Mike Rowe became a national name as host of the massively popular reality TV show Dirty Jobs, in which he traveled around the country and got his hands literally dirty, learning what hardworking Americans do daily to make a living. He has since gone on to head up the nonprofit Mike Rowe Works, which has awarded millions in work ethic scholarships, and he's produced more widely popular content. Mike's latest Labor of Love is a feature-length film, part documentary part narrative that's soon to be out in theaters. In this episode, we sit down with Mike in our Nashville studio to discuss his new film, Something to Stand For, and why he believes America is not just hungry, but starving for something to unite around. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief, John Bickley. It's June 22nd, and this is a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.

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Joining us now to discuss his new movie, Something to Stand For and the Issues Driving It, is Mike Row. Mike, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

Now, it's wonderful to have you here in the studio. First time that you've been here with us. I watched your film and I got to say, I got a little teared up at times. I laughed a lot. But I came away thinking, you present it as something that's going to unite the country. And what strikes me about it is the tone, which is that there's not a hint of cynicism in this film. And I thought maybe we could start by talking big picture. What was your vision for the film and why do you think it's so needed at this time?

Well, first of all, with regard to cynicism, I'll say it like this. I wrote a book a few years ago, and the epigram was from John D. Mcdonald and his series of books about Travis McGee. This is a fictitious character upon whom most of my business model has been based, weirdly enough. But among many quotable things, McGee said, I'm wary of a great many things in this life But above all, I am wary of all earnestness. For a long time, that informed my worldview in the '80s and '90s and shows coming along that were always ironic and always cynical about this, that, or the other. And 20 years of Dirty Jobs, I always had my tongue in my cheek, and I was always open to the idea that we were going to debunk something. And I feel like, I don't know when exactly, John, but I think we turned some corner and we've left the age of irony. And things are briddle and people are looking for something they can trust. And that trust in the traditional institutions has eroded. And so there is an opportunity, I think, to be earnest in spite of McGee's warnings.

And I think there's an opportunity to embrace a certain sentimentality. You can't do it unctuously. It needs to be honest or at least personal. And so that's what the movie is. It's nine stories that I wrote over the years in the style of Paul Harvey's, the rest of the Story. Because they're all patriotic in nature, I thought stitching them together with a field trip of sorts to DC might be a fun way to look at history and mystery and current events and stories storytelling, and just smear it all together into a bouillabase of, well, why not? It's Independence Day.

Yeah, to give the audience a sense of what the film is, like you said, there are nine stories, vignettes. There's a mystery element to each of them. Can you explain the narrative approach to each of these stories?

Yeah. I mean, look, there are no new ideas. I would love to tell you that I've stumbled across some new way to tell the tale. Paul Harvey Jr. And Paul Harvey mastered this in the late '70s and throughout the '80s with the rest of the story, where essentially, over maybe eight minutes, you learn something you didn't know about somebody you do. So they would just tell stories of famous people from the inside out. And I loved that format. I can still remember the transister radio up in the woodpile where my dad and my grandfather and I were chopping wood. Our house was heated by as Woodstoves. And Paul Harvey was always on that radio telling us stories. And I remember, I read about this in my book a few years ago, Missing a flight. I was driving to BWI and I was in long term parking and I was running late. And just before I got out, Paul Harvey comes on with one of his tales. And I can't leave, man. I have to sit there and wait for him to say, And now you know the rest of the story. And I missed my flight.

That storytelling, brief mysteries for the Curious Mind with a Short Attention Span. That interested me. And so what came out the other end was a podcast with about 250 stories in it called The Way I Heard It. That turned into a TV show that I didn't think anybody would watch but was wrong. We did six seasons. And now we're looking at how to adapt these things to the big screen. And the first and most obvious thing to do was to try and make a good-natured case for things that we can still agree or literally figuratively worth standing for. I didn't write it for liberals or Conservatives or Republicans or Democrats. I wrote it for people who still see themselves first and foremost as Americans. In that regard, it's not a political film by any stretch, but it is unapologetically patriotic. That might create, for some, a measure of cognitive dissonance that's just too bad.

