Saturday Bonus Podcast - Dirty Jobs Host Mike Rowe On Finding Your Identity Outside Your Work-Part 1
December 20, 2025 • 22 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
To Michael Marry Show, we've told a whole generation of
kids that your happiness depends on what you do, not
who you are, and we've given them a roadmap that
takes them right off a cliff, and we've encouraged them,
for their trouble, to borrow more money than they'll ever
(00:21):
be able to pay back, money by the way, that
we can't even afford to lend them to train them
for jobs that don't exist anymore. Everything is backwards. You know.
The machinery's changed, but unfortunately so too as the mindset.
And I think that's what we should maybe talk about.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
It's safety third.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
You had a fifty to fifty shot. Yeah, it was
either up or down.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Up for down. So it's safety third and it's micro
for one solid hour. Welcome to Colorado.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Safety first. If Bosha got it wrong, what if it's
really safety third? Right? And so when I say safety third,
just because you're in compliance, does it mean you're out
of danger? Safety third? We oh Safety third was a
turn of phrase that came out of Dirty Jobs about
(01:17):
ten twelve years ago, and it was in direct response
to an expression you'll be more familiar with, which was,
of course, safety first. Safety is important. Everybody knows that
who's ever worked around machines like this or has just
tried to get through life. Safety matters a great deal.
But on Dirty Jobs we always look for the unintended
(01:40):
consequence of a thing, and we always tried to look
at bromides and platitudes and cookie cutter advice with some suspicion,
because the unintended consequences of following pat advice can be
very steep, especially in the vocational art. And so what
(02:01):
happens when you tell somebody safety is first. What happens
when you tell a worker that the most important thing
in the world is their safety, Well, that's a well
intended thing to say, but if you say it often enough,
then you run the risk, in my opinion, of creating
(02:21):
an air of complacency that ultimately puts people in harm's way.
What happened to us on Dirty Jobs was really simple.
For the first two years of that show, we went
to the most hazardous places in the country, a crew
of greenhorns who went out into the world to try
(02:42):
and give our viewers an honest look at what work
looked like. Now, we were frightened because by and large
we were in places that could rip you into very
small pieces, with all kinds of machinery that was truly
truly hazardous. Right, So we were very very mindful of
our surroundings, and we sat through all of the safety
(03:03):
protocols and all of the safety meetings like this, right Like,
we paid attention because we had a lot of skin
in the game. So for the first two years of
dirty jobs, whether it was on a crab boat or
whether it was on top of a windmill or at
the bottom of a coal mine, nobody got hurt, not once,
because we were very very focused on the work. We
(03:26):
were very much of a safety first mindset. Season three,
everything fell to pieces. I broke two fingers, a toe,
cracked a rib, and fused my eyebrows off my cameraman
same thing. Everybody on the show got hurt, thankfully, no
one catastrophically, but there were lots of stitches, sprains, brakes, contusions,
(03:50):
and concussions. What happened, what I think happened, was after
sitting through maybe sixty mandatory briefings, all of the safety
first banners, all the nomenclature, all the orthodoxy, we stopped
paying attention. It started sounding Remember the teacher and the
(04:10):
Charlie Brown things. Wowow, missus Oathmark. That's what all the
safety professionals started to sound like. We just simply stopped
focusing on lockout tag out procedures. We went through the
confined space training, but we didn't really pay attention. Safety
first became a thing that ultimately created in us an
(04:33):
impression that somebody cared more about our well being than
we did, and that impression was the beginning of the
end for our health and well being. So I started
saying safety third to my crew members simply to break
(04:53):
through the noise and remind them that in the end,
real safety, which is safety always, is a combination of
personal responsibility and focus and the unintended consequence of letting
somebody know that you care more about their well being
than they do. That, in my view, leads to all
(05:15):
sorts of trouble.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
You're sitting in a as it were, you coined the
phrase a cathedral to work. There's seven million jobs waiting
to be filled by people that could run a drill press,
run a lathe deal with these kind of things, and
somehow work got redefined in a unique way. So take
(05:40):
me to your counselor's office in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Mister Dunbar, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Because you were a potential victim of an attempt to
change work.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
A well intended attempt. You know, I don't want to
shake my finger at anybody. But in the mid late seventies,
we decided as a culture that more people needed to
get an advanced degree. And we were probably right. We
needed more people to enthusiastically pursue a university education. But
(06:16):
in order to convince people that their best chance of
success was a four year degree, we began promoting four
year degrees at the expense of all the other forms
of education. And so we do this in so many
different ways. But for me, I remember mister Dunbar calling
me down was Office nineteen seventy nine, and he wanted
(06:38):
to talk about my future. You know, it's time to
talk about your future mine. And I'd done okay on
some college entrance exams and he looked at my scores
and said, your future is University of Maryland, University Pennsylvania,
maybe James Madison and I couldn't afford any of those schools.
