The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 227: About Those Safe Spaces

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

How safe is your space? This is the question Mike attempts to answer with Justin Folk, a filmmaker who left Hollywood behind to make the kinds of movies he believes matter most.

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About those Safe Spaces. A couple years ago, I wrote a story for the podcast called A Safe Space. And I wrote it because I believe that safe spaces, by and large, with the exception of one, are a really dangerous myth. And I wanted to make that point because it's my opinion that the whole safe space mentality arose from a growing unwillingness to tolerate ideas that we find objectionable. In colleges, that mentality led to a level of intolerance that, again, just my opinion, a level of intolerance that I think is completely at odds with our First Amendment. We can't, in other words, or at least we shouldn't deal with speech we find offensive by creating separate spaces where such speech is not allowed. Obviously,

I'm not the only one who shares this view. Shortly after I wrote a safe space, a filmmaker named Justin Folk called to see if I'd like to participate in a project that he was directing called No Safe Spaces. Justin and I had a great conversation, and we agreed that safe spaces are, by and large, a very bad idea in a Democratic Republic, like this one. But Justin's project was based on the belief that there are no safe spaces anywhere at all. And my story argued that there was, in fact, one such place, begging the obvious question, who's right? Today, Justin Folk is my guest, and I'm delighted to have him on the podcast because even though the schedule didn't allow me to participate in no safe spaces, I was able to participate in his next project, a documentary called Trading Up, which I discussed on the podcast a few weeks ago with my guest, Chloe Hudson, on whom the documentary was based. Anyway, Justin and I are going to talk about Chloe today and trading up and microworks, but mostly we talk about courage and the difficulty of making projects today like the ones Justin is focused on. We'll also discuss the differences between a safe space by Mike Roe and no safe spaces by Justin Folk.

Let's start with mine. It's a short story about a man named Roy who finally found the safe space he'd been looking for. Then we'll catch up with Justin, who took a much deeper dive into the unsafe end of the pool. This is episode 227 of the way I heard it about those safe spaces. Roy was not a pervert, nor was he a deviant. He was just a guy in a department store trying to consummate a simple transaction. But the lady behind the cash register was not convinced. Will there be anything else, sir, or will you be loitering for the rest of the evening? Behind the cashier's super-sillious smile, a palpable wave of judgment informed her every move.

Like the various clerks who had refused to answer his earlier questions, this woman stared down her nose at the man who had no business in this part of the store, her withering gaze the very definition of disapprobation. Please, ma'am, just put it in the bag and I'll be on my way. Roy slid his credit card furtively across the counter. The cashier lifted his items into the air, inspecting them, displaying them to the women in line behind him. I'm going to need to see some ID, sir. Two forms, if you please.

Roy could feel the disapproval buffeting him from all sides, as customers and employees collectively wondered how a degenerate had been allowed to creep into a reputable department store. Today, some might say that those women were triggered by Roy's presence, as well as his purchase. Others might say that Roy was in need of a safe space to explore his personal proclivities and peace. Alas, in 1977, there were no safe spaces for men like Roy. perhaps if there had been a sanctuary of some kind, Roy would not be divorced 13 years later,

or bankrupt, or publicly humiliated. Maybe if Roy had kept his secret just a little longer, he wouldn't have found himself teetering on the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge on a cool August evening in 1993, staring through the fog into the swirling water, 250 feet below him. It's funny how shame sticks with you, even when there's really nothing to be ashamed of.

On the ride home from his embarrassing encounter at the women's wear department, back in 1977, Roy's humiliation had turned to anger, and his anger and to resolve. Surely he was not alone. Surely other men with similar predilections, had suffered the same sanctimonious stares from disapproving clerks. That was the moment Roy resolved to push back, to build a safe space for men like him.

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, Roy's idea required cash. So he borrowed $80,000, a lot of money back in 1977. Some of it went toward a lease in Palo Alto. Some went toward the hiring of cashiers and clerks with a more tolerant view of men like Roy. The rest went toward merchandise, inventory, insurance, advertising, all the other stuff that a new business needs to deal with. Well, Roy was right.

He was not alone. And soon, San Francisco gentlemen were flocking to his safe space, spending over $500,000 in the first year. Year two was even better. Roy rolled out a catalog, leased more space, and hired more understanding clerks, clerks who would never judge a man for asking an indelicate question. But, of course, sales and profits are two very different things. And even with revenue on the rise, Roy was bleeding cash.

So when a man named Leslie Wexner offered Roy a million dollars to simply walk away from his idea, Roy took it. Back in 1982, a million dollars was a lot of money. What happened next is the oldest story in the world. Roy used his windfall to start a brand new business, a business that led to a very public failure. A failure that led to a very public divorce. A divorce that led to a very public bankruptcy, a bankruptcy that led to a very long walk on a very foggy San Francisco. night, which brings us back to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge where a lonely and bankrupt entrepreneur named Roy Raymond contemplated the fortune that slipped through his fingers. No, not the million dollars he lost after selling out. I'm talking about the money he lost because of the secret he failed to keep. You see, Leslie Wexner, the man who purchased Roy's

business in 1982. He didn't see Roy's idea as a safe space for men. He saw it as a place of empowerment for women. So Leslie Wexner made a few tweaks. And by 1993, just 10 years after Roy pocketed a cool million dollars, the safe space in Palo Alto was worth $2 billion. And back in 1993, $2 billion was a lot of money. Too much, perhaps, for Roy to live with losing. We'll never know for sure. All we can say with certainty is that Roy entered the ultimate safe space on August 26, 1993, because in the end, Roy Raymond couldn't keep a secret. A secret born from his awkward attempt to buy a sexy birthday present for his wife. A secret he named for a woman who understood that the most enticing fashions were always hidden just beneath the outer garments. A queen named Victoria whose secret might have made Roy Raymond a multi-billionaire if only it hadn't sent him straight off.

