The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 236: Don't Fly Over the Story

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

Journalist Salena Zito drops by to discuss the dignity of work, the populist movement, the censorship culture, and why she refers to Mike as her brother from another mother.

Do do do do do do do. Dumb. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have an HR department for better or worse.

And it's also why I use ZipRecruiter whenever we need to expand. ZipRecruiter has proven themselves a million. million times over by helping countless employers get through the hiring process faster and more effectively than ever before. And now they have a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, the most passionate, and the most qualified candidates first. This is a huge time saver, hours and hours of save time. And it helps people like me find the people who can function in a non-traditional work environment like MicroWorks. In other words, ZipRecruiter works for me, and they'll probably work for you, too.

Post a job for free at ziprecruiter.com slash row. And watch what happens. Odds are, you'll find a human resource that just happens to be a great fit for your company in 24 hours or less. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. Hello, friends. It's episode number 236 of the way I heard it. called don't fly over the story.

Don't fly over the story. Nobody wants to fly over the story, but people do it all the time. My guest is Selena Zito. Chuck, would you think? We just had one of the longer conversations so far on this podcast. Personally, I was hanging on every word of it. Yeah, me too. She's a fascinating person.

She's a mother. She's a grandmother. She doesn't fly to the story. She drives to the story and gets stories along the way. as well. And she's just a fascinating person. I think she's probably doing some of the most important work in the country right now in terms of reporters. She truly goes to where the story is. She takes backroads. She drives all over the country. She's been writing a column now for a while called the middle of somewhere. I just love it. It did get a little indulgent from my end from time to time

because everything she says about her approach to being a journalist has a corollary in what I tried to do on dirty jobs. You know, I didn't realize it at first to this extent, but it's really amazing. This woman is like my sister, technically my older sister, because I believe she's in her early 60s. She is a grandmother. And she is just full of piss and vinegar, and she writes so well. And she writes like three big, meaty articles every week. I don't know how she does it. She writes three to five articles a week.

She's very prolific and really interesting. And when we were first talking about having her on, I'm like, she is you. She is you with long hair and lady parts. That is what she is. You guys are the same person because you think the same way. You've gone to the same places. You've met the same people. You understand the parts of the country that,

a lot of other people just fly over, what's known as the flyover country. And that's what you guys have in common. Well, that's why I wanted to call it, don't fly over the story. But now that you say it, she's you with lady parts is also a pretty good title. I'm really not sure which one we should go with.

If you're not familiar with Selena, I bet you've seen her. She pops up all over the place on all sorts of news programs to talk about the articles. She writes. we'll plug it properly at the end of the conversation, but in case you don't make it to the end, check out her column, the middle of somewhere. It's really great. And Chuck, didn't she get somewhat famous for summing up the whole Trump phenomenon in a pretty catchy way?

Yes, I had heard this quote somewhere in 2016. Someone said this to me, and I went, wow, that is really, it sort of just blew my mind. And I later found out that it was Selena Zito, who first said this, and that is, the press takes Donald Trump literally, but not seriously. His supporters take him seriously, but not literally. And I thought that made so much sense, and I completely got it. It just seemed like a brilliant summation of the situation to me, anyway. Yeah, I mean, it feels especially pressing it now, because part of what we talk about in this conversation is what's happened to our language and seriously is different than literally. It's very different than literally, but it's easy to conflate them at the same time. And so, yeah, I think she was right about that and I think

she's right about a lot of other things too. But mostly, I just really enjoyed this. And full disclosure, the other reason I invited her on was because we had reached out like a year ago just to say, look, here at MicroWorks, we're fans of your writing, we like what you're doing. And of course, she was so gracious and said, look, I'm very aware of what you've done. And I love your foundation. And at some point, I would love to write an article on it. So our schedule being what it is, is pretty jammed. And we wanted to get a podcast up. And Selena wanted to conduct an interview. So I just said, look, let's just do it together. So what you're about to hear is a weird mix of a conversation and an interview with a terrific writer and a great reporter

who also happens to be a 60-some-year-old grandmother whose commitment to her craft involves driving all over Hell's Half Acre because, as you'll hear her explain, there is no middle of nowhere. Every place is the middle of somewhere. And today, I'm glad to say that somewhere happens to be episode 236 of this podcast where Selena and I solve, the problems of the world in mere moments. In other words, don't fly over the story.

Gosh, I'm sorry you folks missed the opening, but we greeted our guest with the request to put down what amounts to a drop cloth. Ross, who's the producer behind Chuck, is trying to make the audio as great as possible, Selena, because we have every expectation that every word out of your mouth is going to want to be captured in the highest possible fidelity to match the interest and the intellect that you bring to our humble broadcast. Then I better watch my Pittsburgh accent. No, lean into it. Come on now, hon.

You can be free here. You just talk the way you want to talk. What Ian's talking about, Nat. See, that's the thing. In Baltimore, it was used. Y-O-U-S-D. You guys going down to the ocean or what? In Pittsburgh, I noticed a long time ago,

it was more like U-N's. It's Y-I-N-Z. But we say Dan, The same way. Yin's going down a beach. Yin's going down a river. Dan. Yeah. We're more down. Down. Down. Yeah. Down the ocean. Yeah. Down the ocean. Yeah. One time I went down the ocean with Chuck and we got so sick, we threw up in a Zink. Oh my God. You could be a Yinser. You could totally be a Yonzer. We had to wash all our clothes.

Let me start by sucking up a little bit, as I said in the intro. I honestly, don't know. First of all, I don't know of anybody with better hair, male or female. What an extraordinary head of hair, Salina Zito is sporting. It's my parents' fault. Chuck's hair is great. Mine's average, but yours is, I, I, I, words fail me, honestly. Yeah, and I don't even do anything. I just wake up and this is it. Like, I am the most minimalist female ever. I mean, just make sure I have my lipstick, but my hair, this is it. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, I don't think anybody's writing more important stuff than you. I'm not just saying that.

If I had some sort of parallel career in journalism, I'd like to think I'd be doing something really similar to what you've been doing for the last decade or so. I went another way. I'm in this crazy jacked up business of reality TV, but I've been to every state half a dozen times. And the first time we met, you probably won't remember it, but you were on Tucker. Yep, I do. And I was sitting in this exact chair waiting for my life hit, and you came on, I think, to talk about Keystone. Yes. And energy.

And, yeah, like, maybe one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds ever. And I think I just mentioned you in our conversation with Tucker, because you had just been on. And you reached out. And I took a deeper dive into your stuff. And I thought, one of these days, maybe she'd interview me. And then Chuck was like, well, screw that. Why don't you interview her? And I said, wait a minute.

Why don't we interview each other? Exactly. Like this. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you've been on my radar in my life for years because of the work that you do. And I think we do a lot of the same things just in different mediums. And I believe through listening to you and watching you and from reading you that we share sort of the same geographical understanding. of what it means, first of all, begin with roots. People don't often understand what it means to be

rooted and or have a sense of place. But a lot of people's lives begin and remain in that part right there. I'm rooted to where I'm from. I'm rooted to my family. I'm rooted to my community. And they make live choices because those roots are so strong and so deep. And, you know, I see that all across the country. It's not just limited to Appalachia, which is, you know, Pittsburgh is the Paris of Appalachia, which is where I live. Wow. Way to spin it, Selena. I like that. But it's the largest city in Appalachia. And I'm obsessed with Appalachia from where it starts in New York City to where it ends down in Mississippi, not New York City, but New York State and down into Mississippi. There's so much interesting cultural connections with each other. Well, I read something, gosh, I don't remember.

it. You write so much. I'm going to wind up conflating things, and I want to talk about that, too. You write a lot about Rochester, and places, obviously, Kenosha is not Appalachia, but there's so much in common with the geography that you choose to write about. And of course, you're really writing about people, but you can't write about the people without the geography, to your point. Dirty jobs, people always ask me about the dirt and the jobs, but really it was a show about people. Yes. That's the thing that I get from all of your writing. You love Pittsburgh the way Chuck and I love Baltimore. I mean, let's start there.

What the hell? I woke up this morning and a bridge fell down. I know. It's like every Jensers' irrational fear happened. There's 4.62 bridges within the city limits alone. There's 1,500 within the county. And one just collapsed this morning. And it's not one of our oldest bridges.

The bridges was built in 1970, 1971, old enough to remember that. We don't have a lot of details about what happened. Thank God it snowed because it's delayed school and it delayed people traversing it, or it could have been a lot worse. One person was hurt, but what was wonderful is that you saw people form a human chain to pull people out and get them out of there. That's that sense of rootedness and community. This is my backyard.