And more to the point, Matt, I didn't I didn't
know what I wanted to do, and so a liberal
(06:59):
arts degree he was expensive. It would have required me
to go into debt borrow money. That wouldn't have played
well in my home. And so my strategy was to
go to a two year school, take all the different
kinds of courses I could find, and see if something sparked,
you know, And at twenty six bucks a credit, I
could afford to be wrong at that point. So I
(07:20):
told this to my guidance counselor, and he said, that's
all beneath your potential. And then he pointed to a
poster behind his head on the wall, and his question
was which one of these guys do you want to be?
And on the poster were two men, one a young
graduate from a college, dressed in a cap and gown
(07:42):
holding his diploma sunrising before him a wash in optimism,
and next to him was a skilled worker in a
dirty environment, looking down at the ground holding a wrench,
looking very much like he had just won some vocational
consolation prize, and the caption the caption said work smart,
(08:05):
not hard, and so as near as I can figure it,
the war against traditional work began around the same time
the push for a very specific kind of education embarked.
And so while we started telling a whole generation that
(08:25):
the best path for the most people was a four
year degree, we also started telling them that if you
don't go in that direction, you're going to wind up
like the guy in the photo, looking dirty and miserable
and doomed. Around the same time, we took shop class
out of high school. When we did that, we removed
(08:48):
all vestige of what an entire chunk of our workforce
actually looks like. Wood shop, metal shop, auto shop, all
this stuff. Right, It doesn't matter if you're allultimately into
it or not. When you're fifteen or sixteen years old.
There's nothing more persuasive to discourage you from thinking about
(09:09):
something than removing all proof of its existence. And that's
what we did. We took shop class out of high school.
We started telling an entire generation that if it wasn't
a four year degree, you were doomed. Flash forward to today,
one point six trillion dollars in outstanding student loans, seven
and a half million jobs that don't require a four
(09:30):
year degree but require training and skill. The skills gap
and the cost of college are not problems, they're symptoms.
They're symptoms of a larger disconnect with work and to
the extent that I'm able with dirty jobs and somebody's
(09:52):
got to do it. And my foundation we simply try
to show the country examples of people who have bridged
that disconnect by learning a skill that's in demand, by
figuring out how to operate that thing or that thing
or whatever it is, and by not making skilled training
the enemy.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
You know, we just were making this up as we go,
but that poster got my attention. You've, through your foundation,
you've made these posters up. And if there's a telephone
number on the screen, call it. If it's an email address,
email us, and we want to get you one of
these things.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
And Matt, let me explain it before and after. Just
some people are clear, I didn't really tell you this,
but the urge in me to lean across my guidance
counselor's desk and slap mister dunbar upside the head was
very nearly overwhelming. Because the guy in the photo who
looked like you know, the sad case, he looked like
(10:56):
my grandfather, a man who could build a house without
a blueprint. The whole depiction of him was wrong. Yeah, right,
And so for that reason. I didn't really want to
slap the guy, but I did want to cross out
the word not and replace it with the word and
work smart and hard. There was a time in our
(11:18):
country where that was the mandate, that was the conventional wisdom.
But somehow along the line we got clever and we
got cute, and we started saying, wait minute, if you
work smart enough, then you won't need to work hard, right,
And that is also part of the reason why it's
just became so fashionable to wage a war on work.
(11:41):
It goes to the difference between being efficient and being effective.