The Golden Gate Bridge. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. It's hard to know what to say in a moment like this. We've just listened to another story, and you want to hop right into the conversation, but once again, the listener is not privy to the last half hour of pure ingenue, agony. What would you call it, Chuck?

It was a nightmare as what it was. It was 40 minutes of unending sound checking. You've been impersonating a producer now for this podcast for how long, roughly? Five years maybe, something like that. Five years. Okay, good. I just want to make that point because our guest today is Justin Fulke. Who's a filmmaker who lives in this world of production and pre-production and checking the very basics of things? And he just sat here showing an extraordinary amount of patience as you and I, a couple of monkeys, attempted to f*** this football into oblivion.

I think we've got it worked out, Justin. Thanks for your patience. How the heck are you? Great. And let me just start by saying, I'm just privileged to join such a well-oiled machine. This is you guys, what you do, it's magic, really. You guys should be the template for how to do this. Oh, my God.

We're the template for something. I read the other day, there are 2,400,000 podcasts out there. And we are consistently in the top, like, not the top 10th of a problem. We're very high up. We'll keep it up. Just keep up all this because it's working. I just want to encourage people. If you think you can do this, give it a try.

Because somehow or another, we fail every week. And yet they come, Justin. They come to listen. I think they come to listen to see if we're actually going to pull another one off. And I don't want to get too far over my skis, but this is the first glimpse of optimism I've had all day long. Well, you guys are the Keystone Cops of Podcasts. So congratulations.

I've been called worse. It's great to see you again. When last our paths crossed, you were finishing where we were in the midst of a documentary in Nashville, right? Yeah, that's right. We were out in Nashville filming, trading up the short documentary for Prager You, and that was a lot of fun. Getting you out there with Chloe Hudson, and we found some abandoned warehouse somewhere by a, you know, railroad yard or something like that and filmed and had a great time. It was terrific, man. Congrats. It's a short doc, barely 20 minutes or so, but the feedback has been great. And I don't know if you heard, but Chloe was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago when the audio worked again, amazingly.

Everything works with Chloe. Anything she touches turns the gold, so I can see that. Pretty amazing, man. She was incredible. What was it like to direct her and work with her? Because I don't think she had ever done anything at all in her short life. She doesn't have any sort of like showbiz or hosting experience. I think what happened was we became aware of her from MicroWorks, from the work that you guys did with her with the scholarship. And, you know, I had read her story and I had seen her on your profile there on your website and talked to Chuck about her and knew that she just was a person that really broke the mold on being a welder and just her appearance and being sort of an Instagram influencer.

And so we scheduled just a conversation over. Zoom with her. And I was just struck by how well-spoken she was. She just has a way of communicating and not just talking about the issues that she knows about and the work that she does, but any array of issues she could just weigh in on and just has this amazing kind of worldview. She's just so well-studied. And for a young person, she just struck me as somebody really special and just had so much to offer, again, not just what she does, but just the world in general. Yeah, and why she does it. She has a take on just about everything, and I do admire it, but let's back up a little bit

because you were a, I almost said, an actual filmmaker, and I didn't mean it to sound like that, but I mean, you. A pretend filmmaker, right. You were in the belly of the beast. You were working with some of the Matrix stuff and some full-on productions, and now you're in this very different space, dare I say, an unsafe space. But talk a little bit about where you came from. from and what you were doing and why you wound up where you are now.

Right. Well, I always want to be a filmmaker. And so naturally, the first thing you do is you move to Hollywood and you start working on jobs. And I got the, you know, the privilege to work on some pretty big movies and met a lot of people. And it was a good experience. I worked on the Matrix sequels, reloaded and revolutions. I worked on the Incredible Hulk and a number of other films.

I worked in the visual effects department. And I did that for a while. And after a while, I just sort of kind of got tired of being a cog in the wheel and really wanted to impact, I guess, the war of ideas and do something a little different. One sort of catalyst for me was I was a pretty avid snowboarder also at the time, kind of a fearless snowboarder and a cautious filmmaker. And one day I hurt myself snowboarding, blew up my knee. My first child was on the way. And I think that kind of put me in my seat and really made me think about what I wanted to do. It kind of got me serious about what kind of stories do I want to tell. And for me,

because everything coming out of Hollywood, and it's true today too, just has a sort of a negative connotation on the idea of America. What is America? What are the principles of our founding? It didn't always used to be this way, but it is now. And so I really thought, hey, what if we could tell stories that actually promote the idea of America, what this place is, liberty, things like that. And that's when I kind of made up my ambition to tell stories that talked a lot about the American idea.

Why do you think that happened? Because you're so right, when you think back to the 50s and 60s, there was such an unapologetic pro-American. Granted, maybe we overreached here and there, but the default position was, this is a pretty remarkable country, and we want to make movies that tap into that remarkability. Somehow or another, that seems to have not only shifted, but kind of reversed. I think it actually has something to do. I mean, there's probably several factors. Politics plays into it. But I think the globalism of things, in terms of markets, has changed storytelling and filmmaking, where now Hollywood studios are making films not for American audiences. They're making it for international audiences. And so there's a real keen eye towards, hey, listen, is this a story that China is going to like or something that will play in other markets in Europe or South America? these studio executives aren't making decisions based on what Joe and Sue in Iowa want to watch. They're making decisions based on what they can sell to the international market. And I think that's played a big role in what types of films are being made, what kind of content is being made. That's probably just one factor, but I think it's probably a major one. Can I just say that's really scary? The idea that we're trying to appease, in some cases, our enemies.

Yeah, and it's the almighty dollar. I mean, and look at everything else with sports and with Nike, what's happening with basketball. I mean, I don't think the entertainment industry is unique to that. I think a lot of the corporate interests here in America are thinking outside of our borders and how whatever they do plays over there. And so it gives Americans a very different product. And it certainly has for movies. Yeah, it is scary.