I'm going to help people. Yeah. I think it's incredible. And I'm bringing it up because in my foundation, infrastructure was a word we talked a lot about in 2008. Back then, it sounded like I was mispronouncing something. Nobody was really talking about infrastructure. And today it's not only being talked about, it's being, to my mind anyway, redefined before our eyes, right? It's happening right now. And on the one hand, a bridge falling down in Pittsburgh is an incredibly complicated thing. On the other hand, it's pretty simple. Second law, thermodynamics,

just tapped the country on the shoulder and said, hey, remember me? It's all coming down, right? So I'd love your thoughts on what's going on with the infrastructure bill. Your thoughts on how much fun our politicians are having with the language, and

what that means for Joe Blow from Idaho, who would just like to get down the road without falling into a pothole. Right. So infrastructure, as we were coming up as young people, right? Infrastructure was most kids we went to high school with probably went off to get degrees in engineering and or went to trade schools to get educations on the things that support engineering

because we had great value in those types of enterprises in terms of keeping our cities healthy and functioning and moving. And then that all of a sudden fell out of favor. And then you look at infrastructure today and the jobs associated with. We don't have a lot of people to fill those jobs that support engineers, whether they're chemical engineers, mechanical engineers. We don't have a lot of people to support it because we may go into college to be the one and only thing. Well, someone has to actually support the engineers. There's the welders, there's the plumbers, there's the heating and the air conditioning.

and all those other things that you need to make a sound structure. So you can cross the bridge, so you can go into your home, so that you can have a community building, you can have a church. But we said, not we, but culture said, we don't need those jobs anymore. You only go to higher education. You only become this person. And we devalued the importance of those jobs. Well, we can't survive without these jobs.

I mean, that's what I kind of love about your foundation. Can I ask you a question about it? Because I just think it's amazing and thoughtful because you were even thinking about it before, you know, it became this sexy thing to sell to get money from politicians. After all you talk about that, I want to go back to the fact that climate change has now become infrastructure. What the holy heck is that?

And reparations. Yeah, reparations. What your sexuality is, is, is infrastructure. infrastructure. No, it's not. It's bridges. It's roads. It's sewers. It's our water systems, which in both rural areas and city areas are just completely, we walked away and we stopped talking about Flint. Well, I'm sure you know this, Mike. Flint wasn't a one-off. That's everywhere. What happened in Flint is everywhere. We just stopped talking about it because there's not an election to talk about it anymore. But I want to talk about your foundation.

Let me just make one point to Chuck real quick because I told him a week ago, it's like if there were a dirty jobs primer and a MicroWorks handbook and somebody went out into the world of journalism to say, okay, let's seriously write about issues through the lens of whatever that amalgam is. It's you. I'm going to try and stay quiet most of the time unless you want to interview me and write an article seriously, which I think would be great. But I'm literally jumping out of my skin. because I've never talked to a reporter before who says things that I wanted to say seconds before I said it. And that's what I told Tucker that night. I'm like, when I sit here waiting to go live on any of these shows, I always put myself in the place of the person in front of me. And I always trying not just guess what they're going to say, but say what I would say to that question. It's kind of the way I warm up. Every single thing you said that night was exactly what I would have. said and it both freaked me out and tickled me a little bit. Not to repeat myself, but that's why

you're here. And if what comes out of this conversation is an article that is of use to you, I mean, that would be some high cotton. So yeah, fire away. So let me talk a little bit about how I approach reporting. I have been blessed throughout my career to never have an editor tell me, go get this story. I want this story. I have always had editors who valued my intuition and I don't want to say fearlessness because that seems like ego trip but my willingness to just get in the car and go i don't curiosity selina yeah curiosity so i don't fly not because i'm afraid of flying but because if i'm going to go find the story i don't want to fly over half the country and miss 13 other stories and i don't take interstates

That's as bad as flying. You're just going past, you know, Chuckie cheese and a gas station, but you're still not getting a story. You're just seeing the same little maraud or a little island along every 17 miles. I only take U.S. routes or state routes. Only back roads. So why? Because if you're going to write a story about a community or a town, you have to actually pass the counties and the towns along. the way. Why? Well, because they tell you how these outer excerpts tell you if this area is doing good,

doing great, if it's prosperous, or it's just on its needs. And that's part of the story is the journey to wherever you're going. I also don't stay in hotels. I stay in bed and breakfast. Why? Because the first person I meet is a small business owner. And they know we're all the bodies are varied. But they have all the gossip, right? They belong to the little chambers of commerce or the little rotary clubs or those fraternal organizations that are so important to holding the fabric of communities together. That's where I always start. And that's how I've sort of always been. That's how I've always approached covering politics and culture. It's why I understood in 2016 why Donald Trump was going to win.

It's not because I liked him, it's not because I didn't like him. I listened to people leading up to that election and understood that people didn't like the establishment in the Democrats or the Republican Party. Donald Trump didn't cause that election. He was the result of sentiments I had been writing about for 15 years. That was your book, right? the Great Revolt? Yeah, the Great Revolt inside the populist coalition reshaping American politics.

If you want a blueprint of what's still going on in the country, that is it. And so because I wrote it, because it's it. I didn't read it cover to cover, but I read enough of it to once again know. Well, let me say it this way. The Sunday after the election, I was invited on Meet the Press, me, a guy who crawls through sewers. basically, right? And I'm no stranger to interviews or press, but meet the press. Never before had they reached out. And so suddenly I'm sitting there in my ball cap dressed like I'm going to a parade or something, talking to, what's his name, Chuck Todd about what happened? He asked.

What the hell happened? And everybody else at the table is looking at me as though, wouldn't that be interesting if somebody actually knew what happened? And of course, I don't know what happened, but my theory of what happened, was very similar to yours, which was a big chunk of the elector. It just didn't feel like they were being heard at all. Right. Or being written to or being programmed for. The story of Dirty Jobs is, in some ways, very similar to the GOP's conundrum.

You know, when you had 17 candidates on stage and what's his name, Rebus maybe? One of those guys would say, they're all terrific. Everybody up there. We've got this one and that one. Look at that. We have an African-American gentleman, and we have a woman. But don't look over this guy. All great choices.

Anybody but that guy in the middle. Not the guy in the middle. Let's not do that. That's what Dirty Jobs was in 2003. It was not the show that the network really wanted their audience to love. It just happened. Yeah. You're absolutely right.

And one of the really important thrusts in the book and a strain for a continuum among all the people that were interviewed where the book was, first of all, Americans are aspirational. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They haven't felt like that for 10 years. They haven't felt like anything was connecting them anymore. Which leads to the second problem, our cultural curators. So what do I mean by that? Corporations, academia, institutions, government, all of them are located in. in these super zip codes, right? Centers of wealth and power.

There's nothing wrong with that. However, they don't know the people that they serve. They don't have any cultural connection to them. Think about Hoover vacuum cleaners. Hoover vacuum cleaners were made in Akron, Ohio, Stark County, Ohio. Mr. Hoover lived four blocks from his factory. Not only did he know every single person

that worked for him, maybe not personally, but by base, but he also knew who his customers were. He sat in the church pew with them every Sunday. His wife was on the school board. Why is that matter? He was culturally connected. So he's not going to put a tweet out that alienates 70% of his customers. He's just not going to do that because there was a connection.

Now let's just think about the NFL. Where is the NFL's headquarters? Park Avenue, New York. 2016. Now I have argued the NFL's headquarters should be in Canton, Ohio, right, where the Hall of Fame is. Instead, it's in Park Avenue, New York. First of all, everyone on that board never paints their face every Sunday or has to take out a loan to pay for their tickets, their season tickets, right? They don't have man caves in their houses with old grimy signed footballs or terrible towels. and so they don't know who's sitting in their seats. And Colin Kaepernick, whether you agree with him or not, decides to say, I don't want to stand for the national anthem. Now, if you were in Canton, Ohio, and there's some bean counter

who's looking at the contract that works for the NFL, he looks at that and says, yeah, Mr. Kaepernick, age nine, you signed, you signed this contract. that says you're going to stand for the National Anthem. So, yeah, you're going to have to stick with that. Now, you want to re-go-negotiate that next year. That's fine. But there's, like, no one with anyone common sense on their board.

They're worried if they say something like that, that they won't get invited to cocktail parties or, you know, weekends in the Hamptons. And rightly so. They won't be. The same problem is in newsrooms. Most people in most major news networks didn't go to a community college. which I did. And I also went to a Votech school, too, to see you know that. I have a beauty school degree, whatever it was called.

