Something to Stand For (With Mike Rowe)
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Coming up on the Dr. John Deloney Show. I just thought, how can we be so confused? How can you guys not know that the national anthem is a protest song? You can't protest a protest song unless you really fundamentally don't understand how it came to be. What's going on? What's going on? This is John with the Dr. John Deloney Show, talking about your mental and emotional health.

Being well in a world gone sideways,

and trying to figure out what in the world's the next right step in your marriage, with your friends, at work, with your kids, whatever's going on in your life. If you want to be on this show, go to johndeloney.com slash ask, A-S-K, or give me a call at 1-844-693-3291. You can leave a message, and we will holler back, girl, at you. I ain't no holler back, girl. And today, on today's show, we have a...

Super special guest.

A guy who's become a good buddy. We did a live event together and then we hung out and then we've done a couple of other events together. Now he's become a friend who has been incredibly generous both in front of the camera and behind the camera just helping me out. It's the great Mike Rowe. Mike Rowe, the Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame and Mike Rowe who's been an advocate for those in the margins, those that society kind of forgets, those who...

build our country's infrastructure and keep it running and those who are farming our food and Taking care of our sewers and building bridges all those things the great Mike Rowe and Mike has a brand new movie out called something to stand for and He's in it was in town in Nashville and I was like man You got to come on the show and so he came and hung out with me for a long time and we talked about all sorts of things from dealing with failure to loss to

what in the world's happening in our country and what are some actual practical steps for moving forward. And so I'm excited for you to join this, to just plop in on this conversation with two guys who love working on stuff, who love thinking about stuff and who love talking about stuff. And if nothing else, dude, that's sultry voice. That's sultry micro voice. So stay tuned, check it out. Turn it up a little bit louder for my conversation with the great micro.

It's so great to have a show with no clear beginning. You know, my favorite new podcast is Rick Rubin's. It's called Tetragrammaton. And it drops in the middle of what I think is a five-hour conversation. And then it's just over. Yeah. And I, the first seven or eight episodes with these very interesting people, I'm like,

I was super frustrated. Like, are we starting? And then it'd just be over. And now I think that's the point, right? That is the point. Is there's not three points in a lesson to human interaction. There might be. This is my friend Mike and. And, right. But look, I mean, first of all, you don't want to gainsay Rick Rubin. He's usually right about stuff that,

There you go. He's Gretzky. That's fair. He's like, I'm just standing here because the puck's coming. He's out ahead. And I'm waiting. But yeah, I think like if you think about the interactions you're going to have over the course of this day and you imagine the number of conversations you're going to experience that you walk in on and leave before they're officially terminated, I

That number's legion. Yeah. You know, it's real. It's not artificial. That's right. Yeah. And every single thing, except for very, very few exceptions that we see in media today, all kind of redounds to we're still there waiting to hear somebody say, go and action. Yeah. And let's begin. But life never does that. Doesn't do that. Or it reduces human interaction to a transaction. Right.

I need you here because you're famous and you're going to help me. And I'm going to try to... It makes us very much like this, which in a media context is great. But I think since this is how we... This is the model for human interaction we have now because we don't have grandparents in our lives and we don't have...

We don't have local coaches anymore. This becomes the model that you then take with you. I think we kind of talked about this a little bit when you very kindly came onto my podcast when I was desperately seeking celebrity and you put yourself out there. I will help a brother lift his show.

So I think maybe sometimes the grout is becoming the tile. Yeah, I like that. Right? And the tile is becoming the grout. And we have it in our heads in a lot of different ways, I think. You know, if you glance at a brick wall, most people see brick, period. But all the brick is held together with mortar, right? If you glance at a mosaic, you know, you see the tile. You don't focus on the grout.

And podcasting and social media and all of those sort of smaller, more modest things have traditionally been relegated into the smaller, more modest model. But now, now people are starting to, I mean, we're searching. There's so much out there. Yeah. And if you want to find an authentic conversation, well, guess what?

It's drinking from a fire hose. That's right. They're everywhere. And what they're doing, in my estimation, is they're revealing the naked emperor in traditional media. They're everybody. If you're looking at a prompter now, you know, and pretending not to read it when you are, right? If you're pretending that that IFB in your ear...