That is too bad. Now, there's quite a few stories about veterans in your film. There's also stories about people taking some of our great monuments and vandalizing them. That can be a pretty touchy subject for some people. You chose to highlight that now. Why?

Well, I've been fortunate over the years in a couple of occasions where the headlines catch up to whatever it is I'm involved in and make it relevant in ways that I didn't really anticipate. Happened with Dirty Jobs when our country recessed back in 2009, and all of a sudden, we were desperate to have a conversation about the definition of a good job. I just happened to be a guy on the TV and people were asking my opinions and, well, I shared them. Same thing with my foundation. Today, today. And to your point, we saw the craziness in Lafayette Square. We've been reading about it for the last couple of years and struggling, I think, as a people, to try and get our heads around the fact that two things can be true at the same time. We've always known that the right to burn the flag has to exist in order for the flag to mean anything at all. We get that. But it feels like if you're going to do that, you really need to be able, you should be able to explain why you're doing it. And the thing that rankled me was that I'm not hearing cogent explanations for the vandalism, for the defacement, for the rage.

I'm open to it, but I haven't heard it. I didn't really write the movie for those people, but I did write it because of them, because I think the fat part of the bat, most of us, most of us, 330 million people, no matter how we vote, still know in our bones that something extraordinary happened that gave us the right to deface our statuary and burn the flag and do all of these other things. We owe it to ourselves, I think, and to our forebears to at least understand what the price was that was paid. To your point, it's not just founding fathers. It's not just famous people who we look back at through the mists of time. It's the 13 guys who died during the Afghan withdrawal. It's any man or woman who ever wore a uniform, who ever raised their hand, who ever took an oath, and who ever meant it. Surely we can stand for them.

On the topic of monuments, actually, it strikes me that the way you piece together these stories of famous figures from our past, in many ways, you're creating little mini monuments to some of these folks and highlighting in these stories the fact that they are flawed. I'd love to hear, for the audience's sake, maybe one or two of those stories that you decided to tell Jack Lucas got me. I'd love to hear you talk about that, some of these flawed figures that are ultimately worth celebrating.

Well, spoiler alert. This will wreck the mysteries for a couple of these stories, but I'm happy to do it. I also want to say before I do it that when you build a monument to a thing, it can be very tangible. I mean, you can literally be a sculptor. You can We literally, physically create a work of art for that purpose. But you guys do it every day depending on who you point your microphones at. And I did it for a long time on Dirty Jobs, depending on who we point our cameras at. That's the modern state of statuary. We get to decide what we want to elevate by what we share, and obviously by the stories that we tell. Jack Lucas was a guy who I read about when I was a kid. The short version is, like a lot of people, after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted to fight for his country. And he wound up in Hawaii, and then he wound up on a carrier headed to Iwo Jima. And then it was discovered that he was a deserter, and he was called in to basically be court-martialed on the ship. The captain's there.

He's livid. What did this guy do? What was his crime? What led him to desert his post? Well, the story essentially reveals that when he enlisted, he lied. He lied to his mother. He lied to his family. He lied to his enlistment officer. He lied to everybody. And he lied because he was 14. And he got stationed in spite of that, and he kept up the And then he stowed away. He left his post to get on the carrier to go to Iwa freaking Jema. Okay? Into hell. Into hell. And by that point, I think he was made E. B. 16. And what he said to his commanding officer, persuaded him, the officer, to let him fight. And what he did on Iwo Jema, and this I spoil, but what he did turned him into the youngest person ever to win the Medal of Honor. That story is not entirely new, but I would say that the vast majority of people, even listening to this show, didn't know it. When I'm looking around for things that the most strident opponents might be able agree upon, surely we can agree that that thing in Jack Lucas.

Surely we can look at that and go, All right, that's something. 70% of Americans in 1998 describe themselves as intensely to extremely patriotic. That number today is 39%, and under 35, that number is closer to 18 or 19%. So Jack Lucas would not recognize these times.