So you got something you can fall back on if this journalism thing doesn't work out. Yeah. So these newsrooms have, everyone has an Ivy League degree. So there's a mass shooting that go out to cover it. All they talk about is guns. No one in that newsroom has ever owned a gun. They'd never known anyone who's owned a gun. And so they write about. the gun as though it's a demon as opposed to most people that own a gun own it for empowerment and own it for protection and own it to feed themselves. And the same goes with covering things like abortion or the March for Life. They can't cover them because they don't know anybody like that. They don't know anybody that believes that life issue is supremely important or the religious liberty is important.

So when they cover people, they make them sound like false. freaks. And they have no connection to the people that they're covering. And as we lose more and more of newspapers and people have to rely on the national news, but everything just sort of collapsed. And so that's what I mean about our cultural curators. That was a really long way of saying, we are disconnected from our cultural curators. That is what started this conservative populist coalition. It was not Donald Trump. He was the result of it, but it was not him. And each election, And it has grown. Just because he lost doesn't mean it hasn't grown.

All you have to do is look at down-ballot races across the country in 2020 and 2021. And you look at the growth among Hispanic voters and black voters and minority voters. And they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. And that's what's going on right now. 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? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle.

The poop is out of the goose, I'm afraid. AI is here to stay. And every business in the country is asking themselves the same question. How do we make it work for us? Well, the answer to that question varies, but you'll find it in a free guide that you can get right now at netsuite.com slash Mike. It's called demystifying AI. It's totally free. It's essential reading for anybody trying to make sense of a future that appears to have arrived yesterday. NetSuite, of course, is the number one AI enterprise resource planning software out there, trusted by over 43,000 businesses. 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-deaddening manual processes. This is AI built into the system that's currently running your business. Learn more at netseweet.com slash Mike. 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 Mike. That's netsuite.com. That's sweet on. Something happens that I just find endlessly fascinating that goes beyond the kind of bias that you're talking about, right? I mean, we all bring the totality of our experience to whatever the task at hand might be. We all get that. But the thing that fascinates me is the cognitive dissonance that occurs when, say, a newspaper realizes that its readers don't.

want to read the stories they want them to read or when a producer for a network realizes wait a second we might want them to watch planet earth 24-7 but what they're watching is a smart aleck crawling through a sewer making a poop joke what do we do with that what do you do when you realize your customer or your constituent or your reader or your viewer is not the person you wish they were with the taste you wish they had. Do you adapt or don't you? Do you write for them or do you write for yourself and hope they'll catch up? Which is a long way of asking you, how in the world did you ever in this crazy industry never have an editor that told you to go get the story and simply let you write the tales you've been writing? I think that they trusted me. I think that they trusted my

intuitions. I'm not going to write about a coal mine unless I go down in the coal mine, which I've done 1,200 feet. By the way, this is so fascinating, but I'm sure you know that. Did you know that from the moment of a piece of coal goes out of a coal mine travels, well, I traveled, eight miles on a man car, and through the processing center, over to the coal-fired power plant and into your house. It only takes 12 hours. It varies. Anthracite is a little different than by two minutes. and we did both mines, not too far, one in Pennsylvania. And yes, we have it in our head that this is an ancient technology that hasn't done anything to adapt at all. And we see the dirty faces of the dirty miners and it's still 1940.

As though there has been no, like, gobsmacking, monumental revolution in fossil fuels. Oh my God. If we're going to talk about energy, strap in, because my guess is we're singing out of that same hymn book, too. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And one of the things that frustrates me also, and you guys grew up in Baltimore, I mean, we grew up in neighborhoods that weren't all white or all black. We grew up in mixed neighborhoods. My high school was 75% minority.

So my experiences were with that. It was an Italian black neighborhood. We had the best food ever. But my willingness to go in the housing project and talk to people. I mean, I remember, gosh, what year was it? 2016. I was in Fort Heights, Chicago. It was just an outer southern borough in Chicago in Cook County.

And I just remember just going through these projects and trying to talk to people. And I just sat down and cried because it was so sad. The poverty, the bullet holes. It was just all the businesses were gone. I think if my bias comes from anything, it's empathy, empathy for people, empathy for their experiences, and trying to walk in their shoes, which is very similar to what you do. You know, you get in there and try to experience what they're experiencing so you can talk about it in an authentic way. For a day. Yeah.

Or two. It's so easy to fall in love with your own smack. sometimes and dirty jobs has been on the air every day for 20 years. It's become inculcated in people's minds optically. And so they assume I've spent the last 20 years going from bridges to coal mines to skull cleaning facilities to golf ball retrieval operations and that's it. I go in for a day and do my level best and then I get out of there and I think about what I saw and then I try and edit it together in a way that might stay on its feet, I would never understate the importance of empathy, but the quality that comes through most for me, when I look at what you write,

really is curiosity. Yeah. That's the cornerstone upon which the entire discovery brand was built. It's such an important word because you can't be curious without being humble. Because when you're curious, right, you're starting from the place of saying, I don't know. Yes. you know, but I'm keen to find out. And then if you happen to be an empathetic person, well, then you're kind.

And maybe people will like you more than if you weren't. But to me, the thing that's missing in journalism today is that slavish devotion to curiosity, first and foremost. Yes. Something has replaced it. And I don't know what. I feel like everybody's grandma said this. But my grandmother always said,

And it was probably because I was little and yapping. You have two ears and one mouth. You should listen twice as much as you talk. And I do that. I rarely say anything when I'm interviewing people. I just start talking. I just start asking questions. And if you take in the surroundings, you are respectful.

And as long as you are respectful and curious, everyone's got a story. Everyone has a story. And everyone's story is compelling and unique to them, but also where they are and where they're from. That's what I take with me every time. Plus, you know, my parents would beat me if I was not, even though I'm in my 60s. I carry that responsibility of my parents being on one shoulder and my children and grandchildren on the other shoulder. So I will always be respectful to someone. Well, easier said.

And again, this is something that I was in the business maybe 20 years before Dirty Jobs became a thing. And at the heart of that show, it's really a talk show. And I said, well, if we imagine that we're Access Hollywood and we treat a septic tank technician like he's Brad Pitt, then we're in the right direction. It's not just paying respect. It's paying attention. And so you've interviewed so many people who are rooted. Yeah. Who are rooted in aggressive anonymity.

Yes. But you treat them as though you are sitting down with a world leader or a president. Which you've also interviewed. Right. You've like to talk to every president, every presidential candidate since what? Since 2000. Since 2000. Yeah.

I'm much more comfortable talking with people and listening with people. Technically, they're people, Selena. Technically, our past presidents have been part of H. Sapien, far as I know. A couple exceptions, perhaps. Yeah, I've interviewed a ton of people in all kinds of different places. I completely forgot where my brain was going at that moment, which is that something. I do a lot as well. Well, but... It could have been Pittsburgh. It could have been Akron. It could have been to a lot of places. I have. That song always runs in my head, too. I've been everywhere, man. So every year, I drive north-south and east-west, cross-country. Always on back road.

My favorite road is US 30. It's the original. It's the Lincoln Highway. It's the first highway that was ever in our country. It's just magical to me. And I usually go maybe like 11 or 15 straight up and down and go down to the south. It just always learns something new. I always meet a new person.

One of the most interesting routes that I've never done all at one time, but I really, really want to do is US-6. which starts in Buffalo and the New York Canadian border and ends up at the Mexican-US border. I feel like that would be fascinating. Those diagonally across the street, but I'm being a nerd. I'm kind of fascinated by Route 1, actually,

not far from where we grew up. Before 95 became the aorta for the Atlantic, it was Route 1. Yeah. You know, in our neighborhood, it's Bel Air Road. Blair Road. Yep. Blair.

Just say it Blair. Yeah. Blair. Yeah. And it's fun to sort of watch the road change names if it goes through either a county or a township or a state. But I've done one and I think 11, is it 11 that also goes through Baltimore or 15? 40. Yeah.