Like if you're gonna try and act like somebody isn't telling you what to do when they are, whether it's conscious or not, your viewers, your listeners, they know that. And then the BS meter today. You can feel it now. You can feel it and you know you're either being marketed to or manipulated or driven to a break or we're being pulled into some sort of tease.

and we're tired we're tired of it man rick rubin's right just we're going to be flies on walls yeah hopefully that can translate into just come over to my house and bring whatever you got in the fridge right i always like how do i distill this down to a kitchen table in a neighborhood yeah just grab whatever you got and come over right one of the things when i'm working with people who are struggling who are real anxious i'll tell them you gotta have one you gotta invite somebody to your house once a week and you have to leave something out

that you'd otherwise want to put away. Because now it's a performance. That's right. I have to show you my home. It's all a welcome. It's all a Chip and Joanna reveal, right? And it's like, no, dude, I just want to come to your house and hang out. I don't even see the laundry in the couch. We're not performing anymore. Leave the dishes in the sink. I'm here for you. It's not a question of eliminating that line. It's just a question of drawing it someplace else. Like there are some things I would appreciate if I'm coming to your home. Like, you know,

Maybe you put some clothes on, right? That was one time, and that was weird. That was weird. I get it. That was one time, though. Maybe, you know, if the dog is, you know, is like really hungry and ravenous and poorly trained, you keep him over in a special room or something. But by and large, you're right. You know, anything, like on Dirty Jobs, we never did a second take.

I love that. I didn't know that. Never did. 350 jobs, no take two. That's not to say we didn't have to kind of go back and revisit a thing. But when we did that, we always went to the behind the scenes camera to let the viewer know,

that the business of production had been paused. Right? And there was a lot of pushback in 2004 from the network when we did that because it's kind of like... You're breaking the fourth wall. Well, you're not breaking it. You're ignoring it. Okay. It's not there. So when camera A becomes the behind-the-scenes camera, you still have camera A, but now you got camera one. Right. Well, what do you do in a production hierarchy...

Typically, if this is too inside for your listeners, you're on a set, you got camera A, camera B, camera C. One, two, three, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, right? And so the guys who are running the show need to understand how they're cutting. But of course, the other old expression is when you're cutting, you're lying, right? So when you start to look at an edited thing, you know as if you're, okay, I'm being shown something in a very deliberate, very intentional way. And that's cool. That's why we have...

Goodfellas. That's why we have great movies, right? But if you're looking for an authentic chat, and if you're going to try and make a living in that weird bully-a-base called reality TV, then you need a camera. You need a truth cam that you can always look at and go, all right, you know what happened there? A plane flew over. My audio guy got upset. My battery just died. Okay, Frank over there needed to use the necessary equipment.

you know, we don't have a special camera for that, but now you know what I know. But that's taking the viewer from their couch and pulling up one of those little director's chairs and saying, no, sit right here behind the camera. Like you're on set now. Yep. That's always been the promise for me. And the thing that I thought might be open for debate 20 years ago in television was, what if instead of being voices of authority, we look to be voices of authenticity? And what if

instead of telling viewers, let us show you something you've never seen before or enlighten you in ways, right? You didn't think you'd be enlightened. What if instead we said, why don't you come with us and see if we can find something worth sharing, celebrating, talking about? Dude. That's different. It's an invitation. That's what Ruben is doing. Yeah. That's what really smart people are doing. That's right. So...

I'm talking to people. I've got this academic credential. I sit down and do little snippets of mental and emotional health coaching live, right? They call into the show, old Dr. Phil Frazier Crane. Help, they move on. There is a surge of colleagues across the country who do this day in and day out every day. And it's like, yes, finally somebody's talking about it. And then the show gets real big. And then it's like, well, who's this guy? He didn't even do it for real. I do it for real. Yeah.

And I look at someone like you who gave these guys who literally are underground like a spotlight. I need y'all America to know under the street you're driving on, these 14 guys and these seven women are making sure to cave in. That's right. And there's this trade like, thank God you're shining the light. And you become the guy who shines the light.

How do you manage over time when that light gets turned back on you and it's like, well, hold on. Mike doesn't turn a wrench. How is he getting there? You know what I mean? How have you navigated that? Because I tell you, it's a weight on the squat bar that I didn't expect. Oh, yeah. Right? I expected as this thing got bigger, it would get heavier and the criticism and all that. I'm okay with all that. In fact, I love it when people write in, especially buddies that call that are experts and they're like, hey, you blew that one. I love that.