And it's like the frog in the boiling water. I would leave it to some filmographer to do a better take down on it. But I bet if you look from the 60s to the 70s to the 70s to the, the 80s, you can probably find the month where things tipped. And then all of a sudden, we're just in a completely different world. And Frank Capra is just a name that maybe a few people remember and John Ford and, you know, all of those movies that just really started with the premise of, we're good, here's why. Your name as a filmmaker first came across my transom with the project prior to this short doc, with Prager and with Carolla. No safe space?

Yeah, so no safe spaces. Yeah. I'm trying to think of an articulate way to ask it because the story that we just played, which I assume you listened to, the story of Ray Raymond. Yes. I mean, this is weird for me, Justin, because I wrote that. That was the 75th story in this podcast. I wrote a couple years ago when words like Trigger and Safe Spaces were starting to worm their way into the culture.

And at the time, I was trying to be very, very careful. I didn't want my slip to show. if that makes sense. And I wanted to say something about what I believe is the futility of the safe space movement. And I did it through the story of Victoria's Secret. At the same time, you were hitting the nail very squarely on the head and asking me to participate in that project. And in hindsight, I just wanted to tell you, A, I wish I would have, because the stakes are higher than I realized. But talk about that movie a little bit, what it meant for you and what it was like to work with those guys. Sure. To your defense, you're pretty,

busy guy at the time. I remember that you had like five shows going on at once, so you have an excuse for not being in no safe spaces. I won't hold that against you. Thank you. In terms of your story there, I'm sure, you know, the fact that you tell a story about women's underwear and now you're trying to relate it to my movie. I appreciate that. But I thought it was a really entertaining story. I didn't know any of that about this Roy Raymond character who created Victoria's Secret. I do think there's kind of a parallel to no safe spaces because Roy sought to create a safe space for men to go and peruse women's underwear without any sort of stigma and a place where he could go and ask questions and not be looked down upon. And, you know, I think with our movie No Safe

Space is the major point that we want to make is that America is the true safe space for ideas, a place where people can peruse ideas and ask questions and look around and talk about these ideas much the same way that maybe Roy want to look at women's undergarments. So exploring ideas is like exploring women's undergarments, I guess, in that sense. But increasingly, that's come under attack. The idea that we can peruse ideas, we can talk about things, we can ask questions, that's what's come under attack in the last couple years. And we've really seen it ramp up, obviously, in the last couple years, since you and I, Mike, talked about no say spaces and trying to get you involved. It's really kind of alarming how relevant our moving no say spaces has become.

I knew when we were making it that we are tapping into some real truths, but I just had no idea how quickly these things would unfold and these truths would be right in front of our face every single day with the cancel culture and with just this notion that if you say something that offends me, you need to go. And so I'm proud of the film, extremely proud of the film. I wish it wasn't quite as relevant as it is today because it speaks to a great problem that we have in our society. You know, like I mentioned earlier about my desire to tell stories about the American idea, freedom of speech is just at the center of that American idea. And I don't think young people quite get it, unfortunately. I mean, we saw it on college campuses. Now it's

gone everywhere. It's gone into big tech. These people that were at these colleges have now gone on to jobs at Google and Facebook and corporate America and finance. We saw how Chase is basically removing customers based on their political ideas. And it's scary. And I don't think young people quite grasp what this thing is. They don't understand it as a slippery slope. They don't understand that free speech, what the founders intended can be messy at times. It means that people can be offended at times, but they've been told that they have a right not to be offended. And so they want to jettison the thing in our society, which makes us unlike any other place in the world where we can have ideas, we can talk about those ideas, we can debate. And it's really, it's how we solve problems.

It's why we've been such a prosperous society for so long is because we can bash ideas against each other and see what shakes out. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time. Do you miss the rotary phone?

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With NetSuite, you can use the AI of your choice, GROC or Claude or Chat, GPT, whatever else is out there to connect to your actual business data, all of it, and automate all of those tiresome, time-sucking, soul-deadening manual processes. This is AI built into the system. that's currently running your business. Learn more at netsuite.com slash mic. And while you're there, pick up their free business guy, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information.

And again, it's free at netsuite.com slash mic. That's netseweet.com. I don't know where I heard this, Chuck. Maybe you heard it. I think it was Microsoft. Are doing ads now. And they're just extraordinary. People are introducing themselves as, right?

It's like I'm 28 years old. I'm wearing a green shirt. I am of Latino descent. My pronouns are he and him. Right. And this is what my business card says. It's this whole campaign essentially for blind people. So they can understand exactly who you are.

but the entire transaction is based on understanding who you are by the way you look. It's like the entire thing is, let's remember how important the cover of a book is. So let's judge it like that. I literally couldn't believe it. And there's so much personal cognitive dissonance for me because I bought Microsoft about three years ago. And they're having a great run and I'm rooting for them. But I didn't know what to make of this. And it just made me wonder if you're blind.

I mean, if we want a colored blind society, it seems like the whole safe space thing is somehow not only wrapped up in it, but aligned against it. Well, let me just jump in for a second and say that there are a lot of people now who are not rooting for a colorblind society. And I think that Microsoft thing exemplifies it. That, yes, it should be, that race should be the first thing you look at. To me, I love what Prager says. I care about your color as much as I care about your eye color or your hair color. It's like, who are you? The goal used to be we want a colorblind society.

That's what Martin Luther King Jr. preached about. But now there are young people who think that is a bad idea. And I just, I don't get it. But I get an OK boomer from the young. Yeah, you're an old white dude. You're not supposed to get it. And isn't it just such a big waste of time? The identity politics and the sort of the wokeism.

I mean, that intro was like a minute and a half long. and all they accomplished in that time was say what their hair color hairstyle look like and it had nothing to do with whatever they should have been talking about. And I think we're seeing that everywhere. We're spending so much time, not that there aren't issues to discuss, but this sort of wokeism, this sort of like virtue signaling, it's just such a waste of time. I mean, it's just constantly people have to like, no, I'm in the right tribe.

They have to list their intersectionality wise where they're a good person. And it's just such a waste time. Let's get right down to it. Let's talk about ideas. It becomes comical in that instance. That Microsoft video was absolutely hilarious. It was just a big way to time. It was the opposite of Dave Chappelle's The Black Klansman, the blind black Klansman.