40. That comes out my way. That was actually the official term pike developed by Albert Gallatin. That was our first sort of the canal and the term. bike to move commerce to the Ohio country. I'm nerding. I'm getting too nerdy. Interesting. And our world Route 40 is Pulaski. Yes. Pulaski Highway. Yes. It is fascinating how the same road has so many different names depending on the little burg it happens to wander through. When you were talking before about Akron, I was thinking about

God, like how many frontage roads have you been on? Like the frontage roads. The frontage roads. Road, like they're not called frontage, but it's sort of like there's the Motel 6 and there's the Super 8 and then there's the Beniggins and then there's the Chili's. And then there's the highway, but between the two is this access route. Yes, the Frontage Road. They're everywhere in America and you're right. There's one right in Akron and I've stayed at a quality in motel, which by the way are very lovely. Motel's are these other wonderful experience. experience. Two chairs in front of the motel and they're all mom and pop. Most quality ins are owned by families, multi-generations. I interviewed the owners of the first quality in in Breezewood,

Pennsylvania. Certainly you guys have been through Breezewood, have you? Sure. I've been through Breezewood. Yeah. And I wrote a story about it because people crap on Breezewood because of, you know, if there's a lot of commerce, if there's traffic. But I'm like, yeah, did you? Did you? ever actually go through Breeswood? I mean, there are four and five generational family businesses in that little village, and American businesses don't usually go beyond three generations. Those were stories unto themselves. They had been there since their families owned the dairy farms, and they decided to put the highway through. It was one small town that actually survived the turnpike because the people were forced to come off the turnpike or 70 to go through there.

How many stories began with people were forced to go somewhere where they didn't think they wanted to go because of a decision like that. Those frontage roads used to be the highway. And then like Pluto, they were demoted. They lost their planetary status, but they were still there. And Akron was one of the first places we went to on Dirty Jobs in 2004 to profile roadkill picker uppers. while I was there. I've done that. Yeah, I mean, they worked for the DOT,

and we learned so much so quickly about what happens if those guys all call in sick for a week, especially like during deer season, forget it. I mean, interstate commerce stops because the highways are clogged. But there was a frontage road in Akron that I later learned was the beta testing site for virtually every fast food restaurant known to man.

if you drive down this road for about two miles, you will see them all. From Pizza Hut to Longdown Stover. Yes. It's incredible. And I couldn't understand why anybody would put a restaurant there with so much competition. It was like the mall of fast food. And I learned later that you have to be there because that's where you test your prices. That's where you test your new entrees.

That's where you test everything. Yeah. And nobody really thinks about that or knows that in Akron, there's this place where every French fry ever consumed has been tested. Yeah, and Akron is the perfect place to put it. It's where two highways meet. It's where US 30 goes through. And it is both Appalachia and the Great Lakes Midwest. So you have this concentration of customers that you want right there.

Can I tell you something too about Kenosha, since I read something you wrote about it and it just really touched a chord with me? Chuck and I, in another life, sang in the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet singing in America. That's amazing. This happened in the late 70s and early 80s. And then Chuck went off to be a famous Broadway actor and I stayed in Baltimore to sing some more and screw around and figure things out. And I learned that this impossible acronym that we both love dearly was headquartered in Kenosha. And I didn't know where Kenosha was. I didn't know what it meant, but I became so interested in it.

And before the Internet was out there, I got maps and I looked at it and I read up on it. And I learned a lot about this little town. And then one day, in the late 80s, I went there with some of these fellow singers in this group. And I got a tour of the headquarters. And I saw what looked like the frontage road in Akron, except it was Kenosha. And it wasn't a frontage road. It was the people. It was like my feeling.

And what I think of, when I think of America, this weird, sentimental amalgam that exists probably mostly in my mind was really embodied by the people of Kenosha. And the fact that the barbershop quartet singing organization was headquartered there just struck me as somehow important. Flash forward to less than a year ago, that town didn't look like Kenosha to me anymore at all. And it broke my heart in a weird way to see it be used the way it was used. Talk about that for a minute, if you want,

because what you wrote about that, I thought was important. So Kenosha, interestingly, is featured prominently in my book, because I picked 10 counties in five states that flipped from blue to red in 2016. Kenosha was one of them, so I spent like a month living there, writing and interviewing and learning about people. And that heart of people, that Kenosha of the 1970s that you talk about still exist, but it was hijacked during those protests. And it was heartbreaking. As you point out, And Kenosha will always stand that people are still the same. Wisconsin is really interesting.

In Kenosha in particular, it's one of those places, if you look at the census data where people rarely move. They always live there. They're always from there. And it's a legacy county because the children and the grandchildren also always stay there. All those things are transpired in Kenosha. The heart and soul. It fractured it, but it didn't break it.

Kinocia is going to be okay. going to be okay. I was just there. I forget how long ago. Ever since 2020, I don't actually know what time anything is anymore. Right. It's always Tuesday around three in the afternoon. Yeah, yeah. And I also don't know the year it is either. I feel like I'm on 2020 part three. I know. I know. We're off to a weird start. It's so weird. Time has such a different feeling. Do time compress for you when you write? Yes, it does. I remember in 2016, the New York Post had said,

go out there and see what's going on. This was like six weeks before the election. I said, okay, I'm going to go and drive Route 30 from Times Square all the way across the country. And they said, okay, we're going to say, send a photographer with you. She was lovely. We had never met each other. I met her and we started driving across the country. This is a long way to answer this, but I think this is important. What was really interesting for me to have her with me is that she grew up in Beverly Hills, went off to Dartmouth and had been living in Manhattan all of her life. She had never been to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, but she had been to yours. And her curiosity and wonder at seeing the country and seeing, it was rough in 2016.

2016 was rough on our hearts and our economy. This is ahead of the election. This was after eight years of the recession and sort of the ascension of new politics. And she was just sort of blown away. She's like, I never saw this before. I didn't know this is what our country looked like. And she approached it with not wonder, and that was good. That made the story even more important.

However, I get back and I wait. I forget how long that was gone, maybe two weeks. I get back and I don't go to my computer immediately. I just sort of sit there and let everything that I experience come at me. Two mornings later, I sat down at my computer, and the next thing I knew, it was 5 o'clock at night, and I had written 10,000 words. Wow.

And I didn't even know it was the evening because it did compress. I started from the beginning. I record every person that I interview and then I haven't transcribed. I would, you know, go back and look at my notes. But mostly I was just writing and writing and writing. And everything that I experienced was part of it. And I don't remember ever doing that before, but I had never done anything that big before,

like all of the country in one story. I knew at that moment, this is before I wrote my book, but I knew at that moment I had a book in me. I could do it because it was the first time I really noticed that I could consume these experiences and write really fast. My guest today, Tom Olbenice, 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 could.

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 check out their high quality staples, hoodies, tees, denim built to be worn year after year

at American-dash-giant dot com slash Mike. It's quality you can feel and a true American success story that you can be proud to support. Use code Mike. Get 20% off your order at American-giant dot com slash mike.

American Giant American Made. American Giant American Made. I envy your, what is it, prolificness. Your prolificality, prolificity? So I don't know if you ever noticed this before. I write for three different places.

I'm a daily reporter. At least I'm a middle of somewhere. Yeah, middle somewhere. So I write daily for the Washington Examiner weekly for the New York Post and also weekly for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. But I call my columns the middle somewhere. And that came from Bill Crystal, who he used to be the editor of the weekly standard.

And he had tweeted, this is when I was on social media, I left because damn, that's not a good place. But he tweeted that I feel bad for everyone from Philadelphia or New England who has to go to the middle of nowhere, Minnesota, to watch the Super Bowl game. And that just got to me like that. I just said politely, but I said, in my estimate, nowhere in this country is the middle of nowhere. This is America. Every inch of soil is the middle of somewhere. Everyone has equal value.

That just sort of stuck with me, the middle of somewhere. I don't think I had ever articulated it before, but that's how I've always viewed everyone that I cover, that everyone has value, and every part of this country has an important and compelling story to tell us about who we are. And it's so easy. It's so easy to go too far with a good thing.

So much of what we've talked about so far is geography, but there's a clear corollary with humanity. And just listening to you right now, I'm reminded of what's happened to the word, I mean, infrastructure, obviously, but essential. Yeah. Essential. Yeah.

And for me, this has been so weird because dirty jobs began. I mean, I think that show was the granddaddy of essential working shows. And I was very comfortable and very happy to talk about the fact that we were looking specifically for people who typically labored out of sight and out of mind but did something essential. And then after the lockdowns and Dirty Jobs gets rebooted, I'm out there and kind of defaulting to my normal patter because I've been promoting that show for a long time. It just didn't sit right anymore because I was beginning to think in the same way that every place is the middle of somewhere, every work. is essential if to nobody but him or herself, maybe their immediate family. This idea of dividing the workforce into those that are essential and those that aren't, holy shit, the unintended consequences of doing that are no different than to your earlier point, elevating one form

of education at the expense of all the others. Right? Absolutely. It just seems like, though, that's what we're doing, Selena, at every turn. We're not saying, Hey, Kenosha in the springtime, right? And Phoenix is great. It's like, no, no, no. Phoenix is great because New York sucks. Yeah. Or Kenosha is rotten because Tampa's awesome.