But it's the... Swing and a miss. It's the other. It's the, no, no, no, I'm on your team. And it's like, no, not even... You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. How do you carry that? Well... I guess you can't. You can, but it's not, you know, you were...

analogizing a weight bar. It's not on your shoulders all of the time. Sometimes it's under your arm and sometimes it feels kind of heavy and other times it's not a bother at all. I've been rucking here of late. Yeah, I'm obsessed, man. Me too, me too. When I'm home, eight miles a day, 45 in the bag. There you go, man. Right? The answer, I think, in part has to do with the expectations of your audience. And I think your audience today

if it's anything like mine, is under a lot of pressure to comport and conform with the binary model. So, if I see Mike on TV for 20 years working shoulder to shoulder with steam fitters, pipe fitters, welders, mechanics, engineers, building things, getting dirty,

Then I'm going to form a couple of opinions based on the assumptions that he's, you know, the images that he's wanted me to see. All right. So that transaction is, all right, I'm the viewer and I'm looking at Mike and he's not under duress. So he wants me to see what he's showing me. And then I'm going to conclude a few things from what I've been shown.

And so that's how we start to form expectations of the people we see on the TV. Then that viewer learns later that I sang in the opera for eight years. Right. Wait a minute. You just blew their picture up.

Or you didn't do anything, actually. I didn't do anything. And also, I'm careful to say they learned. Most of what will come back, if it's going to come back in the form of some criticism, is I found out. You know what? You know what I found out about Mike Rowe? It's like you didn't really find it out. I told you. I've been an open book. I sang opera in the sewer on Dirty Jobs to make the point.

But the point here is that it doesn't matter. The audience doesn't really have the nuance and it's not a slam on the audience. It's just an observation. We have been told today that everything has to go in its right place. And when it doesn't, or when it presents a more complicated face, right? That cognitive dissonance, which I know you're super familiar with, right? That I think is a bigger problem

today for people than it's ever been before. Why? I guess maybe because trust is at an all-time low in most of our institutions. And so people... It's gone, man. It feels like it. It's strange. It's strange. It feels like there's never been a more important time to really be both curious and skeptical. Yeah. You know, Discovery was... That brand was built on curiosity. But...

Science, of course, is built on skepticism. Right.

And, you know, we're being told a lot of things today that don't fit into that whole binary thing. Follow the science, but a man can have a baby. Next question. Exactly. And people are left going, wait, what? Right, exactly. You're just going to gloss over it, right? Yeah. So, you know, from the sublime to the ridiculous, who cares if the Dirty Jobs guy sang in the opera? Well, not many people really, but if I'm going to try and

make a deal, say with Ford or Caterpillar. And somebody in that organization goes, but I saw him on the home shopping channel selling tchotchkes in the middle of the night. And he also sang in the opera. And he also, so suddenly people are like going, I'm not sure I understand who he is. And I think that's a long way, John is saying. The thing I worry about today is people are rushing to

to hang a label. That's it. On not just everybody around them, but on themselves too. And so what we've lost is patience and grace when those labels either confuse us or appear inconsistent. Dave's always talking about the, okay, student loans are bad. I'll even go with you that some people were preyed upon and we need to do away with their loan.

But you can't say they're so bad that we've got to get rid of them and keep making them. Right. At some point, you have to balance that cognitive dissonance. I think that we haven't fully digested how we have burned the traditional institutions to the ground. Because I think that the old data would tell us, yes, there's a ton of evil and injustice done under some of these tents.

But our God, our gods told us what we're going to wear and what we're going to do and what our roles were. Or our society told us what we're going to wear and not wear and what our roles were. And our schools told us this is how we're going to do things. And we just melted them. I know. Look, man, it's stay in your lane. I hear it all the time. You know, Mike, just stay in your lane. Why? Because when you get out of your lane, it's confusing and scary. I need a world, right? And look, I'm...

I'm being critical right now when I say that. But at the same time, I want my institutions to stay in their lane. I want politicians to be politicians. I want them to be boring. I want them to make the sausage. I want them to experience the gridlock that the founders intended and do their best with it. I want scientists to stay in their lane. And I want to hear the facts.

And I don't want any, I don't want arrogance. I don't want certainty from my scientists. No. I want, this is what we think. I want iron sharpening iron, yes. Yep, that's what I want. That's what I want from my scientists. I want my artists to go be artists. Be artists, be crazy, take risks. Yes. You know, keep your tongue in your cheek. Yes. Have a good time. Challenge me. Do all those things. Be absurd. Be absurd.

