:28.800 I mean, 150 years from now, what will the topic be that most mirrors the way we feel about slavery

01:40:40.820 today? I don't know anybody who doesn't look back at slavery and go, oh my God, it's, it's the human

01:40:48.020 stain. It's our great sin. What a terrible thing. What a demonstrably, undeniably terrible thing that

01:40:55.460 was. What do you think 150 years from now, that generation will be saying the same thing about?

01:41:03.040 Could it be eating meat? Could it be abortion? Capital punishment? Anything that's in the headlines

01:41:12.600 right now that seems controversial is going to be completely worked out 150 years from now,

01:41:17.600 assuming we make it that long, including the environment. And when that generation looks back

01:41:23.060 at us, how harshly, how harshly will they judge us? You know, if they judge us as harshly as we judge

01:41:32.900 our ancestors, then whose statue is safe? Right. Who will be left standing? It reminds me of the,

01:41:43.180 there was a report not long ago about the famous, the famous Martin Luther King biographer,

01:41:50.320 this guy, David Garrow, who got access to these FBI files from the 1960s, studying Martin Luther King

01:41:58.620 Jr. And some of what was in there was not good, suggesting he had affairs with 40 women. This is

01:42:04.980 a guy who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on King, that he stood by as a friend, raped a woman,

01:42:10.560 was not good stuff. Yep.

01:42:12.440 It's never going to change what Martin Luther King did for race relations in this country.

01:42:18.860 It's hard, it's hard to sum up the character of any man or a woman by, by diminishing it based on

01:42:27.140 even one terrible thing. You know, people are complicated. And back then when, when, you know,

01:42:33.800 Thomas Jefferson had slaves, sadly, so did a lot of other people. It just wasn't the same. And I,

01:42:39.240 and you're right, I think when it comes to even just the way we treat our animals today. And,

01:42:44.080 you know, when you think about what happens with the chickens, what happens with the cows and so on,

01:42:47.300 makes it hard. But right now we're not there. Doesn't make everybody who has a hamburger a bad

01:42:52.440 person. It's so delightfully glib and easy. That's all I'm saying. You know, the, the, it's the laziness

01:42:59.520 that allows us to take our standards and apply them to Alexander the Great or George Washington

01:43:07.740 or William the Conqueror or Sally Hemmings or it, it, you know, and Winston Churchill.

01:43:13.900 Of course, of course, you know, if, if you can't separate, look, Martin Luther King,

01:43:20.100 when he talked about the, the content of character, that idea deserves to be ruminated on and,

01:43:30.940 and unpacked, um, completely separate from the man.

01:43:37.740 As, as, as all ideas do, because all men are deeply irredeemably flawed.

01:43:45.900 Who are we kidding? We're all pigs. We all know it, you know, we all know it. It's just,

01:43:53.900 you know, if, if, if, if myself as more of a cougar,

01:43:58.740 Hey, not yet. Give yourself another 10 years. You're still a lioness, Megan.

01:44:05.500 Ooh, I like that better. Okay. I'll choose lioness or pig, but the point is animals were animals.

01:44:10.900 Yes. Yes. I mean, look, I, I do think there's a hierarchy of, of species. Um, and I do make value

01:44:19.660 judgments all the time and I, and I, I can't defend it, but I look at dogs differently than I look at

01:44:27.100 chickens. Um, but who knows 150 years from now, what the most enlightened among us, who knows how

01:44:36.620 they're going to make sense of our inconsistencies, our proclivities, our flaws, our contradictions,

01:44:45.920 our hypocrisies. Well, I am going to ruminate on what you just said. If we're not a grateful people,

01:44:52.560 then we're rolling out the red carpet to anger, bitterness, and envy as we go into the new year,

01:44:59.120 which I do think is exactly right. It's, it's profound. It's simple, but it's profound. And I'd like

01:45:04.620 it a lot better than we live in a very dangerous world and no one is getting out alive.

01:45:15.340 Today's episode is brought to you in part by Jan Marini Skin Research. Dramatic results,

01:45:20.740 dermatologist recommended. Get your award-winning skincare system now at janmarini.com. Don't miss

01:45:27.480 the next show we have coming up because it's Amy Chua, Tiger Mom. Remember Battle Hymn of the Tiger

01:45:34.560 Mother? She wrote it along with some other fascinating books. She's a Yale law school

01:45:38.780 professor and mentor to J.D. Vance. We might not never, we might've never had Hillbilly Elegy if

01:45:44.660 it hadn't been for Amy Chua, who was J.D.'s law school professor, saw what he had written down and

01:45:49.260 said, J.D., you got to keep writing and turn this into a book. So we have her to thank for J.D., which is

01:45:54.340 good. But she's written a book on tribalism. Could that be better timed? And she studied it for years

01:46:01.460 and years and years and years and sees how it turns out in other countries that get more and

01:46:05.060 more tribal, more and more entrenched in their respective camps. And she's got some predictions

01:46:10.560 for how it's going to go in this country, which as you know, is feeling more tribal than ever.

01:46:15.240 She knows why it happened and where it's going. And we'll talk about not allowing any playdates,

01:46:21.360 any sleepovers, any sports, any grade other than A and how that's working out.

01:46:29.240 I love this woman. We're very different in terms of our parenting approach,

01:46:32.760 but she's amazing. And you're going to love her too. Don't miss it.

01:46:37.440 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:46:43.740 The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

01:46:48.100 Your business doesn't move in a straight line. Some days bring growth, others bring challenges.

01:47:04.560 But what if you or a partner needs to step away? When the unexpected happens, count on Canada Life's

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The Megyn Kelly Show - January 01, 2021

Mike Rowe on Patriotism, the Value of Authenticity, and COVID Hypocrisy ｜ Ep. 45

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