Yeah. It's this false equivalency or this false comparison that's making me crazy. Well, Kenosha is great because cheese curds, right? I mean, who does not love cheese curbs or sausage or kobasi or. or really cold beer with all of those things in front of you. That is amazing. And, you know, I spent some time recently in Kenosha, but also in Pennsylvania with dairy farmers.

And the impact that they have had by the energy cost, okay? And people don't think about that, right? The amount of people that you can have a one-off conversation with, young people that don't think about where their food comes from. I think they think that's in the back of the supermarket and the truck dropped it off. But they don't think about the inception. They weren't educated about the inception. There's a farmer that's getting up at 4.30 in the morning and feeding their cows

and heating, making sure their cows are warm before they take care of their own children. And they're doing it for you. So that you have fresh milk or, you know, cream or ice cream or cheese or whatever, Fetuccini, now I'm hungry. But we don't think about these, like that to me, dairy farmer isn't essential worker. Of course. Right?

We shouldn't elevate, you know, we cause teachers to have a really bad public relations problem because our politicians have elevated their status and their feelings above love everyone else. And there are plenty of teachers that I talk to that say, oh, please stop it. Just please stop it. Because you're making us the bad guy. It's politicians and unions that do it, not teachers. You know, I'm so torn with teachers. My mom and dad both taught public school. Aside from those two, the most influential figure in my life was a high school music teacher, who we've talked about a lot on this podcast. I don't think pound for pound you can come up with a more impactful vocation than that of a good and dedicated teacher.

But what's happening now, I mean, there's so many parents, Selena, who are genuinely freaked out, really concerned about what's going on in the schools and what's not going on in the school. Yeah. You know, what just happened in Virginia, you had a lot to say about that. it's going to continue to resonate more and more with people. Who's in charge of the kids? Like who's really in charge? Who owns our kids, if such a thing is possible? And I saw this.

You know, my kids are in their 30s now. But this happened with both of my kids. They're three years apart. But I thought this was remarkable. So I always expanded on my kids' education by taking them to historic places, not just reading it in a one-dimensional way. Let's go to Gettysburg. Let's go to Antietta.

Yeah. You know, let's go to Philadelphia. Like, feel, like, stand where these people stood. And I don't remember what the case was, but both of my kids, the history teacher, American history teacher, called me on both children saying, you know, your daughter and your son contradicted me in school today. And they gave the incidents, and I said, well, they're right. Awkward.

What are you teaching them? And when it happened with my daughter, it was at that moment that I understood, there were things going on the skull that I thought were too one-sided. Now, I had already intuitively had always broadened their viewpoint. Then I'd like jumbled down on it. And that was, you know, 15 years ago. I can't imagine because I've been covering it, but it's only gotten worse. And I think this is one of the things that I find sort of fascinating about your foundation. in that your whole premise about education is about work ethic.

And the whole premise right now about education in places of higher learning is about feelings. Yeah. Nobody cares about my feelings. You know, it's my work ethic is why I have three full-time jobs. It's not because I have feelings. Me cares about my feelings. But that's the whole thing about work ethic.

You know, this country has always been like, your point of pride was your work ethic. I'm your like, did my feelings get hurt? I try and stay in my lane, but I've realized now, I don't know what my lane really truly is anymore or where their parameters are. This makes Chuck very nervous and everybody else who works with me because you run a nonprofit foundation. It's not in my interest to alienate everybody. We're about to give away a million dollars next month again, and we're going to try to get his many kids to apply for a work ethic scholarship as possible. And it's going to be a slog. It's amazingly

hard, Selena, to give away a million dollars if you ask people to make a persuasive case for themselves at a time when they've been trained not to do that. They've been trained instead to find a way to articulate their feelings and to share their fears. And just one more rich white guy shaking his fist at the heavens, telling the kids to get off of his lawn as he moans about something that feels lost. But damn it, something is lost. Look, this, just because we're talking about it, we actually turned our sweat pledge into a work ethic curriculum. Oh my gosh. This is in 30 trade schools right now, and my hope is to try and get it in the high schools. But obviously, I'm pissing up a rope. Because you go through, I mean, this is everything.

from a positive attitude to delayed gratification to personal responsibility. I don't know that it has any hope of getting into the schools. But when I look, if there's something that's opposite of what was going on in Virginia and so many other places, I think this is it. Yeah. And so it's a heck of a thing when work ethic becomes the enemy. Right. It's like work ethic and infrastructure. and essential and so many other terms, they just don't mean what I used to think they meant. No, and you know, it's a confusing time. You were so critical, you're like, oh, you know, like I'm a white guy, like who's going to listen? Actually, honestly, in my experiences in interviewing people across multiple ethnicities,

this is still an American value. Unfortunately, you can't talk about it. You can't preach about it, you know. Oh, right. You can't go in social. It can't be aspirational. Yeah, you can. However, if you go to communities on the most granular level, no matter if you're white,

Asian, black, Hispanic, there are parents out there that has value to them. And they want that for their children and they want that for their grandchildren because they believe that's the tenant of being not just successful, but also confident about yourself and make you a better member of the community. So how then do we make a persuasive case for work ethic if we're not going to preach about it or lecture about it or even talk of it in terms of its inherent aspiration? I think Dirty Jobs did a better example of that simply by showing it than really anything I've done since. And I just wonder as a writer, you know. I think your best advocates are the people that have gone through it.

They have the best stories to tell. But also you need to pinpoint people in the communities, in the black community, in the white suburban communities, in the Hispanic communities, to be your advocate, to talk about it to the schools, to be on the school board. That's how you make that persuasive argument. You know, this is where I'm going to get political for just a second, but not pick aside. But this is important, I think, to understand in the cultural shift with Hispanic voters. The Democratic Party has wildly misunderstood Hispanic voters.

They have thought of them as Hispanic voters and not as Americans. They have approached them as this entity when they see themselves as shoulder to shoulder with everybody else. and that has turned them off completely, but also one of the top small business owners groups in the country are Hispanics and blacks. You know, the small businesses are people that didn't go off to college and go to live in New York City of Manhattan, but stayed in their community and have H-MAC trucks in their suburban Baltimore backyards. I mean, that's what I see. That's who your advocates are, are those parents. Because they want to be. their communities to be made up of a lot of people just like them who value work, because that

makes community safer and makes community stronger and makes the fabric stronger between each other. But to your point, when you say communities just like them, what I hear is a community of people who share an idea and a path to something that looks like prosperity. Yes. a path that's paved with delayed gratification and personal responsibility, right? And so forth and so forth and so. But today, when you say that, it immediately goes to, well, this is a group of people who look like me or who came from the same place.

I worry, and I know this is almost hackneyed now to point out, but when we talk about CRT and when we talk about what seems to be in the headlines now, day after day after day after day, I just can't, for the life of me, imagine what Dr. King would say if he were here today. I mean, look, anybody who's going to argue persuasively or genuinely about the importance of an integrated, diverse society, has to favor a colorblind nation. Yes. You just have to. That's the goal of all of this is to get to the point where nobody gives a damn. Right.

Where you're from, who you worship, or what you look like. And it just feels to me like we're in opposite, Phil. We are so focused now on how we look and not at all looking for the similarities and what we believe to be important regarding work. That's what I meant to ask you before. When I say, how do you make a case for work ethic? I mean, how do you make a case for work ethic when there's such a persuasive case on the other side? being made for the opposite.

Well, you make it by example, obviously. And this is my experience. But my experience is we are much more the country that you just talked about, who's rooted in wanting a community to be prosperous and have a road to prosperity and to work to get it, not pull up to McDonald's and expect to be delivered your job

and delivered whatever you want. We more and more that. That has been my experience. However, these are not. the people. These are not the communities that have the megaphone. I mean, that's sort of the problem when I talk about our cultural curators and I say corporations and academia and government. Well, it's also big tech. If I had my druthers, if someone said, how do you fix the world's lane? I'm like, I got it. Take every single major corporation and get it the hell out of a

super zip code. Put it in Columbus, put it in Akron, put it in East Liverpool, Ohio. Put it down in West Virginia. Have these decision makers immersed in a culture that doesn't echo everything that they think. That's my big wish list. My co-author, Brad Todd, wrote a story once that I thought was brilliant, where he said, take the Republican National Committee and all the Alphabet Soup committees in the DNC and locate them in Columbus, Ohio, because they're surrounded by everyone that thinks just like them,

including the Republicans, Democrats, they all think alike. They have forgotten where they came from or they never came from places like Pensultaki. But honest to goodness, nobody in Washington, D.C. has ever, not one vote in Washington, D.C. has decided a presidential election. But they have in Pennsylvania and they have in Ohio. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Rowe, my mom was paid. Biggie Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel

and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades. In fact, we'd love to help you. You can apply for a work ethic scholarship right now at MicroWRow. works.org, we've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants, thanks to a number of very effective fundraisers, including the one with my grandfather's name on the label. I refer, of course,

to Noble Tennessee Whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, which is now available in a variety of delicious mash bills, all of which you can peruse at noblespirates.com. In fact, if you spend 100 bucks and use code Carl, C-A-R-L, you'll get one tube of orange bitter-infused sugar cubes for free. That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered to make nine perfect old-fashions every time. It's my favorite way to support Microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirits.com. B-E-L-S-Pirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone.