Absolutely. And be realistic. If you're going to draw an apple, make it look like an apple. You know, if you want to tell me it's something else, fine, but you better have a thick skin because I'm going to push back too. And so life makes sense. If you're going to be a journalist, if you're going to be a journalist...

Be skeptical of every single thing. Be as skeptical as the scientists are. Just be better writers. Yeah. You know, and hold our elected officials' feet to the fire. All of them. All of them. I remember being at a table with Colin Powell years ago, and somebody said, how are we going to do with this division of the right and the left? And he said, no, that's the design.

Like the design is, there's going to be warring sides and the media's job is to hold everybody accountable. Yeah. Not to pull up a seat on the other end of the table. Not pick winners. Man. Colin Powell, man, that guy. He's an extraordinary public speaker. He's so good. Yeah. And he's so good for the same reason Rick Rubin's show is good. He has a plan. Oh.

but he's not married to it. He listens. He'll take the temperature of the room. He'll tell you a story. And that's all we're looking for, really, as consumers. Just take me on a ride. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

So my wife and I were meeting the other day about the back-to-school madness that is about to be on us. We've got my travel schedule, her work schedule, our daughter's new school and clothes and forms to fill out and all these online portals and my son's sports schedule and he's got to have shoes every two weeks because his feet won't stop growing and how are we going to pay for all this and on and on and on.

And when we step back and look at our schedule, it's so packed and we haven't even put in the things like exercise, date nights, counseling appointments, church and holiday trips and big home projects. And these are the things that make life worth living. And I listened to y'all. This is your life too. And here's what I've learned. When it comes to taking care of me, my family and my work, I have to begin with the things that matter most and the things that keep me well and whole so I can wade into the chaos and be sturdy and present and strong.

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There's a burr in your saddle, as they say in Texas, and I guess Oklahoma. There you go. A bee in the bonnet. There you go. That's more Oklahoma. That's more Tennessee. You had a bee in your bonnet about... A pebble in my shoe. Ooh, this could get awesome. This could get fantastic. About division and about...

When I took away from watching this, yeah, we were talking about earlier, this film slash theater performance slash documentary slash just story, like a tapestry woven together, which was pretty remarkable. That at some level, you've got groups of people in this country that share a citizenship with me and with you. Yelling and screaming and fighting and being heartbroken about things,

And they don't understand the sidewalk they're walking on. And almost, I saw a parallel back to 30 years ago. And you're like, hey, San Francisco, I want you to know what's going on underneath the streets that you're driving on. These aren't magic. Somebody built this. And somebody's keeping it together. Then 20 or 30 years later, did the exact same thing with, if you're protesting something or if you're sitting in your living room angry about something,

A group of people made that possible for you, wherever you happen to be. And I'm going to tell you about those stories. And I want to hear about that bee in your bonnet and how that led to, I'm a storyteller, I'm a filmmaker. It was storytelling in the, I, my dad...

Every Saturday, we had Garrison Keillor on in my house. It reminded me of that. Like old school storytelling, like I'm going to take you on a trip to where you hang in there, right? So the movie is called Something to Stand For, and it's based on stories from my podcast. The podcast is called The Way I Heard It.

I would have called it the rest of the story, but that was Paul Harvey's title. And so I couldn't steal his title, but I did borrow his format, which was to basically tell you something you didn't know about somebody you do. So rather than give somebody a lecture or a sermon or a history lesson, give them a mystery lesson.

Right? And let them try and unpack it as you go. I thought Paul Harvey was ingenious in that way. I agree. I think Garrison Keillor and Charles Kuralt and Studs Terkel and George Plimpton, these guys all immersed themselves in the stories before they told them. They created a world. They did. They did. And they made it personal.

And they also made it relative and relevant, right? And many times they did it on the radio or on the page. They didn't rely on a camera necessarily to do it. They're gone. And in no way do I think I can fill their footsteps, but I do think I can...

I do think I can follow in their footsteps. You did. You did. Well, that's what the podcast attempted to do. Those stories turned into a TV show called The Story Behind the Story. And just a few months ago, somebody came and said, one of the guys over at the Fathom Group that do these theatrical cinematic releases, they said, you know, we have a lot of really great stories in here and we do these themed events and

So what if we did like a Christmas special with all these Christmas type stories you have? You could find probably nine or so. And I said, yeah, I could. But what about Independence Day? Like, great. So we took nine unapologetically patriotic stories about people, you know, but stories you don't.