Yeah. That was maybe the greatest skit of all time. Yeah. And what makes that? There's so many great truths in Dave Chappelle's work. There's just so many. And that was like prophetic in a lot of ways. I like to look at it in terms of what you can control and what you can't control.

I can't control my blood type. my star sign, my eye color. I can't control my ethnicity. Obviously, my color. But it seems like what we're doing is focusing only on those things out of our control, as opposed to what we choose to believe, if we choose to worship, where we choose to live, what we choose to do, which gets us back to the whole point of trading up. What is the definition of a good job?

What is the definition of job satisfaction? All of that stuff can't be sorted out in a safe space. It has to be figured out in a place where there are consequences and sharp elbows and so forth and so on, I think. Right. It's like, didn't we learn this lesson? You mentioned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Chuck. And I remember growing up learning about him and those immutable characteristics we learned were

meaningless. And it's all about the content of character. character. But somehow now we're going back to that as the number one thing. And now we're essentially fighting racism with racism. And it's like, didn't we learn our lesson about, you know, putting focus on things that you're essentially born with is not the way to go. And now we're right back there. And the people that have maybe the intentions of doing good things or race are actually doing incredible damage by continually reminding us how we look different, how, you know, we've come from different places. It's the opposite of America.

which is E pluribus unum. And man, we got to get back to it. I just don't know what we can do. At this point, I hope the ship hasn't sailed. I hope that we can remind people that those things don't matter. Let's talk about what does matter. Like, what can we do to improve this country? What does work look like? I think sometimes things have to go splat before people really start to pay attention. I'm just not sure what splat looks like right now. I'm looking out this window. I'm down in downtown Baltimore for a couple days visiting my folks. And I can see the end of Martin Luther King Boulevard. It's just around the corner from where I'm sitting. And how many towns have a boulevard named after this great man? And what direction are we headed in? Are we going to take

his sign down? Are we going to take his statue down? Because this guy affirmatively says his dream is a time when the content of character trumps the color of skin. And the people with whom you would think he would be most aligned today are not just disagreeing. They're saying the exact opposite. It is opposite, Phil. The thing that matters most is the color of your skin. Never mind the content of your character. That's personal. You'll sort that out on your own. So I wonder, 30, 40, 20 years from now, maybe his statues are down. Maybe the names of the streets are changed. Who knows? I'm hoping you do, Justin. I wish I could just fix all this right now. but that does seem the way it's going because it's an increasingly unfunny,

unforgiving society that we're creating for ourselves here, where we're going to dig into everybody's past for the past 20 years and hold that up and basically punish people perpetually for anything they said or did or if they're in a picture that just didn't look right. I don't know what Splat looks like either, Mike, but it sure kind of looks like Splat right now. It's just messy right now. And it's like we're just focused completely on the wrong things.

I would love to nominate myself as the one to fix it. What we can do is just continue to tell truths so that when the crisis gets so bad that those truths will be sitting there remaining that people can look at and say, okay, no, that is the way. Let's get back to that. Let's go that direction. We hold these truths to be self-evident, except we don't anymore. They're not self-evident. They need to be reintroduced.

They need to be pulled apart. They need to be examined. somebody needs to make a case for them because Jefferson had to cut to the chase. So we hold these truths to be self-evident. But if we don't hold those truths to be self-evident, then we've set the table in a way that we can't possibly hope to achieve any kind of meaningful detain

because nothing is self-evident. We have to step back and re-examine everything. What does splat look like? Ask Ray Raymond. That's what splat looks like. When you go off the bridge and realize that you're going to enter the only safe space there ever was, which is oblivion, however you think of it.

Again, I wrote that at a time where I was trying to be terribly clever, where I wanted to say the things I'm saying to you right now, but couldn't say it in a direct fashion for a lot of reasons. I just felt and still feel like nobody wants a lecture, so I'm hesitant to have these kinds of conversations because we're not going to convert. anybody. I don't think talking among ourselves, but the movies that you make, the things you put out there and the stories that we tell, who knows where they land? Maybe they'll get people to start thinking differently about what's self-evident and what isn't. Yeah, I mean, you say we may not

convert anybody, but I think we will if you just sit there, if you just tell the truth. And, you know, that's what I hope that my movies do is tell the truth. But if we can just tell the truth, and a lot of people don't want to tell the truth. They're scared right now. It's a scary, scary time. Social media has made things scary, where you can make one post and lose your job immediately. And so people don't want to be that guy. They don't want to be that person that's held up as an example, and especially if they have kids and family and a good job. So it's hard for people to speak out. There are some people that are bold and brave. But if we all can continue to speak the truths, collectively, that truth, I think, can win out.

But it takes a lot of courage. I'm kind of in a safe space now as a filmmaker where the type of films that I make, you know, the ship has sailed with me in like mainstream Hollywood a long time ago. That was my question. They're not going to be calling me to do, you know, Glee Part 4. And I recognize that. But that's not a bad thing for me because I've made a pretty good go of it here, making these types of films and establishing myself.

in this way. But for a lot of people, that's not easy to do. They're working different jobs in Hollywood or they know that if they simply say the wrong thing on set, the phone's going to stop ringing. So what about simply being on the wrong set? You've got room to maneuver now because Dennis Prager has left a big footprint in the world. And what he's done over there at Prager, you, he's done two things. He has made a persuasive case for the ideas that he wishes to espouse, but he's also pissed off a lot of people. And what that means for a guy like me, I don't get judged on what I say, really, not much anyway, because I try to be thoughtful about it and I put it out as reasonably as I can. I get judged for the company I keep.