One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. We just figured it out, Selena. If a frontage road in Akron can function as a reliable indicator of what people truly want, vis-a-vis the existence of every imaginable fast food restaurant ever, then why wouldn't that work? They didn't go to Akron by accident. You don't go to D.C., New York, L.A. or San Francisco to figure out what the country really wants. You go to Akron.

You go to the middle of somewhere. You do exactly what you've been doing. And maybe to some extent, this whole forest gumpian adventure called Dirty Jobs, really did the same thing in a slightly different way. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The last frontage road I was on was in Montana along the Yellowstone River, and I went fly fishing. Are you watching Yellowstone, by the way? Uh-huh. Are you? Oh, Mike. I just had the funniest conversation with my mother, whose birthday is today, by the way.

Oh, happy birthday, Mom. Real time. Thank you. She'll love that. She hates violence. She abores it, almost as much as she detests stupidity. but my dad who's 89 he can't get enough of it man he's i mean he's like this far away from green lighting a snuff movie and so he loves he loves yellowstone and because they're in a smaller apartment now my mom has no choice you know he's deaf so it's so loud she's going to hear it no matter where she's sitting so like oh michael i might as well watch it so now she's sitting there watching yellowstone and she's just i just can't believe all this death and mayhem but the countryside sure is beautiful, isn't it? Way to make lemonade, Peg.

Oh, my gosh. My mom is watching Yellowstone for geography. There you go. But if you press her, she's like, oh, and that Beth, I mean, my goodness, what a slut. And then I say, my mom, you know, she's an English actress. She is? Oh, well, suddenly, she's totally into it. But it's a soap opera with guns. With guns and great scenery. Oh, in 1883, have you watched that yet? I have. That's also Tyler Sheridan, and he's got what Faith Hill and what's his name? Tim McGraw. Yes. And my son was just, he's driving across the country right now. He lives in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. He's driving home.

But he made me watch the Ozarks. Oh, yeah. Watch that? It's just Ozarks. Okay. But it's like me, you know, in 1990 saying the internets or the interwebs. Yeah. And my dad in 1970s saying, we're going to the Sears. Like there's only one.

There's only one. Ozarks. I also say, the Ukraine and, you know. The Ukraine. No, you can't say it. Can't do that. But it's also singular, Selena.

It's not Ozarks. It's just Ozarks. All right. Ozark. Correct. Look, if I were your editor and you wrote a story called The Ozarks about a new TV show, I'd be like, look,

I want you to go get the story you want to get but I'm going to have to insist we spell the title right. It's not a redeeming person in that show and somehow I love it. Jason Bateman's best work so far. He's always in that root. Yes. No, it's so good. I just watched the latest one. Maybe not the latest one, but I'm into the latest season and Ruth Langmore is just, it's her show. She's running away with it. And how much of her, forgive me, for anybody who's listening who hasn't seen Ozark or the Ozarks. The Ozarks on the interwebs.

But there is a character called Ruth Langmore. And, man, is she your people or what? She's something. I'm not quite sure what she is. We binge-watched it. And I needed to go get communion or something after that. Lordy, Lordy. There is a lot going on there.

But yet I couldn't stop watching. it. What was like a drug? It's like a dopium. It just couldn't like stop watching it. But check it out. Here's my theory on Ozark and Ruth in particular. Never mind the drugs, never mind the murder, never mind all of the many, many, many curious and salacious choices. What you have in Ruth and even Darlene, the older crazy woman who, spoiler alert, killed her husband. These people are really, really easy to put in. into a one-dimensional box that confirms everything you think you know about Appalachia or Lacha, Ozarks or Ozark, fill in the blank.

But they're cany, they're smart, they are intuitive, they're intelligent. And all of that stuff simmers under the stereotype. Yeah. Right? And it's so true of dirty jobs as well. Anyway, it's my theory. I'm drawn to good scripted programs. They're like Mamet. It's like a David Mamet screenwriting, right? It's like Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross for Ozark. It's just, if you've ever watched Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, there's not really anybody redeeming in that movie either. However, they're very three-dimensional, and the dialogue is compelling, and you just can't stop. We want to know what happens, even though you really don't like anybody there.

Alec Baldwin's best work, Jack Lemmon's best work, Kevin Spacey, he's never been better. Remember ABC? Always be closing. Always be closing, yeah. Maybe Mamet's best work. That's an amazing film, and everybody should watch that. And I'm not sure there's better advice, whether you're a writer or whatever I am or whatever. Always be closing.

Do you think we're all salesmen? Oh, we are. If we think about ourselves that way, we should always be our best salesman. We all have something of value to talk about, to bring to a conversation, to bring into someone's life. It doesn't matter what you do, whether you're a CPA or you're out milking a cow at 4.30 in the morning, you have something really important to talk about because all of us contribute to everything that we experience. And I think we need to do more of talking about that with value, whether them whining about things or talking about our feelings. I mean, I don't think my parents were elected all that much.

It would be like, well, I feel like, my God, get in your room for goodness saying. I want to eat right. I feel like I'll give you something to feel. Yeah, you want to feel something? Back in my hand. We have something else in common. I just thought about this. When I was in high school, I was in the.

choir and I am a member of the who's who of American talented students class in 1977 oh wow high cotton yeah what kind of choir would you sing alto or alto as they say around here alto yeah go down to Crick sing some alto that's so awesome back to the salesman thing though because it matters a lot to me more than I ever thought it would because my whole career started, you know, I was selling magazines over the telephone in college to pay for it. And so Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross hit close to home. Death of a salesman hit close to home.

You know, my first job in TV was on QVC for three years, selling crap in the middle of the night. Yeah. And so today, that doesn't seem to have a lot in common with what I'm doing, but for the fact that everything relies on persuasion. And you need to persuade your readers. I need to persuade my viewers. Certainly from a foundational standpoint, it's persuasion 101 all day, every day.

I think what you said before is really important and worth repeating in a slightly different way somehow or another. But when people see themselves as salesman, I think maybe they take a newfound responsibility for not merely expressing their feelings, but for making a case, making a case for the middle of somewhere. making a case for a dirty job, making a case for a candidate. We're all in the business of making cases. Americans have this great tradition of good storytelling that we've sort of lost, not completely lost, but it's sort of faded behind the immediate gratification of the internet, the interwebs. But you bring up a really valuable point.

You're a great storyteller. That is at the heart of who you are. So that salesperson in you is your ability to tell a good story. It's a pitch. I remember, so Harvard asked me to teach. And I thought, soon as you know, at Harvard, I don't think so. And then they asked me again. And I said, okay, but only if I can take my students out, like out of the halls of Harvard

and immerse them into different parts of the country that they would never seen before. I don't know what they were drinking, but they let me do it. And I took these kids to three different towns, Youngstown, I forget the other towns, but we didn't fly. We had to take the back road. We all went in this big band together. I had like anywhere from 17 to 30 students at a given time. And they had to live in the bed and breakfast, but they worked in a steel mill. They went to the Fiestaware factory in West Virginia and made those beautiful, colorable plates that you see.

and that's the last pottery in this country, by the way, where pottery is made in America, mass, you know, big pottery. But they also went to church. They went out with police officers. And I took them to a gun range. None of them had ever been even with in like a hundred yards of a gun. These kids were really willing and interested. I mean, these are the best in the bright.

right and if they're going to be running thing in this country you know they were really interested in having a different experience and not only did they learn to shoot a pistol one of them saw an AR sitting in the corridor and they're like can we try that and they did and they understood what it's like to do target practice and they had a great instructor former military guys spent like six hours with them each place I took those kids, each experience that those kids had, the people that talked to them, and they were just regular people, really were their best salesmen and saleswomen. They really taught these kids, not me standing in front of a podium and lecturing them, but people who would normally not have an interaction like that were selling their life,

selling their job, selling their experience, selling going to children. church. And I think that we do that well, and we should do more of that. To bring this back where we started, it wouldn't have happened without geography. You had to go to the gun range. You had to go to the place. There's a scene in death of a salesman, which I'm sure you're familiar with, but it's not a scene that gets quoted a lot or referenced a lot, but it's one of my favorite moments where Willie is talking to his, I think it's his uncle, Ben, And a very successful man. And of course, Willie's not so successful.