And that just became the basis for the movie. We stitched it together with a field trip of sorts to DC where I visit the monuments and the memorials that were constructed to honor some of the people in the film. But it happened so fast, John. And believe me, there's no wish fulfillment thing on my bucket list to make a movie. But when I really thought about it,

I realized, you know, it's a great opportunity in 2024 to put something on the screen

what the, the, the final story in the movie is actually called something to stand for. And I wrote it a few years ago during the whole Colin Kaepernick thing. And I didn't write it in anger, you know, um, but to your point, I just thought, how can we be so confused? How can you guys not know that the national anthem is a, is a protest song? You, you can't,

protest a protest song unless you really fundamentally don't understand how it came to be. And if you don't understand the basic pillars of the history upon which our country's based, then you're really not much different than the person who drives down Van Ness Street in San Francisco with absolutely no understanding of the giant sewer system beneath them, right? So you're

It's the same sort of thing, right? I mean, when I found that Dirty Jobs parallel into this kind of storytelling, it excited me because I realized that in the end, you know, your shows basically...

Tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems as if the thing that you're offering is understanding and awareness, self-awareness and understanding through a more honest... It's very similar. It's like, hey, you think this is the issue. There's something underneath the sidewalk. That's it. And for me, that thing under the sidewalk, that thing in our past, it's always the same thing.

or a version of it, a variation on a theme. And it's a disconnect between the past and the present. And the connective tissue, the grout between those tiles is gratitude. If you are fundamentally grateful for what Thomas Jefferson did, an imperfect man with an enormous brain and an incredible vision, if you're fundamentally grateful for what he did, you're gonna have a hard time pulling a statue down.

If you're fundamentally grateful for what electricians do and construction workers do, you're going to have a hard time flipping them off when you're stuck in traffic and late for your appointment, right? So I think in some ways, all of the jagged little pills that we've become, all the brittleness out there today,

could be mitigated, and this will sound very tropey, platitudinous, but that attitude of gratitude. Yeah. It's a thing. It's absolutely a thing. And it applies to our history. It applies to our workforce. It applies to our headlines.

And, you know, it's very, very hard to feel grateful when you've lost trust in the institutions that we've talked about. But we still have to find a way. Because if we don't, well, it'll just eat us alive. The only historical trajection is ash. That's it.

We burn it to the ground. Say that again. The only? The only historical trajection. We have a whole bunch of roadmaps when it's, no, I'm just going to burn your thing to the ground because it's not my thing. Yeah. Instead of, and I wonder as you're talking, it reminds me of there was some well-intentioned and it came out of some faith-based literature back in the 80s. Don't fight in front of your kids. You're going to scare them. You're going to destroy them.

Go in the back bedroom. Y'all have your arguments. Y'all fight it out and then come back out a united front. And that makes sense logically. That's really good, man. And you stole from kids this picture of those two people are really getting after. They're arguing. And they still love each other and they're committed. And so now you have a generation of young people that get married. They are in a long-term committed relationship. They have the one big blowup and they are on to the next because they don't have a mental map for life.

How do I love you and critique and sit in tension with you? Because we're all going the same direction. Think of the experts, the expert class upon whom we rely as the parents in your metaphor. That's right. And think of the rest of us as the kids. In moments of fear, uncertainty, COVID, we look to these institutions in much the same way a frightened kid would look to a parent, right? And we don't...

We don't just need a bowl of warm milk. We need the truth. And the truth. We need the truth. We need to understand because in reality, we're not actually children. We're more like the townspeople in the emperor's new clothes, right? We need courage. Right. And we need to stiffen our spines. And we can only do that if we know what the truth is. But our experts, what do we do when our experts not only don't agree on anything...

but fight right in front of us. The experts didn't go in the back bedroom to sort it out and come out with a consensus. They might've tried to stay six feet apart, mask, blah, blah, blah, blah, down the list, not to make it about that, but we didn't get clear, convincing, consistent guidance. It is one of my most sincere honors to be partnering with an amazing supplement company. I'm talking about Thorne.

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higher ed after 20 years there and coming to a media company straight on the heels of that and I came here in late January of 2020 here's what I saw I saw the academic discourse happening out in the street in public in front of the kids without a context for it and so when I don't I think it was King's College out of London and this I think it's instructive for this this incredible film you've made

King's College says, we're looking at the data. Here's our model. I think I'm making up numbers, right? 25 million people are going to die. Every virologist, every public health administrator, they all across the world went game on. So they took their models and that data plus the next three weeks worth of data and they, boom, next week they're out. We think only 12 million are going to die. Instead of all of us celebrating and saying, wow, 17 million fewer people, we all went,

They're idiots. They, they, they changed their mind or these guys are dumb because they didn't even get it right. Right. And so you're watching these groups of people, iron sharpens iron and you get nine months in and they're like, okay, we, we told you to wash your boxes and put on masks and stand six feet apart. We've got new data now. Don't wash your boxes. Right.