About this younger generation, a culture is created by the stories that are shared. You're a storyteller. I feel like there's a great power in recognizing, first of all, the role that storytellers play and the responsibility they have to tell the stories that matter. When you went through the stories that you chose for this film and the stories you've chosen for your podcast and for Dirty Jobs, what was the process like for you in terms weeding out who it is you should point the microphone toward and what stories you should tell? Is it complicated or is this usually pretty obvious to you?

Well, it's not complicated, but it's ephemeral and it's always in... It's very fluid. In the same way, the times are fluid. And going back to that earnestness beat, I've always been wary of it because that's the quality that allows soap salesmen to succeed. It's the The quality that allows news anchors to be believed even when they're dead wrong and narrators to believe. Listen to how certain I sound when I tell you there are two trillion galaxies, which I did on a show called How the Universe Works, only to go in two weeks later to tell you that, in fact, it's only 100 million. So I'm basically off by two trillion, right? And I sound the same, by the way.

I believe both statements simultaneously.

The point is, when I'm off by 2 trillion, I sound just as sure of myself when I'm not, right? And so being surrounded by all of that certain noise and knowing that earnestness is a part of that, yeah, man, it informed every single thing I did, all the way up to the title. Not of the film, but of the podcast that the stories were pulled from. It's called The Way I Heard It. And that title was my rejoinder to Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story. And I didn't want to just shamelessly steal it from him, but I wanted to update it. I asked myself in 2015, 2016, what's really emblematic right now? What should the disclaimer be at the end of the news, for instance? Walter Cronkite used to say, and that's the way it is. August 12th, 1972. Well, you know something? That's not the way it is in 2024. In 2024, it's, Well, that's the way I heard it. You may I've heard it differently. In fact, I'm pretty sure you have. In fact, if you want to prove it, I'm pretty sure you can reach for your device, do a quick search, and find half a dozen experts who agree with you.

I'll find the experts who agree with me. Maybe sometimes these experts are historians, maybe sometimes they're scientists, and maybe sometimes they're politicians or journalists or members of whatever institutions are now currently at all time low trust levels. That's a long way of saying, I wanted to balance the earnestness of my own interest in the topic with something that looks like humility. I wanted to say, I could be wrong. Probably am. I wasn't in the room when Lincoln signed the emancipation. I wasn't there when Jefferson wrote the declaration. I wasn't there when Reagan said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. But I've seen the footage and I've heard the conflicting stories about what informed that moment. I don't want to be confused with going out into the world with some declarative explanation of how it happened. What I want to say is, what a wonderful thing to have enough information at our disposal, to take a deeper dive as we want, and then put together something that most of us can agree looks an awful lot like what surely must have happened, and rally around the idea. Jack Lucas was real for sure. We can prove it.

But I wasn't on that troop transport, and I wasn't there when his commanding officer dressed him down. But man, the cinema lover in me is there. I can imagine that moment and bringing that to life for Independence Day. That's a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Every final statement you make in a question is a great ending for a podcast. I'm going to ask you one more question, though.

With respect to Shakespeare.

That might be the end. Sorry. I'm glad you brought up experts. There has never been a time, I feel, in recent history, where the experts are so doubted and for such good reason. You said it, there's experts on every side of every issue. There's not just two sides. There's infinite number of sides. At the One result is we trust none of the experts. I feel like part of the power of you is you're an every man going through life, observing, telling us how you saw it, and doing it in a way that is expert in every sense. Do you feel there is a hunger now for a different mode of engaging with information, how to make sense of the world, how to tell the story of the human experience, the American experience? Are people hungry for that? Do you find that there's an audience for that?

Not hungry, starving, ravenous. I think the best way to explain the fact that there are three and a half million podcasts today where there were none 20 years ago. Have you ever gone through a museum for the first time and not really know where to go and looking at things but not quite understanding? For sure. What you need in a moment like that is a docent. I was in Munich not long ago, and I went to the Munich Museum, which is a wonderful and really detailed look at everything that led right up to the first World War, right up to the end of the second. Five floors, Panoramas, so much history and so much to take in. And I would have been lost had one of their experts not taken me by the arm and spent three hours walking me through it. That's what we We have now at our disposal for the first time in history, 98 % of all the known information in the history of the world. It's right there. It's right there on your device. It's right there on mine. But we lack the compass. We're like Magellan with no sense of direction out in the middle of the North Atlantic, with no sextant, no star.