Right. I get judged for making a video for Dennis Prager. I got judged hard for making a show for CNN for two years. And then I got all kinds of blowback today. I spent the last three days with Fox. I went to the Patriot Awards, right? I'm curious about your thoughts, not on what happens when you say or do the wrong thing, but when you're simply spotted next to the wrong guy. That's what scares me now. It's not just the war of ideas. It's the war of geography. Yeah, and the guilt by association thing is just another level of an ad hominem attack. You're not debating the person on any sort of ideas or what they said or what they stand for. You're just finding, you know, you might as well make fun of them or say that

I don't like this person because they have an ugly face. The fact that you hung out with Ben Shapiro one time. That makes you just unapproachable. So it's just another level of attacks that come when people want to smear you. It's an unfortunate thing. I wish that didn't work. But for some reason, that kind of does. People say, well, oh, that person voted for Trump or that person hung out with, I saw that person with so-and-so at a cocktail party one time. And it's just tribalism that's taking place. I think social media has something to do with it too, but people are being cordoned off into their various tribes. And if you're in the other tribe, or if you're hanging out with that person, you're obviously in that other tribe. And so therefore, I can't associate with you.

I don't know how that ends. The most powerful people I feel in society today are, are the people that break that tribalism mold. Glenn Greenwald is an example. There are people that, okay, maybe they're a liberal like Glenn Greenwald or a guy like Brett Weinstein where they're like, okay, yeah, I'm a liberal, but I'm not going to be constrained into a box to think a certain way. And so therefore, next thing you know, they're hanging out with conservatives. And people are like confused about that.

And what it tells me is those people like Greenwald and Weinstein are just interested in ideas. they're not interested in that whole association thing. And that's where some of the best conversations take place are people that are kind of coming from different places and discussing something head on. A conversation is much more interesting if two people are coming from different places.

I mean, wouldn't you agree? If you are just coming from the same household and arguing about something, nobody wants to watch that or listen to that. Nobody wants to watch me argue with my wife. Maybe somebody does. Well, maybe. Chuck does, maybe.

I'd like to see the video. I'm curious. I'll tell you. Jump to any conclusions. The most interesting conversations we have are from people from different schools of thought coming together and, again, kind of ramming their heads together.

So those are the most powerful people I feel like right now, the people with the greatest influence or the people that can cross over those tribalistic boundaries and have some real conversations. And Dave Chappelle is one of them, you know. Right. Is he powerful because he's crossing? That's exactly what I was going to say.

Is he powerful because he's talking to the other side? or is he powerful because he's talking to his side in a way that his side might not want to hear? That's what Bill Maher is doing right now. That's amazing. Every single monologue. Yeah. It's both of those things. Yeah.

Because right now we have such a siloed off society where Bill Maher on his show, if he's just talking to his audience, he's not reaching conservatives necessarily. You know, maybe a few curious ones. But by speaking differently, he's speaking both to his own side, like you just said. but he's also talking a concern as well. It's like he's getting out of that silo. He's breaking down those walls. I think it has to do with criticizing one's own tribe to a degree. The reason that, you know, Bill Maher, you go, hmm, is that he is talking to his audience,

who is traditionally liberal, and he's expressing ideas that are counter to what they believe. Tucker Carlson does that with Republicans. I've heard Tucker Carlson say, careful, Chuck, careful. I know. That association thing. You may be right. But I think that when you criticize your own camp, it gives you credibility. There are others who you will never hear criticize their own camp.

And I find them not as interesting to listen to as people who are willing to take on their own tribe, as it were. For Jews to say, that Jew did something wrong. For Catholics to say, that Catholic is doing something wrong, whatever. I think that's what Bill Maher is doing. I think that's what Glenn Greenwald is doing. But the problem is that now Glenn Greenwald is being associated with conservatives and people on the left are writing him off as oh, he's just a closet conservative. And I just don't think that's true.

Right. Right. Well, he's sharing his opinions with an out-of-the-closet conservative. If CNN would have Glenn on, we'd be having a totally different conversation. but they're not. I couldn't agree more, Justin. The people who can move the needle now are the people who can still make some kind of argument

from a middle or a perceived middle. I started wading into this thing more and more a couple years ago. I might have told you this one in Nashville, but there was a very strange week for me when I went on real time with Bill Marr and a couple days later went on The Blaze with Glenn Beck. The same exact conversation with both men

about the foundation. about the very concept and the very things that you did with Chloe in that great doc. It was amazing. The blowback I got from the left and the right was identical. And no one, and there were thousands and thousands of exchanges on Facebook. And nobody said, I disagree with what you said. They all said, how could you? How could you sit next to that guy?

What were you thinking? Right. Right. That's a long way of saying. that's why I probably should have just dropped the pretense for a moment and been on no safe spaces because when I saw it, I got it. I had a better understanding of what the stakes truly are. Adam Carolla did a great job in that. That must have been interesting, too, to see the shift in his career. He burned some bridges, didn't he? Crossed a Rubicon. Yeah, Adam has always been fearless. And he's created a platform, obviously, for him to be fearless. He calls it the pirate ship,

which was his podcast, which set the Guinness Book of World Records for listeners, because that people love that fearlessness. And Adam has an amazing ability to kind of straddle that divide where he can keep some of his friends on the left, and he has friends on the right. And people know Adam as a guy who just calls it as he sees it. And he's been consistent in that. And I think that's what kind of keeps him in that position.

He doesn't play this partisan game. He's not a tribalist, so to speak. he looks at every issue uniquely and weighs in on it. And I think people really respect him for that. They know that they're not always going to agree with Adam Carolla. He has some friends on the left that know that he's going to say things. He's going to hang out with a guy like Dennis Prager. He's going to do things occasionally that are going to be off-putting to their worldview a bit.

But they also know him to be a truth speaker, speaking truth the way he sees it. And they respect that. I wish more people had that position. Adam sort of built that for himself to be able to do that. And that's not an easy thing to do. It is interesting to see how he operates and how he can kind of straddle that divide of being kind of best friends with Jimmy Kimmel, but going around and hanging out with Dennis Prager. So he's kind of a model for society in a lot of ways.