In a laboratory, the virus survives. In real life, that's not how it works. We're good. And instead of us all going, yeah, we got further down the road, we started nuking each other. And it's the same as like the DSM, the Diagnostic Manual for Mental Health.

That is for researchers in Delaware to talk to researchers at UC Berkeley. We're both studying depression. Can we all just say this is what this looks like? And for a doctor to talk to an insurance company, not for me to Google in the middle of the night when my kid won't sleep and be like, oh. And so there's something about releasing it to the hounds. I remember a colleague at the law school said –

One of the political groups was fighting to release the Fed minutes. And she said, I promise you, you do not want the Fed minutes released to the world because what they have to discuss behind those closed doors is

you and I cannot handle that. That's right. And so we need them to come out. And also, I have to trust there's a process going here. And I think that's what's been burned to the ground. See. I don't trust the process anymore. Right. Because you've seen too much of it. That's it. The buffet's too big. The plate's too small. You're overloaded with it. The Reuben thing is interesting. If you come back to that level of authenticity and fly on the wall, but apply it to, would you call them the Fen-what?

The FEN, you just said you don't want to release the... Oh, the Fed minutes. The Fed minutes. The minutes of the Fed meeting. The Fed minutes, right. So like...

We can't handle that level of authenticity. You don't know. I don't know. I need you to produce that. That's right. I need you to put some sides on it. Right. I need a director. I need it spoon-fed to me. Yeah. Right? Because the content is different. It's a different set of data. It's a different medium. And the stakes are different. We're not talking about an entertainment property. We're talking about data that's going to fundamentally...

impact our lives and our livelihoods and all of those things, right? So the stakes couldn't possibly be higher. And suddenly, again, back to the parents in the back bedroom having an argument. Not only is the door open for the kids to look at it,

It's billions of kids. And they are armed with a device. Right. I mean, everybody is plugged into it. Exactly. And then they make their own little shows. That's right. And put their own thing out there. So if you're a – remember John Ioannidis? Who? John Ioannidis was his name. He was very, very early on. I think he was a Stanford guy. He was one of the ones who came out and said, look, these projections are –

My models don't show this. Okay. Right? And he was eviscerated. Right. He was eviscerated. And he's since been proven completely right. Of course. About everything. Of course. And so now it's so fast, John. We don't know how to...

Like history is interesting. This movie was interesting to me because it's based on a podcast called The Way I Heard It, which is another way of saying I could be wrong. I wasn't in the room when the emancipation was signed. If we could say those words, I might be wrong. I could be wrong. God almighty. I think the stock market goes up 20,000 points if the president of the United States comes out and goes, hey, I might be wrong, but here's, we're going to do this.

I don't know about 20,000, but it's going to move. Because that, look, if you replace- That's wisdom. It's humility. It's wisdom, yeah. If you replace certainty, we're very long on certainty right now, and we're very short on humility because we, the people, are in this feedback loop where we are rewarding certainty. Mm-hmm.

And punishing humility. Yes. Right? That's it. That's it. We demand apologies if you've offended me. We execute you. But if you do apologize, now you're just weak and pathetic. You make me sick. You make me sick. You've got... Right? So we're just caught in some weird tautology. But to me, it...

Those are the pillars. The reason the stool is wobbly is because the certainty leg is too long and the humble leg is too short. And that has infected journalism, science, politics, for sure.

but mostly journalism, mostly the media. There is no humility. It's gone. There is no, in the same way you're saying, can you imagine the president saying, look, I could be wrong folks, but you imagine Wolf Blitzer. Can you imagine Sean Hannity? Can you imagine any of these guys saying, look, I don't know about this, but here's what I'm worried about.

We're still stuck in this age of authenticity. Still, where the biggest anchors on the biggest shows are still looking straight into the lens as if there's not a prompter there.

And telling you the way it is. Well, Cronkite got away with that. You know, three channels. He actually got away with saying, and that's the way it is, August 14th, 1977. Yeah. You can't do that anymore. No. Today, whether we know it or not, we have entered into an age of, well, that's the way I heard it. Okay. But that level, that lack of certainty, the advertisers don't want it.