Both are good things, right, but if you take efficiency
to its logical conclusion, well you have a robot a robot,
And if you take effectiveness to its logical conclusion, you
have a very competent human. Huxley said, the greatest threat
(12:06):
to freedom is total anarchy, but the second greatest threat
is total efficiency. My goodness, So you know, Dirty Jobs
was a rumination on work. My foundation came out of
that show, and today we're still ruminating on it, and
we're still trying to challenge the prevailing definition of a
(12:29):
good job.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
I sometimes get frustrated sitting with you and take a
number yeah, and because I have never really been able
to get a look down the rabbit hole deep enough you.
Every time I think you've gone deep in something that
you really care about, you go to a whole new level.
(12:55):
I've never been able to tap the well of who
you are. This stuff is really meaningful to you.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
I'm like a Russian nesting egg. Yeah, but there's another aggamy. No, look,
you know it's I look at it. It's all things
are micro macro to me right a micro so on
an individual basis, I do my best to make sense
of the challenges that I'm presented with, but on a
(13:23):
macro level. You know, when we've talked about this before,
work is one of those things that ought to be
one of the great uniters in a country right now,
and once upon a time, it was nobody in this
country would dare logically make a case against the benefits
of hard work. We wouldn't do it because we all
(13:44):
knew that part of the path to prosperity involved hard work. Today,
there is an affirmative push to challenge anyone who says,
wait a second, maybe the problem is you're not worth
looking hard enough. If you say that, that's heresy it's
not just a polite debate. You're really not allowed to
(14:06):
say that. You know, we have this thing in our
foundation called the Sweat Pledge. Everybody has to sign it.
It's twelve simple points that are really a statement of belief.
And many people will find a point or two on
there that they don't agree with, and parents especially will
really take offense. So why should my son sign this
thing that says, just because I'm in compliance doesn't mean
(14:29):
I'm out of danger, because ultimately my safety is my responsibility.
They don't want their kids signing that because they've bought
into this idea that their health and well being isn't
up to them, It's up to their employer, it's up
to whoever owns the building. You know, you've got axes
and hatchets and knives lying around here. I see a thing.
(14:51):
It looks like you throw hatchets into wood all right, now?
Is that a safety first thing to do? No life,
life is risk, you know, and risk ought to be mitigated,
It ought to be managed. Nobody wants to take needless risks.
(15:12):
But if we think we can make life better by
eliminating risk entirely, then we've lost something that goes right
to the guts of humanity.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Part of this discussion that led to these leather chairs
being sat here in this workshop here in Western Colorado.
We have to thank Governor Cuomo of New York for Okay,
so thank you, Governor. He made a statement that you challenged,
(16:02):
and so he made a statement that there was really
no policy that he could, you know, impose upon the
citizens of New York that would be too draconian if
it saved one life. I remember, Okay, then I think
you said something in response to that, Well, then let's outlaw.
(16:24):
Left hand turns.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Well, look again, politicians, and the reason I'm not in
politics is that you have to dispense cookie cutter advice.
That's your job because policy, by and large is a
reflection of that which is best for the most people.
So you have to say the thing that's going to
(16:48):
feel the most true, not the thing that is the
most true. Yeah, and so yeah, Cuomo said that no
sacrifice is too big if it saves a single life.
And I think my response was, well, I get it,
you're trying to get elected, but it's not like COVID
(17:09):
people acted for a while there as though they just
learned they weren't immortal. Wow. It was like, what do
you mean I'm gonna die? What do you mean I
could die? I don't want to die. And so our
politicians come in and say, yeah, you're right, we're not
going to let you die. Here's what we're gonna do.
We're all going to stay in our houses until nobody
ever dies again. And it was so simplistic, but if
(17:33):
you like line it up, that's how the thinking went.
Here's our strategy. We're just going to wait it out.
In the history of the world, whoever waits it out
Columbus Magellan, Balboa, anybody whoever wore a uniform, any fireman,
any cop, anybody who ever assumed a measure of risk
(17:54):
in order to put something in front of their own
well being. What Cuomo said was the epitome of safety first.
If you believe something so completely, or if you believe
the people who are listening to you believe it so
completely that you can just get away with saying it.
(18:14):
So part of my response was to say, okay, look,
if safety is truly first, and if no sacrifice is
too great, and if you're the governor of a state, look,
forty thousand people died on the roads last year. I
can knock that number down to zero right now. It's easy.