Can this be done on a personal level for you at work? Can you hang out with Sally over there in accounting and then go hang out with another guy, you know, in the shipping department who has very, very. different views. Can you have conversations with both those people? And when Sally sees you hanging out with the guy in shipping, she doesn't get offended. Adam's been amazing at being able to do that. My guest today, Tom Albanyse, is an American giant, and I'll tell you why. Tom understands on a fundamental level that the business of mining is a non-negotiable prerequisite of our civilization and our economic independence, just like the business of making things. American Giant knows this,

which is why they committed themselves 16 years ago to make all their excellent clothing right here in this country. It wasn't easy, but they did it. They sourced locally grown cotton, and they built factories in towns across the nation where they could hire hardworking locals who cared about making a quality product. And then they went about the business of gently reminding people that when you buy a piece of clothing from American giant, you're not just buying a high quality sweatshirt or T-shirt or another pair of jeans. You're investing in a local supply chain. You're supporting communities from the Carolinas to California. And you're getting a piece of clothing that won't just survive the wash. You're getting a garment that'll get better with age.

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at American dash giant.com slash Mike. American Giant, American Made. American Giant, American Made. We used to be able to do that. Do you remember the show Donahue? I do in the 70s. He would have these long talks

with people on opposite ends of the political spectrum, respectful conversations and in-depth, I think of Milton Friedman all the time on there. Single best thing anybody can do listening to this right now. If you're going to go down a YouTube rabbit hole, listen to Milton Friedman on Donahue. There were some of the best interviews ever, and I give the guy a lot of credit for putting him out there.

That's must-watch stuff. I totally agree. And while we're at saying, what you should take a dive on, we've been mentioning Justin's movie No Safe Spaces, and it really is a terrific movie. It's not just a thoughtful movie. It's an entertaining movie. And I think that is the thing that is really important today. You know, I know Breitbart said that culture is downstream of politics, or is it the other way around maybe. But the idea of no one's going to watch your movie. If it's a lecture, like you said, it's got to be entertaining.

And that film is definitely entertaining. Well, thanks, Chug. that's why we have Adam Crolla in the film. The guy's entertaining. The guy's funny. And Prager's kind of funny in his own right, too. When we made the movie, what kind of struck me was when we got those two guys together, there was like almost a role reversal where Prager would kind of become the funny one. And then Adam Crolla would be like the really super insightful one. And they would just kind of trade positions, you know. If you want to speak to people, it is important that you make them laugh a little bit, that you pull at their heartstrings a little bit. If you just basically throw a white paper in their face and say, read this, it's not going to convince anybody.

But we had a lot of fun making it. It was a lot of fun making that movie. It took us well over three years to actually make that film. Both those guys had very busy schedules. This thing was kind of unfolding in front of our very eyes. And so we were kind of like, what do we follow here? There was just things popping all over the place, you know, kids riding on campuses and then everything going on with big tech. And it was like drinking out of a fire hose there for a while.

Was. Yeah. Did anything happen that affirmatively shifted the trajectory of the film you thought you were going to make? Were there issues at college campuses, for instance? That's what seemed like was on fire. Just the full-on locking down of speech. Well, at the very beginning, I think there was. We had broad ideas about the film. We knew that we wanted to talk to young people about various ideas. And that's when the Berkeley riot happened, the one with, I believe, Milo, they're burning the campus. And at the home of free speech, like Berkeley, supposedly the home of free speech, where they're burning things over a speaker. And so I think that was a thing that really pointed us in a direction of, wow, what's happening here? And then not long after that, it was only probably a couple months later, we were trying to do an event with Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager together on stage at Cal State Northridge, and they essentially got canceled. The college

administrators said, no, you can't do the event. They didn't give us a good reason why. They made up a bunch of lame excuses. And so, okay, now we're in the story. Now we're part of this story because it just happened to us. Right. So those are I think that are the two things back to back that propelled us into this story. And how did it impact your state of mind and your view of the film when you suddenly realize that you're a character in your own doc? What does that do? It gives you a little sense of importance. You're like, you're doing something that matters. I think when we went to these college campuses

and we would see what was happening, it was a real eye-opener. It was a bit scary, but I think I had the same thoughts about college campuses that a lot of people do, like all those crazy kids, and they're just going to be dumb and stupid and do crazy things, but it doesn't affect me. But I think once we got on these campuses and saw what was going on and saw the mentality behind it and realizing that it was going to spread,

that's when it was a wake-up call, I think, for me, knowing that this was not going to stay on campuses. This was going to go everywhere. That's a really jolted me. Like, it's not fun of games anymore. We can't just sit there and point at them and laugh and be like those silly kids with their safe spaces and their trigger warnings and everything else.

And they're crying closets. Right, right. Yeah. This dangerous thing is coming in front of crying closets, Mike. But I still think there's something really kind of important and hard to articulate around the sneakiness of this. I just wrote this down when you were talking before, but I was accused a couple of weeks ago

in the New Republic of sneaky conservatism vis-a-vis dirty jobs. And this is why I had Chloe on a couple of weeks ago because the guy who wrote the article said the sweat pledge was bonkers. And I wanted him to hear somebody who signed it who had prospered as a result. But also in the course of all,

all that, this guy, Jake was his name, he talked about the fact that he used to love dirty jobs, used to watch it with his dad, until he got older and realized many years later that the ideas at the heart of the show were what he described today as sneaky conservatism. We were entertaining you first and foremost, but underneath that, there was a morality play, and it had to do with hard work and delayed gratification and a decent attitude and some sense of personal responsibility and rugged individualism. Isn't it crazy how those attributes have become associated with conservative principles in the same way that liberal ideas today tend to fall in line behind kindness and empathy and basic decency? And it's like, why would either side

abdicate any claim onto those virtues. But we have. It's just so bananas. So it's the non- sneakiness of your movie that I admire today. You still entertained, first and foremost, but you led with your right. No safe spaces. Let's not be confused about what we're trying to do here.