And even though we say we want it as consumers, you know, what it really does is saying, you know, I have this conversation all the time with clients. You know, I work in the spokes space from time to time, you know, Ford and Caterpillar and so forth. I've been super lucky with all that.

And I've looked at a lot of marketing campaigns and I've had a lot of directors and a lot of conversations about what is persuasive. How are you going to get people to buy the soap? How are you going to, and so forth. It just fell in the blank. It's all the same rubric. It's all the same calculus. I think, honestly, today we're so upside down that if you look into the lens and say, trust me, that's about the most unpersuasive thing you can do. Right.

For me, for me, I can't think of anything more persuasive to say today, whether you're running for office or selling gold, than to say, look, do your homework on this. Think about it. Cookie cutter advice,

Yeah, that's what scares me a little bit. Back to your earlier question, you know, what do you say in your own cognitive dissonant world to a listener who calls in with a hard problem? How do you square all that? I don't begin to have an answer because you're dispensing advice to an individual with a question, but...

You might have a few hundred thousand people listening too. Right. And how do you know what they need to hear? Right. How do we advise the masses? So here's how I was transformed on this. And then we'll wrap it up. I want to ask you one thing about the show. Sure. I learned this in the work at the universities.

I was a dean of students, so I was always the, like the, I was got, they gave me a hard time because these guys were their academics, they were scientists, and they did their, they were theologians, they did their thing for 25 years. And I was just the guy that helped the students, right? And so that was always part of the rigmarole, and we'd sit around the table and go back and forth. And I learned over time, I would ask somebody, hey, what do you, what do you think about this law that just got passed?

And they would rattle off, it's going to do this, it's going to do this. I think this, I think this, I think this. Well, then I would see their kids. I'd see their kids, our kids would be playing and their kids would be doing something different than what they quote unquote think.

Here's what I think. And what I learned over time is, so here's an example. Like, what do you think about this new traffic law and riding bicycles? Well, I think kids are going to get run over. I think it's going to increase speeds. It's going to whatever. And then we'd come over to my house and their kids would be riding their bikes down the street. And I was like, oh, so academicians are trained to think about the holes, about what could be, and to go down these rabbit holes and write papers on it and study it and get way outside the bell curve.

So I stopped asking the question, what do you think? And the funniest one was I was leaving. My wife had this emergency surgery. Her OBGYN saved her life. She's an amazing surgeon. And as we were leaving, and she was a colleague, so I stopped and said, Jen, do you spray your kids with bug spray? With DEET? And she goes, because I'd just been hassling her about different questions. And she's like, yeah, it's a neurotoxin, blah, blah, blah. And I'm way more concerned about X, Y, and Z. Yes, I use bug spray. And I was like, that's all I need.

because I stopped asking what do you think? And I started saying, what do you do with your kids? What are you doing? And so I don't get on when I take on a sponsor, my rule is I have to use it in my house, particularly with my children.

And if I can get on air and say, my kids sleep on this mattress, me and my wife sleep on this mattress, that's the best I can tell you. Or if you call me with a mental health thing, I say, this was my sister. Here's what I would say. That's the best I can give you because the, oh, here's the truth. I don't know. I don't know what the truth is. I know what I would do in that situation. I think at the end of the day, that's the best we can do. But that starts with humility, not with this.

This psychosis to be right. Oh, yeah. I have. I have the recipe. I have. There was even a book, horrible book. It's called The Secret. Oh. I have the answer. You're right. Everybody, I mean, the self-help section is just full of people with the answers. Isn't it amazing? It's incredible. And to your point, it's amazing.

In journalism and in most of what passes for discourse today, the topics we're most focused on are things that haven't happened. Right. We're so determined to try and understand what's coming.

You know, as if we really have the propensity or the capability to do that. Anchors and journalists spend 90% of their time asking their guests, well, so-and-so said such-and-such about this. What will that mean on this date? Everybody, it seems—

to some degree, is being asked to shake the magic eight ball or look into the crystal ball. It's so dumb. What we need our journalists to do is look back just a couple of years and then say, okay, we know this happened and we know you said it wouldn't.

What do you think now about that? Yeah. That's why the movie was interesting to me because of course we're going to grapple with the things we can't see. Because we love it. Because we love it. We love to grapple. Yeah, we have to. I'll tell you this. We're running out of time.