Drop the speed limit to five miles an hour, everybody
(18:35):
wears a helmet, wrap yourself in bubble pack, and no
more left turns, and let's make the cars out of
rubb or two right, forty thousand lives saved like that.
If that were your real goal, why don't you do that?
And the answer, of course, is not going to get
you elected. But the truth, the truth is cars are
(18:57):
a lot safer when they're in the driveway, and ships
are a lot safer when they're anchored at harbor. And
we're a lot safer when we sit quietly in our
leather chairs and make no sudden moves, when we don't
take any risk, when we don't dare to do a
thing right. So, if your God is safety, and if
(19:20):
you worship at the altar of well being, and if
your burnt offerings go up in the name of risk mitigation,
then okay. But you're not going to be terribly interesting
at parties, and you're not ever going to say anything
(19:41):
that anybody writes on a T shirt, and you're not
going to do anything ever except live, in which case
I suppose each day concludes when you pat yourself on
the back and give yourself a high five. Too hard,
you could hurt a finger. Not too hard, right, So
(20:04):
look all of this. I get a lot of pushback
on this because it sounds like I'm encouraging a level
of recklessness. I'm not. I'm simply saying that we made
a bargain a long time ago. And when you get
behind a wheel and you go for a drive, somewhere
back there in the reptilian part of your brain, you
know six million accidents are going to happen this year,
(20:27):
and yet you drive, and yet you live. If you
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(20:49):
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The Michael Berry Show and Podcast is produced by Ramon Roeblis,
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Speaker 2 (21:14):
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Speaker 1 (21:17):
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(21:40):
we take all the credit for ourselves. God bless the
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man like Leonard Skinnard told you, and God bless America. Finally,
if you know a veteran suffering from PTSD, call Camp
Hoe at eight seven seven seven one seven PTSD and
(22:05):
a combat veteran will answer the phone to provide free counseling.
To Michael Marry Show, we've told a whole generation of
kids that your happiness depends on what you do, not
who you are, and we've given them a roadmap that
takes them right off a cliff, and we've encouraged them,
for their trouble, to borrow more money than they'll ever
(00:21):
be able to pay back, money by the way, that
we can't even afford to lend them to train them
for jobs that don't exist anymore. Everything is backwards. You know.
The machinery's changed, but unfortunately so too as the mindset.
And I think that's what we should maybe talk about.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
It's safety third.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
You had a fifty to fifty shot. Yeah, it was
either up or down.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Up for down. So it's safety third and it's micro
for one solid hour. Welcome to Colorado.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Safety first. If Bosha got it wrong, what if it's
really safety third? Right? And so when I say safety third,
just because you're in compliance, does it mean you're out
of danger? Safety third? We oh Safety third was a
turn of phrase that came out of Dirty Jobs about
(01:17):
ten twelve years ago, and it was in direct response
to an expression you'll be more familiar with, which was,
of course, safety first. Safety is important. Everybody knows that
who's ever worked around machines like this or has just
tried to get through life. Safety matters a great deal.
But on Dirty Jobs we always look for the unintended
(01:40):
consequence of a thing, and we always tried to look
at bromides and platitudes and cookie cutter advice with some suspicion,
because the unintended consequences of following pat advice can be
very steep, especially in the vocational art. And so what
(02:01):
happens when you tell somebody safety is first. What happens
when you tell a worker that the most important thing
in the world is their safety, Well, that's a well
intended thing to say, but if you say it often enough,
then you run the risk, in my opinion, of creating
(02:21):
an air of complacency that ultimately puts people in harm's way.
What happened to us on Dirty Jobs was really simple.