And he's struggling. And he can't get out of his own geography. He can't get out of his own way. And he's just so mystified by the success of Ben. He says to him, how did you do it? How did you make your money? And how did you build your empire? And how did you succeed?

And his answer was, I went into the jungle with nothing. And I came out a rich man. I always think of like what does it feel like to be a kid today and have no sense of how you can be free of your college loan and on the road to prosperity. So many people are surrounded by so many versions of Willie's uncle who just say, you know, I went into the jungle with nothing and I came out rich. And the whole thing just feels to damn mysterious and unattainable. And the point is you have to go. into the jungle. Yes. You have to go to the middle of somewhere. Yes. You've got to get out of your comfort zone and you've done that. Yeah. Well, you have to be willing to take a risk.

Mitch Daniels, he's the president or whatever. Oh, the governor of Indiana? Former governor, Indiana. He's now the president of Purdue. I love that guy. He gave the most compelling commencement speech this past year in 2021 to his students about taking race. I went out and interviewed him about it because I thought it was just, it's so simple, yet so powerful. There's a segment of society that wants to train our children from the very beginning not to take any risks. Well, my dad used to say you can't get to third base if you don't take your foot off of second, which I'm sure everybody's dad's told them that as well. But it's true, you gotta take a risk.

You might get out. You might not. not. You might score. Your team might win because of you. Your team might hate you because of you. But you got to be able to take that risk. And we need to instill that value in our students. What we're doing, and this is back to the cultural curators, but all of our cultural curators are trying to sort of nullify risk out of our lives. Don't do anything that makes you feel unsafe. Don't do anything that hurts your feelings. Don't interact with people that are different with. you. You literally need a dictionary to understand the words you're allowed to say and not say these guys. You need to like carry it around with you. We're making our kids head cases. And it better be a very, very up-to-date dictionary because as we've said, the definition of everything is changing every week. I mean, did you see that anti-vax? Now it's Ozarks. It's the Ozarks. Now they're down to just one Ozark. Miriam Webster has officially changed the definition of anti-vax.

to those who oppose mandates. That to me is one of the most incredible shifts ever. That's also not true. Yeah, but Miriam Webster says it is. You know, there's a whole generation of kids who, they're going to look stuff up. They're going to look up infrastructure. They're going to look up essential.

They're going to look up anti-vax. It's changing in front of our face. And it's backfiring to the people that are changing it. This is why our political parties have changed. It is forcing people more rightward, even if it's not their natural intuition. Because it's in our DNA. It might not seem like it if you go on the interwebs or the Twitters, but it's in our DNA to be skeptical of all things big.

And I see this across the country, people quietly just pushing back. Really, does Miriam Webster really say that about anti- Yes, that's been the most recent, official updating of what that term means. I think language is so important. Yes. Education is such a huge topic. And if you put the word higher in front of the word education, then you can't help but implicitly suggest that there are forms that are lower.

Yeah. And once you tell somebody that they're- Yeah, guess what? You're perfect for the lower education we've been imagining for you. Okay, you're going to be great. Now, we don't call it lower, but we call it alternative. And so into that bucket goes trade schools and community colleges and so forth and so on. So I know you see this as a writer day after day, but I swear to God, maybe we should start to land the plane. God, I've been talking you for an hour and 23 minutes. I got all the time in the world, but this could really go on forever. But your take on Let's Go Brandon happened around the same time as I kind of lost it. I know I saw years after I wrote mine. I swear to God. Rather from another mother. It has something to do just to sum up.

Selina and I both in our own way said that that expression is not merely code for saying F. Joe Biden. It's something much bigger. and it has to do with our words being redefined in front of us. And even more, I think, it has to do with the feelings so many people have when they are looking at something. And they can see it with their own eyes and they're being told that they're not seeing what they're looking at. It makes you crazy. And to me, that's what let's go, Brandon. And you're exactly right.

And I've talked to people all over across the country about this. It's absolutely right. By the way, if you drive across Pennsylvania, sign that. are everywhere. People think it went away. The other thing that's interesting to me is you still see 13 beers for the men and women that lost their lives in Afghanistan. You still see 13 beers at bars or 13 chairs in town squares. These things have left an imprint. And one of the things I think that DC report, I mean, they were so, like they had their panties in a bunch over this. Are we not allowed to have a sense of humor? Also, like I wanted to add that on top of it.

It's because these people, these people, these people take government so seriously. Like, you know, government is church, right? It's the most important thing. However, people that live in the middle of somewhere, government's something to be skeptical of. So it's okay to laugh at it. Like, what happened to the men and women of the 60s and 70s where we grew up where it was like middle finger to the establishment? What happened to them? Like Neil Young?

Yeah. Dude, it's oppositeville. It is. How in the world, how does Neil Young become the guy who says it's me or Joe Rogan, right? How in the world does, if you had told me a year ago that the four dead and Ohio guy, if you had told me that that dude would be the one calling for a measure of censorship, I just don't know how much. further it goes until it truly goes splat. I mean, mind-boggling. It is absolutely mind-boggling. I don't know what happened to these 60s and 70s revolutionaries. They got power. They got power. They got power. And it turns out they're worse than the ones before. Yeah. Was it either always an act or you got power

and you sold out. But you aren't whoever you said you were. Meet the new boss just like the old boss. is what you were going to say, Mike. No, it's Roger Daltrey. But for Neil Young, it doesn't matter if Robert Malone, who I think was the guest that upset Neil Young on the Rogan podcast, yeah, we ought to have the conversation about whether it was accurate or inaccurate, but we're not. We're having the conversation as to whether or not it should even exist.

Are we allowed to talk about this? And of all people, for Neil Young to say, no, I don't think we should. But I mean, wow. It's like Bizarro Superman, right? Do you remember Bizarro Superman when we were kids? Yes. That's what big tech, that's what all of these cultural curators live in. They live in an alternative universe.

A lot of them are driven, not Neil Young. I saw a lot of people tweet, who's you, Neil Young? So, you know, there's that. Right. But they've just lost touch with the common person, with the everyday, person. Do you ever feel like the kid in that Hans Christian Anderson, the emperor's new clothes? To try and sum up the general feeling that I've gotten over the years from just being in a lot of the towns you go and just talking to regular people, it's this growing idea that that's who they are.

They're standing there and they're looking at the emperor and he's naked. But everybody around them is saying, gosh, what a handsome outfit. You just look great. It takes a kid. It takes a kid to finally get the crowd to go, oh yeah, well, I guess he is naked. Yeah, absolutely. When I used to be on Twitter,

I'm still on Instagram, pretty pictures, but when I used to be on Twitter, I can remember feeling, it's part of why I left. Because I felt like I was straddling two different dimensions. The one that were real people live,

and then the one where Twitter lives. The position that most of the people, and there's a great Pew research study that shows that this is true, that it's mostly people that live in wealth and power that have the most followers and spend most of their time there. And I just can remember thinking,

well, I need to get off of this place because everything I read on here has like nothing to do with anybody I've ever talked to. It's not formed in reality. And it's people repeating the same story back and forth rather than actually being curious to explore what the story really is. I think that's why what you're doing is so important. Not just because you're doing it well, but because your stories exist in places like The Examiner, which can get out all over the place. You're not just preaching to the choir.

Honestly, it's the same reason I agreed to put dirty jobs back on after a 10-year hiatus. It reaches people who I could otherwise not reach. Do you worry that we're going to have a Twitter for every specific group and we're going to lose any kind of diversity in our social platforms if we haven't already? One of the things I loved about Twitter in the beginning was it was really fun to meet different people and exchange ideas. And it was interesting, right, for the first couple of years. But if you start to say things, I mean, I had people try to cancel me on Twitter. It was an absolutely horrible thing.

And the worst part was they didn't even have a name. They were anonymous. If those kinds of antics continue, I do worry that we're going to be all segmenting. However, what gives me great heart is the amount of people that don't use Twitter. They just don't. They live their lives. They do the best that they can. in their communities and they have social fabrics that are outside of Twitter.

