This is The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. My guest today is Mike Rowe, the podcaster, former

host of Dirty Jobs, and star of Something to Stand for, an unabashedly patriotic film in which he tells

unknown stories about legendary figures in American history. Something to stand for will be in

theaters from June 27th through the 4th of July.

We talk about the decline of patriotism and trust in experts over the past 50 years,

the necessity of knowing history and your neighbors, and how developing gratitude may lead to a social renaissance in the midst of political polarization.

Here is the reason interview with Mike Rowe.

So you've got the movie coming out, something to stand for.

Can you describe it? What is something to stand for?

Well, I mean, in the general sense, you get to fill in that blank. We all get to decide,

you know, when to stand, when to kneel, when to applaud, when to boo, so forth and so on.

The personal answer is it's a shamelessly patriotic homage, both to the country and to a kind of storytelling that I know you and I have talked about before.

Both patriotism and this kind of straightforward tale seemed to be weirdly out of fashion at the moment.

So really, all I did was take the format that worked well on the podcast, which was to tell these historical tales through the lens of a mystery while stealing shamelessly from the late

great Paul Harvey, whose son actually did give me his blessing. So, you know, I've been doing that.

I wrote a few hundred of those things over the years, and some of those got turned into a book

and others got turned into a TV show. And as we

approached Independence Day, we thought, well, why not do a movie? There are nine or 12 of these things

that are perfect for Independence Day. So we stitched them together with a trip to D.C. We visited

some monuments and some memorials. and then every few minutes of that,

you get another story, another mystery, something you didn't know about somebody you do.

That's, you know, it's a very engaging documentary, or that's not quite the right word for it,

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