For the first two years of that show, we went
to the most hazardous places in the country, a crew
of greenhorns who went out into the world to try
(02:42):
and give our viewers an honest look at what work
looked like. Now, we were frightened because by and large
we were in places that could rip you into very
small pieces, with all kinds of machinery that was truly
truly hazardous. Right, So we were very very mindful of
our surroundings, and we sat through all of the safety
(03:03):
protocols and all of the safety meetings like this, right Like,
we paid attention because we had a lot of skin
in the game. So for the first two years of
dirty jobs, whether it was on a crab boat or
whether it was on top of a windmill or at
the bottom of a coal mine, nobody got hurt, not once,
because we were very very focused on the work. We
(03:26):
were very much of a safety first mindset. Season three,
everything fell to pieces. I broke two fingers, a toe,
cracked a rib, and fused my eyebrows off my cameraman
same thing. Everybody on the show got hurt, thankfully, no
one catastrophically, but there were lots of stitches, sprains, brakes, contusions,
(03:50):
and concussions. What happened, what I think happened, was after
sitting through maybe sixty mandatory briefings, all of the safety
first banners, all the nomenclature, all the orthodoxy, we stopped
paying attention. It started sounding Remember the teacher and the
(04:10):
Charlie Brown things. Wowow, missus Oathmark. That's what all the
safety professionals started to sound like. We just simply stopped
focusing on lockout tag out procedures. We went through the
confined space training, but we didn't really pay attention. Safety
first became a thing that ultimately created in us an
(04:33):
impression that somebody cared more about our well being than
we did, and that impression was the beginning of the
end for our health and well being. So I started
saying safety third to my crew members simply to break
(04:53):
through the noise and remind them that in the end,
real safety, which is safety always, is a combination of
personal responsibility and focus and the unintended consequence of letting
somebody know that you care more about their well being
than they do. That, in my view, leads to all
(05:15):
sorts of trouble.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
You're sitting in a as it were, you coined the
phrase a cathedral to work. There's seven million jobs waiting
to be filled by people that could run a drill press,
run a lathe deal with these kind of things, and
somehow work got redefined in a unique way. So take
(05:40):
me to your counselor's office in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Mister Dunbar, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Because you were a potential victim of an attempt to
change work.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
A well intended attempt. You know, I don't want to
shake my finger at anybody. But in the mid late seventies,
we decided as a culture that more people needed to
get an advanced degree. And we were probably right. We
needed more people to enthusiastically pursue a university education. But
(06:16):
in order to convince people that their best chance of
success was a four year degree, we began promoting four
year degrees at the expense of all the other forms
of education. And so we do this in so many
different ways. But for me, I remember mister Dunbar calling
me down was Office nineteen seventy nine, and he wanted
(06:38):
to talk about my future. You know, it's time to
talk about your future mine. And I'd done okay on
some college entrance exams and he looked at my scores
and said, your future is University of Maryland, University Pennsylvania,
maybe James Madison and I couldn't afford any of those schools.
And more to the point, Matt, I didn't I didn't
know what I wanted to do, and so a liberal
(06:59):
arts degree he was expensive. It would have required me
to go into debt borrow money. That wouldn't have played
well in my home. And so my strategy was to
go to a two year school, take all the different
kinds of courses I could find, and see if something sparked,
you know, And at twenty six bucks a credit, I
could afford to be wrong at that point. So I
(07:20):
told this to my guidance counselor, and he said, that's
all beneath your potential. And then he pointed to a
poster behind his head on the wall, and his question
was which one of these guys do you want to be?
And on the poster were two men, one a young
graduate from a college, dressed in a cap and gown
(07:42):
holding his diploma sunrising before him a wash in optimism,
and next to him was a skilled worker in a
dirty environment, looking down at the ground holding a wrench,
looking very much like he had just won some vocational
consolation prize, and the caption the caption said work smart,
(08:05):
not hard, and so as near as I can figure it,
the war against traditional work began around the same time
the push for a very specific kind of education embarked.
And so while we started telling a whole generation that
(08:25):
the best path for the most people was a four
year degree, we also started telling them that if you
don't go in that direction, you're going to wind up
like the guy in the photo, looking dirty and miserable
and doomed. Around the same time, we took shop class
out of high school. When we did that, we removed
(08:48):
all vestige of what an entire chunk of our workforce
actually looks like. Wood shop, metal shop, auto shop, all
this stuff. Right, It doesn't matter if you're allultimately into
it or not. When you're fifteen or sixteen years old.
There's nothing more persuasive to discourage you from thinking about
(09:09):
something than removing all proof of its existence. And that's
what we did. We took shop class out of high school.
We started telling an entire generation that if it wasn't
a four year degree, you were doomed. Flash forward to today,
one point six trillion dollars in outstanding student loans, seven
and a half million jobs that don't require a four
(09:30):
year degree but require training and skill. The skills gap
and the cost of college are not problems, they're symptoms.