We're all trying to dead-reckon in the middle of a rough tempestium you a sea, and it's scary. And so, yeah, we look for stars. We look for harbangers. We look for guides. Sometimes it looks like Rogan. Sometimes it looks like Malcolm Gladwell for some. Other times it looks like Douglas Murray for others. And if you haven't seen that debate at the Oxford Union, I highly recommend it.

Indeed.

So what a great example of exactly what we're talking about. Two certain people coming from completely different places and having a chance, you might as well say pistols at dawn. That's what that debate was. But what a wonderful opportunity for thousands of curious, mildly confused people to sit back and watch and then think about it and then say the way they heard it. It's not going to be easy, John, this landscape of opinions. But What it really means, I believe, is that the rules of persuasion are going to evolve and we're going to look for our docents, and we're all going to have to balance this weird measure of earnestness and skepticism. Because if I heard what I think was implicit in your question, we have to be skeptical. Skepticism is the armor to keep us from buying all of the soap from all of the soap salesmen. But the minute that skepticism is perceived by maybe someone who disagrees, then we don't become skeptical, we become deniers, just like that. And so that's where we are today in the headlines today. My hope is that by looking at the headlines 160, 150, 80 years ago, we can start to see that we have been here before.

Different tools, but same stakes, same species.

And we made it through stronger often.

Here we sit, cogitating, naval glazing, reflecting. Right.

Now, your film is making its way into theaters, which is a major step, and we're starting to see this with more independent media companies getting their films on the big screen. In fact, the Daily Wire is partnering with Angel Studio to release The Sound of Hope on July fourth. Where can people see your film and where can they find it online?

We're We're looking at about a thousand theaters on June 27th that will premiere the film, and it will run through the fourth of July, thankfully, because that's really why we did it. And the trailer will give you a good sense. It's something to stand for. Movie. You can get tickets there, look at some behind-the-scenes photos. How much time do we have? Because I'd be remiss if I didn't share one quick thing with you. Please do it. I spent a lot of time working in the medium where no second takes were allowed. That was Dirty Jobs. That shooting was blisteringly honest and the opposite of deliberate. Making a movie is not. Making a movie is a script, and in this case, a script that revolved around nine pre-existing scripts that were all brought to life. In other words, everything was super intentional. When I went to stitch it all together in DC, we had a shot list, and I had a director, and there was a crew, and we knew exactly what we needed to get before we got out of Dodge. Standing there in the World War II Memorial, waiting for my cue, everything set up.

We got the light set up, and I'm going to walk and talk and make some sounds, and it's going to be lovely. An honor flight shows up on the other side of the Memorial. Dozen old men in wheelchairs, and their families are with them, and volunteers are there, and they're being wheeled in. And I just couldn't take my eyes off one of these guys. And I said to the director, Follow me over here. Grab the camera. And his name was Andy Michael. He was 91. He was in Korea, same time my dad was. And he'd never been to this memorial. And John, when you see tears streaming down a 91 your old face. I ask him what it meant to be there. And the old guy looks around at all the stars that are on that wall, and he looks back at me, and he says what he says. You saw it. You saw the movie. So I'm telling you this because even now, I'm out there with my plan. I'm pretty sure I know what I'm doing. I've been at this a long time. And the whole point of the movie, the whole purpose of the movie reveals itself in a completely unplanned moment.

Now, what schmuck would not put that in the film? I had to. And so, once again, it's so humbling to find the thing you need in a place you weren't even looking.

In a beautiful moment. I can't actually speak about it. It gets me too much. Mike, thank you so much for coming on. Pleasure. Great luck with this film. Thank you. That was Mike Row talking about his new film, Something to Stand For, out in theaters on June 27th. And this has been a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.