Still want to entertain, but you kind of hit that nail pretty hard on the head, I thought. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, we basically created a character for the First Amendment named Firsty, and we basically murdered him on screen. So that was pretty direct. Schoolhouse Rocks. Cartoon murder of the First Amendment, but... Whose idea was that? I think it was my co-producer, came up with that idea. It was a great idea. It was just, how do we execute that? We found a great animator. We had a great composer who basically rewrote the song or wrote original song for it.

So my co-producer Owen came up with that idea. idea and then we went out and made it. And it was just crazy enough to do and stick in the film to really kind of make people. We did a lot of test screenings for no safe spaces. And that scene always through people. They either loved it or they hated it. And that's why I knew it needed to stay. It was just a lot of fun to make. One of the points I was going to make is one of the greatest benefits about being a filmmaker is being able to learn about things while you're making a movie on the topic. And it's been one of the fun. I've learned way more as a filmmaker than I ever did in school. And that's why trading up was such an awesome thing, making the short documentary

trading up on the trades was great because I got to learn about that. I got to learn a lot more about the trades. I remember when Prager, you asked me to make a short documentary about the trades and trade school, you know, the first person I called was my plumber, but he was like too busy to talk to me. So that told me something right there. But the second person I call was Chuck. You know, I got to talk to Chuck about this. Chuck was funny because I think he knew, like, I didn't know enough about the trades yet to really tell this. story. So he's like, kind of quizzed me on the phone. He's like, what do you know about the skills gap? Like, can you tell me about the skills gap? And I'm kind of like, oh, the skills gap. Meanwhile,

I'm like Googling skills gap. Yeah, Chuck. No, skills gap. It's a very real thing. And we got to do something about that. And so in the process of making trading up, it was a lot of fun because I did. And again, just like no safe spaces, it was alarming what I learned. And a couple things that stand out to me is that, you know, the fact that we have so many of these jobs that are unfilled and we don't have the people to fill them, and that is the skills gap. But what's even more alarming is the fact that, and I don't think people know this, but your audience would probably love to hear that half of the trade's workforce is going to retire in the next decades. Which is like, boom, like, who's going to fix anything around here? Who's going to do anything? And then now we have Biden and

Congress talking about infrastructure and passing these bills, but, okay, who's going to do that work? Are we manufacturing a bunch of robots somewhere that can weld and draw blueprints and do everything else somewhere and some factories somewhere that are going to actually do these jobs? So it's a scary thing that we have a country that won't be able to fix anything. That's one of the major sort of things I learned when we were making trading up. I think it's a truly terrifying thing. I think it's a matter of national security, the whole business of a balanced workforce. But I also want to talk about not just the political divide, but the rhetorical divide. and the assault on the language.

You mentioned infrastructure. There was a time when everybody could talk about infrastructure spending because we all knew what it was. Recently, we've learned that it's not just bridges and roads and power grids. It's not just sewer lines and runways. It's also free college, and it's free health care, and it's slave reparations. And look, I got no beef discussing any of those things

among people of good faith, to redefine them as infrastructure, that's something new. That's something different. When you Googled Skills Gap, you probably found a number of articles that would talk at length about how it wasn't a thing, how it was a myth, how it didn't really exist. Now, 10.4 million open positions does make that a difficult argument to make, but people are still making it and they're making it passionately. Hell, Justin, Miriam Webster just redefined anti-vaxxer to include those people who were opposed to mandates. So the language is being completely shifted right in front of us in real time, the attacks that you mentioned before, whether it's ad hominem or logical fallacies

or any of the other rhetorical devices that are used to upend a conversation. Those are happening. The supply chain is happening. It's frozen. I'm trying to get a line of whiskey launched. I can't do it because I can't get the damn bottles. They're still stuck in the port, right? Boo-hoo.

Mike can't get his whiskey out. I'm just saying that it's heartbreaking, really. It is heartbreaking because it's really good whiskey. I kind of feel like the country could use a drink right now, and I like to help provide one. But what we really need are bottles. I might go have one now to go lament your lack of bourbon. I would appreciate it.

Drink it if you got it. 13 years ago, when we started this odyssey, it was based on exactly what you said. We don't have enough people replacing the workforce that's retiring. Today, we're still having the same conversation, still trying to make a more persuasive case for the trades. But we're doing it when the words trades don't mean what they used to mean. So this is why I wanted you to come on, frankly, because you're in this fight in a meaningful way, because you're making content that can be shared and that can hopefully help move the needle.

And the fact that you used to be a skateboarder, not a skateboarder, a snowboarder who took risks and made some films in a spare time, and now you're a filmmaker who takes risks, who probably, I don't know, do you still skateboard? You're figuring it out in front of your audience. It's awesome. I am now a careful snowboarder and fearless filmmaker,

so I've just shifted those two things around. You're right about the language. This stuff is one and lost with the language. They're probably going to come up a new way to explain supply chain. That's going to mean something else right there. That's going to be, oh, we don't have enough gender studies professors going into, you know, that's going to be the supply chain issue that we're going to be dealing with next. There's your problem.

Trading up is an important, even though it's a short documentary, when a Prager used main goals of that film was to kind of put that out there for young people that are considering this stuff, speak some truth to them, and people that are considering coming out of college, thinking about college, thinking about universities, and just kind of dangling it out there. Like, you know what? Hey, there are some other options that maybe you haven't considered. And I think one of the greatest parts of trading up, besides Chloe and her story, is when you lay out for us the PR campaign that has taken place over the last 30, 40 years and the stigma that's attached to somebody that doesn't go to college and decides to do something else and learn a skill.

I think that's one of the most important parts of the film in terms of message, because this is what young people need to hear today. I'm a bit in the abstract. Those are the kind of truths that we need to continue to speak to people. And you guys have been doing it with Mike Roe Works for a long time now. I credit you guys, but you guys were sort of the inspiration for making this film in a lot of ways. If we can keep speaking those truths, I think, again, when that splat happens, at least the truth will be sitting there for people to come and pick it up.