They're symptoms of a larger disconnect with work and to
the extent that I'm able with dirty jobs and somebody's
(09:52):
got to do it. And my foundation we simply try
to show the country examples of people who have bridged
that disconnect by learning a skill that's in demand, by
figuring out how to operate that thing or that thing
or whatever it is, and by not making skilled training
the enemy.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
You know, we just were making this up as we go,
but that poster got my attention. You've, through your foundation,
you've made these posters up. And if there's a telephone
number on the screen, call it. If it's an email address,
email us, and we want to get you one of
these things.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
And Matt, let me explain it before and after. Just
some people are clear, I didn't really tell you this,
but the urge in me to lean across my guidance
counselor's desk and slap mister dunbar upside the head was
very nearly overwhelming. Because the guy in the photo who
looked like you know, the sad case, he looked like
(10:56):
my grandfather, a man who could build a house without
a blueprint. The whole depiction of him was wrong. Yeah, right,
And so for that reason. I didn't really want to
slap the guy, but I did want to cross out
the word not and replace it with the word and
work smart and hard. There was a time in our
(11:18):
country where that was the mandate, that was the conventional wisdom.
But somehow along the line we got clever and we
got cute, and we started saying, wait minute, if you
work smart enough, then you won't need to work hard, right,
And that is also part of the reason why it's
just became so fashionable to wage a war on work.
(11:41):
It goes to the difference between being efficient and being effective.
Both are good things, right, but if you take efficiency
to its logical conclusion, well you have a robot a robot,
And if you take effectiveness to its logical conclusion, you
have a very competent human. Huxley said, the greatest threat
(12:06):
to freedom is total anarchy, but the second greatest threat
is total efficiency. My goodness, So you know, Dirty Jobs
was a rumination on work. My foundation came out of
that show, and today we're still ruminating on it, and
we're still trying to challenge the prevailing definition of a
(12:29):
good job.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
I sometimes get frustrated sitting with you and take a
number yeah, and because I have never really been able
to get a look down the rabbit hole deep enough you.
Every time I think you've gone deep in something that
you really care about, you go to a whole new level.
(12:55):
I've never been able to tap the well of who
you are. This stuff is really meaningful to you.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
I'm like a Russian nesting egg. Yeah, but there's another aggamy. No, look,
you know it's I look at it. It's all things
are micro macro to me right a micro so on
an individual basis, I do my best to make sense
of the challenges that I'm presented with, but on a
(13:23):
macro level. You know, when we've talked about this before,
work is one of those things that ought to be
one of the great uniters in a country right now,
and once upon a time, it was nobody in this
country would dare logically make a case against the benefits
of hard work. We wouldn't do it because we all
(13:44):
knew that part of the path to prosperity involved hard work. Today,
there is an affirmative push to challenge anyone who says,
wait a second, maybe the problem is you're not worth
looking hard enough. If you say that, that's heresy it's
not just a polite debate. You're really not allowed to
(14:06):
say that. You know, we have this thing in our
foundation called the Sweat Pledge. Everybody has to sign it.
It's twelve simple points that are really a statement of belief.
And many people will find a point or two on
there that they don't agree with, and parents especially will
really take offense. So why should my son sign this
thing that says, just because I'm in compliance doesn't mean
(14:29):
I'm out of danger, because ultimately my safety is my responsibility.
They don't want their kids signing that because they've bought
into this idea that their health and well being isn't
up to them, It's up to their employer, it's up
to whoever owns the building. You know, you've got axes
and hatchets and knives lying around here. I see a thing.
(14:51):
It looks like you throw hatchets into wood all right, now?
Is that a safety first thing to do? No life,
life is risk, you know, and risk ought to be mitigated,
It ought to be managed. Nobody wants to take needless risks.
(15:12):
But if we think we can make life better by
eliminating risk entirely, then we've lost something that goes right
to the guts of humanity.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Part of this discussion that led to these leather chairs
being sat here in this workshop here in Western Colorado.
We have to thank Governor Cuomo of New York for Okay,
so thank you, Governor. He made a statement that you challenged,
(16:02):
and so he made a statement that there was really
no policy that he could, you know, impose upon the
citizens of New York that would be too draconian if
it saved one life. I remember, Okay, then I think
you said something in response to that, Well, then let's outlaw.