The story of the unknown soldier that you tell in that film, the way you unpack it and just pull the threads out of the sweater was phenomenal. Thanks. And to everybody watching, the story of Jack Lucas, I didn't know. And that was remarkable. It was remarkable. And there's so many more. Those are the two I was going to unpack with you, but I'm going to leave it to the folks to go watch the movie. Where can they get it?

You're going to have theatrical release? Oh, yeah. We'll be in the theater for one week, June 27th to July 4th. Cool. Something to stand for.movie. You can see the trailer. You can look at some behind-the-scenes stuff. You can get tickets in advance. Sorry to put the hard sell on you, but you should do it because I think...

I know it's gonna be a limited run, but let me just, one quick final thought, going back to the very beginning, we're talking about authenticity and deliberate plans versus seat of your pants, no second takes. Movies are very different, right? And you got a script and I wrote these stories carefully and I recorded them deliberately and they were brought to life specifically by Oklahoma actors.

But the best part of the movie. Two Texans. Two Texans, had to let them go. Nice people, but ultimately not reliable. My favorite part of the movie was I'm at the World War II Memorial and I'm getting ready to shoot this stand up. And you know, the lighting guys are doing this and everybody's doing what they're doing. And I look over and there's an honor flight coming in. All right, so half a dozen very old men in wheelchairs, some on walkers, their families are with them and friends.

And I'm looking at this guy in a wheelchair and he's looking at me. And I said to the director, hey, come over here with me for a minute. Bring the camera guy. And they're like, what are you doing, man? We don't have time, blah, blah, blah. I kneel down next to Andy Michaels. I got choked up on that scene. I mean, 91 years old, Korean vet there with my dad, actually. Turns out we grew up, you know, not too far apart from each other. When you see a 91-year-old veteran who had never been to that memorial before with tears streaming down his face,

trying to explain the gratitude of being brought there. And when you realize, John, that that moment was completely unscripted and has no business in the movie, it's not in the script, it's not. And then you tell yourself, Mike, good God, man, what are you doing? You're not going to learn this lesson again, are you? Put him in the movie. Find a way.

And so I guess in a way, maybe that's how I think about our history. That's how I think about our present too. Sometimes the answer is right in front of us. It's not on the page. It's not in the focus group. It's not part of your plan, but it's a part of what you need. And it's in this.

It's sitting across the table. No beginning, no end. Just a couple of guys, some below average coffee, some microphones and some cameras we don't bother to look at. Kind of sketchy water. Thanks for coming to hang, man. And cheers to your engineer who's actually wearing a shirt with your name on it. We didn't even get to unpack that. There's a tall price to pay to be on this team. Clearly. Thanks, brother. I'm an extra large, by the way.

I cannot shut up about my Helix mattresses. My sister is staying with me this week and she came down looking this morning like she just woke up from a coma. And her first question was, what in the world is that mattress? And I sang it to her. Hey,

I got a Helix for every bedroom in my house. I sleep on a Helix mattress every single night, and I love it. My family loves it. Our sleep is getting better and better and better. As soon as you can, I want you to get online and take the Helix Sleep Quick.

quiz and you're going to find your perfect mattress in under like two minutes. And there's a mattress for every fit, softer firmness level, mattresses for side sleepers and back sleepers and stomach sleepers and mattresses for every shape and size of person. And they also have a bunch of mattresses at a bunch of different price points. Whatever you order, you can try it out for 100 days risk-free and they're going to deliver it right to your home and in no time you'll be sleeping your best sleep. Helix

We'll be right back.

go to helixsleep.com slash Delaunay. That's helixsleep, H-E-L-I-X-S-L-E-E-P dot com slash Delaunay. This offer won't last long, so go right now. Because with Helix Sleep, better sleep starts now.

All right. Thanks for staying with us. That was my conversation with the great Mike Rowe. A link to his show, Something to Stand For, will be in the show notes. Check it out. And don't forget, if you see somebody coming up and down your street, taking out the trash, stop and say thank you. If you see a lineman out there repairing the electrical work, shout out to him. Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, ma'am. Thank you. If you see a carpenter or somebody painting your house, stop and say thanks.

These are the people who are building our country and rebuilding our country and keeping it together. And I challenge you, sit down and have hard conversations, challenging conversations with people you love and set the ground rules. We're not going to agree on everything, but let's keep it rolling. Thank you so much for being with us today. We'll see you next time right here on the Dr. John Deloney show. Be nice to each other. Stay in school. Don't do drugs. Peace.