One other truth, too, is if you think a plumber costs a lot of money now, just wait till half of them retire. Mm-hmm. Right. The trap is that most people wind up thinking of this in terms of the employee and the employer and the relationship, the eternal struggle between labor and management, right? Humanity and Capital. But it's not. I mean, it is, but it's bigger than that. That's why trading up is a movie that people need to see, in my opinion, because it does engage the 330 million people in this country who are all impacted by the skills gap.

Whether you think it's a myth or not, Chuck's point is valid. How long do you want to wait for a plumber and how much can you afford to pay? And these questions answered honestly, sometimes, oftentimes, in fact, are counter to the objection. of a union. And that's why I'm often in a difficult spot. If you're representing plumbers collectively, well, the fewer there are, the more they can charge. And congratulations, your role is done. You've done your job. But there's a bigger job to do because everybody in the country now has indoor plumbing and we'd like to keep it, right? And so to get the country engaged in the conversation. That's the trick, Justin, and you're doing yeoman's work. Thank you. It means a lot coming

from you, Mike. And the thing is, when they think about the trades, they need to keep in mind, it's not just broken pipes and clog toilets. The trades encompass so many things. Air traffic controllers are trade workers. They have their own trade school from the FAA, where they go learn how to land planes safely. So, okay, yeah, you might have a clog in your toilet, but do we have enough people that can land planes safely? I know there's a shortage. right now in air traffic controllers, maintenance guys on these airplanes. Do we like it when our airplane lands safely on the runway? Well, if we do, we should consider what's happening here with the trades workers. Do we have enough people to meet the demand? So, you know, whether it's air traffic

control, whether it's heating and cooling, whether it's even cooking, if you like going to a nice restaurant, the culinary arts, that's a trade. So much of our society is built around the trades, people that have skills that can do amazing things. What's frustrating is it's so disregarded, and it has been for so long, and that emphasis needs to change. What's particularly ironic and personal for me, the reason that I didn't edit the beginning of our conversation to cut out the incredible frustration we experienced

for the half hour we spent trying to get this damn connection to work on this eternally vexing podcast is because metaphorically, it's exactly what you're talking about. I'm not saying podcasting is a trade necessarily in and of itself, but it is a pursuit that requires skill. And that skill comes with preparation and planning

and all sorts of things that Chuck and I simply can't do because we're spread too thin. Now I'm making excuses, but that's part of it too. That was my 4D chess move guy. I'll come clean now. I had a button I was pushing that was keeping us from hearing each other. And I knew that you would make that connection and have that really brilliant insight. So, you know, it worked.

It worked. Chuck's job is to make sure the connections are clear. My job is to land the plane. And you did set me up nicely with the air traffic control metaphor. I thought I was going to bring everything back around to a normal man searching for some lingerie for his wife on her anniversary and the ultimate chain of events that led him to go splat off of the Golden Gate. It's still not a bad way to end it. But the truth is, we are all incredibly connected and reliant on somebody to figure out the mic, the toilet, the electricity, the air traffic controllers.

We can't separate our workforce anymore into blue and white collar halves. Because when you do that, there's your gap. The gap is the space between those two colors. It ain't the color of collars. It's all of us figuring out our role in this and showing up early and getting it done right. Amen, brother. Look at that. I got an amen, Chuck.

I got an amen. I got an amen from you. I got an amen from Justin. I was nodding my head. That just doesn't translate in the audio version of the podcast. In the category of shameless pluggery, where can people go to see either of the films that we've been talking about? And what, if anything, can they do to help the cause along? Well, thanks. Yeah, no safe spaces. You can just go to either no sayspaces.com or it is available on streaming platforms everywhere. And then trading up, you can go to prager you.com and watch that short documentary. You got to look forward under short documentaries at prageru.com. And then you can follow me at Justin Folk, at Justin Folk on Twitter. I'm not very active on Twitter, but like, you know, if you wanted to follow me and then reach out to me somehow, that's probably the best way of doing that.

What are you working on now? What's next? I have a feature-length documentary I'm working on that I have to keep the details to myself for the moment. When we talk about fearless filmmaking, it's requiring a lot of that. It's touching on a very controversial topic that's very relevant today. And again, trying to speak some hard truths, I guess, and get the conversation going about some important issues going on. So we're hoping to have that done and have that released in 2022 coming up next year. year. Maybe we can, I'll let you guys go. Come back when you can talk about it. Yeah, absolutely.

I'm curious, Chuck, this isn't the project that you and I were discussing with our actor friend. Is it? Is it the same project? You mean Rico Colin Tony? No, no, no. No, no. Not that guy. No, no. Oh, no. It is not. It's not that. No, no, no, no. Sorry. Folks, I apologize. The initials, NS. Is that you're talking about the act? I cannot confirm or deny. And as I just know. Okay.

That's what I'm talking about. I'm aware of that project. I'm not involved with it, but that's another controversial topic. I'm doing a different controversial topic. This is a better way to end this conversation. The idea that filmmaking has gone from It's a Wonderful Life and the Searchers and all of that great stuff into this desperately cynical attempt to pander to an audience that is not a. us, right, to now making movies with people who can't even talk about them yet. Right.

We just can't talk about them yet because it's too hot. It's too sensitive. That's where we are as we approach 22, talking with filmmakers who can't even promote their next project just yet. It's a hell of a thing, Justin. It is. It says a lot about where we're at, but it kind of reminds me of a quote by a famous director Warner Herzog, who said that the two greatest skills of filmmakers,

can have is picking a lock and forging a document. So, you know, it's just the art of filmmaking, you really have to go rogue to tell a good story, unfortunately. But it ends up being a lot of fun, too, at the same time. Congratulations on being fearless at doing a thing that you actually love. You're good at it. I'm flattered that you thought of me for the first one and grateful that I shnered my way into the second one.

And when you can tell me the title of the third one, if you need a narrator, let me know. I'm available for reasonable rates. So is Josh. I'll start saving my money now, Mike. You better. Justin Fulke, thank you for your time and apologies again for the goat rodeo that preceded this. That was fun. Thanks, guys.

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