(16:24):
Left hand turns.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Well, look again, politicians, and the reason I'm not in
politics is that you have to dispense cookie cutter advice.
That's your job because policy, by and large is a
reflection of that which is best for the most people.
So you have to say the thing that's going to
(16:48):
feel the most true, not the thing that is the
most true. Yeah, and so yeah, Cuomo said that no
sacrifice is too big if it saves a single life.
And I think my response was, well, I get it,
you're trying to get elected, but it's not like COVID
(17:09):
people acted for a while there as though they just
learned they weren't immortal. Wow. It was like, what do
you mean I'm gonna die? What do you mean I
could die? I don't want to die. And so our
politicians come in and say, yeah, you're right, we're not
going to let you die. Here's what we're gonna do.
We're all going to stay in our houses until nobody
ever dies again. And it was so simplistic, but if
(17:33):
you like line it up, that's how the thinking went.
Here's our strategy. We're just going to wait it out.
In the history of the world, whoever waits it out
Columbus Magellan, Balboa, anybody whoever wore a uniform, any fireman,
any cop, anybody who ever assumed a measure of risk
(17:54):
in order to put something in front of their own
well being. What Cuomo said was the epitome of safety first.
If you believe something so completely, or if you believe
the people who are listening to you believe it so
completely that you can just get away with saying it.
(18:14):
So part of my response was to say, okay, look,
if safety is truly first, and if no sacrifice is
too great, and if you're the governor of a state, look,
forty thousand people died on the roads last year. I
can knock that number down to zero right now. It's easy.
Drop the speed limit to five miles an hour, everybody
(18:35):
wears a helmet, wrap yourself in bubble pack, and no
more left turns, and let's make the cars out of
rubb or two right, forty thousand lives saved like that.
If that were your real goal, why don't you do that?
And the answer, of course, is not going to get
you elected. But the truth, the truth is cars are
(18:57):
a lot safer when they're in the driveway, and ships
are a lot safer when they're anchored at harbor. And
we're a lot safer when we sit quietly in our
leather chairs and make no sudden moves, when we don't
take any risk, when we don't dare to do a
thing right. So, if your God is safety, and if
(19:20):
you worship at the altar of well being, and if
your burnt offerings go up in the name of risk mitigation,
then okay. But you're not going to be terribly interesting
at parties, and you're not ever going to say anything
(19:41):
that anybody writes on a T shirt, and you're not
going to do anything ever except live, in which case
I suppose each day concludes when you pat yourself on
the back and give yourself a high five. Too hard,
you could hurt a finger. Not too hard, right, So
(20:04):
look all of this. I get a lot of pushback
on this because it sounds like I'm encouraging a level
of recklessness. I'm not. I'm simply saying that we made
a bargain a long time ago. And when you get
behind a wheel and you go for a drive, somewhere
back there in the reptilian part of your brain, you
know six million accidents are going to happen this year,
(20:27):
and yet you drive, and yet you live. If you
like the Michael Berry Show in podcast, please tell one friend,
and if you're so inclined, write a nice review of
our podcast. Comments, suggestions, questions, and interest in being a
corporate sponsor and partner can be communicated directly to the
(20:49):
show at our email address, Michael at Michael Berryshow dot com,
or simply by clicking on our website, Michael Berryshow dot com.
The Michael Berry Show and Podcast is produced by Ramon Roeblis,
The King of Ding. Executive producer is Chad Knakanishi.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Jim Mudd is the creative director.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Voices Jingles, Tomfoolery and Shenanigans are provided by Chance McLean.
Director of Research is Sandy Peterson. Emily Bull is our
assistant listener and super fan. Contributions are appreciated and often
incorporated into our production. Where possible, we give credit, where not,
(21:40):
we take all the credit for ourselves. God bless the
memory of Rush Limbaugh. Long live Elvis, be a simple
man like Leonard Skinnard told you, and God bless America. Finally,
if you know a veteran suffering from PTSD, call Camp
Hoe at eight seven seven seven one seven PTSD and
(22:05):
a combat veteran will answer the phone to provide free counseling.
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