Twitter isn't a real, it is a social fabric that's based on rumor. Whereas when you're interacting with someone face-to-face, you have to conduct yourself in a much more honest and authentic way. Based on the amount of people that use Twitter, you know, you would think if you talk to a reporter, well, I saw it on Twitter or I read it on Twitter, that it was like, oh, the whole country is on Twitter. This much of the country is on Twitter, and most of the lives in Washington, D.C., New York, or Silicon Valley.

If the movie Mean Girls were a social platform, it would be Twitter. The thing that I still can't get over is serious journalists, doing their best serious journalist impersonation. We'll start a news report with, and so-and-so, had a tweet today. We've gotten used to it. But it's such a stupid word. I equate it to like a fart, right? Like a tweet is like a fart.

And sometimes they can be really loud and noisy and everybody's head will snap around as if to say, who farted. And sometimes they don't make any sound at all, but they still stink up the room, right? And people are looking around going, oh, you know, somebody must have tweeted. But in the end, it's just a thing that everybody can do. everybody does do, it seems like. But really, I wish we didn't tweet so much in the same way. I wish we farted a little less. I wish you'd never started that analogy.

Sorry, man. I'm just trying to land a plane. I think it's pretty awesome. So to me, journalists have become lazy. It's really this just mind-boggling thing. Not only do they not pick up the phone and call like a politician, they'll be like, can you text me your answer? And they're like, oh, can you text your question?

I had someone the other day who's this agriculture secretary in Pennsylvania. Well, you're gonna have to send your questions first. I'm like, I'm not sending my questions to you. I wouldn't do that for a guy running or a woman running for president. I'm gonna do with a secretary of agriculture. Are you crazy? But that told me everything about what my profession accepts as an interview. Do you know what there's like 32 people that are gonna be saw you?

people that are going to massage that and message it before you get it back in your email and you know they didn't say it. I don't know if you have enough information out of the last 90 minutes to write an article. But what I said to Chuck was, look, there's nothing I would say on this podcast under any circumstances that I wouldn't say to a reporter on the record. So I don't know why we don't do this more often. If you're going to be accessible, if you're going to be accessible, if you're going to be. going to give an interview, the best interviews I've ever had are no different than the best

conversations I've ever had. And the best articles I've ever read are articles that capture the conversation. Absolutely. When I get home after doing, you know, several, by the way, I'm like always on the road. Car breaks down. Sometimes I get a flat tire. I've had some really interesting experiences. When I get home, I have hours and hours and hours and hours of transcripts. And I'm happy because I've had this really meaningful. And it helps me tell their story better. So a podcast does that, I think. I think that your podcast is great storytelling.

I always love to listen to it. Honestly, I'm going to be like a fan girl right now. I'm like really thrilled that I'm here because I've always thought of you as like my brother, like doing something else. Well, thanks. I don't understand. I've had people from water authorities, not just. the Secretary of Agriculture tell me, well, you're going to have to email your questions. Like, that's not happening. So that's my problem with journalism today. They have accepted

getting a massaged quote by 3224-year-olds as an answer from a Secretary of Agriculture in Pennsylvania. And all I was going to ask them about was energy. By the way, they were 30 feet from me in the farm show complex. Yeah. Come on. And the other problem with journalism is they don't leave. And if they do leave, they fly into a place. This is the thing I have to say this, because this was so important to me in 2016. If you remember the initial reports about the rallies for Trump, they were like, violent and all these crazy people were there. And so the first one I went to, my boss was like, are you okay? I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. It wasn't Akron or somewhere, like Trumbull County. It was like over there in Ohio. I'm saying over there because I live in

Pennsylvania. It's right there. See you from my house. I remember I did my thing. I drove back roads. I stayed in the bed and breakfast. I got there a couple days ahead of time, got to know the community, went to a high school football game,

went to church, went bowling, like to get to know the community. And then I went to the event. And I went like six hours early. And I was like, this was like a Dave Matthews concert. There was like a beach. ball going across the crowd people bought their grandmothers they brought their kids they bought their Harbachi they brought their folding chair and I was like

this is so different and everyone was happy it was like happy and I go to the press area and then the press comes and they come in a bus okay they got to the bus from a plane they got to the plane from Washington DC they missed all that stuff that I saw in between and they get there seven minutes early and your intuition as a reporter like what stands out. So at a Trump rally, well, who's dressed in 32 American flags? Who has a Confederate flag on? And then I would watch the stories. And the stories would be like they would all have literally the same story. They would pick out the same four weird people out of 25,000. And the story would be about those four weird people. And they missed everything else

that happened with the people, let alone, they would also pick out three things that Trump would say that was, you know, offended their sensibilities. However, missing him talking about work ethic, we're missing him talking about economic opportunity. And I just was struck by there's so much value you have lost and you don't understand what's happening because you think everyone is an oddball. And by God, this can't be happening to our country.

Had you listened to those people, it was never about him. It was always about them. It was always about their community. And it is only getting larger. If they go out there right now, they would understand that it's always getting larger. They were as baffled by what was happening there as Willie Lohman was by his uncle's success. All they heard was he went into the jungle with nothing and came out a rich man. I went to a Trump rally and all I saw was a guy in a Confederate flag and this one juggling pies and so forth and so on.

It's the old blind man grabs an elephant by the tusk and reasonably concludes he's hanging on to an ivory monument. You grab it by the tail. You think it's something else altogether. We just don't have a sense of the animal. You don't. That I think is the problem with my performance. profession. It's what is contributed to our disconnect with the media. The other problem is, I mean, we have so many media deserts out there, so many places where there's no newspaper.

You can go in places across this country where there's four counties that don't have local news. And if you don't have someone in a local newsroom that's either covering things or doing investigative work, someone that sits in the same few as you on Sunday, someone who coaches your kid's little league, whose parents grew up in the neighborhood, that local journalism is missing, and it's part of our problem with journalism. So I try to cover things like I'm a local.

Well, you're doing a hell of a job, seriously. Studies show that nobody listens to anything after an hour and 41 minutes, and that's where we are right now. Really, I would like to talk to you for another. hour. But seriously, are you going to write something based on this conversation? Absolutely. From this conversation, I want to talk to some of the kids. I really want to maybe go and go and meet some of them before you kick off your scholarship drive. Awesome.

But I think those stories are really compelling because nothing tells your story better than someone who's experienced it. It's taken that journey. Not that you're not moving, Mike. you're a very moving man even with your far Twitter jokes thank you but I have enough here to write a great story but what even is a more important story is for young people that have come up through and up and found themselves and are contributing to making us a better place to live thank you we have 1,400 examples chuckle hook you up with whatever you need yeah I propose we just post this entire conversation exactly as it is, if for no other reason to give listeners a chance to see, like we said, there's a difference between an interview, a conversation, a story,

breaking news, all these things, right? I believe that the best stories and the best writers have conversations like this all of the time. And so, you know, make me sound smart, would you? Pardon me for one second. If you want to read a very good writer, you should go to Selena dot com. It will link to you have stuff with the Washington Examiner. Post Gazette and the New York Post. New York Post. Sign up for my emails. They're free. They're fun and they're not fattening. It has snowed the entire time I've talked to you. I'm going to have to go out and redo my driveway for the 90th time in three days. The struggle is real. Sleena. You know what? During this conversation on my computer, two alerts have come up. And I assume it's about the bridge in Pittsburgh talking about people coming together,

forming human chains, saving their neighbors. I mean, how weird to talk about that and then to see a news alert pop up with the same thing. Chuck will laugh. The titles for these things usually come at the very end of it, but somewhere between the death of a salesman thing and this idea of a human bridge being used to save people during the collapse of a mechanism. one. There's our theme, Chuck. That's how you land the plane. A bridge in Pittsburgh. A bridge too far. I think I would go a conversation about the middle of somewhere. Or we just call it the middle of somewhere and just really shameless people. Or we just keep talking. We never need to come up with a title because it never ends. It really never ends. It's the podcast that never ends.

Oh no, that's Rogan. Three and a half hours the other day. That's crazy. I try and listen to What he does, it's very difficult to set three and a half hours aside. I'm listening to double speed now. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Are you guys snowing here in California? There's no snow. No, there's no snow. Just snowflakes.

Ah, I see what I did. He'll be here all week, folks. We are the clouds from which the snowflakes fell, Selena. Sadly. That's a good one. That's so true. It's so true. I didn't raise snowflakes, just so you know.

I believe it. Again, your hair is fantastic. A close second, only to your rapier wit and your commitment to your chosen field. So thank you. Thanks, guys.